satori99

As an Australian, I am so grateful for compulsory voting.

> Should Australians brace themselves ?

Australians are currently paying him billions for 2nd hand nuclear submarines (which are not likely to ever be delivered), so that they can protect themselves from their biggest trading partner.

My first thought was about Children Of Men

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/

(Which is a harrowing, yet brilliant, film)

Mel Brooks did not even try to defend against this. He is a huge admirer of her. He thought it was appropriate to pay her and apologise for any offence she may have taken from the gag. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQef9PqjKbG/

It is wealthy people in highly affluent harbourside suburbs who are the customers for cocaine in Australia. It is not being consumed by 'junkies'. https://au.news.yahoo.com/affluent-suburb-called-drug-issue-...

The 'flys' are the enormous curtains and backdrops used in theatre productions. They are raised and lowered to set new scenes in a production. They need a large space to be raised into, above the stage--which is known as a fly tower.

I wasn't sure what you were discussing. Like, what is a fly tower? So I went down a barbican rabbit hole and found this part of a video, where one of the theatre fly techs describes the same thing as you!

https://youtu.be/uDdTUBk-qjo?t=140

Indeed

"It turns out that GPS must account for both special relativity and general relativity to deliver position at 1-meter level and time at 100-nanosecond level to its users."

https://www.gpsworld.com/inside-the-box-gps-and-relativity/

I recall reading Kay Cottee's account of her solo unassisted circumnavigation in 1988. She was the first woman to do so.

Part of her preparation was removing the labels from all tinned food, and then re-writing what was in the can with a permanent marker on the lid, before fully immersing each can in laquer. Presumably this was done to help deal with corrosion problems.

> The use of mathematics to produce sounds resembling real instruments quickly became obsolete once we could just go out and sample the real thing. Sampling is a boring, brute-force approach to sound synthesis, but it’s a relatively straightforward one, now we have the computing power and memory.

I guess this is true, but the next thing to come along that made me leave the DX7 at home was an Ensoniq EPS-16+.

https://www.vintagesynth.com/ensoniq/eps-16

The article mentions Sydney harbours 18 foot racing skiffs. These are very light 3 man racing vessels with far more sail than boat. They are very fast and require all 3 crew to be suspended on trapeze wires far from the hull, just to stay upright.

They are fun to watch because they flip and capsize a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UqXaTHG0_M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmKQY0KdKSo

> A lot of prescience is just paying enough attention

Terry Gilliam said much the same thing when talking about making Brazil in the 1980s.

"People think I am a prophet and that Brazil described the world we’re living in now a few years ago. But we were living in that world then; people just weren’t paying attention the way they do now."

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/magazine/terry-gilliam-is...

Jessica Watson's attempt (16yo) was non-stop, but fell just short of the required 21,600nm for an official record.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Watson

This trial has its own website too.

https://www.avatartherapytrial.com/what-is-avatar-therapy

What you really need is a Non-Linear Junction Detector. These can detect an unshielded device with transistors, even if it's off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_junction_detector

This is how Australia's public broadcaster is funded. But it means politicians directly decide its budget, which makes it a political football.

Typically, they were managed based on level of fame, health, and age.

Any notable persons named in recent news reports for matters of health were kept near the top of the pile.

There was nothing pre-prepared for Princess Diana's death as she was just too young and healthy, despite her incredible fame.

> draft obituaries ready for all living celebrities, which have to be constantly updated

I was responsible for doing this for a news radio network 30 years ago. Mostly I was able to stay on top of things, but Princess Diana really ruined my weekend. No-one was ready for that one.

My understanding is that pagers are typically radio Rx-only, and that it is not possible to track their location like a cellular device -- which is likely why Hezbollah chose to use them.

Though it would be possible to add this ability when the hardware was intercepted, a transmitting device is also easy to detect.

I'm not sure that Infinite Fun Space is used to simulate the real. I got the impression that IFS is where Minds go to unwind and play in synthetic universes with rules of their own imagining. And that humans cannot really even properly conceive them.

The Culture is also very cautious about running high fidelity simulations for ethical reasons. Useful simulations approach the real in fidelity which makes them problematic to delete -- But they still do it.

A Culture Mind would be deeply offended if you called it "An AI" to its avatars face :P

> You might want to live there, but I wouldn't. Virtually all humans in the books [...] are kept as pets by the ships, for amusement, basically as clowns.

I got the impression that the Minds are proud of how many humans choose to live in their GSV or Orbital, when they are free to live anywhere and they appear to care deeply about humans in general and often individuals too.

Also, the Minds are not perfect Gods. They have god-like faculties, but they are deliberately created as flawed imperfect beings.

One novel (Consider Phlebas?) explained that The Culture can create perfect Minds, but they tend to be born and then instantly sublime away to more interesting dimensions.

Do people at Antarctic research stations ever hear this sound?

The last Australian deep desert tribe to discover that their continent had been colonized by white people was in 1984. When they realized that extended family members from other groups had been living with running water (and sugar!) for years while they were out in the desert, they were pissed. Only one member of the group chose not to join modern society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pintupi_Nine

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591

Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon made reference to a hacker dubbed The Digi-Bomber, as he could make his victims CRT monitors implode in front of them by remotely forcing a dangerously bad configuration.

Why not both? My Atari 800 came with a BASIC and a Logo cartridge. Logo was the thing that got my attention first because it could draw pictures on a TV screen right away, but writing BASIC programs and storing them on a cassette tape was the thing that got me hooked for life.

NSW is home to the largest number of gambling machines anywhere outside of Nevada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_in_Australia#New_Sout...

There were others in his league who have been mostly lost in history. When von Neumann first published a description of a stored-program binary computing machine in 1945, he cited only one paper -- which was co-authored by Walter Pitts;

https://nautil.us/the-man-who-tried-to-redeem-the-world-with...

It is only a matter of time until the manufacturers include a GSM modem (under their control), and exfiltrate the info they want without using your network at all.

Last year, Australian farmers lost automatic steering for their agricultural machinery for a significant time when a single geo-sync satellite, which broadcast a GPS correction signal over the continent, failed.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/apr/23/austr...