Geoffrey Robertson, the defence's lawyer, is a pretty amazing fellow, having represented one side or the other (and more often than not the side we'd collectively cheer on) at many high-profile human rights trials in Britain, Australia, and many other Commonwealth countries.
Amongst others, he successfully defended Duncan Campbell, perhaps the most significant figure in publically revealing the tendils of the NSA's global network of listening stations, the defendants in several trials of people prosecuted under Britain's archiac "obscenity" laws of the 1970's, and defended several prominent death-penalty cases around the Commonwealth.
Additionally, he has written several highly-successful books on human rights laws, wrote a play (later turned into a BBC mini-series, IIRC) about one of the most famous obscenity trials he was involved in, writes occasionally for British and Australian newspapers, and hosted a fondly-remembered TV show that involved a large group discussing hypothetical scenarios about legal, moral and social issues.
Joeseph Gutnick, the plaintiff, is also a fascinating character. By profession, he is actually an orthodox rabbi. He has made and lost several fortunes out of Australian mining companies, and there have been persistent allegations that his fortunes have been gained by less than legal methods.
He has spent many millions of dollars supporting Likud and other right-wing parties in Israel, and has funded the expansion of some of the Jewish settlements that so enrage the Palestinians.
To top it all off, for the past three years he has been the president of the Melbourne (Aussie Rules) Football Club, which by Australian standards is the football club of a conservative, mainly WASPish, Melbourne "establishment". Whilst highly popular with the rank-and-file members of the club after personally funding the club with millions of dollars from his own pocket (very uncommon in Australian Rules football), and thus saving it from a merger with another club, he has managed to fall out dramatically with the members of the club's board, and resigned implying that the board was out to get him for his (domestic) political views and even that the board was anti-Semitic.
It is also worth noting that "Diamond" Joe Gutnick's financial situation is apparently very tight at the moment, so he is under pressure in a variety of ways.
So, all in all, there are some intriguing characters involved in this dispute, as well as the wider issues of defamation on the Internet.
Let's get rid of maps and compasses as well and be lost all the time!
Might I suggest you try getting lost in the wilds of Australia, particularly a bit with no civilization within a week's walk (and people do that kind of trek in Australia quite regularly). I *have* been lost (briefly) when bushwalking back in school camp (the moronic older teenagers who were supposed to be guiding us couldn't read a friggin' map), and all thoughts of the joys of the wild were lost in annoyance, concern that we might not make it back before dark and endure a cold night out, and just plain sore legs from walking twice as far as we otherwise would have.
If you want to turn your GPS off and enjoy being "lost", that's fine. I have a mobile phone which stays turned off a fair bit, as well. But modern technology allows us a far greater safety margin to enjoy the beauty of the wilderness, and I have no time for luddites who needlessly take risks for dubious aesthetic gains.
the months of rigorous training astronauts go through before they go into space.
It takes years of training to learn to fly a 747. It takes five minutes to run through the safety briefing for passengers . . .
As to the health demands of space, they've sent up large numbers of middle-aged and even a few elderly people. Aside from space sickness (which apparently affects both young and old equally), and the G's of the launch (a rollercoaster probably applies more acceleration, and certainly more unpredictably), space is quite fine health-wise for a short-term visit.
Opera Australia has a similar gadget, and they call the result 'surtitles'. I believe most big opera companies have something similar.
While it's essential if you want the audience to have some understanding of what's going on, it can be a bit of a PITA occasionally because you spend too much time concentrating on the titles rather than the action (such as action is in most operas).
Strangely enough, they also use the surtitle machine when operas are sung in English. I suppose it's because some people with partial hearing loss have trouble catching the diction of
the singers sometimes.
I've gone to Europe a couple of times and noticed that instead of voice dubs they do this:subtilting the movie, but who would want to look at the bottom of a screen the whole movie?
Me. Most other Australian foriegn-film buffs. Overdubs are generally regarded as something that gets done for illiterate Americans . . .:)
Overdubs can interrupt the sound effects, get in the road of anyone who *can* understand the original dialogue, tend to paraphrase far more than subtitles (check the difference between the overdub and the "literal translation" of Pricess Mononoke), and the lack of lip-synching is incredibly annoying.
In Australia, the courts initially ruled in just this manner - that it didn't fit under the original definition of what was copyrightable. For a little while people were copying software left, right, and centre, until political lobbying from people like Microsoft saw the law in Australia changed to explicitly include computer software under the definition of what is copyrightable.
TSE's are relevant to the argument for the quarentine of rocks from mars because they cannot be disposed of through traditional means of disinfection. They resist heat, chemical antiseptics, and often continue to function after long dormant periods.
Sure, it might resist boiling or iodine, but are you really trying to tell me that TSE's can resist a few minutes in a high-temperature incinerator?
Well, not quite, but they took advantage of the fact that a) their program was highly secret, while the US program was public, so they largely knew what the US was going to attempt and when and b) they were prepared to take far more risks than the US was (not that the US space program was risk-free, by any means).
Their unmanned probes also suffered from the Soviet's crappy electronics, IIRC, which meant that in a lot of cases they may have been first but the quality of the data was not great.
Not that I'm knocking the Soviet effort - they had a lot of chutzpah to pull of the stuff that they did, and they showed a lot of engineering ingenuity, but the way they did things would never have been possible in the west. And, of course, without the Soviet effort the US space program would still barely be off the ground:)
U-571 is an absolute joke: American sailor's boarding a German U-boat to capture a Enigma cypher machine is how Hollywood tells the story. History, on the other hand, tells us that the first Enigma was captured by the British before the US even entered the war!
Well, that's not the whole picture either. If I recall correctly, the Enigma was stolen by the Polish Intelligence Service and then given to the British.
However, the Enigma machines used by the U-Boats were significantly different to the standard Enigma models, and thus remained unbroken until a Royal Navy ship caputred a U-Boat. You're absolutely correct, however - the Americans had absolutely *nothing* to do with the crucial cryptanalytic breakthroughs of the European war.
Of course, the Americans did break the Japanese naval codes in the Pacific theater as well, before Pearl Harbor IIRC.
That's exactly what I meant - "hybrids" in the sense of the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight, who gain their efficiency from a) not running the engine when sitting still, and b) capture a lot of energy back as regenerative braking.
To me, it seems logical to combine this technology with diesel engines.
Yeah, but they do it for a different reason, IIRC. Diesel locomotives use a hybrid arrangement because a pure diesel locomotive would have trouble moving away from rest smoothly (imagine changing gears on a locomotive . . . ). I don't know whether they use regenerative braking or not, though . . . as diesel locomotives tend to not brake very often it might not be worth it.
Hmmm. If diesel cars get approximately twice the mileage of petrol cars, and hybrids are about twice as efficient as conventional cars, makes you wonder what kind of fuel efficiency you'd get out of a diesel/electric hybrid, doesn't it?
Of course, while petrol is as cheap as water in the US and Australia we'll all keep pouring fuel down our oversized, overpriced and unsafe (both for drivers, passengers and especially for other road users) SUVs. Sigh . ..
OK, let's put this into perspective for American readers. How would you feel if, say, France, was spying on every bit of civilian US phone and Internet traffic they could get their hands on. Would you be impressed if, say, the Alaskan and the Nevadan state governments were leasing them sites for the receivers to do so? Would you be impressed if the French were using the information to help, say, Airbus win contracts over Boeing?
I think the EU has every right to be pissed off that the US is using the UK to spy on the other European countries.
Just because Americans feel just relaxed and comfortable about spying on the rest of the world (including its UKUSA partners - I believe it was Ronald Walker who revealed that the US was spying on the Australian government) doesn't mean the rest of the world has to like it, and if it involves bases on non-US territory, doesn't have to put up with it.
Hooray! Somebody's figured out that region encoding is trying to accomplish parallel import restrictions by technical means, parallel import restrictions harm consumers (I would prefer the world citizen, but consumer seems to be the favoured term these days. Oh well), and we should try to remove such technical restrictions where we can.
Now, if only somebody in government, or even the bureauracy, would work out that retaining copyright protection over Steamboat Willie and Rhapsody In Blue is equally harmful, we'd really be getting somewhere . . .
It seems like the NSA is drowning in data - instead of encryption making their life tough, it seems like the crude steganoraphy of the data flood perpetrated by great unwashed using Napster and downloading porn is enough to overload their supercomputers . . .
Now, I suppose, we *really* know why governments around the world want to eradicate music-swapping and "indecent" Internet imagery - they can't monitor what we're really up to through all the noise:)
Of course, you can take anything said in public about intelligence activities with several grains of salt. If the NSA *can* successfully and selectively monitor undersea cable traffic, they're not going to be so silly as to broadcast that fact to the world.
Kernel compile is real world. Hey, I compile stuff all the time.
I'd go further than that - for me, compiling stuff is really the only performance benchmark I'm interested in - everything else happens "fast enough" these days. If reformatting my/home partition as ReiserFS is going to increase performance for kernel compiles significantly, I'll seriously consider converting.
If people are doing something even vaguely useful on this system (chiefly porting/testing/debugging software), IBM would almost certainly leave their account open as long as they wanted one.
For instance, when the <plug>GnuCash</plug>developers get the RPC-enabled, PostGres-driven backend fully up to speed (it works, but it's not production-use material yet) it'd be a blast to port it to this architecture. If we did, do you really think IBM would cut off access?
I'm not a graphics pro, just a programmer (who nevertheless loves big monitors and is about to go buy a 21" - any recommendations?), but I can't imagine going with current LCD technology.
A couple of my friends had CRT desktop displays, and while they looked incredibly cool sitting on the desktop, what they actually displayed wasn't quite so great. Subjectively, the "refresh rate" seems to be a lot lower, and whites in particular tend to be very "glary". Was it just that the controls were set wrong for my own preferences? Do I need to get used to the LCD?
Yeah, I've no doubt that they'd be great at twitch games, but RPGs? I wouldn't have thought they'd be, as a group, better (or worse, for that matter) than average at anything that's based on strategy rather than exceptional reaction times.
As someone who rides a great deal, I can tell you that this bike is really good for one thing and one thing only: straight-line speed. Much more important to any motorcycle is its handling and corner speed.
Quite correct. Street-legal 250cc two-stroke "GP Replicas", that put out about 70 horsepower and way about 280 pounds, are as fast or faster round a racetrack than 750 cc four-stroke sports bikes, which put out around 170 horsepower but weigh about 400 pounds. The greater corner speed made possible by the lighter-weight bike makes all the difference.
I'd also point out that somebody's already done better than helicopter turbine power.I remember hearing a story about a nutcase who fitted a 1500 horsepower engine from a WWII-vintage Mosquito fighter-bomber into a road-registered motorcycle. I think I'd be wearing nappies if I ever tried to ride a bike like that:)
The big global oil companies, particularly those that have some exposure to the environmentally-conscious European market, know which way the wind is blowing. At least some of them are spending money like crazy to make sure that they can take advantage of any trend to alternative energy.
The smaller oil companies, the ones run by people like GWB, are the ones likely to be squashed if alternative fuels take off, and that is why they are buying . . . er, donating heavily do . . . politicians at the moment.
True. The nanny impulse exists across the Australian political spectrum, I'm afraid. However, when it comes to Net censorship, Labor has at least recognized the technical impossibility of doing so and has advocated education as a better solution.
All the people I know who work with accounting type stuff think the GST is a good thing because it simplified sales tax immensely.
That's certainly true, if you were in a business that was involved in sales-tax collection. Most Australian businesses weren't.
Secondly, the procedures for filling in the GST forms were unnecessarily complex and required many small businesses to pay accountants a large amount of money to fill them in. Thirdly, it made tax evasion more difficult - a practice many small businesses like to indulge in.
The current Australian government is a (highly steady) coalition of two conservative parties, which has been in power since 1996. The other major party is the Labor Party, roughly analogous to the British Labor party, but still retaining tighter links to its labor union history.
Our parliamentary and party system, again, most closely resembles Britain, in that party discipline is very strong, and votes in the lower house are purely a formality. However, the upper house of parliament is not controlled by a single party, and two small left-wing parties (the Democrats and Greens), a religious right-wing annoyance, and a member of the lunar-nutball right hold the balance of power in that house, meaning that the government has to reach agreement with either the opposition, or some or all of the others, to get legislation through.
The current Prime Minister is one John Howard, who was aptly described by American travel writer Bill Bryson as "the world's most boring individual". By Australian standards, he is a economic conservative (though due to his current electoral unpopularity he has swung towards popular pork-barelling), and an utter social reactionary.
For some time, he has tried to play off the unpopularity with rural voters on economic issues (the government has imposed a universal sales tax, which has resulted in higher prices and a great deal of extra accounting overhead for small businesses, who are not happy about it) by, in essence, appealing to their prejudice against drug users, asylum-seekers, homosexuals, the primarily city-based and relatively wealthy advocates of removing the symbolic link to the British monarchy, Aboriginals, and so on. Unfortunately for Mr Howard, the rural and outer-urban constituency appears to be sufficiently annoyed by the economic issues that they will vote Labour or (in relatively small proportions, thankfully) lunar-right regardless, and the inner-urban "elite" are going to also desert his party because of disgust at his social policies as well as economic.
I think I will join most Australians in welcoming Mr Howard's fairly imminent and fairly certain departure (the election must be held by November or so). Unfortunately, the alternative, Labor, doesn't appear particularly inspiring - if a little more clueful on some aspects of IT policy, which is nice.
Slashdot Mirror
Additionally, he has written several highly-successful books on human rights laws, wrote a play (later turned into a BBC mini-series, IIRC) about one of the most famous obscenity trials he was involved in, writes occasionally for British and Australian newspapers, and hosted a fondly-remembered TV show that involved a large group discussing hypothetical scenarios about legal, moral and social issues.
Joeseph Gutnick, the plaintiff, is also a fascinating character. By profession, he is actually an orthodox rabbi. He has made and lost several fortunes out of Australian mining companies, and there have been persistent allegations that his fortunes have been gained by less than legal methods.
He has spent many millions of dollars supporting Likud and other right-wing parties in Israel, and has funded the expansion of some of the Jewish settlements that so enrage the Palestinians.
To top it all off, for the past three years he has been the president of the Melbourne (Aussie Rules) Football Club, which by Australian standards is the football club of a conservative, mainly WASPish, Melbourne "establishment". Whilst highly popular with the rank-and-file members of the club after personally funding the club with millions of dollars from his own pocket (very uncommon in Australian Rules football), and thus saving it from a merger with another club, he has managed to fall out dramatically with the members of the club's board, and resigned implying that the board was out to get him for his (domestic) political views and even that the board was anti-Semitic.
It is also worth noting that "Diamond" Joe Gutnick's financial situation is apparently very tight at the moment, so he is under pressure in a variety of ways.
So, all in all, there are some intriguing characters involved in this dispute, as well as the wider issues of defamation on the Internet.
Go you big red fire engine!
Might I suggest you try getting lost in the wilds of Australia, particularly a bit with no civilization within a week's walk (and people do that kind of trek in Australia quite regularly). I *have* been lost (briefly) when bushwalking back in school camp (the moronic older teenagers who were supposed to be guiding us couldn't read a friggin' map), and all thoughts of the joys of the wild were lost in annoyance, concern that we might not make it back before dark and endure a cold night out, and just plain sore legs from walking twice as far as we otherwise would have.
If you want to turn your GPS off and enjoy being "lost", that's fine. I have a mobile phone which stays turned off a fair bit, as well. But modern technology allows us a far greater safety margin to enjoy the beauty of the wilderness, and I have no time for luddites who needlessly take risks for dubious aesthetic gains.
Nice troll, BTW :-)
Go you big red fire engine!
It takes years of training to learn to fly a 747. It takes five minutes to run through the safety briefing for passengers . . .
As to the health demands of space, they've sent up large numbers of middle-aged and even a few elderly people. Aside from space sickness (which apparently affects both young and old equally), and the G's of the launch (a rollercoaster probably applies more acceleration, and certainly more unpredictably), space is quite fine health-wise for a short-term visit.
Go you big red fire engine!
While it's essential if you want the audience to have some understanding of what's going on, it can be a bit of a PITA occasionally because you spend too much time concentrating on the titles rather than the action (such as action is in most operas).
Strangely enough, they also use the surtitle machine when operas are sung in English. I suppose it's because some people with partial hearing loss have trouble catching the diction of the singers sometimes.
Go you big red fire engine!
Me. Most other Australian foriegn-film buffs. Overdubs are generally regarded as something that gets done for illiterate Americans . . . :)
Overdubs can interrupt the sound effects, get in the road of anyone who *can* understand the original dialogue, tend to paraphrase far more than subtitles (check the difference between the overdub and the "literal translation" of Pricess Mononoke), and the lack of lip-synching is incredibly annoying.
Go you big red fire engine!
In Australia, the courts initially ruled in just this manner - that it didn't fit under the original definition of what was copyrightable. For a little while people were copying software left, right, and centre, until political lobbying from people like Microsoft saw the law in Australia changed to explicitly include computer software under the definition of what is copyrightable.
Go you big red fire engine!
Sure, it might resist boiling or iodine, but are you really trying to tell me that TSE's can resist a few minutes in a high-temperature incinerator?
Go you big red fire engine!
Their unmanned probes also suffered from the Soviet's crappy electronics, IIRC, which meant that in a lot of cases they may have been first but the quality of the data was not great.
Not that I'm knocking the Soviet effort - they had a lot of chutzpah to pull of the stuff that they did, and they showed a lot of engineering ingenuity, but the way they did things would never have been possible in the west. And, of course, without the Soviet effort the US space program would still barely be off the ground :)
Go you big red fire engine!
Looks like it's moderators on crack day today . . . :)
Go you big red fire engine!
Well, that's not the whole picture either. If I recall correctly, the Enigma was stolen by the Polish Intelligence Service and then given to the British.
However, the Enigma machines used by the U-Boats were significantly different to the standard Enigma models, and thus remained unbroken until a Royal Navy ship caputred a U-Boat. You're absolutely correct, however - the Americans had absolutely *nothing* to do with the crucial cryptanalytic breakthroughs of the European war.
Of course, the Americans did break the Japanese naval codes in the Pacific theater as well, before Pearl Harbor IIRC.
Go you big red fire engine!
To me, it seems logical to combine this technology with diesel engines.
Go you big red fire engine!
Yeah, but they do it for a different reason, IIRC. Diesel locomotives use a hybrid arrangement because a pure diesel locomotive would have trouble moving away from rest smoothly (imagine changing gears on a locomotive . . . ). I don't know whether they use regenerative braking or not, though . . . as diesel locomotives tend to not brake very often it might not be worth it.
Go you big red fire engine!
Of course, while petrol is as cheap as water in the US and Australia we'll all keep pouring fuel down our oversized, overpriced and unsafe (both for drivers, passengers and especially for other road users) SUVs. Sigh . . .
Go you big red fire engine!
Just because Americans feel just relaxed and comfortable about spying on the rest of the world (including its UKUSA partners - I believe it was Ronald Walker who revealed that the US was spying on the Australian government) doesn't mean the rest of the world has to like it, and if it involves bases on non-US territory, doesn't have to put up with it.
Go you big red fire engine!
Now, if only somebody in government, or even the bureauracy, would work out that retaining copyright protection over Steamboat Willie and Rhapsody In Blue is equally harmful, we'd really be getting somewhere . . .
Go you big red fire engine!
Now, I suppose, we *really* know why governments around the world want to eradicate music-swapping and "indecent" Internet imagery - they can't monitor what we're really up to through all the noise :)
Of course, you can take anything said in public about intelligence activities with several grains of salt. If the NSA *can* successfully and selectively monitor undersea cable traffic, they're not going to be so silly as to broadcast that fact to the world.
Go you big red fire engine!
I'd go further than that - for me, compiling stuff is really the only performance benchmark I'm interested in - everything else happens "fast enough" these days. If reformatting my /home partition as ReiserFS is going to increase performance for kernel compiles significantly, I'll seriously consider converting.
Go you big red fire engine!
For instance, when the <plug>GnuCash</plug>developers get the RPC-enabled, PostGres-driven backend fully up to speed (it works, but it's not production-use material yet) it'd be a blast to port it to this architecture. If we did, do you really think IBM would cut off access?
Go you big red fire engine!
A couple of my friends had CRT desktop displays, and while they looked incredibly cool sitting on the desktop, what they actually displayed wasn't quite so great. Subjectively, the "refresh rate" seems to be a lot lower, and whites in particular tend to be very "glary". Was it just that the controls were set wrong for my own preferences? Do I need to get used to the LCD?
Go you big red fire engine!
Yeah, I've no doubt that they'd be great at twitch games, but RPGs? I wouldn't have thought they'd be, as a group, better (or worse, for that matter) than average at anything that's based on strategy rather than exceptional reaction times.
Go you big red fire engine!
Quite correct. Street-legal 250cc two-stroke "GP Replicas", that put out about 70 horsepower and way about 280 pounds, are as fast or faster round a racetrack than 750 cc four-stroke sports bikes, which put out around 170 horsepower but weigh about 400 pounds. The greater corner speed made possible by the lighter-weight bike makes all the difference.
I'd also point out that somebody's already done better than helicopter turbine power.I remember hearing a story about a nutcase who fitted a 1500 horsepower engine from a WWII-vintage Mosquito fighter-bomber into a road-registered motorcycle. I think I'd be wearing nappies if I ever tried to ride a bike like that :)
Go you big red fire engine!
The smaller oil companies, the ones run by people like GWB, are the ones likely to be squashed if alternative fuels take off, and that is why they are buying . . . er, donating heavily do . . . politicians at the moment.
Go you big red fire engine!
True. The nanny impulse exists across the Australian political spectrum, I'm afraid. However, when it comes to Net censorship, Labor has at least recognized the technical impossibility of doing so and has advocated education as a better solution.
Go you big red fire engine!
That's certainly true, if you were in a business that was involved in sales-tax collection. Most Australian businesses weren't. Secondly, the procedures for filling in the GST forms were unnecessarily complex and required many small businesses to pay accountants a large amount of money to fill them in. Thirdly, it made tax evasion more difficult - a practice many small businesses like to indulge in.
Go you big red fire engine!
The current Australian government is a (highly steady) coalition of two conservative parties, which has been in power since 1996. The other major party is the Labor Party, roughly analogous to the British Labor party, but still retaining tighter links to its labor union history.
Our parliamentary and party system, again, most closely resembles Britain, in that party discipline is very strong, and votes in the lower house are purely a formality. However, the upper house of parliament is not controlled by a single party, and two small left-wing parties (the Democrats and Greens), a religious right-wing annoyance, and a member of the lunar-nutball right hold the balance of power in that house, meaning that the government has to reach agreement with either the opposition, or some or all of the others, to get legislation through.
The current Prime Minister is one John Howard, who was aptly described by American travel writer Bill Bryson as "the world's most boring individual". By Australian standards, he is a economic conservative (though due to his current electoral unpopularity he has swung towards popular pork-barelling), and an utter social reactionary.
For some time, he has tried to play off the unpopularity with rural voters on economic issues (the government has imposed a universal sales tax, which has resulted in higher prices and a great deal of extra accounting overhead for small businesses, who are not happy about it) by, in essence, appealing to their prejudice against drug users, asylum-seekers, homosexuals, the primarily city-based and relatively wealthy advocates of removing the symbolic link to the British monarchy, Aboriginals, and so on. Unfortunately for Mr Howard, the rural and outer-urban constituency appears to be sufficiently annoyed by the economic issues that they will vote Labour or (in relatively small proportions, thankfully) lunar-right regardless, and the inner-urban "elite" are going to also desert his party because of disgust at his social policies as well as economic.
I think I will join most Australians in welcoming Mr Howard's fairly imminent and fairly certain departure (the election must be held by November or so). Unfortunately, the alternative, Labor, doesn't appear particularly inspiring - if a little more clueful on some aspects of IT policy, which is nice.
Go you big red fire engine!