ctrl-c wasn’t sufficient to tell bash to cancel a line. Eg, go to bash shell, type “askjhaksjdhkj”, press ctrl-C, that should clear the line. No acknowledgement at all in my case.

SIGINT won’t kill a process if it’s trapped in the kernel. it won’t even get the signal until the syscall returns.

even SIGKILL (’kill -9′) won’t kill a zombie process.

Petrol prices in Australia are by far the lowest or among the lowest in the industrialised world.

Supply and demand drives (pun unintended) petrol prices. Supply is increasingly constrained and demand is growing. There’s only one way for petrol prices to go, and that’s up.

It is in fact a very, very good thing that petrol prices are rising. Higher prices will help prevent humankind from destroying the planet. Higher prices will help discourage humankind from committing suicide.

Instead of whinging and whining about petrol prices we should be focussing on identifying and developing transport options that are less damaging to the environment and more sustainable long term. Because if we don’t we are heading toward the extinction of our species. Which will be good news for the planet and for all non-human life on it. Whales will be happy. Tigers will be delighted to see us go.

The Government does not have a magic wand to magically cause prices to fall and supply to increase. Any Government action to control petrol prices will inevitable mean correspondingly higher costs in other areas, eg healthcare.

And by the way, the Government has no money of its own. All the money available to the Government comes from taxpayers. I thought people understood that. Apparently not. We seem to want to invest our own money in our own destruction. How stupid is that?!

The main message I got was that alternative energy will never catch on until they are economically viable. One way or another, we will reach a point when, e.g. driving electric car is much cheaper than driving a gasoline-powered car. The government can help ease the transition by artificially making gasoline more expensive now (and save the surplus for some public good), rather than later when pure facts of economics will force that to happen anyways (and environment has been irreparably damaged, with no funds in reserve to help repair it).

This isn’t going to change. This is not something we have any choice about. Prices are never going to go back down. In fact, it’s only going to get worse as oil gets scarcer. Whether we like it or not.

Deal with it. Face reality. We can no longer pretend that oil - and the cheap energy it gives us - is in unlimited supply.

Whinging won’t help.

The only thing that will help is understanding the situation we are in (and, worse, the situation we WILL be in if we ignore it), and start developing the technology and infrastructure needed to keep our global civilisation going.

Whinging about petrol prices not only doesn’t help, it actively harms us - it gives governments an excuse to do nothing real while they have pretend debates about a few cents per litre…the modern equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns.

Since 2000, the cost of filling my tank has gone up over 3.5 times, whereas my paycheck definitely hasn’t. I don’t care where you are from, or what your political leaning is, that’s a lot of money, and has a significant mental and actual effect on other spending habits. An extra dollar on petrol means one less dollar to spend on something else, redirecting money out of the economy.

Also, your comment, ‘Yanks find metric too hard to understand…’ is mis-informed and grossly offensive. What you could have said is, ‘the American populous does not use the metric system, rather they use U.S. customary units (imperial units), and would be more likely to refer to gallons rather than litres’. Despite what you may think, Americans CAN count to 100. The American Scientific community uses SI units, and national and international trade is carried out using the metric system.

Anyway, it should have been obvious i wasn’t talking about America - Yanks find metric too hard to understand, and wouldn’t be writing about litres.

and yes, there’s little point in just increasing taxes (although that alone would reduce demand), the real benefit would come from using the proceeds to develop the technologies and build the infrastructure for alternative energy generation and distribution.

(and, of course, if it’s built with public funds, it should stay in public ownership - and not just be another gift to the government’s corporate masters).

“A tank will hold less than 100 litres. Typically around 50, but let’s say it’s 100 litres.”

i used 100 litres as an example to make the maths simple enough for the kinds of morons who whinge about a few cents per litre.