So now you can’t criticise bad, expensive food and service ?
The Court of Appeal agreed, finding that it was defamatory to say the food was unpalatable and the service bad.
It appears that only Justice Kirby had any common sense, saying that the jury was far more likely to know what the community standards were than the judges, saying:
Astonishing as it may seem, judges may occasionally lack a sense of irony or humour
Or even common sense, in this case..
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Casu marzu:
Casu marzu (also called casu modde, casu cundhÃdu, or in Italian formaggio marcio) is a cheese found in Sardinia, Italy, notable for being riddled with live insect larvae. Casu marzu means “rotten cheese” in Sardinian and is known colloquially as maggot cheese.
I think I might just pass on this one..
The Planetary Society has some amazing images & animations of Earth taken by planetary spacecraft.
My favourite at the moment has to be the image of Earth from the surface of Mars, taken by the Spirit rover in 2004 and the first image taken from the surface of an object beyond the moon.
Shades of the Total Perspective Vortex, for those HHGTTG fans out there.
Speaking of which, Paulo Ang has a rather wonderful Flash animation entitled “The Total Perspective Vortex” which makes powerful use of planetary and astronomical imagery alongside music and a liberal smattering of Hitch Hikers quotes.
From the decision, handed down on June 3rd 1995.
The common law of this country would perpetuate injustice if it were to continue to embrace the enlarged notion of terra nullius and to persist in characterizing the indigenous inhabitants of the Australian colonies as people too low in the scale of social organization to be acknowledged as possessing rights and interests in land. Moreover, to reject the theory that the Crown acquired absolute beneficial ownership of land is to bring the law into conformity with Australian history.
The dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants of Australia was not worked by a transfer of beneficial ownership when sovereignty was acquired by the Crown, but by the recurrent exercise of a paramount power to exclude the indigenous inhabitants from their traditional lands as colonial settlement expanded and land was granted to the colonists. Dispossession is attributable not to a failure of native title to survive the acquisition of sovereignty, but to its subsequent extinction by a paramount power.
There is a summary of the (very long) decision at Wikipedia and a news report on the anniversary at the ABC.
An ABC news report called “Climate report: record temperatures, not enough rain” says that:
The warmest May on record in the eastern states of the country will be the subject of a special climate statement to be released by the Bureau of Meteorology on Monday.
The eastern states of Australia have had temperatures about 2-3C above normal for the start of the year, and the Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate analysis (Dr David Jones) said:
“If you look at Victoria, for example, there has been almost no frost despite the fact here we are at the start of winter,” he said. “That’s really almost an unheard of phenomena.”
Whilst we have had some rain recently the fact that the ground is so dry just means it’s getting sucked straight in without making it to rivers, or reservoirs..
Linux.Conf.Au 2008, which will be held right here in Melbourne, has just (( I started writing this around 11am, now I get to post it about 9 hours later.. )) opened up its Call For Papers, some come on in!
The closing date of the CFP will be 20th July 2007.
They are also accepting proposals for mini-confs too.
The mini-conferences are dedicated conference streams for specific communities of interest. The linux.conf.au organisers provide the space, and leave the rest up to the organiser of each mini-conf. Mini-conf speakers and delegates need to register for the main conference to participate.
Go on, give those of us on the LCA 2008 papers committee something exciting to read!
Great news today, Rich Boakes has gotten his doctorate! He’s even got the photos of his viva on his thesis “Semantic Web based Log Analysis for Distributed Systems and Applications“.. 🙂
14:56 : phd awarded. 🙂
Nice one mate!
Update: Rich now has his own blog about his viva voce up.
There are two significant anniversaries in the equal rights battle for the indigenous peoples of Australia this weekend.
For those outside of Australia this may be a difficult fact to comprehend, but today, Sunday 27th May, is the 40th anniversary of the 1967 national referendum to remove the two sections of the Australian Consitution that discriminated against Indigenous Australians.
Saturday, 26th May, was the 10th anniversary of the release of “Bringing them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families” which dealt with the forced removal of indigenous children from their parents from the first days of colonisation through to the present day.
On the 9th July 1900 the UK Parliament passed the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 (Wikipedia page) which removed the power of the Federal Parliament to legislate on behalf of the indigenous peoples, saying that the Parliament could pass laws for:
The people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws
It also prohibited the indigenous peoples from being counted in any census, Section 127 “Aborigines not to be counted in reckoning population” saying:
In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.
Then, on June 12th 1902, the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 (PDF of original) removed the right of all coloured people (except Maoris) to vote, in a section bluntly called “Disqualification of coloured races”, saying:
No aboriginal native of Australia, Asia, Africa or the Islands of the Pacific except New Zealand shall be entitled to have his name placed on an Electoral Roll unless so entitled under section forty-one of the Constitution.
There is a common perception that the 1967 referendum permitted Indigenous Peoples to vote, but that is not the case as the earlier Commonwealth Electoral Act 1962 had already extended voluntary enrollment and voting rights to all Aboriginals (a 1949 act included indigenous people who were enrolled at the State level, basically covering SA, VIC and NSW), but it was not made compulsory (as it had been for other Australians since 1924) until 1984. The Australasian Legal Information Institute has a timeline detailing “Legal Developments Affecting Indigenous People” in beta at the moment.
Sadly, this is bittersweet anniversary as the average life expectancy for an indigenous person is still around 17 years less than a settler, according to a recent WHO report. As the primary author on the section for Australia, Dr Lisa Jackson Pulver, told the ABC:
For example, Indigenous babies born today can expect to live only as long as people in Australia 100 years ago.
Australia is now officially the worst wealthy country in the world for Indigenous health. It is a shameful record.
At SC06 there was a panel discussion on the final day about whether the trend to more and more cores on a socket was going to be good or bad for HPC. The feeling was that because the fact that chip makers need to do something to make up for stagnating clock speeds coincided with having more and more blank space on the die as transistor sizes shrunk more cores was inevitable.
However, this puts all your memory on the wrong side of the pins from the cores, and HPC will (must) need to find a way to deal with it!
The presentations were really good and I was a bit sad that I couldn’t get enough notes as the session was packed and I was up near the back, but I’ve just found out that all the slides used are up on the web as PDF’s, courtesy of the most amiable Thomas Sterling, who chaired the session.
The most illuminuating HPC related quote was from the slides of Steve Scott talking about how RAM characteristics have changed over the years:
1979 -> 1999:
16000X density increase
640X uniform access BW increase
500X random access BW increase
25X less per-bit memory bandwidth
My favourite non-HPC quote is from Don Becker’s slides:
My nightmare: An 80 core consumer CPU means your web experience will be 79 3ÂD animated ads roaming over your screen
Be afraid, be very afraid (on both grounds)..
