Identity fraud cost the Australian community AU$1.1 billion in 2001/02, according to a report released by the Minister for Justice and Customs, Senator Chris Ellison, who also acknowledged the rapid subsequent growth of the problem
The government has finally gotten a clue about the reality of IT jobs in Australia, with information and communication technology skilled jobs cut from the federal government’s list of high-demand jobs for potential migrants
Small countries in the United Nations have been arguing to put the Internet under the control of the UN so that countries can more easily control Internet content. It’s on hold for now, but this could become a very real censorship problem, very soon. Some nations have gone so far as to suggest ‘monitoring boards’ for internet content
While OzEmail subscribers fume over undelivered email, the supplier of the ISPs e-mail platform says it has not asked for technical assistance. According to OzEmail, only its MyMail webmail users have been affected by an outage that has been going on for more than two weeks. However, many customers have described a wide range of problems beyond the webmail product
Optus has announced it will soon begin offering ADSL to residential customers, after finalising negotiations to use Telstra’s infrastructure. Which means that it will be prone to the same faults and breakdowns that plague the Telstra product
The homeless children of Miami have developed their own complex folk tales that are littered with angels and demons.
On Christmas night a year ago, god fled heaven to escape an audacious demon attack — a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why god has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from hell.
The gateways from hell include abandoned refrigerators, mirrors and Jeep Cherokees with black windows. While the demons are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear.
With a pending server move leaving the installation of Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist temporarily on the back burner, Joseph Duemer took a decidedly different course when dealing with a recent comment spammer… he invoiced the bastard
I was walking the pods a couple of months back and ran into a neighbour who always pats the dogs. As he was giving the Husky a pat he asked if I knew anyone with puppies, which was oddly coincidental, as my Husky’s breeder had a litter arrive a few days earlier.
Today I got to pick the little guy up from the airport. My Husky is a half-brother and uncle to the mini pod.
Before you complain about your job, take a look at some of the most noxious jobs in science. Some of the career gems include; fart-sniffer, barnyard masturbator, and prison-rape researcher. Then there’s the outright terrifying; the pre-med student who ate, drank, and breathed the blood, urine and vomit of yellow-fever victims
A free, experimental IPv6 migration broker has been announced, which will allow Australians on IPv4 internet connections to test out applications for the newer internet protocol
The disposable mobile seems like a nice alternative to being locked into a lengthy contract, or for people who only need a mobile for a short period of time. Plus the company offer a $5 rebate for you to bring it back and swap for the next one
At a juncture in history during which women are seeking equality with men, science arrives with a belated gift to the feminist movement. Male-biased evolutionary scenarios — Man the Hunter, Man the Toolmaker and so on — are being challenged by the discovery that females play a central, perhaps even dominant, role in the social life of one of our nearest relatives. In the past few years many strands of knowledge have come together concerning a relatively unknown ape with an unorthodox repertoire of behaviour: the Bonobo.
The species is best characterized as female-centred and egalitarian and as one that substitutes sex for aggression. Whereas in most other species sexual behaviour is a fairly distinct category, in the Bonobo it is part and parcel of social relations — and not just between males and females. Bonobos engage in sex in virtually every partner combination (although such contact among close family members may be suppressed). And sexual interactions occur more often among Bonobos than among other primates. Despite the frequency of sex, the Bonobo’s rate of reproduction in the wild is about the same as that of the chimpanzee. A female gives birth to a single infant at intervals of between five and six years. So Bonobos share at least one very important characteristic with our own species, namely, a partial separation between sex and reproduction.
Lest this all sound like a non-stop Caligulean orgy, Dr Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University in Atlanta who is the author of Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape, emphasises otherwise:
Sex is there, it’s pervasive, it’s critical, and Bonobo society would collapse without it. But it’s not what people think it is. It’s not driven by orgasm or seeking release. Nor is it often reproductively driven. Sex for a bonobo is casual, it’s quick and once you’re used to watching it, it begins to look like any other social interaction.
Cyberkinetics is about to ask federal regulators for permission to start testing a device that would enable paralyzed people to control computers directly with their brains or possibly help them move their limbs. Initially, the device, implanted into the brains of paralyzed people, will help them control a cursor on a screen or play video games. Researchers believe the technology could one day enable paralyzed people to type, control lights and heating controls, manoeuvre wheelchairs, or even manipulate robotic arms
Researchers at Harvard University have demonstrated for the first time that they can easily apply a film of tiny, high-performance silicon nanowires to glass and plastic, a development that could pave the way for the next generation of cheaper, lighter and more powerful consumer electronics. The development could lead to such futuristic products as disposable computers and optical displays that can be worn in your clothes or contact lenses
Sun is planning on creating Opteron-based servers. These are expected to include 2-processor and 4-processor models running either Solaris or Linux. This move isn’t surprising, given the performance and cost gaps between the Opteron and UltraSPARC processors. A move to Opteron would allow them to be more competitive in cost and focus more on what they’re good at, designing systems, not processors
Tooling around with the Political Compass test today. Much like HogBlog, I guessed correctly that I would get lumped under the hard libertarian left box.
Economic Left/Right: -8.62
Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.46
I figure it would probably have been more Libertarian if I wasn’t easily bored by surveys. Regardless of that, at the outcome of the test you will be prompted to check out the writings of people of the same political persuasion and I wasn’t at all surprised to find I already have half the books on the list.
Gertrude Jones didn’t want flowers or cards when she died. She wanted to get rid of the retarded monkey boy. The 81-year-old woman’s obituary asked that memorial donations be given to any organisation that seeks the removal of President Bush from office
. And people across the country are following her wishes
McDonald’s misunderstands the nature of dictionaries: that is, to observe the language as it is spoken and to document it. McDonald’s is up in arms over Merriam-Webster’s inclusion of ‘McJob‘ — a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement — in its current edition and has, naturally, trumped up a completely groundless trademark claim to back this up. Trademarks don’t let you control how people speak — they only allow you to stop other commercial outfits from confusing your customers; certainly, they don’t give you the power to stop the reporting of the fact that English speakers use ‘McJob’ to describe a crappy job. Interesting to note that Merriam-Webster later caved in to the bully boys and pulled ‘McJobs’ from the list of examples of new words added to the dictionary
Weeks after a groundbreaking scientific study said naval sonar appears to be killing marine mammals, the Bush administration yesterday won House approval to use sonar wherever Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sees fit. Passage next week by the Senate is virtually assured
Ran across an interesting software program this week. Boolean Dream‘s Hotmail Popper is a small application that allows you to check your Hotmail account e-mail from a normal POP mail client, such as Thunderbird or Eudora.
Interestingly enough, it also works for Netscape Webmail, which pleased a friend of mine no end. At least they now have the option of installing their own spam filters and escaping the avalanche of spam that is attracted to their Netscape Webmail account.
YahooPOPs provides the same service for Yahoo webmail accounts. Although it’s worth noting that if you run both, you’ll have to change the incoming mail server port for one program.
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