If laws are the fabric of our society then surely we have a responsibility for them to accurately reflect what is going on in that society? Clearly changing laws should not be something that happens without serious analysis and consideration of all the implications (or as far as such things can feasibly be taken), but it strikes me that we as a society are starting to fail in this task, as right now after looking at a few different areas it's clear to me that our laws are simply not reflecting what's happening in our society. Let me take a couple of examaples that seem pertinent.
Children. This seems to be one of the big issues right now that was highlighted to me in a recent case where some "child", 17 years old, murdered someone and because they are under the age of 18, that is to say legally not an adult and consequently not responsible for their own actions, they got an extremely mitigated sentence. Now in some cases I can see this as being a good thing, after all we'd like to think that when someone is very young they can reform their ways and be reintegrated back into society, however, my issues comes with a lack of consistency in thought. If the law in the UK says that someone is not an adult until they are 18, why then can they have consensual sex and children of their own while still being considered children, ie at 16? Now I'm not saying that the legal age of sex should be pushed up, actually if anything I'd suggest that people should be considered adults at the age of 16, but the point here is that there is no consistent thought to what the implications of one law to another mean. Of course all this is a little off track to keeping laws up to date with changing things in our society (well perhaps not completely, I'd suggest that the level of extreme crime at young ages is more of a modern thing then in the past, note i say extreme crime, not petty theft etc) so on with the things that seem more relevant to my opening statement.
Genetics. Genetics is one of those things that our legal codes need to start dealing with now. Already it's entirely possible for our society to do some fairly amazing things in regards to eugenics and no one wants to address the questions of what is and isn't legal and more importantly WHY things are and are not legal. Eugenics is already practised in many places around the world, China being the most obvious example of it being embraced by a society and enforced by laws. It will be very interesting to hear the arguments both for and against the coming of the genetic revolution, Gattica anyone?
Computers. The easiest example for me to pick on due to my job and own experience with the law. Computer crime is obviously something fairly new, after all in the scale of legal codes computers are very new. Really you can say that computer crime laws came into their own category around the late 90's in most countries, and while there have been some updates to most of the original codes they are still hopelessly out of date in a few different ways. One of the fundamental paradoxes of computer crime is that more and more frequently the laws reference access via the Internet. A typical example would be a law that states (and i'm paraphrasing the australian law here as I can't be bothered to look up the precise wording) "it is a crime to intentionally modify, delete or access data on a computer not maintained by you". Of course this means that anyone who sends an email to another person is in breach of said law. When I brought this up with the then Senate rep for this type of thing (can't remember the tittle, it was during one of the more tedious meetings I had with the federal government while doing security work in Canberra) he smiled and said "I know, of course it means we can bring you in on that charge whenever we want". Nice back door for abuse of citizens that you don't like there sir! Computer crime is even trickier though, because people seem to overlook a fundamental thing, that being the Internet is a PUBLIC network. Think about that for a moment, the Internet is a public resource, just like a street. You have every right to walk down the street outside your home, because it's a public resource, just like I have every right, if we were to extrapolate from that law, to walk along the street and look at the houses and see if any had their front door open. Now I wouldn't be allowed by law to enter the house, even if it had it's door open, that would be trepassing, but it would be inconceivable to tell someone that they couldn't look from the street at the door, or even knock on said door. In computer crime terms though many countries have now made it illegal to do a port scan, the virtual equivalent of knocking or looking at someones door. Saying the Internet is a public network has other implications, spam for example. Spam is of course unsolicited, but just like it's not illegal (actually it is in some places in the world, but generally not in most that I'm aware of) to deliver pamphlets to a house, it shouldn't be illegal to deliver emails, after all, if you're on a public network, running a service for the explicit purpose of receiving emails why shouldn't someone send an email to you? Don't get me wrong, I'm not supporting spam, merely pointing out that by our current set of laws it should be legal, again though in many places it's not.
I suspect that the glaring descripencies between many laws are what causes the average layman to believe the legal system is broken, or at the very least not doing it's job as well as we would like. I'm not even going to delve into the world of copyright and patents and where to draw a line on what should and shouldn't be patented / copyrighted and what it means if that can be broken in a trivial manner, in particular if it's demonstrably unenforceable.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
fucking animal liberationists
What is it with animal lib activists? I completely don't get the mindset of all these self styled animal champions. I just read this article, where once again animal right activists, fighting to stop unnecessary harm and injury to ANIMALS attack HUMANS in order to achieve their goals. What the fuck kind of logic process do these retards have? Not only are they attacking people, in this case a japanese whaling vessle, they attacked the very ship that just saved their asses from dying by rescuing them from running around Antartic waters in a dingy, bright idea guys!
Seriously though what is the rationale for all these terrorist attacks, because make no mistake that is precisely what they are as, with few exceptions, almost all of the attacks are against perfectly legal targets / operations. It would seem that some people have issues with humans killing animals or causing them pain. I just don't get it, pain and suffering happens in the wild every day, it's for survival, yes, but it still happens. You don't see them out there trying to lecture the average cat that it needs to kill mice quickly and cleanly, felines and mustelids are both animals that practise vivisection, but they arn't on the receiving end of our wonderful anti vivis. Nor do they seem to grasp that we have every right to kill and eat animals. That last line seems to really fire up animal libs as they all like to start bringing in Peter Singers various works, as the champion of animal libs he is the most often quoted, normally by those that lack the ability to understand him. In particular this excerpt is often quoted as the definitive reason why animals are our equal. Well I hate to point a few things out, but first and foremost as was most clearly stated by a friend of mine, Benjamin Waters, rights are a human concept and as such, can only be given by us, they are not innate. It is therefore in my mind not a given that animals have any rights at all, beyond which any we so chose to give them. That to one side, the entire basis for most of singers conclusions is a basis of equality, something you need to accept in order to reach his conclusions. On the outside it seems reasonable to accept equality as something that we want to aspire to, in fact it's phrased as such a way that you'd appear to be a insensate heathen not think that it was reasonable, after all who'd want to be labelled a speciest? Well as it turns out I'd guess I'd be the stereotypical one, in the words of Denis Leary "I represent angry, gun toting, meat eating motherfuckers, so pull this bus over to the side of the pretentious turnpike!".
Seriously though what is the rationale for all these terrorist attacks, because make no mistake that is precisely what they are as, with few exceptions, almost all of the attacks are against perfectly legal targets / operations. It would seem that some people have issues with humans killing animals or causing them pain. I just don't get it, pain and suffering happens in the wild every day, it's for survival, yes, but it still happens. You don't see them out there trying to lecture the average cat that it needs to kill mice quickly and cleanly, felines and mustelids are both animals that practise vivisection, but they arn't on the receiving end of our wonderful anti vivis. Nor do they seem to grasp that we have every right to kill and eat animals. That last line seems to really fire up animal libs as they all like to start bringing in Peter Singers various works, as the champion of animal libs he is the most often quoted, normally by those that lack the ability to understand him. In particular this excerpt is often quoted as the definitive reason why animals are our equal. Well I hate to point a few things out, but first and foremost as was most clearly stated by a friend of mine, Benjamin Waters, rights are a human concept and as such, can only be given by us, they are not innate. It is therefore in my mind not a given that animals have any rights at all, beyond which any we so chose to give them. That to one side, the entire basis for most of singers conclusions is a basis of equality, something you need to accept in order to reach his conclusions. On the outside it seems reasonable to accept equality as something that we want to aspire to, in fact it's phrased as such a way that you'd appear to be a insensate heathen not think that it was reasonable, after all who'd want to be labelled a speciest? Well as it turns out I'd guess I'd be the stereotypical one, in the words of Denis Leary "I represent angry, gun toting, meat eating motherfuckers, so pull this bus over to the side of the pretentious turnpike!".
jokes
I often think that Isaac Asimov was on to something in one of his short stories (I forget which one right now) that proposed that jokes were an alien experiment to work out the personalities of Humans. I find it difficult to understand how it could be anything else by the amount of repetition in jokes. I just received yet ANOTHER joke that I originally got about 5 years ago but that once again seems to be making the rounds. Now that is not particularly unusual, which says something in of itself, but what is unusual is that half the recipients are the same people as well...
The babbling starts!
For some time now I've found myself thinking about something and wanting to write a blog entry. Unfortunately each time I decide that I'll sit down and "write it up" in a sensible manner. Of course, while it's probable that doing this makes the thought a little clearer, it has the unfortunate side effect of meaning that I almost never blog 90% of the thoughts that I have because I never have the time to actually sit down and write it out correctly. In an attempt to see if I can get into the real spirit of "blogging" I've decided to start actually putting down on this blog any miscellaneous thoughts that I think are of interest, either to myself, or some of my readers (it continues to surprise me the amount of people that actually read these ramblings!).
To that end I've created a net category, babblings, which if the nature of my ill considered random dumpings upsets you then simply remove it from what you view. Otherwise I hope you enjoy my new attempt at blogging, and Doug, if you're reading this, I hope that your opinion of my blog doesn't fall too far, I'll try to keep the babblings vaguely interesting ;)
To that end I've created a net category, babblings, which if the nature of my ill considered random dumpings upsets you then simply remove it from what you view. Otherwise I hope you enjoy my new attempt at blogging, and Doug, if you're reading this, I hope that your opinion of my blog doesn't fall too far, I'll try to keep the babblings vaguely interesting ;)
Friday, February 2, 2007
Sickness
I've never understood the majority of peoples actions when they get sick. At work I see the following behaviour all the time. Someone comes in, and they are clearly coming down with a cold, headache, coughing, red eyes and generally not well. Funnily enough they rarely complain, except to reply that yes they're not feeling well, when directly questioned. They'll last that day, even coming in the next on many occasions, and then end up going home sick for a day. The day after they were at home they'll be back at work either still sick, or JUST starting to recover. Usually a day or two after that someone else in close proximity to them gets sick and the cycle repeats itself.
Now I'll freely admit my work ethic isn't as strong as some people's but I just don't undertsand the above scenario. I've been sick about 6 days in 15 years now, so I guess I'm a little biased but I suspect that my actions have a large part of why that number is so low. When I start to feel unwell, it's unusual, and guess what? At that point in time I call in sick, relax, have vitamins, eat well, sleep and generally look after myself. The next day I'm normally fine and I trundle into work. I'd guess that I feel unwell about 4 times a year, which starts to fit into normal metrics on average sickness levels. What I don't understand is why do people let themselves get so sick so as to have to take time off work, often for extended periods of time? Why, when they are sick do they try and "soldier on" ? I work in high powered positions and I've basically NEVER, in my entire career, seen anyone who a company couldn't do without for a couple of days. Why, when they are still sick, do they come in to work and infect other people? What is it about sickness that causes otherwise sensible people to forgo logic and just act like idiots?
Now I'll freely admit my work ethic isn't as strong as some people's but I just don't undertsand the above scenario. I've been sick about 6 days in 15 years now, so I guess I'm a little biased but I suspect that my actions have a large part of why that number is so low. When I start to feel unwell, it's unusual, and guess what? At that point in time I call in sick, relax, have vitamins, eat well, sleep and generally look after myself. The next day I'm normally fine and I trundle into work. I'd guess that I feel unwell about 4 times a year, which starts to fit into normal metrics on average sickness levels. What I don't understand is why do people let themselves get so sick so as to have to take time off work, often for extended periods of time? Why, when they are sick do they try and "soldier on" ? I work in high powered positions and I've basically NEVER, in my entire career, seen anyone who a company couldn't do without for a couple of days. Why, when they are still sick, do they come in to work and infect other people? What is it about sickness that causes otherwise sensible people to forgo logic and just act like idiots?
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