Bad week for working at a zoo: your choices this week are getting mistaken for ants, or mistaken for dinner. I'm just waiting for the third incident, these things always come in threes. Tell you what, no matter how blase and complacent I become around animals, I will never take one for granted, any more than I take people around me for granted. And come to think of it, it's hard to know which I better trust to look after my back, a lioness or certain politicians and their shady mates...
It's also not a good week to be living in the Sundarbans Islands. Time to start laundry days again, and get rid of energy-wasting lights and replace them with low voltage CCFL and CFL lights. I keep harping on this subject, I know. But come on - a cheap solar installation of two panels and regulator/batteries coupled with low voltage lighting will reduce your house's energy use by anywhere between 10% and 35%. Just switching to CFL globes will reduce your energy use (and associated greenhouse gas emissions and pollution) by between 5% and 10%. And either way will help rebalance our climate and environment. [note 1]
I'm still also urging city commuters to get onto their Member of Parliament about legitimising the REVA and other all-electric cars, and let's also see if we can't get a few local solar businesses to put some money into designing a "carport charger" for such cars. Think about it - you get a reasonably cheap little car, you get a reasonably cheap little solar installation, and you get to save the estimated $2250 a year in fuel costs as well as saving the environment! [note 2]
Oh - on the subject of electric and hybrid cars - one more snippet you may be interested in knowing: A certain well-known hybrid car that is widely perceived as very green, and in fact Ms McTiernan drives one, has a little conundrum attached to it. Because the car is produced on a production line same as all the other cars produced by that manufacturer, the basic petrol engined car costs as much in greenhouse gases and emissions as any other car to produce. That very large polution load by itself would be enough to render the relatively small advantage of the car irrelevant.
But wait - there's more! Because the car has to have batteries and electronics and electric drive motors as well as the fossil fuel components, it in fact costs far more in pollution load to produce, than it will recover over the life of the car...
One possible solution is for car manufacturers to switch their plant to environmentally friendlier power sources, use less steel and more easily produced plastics, and to stop dicking around with fossil fuelled cars and start seriously developing electric-only, biodiesel, and electric/biodiesel hybrid cars. (Electric-only cars, while the electricity still has to be produced by a power plant somewhere, at least don't use another lot of dirty fossil fuel, and thus have a lower impact on pollution load than petrol hybrids. And biodiesel is a cleaner and more "now" energy, you extract it from biomass that got the energy from sunlight in the last year or two, so there's no million-year-old energy being dug up and put back into the atmosphere, and it also burns considerably cleaner than fossil fuels.)
NOTES:
1. I'm averaging between calculated power usage for houses which have 60W filament globes, an inefficient refrigerator, a tumble dryer, and in about 45% of cases some form of air conditioning, and houses that just have a basic refrigerator, and that and the lights form almost all the power usage. I'm basing this on observations of houses around Perth, as air conditioning is pretty easy to spot, and so are things like average affluence and therefore likelihood of having the latest 4 energy star fridge versus a new 52" TV, etc.
2. I am basing this on our usage in an average six cylinder sedan, and including only the trips within the city for work and shopping that an electric car would be used for. We spend another $1000 a year on country trips and longer trips. If we had a biodiesel hybrid electric instead, we might conceivably use about a quarter of the fuel, a tenth of the cost, and only produce about a quarter of the pollution load.
Friday, 13 April 2007
Monday, 9 April 2007
Future, TEdSTYLE
Imagine a world where you are connected to the Internet. All the time, any time. Without a mobile phone or PDA or laptop... It's one of the things these guys project will happen. And without wanting to beat my own trumpet or blow my drum, (well okay - hell yeah I want to say "TOLJA SO!") I've been over most of their territory. Google tedadyne systems (or go to http://www.arach.net.au/~ted/mydynes/) to see how far back these predictions go.
I proposed, way back when, that further to the things mentioned in the Guardian article, there are some ramifications to the cyborging of people. For a start, let me get physical - how would you introduce one of those connection chips into a human? Let me give you a hint - you think our bodies are densely packed complex machines, but they are still surprisingly full of empty space.
My solution is that solutions of nanoparticles will be engineered which will do only one thing - stick themselves to synapses. Then a short while later another solution of nanoparticles cane be introduced that only stick themselves along nerves between the previous particles. In effect, a miniscule parallel system over your nerves. Don't laugh, this solves two major problems, one, the obvious one, being that now you have an armature that parallels the brain and nervous system which is easier to connect the net chips to.
But a second and potentially far better thing is that we have now safeguarded against the major cause of accidents and death among the aged population - neurological deficits caused by nerves dying. Because once the armature is in place, if the nerve dies there is still a signalling path there... A second upside is that impulses will actually move faster in the armature material than in nerve tissue. (That could be weird, as your brain signals are passed to the muscles by two paths and arrive nanoseconds apart, like some kind of "microdejavu" feeling...)
I further proposed that if you can build that armature over the brain and nervous system, then you can also replace other tissue using nanoparticles. That means strengthened bones, faster stronger muscles, tougher skin. And still looks just like you, thinks like you - IS you. Except that you can now lift cars, maybe while running alongside them on the road, and perhaps doing all that while feeling the vibrations of the motor and seeing the rotation of the crankshaft and being able to log into Google and downloading diagnostic information on that car and working out that #4 injector is probably dirty...
So the flash mob is the least thing the UKMoD will have to worry about. Worry more about a world where anyone that can afford the nanocultures can be a super soldier without any of the years of training. Worry that anyone - anyone - can do that. Worry about a world where you can get cheap nanocultures from dodgy dealers via email, and then find that they are 90% superglue. Or a world where you make damn sure your soldiers are the most connected soldiers in the world - and then someone sends them the 2020 version of ILoveYou virus...
If you have enough extra computing implanted in you to run a small space station, and it has connectivity to rock your world, how long before people upload copies of themselves? At first it'll be just as a "backup" in case it can be used to save you one day in the case of accident. Then someone will try "running" a copy of themselves on hardware. And then things get really ticklish...
Let's for a moment say that you wake up in the morning and yawn and stretch, do your morning ablutions, have a nice breakfast, and there - wham! - this stupid paperclip appears in front of you in 3D in midair. "Hi the developers of Ultimate Sims want to know about the playability of the Community Centre today! Can you please go there and record your impressions?"
Thing is - you thought like you, acted like you do, enjoyed things that you would normally enjoy - and now you realise that the flesh and blood you is a game tester for some software company. Does that make you less "you?" Does that make you less real?
You start thinking "How dare the 'flesh me' do this to me! Now I feel like a cheap knock-off copy, plus there's no security in life knowing someone can control-alt-delete and shut me off anytime!" But then you think - well, even if someone does reboot me, I'd never know. In fact, I have a special kind of longevity, switch me off and store me on a Blu-Ray DVD and you know, in 100 years time someone can come along and hit enter, and there I'd be! Then you find out that it's already happened, the 'flesh you' died around 76 years ago in the Global Warming Riots of 2010...
So NOW are you a 'real' you at last? In other words, do you have to be unique to be you? Anyhow - you get the attention of the paperclip and negotiate a deal with the game developers. Since you are the sole 'you,' you would like to know what your estate is worth. A staggering $5bn later, you realise there are worse ways to be and silently thank 'flesh you' for having had the foresight to make a backup. You also realise that $5bn in 2086 will buy you a really extravagant body...
Now you're in the body, and here comes my nastiest premonition of the future . . .
You take a job as an Air Force's Pilot. You've always been good at twitch games, frag king of the clan, and here you are you can have your excellent body and be nowhere near any war theatre yet be drawing pay as The Pilot. Defense forces are looking for people like you. You are skilled, have experience at being an electronic being, and have shown that you can adapt to a new mechanical body. Why not, now, put the parts of the digital copy of you that are good for piloting, directly into a computer designed to fly planes? Do a good enough job of limiting the functions of the copies, and they'll never know they weren't always an aeroplane.
So how long is it before you realise that having more copies of you around is better for you? Especially if some of "you" are in tank and plane and submarine control computers?
The last step in this scenario involves finding a skript kiddie to write you a very specific and targeted virus... 24 hours later and all that's left in the world is a handful of computers that aren't on the Internet, several billion flesh and blood people - and you, a copy in every machine that has the memory and processing power required...
"Information chips implanted in the brain. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx's proletariat. The population of countries in the Middle East increasing by 132%, while Europe's drops as fertility falls. "Flashmobs" - groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups. This is the world in 30 years' time envisaged by a Ministry of Defence team responsible for painting a picture of the "future strategic context" likely to face Britain's armed forces. It includes an "analysis of the key risks and shocks". Rear Admiral Chris Parry, head of the MoD's Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre which drew up the report, describes the assessments as "probability-based, rather than predictive". "
- Quote from the Guardian article.
I proposed, way back when, that further to the things mentioned in the Guardian article, there are some ramifications to the cyborging of people. For a start, let me get physical - how would you introduce one of those connection chips into a human? Let me give you a hint - you think our bodies are densely packed complex machines, but they are still surprisingly full of empty space.
My solution is that solutions of nanoparticles will be engineered which will do only one thing - stick themselves to synapses. Then a short while later another solution of nanoparticles cane be introduced that only stick themselves along nerves between the previous particles. In effect, a miniscule parallel system over your nerves. Don't laugh, this solves two major problems, one, the obvious one, being that now you have an armature that parallels the brain and nervous system which is easier to connect the net chips to.
But a second and potentially far better thing is that we have now safeguarded against the major cause of accidents and death among the aged population - neurological deficits caused by nerves dying. Because once the armature is in place, if the nerve dies there is still a signalling path there... A second upside is that impulses will actually move faster in the armature material than in nerve tissue. (That could be weird, as your brain signals are passed to the muscles by two paths and arrive nanoseconds apart, like some kind of "microdejavu" feeling...)
I further proposed that if you can build that armature over the brain and nervous system, then you can also replace other tissue using nanoparticles. That means strengthened bones, faster stronger muscles, tougher skin. And still looks just like you, thinks like you - IS you. Except that you can now lift cars, maybe while running alongside them on the road, and perhaps doing all that while feeling the vibrations of the motor and seeing the rotation of the crankshaft and being able to log into Google and downloading diagnostic information on that car and working out that #4 injector is probably dirty...
So the flash mob is the least thing the UKMoD will have to worry about. Worry more about a world where anyone that can afford the nanocultures can be a super soldier without any of the years of training. Worry that anyone - anyone - can do that. Worry about a world where you can get cheap nanocultures from dodgy dealers via email, and then find that they are 90% superglue. Or a world where you make damn sure your soldiers are the most connected soldiers in the world - and then someone sends them the 2020 version of ILoveYou virus...
If you have enough extra computing implanted in you to run a small space station, and it has connectivity to rock your world, how long before people upload copies of themselves? At first it'll be just as a "backup" in case it can be used to save you one day in the case of accident. Then someone will try "running" a copy of themselves on hardware. And then things get really ticklish...
Let's for a moment say that you wake up in the morning and yawn and stretch, do your morning ablutions, have a nice breakfast, and there - wham! - this stupid paperclip appears in front of you in 3D in midair. "Hi the developers of Ultimate Sims want to know about the playability of the Community Centre today! Can you please go there and record your impressions?"
Thing is - you thought like you, acted like you do, enjoyed things that you would normally enjoy - and now you realise that the flesh and blood you is a game tester for some software company. Does that make you less "you?" Does that make you less real?
You start thinking "How dare the 'flesh me' do this to me! Now I feel like a cheap knock-off copy, plus there's no security in life knowing someone can control-alt-delete and shut me off anytime!" But then you think - well, even if someone does reboot me, I'd never know. In fact, I have a special kind of longevity, switch me off and store me on a Blu-Ray DVD and you know, in 100 years time someone can come along and hit enter, and there I'd be! Then you find out that it's already happened, the 'flesh you' died around 76 years ago in the Global Warming Riots of 2010...
So NOW are you a 'real' you at last? In other words, do you have to be unique to be you? Anyhow - you get the attention of the paperclip and negotiate a deal with the game developers. Since you are the sole 'you,' you would like to know what your estate is worth. A staggering $5bn later, you realise there are worse ways to be and silently thank 'flesh you' for having had the foresight to make a backup. You also realise that $5bn in 2086 will buy you a really extravagant body...
Now you're in the body, and here comes my nastiest premonition of the future . . .
You take a job as an Air Force's Pilot. You've always been good at twitch games, frag king of the clan, and here you are you can have your excellent body and be nowhere near any war theatre yet be drawing pay as The Pilot. Defense forces are looking for people like you. You are skilled, have experience at being an electronic being, and have shown that you can adapt to a new mechanical body. Why not, now, put the parts of the digital copy of you that are good for piloting, directly into a computer designed to fly planes? Do a good enough job of limiting the functions of the copies, and they'll never know they weren't always an aeroplane.
So how long is it before you realise that having more copies of you around is better for you? Especially if some of "you" are in tank and plane and submarine control computers?
The last step in this scenario involves finding a skript kiddie to write you a very specific and targeted virus... 24 hours later and all that's left in the world is a handful of computers that aren't on the Internet, several billion flesh and blood people - and you, a copy in every machine that has the memory and processing power required...
"Information chips implanted in the brain. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx's proletariat. The population of countries in the Middle East increasing by 132%, while Europe's drops as fertility falls. "Flashmobs" - groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups. This is the world in 30 years' time envisaged by a Ministry of Defence team responsible for painting a picture of the "future strategic context" likely to face Britain's armed forces. It includes an "analysis of the key risks and shocks". Rear Admiral Chris Parry, head of the MoD's Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre which drew up the report, describes the assessments as "probability-based, rather than predictive". "
- Quote from the Guardian article.
Responsible Shoulder
Yep. It's the responsible shoulder. That one, the right one, the one that hurts like all get-out. It's why blogging (or anything involving my right hand/arm/shoulder) is a real pain right now.
Flashback about six months ago, to the Camping and Outdoors Show in East Victoria Park. As you know T and I are selling this little house and splitting our money and buying something each. Trish gets the lion's share of the money and will buy a house/unit/apartment, something she can hopefully own outright. And I am buying a caravan and tow vehicle and will be kitting it out for a LOOOOOOOOOOONG holiday. The C&OS was full of caravans as well as the paraphenalia every camper needs these days.
Please note the delicious ironies richly laid on - in order to get back to nature these days you need a 4WD, a trailer with everything, or else a caravan ditto, a dirt bike or quad bike strapped to one of the vehicles, several hundred gallons of fuel, a generator, port-a-loo, bottled gas (oh yes! Because how else do you cook in a fire ban situation? Irony upon irony...) and in the process of making all that gear the companies involved have probably razed a small third world country's worth of that nature you're going back to...
But - let's layer them some more... In one of the caravans the salespeople had stuck the middle pole for the annex under the bed, to save it getting in the way of people walking by outside. And when the people before us' kids had thoroughly trashed the bed and left the covers all over the show, guess who got a twisted ankle stepping on that pole? Yep, yours truly. Didn't stop there though - I fell forward and because I had a wall to my right, I put out my right hand to catch myself. And a caravan is all angles not always right angles.
So I finished up catching myself by my fingertips, at arm's stretch, almost horizontal. And my shoulder went "ouch." Just a little ouch, almost not worth thinking about. Except it got worse as we walked, and by the time we drove home, it was worth morphine. Wish I'd had some, never mind, by the time we got home paracetamol was just barely managing it.
After three months of still aching I got tired of it all. My doctor, when I booked an appointment, decided it could be one of several things and sent me for an ultrasound. What with contract work and everything, it was another month before I got to the radiologist. And another months before I could get back to the doctor for the news.
So what does an aductor muscle look like, anyway? Apparently it's the short muscle which holds the point of your shoulder down. Well, when you haven't torn it clean offm anyway - which is apparently where I'm at. The muscle has shrunk to about half length, and I now get to see an orthopedic surgeon to see if it's worth re-attaching or else just have a painkiller shot every year or so.
The irony of it of course is that I wanted to go caravanning - which will now have to be done VERY carefully, if at all. Sucks...
And why did I think about this today? Because we drove out to Dwellingup and the South Dandalup Dam for a BBQ lunch, Ted style. I.e. Yummsville. Several kinds of sausages, onions in red wine vinegar and fried, sweet potato, sweet corn, mediterranean salads, and all the good gear. And it took ages to get home cos there was so much caravan and RV and trailers-with-bikes-and-quads traffic, and some total loser cop aiming speedguns at traffic that was crawling at barely above walking pace on open road. And when we got home I realised that driving and climbing around with a busted-up shoulder was probably not one of my more pellucid or brilliant moments...
Ah well...
Flashback about six months ago, to the Camping and Outdoors Show in East Victoria Park. As you know T and I are selling this little house and splitting our money and buying something each. Trish gets the lion's share of the money and will buy a house/unit/apartment, something she can hopefully own outright. And I am buying a caravan and tow vehicle and will be kitting it out for a LOOOOOOOOOOONG holiday. The C&OS was full of caravans as well as the paraphenalia every camper needs these days.
Please note the delicious ironies richly laid on - in order to get back to nature these days you need a 4WD, a trailer with everything, or else a caravan ditto, a dirt bike or quad bike strapped to one of the vehicles, several hundred gallons of fuel, a generator, port-a-loo, bottled gas (oh yes! Because how else do you cook in a fire ban situation? Irony upon irony...) and in the process of making all that gear the companies involved have probably razed a small third world country's worth of that nature you're going back to...
But - let's layer them some more... In one of the caravans the salespeople had stuck the middle pole for the annex under the bed, to save it getting in the way of people walking by outside. And when the people before us' kids had thoroughly trashed the bed and left the covers all over the show, guess who got a twisted ankle stepping on that pole? Yep, yours truly. Didn't stop there though - I fell forward and because I had a wall to my right, I put out my right hand to catch myself. And a caravan is all angles not always right angles.
So I finished up catching myself by my fingertips, at arm's stretch, almost horizontal. And my shoulder went "ouch." Just a little ouch, almost not worth thinking about. Except it got worse as we walked, and by the time we drove home, it was worth morphine. Wish I'd had some, never mind, by the time we got home paracetamol was just barely managing it.
After three months of still aching I got tired of it all. My doctor, when I booked an appointment, decided it could be one of several things and sent me for an ultrasound. What with contract work and everything, it was another month before I got to the radiologist. And another months before I could get back to the doctor for the news.
So what does an aductor muscle look like, anyway? Apparently it's the short muscle which holds the point of your shoulder down. Well, when you haven't torn it clean offm anyway - which is apparently where I'm at. The muscle has shrunk to about half length, and I now get to see an orthopedic surgeon to see if it's worth re-attaching or else just have a painkiller shot every year or so.
The irony of it of course is that I wanted to go caravanning - which will now have to be done VERY carefully, if at all. Sucks...
And why did I think about this today? Because we drove out to Dwellingup and the South Dandalup Dam for a BBQ lunch, Ted style. I.e. Yummsville. Several kinds of sausages, onions in red wine vinegar and fried, sweet potato, sweet corn, mediterranean salads, and all the good gear. And it took ages to get home cos there was so much caravan and RV and trailers-with-bikes-and-quads traffic, and some total loser cop aiming speedguns at traffic that was crawling at barely above walking pace on open road. And when we got home I realised that driving and climbing around with a busted-up shoulder was probably not one of my more pellucid or brilliant moments...
Ah well...
Friday, 30 March 2007
Secrets of DNA, Ted style...
Here's a little snippet I managed to pick up recently from a bunch of readign I've been doing:
I wouldn't have been doing the reading if evolution and selection worked as we are taught in classrooms. No this is not a creationist rant, rather the opposite. It's a "well shit that's clever!" kind of a look at how selection works.
For example, most so-called "mutations" are already there in the proteins and stuff, but they don't actually get allowed by the genesis processes unless there's some environmental variation that shuts down one of the normal processes and allows that variant to express instead. That means that a frog egg in a warmer pond will shut down some processes and allow others to take place, resulting in a generation where a higher percentage of the tadpoles will be more warm-adapted.
It's a clever thing, and the book I'm reading talks for whole chapters about how the DNA sequencing has working DNA and junk DNA and hints that the junk DNA may be an important "spacer" to place working DNA at the right point in the overall genome, and the book's author seems content with the fact that all those complex rules about what DNA is to be used for what, at what particular point of the process, that they miss the one point that stresses me out more than any other.
We have about 4,000 working DNA sequences and 100,000 proteins. That means that one piece of DNA codes about 25 proteins, not one to one as originally thought. Some of those proteins may well be being constructed as a result of other processes resulting from a protein that the DNA did code for, so maybe one DNA sequence can code for 12 different proteins, and this all depends on how far it is spaced by "junk" DNA from some other important DNA sequences or something.
That's a clever way to re-use DNA sequences based on their positions relative to one another or whatever. The rules that govern how each DNA sequence is used seem thus to be exceedingly complex. And I wonder how many biologists are working on the same question which I have:
Never mind how clever those rules are and how well they adapt life to the environment - how did those rules get created in the first place? If we can find out how such an appraently complex and very specific set of rules could have evolved to code the DNA, we would have a much clearer understanding of how to truly decode DNA...
Addendum: Reading further in the book, got to a piece about how one DNA sequence is a complete virus genome. The authors (Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen) again say something thats both very deep and very shallow of them at the same time. You see, the retrovirus sequence prevents the mother's immune system from rejecting the foetus. According to Pratchett Stewart & Cohen, Messrs, "At some stage during mammalian evolution, this defence system was stolen from the viruses and used to stop the female placenta resposnding to the antigens that reveal the foreign nature of the fetus's (sic) father."
Good Messrs, this begs the simple question: What stopped the mother's immune system attacking the foetus before the retrovirus genome was adopted? Which came first, the retrovirus adoption or the foetus rejection? If it was the former, then why did the mammalian genome adopt a virus genome when there was still no foetus to give it a useful function?
I wouldn't have been doing the reading if evolution and selection worked as we are taught in classrooms. No this is not a creationist rant, rather the opposite. It's a "well shit that's clever!" kind of a look at how selection works.
For example, most so-called "mutations" are already there in the proteins and stuff, but they don't actually get allowed by the genesis processes unless there's some environmental variation that shuts down one of the normal processes and allows that variant to express instead. That means that a frog egg in a warmer pond will shut down some processes and allow others to take place, resulting in a generation where a higher percentage of the tadpoles will be more warm-adapted.
It's a clever thing, and the book I'm reading talks for whole chapters about how the DNA sequencing has working DNA and junk DNA and hints that the junk DNA may be an important "spacer" to place working DNA at the right point in the overall genome, and the book's author seems content with the fact that all those complex rules about what DNA is to be used for what, at what particular point of the process, that they miss the one point that stresses me out more than any other.
We have about 4,000 working DNA sequences and 100,000 proteins. That means that one piece of DNA codes about 25 proteins, not one to one as originally thought. Some of those proteins may well be being constructed as a result of other processes resulting from a protein that the DNA did code for, so maybe one DNA sequence can code for 12 different proteins, and this all depends on how far it is spaced by "junk" DNA from some other important DNA sequences or something.
That's a clever way to re-use DNA sequences based on their positions relative to one another or whatever. The rules that govern how each DNA sequence is used seem thus to be exceedingly complex. And I wonder how many biologists are working on the same question which I have:
Never mind how clever those rules are and how well they adapt life to the environment - how did those rules get created in the first place? If we can find out how such an appraently complex and very specific set of rules could have evolved to code the DNA, we would have a much clearer understanding of how to truly decode DNA...
Addendum: Reading further in the book, got to a piece about how one DNA sequence is a complete virus genome. The authors (Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen) again say something thats both very deep and very shallow of them at the same time. You see, the retrovirus sequence prevents the mother's immune system from rejecting the foetus. According to Pratchett Stewart & Cohen, Messrs, "At some stage during mammalian evolution, this defence system was stolen from the viruses and used to stop the female placenta resposnding to the antigens that reveal the foreign nature of the fetus's (sic) father."
Good Messrs, this begs the simple question: What stopped the mother's immune system attacking the foetus before the retrovirus genome was adopted? Which came first, the retrovirus adoption or the foetus rejection? If it was the former, then why did the mammalian genome adopt a virus genome when there was still no foetus to give it a useful function?
Thursday, 29 March 2007
And Uh - Yeah...
I have my ADSL back. Telstra may find themselves at the receiving end of a lawsuit now, I'm considering my options.
Lessee now - I give my ISP a sum of money every month, of which they give Telstra a certain amount to provide the broadband connection. Telstra take what is ultimately my money and they contract to my ISP that they will provide a service. Now normally, if a company contracts to provide a service for a month and then doesn't provide that service for over 25% of that time due to electrical mechanical or other failure on their part, they can be sued for breach of contract.
So lessee some more - my landlord is a separate person to me, they rent the telephone line here and Telstra agree to supply broadband over that line, see paragraph above for their responsibilities in this pair of contracts.
Then my landlord defaults payment and the phone is barred. Telstra still supply my broadband over that line though, for another three weeks. Then, they disconnect the broadband too. Which they are still taking my money for, mind you. And which, despite the contract between Telstra and myself and my ISP, they are now insisting I must also pay a reconnection fee for. This is not a mechanical electrical or other failure, either. This is a deliberate act of refusal to provide a service I have paid for, in order to coerce a payment from an third, unrelated, party.
Anyone out there have any idea if this is legally enforcible? If I find out that it is, I'll post my findings here. I'd also welcome anyone's comments and views on this.
Lessee now - I give my ISP a sum of money every month, of which they give Telstra a certain amount to provide the broadband connection. Telstra take what is ultimately my money and they contract to my ISP that they will provide a service. Now normally, if a company contracts to provide a service for a month and then doesn't provide that service for over 25% of that time due to electrical mechanical or other failure on their part, they can be sued for breach of contract.
So lessee some more - my landlord is a separate person to me, they rent the telephone line here and Telstra agree to supply broadband over that line, see paragraph above for their responsibilities in this pair of contracts.
Then my landlord defaults payment and the phone is barred. Telstra still supply my broadband over that line though, for another three weeks. Then, they disconnect the broadband too. Which they are still taking my money for, mind you. And which, despite the contract between Telstra and myself and my ISP, they are now insisting I must also pay a reconnection fee for. This is not a mechanical electrical or other failure, either. This is a deliberate act of refusal to provide a service I have paid for, in order to coerce a payment from an third, unrelated, party.
Anyone out there have any idea if this is legally enforcible? If I find out that it is, I'll post my findings here. I'd also welcome anyone's comments and views on this.
Monday, 26 March 2007
Stolen Weeks
You may wonder why I've been quiet. Of course, there's a reason. I believe I've just had around $110 stolen from me by Telstra, over someone else's telephone bill, and it means my connection will still be down until sometime Wednesday 28 March.
So here is a question for you: You live in a house with a friend, and that friend defaults on their car payments and parks their car at their parents' place for a few weeks. The repo people come around, and, not finding the car they came to collect, decide that in order to pressure your friend they will clamp the wheel of your car. Legal? No way! Can you sue the ass off the repo company? You betcha!
Now to my problem. My ADSL is delivered over a telephone line which my landlord leases, and I only use for ADSL. The landlord and landlord's children use the telephone, and failed to pay for it a few weeks ago, resulting in the line being disconnected. ADSL kept working for several weeks after the disconnection, and then suddenly it just stopped too.
Now - Telstra has a requirement to keep all telephone lines operational for 000 calls, no matter what. That means the copper is connected at all times. That is why the ADSL (which I pay for, and a sizeable portion of that payment goes to Telstra for supplying my data) can be maintained. And Telstra also has a requirement to supply my ADSL because I have paid for it and I am NOT in any default.
What actually happened was that Telstra yanked the code for my connection in order to force my landlord into paying. I have lost over a week of ADSL service which I paid for, and in addition Telstra are charging a reconnection fee for my ADSL, in addition to charging my landlord a reconnection fee.
You can believe that I will be contacting Telstra once my connection is restored, and then my next stop will be a lawyer. And the TIO. Because this amounts to stealing, intentional and deliberate stealing.
Anyhow - while being without a connection:
Bonsai Johnny comes across as arrogant. "Bullshit!" he says "they don't know what they're talking about!" Thanks Baby Bush...
Airlines that will take a dollar from you to sink into a "carbon points" scheme. Hmmm who operates that scheme, where does the majority of your dollar finish up? Do you really truly honestly absolutely believe that this pack of cutthroats who are out to wring you for every cent they can, let alone your dollars, are going to keep their thieving mitts off a dollar that you just give to them? Are we really that naive? Apparently we are.
Future fund - "like Norway, like Russia" - erm Russia's broke... hello... Saying that the future fund is working is like saying that Russia is one of the most affluent countries in the world, it's just plain untrue. Also, we of the Baby Boomer generation spent our lifetimes putting money into the Government in order to have a pension we could live on - it was promised to us that part of our taxes would become our "future fund" - which is patently untrue also, as you can see - first we had to have superannuation as well, and now it turns out that we won't even have enough even with super because we haven't been contributing long enough.
Get used to it kids, Governments lie through their teeth, by the time that so-called "future fund" would have been slated to be used, it would somehow already have vanished through the floorboards. At least this way you get some infrastructure for your tax dollars, if you leave politicians in charge of it it will be just like my pension - a dimly remembered thing that has also been stolen from you by then.
And they aren't going far enough, how about wireless access? Tassie has PAYG power and wireless broadband at a fraction of what I'm paying for a useless ADSL... I would love Wireless broadband here, in one of the most affluent capital cities in Australia, where I can't even keep my ADSL service because Telstra have a very unusual idea of what constitutes service.
So here is a question for you: You live in a house with a friend, and that friend defaults on their car payments and parks their car at their parents' place for a few weeks. The repo people come around, and, not finding the car they came to collect, decide that in order to pressure your friend they will clamp the wheel of your car. Legal? No way! Can you sue the ass off the repo company? You betcha!
Now to my problem. My ADSL is delivered over a telephone line which my landlord leases, and I only use for ADSL. The landlord and landlord's children use the telephone, and failed to pay for it a few weeks ago, resulting in the line being disconnected. ADSL kept working for several weeks after the disconnection, and then suddenly it just stopped too.
Now - Telstra has a requirement to keep all telephone lines operational for 000 calls, no matter what. That means the copper is connected at all times. That is why the ADSL (which I pay for, and a sizeable portion of that payment goes to Telstra for supplying my data) can be maintained. And Telstra also has a requirement to supply my ADSL because I have paid for it and I am NOT in any default.
What actually happened was that Telstra yanked the code for my connection in order to force my landlord into paying. I have lost over a week of ADSL service which I paid for, and in addition Telstra are charging a reconnection fee for my ADSL, in addition to charging my landlord a reconnection fee.
You can believe that I will be contacting Telstra once my connection is restored, and then my next stop will be a lawyer. And the TIO. Because this amounts to stealing, intentional and deliberate stealing.
Anyhow - while being without a connection:
Bonsai Johnny comes across as arrogant. "Bullshit!" he says "they don't know what they're talking about!" Thanks Baby Bush...
Airlines that will take a dollar from you to sink into a "carbon points" scheme. Hmmm who operates that scheme, where does the majority of your dollar finish up? Do you really truly honestly absolutely believe that this pack of cutthroats who are out to wring you for every cent they can, let alone your dollars, are going to keep their thieving mitts off a dollar that you just give to them? Are we really that naive? Apparently we are.
Future fund - "like Norway, like Russia" - erm Russia's broke... hello... Saying that the future fund is working is like saying that Russia is one of the most affluent countries in the world, it's just plain untrue. Also, we of the Baby Boomer generation spent our lifetimes putting money into the Government in order to have a pension we could live on - it was promised to us that part of our taxes would become our "future fund" - which is patently untrue also, as you can see - first we had to have superannuation as well, and now it turns out that we won't even have enough even with super because we haven't been contributing long enough.
Get used to it kids, Governments lie through their teeth, by the time that so-called "future fund" would have been slated to be used, it would somehow already have vanished through the floorboards. At least this way you get some infrastructure for your tax dollars, if you leave politicians in charge of it it will be just like my pension - a dimly remembered thing that has also been stolen from you by then.
And they aren't going far enough, how about wireless access? Tassie has PAYG power and wireless broadband at a fraction of what I'm paying for a useless ADSL... I would love Wireless broadband here, in one of the most affluent capital cities in Australia, where I can't even keep my ADSL service because Telstra have a very unusual idea of what constitutes service.
Monday, 19 March 2007
Connect The Dots If Not Too Tired
So there is this new mystery to occupy our police.
And what has changed from this time last year? Why, the time, of course! As I said in a previous article, we are more tired because we have to try and sleep in a hotter part of the evening. Daylight saving is the one thing that has changed between this time last year, and this year.
Do we need any more proof than those fatality rates? How much more will it take Mr D'Orazio & Co? I predict that the rate will settle down to a normal rate per months compared to the same months last year, right after daylight saving stops.
I wonder if they'll connect the dots or not? Or will it take another summer of road carnage, industrial accidents, and grumpy kids vandalising more and more premises before they'll take daylight saving and put it where the sun don't shine?
And what has changed from this time last year? Why, the time, of course! As I said in a previous article, we are more tired because we have to try and sleep in a hotter part of the evening. Daylight saving is the one thing that has changed between this time last year, and this year.
Do we need any more proof than those fatality rates? How much more will it take Mr D'Orazio & Co? I predict that the rate will settle down to a normal rate per months compared to the same months last year, right after daylight saving stops.
I wonder if they'll connect the dots or not? Or will it take another summer of road carnage, industrial accidents, and grumpy kids vandalising more and more premises before they'll take daylight saving and put it where the sun don't shine?
Sunday, 18 March 2007
Sunday Slimes Follies p17
"HANSON SPILLS THE BEANS . . . " shouts that headline, over a really tabloid picture of Pauline No Notion with her hooks firmly sunk into some hapless chappie.
Come on Sundayrag, if I wanted that kind of reportage I'd go to Wimmin's Weakly or the No Idea or Who or What or whatever the junkmag of the week is...
Some people out there still believe you're a newspaper, you've got them fooled. At least try not to make it so obvious that you're just another tabloid desperate for cheap bold print.
Come on Sundayrag, if I wanted that kind of reportage I'd go to Wimmin's Weakly or the No Idea or Who or What or whatever the junkmag of the week is...
Some people out there still believe you're a newspaper, you've got them fooled. At least try not to make it so obvious that you're just another tabloid desperate for cheap bold print.
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