On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 02:34:35PM +1000, Lawrie Conole wrote:
> Some of the virus-affected PCs around the
> place must have lots of old Birding-Aus messages stored on them - or are
> they being harvested from the BA archive?
A worm like Bugbear could retrieve e-mail messages from a web archive
but I've seen no mention of such behaviour from it or previous worms.
On another non-birding topic John Gamblin suggested desalination as the
solution to Australia's water problem. It costs roughly $1000/megalitre
to desalinate water currently. Irrigators who buy water by the megalitre
pay under $50 I believe. The return per megalitre for the major consumers
of water, livestock/pasture/grain, cotton and rice, is said to be in
the range $200-600 per megalitre.
Desalination technology will improve but don't expect it to provide
water cheap enough for the above uses in the near future. Sydney Water
charges us (consumers) ~$1000 per megalitre - although much of this is
not the "raw water" cost. As desalination gets cheaper it may be used
to supply Australia's coastal citites particularly if cheap energy is
available - similarly it may become viable for high-value agriculture
(fruit and grapes) near the coast.
You don't necessarily need to desalinate water to drop it from helitankers
such as Elvis, as John suggested. Although you it won't change the
economics much. For those that like arithmetic. The helitankers cost
$12000/hour to run, carry 9 kilolitres and under good circumstances can
dump a load every 4-5 minutes. That's ~$100000 per megalitre delivered
to a fire.
And to add some token birds - Koels are now present in inner Sydney in
numbers There were 3+ "pairs" calling near my street this afternoon.
Also heard a Koel (and a Channel-Bill) south of Bateman's Bay last week -
near the southern end of their range.
Andrew Taylor
Birding-Aus is on the Web at
www.shc.melb.catholic.edu.au/home/birding/index.html
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