Humodour

But... that's not really true. Certainly for Australia it's pretty much following normal El Nino patterns and strength.

Found water. India's probe was the third space agency to discover water on the moon. It just means it's near irrefutable that the moon contains water and it wasn't a contaminant or measurement error. India's probe used a NASA device to discover the water anyway.

Well, fine, I'm gonna hijack the thread. Let's talk about the world's biggest space telescope and an accompanying exaflops supercomputer that Australia is going to start building (with the help of NASA, ESA, etc) in 2012. That thing will be as amazing as the moon landing or the LHC!

In other news they recently found definitive proof of water on the Moon. It's created by the sun's radiation causing hydrogen and oxygen in moon rocks to bind. So the Moon is constantly covered in a thin film of water. Enough to make rocket fuel out of. Edit: Wait, ****. I should have read the article before posting.

Anyway, I hate this idea because EA has been a fairly decent support of Mag gaming in the past, and has recently been making noise about the growth of Macs and how it plans to expand its Mac market even more. So a Microsoft acquisition would be... less than ideal.

I doubt the bingo would directly prevent the sale, though. Might lead to constraints on it of course (such as compulsory cross-platform deployments).

There's Gimp which is an open source (free) alternative to Photoshop. It's as hard to use as photoshop, and if you know Photoshop there's no guarantee that'll help you know Gimp, but it's very powerful and heavily supported since it's what Hollywood and all *NIX distros use. http://www.gimp.org/

That was my first impression, it probably wouldn't get approved. Yes it would unfortunately; Microsoft doesn't operate in the games software industry (it used to a bit, but it has since largely cut and run - and even then it wasn't a big player). For example: it'd be OK for Google to acquire an online store because that would diminish competition in the online store market, but it would not be OK for Google to acquire another search business (such as AOL) because that would directly lower competition in the search market. Because a Microsoft acquisition of EA wouldn't visibly reduce competition in this manner, I imagine it'd pass smooth sailing. What wouldn't pass is something like Activision-Blizzard buying EA. Edit: Though I can certainly see it being sued for anti-trust issues if it suddenly made all EA games 360 only.

I don't remember him being especially bad. He was pretty ****e, IMHO.

Some are. But they are definitely entertainment, so don't mock him for splurging on them.

This video is from a dust storm in Broken Hills 2 years ago, but it's still fething awesome:

Here's an excellent photo album: http://www.flickr.com/photos/plasticbag/ga...57622310168099/ For example, this is the beach: And here's the view from the laundry:

I dunno about cars, but it's playing havoc with our data centres. The data centre I work at has been running fine, though. The vast majority of damages and outages were caused by the storm that led to the dust storm. Mainly flooded server and switch rooms and stuff. They had to ground flights because the dust ****s with the engines. Not to mention visibility. Edit: But yeah, you could walk around in it easily with only mild discomfort. As long as you weren't asthmatic. Anyway, it's a once in a lifetime phenomenon (we've been getting a lot of those lately) - gotta enjoy it.

Matt isn't too bad at what he does.

Considering Microsoft has been cutting and running with regards to its game companies recently (e.g. Ensemble), I doubt it. It'll be a sad, sad day for the game industry if it does happen.

You sound very Australian for a Qu

The Deus Ex main theme was awesome. All the DX music was awesome. I have them saved to my computer.

No. It stung my eyes and it smelt and tasted horrible. The government had to issue health warnings telling people to stay indoors if they could help it, and simply not to leave the house if they were young, old, or asthmatic. The amount of particulate matter in the air was above minimum safe levels (2000 parts per million IIRC). Prolonged exposure to levels of particulate matter above that level significantly increase risk of cancers and diseases (mainly of the lungs). But a day of it is unlikely to cause that (you've got a problem if you're a labourer in the mineral industry who works in such circumstances every day, though). The amount moved was pretty amazing, though. About 52 million tonnes of dust was dumped over the state of NSW.

el nino "started" several months ago and is now holding steady according to the latest reports coming from JPL. That's not really correct. Basically, at first glance, some indicators of El Nino aren't showing, so some people are predicting a weak or non-existent El Nino. But those predictions arise from not looking at the entire data set.

I don't know why you persist with this delusion.

Now the storm has moved to Queensland, where the winds are fuelling the bushfires while the dust opacity is grounding firefighter helicopters. And yes, the top of Australia is on fire while the bottom experiences earthquakes, flooding, golf-ball hail, and tornadoes. Earlier this year it was the reverse. The cycle looks likely to continue. This was the 2nd warmest winter on record and El Nino is about to start.

Yeah, it hit where I live too. I woke up to go to work and the sky looked a bit odd, being burning orange and all. When I arrived at work, the building had been repainted red. Satellite photo:

Bah. Fine. It better.

I didn't like Psycho. My grandmother showed it to me when I was 8.

I don't find anything particularly disgusting or controversial about this thread, except the actions of the murderers under Lenin and co which LoF describes. The idea is that you come in expecting a partisan, hypocritical rant on communism, but instead are greeted to a neutral, factual, interesting account of Russia during the World War eras. Roll with it.