Indeed, I installed Epic's UDK recently purely out of curiosity. All the tools you need to make high quality 3D graphical applications with an emphasis on games. Automatically installs the free versions of visual studio, (yet another great example of free tools from a commercial software house). The only "catch" is that they will take 5% of your revenue if/when your app/game exceeds $3k per quarter. I recall the days of CD distributors that would charge up to 60% of revenue just to print and ship the media. All the hard problems of creating tools to create apps are gone, and yes it mainly due to the open nature of the profession as a whole, not the rants of one noteable pioneer.

Of course large companies like MS/Epic/NVidia/IBM are not giving their tools away out of the goodness of their heart, their aim is to hook devs early in the process and milk them when they succeed. Unlike the recording industry who have a similar business model, the "talent" gets to keep the cream, the company risks nothing, it's a win-win that has become the norm in our industry, rather than the exception.

My personal favorite however is a true OSS hero, sqlite, the licence is a prayer that puts it into the public domain, it is the world's #1 RDBMS by install count. Another is a "maths toy" called "fractint" from the late 80's(?), the license said something like "Got money, want admiration". These two licenses sum up the attitude of most devs that I have worked with over the years. But hey, if a mechanic mate won't help me with my car, I certainly not going to help him with his computer

lol - The croc bait is criticising Aussie beer and intelligence.

Yep. The other side were so busy fighting amongst themselves they gave Abbot a free ride. Now he is PM we can all see that he didn't actually do any work on his own policies when in opposition, he's still stuck in opposition mode, ie: simply making shit up on the fly and hoping nobody spots the absurdity of his rhetoric.

BTW the mining unions were the force behind the demise of Rudd in round one of the leadership brawl, they are just as anti-AGW as the mine owners themselves, and for the same reason. Getting rid of rudd turned the ETS into a "revenue neutral" tax and diluted the Mineral Resource Tax to the point where it had no effect and raised nothing in revenue. Abbot was on a winner fighting these tax because, aside from the voters natural aversion to new taxes, the miners (Labor), mining unions(LNP), and Rupert's newspapers(ordinary punters), all desperately wanted those taxes dumped or neutered.

The end result is that Australia is now an international piranha when it comes to climate change, it even has a multi-billion dollar "direct action" scheme that in effect rewards companies for polluting the atmosphere.

Neither side actually wants to implement this stuff, the only reason either party bring up these ideas and have long running inquiries is to buy the votes of independent senators on other matters, particularly those senators from the far right minority parties such as "family first". Even if Brandis pushed a bill thru the lower house the senate will drag out voting on it until the next election and then start all over again, with a new set of nutjob independents. The same pattern has repeated itself every election cycle for the last 20yrs, longer if you count video recorders and photocopiers. No matter who is in power the govt always plays bad cop on this issue, the opposition always play good cop because they cannot push legislation thru the lower house and therefore have little to offer in exchange for said senator(s) votes on other matters.

I made the same prediction about Conroy's filter and most of slashdot laughed - this proposal will go nowhere and be will forgotten before the next election, especially now that we have a communications minister with a functioning brain and his eye on the top job.

Yes, but now you know who to vote against in the senate. :)

As an ex (Aussie) taxi driver I can tell you that the rules are enforced by the transport cops who patrol the streets doing spot checks on trucks, cabs, and busses. There are heavy fines for both driver and owner, tampering with a sealed meter is considered fraud and can attract jail time. Small yellow lights on the top of the cab tell the cops what rate the meter is charging. Taxi's are also cleaned twice a day and can be put off the road by the transport cops if they are dirty. But hey, if you want to pay 50% more for "freedom" and risk being sued by an insurance company when it turns out the uber driver doesn't have the right insurance, it's your choice.

In what way? The driver in either situation is much more likely to be attacked than the passenger? No physical protection or panic button in an uber car.
What do you do when the driver starts yelling at you for enforcing the rate card?

You video him with your phone and send the footage to the transport cops. Uber is an illegal scam on uber drivers, desperate people who ignore the insurance risk and run their own car into the ground trying to make a quick buck. Sad truth is they won't make enough to cover the cost of maintenance and fuel, they will end up still desperate but with no car to live in when they can't pay the rent. Courier companies here have already done the same thing to drivers, a rusty shitbox with a "courier" sign slapped on the side is a common sight here in Melbourne. I don't want to see that happen to our (already underpaid) cab drivers, I think uber and companies like it should be shut down, if they are allowed to continue it will be a very fast race to the bottom as the market is flooded with desperate people in rusty shitboxes with the word "taxi" hand painted on the door.

tl;dr - If you want a hair raising third world taxi experience to be the norm, then keep using Uber.

I recently visited "The Kimberly", it's one of the hottest places on Earth, the well water is pumped into a water tower for pressure where it sits in the tropical sun all day. It's impossible to have a cold shower, if you get up first in the morning there is about 30 seconds of cool water from the underground pipes before the ~32deg C tank water comes thu.

Not sure who it was but a physicist showed that; if you model US income by assuming that everyone has a pile of money and everyone goes out for a few hours a day and throws/catches random amounts at each other based on the size of their pile, the resulting income distribution mirrors that of the US population as a whole. Further, it does not matter how much each individual starts with, the same result occurs even if all piles are all equal at the start.

A pedantic compiler is all you need.

True, and some will interpret your post to mean you are not worthy, but what makes you think you, or the state, have the wisdom to decide who should live and die?

That excuse could fly

Troll food" - Dance troll. Dance I say!

Yeah right, tell that to the people of London, Dresden, Hiroshima, Manchester, Nagasaki, Auschwitz, etc, etc, the only reason Paris was spared was because Hitler valued the architecture and wanted to keep it intact.

Even the most bloody wars (such as the English civil war) kill less than 5% of the population, OTOH the black plague regularly killed ~50% or more of the people in the cities/regions it infected. People who survived the plague had a brief period of high living standards due to all the abandon property lying around.

As a science based "greenie" my "agenda" is to be a part of a sustainable, peaceful, disease free species. Wars, plagues, and mass starvation are what I want to avoid. Science and common sense tell me that the main factor in obtaining what I want (for my 3 grandkids) is population. There's plenty of evidence we can achieve humane population control by educating and allowing women to control their bodies, and providing security of living standards in old age.

Or we can continue to behave like fermenting yeast, expanding to consume our available resources and killing each other for access to untapped/unguarded resources (territory, water, food). AGW is the #1 mid (and long) term threat on the pentagon's list of threats to global stability and it has been that way for almost a decade. The reason is that AGW will dramatically change the current (territory, water, food) map, and it will do so this century - even if we all stop emitting GHGs today.

Syrian civil war - Canary in the coal mine? - "There is evidence that the 20072010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria. It was the worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers. Century-long observed trends in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure, supported by climate model results, strongly suggest that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region, and made the occurrence of a 3-year drought as severe as that of 20072010 2 to 3 times more likely than by natural variability alone. We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict."

The four Galilean moons are interesting from an evolutionary POV.
Io - Molten sulphur on the surface, purple volcanoes all over it.
Europa - Deep water ocean, thin crust, very active plate tectonics.
Ganymede - Europa with a deep dish crust and cooler core.
Callisto - A rock.

So it would seem that gas giants may have their own "goldilocks zone" when they are orbiting in the colder regions of their host system. So the "average" solar system may have 3-4 "habitable zones" rather than just one.

Yes, the people who push Homeopathy and other forms of medical voodoo are also very likely to fuck with the victims mind, the aim of the brainwashing is make sure the victims avoid real doctors and keep coming back. The well known skeptic James Randi lost his father to one of these charlatans.

..don't approve, I'm off to the pet shop to buy a giant anteater before they are sold out!