I'm in no way condoning the OP since I have no idea of the problems Australia faces but your rebuttal argument here is a primary school level one. The bad behaviour of a government in an adjacent continent (geographically Australia is not part of Asia, it's a continent by itself) does not give every nearby government a license to misbehave and even if it did Europe is also adjacent to Asia and by your logic is in the same situation. Besides if you are going to pick an Asian government to compare yourself to why not North Korea? Using your argument this would suggest it is ok to use famine as a carbon reduction strategy.

The moral of this is that if you are going to make an unpopular decision for reasons that you believe are important stand up and be honest about your reasoning. People might disagree but at least we can have an honest debate about the real points. Indeed I thought that open and frank speaking was a well known and widely admired Australian trait?

This is not a fantasy it is a useful result. Previously it was thought that negative mass was fundamentally incompatible with GR i.e. you could not have negative mass in our universe according to one of our most fundamental theories. This result, if confirmed, suggests that actually you can have negative mass in a way that is compatible with GR.

It is important to note that this does NOT mean that negative mass exists, only that, so far as we know, it could exist. All it means is that it is now another possible tool in the theorists arsenal to explain experimental observations without rewriting GR. However if I were to apply Occam's Razor to this discovery then I would argue that if something is allowed by GR we would expect it to be possible to produce because otherwise you need some additional mechanism beyond GR to prevent it from existing. Hence the simpler model is one where negative mass can exist...not that this means that it does. We are talking theoretical possibilities here, not experimental observations.

Yes they are wrong and it is easy to prove: just accelerate an electron to a high speed and the prediction of Newton will vary widely from that of Einstein. Hence Newton's laws are wrong as a fundamental model of the universe. As you say the aim of science is to come up with a mathematical model that predicts the behaviour of a system and under those precise criteria Newton is wrong and his model was most definitely proven wrong.

The absolute truth that scientific laws are trying to describe is "what will happen if we do X". In this sense they absolutely can be wrong. Newton's laws most definitely DO NOT work 100% even in the realm to which they are applied. They work 99.99...% which is usually "good enough" for most things but not always e.g. GR corrections to GPS satellite clocks, police radar guns etc.

However if you used relativity it would always be right for any situation we have managed to encounter or create. The only reason not to do so is that the maths is more complex hence we use laws we know to be wrong as approximations to our best understanding of the truth. Indeed we do this a lot in physics the only difference is that at one point we did not realize that Newton's laws were an approximation.

Ultimately it remains to be seen whether any scientific law we come up with can actually be "right" and I suspect that we will never really know even if we do come up with a perfect model to describe the universe. But we definitely can know when we come up with a wrong one.

Agreed - there is no reason to require the program be written in perl.

Wow - I never knew you could tell a real programmer by their choice of bathroom cleaner.

Except that at the time almost nobody was doing this and they actually used the built in BBC Micro random number generator which is why it took so long to get the game ported to other platforms!

...and bugs! I'll agree that it was as ambitious as Elite but it was full of often serious bugs where Elite was not. In addition to that there were some serious design issues such as your relative speed indicator switching to the planet you were trying to land on when you were far too close to the planet to be able to slow down. This resulted in having to approach at a snail's pace to ensure that you did not just add a crater to the existing surface features!

Easy: Braben and Bell who wrote 'Elite'. This game was so far ahead of its time it was simply unbelievable. It was one of (if not the) first true 3D game and contained 8 galaxies of 255 stars on a machine with 32kB of memory. It also introduced true "sandbox" gameplay. It might not stand up to today's standards and the sequels, while great games, were nowhere near as revolutionary, although it remains to be seen how Elite: Dangerous turns out - I have my fingers crossed!

So, no matter how you spin it, there is no way that you can deny that they were true Elite programmers! ;-)

I have no clue which alternate reality you have come from but in this one Einstein was most definitely NOT a school dropout, for details see Wikipedia. The worst that can be said about his education is that he initially failed to meet the required standard in the general entrance exam for the Zurich Polytechnic (although he excelled in the physics and maths portion) and had to go to a secondary school elsewhere for a few years before being admitted (at the age of 17) to the Polytechnic where he graduated with a maths and physics teaching diploma.

Unfortunately anesthetics take quite a while to wear off during which you may feel even worse than if you had been awake for the entire time. This would also make them dangerous in case of emergencies.

Pushing is nowhere near as effective in cleanup operations which is why vacuum cleaners suck instead of blow (and very early victorian models did). Suction concentrates the particles in a fixed location whereas blowing scatters them.

Forget the comedy - this might be an invention that could make long distance flying bearable! Turn off your brain after take off and back on for landing with no memory of many hours of sitting in a tin can in between.

Not unless something radical happens with evolution. It would be more like a viking, anglo-saxon or celt from the year 1028 hanging around us. They may have different standards of acceptable behaviour but they would likely quickly learn how to fit into modern society because they are no less intelligent than we are. In fact they might quite possibly more intelligent on average given that they had no safety labels or health and safety inspectors to reduce attrition at the bottom end of the spectrum.

Only if you control the entire network and all the servers used. This is not really practical in 99.9% of the use cases of email since it means you need to form a separate email network, isolated from the outside world to prevent any forwarding over insecure networks or to insecure servers.

Unless someone has email forwarding set up.