ack! JCU is a world leader... not my friend (in case the language was ambiguous).

About 20 years ago it was noticed that many of these reefs were dying back. An important cause? Increased sediment discharge from those same rivers you were talking about... apparently clearing vegetation, runoff from cities and agriculture was doing the damage. My brother is a builder and it's law that he take great care about sediment control from his building sites, as is the case with many other sediment generating activities. This is not news in North Queensland. The prospect of lead, mercury, cadmium etc... in seafood isn't exciting either. Apparently trace elements in anaerobic sediments become bioavailable after they're dredged up then get concentrated up the food chain. This happened during the 80's a few hundred kilometres south in Gladstone and closed a fishery. (I've attached a paper documenting this elsewhere in this thread).

Not REALLY concerned about crabs here... I should have spelt it out, but although copper is a real problem for sea life the bioavailable lead, cadmium, aluminium and arsenic isn't much good for seafood lovers like me. It wasn't just in the crabs either.

You're an idiot. My brother is a builder, and must be ultra careful to control sediment flow from his building sites. This is because the reef was dying, studies were done, and it was realised increased sediment runoff from clearing, agriculture, cities etc... was killing the reef. We were much more careful about this kind of thing, but apparently these days that's all greeny bullsh*t, and we're back to carefree shovelling.

It might surprise you. Dredging like this basically closed the Gladstone mudcrab and barramundi fishery - the anerobic sediments contain trace elements which suddenly became bioavailable when exposed to oxygen. They were finding lesions on crab shells and fish from being exposed to copper, mercury, arsenic, aluminium, lead etc... I posted a link to a paper elsewhere in this thread.

This paper is probably also relevant. It's about crabs from the commercial fishery near Gladstone developing holes in their shells. The conclusion was dredging was exposing anerobic sediments to oxygen releasing copper, arsenic and a bunch of other metals and compounds which had a detrimental effect on sea life.

I've just been speaking to a friend of mine who studied marine biology at James Cook University (a world leader in this kind of thing) and is a bit of a fish nerd. There's a reason the reef only starts 30km offshore. Coral is evolved for low nutrient low sediment conditions. Milky water cuts the light, and extra nutrients encourage filimentous algae which basically take over and shade the coral. Even the seagrass beds are very fragile especially at the moment after the natural disasters (floods, cyclones etc...) we've been having lately - the Southern Dugong is almost extinct. This stuff is widely known and care is taken even down to the building site level etc... to control sediment runoff. Apparently at the micro scale we need to worry about this, but at the macro scale it's no worries mate.

...many important concepts useful to logical and critical thought can be learned this way. I guess it's up to the educators to decide the best way to get students to grok these skills. Coding for codings sake? Wrong reason.

...ahh yes... people with more time than money ie. the people where much of the new music and ideas actually come from.

Perhaps you honestly don't know. The Unix Wars, basically infighting between BSD derivatives, almost undermined Unix is a platform. Linux came in just in time to save the day... it was inferior in almost every way, but the GPL enforced cooperation so software actually worked between distros with little modification. It used to be common knowledge that the BSD licence encouraged a prisoners delema type situation... but apparently the new generation either disregard this, or never learned this in the first place.

Learn some history... BSD-derivative infighting almost undermined Unix as a platform. Linux came just in time to save our collective bacon - even though Linux was technically inferior the GPL enforced cooperation so software wasn't as difficult to get working between distros. This was obvious once, but apparently the new generation either forgot or never knew.

Yeah, if you enabled everything there'd be potential for fun, but the features are there to pick 'n mix.

Should mention the IRC channel #fusiondirectory is active and helpful on FreeNode.

There has been a powerful infrastructure almost ready to do this (plus much more) available for ages : A GUI + LDAP based web interface called GOsa and a more active fork called FusionDirectory. It does almost everything, but noone has pulled the trigger on an important piece to allow imaging and/or OS installation - this requires a plugin for their messaging daemon. This messaging daemon is either called GOsa-si, or Argonaut in the two projects respectively). This has worked in the past... though bitrot and lack of interest has broken that particular piece.

Right now it allows GUI administration of DNS, DHCP, Samba, your choice of SMTP and POP/IMAP daemons, multiple groupware, Squid, rSyslog, Asterisk, Nagios and much more... with the ability to extend the interface via plugins. If/when the messaging daemon bits get completed it will be able to deploy clients and servers... using FAI/puppet for Linux and OPSI for MS. This HAS worked in the past, and I even believe the Munich Linux project may have had this working for years - but they've only packaged it for their own distro.

That's a weak argument - I'd expect better on a nerd site. It's irrelevant if they're "corruptible" or not. Honourable Uncle Pete is probably easier and cheaper to buy... "These guys are decent because their helping me out!". Used car salesmen are infamous for that one.