pmccool

There has been Internet censorship in Australia for some time. What is at issue here is mandatory filtering. The current regime is summarized here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Australi...

I doubt it. Australia has an implied freedom of political communication (per the Lange and Coleman v Power cases). This law is on shaky legal ground already. Blocking entire sites will make it more likely that the law will be struck down.

It would also be more politically risky.

No doubt they could try - it's technically possible - but I think they wouldn't.

I agree that the fact that this law could be abused in such a way is a compelling objection to it.

Hopefully, adding "Australia is rapidly becoming an international laughingstock" to the list of reasons to drop this stupid law will convince Conroy. I doubt it, though; "it won't work", "most people oppose it" and "it's on shaky legal ground" don't seem to have convinced him.

Yeah, modern derailleurs have fixed that problem - it's a fairly old article. A couple of our bikes have gearing that low, and no issues with chain slap. They use MTB derailleurs.

It's the gear ratio times the nominal diameter of the wheel. Your gear ratio is 1.5:1. Assuming it's a road bike, the nominal diameter is 27 inches. You would have a 40.5 inch bottom gear. This is a rough, easy-to-calculate way of comparing gearing on different bikes, ones that don't necessarily have the same diameter wheels.

There are better methods around, but this is probably the most popular. I imagine it's because the better methods involve harder calculations.

edit: grammar, punctuation.

I was making the point that a lot of the advantages mentioned apply to netbooks. Some of the ones that don't (e.g. standing-up use) would be a case of swings and roundabouts. I agree that standing-up use, particularly data entry, is one of the iPad's advantages. I didn't get how much of the standing-up use was data entry (where it's game, set and match to a touchscreen) and how much of it was passively displaying data (where the advantage is smaller).

One place mentioned in the article where the iPad wins over netbooks is ease of cleaning, having way fewer crevices than a device with a keyboard. Not an impossible problem, but I imagine it's nice not to have to worry about it.

The article describes a situation where an ultra-portable device with long battery life is a winner. It's not clear whether the iPad is any better than a netbook would have been. I would imagine it would win on standing-up use and lose out on typing. At any rate, it seemed more about the virtues of an ultraportable than the particular virtues of the iPad.

edit: which is not a criticism of the article, merely an observation that it applies to more than one device.

Or a bicycle. I gather there are any number of e-bikes around if pedalling is an issue.

This is what I never understood about the Segway: what does it do that a bicycle of some description cannot?

As I started reading the article, I wondered how he would get such a car serviced. When I got to the bit about a faulty timing chain destroying the engine, I couldn't help but wonder if lack of routine maintenance was to blame (I understand timing belts/chains in interference engines to be one of the neglect-at-your-peril things, particularly with high-performance engines).

A couple of weeks ago. Locked my phone in my house along with my keys. I'm glad they're still around; when they're useful, they're very useful.

Consider the two recent creepy proposals together. They point to everything being censored and everything being monitored.

Consider Wikileaks. Consider how these laws work together against whistleblowers. How convenient for a government to be able to - block such a site from the majority of citizens; and - have a red-hot go at tracking down anyone rash enough to upload anything.

Throw in a law or two to make it illegal for paedophiles and terrorists to circumvent these arrangement and you have a truly nasty arrangement.

My mistake. Thank you for the correction. I certainly agree that popular opposition to creepy laws isn't an area where Australia has covered itself in glory over the years. That's not a specifically Australian failing, though.

I'd answer "No".

1. A lot of these creepy proposals never get past the proposal stage. Take the Australia Card.

2. Australia's legal institutions have proved reasonably effective in dealing with such creepy laws. E.g. laws banning the Communist Party were struck down in the '50s.

3. This latest proposal is about law enforcement, not censorship. Creepy anti-terrorism laws aren't a peculiarly Australian vice.

4. The government doesn't have a majority in both houses; it needs the complicity of non-government members to make laws.

None of this is to say that this is a good thing. It's creepy and embarrasing and I wish they'd stop. 

If this law ever comes into existence, I predict its number-one use will be pursuing illegal downloaders or something. I bet it won't be explicitly limited to terrorism or whatever its ostensible purpose is.

Hope I'm wrong, on both points.

To be fair, this creepiness is coming from the Attorney-General's department, so Conroy doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it.

From the article:

"Recently legal scholars have started looking harder at such fields, hoping to find mechanisms that can support innovation without the cost and complexity of conventional intellectual property law, and wondering how broadly those alternative mechanisms might be applied."

Honest question: how much innovation is there in this field? Is there a steady stream of new magic tricks? Assuming there is, and I have no idea one way or the other, it might serve as a interesting counterexample to the claim that patent laws are essential to innovation.

The extralegal protection system they've developed - essentially a guild system - doesn't seem like a terribly promising candidate for broad application. Among other things, it's more effective than the patent system at stopping ideas getting into the public domain, ever. Whatever its other drawbacks, a patent means an idea will eventually make its way into the public domain.

edit: grammar

They're useful in many non-car situations too - tidying up cabling is another favourite.

One important issue the article doesn't address: do these scores have any meaningful correlation with success in the sciences? The ability to do research and the ability to do well in exams are two quite different things.

On the face of it, a pretty shaky premise.

Agree. I find there is much more value in small-group tutorials than in lectures. Finding those on the Internet is much harder.

In particular, my experience is that lectures are more about information transfer and less about problem solving and application.

Margaret Wertheim's book "Pythagoras's Trousers" discusses this issue. The contention there is that it's not just about this sterotype, it's also about a deeply entrenched anti-female culture.

The gender bias problem can't be fixed simply by reversing this stereotype; it goes much deeper than that. It's not whether women can do it or not; it's blindingly obvious that they can. It's that significant numbers of them are put off by the culture and either cut their careers short or don't start one at all.

Sounds cool. It'd be nice if it could run off an existing dynamo. I wonder if it uses the standard voltage for these things (6V/3W)?

I found the very subjective attitude to selecting talent interesting. I imagine this is because soccer is a sport that doesn't really lend itself to collecting metrics. Nor is it a sport where physical attributes are decisive.

The case of the 5-year-old was also interesting. It makes me wonder: how young is too young to meaningfully identify ability?

Dunno about this situation, but there's a discussion in

http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/sinodisp/au/cases/cth/FCA/...

starting at about paragraph 110. They are coy about the details, I suppose to make circumvention harder or something.

Does the first amendment apply to corporations? No doubt it would apply to government organizations, but I can't see that nattering to BP's shareholders.

The ability to print, e.g. drawings. Nothing too elaborate, screendumps would be fine.

Definitely, especially if going touchscreen(which is the way to go - imagine how often a stylus would go missing). The resolution needn't be massive, so I would hope this wouldn't be costly.

Difference is, as the parent post said, they don't have to give you a degree. There are all sorts of strings attached to that. You pay for the possibility of a degree; they are not obliged to hand them out.

As an aside, I'm not sure this would be governed by contract law. In .au, this sort of thing has been the subject of administrative law cases...

I think the marketing department did just fine. Browsers do indeed have a shelf life. The blame rests with those who created the situation, not those who pointed it out.

Also, unlike open source, there's no way for people to experiment en masse on leaking deepwater oil wells. Solutions can't be attempted in parallel.

Sure, but that analysis only matters if they'd been found to owe fiduciary duties.

As I understand it, there are two distinct conclusions.

One, they did not owe fiduciary duties, as discussed above.

Two, even if they did owe these duties, they didn't breach them.

Bear in mind, they would have won even if the court found against them on point two.