I think it's extremely unlikely that Stephen Conroy isn't aware of this simple truth.
It's being pushed through for the same reason most policies are pushed through by governments -- because they think there is political capital to be gained in doing so. While I'm unsure whether their assumption is accurate, there is no way it would have come to this point without extensive focus group testing and behind-the-scenes calculations of exactly what they have to gain.
On the other hand, I'm struggling to see how it's a vote winner. It's not so much the level of support it has that counts, but how many votes are likely to be changed on this issue alone. Many of the strongest opponents of the filter are young, educated, tech-literate Labor voters and I have no doubt the policy is going to cost them dearly in that demographic. The strongest supporters of the filter are right-wing religious fundamentalists who are unlikely to vote Labor anyway, particularly with "Mad Monk" Abbott leading the Liberals (the Liberals are the conservative party for our foreign readers... go figure).
Which leaves lukewarm support amongst parents and others who aren't strongly involved, but two minutes conversing with them makes it clear that the policy they support isn't the one the government is proposing. Every time this comes up for discussion on talkback radio, blogs, letters to the editor and other forms of public commentary, it's the same arguments over and over. "I want the internet to be safe for my ten-year-old when I'm not around", "the government needs to do something about all this porn on YouTube", "I caught my son looking at hard core pornography", "there's too much porn on the internet". These people are going to be extremely disappointed when they realise that R-rated and X-rated material (i.e. up to and including hard core pornography) falls outside the scope of the filter, and that out of the trillion or so urls on the intertubes, only about a thousand will be blocked (i.e. about 0.0000001 % of the internet, and as most are probably aware, slightly more than that figure is currently porn). It doesn't even attempt to remove porn from the internet, let alone entertain the delusion that it is even remotely possible.
To those people, I keep saying it's like mandating the hiring of a babysitter who lets the kids drink, smoke, play with knives and have sex, but who is required to hang around and baby-sit Mum and Dad in their bedroom when the kids are asleep. Thankfully this is finally starting to gain some attention, and those pushing for the porn filter will realise this is nothing of the sort. Whether the U.S. Government's involvement in that helps or hinders our cause, I'm not too sure, but if it was important enough to the U.S., I'm sure a behind-the-scenes phone call or two would have it dropped in no time.
I really hope the minor parties (e.g. Pirate Party, Democrats, Greens and the Sex Party) clean up next election over this.
I wonder how Conroy is feeling about now, between the censorship and NBN debacle he hasn't many people left who like him enough to vote for him.
As long as Conroy retains top billing in the Senate, he doesn't have much reason to worry. He's considerably less popular than other Labor senators, but because of internal factional politics, he's pretty much guaranteed top billing.
An overwhelming majority of Labor voters will mark "1" above the line and think nothing of it, if Conroy goes, it will be because Labor, not Australia as a whole, pushes him.
But the average kinetic energy of a gas molecule depends on the temperature, but not the mass of the molecule.
For a lighter molecule to have the same kinetic energy as a more massive molecule, it has to be moving faster.
If the molecular speed exceeds the escape velocity of the earth, the molecule will escape from the atmosphere. Helium is one of the most common elements in the universe and it's constantly being replenished on earth due to radioactive decay, but there's practically none of it in the atmosphere because it escapes so quickly.
Sorry, the charts are admittedly a little confusing. The "delta 13 C" value is a change in the carbon-13 concentration, but the y-axis on the graphs is upside-down. The graphs show an upward trend, which means the carbon-13 change is becoming more negative -- i.e. it's concentration is decreasing.
This does take the carbon-13 ratio of the fuel into account. It can be verified that fossil fuels have a lower concentration of carbon-13, and this is because they are a by-product of photosynthesis and photosynthesis favours lighter isotopes of carbon.
As a sidenote: the earth has gone through numerous hot and cold periods; the CO2 levels rising can also be the *result* of a heating earth, instead of being the cause. The CO2 infrared absorption lines and it's presence in the atmosphere are both very small: it has just a very little real effect on heating up the air. CO2 will escape from water when the temperature rises though... We know temperatures are rising, so we can expect to see the level of CO2 rising too.
Not wanting to turn this into another climate change flamewar - but it's both a cause and a result; when it's something else doing driving the change (e.g. the sun), carbon dioxide increases as a result of the temperature increase and it amplifies the initial driving force through a positive feedback, when it's carbon dioxide doing the driving (as it appears to be at the moment), the temperature increase is the result itself.
There's a quick way to check whether the increase is coming from the oceans - photosynthesis has a slight preference for carbon-12 over the heavier carbon-13, so if fossil fuels are responsible for the rise, the carbon-13 ratio should be decreasing. If the oceans are temporarily overwhelming the biosphere, it should be increasing.
Also, the carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere is lower than our emissions. Nature is busy trying to remove it from the atmosphere, let alone being a source itself.
Yes, methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Over the twelve or so years it lasts in the atmosphere, it would have about twenty times the effect of the CO2 produced from burning it.
Not just that, but it oxidises to CO2 in the atmosphere anyway, and if it's used as an energy source, you can also factor in the CO2 that isn't being emitted from alternative sources.
If it's practical to tap the methane, it's a win-win situation.
These unsubstantiated claims of deliberate fraud and conspiratorial nonsense seem to pop up with such regularity that I'm surprised no libel claims have come about so far, particularly in the libel-friendly UK.
It's clear that the science isn't on the side of the denialists, so FUD and Chinese whisper campaigns are the obvious alternative.
Anything floating in water will only displace a volume of water equivalent in mass to the object itself. If ice was less dense, it would expand, but it would still displace the same amount of water since more of it will be above the surface. Therefore floating ice doesn't contribute significantly to the sea level.
The sea level rise due to warming is from thermal expansion of the oceans (above 4 C water starts expanding again), and the melting of ice on continental shelves (such as Antarctica and Greenland).
Don't forget the games that are shoehorned into the fairly tame MA15+ rating, which can legally be bought by 15-year-olds at all times and those under 15 with parental supervision.
Case in point - Modern Warfare 2. The mission where you run through an airport, killing civilians and counter-terrorist forces received a fair bit of attention - rightly or wrongly it was an artistic decision and adults should be able to play the game if they want to. Pretty much everywhere else in the world it has received an 18+ rating or equivalent - in Australia, where an 18+ rating is unavailable, it has received one of the softest classifications in the world.
For films, there is a reasonable scale with reasonable steps of increasing impact - R18+ sends a clear message that it's not suitable for children, X18+ even more so, and RC suggests an even more extreme impact. For games it jumps straight from "suitable for children" to "banned - outright". Those in the middle get bunched into one category or another - either too soft, where parents aren't made aware of the full impact of the game... or too severe, which restricts it for everyone and dilutes the "refused classification" category to the point of ridicule.
Either way, it's a rather pointless discussion. We're highly unlikely to get an R18+ rating in the near future, particularly with federal Labor now green-lighting their mandatory internet filter.
Unfortunately we can have all the consultation we want - as long as Michael Atkinson (think Jack Thompson with a political office) is Attorney-General of South Australia he will veto it.
As it stands, the decision needs to be unanimous amongst all the states - support for an R18+ rating seems to hover around 90% in most polls, but without the support of this one idiot, nothing is ever going to change.
Actually, there's a "Preview my profile" in the privacy settings - it shows you what the general public sees and you can modify it so that it shows you what any specific person sees.
Not sure how long they've had that, but I got a nasty surprise the first time I used that, having previously thought my profile was locked down pretty tightly.
This last debacle was pretty disgraceful, though - sending out a message telling everyone they should change to the "recommended" setting of making everything public by default and even calling private settings "old facebook" rather than actually describing them as what they were. For some reason they still don't realise they're not Twitter.
This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
You bring out examples of supposed flaws in global warming as a "gotcha" argument, but ignore the fact that eachandeveryone of these arguments has been repeatedly debunked.
Again - you're ignoring rebuttals to denialist arguments, then pretending they don't exist. It's not that no-one's listening to your arguments, it's that they are scientific nonsense.
Well, no, but to pretend that they aren't actually doing so in the age of Google is a little disingenuous.
There are only so many times you can rebut stale contrarian talking points before you sound like a broken record. Particularly when you are 100% certain that the target isn't remotely interested in listening.
They weren't preventing dissenting opinions from being accepting into peer reviewed journals - they expressed disappointment in the fact that the peer review process wasn't doing its job: weeding out bad science.
The main paper in question was a literature review paper (funded by the Marshall Institute and the American Petroleum Institute) full of bad science, where the actual authors of the papers cited claim to have been profoundly misintepreted, and in which severe methodological flaws have since been found. One of the authors doesn't even believe that CFCs affect the ozone layer. It should have stood as a textbook example of why we have the peer review process to begin with - it's not a platform for anyone to publish scientific nonsense.
Scientists actually are pretty skeptical people by nature, those who seem to be saying "I'm a skeptic! I don't know the science, but I'm absolutely certain it's a liberal hoax and we're all being lied to"... not so much. Most "skeptics" are nothing more than contrarians; skepticism to me implies a willingness to investigate the issue for one's self, but most of the denial movement shows such a poor grasp of the science that they clearly haven't done so.
Doesn't work with everything - for instance, I first noticed that they switched when looking up the word comprise. It doesn't actually contain a definition, just a number of explanatory sentences and examples:
"If you say that something comprises or is comprised of a number of things or people, you mean it has them as its parts or members."
In fact, try a few words at random and you see this as a general pattern - very few words actually contain any definitions. It's the dictionary for people who don't know how to use a dictionary, and is pretty frustrating for those who can. Although it usually contains good definitions further down the page (e.g. wiktionary), I'll just have to remember to use those directly rather than googling it and clicking on the definition in the future.
I am not an expert, but it seems to me that you can keep accumulating water during the night when there is no need, and open the pipes in just a few minutes instance when there is urgent demand.
Not just that, you can use pumps to run the system backwards, turning the dam into one large rechargeable battery. This can definitely help to accommodate intermittent renewable sources such as solar and wind.
Supergrids can also help, but in many cases large regions are already connected and distribution over large distances is expensive. Demand management is another option, but we should be doing everything possible to remove coal from the generation side - and nuclear is currently the most viable alternative.
I would have said that the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy was more deserving of that title. He's the one pushing for mandatory state-wide internet filtering, three-strike copyright infringement laws, and privacy/interception exemptions for ISPs so they can prove their users aren't breaking the law. Also known as the internet villain of the year.
I wonder if this has more to do with the Twitter effect (see Brüno) than stopping piracy.
It seems rather implausible (to be generous) that someone would try to illegally film a movie using a crappy webcam on your average laptop (particularly if they manage to do it with the laptop in the bag). If you think about how a laptop is likely to hurt them financially, the reason should be pretty clear.
So you can say 'Fuck the government', as long as you write it on a note and put that note in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'?
Like I said... I'm not familiar with the constitution, but it seems strange that they can't regulate what you say but they can require you to meet their standards as to how to say it.
And while it's not the end of the world to lose an email account, it's not a problem as trivial to solve as just signing up for a new one. That won't catch emails from people trying to contact you, that may not help with the dozens of online accounts that could be tied to that address, that won't give you access to your contact list or old messages, it requires you to chase down everyone who used your old address to continue to communicate with them, etc...
Whether it's a constitutional issue or not, it certainly is one of freedom of expression.
Not from the United States and not too familiar with the U.S. Constitution, but wouldn't this be a blatant violation of the first amendment?
There is a clearly innocent party here who has had a primary communication medium forcibly disconnected. Not only can they not talk about this confidential material (which there may be an argument for preventing), but they can't talk to anyone about anything. That sounds like a massive violation of freedom of expression...
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I think it's extremely unlikely that Stephen Conroy isn't aware of this simple truth.
It's being pushed through for the same reason most policies are pushed through by governments -- because they think there is political capital to be gained in doing so. While I'm unsure whether their assumption is accurate, there is no way it would have come to this point without extensive focus group testing and behind-the-scenes calculations of exactly what they have to gain.
On the other hand, I'm struggling to see how it's a vote winner. It's not so much the level of support it has that counts, but how many votes are likely to be changed on this issue alone. Many of the strongest opponents of the filter are young, educated, tech-literate Labor voters and I have no doubt the policy is going to cost them dearly in that demographic. The strongest supporters of the filter are right-wing religious fundamentalists who are unlikely to vote Labor anyway, particularly with "Mad Monk" Abbott leading the Liberals (the Liberals are the conservative party for our foreign readers... go figure).
Which leaves lukewarm support amongst parents and others who aren't strongly involved, but two minutes conversing with them makes it clear that the policy they support isn't the one the government is proposing. Every time this comes up for discussion on talkback radio, blogs, letters to the editor and other forms of public commentary, it's the same arguments over and over. "I want the internet to be safe for my ten-year-old when I'm not around", "the government needs to do something about all this porn on YouTube", "I caught my son looking at hard core pornography", "there's too much porn on the internet". These people are going to be extremely disappointed when they realise that R-rated and X-rated material (i.e. up to and including hard core pornography) falls outside the scope of the filter, and that out of the trillion or so urls on the intertubes, only about a thousand will be blocked (i.e. about 0.0000001 % of the internet, and as most are probably aware, slightly more than that figure is currently porn). It doesn't even attempt to remove porn from the internet, let alone entertain the delusion that it is even remotely possible.
To those people, I keep saying it's like mandating the hiring of a babysitter who lets the kids drink, smoke, play with knives and have sex, but who is required to hang around and baby-sit Mum and Dad in their bedroom when the kids are asleep. Thankfully this is finally starting to gain some attention, and those pushing for the porn filter will realise this is nothing of the sort. Whether the U.S. Government's involvement in that helps or hinders our cause, I'm not too sure, but if it was important enough to the U.S., I'm sure a behind-the-scenes phone call or two would have it dropped in no time.
I really hope the minor parties (e.g. Pirate Party, Democrats, Greens and the Sex Party) clean up next election over this.
I wonder how Conroy is feeling about now, between the censorship and NBN debacle he hasn't many people left who like him enough to vote for him.
As long as Conroy retains top billing in the Senate, he doesn't have much reason to worry. He's considerably less popular than other Labor senators, but because of internal factional politics, he's pretty much guaranteed top billing.
An overwhelming majority of Labor voters will mark "1" above the line and think nothing of it, if Conroy goes, it will be because Labor, not Australia as a whole, pushes him.
But the average kinetic energy of a gas molecule depends on the temperature, but not the mass of the molecule.
For a lighter molecule to have the same kinetic energy as a more massive molecule, it has to be moving faster.
If the molecular speed exceeds the escape velocity of the earth, the molecule will escape from the atmosphere. Helium is one of the most common elements in the universe and it's constantly being replenished on earth due to radioactive decay, but there's practically none of it in the atmosphere because it escapes so quickly.
Yes, the game was banned, and a bowdlerised version was released in its place. I don't see an inaccuracy.
That ends up happening with most games, doesn't mean we're allowed to buy the originals.
Sorry, the charts are admittedly a little confusing. The "delta 13 C" value is a change in the carbon-13 concentration, but the y-axis on the graphs is upside-down. The graphs show an upward trend, which means the carbon-13 change is becoming more negative -- i.e. it's concentration is decreasing.
This does take the carbon-13 ratio of the fuel into account. It can be verified that fossil fuels have a lower concentration of carbon-13, and this is because they are a by-product of photosynthesis and photosynthesis favours lighter isotopes of carbon.
As a sidenote: the earth has gone through numerous hot and cold periods; the CO2 levels rising can also be the *result* of a heating earth, instead of being the cause. The CO2 infrared absorption lines and it's presence in the atmosphere are both very small: it has just a very little real effect on heating up the air. CO2 will escape from water when the temperature rises though... We know temperatures are rising, so we can expect to see the level of CO2 rising too.
Not wanting to turn this into another climate change flamewar - but it's both a cause and a result; when it's something else doing driving the change (e.g. the sun), carbon dioxide increases as a result of the temperature increase and it amplifies the initial driving force through a positive feedback, when it's carbon dioxide doing the driving (as it appears to be at the moment), the temperature increase is the result itself.
There's a quick way to check whether the increase is coming from the oceans - photosynthesis has a slight preference for carbon-12 over the heavier carbon-13, so if fossil fuels are responsible for the rise, the carbon-13 ratio should be decreasing. If the oceans are temporarily overwhelming the biosphere, it should be increasing.
Guess which one it is.
Also, the carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere is lower than our emissions. Nature is busy trying to remove it from the atmosphere, let alone being a source itself.
Yes, methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Over the twelve or so years it lasts in the atmosphere, it would have about twenty times the effect of the CO2 produced from burning it.
Not just that, but it oxidises to CO2 in the atmosphere anyway, and if it's used as an energy source, you can also factor in the CO2 that isn't being emitted from alternative sources.
If it's practical to tap the methane, it's a win-win situation.
Because I think GP was serious.
Some of us are Australian, funnily enough.
If these allegations are true, it will be an outrage if the end result is only "a lot of people getting fired".
The child porn angle is only the tip of the iceberg, and I would hope that anyone signing off on this faces severe criminal charges.
These unsubstantiated claims of deliberate fraud and conspiratorial nonsense seem to pop up with such regularity that I'm surprised no libel claims have come about so far, particularly in the libel-friendly UK.
It's clear that the science isn't on the side of the denialists, so FUD and Chinese whisper campaigns are the obvious alternative.
Anything floating in water will only displace a volume of water equivalent in mass to the object itself. If ice was less dense, it would expand, but it would still displace the same amount of water since more of it will be above the surface. Therefore floating ice doesn't contribute significantly to the sea level.
The sea level rise due to warming is from thermal expansion of the oceans (above 4 C water starts expanding again), and the melting of ice on continental shelves (such as Antarctica and Greenland).
Don't forget the games that are shoehorned into the fairly tame MA15+ rating, which can legally be bought by 15-year-olds at all times and those under 15 with parental supervision.
Case in point - Modern Warfare 2. The mission where you run through an airport, killing civilians and counter-terrorist forces received a fair bit of attention - rightly or wrongly it was an artistic decision and adults should be able to play the game if they want to. Pretty much everywhere else in the world it has received an 18+ rating or equivalent - in Australia, where an 18+ rating is unavailable, it has received one of the softest classifications in the world.
For films, there is a reasonable scale with reasonable steps of increasing impact - R18+ sends a clear message that it's not suitable for children, X18+ even more so, and RC suggests an even more extreme impact. For games it jumps straight from "suitable for children" to "banned - outright". Those in the middle get bunched into one category or another - either too soft, where parents aren't made aware of the full impact of the game... or too severe, which restricts it for everyone and dilutes the "refused classification" category to the point of ridicule.
Either way, it's a rather pointless discussion. We're highly unlikely to get an R18+ rating in the near future, particularly with federal Labor now green-lighting their mandatory internet filter.
Unfortunately we can have all the consultation we want - as long as Michael Atkinson (think Jack Thompson with a political office) is Attorney-General of South Australia he will veto it.
As it stands, the decision needs to be unanimous amongst all the states - support for an R18+ rating seems to hover around 90% in most polls, but without the support of this one idiot, nothing is ever going to change.
Actually, there's a "Preview my profile" in the privacy settings - it shows you what the general public sees and you can modify it so that it shows you what any specific person sees.
Not sure how long they've had that, but I got a nasty surprise the first time I used that, having previously thought my profile was locked down pretty tightly.
This last debacle was pretty disgraceful, though - sending out a message telling everyone they should change to the "recommended" setting of making everything public by default and even calling private settings "old facebook" rather than actually describing them as what they were. For some reason they still don't realise they're not Twitter.
This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
You bring out examples of supposed flaws in global warming as a "gotcha" argument, but ignore the fact that each and every one of these arguments has been repeatedly debunked.
Again - you're ignoring rebuttals to denialist arguments, then pretending they don't exist. It's not that no-one's listening to your arguments, it's that they are scientific nonsense.
Well, no, but to pretend that they aren't actually doing so in the age of Google is a little disingenuous.
There are only so many times you can rebut stale contrarian talking points before you sound like a broken record. Particularly when you are 100% certain that the target isn't remotely interested in listening.
They weren't preventing dissenting opinions from being accepting into peer reviewed journals - they expressed disappointment in the fact that the peer review process wasn't doing its job: weeding out bad science.
The main paper in question was a literature review paper (funded by the Marshall Institute and the American Petroleum Institute) full of bad science, where the actual authors of the papers cited claim to have been profoundly misintepreted, and in which severe methodological flaws have since been found. One of the authors doesn't even believe that CFCs affect the ozone layer. It should have stood as a textbook example of why we have the peer review process to begin with - it's not a platform for anyone to publish scientific nonsense.
Scientists actually are pretty skeptical people by nature, those who seem to be saying "I'm a skeptic! I don't know the science, but I'm absolutely certain it's a liberal hoax and we're all being lied to"... not so much. Most "skeptics" are nothing more than contrarians; skepticism to me implies a willingness to investigate the issue for one's self, but most of the denial movement shows such a poor grasp of the science that they clearly haven't done so.
Doesn't work with everything - for instance, I first noticed that they switched when looking up the word comprise. It doesn't actually contain a definition, just a number of explanatory sentences and examples:
"If you say that something comprises or is comprised of a number of things or people, you mean it has them as its parts or members."
In fact, try a few words at random and you see this as a general pattern - very few words actually contain any definitions. It's the dictionary for people who don't know how to use a dictionary, and is pretty frustrating for those who can. Although it usually contains good definitions further down the page (e.g. wiktionary), I'll just have to remember to use those directly rather than googling it and clicking on the definition in the future.
I am not an expert, but it seems to me that you can keep accumulating water during the night when there is no need, and open the pipes in just a few minutes instance when there is urgent demand.
Not just that, you can use pumps to run the system backwards, turning the dam into one large rechargeable battery. This can definitely help to accommodate intermittent renewable sources such as solar and wind.
Supergrids can also help, but in many cases large regions are already connected and distribution over large distances is expensive. Demand management is another option, but we should be doing everything possible to remove coal from the generation side - and nuclear is currently the most viable alternative.
This is not censorship: this is rating
Unfortunately in Australia, it is. If something is refused a classification, it's banned.
Unfortunately they're not quite that honest - that title is from the author, not the Australian Government.
His actual title is "Minister for Home Affairs".
I would have said that the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy was more deserving of that title. He's the one pushing for mandatory state-wide internet filtering, three-strike copyright infringement laws, and privacy/interception exemptions for ISPs so they can prove their users aren't breaking the law. Also known as the internet villain of the year.
I wonder if this has more to do with the Twitter effect (see Brüno) than stopping piracy.
It seems rather implausible (to be generous) that someone would try to illegally film a movie using a crappy webcam on your average laptop (particularly if they manage to do it with the laptop in the bag). If you think about how a laptop is likely to hurt them financially, the reason should be pretty clear.
So you can say 'Fuck the government', as long as you write it on a note and put that note in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'?
Like I said... I'm not familiar with the constitution, but it seems strange that they can't regulate what you say but they can require you to meet their standards as to how to say it.
And while it's not the end of the world to lose an email account, it's not a problem as trivial to solve as just signing up for a new one. That won't catch emails from people trying to contact you, that may not help with the dozens of online accounts that could be tied to that address, that won't give you access to your contact list or old messages, it requires you to chase down everyone who used your old address to continue to communicate with them, etc...
Whether it's a constitutional issue or not, it certainly is one of freedom of expression.
Not from the United States and not too familiar with the U.S. Constitution, but wouldn't this be a blatant violation of the first amendment?
There is a clearly innocent party here who has had a primary communication medium forcibly disconnected. Not only can they not talk about this confidential material (which there may be an argument for preventing), but they can't talk to anyone about anything. That sounds like a massive violation of freedom of expression...