Honestly your first picture could also be a good example to demonstrate ring species, which are a great countertexample to the "reproduce to produce fertile offspring" definition of species.
Zagorath
joined 6 months ago
Damn, this is mega disappointing. I've moved so my local MP is no longer Greens, but I haven't updated my address on the electoral roll so I might write to her, and to the Greens Senators, to express my disappointment at this.
I'll also just re-share here the text of a fantastic Facebook post that came out a week ago, before Albo capitulated:
A Royal Commission is for systemic, nationwide failure not a single criminal act like the Bondi Shooting
Australia only uses Royal Commissions when normal oversight has completely failed, causing widespread harm over years not localised to one region, city or state.
Examples:
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse
- Most expensive ever (~$535 million)
- Decades of abuse across churches, schools, state institutions
Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability
- ~$300–350 million
- Widespread abuse and neglect across care, health, justice, NDIS
Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety
– ~$110–120 million
– System found to be unsafe, neglectful, and failing nationallyRoyal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme
– ~$60 million
– An unlawful government scheme that harmed hundreds of thousandsThe Bondi attack was a single act of violence by an individual.
It is already subject to:
- Police investigation
- Coroner’s inquest
- Independent reviews
Unless evidence shows repeated ignored warnings, systemic government failure, or nationwide negligence, a Royal Commission is not justified.
Calling one without proof of systemic failure is political theatre, wastes public money, and retraumatises families.
Facts first. Evidence first. Accountability where it belongs.
I highly doubt they’d do it this blatantly if they were not confident this is an easy sell
I mean, I would have agreed with you, except we've also just recently seen even more blatant and indefensible union-busting from Rockstar in the UK, another country with good labour laws, and another country with more than adequate legal resources.
I think you're probably right that Ubisoft has sufficient legal cover to win this case, but that's because of the merits of this case, not because a big company from a country with good laws could never do something stupidly illegal.
How is their site (and product) as an option for your non-techy mum? Also does shipping end up being exorbitant if you're not in the same country they're based in?
What companies actually make decent mid-range laptops these days?
I thought we were past the days of waiting multiple weeks for internet after moving in.
In still remember in November 2019 when my apartment finally got NBN installed, and I had to wait until late January 2020 to actually get it all connected.
That was very convenient timing.
I also bought a new bike as a Christmas present to myself in December 2019. COVID couldn't have happened at a more perfect time for me.
My parents recently moved back into their house after moving back to Australia for the first time since before NBN existed. The place was rented out and at some point got NBN (HFC) installed.
There was no NTD (the black NBN connection box) inside the house, so we assumed the previous tenants had taken it even though they're not supposed to. Easy mistake to make. After ordering a new NTD and it not working, they had to go through the whole Christmas period without Internet waiting for an NBN officer to come out and fix it up. It was only yesterday when he finally came that they discovered...there is no cable from the kerbside pit to the NBN utility box on the side of the house.
A utility box with NBN branding exists, and a cable is run from it to a coaxial port inside the house, but apparently there's no cable from the utility box to the kerbside pit.
So presumably NBN was installed at some point, but somebody has ripped out the cable‽ Could anyone speculate as to what happened here?
I suspect they probably already are cheaper over the lifetime of the product. Of course there's also a lot of value in the upfront cost coming closer, but there are other problems at play.
First and foremost: the culture wars. The right-wing loves to make a big fuss at how poor and inadequate anything that might be better for the environment is. And EVs have been a huge target of this.
There's also range anxiety. Australia doesn't have the best fast-charger network for those rare long-distance trips, and far too many people make their purchase based on what they might need for a trip they take less than once per year.
And then there's dealers. There have been many reports of dealers discouraging people from getting EVs. Probably because they make a lot of their money on aftermarket servicing, which EVs need a lot less of than ICE cars. So it's in their best interest to avoid EVs.
I'm gonna say, I don't like the use of LLMs to replace real artists, but IP law is not an appropriate vehicle to stop it happening. AIs trained on pirated material should face the consequences for that, but scraping publicly available (not the same as public domain) material is ethically no different to human artists taking inspiration from that same material. It's the output that needs to be restricted, not the input.