Kewl, so all you need to do to hide things is apparently swallow them?

In Australia we have two huge problems that need solving - paranoia and a willingness of our government to spy on everything we do.

How the internet firewall didnt get rolled out is a mystery to me (even though in part it did manage to make a small appearance in a different form).

I personally wouldn't jump to that conclusion. Considering the sheer volume of stars just in our galaxy even 10000 exoplanets would be an astronomically small figure besides those we're yet to discover.

But just discovering an exoplanet doesn't simply mean "finding life". Who knows one of the planets we've already seen might have some form of life on it. ET's (assuming they're anything like us) may "find" our planet but have no idea whats on it.

All of that also assumes that ET's are behaving something like us. What I mean is that we're trying to find a planet capable of harbouring life based on what we know of life (i.e. our eco system) and hence we're throwing out planets that dont fall into what we believe is a "habbitable location" for life. Without any evidence to the contrary, ET's would probably do something similar. The problem with that is that if life involved in completely different ways (completely alien to us) in locations we wouldn't suspect capable of being fertile are they going to miss us like we're likely to miss them? Are they even interested in finding life on other planets throughout the universe?

Then again, lets say ET's in some solar system were plausibly capable of developing in some way that meant planets like mercury or pluto were "habbitable" for them (unlikely by our reckoning) chances are they'd be so different that once they started looking for life on other planets they'd look for completely different things. for eg, we might look for a planet that gives off a spectrum suggesting it has water or co2/o2/n2 composition in its atmosphere where they might look for something completely different.

But assuming they are similar to us and do look for something similar (and chance upon our planet), how are they going to know we're here? The huge amount of radio EM radiation we give off? Well, we've only been doing that for less then 100 years - consider how far that actually reaches (moving at the speed of light) within our own milky way (around 100,000 light years across) - 100 years doesnt go very far really. According to this little calc (http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980123d.html) that would cover around 15000 stars. 15000 of around 200,000,000,000 stars... Doesn't really cover much.

Im not saying its far fetched as such cause you'll never know what an ET is capable of until you meet one and they explain it to you - but, if they're like us (aside from praying they dont have big guns and are looking for oil) finding "us" has reasonably low odd's.

More introduced species in australia.

I cant help thinking of that simpsons episode with the lizard, which ate the pidgeon, and they got out of control, so they brang in something else.. etc etc...

This is already what Australia is like. Someone brang in rabbits, cane toads, snakes, etc etc... then they brang in something else to combat such things... the only thing ends up suffering in the long run is the native wild life and our ecosystem as a whole.

Australian researchers (or anyone) should be shot in the head when they do the following:
1) consider introducing a new species of anything to this country
2) consider modifying an existing species DNA and introducing that into the country.

I have faith in science, but morons are morons. Anyone who cant learn from the mistakes of the past needs to be locked up or put down so they cant do any damage - they really are cretins. Oh, "but we know more now?" ... your a moron if you actually believe you understand an ecosystem well enough that you can predict the implications of adding a new species of anything to it, being able to control it in the long run or actually measure whats going on when it does get into your ecosystem.

Your an even bigger moron if you think you'll have a endless pit of money from either the government or some other body that will allow you to have the kind of control you need to police such a move for the foreseeable future.

I really wish people like this professor would just cease to exist, they're bad for the planet and our species as a whole. I dont mind if they sit there researching the crap out of anything, but until they can prove they actually understand an eco system in its entirety and the government gets behind them with such a huge wad of cash they can prove they'll have the ability to remain in control, they should be locked in a cage somewhere.

You can just already see the future of something like this:
"turns out that elephant feases combine with a local australian-only plant to produce a toxic substance that is now leaching into our water supply - we must now evacuate australia - thanks for coming".... and then much later from the same professor "oh, we didnt quite take that into account".

If you like php, use it.

Theres a simple quote who's origins i forget (think it was bjarne stroustrup) that goes "there are those languages that people complain about, and those that people dont use".

Sadly, the more people who use language, the more you generate hate, and php is one of the most widely used in existence.

PHP has alot going for it:
- its an elegant language
- its quite quick to write almost anything in
- its generally quite fast
- theres bucket loads of people using it, so finding solutions to problems is easy
- lots of different frameworks if you need them
- tonnes of api support.
- almost every web host supports it.
- the number of people using it generally just helps the code base, bugs get found and dealt with, etc etc etc.

The only reason to switch to another language comes down to the goals your trying to achieve, which aren't really stated. Generally speaking you could achieve any type of web content in any language to an extent. There are few languages that have the support for api's that php does, thats for sure. Perl is probably the only one that beats it in terms of "i want to connect to from my web code".

But it depends also on what you had in mind in terms of switching to.
- Java is a reasonably nice language, very well supported (by vendors) and scales well, but requires significant development time and quite a decent amount of grunt - forces you to abstract your work ad infinitum but sometimes thats a good thing. Lots of different api's, though mileage varies greatly.
- Dot-net i personally find to be somewhat on the buggy side, but again, well supported and well used - often forces you down an MVC framework path, which i dont like.
- Python's probably a better language generally, but for web coding, you get caught up in the basics with python around choosing frameworks and so forth and later if you find the framework you choose wasnt that great, then its re-code time cause frameworks generally dont have easy migration options. My main annoyance with python is that learning python tends to diverge a fair bit from helping you with other languages (i.e. learning python wont help you with c/c#/c++/java/etc).
- Ruby has similar traits to python - you get caught up in the frameworks, the language is nice but doesn't translate easily to other languages.

There are other options, but personally, stick with the top three if its your first coding exercise for content - php, java, dot.net

I'd love to know what hardware your running that doesnt have ipv6 support.... just about every supportable, mainstream vendor does, the short list:

- juniper (screenos and junos)
- cisco
- avaya
- netgear
- hp
- ibm

Actually, I take it back, theres too many. If your running gear right now that cant do a firmware upgrade to support ipv6, you really should be considering replacing it cause it must be decades old. Even still-supported decades old kit from cisco has ipv6 support via firmware upgrades.

To be honest, I cant really think of many vendors that dont support it off the top of my head.

Yes, running out of ipv4 address space is alot of hot air, probably for another 3-5 years. In reality they could even extend that quite a bit. assuming you dont take into account china and india all getting internet-connected phones... thats a somewhat scary scenario.

But, what I dont get is why geeks arent excited about the move to ipv6... I *LOVE* ipv6, i wish my isp would get it faster.

From a purely geektechnonerd perspective, i find ipv6 interesting and hence want to use it (do use it in fact).. i think it has its flaws though, and what scares me is the lack of a "real" private address range (with nat) like we do now with ipv4. While I can understand people in the linux kernel going "nat was crap, we're not doing it in ipv6", i find that view very short sighted. Yes, ipv4 nat is a "hack" (or was originally created to facilitate a hack), but its come to be a useful one and can get you around some nasty things an isp can do to you simply by limited the number of addresses you can have (not to mention many other things it can give you)...

But, the techo in me who loves setting up networks cant wait till the next job im doing that uses ipv6, and thats coming more frequently now.

Quite honestly, if the press wants to make a big deal out of it and blow it out of proportion, im not going to stop them or even criticize them. I love doing ipv6 and if a client is thinking "maybe i should do ipv6 with my next network overhaul" I dont really care what the reasons for it are, be it a sensationalist media hype reflex or an interest in the protocol itself...

But then i get excited over most new bits of tech - be it physical or not. As in, i get about the same levels of excitement when google announce a new android phone (i.e. the nexus) as I do when a client starts asking me about how they adopt their network for ipv6.

Ok, ipv6 aint exactly new by any means, but people implementing it is another matter. The best part is until you see real (i.e. complex) networking scenarios using ipv6 you dont even some of the challanges that lay in store for you when implementing the protocol... but thats an article, not a slashdot post.

ahhh, well, depends what you do from home doesn't it? take this as an example of why dyndns doesnt really solve some of the problems static-ip-for-home does..

1) my dns entry "me.dyndns.org", points to my current dynamic home ip
2) i run a webserver, chat server (xmpp), mail server perhaps... many different things you could list here
3) my home internet switches off for some reason and i loose my dynamic ip address.
4) someone else logs on and gets my ip adress while im offline
5) someone else starts getting a bunch of connection attempts....

Note: "me" and "my" in this scenario are hypothetical, not actual references to me specifically.

The effect of which can be somewhere between unnoticeable and catastrophic, if you really think it thru... Personally i do run a web server on my home machine for unimportant things and only for me, but there are lots of scenario's where some service your expecting to send data to on your old ip address may expose something you didnt want someone else to see... Then again, it may lead to something more annoying like the user who's getting random connection attempts assumes he's being hacked and acts accordingly...

Thats actually incorrect. RIR's still have "plenty" of ip addresses to go around, its only IANA thats run out of address space to give to those RIR's.

While its more then plausible that they're going after google cause someone else said so, and one could perhaps consider its a rather large conspiracy between many companies to erase google from the IT landscape by burying them in legal costs up to their ears, its also plausible they go after google simply cause they have the most number of mobiles and the largest market share, hence the largest chunk of plausible revenue should they win.

to be honest though, i do believe alot of people are going after google cause its google and they're "open platform" scares the pants off people (from a "how do we make money from ours when google give it away for free" perspective - if nothing else).

With any luck, these lawsuits (including MS, apple, etc) will all end with one result - alot of patents being voided... one can only hope its worth the cost and that google can afford it.

Personal opinion, but i believe the difference is moot. I find that (as a hacker type) apps I want on my phone (android) are available on the android market. For example an SSH daemon (which i dont think there is one on the apple market) that can access the root of my phone's filesystem. Some may think me crazy for running such a thing, but I am a little crazy. But it is apps like that you'll find quite a few of (apps designed to support rooted phones) that you'll never see on the apple market and they do appeal very much to me in alot of cases.

The problem with that particular example is that im the 1-2% of the android market who are looking for those type of things.

The general populace want games, some lifestyle apps, some social apps and maybe some business apps. In general, i believe there are more then enough of these available on both platforms and markets. On the whole, i'd say its a line-ball call. You'll find what you need for all those in both markets and in some cases they'll even be the same app ported from one platform to the other (angry birds is a good example). You'll also get alot of pure entertainment from both that'll fill just about any taste. These days i've yet to find something I wanted to do I cant find on the android market (which wasn't always the case).

One thing I do believe is true, if you sat down and decided "i want to do this, this and this with my phone that it doesnt do right now", the cost of adding that functionality tends to be lower on the android platform them the iphone side however, you'll probably have to live with advertising on the android device to do so. What I also mean with this is that you'll find what you want is probably available on both platforms these days.

I dont think this project has any real (or official) input from google. Intel's port might, but thats not this.

While slightly off topic - if you like ion, try amd fusion (e350m series)... very much like atom, but actually worth having (faster, and generally better hardware).

I liked the idea of atom, until i got one and compared to a (at the time) 8 year old epia (N10k)... the atom was about 1.5 times the speed and sucked down more juice... I was really disappointed with the atom processor... ION made it worth while, but in reality the atom is a POS bang per W is very low on the platform and the atom has had several functions torn out of it (compared to a i3/i5/i7 or core/core2) which i personally found kind of annoying..

But, back on topic. This should run on the embedded cpu AMD fusion boards (such as the e350 mentioned above) and if i get the chance i do plan on giving it a shot.

What I find interesting is how this is going to impact Compliance and Discovery type activities (things like PCI, SOX, etc etc). Theres lots of compliance type directives that basically say "communications inside and outside of your company must be kept for xxx days/years/months"... Alot of people read this as "we need to archive our email so if we get into a lawsuit we can cover our discovery requirements".

The best part of this is that people dont (yet) seem to realise that compliance and discovery don't specify email - they specify electronic communications. So if you dump email and move to something else and you have compliance requirements your going to have to comply with them no matter what your system of communication is!..

Keeping in mind of course that compliance and discovery type measures are defensive ones. The ability to prove/disprove something was done or said is simply a way of "covering your arse" in court and often where people read compliance to mean "i need to archive all communications" what it really means is "if i dont archive all communications, i cant prove joe from company X sent me an email telling me to do something".

Ultimately though, my point is that who ever wins the "internal social networking email replacement tool" war will also have a trail of developers behind them wanting to develop a set of archiving and compliance tools that go along with them... read that as $$$.