When is spin doctoring not so much spin doctoring, as drilling right through the planet and landing on some alien landscape?
When it's the GOP trying to salvage a shred of dignity out of that whole Sarah Palin thing:
" "The candidacy of Sarah Palin was immensely helpful, absolutely essential to making this a reasonably close race," said Morton Blackwell, Republican National Committee member from Virginia. " SFGate Article
"Reasonably close?" OMG they would have done better if McCain had run the entire campaign himself - on foot. Palin aggravated millions of voters into voting Democrat, attracted maybe a paltry few hundreds of thousands to the Republican side. Had it not been for Palin, the result might have become "close." How did that make her "absolutely essential?"
Q: "What's closer, the ex USSR or the moon?"
A: (a blonde) "The moon, dummy. I mean, can you SEE Russia from here?"
A: (Sarah Palin) "Please explain?"
UPDATE: (Sort of)
You can put any amount of makeup and clothes on it, but in the end... She lied outright, about not asking anyone to buy those clothes for her - aides were asked, by her directly, to buy clothes for her using their own credit cards. She also directly bought, or asked to have bought, clothes for members of her family. Look, if she wanted to do that I'm sure she could have used her own personal credit card - but she did not, she used campaign funds to do those things. Me, I would buy the stuff myself and then ask for a reimbursement of those items that were directly and legitimately campaign related. That's what I consider the responsible way to deal with taxpayers' money...
Saturday, 8 November 2008
Thursday, 6 November 2008
Broadband For Grey Nomads? Not Guaranteed.
Did you know we have a Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy? Well, we do. You can contact them here - I've done the link finding for you.
Why would you want to contact them? Well, DBCDE agrees that broadband is these days a necessity of life, and they have a thing called the Broadband Guarantee. Basically they say that if you're in an area that's disadvantaged, they will provide some way to get broadband to you, at an equivalent rate and speed as someone in an urban area.
Around the world, broadband is acknowledged as a necessity rather than a luxury, as evidenced by this article - and others like it. People often buy property now based on availability of broadband rather than proximity to shops or transport.
And so I thought to myself - what about us Grey Nomads and Winter Drifters in our buses and caravans, what broadband guarantee do we have? And there's really none. Despite the fact that mobile broadband is available all along the major routes and cheap enough to provide to us, we seem to be in a (pardon the ageist joke) a "grey" area...
Meanwhile, I've developed a few tips and tricks for getting wireless inside caravans and buses, I'll take a few pictures and put together a few articles over the next few weeks.
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Why would you want to contact them? Well, DBCDE agrees that broadband is these days a necessity of life, and they have a thing called the Broadband Guarantee. Basically they say that if you're in an area that's disadvantaged, they will provide some way to get broadband to you, at an equivalent rate and speed as someone in an urban area.
Around the world, broadband is acknowledged as a necessity rather than a luxury, as evidenced by this article - and others like it. People often buy property now based on availability of broadband rather than proximity to shops or transport.
And so I thought to myself - what about us Grey Nomads and Winter Drifters in our buses and caravans, what broadband guarantee do we have? And there's really none. Despite the fact that mobile broadband is available all along the major routes and cheap enough to provide to us, we seem to be in a (pardon the ageist joke) a "grey" area...
Meanwhile, I've developed a few tips and tricks for getting wireless inside caravans and buses, I'll take a few pictures and put together a few articles over the next few weeks.
Monday, 3 November 2008
Open Letter: Objection to Mandatory Internet Filtering
Dear Senator Conroy
As an Australian and an internet user, I have serious concerns about your mandatory Internet filtering initiative.
Given the importance our Government has attached to modernising Australia's broadband network, pursuing a policy that will slow down and increase the costs of internet access seems misguided at best. Australian households are diverse, and most do not have young children, so mandating a one-size-fits-all filter will not serve the public well. Nor do I think it is the Government's role to decide what's appropriate for me, and neither do most Australians.
Given the amount of Internet content available, no filter will ever be able to classify it all - and filters will always result in an unacceptable level of over-blocking. That alone is a price too high to pay, for all those using the Internet as a research tool for studies, technological development, or health and medical reasons.
I feel that the time and money could be spent in better ways to improve Australia's digital infrastructure. Trying to rid the Internet of what the government decides is objectionable or censored content is futile, and can only distract from that mission, and lead to further erosions of our rights.
As a voter and Australian ecologically aware citizen, your plan strikes me as very overly simplistic, worrying, and irresponsible.
Why Simplistic? Because I know children in primary schools who regularly and routinely already employ various means to circumvent content filters. You seem to want to waste time, money, and our already scarce resources to put in place a system any child knows to circumvent.
Worrying? From the point of view of eco-friendliness, this plan is a disaster. At a time when ISPs are working to sustain the load from Australian Internet traffic while at the same time trying to reduce their footprint on resources such as electricity, air conditioning, and space, this filter will make it a requirement for them to put in place another array of servers to cope with the filtering process. (Which, as we just established, won't work anyway.) This will cost dearly because there need to be extra machines built over and above the normal expansion, these machines will have to be powered, and housed in airconditioned data centres, and this will have to scale up with increasing Internet use.
Not all our ISPs are going to be able to absorb that extra cost. The smaller ISPs in particular will fall by the wayside, and we'll effectively end up with a situation similar to having had Telstra as a monopoly for almost a century. Look how well *that* turned out, with Australia now having a very high tariffs for cellphone voice, data, and SMS usage compared to many countries.
Of those ISPs that are left, their performance will suffer a hit of 25% (and up to maybe 75%) in speed and performance. On top of that, they will probably charge me 15% - 30% more for that privilege. In a time when our economy is already in trouble, do you actually want to cause this kind of financial turmoil among an entire industry sector and its customers, this kind of wholesale waste of resources on something which will be bypassed by 75% of your target demographic?
Which probably also covers my next point. Irresponsible.
I seem to remember that few years ago now, the government had already put in place a scheme whereby anyone who felt that they or their family needed to be filtered, could freely download filter software and assistance, provided by the government. Thus saving the kinds of environmental and economic and political costs which you propose now to impose with your filtering scheme. It's a system that is already in place and working right now. You could spend one tenth of the budget for the Clean Feed Filter on advertising the existing software and assigning a tech support contact in each capital city.
It seems irresponsible to me that money is being spent on an unwanted and unwarranted system when there's already a system in place, to put in place that new system that will cost Australia economically, ecologically, socially, educationally, technologically, and worst of all, will make us no better than a dictatorship or communist country in the eyes of the world.
register your discontent with mandatory filtering.
Perth, Third Most Liveable City In The World.
A bow and a nod to Australian cities, as Mr Murdoch said in his first Boyer lecture this year, Australia has four of the top ten spots, with five of our cities in that bracket.
Mega-nod to Perth for ranking third in the world!
Mega-nod to Perth for ranking third in the world!
Australia Is "Unprepared."
Rupert Murdoch says Australia just isn't prepared. Much as I love Australia, I have to agree with him. We're used to the idea of "them" fixing everything for us. By "them" we tend to mean the government but also insurance companies, banks, restaurants, councils, committees, and the lawn mower bloke. We tend to think that external things control and moderate our lives, when in fact that's a myth created by decades of "nanny-state" mentality, which the government sought to actively promulgate and bolster at every opportunity. Like every other chicken the government ever laid, this one to is now going to come home to roost, as hundreds of thousands of Australians sit back, live the lifestyle, and expect the government to "fix it all, a bit down the track..."
K-Rudd, much as he is showing us that he's environment-savvy and ecologically cool and an economic saviour, is continuing to try and both stay on as the moderating nanny, and at the same time, make businesses responsible for being the nanny also. The one person he's discounting is the general voter. Our part is to sit back and take what they shove into the trough in front of us...
I will hammer and hammer this point - take personal responsibility. Don't - under any circumstances - leave it all to the government and businesses. Whose interests will they have in mind? Do you think that you're important to the company accountant of a big supermarket? Really? The CFO is only there to care for one group of people - the shareholders who pay him.
Imagine this - purely imaginary! - scenario:
In another three years, and knowing about the melamine poisoning scare, if you and 5,000 people die from melamine poisoning because the supermarket bought the cheapest shit milk products it could source worldwide, that's collateral damage to the CFO and to the people in the supermarket making money from your purchases. Tough. People will sue the supermarket for damages but that's small potatoes compared to the profits the company made selling 5c/litre milk for $3.00 for the last three years before people started dying...
But if you take a personal responsibility for yourself, do some research, and decide not to just take whatever crap that supermarket shoves at you, they will drop that product like it's hot, and not only will you have saved yourself, you'll have saved other people who might not be into reading labels as closely as you, and you've also saved the cost of all that litigation... It may not amount to much if you only boycott milk - but if you apply this personal responsibility ethic to all your purchases, the effect will quickly turn into a habit. And a lot of people with this habit will quickly turn into a tsunami of activism. And that will prepare us better than anything else.
Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!
K-Rudd, much as he is showing us that he's environment-savvy and ecologically cool and an economic saviour, is continuing to try and both stay on as the moderating nanny, and at the same time, make businesses responsible for being the nanny also. The one person he's discounting is the general voter. Our part is to sit back and take what they shove into the trough in front of us...
I will hammer and hammer this point - take personal responsibility. Don't - under any circumstances - leave it all to the government and businesses. Whose interests will they have in mind? Do you think that you're important to the company accountant of a big supermarket? Really? The CFO is only there to care for one group of people - the shareholders who pay him.
Imagine this - purely imaginary! - scenario:
In another three years, and knowing about the melamine poisoning scare, if you and 5,000 people die from melamine poisoning because the supermarket bought the cheapest shit milk products it could source worldwide, that's collateral damage to the CFO and to the people in the supermarket making money from your purchases. Tough. People will sue the supermarket for damages but that's small potatoes compared to the profits the company made selling 5c/litre milk for $3.00 for the last three years before people started dying...
But if you take a personal responsibility for yourself, do some research, and decide not to just take whatever crap that supermarket shoves at you, they will drop that product like it's hot, and not only will you have saved yourself, you'll have saved other people who might not be into reading labels as closely as you, and you've also saved the cost of all that litigation... It may not amount to much if you only boycott milk - but if you apply this personal responsibility ethic to all your purchases, the effect will quickly turn into a habit. And a lot of people with this habit will quickly turn into a tsunami of activism. And that will prepare us better than anything else.
Sunday, 2 November 2008
Spam Figures Confuse Me
I wonder what this figure means, exactly. "One in 416" - that's about 0.25%, right? So they are saying one quarter of a percent of all email is spam. And they are bemoaning it. "Oh that's so much worse a result than one in 3,333! Oh woe is us!"
A year or two ago, these same firms were bemoaning that they figured between 25% and 95% (depending which firm you listened to) of all email was spam. There's something a bit fishy fishy fishy here. My email quantity has been increasing at about a linear rate over the last four years, no major blips or dips.
If I turn off spam filters on all my email programs and let them fill up for a day, I get a few hundred. Say I get 240 emails across the four accounts I use. That's a rough figure, but tends to be close to the lower end of the quantity. About ten (10) per account are real emails sent by real people, let's say 12 to get to a round figure that will divide nicely into that 240 figure. That's 15% of my mail is stuff that are real emails. I'd say another 24 to 36 (to stick with round figures) per account are what was briefly called bacn, i.e. emails sent by supplier listbots, security systems, jokes lists, etc. That's about 48 emails per account that I can say are not spam. Out of an average of 60 emails, that's at least another 20% of my emails that is, by definition, spam.
And I'm being generous indeed there - because the amount of solicited email (i.e. the stuff I want or have requested) stays about the same from day to day, while the maximum number of emails I receive generally goes much higher, some days double, very rarely lower than 150.
So I'm blessed if I can figure out where they got their figures from.
A year or two ago, these same firms were bemoaning that they figured between 25% and 95% (depending which firm you listened to) of all email was spam. There's something a bit fishy fishy fishy here. My email quantity has been increasing at about a linear rate over the last four years, no major blips or dips.
If I turn off spam filters on all my email programs and let them fill up for a day, I get a few hundred. Say I get 240 emails across the four accounts I use. That's a rough figure, but tends to be close to the lower end of the quantity. About ten (10) per account are real emails sent by real people, let's say 12 to get to a round figure that will divide nicely into that 240 figure. That's 15% of my mail is stuff that are real emails. I'd say another 24 to 36 (to stick with round figures) per account are what was briefly called bacn, i.e. emails sent by supplier listbots, security systems, jokes lists, etc. That's about 48 emails per account that I can say are not spam. Out of an average of 60 emails, that's at least another 20% of my emails that is, by definition, spam.
And I'm being generous indeed there - because the amount of solicited email (i.e. the stuff I want or have requested) stays about the same from day to day, while the maximum number of emails I receive generally goes much higher, some days double, very rarely lower than 150.
So I'm blessed if I can figure out where they got their figures from.
Friday, 31 October 2008
Do You Live Safely Securely And Privately?
Add another security scare - software that can analyse a picture of your keys and prepare the cut schema for making a new key. If your keys can be photographed by someone, they can in theory be copied, and people are being urged to treat keys like credit cards. But wait - wasn't there some similar panic about a year or two ago about so-called "bump keys?"
Basically, our security is about as vaporous and tenuous as as our fabled privacy. While we should not let that stop us from trying to stay safe secure and private, we should be aware that it's not always going to happen, and adjust our lives accordingly.
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Basically, our security is about as vaporous and tenuous as as our fabled privacy. While we should not let that stop us from trying to stay safe secure and private, we should be aware that it's not always going to happen, and adjust our lives accordingly.
Thursday, 30 October 2008
How To Fail At Ideas. My Ideas, Let Me show Them To You...
I had an idea, about two years ago. An idea I stupidly held close to the chest. Now I see this and I wish I'd posted this two years ago...
The idea was actually to place an oil press and a biodiesel reactor into a 20ft container, making them able to be shipped anywhere in the world that there was something to be turned into oil. Place a small diesel generator in there too, and once you've generated the power to extract and refine your first batch of diesel, you're running on your own product . And generating useful electricity as a side effect...
My first target was the olive farms here in Western Australia, because it seemed that all those stones and bits left over from pressing were an ideal feedstock for such a setup.
Second target - and I'm going to put this out now before I find yet another idea of mine developed in parallel but years later - is vineyards. They throw out tonnes of grape seeds and skins each year... Those are the same seeds that in other vineyards get turned into grapeseed oil for cooking, yes.
And seriously, I am sooooo bloody tired of having ideas and never getting them off the ground...
The idea was actually to place an oil press and a biodiesel reactor into a 20ft container, making them able to be shipped anywhere in the world that there was something to be turned into oil. Place a small diesel generator in there too, and once you've generated the power to extract and refine your first batch of diesel, you're running on your own product . And generating useful electricity as a side effect...
My first target was the olive farms here in Western Australia, because it seemed that all those stones and bits left over from pressing were an ideal feedstock for such a setup.
Second target - and I'm going to put this out now before I find yet another idea of mine developed in parallel but years later - is vineyards. They throw out tonnes of grape seeds and skins each year... Those are the same seeds that in other vineyards get turned into grapeseed oil for cooking, yes.
And seriously, I am sooooo bloody tired of having ideas and never getting them off the ground...
Pear Shaped
According to the news, we're about fifth most resource intensive in the world, our per person use of land for all our needs and wants accounting for quite a few hectares per person per year. But then too we have a strange kind of land, where we're trying to balance productivity with lower environmental impact more and more. So a hectare for us may not produce quite as much consumable resources as for some intensively-farmed countries. In other words, we may be using more land per person but we're not taking as much from it. I think we do quite well, and as new greening initiatives take hold, we'll start doing more with less, and bring our footprint down.
I remember also that we were among the more polluting people in the world too, with a carbon footprint that put us in the top end of the offenders. It will be interesting to see how that fares in the next few years, too.
And we're also one of the hardest-working, according to this article. It seems though that we're perhaps not as productive, because we're still tipped to slide into a recession, and our dollar is worth less and less compared to the greenback. Hardly seems fair does it? America plunges everyone into a recession and their dollar increases in value relative to ours, even though we're supposed to be only heading for a shallow soft recession.
Something's not quite in shape here....
I remember also that we were among the more polluting people in the world too, with a carbon footprint that put us in the top end of the offenders. It will be interesting to see how that fares in the next few years, too.
And we're also one of the hardest-working, according to this article. It seems though that we're perhaps not as productive, because we're still tipped to slide into a recession, and our dollar is worth less and less compared to the greenback. Hardly seems fair does it? America plunges everyone into a recession and their dollar increases in value relative to ours, even though we're supposed to be only heading for a shallow soft recession.
Something's not quite in shape here....
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