http://youtube.com/watch?v=TEBpC0GLr6Y
At the above Youtube page there is a video from MSNBC where Keith Olbermann discusses Bush’s record. Before I watched that I thought that it was impossible for me to have a lower opinion of Bush, however Keith’s presentation achieved the seemingly impossible task of making me despise the cretin even more.
www.ted.com is a premier partner for the Miro player [1]. This is a free player for free online content, the site www.getmiro.com has the player for download, it has binaries for Mac OS/X, Windows, and Ubuntu as well as the source (GPL licensed), it is in Debian/Unstable. It supports downloading in a number of ways (including bittorrent) and can keep the files online indefinitely. A Debian machine connected to the net could be a cheap implementation of my watching while waiting idea for showing interesting and educational TV in waiting areas for hospitals etc [2]. When I first checked out the getmiro.com site it only seemed to have binaries for Mac OS/X and Windows. But now I realise that it’s been in Debian since 11 Sep 2007 under the name Miro and since 12 Jun 2006 under the name Democracyplayer. I have only briefly played with Miro (just checked the channel list) and it seems quite neat so far. I wish I had tried this years ago. Good work Uwe Hermann!
I hope that the Miro player will allow me to more easily search the TED archives. Currently I find the TED site painful to use, a large part of this is slow Javascript which makes each page take an unreasonable delay before it allows me to do anything. I am not planning to upgrade my laptop to a dual-core 64bit machine just to allow Firefox to render badly written web pages.
Biella recently wrote about the Miro player and gave a link to a documentary about Monsanto [3].
One thing I really like about this trend towards publishing documentaries on the net is that they can be cited as references in blog posts. I’ve seen many blog posts that reference documentaries that I can’t reasonably watch (they were shown on TV stations in other countries and even starting to try tracking them down was more trouble than it was worth). Also when writing my own posts I try and restrict myself to using primary sources that are easy to verify, this means only the most popular documentaries.
Rick Falkvinge (leader of the Swedish Pirate Party) has written his predictions about an economic crash in the US [1]. Predicting that the US economy will crash is no great stretch, it’s gross failures seem obvious. The Pirate Party [2] is a one-issue political party that is based on reform of intellectual property laws. It derived it’s name from the term Software Piracy [3] which originally referred to using software without paying for it, but in recent times has been broadened in scope to cover doing anything that copyright holders don’t like. The term “Piracy” is deprecated in the free software community based on the fact that it’s unreasonable to compare armed robbery and murder on the high seas (which still happens today and costs between $US13,000,000,000 and $US16,000,000,000 per year [4]) with copying some files without permission. But that battle has been conclusively lost, so it seems that the mis-use of the term “Piracy” will continue.
The majority of the acts which are considered to be “Piracy” are well accepted by the community, the acts of the music industry in taking legal action against young children have only drawn more public support for the “Pirate” cause. Such support is increasing the changes of the Swedish Pirate Party getting a seat in parliament at the next election, and has caused the major Swedish parties to change their positions on IP legislation.
Now Rick’s background related to Intellectual Property issues causes him to analyse the IP aspects of the current US problems. His claim is that the US economy was trashed during the Vietnam war, has been getting worse ever since, and that the US position on IP legislation is either intentionally or accidentally helping to finance the US while it’s production of useful things is steadily decreasing. He also claims that some multi-national financial customs (such as using the US dollar for the international oil trade) is propping up the US currency and effectively allowing the US government (and the US residents) to borrow money from the rest of the world.
Dmitry Orlov’s presentation titled “Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US” [5] provides some interesting information on what happens during an economic collapse. He also has some specific advice on what can be done (by both governments and individuals) to prepare for an impending collapse. However he doesn’t mention some issues which are important to people like us (although not as important as food, water, and shelter).
The latest news related to the Beijing Olympic games is that Kevin Rudd (our Prime Minister) has said “It is absolutely clear that there are human rights abuses in Tibet. That’s clear-cut; we need to be upfront and absolutely straight about what’s going on,” – stating the obvious really. If that was all that happened then it wouldn’t be particularly interesting.
The paper version of “The Age” quotes George Bush as seconding Kevin Rudd’s statement. I believe that this is quite significant. Bush is well known for being stupid, the fact that he is now following the example of someone else who is doing good things is a very positive thing for the world. When John Howard was our Prime Minister we had an idiot (Howard) following an even bigger idiot (Bush) and the result was not good.
Kevan Gosper (an Australian IOC board member) said “They just take their hate out on whatever the issues are at the time, and that hate against the host country is being taken out on our torch“. People who are totally corrupt sometimes seem confused when other people are motivated by moral principles, maybe we have a culture clash between the corrupt IOC board and the attitudes of most people in the rest of the world (I can’t think of any other way to map Kevan’s statement to reality).
Mr Rudd has confirmed that Chinese “security guards” (soldiers) will not be permitted to operate in Australia to protect the Olympic torch from protesters, but the “security guards” have been operating in the UK.
I read about this on the web site of The Age, but I won’t link to them because they have a lot of broken links with the following explanation – I am not going to link to sites that are so transient in nature (linking to The Age would lower the quality of my blog). Incidentally does anyone know of a news service in Australia that has reliable pages which stay online?
We could not find the page you requested. This is often because older content has been removed from our site. In most cases you can still find the item via our archive service, News Store, where you can buy articles for a small fee.
It also has the following text which indicates that the most visible problem is probably transient, but the fact that they deliberately break links is unacceptable to me:
If you reached this page from a link on our site, please contact the webmaster (choose Technical faults) and tell us the address of the faulty page and the address shown for this page.
The MSN article about the meeting between Bush and Rudd also had an interesting quote from Nancy Pelosi (speaker of the house in the US congress) [1]. She said “As I said in India last week where I met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, if freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China’s oppression in Tibet, we have lost our moral authority to speak out on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world” and that the IOC made a mistake in awarding the games to China.
Pelosi is not known for being left-wing (the US Democratic party is centrist/right by the standards of most democracies) so it’s interesting to see her take a stand on this issue.
Erich Schubert has written about this, he points out that the Olympics are not about sports [2]. Well of course the Olympics are about money, drugs, and sports-science!
I’m not sure that I agree with Schubert and Pelosi, the Chinese Olympics has focussed a lot of international attention on what China is doing – this has to be good for human rights. The Olympic games are a white elephant, running them costs a huge amount of money and there is no evidence that they actually make money for the host country once the opportunity costs are taken into account. Maybe we should give the Olympics to Zimbabwe or the Sudan next?
I am just watching US Senator Barack Obama speaking at Google about his bid to become the next US president [1]. He has announced plans for allowing greater citizen oversight of the government including having all government data in open file formats (a great idea – the Australian Bureau of Statistics has a large amount of data online in Excel format). But his most significant item so far is to have a National CTO (Chief Technology Officer). It’s an idea that seems totally obvious now that I’ve heard it and leaves me wondering why I never thought of it before!
Barack understand technology, wants a functioning democracy, and gets a +5 Insightful from me for the CTO idea!
He also announced a plan to double federal funding for basic scientific research as part of a measure to make the US more competitive with other countries. He mentioned the US standing in the world as a problem (it’s the first mention of this that I’ve heard from anyone in the US government) and notes this as an issue which limits the ability of the US to save lives in regions such as the Darfur. He also claims that there is no clash of civilisations and cites his experience living in a Muslim country as helping to build bridges.
When discussing his reasons for running he said that he believes that he can bring his country together to solve problems better than other candidates. That’s the type of thing you often hear and ignore in political campaigns. It is often difficult to believe that someone wants to be famous and powerful for anything other than the most selfish reasons. But Barack gives me the strong impression that he is genuine.
He stated a plan to shut down Guantanamo bay (presumably just the prison and torture aspect – I’m guessing that he is not intending to close the military base) and to stop “rendition” (sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured).
His plans for education are innovative, as part of educating young children (0-3 years old) he stated an aim to teach parents to read so that they can read to their children! It’s sensible and obvious once you have heard it, but no-one seems to have publicised that idea before. He announced that he will increase teachers’ salaries.
He describes the US as having an “empathy deficit“, it’s obvious to almost everyone outside the US but not something that many people in the US realise.
He wants decisions to be based on facts and is determined to use facts when dealing with health insurance companies.
I just wish that we had some politicians like him in Australia. In terms of policy the Greens politicians would agree with him, but the combination of great policies, insight, and excellent delivery seems a lot better than any of the options in Australia.
Update: Changed the post (including the permalink) to have the correct spelling of Barack. Mental note – double check the spelling of everything in the permalink.
Currently in the US the main political parties are deciding who will contest the next presidential election. Naturally this gets some commentary from all sides.
Planet Debian has syndicated two blog posts commenting on these issues, it’s interesting to compare them:
First John Goerzen writes a post about an issue he (and almost everyone in the Debian community) considers important – copyright law [1]. He quotes the Randall Munroe who is the author of www.xkcd.com (described by the author as “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language“) which is wildly popular in the free software community (I believe that there is a fan-club which has meetings). Randall’s commentary is quite interesting and I recommend reading it [2]. The most noteworthy fact is that Barak Obama has sought advice from Lawrence Lessig – who has done more for the free software community than any other lawyer.
John’s post doesn’t contain much original content, but citing a lengthy post from a highly regarded source and quoting a particularly relevant paragraph make it very noteworthy.
Next Jaldhar Vyas writes about “the war against Islamic terrorism” [3] and makes the claim “we are finally gaining the upper hand in Iraq“. To consider that claim it’s best to read some expert commentary. William S. Lind [4] is a widely respected conservative who is an expert on military strategy, his comments about stabilising Iraq are always interesting [5]. It’s sufficient to note that William has been predicting failure for the US occupation of Iraq right from the start and that events over the last five years have proven him correct.
William S. Lind’s thoughts on Democracy are interesting too [8], I don’t agree with him in this regard (I generally disagree with him on most things other than military matters) but it’s an interesting thought.
Jaldhar also claims that “Democrats on the other hand have a closer association with the media who are behind many of the sillier IP laws“, this seems to be a reference the the “liberal media” conspiracy theories. There seems no clear party association with bad IP legislation (both the Democrats and Republicans do silly things in this regard), and debunking the liberal media claims can be done simply by watching some TV (choose a couple of random news shows on different channels). Fox is not the only right-wing news outlet.
Jaldhar also has a conspiracy theory about the Supreme Court and the “need to ensure that the court does not veer leftward again as it will inevitably do during a Democratic administration“, not that the Democratic party is particularly “left” by whatever definition you might apply to the word. I prefer the www.politicalcompass.org analysis which shows that all the serious contenders in the Democratic primary are Authoritarian Right [6]. So the result of the next US presidential election will determine how authoritarian and right-wing the government will be, the fact that it will be authoritarian and right-wing is beyond doubt. That said it would be good if the authoritarian right-wing government that we (*) get at least has some decent policies in regard to IP law (which is the hope for Barak Obama).
John Nichols has an interesting analysis of Ann Coulter’s support of Hillary Clinton over John McCain [7]. It would be interesting to see Jaldhar’s comments on this issue.
(*) I use the term “we” when talking about US politics to acknowledge the fact that the Australian government will take orders from Washington. Some pundits predict that the Greens will be the second major party in Australian politics in a couple of elections time, so maybe in 8 years time we will have an Australian government that represents Australians instead of Americans. But for the entire duration in office of the next US president (be it 4 years or 8) they will be able to get the Australian government to do almost anything that they desire.
Glen Turner writes about how Internet censorship could hurt science [1].
The ABC has an article about what is planned [2] which includes “Senator Conroy says it will be mandatory for all internet service providers to provide clean feeds, or ISP filtering, to houses and schools“. If Senator Conroy sticks to that plan then section two of Glen’s post (concerning high-speed access to research data) will not be a problem. This is no criticism of Glen for mentioning the issue as some idiot might try to change the plan to filter corporate and university access.
Senator Conroy also earns a Godwin point for “If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree“. There is a good discussion paper by Electronic Frontiers Australia about Labour’s plans in this regard before they won the election [3]. One issue they raise is the small number of sites identified as having child-porn. Imposing filters on an entire country to block the 3,236 web pages identified as prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority is not a sensible solution.
Another issue that EFA raises is the variety of reasons for content getting an R18+ rating (if that is to be a filtering criteria). One notable issue is “Adult themes” which includes “issues such as suicide, crime, corruption, marital problems, emotional trauma, drug and alcohol dependency, death and serious illness, racism, religious issues“. I doubt that there is much agreement between parents as to the relative significance of those “Adult themes” and which ones their children should be protected from. I also expect that a significant number of parents would like to have information about safe sex (including safe gay sex) and safe drug use available in case their children are interested in such things. I hope that the number of parents who disapprove of homosexuality and drug use so strongly that they are willing to risk their children’s lives is quite small (although the response to the cervical cancer vaccine indicates that it’s sadly larger than expected). Glen has some good points about this in the first section of his post.
Glen Turner writes about silly people who think that fluorescent lights don’t save energy over their lifetime [1].
A compact fluorescent light (one that is designed for the same socket as an incandescent globe) is not the most efficient light source, the Luminous Efficiency page on Wikipedia [2] lists a CFL as having an efficiency of between 6.6% and 8.8% while fluorescent tubes can be up to 15.2% efficient and low pressure sodium lamps are 27% efficient! But given that low pressure sodium lights are unsuitable for most uses due to being monochromatic and having a long warm-up time and the fact that fluorescent tubes are often not suitable due to design an 8.8% efficiency is pretty good. LEDs can give up to 10.2% (and prototypes offer 22%) but don’t seem to be available in a convenient and reliable manner (they are expensive and the ones I’ve tried have been unreliable).
When comparing fluorescent with incandescent one factor to consider is the power used. While high-temperature incandescent lights are quoted as having 5.1% efficiency and a 100W 110V tungsten incandescent globe is quoted as having 2.6% efficiency a 40W 110V globe will only have 1.9%. If you want to save energy then you probably don’t want to use 100W globes, using less light is the first way of saving energy on lighting! So the efficiency of incandescent lights used for the comparison should probably be closer to 1.9% than 2.6%.
Now the theoretical performance won’t always match what you get when you buy globes. There is some variation of quality between manufacturers and there are at least two distinct “colours” of fluorescent lights (one is about 5800K – similar to our sun, the other is something over 8000K – blue-white), I expect some difference in efficiency between lights of different colour range.
I see CFL lights marketed as being 5 times more efficient than incandescent lights, my observation is that they appear to be about 4 times more efficient (IE I replace a 40W incandescent with a 10W CFL or a 60W incandescent with a 14W CFL). Glen claims that an 8W CFL can replace a 60W incandescent globe, the only possibility of getting a factor of 7 or more efficiency improvement (according to the data on the Wikipedia page) would be to replace some 5W incandescent globes with CFL. In my experience (converting two houses that I lived in to CFL and the conversions of some friends) such an efficiency benefit is not possible on direct electricity use.
However in a hot climate any waste heat needs to be removed with an air-conditioner. So when a 60W incandescent light is replaced by a 14W CFL there is 46W of waste heat removed, with an ideal efficiency of a heat-pump it would take 15W to remove that heat from a building (and possibly more if it’s a large building). So in summer we are not comparing 60W to 14W, it’s more like 75W to 14W.
The issue of economics that Glen raises is more complex than it seems because governments often give companies significant discounts on electricity costs, EG in Australia aluminium refineries are subsidies heavily so they pay much less than home users. So hypothetically it could be possible to manufacture a device made entirely of aluminium which saves electricity (and therefore money for the user) but not enough to cover the electricity used in aluminium refining. However when we consider the margins of the various middle-men it seems quite unlikely that such a hypothetical situation could actually happen.
As for the issue of mercury in fluorescent lights there are two things to consider. One is that it is possible to recycle mercury (in Australia at least), the other is that coal fired power plants have a lot of mercury in their smoke…
The web site www.CheatNeutral.com offers cheaters the possibility of paying single or monogamous people to offset their cheating. It’s an interesting spin on the carbon trading schemes that are on offer.
www.greenmaven.com – a Google search site for Green related information. www.greenerbuildings.com – information on designing buildings to be “Green”.
Binary adding machine using marbles and wood-work [1]. I’ve just been reading Accelerando by Charles Stross [2], in that book he describes the Pentagon using Babbage machines to avoid the potential of electronic surveillance.
Alan Robertson has just started a blog [3]. He is a lead developer in the Linux-HA (Heartbeat) [4] project (which incidentally lists SGI as a friend due to the work that Anibal and I did [5]).
Here is an interesting article about light pollution [6]. It covers the issues of observing the stars, saving energy, and reducing crime through effective lighting.
I am a member of the Greens. The main reason for joining them is that they have principles. The Greens Charter [1] guides everything, policy must comply with the charter and candidates agree to uphold the policies which have been ratified if they get elected. There are no “non-core promises“.
The policies of the Greens are all positive. The major parties have some mean-spirited policies that aim to help Australians by making things worse for people in other countries. Unfortunately for them the world is very inter-connected at the moment, so it’s difficult to harm other countries without harming yourself in the process.
As you might expect the Greens are very positive towards the environment. Anyone who expects to live for more than 30 years (or who has children) should be very concerned about this. Currently even the most cautious estimates of the scope of the climate change problem by reputable scientists suggest that there will be serious problems in the next few decades. If you are young or have children then you should vote for the Greens (that covers most people).
Many religious groups have determined that God wants them to help the environment, for example the Australian Anglican Church General Synod 2007 resolved that “the Anglican Communion’s 5th mark of mission to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth; and recognises that human activity contributing to Climate change is one of the most pressing ethical issues of our time”. Anglicans and believers in other religions that have similar ideas should vote for the Greens.
The Greens have policies that are very positive towards minority groups. If you are not a straight-white-Christian then this is a strong reason for voting for the Greens. If you are a straight-white-Christian but have compassion for others (as advocated in the Bible) then again voting for the Greens is the right thing to do.
The Greens policies are humane towards people in unfortunate situations, including drug addicts, the mentally ill, and the unemployed. When considering who to vote for keep in mind that at some future time you or a close friend or relative may fall into one of those categories.
Finally the Howard government’s industrial relations legislation is very bad for the majority of workers. If the Greens get the balance of power in the Senate then they will be able to get such laws significantly changed or removed.
The Greens election web site is here [2].
As an aside, I never liked Paul Keating (our last Prime Minister) until I read his op-ed piece in The Age about John Howard [3].
Also here is an interesting article on preferences and why the major parties want people to misunderstand the Australian electoral system [4]. In summary if you vote for the Greens as your first preference and they don’t win, then your second preference gets counted, and if that party doesn’t win then the third preference counts, etc. So if you have the two major parties in last and second-last position then your second-last preference may make an impact on the result! Putting Greens in the #1 position does not “waste” your vote. Parties get government funding based on the number of #1 votes, vote for the Greens as your first preference and you effectively give them $2 for their next campaign. Finally when a party wins an election they immediately look at where the #1 votes went and often adjust their policies to please the people. Vote #1 for the Greens and if Labour wins they will have more of an incentive to adopt policies that are similar to those of the Greens.