BTW, the Maori in NZ gained the right to vote in 1840 with the Treaty of Waitangi. From that point, Maori and Caucasion/Pakeha were all treated the same. If you needed to be a land owning man to vote, then race was irrelevant. When universal suffrage was granted in 1983, all men and women could vote in the national elections. If an Australian colony (there were no states in the 1800s) gave the vote to all before NZ did, then that's great, but which was it (I'd like to read up on that history)?

Umm, no. What I said is that you are entitled to your opinions, not your own facts. If you think don't Australia is a racist country then that is your opinion. Whether you are right or wrong is simply someone else's opinion.

I didn't think Australia was all that racist until I travelled out west. It was a shock to me the way that people spoke (black & white people) of other races. It is my opinion that in the cities Australia is multicultural and quite tolerant, but in many (but not all) of the small country towns they party like it's 1912, not 2012.

You are full of wrong. Australia gave women the vote in 1902. New Zealand gave women the vote in 1893.South Australia gave women the vote in 1895. Aborigines had the vote in some states prior to Federation, but this was not universal until 1962. Read Wikipedia and the Australian Electoral Commission. You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.

Depends where you do high school. We had a month or two on matrices in 5th form (now Year 11) and that was it. The more 'interesting' matrix mathematics was taught at university. On the other hand everyone had to do calculus in 6th Form (Y12), and it was an option (along with statistics) in 7th form (Y13).

Small signal stability (modal) analysis using eigenvectors etc does the head in of many engineers. It is a rare breed that actually enjoys it. I picked it up because I needed to, but testing the stability of generator is a lot more fun for me. It is a nice feeling though when the recorded results match the modelled results, and you can do the check in close to real time. For some reason people get a bit twitchy about delays when a 150MW generators is running on diesel (using 1000 litres of fuel per minute).

Are you really surprised that someone with 12y experience can outperform someone with a 3 or 4 degree and a couple of years experience? Come back in 10y and see who is outperforming who. There are many tech level jobs that engineers are rubbish at, and many engineer jobs that techs are rubbish at. Occasionally you'll get a person that is the exception to the rule, but on the whole, you need a mix of people in your team.

Me? I'm an engineer than doesn't overly like maths, but can connect test equipment up to large generators (>400MW) and not break anything or kill myself in the process. I'm not as fast as connecting gear as an electrician/electronics tech, but I can do machine stability analysis that you need university level maths to understand (unless TAFEs and polytechs are teaching eigenvalues and eigenvectors + linearisation of non linear systems these days).

All a GPS repeater tells you is where the repeater receiving antenna is. Only good for rough positioning, but still very good for timing. This is why they are used in hangars and bus tunnels -- near enough is good enough.

TBMs are generally navigated by laser surveying instruments. This is a real example of the surveyor's craft, and even in ancient times (i.e. pre laser) tunnels generally met in the middle.

The IEEE also convert nice vector graphic illustrations to bitmap format too :-( The only publications that remain vector are conferences where the authors have to make their own PDFs (and then jump through the IEEE hoops to get it validated). The text in IEEE journals is slightly denser than the LaTeX class. I saved a page on my most recent journal paper and avoided the page charges, so I am happy about that.

IET Journals will take .tex files, but really are after the text. The same goes with Elsevier journals. The Elsevier LaTeX class does not approximate the typeset format, but contains the basic formatting that they can make use of.

Engineers and Computer Scientists have this sorted with LaTeX. Others can take advantage of graphical editors for LaTeX like LyX, and generate publication quality manuscripts. The typeset output from the LaTeX IEEE template is not identical to what the IEEE finally typeset, but it is a very close copy. Similarly the Microsoft Word template is pretty good too.

I know many journals only want 'plain text' and then do the typesetting. There is a lot of skill in this and it does cost money. Perhaps if the journals received LaTeX formatted text then the paper could be open access for free? Fat chance.

Open Access is required at my university, and we are required to publish the 'accepted version', but not the 'published version' (with some exceptions). OAKList provides a reference for publication policies.

The poster needs to go to the NBN website and read the tech docs.

The telephone service will be provided over the NBN using a dedicated channel and the UNI-V interface. This interface provides the standard copper connection that a POTS phone expects. Some providers may enable the voice circuit to be routed to a UNI-D data interface for an Asterisk PBX or the equivalent.

Using copper lines as the phone connection makes no sense as the NBN is replacing the copper network, and in greenfield areas like rebuilt Grantham will be the only network.

I have a Virtual Machine with Win2K on it for this exact reason. It's all setup with a clean copy to restore for the next time. This video should be interesting watching.