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Multiple hundreds of artesian bores are still uncapped. But the Qld Govt has introduced the Great Artesian Basin and Other Regional Aquifers (GABORA) Water Plan 2017, which requires all artesian stock and domestic bores to have watertight delivery systems by 2032. I cannot believe the mindlessness of so many, so-called intelligent rural people, in leaving thousands of artesian bores uncapped, and wasting billions of litres of precious water, annually. Even more so, I cannot believe that someone hasn't harnessed the massive available heat from the artesian bore water, to produce energy.

Every crow I see is checking out the rubbish! - especially the wrappers around humans food! 😄 But I've yet to see one drop stuff in a bin - the converse is the case, they'll empty bins every chance they get!

I had to laugh in the Costco service station a few weeks back. Costco have signs saying something along the lines of, "pull in anywhere, the hoses will reach across your vehicle". I do this regularly. However, you do have to apply a bit of effort to pull the hose right out, to get it across your vehicle. There was a lady behind me who had parked with her filler on the far side from the bowser - and she'd called the attendant in a fit of annoyance, claiming "the hose won't reach, it's not long enough!" Naturally, she hadn't pulled the hose right out, only relying on the loose hose length available. The attendant pulled on the hose to extend it to her filler, and she was greatly embarrassed.

I've never seen an arrow pointing out which side the filler cap is on.

Which side of the pump do you poll up to. Nothing worse than trying to stretch the hose across the car and still get the nozzle in the tank.

I think the message is that the USofA cannot be trusted, no matter who has the *residency. Or which political mafia (party) is in charge. At present, DjT can wear the blame.

My Dad told me of a notice that used to be displayed at unrinals in public toilets. Please do not throw cigarettes butts into the urinal. It didn't take long before there was a scrawled addendum to the notice, It makes them soggy and hard to light.

What was wrong with knowing where the filler cap was located before getting in the car. I had no idea about the arrow/bowser indicating where it was. Never had a problem locating the filler cap yet.

Variation on a theme.

I don't know about the original arrow, but I was lead to believe that nowadays the location of the image of a fuel bowser on the instrument panel performs the same function.

I take your point on the off road learning.. and I also think, for example, spins and probably basic aeros or at least upset prevention and recovery training should be taught as part of the PPL syllabus. But syllabus content is not the question. I was using scooter as an example of a bike a 16 tear old can ride. A 16 year old with a CBT (learners permit) can also ride a 125CC bike, of which wheel size (except for width of cheaper ones) is comparable with bigger bikes. Mind you, it is more the behaviour of the riders than the size of the wheels they are on that is the issue. My stepfather happily rode a C90 to and from work in Melbourne and the only times there were problems were other drivers or himself.. and those darned tram tracks. I happily rode my 11bhp CG125 around London and even on the motorways - although it was embarressing being overtaken by laden tippers on uphil sections... Although I can see there could be situations where not having enough power coiuld be dangerous, in the c. 6 months daily riding in all conditions before going onto the unrestrcited licence training and taking the test on a Kawasaki ER5 and moving straight to the VFR750, I never encountered any such situation.

Small wheeled bikes and Scooters are NOT safe. Ride them (If you must) and find out for yourselves. NOT ONE response to my OFF road suggestion. You should know how to DROP a bike and manage slippery surfaces. Nev

Probably should start another thred... I don't intirinsically disagree as things are rarely black and white and we should try and cater for individuals where possible. And I agree that a blanket CC limit is futile - the pre-2011 unrestricted Aprilia RS125 could easily hit 170kph... But so can many of the approved Vicroads LAMS models. The BMW G650GS is onme approved bike... According to Google it also has a top speed of 170mph. The difference is that in a larger bike, the torque usually provides much better acceleration and smoolther ride, masking the feel of speed to inexperienced riders. Also, in the UK, it is nto a blanket 125cc limit. The bike cannot exceed 14.6bhp.. period. The other thing to bring into the equation is that the risk of an inexperienced rider having a crash, if insurance data is at all reliable is a lot higher than that of experienced riders. Even if the power/weight ratio is the same, the consequences on a heavier bike have the potential to be much higher than a lighter bike thanks to Newton's second (force = mass x acceleration) and 3rd law (every action has an equal and opposite reaction). Collisions will by definition be subject to greater force if the mass is greater. I would be surprised if too many learners would think bigger bike such as a G650GS, let alone a Pan European or Triumph Trophy is going to be light or zippy as a scooter. In the UK, you have to take the test on the class of bike your licence level permits you to ride. Before you are permitted to ride a class of bike on the road, you have to have experience and proved you can safely handle it. Admittedly, the classes are probably too narrow.. For the driving environment in the UK, which is very different to Australia, except probably for some inner city suburbs such as Port Melbourne or Brunswick, I think a 125CC/14.6bhp bike is generally too small even for a 16 year old (let alone the 18 year old minimum in Vic - at least it was 17 years and 9 months when I did it). I think, for the UK, a 250cc of the ilk of a Honda CB250 would be adequate. In Australia, where the closed ion congested environment is by far the minority of the driving environment, LAMS seems more appropriate. I liken it to flying. Very few start ab initio training in a complex fast single (I understand Cirrus has a program). Most start in a light and simple beast, albeit rarely nippy; get familiar with the basics and progress.

Bit hard on the crows. Nev

A short 15 minute documentary on the history of Chamberlain tractors.

In 1971, a man sent himself a message nobody remembers—and accidentally invented the way 5 billion people would communicate for the next fifty years. Cambridge, Massachusetts. BBN Technologies. A basement lab filled with machines the size of refrigerators, humming and clicking, connected by wires to a strange new network called ARPANET. Ray Tomlinson sat alone. He was a 29-year-old computer engineer working on a problem nobody had asked him to solve. ARPANET already allowed people to leave messages on shared computers—but only if you shared the same machine. If you wanted to send a note to someone using a different computer, you were out of luck. Ray thought that was silly. So he started tinkering. Not because his boss told him to. Not because there was funding or a deadline. Just because it seemed like something the network should be able to do. He wrote a program called SNDMSG—"send message"—that could transfer a text file from one computer to another across the network. It worked. But there was a problem. How do you tell the computer where to send the message? You needed a way to separate the person's name from the machine's name. Something clear. Something simple. Something that wouldn't confuse the computer. Ray looked at his Model 33 Teletype keyboard. Most keys were letters or numbers. Punctuation was sparse. But there, on the upper row, sat a symbol almost nobody used. @ It was an accounting symbol—shorthand for "at the rate of" when calculating prices. It had survived on keyboards mostly out of habit. Ray figured nobody would miss it. He made a decision in seconds that would shape the next half-century of human communication. Username @ Computer Name. Simple. Elegant. Permanent. He typed a test message. Something forgettable—probably "QWERTYUIOP" or another string of random characters. He sent it from one machine to another, both sitting in the same room, connected through ARPANET's sprawling network. It worked. Ray sent the first networked email. To himself. In an empty lab. With no witnesses. He later couldn't even remember what the message said. "Entirely forgettable," he called it. But what happened next wasn't forgettable at all. Within weeks, ARPANET engineers started using Ray's system. Within months, email accounted for 75% of all traffic on the network. People who'd been sending memos and making phone calls suddenly had a faster, quieter, more efficient way to communicate. They loved it. By the 1980s, email spread beyond research labs into universities, corporations, and eventually homes. By the 1990s, it was everywhere. The @ symbol—Ray's casual choice from a forgotten accounting character—became one of the most recognized symbols on Earth. Today, over 330 billion emails are sent every day. That's 3.8 million per second. Email created entire industries: marketing automation, cybersecurity, productivity software, spam filters, customer service platforms. Careers were built on it. Relationships formed through it. Revolutions organized with it. And Ray Tomlinson never tried to own it. He didn't patent email. Didn't trademark the @ symbol. Didn't start a company or demand royalties. He was an engineer, not an entrepreneur. He built it because the problem was there, and solving problems was what he did. In 2012, Google invited Ray to their headquarters to celebrate the 40th anniversary of email. They gave him a cake shaped like an @ symbol. He seemed slightly embarrassed by the attention. When reporters asked him about inventing email, he downplayed it. "I just happened to be in the right place at the right time," he said. "It was a fairly obvious thing to do." To Ray, it wasn't a revolution. It was just good engineering. In 2016, Ray Tomlinson died of a heart attack at seventy-four. Gmail's official Twitter account posted a tribute: "Thank you, Ray Tomlinson, for inventing email and putting the @ sign on the map." Millions of people saw it. Most had no idea who he was. Because Ray never became famous. He never gave a TED talk or wrote a bestselling memoir. He never became a billionaire or household name. He lived quietly, worked on projects that interested him, and died having changed the world in ways most people never realized. Think about that. Every email you've ever sent—job applications, love letters, meeting invites, password resets, breakup messages, acceptance letters, apologies, thank-yous, spam about discounted furniture—all of them carry the ghost of Ray's decision in 1971. That @ symbol you type without thinking? Ray chose it in seconds, alone in a lab, solving a problem nobody had asked him to solve. No venture capital. No product launch. No press release. Just an engineer noticing something missing and quietly building it into existence. The world celebrates founders who raise millions and disrupt industries. We make documentaries about visionaries who change everything with bold speeches and flashy keynotes. But some of the most important revolutions happen in silence. One man. One keyboard. One overlooked symbol. One message sent to himself that nobody remembers. And suddenly, billions of people had a way to say: I'm here. Are you there? Ray Tomlinson didn't change the world by shouting. He changed it by typing. And fifty years later, we're still using the language he invented—one @ at a time.

The inventor of the arrow on a car's dashboard which indicates which side of the vehicle the fuel filler is located on has died at the age of 80. James Moylan came up with the inventive solution in the late 1980s and has made life easier for millions of drivers ever since.

I think they are going back to before that. . Putin's promises aren't worth Much. They point blank Lied to the UN. Nev

That’s obvious dramatic nonsense. I’d be the last person to defend MAGA or Rubio but Crimea was invaded when the Democrats were in power and the US did practically nothing. Trump has made things a lot worse for Ukraine than they probably would have been under Kamala Harris but the problems pre-date both Rubio and MAGA.

On Facebook today. CALL TO ACTIVISM ·· 🚨READ THIS BEFORE IT DISAPPEARS. RUBIO’S CAREER AT RISK AS TRUMP UNDERMINED GLOBALLY Marco Rubio knew exactly what the United States promised Ukraine. That’s why he hoped this clip would stay buried. As Volodymyr Zelenskyy visits Washington and is met with hostility instead of solidarity, and forced peace terms that could have been written by the Kremlin itself - one truth keeps resurfacing: the United States made Ukraine a promise - and Donald Trump is now undermining it on the world stage. At the time, Marco Rubio was a sitting U.S. senator, speaking on the record - not speculating, not guessing. His fiery speech about why America must defend Ukraine was powerful: After the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine was left with the third-largest nuclear arsenal on Earth - tactical and strategic weapons capable of reshaping global power. Instead of keeping them, Ukraine signed a 1994 agreement with the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia. The deal was clear: Ukraine gives up its nuclear weapons. In return, United States and the UK would assure its defense. Ukraine kept its word. They dismantled the arsenal. Twenty years later, one of the countries that signed that agreement didn’t just walk away. It invaded Ukraine. Rubio warned this betrayal would echo far beyond Europe. He explained that countries like South Korea, Japan, and Saudi Arabia were watching - being told the same thing Ukraine was told: don’t pursue nuclear weapons. Trust us. We’ll protect you. And then he asked the question that now hangs over American credibility: If Ukraine gave up its nukes and still got invaded, why would any country ever trust U.S. security guarantees again? Here’s the part Rubio can’t escape. He understood the consequences. He articulated them clearly. He warned the world. Now Trump undercuts allies, weakens NATO, and treats Ukraine like an inconvenience instead of a frontline partner - undermining America’s credibility in real time. That’s why Rubio’s past isn’t just awkward. It’s consequential - and his past words on Ukraine are now a liability in a party run on Trump’s loyalty tests. Because he knows the promise was real. And he knows Trump is breaking it. And here’s the question MAGA never answers - because they can’t: If America’s word meant nothing to Ukraine, why should any ally ever trust the United States ever again? That’s the damage MAGA owns. And that’s the truth they’re desperate to bury.

No Point having shallow water in a desert. The Lake at Mt ISA is 11 metres deep and still evaporates too much to be an effective storage. Nev

Learn serious off road, or you never really learn at ALL.. Nev

I kind of agree with the Australian laws. We used to be limited to 250cc here, but then people would buy 250's that were quite capable of doing 200kph and getting there quickly. Power to weight ratio is smarter. As to the heavier bike thing, I think it makes sense for a learner to start being able to control a heavy bike at low speed, rather than learning on something light and zippy and assuming all bikes feel like that. I was riding yesterday and felt the tarmac scraping the heel of my left boot in a corner. It was on the peg!

I have to admit.. sometimes aftert the long rides I do, to stretch the legs a bit, I let them dangle as I come to a stop. As I am of shorter stature, there is little risk of them inadvertently contacting the tarmac until I want them to.