Exception is the Soul of Humanity

Morris Iemma wants to sell off our state's power to private investors.

While the public on-masse has rejected this idea as stupid, he's pressing ahead with everything in his power to make it happen. He's spending big (possibly on taxpayers' money) to craft a campaign selling us on the idea of privately owned energy. I'm guessing the campaign won't also sell us on the idea that we're happy to be paying for the campaign.

To me this just smacks of John Howardism. It didn't take long after he became Prime Minister for John Howard to start doing things he liked, regardless of whether it was what the public wanted. He had us invade and murder in other countries, screwed over our workers in favour of businesses, and told our indigenous people to go jump for all he cared of what our forefathers did to them.

Yep, it's beginning to smell like little Johnnie is living on in little Morris.

Carbon credits. Who’d have thought saving the environment could be purchased off the shelf. For the D&D’ers out there, imagine being carbon true neutral. Not paying someone to assuage your eco-guilt, but rather not incurring such guilt in the first place.

Is it possible? Possibly. Is it affordable? Probably not, for the vast majority. Sure you could use an electric only car, or a Prius modded to allow full electric mode (in Euro models but is crippled in the US). And sure you could run your house fully on wind and/or solar energy, but that would mean huge upfront costs and require major changes in power usage.

In the last few days we’ve been hit by some pretty bad weather at home. It caused some major flooding, washed a 40000 tonne coal tanker ashore and killed 9 people so far. Before the situation was even settled some journalists were jumping on the climate change wagon.

Does that mean that we won’t have natural disasters any more, just climate change events? Does it mean that the rebuilding costs are like carbon credits to pay for our climate changing ways? One thing’s for sure, in an election year it’ll get good milage.

Slate’s running a cute top 10 article listing the top 10 most outrageous civil liberty violations in the USA in 2006. There was a time we could safely just roll our eyes and say or think “only in America”.

While it’s a journalist’s job to make an article sensational enough to pull in readers, nonetheless it’s quite a worrying picture she paints. It appears as if, while the Bush regime can’t hide the failure of the war in Iraq any longer, they still aim to try and hide the atrocities they commit on their own soil (or close enough).

I think George Dubya felt a chill seeing the fate that caught up with Saddam, and determined that that would never happen to him, by hook or by crook.

References:
The 10 most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006

It used to be that we could shake our heads, roll our eyes and utter "only in America" when we heard of the latest unbelievable case of corporate evil.

However now thanks to Little Johnnie's "Free" Trade Agreement with America, soon we too will look at other countries slightly shamefaced, as we try to surreptitiously wipe the stink of DMCA shit off our shoes.

Ahh but that's OK. Soon enough F.T.A. inspired U.S. control of our media will kick in and the pain of consciousness will be nothing but a bad and fleeting memory.

Blogged with Flock

References:

Trivia for you - did you know, in Australia we actually don't have free speech.

Apparently it's not enshrined in law like it is in the "land of the free", America. Here it's kind of implied that we are free to express our views on things, but you have no strong legal backing if somebody takes you to court over it.

Dissidents beware. Employees beware. Political journalists beware. A few days ago the Howard Government ordered MelbourneIT (that paragon of all that is good and pure in the tech world) to take down a site parodying John Howard's site.

To be fair, the site was cutting a bit close to the bone for real parody (using imagery, site layout, copyright notices etc that are probably rightfully owned by the Government). Then there's the fact that someone who didn't know John Howard from a bar of soap may believe he really wrote the press release that has triggered the site take-down. It's so cunningly written that you could well believe Howard himself wrote it, if he knew how to admit mistakes or say sorry.

The funny thing is that if Little Johnnie had actually penned the text it would probably have gone a long way towards having the bulk of the populace think better of him, and maybe even vote for him for a reason other than the utter lack of decent alternatives.

References: Slashdot posting of story Link to PDF of “supposed” John Howard speech from shut down site

On the radio while driving home they have been running ads for becoming an officer in the Australian Army. They’re pushing the fact that it now only takes 18months of training at Duntroon to become an officer.

I wonder whether existing Army Officers feel cheapened by this, after all the time and effort they would have put in to get to where they are?

And while I would welcome such a rush campaign for say, doctors, nurses or police officers, I’m not sure what the point and/or need is for ever more Army officers. Maybe we sent too many over to kill people in other countries for possibly having bad thoughts.

Recently on ProBlogger.net an article was posted which drew quite a large and lively comment discussion. Someone had ripped off the layout of the ProBlogger site and was using it on their own blog. Their blog was on a similar theme as ProBlogger – amateur blogging. From what I’ve seen Vince of AmBlogger.net (who was since changed his layout to differ somewhat from ProBlogger’s) didn’t really credit Darren’s ProBlogger, or Rachel’s Cre8td Design for the look of the blog – at least not until called on it.

The absolute certainty of most spectators that Vince did in fact have a case to answer to, in terms of infringing on copyrighted materials, has made me wonder. Just how far is too far?

It seems obvious that a copy of a whole site design (CSS, layout, imagery) would constitute copyright infringement, but where is the line drawn?

For imagery I expect (yeah I’m speculating; I can’t be bothered finding facts to back this up, and they’d be Aussie laws that’d be irrelevant to the USA) that a rip off of any individual complete image would be wrong, even if renamed and altered in terms of filetype, resolution or palette.

But for CSS and layout – hmm. A complete CSS file replete with original comments – obviously wrong. Likewise for a layout. And like with images I expect it doesn’t cut it just to remove original comments, change selector and id names and colours. But what about a chunk of a CSS or layout? What if the original isn’t a complex masterpiece, but rather a simple minimal design?

What if the person lifting a CSS takes the whole thing, but refactors it such that it’s more modular/cascading, and in the process shrinks it and makes it more efficient? What if they take a CSS and layout and reshuffle the layout components into a more pleasing design? What if they replace copyrighted imagery with similar stock pictures?

Where is that line? And, what colour is it? :-P
PS I expect it’s border-style:dashed;

Everywhere you look around Newcastle’s CBD there’s new construction. It’s a curious mix of heritage age buildings and skyscrapers. Well they don’t so much scrape as point, but they’re still 10 or so storeys high.

On the other hand you have the “markets” in Newcastle CBD’s mall. What markets, you say? Oh, they are no more. They tried to fly but the Council had tied them to the anchor with extra big parking fees – on a weekend! To “encourage a greater turnover of shoppers”. That’s right, and it’s not their only “duh” moment.

The government in it’s infinite wisdom wants to can our rail lines (probably so they can steal the trains to shore up Sydney’s rail system). The Council has yet to stop that happening. If the rail corridor was vacated, what would you expect to replace it? Something for the Council’s employers, the people? Bzzzt. Wrong. Something for the developers who missed the land grab for the first round of harbour blocking skyscrapers.

With all the new multi storey apartment blocks sprouting around the beach end of the CBD you’d expect that there would be regulations in place to enforce minimum parking allocations, wouldn’t you. Ha, foolish one.

So, Peter Costello says “the time is right” to give some tax cuts. I wonder if this time it’ll be enough to buy a(nother) coffee. Or maybe this time it’ll be a huge amount – enough to buy a McDonalds meal.

Why do we fall for this crap? Is it because we’re so jaded that we can’t believe that any other politician would spend the money on infrastructure instead, like we asked? Yeah, yeah, screw our health and aged care systems, etc, just give us a little money fix now, right?

References:
The Australian: It’s time for tax cuts: Costello