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In a statement last week, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said Abbott’s claim that consumers would pay three times more for broadband under the NBN was “just wrong”. “Prices for NBN plans released to date are cheaper than, or equivalent to, existing ADSL plans, but with much improved quality of service,” Conroy added. “For example, Skymesh is offering NBN services from $29.95 per month. Exetel’s entry-level plan costs $35.00 per month. A number of other retail providers, including Optus, offer NBN services starting from $39.95 and $49.95 per month. Thanks to the NBN, competition between retail providers is increasing.”
“Tony Abbott should check his facts before delivering a national address in the Australian Parliament.”
Another aspect of Abbott’s speech may also be incorrect; his statement that the funds being ploughed into rolling out the NBN could be invested instead in building transport infrastructure such as roads, whilst still leaving “$10 billion” to invest in broadband as well.
Abbott made this same claim in February. However, at the time, analysis showed that the NBN is not an expense in terms of the Federal Government’s annual budget, and cutting the project would not free up money to be spent in other areas. This is because the project is an investment expected to make a return for the government — a long-term profit. That return is currently projected to be between $1.93 billion to $3.92 billion.
Diablo 3 comes out in a couple weeks. I'm giving it the coveted award for "Biggest Comeback In System Design." Diablo 2's ability system was so bad that it's almost unbelievable, while the way Diablo 3 handles ability customization is one of the very best systems I've seen.
The European Space Agency is preparing a mission to explore Jupiter and its moons. JUICE will launch in 2022 in search of liquid water that could contain life.
Europe is to mount a 1 billion-euro mission to Jupiter and its icy moons, moving ahead with an ambitious plan deemed too expensive by the United States.
After more than eight years of review, the European Space Agency (ESA) has given the green light to a space program to explore the giant gas plant and several of its moons - in search of liquid oceans that may harbor life.
This is as much about a human future in space as it is about scraping some gold out of an asteroid. The fuel and resource depots developed for the mining project could serve as a jumping-off point for both robotic and manned missions to the outer Solar System. Planetary Resources is run by people that love science and technology, and want to see humans continue advancing.
Planetary Resources Chief Engineer Chris Lewicki has been making the rounds online talking about the technical side of the initiative, and he indicates that there is still another advantage to the mining project. When we’re not scooping out their insides, asteroids sometimes make suicide runs at Earth. Numerous mass extinctions have been caused by large impact events.
Given the vast number of planets in the universe, many much older than Earth, why haven't we yet seen obvious signs of alien life, or singularity fields? The potential answers to this question are numerous and intriguing, alarming and hopeful.
This brilliant TEDEducation animated exploration of the famous Fermi Paradox is narrated by Chris Anderson. This animation is part of TED's new series, "Questions no one knows the answer to".
I’m a former high frequency trader. And following the tradition of G.H. Hardy, I feel the need to make an apology for my former profession. Not an apology in the sense of a request for forgiveness of wrongs performed, but merely an intellectual justification of a field which is often misunderstood.
In this blog post, I’ll attempt to explain the basics of how high frequency trading works and why traders attempt to improve their latency. In future blog posts, I’ll attempt to justify the social value of HFT (under some circumstances), and describe other circumstances under which it is not very useful. Eventually I’ll even put forward a policy prescription which I believe could cause HFT to focus primarily on socially valuable activities.
These drawings date from 1982 (thirty years ago). Alan Kay had just become the Chief Scientist at Atari and he asked me to work with him to continue the work I started at Encyclopedia Britannica on the idea of an Intelligent Encyclopedia. We came up with these scenarios of how the (future) encyclopedia might be used and commissioned Glenn Keane, a well-known Disney animator to render them. The captions also date from 1982.
The closest anyone came to giving me direction was when most of the Source engine team was working on Portal 2 optimization; I’ve done a lot of optimization, so I suggested to Jay Stelly that maybe I should work on Portal 2 as well. Jay said, “Yeah, you could do that, but we’ll get it shipped anyway.” After a couple of discussions like that, I realized that he was saying was that I should think about whether that was really the most valuable thing I could be doing – there were plenty of people who were skilled at optimizing the Source engine already working on Portal 2, so it would be more useful to think about what high-impact things I could do that no one else was doing. That, and conversations with various people around the company, kicked me into a different mode of thought, which eventually led me to a surprising place: wearable computing.
A full replay of the spellbinding tour of the cosmos by the 2011 Nobel Physics Laureate Professor Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University.
Surely some people-like animals have evolved elsewhere. Surely we are not, in this crowded reality of countless other similar planets, the only thinking beings to have turned up. Most unlikely! So why isn't life out there contacting us? Why aren't the intergalactic phones ringing?
Here is one sobering possibility for our isolation: maybe life has often evolved to intelligence on other planets with biospheres and every time that intelligence, when it became able to alter its environment, did so with catastrophic consequences. Maybe we have had many predecessors in the Cosmos but all have brought about their own downfall.
That's why they are not communicating with Earth. They have extincted themselves. They have come and gone. And now it's our turn.
A new report published by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development paints a grim picture of the world in 2050 based on current global trends. It predicts a world population of 9.2 billion people, generating a global GDP four times the size of today's, requiring 80 percent more energy. And with a worldwide energy mix still 85 percent reliant on fossil fuels by that time, it will be coal, oil, and gas that make up most of the difference, the OECD predicts.
More than one billion stars in the Milky Way can be seen together in detail for the first time in an image captured by an international team of astronomers. Scientists created the colour picture by combining infra-red light images from telescopes in the northern and southern hemispheres. Large structures of the Milky Way galaxy, such as gas and dust clouds where stars have formed and died, can be seen in the image.
The highly detailed, colorful map reveals a number of volcanic features, including: paterae (caldera-like depressions), lava flow fields, tholi (volcanic domes), and plume deposits, in various shapes, sizes and colors, as well as high mountains and large expanses of sulfur- and sulfur dioxide-rich plains. The mapping identified 425 paterae, or individual volcanic centers. One feature you will not see on the geologic map is impact craters.
“Io has no impact craters; it is the only object in the Solar System where we have not seen any impact craters, testifying to Io’s very active volcanic resurfacing,” says Williams.
NASA has released a new atlas of more than 560 million stars, galaxies and asteroids, many never seen before.
The more than 18,000 images were taken by the Wide-field Survey Explorer (WISE), NASA’s infrared space telescope.
With WISE, scientists discovered Y Dwarf stars, the dimmest stars of the brown dwarf family. By solar standards, they’re exceptionally cold: One discovered in 2011 had a temperature of only 80 degrees Fahrenheit. By comparison, our sun has a scalding surface temperature of about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
The story of every company begins with a clever hack. Pick any company, read its history, and I’m pretty sure there will be a well-documented origin story that will define its beginning and involves someone building something new and possibly of unexpected value. What isn’t documented is the story of every moment before where everyone surrounding the hacker asked, “Why the hell are doing you that?”, “Why would you take the risk with so little reward?”, or “Why are you wasting your time?” What’s not documented are the nine spectacular failures the hacker survived before they built one success.
Nasa has announced that 1,091 new transiting extrasolar planet candidates have emerged in data received from planet-hunting space telescope, Kepler. It brings the total count up to 2,321 exoplanet candidates.
That number comes from data spanning May 2009 to September 2010, where nearly 5,000 periodic planetary transit-like signals (where a planet passes in front of a star, revealing its presence) were received, and subsequently vetted against known phenomena that could be masquerade as a transit.
An example: eclipsing binary stars. When two stars orbit each other and block each others' light, it can look like a planetary transition.
The data shows a clear trend towards finding smaller planets at longer orbital periods -- meaning planets more like Earth than like Jupiter. This latest data dump contains over 200 Earth-size candidates and more than 900 that are smaller than super-Earths (double our planet's 12,756km diameter).
Ferrari says the new F12 Berlinetta has a lower and more rearward center of gravity thanks to a redesigned suspension and gearbox, with 54 percent of the weight resting over the rear tires. A 0.299 Cd and 76 percent more downforce allows a top speed of over 211 mph.
The F12 Berlinetta will be shown for the first time at the upcoming Geneva Motor Show, and we'll be on hand to chronicle the festivities for your viewing enjoyment.
Brian Greene told the audience at TED that the wonder we see is not only mysterious, but a limited-run engagement. Greene is a theoretical physicist who has been engaging the public through books, PBS specials, and by organizing the World Science Festival. Here, Greene was in cosmologist mode, talking about how the Universe is going to change in ways that will fundamentally alter how it can be observed.
Astronomers in the far future will not have the beautiful night sky we have. In fact, unless they have our knowledge and scientific records, they will think that the Universe is a dark, static and unchanging place. Why will our night sky go black? The expansion of our Universe will eventually push other galaxies so far from us that we will no longer see them, even with advanced equipment. Light cannot overcome all distances, Greene said, describing a future where all we can see are the galaxies in our immediate neighborhood.
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