Now the environmentally conscious can continue their quest to clean up this dump we call Earth by requesting to be buried near Lismore Memorial Park Cemetery in the Northern Rivers region of Australia.
“The deceased will be buried in biodegradable coffins between gum trees in a protected koala sanctuary,” according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Headstones must be made from natural rock and the Lismore Council of cemeteries prefer that coffins be made from “woven wicker, plantation pine, or recycled cardboard.”
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The Australian government has proposed legislation that would allow employers to spy on their employees’ e-mail and IM conversations in order to prevent terrorism. The legislation was spurred by Estonian cyber-attacks, which was actually the work of a single 20-year-old student, and not a terrorist organization.
Currently, the Telecommunications (Interceptions) Act allows security agencies to monitor their employees’ communications without consent, a power that will end in June 2009 if no legislation is passed. This legislation aims to extend this power and open it up to the employers as well as the security agencies.
In a smashing blow against my neighbor Carmine, Australia has outlawed high power laser pointers. Like Carmine, Australians cannot be trusted with high powered lasers and, like Carmine one night last summer, they’ve been shooting them at airplanes.
WA Police have reported people pointing lasers at a Royal Flying Doctor plane, a police helicopter, a rescue helicopter, and several commercial and private airplanes.
That’s right: About five aircraft have been hit so far. That’s considerably fewer people in danger than those who eat the Bloomin’ Onion each year, but no one’s outlawed that yet. Where is the fairness?
If you’re a surfer in, say, Australia, you may have considered investing in such sharky countermeasures as a Shark Shield or chain mail. Neither is perfect as the latter tends to make you sink, and the former apparently causes the occasional shark to eat it, as evidenced by a recent test in which a 10-foot great white took a bite out of a unit being tested.
The maker of the device promises that it does not, at least, attract sharks, but critics have suggested that the Shark Shield does no good and may in fact pose additional health risks due to its emissions. Maybe I’ll just stay on the beach.
Great white ‘ate anti-shark device’ [The Australian]
Despite the fact that previously attempted ISP-level filtering technology failed, the Australian government will go ahead with a plan to implement such filtering, starting with a trial in Tasmania. The Government will spend $89 million to deploy the filtering system in hopes of protecting youngsters from accessing X-rated material. (For illustrative purposes only: the initiative was announced at an event held by the Australian Christian Lobby.) So, the Government will spend lots of money on a program that doesn’t work. I know the water drains “backwards” down there, but is logic also reversed in Australia?
ISPs will have a blacklist. Try to access a site on the blacklist and you’ll be denied a connection. Even more annoying, the filter will be on by default, meaning if you want to see what you want to see you’ll have to call your ISP to get an unfiltered connection.
I don’t know, it seems that teaching your kids from an early age what’s acceptable in your house would be a lot cheaper and more effective long-term than such filtering technique, but I’m not a politician who has interests to please.
Australia moving ahead with plans to erect ISP porn filters [Ars Technica]
Sweet. I like that some of the alternative-energy cars coming out have three wheels. This commuter car is called the Trev, for two-seater renewable energy vehicle. It’s designed by people at the University of South Australia and runs for almost 100 miles per lithium ion polymer battery charge. It can go from 0 to 60 in around ten seconds.
It uses about 1/5th of the energy that a normal car uses, costing about one Australian dollar per charge and there’s room inside for two people and two small bags. It’s currently in the process of being approved for street-worthiness and may be on the road soon (although the source website says that they’re looking to get the car on the road in 2006, so things might be a wee bit delayed). Still, looks pretty cool.
Trev (two-seater renewable energy vehicle) [UniSA.edu] via TreeHugger
In Australia, the land down under where everything is somehow deadly, the latest casualty just might be plasma TVs. As TVs get bigger and brighter, they naturally use more energy. Australia is on the cusp of adopting a new energy-rating system for electronics in a six-star system. Plasma TVs, however, wouldn’t make the cut.
So the Australian Broadcasting Company is trying to either work them into the law regardless, or, more likely, get suppliers to tweak Australian-bound HDTVs to fall within regulations. Since the system won’t be in place until 2011, there should be plenty of time for the industry to adjust to where they’ll need to be. Uh, mate.
Proposed Australian Regulations Could Oust Plasma TVs [Daily Tech]
What’s wrong with people these days and getting arrested for pirating movies? It’s not that hard. Anyways, a 21-year-old male was arrested in Australia under suspicion that he recorded the movie on his mobile phone, which was uploaded to the Net and downloaded more than 3,000 times. This was the first copy to hit the Web and was traced to a home in Sydney. Sucks to be that guy.
Pirated Simpsons movie traced to phone [The Register]
Research firm Gartner is predicting that SMS will become obsolete or at the very least become insignificant by 2010. Duh. The report may only apply in Australia, but it isn’t very hard to see the correlation here in the U.S.
Mobile e-mail is becoming more prevalent every day with Joe Shmoe picking up a BlackBerry or some other smartphone with e-mail capabilities. You may be led to believe differently with Verizon reporting 10 billion text messages sent/received in June, but that’s only because they charge you up the ying-yang for e-mail usage.
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Traveling in a fried-out combie
On a hippie trail, head full of zombie
I met a strange lady, she made me nervous
She took me in and gave me a 3.6Mbps mobile e-mail device running on Australia’s Telstra network.
That’s what’s coming to the Land Down Under, according to ZDNet Australia. Not a whole lot of other details except that it might have built-in GPS and Wi-Fi and should be available early next year.
The Telstra network offers what it calls “Next G” — basically a 3G network capable of 14.4Mbps download speeds. The Telstra BlackBerry will cap out at 3.6Mbps, though. Still should be plenty speedy.
RIM working on Next G BlackBerry [ZDNet Australia]
Spotted on Perez earlier today, Nicole Kidman is indeed doing a Nintendo DS commercial. Not only is she a terrible actress in this commercial, but the whole thing doesn’t even have an ounce of humor in it. It’s very plain. Shame she went from being such a great actress to this.
Acts of De$paration [Perez Hilton]
Quite the rumor to wakeup to, I’m not sure if I believe this or not. Microsoft Australia of all companies has tipped off a retailer (Myer) that a new version of the Xbox 360 will soon be coming to stores and to prepare for it.
The new 360 will feature HDMI out and an included 120GB hard drive, as well as a dark black paint job—Xbox 360 2.0 if you will. This rumor even comes with a price and release date: Supposedly $749 AU ($580 USD) in early April.
We’ll continue to monitor this one and see if any more details surface.
Rumor: “Official” word on 120GB+HDMI 360? [Xbox 360 Fanboy]
Trashers: you now have something better than Guitar Hero to satisfy you: The Air Guitar T-shirt. Seems those Aussies down under have come up with a shirt bound with sensors on your elbows and sleeves to measure arm and body movements. You can create chords, rub out power ballads, and mimic your favorite Maiden riffs all by moving your arms as if an actual guitar were beneath you. The device looks like a normal shirt and could open up millions of possibilities for performance art. Check out the video that shows one of the creators rocking out.
Air guitar T-shirt: cotton-picking? [Yahoo! News]
Video: http://www.csiro.au/csiro/content/file/pfn4,,.html
The Korea Times is reporting that following a similar move by the Aussies at Qantas, Korean Air has banned Dell laptops and Apple Powerbooks and iBooks from its flights. The decision comes at the heels of recent widespread issues with exploding laptop batteries. Laptops from Sony, the makers of the questionable battery, remain unaffected because they were apparently using better, non-exploding batteries in their laptops.
Fortunately at least, Dell and Apple users can avoiding checking their laptop by simply removing the batteries. This is certainly a more agreeable option, because checking your electronics as baggage seldom ends up favorably. Also, it’s unclear why this affects only Powerbooks and iBooks, because MacBooks have been exploding just as efficiently as the other two. Anyone have a theory about this oversight?
Edit: Upon further reading, it seems seems that the oversight was mine. MacBook batteries were apparently recalled for reasons other than explosions. Sorry for the confusion.
Korean Air bans Apple, Dell notebooks on board [Think Secret via Engadget]
