Tau

Judging from stage one and Sydney's light rail efforts I'm sure we can make 2km of track take at least a few more years, then after that we can spend a few more years thinking about plans for stage 2B instead of doing that while building 2A...

The idea of like having to put on a comedicly overwrought accent to make a machine understand you is 👌

I've tried this to good effect before when I got my current motorbike helmet headset - the voice commands on default settings worked much better when hamming it up with an American accent like one was trying to audition for a part in a Western. Luckily though I ended up finding out that Cardo also trained a British accent option in the settings, and that works a lot better if you want to talk like a normal person.

There are a few actual streets like that in that suburb - I had a look to see if I could find the location of the photo and I think it's Ganges St.

Thanks :)

I've clicked around a bit this morning and so far so good, so all might be well again after your changes.

I looked it up and their normal charge for dogs is $395 while the normal charge for cats is $195 (rabbits normally $80). Pretty steep prices but I guess vaccinations (plus desexing if necessary) and housing/looking after the animals adds up quickly so they need to get enough back to keep operating.

Edit: Also still a lot less than what you see many dog breeders selling dogs for - I've looked occasionally and you see people wanting thousands of dollars for a puppy.

The same argument that won the gay marriage plebiscite - people should be equal under the law and, by extension, our constitution.

Last year, Australia showed how unengaged and racist this country remains by refusing to insert an Indigenous advisory voice

Convenient that the author forgot to mention that the very person they're writing about was a vocal No voter. You can say many things about Lydia Thorpe but politically unengaged is not one of them, and while she might be a little bit racist it's definitely not against Indigenous people.

I'll also note that the Tent Embassy had a giant banner hung up urging people to vote No, guess they're all politically unengaged and racist...

Yes, it makes sense that they'd be the first to lose seats to another non-major candidate. Another possible factor is that the Greens lost protest vote value due to being known as part of the incumbent government - that's going to attract less of the votes from people who want something different (but aren't going to vote for the Libs).

That's pretty much what I was expecting; the Liberals getting enough seats for a majority would have been quite surprising so it was really a matter of how close Lab/Lib would get and who Labor has to negotiate with. I am not surprised that Labour's primary vote is middling considering it's been two decades in power, the fact that they still hold power is a real testament to how badly the Libs are received in this town.

The rise of independents is interesting, and I can't say I dislike a shift away from party based politics. How it turns out is obviously going to be more variable though - I will be curious to see if they retain their seats after a term.

The smartest thing in any of my vehicles is an aftermarket Android Auto unit so I can't speak from personal experience, but there are various things such cars can do where the connectivity could be useful. Three I can think of are notifications/video of things happening around the vehicle at the time of occurrence (a la Tesla Sentry mode), being able to remotely start the vehicle to give the air con a head start on a hot day, and over the air updates for bug fixes or possible new software features without having to go near a mechanic.

Part of the problem here is that the things that can invade privacy do have genuine use cases, it's just that you can coopt them to also gain information. For example even the seemingly hard to justify internal cameras could have a genuine safety use by watching the driver for fatigue symptoms. If effective this would save lives over a car model lifespan, so you're balancing obvious privacy issues against the idea that such inconvenience is worthwhile if it saves a life (a sentiment more typically seen in speed limit debates, but applicable here too).

They tried other designs first but it was found you can't roller skate in a buffalo herd...

I do think there is something to be said about being wary of modern cars in regards to security. I wouldn't trust manufacturers as far as I could throw them when it comes to actually making secure systems - particularly when you're dealing with remote connection capabilities. The focus on China is convenient for the US but I wouldn't trust their systems either. Ford in particular has been concerning recently by patenting a way of ad serving based on user data a normal person would consider private (such as conversations within their cars). It doesn't even take the OEM being malicious to be a problem, they only need to miss a security hole...