I seem to be locked into beta on my phone, and it just simply doesn't work. 3 comments down, and the comments are single-word lines, and a few more nested comments down, even that breaks. Even though I visit classic.slashdot.org, i end up at beta.

Look, someone with black-hat skills, track down their dev environment and rm -r it for us, please?

You've got your location wrong. The tidal range at Abbot Point is less than 4 meters.

http://www.bom.gov.au/oceanogr...

So you want them to dump the spoil closer to the reef???? The great barrier reef is about 75 km off the coast at Bowen, where this development is happening, and you'd need to travel twice that to be outside the boundaries of the marine park.

They have chosen a safe dumping zone where the movement of silt won't cause problems. But the entire east coast of Queensland, however, is the marine park, so all the safe dumping zones are inside the 'park'. So that means that GBRMPA has to check the details and make sure that what the engineers have worked out is a safe dumping zone is actually one, and that the currents won't take large quantities of fine silt onto reefs. They have done so, worked out that it is, and the world moves on.

Now whether anyone should be digging up coal and shipping it to places where it will be burnt is another matter. But the placement of the dredge spoil is simple engineering.

It is still there as an optional item in the installer, not selected by default (because that is the way it should be).

And that is the main problem. When an inventor files a patent, it should be totally specific. If that patent is rejected, they should have two options: Argue that the patent as it stands is valid, involving the courts if necessary, or toss it out, and create a new, correct patent with a new effective date.

And if the way a patent is written could be read to cover some prior art, either before or after it is approved, then the patent is wrong and should be tossed, entirely, unless that prior art was explicitly listed in the 'prior art' section.

So this patent application should be the recipient of a junior-clerk's REJECTED stamp, because it doesn't explicitly list the Satoshi paper in it's applicable prior art section.

'If you were going to say one of these, STOP! you are being boring! Think of something original to say, or shut up!"

The US has gone to war a number of times (it is claimed) to prevent countries trading oil in currencies other than the Dollar. Some of those claims might border on conspiracy theories, but it remains that the tactics to keep oil trading based on the U.S. Dollar look remarkably like 'force'.

Etymology note: Petroleum is latin for 'Rock Oil' (Petra, rock + Oleum, oil, from the Latin for Olive.). When we created that abbreviation, Petrodollars, dollars for oil, all that was left of the oil was the 'o'. The word looks more like 'Rock 'o Dollars, doesn't it?

I'd give it -3 overrated. And this thread has been interesting - I have learnt a few things about this that I wasn't quite aware of - such as the actor's guild conditions that prevented the recordings continued use, and so contributed to their destruction. I was aware of the official programs to recover missing copies, but am not surprised at BigBadBus' notes below about archivists lack of concern for the official programs.

Namely, destruction of all extant copies.

BBC destroyed the only copies of most of those episodes decades ago. The only existing copies are some that were sent overseas and temporarily lost, so they were not recovered and destroyed. Others only exist in the form of home-made speaker-to-microphone reel-to-reel audio tapes.

You make this point yourself. If the developer of a closed source package gets bored of it, or it is not profitable (which itself is a high bar for a most producers!), or both, they will drop it. Anyone who came to rely on it is completely stuck, as they cannot fix the most trivial or sexy bugs. They have to live with it until advancing technology and other changes make the program fail completely, and they will have to retrain.

If it is open source, then at least you can recompile and/or port to a new OS. You have the option of paying someone to fix a problem. You have none of those options if the closed-source producer of a package arbitrarily decides to drop it.

That is exactly the system.

When a voter selects a vote above the line, they are choosing for their numbering of all the candidates to be as the party has outlined to the electoral office. It is a short-cut - a useful one, because there is often over 100 candidates for the senate.

You can choose not to use the shortcut, and number alllllll the boxes below the line. You might just get finished before the count is done.

They are trying to hit an earth-sun lagrange point. If they do so, the object leaves its solar orbit and enters an unstable earth orbit. They then need to give it another few burns to stabilize the orbit (and keep it away from the lagrange point, which would allow it to leave earth orbit and resume orbiting the sun) . If they miss, then it travels on, on a different orbit, with roughly the same chance of hitting the earth as it ever did.

The FAA almost never comes out with flat 'pilot error' as a cause. They always go as far as they can to answer the next why - Why did the pilot make this decision, and why did the craft respond so poorly to the sub-optimal inputs. And then why those issues happened, etc. They will often start the process at the human error and try to find the design and corporate failures that caused it.