On Tuesday morning, an Australian pilot took some artistic liberties with his flight path.
ABC News:
The Diamond Star plane, operated by Flight Training Adelaide, spent a little over three hours in the air on Tuesday to draw the letters over South Australia.
The message was not seen by people on the ground, but was visible to aviation followers watching live flight tracking programs and websites.
It is believed the pilot, who was working out of Parafield Airport, north of Adelaide, was "running in" a new engine.
The FlightAware website captured the pilot's work between 8:53am to 11:57am.
The pilot flew several loops, creating some somewhat explicit graffiti along the coast, before tracing "I'm bored" over the Princes Highway.
Retired Qantas A380 pilot Chris Wilson said he thought the message was "harmless".
screenshot by Flightaware via ABC News
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Last year saw a massive surge in the right to repair movement, which seeks to limit manufacturers' power to undermine repairs, by mandating certain design decisions to facilitate independent servicing of goods, as well as access to parts and manuals.
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"Horrific" CCTV footage shows a group of Aussie cops savagely beating a teen with autism, and the resulting outrage is drawing attention to the country's worsening reputation for police brutality.
In another case, Victoria police beat up a teenager who had ridden his scooter in front a police car, claiming that the baby-faced kid was the middle-aged, bearded car thief they were unable to find.
Tommy Lovett was riding by a police car on his scooter when he was wrongly arrested. ... Documents obtained by The Age reportedly support Mr Lovett’s claim that he was hurled into a fence, assaulted while handcuffed and capsicum sprayed — leaving his body bruised, grazed and bleeding. Victoria Police vehemently denied the claims and an internal investigation found nothing wrong with Mr Lovett’s arrest. However, a human rights lawyer who spoke to 7.30 said the cases — including one where a Melbourne doctor claims police threw her to the ground and punched her in the head — outlined in the investigation are alarming.
“These cases keep going on,” he said. “There’s clearly cultural systemic issues at work."
More footage shows another Aussie cop attacking a disabled senior.
A Victorian policeman retained his job and rank despite being caught on CCTV assaulting a drunk disability pensioner at Geelong Police Station.
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Irene O'Shea of Athelstone, Australia just broke the world record for the oldest female skydiver. She's 102 years old. This isn't her first jump though. This badass centenarian started two years ago when she turned 100.
ABC reports:
Sunday's skydive, which broke the world record, "went smoothly," SA Diving said, describing her as "an absolute joy to have in the dropzone."
O'Shea's daughter died of motor neurone disease years ago, according to SA Diving. She saw this year's skydive as the "perfect opportunity" to raise money and awareness for the Motor Neurone Disease Association of South Australia.
O'Shea jumped from 14,000 feet at SA Skydiving's Langhorne Creek Dropzone with instructor Jed Smith, a 24-year-old paramedic who she made her previous jumps with. The pair fell at about 136 mph before the parachute was deployed, according to SA Skydiving.
Wow.
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Vegemite has enough salt to be conductive, and is viscous enough to draw distinct traces with on suitable medium (say, toast that has been cooked such that most of the water has evaporated, making it a good insulator), as Luke Weston has ably demonstrated.
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In 2015, Australia created the most aggressive copyright censorship system in the world, which allowed the country's two major movie studios (Village Roadshow and Fox) along with an assortment of smaller companies and trolls to get court orders forcing the country's ISPs to censor sites that had the "primary purpose" of infringing copyright.
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Australia is about to radically expand its copyright and the publishing industry has forged an unholy alliance with authors' groups to rail against fair use being formalised in Australia, rallying under the banner of "Free is not fair."
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Just an emu in love. Read the rest
SOPA has come to Australia: under Communications minister Senator Mitch Fifield's Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2018, rightsholders will be able to tell search engines which results they are allowed to show users, and will expand the country's censorship system ("copyright blocking orders") by allowing rightsholders to have any website censored by claiming it is a "mirror" of an already-blocked site, without having to show evidence for their claims.
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Australia's marvelous television is exemplified by A Current Affair, a current affairs programme specializing in filmed confrontations with ne'erdowells such as this shirtless pastor, described (perhaps accurately) by the reporter as Serial Pervert Con Man in a prelude to a low-quality public fistfight.
See also the excellent Australian highway patrol show, Highway Patrol Australia. Read the rest
British-Australian I.T. developer Nathan Hague was traveling through Australia's Sydney airport when authorities forcibly detained him and seized his devices, according to reports. Hague says his laptop password was cracked, and his digital files were accessed by Border Force officers. Read the rest
Smartphone video footage of police brutality being exercised against black Americans and other ethnic minorities living their lives within the nation’s borders have become depressingly commonplace. While difficult to watch and, most likely for the videographer, difficult to stand by and film, such footage can be an important tool in bringing cops who abuse the power of their office to justice. The news, social media and water cooler talk here in North America often overflows with reports of abuses of power by law enforcement officials. It’s easy to forget that the very same brand of injustice and violence are served up in other parts of the world – a lot.
According to The New York Times, in Australia, a country that’s been marred by institutional racism since its inception, “...aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are incarcerated at 13 times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians. They make up 27 percent of Australia’s prisoners, compared with 3 percent of the overall population.” Given the disproportionate representation of Indigenous Australians in the clink, it’s safe to say that there’s some greasy shit going on Down Under, of a similar sort to the greasy shit we see going on up here in places like New York City and Ferguson, Missouri.
To help Australia aboriginals and Torres Strait Islander peoples to mitigate this prejudicial treatment at the hands of those meant to serve and protect them, human rights activists are teaching them how to respond to the threat of police violence and to record their interactions with law enforcement, just like we do up here:
From The New York Times:
The Copwatch workshops, activists said, are intended to teach people their legal rights and how to safely record interactions with police officers.
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Wangkatjungka artist Nyuju Stumpy Brown first saw white people in the 1940s as a teenager. Here, she describes that time and later shows some of her artwork. Read the rest
Watch freerunner Jiemba Sands of Tasmania get over a short chainlink fence in a variety of different ways like it's no big deal.
Now watch his blooper reel:
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Australian skater Jackson Pilz is making the internet go wild with his latest skateboard trick. Watch it first in slo-mo, then at regular speed. Either way, prepare to be impressed. Read the rest
Sydney's annual Vivid festival fills the harbour with barges equipped with powerful projectors that use the buildings ringing the harbour (especially the iconic Sydney Opera House) as geometrically complex screens for projection-mapped lightshows, synchronised to music.
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Australian retailers are required to collect 10% Value Added Tax on every sale; Amazon's Australia store collects this tax, but the company has rejected any suggestion that its non-Australian stores should collect the tax on shipments bound for Australia.
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