Why is there a donate button for a public inquiry?

Ok, if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the site.

"A non-partisan, civil society inquiry into Australia's nuclear submarine partnership. Auspiced by the Australian Peace and Security Forum. Funded by Australia's civil society."

So not government backed in any way. I bet this confuses a lot of people. I dislike how it is named and presented, seems deliberately misleading.

To me the words "independent public inquiry" typically means something that is started/funded by government and then run by an independent agency or board to investigate the thing they are set up to do.

The fact that they call it different things on the same page doesn't exactly help with clarity.

If they weren't asking for people's money, I wouldn't care at all. But I suggest anyone that donates figures out what their $$$ will be actually spent on before they send any (let's hope it's not to pay Peter Garrett).

Depends if you care about names or about physics. Radio, Infrared Gamma etc are just names we give to various parts of the continuous electromagnetic spectrum. The edges of these definitions are not super well defined. Changing from RF to microwave could be defined at say about 3 GHz, but there is not some clear physical difference between a 2.9 GHz photon and a 3.1 GHz photon other than the frequency change.

The lower limit to the frequency is I guess the inverse of the theoretical age of the universe/2. Something can't currently be oscillating slower than that.

There are some theories on plank length, quantisation limits, etc that might set some theoretical upper limit of photon frequency. But we don't appear to be anywhere close to observing such things. We have seen some rather crazy short wavelength particles that we haven't fully understood.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle

I'm with the RBA on this one. The price on the sticker should be what I pay no matter the format I pay in. It's one of the great things about aus.

Cash still has significant overhead and businesses manage to account for that. Digital should be no different.

Sounds like it's time to switch out the 1080ti for a 9070xt. Been almost 10 years, probably due for an upgrade.

I will miss having that CUDA compatibility on hand for matlab tinkering. I wonder if any translation layers are working yet?

Can't believe the guts that must have taken. Absolute legend.

There are variations of the Skull and Crossbones here that have specific meaning?

I have no doubt that that code is over complicated and inaccessible and probably needs a full rewrite that actually makes it accessible and effective.

That said, I'm sure there are far too many builders that are looking for the cheap and easy loopholes that certainly contributed to its current state.

Literally yesterday I found a beam in a 2007 apartment build that has been secured to the slab above with framing nails. This should have been done with a proper concrete bolt or anchor. The nails were failing and the whole ceiling was starting to fall.

Honestly. I think the government should design a cookie cutter 3 bed house that is standardised and easy to build, easy to check and certify the build. Buy or hell even make the framing and materials locally in bulk and start pumping out the same house over and over again.

How can we reduce paracetamol poisoning? Better access to mental health services? Nah. Let's make them buy two boxes instead of one. That will do it.

What a joke.

I installed fedora to replace windows on the 31/12/2023. I wasn't a complete Linux noob by any measure but haven't run it as a main OS before. Thank you proton for getting me over the edge.

The whole repo situation on fedora is honestly pretty meh, things are out of date or broken too often. Or they just don't exist. I have put arch on a number of machines since and find it significantly better. My main box will move away from fedora next time I'm enthused to mess with it and this is the primary reason.

Even when in power and offering cash incentives, the LNP couldn't convince the power industry to extend coal power plant lifetimes or build new generators. Renewables have already won the free market, they will likely never be beaten in our lifetime. Good fucking luck getting any company that wants to actually make money to invest in nuclear.

The only reasonable argument left for nuclear is the baseline and storage argument, but again the writing is on the wall, industry can see the trajectory that batteries and storage tech is on and know that by the time they spend 2 decades investing in current gen nuclear, it will probably be beaten by storage in the free market anyway.

For the lulz

Wikipedia is amazing, and I have donated to them a number of times. But something just rubs me the wrong way about their current donation drive and anything I read about how much their higher ups are getting paid makes no sense to me. Why are the salaries so high? Where is the clear breakdown of server cost and infrastructure?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07209

I can't stand these popular science articles that just cherry pick phrases from a paper. tl;dr it's a very promising result but more observation of other galaxies or other mass consistent observations is needed before we should believe this.

However, the signal from the MW halo alone does not constitute the definitive proof of dark matter annihilation. Detection of annihilation signals from other objects or regions with consistent WIMP parameters will be crucial for the final confirmation. Gamma-ray observations of dwarf galaxies in the MW halo are fascinating from this perspective.

I would say the most exciting part is this gives us a mass range to optimise the search with earth based detectors. Start looking for 0.5-0.8 TeV masses.

I would say it's pretty typical of all Aus communication and intelligence legislation from the last 20 years. Put total overreach into the legislation then apply it selectively, because scary terrorists or scary guns or fucking bunyips, idk.

I have seen a lot of wives and mates getting gun licences recently. Pretty easy way to overcome the rather pointless quantity limitations. In some ways I worry the number limits may actually increase the spread of firearms in the country.

A cat C license (self loading) is a lot more difficult to get than a cat A,B licence. So far this has worked, no semi auto terrorist attacks since Port Arthur. Thank fuck these guys did not have semi auto weapons.

I honestly wouldn't have much issue with them removing the cat C licence, effectively banning semi auto outside of military use. But it certainly has some legitimate use cases in feral animal control.

Yeah no shit mate. That's why pump shotguns are also under a cat C licence here. The legislators weren't stupid, they basically categorised things on fire rate and public danger.

The Adler lever actions are very questionable in my opinion. They are almost as fast. Though the one I tried would jam all the time. Lever actions like that weren't a common thing in the 90's so it slipped by for a while.

And saying that a bolt action is potentially worse than a semi auto is some full on American bulshit. Sure things can jam and go wrong, but in the worst case situation with aresholes like this firing into a dense crowd where aim doesn't really matter, faster shooting is more casualties.

No. Some people will continue to be morons no mater what changes. The studly might as well find that 50% of people have below median intelligence.

Green implies safe, swimming at the beach is never safe, even for a strong swimmer. There are dozens of pictorial danger signs at popular beaches and usually signs about how to interpret the flags.

Useless journalist. At least link the fucking report. Or I guess don't because people might read it and make their own opinions.

https://polis.cass.anu.edu.au/research/publications/social-cohesion-and-support-democracy-australia-assessing-recent-polling-data

It's here and no surprise the context matters.

indicate their agreement or disagreement with the statement: ‘Democracy is always and under all circumstances preferable to any other kind of government.’

only 1.4 per cent of Australians strongly disagreed with the statement, and a further 5.5 per cent disagreed. Another 26.3 per cent neither agreed nor disagreed.

Big surprise, strongly worded poll gets a lot of middle ground votes, but less than 10% outright disagree with the statement.

This article has some huge issues.

As mentioned already, the type of gun matters a lot. No mention of how many are semi auto, but I am guessing it won't be many.

Also no accounting for population growth over the last 30 years as a factor in total gun numbers.

This paragraph was absolutely journalistic garbage.

"NSW firearm registry data shows that in Sydney there are more than 70 individuals who own more than 100 firearms, including one person who owns 385 guns. The register notes that this is not a collector or a dealer."

Clearly this is a hobby/interest and the person is a collector with too much time and money (good for them I guess). What they don't have is a "collectors" licence that effectively means they cannot ever use their guns. A licenced collector will usually have inoperable firearms on display (think museum).

All that said, the SSAA and others do have a higher than normal concentration of right wing nuts that continuously lobby the government to weaken our excellent (imo) gun laws. It's why I stopped giving them any of my money.