Firstly, anyone that votes only on one policy is nuts… there are a lot of things that makes Australia what it is… voting on one tiny aspect of a whole of government approach is just weird IMHO.

Now I am on the record as saying that I think the whole Net Filter is a big joke… (a bad one), but a joke. It won’t do one thing to stop what the government claims it is for. How often do you see when places are raided, collections of DVD burners. These DVD’s are distributed by hand or by post, not by the internet. But I digress…

From IT News

Ludlam, who has long opposed mandatory filtering, said the Liberals were likely to support Labor’s filtering proposal under Tony Abbott’s leadership.

“I think the Liberals are ducking and weaving; I think internally, they’re split … but the fact is, the party is led by Tony Abbott who is deeply conservative,” he said.

Never have truer words been said.  If you don’t think that a government lead by someone on the record by such a Conservative as Tony Abbott would not leap at an opportunity such as this (even if only partially technically feasible) you are in the words from The Castle ‘Dreaming Mate’.

Perhaps if both sides of politics took the time to read the facts http://aph.gov.au/library/pubs/BN/sp/AsylumFacts.htm and stopped going for the lowest common denominator,  this would not be an issue.

Instead we play gutter politics with the most vulnerable, when what we should be doing is educating people.  Yet the problem seems to be that educating takes longer and doesn’t fit the soundbite

Let me get this straight first. I am against the filter, it won’t work, never will, and I will just get around anyway.  My reasons for this are around the fact that all governments of all persuasions would be to tempted by the lure of the vocal minority to secure votes. Sorry but the No Clean Feed People need to be as organised, financially together and focused as the Christian Lobby groups that seem to be pushing this.

Stilgherrian wrote a great piece on The Drum the other day about the Internet Filter.  However if you read the article nice and slow, paying attention to the big words you will notice he was drawing a very clear distinction between the person and the policy.  Yet the vast majority of the comments are about the person.

Now in the last few days a couple of interesting things have happened. Firstly the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy joined twitter @DBCDEgov. My first reaction was “ well that ain’t going to go down well the natives “ and secondly, the people behind that account are going to have be fairly thick skinned.

Didn’t take long (and by long I mean minutes) before the No Clean Feed people were jumping up and down all over that account. Jumping up and down on one policy of a massive portfolio isn’t going to change jack shit. (Or as they say, wake up and smell the cat food).  Then yesterday the Department made a change to the overall timetable of the policy along with a few changes to the possible implementation methodology of the filtering policy.  Then shock horror, to communicate these changes the department very rightly attached the #openinternet hashtag to links to the press release.  Why, because that is what they should have done.  They are trying to communicate a policy to the group that the policy effects.  Yet, the critics quickly said “oh the irony”, “outrage”, “WTF”.

Of course they did, if I was in the Department running that Twitter account, so would have I.  It is no “#budgies” hashtag AKA Budget reply, but a well targeted approach to getting their message out. But no to the “rabble” it was just more petrol on the fire.

One final point.  I see lots of people saying, well I won’t vote for Conroy (people who do not live in Victoria btw and can’t vote for him regardless).  Sure, you can take a single policy approach to an election. Or worse still a single person approach to an election.  But if you think that the Liberals (remember their great filtering software, the one the 14y/o broke in 5 min) will not jump at this kind of policy when it suited them I am afraid you are seriously disillusioned.

On what has been a rather monumental day in Australian Politics… I thought I really did need to point out one little fact. A fact that not only the Opposition, but both the new Prime Minister and former Prime Minister have made the simple mistake of saying they were elected as Prime Minister.

Yes with modern politics it does seem to be driven by a “personality” as opposed to a Party system, however what has not changed is the Constitution.

A head of government (or head of the executive), known as the prime minister (PM), premier or first minister. While the head of government is appointed by the head of state, the constitutional convention that the person appointed must be supported by the majority of elected Members of Parliament. If more than half of elected parliamentarians belong to the same political party, then the person appointed is typically the head of that party. (Wikipedia)

You will notice what is missing in that. The fact that the public do not vote for the leader. The leader can change (and does) in the middle of terms. This has never has represented a constitutional crisis. If the leader was voted in by the public and then changed by the party, this would be a crisis, but this is not how the system works.  However the PM is appointed by the Governor-General of Australia under Section 64 of the Constitution.

The only time there was a Constitutional crisis was when the GG Kerr replaced Whitlam as prime minister,  putting Fraser in as the caretaker prime minister.  In this case it was a change of party and not just leader.  That is the power that the Governor General has.

It would help if even the current Prime Minister would stop playing word games with the Constitution. Julia the Lodge is yours by our system of government fair and square.  You can move in and change the curtains when ever you like.

I think you were on my bag on Wednesday night when I was out taking photos, but do not remember you on Thursday and when I went desperately searching for you at midnight last night around the house you were nowhere to be found.

If I did something to upset you make you leave, I am sorry, and I will try and change my ways.  I promise that other tripod meant nothing to me.

You are the only one for me…  you are my party tripod, my fun friend to be with.

So you if find my beloved Gorilla Pod DSLR with Ball head, and NO mounting plate (the bit with the spirit level), let me know…  I have the mounting plate. And really I like my tripod.

Here are three places I may have dropped it on Wednesday 2nd June 2010…..

View Larger Map

P.s I really do miss my tripod.

So here are two posts in one…

A pro iPad and then an antiIpad post….

…………………….

Magical device blah blah.
Revolutionary device blah blah blah
This changes the face of publishing blah blah
Taking the world by storm blah blah.
OMG how did we live with out this blah blah blah
Steve has shown the way of the future blah blah blah.
Flash is just for advertising blah blah blah
I waited 7 days in a blizzard for it blah blah blah
So many great apps blah blah blah
So much better than the iPhone blah blah blah
It replaces 500 devices in my house blah blah blah
Everyone should release an iPad version of their blah blah blah

…………………….

Flash is an important part of the web blah blah blah
Close ecosystem blah blah blah
4×3 video is a waste of blah blah blah
No camera no blah blah blah
Queuing for a computer is just stupid blah blah
Oh you can change Job’s liver but not the battery blah blah blah
No Mulitasking blah blah blah
iTunes is just screwing developers blah blah blah
It is just a big iPhone that can’t make calls blah blah blah
Just more e-waste that does nothing my blah cant do blah blah blah
Why do we have to recode blah blah blah for the iPad

……………………

Under the post you may or may not find lots of pro and anti Apple flame wars…  although I doubt it

I think I’ll leave the conclusion to iPad Lorem Ipsum…. it seems only fitting, and possibly better research than a lot of content out there.

Nunc iPad lectus a urna commodo iPad. Apple feugiat ipad consectetur diam revolution scelerisque. Suspendisse iPad dui a Apple dictum Steve Jobs. Vivamus quis iPad magic sapien placerat blandit vitae in iPad. Apple erat magical, pulvinar nec elementum sed, facilisis sit amet est. Praesent ipad, tincidunt semper publishing industry, ornare vel turpis. Fusce lots of apps pharetra. Aenean tincidunt dapibus iPad, eu aliquam sem Apple non.

Here is how the internet works…

Someone creates funny and unique content, it may be a mashup of your content for example.  They will upload it to say Youtube…

Then what happens is that people link to it.

They do not do the following..

Pull the video from Youtube, wrap it in their own branded player… then write a story about how said video went “VIRAL” and then not put a link to the original content, nor mention the creator of the original content.

I am looking at you Henri Paget in particular as your name is on the by-line!

Of course if you like we can just pull your content and claim it as our own if you like?

The NineMSN version of the story…. http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/1039487/vicious-dog-man-basks-in-barking-glory

And the source video… by djhippster

so ninemsn… google attribution and see what it means…

here I have done it for you..

Definitions of attribution on the Web:

“In journalism, a source is a person, publication, or other record or document that gives information”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_(journalism)

“Thank you for submitting C64 1.0 to the App Store. We’ve reviewed C64 1.0 and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it violates the iPhone SDK Agreement; “3.3.2 An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).” Source: http://nexus404.com/

Sorry but anything that even Mr J says about (or not) about how crap Flash is or that it is a performance issue with the processor, or that device X can’t multi-task e.t.c are all for want a better word a lie.

See Flash or even the Commodore 64 Basic complier do something that is a much bigger threat to the Apple brand than stability issues. They are a threat to the bottom line. If you can make and download apps from anyone or anywhere, then you are not inside the walled garden. The real money is only to be made for Apple by keeping the gates to that garden all locked as possible. Once inside this garden it is often quite hard to get yourself out of it. Once you have all your music in Itunes, all your purchases in Itunes and no way to get them out, why would you move. Imagine if you could get Apps for your device and not be locked into the Apple Garden.

I have Flash running on a number of devices that are a lot older and not as “grunty” as the iPad tech specs say it will be. But all those that have drunk the Kool- Aid want you to believe that they removed Flash from their site around the time of the launch of the iPhone because it was just so buggy on the browser.

When the public can load any app on these devices without voiding the warranty (aka all of you that have Jail broken your device), then I will come back and fix this blog post. Something I am sure I won’t be doing in quite sometime.

In the mean time I will keep playing with Flash on my N95-8gb, and even Flash 10 on my Asus R2H whilst I multi-tasking doing other things on my devices as well.

If Apple weren’t so scared of the Basic Compiler from the C64 which was the computer of choice in 1982!, then the argument might be very different, however it is not.

I do not have a problem with Apple framing their business model in this way.  Most business do this in one degree or another.  Silverlight didn’t come out from Microsoft because they wanted to work hand in hand with Adobe.  I do have an issue with them not just coming out and saying why.

It is about the bottom line to Apple fullstop.

Screen dump from The Age online home page. (16/11/09)

This image shows an Australian Army BlackHawk, but video is about a Chechen helicopter attack!

Oh wait it is just more lazy journalism….  FFS stop using stock images!

More so when they are NOT even closely related to the story.

ps… buy a calendar

The Australia runs a story (well o.k, they don’t have any journo’s left so the run a wire story) about Twitter, bashing it again… this time with the none to provocative headline of “Twitter useless as public opinion gauge” (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25590556-12377,00.html)

Whilst I am sure others could go into a lot more detail… this is just a short rant about what a load of crock the article is.

10% of the numbers of people using twitter generating 90% of the content is a shit load of people actually (if 2 million people alone are following one celb!).  And the number is higher than a lot of blogs and newspapers anyway on how much public opinion they actually get.

A quick look at the The Age poll page for example gives you a real highlight as to user numbers. I will take the big leap and presume that the numbers interacting with The Australian and The Age are even within 50% of the same… have a look at the voter numbers on this page http://www.theage.com.au/polls/sport/form2.html

THE BIRD : What punishment should Ben Cousins receive for his one-finger salute?
A fine – 24%
Suspension – 12%
Nothing – 63%
Total Votes: 651 Poll date: 31/05/09

Striking decision : Are Sydney right to suspend Barry Hall from the club?
Yes – 40%
No – 60%
Total Votes: 5 Poll date: 07/07/08

WISHFUL THINKING : Should the AFL abandon its plans to establish a second Sydney team in the next four years?
Yes – 85%
No – 15%
Total Votes: 1233 Poll date: 04/02/09

So less than 10% of the readers of The Age are giving their opinion…. Come on Oz, lift your game, or should we just do a poll on how many people actually read the paper…..