davegardner

I think the main reason why Australia has such a high voter turnout is because it's extremely easy to vote. It is compulsory in Australia, but the fine is only $20 (~US$15). Voting always takes place on a Saturday. There are polling booths all over the place, and you can lodge your vote at any booth anywhere in the country. If you know you won't be able to make it on the day then it's quite easy to find a pre-polling station or lodge a postal vote in the few weeks prior to the election.

AFter spending some time in Tasmania I can see how it would be easy to imagine there could still be Thylacines living in the bush. The island contains some very large national parks and reserves, and the Thylacine was fairly well camouflaged for that environment.

That's just one of the many words that have different meanings in different countries. We Australians take our barbecueing very seriously and it rarely involves indirect cooking. :-) The most common form of barbecueing here involves cooking on a flat hotplate over direct heat.

This is true, however they don't purge any of the old archives. If the robots.txt is updated to allow bots again then all of the previous archives will become available again.

I think the nuance of this advice is in the final two paragraphs of the article. If there’s more than "2 cents" worth of stuff that needs to change, then this rule does not apply. But if your contribution is small, just let it go.

Yet another reason why self-driving cars will be an improvement over human drivers.

The big assumption you're making is that everyone would want another shot at life. I'd be surprised if that were universally true.

My RHR is around 40. When my GP discovered it he ran a few tests (ECG and echocardiogram) that were all clear and then sent me to a cardiac electrophysiologist. He basically said that as long as I wasn't experiencing any of the symptoms of sinus bradycardia (fainting, dizziness, fatigue, etc) then this is just a normal heart rate for my body and I didn't have anything to worry about.

It's referring to a television show or station that is broadcast across the country, as opposed to one that is only broadcast within a single city or state. It's a term used reasonably commonly in Australia.

The actual EPA documentation[1] about this site shows that the comparative exposure is not nearly as significant as the article indicates. A handy comparative radiation dose table that they provide shows that you'd receive an additional 240 mR/year simply by moving from NYC to Denver, Colorado.[2] By comparison, the estimated annual dose received by a worker at the former Wolff-Alport site is 120 mR/year.

[1] http://www3.epa.gov/region02/waste/wolff/docs.html#Docs [2] http://www3.epa.gov/region02/waste/wolff/pdf/NYC_DOH_May_200...

I find it mildly amusing that you used the term "American audience" in the context of your comment.

$43 is for a VIP type experience - smaller number of big reclining arm chairs, food and drinks delivered to your seat throughout the movie, etc. Similar to the difference between an economy and business class seat on an airline.

At the big-chain theatre that I saw Star Wars, the "standard" price for a non-3D movie is $19.50. However it's very easy to get discounted prices for any movie. I paid $12.50 for my ticket, booked it online a few minutes before I left home.

I'm quite sure that the extra dollars paid for the $43 movie ticket was going to the movie theatre, not Hollywood.

In this case it certainly wasn't a serious bug. However it suggests that they did no testing at all on Windows, so in the future they may not be quite as lucky.

The IMF recently published a working paper[1] on energy subsidies at global and regional levels that might be of interest. They do use an fairly broad definition of what counts as a subsidy (including cost of damages environmental damages and global warming effect of CO2 emissions).

[1] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=42940.0

Unless you live in the southern hemisphere, in which case you want to plant them on the north side of your house. On a somewhat related note, rooftop solar panels have also been shown to have good insulation benefits[1]. [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038092X11...

10 years ago the fastest supercomputer was BlueGene/L which was rated at 136.8 TFlop/s. The current fastest supercomputer is rated at 33,862.7 TFlop/s, or 247 times faster.

It seems to me that the aim of taking 10 years to build a supercomputer that is only 20 times faster than the current one might fall a little short if it's aiming to take the top spot.

In Australia it's a little different as they don't do a cheek swab. You register via a Red Cross blood service donor centre. It involves taking a small sample of blood - if you're donating blood at the same time then they just take it at the start of the donation (no additional needle required).

Good luck. I really hope a match is found for you.

Surely the disorientation would only last a few weeks at the most, so any benefit would quickly disappear.

In Perth the vast majority of houses are built using a double brick construction, so there's definitely a local market for this.

> As it is out biggest city, Auckland, is experiencing insanely high house prices that folks in the Bay area would grimace at.

I was a little surprised by this comment and wondered how true it actually was. According to Numbeo, rental prices in Auckland are 67% lower than SF. Likewise property purchase prices are between 66% and 71% lower on a price per square metre basis. Something worth noting these figures are for SF on average, not just the Bay Area.

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...

Edit: Formattting

Well that's not entirely true, since her music is available on YouTube.

In Australia there is a political party that is along those lines - http://www.senatoronline.org.au/. They don't have any seats in parliament though.

The Earth-toned version looks much nicer IMHO http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-map...

I'm not a doctor, but based on what little research I've done in the past, a basic heart rate monitor such is this is unlikely to provide any pre-warning of a serious cardiac event.

I read that as Immoral Linux and immediately started thinking about what immoral actions the OS could automatically perform.

According to the article the fares cover 175% of the operating costs. So even without the additional income from real estate it's still a profitable business.

Speaking as an Aussie, I'd much prefer to come across one of these in the bush than I would an angry drop bear.

So I guess we can say with a high degree of confidence - "That's no moon".

Strong demand for a crowdfunding campaign perhaps. However it's really a drop in the ocean if you compare their 18k funders to the estimated 259 million tablets that'll be sold in 2016.

Edit: I jumped a year ahead. A better comparison would be to the 233.4 million that are estimated for 2015.

Does anyone know how well search engines cope with ligatures? If they don't I expect it won't be long before we see spam sites using ligatures as a way to hide their spamminess.