A Networked World

A large dose of common sense

2010-02-04T15:37:28+13:00

This is SO satisfying. Aussie ISP strikes landmark blow in copyright war

Aussie ISP iiNet has won a landmark case over service providers' responsibilities when it comes to handling copyright-protected material.

The case kicked off in the Australian Federal Court in October, between internet service provider iiNet, and AFACT (the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft).

AFACT accused iiNet of authorising 'torrent' downloads by not acting on known copyright infringements by its subscribers.

In what is likely to represent a blow to attempts to crack down on copyright infringing downloads, Judge Cowdroy has ruled that iiNet are not guilty.

In 2008 AFACT, the Australian cousins of NZFACT, accused iiNet of condoning copyright infringement, accusing them of ignoring requests to discipline subscribers for breaking copyright laws.

iiNet in turn replied, saying that said that they couldn't disconnect a customer based on mere allegation, and that any alleged offences would need to be proven in court.

Bringing a large dose of common sense into the equation, Judge Cowdroy stated that iiNet has no control over BitTorrent and cannot be held responsible for the actions of its subscribers.

My god, how dare a judge demand that allegations be proved in court before actions are taken against the alleged miscreant? What IS the world coming to when the rule of law trumps the profit demands of entertainment companies?

A gong for Judge Cowdroy.

And next time they come with the "free downloads are damaging the creative people" shtick, show them this.

Brilliant.

Data point close to home

2010-02-03T08:03:36+13:00

Had a call from my duaghter to say that her job as graphics designer/ publications for a major architectural business is finished. Last year they were applying for contracts to build mobility ramps for homes, a far cry from the major private sector and government contracts they had been used to for a couple of decades so its no big surprise.

But its pretty close to home. If you're in Wellington and you need a smart, bright, hard-working person with a degree in design and an aptitude for damned near anything legal, give me a yell and I'll put you in touch.

In the meantime you can do something practical by buying some of her designer gear.

Green shoots my bum.

More data points

2010-02-03T07:58:44+13:00

If we are on the cusp of recovery from the recession, why is it that i keep getting new data that says BS?

My neighbour works for a major oil company as a customer support/sales person. Well, she did till just before christmas, she's now getting seriously into the job hunting.
Another mate was the Corporate affairs Manager for another major international corporation, he dealt with CSR and community support, he's looking for a job.
Ther fays of first class travel appear to be over Qantas to dump most first-class seats

Under the scheme that could be announced within weeks, Qantas would retain first-class seats only on its London and Los Angeles flights, slashing the number of its first-class planes to 12 from 30, The Australian Financial Review said.

The paper, quoting a leaked reconfiguration plan, said the changes would mean that sumptuous first-class bed-seats would be stripped out of all the airline's Boeing 747-400s, leaving 14 first-class seats in just 12 Airbus A380 super jumbos.

That would leave exactly 168 first class seats on the entire QANTAS fleet, a little more than one 737-full. These seats are filled by people who take their own privileges seriously, whose backsides, apparently, are too delicate to endure the rigours of the lower classes. But they are either no longer traveling or their extra special comforts are no longer affordable or worth the money.

If this was a short recession, why is QANTAS making long term decisions about its seating configuration, why aren't they preparing for a return to the good old days when companies paid for their special people to travel in special comfort?

Because QANTAS isn't stupid; it knows those days are not coming back any time soon and it is making adjustments. Apparently it is easier to change the seating comnfiguration on a string on multimillion dolalr machines than it is to get the rosy specs off the ears of the econimic nattering class.

Joining the race to the bottom

2010-02-01T09:25:25+13:00

Seth is one of my favourite thinkers, although I don't read him often enough and I'm catching up today. This one rang a bell.
Seth's Blog: It's no wonder they don't trust us

The digital world, even the high end brands, has become a sleazy carnival, complete with hawkers, barkers and a bearded lady.

Its more than that, much more. I knew the economy was in the can nearly a decade ago when I walked into my local Coles supermarket in Sydney and say adverts for a TV magazine on the little plastic bar that you use to separate the orders on the checkout conveyor.

I knew, for absolute certain, at that moment, that business was in trouble. I'm sure some bright spark was rewarded for "capturing the checkout bar marketing space" but the fact that they had to do that meant to me that there were no places left for companies to try and squeeze out a profit and that they were scraping the barrel.

That was the day, pretty much, that I started planning my urban homestead because when a big supermarket chains needs the few cents they would get for each checkout bar advert, and the TV mags need to spend it to prop up their sales, we had reached the end of the growth phase of business development and the thing that was about to change was the whole system.

YESSS!!!

2010-01-25T09:49:13+13:00

Delicious. But we knew this all along. Federal Bureau of Investigation - The Washington Field Office: Department of Justice Press Release

Twenty-two executives and employees of companies in the military and law enforcement products industry have been indicted for engaging in schemes to bribe foreign government officials to obtain and retain business, announced Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Criminal Division; U.S. Attorney Channing Phillips for the District of Columbia; and Assistant Director Kevin Perkins of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division. Twenty-one defendants were arrested in Las Vegas yesterday. One defendant was arrested in Miami. The indictments stem from an FBI undercover operation that focused on allegations of foreign bribery in the military and law enforcement products industry.

[...] The indictments allege that the defendants engaged in a scheme to pay bribes to the minister of defense for a country in Africa. In fact, the scheme was part of the undercover operation, with no actual involvement from any minister of defense. As part of the undercover operation, the defendants allegedly agreed to pay a 20 percent “commission” to a sales agent who the defendants believed represented the minister of defense for a country in Africa in order to win a portion of a $15 million deal to outfit the country’s presidential guard. In reality, the “sales agent” was an undercover FBI agent. The defendants were told that half of that “commission” would be paid directly to the minister of defense. The defendants allegedly agreed to create two price quotations in connection with the deals, with one quote representing the true cost of the goods and the second quote representing the true cost, plus the 20 percent “commission.” The defendants also allegedly agreed to engage in a small “test” deal to show the minister of defense that he would personally receive the 10 percent bribe.

Face it, anyone in the business of enabling people to kill each other start with no moral compass, beside which a little financial corruption is in fact a trivial issue.

More sustainability BS

2010-01-19T09:44:21+13:00

I can't believe that we are still reading this stuff. We have secret to sustainable paint. Don't get me wrong, there is every reason to try new stuff and push the limits as far as they can go but where the hell was the journalist's mind here?

Resene believes it has identified the secret ingredient that will allow it to produce the world's first sustainable paint.

In August the paint-maker was the inaugural winner of What's Your Problem New Zealand?, a competition set up by the Crown research institute Industrial Research.

The prize was $1 million of research, and Resene has wasted no time in getting its project under way to develop a waterborne paint that is based on resins made up of 80 per cent sustainable ingredients.

Waterborne paints at present use acrylic as a resin, and existing environmentally friendly alternatives contain only 30 to 40 per cent sustainables.

The key is to find a substitute that will allow it to make a paint based on resins made of 80 per cent renewables.

The company will only say that the ingredient will be non-cropping (it won't compete with food crops for space) and is likely to come from existing industrial waste streams.

So lets go through that again shall we?

Resene believes it has identified the secret ingredient that will allow it to produce the world's first sustainable paint.

sustainable - Wiktionary
1. able to be sustained
2. able to be sustained for an indefinite period without damaging the environment, or without depleting a resource; renewable

OK? Simple; at the end of the day we have as much of the same quality of resources as we started with. So, how does it measure up?

The prize was $1 million of research, and Resene has wasted no time in getting its project under way to develop a waterborne paint that is based on resins made up of 80 per cent sustainable ingredients.

Weasel number one. to put it another way, this paint is 20% UNsustainable. Now, unless you can throw out of the formula the 20% that is not sustainable, then as soon as you run out of the unsustainable ingredients, you stop making the paint. Here, take enough food for a walk across the Nullabor plain and 80% of the water you will need. Have a nice trip. There is no such thing as percentage sustainability, your ability to produce anything is absolutely limited to the least available element. When that runs out, you are done.

Waterborne paints at present use acrylic as a resin, and existing environmentally friendly alternatives contain only 30 to 40 per cent sustainables.

See above, it doesn't matter whether your sustainable elements are 10% or 99%, its the non-renewables that will kill you. Now, not adding to the environmental load is in itself a good thing so 80% renewables is better than 30%, but sustainability it isn't.

The company will only say that the ingredient will be non-cropping (it won't compete with food crops for space) and is likely to come from existing industrial waste streams.

More weasels. If the sustainable elements comes from existing waste streams then they are absolutely dependent on the continuance of those waste streams in sufficient quantity to feed the sustainable paint mix. If those waste streams are legislated out of existence, or if they are generated by non-renewables, they too are going to stop and the sustainable paint is wholly dependent on the least renewable constituent of the other company's waste stream.

Furthermore, if the recovered ingredients are themselves composed of non-renewable atoms, Resene has shifted the problem exactly one step and, while they may have reduced some costs by being able to discount the waste content of their providing industries, they have exposed themselves to all the uncertainties that those industries have to deal with. I would bet they have increased their business risk by 50% or more.

I'm all for safer paint, I'm all for products that remove anything from the waste stream that can be reused as something else, but I'm 100% against misrepresenting this as sustainable, it's not even close.

The Great Waiheke Plum drive

2010-01-08T11:16:34+13:00

This is a great model for community engagement in locavore living. Plum Drive

This page will offer details of The Great Waiheke Plum Drive. As mentioned in the “About” page, this is being run as a social enterprise.

Social enterprises are social mission driven organizations which apply market-based strategies to achieve a social purpose. The movement includes both non-profits that use business models to pursue their mission and for-profits whose primary purposes are social. Their aim – to accomplish targets that are social and or environmental as well as financial – is often referred to as the triple bottom line. Many commercial businesses would consider themselves to have social objectives, but social enterprises are distinctive because their social or environmental purpose remains central to their operation.

Another part of the philosophy behind this initiative is transparency in every aspect.

Here are the Timeline, Record-Keeping and Timesheets.
Here are the Assumptions, Process and Planning records

The last 2 lines are as much the key as all of the rest. It looks at the economics and plannign requirements to make use of produce in glut. Not just the financial econimics but the whole economics of the process.

Having just processed my neighbour's plum tree, the biggest frustration is the huge amount of windfall plums I raked up, about 250Kg from a single tree. Next year we plan to have a local working bee to process them and now we have a model for the job.

This is how we will need to manage our local food production and management, not just for plums, but all the fruits and seasonal vegetables.

Its not JUST acting

2010-01-06T14:54:51+13:00

A while back I walked out of a live performance of the Lieutenant of Inishmore in 2003 because its graphic violence cannot be good for the psyches of the cast and I refused to participate in that kind of abuse of the performers, let alone the audience.

Its nice to get s9ome backing for that position, even if I've had to wait 6 years for it. Actors search for the light after dark roles

WITHIN a few weeks last year, Toby Schmitz went from playing an advertising executive whose life disintegrates through alcoholism to an Irish psychopath who takes off his father's head with a shotgun.

The Sydney academic Mark Cariston Seton believes actors who play such troubled characters are candidates for what he calls ''post-dramatic stress'' - a little-discussed consequence of the emotional rollercoaster of performing.

Examples of actors whose roles seep into their lives abound in film and theatre, including Heath Ledger struggling with mental exhaustion while playing the Joker in The Dark Knight, a sobbing Daniel Day-Lewis quitting a production of Hamlet after seeing the ghost of his own father on stage and Robert Downey jnr admitting that playing a cocaine addict in Less Than Zero contributed to his own addiction.

''In a performance run there's the high of performing but the aftermath of performance I believe we're not very good at managing,'' Dr Seton said.

Imagination is a powerful tool; it can take us places we could not reach otherwise. But just as some sportspeople improve their real-world performance by imagining themselves achieving at a higher level, those of us who venture into dangerous emotional and psychological spaces risk the real-world consequences of that as well.

Right now there is a suspicion that some actors are paying a price too high for entertaining us. And I'm fairly sure that the audiences are having their realities modified as well in uncontrolled experiments.

Reality checks and data points

2009-12-17T10:43:08+13:00

This piece from CIO.com is a nice reality check and the general principles apply to everyone, not just IT people. Retire? How About Never?

Overall, the recession has had far more of an economic impact on late-middle-aged adults. In an April Pew Research Center study of 2,969 adults aged 50 to 64, nearly 75% said the nation's economic problems are making it difficult to afford retirement.
Click here to find out more!

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed in that age bracket said their 401(k) accounts or individual stocks have been clobbered, with two in 10 claiming that their investments have lost 40% of their value and another four in 10 saying nearly 20% to 40% of their retirement funds have been erased.

I have never believed that I would be able to retire, not just because I could not save enough to do so, but because I have known half my life that when the moment came to kick back I would be doing it with millions of other boomers whose removal from the "productive" economy would shrink that economy and make it too small to support us.

I've also been pretty much convinced that rule number one of investing is "never give your money to someone else to play with on your behalf, never, ever, no, I really mean it, never"

So I have paid off my mortgage and I'm building an urban homestead where we are aiming to be able to live, not just survive, on about $200 a week in current dollars.

While most of the rest of my peers have spent their lives trying to get rich enough to retire, I've spent mine learning to live poor.

My wife is a teacher on a 4 year contract and she has 2 years to go. Here's how I rate that contract.

Chances of it being renewed on similar terms - 20%
Chances of being significantly cut on renewal - 40%
Chances of not being renewed 20%
Chances of being bought out before the end 20%
Chances of surviving any of those otucomes, pretty good.

Now eher are some more data points.

56 year old family member on contract for a company that provides training to large insurance and financial companies. Unpaid for several months, yesterday asked me for a loan to get through Christmas
58 year old CFO for several medium sized north American companies. Laid off in march, 10 months on global search for new job. Nothing
58 year old former exec and successful business man. Lost his company 3 years ago, still no job and about to run out of money

Just people close enough to hear about their actual problems and 2 of those in the last 4 days. Interestingly, all three are still in denial about their real situation, still looking for the silver lining that tells them all is going to come back to what they fondly believe is normal.

Economic recovery? Not close.

This thing hasn't even cleared its throat yet and as the CIO peives goes on to say, "there is no place to hide in this economy"

Too good to be true

2009-12-15T08:10:51+13:00

I have a rule. If someone calls me or comes knocking at my door with a special deal for anything - anything at all - I send them away or hang up on them. And that goes double for the deals that are too good to be true. Like this.
Crossed lines: phone scam dudding small business

For Mr Holroyd it began late last year when a well-dressed man in his 30s appeared at his car parts and plumbing business in Ingleburn offering a package of cheaper phone calls with the added incentive of $5000 worth of free equipment for the workshop.

Mr Holroyd signed up and took delivery of a phone system and a bandsaw that did not work, and an air compressor that did.

Two months later he took a call from Macquarie Bank telling him he was in arrears and owed them $30,000. Mr Holroyd, who was not even aware he was in business with Macquarie, pleaded for more information. Finally he discovered that the documents he signed had left him tangled in a lease agreement with two other companies he had never heard of, who had taken out finance with Macquarie.

There is no suggestion that Macquarie had engaged in any wrongdoing, although the bank was unmoved by Mr Holroyd's predicament. It hired the debt collection agency, which came banging at his door.

Which bit of "we will give you $5,000 worth of equipment as a sweetener for a cut-price phone deal" failed to ring any of this bloke's warning bells? How does he imagine the world actually functions? Does he believe in magic?

These scammers are no different from the Nigerian money scams or the NZ Finance company scam or most superannuation scams, they offer something for nothing. Whenever anybody tells me that something is free I know they are lying to me and that's pretty much the end of the conversation.

Nothing is free. Somebody always pays and the problem is that everyone involved in these deals, including the banks, don't actually care who that is. It can be you, it can be the slaves that work in some Northern Marianas sweatshop, it can be the whole communities living in the midst of vile pollution that shortens their lives and damages their genes, it can be our grandchildren who will find their climate untenable. But somebody always pays. Without exception, ever.

What these con artists depend upon is that you and I are basically corrupt, we all want something for nothing and if they tie it in the appropriate bow we will look away long enough for them to profit.

I don't actually blame the scammers that much, there is plainly a market for their business, if nobody ever accepted anything for "free" it would stop.

We need to teach our kids from kindergarten the simplest of rules; if it looks too good to be true, it is, someone is laying to you and someone, probably you, is going to get hurt. How hard is that to learn?