Fields upon fields of fully autonomous farming machinery, packing machinery and mining robots churning up the fields and then loading their spoils onto giant sentient airships powered by clean solar power.

Australia is a shining example of how not to be destroyed by technology… The Skynet virus that crippled the rest of the developed world and its networks in 2012 never actually made it into the country because of the Governments botched broadband plan… hehe

http://www.robowars.org/forum/index.php

Who is under the misunderstanding the chief (and, apparently, the "only") goal is a subscription to a mag you can get for 15 usd pa over the internet (be it better than "Robot" or not ?

Doesn’t anyone take this group, their membership of it, or robotics or possible career goals at all seriously?

Is it for everyone else all along the lines of a low-energy alternative to watching games shows on TV or going to live gigs where gangs of discordant pre-pubs moan about death and sex and how hard it is to be a tweenager?

Sorry.

"Career goals".

For a second I forgot I was in a always-will-be-because-it-always-has-been-primary-producing backwater.

I have no problem showing off my in-progress Magellan bot. The more exposure the better.

The story is still IMO a sorry one for C21 Aus — although maybe short/medium-term profitable given the range of imminent population-driven  food, water and energy disasters.

Last financial y almost 1/4 of Australian exports in dollar terms were just coal and iron ore.  Overall, almost 40% was some kind of primary product, 24% services (1/3  of that was inbound tourism) and 17% manufactured goods.

Just looking at the local economy,  while less than 10% of the GDP is directly related to farming and mining, around 1/3 (and the largest category, depending on your classification methodology)  is related indirectly by being primarily service providers to farmers & miners or in close downstream allied processing — e.g. food canning.

But it’s probably time to stop the naive preaching and start digging another cellar.

At this stage I don’t think it matters whether they are “works in progress” or perform some task.

Perhaps ash can setup a “menagerie” public directory and any “member” (don’t want a lot of porn, do we?) can just upload a couple of images to it.

I figure we could rustle up maybe a couple dozen pix between us.

And just for fun, maybe we can all try to make them (say) 320×280 or somesuch “zoo standard” format so they don’t need to be cropped or messed around with to tile up into a “zoo” pic.

I’m happy to by part of it but I don’t need another copy of SERVO each month

Surely there are some younger ones here with the disposable income and lack of social life to dedicate all their time to robotics? (I know I did exactly this sort of thing but with computer programming instead, way back in the 80’s and 90’s when most of those here weren’t even born.)

As regards Australia, there’s just nothing happening here because there’s insufficent population and no "national identity" – I mean, the "Ocker", he’s long gone. (The same thing can be seen with various sports like baseball, softball, hockey, any sort of football, there’s no money in it and bugger all fans too). So the fools (erm, those in charge of the country) value their own political power over the greater future and glory of the nation and so we will *never* be a world-player. Where are the incentives and "helping-hands" to have more children and enlarge the population. Nah. It’s "raise taxes, squeeze us harder, both Mum & Dad need to work now so only one child, gouge, gouge, gouge". Don’t you worry mate, the population will stagnate (decline most likely because two parents in equals one child out is a negative sum), except for multi-cultural (there’s another issue) immigration resulting in cheap labour workers and single Mums on the pension with 6 kids and those kids never working either – Australia is still a mighty "welfare state" - you better believe it), and because of all this we are going nowhere, fast.

What can one do about it? Not much. And as long as the mining companies dig up and ship out, physical removing and selling off Australia one boat-load at a time, without paying *us* citizens for raping *our* resources, there still won’t be any need for "educated high tech" here. We’d simply be better off expat’ing this backwater (which is after all, on the other side of civilization at the bottom of the world), or else build a bloody mining robot and sell it to BHP and then screw the right and decent thing to do for this country’s future…

EDIT: Australia WAS a primary-producing-backwater, but not now. Now most of our food that actually even gets grown here (lack of water, guys) and not juiced up at SPC (because it just didn’t grow right and won’t sell – lack of water again) is exported overseas (as the "export quality" and not sold to Woollies), and what we are actually eating is imported from, for example, Brazil… And the farmers are paid peanuts anyways. It’s a mug’s game… So that’s why all Australia really "produces" now is mineral exports, including coal and uranium too.

In all seriousness it would be great to showcase everyone’s stuff even
for the members on Ausrobotics to get a better idea. There are a lot of
projects spread out between all of us members and it would be good to
get it into one place visually.

Of course, that is the whole point of the ‘Project’ system I want to set up on the new site…

In the interim there is a new ‘Photo Gallery’ link from the menu to give us a better place to post images to.