Here is a discussion on boing boing about the recent damage to the tubes. Current thinking posits that sea monsters are eating the tubes so I made this pic from an old radio tube advert I have been wanting to use for a while and Blake’s vision of the Biblical Leviathan. Blake’s picture is also used on the cover of an edition of Hobbes‘ Behemoth, so if it does turn out to be the doing of some government rather than sea monsters, the picture will still apply:
Less
More
I haven’t posted anything for a while, but this is outrageous.
He was accused of blasphemy after he downloaded a report from a Farsi website which stated that Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed.
Mr Kambaksh, 23, distributed the tract to fellow students and teachers at Balkh University with the aim, he said, of provoking a debate on the matter. But a complaint was made against him and he was arrested, tried by religious judges without – say his friends and family – being allowed legal representation and sentenced to death.
My last Melbourne Critical Mass for a while:
Flossmanuals has a good tutorial for embedding ogg theora videos with a java applet from Flumotion. With java GPL that means you can have a totally free software video stack. One downside is the load time of the java VM. I’m having trouble getting it to play nice with wordpress so for this experiment it’s back to hand “crafted” HTML.
TheAge has some really annoying ads (flashing, sound, video), but this one takes the cake and defines the spirit of the Hummer rather well.
In a post about the Burmese junta trying to shut off digital connectivity John Quiggin notes the storage capacity of usb sticks is so great that unless the junta stops all border traffic they can only really hold things out for a day or so. It reminds me of a project in the US which is now defunct which was trying to train community TV stations to share video through the Internet rather than “bicycling” it between stations. I suppose it’s the old saying that you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of quarter-inch tapes. Quiggin has some good links in the article to other Burma-related reading material.
On Facebook there is a group called “Support the Monks’ protest in Burma” with well over 300,000 people and tons of links to various protests, meetings and mobilizations. It’s good to see Facebook being used for something more, although it’s worth noting with regard to the group name that the it’s not just the monks who are protesting. Update: just found a fuller commentary on the “open source politics” of the issue in Wired.
After the former CEO of Telstra Dr. Ziggy Switkowski, a former nuclear physicist, was re-purposed to try to sell nuclear power to the Australian people an American, Sol Trujillo was parachuted in to head up Telstra. The only problem is that he has not played along with their game and has been agitating against any and all regulation.
One of his more notable tactics has been to hire fellow American Phil Burgess to run an astroturf “citizens website” called nowwearetalking.com.au filled with propaganda. Burgess has taken it to new levels by claiming Australia will be vulnerable to terrorist attacks if they aren’t given contracts in August and now they are attacking the government in a letter to shareholders with the election to be held very soon:
I suppose I just expected them to play along with the government but if they truly have the Wall Street ethic (and huge golden handshakes in their contracts if they are fired by the government from agitating anyway) I suppose they will agitate no matter what. Or maybe they have seen that Rudd is going to win and have decided to put the boot into the Libs to get concessions in the regulatory regime of the most likely future government…
I’ve wanted to pursue hobby electronics projects ever since my primary school computer teacher gave our class control over a logo programmable robotic turtle and encouraged us to tear apart consumer electronics and having basic electronics kits at home as a kid. However, whenever I searched in the past few years I couldn’t find an environment that was easy and well documented for somebody like me (non-Windows). Times have changed however, bringing along stuff like the arduino board, which is a creative commons share-alike licenced programmable board with cross-platform support.
Being able to program and talk to a open source hardware board in ruby is amazing. The ruby framework for the arduino looks committed and has video tutorials of ruby arduino development. I’ll keep looking, but I think it will be hard to top this. Picture above from cmpalmer.
Taxpayer funded advertising has been very useful for John Howard, as the post over at Possum Pollytics I commented on earlier shows. I would like to reiterate the very strong case that given how close the 2001 election was and given the effect the advertising had that this benefit of incumbency at the taxpayer expense secured Howard an election he would have otherwise lost. They have been spending one million dollars a day. Here’s a clip from Lateline:
People aren’t convinced this time around with the polls bouncing back to Labor, 60.5 to 39.5. I think it’s much the same as someone coming to your door and taking some money out of your pocket to print some pamphlets to hand to you. The citizen group GetUp, modeled after MoveOn in the US, is funding this ad on TV:
Faced with this, the current polls, the current trends and even Telstra stabbing them in the back in a letter to shareholders it may be the Libs are on the way out. But it’s not impossible as they only need to cut Rudd’s swing down from 8 or more to below 4 percent to win. However if Rudd does win the question that needs to be asked now is whether or not Labor will use these same tactics once they get into power. On the topic of citizen funded advertising a blog action day on climate change will arrive October 15th - which will be interesting to observe, if only because it will bring out the loons.
Regardless of my difference with Hitchens about going into Iraq I think he’s always an interesting person to listen to as he is one of the few journalists to actually go to the places they are talking about. It’s available on youtube: part 1, part 2, and also the ABC’s enlightened podcasting policy lets you get it direct from them mp4 or wmv.
Digital Public Broadcasting Services
Lateline is on the right track in using podcasting compared to SBS World News who are wrapping their program up into a flash player (same one the Herald Sun uses I believe) which prevents the user from making excerpts or using it in any other way. Although to their credit SBS was the first to use podcasting with John Safran vs God.
Hopefully the ABC will add theora/vorbis in an ogg and perhaps licence it clearly so people don’t fear exercising their fair dealing rights or redistributing. To my mind there is no reason public broadcasters should be using anything but open standards, and the material should become public domain.
It is viable to use open standards: CBC in Canda have broadcast some radio in vorbis and in early 2006 I used ffmpeg2theora, oggfwd with icecast on GNU/Linux with a custom script to stream SBS to friends. Unfortunately a Pentium 4 running at 3 gigahertz only gets you a low res. However if I can do it, then the ABC or SBS could do it quite easily and cheaply with modern commodity processors. The BBC on other hand use the puppy killing Realplayer and Windows Media to stream their news services, but now they are taking it to new heights with a DRMed “iPlayer”. As I understand it iPlayer incorporates Microsoft technology to deny you fair dealing uses on Windows, but users of OS X or GNU/Linux are denied everything because it doesn’t work on those platforms. As governments around the world have failed to act in a meaningful way against Microsoft’s monopoly I think it wouldn’t be an unreasonable policy for them to at least stop locking everyone into Microsoft’s platform by using their products.
update
I forgot to mention there is a good video from the Authors@Google lecture program with Hitchens in his other role as an author agitating against religion (Tony Jones never got round to asking him about it in the interview). Watch it on youtube.
