How to shop!

Coming back to Australia after living in London for 7 years was an eye opener into tariffs and duties. Typically people tend to think of London as being very expensive, which it is, but what many people don’t realize is that Sydney is comparable, and for many things, even more expensive. The main reasons for the high cost of buying general retail goods in Australia are tariffs and duties, and it appears that people are generally ignorant about what they are and why they are in place, so I thought I'd write a quick post about it, not to explain all the economics behind it, but simply to point a few things out. This ignorance about tariffs was highlighted when I recently bought my Boxee box and read the outrage on their forums about the different costs of the unit all over the world. I’ll use the boxee box as an example for the confusion.

The boxee box was initially selling for $199 USD in the US, 199 pounds in the UK, and $300 AUD in Australia, to name just 3 of the discrepancies. The boxee forums were in an uproar, as very few people seemed to understand that you can’t just sell an item at the same price all over the world. I won’t go into the economics of it all, but basically every country has it’s own set of tariff’s, duties and taxes, for example the UK has VAT, Australia the GST, then you have the government trying to protect local industries in some cases incurring additional tariffs and the like to try and "level the playing field". Then you have shipping, which is relevant to a place like Australia and last but not least you have what the local market will bear, in the case of both the UK and Australia, they are both used to paying over the odds for the majority of “luxury” items bought, and thus distributors have learnt to take advantage of this and put an additional premium on top. This has reached a point where recently I was looking to buy some climbing gear from Wild Country. Wild Country is a welsh company, that manufactures locally. Amusingly the cost of their products at discounted stores in the UK, was still ~25% more expensive then going to online stores in the US. How’s that for duties and leveraging what the market will bear?

Ofcourse the solution to this is obvious to most people, buy it where it’s cheapest and then ship it to wherever you are! In most cases, for luxury goods, that means buy it in the US. Now interestingly, in Australia, unless something costs more then $1000AUD, you can bring it into the country without any additional taxes or duties, which in effect means that once you cross a threshold of cost where the savings from buying it in America plus the cost of shipping is less then buying it locally, you’re ahead. That mark is typically at around ~$130AUD, which ofcourse means that the majority of things that most people buy would be cheaper to buy from oversea’s. Now I’m hardly the first to note this, and thus enterprising individuals have started business models around this, for example check out www.myus.com, which gives members a US address (many US stores refuse to ship internationally, supposedly due to fraud issues, more commonly because they have agreements with their suppliers who want to ensure that their local distributors have the market cornered), will repackage all parcels, stripping unnecessary packaging, and then collate a number of parcels into one shipment all for express delivery leveraging their scale to get reduced rates from various couriers. All in all I’m absolutely astounded that more Australian’s don’t buy from oversea’s, I guess it’s just the relative lack of net savvy that pervades over here that is the cause, that and concerns around getting “support” for the product you buy in the event that there is a problem.

All of this has recently started to be brought to the attention of the public as local retailers are starting to complain about being unable to compete, and there is now a campaign underway to try and lower the threshold of where duties and tariffs are applied. My advice to anyone living outside of the US, buy what you're after sooner rather then later!

Writing - the return!

So another full year has passed and I note my previous decision to start to blog more frequently. Ofcourse equally obviously there hasn't been a post in that time frame, so much for good intentions.

This time around I'm not going to make any bold claims, but I'd like to get in the habit of writing an essay a month so I'll see if I can keep up with it. Perhaps sitting down and having to formulate an article or chain of thought will spur me on to write smaller snippets more suitable to a blog, we'll have to see.

Upgrade path

As most technologist will tell you, the first thing to do when you get a new gadget is to upgrade it to the latest software and bios version. So this was in my mind when I recently upgraded my phone to a new Nokia 6500 classic. I promptly downloaded the software to manage the phone and at the same time downloaded the software to update the phone itself. I started off by transferring the phone numbers on my old phone to it's sim card, then i put the old sim card into the new phone and moved the numbers from the sim to the new phone. Then I put the new sim in my new phone and moved the numbers from the phone to the sim card. My idea being that I prefer the numbers on the sim card rather then the phone in case something happens to it (reasoning that it is more likely the phone would get broken then the sim card inside of it, besides I'd be able to put the sim card in another phone and still have access to my numbers). So there I was with my new sim card in my new phone with all my numbers on it. At this point I decided to back up my phone using the supplied software from nokia. That done, I decided to try and finally fix all the spelling mistakes in my address book and update some numbers. I was a bit annoyed to discover that while the software on my computer was able to manage other aspects of my new phone just fine, when it came to getting the numbers out of it and allowing me to edit them on the software on my computer, it just wasn't working. There appeared to be some bug, so before I started to try and solve that I decided to upgrade to the latest version. Big mistake.
I downloaded the new software for the new phone and updated it. I once again tried to manage the names and numbers in the phone with the software on my computer only to find that the bug had persisted and in fact got worse. Now instead of seeing maybe 25% of the numbers that were in the phone, I could see 2. I decided to try and create a new number and push it to the phone to see if that would help. I promptly added a number and asked it to synchronize. Just as promptly the phone deleted ALL numbers on the phone and synchronized the new number. Annoyed but not panicked, I thought I'd simply restore from backup all of my numbers, because I realized at this point that by moving the numbers off my old sim to the new phone I had ofcourse deleted them from the old sim. The only copy of my numbers now resided in my back up of the phones configuration. Well I'm sure you can guess what happened then. I restored from backup but the bug seemed to have taken residence in no uncertain fashion and ate all of the numbers. When it was done restoring I had 2 numbers in the phone. Thanks Nokia, thanks very much.

If you're reading this please drop me a line with your contact details because chances are I don't have them any longer.

Spot the techie!

Uncertain if the person in front of you is a techie masquerading as an investment banker or the real thing? Then I have the solution! Simply look at his cuffs. If he's got cuff links on, then he's not a techie but a real investment banker!

How do I know I hear you ask? Having just started at an investment bank and turned up fully suited for my first day, I was quite dismayed to find out how hard it is to type with cuff links on, they basically make it impossible to do any real computer work.

Keeping things cold

After almost 5 years living in England you'd think that I'd be used to all the little differences here from back in Australia, however, even after all this time there are some things that still have the ability to wind me up and cause me to shake my head. One I just ran into again was trying to buy a cold drink.

I accept that growing up in Australia my perspective is a bit borked, after all most Australians are taught at a young age that if you get something out of the fridge, you use it, then put it straight back as it's too hot to leave anything out for too long. That aside though europeans (it's not just the Brits that suffer from this) have real issues at the other extreme. For some reason, I'd guess it was initially to save on power or perhaps floor space, shopkeepers over here have traditionally decided to not buy refridgerators, but rather, to buy "cool shelves". This idea was questionable at it's inception but certainly after I'd guess 50 odd years of evolution has now reached a state of complete and utter uselessness. For those of you that don't know what a cooling shelf is, it is much like a fridge, but sawn in half and with the cooling element at the base rather then behind. The result is a completely open air contraption that tries to cool from the bottom. Now physics aside about hot air rising and all that, it's curious that the concept of keeping a static amount of air in place and cooling it to a set temperature seems to have escaped my european brethren, and not surprisingly the cooling shelves have a net effect of, IF you're lucky, lowering the temperature of items placed in them by about 1 degree. Unfortunately the state of most cooling shelves is fairly abysmal, most are broken and filthy, few actually work as they should at the best of times. What's the issue I hear many euro readers thinking, well the issue my friends is that it doesn't COOL the damn drinks!

The issue with temperature is not limited to drinks though. It was with initial surprise, followed by amusement and then outright incredulity that I met the assertion that Air Conditioning is bad and makes you sick. As every Australian knows, life without AC in Australia is unbearable, trying to work in stifling heat is just a nightmare, yes now and again if you're in the habit of walking in and out of AC'd buildings hundreds of times in a day, and you're run down, and you're stressed and the first 4 moons of gemini align, you might get sick from the temperature changes. Yes it's also possible that you can get outbreaks of legionaires disease and a few other air bourne nasties, but given that a large chunk of the worlds working population in the first world works in Air Conditioned buildings, it seems a little far fetched to think that they are a death trap, talk to the average european though and you'll get a completely different picture. Almost without exception every european I've met, when the subject of AC comes up, they cross themselves to ward off the devil and start swapping stories about how one of their friends got sick from it (almost how aussies swap stories about how close they've come to being attacked by a shark / croc). Try to point out that they might be exaggerating the risks or that AC is actually good, and you're immediately excommunicated from the conversation, but back to my drink.

Now again I can only assume that in the past europe was actually a REALLY cold place, so cold in fact that inside a store, on a cooling shelf without real refridgeration it was reasonable to expect things to be kept at 4 degrees. I'm dubious that this was ever the case but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt (I don't know too many shops that don't run a heater inside the store during Winter). That was the past, possibly, now though I can assure you that most of Europe and certainly not many parts of London actually even get that cold let alone consistently. Instead, like today, it was about 15 degree's and I was after a cold drink. I walk into the local store and low and behold all their drinks are actually HOTTER then room temperature as their cold shelves don't work and they've got a heater going in the store. It took me going to about 4 local shops before I found one that actually had a fridge and consequently was able to serve me a drink that was cold. Europeans are a worried lot, they are panicking about global warming more then most other groups of people, now I understand why, it's going to be damn hard to get a cold drink in this part of the world in the future.

Recruiters and the job hunt

The last two weeks since I've come back from Italy have seen me spending the majority of my time looking for a new job. This in turn has meant that I've spent the majority of my time each day chatting to recruiters. It's funny what proximity will do for perspective, normally recruiters are reviled by most people and while I have my issues with them, which I'll deal with later, on the whole I mostly feel sympathy for them right now, let me explain.
Currently most of my effort is going towards getting into the financial sector, in particular investment banks. Now investment banks typically have a fairly hefty dose of self importance at the best of times, but when it comes to recruiters I get the impression that they basically think of them as being scum. It's an unfortunately reality that most people, at least in IT, think of recruiters as scum and when you combine IT, with investment bank attitude you end up with no respect for the recruiter. What I've discovered is that it directly effects me. An example of this is where I'll get contacted about a role. The recruiter will go through it with me, come to the conclusion that I'm perfect for the role and put me forward. At this point the recruiter tells me that they normally hear back within 2 days whether the company will want an interview. Two days go by and the recruiter contacts me, telling me that he's talked to the HR department of the company and they are busy, "you know still sub prime fallout", and that they'll review my CV in the next two days and get back to him. Two days go by and the recruiter contacts me and tells me that HR are still busy and .... you see the pattern. The problem is that the poor recruiter has to deal with me calling him up asking what the status is, has he really put my CV forward, why haven't we heard anything back, is it really HR and not someone technical reviewing my CV etc. At the same time the recruiter is strung along by the bank giving him false information which they, unbeknowingly, pass on to me causing me in turn to get frustrated. All in all it's hard not to have some sympathy for the recruiters, they cop it from both sides and generally don't get much respect. Of course there is the flip side as well.
I understand that recruiters are not technical people, and that HR at the company you're applying to is equally not technical, but you'd think if it was your job to assess people with a certain skillset that you might learn how to do it with some level of accuracy, after all it helps everyone involved. You can imagine my surprise then when time after time I have to sit there and explain that I do know how to install linux right after I've explained that I'm a linux developer. You can view my resume here and see if it comes across as someone who has little to no knowledge about unix or security. In the last 2 weeks I've had to create 5 versions of my CV to "emphasize" different aspects of CV so that it will get past the recruiter / HR filters before going to someone that will actually understand it. Emphasizing sounds reasonable enough, until you realize what this actually entails is not rewriting it with a particular focus, nothing so complex! No, emphasizing simply means replace all occurances of "implement" with "build" because the client wants to know that you can build a linux box. Another tip for recruiters or HR is to google your candidates. If you're going for a serious IT role, by serious I mean any role that involves you having years of experience or a senior level of understanding, then googling their name will turn up hits on them, from emails they've written to mailling lists through to articles that they've published on different topics. If there isn't any hits, then you should be concerned, of course on the flip side if there is then it's a good indication that they are the real deal and not making up their skillset. Finally something that I understand but that annoys me is the insistance of people asking "so what was your package in your last job?". Frankly what relevance does this have if the recruiter / HR department is doing their job properly? What they use it for is to get a base from which to judge what kind of salary they should offer you for the role you are going for. Funnily enough it was my understanding that HRs point in life was to assess peoples suitability for a role, on the assumption that they are suitable then they are worth what the budget for the role is worth.

Cats

For a while now I've wanted a pet, but given the fact that I'm living on a visa in a "foreign" country, it never seemed to be a good time. Well I finally got sick of it never being a good time and decided to just deal with the issues as they arose and bought a cat. To be precise I bought an absolutely gorgeous Russian Blue female 14 weeks old kitten. Mysha (or Myshka still trying to decide), is absolutely amazing, in all my life I've never seen a cat like her. She is so affectionate it's crazy, doesn't bite or scratch, eats well, uses the litter tray, has no "accidents", doesn't keep me up too much and is all around just great. After chatting to a number of breeders I've decided that I will get another kitten as 2 cats are no harder to look after then just 1 and will keep each other company. For the second cat I've decided on an Egyptan Mau. Some good pictures of them can be found at this link. I've decided on a silver spotted male and have one lined up for the end of the month. I guess I won't be getting much sleep for a while!

In other news Kasia and I have decided to move in together and have just made an offer on a new place in Ealing. Hopefully we'll get that and move around the end of this month. Finally less noise and a nicer place!

It's all about HOW you think!

I remember when I first started to play chess seriously I spent many hours reading all kind of books on every aspect of the game. One of the things that struck me when I read it was a study about Grand Masters (people that have achieved a coveted title for their prowess in the professional chess world) and other players. The common thought before this study was that GM's somehow just "saw" a lot further then anyone else did in the same position. That is that there were able to evaluate say 50 positions in a second rather then 3 or 5 that a normal player could. What the study proved through a variety of methods was that in fact that is completely untrue, a GM can see or evaluate slightly more positions then a rank amateur per second, but an identical amount to that of any semi serious club chess player or above. So what was the difference? It turned out it was simply HOW they evaluated the positions. A GM will simply only consider lines (lines is a synonym for "possibilities" in chess lingo) that are strong, whereas a normal club player will often consider moves that are quite simply much weaker. In other words the GM is able to achieve more with an identical amount of processing power because of HOW they think. I never thought of this being relevant in IT until I read this comment.

Survival

Today there was a lucky american tourist with a camera on safari, he managed to catch this amazing footage, showing survival at it's best. Check it out here.

Porn

I read a very interesting blog recently about the observations of a female clerk in a video store that had a porn section. It was really quite an interesting read on a number of levels, firstly it was an insight into the female perspective of porn, something that I don't often get much of an insight into. The author has quite a humorous style which helps with such a topic, but also some very interesting insights into porn, it's role and it's downsides in society. Unfortunately I can link directly to the section in question, but if you click on this link and scroll to the entry labelled "Men and Women and Porn" you'll see what I consider to be one of the better explanations of porn and it's usage and the differences of perspective between sexes.

On an unrelated note but still in the realm of things you don't talk about in polite company here is a list of swear words as sorted by the British publics impression of how offensive they are and what's more they have the same swear words ranked over time! Check it out here.

a giant leap for mankind

Well I just finished watching 2001: A space odyssey again and as usual it left me thinking. One part of my thought process I'll sit down to write soon, was about the paucity of decent movies coming from Hollywood (everywhere?) in recent times, but the other was about the future and our achievements.

When I look back at the last 100 years or so, I can almost mark every 15 years by something completely revolutionary coming along. Machine guns, Airplanes, Atomic bombs, space flight, television and so on it goes, and then I look at what my generation has contributed and I'm starting to run out of contributions. It seems that what my generation is particularly good at is refining everything else, we take something and we just refine it, so much so that in some fields you could even argue that it is refined so far past it's original inception as to almost be a massive jump, but still, it doesn't feel like it. Maybe it's just my ignorance on matters, but it really does seem that we, as a generation have stopped taking giant leaps, or even looking in many cases. Is it really the case that we have taken all the large steps that can be taken? Is there really no more massive leaps that can be found, are all the advances that are to be made in our society from here on in to be made incrementally? It's feasible I suppose, but it doesn't sound likely to me. So I wonder what am I missing, where have we been making the giant steps? Or have we, as I suspect, not been making any for some time? What causes such a gap in our technological (or otherwise) evolution? When we will once again be driven forwards in all the disciplines of our society by visionaries who look beyond our current limitations. People that aren't afraid to challenge Einstein's theories because they're Einsteins (ok yes it's not that simple, his theories stand because either they are correct, or we simply can't disprove the hypothesis, but I often feel people don't even TRY). I'm looking forward to our next giant leap for mankind.

Do you want some more?

A few weeks ago I read this interesting article. What I liked about it was not that it just summed up my feelings about giving aid to the third world, but that it was also from a native and it had a solid logic reasoning. How long do we (I'm using "we" in the first world sense) have to keep giving "aid" to the third world with no difference in the long term outcome before we start to question what we are doing? The charitable side of me would like to think that we keep giving aid in the same way because even though we realize that we are only helping some people directly and in the short term it's better then nothing, isn't it? My cynical side suggests that it's because it's easy to give money and wash our hands of the problem having assuaged our guilt. Of course why we feel guilty about it is a whole different debate ....

Back in the flow

Well after spending the last few months sitting around gaming and watching various movies I'm now, finally, back in productive mode. So for those of you who are subscribed to my blog be prepared for a lot more posts!

While I'm on the subject a lot of people have expressed interest in what my plans are at this point. Basically I'm going to make a concerted effort (no, really!) to get a job this week. If I don't look like I'm getting somewhere by the end of the week I'm going to take some more time off and go to Germany for a language course, then come back and continue to look. It's a source of amusement for me that now when I've decided to go contracting some really tempting permanent roles have been shown to me, one of them that might involve moving to NY at some point. While I've said I'm going contracting, and I intend on doing so at this point, I won't disregard these interesting roles. I'll keep you all posted.

Who runs the Internet?

I'm just going through all my data at the moment and attempting to once and for all bring some order to the chaos. Amongst the chaos I found all my old bookmarks. Funny how the entire concept of bookmarks has just about vanished these days, the days of the google. Still I found one link which was useful and thought I'd throw it up here in case any of you readers were also curious about who and how the Internet actually runs. Who makes the decisions? This article should clear it up for you.

Cleanliness is next to ... food?

I was sitting on the tube yesterday vaguely looking at an issue of "The Metro" when I saw an article that got my interest. The headline was about some restaurant fined for sanitation violations, and I saw the word "Ealing Broadway". Upon closer inspection I read that a local restaurant, Chinese / Thai place, was being fined for a number of sanitation violations, apparently having a rat and pigeon infestation. I have eaten at the place a couple of times, but it wasn't a restaurant that I liked so I wasn't feeling too queazy still it occured to me that there was a bigger issue. How would I, as someone that eats out every meal, know if a restaurant I was eating at had a record of bad sanitation? The answer isn't readily apparent. On the one hand some restaurants I've been to have some kind of certificate up on the wall saying that they passed some audit, but most don't do that. On the other hand forcing a restaurant that had failed a sanitation check to put up a notice to that effect would probably hurt the business significantly (rightly so in my opinion) and wouldn't be enforced. I guess there must be some kind of government website around that allows you to look up information on restaurants, but it will make me think before I wander into the next restaurant, well for a second or two at any rate :)

the best example of

a case in point. I'd just referred to a line from the "Love song of J Alfred Prufrock" and when my manager looked blank I'd given him a small serve about being an educated brit .. his response was pure value.

Jonathan "When it comes to poetry, no, just no. I know it's a bit philistinic, philosthropic, philosomething".

I've never heard of a better case in point.

Expensive?

I've started to read The Economist which I have to recommend as being one of the better bastions of journalism around (yes I know all you regular readers of it know that already, but many don't!). One thing that got my eye in the latest edition was this article. Basically it confirms what I've been saying for some time, that London is one of the most expensive places in the world, certainly more expensive then the places that typically thought to be more expensive (NY and Tokyo being the main culprits). Coming in 4th it was notable to me that 2 of the cities more expensive then London were Scandanavian (Oslo at one, and Copenhagen at 3rd).

Skiing

Well I'm just back from the Winter park resort in Colarado where I was on my first skiing trip. Skiing (bizare spelling actually, I had to verify that "skiing" was actually the correct way to spell it as while I initially just spelt it like that when you look at the double 'i' in English it's fairly rare.) was a lot of fun. I was spoilt by all accounts as the weather was pretty much perfect for skiing, the first day was bright and sunny, with about 2 feet of snow the night before meaning that I could fall over over and not hurt myself as well as the fact that I had good snow to learn on rather then the infamous ice that the resorts (perisher and thredbo) in Australia are mostly associated. All in all I was relatively happy with my progress. By the end of the week I was able to hit a black run and not fall over, though admittedly I was more comfortable on the blue runs. I was very glad that I had decided to ski rather then snowboard as watching the poor unfortunates trying to learn to snowboard I saw them fall over every couple of minutes, and often hurt themselves. Skiing on the other hand was fairly forgiving, I'd guess I only fell over about 10 times during the entire week, and didn't even come close to hurting anything other then my pride on each occasion. Of course the weather didn't remain perfect, there were a few days where the temperature dropped to -30 centigrade, before wind chill, and where skiing was a little harsher, still as most people that read this blog will know I don't really feel the cold and as such my jacket and tshirt kept me perfectly warm, except my fingers which I've come to the conclusion that after all these years of typing suffer from low blood pressure and consequently get cold, so aside from my whinging about cold hands, i got to sit there and chuckle as Adam and John complained about being cold in general.

The Rockies are a beautiful place, to date they are the most impressive mountain range that I've seen, though to be fair I didn't see much of the alps when I went through them on the train. There was one point where the ski lift we were on in the middle of a blizzard, seemed to be just ascending to heaven as the incline was ~70 degrees and due to the snow you couldn't see very far at all but we were just going straight up it felt like. So while I won't be quitting my job to spend a season skiing in Whistler (/wave john!) I will definitely be organizing another skiing trip!

Legalities

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.

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!".