It’s pretty depressing to see how many people in favour of this are prepared to make everyone suffer invasive demands for personal information in order to use a good portion of the internet. These laws haven’t even come into force yet and they’ve already caused harm in the form of tens of thousands of leaked IDs, to say nothing of the problems with further reducing anonymity of discussion in an increasingly authoritarian world.
The continuous output is where average people actually want more power though, one of the main points of ebikes is to reduce effort from climbing hills. Most people are not going to be at your level of fitness or investment in cycling (in both the physical and mental sense) and just want to get places without needing a shower afterwards. I can see why you want to keep a purer form of something you have an interest in (similarly I think there is limited need for automatic transmissions outside of disability) but there is a case for more power if you want more people to be riding over driving.
The 250w limit in EN15194 is overly low, NSW finally changed their laws to a more sensible 500w a few years back so this change will make it so you can’t import a whole variety of bikes you can legally ride. Even 750w isn’t a problem IMO, having ridden one (with throttle and all) I’d class it as definitely still on the bicycle end of things rather than an actual motorbike.
Looking on the bright side though import restrictions will hopefully induce more manufacturers to do ADR compliance for those of us who do actually want the motorbike end of ‘ebikes’, even for dirt bikes the ability to rego them makes them much more useful for non-track riding.
It sounds a logical start point, the central coast and Newcastle have a large population base to work with and it’s not that far apart. The sheer amount of tunnel for that route compared to what one would expect with a corridor through more open country is a downside but you might as well start somewhere rather than talk about it for a few more decades.
They’re most of the way there but fall a bit short of a real Tim Tam. I find the chocolate has a slight sourness to it compared to the original (as if they let an American pick the recipe) - not enough to stop me eating them but enough to reduce the normal Tim Tam desire to rip through a whole packet.
The Choceur chocolate blocks however tend to be a quite acceptable replacement for Cadbury and even Whittaker so not all hope is lost for more affordable chocolates.
I’ve somehow managed to never read or watch any of the versions of that, I know the general gist of the story due to cultural osmosis but not the details. Might have to get around to reading the book at least.
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and The Mysterious Island (this one is barely sci fi) both include messages in bottles but not at both start and end of the story, so at this point I think I’m out of ideas.
That just makes me think of the Count of Monte Cristo, and while that plot kicks off everything with a nautical message it wasn’t in a bottle.
Nothing comes to mind that matches that unfortunately.
I did initially think of Treasure Island for some reason and that definitely matches the latter criteria but I don’t recall any messages in a bottle actually appearing in the book.
Even with a theoretically ideal seal holding suitable humidity it depends a lot on what paper and where the bottle spent its time. I would expect a massively broad range of times - between a few years and thousands of years.
Paper with any significant acid content will last significantly less time than acid free paper, and paper made of cotton is likely to last noticeably better than paper made from wood. You also want the paper to be kept away from light and high temperatures as these will really cut into potential lifespan. If this bottle spent most of its time buried in a beach that would have at least kept it dark and relatively cool, probably why it lasted so well even with an imperfect seal.
Over the last few years I think all our states have now banned phones from being visible in school, so there’s efforts towards reducing usage at least within school. That’s a relatively recent move though and does only cut down on usage during part of the day so I don’t know if there’s been a noticeable effect on the kids.
Doesn’t that sound exactly like the “can somebody please think about the children” argument?
It is that, but the ban in question is being justified by that same poor argument so it might as well be fired right back again.
From my reading it’s going to be the same campgrounds that already exist, but now with a commercial operator being able to book a proportion of the sites before the public can. I don’t know if they will physically separate the commercially booked sites but at this point I have seen no mention of expanding or creating campgrounds for this purpose.
I am ideologically against letting commercial operators into this field - I accept the reality that camping fees in national parks are a necessary evil to help with provision of services and reduce false bookings, but I think if such fees are going to exist the money should go directly to Parks rather than have the majority go to a private company. Commercial camping operations should be operating on private land rather than public - that way public access to public land is not reduced and the public gets limited access to land they would not otherwise get to (the camping might even help fund preservation of said private land).
As expected, the people who were already doing illegal things with machetes don’t care about the machete ban. I can’t see Victoria backing down on it though, they’ll probably claim safety requires expanding the ban to knives in general and screw over more law abiding people.
Yes, it’s a fair enough point to not want a Chinese car due to data security and potential for malicious software but the same applies to basically any modern vehicle. I’d still trust the Europeans and the US more than China at this point but with the demand for (and legal requirements for) in car tech and sensors nobody is building cars without potential vulnerabilities these days.
Anyways, are EMPs real? If so, it doesn’t matter lol
They are but the chances of a normal car being the main problem in such a case are pretty low (you’ll probably either be dealing with blast damage/radiation from the nuke that caused it or the power/comms infrastructure going down and taking the trappings of modern society with it). It is an edge case you’d want to consider for the ADF’s combat vehicles but I can’t see it being applicable to their regular car fleet.
The 1830’s??? ???
Melbourne was founded later than you’d expect given its prominence in size and historical political power, it was indeed started in the mid 1830s. Before that there was a bit of exploration in Victoria but basically all settlements of size were in current day NSW and Tasmania (the expeditions for Melbourne left from Launceston, which had been going for a couple of decades by that point).
I guess you’re a prime example of someone looking to be offended then, because I really haven’t said anything racist.
Turns out that when you go out hunting for things to be offended by you tend to find them.
The "Aboriginal Australian’s house’ one for example was clearly going to be a no-win situation regardless of the output - if the model returned the same house as the ‘Australian’s house’ image they’d be writing instead about how offensive it was to ignore traditional culture.
“Every closure of a manufacturing facility is a loss of sovereign capability and compromises Australia’s ability to build a more complex and dynamic knowledge-driven economy.”
I agree with this sentiment, I don’t think it is a good idea long term to lose manufacturing capability and knowledge. I would however prefer that a stake in the company is transferred to the government when they have to spend large sums bailing out a facility due to it being in the national interest to do so.
Discord implemented age verification due to us and the UK moving towards such laws, a third party involved in this was breached and ~70k users had information leaked (though presumably not all of these included IDs). Approx 68k of these users turned out to be Australian.