Name one. Just one.

Lotus Notes?

If you were a queen (who in the 21st century still won't enter the House of Commons and only talk with the House of Lords)

This extends from 1642, where King Charles I demanded the heads of five of its members. Since then, the monarch has been banned from the Commons and may not enter.

If the target for a long-term stable kernel is embedded systems, then I would suggest having some sort of arrangement with the real-time kernel patches which typically don't release with every kernel.

If, for example, 2.6.39 was chosen as a -longterm, it's unattractive for many embedded developers without the option of the -rt.

Newspeak.

RealClimate (some of whom were the target of the so-called "Climategate" emails) has done this, or covered betting markets several times.

In 2005, they compared the rhetoric of a sceptic to the odds they were willing to bet on. Take a guess as to whether they were consistent.

In 2008, they proposed a bet on a specific paper with specific scientific reasons. Guess what? No takers. And they would have won.

A little more than two years ago, we were worried whether our dams would run out - you can see some pretty graphs here.

Disturbingly, when the dam was finally full again after 8 years of drought in October, the state opposition leader John-Paul Langbroek called to increase the water storage level at the expense of flood mitigation. The main dam (Wivenhoe Dam) can hold 225% of it's nominal capacity for flood storage. It's currently at 190%.

The dam is a earth embankment dam and is not design to spill. If so, it may erode the dam and potentially cause it's failure. Hence, there must be a controlled release, even while the flood conditions are occuring and it's a fine balancing act between holding back more rain and flooding downstream.

In general, it is considered that the flood mitigation capacity (about that of Sydney Harbour) will knock about 2m off a flood peak. There would be many more people currently swimming without it, even before it's expected to peak in about 36 hours.

For the locals from BrisVegas, please consider donating muscles rather than money (or persuade someone else that has muscles to donate).

Last night, there was a good response to call for people to fill sandbags. Post-flood, there will be a much needed effort to clean the mud from more than 40,000 homes and streets (at current estimates).

You can register at www.volunteeringqld.org.au but it's busy (a good thing!) so be patient.

If you have specific offers of heavy lifting equipment (e.g. excavators etc), the Lord Mayor has opened this email for offers: lordmayor (you know what's here) brisbane.qld.gov.au

You know, Americans say that about the Brits, but look to your neighbour to the North. Rather than going through a bloody and violent war for independence, we just kinda sat around for a while.

And Australians did it with a vote, not a war.

> Intriguingly (I think atleast), it is constitutionally impossible for the British government to grant independence to Canada, because it's not possible for one government to do something irreversible that the the next government can't undo. So, technically, the UK must still regard Canada as a colony...

Even Australia is legally separate from Britian, despite the "Queen of Australia" being the same person as the "Queen of England".

Only one step to go before we finish the job...

The (former) little aussie that could :) - they have since been bought out by Boeing (Insitu).

Aerosonde has been doing it for a while, hence aero-sonde. I believe they started doing crazy weather stuff some time before they were the first UAV to cross the Atlantic in 1998.

It's worth taking a read of the satellite itself. Apparently, the accelerometers themselves (3 pairs of them) are mounted to within one picometre (that is micro-micro-metre). Gravity measurements are to within 10^-13 G. All pushed ahead by a cool xenon ion engine :)

That's some serious engineering precision. A bit more than your average accelerometer in your iPhone.

There's a bit more on how it works in this article.

Of course, the raw data looks a lots uglier than the beautiful image of the final result, but if the research is for climate change, then manipulating raw data is what they do best ;)

> Interestingly, the inertial navigation software itself is available as source code for download

[[Citation Needed]]

The other application of the Geoid is that it is essentially the "Mean Sea Level" across the globe.

This is essential for you GPS Receiver - the height calculated by a GPS receiver is the height above a theoretical ellipsoid that has pretty much the same shape of the earth. However, the geoid is used to calculate the difference between this "Ellipsoidal Height" and the "height above sea level" that is reported by receivers - sometimes known as "undulation". Without it, Brisbane, Australia would report being about 40m above the water when out on the Bay in a boat.

GPS Receivers typically use a lookup table for it, but can be calculated from scratch using a geoid model such as EGM96 using Spherical Harmonics. Of course, there is an open source implementation of it in C and MATLAB.

Vincenty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincenty's_formulae is the current benchmark for distance between two points. If you think you've done better, you've got two real options:

(1) A GPS/Navigation Journal, or
(2) Surveying journal

Forget computer science - not really interested in this problem.

As far as conferences are concerned, it's worth trying to get into one of the following:

        * IEEE PLANS http://www.plansconference.org/

        * ION PLANS http://www.ion.org/meetings/

If you think it's still good for a journal, look for who has cited Vincenty's paper in Google Scholar - it will give you a good indication as to what journals to chase.