Running the complete text of speeches, not just campaign speeches but Parliament speeches too, was a regular occurence in the Times, in London, in the 19th century. No idea why it stopped, but I can only guess cost or audience considerations.
Parliamentary prodeedings in New South Wales are available at the Hansard page.
That sort of thing seems more like a web function to me - frankly, square-inch for inch, news pages are more expensive than web space. If you want full text dumps, the web would be the place to put them (provided you could pay someone to transcribe them...).
Myself, if I'm looking for raw info on news, I go to the web, if I want commentary, I go to the papers. I don't think this is an intrinsic feature of the web, but whenever I'm looking for information on the web, the sheer volume of irrelevancy/inanity overcomes me.
Oh were talking about Australia but its not a real country either as its still part of the British Commenwelth and the head of Oz is appointed by the Queen of England.
The British Commonwealth is a Commonwealth of Nations... and anyway, the words "head of state" aren't used in the Australian Constitution. The Vice-Regal, The Governor-General (Sir William Deane) has a purely ceremonial role, except in the event of the Federal Senate blocking supply, and is generally recommended by the Prime Minister, and approved by the Queen.
The Prime Minister, the political head, is the elected leader of the party (or coalition in the present case) with the ruling majority in the Federal Lower House, the House of Representatives.
I know in US you would probably celebrate you 21st birtday more than the 20th, but that just for the alcahol.
In Australia, actually, 21st birthdays are much bigger than 20ths, even though you can buy alcohol and get into licensed premises etc at 18. I think it's a relic of history - voting age used to be 21. So you actually often get two coming-of-age parties - one at 18 and one at 21.
Re:We've all got less than two months to live!!!
on
Apocalypse Not
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· Score: 1
February 29th, 2000 is going to be a leap year! This strange coincidence of events hasn't happened in 400 years
Depends which country you're in. According to this page at least, Catholic countries adopted the Gregorian calendar (in which 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not leap years) in 1582. But Protestant countries took longer. England finally switched in 1752, having to drop an extra day (10 were dropped from October 1582 in Catholic countires, 11 in September 1752 by England) to make up for having had February 29, 1700. Now there's a leap year problem for you.
If Microsoft was split into various 'bits' what happens to the international operations - does the DoJ have any jurisdiction? Are they likely to split from the parent company or split within themselves along the same fissure lines as the parent company?
And I thought 35 cents for a public telephone local call was a rip off...
Australia has flat rate local calls. Optus charges 20c (US 12c) per call, Telstra seems not to be telling... I think it depends upon your pricing plan.
There are two major problems we face with local calls to service providers - the first is the large land mass/small population, meaning that people not living in a city often don't have local call access to an ISP and have to pay long distance rates. The other is that if phone calls drop out while the modem is connecting, thus running up a large bill (our call waiting tends to kill a connection too), then Telstra, who own the lines, and the ISP can bounce the blame back and forth between each other.
The real cost of spam is the time you waste sifting it out from among your worthwhile mail.
I have heard of at least one person (in Australia, as reported by The Sydney Morning Herald's Column 8 section about 2 years ago - I'd chase it up but their site seems to be having difficulties...) invoicing senders of postal junk mail for $70.00 for 'processing' - he got 2/3 to pay up. Don't know if he got taken off the mailing lists though:)
In Australia, to have registered panda.com.au in the first place, it would have had to have been a registered business name - ie you would have had to be Panda Computing. (Actually, Panda Video Productions has panda.com.au). You can't actually even register a domain with a trademark - a lot of companies who want a marking campaign based around www.mynewestproduct.com.au have had to go an register a shelf business name "MyNewestProduct Pty Ltd".
I believe.net.au and.org.au are somewhat easier to get - Internet Names Australia handles.com.au registrations - their policy is here. See www.aunic.net for the others.
I'm not sure about what happens if you actually register someone else's trademark - or if someone's newly registered trademark intersects with your name.
I've also heard of a theory that the human brain has evolved to deal with about 150 people.
Yeah. Apparently that was deduced from the size of the neo-cortex in the brain.
And the number is only that large because we use language to nurture and manipulate social relationships. Other primates use grooming. I think I read an estimate that we'd need to spend 40% of our time cleaning each other to maintain a social group that large.
Dunbar, R. I. M. (1993). Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (4): 681-735. The final published draft of the target article, commentaries and Author's Response are currently available only in paper.
Australia also currently possesses a notably bone-headed executive, currently intent on some tax reform that depends on placating one Tasmanian Senator. He, and they, will not last forever.
Indeed not. In fact your information is out of date - Senator Brian Harradine was our excuse last time.
He is a conservative Catholic (very anti-porn among other things). He held the balance of power in the Senate until recently, while the Liberal government was trying to pass a bill to introduce a Goods and Services Tax (10% on purchases). Hence the Net censorship bill.
However, on July 1 when the newly elected Senate came into being, the Democrats (a minor party, unlike in the US - Liberal == Republicans and Labor == Democrat in Aus) gained the balance of power. Harradine is now a minor player. They passed the GST bill with some admendments a while back, so as of the coming July 1, that's happening.
What the government wants now... heaven's only knows.
:) No. It'd be a good excuse. We just have a majority-elected (debatable in the last election actaully, sorry, I meant "majority-but-only-if-you-count-preferences-electe d") government that doesn't have much of a clue on anything except economic policies.
It gave some rather frightening power to politicians, specifically the Prime Minister.
It wasn't much of a change from the present system. At the moment the Prime Minister of Austrlia is the elected leader in the House of Representatives of the party with the majority of the MPs.
The term head of state isn't used in our Constitution - but essentially it is Elizabeth, Queen of Australia (the Constitution refers to Victoria and her desendents). The Govenor-General is her vice-regal. The Governor-General is almost always an Australian, personally chosen by the Prime Minister and apporved by the Queen (the monarch used to choose a British subject). The Goevernor-General, currently Sir William Deane, has normally ceremonial powers. There is however, one important one - he/she can instantly dismiss an elected government. This happened to the Labor government under Whitlam when the Senate blocked supply in 1976. It was replaced by a caretaker Liberal government under Fraser.
This wasn't the power the 'No' campaign focussed on however. The proposal was to replace the Queen and GG with a President of Australia, who would be appointed by two-thirds of the House of Representatives, and could be instantly dismissed by the Prime Minister, although this was normally supposed to occur by a vote of the House.
The right of the GG to dismiss a government would be retained in the powers of the President, but this wasn't the issue. It was the PM's power.
There were three camps in the campaign: Constitutional monarchists: want to retain the status quo. 'Yes' campaigners: advocates of the proposed model. Direct electionists: advocates of a 'no' vote because their preferred model was one where the President would be elected by the people, not the parliament. They formed a temporary alliance with the monarchists, and are now hoping for another referendum.
The reason such a small change was proposed, was, ironically, that Australians are usually opposed to any Constitutional change. Out of 42 referendums to do so, 8 have passed (the right of Aborigines to vote was one of them).
But it turns out that a lot of people, especially the "battlers" (rhetoric for lower income-earners) wanted a directly elected president.
About 70% of Australians support a republic in some form.
Encryption seems to be OK, at least of data on computer systems. However, the introduction of digital mobile phones was delayed here for a while because ASIO wanted backdoors into the encryption of phone conversations.
but doesn't it seem eerie that this is following so closely behind Australia's virtual complete elimination of private rights to firearm ownership?
As an Australian, I think... well, I don't know. Probably not. IMHO the correlation is more between the election of a conservative party with a very conservative prime minister (socially conservative I mean, although the Liberal Party is economically onservative as well). Our prime Minister, John Howard, is most often painted as a 1950s throwback - pushing policies that promote the nuclear family and so on.
But the attitude towards guns is different in the majority of the Australians. That's why the Prime Minsiter (the same one) pushed through the anti-gun legislation - once the Port Arthur massacre gave him enough political support against gun lobbies, he knew he was making a decision approved of by the populace.
We have no 'right to bear arms' (in fact, Australia doesn't have a bill of rights - a non-legally enforceable preamble to our Constitution stating our country's ideals was in fact voted down with the bill to make us a republic in the recent referendum). And, as I see it, there is less overlap between people who believe in freedom of speech and those who believe there is a right to bear arms. I doubt many of the Internet-using populace bore arms before the legislation (which doesn't disallow all firearms btw).
Offtopic, just amusing myself: Just a note on some of the 'Nazi Germany' arguments in this thread. In the recent campaign before the republic referendum, certain monarchists, notably the MPs Tony Abbott and Bronwyn Bishop, invoked a scare campaign along the lines of "it was a republic you see..." They were very serious too.:) The US is a republic. Bad. Obviously very bad.
Sorry. Just trying to show it's a difficult argument to sustain - there were a lot of things that were wrong with Nazi Germany - I don't believe it was predominantly the removal of personal firearms, or the fact it was a republic.
Here's my suggestions as to who to contact if you want to: (I'm going to give you websites, not email address - you'll have to click through. I really don't want to instigate the/.-ing of my government:) )
You can find email addresses for ministers on this page. The Prime Minister's page is here. The Leader of the Opposition's page is here. The email address of every member of the House of reps is here. Senate addresses here. Be careful please:) If nothing else, they're not all of the party in power...
Ministers in the government: Hon John Howard MP, Prime Minister of Australia. Senator the Hon Richard Alston, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.
Shadow ministers (ie in opposition - not of the party currently in government!): Hon Kim Beazley MP, Leader of the Opposition. Hon Bob McMullan MP, Shadow Minister for Industry and Technology. Senator the Hon Kate Lundy, Shadow Minister Assisting the Shadow Minister for Industry and Technology on Information Technology.
But you do not understand the complete sheep-like fear of the unknown that non-computer-savvy people have.
Isn't that a bit of a generalisation?
I worry about how the "users are idiots" mentality is spreading. Some are, but most just don't know anything and aren't interested. There's a difference between that and being a fool. They have different priorities - perhaps understanding quantum mechanics. They see computers as tools that are meant to save time, or make a task easier in some way. People who read/. are more likely to see a computer as a complex misture of toy and tool - not only something to get something else done with, but something to take apart or build on, and probably something that earns them money.
'Ordinary' people, if they display "sheep-like" fear of computers, do so often because they've been burned by computers - Windoze has crashed or their printer stopped working just as they printed out that thesis or somthing. Or they plain didn't save their work.
And they do know that computers "are the magic that glues their lives together". And thus, from their own experiences with computers, they build upon their image of the computer as faulty tool, and possibly of programmers as anti-social or what you will, and the publicised magnitude of the Y2K problem and see planes falling out of the sky.
Treating them with contempt isn't going to solve the problem. That just scares them more. In the same way you might be scared if quantum physics is harnessed as a tool, and your quantum-admin keeps doing funky things with the location/momentum of your quantum tools and smirks down at you when you wonder why it is a bit hazy today...
I think of this as one of the greatest problems in computer (esp. software) design today - how to design something that can be used as a tool by Ms I-Just-Want-It-To-Print-Dammit, and at the same time be picked apart by Ms Hacker?
Take the ordinary folk seriously. You are not a world unto yourself.
Alas, until I read Paul Hoffman'sThe Man Who Loved Only Numbers...
A really (non-technical, personality focused) good book specifically based upon the 300-year search for a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh, based upon a TV documentary of the same name. It goes into some detail about the origins of the STW conjecture (now Theorem:) ) and the process whereby it was discovered it provided a way to prove Fermat's Last Theorem.
Slashdot Mirror
Running the complete text of speeches, not just campaign speeches but Parliament speeches too, was a regular occurence in the Times, in London, in the 19th century. No idea why it stopped, but I can only guess cost or audience considerations.
Parliamentary prodeedings in New South Wales are available at the Hansard page.
That sort of thing seems more like a web function to me - frankly, square-inch for inch, news pages are more expensive than web space. If you want full text dumps, the web would be the place to put them (provided you could pay someone to transcribe them...).
Myself, if I'm looking for raw info on news, I go to the web, if I want commentary, I go to the papers. I don't think this is an intrinsic feature of the web, but whenever I'm looking for information on the web, the sheer volume of irrelevancy/inanity overcomes me.
The British Commonwealth is a Commonwealth of Nations... and anyway, the words "head of state" aren't used in the Australian Constitution. The Vice-Regal, The Governor-General (Sir William Deane) has a purely ceremonial role, except in the event of the Federal Senate blocking supply, and is generally recommended by the Prime Minister, and approved by the Queen.
The Prime Minister, the political head, is the elected leader of the party (or coalition in the present case) with the ruling majority in the Federal Lower House, the House of Representatives.
I know in US you would probably celebrate you 21st birtday more than the 20th, but that just for the alcahol.
In Australia, actually, 21st birthdays are much bigger than 20ths, even though you can buy alcohol and get into licensed premises etc at 18.
I think it's a relic of history - voting age used to be 21.
So you actually often get two coming-of-age parties - one at 18 and one at 21.
February 29th, 2000 is going to be a leap year! This strange coincidence of events hasn't happened in 400 years
Depends which country you're in. According to this page at least, Catholic countries adopted the Gregorian calendar (in which 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not leap years) in 1582. But Protestant countries took longer.
England finally switched in 1752, having to drop an extra day (10 were dropped from October 1582 in Catholic countires, 11 in September 1752 by England) to make up for having had February 29, 1700. Now there's a leap year problem for you.
BTW, anyone know of a good website comparing Linux to the BSDs?
Here's some Linux v FreeBSD arguments - but it's FreeBSD advocacy - mostly.
If Microsoft was split into various 'bits' what happens to the international operations - does the DoJ have any jurisdiction? Are they likely to split from the parent company or split within themselves along the same fissure lines as the parent company?
Yeah and they quite often don't accept coins (only phone cards).
Rainforests aren't a park - they're forbidding, hostile jungles.
They're a great big resource, waiting to be taken, used, and transformed.
And I thought 35 cents for a public telephone local call was a rip off...
Australia has flat rate local calls. Optus charges 20c (US 12c) per call, Telstra seems not to be telling... I think it depends upon your pricing plan.
There are two major problems we face with local calls to service providers - the first is the large land mass/small population, meaning that people not living in a city often don't have local call access to an ISP and have to pay long distance rates. The other is that if phone calls drop out while the modem is connecting, thus running up a large bill (our call waiting tends to kill a connection too), then Telstra, who own the lines, and the ISP can bounce the blame back and forth between each other.
The real cost of spam is the time you waste sifting it out from among your worthwhile mail.
:)
I have heard of at least one person (in Australia, as reported by The Sydney Morning Herald's Column 8 section about 2 years ago - I'd chase it up but their site seems to be having difficulties...) invoicing senders of postal junk mail for $70.00 for 'processing' - he got 2/3 to pay up. Don't know if he got taken off the mailing lists though
In Australia, I gather I would be up the creek.
.net.au and .org.au are somewhat easier to get - Internet Names Australia handles .com.au registrations - their policy is here. See www.aunic.net for the others.
In Australia, to have registered panda.com.au in the first place, it would have had to have been a registered business name - ie you would have had to be Panda Computing. (Actually, Panda Video Productions has panda.com.au). You can't actually even register a domain with a trademark - a lot of companies who want a marking campaign based around www.mynewestproduct.com.au have had to go an register a shelf business name "MyNewestProduct Pty Ltd".
I believe
I'm not sure about what happens if you actually register someone else's trademark - or if someone's newly registered trademark intersects with your name.
buying up the remainder of the three-letter domains in the UK.
.com .net .org
http://www.3la.org lists all the available three letter domains in
you have to produce a letterhead to prove that that's your company's name.
In Australia you actually have to have registered a company name with the appropriate authority.
Stalin killed thirty or forty million people.
Stalin was an atheist.
You figure it out.
Umm.. umm... *screws up forehead*...
A-hah! Got it!
It's an ad hominem argument, one of the Fallacies of Relevance!
I am always suspicious when scientists take elegance into account in their analysis of data.
Yes, of course.
But isn't it interesting when things do turn out to be elegant? Why?
This is one of the great problems in the philosophy of mathematics - it's nice in itself, but why so generally applicable?
See Indispensability Arguments in the Philosophy of Mathematics.
Yeah. Apparently that was deduced from the size of the neo-cortex in the brain.
And the number is only that large because we use language to nurture and manipulate social relationships. Other primates use grooming. I think I read an estimate that we'd need to spend 40% of our time cleaning each other to maintain a social group that large.
Here's a preprint of the relevant paper - Co-evolution of neocortex size, group size and language in humans.
Quoth the page:
Australia also currently possesses a notably bone-headed executive, currently intent on some tax reform that depends on placating one Tasmanian Senator. He, and they, will not last forever.
Indeed not. In fact your information is out of date - Senator Brian Harradine was our excuse last time.
He is a conservative Catholic (very anti-porn among other things). He held the balance of power in the Senate until recently, while the Liberal government was trying to pass a bill to introduce a Goods and Services Tax (10% on purchases). Hence the Net censorship bill.
However, on July 1 when the newly elected Senate came into being, the Democrats (a minor party, unlike in the US - Liberal == Republicans and Labor == Democrat in Aus) gained the balance of power. Harradine is now a minor player.
They passed the GST bill with some admendments a while back, so as of the coming July 1, that's happening.
What the government wants now... heaven's only knows.
Or maybe they're enforced to, by law?
e d") government that doesn't have much of a clue on anything except economic policies.
:)
No. It'd be a good excuse.
We just have a majority-elected (debatable in the last election actaully, sorry, I meant "majority-but-only-if-you-count-preferences-elect
It gave some rather frightening power to politicians, specifically the Prime Minister.
It wasn't much of a change from the present system. At the moment the Prime Minister of Austrlia is the elected leader in the House of Representatives of the party with the majority of the MPs.
The term head of state isn't used in our Constitution - but essentially it is Elizabeth, Queen of Australia (the Constitution refers to Victoria and her desendents). The Govenor-General is her vice-regal.
The Governor-General is almost always an Australian, personally chosen by the Prime Minister and apporved by the Queen (the monarch used to choose a British subject).
The Goevernor-General, currently Sir William Deane, has normally ceremonial powers. There is however, one important one - he/she can instantly dismiss an elected government. This happened to the Labor government under Whitlam when the Senate blocked supply in 1976. It was replaced by a caretaker Liberal government under Fraser.
This wasn't the power the 'No' campaign focussed on however. The proposal was to replace the Queen and GG with a President of Australia, who would be appointed by two-thirds of the House of Representatives, and could be instantly dismissed by the Prime Minister, although this was normally supposed to occur by a vote of the House.
The right of the GG to dismiss a government would be retained in the powers of the President, but this wasn't the issue. It was the PM's power.
There were three camps in the campaign:
Constitutional monarchists: want to retain the status quo.
'Yes' campaigners: advocates of the proposed model.
Direct electionists: advocates of a 'no' vote because their preferred model was one where the President would be elected by the people, not the parliament. They formed a temporary alliance with the monarchists, and are now hoping for another referendum.
The reason such a small change was proposed, was, ironically, that Australians are usually opposed to any Constitutional change. Out of 42 referendums to do so, 8 have passed (the right of Aborigines to vote was one of them).
But it turns out that a lot of people, especially the "battlers" (rhetoric for lower income-earners) wanted a directly elected president.
About 70% of Australians support a republic in some form.
Encryption seems to be OK, at least of data on computer systems. However, the introduction of digital mobile phones was delayed here for a while because ASIO wanted backdoors into the encryption of phone conversations.
but doesn't it seem eerie that this is following so closely behind Australia's virtual complete elimination of private rights to firearm ownership?
:)
As an Australian, I think... well, I don't know. Probably not. IMHO the correlation is more between the election of a conservative party with a very conservative prime minister (socially conservative I mean, although the Liberal Party is economically onservative as well). Our prime Minister, John Howard, is most often painted as a 1950s throwback - pushing policies that promote the nuclear family and so on.
But the attitude towards guns is different in the majority of the Australians. That's why the Prime Minsiter (the same one) pushed through the anti-gun legislation - once the Port Arthur massacre gave him enough political support against gun lobbies, he knew he was making a decision approved of by the populace.
We have no 'right to bear arms' (in fact, Australia doesn't have a bill of rights - a non-legally enforceable preamble to our Constitution stating our country's ideals was in fact voted down with the bill to make us a republic in the recent referendum).
And, as I see it, there is less overlap between people who believe in freedom of speech and those who believe there is a right to bear arms. I doubt many of the Internet-using populace bore arms before the legislation (which doesn't disallow all firearms btw).
Offtopic, just amusing myself:
Just a note on some of the 'Nazi Germany' arguments in this thread.
In the recent campaign before the republic referendum, certain monarchists, notably the MPs Tony Abbott and Bronwyn Bishop, invoked a scare campaign along the lines of "it was a republic you see..." They were very serious too.
The US is a republic. Bad. Obviously very bad.
Sorry. Just trying to show it's a difficult argument to sustain - there were a lot of things that were wrong with Nazi Germany - I don't believe it was predominantly the removal of personal firearms, or the fact it was a republic.
Here's my suggestions as to who to contact if you want to: (I'm going to give you websites, not email address - you'll have to click through. I really don't want to instigate the /.-ing of my government :) )
:)
You can find email addresses for ministers on this page. The Prime Minister's page is here. The Leader of the Opposition's page is here. The email address of every member of the House of reps is here. Senate addresses here. Be careful please
If nothing else, they're not all of the party in power...
Ministers in the government:
Hon John Howard MP, Prime Minister of Australia.
Senator the Hon Richard Alston, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.
Shadow ministers (ie in opposition - not of the party currently in government!):
Hon Kim Beazley MP, Leader of the Opposition.
Hon Bob McMullan MP, Shadow Minister for Industry and Technology.
Senator the Hon Kate Lundy, Shadow Minister Assisting the Shadow Minister for Industry and Technology on Information Technology.
Some web pages for Australian political parties: the currently governing party (strictly, the party with a majority in the federal House of Representatives) is the Liberal Party of Australia. The party in Opposition (next greatest in numbers) is the Australian Labor Party. The party with the balance of power in the Senate is the Australian Democrats.
But you do not understand the complete sheep-like fear of the unknown that non-computer-savvy people have.
/. are more likely to see a computer as a complex misture of toy and tool - not only something to get something else done with, but something to take apart or build on, and probably something that earns them money.
Isn't that a bit of a generalisation?
I worry about how the "users are idiots" mentality is spreading. Some are, but most just don't know anything and aren't interested. There's a difference between that and being a fool. They have different priorities - perhaps understanding quantum mechanics. They see computers as tools that are meant to save time, or make a task easier in some way.
People who read
'Ordinary' people, if they display "sheep-like" fear of computers, do so often because they've been burned by computers - Windoze has crashed or their printer stopped working just as they printed out that thesis or somthing. Or they plain didn't save their work.
And they do know that computers "are the magic that glues their lives together". And thus, from their own experiences with computers, they build upon their image of the computer as faulty tool, and possibly of programmers as anti-social or what you will, and the publicised magnitude of the Y2K problem and see planes falling out of the sky.
Treating them with contempt isn't going to solve the problem. That just scares them more. In the same way you might be scared if quantum physics is harnessed as a tool, and your quantum-admin keeps doing funky things with the location/momentum of your quantum tools and smirks down at you when you wonder why it is a bit hazy today...
I think of this as one of the greatest problems in computer (esp. software) design today - how to design something that can be used as a tool by Ms I-Just-Want-It-To-Print-Dammit, and at the same time be picked apart by Ms Hacker?
Take the ordinary folk seriously. You are not a world unto yourself.
Alas, until I read Paul Hoffman'sThe Man Who Loved Only Numbers...
:) ) and the process whereby it was discovered it provided a way to prove Fermat's Last Theorem.
A really (non-technical, personality focused) good book specifically based upon the 300-year search for a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh, based upon a TV documentary of the same name.
It goes into some detail about the origins of the STW conjecture (now Theorem