While he won't admit it, he's the main reason why this study - which was due to be released quite a while ago - has taken until now to reach this stage.

I expect he'll just ignore the public and continue to veto any changes.

It was a fairly deliberate design decision, they wanted to make you feel constricted and claustrophobic. Apparently it worked too well in your case.

One of the biggest tricks with PC Dead Space was that you *must* disable vsync. Vsync in the game is horribly bugged and causes major input lag. Without the lag, the controls (especially the camera) are a lot more responsive and you'd probably find that after a bit of play the constricted view becomes less of an issue because the game no longer feels like you're issuing commands to someone on the moon.

Wii has mandatory region lockout. It is easily defeated via software mods - Gecko OS via the Homebrew Channel works perfectly for everything I've thrown at it.

PS2 also has mandatory lockouts. The only practical work-around aside from running the game in an emulator (quickly becoming a fairly realistic option) is to get a modchip installed. Modchips are legal in Australia after the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) went to the supreme court here against Sony and got them officially classified as being 'fair use'.

360 has optional lockout. It's left up to the publisher's discretion. Generally speaking, US-released games from European or US publishers are not regioned, but Japanese publishers lock everything down tight, which can be annoying. There's no real work-around here, but it's fairly easy to import a 360 from another region and if you have an Australian 360 you can plug the power brick into a foreign console and it will work perfectly, so there's no need for an expensive transformer & rectifier.

PS3 has no regional lockouts for games. It does for Blu-ray. Sony's official policy is that regioning no longer makes sense and that it is more practical to 'lock out' regions by simply not offering the games in their language. It's a fairly odd position since they're one of the main proponents of movies on Blu-ray and those do have regions. Additionally, the PS3 has a universal power supply able to cope with all voltages and frequencies, all you need is a bog-standard PC power cable. I have one of the shiny white Japanese PS3s (primarily to ensure I had a blu-ray player in Region 1) and have had zero issues with anything.

The real trick as far as regioning goes is the recent move toward digital content. You're locked to your region for digital stuff. You can create fake accounts from other regions, but you can't actually buy anything on those accounts because your billing address will not match with your bank and the charges will be declined. Services like Entropay used to be an option, but Sony and MS have picked up on those and they generally don't work. Your only option is to have a friend who can buy point cards in their region for you and send you the codes. I've also heard some people have had success with the recent trend toward pre-paid 'gift' credit cards since these aren't associated with a billing address, but haven't tried that option myself.

The system they use for electing senators is far more complicated than the regular preferential system, though. I've never seen an explanation of it that actually makes sense. I think the only time it works like the 'normal' system is if you bother to rank every single senate candidate one by one. Otherwise your vote gets exchanged around through some kind of elaborate preference-sharing schemes. Which is how an utter moron like Fielding managed to get in there.

Are you sure that the voter turnout was only 25% in Victoria, incidentally? Voting is compulsory, I can't believe that 75% of the state would refuse to vote and swallow the resulting fine.

MP3 compression is, at least as far as I know, based off the same algorithms we use for lossy image compression in schemes like JPEG. Essentially we take blocks of the data, whether it is visual or aural, and we apply a transform function to it. In JPEG this is a Discrete Cosine Transform, I'm not sure about MP3 but I imagine it's a very similar transform, adapted for sound.

The transform function changes the values of the data in the block, essentially separating them by how 'noisy' they are. Then we throw away the noisiest components of the transformed data, because these are least likely to contain 'information' content - where in the audio case, information is the actual sound. If you take too much away, you can eat away some of the information as well as the noise, which in the case of audio will introduce degradation and a loss of the richness and texture of the sound. However if you take away a smaller amount, the bulk of what you're throwing away is not interesting or useful.

FLAC by comparison is lossless compression. All that noise in the sound is preserved. However a lossy-compressed copy of the same audio may sound 'better' to our ears because some of that extra noise has been eliminated by the compression. The same phenomenon has been observed with images. Sometimes perceived image quality can actually be improved by lossy compression. It's a side-effect of the process.

As far as I know, to release a game on a medium regulated by the Australian classification board, you have to have the game in question classified. This costs a minimum of $1000 AUD.

This will spell the end of any small-scale iPhone game development by individuals or indie developers in Australia. The only games we'll see will be from big publishers, if we see them at all - even a big-name game is going to struggle to recoup $1000+ from Australian sales alone.

The structure of a URL is:

protocol://domain/path

When you use the 'file' protocol, there is no domain, there is only a path. Thus the domain part of the URL is omitted and you get a triple-slash.

Just under 70 years ago the UK was fighting tooth and nail to defend their country from a fascist empire that had a fairly famous history with profiling and oppressing or promoting people depending on their genetic heritage...

I guess that explains where all our arctic and antarctic ice caps have disappeared to then.

The summary implies that this idea is a bit more elegant than it actually appears to be. Essentially it's mosquitoes with a genetic 'kill switch' which is suppressed by a specific antibiotic. When they're released they mate with female mosquitoes but the offspring of those mosquitoes die soon after, along with the GE mosquitoes. In theory.

So it's not really 'controlling the spread of dengue fever' or whatever. It's just reducing the population of mosquitoes, and it's completely indiscriminate in the way that it works, wiping out both carriers and non-carriers of the virus. Aside from the obvious potential implications that destroying a chunk of the mosquito population would have on the ecosystem, you've got to wonder whether the suppression mechanism is even workable. The antibiotic is apparently used in agriculture a lot, so it's possible that they could get access to it anyway. In fact this could potentially just move the problem out of the urban areas.

Additionally there's the fact that this is really only a short-term solution. In order to have any real effect you'd need to be constantly releasing more Terminator Mosquitoes into the ecosystem. The instant your government stops paying whatever company is producing the things, the population of unaffected mosquitoes is going to bounce back again, and one assumes that they'd bring their various viruses with them.