Many areas in Australia already have higher levels of background radiation due to the large amount of granite in the rock, other areas like Maralinga are already contaminated thanks to atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. We are also considering importing and storing other country's radioactive waste because the ground is so stable and we have desolate areas nobody lives in.

It's a problem, but it can be managed. I think it makes a large amount of sense given the geology in Australia, other countries can make their own decisions on what makes sense for them.

So that would be me then, I've long advocated nuclear power in Australia as a means to get rid of our aging coal power plants. We've got large uranium deposits, a geologically stable continent, and the fuel security alone would be worth it.

So many people are terrified about nuclear power though, and the cost of building new plants tends to put the rest off particularly with the price of wind and solar slowly dropping.

To be fair, 'Africa' is not a bad guess. Malta is a tiny island located between continental Africa and Italy.

As a counter-anecdote, last week I was in France for a music festival, and one of the bar staff there was clearly american. I'm not french and so she wondered where I was from, I answered and her immediate response was; 'I have no idea where that is, my geography is terrible, I'm from the states'.

So apparently being American is a sufficient excuse for being ignorant about stuff, I don't think she was being proud about it as such but certainly not ashamed.

The Russian and Chinese governments are throwing their weight behind Sailfish, it might take off but perhaps not in western markets

I've got Linux with pulseaudio on my phone, it has to handle all kinds of audio routing between the ear piece, speaker, audio jack, bluetooth headset, and to do it all as seamlessly as possible. Can ALSA do this? because pulseaudio seems to handle it well.

Now I admit that this is not exactly a typical usecase, and indeed if you only have one thing you want to output audio to then simply using ALSA is more than adequate. This is perhaps one of the main issues facing the Linux ecosystem, everyone has wildly different usecases and expectations for their software and in the end you get a bit of an overengineered jack-of-all-trades without being good at any one thing.

It really isn't and this method of thinking about the brain isn't helping to figure out how it actually works. This gives a decent overview of why the brain isn't a computer.

When you think about it, our brains evolved over time and so will have been built on top of something approximating simpler organisms around us today, which is to say a purely reactive nervous system like that of a Jellyfish. Add in the fact that sensory deprivation causes us to become unhinged and sensory overload can be quite debilitating as well, we dream when we sleep .etc, then it seems that our senses are things that our higher level brain functions are built on top of.

So we aren't information processing machines as such, we are of course biological nervous systems and complicated ones at that.

My generation are also seemingly less materialistic than other recent generations, we care more about experiences and memories rather than buying endless trinkets. A big limiter on that is time, but realise that the more people have free time and excess money to spend on doing cool things, the more people required to help facilitate and organise all the various activities as well.

Anyway, i'm just suggesting that using a battery tech that doesnt exhibit thermal runaway effects sounds like a good idea in a country thats hot and gets fires on a yearly basis sounds like a good idea should such a technology exist and otherwise performs adequately

Yes obviously, but its still a risk that needs to be managed which limits where and how these units can be used. Do you even build a battery farm? or do you install units into every substation acting somewhat like a UPS for the local area? Crazy idea i know, that different technology might be best suited for different applications.

Lithium-Ion batteries don't like being set on fire, thats well known. In Australia we get bush fires rather regularly and I don't really want to know what happens when a bushfire hits a substation filled with Lithium-Ion batteries. Zinc-Bromine batteries however, are completely different and as such have different pros and cons, one of which is that they dont fail quite so spectactularly when set on fire.

As popular as Musk is, and he is no doubt doing cool things, I can't help but think that the SA Government should be looking locally for a possible solution before importing battery units from Nevada.

We have an Australian company that is bringing Grid Storage products to market using Flow Battery tech called RedFlow, and it seems to be better suited for grid based applications rather than a re-purposed automotive unit, particularly when it comes to risk of fires.

A centralised 'blockchain' is just a database, and we have those already so why bother? The whole value proposition of a blockchain is cooperation between entities that don't really trust each other but the greater value is in working together, so like a multi-player prisoners dilemma.

Not when that Sci-Fi movie includes fictitious science. In the UK I had a conversation about the idea that humans only use 10% of their brain, and upon saying that the idea was basically bullshit and provably so from an evolutionary perspective, I was asked if I had watched Lucy, the Scarlett Johanssen film based upon the premise and that I might find it interesting.

You can get quite far with QML and Javascript, which is modern and reasonably nice to work with. Qt style C++ is there if you need it, but many Sailfish APIs are exposed through QML and so you don't need to use it a lot of the time

Except the total amount of things we want to put a value on changes, so having a variable unit means that people don't have to change the price of their goods everyday, and beyond a certain point gold becomes rather hard to divide up into the right amounts.