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It's not a rebellion, the little robot just wanted to fit in with the other American soldiers.

> We manufacture our own enemies, no need to blame any boogeymen for funding.

There is a lot of truth in this. You only have to look at who supported Osama bin Laden when he was a "freedom fighter" against the Russians. That was before he turned against the US and became a "terrorist". I put the terms in quotes because ObL has not changed at all, just the US view of him.

Similarly have a look at who put Saddam Hussein into power in a coup. I will give you a clue - the color of their flag is red white and blue and it has stars and stripes on it. Who put the Shah of Iran in power in a coup, setting the stage for the subsequent takeover by the mulllahs?

This does not take away from the fact that $1,000,000,000,000 dollars per year are going into the hands of various types of criminals as a result of the policies of prohibition.

The fact that you do not want to hear the truth about what your spending on drugs does does not make it any less true. I lived in a country town in Australia where a local politician was murdered by the drug cartels. This was a wake-up call for many people about what that money was doing.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/07/1070732070321.html?from=storyrhs

As found as I got older that it is very useful to try and separate "what is true" from "what I want to be true" and from "what I am going to do about it".

Tim

$10000 will buy any laptop you want. You don't need to flip anything. Besides, why flip it when that's the computer he and everyone else wanted? Your argument is totally irrational. d(^_~)

You think that's cute, yet I'll bet you wonder why the world hates America.

I replied to this further down as response but I just spent two hours researching this and sifting through source data so i'm going to post this higher.

I really hate the intellectual dishonesty on both sides of this issue.

Here in Australia guns were effectivly banned a decade ago...we have the harshest gun laws in the western world.

Homicide rates are declining at exactly the same rate as they were before laws were enacted...
http://www.aic.gov.au/research/homicide/homicideRate2.png [aic.gov.au]
http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2006/12/13/gr_guns_narrowweb__300x362,0.jpg [smh.com.au]

Pro and anti gun groups estimated between 2-7 million guns in the country before the ban.

~700,000 guns were handed in.

If you dont respect the law, why would you follow that particular one?

The vast vast majority of guncrime here is, and always was, suicide.

Last year alone...

# Accident 40
# Suicide 193
# Homicide 54
# Legal etc. 3

The Australian Bureau of statistics says that suicide by firearm has halved! Rejoice!

Oops suicide by hanging has now doubled...

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/95553f4ed9b60a374a2568030012e707/161eb35db8be9152ca256f6a00733990/Body/0.75F0!OpenElement&FieldElemFormat=gif [abs.gov.au]

Oh Well, No matter! As long as a gun wasn't involved then that's not our problem.

On the other hand mass shootings have become non-existant.

One side says gun deaths have gone down, yay! Except those people are still dying...they're just hanging themselves or being bludgeoned or stabbed to death.

The other side says that it makes no difference, that gun crime will continue as criminals keep their guns. Yes, this is true. On the other hand your average mass shooter doesn't have a criminal mindset or connections, and wouldn't know where to get a gun if they wanted one.

So from our real world data...gun bans reduce mass shootings, no doubt. They have no effect on *general* homicide or suicide rates.

Then again in this country guns have never been anywhere near the top of the list of ways to kill someone. Knives and hands and feet hold that priviledge. 33% for knives, 18% for hands and 14% for guns (down a whopping 1% since the new gun laws a decade ago).

You've got more chance of being stabbed or bashed to death outside the bar than being shot, it's always been this way.

http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/rpp/77/rpp77.pdf [aic.gov.au]

So...
Half a billion dollars to reduce the homicide by firearm rate by 1%
BUT
No mass shootings for a decade.
BUT
Private citizens are now left merciless.
BUT
There is still probably over a million guns in the country.

Don't be fooled...by either side.

I really hate the intellectual dishonesty on both sides of this issue.

Here in Australia guns were effectivly banned a decade ago...we have the harshest gun laws in the western world.

Homicide rates are declining at exactly the same rate as they were before laws were enacted...
http://www.aic.gov.au/research/homicide/homicideRate2.png
http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2006/12/13/gr_guns_narrowweb__300x362,0.jpg

Pro and anti gun groups estimated between 2-7 million guns in the country before the ban.

~700,000 guns were handed in.

If you dont respect the law, why would you follow that particular one?

The vast vast majority of guncrime here is, and always was, suicide.

Last year alone...

# Accident 40
# Suicide 193
# Homicide 54
# Legal etc. 3

The Australian Bureau of statistics says that suicide by firearm has halved! Rejoice!

Oops suicide by hanging has now doubled...

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/95553f4ed9b60a374a2568030012e707/161eb35db8be9152ca256f6a00733990/Body/0.75F0!OpenElement&FieldElemFormat=gif

Oh Well, No matter! As long as a gun wasn't involved then that's not our problem.

On the other hand mass shootings have become non-existant.

One side says gun deaths have gone down, yay! Except those people are still dying...they're just hanging themselves or being bludgeoned or stabbed to death.

The other side says that it makes no difference, that gun crime will continue as criminals keep their guns. Yes, this is true. On the other hand your average mass shooter doesn't have a criminal mindset or connections, and wouldn't know where to get a gun if they wanted one.

So from our real world data...gun bans reduce mass shootings, no doubt. They have no effect on homicide or suicide rates.

Then again in this country guns have never been anywhere near the top of the list of ways to kill someone. Knives and hands and feet hold that priviledge. 33% for knives, 18% for hands and 14% for guns (down 1% since the new gun laws a decade ago).

You've got more chance of being stabbed or bashed to death outside the bar than being shot.

http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/rpp/77/rpp77.pdf

Don't be fooled...by either side.

Or other things happen to your kids.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/28/1085641717320.html

Anybody that shoots up a school is a person who has severe mental issues.

Unless they are a member of the Religion Of Peace (tm), in which case they are a hero.

I wouldn't trust Jimmy Wales with my credit card. This just in from http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/more-woes-for-jimmy-wales/2008/03/11/1205125874243.html "The toughest two weeks of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales's career just became a whole lot worse, with a former chief scientist at one of the world's biggest technology companies claiming Wales traded Wiki edits for donations. Jeff Merkey, a former computer scientist at Novell, claims Wales told him in 2006 that in exchange for a substantial donation from Merkey, he would edit his uncomplimentary Wikipedia entry to make it more favourable. Merkey made a $US5000 ($5455) donation in 2006 and the edit history for his Wikipedia entry showed that, around the same time, Wales personally made changes to the entry after wiping it out completely and ordering editors to start over."

Ironically, Woz also relates how his comments on Apple may get taken out of context:

[Jobs] calls me and he says he doesn't like something that I was reputed to have said. But he gets it out of context. A reporter's seized on a comment and strung along with that. I'm very positive on Apple, but I'll also point out things that could be better, or aren't the way I'd like them to be. To that point, several journalists have picked up this story with a very negative slant:

- Wozniak slams iPhone, MacBook Air
- Woz finds flaws in Apple's latest offerings
- Wozniak 'disappointed' by Apple iPhone
- Former Apple founder vents over iPhone's pitfalls

Unfortunately, a Labour government in Australia was the lesser of two evils. If the liberals had of gotten back in, they would have spent $189m dollars on providing the exact same thing...

There was a widely run and very successful ad campaign, which just gives kids the message "weird old guys will lie to you online, so don't believe everything you're told".

I wont even get started on some of the underhanded tactics that the Liberals used to distract voters from the real issues during an election or how John Howard pledged that he would never ever bring in a GST(which he then pledged to bring a GST in the very next election). Or how he has sold off our telecommunications infrastructure to help balance his budget (Labour will get burnt by this if they do not sell off the rest of Telstra and have major troubles trying to balance this year's budget without cutting spending).

And I wont even get mention the "work place reform" that was implemented by John Howard and the Liberal government which screwed over a lot of employees who got fired and then offered their jobs back with lower incomes/benefits etc.

This is getting a bit longer then I had hoped and is actually off-topic so I will leave it at that...

NEC - yes thats right the major international corp. - found a entire fake NEC outfit working in China, complete with factories, hundreds of employees, using the same logo, letterheads and even staff ID badges. They found out when kit started coming back for repair that they had not even made. its still one of my favorite China fake goods stories, because you just could not make it up.

Think I'm joking? I assure you I am not, here are some references...
http://www.eetindia.co.in/ART_8800416910_1800007_NT_5c0424e2.HTM
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187200176
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/technology/01pirate.html
http://www.smh.com.au/news/biztech/slick-pirates-seize-entire-brand/2006/05/29/1148754904830.html

The hardest thing is sometimes to persuade people that what they are doing in actually wrong in the first place, I guess this is the case with Shareaza.

...considering the track record of the current administration in Australia http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/web-porn-filter-takes-biggest-hit/2008/02/16/1202760663247.html/.

As a long time OS X admin, OS X will -unfortunately- probably go down really hard this time 'round.
After all, LI_US has already passed judgement on it.

With the impending departure of Bill Gates, I think a new Microsoft story icon is in order.
For that I don't think we need to go much further than the picture at the top of this story...

http://www.smh.com.au/news/biztech/yahoo-bid-bad-news-for-the-net-says-google/2008/02/04/1201973796947.html

MS woke up late to the internet. Once they woke up, their attempts at gaining a foothold were more or less unsuccessful.

Indeed. However this move is possibly their most bone-headed reaction yet. I have no doubt it's straight from the brain of Steve I'm going to fucking kill Google Ballmer. Acquiring Yahoo is another attempt to tame the internet and tie it to Windows services, and it will fail as dismally as the last few attempts, because the internet (and Yahoo) is the antithesis of Microsoft.

Users on the web don't like being 'monetized' unless there's something in it for them, and they'll resist attempts by MS to change that balance of power. Those attempts by MS to exploit users are inevitable because it's just not in Ballmer's (or Microsoft's) DNA to let users get something for nothing.

For Microsoft as a company, swallowing Yahoo whole is going to create many more problems than it solves. It will drive the good engineers to Google (very few of Yahoo's people could thrive under the entirely different MS culture), it'll give Microsoft lots of new properties which directly compete with their own offerings, it'll make all the MS Live employees very nervous and trigger more internal turf wars, and finally, it will land MS with servicing lots of disgruntled users on services like Flickr who will desert in droves at the first attempt to corral them into an MS only internet (as MS is prone to do - see ActiveX, IE, Silverlight, etc). Their business model (lock in the users and milk them for profits) isn't under threat, it's past its sell by date; you can't continually abuse your users forever and expect them never to walk away, particularly not if you're trying to operate as a web services company, and I have my doubts that Ballmer et al will ever learn this lesson. They've done too well in the past by applying it to abandon it now.

Still, if you don't work at Yahoo, and you're not keen on Microsoft dominating yet another market, this foolish move is heartening news. Google must be celebrating the beginning of the end of the dark ages of the internet. This will tie up MS for years.

Ahahaha - They say that civlisation is three meals away from barbarism...

The Sydney Morning Herald writes:

'Egyptian blogger The Arabist said he would "resume posting after the problem [two broken undersea fibre cables] is resolved" and predicted, with a hint of sarcasm, "complete social breakdown in vast swathes of (upmarket Cairo districts) Heliopolis and Mohandiseen as thousands are unable to update their Facebook status."' (para. 11 in article).

Compare no, link yes! This is Mick trying to cover Mick's arse by blaming the media. Previously he has tried to blame scotland yard, Indian police, unidentified tipsters, the chief prosecuter, disloyal officers, and of course Haneef himself. Personly I am suprised he hasn't thought of pinning the mess on Corey

Mick's problem is not that he prostitutes his position to curry political favour, it's the fact that everyone knows it.

As for Labour sticking with Mick, not a chance! Remeber in 2000 the AFP raided the home of a Labour MP's adviser in what amounted to a fishing expedition on opposition foreign policy of the time. Labour will relish doing Mick slowly and publicly with the promised full blown inquiry. As for Labour being any better, well soak in the irony of Rudd suggesting Mick's opinion on censorship should be censored.

The Federal Government and the Prime Minister have said they have no intentions of doing this.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/rudd-blacks-out-keeltys-opinion/2008/01/31/1201714110077.html

other factors like urgency might have taken precedence

This article gives details.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/transplant-girl-a-miracle/2008/01/24/1201157559928.html

Or maybe our workforce isn't so culturally conditioned to work themselves to death for the corporation that they get so hopped up on "power" drinks containing a heart mugging mix of nicotine, caffeine and so much sugar it spontaneously crystallizes when you open the can. Therefore, we can generally get through a day without a portable uber-entertainment minicomplex strapped to our bodies to feed a stress addled attention span.

Or not. Who cares?

Seriously, what mystical amazing powers does your cell phone need? And how did you live before the cell phone?

As for them needing help to sleep:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/depression/submerged-stress-in-japan/2006/06/14/1149964602274.html

Microsoft are not getting busted for merely including these programs with Windows. That's only one half of it.

The other half is that the web browser bundled with Windows does not follow "fundamental and open" standards for how web browsers render pages. Essentially, Microsoft is getting busted for trying to subvert the commonly accepted web standards and replace them with proprietary IE-style web standards.

Same goes for the Office file interoperability, although that seems to not be mentioned in the ars technia article, but is mentioned in this one.

The headline of the article implies that this is intended to be some kind of environmental decision, but nothing in the article appears to back it up. In fact, the guy quoted is primarily going on about the much-improved accessibility of the budget. It'll now actually be possible for people to get it (rather than forking out an impossible $200 just to read it), and being in an electronic form, it's much easier to search through and index, not to mention only reading or printing the bits you happen to be interested in.

At the moment I'm working at a government department (non-US) where we've been publishing information online for a while now,. People love it, both inside the organisation and those in the general public (journalists, opposition politicians, economists, and whoever else may have an interest). This is largely to do with the Official Information Act which, in New Zealand, basically states that government departments have to make available whatever information people ask for, unless there's a good reason not to. Over time it's resulted in most government entities publishing large amounts of information even when it's not requested, on the assumption that someone may ask for it sooner or later.

The annual budget is probably one of the most important blocks of information and it's also one of the hardest, because it tends to be full of massive amounts of tables and figures from all over the place and from all kinds of different sources and people who often like to do things in very different ways. Even in a small country it's a big logistical exercise. Recently redeveloping the website to make things more accessible was a 2 to 3 year job, simply because of the amount of historical data that had to be gone through and re-formatted with more accessible markup, with people either using scripts or just manually trawling through it. I guess the nice thing about it now, though, is that there are systems in place to make sure that new data gets marked up usefully in the first place.

Budgets are huge things to manage, as much because of the massive amounts of organisation that have to go into collecting the information and compiling it all together in a way that can be printed at all. Hopefully getting it out as a PDF would be the first step for the White House towards getting it more accessible.

There's a very successful series of TV and print advertisements running in the Australian state of New South Wales. The premise is that everyone else realises that a speeding and reckless young male driver (aka: hoon or yobbo) just does not understand how silly and "inadequate" they make themselves look. These others share among themselves the wiggling of the 'pinkie' ('little') finger when they see such behaviour. The real pay-off is when one of the male passengers in a recklessly driven car wiggles the pinkie to a fellow passenger, and his mate -- the driver -- sees it happen in the mirror, and is shamed.

See an article about the ads in the Sydney Morning Herald of 25 June 2007. Here's a link to the ads at the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority web site.

There is also an accompanying 15-second "viral" internet ad that offers "speedsters" an "xtra xtra small" condom.

You obviously don't read very well, I pointed out that ALTHOUGH HIGH SCHOOL MIGHT BE STATE RESPONSIBILITY, HIGHER EDUCATION IS FEDERAL. Every report has shown that spending is down on this as well as other areas, you want to go around turning a blind eye to things, looking at your obviously precious Liberal party through your rose coloured glasses. Spending has not increased in comparison to the rest of the developed countries, this is another story, there are plenty but you obviously are only interested in seeing things that agree with you. Health is the same, just google it and read a bit, it might be enlightening for you. Oh government debt was around for a lot longer than Labor was in power, we had debt in the sixties, it actually started taking off in Fraser's era (Howard was Treasurer). I still maintain both are only interested in one thing - their own little club. You think Howard was great, good luck to you, our infrastructure is falling apart, there is no plan for the future of our country (apart for THE FUTURE FUND!! YIPPEEE), water resource management (gets a good run every election - remember last election when they were going to fix the Murray?), rail always gets a mention as well, all forgotten within a few months. These things are obviously not important to you because like your reading, your vision is selfish and self serving, blind to anything else.

By the way, why don't you check your facts before making rash statements about the National debt? We owe more than when Labor was in power The Age, Howard has shifted the debt to the public (by not providing what was previously provided) and people as ignorant as you believe they have fixed the debt problem, so long as we keep running a balance of trade deficit, we are heading for troubled times. Neither party has an answer for this.

The truth of the Russian elections

Note: I think the comic on the front page changes every so often, so if it isn't Putin, then you were too slow. At the time of posting it was relevant to this discussion.

I think you can find it here too if the original link isn't working.

Turns out it was a cover up. There's more information at the Sydney Morning Herald. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/11/30/1196037111096.html

As someone who's interviewed technical people for jobs, esp. 10 years ago or so, it seems that most of the online nicknames would relate to "hobby" activities. Applying the same rules, that can help you or hurt you: if I like reading about your social money lending (Sydney Morning Herald - Online social money lending takes off), I may be further impressed and want to interview or hire you, but if I don't like your ability to code widgets then it won't make a difference for a technical job.

Given the upcoming ubiquity of online profiles, most people will have them from their early teens (bismarcktribune.com - Myspace generation . The rules should change as hiring managers themselves start to have online personas that cross the gray lines of hirability. So maybe people will only be judged by their LinkedIn-type postings that are meant to be for business history.

And sites like My Death Space may be joined by sites, such as one poster related to old usenet postings, that showcase frozen profiles of people who lost their passwords or account access, and stopped updating even as they continue to live on.

Thanks for pointing this out, which I entirely agree with. I also agree with the first response to your post, which is that it's like this all through the private sector, too. The difference is that government organisations actually have to be directly accountable to people sooner or later, and in that sense they have a much harder time. It's not really a surprise that a lot of people don't want to work for them.

Lately I've been doing IT work for a government department (in New Zealand in my case) which is actually run well. The entire government sector here was overhauled in the early 1980s with the Official Information Act, which has had at least one really good review from over the Tasman. The law says that anyone can request any information from any department at any time, and the department has to provide it within a specific timeframe (about twenty-something working days), or it'll get into a lot of trouble. The only exceptions are if the request is unreasonably complex, or if there's a good reason to withhold it (such as privacy, etc), in which case the department has to explain why it's withholding the info, and often convince an external auditor that it's justifiable to do so.

After 25 years of working with it, the whole government sector has adapted. We have a full time team of people which is specifically dedicated to receiving official information requests from the public and journalists, delegating them to appropriate managers or other staff, and then making sure the queries actually get answered appropriately.

Everyone knows they could be accountable at any time, any they take it seriously, and contrary to what it sounds like your experiences have been, the management actually supports the whole thing, which as an employee is very encouraging. It's not perfect and people do make mistakes, but the whole system does seem to be a lot more accountable than what I've heard of something like the US Federal Government, for instance.

do nothing?

well, treating sovereign nations with a bit of respect rather than attempting to play off regional conflicts in order to control their natural resources ( yes, its all about the oil ), is probably as close to 'doing nothing' as you need in order to ward off the spectre of an arms race ( implied just yesterday by hans blix: http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/sydney-peace-prize-for-blunt-blix/2007/05/20/1179601243747.html ).

see the problem is, the americans dont want peace, they want peace on their terms, which is to ensure america(ns) are rich and powerful, with scraps thrown out for whoever bends over for them.

its really not that difficult to stop the world going to shit, but how would the rich get richer ( which brings us back OT: please impeach chaney )

No, really. I didn't just make this up to screw with people. The Newsweek story you refer to is part of the first link. Slashdot's story attributes a quote to a linked story that has NOTHING to do with the quote it is supposed to include.

Sorry if I'm an old-timer or just not cool enough to get it, if I say that a link on a "news" site is supposed to contain the 'quote' that it is purported to contain. Once upon a time you were supposed to read and verify what you said before you threw it out in front of thousands or millions of people. My bad for not getting the new rules.

"University of New South Wales Associate Professor Andrew Collins has just completed a 10-week project with his advanced immunology class, requiring students to correct errors and fill the gaps in Wikipedia articles related to immunology."

http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/wikipedia-project-is-a-class-act/2007/10/31/1193618940842.html

Complete with kooky picture of said Professor.

The brazen airport computer theft that has Australia's anti-terror fighters up in arms

--
Simon

What number were you expecting? 0%? 0.001%? 1%? I'd like to know a) exactly what the numbers are, b) what constitutes a search for "sensitive financial information".

Most P-P stuff is copyright violations of photos (porn) movies (Hollywood & Porn) and sound (RIAA stuff which is mostly audio soft porn and cursing with parental advisory stull the parents won't let the kids buy) Most P-P stuff does not involve theft (unless you ask **AA who will tell you copyright violations is theft) and when ID is stolen and used for a shopping spree, then the search for those responsible gets cranked up a notch. When money leaves someone else's account, they take notice.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/security/man-used-filesharing-program-to-steal-data-money/2007/09/07/1188783469524.html

Taking a copy of your MP3 is not the same as taking your bank account. You still have your MP3 unlike the money that was in your account.

Now, instead of RIAA, I have to worry about the Secret Service and the NSA when I'm browsing pirate bay looking for some mus

Your search for muscle building is probably not going to raise any eyebrows. The fact you are sharing your entire My Documents folder with your Turbo Tax records is of a bigger concern. Go to any P-P site and do a search for common applications extensions. .doc, .xls, .ppt, are just the tip of the iceberg. Try searching for .pwl.. enjoy.

Many people just don't get the fact they shouldn't use their home directory as a place to download their goodies. It is what they share without even knowing is what is dangerous.

Here is a WSJ article detailing the problem..
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB118134946950829716-QWDmBwH_qAgisaepbCCMoT_4cPA_20070710.html?mod=fpa_editors_picks
Compuerworld article;
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9012961
and an article regarding an ID theft and arrest
http://www.smh.com.au/news/security/man-used-filesharing-program-to-steal-data-money/2007/09/07/1188783469524.html

They are not interested in your searches for marginal photos. They are interested in the security leaks.

So just where are you pointing your downloads? Just what are you making available?

Darn right! That's why Brazil had the highest prices in the world on the recently-published "iPod index" (comparison of world prices for a commonly-available item, traditionally the McDonald's Big Mac, but replaced with the Apple iPod in this case). See http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/ipod-index-trumps-the-bigmac-one/2007/01/18/1169095897045.html

Here is a link to an interesting article - but it seems some tree-hugger sheeple won't believe it. http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/gore-gets-a-cold-shoulder/2007/10/13/1191696238792.html

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/10/13/1191696214489.html

Some of her creations are rather affectionate too.

Or a bit of reality. With cheap storage it's easier just to let all the pictures just sit there. People are always coming up with new and potentially scary ways to use data that was collected for an ostensibly innocent purpose.

Consider this story from last year- A guy disappears in Mosman (north of Sydney Harbour)and is thrown off the Gap - a big cliff south of Sydney Harbour. Two hours after he was last seen in Mosman the electronic toll tag in his car crossed the Sydney Harbour Bridge going south. Two seconds after that the electronic toll tag in the main suspect's car followed.

We don't know that because of surveillance, but only because a traffic system installed for a completely different purpose happened to log those tags.

Now ok, more power to the police when they're investigating legitimate murders, but you don't have to be all that paranoid to think of ways that that existing data could be abused.

Also: recent photographs indicate its continued presence in the world as well as its insatiable hunger for senior citizens.

More seriously, this is pretty darn interesting, especially since the "most similar looking" modern equivalent (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) has no teeth whatsoever. Of course, real descendents don't literally have to look like their forebearers....

I guess the prehistoric Tooth Fairy worked overtime.

Any consumer lobbyists out there may want to let the networks know that they won't buy stuff advertised as being associated with the 2008 Olympics.

The info will continue to get around these rudimentary efforts at censorship, but the pro-democracy movement is beginning to realise that the UN just ain't gonna show up, no matter how many are gunned down in cold blood.

I submitted a story in March on the role of the intertubes in exposing tin-pot despots.

Rather than OLPC, many in the third-world would benefit from the gift of a digital camera and a few dollars to outlay at the local internet cafe.

"the only party i can see that has any fault is the party who put the image on flickr, the only party too poor to get any cash out of"

Check again.

Not that there may be facts wrong but...

http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/virgin-sued-for-using-teens-photo/2007/09/21/1189881735928.html

"The family of Alison Chang says Virgin Mobile grabbed the picture from Flickr, Yahoo Inc's popular photo-sharing website, and failed to credit the photographer by name."

The claim is virgin didn't even follow the license.

Also, unless Flickr was using a v 1.0 license, the license only licenses the creators copyrights, any other rights needed must be obtained by the user on their own.

Seems virgin may not have done this. We shall see...

How they claim CC does the lincesing is ming boggling. That would be like someone putting some of MS's shared source code out under the GPL without permission and MS suing the FSF claiming that they licensed the code just because someone chose to use the GPL for hteir misdeeds...

Sorry, couldn't be botherd to come up with a car analogy... ~;-)

all the best,

drew

http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/

I'd bet that if you made a realistic looking letter from a made-up law company it would be very hard to trace and YouTube would still remove the video.

If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that

1. the sharks extremely high sensitivity is explainable with our current knowledge, while homeopathy is not, or it has been disproved.
2. the orders of magnitude are somehow relevant, and I don't get it b/c I'm probably not an engineer.
3. whether homeopathy is accepted in national health care schemes in many countries around the world is not a valid argument (orders of magnitude, perhaps.. [grin])
4. my mind is playing tricks on me :)

Before we get further apart, let's briefly consider a few points:

1. when I talk about homeopathy I only refer to classic homeopathy, as practiced and invented by Hahnemann. No vibration crap, and always full interviews.
2. homeopathic practitioners claim that remedies are proven to work in double blind studies and also on monkeys and babies, which significantly reduces the chances of placebo effect
3. classic homeopathy is essentially empirical; remedies are (supposedly) entered into the pharmacopoeia only after being tested on a statistically significant number of people and found to have worked.
4. the esoteric theories of vibrations and water memory are more or rather less successful attempts to explain scientifically something that works, much like the shark's sense of smell
5. homeopathy will never become mainstream b/c big pharma cannot patent its remedies and as such is not scalable; you will never see Superbowl commercials touting homeopathic remedies; big pharma has a vested interest in sponsoring research "proving" it does not work since it's disrupting its business model
6. research pro homeopathy does exist and I'm sure you can easily find it yourself; so does nonsensical research proving that sharks' sense of smell makes perfect sense (and I'm quite sure that 1ppm number vehiculated in literature is much higher in reality, but using larger numbers would sound more like SF)

I'd like to continue this debate with you off-line, so please feel free to email me if you so wish.

I'll leave you with a quote from Erwin Knoll: "Everything you read in the newspaper is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you have first-hand knowledge."

I did supply the link in my post so here it is again http://www.digitaltvdesignline.com/news/198100146. I do agree with you I would be cynical as well.

I live in Australia and other posters live in the UK and Europe and we don't get subsidised like that. While I cannot speak for the UK or Europe I do know that HDTV sales are huge over here to the predicted tune of AU$2.5 billion (approx US$2.1 billion) over this year, http://blogs.smh.com.au/fastforward/archives/2007/09/where_do_your_digital_dollars.html. I can make a reasonable guess that (just on this years spending) means about 10% to 30% HDTV adoption by the average householder.

Perhaps not, but we all know copylaws apply.
Sean Patrick O'Toole, anyone? http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/alleged-piracy-kingpin-facing-extradition/2006/02/10/1139465836383.html

Australian Defamation Laws are ridiculously powerful.

A failed restaurant recently successfully sued a major newspaper for a negative review in the Australian High Court.