tau @ Tau @aussie.zone

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They're most of the way there but fall a bit short of a real Tim Tam. I find the chocolate has a slight sourness to it compared to the original (as if they let an American pick the recipe) - not enough to stop me eating them but enough to reduce the normal Tim Tam desire to rip through a whole packet.

The Choceur chocolate blocks however tend to be a quite acceptable replacement for Cadbury and even Whittaker so not all hope is lost for more affordable chocolates.

I've somehow managed to never read or watch any of the versions of that, I know the general gist of the story due to cultural osmosis but not the details. Might have to get around to reading the book at least.

Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and The Mysterious Island (this one is barely sci fi) both include messages in bottles but not at both start and end of the story, so at this point I think I'm out of ideas.

That just makes me think of the Count of Monte Cristo, and while that plot kicks off everything with a nautical message it wasn't in a bottle.

Nothing comes to mind that matches that unfortunately.

I did initially think of Treasure Island for some reason and that definitely matches the latter criteria but I don't recall any messages in a bottle actually appearing in the book.

Even with a theoretically ideal seal holding suitable humidity it depends a lot on what paper and where the bottle spent its time. I would expect a massively broad range of times - between a few years and thousands of years.

Paper with any significant acid content will last significantly less time than acid free paper, and paper made of cotton is likely to last noticeably better than paper made from wood. You also want the paper to be kept away from light and high temperatures as these will really cut into potential lifespan. If this bottle spent most of its time buried in a beach that would have at least kept it dark and relatively cool, probably why it lasted so well even with an imperfect seal.

Over the last few years I think all our states have now banned phones from being visible in school, so there's efforts towards reducing usage at least within school. That's a relatively recent move though and does only cut down on usage during part of the day so I don't know if there's been a noticeable effect on the kids.

Doesn’t that sound exactly like the “can somebody please think about the children” argument?

It is that, but the ban in question is being justified by that same poor argument so it might as well be fired right back again.

The idea of a bus conversion is appealing, I have tossed the idea around before but I'd have to find somewhere to put the thing while I'm not out and about in it (which realistically would be most of the time - one has to work to pay for the trips). A bus would give enough space to be comfortable in on wet days and I've seen some conversions with the good idea of a garage section at the rear to put a motorbike in to explore where you can't or don't want to drive the bus to.

Pretty sure motorhomes are exempt from having to fill in the logbook too which is handy as that would get annoying for personal use, just have to remember to pull into the inspection stations (there's a nasty fine for missing those).

Here I was thinking having to run things through turnitin was bad enough a decade ago before LLMs entered the scene. At least then though there did seem to be an understanding that it was always going to claim some degree of similarity given how many other uni students were going to be writing on the same topics every year.

Detecting LLM output seems an almost impossible thing to do reliably (i.e. both high sensitivity and high specificity), the whole idea after all is that they output what is commonly written by humans in the training datasets. I can see unis having to return to having basically every assessment done in person as even with the privacy nightmare of monitoring software you can't really be sure non-supervised input actually was written by the student.

Pity they swapped out one of the Canberra pictures since I read the article earlier, I found it amusing how well the roadworks sign works with a protest crowd:

What other kinds are there? Are there shared e-scooters?

Yep, escooters for hire are also a thing - just not much in NSW. There have been (and still are) various trials run in NSW by escooter operators but no permanent areas that I know of. They are more popular than hire bikes in some other places though, for example Canberra has a lot of shared escooters.

Yes, it's a fair enough point to not want a Chinese car due to data security and potential for malicious software but the same applies to basically any modern vehicle. I'd still trust the Europeans and the US more than China at this point but with the demand for (and legal requirements for) in car tech and sensors nobody is building cars without potential vulnerabilities these days.

Anyways, are EMPs real? If so, it doesn’t matter lol

They are but the chances of a normal car being the main problem in such a case are pretty low (you'll probably either be dealing with blast damage/radiation from the nuke that caused it or the power/comms infrastructure going down and taking the trappings of modern society with it). It is an edge case you'd want to consider for the ADF's combat vehicles but I can't see it being applicable to their regular car fleet.

It does seem to me like having a young kid just means you should have thought even more about whether the dodgy stuff was worth it before you did it. I'll be charitable and go with maybe the judge was thinking that it might not have sunk in yet after only two weeks.

Doing it where people can see you rather than far away like you can get with these drones seems a pretty silly idea, but I guess you can't expect too much from those who are prepared to try this.

Choosing a DJI drone for clandestine stuff is also one of the worse choices if anyone has drone tracking technology over there...

I would expect it's a similar situation to a lot of the near misses they have shown with people either not looking before crossing or running last minute and mistiming it. Someone was going to get horribly unlucky sooner or later and that's probably what's happened here.

The police and government will know the exact circumstances as the light rail runs cameras and will have footage of the accident. Unlike the near miss videos though I would not expect to see this video - it would be rather poor form for them to release it.

It does get pretty busy, particularly during peak times. It's the primary north-south route across the lake for the inner north and inner south suburbs and you've got a lot of workplaces at either end (both Civic to the north and the parliamentary triangle to the south) so it can attract a fair amount of traffic.

There are obviously other routes to take but closing half this bridge will cause a bit of traffic chaos both from people still trying to go this way and jamming it up and from people taking the alternate routes and jamming them up. The eastbound Parkes Way route to Civic for example is already crawling in the mornings and will receive a good amount of the flow on traffic from this so will probably be a logjam.

I'm surprised she didn't jump earlier - once their issues were in the news (and with political pressure from Pocock etc) leaving that position was likely going to come sooner or later whether it was her stepping down or being kicked out.

Anyone who wants to give this band a try is in for a real treat!

Agreed, but I'll just note that those giving this band a try should try songs from across a wide variety of their albums. These guys have made music ranging across a bunch of genres and you'll probably end up with some albums you like and some you're less keen on.

Why would you expect Aboriginal people to all vote as a bloc? Nobody does that, regardless of heritage. Expecting them all to vote left wing because you think it would progress their interests is in the same line as someone from the right expecting all white people to vote for them to preserve perceived privileges.

We don't even have have such a clear political split in groups which would gain direct benefit from progressive parties such as welfare recipients. You'd think that would make for a clear choice between the party that wants to either keep or increase your source of money and the party that wants to cut it, but there's a lot who still vote conservative either because they believe something else in that side of politics is more important or they simply don't care enough to think through the ramifications.