It's stuff they dug up from the seabed, which they're dumping onto the seabed. It's silt, sand and clay, and it's processed to remove any incidental toxic matter before it's dumped.

For how long? You might get a couple of dusty days until it all settles down again. Hardly a national emergency. The reason they don't dump tonnes of rubble in residential zones is because the land is more valuable as real estate than a dumping ground, and millions of tonnes of rubble takes up a whole lotta space.

They've got plenty of sustainable forestry. But you can't scale up an industry if there's nowhere for it to scale out to - you need cleared land to plant the sustainable-growth forest. I'd have no problem with Tasmania limiting their own industry, if they weren't getting subsidised by the other states to keep them above water while they did it (Tasmania gets about twice the GST revenue, per capita, as most other states - NT being the exception).

You do know that if I said I was dumping a million tonnes of rubble on your house, and then actually dumped it 25km away, your house wouldn't be crushed, right? If the currents are able to move silt from the dump site to the reef, then they are already doing so - nothing's being dumped that isn't already there.

As for Tasmania, almost 50% of the entire state is currently world heritage listed. I don't think de-listing a fraction of a percent of that is going to cause much damage.

And by "reef", they mean a patch of silt 25km away from the actual reef.

Well, yeah. No industry regularly "loses"; if they did, they'd quickly cease to be an industry. The problem is people who consider insurance to be some sort of gamble; if you think of it that way, the fact that the insurance provider always makes a profit makes it seem like a racket. But insurance isn't a gamble, any more than, say, a RAID array is a gamble. It's a hedge against disaster.

If you have enough money that you can cover the cost of the insured item without hardship, you should never insure it, because you don't need a hedge.

That's because modern ICE cars have been under continuous development for over a century. Electric cars had a few early models, then languished undeveloped for a hundred years, before we recently started up development of them again.

Whoops, sorry, didn't realise GP was you. Should checked usernames once in a while.

I believe Regions offers a superset of the functionality CSS columns does, but that wasn't really my point. The GP was saying "the web doesn't need magazine-like layouts". I was saying, yes, it does. The precise mechanism we use to get them (regions, fragments, columns, whatever) can be debated, but the need for those sort of layouts is pretty well established.

Yeah, that's part of the nature of a physical medium. This has nothing to do with that - hyperlinks, and an infinite amount of scrollable space means the only point in doing that sort of thing is for milking ad impressions, which has nothing to do with graphic design.

As screens get wider, the ability to automatically flow text across multiple containers (e.g. columns) becomes more important. Scanning a line across one of those huge 27" apple monster screens will be unpleasant. Allowing one block of content to appear as either one column on small screens, or multiple narrower columns on large screens is just simply good UI.

How this is dones (CSS Regions, Fragmentation, Columns, etc) is largely a technical issue, but the capacity to generate such "magazine quality layouts" is important.

Bieber is famous for singing. Ok, so I don't particularly enjoy his music, but his fame is at least based on a talent - as opposed to people like Paris Hilton, or Kim Kardashion, who never really showed any particular talent, except for self-promotion.

I dunno, it didn't help the Princeton academics, who apparently didn't realise that viruses and tech companies have two totally different business models, and that the analysis models for one do not translate to the other.

While I broadly agree, it doesn't appear the lesbian couple actually asked for the guy to pay child support; that was all on the state's initiative.

Once you hit level cap, the problem was more finding a reason to log *on*. Raiding was an exercise in frustration, except in pre-organised guild groups that ran maybe once or twice a week. There was nothing to do outside those times, other than maybe one of hundred or so rep-grinds. Many people I know only logged on for the raids; others (including me) started a new alt whenever they hit the level cap.

Well, this seems to be the place for sharing anecdotes (which, I think, is the big pull of D&D - the ability to create shared moments that you can look back on, talk about, and laugh at).

There was the time the party was sneaking in to a goblin warren. The rogue volunteered to try and scout out the entryway, and slipped in. Sure enough, there were two goblins on watch. When spotted, he managed to kill both goblins before they raised the alarm. After this impressive feat of martial prowess (and lucky dice), he signalled the rest of the party that the way was clear by blowing his signal whistle (which the player had included on his sheet, and was looking for a reason to use), thereby alerting the whole warren who promptly swarmed out and mobbed him. After the party had rescued him, and beaten back the goblins, the paladin smashed his signal whistle.

Then there was the time the ranger decided to try and activate the mystic weapon-orb at the top of a tower under siege by the undead, because the party's wizard was being too slow and cautious. It activated, destroying the undead, but also blew the ranger off the top of the tower. He had the ability to reduce falling damage though, and survived the fall. Running up the tower to meet his companions, he forgot about the flame trap the party had avoided earlier, and got scorched into the bargain. Finally he stumbled out onto the towers roof, interrupting the party leader's impassioned eulogy.

They probably stopped caring when they left school, and "being cool" stopped being their life's ambition.