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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 […]

Terms of Abuse for Minority Groups

Due to the comments on my blog post about Divisive Behavior [1] I’ve been considering the issue of terms of abuse of minority groups – a topic of which racial abuse is only one aspect.

It seems that there are many discussions about which terms are offensive and when they are offensive, most of which […]

Divisive Behavior

Past Sins

Sam Varghese wrote an article about Matthew Garrett’s LCA talk “The Linux community: what is it and how to be a part of it” [1]. In page 2 Sam quotes Martin Krafft as asking about how Matthew’s behavior had changed between 2004 and the present, Sam cites some references for Matthew’s actions in […]

Net Neutrality

Martin Krafft advocates a model of Internet access where advertisers pay for the Internet connection [1]. The first problem with this idea is the base cost of providing net access – which in most cases is wires to the premises. Every service that involves a cable to someone’s house (Cable TV, Cable/DSL net access, or […]

Can the NBN Ever Break Even?

I previously wrote about how the National Broadband Network (NBN) seems more suited to porn delivery than regular Internet use [1]. It doesn’t seem to be of much use really. In a particularly insightful comment John Hughes suggested that the real purpose would be TV delivery.

The ABC is currently delivering 640*360 resolution MPEG4 files […]

Would you Short-Change a Pedophile?

For some time the film industry has been running an anti-piracy campaign with slogans such as “you wouldn’t steal a car” [1] in an attempt to draw a false analogy between downloading a movie and stealing a significant and valuable object – the modern equivalent to being a “horse thief“. One of the many ways […]