You better watch out,
you better not cry.
You better not hurl,
or you get no pie.

And so it was that the weed delivery guy—hardworking, dedicated, and discreet—saved Christmas in the nick of time.

Disclaimer: This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal.

God bless each of my swollen testicles.

If Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.

O holy night! the… something something… distant
It is the night with the Christmas trees and pie.
Jesus was born and so I get presents.
Thank you, Jesus for being born.

A university in the United States compiles what they call the Banished Words List, updated each New Year’s Day. Folks around the world submit suggestions for words or phrases that they believe deserve to be banished from the English language, due to overuse, misuse, or general uselessness. Over the years, the list has accumulated such gems as ‘metrosexual’, ‘thinking outside the box’, and the practice of expressing distaste by calling something ‘gay’. I’ve got a suggestion for a new addition that is already somewhat overdue.

“emo”

The noun-adjective emo has been around for years, and it has been fairly innocuous in that time, mostly found in the context of describing bands like Sunny Day Real Estate and whatever fans they had that had managed to stay alive. Lately it has been co-opted by troubled, introverted LiveJournal types and it makes me frown.

“i don’t want to sound emo, but here’s an essay on how emo my life is at the mo”
“so she calls me emo and i’m like whatever, you don’t know me”
“my mum still shops for me so I guess being emo was the natural choice”
“haha, man these emo chicks are easy!”

The example is a little contrived perhaps, but you know what I mean. Word used to mean one thing; taken, reclaimed, and bastardised into meaning something entirely different; now, with all its lexical potency sucked dry, it must go, so that the rest of the language may live.

I’m removing a link from my Other Sites section for the time being. Daz has taken his site offline after being frustrated at all the comment spam he has been getting from online casinos and such.

It’s unfortunate that those who have caused millions of people to retreat from using e-mail entirely, or at least forced them to keep their e-mail address a closely guarded secret, are now crippling the blogosphere as well.

The ideal solution is, of course, a device that allows us to stab these people in the face over the Internet. Until that arrives, here are a few handy hints for keeping your journal free from spam and doing your part for making moron spammers go away:

1. Unless you really need comments, turn them off. A newspaper does not simply allow every Tom, Dick, and Harry to contribute a column, and by the same token, neither does my site. At any rate, I’m already on IRC, so my chat requirements are covered.
2. Activate the comment moderation feature. You get to say ‘no’ to the comment ever making it onto your page in the first place. This creates a bit of extra work, though, and you still see the spam, but the offender doesn’t get the link that he wants.
3. Don’t allow people to put links in their comments. Remember that online casinos, etc., want to get as many links to their site as possible. If they don’t get the link, they will not bother anymore.
4. Have a registration scheme, and allow only registered users to comment. This should only be used in the most extreme of circumstances, because in most cases, people aren’t gonna take the time to register on every web journal they come across.
5. Refrain from posting harsh remonstrations aimed at no-one in particular, in the vein of “no-one cares about your opinion, or reads your stupid blog,” to your own stupid blog.
6. I know the last point had nothing to do with comment spam, I just think it’s profoundly stupid.
7. You could try allowing only users in (for example) Australian IP address ranges to post comments. Sure, the occasional casino rubbish might get through, but think about it. If you have a site that only Australian people tend to visit, then the majority of your users will still be able to post, whilst the spammers—the vast majority of whom do not hail from our fair shores—will not.
8. <James> what i have been trying to do about comment spam
   <James> is make a forced field
   <James> that they also have to enter
   <Insom> that would protect against automated bot ones, I suppose
9. If your web journal separates content from comments, write a robots.txt file instructing Google not to index comments. This won’t stop your site going down like a honeymooner’s trousers, but at least the spammer won’t get a ranking boost.

“Dimebag” Darrell Abbott, 1961–2004, former Pantera guitarist, gunned down whilst performing with his new band, Damageplan, apparently by someone disgruntled about the breakup of Pantera.

Death happens all the time, and bigger atrocities than this one occur daily, but Pantera’s music has been important to me over the years and I have particularly respected Dimebag’s skill as an artist. I saw Pantera perform in Brisbane the last time they were here, at Festival Hall in 2001, at the very top of their game, kicking arse and taking names. Despite the pretty ordinary final album, that is still how I remember them.

Rest in peace, Dime.

I have just been reading an article in this month’s issue of Wired, about renowned spelunker and inventor, Bill Stone—and let me tell you, it has really put my life’s achievements thus far into perspective:

Bill Stone has invented diving gear and roving robots to explore the deepest—and deadliest—caves on earth. In the icy water 4,500 feet below Mexico he had to figure out how to bring his dead friend home.

… With a doctorate in structural engineering and 11 patents to his credit, Stone is the archetypal modern-day explorer, a multidisciplinary maverick constantly inventing tools in the name of discovery lust. Any PhD’s résumé will feature a few—maybe even a few dozen—peer-reviewed articles. Stone has published more than 220 papers on topics ranging from seismic resistance to spacecraft development.

… Over the past 33 years, he has spent 353 days below 1,500 feet. He’s invented breathing regulators, diver propulsion devices, and 3-D mapping tools. When it became clear that lugging dozens of scuba tanks into the depths was hindering his ability to plumb farther, he designed a closed-circuit rebreather to eliminate the tank farms.

Ouch. And here I am, finishing off my IT degree and writing software for a living, without even one lousy patent to my name.

No, I don’t have a clue where Daniel Morcombe is.

The election has come and gone, and the new House of Reps and Senate have taken shape. I am appalled to see the immediate aftermath of federal Labor whimpering about the election loss, with reports of the vultures already circling Mark Latham’s leadership.

At first, I entertained the possibility that this was just the media trying it on, but it’s a bit hard to exaggerate a mass exodus from the front bench. Please, get it together Labor, because no-one—even those who voted against you—likes to see a weak opposition in Parliament. We have one of those here in Queensland, and it has lead to a fairly average government getting an obscene amount of votes.

A more aggressive campaign would have won it for Labor. What they failed to realise, is that many people see the Liberal Party and think, ‘economy, eh… what else ya got’. This is quickly forgotten, however, when both sides tacitly acknowledge the economy as the only significant election issue. Here are some other issues upon which it would be nice to get some productive discussion in the coming 2½–3 years:

Non-traditional families
Same-sex marriage is of increasing significance around the world. A large number of same-sex couples, and their supporters, wish the traditional scope of marriage to be widened to include them, and a number of governments—mostly in Canada, it would seem—have changed the relevant laws to allow same-sex couples to get married.

The argument is that marriage will lead to social acceptance of their love. I tend to disagree, not for any real moral reason, but because the specific institution we call marriage is a traditional recipe that loses its flavour if the ingredients are changed.

Marriage reform so far has been an issue of church-state separation. The law already accords many rights (and responsibilities) to long-term couples that choose not to wed. It is not much of a stretch to accord those rights to a broad category of ‘permanent relationships’. Marriage would be defined as a specific kind of permanent relationship, to which no legal status would be accorded directly.

The republic
The current heir apparent to the prime ministership, Peter Costello, is a republican, under whose leadership we might see renewed debate on the republic question. For the time being, it seems that the conservative nutbag, Tony Abbott, will have to wait his turn.

That aside, John Howard knows deep down inside that the republic referendum of 1999 was defeated because the majority of Australian adults simply do not want to get rid of the monarchy. The Labor leadership, on the other hand, feels that the wrong kind of republic was on offer, and that the majority of Australians want a republic.

We should have another referendum, identical to 1999, in about ten years’ time when the majority of the Queen’s fanclub will have died. This new referendum will succeed. It is the perfect system because it recognises that our existing political system works well. No direct election or other wrongheaded nonsense.

Reconciliation
When are we going to get this apology business over and done with? I’m not sure that anyone expects John Howard to apologise personally to the aborigines anymore. However, an argument could be made that the Australian Government—as a permanent corporate entity, as opposed to the individuals who currently make up Cabinet—is responsible for past injustices to aborigines.

An apology will clear the way for actual reconciliation, which will require radical, and perhaps unpopular, action to address the squalor and poverty in today’s aboriginal communities.

Assimilation as a Government policy was not an entirely bad idea, insofar as it was a plan to take actual, tangible steps to improve the circumstance of indigenous people, according to the social standards of the time. Thankfully, social standards have evolved, and we don’t steal kids from their parents anymore. But the current hands-off policy, throwing money at incompetent indigenous bodies, is so ineffective that hardly anyone can still recall what it was ever meant to achieve. Is this really the best we can do?

Kyoto
This government does not ratify the Kyoto Protocol for the reduction of emissions, saying that it would put this country at a competitive disadvantage to the United States unless they ratify it as well.

The protocol doesn’t even require Australia to reduce its emissions; in fact, there is a permitted increase of 8% over 1990 levels. Why do we need more than an eight per cent increase, John? Just where have all these new factories been popping up?

I’m not mad, though. In truth, I don’t think it makes a great deal of difference which party is in power, but I was hoping for a leader with a bit more arm-breaking style than the current one. Let’s not give up on it yet!

A couple of months back, there was a highly-publicised federal police operation, named Operation Auxin, in which hundreds of men from all over the country were busted for child porn; mostly for possession, but some for distribution and production. Many arrests and confiscations of property have been made; upon that measure, it has been a very successful operation.

(Several of the charged men have subsequently killed themselves, and upon that measure also, it has been a very successful operation. To put it mildly, convicted paedophiles are at the very bottom of the pecking order in a correctional facility.)

This has whipped up somewhat of a media panic about the child pornography epidemic, and whenever there is a media panic on some issue, nutters are given a television audience for their wrong-headed ideas.

Prof. Bill Caelli, from that mecca of computer science, QUT, was on the news advocating the mandatory installation of filtering software on all Internet users’ computers:

“What I’m proposing is brakes for the Internet.”

The internet service provider would be required to prevent access to people who do not have the software installed, and to furnish the software with a continuously updated list of addresses the user is not allowed to visit. It is supposedly a tamper-proof system, one which we have the technology to build, and only needs the regulatory motivation to be put into force.

Other ‘family’ groups agreed, basically saying outright that the civil libertarians could suffer in their jocks, as the privacy concern was far outweighed by the benefit to society of inhibiting unlawful and obscene material. This state’s government was said to be considering it.

Yesterday, Communications Senator Helen Coonan effectively shot down a similar idea, that of a national proxy to weed out child porn coming into the country over the Internet:

“… Mandatory filtering would be highly problematic. It would have the potential to simply choke the Internet and drive up costs unacceptably for consumers and small businesses without necessarily solving the problems of offensive content. …

“… Simple filters are easily outsmarted by merchants of offensive content … the kind of complex technologies needed to analyse every single item being downloaded were not considered feasible in our review. The review also estimated that the cost of this sort of filtering would be $45 million a year to begin with, falling to more than $33 million a year on an ongoing basis.

“The biggest issue—it is not so much the money—is that such an expensive scheme would not necessarily solve the problem and small to medium ISPs would simply be driven out of business for little or no benefit. What does work is greater information and parental supervision, and those are the kind of programs that the government is promoting with the $30 million initiative.”

This is a very sensible policy from the Government. Those who demand that some sort of mandatory national filtering scheme be set-up are usually woefully misinformed about the limitations of the technology at our disposal.

The ideal system would be a magical program that sits on the border of all incoming Net connections, scanning the traffic for unlawful downloads. It would be a very intelligent program. It would have to, for example, discern a picture of child porn from a picture of some trees. Think about how one would go about writing such a program.

It would have to, for example, discern a picture containing child porn from just a picture of a child. Think about how one would go about writing such a program.

It would have to, for example, discern a picture containing child porn from a picture containing lawful pornography. Think about how you would code that.

The reason no such program exists, is because it takes a human being to make this kind of decision. We have the natural ability to be able to do things like categorise pictures, because our brains have the ability to learn and adapt. But writing a computer program to do it requires sitting down and figuring out exactly what it is that the brain does in order to make the decision.

Without sufficient technology extant to teach a computer what child porn is, and how to spot it on a massive internet link on the scale of the ones coming into this country—without slowing the link to a crawl—you have to settle for an expensive and ponderous system of traffic analysis heuristics that is unlikely to catch an acceptable amount of illegal content, and is trivial to circumvent for those who want to avoid getting caught. It’s one thing for a spy agency, with so much computing power that it is measured in acres, to be able to store and analyse telephone traffic for suspicious conversations; it is quite another thing to have such a system enforcing criminal law.

I am, therefore, hopeful that common sense will prevail on the State level as well as the federal one, and we continue to encourage parents to do their job, as well as attacking the child porn problem at its source.