Mark Latham agrees to pay damages to ABC's Osman Faruqi in defamation case | Australia news | The Guardian: In August, federal court judge Michael Wigney struck out Latham's defence in its entirety, labelling the 76-page document “extraordinary” for its references to, among other things, the martyrdom of Christians in the Roman Empire and the persecution of ethnoreligious Huguenots in the French kingdom during the French wars of religion of the 16th century.
Qantas call for Christmas airport volunteers has workers seeing red: The airline is being accused of "wage theft" and "Grinch" behaviour after an email to staff asking them to volunteer time at the airport during its busiest period was leaked on Friday. Particularly shitty move given how much fares are jacked up around Christmas.
Running against Tony Abbott in Warringah | The Saturday Paper: And all of that ... is what made me think I should consider running for Warringah. ... [I]f all my candidacy and others like it does, at first, is force those in power away from the hard right and a little towards common sense, that will be something.
Cricket Australia 'arrogant' and partly to blame for ball-tampering, report finds | Sport | The Guardian: An independent report into the organisation's culture found there was “strong systemic and organisational input” into the decision to cheat during the third Test against South Africa in Cape Town in March. Interviewees said Australian cricket's governing body adopted bullying behaviour, ostracised people and created a “win-at-all-costs” mentality that pushed players to “play the mongrel”.
Thousands still watch TV in black and white - BBC News: A black and white licence has one distinct advantage over its colour equivalent: it is a third of the price at £50.50 a year compared with £150.50. Neither does TV Licensing carry out checks of households claiming to watch a black and white set. "It's entirely done on trust," a spokesperson said. Curious uptick of black and white licenses predicted after this article ;)
Sydney Opera House ordered to display horse racing advertising on its sails | Australia news | The Guardian: The NSW government has ordered the Sydney Opera House to display a racing trophy with the word Everest on it and jockey numbers and colours on its sails in contravention of a policy to prevent the commercialisation of the building. The decision by premier Gladys Berejiklian came late on Friday afternoon after intense pressure from the Daily Telegraph and 2GB's Alan Jones to accept a plan by Racing NSW to promote the Everest Cup on the iconic landmark. Turning an architectural icon into a billboard because Alan fucking Jones had a tantrum. What a shining vision Gladys has for the state. Gambling ads on the Opera House during Responsible Gambling Awareness Week.
Opera House must never again be used as 'billboard': Shorten: Opposition leader Bill Shorten says if Labor comes to power, he will review the laws protecting Australian World Heritage-listed sites such as the Opera House, to see if they need strengthening against commercial use.
Legion of lobotomized unices: This was back when the motd was likely to contain a pithy quotation from the fortune file, not just a dry legal notice about the Computer Misuse Act. This was a tiny yet significant reminder that the system was meant to be used by humans, all working together. Now there's no excitement when logging in, because there's nobody else there. It's just solitude, loneliness. None of the shared magic that made computing social in the first place.
Fold N Fly: A database of paper airplanes with easy to follow folding instructions.
Metadata laws under fire as 'authority creep' has more agencies accessing your information - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): To allay privacy concerns, access to the metadata was limited to 22 specific police and intelligence agencies, such as the Australian Federal Police, ASIO and state police forces. ... The Communications Alliance told the parliamentary hearing telcos are getting around 1,000 requests for metadata each day. It is not clear exactly how many agencies are now able to request access to stored metadata. Precisely as every fucking expert in the field predicted.
We won't save the Earth with a better kind of disposable coffee cup | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian: Amid the general incoherence, one contributor stated: “It comes down, I think, to us each taking responsibility for the personal choices in our everyday lives. That's all any of us can be expected to do.” This perfectly represents the mistaken belief that a better form of consumerism will save the planet. The problems we face are structural: a political system captured by commercial interests, and an economic system that seeks endless growth. Related: Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals | Martin Lukacs | Environment | The Guardian: While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71%. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet.
The reality is more nuanced than NRL players being blokey boofheads | Catharine Lumby | Opinion | The Guardian: One of the issues is that when guys who are already perceived as “education proof” do the wrong thing, it is seen as confirmation that they'll never change. That it's futile to try. This wrong-headed belief is, I think, grounded in class prejudice. A guy in a suit at a corporate function once even asked me: “Why do you even try with these animals?”
Peter Dutton Business | ten daily: the minister responsible for the most powerful law enforcement agencies in the Commonwealth, and in whose hands lies the future of the Prime Ministership itself, is under a legal cloud.
The Constitutional question: is he entitled to sit in Parliament at all.
Kuwaiti police has shut down a fish store that was sticking googly eyes on fish to make them appear more fresh than they are. :-) via Al Bayan newspaper, @bayan_kw. pic.twitter.com/CcPa73fDQh
This Is A Sailboat And Those Are Sails: Most sails you've seen rely on the wind directly acting against them to provide propulsion. But these new types of sails, known as “rotor sails” rely on a physics principle called the Magnus Effect.
Great Pacific Garbage Patch Is Bigger and Mostly Made of Fishing Gear: Microplastics make up 94 percent of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the patch. But that only amounts to eight percent of the total tonnage. As it turns out, of the 79,000 metric tons of plastic in the patch, most of it is abandoned fishing gear—not plastic bottles or packaging drawing headlines today.
There is no social license for My Health Record. Australians should reject it | Julia Powles | Opinion | The Guardian: An example of one of the apps already accessing information from My Health Record was revealed by an ABC investigation last month. Health Engine, a booking service part-owned by Telstra Health, has been passing sensitive health information to personal injury lawyers – precisely the kind of opportunistic “entrepreneurship” that would be anathema to patient expectations.
Investing Outside The Bay Area – Haystack.vc: And, so, I began to ask myself, in the face of intense local inflation for rents, for talent, for simply getting around — are the fundamental of the Bay Area's local conditions simply inhospitable to fledgling startups that I am trying to invest in? Will folks be able to buy a house and raise their families here? Will the Bay Area's cost structure compress the precious runway these newco's have? Will the next company to raise $100M in financing just poach from decent seed-stage companies and pay triple the amount to lock up talent?
Ontario Basic Income Pilot Cancelled By Minister Lisa MacLeod: The pilot project, which reached full enrollment in April, was supposed to last three years. ... Asked by reporters how she knows the program isn't working if the data hasn't been studied yet, MacLeod said, "for the amount it was costing the province of Ontario ... it was certainly not going to be sustainable." The project was budgeted to cost $150 million over three years.
Why Daniel Ricciardo Broke Free of Red Bull: While it's probably true he could have asked for almost any amount of fizzy drink cash to stay, this is the first time we have ever seen a Red Bull junior leave the programme of their own accord with no complication. ... this makes Daniel's decision to move to Renault so much less surprising. And much more sensible.
Australia's fair work watchdog takes legal action against Foodora | Business | The Guardian: In what could become a landmark case for the gig economy, the ombudsman is arguing that Foodora workers are entitled to the minimum award wage, and the company should be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for underpayment, sham contracting and breaches of the Fair Work Act.
NSW in constitutional crisis as government MP crosses floor over secret reports | Australia news | The Guardian: The three reports – the Tune report into child protection services in NSW, the business case for the upgrades of Sydney's two major stadiums, and the business case for moving the Powerhouse museum to Parramatta – have already been ordered to be released [...] But the government has ignored the formal calls for papers saying they were cabinet documents.
Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chef and television presenter, dies aged 61 - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) (pardoning them for mentioning Drumpf, it's an otherwise good piece).
Film Crit Hulk: Anthony Bourdain, Suicide, and Grace | Observer - which is a good if difficult read as it talks honestly about living with depression and suicidal thoughts. It also puts this very well: For decades Anthony Bourdain graced our pages and television sets as a “host,”—a perfectly inadequate word to describe what he somehow managed to accomplish with the programs of No Reservations and Parts Unknown. Shows which could naively be reduced to being about food or travel, yet were really just brilliant meditations on culture, boundaries, sociology and the human condition.
OLPC's $100 laptop was going to change the world — then it all went wrong - The Verge: He's a big fan of XO-1 laptops — many of which, despite very real technical problems, are still running after ten years. “It blows my mind that that stuff still works,” he says. “The batteries still work, the Wi-Fi still works, and amazingly, OLPC still cranks out the software images for it.”
How One Joke Explains the “Roseanne” Reboot | The New Yorker: No one on “Roseanne” has used the word “racist,” let alone lobbed a slur; instead, the show relies on code, such as when Roseanne snarks that Jackie might want to “take a knee,” even as her black granddaughter, Mary (Jayden Ray), sits nearby, an irony no one remarks on. The missing jokes are the show's “tell”: when Jackie fights Roseanne, she takes no real shots at Trump, narrowing the debate to jobs and Hillary, as if the two of them were guests on Hannity. The show's repeated theme is always that Roseanne is not that kind of Trump voter: she's sweet to Mary; she defends Mark against homophobic bullies. You might see this as complexity or as spin. If you're in a darker mood, you might call it propaganda. ... [Conveniently ignoring similar shows] is also what enabled ABC to use the slogan “A Family That Looks Like Us” when selling “Roseanne” to advertisers, a dog whistle so strong that it might have brought Lassie back from the dead. Also: 'Roseanne': When a Punch Line Feels Like a Gut Punch - The New York Times
I think what's weird (other than the obvious) is seeing a guitar solo linearised, so to speak - played up and down the keyboard instead across the strings.
NSW Intercity fleet: New trains too wide for tunnels: But Transport for NSW (TfNSW), the Government body that manages the state's rail system, has come up with a cunning plan. It has proposed simply relaxing current safety standards. Muppets. Absolute fucking muppets.
Australian outrage over ball tampering born out of team's moralising hypocrisy | Kate O'Halloran | Sport | The Guardian: Even some of its darkest moments, such as the underarm delivery from Trevor Chappell, may have flown in the face of the spirit, but not the laws, of the game. This incident has changed all that, which explains what outsiders might perceive as hysteria from down under. Ironically, given its moral failings in so many areas of international politics, Australia has always considered itself an upstanding sporting nation. No longer, however, can its citizens stomach the piousness of a group of hypocrites. and Cricket Australia ball tampering: Steve Smith's deficient leadership exposed: Very few of the people who have ripped into Smith these past few days particularly care about the condition of the ball in a cricket match. What they do care about is the character of the Australian team, which has been exposed as deeply rotten.
Ajit Pai faces heat over proposal to take away poor people's broadband plans | Ars Technica: Pai's plan would prevent all resellers from participating in Lifeline, limiting the subsidies to "facilities-based broadband" providers, those that operate their own networks. The proposal has drawn widespread condemnation from both liberals and conservatives ... Pai claimed that kicking resellers out of the program would spur facilities-based carriers to invest in their broadband networks. But his proposal offered no evidence for this claim.
Real Guns, Virtual Guns, And Me: I'm knowledgeable about firearms to a degree that frequently clashes with how I feel about them in the real world. I don't want a gun in my home, but I can differentiate between 5.56mm and .30-06 ammunition on sight. I think America's gun laws are ludicrously lax, and yet I can confidently tell you the difference between an ACOG and a reflex sight. I get nervous when I'm in the airport and see soldiers with assault rifles, but I can probably tell you what kind of rifles they're holding. I know about a lot of gun stuff in part because of the movies and TV shows I watch, but mainly because of the video games I play.