Yeah, best move for them (Labor Party). Sorry should have been clearer.
As for myself - I feel there are a lot of problems with the way censorship is handled in this country, and it's getting worse with the proposed internet filter etc.
The government is using the 'protect the children' line to outflank the Right and minimise electoral damage. Basically having their cake and eating it too.
If you read Brendan O'Conner's comments you'll see that the government is suggesting the purpose of the R18 rating for games is to 'protect teenagers' - and by pushing this line in the media they deny that ground to the conservatives. This way the government gets to implement a sensible policy which the majority of the electorate want, but at the same time they can sell it as 'protecting the children' to make it palatable to the more moderate social conservatives.
This was really the best move, although it's a shame they can't just be honest with the electorate and sell the policy on its own merits. I suspect it has been planned this way since their community consultation backfired so spectacularly. It was just a matter of timing, waiting for the SA attorney-general to leave.
I didn't suggest that clearance implies access. Nor that these 854000 all had access to the documents that have come out via WikiLeaks.
The point I was making:
With so many people involved in the security apparatus, it is inevitable that security breaches will happen. The more secrets and the more people involved, the higher the risk of breaches occurring.
Even if people are loyal and trustworthy 100% of the time, the complexity of such a large bureaucracy guarantees that mistakes will happen.
I also grew up in Queensland, and am back living here now. Sadly there is a lot of truth in the comment above.
Queensland used to be very progressive... in the 19th century. We had the world's first Labour government in 1899. And until 1910 the Queensland Education Act guaranteed a free and secular education for every child. Then it was amended, to remove the 'secular' references and include provisions for bible classes in government schools. It's been that way since.
It's depressing to think we've been going backwards for 100 years.
I don't see how my taxes should be paying for someone to evangelise at what is meant to be a secular school. If they wanted a school counselling program with actual psychologists, I'd be all for that. And don't get me started on 'religious education' at secular schools...
I too, think it will suck. Dune was a great novel, but pretty dense in terms of details and plot even for a book. Trying to film it has not worked well so far - you just can't translate a book like that into a 2 hour movie.
I also thought the Lord of the Rings movies sucked too. After watching even just the first one, I hated hobbits - if I saw one walking down the street I'd want to punch it in the face.
I say that as a fan of the books.
Taking this further - why does government have anything to do with religion at all?
Why are there tax breaks for religions?
How does that fit in to capitalism and open markets? e.g. the Sanitarium food company in Australia, owned by the Seventh Day Adventist church. Their advertisements on TV do not advertise the fact that they are owned by the church or operate as a charity (if you're a charity why not advertise the fact!), and while as a charitable company I'm sure most of the profits go back to the community, you can certainly argue that this is state-sponsored evangelism due to the tax breaks they receive.
Why does the state have anything to do with marriage - gay or hetero?
Rather than debate about whether the government should allow or ban gay marriages, I suggest the government get out of the marriage business altogether. Marriage is about belief systems, this is personal and different people have different views. It shouldn't be legislated any more than what pants I decide to wear or what music I like to listen to - or what church I choose to belong to (if any). The government and courts should have a minimal role regarding living arrangements and tax arrangements, but only to protect people financially in case of relationship breakdowns, or to resolve custody issues.
Apart from this let people decide who they want to live with, and when, and if they are a member of a church and want to get married that's between their church, their god, and themselves.
I've had a quick scan through the comments and couldn't find any jokes about the Toyota Matrix using its passengers as human batteries for environmentally-friendly power... or about how the automatic traction control system gained sentience and has now started a war against mankind... or about how this lady should've taken the blue pill instead if she just wanted to live her normal boring content life...
What is Slashdot coming to... I thought it was news for nerds?
"The Washington Times reports, 'The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive they swamped the agency's inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.' One senior executive at the National Science Foundation spent at least 331 days looking at Slashdot on his government computer, records show. The cost to taxpayers: up to $58,000. Why aren't they running a product like Websense?"
I hate to think how much money Slashdot has cost us collectively, over the years.... not to mention all the 'psych problems'
As far as justifying use of full-volume encryption, I would guess that for 99% of people they are protecting data against accidental loss or theft of laptops and portable storage devices.
Corporate espionage etc is a whole other ballgame. Disk encryption can't protect against someone who is really determined to get their hands on your data, remember most users will divulge their passwords if you give them a chocolate bar... that's without resorting to rubber hoses:)
But disk encryption is useful and worthwhile if just to prevent PR disasters when an exec's laptop is left in a cab or at an airport.
I think it can be done, and done well. All the problems have been solved before/already.
As for Joe Average, I think his faith is not that hard to get. He already shops online, watches Fox News, eats at the food court in the mall.
If a bunch of professors, lawyers, and IT people tell him that a new electronic voting system is trustworthy, that will probably be good enough for him. They won't even need to explain exactly why it is trustworthy.
It doesn't even need to be perfect, just 'good enough' - i.e. a lot better than the current options.
One I remember from university was the 'dinosaur' book, "Applied Operating Systems Concepts" by Ali Silberschwartz, Peter Galvin, and Greg Gagne.
Although not a book on thread programming per se I remember it had lots of discussion about threads, semaphores, mutexes, shared mem, resource locking etc and I think good understanding of these topics is essential before you dive into trying to write and debug multi-threaded programs!
Especially if you already have significant programming experience I guess you mainly want the theory anyway.
I'm in Australia and have a 12GB peak usage cap/month (7am to 7pm). If I use up this limit my bandwidth is shaped down to 64kbps (I think?) until the beginning of the next month. It's happened once or twice and is a bit of a pain but I'm too cheap to pay for a bigger monthly quota.
64kbps sucks for most content but VoIP actually performs pretty well over the slow connection, it's the one application that doesn't give me grief. I probably have 20 or 30 calls a day.
The shaped approach is very common in Australia and definitely a better approach than just cutting off access.
Seconded.
I fully agree, this works well for me too. I find cutting calories works much better than increasing exercise. I try to do both but am not always as disciplined with the exercise.
Probably lost around 15 kg over that last 5 months and most of that is attributable to diet - I'm sure the exercise has helped a little but I'm not doing it regularly or intensive enough to be genuinely 'fit'.
Erm, yes, we do. Especially since Port Arthur, there are high levels of public support in Australia for tighter gun controls. You, as an individual Australian might not agree with gun controls but We, as in the majority, want these laws.
"An unarmed population is an oppressed population". Who exactly is oppressing you, that you need a firearm to protect your freedom? The fact is that in a properly functioning democracy, with appropriate civil policing, the population does not need firearms.
If you want to use guns, fine. Join a rifle club and leave your weapon locked up there. Or join the Army Reserves where they pay you to shoot, and defend our freedoms. You could even use the argument 'I live in the bush and I want to be able to go pig shooting'.
But don't try and tell me you as a citizen need to keep a gun to protect yourself from 'oppression'. You live in Australia, not Sudan.
IANAL, but my understanding is that it is already legal for employers to monitor any and all use of employees emails, IM, etc. The company owns the computers so they can do what they want with them. There is no distinction between work-related and personal emails if they were sent or received using company resources.
The Attorney-General says otherwise which is a surprise to me, and also I'm sure to much of the business and legal community. The legal advice to several businesses I've worked at, is that they are well within rights to intercept employee emails.
Any Australian lawyers that can comment on this?
I'm pretty sure the best approach (if there are no other constraints) is to use both - more and better data, and the best algorithm, will give the best results won't it?
If you have other goals - like getting the best result for a fixed amount of money or time - then you look at compromising.
Look at ethics, not behaviour
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 1
Maybe you shouldn't be looking for anecdotes etc or trying to handle 'IT' ethics as somehow separate from ethics in the more general sense. The study of ethics is more about how to arrive at valid decisions on complex ethical issues - in IT there is much new or unexplored territory in this regard but the underlying dilemmas, and the way they're approached remains the same as for any other field.
You should be trying to clear up these new or murky problems with well-reasoned arguments. Don't spend too much time on cut and dry issues where people have just decided to do the wrong thing anyway. Instead focus on issues where people may genuinely want to do the right thing but have difficulty deciding just what that is.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, best move for them (Labor Party). Sorry should have been clearer.
As for myself - I feel there are a lot of problems with the way censorship is handled in this country, and it's getting worse with the proposed internet filter etc.
The government is using the 'protect the children' line to outflank the Right and minimise electoral damage. Basically having their cake and eating it too.
If you read Brendan O'Conner's comments you'll see that the government is suggesting the purpose of the R18 rating for games is to 'protect teenagers' - and by pushing this line in the media they deny that ground to the conservatives. This way the government gets to implement a sensible policy which the majority of the electorate want, but at the same time they can sell it as 'protecting the children' to make it palatable to the more moderate social conservatives.
This was really the best move, although it's a shame they can't just be honest with the electorate and sell the policy on its own merits. I suspect it has been planned this way since their community consultation backfired so spectacularly. It was just a matter of timing, waiting for the SA attorney-general to leave.
I didn't suggest that clearance implies access. Nor that these 854000 all had access to the documents that have come out via WikiLeaks.
The point I was making:
With so many people involved in the security apparatus, it is inevitable that security breaches will happen. The more secrets and the more people involved, the higher the risk of breaches occurring.
Even if people are loyal and trustworthy 100% of the time, the complexity of such a large bureaucracy guarantees that mistakes will happen.
How is my reasoning 'completely bogus'?
While we're talking about the Washington Post:
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/
Remember the saying 'two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead'?
How about 854 000? I'm sure they are all completely trustworthy huh.
Cameron, love the site, it's a great tool. I managed to have a look before it was nuked.
The AEC should have thought of this a long time ago!
Now all we need is some information on those dozens of independent candidates. Beyond their name. Google could only help me with a few of them.
I concur.
Now, let's talk about HTML5 and encumbered video codecs....
I also grew up in Queensland, and am back living here now. Sadly there is a lot of truth in the comment above.
Queensland used to be very progressive... in the 19th century. We had the world's first Labour government in 1899. And until 1910 the Queensland Education Act guaranteed a free and secular education for every child. Then it was amended, to remove the 'secular' references and include provisions for bible classes in government schools. It's been that way since.
It's depressing to think we've been going backwards for 100 years.
Not sure if this was a troll or not... but here you go anyway:
King prawn info from Sydney Fish Market
This is what is being cooked when Hoges says he will 'slip another shrimp on the barbie'
Australian tourism ad from 1984
I disagree. Abbott already has a proven record of forcing it down people's throats.
(see http://www.theage.com.au/news/sushi-das/mr-abbott-minister-for-meddling/2005/11/23/1132703249708.html)
Unfortunately Abbott is not on his own in this regard, I believe this may be something that Abbott and Rudd actually have in common.
For example, the ridiculous taxpayer-funded school chaplaincy program introduced under Howard, has been continued with additional funding under Rudd.
http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/NationalSchoolChaplaincyProgram/Pages/home.aspx
I don't see how my taxes should be paying for someone to evangelise at what is meant to be a secular school. If they wanted a school counselling program with actual psychologists, I'd be all for that. And don't get me started on 'religious education' at secular schools...
Also while we're talking lobbies, I'll point out an alternative: http://australiansecularlobby.com/
I too, think it will suck. Dune was a great novel, but pretty dense in terms of details and plot even for a book. Trying to film it has not worked well so far - you just can't translate a book like that into a 2 hour movie.
I also thought the Lord of the Rings movies sucked too. After watching even just the first one, I hated hobbits - if I saw one walking down the street I'd want to punch it in the face. I say that as a fan of the books.
Taking this further - why does government have anything to do with religion at all?
Why are there tax breaks for religions?
How does that fit in to capitalism and open markets? e.g. the Sanitarium food company in Australia, owned by the Seventh Day Adventist church. Their advertisements on TV do not advertise the fact that they are owned by the church or operate as a charity (if you're a charity why not advertise the fact!), and while as a charitable company I'm sure most of the profits go back to the community, you can certainly argue that this is state-sponsored evangelism due to the tax breaks they receive.
Why does the state have anything to do with marriage - gay or hetero? Rather than debate about whether the government should allow or ban gay marriages, I suggest the government get out of the marriage business altogether. Marriage is about belief systems, this is personal and different people have different views. It shouldn't be legislated any more than what pants I decide to wear or what music I like to listen to - or what church I choose to belong to (if any). The government and courts should have a minimal role regarding living arrangements and tax arrangements, but only to protect people financially in case of relationship breakdowns, or to resolve custody issues.
Apart from this let people decide who they want to live with, and when, and if they are a member of a church and want to get married that's between their church, their god, and themselves.
I've had a quick scan through the comments and couldn't find any jokes about the Toyota Matrix using its passengers as human batteries for environmentally-friendly power... or about how the automatic traction control system gained sentience and has now started a war against mankind... or about how this lady should've taken the blue pill instead if she just wanted to live her normal boring content life...
What is Slashdot coming to... I thought it was news for nerds?
"The Washington Times reports, 'The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive they swamped the agency's inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.' One senior executive at the National Science Foundation spent at least 331 days looking at Slashdot on his government computer, records show. The cost to taxpayers: up to $58,000. Why aren't they running a product like Websense?"
I hate to think how much money Slashdot has cost us collectively, over the years.... not to mention all the 'psych problems'
As far as justifying use of full-volume encryption, I would guess that for 99% of people they are protecting data against accidental loss or theft of laptops and portable storage devices.
Corporate espionage etc is a whole other ballgame. Disk encryption can't protect against someone who is really determined to get their hands on your data, remember most users will divulge their passwords if you give them a chocolate bar... that's without resorting to rubber hoses :)
But disk encryption is useful and worthwhile if just to prevent PR disasters when an exec's laptop is left in a cab or at an airport.
I think it can be done, and done well. All the problems have been solved before/already.
As for Joe Average, I think his faith is not that hard to get. He already shops online, watches Fox News, eats at the food court in the mall.
If a bunch of professors, lawyers, and IT people tell him that a new electronic voting system is trustworthy, that will probably be good enough for him. They won't even need to explain exactly why it is trustworthy.
It doesn't even need to be perfect, just 'good enough' - i.e. a lot better than the current options.
One I remember from university was the 'dinosaur' book, "Applied Operating Systems Concepts" by Ali Silberschwartz, Peter Galvin, and Greg Gagne.
Although not a book on thread programming per se I remember it had lots of discussion about threads, semaphores, mutexes, shared mem, resource locking etc and I think good understanding of these topics is essential before you dive into trying to write and debug multi-threaded programs!
Especially if you already have significant programming experience I guess you mainly want the theory anyway.
I think it had exercises around these topics using Java as the teaching language to demonstrate the concepts. (If I'm still thinking of the same book)
http://www.amazon.com/Applied-Operating-Concepts-Abraham-Silberschatz/dp/0471365084?tag=particculturf-20
I'm in Australia and have a 12GB peak usage cap/month (7am to 7pm). If I use up this limit my bandwidth is shaped down to 64kbps (I think?) until the beginning of the next month. It's happened once or twice and is a bit of a pain but I'm too cheap to pay for a bigger monthly quota.
64kbps sucks for most content but VoIP actually performs pretty well over the slow connection, it's the one application that doesn't give me grief. I probably have 20 or 30 calls a day.
The shaped approach is very common in Australia and definitely a better approach than just cutting off access.
Seconded.
I fully agree, this works well for me too. I find cutting calories works much better than increasing exercise. I try to do both but am not always as disciplined with the exercise.
Probably lost around 15 kg over that last 5 months and most of that is attributable to diet - I'm sure the exercise has helped a little but I'm not doing it regularly or intensive enough to be genuinely 'fit'.
Erm, yes, we do. Especially since Port Arthur, there are high levels of public support in Australia for tighter gun controls. You, as an individual Australian might not agree with gun controls but We, as in the majority, want these laws.
"An unarmed population is an oppressed population". Who exactly is oppressing you, that you need a firearm to protect your freedom? The fact is that in a properly functioning democracy, with appropriate civil policing, the population does not need firearms.
If you want to use guns, fine. Join a rifle club and leave your weapon locked up there. Or join the Army Reserves where they pay you to shoot, and defend our freedoms. You could even use the argument 'I live in the bush and I want to be able to go pig shooting'.
But don't try and tell me you as a citizen need to keep a gun to protect yourself from 'oppression'. You live in Australia, not Sudan.
IANAL, but my understanding is that it is already legal for employers to monitor any and all use of employees emails, IM, etc. The company owns the computers so they can do what they want with them. There is no distinction between work-related and personal emails if they were sent or received using company resources.
The Attorney-General says otherwise which is a surprise to me, and also I'm sure to much of the business and legal community. The legal advice to several businesses I've worked at, is that they are well within rights to intercept employee emails.
Any Australian lawyers that can comment on this?
I'm pretty sure the best approach (if there are no other constraints) is to use both - more and better data, and the best algorithm, will give the best results won't it? If you have other goals - like getting the best result for a fixed amount of money or time - then you look at compromising.
Maybe you shouldn't be looking for anecdotes etc or trying to handle 'IT' ethics as somehow separate from ethics in the more general sense. The study of ethics is more about how to arrive at valid decisions on complex ethical issues - in IT there is much new or unexplored territory in this regard but the underlying dilemmas, and the way they're approached remains the same as for any other field.
You should be trying to clear up these new or murky problems with well-reasoned arguments. Don't spend too much time on cut and dry issues where people have just decided to do the wrong thing anyway. Instead focus on issues where people may genuinely want to do the right thing but have difficulty deciding just what that is.