Like the quality of your post, the opposition in the state and federal parliaments is a waste of time. If Baillieu was any good he'd win this election hands down over the horrific failure by the Brumby government regarding the bush fires. Instead we get yet another Liberal scare campaign, when they could be getting down to real issues.

My reference to reckless spending is regarding the Myki system which cost a billion dollars, and counting, to replace a system that wasn't broken. Worse still, the Metcard system it replaced is still required and the public transport network is still unreliable!

If you consider a billion dollars in context: We could have just had free public transport for 1-3 years without a single ticket instead of this failure. That's based on back of a napkin maths but a billion dollars buys a lot of zone 1 dailies. And it's not the only waste I can point to.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/355318/ipads_go_under_knife_victorian_hospitals/

Looks like this has been floating around for a good while.

This really shouldn't be a story, the likely case is the Labor government wont return to power at all.

If they do it will be with the Greens holding a deciding vote in policy and given their position to reckless spending like this they'd harpoon the idea anyway. This would be news if in three months time doctors were actually being given iPads to do their work via.

I totally agreed with the ranges used in BSG space combat. Too many hours of EVE fleet fights have convinced me that regardless of what makes sense space combatants will always follow a simple rule regarding engagement ranges: furtherest 'safe' distance to effective deploy weapons. In BSGs context this meant incredibly close range battles due to the option of deploying nukes which needed as short a travel distance as possible since both forces had defense batteries. These close ranges were backed up with the ability to jump away, assuming the FTL stayed up (real life wouldn't have plot devices). In EVE the same sort of tactic exists, typical maximum range of battleships is 150KM and at that range it takes almost a minute to take direct action against a fleet giving it time to jump away. I assume this rule would be a constant in any combat where both parties have the option of fleeing at will.

The way space combat would look is entirely dependent on what sort of ships exist. A couple of shuttles duking it out would really be who landed the first shot. My only issue here is light source, how would you see the battle with no light. BSG battles often mimicked what you'd see in EVE where the larger ships really just sat there while the smaller ships had all the fun and the real action, if any, was in following them. BSG battles always heavily focused on the fighters.

I don't understand how it is hard to install VLC in the Apple environment?

On my iPhone 4 for the purposes of this reply I went to the App Store, hit search, typed in VLC, and installed the first result. I now have VLC installed on my iPhone 4.

I also know that on an OS 10.4 laptop installing VLC is as simple as going to Google, typing VLC, and installing the first result. This will be the same for OS 10.7.

I would confidently state that VLC isn't hard to install at all.

http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/

These guys are doing some thing almost as cool though sticking to purely amateur ideals. Luckily for science loving people they've gotten a lot of press coverage. Unfortunately their latest launch failed on the pad, due to an issue with power, and they wont be able to attempt another test for six months odd. Still it is great to see people attempting to move past the generic rocket club stuff people have been doing pre-fab for 40 years.

They definitely, along with some other examples, inspired me to push my friends to start doing serious engineering projects for fun. So far our list of things to attempt comes from any thing cool on TV that come with the stupid warning 'don't try this at home!'.

Why do I never have mod points at the right time!?

Still while we're being a little bit mathy I'd like to point out the set of developers this story was pulled from. 59% of developers who already develop for Android said they'd consider Android in the long term. This is totally meaningless!

What percentage of developers make applications exclusively for the iPhone? What ratio of those who develop for both use this companies compiler? What does 'bet big' mean in the long term if they are already developing for iOS?

This is a total non-statistic.

"For example, every time an iPhone user closes out of the built-in mapping application, the phone snaps a screenshot and stores it." - TFS What?

Are national geographic seriously saying that 6% of the US population can't point to their own country on a map? And, are you seriously linking to that like it's a good thing? Jeeze...

I applied their study methodology to sex in a status update.

If you only look for sex statistics in brothels you'll only find prostitutes and from that information you can be sure that 99.7% of all human sex is paid for.

As you can see it is sound and the results are rock solid!

If you hadn't noticed the Internet has terrible speeds and reliability compared to standard networks. So his point still holds true, comically.

While we're on the topic of rude things I must ask: Do Americans give standing ovations to particularity loud or interesting farts or is there some minimum standard of quality I can't ascertain?

I base this question on at least two reports of ovations at this weeks TED for mildly insightful talks and seeing ovations in almost every musical ever produced and moved to DVD for the rest of the world to see.

Yes, this is a serious question.

That makes me worry about the quality of the Firefox they've made for 'mobile' computing if it can't even work on a Black Berry.

I didn't 'get' mobile internet or think it was worth the time of day until my work Black Berry saved my holiday by allowing me to online order tickets from people reselling theirs to a week long festival. This was in the middle of no where using the Opera Mobile browser over 3G while I was standing in the sold out queue trying to get in. By the time I got to the scanning gate I had the barcode up in an Opera tab and walked right in. Was a great festival too. This was three or four years ago.

If Firefox can't equal or better that experience years later what are they really offering beyond some competition?

And why are they pimping a 'full web browser' as my iPhones 3G has had that since the day I bought it almost two years ago.

Close, though a little inaccurate.

The solar maximum is still unknown for EVE as Jita has yet to push it to its limits. Systems on reinforced 'supernodes' can handle 1,500+ players with little to no lag at all. Those same servers have been able to sustain hours of fleet combat involving over two thousand players with acceptable lag (10 seconds to 2-10 minutes on module activation). Normal nodes that haven't been reinforced can handle limited fleet combat of about 700 pilots before lag sets in and 1,000-1,200 with no combat. A normal node will also host a handful of solar systems.

In regards to each solar system being like a continent that is a conceptual divide. WoWs 4 continents are still considered to be a contiguous 'world' as users are all acting towards the common goals of the world and interacting with the same player set. So EVE has 5,300 odd continents in its world compared to 4. Also note that you can 'walk over' the line between two grids by simply pointing your ship in the direction of another grid and flying to it. Like in WoW you also have the option to warp between grids, this would be comparable to flying a gryphon there. Grids are better thought of as a dynamic draw distance of the world around you.

Excluding technical differences like these the defining factor of EVE is that your actions effect over 300,000 players in the only (heh) instance of this 'world'.

For your interest if your sig says every thing you write is a lie but that everything in your sig is a lie then every thing out side of your sig must then be the truth. Is this possibly more misdirection! Seriously who would post their real pin number on slashdot? That would make the number you posted the last one any one who knew you would try. I love thinking this stuff through. ;)