In 1959, John Wyndham (the Day of the Triffids, the Chrysalids etc) wrote a set of linked short stories about a family participating in the colonisation of space. In one of these, the USA, Russia and the UK have nuclear armed moon bases.
An interesting case of art imitating life - even if the the life was top secret at the time!
If you look at the list of companies that were sued (and have settled), you will notice that none of them is an Australian company. It was Australian tax payer dollars that funded this research (and the patenting process), so just how does the Australian government tax all those non-Australain companies??? The ONLY way to do it is with patents so that the companies making money from the technology in many countries around the world pay a part of their profits back to the inventors.
As has been said, the CSIRO will use this money to fund further research - such as the "pure" radio astronomy work which resulted in this spin off piece of technology in the first place!
RobHart
Bias up front: I am an ex academic (in engineering), bored early retiree who is now teaching senior Maths/Physics at high school (in Australia) - including 10th grade Maths. As well as being an academic, I worked in the private sector (including my own business), so I have some idea as to what I would expect of general clerical staff.
I am truly astonished that a "well educated" person could not solve the sort of problems referenced in the article. Simple Maths problems like these do not just show Mathematical capability, but also demonstrate logical reasoning skills - the sort of skills I would look for when hiring someone for a general clerical position.
That said, quite a few of my (middle to lower ability class) kids in 10th grade this year failed to meet this sort of standard, although with most of these it was lack of effort/application not innate ability that determined their outcome. Quite a few of these kids said they couldn't care less as "Maths was irrelevant" to their area of career interest (despite solid examples that demonstrated that idea to be incorrect).
I have the feeling that many kids regard Maths as hard and "you can do well without it" as a socially accepted truth. Yet we live in an increasingly technical (numerate, Mathematical) world, so I can't help but feel this widely accepted "truth" will (or quite probably already is going to) bite us in the bum: without logical, (mathematically literate) people to run our world, it will fall into a hole...
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