Unfortunately all advanced forms of government seem to devolve into to populist democracies, probably then onto dictatorship but we're not quite far enough along the timeline to see yet.
You think that any government sponsored vote tallying system will ever use such complex and costly things as quantum encryption?
RSA has been around for how long again? Do any of them use it...No.
*Hint* No government in the world is going to develop or pay hundred of millions of dollars for an ultra secure hollywood movie style electronic systems that will be used for one day every four years. Especially when there's a perfectly good, proven and cheap way of doing it that's worked over and over for the last few hundred years.
They'll do exactly what they have been doing, half assing it to satisfy people like you, the technology for technologys sake crowd. And then when it all fails scrap it and go back to the cheap, easy and proven method.
It is you who is delusional; delusional of where government departments priorities lay. Certainly not in maintaining the type of multi-million dollar secure networks that you want which will be used once every four years and spend the other 3 years and 11 months costing money and manpower.
Your bizarre expression of paper not being more secure is rather bizarre too, given it's 300+ year proven track record, I and ten thousand others can stand and watch paper votes being counted. Hell I can volunteer to count them myself. How is that possible with a computer? And What if there's a sun spot, or defective memory stick or a million other problems and a single bit that flips and causes 500 to become 5000? That's enough to win an election. Will these electronic systems need to be that hardened as well? How much will that cost? Would they have to redo the election?
Probably easier and safer to stick with the tried and true method I'd say.
Perhaps you should go back to 1946 and tell that to the Allies before they hang 'innocent' (according to jmorris) Japanese officers for doing it. Also make sure you tell the US and Aussie POWs (especially the high ranking officers!) who were on the receiving end of it that you don't 'concede' that they were tortured.
Big fucking heros you American 'conservatives' are aren't ya.
Except when *your* on the receiving end of any of your bankrupt ideology.
"crossed the line to treason more than once"
Good god.
Was it treason when that fat fuck on Fox openly declared he hoped the navy rescue of that ships crew would fail? Or that your all critising Obama in *gasp* a time of war?!
Right.
Critising Bush = Treason. Critising Obama = Patriot.
There's a reason your party is being completely dominated - You and your ilk and your muddled and *completely* morally bankrupt ideology ARE THAT REASON.
It's a shame too, because I bet you only make up a tiny fraction of the party. It's always the extremists who are the noisiest and ruin it for the reasonable majority unfortunately.
"The 4chan kiddies (or more likely, their mommies and daddies) should also be subject to civil suits. Just because the internet exists, doesn't give you the right to be a sick fuck. It also doesn't make being a sick fuck consequence free."
It's funny (in a holy shit that's disturbing) kind of way. There's lots of people here blaming an 18 year olds parents for not locking her in a closet - the only realistic way to stop a 90% grown adult from taking any particular course of action.
But nobody is talking about the parents who have raised the abominiations that are the individuals that frequent 4chan et-al and perpetrate and get pleasure from this kind of sick behaviour.
This girl unfortunately made two *serious* errors of judgement and payed the ultimate cost. Something tragic, and stupid but not unexpected from an 18 year old, upper OR lower class. It's *hardly* a new phenomena.
But these 4chan 'kiddies' (creepily enough most of whom are in their early twentys and are actually grown men), what twisted upbringing did they have? What UTTER FAILURES were *their* parents who raised such mentally sick & twisted individuals.
Everyone wants to heap blame on the girls parents for not locking her up, but where's the fire and brimstone when it comes to the perverse actions of the Man/Children who get *pleasure* out of this sort of disgusting behaviour and to *their* so called parents who "raised" them to think that that sort of shit is ok?
I'm sure her parents gave her the cocaine. Idiot. At 23 do your parents still wipe your arse for you? Most people move out of home as adults at 18, 18 year olds aren't "children".
And by the looks of your abomination of a homepage http://damiennightbane.livejournal.com/ your pretty much everything wrong with the internet typified so I wouldn't talk too loud about other peoples parents failing.
Just because you spent your entire life in your basement posting to 4chan doesn't mean anyone else does. Those of us who grew up in normal social circles get exposed to this thing called "life", where access to drugs of various types is par for the course and 18 years old is *hardly* considered a child.
Though just reading through that embarrassment you call a blog you say you've smoked pot (bloody hypocrite), watch porn (psuedo child porn - Hentai), carry a knife with you everywhere you go and your also proud (a little too proud for a 23 year old) of the fact that you're a racist, 4chan posing internet loser.
23 years old, and your blog reads like a angsty 15 year olds Myspace page.
Something about throwing stones in glasshouses and all that comes to mind.
"The reason is that the Internet has a LOT of doomsdayers, if you haven't noticed."
You could swap the title "Swine Flu" for "Bird Flu" and the comments are *exactly* the same. It's a little disturbing, either people have very short memories or they don't learn a goddamned thing from history. I mean even the same "solution" is being offered - Tamiflu. Seriously WTF http://www.smh.com.au/world/science/tamiflu-linked-to-abnormal-behaviour-20090420-ac3y.html If I was more cynical I'd think the makers of Tamiflu might just have the best marketing department in the world.
Oh but *this time* it's different so says the self entitled 'elite'. It's got x, y and z, SARS was *childs play* compared to what this is going to be! Better to overreact than not act at all! (Try posting that in an article about anything else).
I'll make a prediction, I predict that there will be a pompous overuse of the word "vector" in the comments here.
In general there's a high incidence of people on these boards whose lives are so boring that deep down they long for some sort of drama. That and they are just as prone to fits of hysteria as the "sheeple" that so many around here deride so much.
And when none of it comes to pass, just like it didn't with Sars, just like it didn't when Bush was meant to call Marshall law and cancel the election a dozen times, there will be silence.
Farmers sprayed arsenic on their crops and fed their cows mashed up cow, pig and chicken carcasses to make them 5% more productive.
So probably best not to put *to* much stock in what "farmers" (huge agri-corps run by paid employees - old school farmers are thin and few in between these days) think is best, because it might just wind up killing you.
"I'm disappointed rather than exciting by this news. It could have achieved so much more. In some ways it feels like a lost oppotunity that could so easily have really impressed and create something truely useful."
On the way up a country, any country, and it's people have a sense of purpose and something to prove. Massive projects that say here we are look at us ya carnts we're the best at everything and look at what we can DO (pre ~1960s America, pre 1920's England, China's beginning to). And the citizens are proud of what they have achieved.
Once that proud generations children are born, they naturally rebel against what their parents hold dear, and importantly they actually *believe* that they are the best and that their country is the best but don't really know *why*. Unfortunately then that's the end of it and general mediocrity sets in where everyone's comfortable and will coast along and gaze at their navels pondering such BS as whether it's ethical to boil crabs to eat...while the country and their lifestyle decays around them.
For at least a few generations at least anyway. Though apart from China I'm not currently aware of any country that has risen, peaked, fallen then risen to dominance again without major internal turmoil and redrawn borders in effect creating new countries for the cycle to start over in.
Just like the federal highway system in your country, Before that damned pork barrel project was built the economy was booming! And with all those competing private transport options like...err rail and rail to get goods all over the country industry had no problems at all. Why in the last half a century that highway system has created no wealth for anyone at all! In fact apparently it's *destroyed* wealth.
Oh wait...or was it the opposite? It allowed goods to be moved cheaply from anywhere *to* anywhere, which without the economy of a geographically huge country is completely at the mercy of one or two rail companies...Just like it was.
Must have got caught up in your rabid libertarian idealogical fervor for a second there jcr, you're very convincing.
NOT.
And we won't even mention that pork barrel DARPA created federally funded internet...didn't create a single goddamned job at all, how dare they destroy all that wealth! Without that internet, hugely funded in its infancy by governments across the world, we'd all be *so* much wealthier.
Like most Libertarians you make some good points sometimes jcr but then there's times that (like all Libertarians and most people with an axe to grind) your ideology diverges *so far* from reality that people just won't swallow it at all. It's a shame really because if you all knocked that 10% of crazy out of the Libertarian platform you would all actually get somewhere with the average person.
No reason to oppose expansions of Executive Power if you are the Executive, is there?
A hell of a lot of people were pleading with the supporters of the bush administrations crazy expansion of power that just because they like *him* having the power, doesn't mean they'll appreciate the position having it when someone else is elected.
So now they've done a 180 degree reverse on the last eight years of ideology and now wail and gnash their teeth saying 'dictator' this and 'evil' that because it's someone they don't like wielding it. I no longer see the walls of text posted by the more 'conservative' members of forums posting excruciatingly twisted excerpts and personal interpretation of federal law to lend their support to the executives power of warrantless wiretapping, torture and Guantanamo Bay like I did 12 months ago.
When the Bush administration was calling for massive handouts to the welfare sector..erm financial sector and nationalisation of some banks the 'conservatives' were supportive (no libertarians i'm not speaking about you so settle). When Obama started talking about the same thing then it was socialism and again a 180 degree reverse was made and the wailing and gnashing of teeth began.
"So it's a bit disappointing to see Obama make poor choices and then have those choices justified with "But look what Bush did,""
=
"So it's a bit disappointing to see Bush make poor choices and then have those choices justified with "But look what Clinton did,"
It's just the way of the world and most of the people that do it, on both sides, don't realise just how exactly the same they are to one another. And that they *themselves* are the problem just as much as the other blathering fool.
Hanlon's Razor sounds like it should be renamed to "The GWB Principle"
Heading up an administration that achieved every goal that the top level members of had publicly advocated for over and over for a decade is incompetence?
Reopened war and regime change in Iraq? Check. Hobbling the US federal government by drowning it in debt? Check. Funneling astronomical amounts of public cash into their personal associates Corporations and by extension their own bank accounts? Check. And to top it off, in the last months of presidency, presiding over the greatest plundering of a treasury in the history of the world...Check.
Yes, what a bunch of incompetents, incompetently sitting on their mountains of cash, untouchable by any law after having changed the course of history as they saw fit. Exactly as they said in the 1990s that they were going to do once they got back into power.
Did you just honestly try and tell the readers of this fine site that the CEO of Google somehow doesn't have a handle on, doesn't have even a *basic* understanding of the crazy out there concept of selling eyeballs to advertisers?
I mean really...the CEO of Google.
I'm going to take a guess, but I think he's probably heard of the idea before. Dunno where, but I'm pretty sure of it. Something to do with that website that's the biggest data mining operation in the world that exists solely to sell eyeballs to advertisers.
They say they're going to create a blacklist and nobody in Australia will be able to view any of the sites that have been put on the list as the internet is filtered at the borders with hundreds of millions of dollars of labour, hardware and software funded by taxes to the Federal Government. So if we can't access any of it, thanks to the 100 million dollar filters, we can see the list then right? We can view the list and nobody can access anything on it! Perfect transparency and all is well.
Well no, see the filters are going to be easily by-passable, they're only there to stop *kids* from accessing unwanted material...but they'll stop also paedophiles from accessing child porn to be sure!
To Paraph Steven Conroy on Insight the other night:
And it's ONLY about stopping childporn...hear me just child pornography...
And anti abortion sites...and Pro Euthenasia sites...and Anorexia sites...and any site that advocates self harm...and any site that promotes terrorism.
But it's *just* about child pornography,....(and rape sites and incest sites).
See, just...child porn, protecting the kiddies nothing else.
On Q&A on the ABC The smarmy newspaper "columnist" that was giving Sen. Conroy dreamy looks all night gave himself away as well "Why should people be allowed to read Jihadist literature" plus the constant fall back to "Well in a civil society x *should* be banned" argument with of course him deciding what's civil and what's not.
This is not and never was about child porn.
And I've got to say, the internet losers (sorry harsh but they *were* classic examples of) who were there didn't help things at all. Dear 4chan losers, your internet memes are funny to you on the internet and in your dorms with your loser mates, but in the real world and to the average man on the street they're embarrassing and weird. You did *far* more harm than good to the perception of the anti censorship argument with your childish rubbish and mealy mouthed tired soundbites. Did someone seriously stand up and say "1984 is a warning not a manual" in real life on national TV? Yes yes they did and I gotta say it doesn't translate....at all, not to mention wasting time that someone who actually had a reasonable point to make could have used. Oh and everyone watching groaned and face palmed except Conroy who smirked at the easy pickings.
Seriously if that's the best you can come up with, regurgitating +5 slashdot comments, don't bother standing up and opening your mouth.
And, for the record, "they" didn't take away a bunch of guns; only extremists assert that they enforced it. If you want a gun in Australia you can buy one just about as easily as anywhere else in the world.
Please don't lie it makes us all look bad.
You can't legally buy *any* semi-automatic or automatic firearm in Australia. Many bolt action long arms are banned as are most side arms. To purchase and own a gun you have to have a signed letter from a rural landholder saying you can shoot on their property, or be an accredited sports shooter (where the guns you are allowed to buy are a heavily restricted subset of the above).
Finally the agreement to getting a gun license gives the police the power to access your home at any time without a warrant.
The fact that they tried to enforce the gun ban (which it effectively is) and failed miserably as can be seen by the ridiculous amount of gun violence in the country for the last few years doesn't mean they didn't try their hardest. Just that they're incompetent.
Given that the vast majority of people in any society are "parents" and being that societies are by definition made up of parents and their children...I think your argument makes about as much sense as me saying that it's the selfish childless morally bankrupt individuals in society that are pushing these laws because they hate other peoples children.
Or that you can't have morality until you have a child and the childless are without morality living only for themselves and leeching off our childrens society when they become older.
Wow that's *really really* easy. You know we can all bandy about fuckin *stupid* arguments, but I gotta tell you yours is probably one of the most empty headed of any I've seen on this site.
Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were both dads, in fact most of the great thinkers, leaders and men of history were. How does that reconcile with your braindead "argument" that it's childless 20 year olds that are the arbiters of "reasonableness" and free thought?
I think you've got some *serious* growing up and thought to do on the general goings on in the world. The fact that it's modded insightful shows how many petty little maladjusted middle class 80's - 90's era latch-key kids there are around here. You hate your parents, WE GET IT, but you are *not* the norm.
When, oh when are people around here going to mature in their world views a little?
"That's a disaster, and much of it is related to high-tech jobs leaving Ireland for elsewhere."
And for Ireland whoring itself out like a 40 year old thai prostitute to every multinational on the planet. A lesson to be learned for those that rant and rave on about how countries should capitulate to the threat of corporations moving offshore if their every whim and fancy isn't catered to in their home country. Ireland catered to every whim and fancy and then some. What happened? Some moved their charters to Ireland abused the lax corporate laws and the *moment* the going got tough, they cut and ran. Where? Back to the protection of their home countries and the laws that they left that prevent them behaving as they did in Ireland. Unfortunately leaving Ireland as a shell of her former self - 30 years of real albeit slow progress undone in 10 years by greed with a side dish of a severe dose of reality for the Irish.
Whoring yourself out with low standards (lax corporate laws and effectively no corporate tax) only attracts the bottom feeders, they don't love you, don't give a shit about your country and the citizens *will* pay for the lax laws and regulation sooner or later.
If you believe that music distribution, artistic variety, consumer cost and access is "flourishing" because of a handful of low level civil lawsuits brought about by a handful of 50 year old corporations, and not *in spite* of them, then you're so far off this planet that I doubt this post will reach you in my lifetime. I'll give you a bit of help on the recent goings on of this world, as you're obviously not part of it. About 8 years ago this thing called the "Internet" became pretty much ubiquitous in peoples homes. A delivery mechanism that allowed people, average everyday 'typical' people, access to a mass distribution network without going hat in hand to old, lumbering very controlling corporations. The same corporations that apparently you idolise and falsely attribute the recent 'flourishing' activities too (how far off this planet are you again?). The same corporate entities that controlled mass media distribution for 50+ years before the Internet was born. Oh where was this renaissance (for lack of a better word) of which you speak in *those* 50 years? Oh not enough "IP" laws...right...
Your post is so full of hubris and delusion that when I came to the piece about "the typical person" I nearly fell of this fine chair I'm sitting in. Where you - an obvious idealogical radical so full of himself that it oozes out onto the page, thinks you can describe anything of the "typical person". Here's a hint, radical 'intellectuals' such as yourself know nothing of the "typical person" by definition. I'll help you though, the average person knows *nothing* about these civil lawsuits and cares no more for copyright law now than they did 20 years ago when making mix tapes and copying tapes and LPs and CDs to tape and giving them to friends was thing to do. To the 'typical person' copyright law is a grey area that that they don't really care about, twenty years ago, thirty years ago AND NOW. Now you claim that people are more aware than ever, but file sharing is more open and more accessible and more popular than ever! So the average man on the street certainly doesn't give a damn about your pathetic radical "IP" ideology now does he? If he knowingly disregards it. Your own argument invalidates itself.
Finally, what a disgusting attempt to try and reposition the entities and corporations and ideology that's been *desperately* trying to stifle and control this new renaissance for the last 8 years as the entities that actually brought it about. You should be absolutely ashamed of yourself.
(Yes I know, 'psudeo-intellectual' radicals have no shame, nor a firm grasp on reality as is displayed in all its glory in your post).
In the haste to throw out the smarmy blue blooded $50k a year private school aristocrat wannabes known as the liberals out of government, we've introduced something that's so far been *far* worse. And I say that as someone voted for them!
At least the liberals had a solid grounding in running the country and seemed to know what the hell they were doing. So far Rudd and that dimwitted treasurer Swan have been blundering about without any sort of cohesive strategy and burning through billions of dollars a day doing it.
It would seem that like any 'revolution', when the dust settles usually the country ends up worse off when the populist leader takes power.
Even my father, a dyed in the wool blue collar labour man has started questioning whether Rudd's more interested in selling us out to China, financially AND ideologically than the he is in the national good. What sort of politician pushes something like this onto his own free country?
Who is Rudd really? (Seriously I'm genuinely interested).
There. Now Slashdot *must* be put on the list as well, pro-illicit drug sites are censored, as are pro-euthenasia sites and I assume anti-censorship sites (such as wikileaks). And inevitably anti-government and anti-globalisation (anti G8, etc) sites.
Slashdot is all of those things at some time or another...to bad bye bye Slashdot.
At least productivity will go up in Australias IT sector without it.
This is NOT about childporn it's not even been sold as such.
always prefix and end your conversations with "yes sir" and "no sir".
This has always baffled me about you Americans, you viciously and readily proclaim yourselves as a nation of citizens over state power and the freest people on earth, but every single time a thread like this comes up people say baffling things like the above. Why would you, a free and presumably upstanding citizen of the community call a public servant "Sir" - in a manner that's really a bit too close to groveling for comfort?
How does having to grovel to police officers lest you upset them and they ruin your life (apparently they have this much power in your country) make you the freest people on earth?
I don't know about general social mores in the US, and perhaps calling people Sir is something that everyone does, but here in Australia nobody calls anybody Sir except for people employed in the service industry and some children to adults. If I was being bailed up by the police and I started calling them Sir, it'd probably make things worse. Either they'd think I was a spineless lick-spittle trying to suck up to them and so not worthy of ANY respect, or they'd think I was taking the piss and being a smartarse and so worthy of a hard time.
Whenever I've had association with police on either side of the law (more often than I'd like to admit now that I think about it), I speak to them in exactly the same manner that I would speak to any other reasonable and upstanding adult that I have just met. With general politeness and general respect, no more and no less, they're not gods and treating them as such is probably half the reason your police run around thinking they are. Wouldn't you get a bit of an ego if people were falling at your feet calling you Sir everywhere you went just because of some government power you wield?
Of course you're entirely correct about the temper and arguing, but attempts at gentle correction of inaccuracies in the officers claims are perfectly reasonable, they're just people after all and may well be wrong. And if they're a reasonable person and officer they'll listen to what you have to say. If they're a prick then all bets are off anyway temper or not.
I enjoy the internet, sometimes it lets me see how much better my own country is than others in various things, (the opposite too).
No it takes capital and the *want* and *desire* to. And I think it's more the dollar an hour wages and virtual slave labour that entice companies to China rather than tax incentives.
Why would anybody ever invest huge amounts of money to build a factory in the USA or the UK or France, when there is state sanctioned slave labour across the other side of the worldand western governments are happy to allow it? Or have you been asleep for the past 30 years as the people who have the ability to build factories in the west have shut them down and moved them to...China.
My point which you seem to have completely missed, is that IP can't be controlled by physical force. If your countries main industry is the production of ideas and entertainment - "IP" then China can take the product of that industry and sell it or make use of it for free, and there's *nothing* you can physically do to stop that. Or to put it another way, China can pillage your industry at will without shedding a drop of blood. On the other hand your country can't just magic up a thousand factories and start mass producing a million types of widgets and items that are required for any modern country to function. And if you want to pillage Chinas (as they can do to yours at will), you'll have to shed a fair bit of blood first.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hey, we had a crash 42 hours into the run, can you take a look?"
"Sure, it'll take me about 120 hours to get to it with a debug build."
Perhaps you should take a course on exception handling and logging.
And before you ask, I work on a system that takes weeks to analyse data and create reports too.
Unfortunately all advanced forms of government seem to devolve into to populist democracies, probably then onto dictatorship but we're not quite far enough along the timeline to see yet.
You think that any government sponsored vote tallying system will ever use such complex and costly things as quantum encryption?
RSA has been around for how long again? Do any of them use it...No.
*Hint* No government in the world is going to develop or pay hundred of millions of dollars for an ultra secure hollywood movie style electronic systems that will be used for one day every four years. Especially when there's a perfectly good, proven and cheap way of doing it that's worked over and over for the last few hundred years.
They'll do exactly what they have been doing, half assing it to satisfy people like you, the technology for technologys sake crowd. And then when it all fails scrap it and go back to the cheap, easy and proven method.
It is you who is delusional; delusional of where government departments priorities lay. Certainly not in maintaining the type of multi-million dollar secure networks that you want which will be used once every four years and spend the other 3 years and 11 months costing money and manpower.
Your bizarre expression of paper not being more secure is rather bizarre too, given it's 300+ year proven track record, I and ten thousand others can stand and watch paper votes being counted. Hell I can volunteer to count them myself. How is that possible with a computer? And What if there's a sun spot, or defective memory stick or a million other problems and a single bit that flips and causes 500 to become 5000? That's enough to win an election. Will these electronic systems need to be that hardened as well? How much will that cost? Would they have to redo the election?
Probably easier and safer to stick with the tried and true method I'd say.
"I won't concede that waterboarding is torture"
Well that's big of you.
Perhaps you should go back to 1946 and tell that to the Allies before they hang 'innocent' (according to jmorris) Japanese officers for doing it. Also make sure you tell the US and Aussie POWs (especially the high ranking officers!) who were on the receiving end of it that you don't 'concede' that they were tortured.
Big fucking heros you American 'conservatives' are aren't ya.
Except when *your* on the receiving end of any of your bankrupt ideology.
"crossed the line to treason more than once"
Good god.
Was it treason when that fat fuck on Fox openly declared he hoped the navy rescue of that ships crew would fail? Or that your all critising Obama in *gasp* a time of war?!
Right.
Critising Bush = Treason.
Critising Obama = Patriot.
There's a reason your party is being completely dominated - You and your ilk and your muddled and *completely* morally bankrupt ideology ARE THAT REASON.
It's a shame too, because I bet you only make up a tiny fraction of the party. It's always the extremists who are the noisiest and ruin it for the reasonable majority unfortunately.
"The 4chan kiddies (or more likely, their mommies and daddies) should also be subject to civil suits. Just because the internet exists, doesn't give you the right to be a sick fuck. It also doesn't make being a sick fuck consequence free."
It's funny (in a holy shit that's disturbing) kind of way. There's lots of people here blaming an 18 year olds parents for not locking her in a closet - the only realistic way to stop a 90% grown adult from taking any particular course of action.
But nobody is talking about the parents who have raised the abominiations that are the individuals that frequent 4chan et-al and perpetrate and get pleasure from this kind of sick behaviour.
This girl unfortunately made two *serious* errors of judgement and payed the ultimate cost. Something tragic, and stupid but not unexpected from an 18 year old, upper OR lower class. It's *hardly* a new phenomena.
But these 4chan 'kiddies' (creepily enough most of whom are in their early twentys and are actually grown men), what twisted upbringing did they have? What UTTER FAILURES were *their* parents who raised such mentally sick & twisted individuals.
Everyone wants to heap blame on the girls parents for not locking her up, but where's the fire and brimstone when it comes to the perverse actions of the Man/Children who get *pleasure* out of this sort of disgusting behaviour and to *their* so called parents who "raised" them to think that that sort of shit is ok?
A little to close to home on this site I imagine.
I'm sure her parents gave her the cocaine. Idiot. At 23 do your parents still wipe your arse for you? Most people move out of home as adults at 18, 18 year olds aren't "children".
And by the looks of your abomination of a homepage http://damiennightbane.livejournal.com/ your pretty much everything wrong with the internet typified so I wouldn't talk too loud about other peoples parents failing.
Just because you spent your entire life in your basement posting to 4chan doesn't mean anyone else does. Those of us who grew up in normal social circles get exposed to this thing called "life", where access to drugs of various types is par for the course and 18 years old is *hardly* considered a child.
Though just reading through that embarrassment you call a blog you say you've smoked pot (bloody hypocrite), watch porn (psuedo child porn - Hentai), carry a knife with you everywhere you go and your also proud (a little too proud for a 23 year old) of the fact that you're a racist, 4chan posing internet loser.
23 years old, and your blog reads like a angsty 15 year olds Myspace page.
Something about throwing stones in glasshouses and all that comes to mind.
"The reason is that the Internet has a LOT of doomsdayers, if you haven't noticed."
You could swap the title "Swine Flu" for "Bird Flu" and the comments are *exactly* the same. It's a little disturbing, either people have very short memories or they don't learn a goddamned thing from history. I mean even the same "solution" is being offered - Tamiflu. Seriously WTF http://www.smh.com.au/world/science/tamiflu-linked-to-abnormal-behaviour-20090420-ac3y.html If I was more cynical I'd think the makers of Tamiflu might just have the best marketing department in the world.
Oh but *this time* it's different so says the self entitled 'elite'. It's got x, y and z, SARS was *childs play* compared to what this is going to be! Better to overreact than not act at all! (Try posting that in an article about anything else).
I'll make a prediction, I predict that there will be a pompous overuse of the word "vector" in the comments here.
In general there's a high incidence of people on these boards whose lives are so boring that deep down they long for some sort of drama. That and they are just as prone to fits of hysteria as the "sheeple" that so many around here deride so much.
And when none of it comes to pass, just like it didn't with Sars, just like it didn't when Bush was meant to call Marshall law and cancel the election a dozen times, there will be silence.
Until the next Big Thing(TM)
Farmers sprayed arsenic on their crops and fed their cows mashed up cow, pig and chicken carcasses to make them 5% more productive.
So probably best not to put *to* much stock in what "farmers" (huge agri-corps run by paid employees - old school farmers are thin and few in between these days) think is best, because it might just wind up killing you.
"I'm disappointed rather than exciting by this news. It could have achieved so much more. In some ways it feels like a lost oppotunity that could so easily have really impressed and create something truely useful."
On the way up a country, any country, and it's people have a sense of purpose and something to prove. Massive projects that say here we are look at us ya carnts we're the best at everything and look at what we can DO (pre ~1960s America, pre 1920's England, China's beginning to). And the citizens are proud of what they have achieved.
Once that proud generations children are born, they naturally rebel against what their parents hold dear, and importantly they actually *believe* that they are the best and that their country is the best but don't really know *why*. Unfortunately then that's the end of it and general mediocrity sets in where everyone's comfortable and will coast along and gaze at their navels pondering such BS as whether it's ethical to boil crabs to eat...while the country and their lifestyle decays around them.
For at least a few generations at least anyway. Though apart from China I'm not currently aware of any country that has risen, peaked, fallen then risen to dominance again without major internal turmoil and redrawn borders in effect creating new countries for the cycle to start over in.
Damned shame really.
Yes!
Just like the federal highway system in your country, Before that damned pork barrel project was built the economy was booming! And with all those competing private transport options like...err rail and rail to get goods all over the country industry had no problems at all. Why in the last half a century that highway system has created no wealth for anyone at all! In fact apparently it's *destroyed* wealth.
Oh wait...or was it the opposite? It allowed goods to be moved cheaply from anywhere *to* anywhere, which without the economy of a geographically huge country is completely at the mercy of one or two rail companies...Just like it was.
Must have got caught up in your rabid libertarian idealogical fervor for a second there jcr, you're very convincing.
NOT.
And we won't even mention that pork barrel DARPA created federally funded internet...didn't create a single goddamned job at all, how dare they destroy all that wealth! Without that internet, hugely funded in its infancy by governments across the world, we'd all be *so* much wealthier.
Like most Libertarians you make some good points sometimes jcr but then there's times that (like all Libertarians and most people with an axe to grind) your ideology diverges *so far* from reality that people just won't swallow it at all. It's a shame really because if you all knocked that 10% of crazy out of the Libertarian platform you would all actually get somewhere with the average person.
No reason to oppose expansions of Executive Power if you are the Executive, is there?
A hell of a lot of people were pleading with the supporters of the bush administrations crazy expansion of power that just because they like *him* having the power, doesn't mean they'll appreciate the position having it when someone else is elected.
So now they've done a 180 degree reverse on the last eight years of ideology and now wail and gnash their teeth saying 'dictator' this and 'evil' that because it's someone they don't like wielding it. I no longer see the walls of text posted by the more 'conservative' members of forums posting excruciatingly twisted excerpts and personal interpretation of federal law to lend their support to the executives power of warrantless wiretapping, torture and Guantanamo Bay like I did 12 months ago.
When the Bush administration was calling for massive handouts to the welfare sector..erm financial sector and nationalisation of some banks the 'conservatives' were supportive (no libertarians i'm not speaking about you so settle). When Obama started talking about the same thing then it was socialism and again a 180 degree reverse was made and the wailing and gnashing of teeth began.
So many hypocrites, so little time.
"So it's a bit disappointing to see Obama make poor choices and then have those choices justified with "But look what Bush did,""
=
"So it's a bit disappointing to see Bush make poor choices and then have those choices justified with "But look what Clinton did,"
It's just the way of the world and most of the people that do it, on both sides, don't realise just how exactly the same they are to one another. And that they *themselves* are the problem just as much as the other blathering fool.
Hanlon's Razor sounds like it should be renamed to "The GWB Principle"
Heading up an administration that achieved every goal that the top level members of had publicly advocated for over and over for a decade is incompetence?
Reopened war and regime change in Iraq? Check.
Hobbling the US federal government by drowning it in debt? Check.
Funneling astronomical amounts of public cash into their personal associates Corporations and by extension their own bank accounts? Check.
And to top it off, in the last months of presidency, presiding over the greatest plundering of a treasury in the history of the world...Check.
Yes, what a bunch of incompetents, incompetently sitting on their mountains of cash, untouchable by any law after having changed the course of history as they saw fit. Exactly as they said in the 1990s that they were going to do once they got back into power.
I wish I was that incompetent.
Hold up...
Did you just honestly try and tell the readers of this fine site that the CEO of Google somehow doesn't have a handle on, doesn't have even a *basic* understanding of the crazy out there concept of selling eyeballs to advertisers?
I mean really...the CEO of Google.
I'm going to take a guess, but I think he's probably heard of the idea before. Dunno where, but I'm pretty sure of it. Something to do with that website that's the biggest data mining operation in the world that exists solely to sell eyeballs to advertisers.
Can't remember the name of it.
I'd love to see her try and assert that ownership.
She's just tradition and well knows her place.
The absolute insanity of the situation is this:
They say they're going to create a blacklist and nobody in Australia will be able to view any of the sites that have been put on the list as the internet is filtered at the borders with hundreds of millions of dollars of labour, hardware and software funded by taxes to the Federal Government. So if we can't access any of it, thanks to the 100 million dollar filters, we can see the list then right? We can view the list and nobody can access anything on it! Perfect transparency and all is well.
Well no, see the filters are going to be easily by-passable, they're only there to stop *kids* from accessing unwanted material...but they'll stop also paedophiles from accessing child porn to be sure!
To Paraph Steven Conroy on Insight the other night:
And it's ONLY about stopping childporn...hear me just child pornography...
And anti abortion sites...and Pro Euthenasia sites...and Anorexia sites...and any site that advocates self harm...and any site that promotes terrorism.
But it's *just* about child pornography, ....(and rape sites and incest sites).
See, just...child porn, protecting the kiddies nothing else.
On Q&A on the ABC The smarmy newspaper "columnist" that was giving Sen. Conroy dreamy looks all night gave himself away as well "Why should people be allowed to read Jihadist literature" plus the constant fall back to "Well in a civil society x *should* be banned" argument with of course him deciding what's civil and what's not.
This is not and never was about child porn.
And I've got to say, the internet losers (sorry harsh but they *were* classic examples of) who were there didn't help things at all. Dear 4chan losers, your internet memes are funny to you on the internet and in your dorms with your loser mates, but in the real world and to the average man on the street they're embarrassing and weird. You did *far* more harm than good to the perception of the anti censorship argument with your childish rubbish and mealy mouthed tired soundbites. Did someone seriously stand up and say "1984 is a warning not a manual" in real life on national TV? Yes yes they did and I gotta say it doesn't translate....at all, not to mention wasting time that someone who actually had a reasonable point to make could have used. Oh and everyone watching groaned and face palmed except Conroy who smirked at the easy pickings.
Seriously if that's the best you can come up with, regurgitating +5 slashdot comments, don't bother standing up and opening your mouth.
And, for the record, "they" didn't take away a bunch of guns; only extremists assert that they enforced it. If you want a gun in Australia you can buy one just about
as easily as anywhere else in the world.
Please don't lie it makes us all look bad.
You can't legally buy *any* semi-automatic or automatic firearm in Australia. Many bolt action long arms are banned as are most side arms. To purchase and own a gun you have to have a signed letter from a rural landholder saying you can shoot on their property, or be an accredited sports shooter (where the guns you are allowed to buy are a heavily restricted subset of the above).
Finally the agreement to getting a gun license gives the police the power to access your home at any time without a warrant.
The fact that they tried to enforce the gun ban (which it effectively is) and failed miserably as can be seen by the ridiculous amount of gun violence in the country for the last few years doesn't mean they didn't try their hardest. Just that they're incompetent.
Oh but at least people don't use a gun when they commit suicide now...they're just hanging themselves instead - Trends in hanging and firearm suicide rates in Australia: substitution of method?.
So long as they kill themselves with rope and not a gun makes the anti-gun nuts all warm and fuzzy I 'spose.
Given that the vast majority of people in any society are "parents" and being that societies are by definition made up of parents and their children...I think your argument makes about as much sense as me saying that it's the selfish childless morally bankrupt individuals in society that are pushing these laws because they hate other peoples children.
Or that you can't have morality until you have a child and the childless are without morality living only for themselves and leeching off our childrens society when they become older.
Wow that's *really really* easy. You know we can all bandy about fuckin *stupid* arguments, but I gotta tell you yours is probably one of the most empty headed of any I've seen on this site.
Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were both dads, in fact most of the great thinkers, leaders and men of history were. How does that reconcile with your braindead "argument" that it's childless 20 year olds that are the arbiters of "reasonableness" and free thought?
I think you've got some *serious* growing up and thought to do on the general goings on in the world. The fact that it's modded insightful shows how many petty little maladjusted middle class 80's - 90's era latch-key kids there are around here. You hate your parents, WE GET IT, but you are *not* the norm.
When, oh when are people around here going to mature in their world views a little?
"That's a disaster, and much of it is related to high-tech jobs leaving Ireland for elsewhere."
And for Ireland whoring itself out like a 40 year old thai prostitute to every multinational on the planet. A lesson to be learned for those that rant and rave on about how countries should capitulate to the threat of corporations moving offshore if their every whim and fancy isn't catered to in their home country. Ireland catered to every whim and fancy and then some. What happened? Some moved their charters to Ireland abused the lax corporate laws and the *moment* the going got tough, they cut and ran. Where? Back to the protection of their home countries and the laws that they left that prevent them behaving as they did in Ireland. Unfortunately leaving Ireland as a shell of her former self - 30 years of real albeit slow progress undone in 10 years by greed with a side dish of a severe dose of reality for the Irish.
Whoring yourself out with low standards (lax corporate laws and effectively no corporate tax) only attracts the bottom feeders, they don't love you, don't give a shit about your country and the citizens *will* pay for the lax laws and regulation sooner or later.
If you believe that music distribution, artistic variety, consumer cost and access is "flourishing" because of a handful of low level civil lawsuits brought about by a handful of 50 year old corporations, and not *in spite* of them, then you're so far off this planet that I doubt this post will reach you in my lifetime. I'll give you a bit of help on the recent goings on of this world, as you're obviously not part of it. About 8 years ago this thing called the "Internet" became pretty much ubiquitous in peoples homes. A delivery mechanism that allowed people, average everyday 'typical' people, access to a mass distribution network without going hat in hand to old, lumbering very controlling corporations. The same corporations that apparently you idolise and falsely attribute the recent 'flourishing' activities too (how far off this planet are you again?). The same corporate entities that controlled mass media distribution for 50+ years before the Internet was born. Oh where was this renaissance (for lack of a better word) of which you speak in *those* 50 years? Oh not enough "IP" laws...right...
Your post is so full of hubris and delusion that when I came to the piece about "the typical person" I nearly fell of this fine chair I'm sitting in. Where you - an obvious idealogical radical so full of himself that it oozes out onto the page, thinks you can describe anything of the "typical person". Here's a hint, radical 'intellectuals' such as yourself know nothing of the "typical person" by definition. I'll help you though, the average person knows *nothing* about these civil lawsuits and cares no more for copyright law now than they did 20 years ago when making mix tapes and copying tapes and LPs and CDs to tape and giving them to friends was thing to do. To the 'typical person' copyright law is a grey area that that they don't really care about, twenty years ago, thirty years ago AND NOW. Now you claim that people are more aware than ever, but file sharing is more open and more accessible and more popular than ever! So the average man on the street certainly doesn't give a damn about your pathetic radical "IP" ideology now does he? If he knowingly disregards it. Your own argument invalidates itself.
Finally, what a disgusting attempt to try and reposition the entities and corporations and ideology that's been *desperately* trying to stifle and control this new renaissance for the last 8 years as the entities that actually brought it about. You should be absolutely ashamed of yourself.
(Yes I know, 'psudeo-intellectual' radicals have no shame, nor a firm grasp on reality as is displayed in all its glory in your post).
And I'll say it again.
In the haste to throw out the smarmy blue blooded $50k a year private school aristocrat wannabes known as the liberals out of government, we've introduced something that's so far been *far* worse. And I say that as someone voted for them!
At least the liberals had a solid grounding in running the country and seemed to know what the hell they were doing. So far Rudd and that dimwitted treasurer Swan have been blundering about without any sort of cohesive strategy and burning through billions of dollars a day doing it.
It would seem that like any 'revolution', when the dust settles usually the country ends up worse off when the populist leader takes power.
Even my father, a dyed in the wool blue collar labour man has started questioning whether Rudd's more interested in selling us out to China, financially AND ideologically than the he is in the national good. What sort of politician pushes something like this onto his own free country?
Who is Rudd really? (Seriously I'm genuinely interested).
Are you a bit dim mate?
Read the bloody summary, it's a link to a site that links to a site that links to an anti-abortion site that got them on the blacklist.
http://www.erowid.org/
There. Now Slashdot *must* be put on the list as well, pro-illicit drug sites are censored, as are pro-euthenasia sites and I assume anti-censorship sites (such as wikileaks). And inevitably anti-government and anti-globalisation (anti G8, etc) sites.
Slashdot is all of those things at some time or another...to bad bye bye Slashdot.
At least productivity will go up in Australias IT sector without it.
This is NOT about childporn it's not even been sold as such.
always prefix and end your conversations with "yes sir" and "no sir".
This has always baffled me about you Americans, you viciously and readily proclaim yourselves as a nation of citizens over state power and the freest people on earth, but every single time a thread like this comes up people say baffling things like the above. Why would you, a free and presumably upstanding citizen of the community call a public servant "Sir" - in a manner that's really a bit too close to groveling for comfort?
How does having to grovel to police officers lest you upset them and they ruin your life (apparently they have this much power in your country) make you the freest people on earth?
I don't know about general social mores in the US, and perhaps calling people Sir is something that everyone does, but here in Australia nobody calls anybody Sir except for people employed in the service industry and some children to adults. If I was being bailed up by the police and I started calling them Sir, it'd probably make things worse. Either they'd think I was a spineless lick-spittle trying to suck up to them and so not worthy of ANY respect, or they'd think I was taking the piss and being a smartarse and so worthy of a hard time.
Whenever I've had association with police on either side of the law (more often than I'd like to admit now that I think about it), I speak to them in exactly the same manner that I would speak to any other reasonable and upstanding adult that I have just met. With general politeness and general respect, no more and no less, they're not gods and treating them as such is probably half the reason your police run around thinking they are. Wouldn't you get a bit of an ego if people were falling at your feet calling you Sir everywhere you went just because of some government power you wield?
Of course you're entirely correct about the temper and arguing, but attempts at gentle correction of inaccuracies in the officers claims are perfectly reasonable, they're just people after all and may well be wrong. And if they're a reasonable person and officer they'll listen to what you have to say. If they're a prick then all bets are off anyway temper or not.
I enjoy the internet, sometimes it lets me see how much better my own country is than others in various things, (the opposite too).
No it takes capital and the *want* and *desire* to. And I think it's more the dollar an hour wages and virtual slave labour that entice companies to China rather than tax incentives.
Why would anybody ever invest huge amounts of money to build a factory in the USA or the UK or France, when there is state sanctioned slave labour across the other side of the worldand western governments are happy to allow it? Or have you been asleep for the past 30 years as the people who have the ability to build factories in the west have shut them down and moved them to...China.
My point which you seem to have completely missed, is that IP can't be controlled by physical force. If your countries main industry is the production of ideas and entertainment - "IP" then China can take the product of that industry and sell it or make use of it for free, and there's *nothing* you can physically do to stop that. Or to put it another way, China can pillage your industry at will without shedding a drop of blood. On the other hand your country can't just magic up a thousand factories and start mass producing a million types of widgets and items that are required for any modern country to function. And if you want to pillage Chinas (as they can do to yours at will), you'll have to shed a fair bit of blood first.