jonny_noog

This one's actually news to me. I'm glad I never bothered keeping up with trends in political correctness, it seems to be a battle fought over shifting sands that cannot be won.

To try and clarify my view a bit, IMO the terrorist "groups" we hear about today are more like Anonymous than they are like the fictional villainous organisations one might see in a James Bond movie, i.e. they're not even really organisations at all, they're just individuals or tiny groups, barely associated with each other at best, who happen to have similar positions on certain issues. But I wanted to make this point without sounding like I thought Anonymous should be branded as terrorists, because I don't.

I get that after 9/11, the entire western world's governments went well overboard, amazingly allowing the military industrial complex to write their own cheques, using scare tactics to allow this to continue. I knew this full well long before I saw The Power of Nightmares. Before I say what else I have to say, I again don't wish my position to be misconstrued, I'm not advocating for the usual government policies, I'm aware of how insignificant the threat of terrorism is when compared to other threats of the day that face our society and I usually find myself pretty firmly on the social-libertarian side of just about any debate. As you say: "these organizations are largely fictional" (emphasis added) and I totally agree. I cannot reconcile any view that we do not need some degree of vigilance when it comes to (the no doubt few and far between) individuals and small groups that are out there and do wish to perpetrate terrorist acts.

So following on from this, yes, terrorism is an overinflated menace and it continues to be overinflated for numerous reasons, most of which revolve around certain areas of government and private industry partners who have vested interests in keeping the public scared in order to maintain power and profit. But some part of the overreaction to terrorism does come from a place of honestly thinking they're doing the right thing, misguided though they may be. Some very small part of the usual government reaction to terrorism is - in my mind - sanctioned and required because terrorism while a largely overinflated boogie man, does none the less still exist. I don't wish to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Governments are still wrestling with what to do about this issue I think. It seems that the best solution they have so far come up with is reducing civil liberty and surveilling everyone. Not ideal from my POV.

Not to mention that as the saying goes, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

I wonder if there's been a noticeable spike in search terms related to that ad, e.g. people searching for how to say "you are cute" in French.

I still don't know how to say "You are cute" in German.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

2. http://webdesign.about.com/od/webdesignbasics/a/aa071607.htm http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/the-golden-ratio-in-...

Google for more.

It may also be worth noting that since the last change of leadership the Liberals[1] went through, we now have an opposition leader who is Roman Catholic (his nick name: "The Mad Monk") and a Prime Minister who is Anglican. This despite a statistic I heard the other day claiming that 9% of Australians actually attend a church on a weekly basis. Fortunately Australian politicians - even the religious ones - tend to retain a greater degree of practicality when it comes to combining religion and politics; compared to what I see from the US. But the fact that we have two guys who are openly religious at the helm has got to factor in somewhere.

I might also point out the relatively recent appearance of such groups as the Australian Sex Party, whose establishment seems to have been a reaction to the apparent ascendancy of this ultra social conservatism that we're seeing right now in Australian politics. Google the obvious keywords if you're interested. From memory, the home page of the Australian Sex Party is marginally NSFW.

[1] Our further right-wing party is known as the Liberal Party... I'm pretty sure this was done solely to confuse Americans. :P

But somehow, I doubt creating the "final solution" fail safe platform was first and foremost in the minds of whoever it was that thought up the iPhone app store model. Nobody likes a monopoly... unless it's their monopoly.

No I'm not in Sydney (I was born there though), but I know what you mean, housing prices are pretty screwed up in many places around the country these days. I'm lucky that I found a pretty good deal for myself, but good deals are getting harder to come by, that's for sure.

As an aside, Google was running 'used aborigines' adverts from ebay for quite a while. Do you think these adverts should also be allowed to run?

I had not heard about this, but honestly I could not care less. If people just ignored this shit rather than pandering to the trolls, maybe there'd be no incentive for them to keep doing it.

Google has in place limits to stop things like pornography showing up, with it's safe search feature. This is already a form of censorship based on the values of countries like the USA.

And this censorship would be gone too, if it were - once again - up to me.

I think you must see where I draw the line now, i.e. I don't draw it. I can imagine that many people may think my view extreme, what about the children and all that? Well, that's what parents are for.

Whether a sociopath is able to say whatever they like on the Internet or not doesn't bother me in the slightest. Because I am an independent person who thinks for myself and feels quite comfortable judging for myself whether I wish to read the writings of a sociopath.

But more than anything else, I was actually commenting on the technological naivety of the people involved in this particular situation. Were I inclined to get a bee in my bonnet about satirical racism on the Internet, would I think having the offending material removed from Google is really any kind of satisfactory outcome? Can people still get to the offending content? Certainly. Do more people know about it now than could have ever possibly known about it previously? Yes.

My point is that no matter how tightly the Conroys of this world try to clamp down, there will always be cracks that are exploited. No matter how "clean" the feed, there's always going to something on the Internet that offends someone. Instead of worrying about where the line is drawn, we could start worrying about taking personal responsibility for ourselves and our children and leave everyone else free to do the same.

Their treatment of the issues betrays a astounding naivety that I find of increasing concern. On the face of it, it's always for a good cause... won't somebody think of the children! We need to censor all the bad sites on the Internet! Some guy feels slighted by a racial slur on some website that no one takes seriously! We must ban it from Google! We can't be seen to be endorsing racism!

The sentiment is always admirable but the reaction betrays an complete misunderstanding of both the online culture and the technological infrastructure that supports it.

The sad thing is I know first hand that there are people in the Australian Government who can and do give better advice that should ostensibly lead to better government decisions in the online space. It just seems like their voices are being disregarded. I suspect the main reasons for this are:

a) Certain politicians refusal to accept that the reality of the Internet does not fit their limited understanding of it.

b) Politician's desire to use the Internet as a political football.

Perhaps it really is time to move to Estonia.

Well yes, I don't really support prison either. But to me as bad as prison is, it's still the lesser of two evils. I feel that society needs to make up its mind whether prison is punishment or rehabilitation. Currently things seem quite grey on this point. Perhaps certain institutions could be defined more clearly either as rehabilitation institutions or punishment institutions, and criminals could be sent to one or the other based on their history or something.

In any case, putting myself in the position of being someone falsely accused of say, murder. Would I be happy to be going to jail with the possibility of being raped or killed myself? Fuck no. But would the idea of being on death row with the ostensible possibility of a "reasonable review" make me feel better? I guess that's one of those things that's hard to judge in the hypothetical, but from this vantage point, I'd have to say no.

If you're innocent, you're more likely to die in the prison infirmary than you are in the death chamber.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised but do you actually have citations for this?

But overall I guess I don't really get what your actual argument is here? Death sentence better than life sentence because prison is so dangerous? Is that it?

1. I bought myself a Mac desktop last year and I love it. I felt the iPhone would compliment nicely.

2. They've had a couple of iterations to sort out the kinks in the iPhone now and IMHO it shows.

The 3GS feels very polished to me and I don't regret my decision. I've only had my iPhone for about 10 days and I already have Google Sync set up for email/calendar syncing, I've used it as a Skype VoIP handset (in conjunction with my home Wi-Fi), I've got games on my phone that are actually worth playing, mobile Internet access that's actually practical to use and I've got an awesome remote for use with the VLC media player.

I've even made a few phone calls.

I really thought about getting one of the slightly less mainstream phones that might give me more "geek cred" or something. But in the end, I just want as good a user experience as possible and I felt I would get that from the iPhone. YMMV.

Granted, upgrading from a SE w800i I probably would be more than happy with any of the current generation of phones and I can't directly comment on the N1. But all my research led me to the conclusion that if you're looking for polished, go with the iPhone. If you're wanting a little more bleeding edge and experimental, go for one of the other options.

I have theorised in the past that perhaps the reason some people use the "Ask Jeeves technique" while I and others might use the "Answer Prediction" technique might be due to me having a clearer general understanding of the way that search engines collect and index their data, i.e. (to oversimplify things for the purpose of illustration) I get that the search engine is just matching text patterns to my query, where as perhaps less technical people don't really understand this and if they think of it at all, they might unconsciously imagine that the Google search page is the interface to some kind of Sky Net like artificial intelligence that is able to take their question, ponder it and provide the most relevant answers. Maybe anthropomorphising our tools is the human default?

Or maybe I'm totally off base here... just some random musings really.

It's better that 10 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man hang.

Or at least that 10 guilty men stay in jail, no?

If it was possible to know with 100% certainty that every criminal who will be put to death was really guilty, then sure I'd be all for capital punishment. But until we perfect a mind reading machine, I'll stay on the "anti" side of the argument.

And won't that be a wonderful world to live in by the way, once the government can accurately read our thoughts. :)

It was realised that it was not the most effective method to maintain profits for those established individuals and organisations that have the clout to influence government policy. Let's hope that one day this changes, but I'm not holding my breath.

It's not that I couldn't use CentOS and stuff (I have and still do to some extent), but I certainly have a much harder time of it. I guess that would probably change pretty quickly if I really wanted it to.

I don't want to though.

One nice immediate benefit of all of this is that ActionMailer gets all of the functionality of ActionController in a clean, intentional way. Everything from layouts and helpers to filters is using the identical code that ActionController uses, so ActionMailer can never again drift away from the functionality of ActionController (as ActionController itself evolves).

I particularly like the sound of this, bringing ActionMailer more into the fold as it were. I've had a number of occasions to need to use ActionMailer and it's not always been a pleasant experience.