The Australian Greens have renewed their call for the voting age to be reduced from 18 to 16 but with non-compulsory voting for those under 18 years
Telstra’s appetite for acquisitions appears unsated by last week’s boardroom bloodletting, with the company in talks with rival Hutchison Telecommunications to buy its Orange mobile phone business for about $250 million
The recent US-Australia Free
Trade Agreement Chapter 17 (IP) locks Australia into our existing DMCA-style laws and extends them further: banning access control
circumvention, extending copyright, guaranteeing penalties greater than actual damages for deliberate copyright infringement, committing us to recognising patents whether a product or process, in all fields of technology
, etc. Linux Australia has produced a draft position paper (rough HTML version), has a how to help page, and started a petition
How hard would it be to swing an election by hacking computerised voting machines? How valuable would it be? Counterpane.com’s Bruce Schneier did the math, and the results are even scarier than he expected them to be
31 August is the release date for Invader Zim – Volume 2: Progressive Stupidity. Like the first disc, the list price on this release will be US$24.95, and the reported running time is 225 minutes. Also of interest is a shot of what they say was the proposed
cover art for Volume 2… before it was rejected by the brain donors at Nickelodeon
An Austrian man cut off his toes, fried them up and ate them between two slices of bread after getting high sniffing butane gas. When ambulance men arrived he offered to share his meal with them, passing over a toe and saying: It tastes like chicken, do you want some, there’s a few still left over.
A police spokesman added: He told the ambulance men that he had more toes than he needed and didn’t think he would notice if he got rid of a few
As if I wasn’t already addicted to online news feeds, Newsmap is a rolling visual representation of the Google News stream — via Die Puny Humans
Newsmap… provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe. Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. It’s objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media.
Inkjet printers can produce a nice enough colour photo at an affordable price for the home user, but the images are far from stable as you’d know if you’ve ever gotten one wet. Darren Barefoot has tracked down a printer using superior dye sublimation printing process at a fairly reasonable price:
Most home colour printers use inkjet technology. Essentially, this sometimes messy screening process involves shooting tiny dots of ink at a piece of paper. There’s a superior approach to colour printing called dye sublimation. Basically, it involves using a heating element to heat dye impregnated in a ribbon to over 350 degrees, at which point it turns into a gas and migrates into the surface of the specially coated photo paper. Temperature controls how much dye transfers at any point on the paper. One critical aspect of this approach is that the dots on the page can be of variable sizes.
Until now, the cost of dye sub has been restricted to professional printers and photo developers. I read today, via Engadget, about the HiTi 730PS. It’s a dye sub printer for the home, capable of printing images up to 6 x 8 inches. The prints cost about 40 cents each, and the printer starts at US$368. I haven’t actually seen these printers in action, but apparently they offer a vastly superior print quality for a decent price. The printer also includes an LCD display, so that you don’t have to download your images to your computer before printing.
Tim Berners-Lee, British inventor of the World Wide Web, has won Finland’s first Millennium Technology Prize. Berners-Lee, who heads the World Wide Web Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, revolutionised the Internet in 1991 when he devised a way to organise, link and browse Net pages
Amazon has entered the search engine fray with the beta launch of its A9 portal, enabling broad-based Web inquiries, as well as delivering results from the company site and a host of personalised services
The DVD Forum, which oversees the DVD format, approved a blue laser-based format, to be called HD-DVD. Unlike Blu-ray, the Toshiba/NEC system retains backwards compatibility with today’s DVD specification. While Sony and Toppan Printing have been working for about a year on printing data onto Blu-ray discs made mostly of paper. The companies are aiming to produce lower-cost discs and expand the use of the technology. The 25GB discs will be able to store more than two hours of high-definition video
He can’t quite make money grow from trees, but Christopher Anderson, an environmental geologist from Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, has devised a way to harvest gold from plants. The idea: Use common crops to soak up contaminants in soil from gold-mining sites and return the areas to productive agriculture. The gold harvested from the process pays for the cleanup — with money left over for training in sustainable agriculture
Film subtitles that can be tailored to suit small sections of an audience could go on general release at the end of 2004
Dotcom entrepreneur Karl Suleman will spend at least 12 months behind bars after NSW District Court Judge Peter Berman sentenced him to 21 months in jail for fraud
German police have detained a man and confiscated an axe he was throwing for his dog to retrieve. Passers-by spotted the barefoot 36-year-old enjoying his dangerous game of go fetch
in a park and alerted police
A month ago, a trial version of a little-known Linux application called CoLinux was released that is the first working free and open source method for optimally running Linux on Microsoft Windows natively. It’s the work of a 21-year-old Israeli computer science student and some Japanese open source programmers; in Israel, analysts are already saying it could help transform the software world
The Onion‘s deadpan satirical news-stories, much-forwarded and chuckled over, have frequently been reported as fact by various news agencies, law-enforcement departments, and pressure groups
A University of Illinois research team is working on turning pig manure into a form of crude oil that could be refined to heat homes or generate electricity. Years of research and fine-tuning lie ahead before the idea could be commercially viable, but results so far indicate there might be big benefits for farmers and consumers
A very nice example of public art.
Several beautiful examples of trompe l’oeil paintjobs on streetside utility boxes, either traffic light switching boxes or telephone punch-down racks.
No idea where they come from, although the text on the books suggests Israel.
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