Politics | etbe - Russell Coker

Preferring Low Quality and Microsoft Software

Is Low Quality in Italian Academia related to the choice of Low Quality Software?

Diego Gambetta and Gloria Origgi wrote an interesting paper titled “L-worlds: The curious preference for low quality and its norms” [1]. The paper describes how in Italian universities (and large portions of Italian life) there are covert agreements that both parties [...]

Optimising the How To Vote Process

I previously wrote about my experience handing out How To Vote (HTV) cards at the federal election a couple of weeks ago [1].

One comment noted that at one polling place “all the volunteers for different candidates had combined into a single team, handing out all the cards together“, which makes sense. There is some [...]

Interesting Developments in Islamic Culture

Shereen El Feki gave an inspiring TED talk about Islamic youth culture [1]. She shows some interesting exerpts from the 4SHBAB TV network which is known as “Islamic MTV“, the music video from the US was of particularly high quality – while I expect high quality videos to be made in the US I don’t [...]

Telling People How to Vote

Yesterday I handed out how to vote (HTV) cards for the Australian Greens. The experience was very different to the one I had when I handed out cards for the Greens in the Victorian state election in 2006 [1]. The Labor party (ALP) hadn’t spread any gross lies about the Greens and there were no [...]

GM Food and Vaccines

Michael Specter gave an interesting TED talk about the dangers of science-denial [1]. Most of his talk is about the people who oppose vaccines, such as the former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy who thinks that she knows more about medicine than people who do medical research. He notes that a doctor who advocates vaccination has [...]

A School IP Project

The music industry seems fairly aggressive in taking legal action against children when they break the licence terms of copyright material. I think it would be good to teach children about how the IP industry really works.

It seems to me that you could have a school project that involves an entire year level (maybe [...]

Is the NBN a Good Idea

Since writing my post about whether the National Broadband Network can ever break even [1] I’ve had a number of people try to convince me of it’s merit. He is my summary and rebuttal of some of the arguments for the NBN:

The FUD

Claims are made that Australia may fall behind the rest of [...]

Slavery vs Child Porn

Slavery Still Exists!

We all like to think of slavery as a problem from the 19th century, but it still exists and is a significant problem! Kevin Bales gave an interesting TED talk about how to combat modern slavery [1]. Currently there are an estimated 27,000,000 slaves in the world, it’s a lot but it’s [...]

Too Stupid to be a Bishop

A Stupid Bisop breaks the Godwin Rule

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Catholic Bishop Anthony Fisher has just claimed that “GODLESSNESS and secularism led to Nazism, Stalinism, mass murder and abortion” [1]. This is a violation of the rule part of Godwin’s Law. We might not expect clerics to have enough general knowledge of [...]

CAL – Self-Serving and Useless

Brendan Scott linked to a couple of articles about CAL (the Copyright Agency Limited) [1]. I have previously written about CAL and the way that they charge organisations for the work of others without their consent [2]. My personal dispute with CAL is that they may be charging people to use my work, I [...]

etbe – Russell Coker

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Preferring Low Quality and Microsoft Software

Optimising the How To Vote Process

Interesting Developments in Islamic Culture

Telling People How to Vote

GM Food and Vaccines

A School IP Project

Is the NBN a Good Idea

Slavery vs Child Porn

Too Stupid to be a Bishop

CAL – Self-Serving and Useless

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