This morning Australian news sensationalised (gasp, shock) a new Auditor-General’s report reveals more than 13,000 soldiers are not considered battle ready. About 7300 had either failed the basic fitness test – the most arduous element of which is a 2.4km run – or hadn’t done the test in the last six months. About 5800 Diggers failed weapons proficiency tests or were overdue for refreshers.
The Auditor-General found only 18,900 soldiers, about 53 per cent of troops, were ready to go at short notice.
Now let’s draw things into perspective. The Australian Bureau of Statistics cites that the average weekly income of an Australian is $1,268.50 with the average public sector employee being exactly a hundred more at $1,368.50. There are several methods of entry to employment with the Australian Defence Force (ADF), but I’m writing this primarily as a post-grad qualified guy who dabbled with the idea of off-setting university costs with enrolment for some time before realising it just had no financial worth at all. If you’re a professional with even reasonable qualifications you can easily make four to five times in private sector as you would with the ADF. But let’s assume you’re not.
Let’s assume you’re a regular person who signs up at age 18, for the first two years you’ll be getting 2/5ths of the average weekly wage Australian’s would get elsewhere. On completion of training, you’ll get a base wage of $25-$30k based on the salary scale on the ADF website. At the HIGHEST non-commission rank you can reach (and let’s face it, a lot of ADF personel can spend twenty years in and not get a commission) CPO/WO2/FSGT you will be on $1,138.53 so you’re still falling $100 short of the national, or $200 of pub. sec.
The biggest insult of it all is, part time ADF employees don’t pay income tax on their ADF salary, whereas full timers pay the same income tax as civillians. So drop several more hundred off that reach for full-timers as Australia is one of the worlds highest taxed nations (not to mention surprise tax, as I like to call it, on almost everything you purchase, from GST, to stamp duty, to other mythical unicorn taxes, speeding fines, bus lane fines, parking fines that hedge just short of $300 a piece, you name it).
So it’s safe to say we’re a reasonably expensive nation to live in, the ADF are paying fuck all, and then people rage at them for having people who can’t be arsed. Would you do your job for their wage? Would you do THEIR job for their wage? Fuck no.
An international aid ship en route for the beseiged Gaza Strip was intercepted by Israeli troops, the Gaza-based committee awaiting the vessel said.
“The Rachel Corrie has been intercepted 35 miles off Gaza,” a spokesman for the welcoming committee, Amjad al-Shawa, who talked with the boat, told AFP in Gaza City, the vessel 5 nautical miles off coastal waters, thus pushing the case that these seizures in international waters amount to piracy. “Several Israeli boats surrounded them and prevented them from reaching Gaza,” said Mr Shawa.
“They try to take the boat maybe to (the southern Israeli port city of) Ashdod or maybe to another place,” he said. Mr Shawa said communication with the boat had been “completely cut” but the committee would keep trying to reach them. Martin Quigley, a Dublin based spokesman for the vessel, which is carrying 15 people and tonnes of aid for Gaza, could not confirm the information and said he had not been in contact with the boat. “They had agreed to call us the minute they spotted any Israeli ships,” he said, saying he had not been able to reach the passengers on the satellite phone. “It sounds like the phone is off the hook.”
A spokeswoman for the Israeli army denied the boat had been taken over, telling AFP: “No… we are not aware of any information about that”.
Israeli governmental credibility is on the ropes after autopsies on the bodies of nine Turks revealed most were shot in the back of the head or the back, the Turks were killed in an Israeli raid on an aid ship bound for Gaza found they were peppered with bullets and many were shot at close range, a British newspaper said Saturday. Citing Yalcin Buyuk, the vice-chairman of the Turkish council of forensic medicine, which carried out the autopsies for the Turkish ministry of justice on Friday, the Guardian said the men were shot a total of 30 times.
One 60-year-old man was shot four times – in the temple, chest, hip and back, Buyuk said. A US-Turkish citizen was shot five times at close range in the face, the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back.
Two other men were shot four times, and five of the victims were shot either in the back of the head or in the back, Buyuk said.
Israel has said the commandos only opened fire after they came under attack with clubs, knives, guns and other weapons, although no weapons other than deck poles were found on the vessel, and night vision footage taken by the IDF revealed that the crew only began to try and repel the attackers once weapons fire had already commenced against the unarmed civillians on board the ship.
Bulent Yildirim, head of the Islamic charity Foundation of Humanitarian Relief, which spearheaded the Gaza aid fleet, said activists used iron bars in self-defence after Israeli soldiers fired indiscriminately when they stormed the Turkish ferry Mavi Marmara.
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him…”
Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science (1882), s126.
Long have we theorised the above line by a madman bearing a labtern not to be talking about the literal God believed in by so many theists. Instead, we interpret, he is talking about what this god represented for European culture, the shared cultural belief in God which had once been its defining and uniting characteristic.
So to has man thrown off the yolk of theism, every element of the divine has been replicated at large through science, trickery, art, illusionism except one final element; the creation of life.
Until yesterday when flamboyant geneticist Craig Venter held true to the pledge he made nearly 15 years ago, unveiling his magnum opus. This landmark of scientific progress, published in the Journal of Science, stands on the shoulders of his race to decode the human genome in his own laboratory, egotistically his own DNA I might add.
The madman carrying this lantern has indeed created the first instance of purely synthetic life, opening the doors nanoscience falter at with the potential to create designer microbes for special jobs such as production of biofuels, pharmaceuticals, through to filtering contaminents from air and water.
“This is the first synthetic life that has been made, and we call it synthetic because the cell is totally derived from a synthetic chromasome, made with four bottles of chemcals on a synthesizer from information on a computer,” Dr Venter said.
Lauded as a tour de force by Prof. Mattick from the Australian Research Council, Dr. Venters work is as ground breaking as science gets these days, the applications for man made life are phenominal and limited only by our imagination. That being said, mans imagination can often be self destructive, so think of all the fantastic synthesized zombie viruses the US military will make with this!
The bacterium used decoded DNA from Mycoplasma mycoides imprinting the synthetic DNA and inserting it into living bacterium, in this case Mycoplasma capricolum, allowing the bacterium to flourish with both it’s own and the synthetic DNA within, then finally using an antibiotic designed to kill all but the synthetic DNA allowing only the synthesized organism to proliferate and produce protein strands from the original Mycoplasma mycoides creating, simply, artificial life.
Amusing article about a not so secret bnet management system and php sploit: -
Researchers at Imperva have discovered an ‘experimental’ botnet that uses around 300 hijacked web servers to launch high-bandwidth DDoS attacks.
The servers are all believed to be open to an unspecified security vulnerability that allows the attacker, who calls him or herself ‘Exeman’, to infect them with a tiny, 40-line PHP script. This includes a simple GUI from which the attacker can return at a later date to enter in the IP, port and duration numbers for the attack that is to be launched.
But why servers in the first place? Botnets are built from PCs and rarely involve servers.
According to Imperva’s CTO, Amachai Shulman, they have no antivirus software and offer high upload bandwidth, typically 10-50 times that of a consumer PC. Are there disadvantages to this? There are simply fewer of them, the attacker needs to find vulnerable machines using PHP, and they appear to need manual control, although Shulman did say that attacks could probably be automated using a separate script.
Imperva uncovered the attack by obtaining the server attack source code, which was simply run through Google, revealing a list of servers infected with it. The company was then able to watch as the attacker used a compromised server to launch a real denial-of-service attack on a Dutch ISP. The purpose is probably extortion-related.
The controller of the botent had used the Tor anonymity system to hide his or her incoming connections, which made it impossible to judge location. The servers themselves were lone servers at hosting companies, perhaps ones not carefully monitoring outgoing traffic patterns.
Would hosting companies or website owners know they were being hijacked by one of the Internet’s oddest botnets? Most likely, only if the authorities or third-party ISP comes calling with complaints of unwanted Internet traffic.
The botnet’s GUI hints that the hijack program, and perhaps the botnet itself, was probably created to be rented out to third-parties. A message in the simple interface reminds its users “Don’t DoS yourself nub.”
It was a massive hit for Lady Gaga and Beyonce, but apparently Britney Spears had first dibs on recording Telephone – and it was Lady Gaga herself that offered it to her. Website iLeaks last week released a snippet of what it claimed was Spears’ version of the song which became Lady Gaga’s sixth consecutive No 1 hit on Billboard’s Pop Songs list.
Fans of both have been teased with rumours that Lady Gaga originally wrote the song for Spears’s album Circus, but the story has never progressed any further than hearsay. iLeaks claimed Spears sang a demo of Telephone and it then sold the complete version of the demo to a fan for $US750.
The full version appeared on the internet within days.
News first surfaced that Spears had been offered the song in March last year, when Lady Gaga producer Rodney Darkchild moaned about the fact Telephone never made it onto Circus. “Me and Lady Gaga wrote a smash for Britney called ‘Telephone’ the label didnt out it on the LP (Circus). It should be out right now!!! Its too hot!!!” Darkchild reportedly tweeted. Now debate’s raging among fans of both sides as to whether it’s really Spears, World of Britney claims the original has no autotuning, unlike the leaked version, which is heavily autotuned.
In February, Electronic Arts laid out its release slate for the coming year. At the end of the list of games scheduled as coming in the October-December quarter was “The Sims 3 on Console Title TBA (consoles, handhelds).” The schedule backed up reports that initially surfaced in 2006 that the Sims series was coming to consoles. It also made perfect business sense, as the Sims 3 has sold over 4.5 million units to date on the PC and Mac, making it the top PC game of 2009. Today, EA officially announced that the Sims 3 will ship for the DS, Wii, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 this fall. Published under the EA Play label, the game will sport many of the same customization and character creation options as the PC edition of the game, as well as some new features. These include karma powers, which players can use to give their in-game incarnations instant luck–be it good or bad.
Sims 3 is already cross platform as it is with iPhone / iPod extended expansions allowing your favorite sims to be exported to come with you anywhere for unlimited adventures around the world, so these expansions will make it the most platform open game engine developed.
7,000 screaming pubescent teenage females rushed the barricades like estrogen fuelled psycho hose beasts for the party frank of a 16 year old boy who resembles a 9 year old (polar opposite of a manchild) who sounds like a 12 year old girl.
What’s wrong with this picture? What the fuck is right with it? (If you answered nothing, read on, else beat yourself across the head, re-read, and repeat until enlightenment)
It’s 2010, when our prime minister lied about stopping Japanese illegal whaling, withdrawing our troops from America’s war against adjectives, and getting rid of the vile fuck-the-workers “work choices” scheme … we saw no one swamp the streets to protest.
In 2008 during the mandatory censorship protests we saw only 5,000 mob Town Hall to protest the decay of Internet freedom in our nation not to mention free speech at the draconian hands of Senator-can’t-program-a-VCR Conroy.
What is wrong with a society which has crazed teen girls acting like sleazy 40 year old men with their hand in their pocket over some kid? In what jilted fucked up take of reality do we see people mobbing barricades and police lines over some b-grade net celebrity? When did Australia turn into the US?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware that teenage females are the least intellectually gifted let alone autonomous minority in our society and I’m also aware that they’re brain washed to be the future of mindless consumption technicians that will keep our male workforce subjugated; but there’s something seriously wrong with parents who don’t discourage clearly unhealthy behaviour.
I don’t have children, well none that Centrelink can prove are mine, and I’m personally a fan of ‘late term’ abortions up to the age of 35, but seriously, seeing this in the news disgusted me.
These silly little trollops need to watch less OC/hills/jersey shore and get the fuck back into a classroom or better yet an adidas sweat shop. We boggle our logic to no end trying to figure out why women are paid less than men and have more dick-in-butt ratio in the socio-economic front yet allow borderline psychotic behaviour and encourage hive mentality and worship of TV-told-me-to tin gods. No male would get away with that over any female without their mates outright telling them they’re bent in the head and probably slap them around when they won’t talk about anything but their obsession. Not to mention the extremes many young girls go to (see: changing their online surnames everywhere to reflect obsessed marital fantasies) are just bizarre and unhealthy.
How young females can’t see that there’s no such tangible thing as a ‘fanboy’ but ‘fangirl’ is an ever present term and not appreciate that they’re jipping themselves out of individualistic thought or gender rights progression is beyond me.
Pre-pube girls, grow the fuck up. Pre-pube girl parents, put them in therapy you disillusioned cunts.
The letter to Gizmodo from Apple once it realised who had its iPhone 4G / www.gizmodo.comSource: news.com.au
Gray Powell lose his job and if he does, who’s responsible?
That’s the question on the lips of anyone watching the drama unfold around the device found in a bar in California that turned out to be the new iPhone 4G.
Gray Powell is the Apple employee who lost it – and there was no hiding for him today after technology blog Gizmodo printed his name and photo after an interview with him in which they said he “sounded tired and broken”.
A uni graduate who helps build the software that enables the iPhone to make calls, Mr Powell is now the pin-up boy of several “Save Gray Powell” fan clubs on social networking sites.
And Gizmodo is under increasing pressure to justify two things – a) Whether it should have paid for, kept and dismantled a product under development and b) whether it was right to publish the name and photo of the person responsible for losing it.
Gizmodo contributing editor John Hermann – who interviewed Mr Powell and today revealed Apple’s failure to get its phone back – says he doesn’t know Mr Powell’s fate, other than “this has to be rough on him”.
He said Gizmodo wouldn’t be doing its job if it didn’t break the story properly.
“People read us because they’re obsessed with tech, either as a hobby, or as part of a recognition that it’s becoming drastically more important in their daily lives,” he said.
“As tech writers, if we knew about something like this and didn’t look into it, didn’t report it, we wouldn’t be doing our jobs.”
Mr Hermann said Gizmodo took a chance on spending $US5000 to acquire the phone and didn’t even realise what they had until they published the story.
Apple’s rapid reply confirmed their suspicions.
“We spent around a week vetting it, decided it was legit, and published our story,” Mr Hermann said.
“When Apple asked for it back, on record, we gave it back.”
The letter of reply from Gizmodo read: “P.S. I hope you take it easy on the kid who lost it. I don’t think he loves anything more than Apple.”
In an apology of sorts to Mr Powell, a blog today by Gizmodo editorial director Brian Lam told Mr Powell they “couldn’t resist a good story” and to “keep your head up”.
“After all, it’s just a f**king iPhone and mistakes happen to everyone,” it read.
But Gizmodo’s readers weren’t so keen to brush the news – and the method of getting it – under the mat.
“Printing the name and photograph of the engineer who lost it was unnecessary and tasteless,” one wrote.
“If you needed a photo for the story, you had lots of options,” the reader continued.
“If you had printed all of those details (the bar, finding the Facebook page, etc), but withheld the name, it’s still the same story.”
Mr Powell wasn’t the one who handed the phone over to Gizmodo. Someone sitting near him was given the phone after he left and held onto it for three weeks.
“I thought it was just an iPhone 3GS,” he told Gizmodo.
“It just looked like one. I tried the camera, but it crashed three times.”
The finder had time to access Mr Powell’s Facebook account and record his last status update: “I underestimated how good German beer is.”
His Twitter account also showed Mr Powell was celebrating his birthday on the night in question.
Gizmodo paid the finder $5000 for the phone, after he claimed he’d tried to give it back, but the only people he could speak to at Apple didn’t want to know about it.
One Apple employee told Gizmodo he remembered the call coming in to a colleague next to him.
“We haven’t gotten any notices or anything about a lost phone, much less anything stating we are making a new one,” he said.
“We wouldn’t have any idea what to do with it and that’s what sucks about working for apple.
“We’re given just enough info to try and help people but not enough info to do anything if someone calls like this.”
Earlier, underworld figure Mick Gatto said he had heard unconfirmed rumours about Williams having died but said that was all he had heard.
“I would rather let dead dogs lie,” he said.
“If you hear any more let me know but I would rather not comment on him.”
He said Williams was “certainly not” a friend.
Victorian Premier John Brumby said he wouldn’t comment on the death until he had more details.
Williams, who was serving a 35-year prison sentence for several murders, was a key player in Melbourne’s brutal underworld war that claimed about 30 lives and took police more than a decade to bring under control.
In sentencing Williams, Supreme Court judge Betty King said there were “no other appropriate penalties for crimes of this nature, gangland executions carried out … in the presence of frightened men, women and children”.
Justice King said she was concerned Williams could become a cult hero.
“You are a killer, and a cowardly one who employed others to do the actual killing,” the judge said.
Police payroll
Meanwhile, it was revealed today by the Herald Sun that police paid the private school fees for Williams’ daughter.
The $8000 payment was made by Victoria Police command for Williams’ child to attend a top private school.
A letter written by the Victorian Government Solicitor’s Office, and signed by its managing principal solicitor in February, shows police admit they paid for Williams’ daughter to attend the school.
Williams’ lawyer Rob Stary said he spoke to Williams about 9am today about the revelations in the Herald Sun.
Mr Stary said he and Williams talked “about how disturbed we were that material was being leaked to the press”.
“Of course he was (upset),” Mr Stary said.
“It exposes his daughter to risk. Of course he was concerned about that. He was not concerned about his own wellbeing, he was concerned about her.
“I just hope that justice prevails.”
The letter also showed that Victoria Police offered to pay a $750,000 debt owed to the tax office by George Williams, as first revealed by the Herald Sun in February.
The Herald Sun was unable, for legal reasons, to outline why the school fee payment was made.
Roberta Williams has remained tight-lipped about the payments.
“I’ve got no comment about that, but you have a great night,” Ms Williams said.
The State Government and Victoria Police command refused to comment about the school payment.
Opposition crime prevention spokesman Andrew McIntosh said Premier John Brumby and Police Minister Bob Cameron should explain why Victorian taxpayers picked up the bill.
With AAP and the Herald Sun
For more switched on American’s this is good news, as Goldman Sachs utilised the GFC and government funds to exploit American tax payers, with tax payers money they bought out people’s homes that were foreclosed and sold them back into the market with a massive markup months later, shafting everyone along the way. Excerpt below: -
A US watchdog has charged top Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs with financial fraud and raised the prospect of a wider crackdown.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in a civil suit, accused Goldman of “defrauding investors by misstating and omitting key facts” about a product based on sub-prime mortgage-backed securities.
The securities were a key contributor to the financial crisis that peaked in 2008 because many contained risky mortgages.
The SEC said Goldman failed to tell investors that a major hedge fund which helped put together the so called collateralised debt obligation (CDO), was at the same time betting against it.
Australian TV broadcasters are bowing to audience demand, reinstating time shifted programs due to public pressure from fan bases. Public broadcaster the ABC is the latest station to follow, restoring Friday-night series Collectors to its usual slot after it was displaced by new comedy Sleuth 101. Angry Collectors fans flooded the ABC with concern about their much loved program, leading ABC TV head of programming Marena Manzoufas to admit defeat and amend the schedule. “The dedicated Collectors audience has clearly demonstrated their preference for the show’s original 8pm Friday slot so I have decided to reinstate it there and move Sleuth 101 to Sundays at 6.30pm,” Ms Manzoufas said.
While fans of certain programs long have felt shunned by networks chopping and changing schedules – often leaving a series incomplete – or moving programs without broad appeal to late-night timeslots, the advent of digital TV has delivered a win. While Channel 10′s digital offering One is purely sport, rivals Nine and Seven’s second channels have become an avenue on which the networks can screen programs that have not rated strongly but have concentrated and passionate fan bases.
Channel 7′s US acquisitions Lost and Ugly Betty are examples of such programs, with fans now treated to weeknight primetime slots on 7Two.
University of South Australia senior communications lecturer Dr Jackie Cook says the shift in attitude by channels is a way of testing out programs and gauging viewing trends across different age groups.
“I think they are developing demographics,” she said.
“They are looking at the capacity of cult shows to develop a much stronger audience. “We’re beginning to see an understanding among networks it’s not a case of trying to appeal to the largest audience and beat their rivals.”
This could also be indication that the average viewer having access to broadband or greater is leading to less viewers of television as viewers obtain what they want to see when they want to see it as opposed to waiting up to several years for a network in Australia to pick it up.
Google has agreed to remove from its search index links to a satirical website that allegedly promotes racist views of indigenous Australians.
Aboriginal man Steve Hodder-Watt recently discovered the US-based site by searching “Aboriginal and Encyclopedia” in the search engine. He tried to modify the entry on Encyclopedia Dramatica, what the Australian media called ‘a satirical version of Wikipedia,’ but was blocked from doing so.
Hodder-Watt then undertook legal action, that resulted in Google removing the offensive site from its listings. However the site itself remains available by navigating directly to it, naturally.
His lawyer, George Newhouse, said the site was “one of the most offensive sorts of racial vilification you could possibly find”. “It portrays indigenous Australians in the most unsavoury light possible, and you wouldn’t want a child stumbling across it,” he told ABC Radio.
Newhouse said Google agreed to take the link down after he filed an official complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission. “Lo and behold they agreed last night to take down the sites.”
Newhouse later told AAP that he believed any material found to contravene the Racial Discrimination Act should be blocked under the federal government’s proposed internet filter.
The Federal Government plans to introduce legislation this year requiring all service providers to ban “refused classification” material.
What does this mean? Any website with a channer noon spamming ‘niggerniggernigger’ or linking to Electric Retard, etc will get that site blocked by the great Australian firewall?Fuck that, address the problem, don’t ban us all from seeing crap. As much as racism shits me, censorship shits me much, much more. Censorship erodes every demographics rights regardless of age, gender, sexuality or race; it punishes all equally for the sake of the moralist minority.
If it offends you, don’t fucking look at it. Once we start the OMG OFFENSE game on the Internet it’s game over to free speech. Besides, there’s a lot of us out there who enjoy trolling racists, that being said I’m not sure whether ED is inherently racist or more offensive for the sake of causing offence, I’d probably say the latter.
Interestingly the article on news.com.au was pulled due to the comments field being flooded with trolling from btards. :P
After super conservative fuckwits jumped up and down while the mainstream media was being ambiguous about the ramming of the Ady Gil, originally referring to it as ‘allegedly rammed’, more video has come to light, and even the mainstream media are releasing the footage from the Ady Gil’s cameraman around about the place that shows without doubt the Japanese vessel moved to ram the Ady Gil, which was floating dead in the water with all crew on deck taking a break, including the captain.
Earlier in the week, Japanese whalers and their puppet ‘research’ groups in New Zealand (who have, off the record, been showing strong pro-whaling flags backing Japan, in exchange for Japanese funding of course) claimed that the Ady Gil pulled in their way at the last minute causing the collision and went as far as demanding that Australia intervene against Sea Shepherd.
Captain Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd announced that $170,000 was pledged in the first few hours after the incident while more was flooding in following the screening of a Sea Shepherd advert featuring Transformers actress Isabel Lucas to replace the $3,000,000 dollar stealth yacht the whalers sunk.
Captain Watson also praised Australian Acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard – who has been accused by Japan of inflaming public opinion and making diplomatic resolution of the whaling dispute harder to realise – for speaking out. “Julia Gillard is the only politician who has had the courage to say something about the illegal activities Japan has undertaken; the rest of them are hiding behind Japan’s kimonos as far as I can see.” It’s a fair call given pre-election promises by Kevin Rudd that he would engage the Japanese illegal whaling activities under the guise of research, amongst other intra-political matters along the employment lines, and delivered on none of them.
Captain Watson was especially scathing of New Zealand Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully, who has said it was not the NZ Government’s responsibility to send armed vessels to protect people “determined to break the law”. “The Minister of Foreign Affairs has made ignorant and unsubstantiated accusations and he should apologise and if he refuses to apologise he should be asked to resign,” Mr Watson said. A fair call given the almost blatent public backing of Japan’s piratical acts over the past decade in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.
“How dare he take Japan’s side in this issue against his own citizens? If a Sea Shepherd ship had rammed and sunk a Japanese ship, there would be no hesitation in sending a Navy ship to the Southern Ocean with a warrant of arrest.” It’s unfortunate no governments are taking any action, especially in light of the new evidence that the Japanese vessel intentionally rammed and sunk the yacht.
Optical fibres make it possible for us to use the technologies we take for granted, such as the internet our mobile phones, and other ‘unwired’ tech, but now new research from Macquarie University may hold the key to more cost-effective, energy-efficient, durable and easy-to-use fibre optics in the future.
Professor Town’s team of fibre optics specialists from the University’s Department of Electronic Engineering has been developing a new prototype for fibre optics which is made from a “bubbly” polymer fibre. “Our technique involves heating the polymer to form bubbles-it’s easier and cheaper than assembling tubes or drilling,” he says. “This could be a cheap, clean and relatively fast way of developing an optical network and the production process uses significantly less energy than if we were working with glass.”
Traditionally, glass has been used to produce optical fibres, but the equipment needed in order to process the glass at high temperatures makes this an expensive option. While several groups around the world are investigating polymer as a potential future replacement, the Macquarie team is the only group to develop and test a system which uses bubbles within the polymer to guide and scatter light.
Deliberately leaky fibres are ideal for transmitting data over short distances. “This technology would be applicable to, for example, inter-office connections where workers could use ‘wireless’ laptops within a certain area of the workplace,” Professor Town says. “The bubbly design allows you to scatter out of the fibre and also to scatter back in: if you can do that, it reduces the cost of coupling and the overall system costs are reduced.
“It’s like when you drive into the Sydney Harbour Tunnel and you can still listen to your car radio-they use a co-axial cable that leaks in a similar way so that you can receive the signal anywhere on the roadway.” He doesn’t go on to explain how a leaky feeder can be implemented with light, where light lost will cause errors in reception of the signals target.
Because the bubbly polymer allows light out and in, it also makes it potentially very useful for sensing applications. “This type of polymer optical fibre may also prove useful for distributed sensing of materials such as toxic or explosive gases,” says Professor Town.
The other day pirate Japanese whalers rammed a Sea Shepherd vessel during ‘scientific’ whaling operations that were deemed illegal by the HCA in Australian territorial waters of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. (read the report here: http://tr.im/JIY7 ) Their actions drew the usual irritation of the global community that the Japanese are still scamming their arses off trying to use loopholes to commercially whale.
Glen Inwood of the ICR, the Japanese government sponsored ‘research’ organisation spoke briefly this morning on the issue, getting railed by reporters and asked many hard questions. He claimed that their research is to ‘establish whether commercial whaling is sustainable,’ and to do this research they need to use lethal research methods, defending the commercial operation stating the IWC set a ‘requirement that the meat goes on the market’ before running the usual fake ‘tradition’ defence that has been debunked by many a researcher interviewing average Japanese citizens on the issue.
It was ironic hearing Glen Inwood spouting that to convince IWC that whaling can be sustained they ‘need to whale,’ and that they were merely trying to ‘obtain data’ on commerial sustainable whaling. One interviewer nailed him, asking “When will you have adequate data?” after citing a list of whales to be slaughtered this ‘season,’ to which he immediately stated “All of your figures are wrong.” and beat around the bush before admitting it is “Indefinite research.”
He stopped short of outright admitting it’s all just a Japanese government sponsored scam, but toes the line of his puppeteers well. The interviewer ultimately asked if he can understand why whaling pisses the average Australian off given that it’s in our waters, illegally conducted, and in a whale sanctuary; he floundered before trying to claim many nations deny Australia’s claim to the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.
He didn’t quite elaborate if there were any nations aside from Japan and Norway, the two nations that still illegally whale regardless of the worldwide moratorium, that deny Australia’s claims to it’s own territorial waters.
He ended stating the usually tripe of the political correctness defence of “It’s a cultural tradition that Australians will need to learn to respect.”
Let’s hope they try and ram a vessel that isn’t 1/10th their size, maybe the Steve Irwin next? They wouldn’t have the gall, IMHO, a tiny fiberglass trimaran is an easy mark.
I almost shat myself when I read that the classic zombie novel (pun intended) Pride & Prejudice and Zombies (best grabbed in book form, or as a podcast from itunes) is going to be shot as a film, not sure whether it’s going to be big screen–following in the wake of the United States trying it’s hand at a comedy that isn’t slapstick nor starring Ben Stiller or Will Ferrell (Zombieland, 2009) that’s slightly undead related type film–or whether it’s doomed for DVD/TV. Hell, it hasn’t even been leaked in mainstream news who’s directing it or distributing it, but Natalie Portman has said she’ll produce it.
“Natalie Portman has signed on to produce and star in the movie version of the best-selling book “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” written by Seth Grahame-Smith and, uh, Jane Austen.
This expanded version of the Austen classic adds a twist on the well-known love story when the outbreak of a deadly virus begins to turn townsfolk into killers. Elizabeth Bennet struggles to balance her blossoming love for Mr. Darcy with her obligation to kick some zombie butt.
And who better to bring the right combination of elegance, wit, and edginess to the role of Elizabeth Bennet than Portman? She certainly has the chops to convince us to embrace this version of Elizabeth — a woman who at long last will have a proper outlet for her sense of purpose.
Sure, zombies may seem like a peculiar addition to the original text, but there is something about the outbreak of the undead in 19th-century England that somehow makes the story more accessible. The idea that love can blossom in spite of treacherous, external forces is really a modern concept. Besides, who hasn’t had to slay a couple of zombies to land Mr. Right?”
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart and was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University, who developed the CAPTCHA programme. To us mere mortals it often appears as hemetic arabic language font, so heavily distorted even humans can’t read it. However they’ve gone a step further, and whilst I may be slow on picking up on this I noticed the ‘easier’ CAPTCHA code to read looks like old type font, and sure enough it is!
CAPTCHA is a program developed by that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.
In an attempt to archive human knowledge digitally archive materials, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being scanned as images, and then transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). Whilst images are readable by humans the text isn’t searchable and cannot be indexed, also file size is compromised as images are much larger and harder to store.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
I was sold by this point and thought it absolutely novel and twee, but I couldn’t help but wonder how they know what we’re entering is correct. The gimmick is, one of the words is a control word, already known and intentionally seeded back and usually from the same source as the second word, the project assumes that you have entered it correctly and saves the word after enough people have entered the same word in the same fashion and assumes it is correct with higher confidence.
The only downside to this project is that at present they’re digitizing old editions of the New York Times, which isn’t of much benefit to mankind as a whole IMHO, but such is life. If you’re REALLY bored, you can click here to answer reCAPTCHA’s just to contribute to the project.
More by von Ahn
Matchin’ is a covert experiment in artificial intelligence. Every time players agree on a picture, it’s tagged as prettier. Von Ahn, a 28-year-old professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, will put the game online this summer, and as thousands of people play it, his database of 100,000 photos will be imbued with something quintessentially human: an aesthetic sensibility, encoded as a ranking of attractiveness.
The game basically tricks humans into teaching computers what constitutes prettiness. If enough people play Matchin’ — and von Ahn’s previous games have garnered millions of play-hours — it could eventually rate the appeal of every image on the Internet. Google could incorporate the ratings into its search engine, so you could search specifically for “beautiful” pictures of houses, people, or landscapes.
“People are good at figuring out what’s attractive, and computers are good at quickly searching and finding,” von Ahn says. “You put them together, and bang!”
This is “human computation,” the art of using massive groups of networked human minds to solve problems that computers cannot. Ask a machine to point to a picture of a bird or pick out a particular voice in a crowd, and it usually fails. But even the most dim-witted human can do this easily. Von Ahn has realized that our normal view of the human-computer relationship can be inverted. Most of us assume computers make people smarter. He sees people as a way to make computers smarter.
Odds are you’ve already benefited from von Ahn’s work. Like when you type in one of those stretched and skewed words before getting access to a Yahoo email account or the Ticketmaster store. That’s a Captcha, which von Ahn developed in 2000 to thwart spambots. Or there’s von Ahn’s picture-labeling games, which have lured thousands of bored Web surfers into tagging 300,000 photos online — doing it so effectively that Google bought his idea last year to improve its Image Search engine.
In the nastiest piece of advertising filth to hit the face of the globe Toyota really went in balls and all with this little ditty. I’ve got pretty crass humour, but tbh I didn’t even find this mildly amusing, and I’m glad that the whole hairy armpitted muff diving feminist lobby is raging at these twats, the marketing execs behind this should be hung drawn and quartered, or at least sacked and damned to the pits of advertising and marketing lecturing at some shitty third rate university in Uzbekistan.
This is one of the many adverts in a long line that have been massively sub par released from what used to be the hoity toity brand of Saatchi & Saatchi, their most recent succession of adverts have been either abysmal quality on par with a second or third year university project, or utterly offensive. Check out the advert below, it’s probably the first and last thing you’ll knowingly see by this ailing advertising firm. It’s doubtful that familial rape and incest will get many brownie points with future clients.
“The people at Toyota have besmirched their brand with this squalid effort, featured above, which revolves around a creepy play on words in which a father discusses her daughter’s virginity and sexual prowess with her young boyfriend.” says one angry journo-blogger, “It almost defies belief that a major company would associate itself with this garbage. It’s offensive on so many levels – the kids in the ad look really young, the idea of a father discussing his daughter in such a fashion is a total gross out, there’s a stupid hubba-hubba tit joke, the “give her a pounding in any direction” line, the girl at the end saying she’s ready to blow. In a perverse way it’s a credit to the creators that they managed to jam so much tasteless and desperately unfunny crap into just one minute and 14 seconds.”
Toyota are ubiquitously pointing the finger at their commissioned advertising firm, claiming they selected the ad ‘at arms length’ by letting Saatchi & Saatchi handle it exclusively, but regardless some balls are going to be getting kicked, and with humour this fucking low brow and lame it’s worthwhile.
There’s one line, as corny as I’d expect from S&S to drop, which you won’t hear their execs saying in relation to their plummeting share prices, “Oh what a feeling!” :)
I stumbled upon this little article floating around the net randomly searching zombie related things to find synonyms to express how sleep deprived I feel; whilst I am unsure of the statistical models used or the science behind it being solid, it definitely made me smile to see something like this in the NY Times: -
Epidemiologists today worry a lot about swine flu. But earlier this year, Philip Munz got interested in a more devastating possibility: an outbreak of zombies. A graduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa, he was watching a lot of movies about the undead and realized that zombification could be regarded as a classic paradigm of infectious spread: people get bitten by zombies, after which they turn into zombies themselves and start biting others. So Munz decided to use the tools of epidemiology to answer a sobering public-health question: could humanity survive a zombie outbreak?
Working with a professor and two other graduate students, Munz built a mathematical model of a city of one million residents, in which an outbreak occurs when a single zombie arrives in town. He based the speed of zombie infection on the general rules you see in George Romero movies: after getting bitten, people turn into zombies in 24 hours and sometimes don’t realize what’s happening to them until they change.
When he ran the model on a computer, the results were bleak. “After 7 to 10 days, everyone was dead or undead,” he says. He tried several counterattacks. Quarantining the zombies didn’t work; it only bought a few extra days of survival for humanity. Even creating a “cure” for zombification led to a grim result. It was possible to save 10 to 15 percent of the population, but everyone else was a zombie. (The cure in his model wasn’t permanent; the cured could be rebitten and rezombified.)
ILLUSTRATION BY MR BINGO
There was only one winning solution: fighting back quickly and fiercely. If, after the first zombies emerge, humanity begins a policy of “eradication,” then the zombies can be beaten. This is, as Munz points out, what traditionally saves humanity in zombie flicks. “People finally realize what’s happened,” he says, “and they call the army in.” Or as he concludes in his paper on the work, to be published in the collection “Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress”: “The most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to hit hard and hit often.” CLIVE THOMPSON
