Who is Leon Ashby?

A response to Leon Ashby's presentation: "Why an Emissions trading Scheme (ETS) is not necessary"



UPDATE A more thorough response to Leon Ashby's presentation can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/ashby-response













Who is "Leon Ashby"? What is his education in natural sciences? What research papers has he submitted to the field?

All we really know is he is a director of the right-wing think tank "Institute of Public Affairs" and the "Australian Environment Foundation" is a front group of it.

But still he writes and distributes his opinion on climate change which i'll discredit here.

Is CO2 a pollutant?

What makes it, or not makes it a pollutant is whether it is a greenhouse gas and whether greenhouse gases will warm the earth. The argument presented is simply begging he question. The argument also hijacks this 'question' by trying to introduce what carbon dioxide can also do. To try and win the argument by convincing the reader that climate science is complicated isn't valid.

Only 3.4% of the CO2 is human caused

This argument disregards that there's a required balance needed in the atmosphere and it is only that 3.4% that is the problem. To start talking about the other 96% of greenhouse gases is simply trying to hijack the argument again.

Frontier Modelling says it will cost Australia

Who is Frontier Modelling? A company commissioned by Malcolm Turnbull. Financial statistics like this are so easy to manipulate. The cost of reducing that 3.4% CO2 follows an exponential graph. Reducing the first 1% is cheap and will cost each australia eg $20 per year, while the last 0.1% no doubt involves so many industries and methods of manufacturing that it would cost a ridiculous amount. Taking a realistic perspective: once we spend a couple of years cutting down the first percent or two this "exponential graph" will start to flatten and innovation and economics will take over. This is very much what happened with CFCs - the original binding target was not enough to fix the problem but once it was put into place everything else solved itself very quickly.

31,000 Scientists saying CO2 does not cause climate change

The argument leading up to this is ridiculous. How some brain dead donkey can think a scientist not being able to give more than 90% certainty equates to saying "does not cause" is ludicrous.

All you can conclude here is:

• From 2,500 papers only 2 papers were independent, dealt with CO2 levels, made it to the second review, and did not reach a 90% certainty.

• 95% of the papers concluded climate change was more likely than not affected by human activity (the main conclusion from IPCC)
• 80% of the papers on CO2 concluded climate change was almost definitely attributed to CO2 levels,
• 16% of the papers on CO2 levels gave quality to a conclusion, the others no doubt were more quantifiable research papers which in turn gave foundation to those papers which could qualify, IPCC had to review them still to check such priori.
• 50% of the papers on CO2 levels made a second review, the IPCC only took those papers it felt gave concrete or unique enough conclusion into the second review,
• 25% of the papers were on CO2 levels, climate change is a complicated science, and papers related can be submitted from any of the natural science fields.

The truth is that from the 2,500 papers the IPCC evaluated over 95% concluded that global warming was real and more likely than not affected by human activity. Compare this to you wont find many scientists who can give you a 100% certainly that einstein's theory of relativity stands, and probably many that can throw doubts even on newton's laws. Furthermore what type of scientists constitute this "31,000"? economic scientists? medical scientists? One petition is hardly comparable to 2,500 research papers.

When there's such a large scientific consensus supporting a strong probability, especially when climate science itself is statistical mathematics and all about probability, isn't it the public's responsibility to fall in line and leave further questioning to the experts?

Climate change is natural, and warmer periods occur without human CO2 emissions being the cause

Notice the timelines all vary. This line of climate skepticism always requires a precise timeline selection for each graph. Mostly it's just manipulation of statistics again.

From the first paragraph of wikipedia's Global Warming article:

"The IPCC also concludes that variations in natural phenomena such as solar radiation and volcanoes produced most of the warming from pre-industrial times to 1950 and had a small cooling effect afterward. These basic conclusions have been endorsed by more than 40 scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming This wikipedia entry seems the best rebuttal to "warming periods" skepticism.

The Evidence of the Arctic Ice Cap

A lie. Last summer it was the thinest it's _ever_ been with only 50cm thickness in places.

list of Scientists who have found the opposite results to Miskolczi … It will mean Australia`s economy will become the equivalent of Cambodia`s within 10 years.

All emotive pleas with some magic number "0.33" pseudo-science in between. The fossil fuel industry is spending millions of dollars every week on creating crud around climate change.

How would you expect it to appear?

And are you surprised people want to follow this convenient interpretation?

Blog Action Day '09

Can file sharing be both illegal and ethical?

Illegal File sharing is not theft. The dictionary definition, the legal definition, and legal precedence all supports this. The English legal definition comes from the Crime Act 1968: "A person steals if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently *depriving the other of it*." Most countries have some variant of this. In 1996 a US Supreme Court Judge in the court case 'Dowling vs US' stated very clearly that one could not refer to illegal file sharing as theft. Appropriating something inappropriately (without removing/altering the original object) is fraud and in this particular case copyright infringement.

Robin Hood: … something that is illegal isn't always immoral, and can be at times moral and ethical. Robin Hood is a classic example of this, that's clear enough that we are willing to give it to our children. But beyond raising the possibility it doesn't actually address the question of file sharing ethics.

So how, if illegal in many countries, can file sharing when it breaches the copyright be ethical? There are different opinions amongst file sharing advocates:

• that the copyright is invalid in the first place because the practices carried out by the music industry are unfair to the artist or that the industry is breaking fair competition principles. Which other industry do artists have their own copyright stolen from them upon any initial contract signed with the distribution agents? Should private citizens really need to honour a copyright agreement that is longer direct with the artist or the distribution model that was used to obtain the artists work? It's fascinating how RIAA and MPAA label file sharing as stealing while they have been stealing the ownership of the work from the artists for decades. This theft correlates more accurately to today's legal definition, and to see it coming from the artists mouths read Steve Albini's ?The problem with Music? or Courtney Love's speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference
  
  
• that copyright collides with natural rights of physical ownership. Copyright was intended to prevent plagiarism not to prevent a private citizen's ownership. That is copyright is about authorship, not ownership. This is explored in-depth with ?Filesharing and Copyright? by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf. Something that spins off the natural right of ownership, is one's natural right to share. This natural right is so ingrained into our society that we actively teach children from a young age both at home and in our education institutions of the benefits to all from sharing. It is a fundamental morale in our communities, and when it collides with copyright infringement that tries to tell us something different… well not everybody ends up agreeing with multinational corporations despite the propaganda budget they have.

History repeats itself: Is copyright applicable today, or just out of date? What was copyright originally and is it time to return to it?

Read up on the Statute of Anne and you'll quickly see that copyright has undergone a number of changes in recent history due to changing conditions in distribution. Up until 1709 a monopoly the Stationer's Company , much like the music and movie industry today, held complete dominance over distribution and publishing rights. Queen Anne was forced to step in and change this and she did with what is known as the first Copyright law, the Statute of Anne. This original Copyright law ensured that distribution and publishing rights always, forever, belonged to the author. It introduced the limit term of 21 years after which everything went into the free domain, and it forced that every print require free copies be sent to every library so that the general public could benefit without purchase obligations, much like having a free copy available on the internet today. How did Copyright law go from this to what people think of it today? Well read up on what happened when Disney's copyright on Mickey Mouse was about to expire. But what can be seen evidently here is that Copyright law is something very plastic and quickly inappropriate when a new distribution model arises.

The tide is turning: Crowds are gathering around the legal proceedings against file sharers, or ISPs, opposing what RIAA, MPAA, and each country's counterpart like AFACT are doing. The music industry knows it is it losing public opinion en-masse by suing children (or their mothers) and is having to give that strategy up. People are starting to understand that the amount of money the music industry thinks it is losing due to absurd claims that every download would have otherwise been a purchase is comparable to the amount of money is it spending on legal costs and propaganda fighting file sharing in the first place. People are starting to understand that it will cost the public more if ISPs are (or taxpayers if the government is) forced to become the music industry's private police. Not to talk about wiping out the principle that we are innocent until proven guitly how the hell does it make sense that any ISP should incur costs from such private policing that are higher than the ?supposed? value lost in the first place.

And now Pirate Parties are establishing with alarming success with their appeal to liberalism (typically right-wing) and progressivism (typically left-wing) and an understanding to a modern digital world. They are quickly becoming the largest or second largest ?outside? political party. In the EU election last year they received 13% of the votes of people under 30 becoming the second largest party favoured. That's not 13% of them that agreed with the issue, but 13% that believed recognising file sharing as ethical is an issue more important than any other in the spotlight. For as passionate as I am for the argument I would still have trouble saying it's more important that the need to address climate change, or stronger regulations to prevent another global financial crisis, etc, yet 13% in this demographic did. Once you go down to the under-20 demographic, where most are digital natives, this percentage dramatically increases. Our children simply do not agree with our outdated, pre-digital, laws and morals, and they have plenty of justification not to.

Telenor ZyXel P2602HWT

I was unable to configure it to bridging mode (rather than routing). Along with software configuration it has a switch to activate either mode, whenever the switch was on "DSL WLAN" the modem failed to connect to telenor. If anybody gets bridging to work on this modem please email me.

The alternative is to forward all ports using the NAT SUA option. All ports can be forwarded except 1845. Reason unknown but any port range that includes 1845 will not take effect.

Initially i found the modem to hang every hour from heavy traffic and/or too many entries in the NAT table (probably from torrent/gnutella connections).

The solution was to upgrade the firmware from 3.70(ASC.1) to 3.70(ASC.2) found here.

Disable hot deployment in JBoss-5

And various pages, eg this, referred to using a similar approach of setting scanEnabled property to false in deploy/hdscanner-jboss-beans.xml.

But this didn't work.

What worked is the remarkably obvious

rm deploy/hdscanner-jboss-beans.xml

This also turns off autoDeploy in tomcat (jbossweb) so there's no need to add autoDeploy="false" to the Host element in jbossweb.sar/server.xml.

Stephen Fry launches a surprisingly ferocious attack on the music and movie industries

pirateparty.org.au

Stephen Fry on copyright

[SOLUTION] … bnep module in 2.6.27 fails to provide bnep0 device

With a new phone months later i finally got it working on post 2.6.26 kernels. I did try posting to back to the list but it's not coming through (whether my subscription is dead or the thread was too application level for list's intention i don't know, and don't care) - but the reply is here for anybody that cares.

> > I'm using the following combination on gentoo:
> > 
> >  linux-2.6.27 (64-bit)
> >  bluez-libs-3.36
> >  bluez-utils-3.36
> 
> The problem exists the same after an upgrade to kernel-2.6.28
> 
> Downgrading to 2.6.26 everything works well.
> The same environment is being used so the userspace seems not at
> fault.
Ok, 6 months down the track i lose my phone and buy a new Sony Ericsson
C901. I get the same behaviour but have found by luck a work around.
If i "Browse files on device..." (using gnome's bluetooth-applet) and
connect to my phone (establishing, via obex, a bluez connection)
AND THEN run
pand -c <bdaddr>
everything works fine, and it played well with NetworkManager.
To simplify, now that i know, I can just run:
hcitool cc <baddr> && pand -c <bdaddr>
The successful system log looked like:
> Jun 25 15:30:31 [pand] Connecting to 00:25:E7:0D:5E:6D
> Jun 25 15:30:32 [pand] bnep0 connected
> Jun 25 15:30:32 [NetworkManager] <info>  (bnep0): driver 'btusb' does not support carrier detection.__You must switch to it manually._
> Jun 25 15:30:32 [NetworkManager] <info>  (bnep0): new Ethernet device (driver: 'btusb')_
> Jun 25 15:30:32 [NetworkManager] <info>  (bnep0): exported as /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/net_00_03_7a_dc_47_18_
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  (bnep0): device state change: 1 -> 2_
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  (bnep0): bringing up device._
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  (bnep0): preparing device._
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  (bnep0): deactivating device (reason: 2)._
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  (bnep0): device state change: 2 -> 3_
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [nm-system-settings] Added default wired connection 'Auto bnep0' for /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/net_00_03_7a_dc_47_18
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) starting connection 'Auto bnep0'_
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  (bnep0): device state change: 3 -> 4_
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) Stage 1 of 5 (Device Prepare) scheduled..._
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) Stage 1 of 5 (Device Prepare) started..._
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) scheduled..._
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) Stage 1 of 5 (Device Prepare) complete._
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) starting..._
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  (bnep0): device state change: 4 -> 5_
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) successful._
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) Stage 3 of 5 (IP Configure Start) scheduled._
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) complete._
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) Stage 3 of 5 (IP Configure Start) started..._
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  (bnep0): device state change: 5 -> 7_
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) Beginning DHCP transaction._
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  dhcpcd started with pid 20383_
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) Stage 3 of 5 (IP Configure Start) complete._
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [dhcpcd] bnep0: dhcpcd 4.0.13 starting
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [NetworkManager] <info>  DHCP: device bnep0 state changed normal exit -> preinit_
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [dhcpcd] bnep0: broadcasting for a lease
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [dhcpcd] bnep0: offered … from 10.252.177.241
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [dhcpcd] bnep0: acknowledged … from 10.252.177.241
> Jun 25 15:30:37 [dhcpcd] bnep0: checking … is available on attached networks
> Jun 25 15:30:42 [dhcpcd] bnep0: leased … for 300 seconds
> Jun 25 15:30:42 [NetworkManager] <info>  DHCP: device bnep0 state changed preinit -> bound_
> Jun 25 15:30:42 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) Stage 4 of 5 (IP Configure Get) scheduled..._
> Jun 25 15:30:42 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) Stage 4 of 5 (IP Configure Get) started..._
> Jun 25 15:30:42 [NetworkManager] <info>    address ..._
> Jun 25 15:30:42 [NetworkManager] <info>    prefix 29 (255.255.255.248)_
> Jun 25 15:30:42 [NetworkManager] <info>    gateway 10.252.177.243_
> Jun 25 15:30:42 [NetworkManager] <info>    nameserver '212.169.123.67'_
> Jun 25 15:30:42 [NetworkManager] <info>    nameserver '212.45.188.254'_
> Jun 25 15:30:42 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) Stage 5 of 5 (IP Configure Commit) scheduled..._
> Jun 25 15:30:42 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) Stage 4 of 5 (IP Configure Get) complete._
> Jun 25 15:30:42 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) Stage 5 of 5 (IP Configure Commit) started..._
> Jun 25 15:30:43 [NetworkManager] <info>  (bnep0): device state change: 7 -> 8_
> Jun 25 15:30:43 [NetworkManager] <info>  Policy set 'Auto bnep0' (bnep0) as default for routing and DNS._
> Jun 25 15:30:43 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) successful, device activated._
> Jun 25 15:30:43 [NetworkManager] <info>  Activation (bnep0) Stage 5 of 5 (IP Configure Commit) complete._

Copyright was intended to prevent plagiarism not distribution

Good to have kittens back

Did Jan Zahl skip history class

Jan Zahl writes in Stavanger Aftenposten that the people that listen to music should pay for the music.

http://www.aftenbladet.no/debatt/kommentar/1043762/Kven_skal_betala_for_musikken.html

It sounds nice and simple, but lacks some understanding that throughout history culture has always spilled out into the community beyond those that initially paid to appreciate it.

> Who should pay for the music?

The same people that have paid throughout history.

Not much has changed today with the majority of money for musicians coming from concerts, and for film-makers from cinema sales. Concerts and cinemas are the "raw experience" closest associated with the creative essence and its artist. The experience cannot be copied so there's no real threat to the artist.

Additional money from the creative work on some form of medium, such as CDs and DVDs, is a relatively new thing in our history. It has been developed and profited from by middle men, such as recording and production labels, giving very little money back to the artists, typically less than 0.1% earnings. The boom in our use of these mediums has lead to these middle men accumulating too much power too quickly over both audience and artist. For example we see this from how recording labels direct and dictate what "pop" culture is, how difficult it is for artists to "make it" outside of the pop culture, and how little freedom and rights are given to them when signing their first contract with a record label.

Now the boom is going bust because technology has stepped past the need for these mediums. The middle man is left holding onto yesterdays technology and yesterdays business model, the artist trapped behind these middle men failing to see any of the other 99.9% of the money, and the audience is labelled as unethical because they appreciated and helped give the artist popularity.

Trying to undermine the value of the "raw experience" because the live shows are funded indirectly by alcohol is ridiculous. That's just today's economy in Norway and is evident by examining where any Oslo restaurant's earnings come from. Should we make it illegal to eat at home because restaurants can't make enough money directly from the food? Should we make it illegal to read news online because people don't buy papers anymore?

By learning a little history it's soon obvious that the corrupt and unethical element today is the middle man thinking he has all the rights and power in our courts and can hold our artists to blackmail and create scare campaigns by suing selected individuals.

It's time to get back to our roots of culture. To understand that the basic principles are about "experience" and "popularity", neither can be stolen but with sharing comes popularity. With popularity any fresh-thinking business man can make a bucket of money.

1. Ado + Nick