From the ABC news:
The International Energy Agency has warned of a shortage of oil in the next five years. It says world oil production may not be able to keep up with demand, leading to a supply crunch.
Hold on tight folks, it might be a bumpy ride..
The ABC is reporting:
A Sydney court has heard that a woman charged with stabbing her father and sister to death and seriously wounding her mother was denied psychiatric help because of her parents’ belief in Scientology.
The Australian reports:
“She had a history of being diagnosed with a psychotic illness in late 2006 at Bankstown Hospital, but follow-up from the mental health team was apparently declined by her parents because of their alleged Scientology beliefs,” Dr Cross said. […] The report said that instead of receiving follow-up treatment by Bankstown Hospital’s mental health team, the woman had instead seen a private psychiatrist as well as a psychologist. She also was prescribed an anti-depressant as well as an anti-psychotic treatment that she took until January this year. The report said after she stopped taking her medication she began to feel anxious, and depressed. She also experienced poor sleep and felt unsafe at home. “She stated that her parents did not want her to take the prescribed medication she had been on in 2006, and apparently started her on medication they got from America – which was not psychiatric in nature,” it said.
An email interview with myself following on from my ZFS/FUSE blogs has formed part of an article about ZFS/FUSE on LinuxWorld, which has also been noted on LWN.
An interesting op-ed piece from The Observer in London:
Here is how democracy works in the Alice in Wonderland world of Palestinian politics under the tutelage of the US and international community. After years of being hectored to hold elections and adopt democratic norms, a year and a half ago Palestinians duly elected Hamas with 44 per cent of the vote, ahead of Fatah on 41 per cent.
It was a good election, as former US President Jimmy Carter observed at the time, a free, fair and accurate expression of the desires of a Palestinian people sick of the uselessness, corruption and gangsterism of Fatah. The problem was that it didn’t quite reflect the wishes of Washington and the international community.
[…]
It is hard not to be cynical. Palestinian society was squeezed until it hurt – punished as a whole for voting for the wrong party.
I believe violence is wrong, and have no love for Hamas, but if you don’t have respect for peoples democratic choice when it isn’t convenient for you then there is no real hope for democratic change in the Middle East.
Found via this blog which came up via Google News.
So this is what all those police helicopters were doing overhead today. 🙁
Melbourne’s CBD is in lockdown after a gunman killed one person and wounded two more in a rush-hour shooting this morning. The shooting happened at about 8:20am on the corner of Flinders Lane and Williams Street. Witnesses said the shooter opened fire at almost point-blank range after two men tried to stop him from dragging a woman into a taxi.
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..
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..
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.
LWN has this to say:
The terms of the Microsoft/Novell deal have been posted at last. There are three parts: the patent cooperation agreement granting the patent non-licenses, the technical collaboration agreement describing the technical work each company will do, and the business collaboration agreement on the business arrangements.
Groklaw also has an initial post about the SEC filing which details the agreement and quotes Novell on how GPLv3 may affect it.