and where would you find the time?

Yeah, the budgets wasted on such a fruitless endeavour by turning a public health issue of addiction into a crime and policing issue.

Yeah, If you were going to impeach Clinton it should have been for not putting down a case of Kentuky's finest in front of President Boris Yeltsin and saying "Sign this Nuclear Disarmament treaty". The greatest missed opportunity ever.

Yet there is still no legal requirment for the oversight of these spying powers.

I'd say you've nailed it right there.

Both major parties voted it in, completely defying the wishes of the electorate. The spooks wanted their toys.

I appreciate you saying so.

Power.

It might work however under the act the table of collected data can be modified by the Communications Access Controller and I'm not going to start handing out ideas for what data to collect here. I suspect that tech savvy Australians will start to develop new techniques to protect themselves.

No, if you read the bill that is exactly what the new law allows under section 184KA. And protections from the Privacy Commissioner have been bypassed.

Unfortunately not enough people protected their rights enough for downloading to continue. Now the movie industry is coming after everyone they can.

I analysed the bill several weeks ago. I wrote to *all* the senators and tried to stop it and I tried to raise awareness, I was on a public forum answering questions and worked pretty much to 3am every night for 2 weeks trying to stop it from passing. I even tried submitting a slashdot story that it was about to pass. It was quite clear to see that it was going after downloaders otherwise why would the ACMA be referenced in the bill.

But it is worse than that, there is little doubt that these systems will be a blackhat's wet dream because the data will be in one place, IMHO a free for all for online fraud. I suspect that most Australians will be furious when they realise that they are being told to pay extra internet fees for a system, that will create new classes of fraud crime against them, is of limited use to police, by businesses who don't want them there to complicate infrastructure who will seek taxpayer assistance to fund and install them.

I tried pretty hard. I won't post the whole letter here, as it is four pages of analysis of an 80 page bill that is deeply flawed and now law. This extract is core to the problems with the bill:

As for the Bill, the criticisms I derive from part one follow:

The 'Implementation Plan' IP under the act is too loosely defined in terms of data encryption and access requirements. The government should implement MANDATORY public key encryption standards for business that promotes business and consumer confidence. The act should also refer to data access standards that produce an audit trail for the Privacy Commission PC so abuses can be tracked and prosecuted, if required.

Encrypted access for law enforcement with revocable keys controlled by the Privacy Commission (P.C) and also accessible by the member of the public who produced the data. Either the Telecommunications Ombudsman (T.O) or the P.C should have the power to review the audit trail of accesses to the data and revoke access based on their findings and satisfactory resolution of a complaint. A person's access to their own data should not be audit-able and a complaint mechanism should exist through both the P.C and the T.O who receive increased powers to prosecute abuses, which would serve to stimulate business and consumer confidence because of the protections offered.

No definition of what the "plan" (under the Bill) requires for access under a Communications Access Controller's CAC - implementing the technology requires 'requirements' and standardisation however the Bill offers none. The public should be able to access the data collected about themselves and have assurances that it has an expiry date.

Clarification and revision based of the Bills inevitable and chilling effects mean consumer and business confidence will be affected for years, policing will receive questionable, if any, benefit. The Bill however is good for centralising data collection techniques for foreign organised crime whose work will be greatly reduced subsequent to the passage of this Bill.

• Criticisms of specific sections in Part one:
• 187AA.3A,3B remove because it introduces the possibility that any e-commerce business that is not a telecommunications provider can be forced to retain data and bare the cost of limiting their business throughput and capacity for expansion. For business this represents a rising linear cost that increases with additional customers.
• 187B.2 Needs definition of who a CAC role answers to, which department, and limits to retention demands
• 187B.2A change 'may' to 'must'
• 187B.3.c Remove. Additional requirements from the CAC impose incremental infrastructure and capacity restraints on business coupled with forcing them into I.P cost and approval cycles every time infrastructure upgrades are required as a result of demands from the CAC. The business is forced to write for approval for mandatory upgrades to meet retention requirements demanded by the CAC.
• 187BA.a Specify an minimum standard for encryption of data. Governmental should mandate minimum encryption standards revised regularly to protect consumers from fraud, organised crime, identity theft, harassment and so on. The same standard should control access to the data from all parties.
• 187BA.c add allow encrypted access to the data by the entity or person that generated it.
• 187E.2.b,c service providers must never be exempt from section 187BA when storing entity or personally generated data
• 187F.2.a add ensure adherence to encryption standards in 187BA; and
• 187F.2.b add: whilst still complying with 187BA
• 187F.2.f remove for the same reason as 187B.3.c
• 187G.1 Law enforcement uses a secured access standard under 187BA.a to access the data
• 187G.2.d change 'may' to 'must'
• 187G 4,5 Define a criteria for the ACMA's collection requirements
• 187K.1.d add: not approve an exemption from 187BA
• 187KA.4 define the ACMA's relation to policing here
• 187KA.4.f add: input from the PC and T.O
• 187KA.5 remove: ACMA considerations have nothing to do with policing for terrorists
• 187LA Should provide protection from abuse from government employees
• 187M add: Section 187BA(a)(b),

I don't believe that any policing objectives for combating terrorism, many of which are already provided for in the existing National Security Amendments made in 2014, will worth the economic damage that will be caused. Further, any interference from the movie industry to pursue "down-loaders" of pirated movie content through the machinations of the Bill would be better met by that industry offering a viable business model to consumers instead of holding Australia and her people back from the massive economic opportunities that participating in a global digital economy offer.

-----

Like I said, I tried.

perhaps I needed to vent.

It's more a case of resolving bad business decisions and being the third party witness to the damage done. Often the people who made the decisions try to cover their ass regarding the choices they make and this often snowballs into a critical situation where people's lively hoods are on the line.

The 'reboot' mentality of Windows products shows that, whilst the bar to entry is very low, so to is the bar for failure. Good design practice is mandatory for Windows uptime and remains a hidden cost of the Windows model that is often regarded as unnecessary. Consequently technical debt in MS products is a common failing that is always present. You can try to fix it but the ship is sailing.

In the *ix space, the bar to entry is higher however the bar to failure is very high and technical debt has to be very high to produce failure, which, as opposed to windows systems, manifests in a slow and predictable way that don't result in downtime. Once coupled with the same good design practices *ix based systems are practically unstoppable. They are the internet.

So back to the question, show me a list of 10 common *day to day* operations that can be achieved in 365 but not on LibreOffice?

Corporate games are what they are. No one likes them but you have to know how to play to survive. I've worked with MS products since DOS and observed many of the shitty things that they do.

They have to play nice now, because Open Source offerings are a more powerful and flexible paradigm for modern business that yields greater returns over time. The ecosystem of software is larger, growing and permanent because it has its own intrinsic rights.

So much so that the discussion is about which Open Source licence model.

The fact they have been found by a court of law to be criminal, engaging in predatory monopolistic practices to maintain their dominance in the market. They have acted that way for about 30 years, they were ok in the beginning however they continued to build antagonistic relationships that business had to submit to.

Business prefers open source because it, by default, doesn't have that practice attached to it. So business does not have to endure the antagonism anymore so, given the opportunity that Open Source gives them, business gets out of that relationship quickly.

MS Server products are an also ran, they simply are not taken seriously in high end data center environments. They cannot compete with the agility of the Open Source cost model.

Windows provides a great desktop offering with Windows 7 and perhaps 10 will be, we will see how he captains the ship. Microsoft failings though are like tears in the sails though, the wind blows and the ship moves with no regard for who or what is in the way. Much the way it always has it will go forward squashing anything in the way, just more carefully, as most business does not want to work with abusive partners, no matter how nice they are being now.

Thanks for the NASA study, it's a little lighter than I expected. It only talks about carbon deaths and assumes deaths from nuclear effluent do not exist. Also, as I said the IAEA has publishing interdiction orders over the WHO in all matters nuclear which I see cited in the references which automatically bias the report.

From the article:

The study also excludes aspects of nuclear power that cannot be easily quantified, such as deaths from nuclear proliferation.

That is basically all of them.

1. Cancers from bio-accumulation of radio isotopes are not easily quantified because they travel through the food chain for a random period of time and when they are finally ingested by a human there is another 6 years before it gestates into cancer depending where in the body it end up.

2. Transgenic disease that affect subsequent generations via absorption of low level radio isotope emitters that didn't kill the parents and damage DNA.

3. Failed pregnancies from absorption of medium level emitters of radioactivity.

4. Not including deaths from Nuclear proliferation isn't reasonable because U-238 is a by-product of fuel enrichment used in warfare. The radio-isotopes there will continue killing for generations. That said, I'll go over it again when I have more time to absorb it. I appreciate you sending it to me.

As I said, it uses the flawed results of the Vattenfal study:

I'm not certain what NASA/UN studies you refer to? I do know that some rely on a document sponsored by the nuclear industry player Vattenfal, as does the IPCC, which gives them an overly optimistic picture of what is achievable with Nuclear.

Which is exactly what the bloomberg you have sent me indirectly does, as I've already read the study the UN and IPPC based their findings on.

And yet it still isn't being dealt with correctly and every day the Nuclear Industry releases more radio isotopes into the environment. I'm not interested in talking about another fuel cycle until this one is managed.

The original report was prepared for the Dutch government. The report of 1982 and its methodology has been peer reviewed by the publication of a short version in Energy Policy in 1985 [Q2]. It was also referenced by the European Parliament and updated in 2000/2001, again in 2005,2008 and 2012 before it was published on the web. It has been cited over 70 times.

If your position is pro-nuclear then you'll characterize the information that way. They are scientists. If you read the thing they tell you they start with no fixed position and examine the lesser known parts of the industry.

Your assumptions are based on a flawed study that has not been peer reviewed and will soon been out of date. It is often used in the way you have used it, however if you read it you'll discover how flawed it is (and now, difficult to find). I'm not criticizing you, btw, it's a deception that was played on all of us. I didn't buy it and it did not take much research to see what a fragile house of cards it was.

Still, it will be interesting to see what happens over the next 4 years or whenever the next IPCC document is due.

That's because you are a shill, maybe not paid, but still a shill. After being locked into Word and its inconcrappable file formats *with itself* and having to reinstall older versions of the software to restore documents, output them in text and reformat them *yeah* there is a BIG reason to stop using MS Anything. 80% of people out there use 20% of the functionality of a Word Processor like LibreOffice or Office 365.

Show me a list of 10 common *day to day* operations that can be achieved in 365 but not on LibreOffice because the UK government disagrees with you and being locked into MS Word products. Even their support of ODF was something they are unwilling to do voluntarily so until you have experienced the costs of freeing yourself from such a lock I respectfully suggest you STFU.

Professionally my judgement of Microsoft came from experiencing the heavy handed way they dealt with customers, their vendors, the ruthless way in which they dispatched both their competition and worse, anyone who ever partnered with Microsoft have the intellectual assets of many good start-ups who just wanted to get a good idea out there and make a living from it, plundered.

I have seen businesses, who put their faith in Microsoft, destroyed by Microsoft and everyday businesses who had nothing to do with them, aside for it being on their desktop, be the subject of audits for licensing, which Microsoft would resolve by squeezing that customer for everything they could get simply because they didn't know how to handle their software licenses.

Microsoft has mercilessly bashed, berated, ridiculed, marginalized, litigated and patent harassed the open source community for over a decade all the while using whatever BSD and apache licensed software they could get away with not crediting in widows.

Any company smaller than a government were harassed with lawsuits and endless appeals on the details until MS got their way, making it easier for many to just not fight and give Microsoft what they wanted.

And if you were a government, like the US government, lobbying and whatever sleight of hand could be used from the dirty tricks department to again, get their way.

Fortunately the GPL is seeding the exact type of business models that Microsoft cannot compete with or touch. They may always be around, but every day they get less relevant and because of that the growth of Information Technology can shed the atrophy attached with being shackled to the Windows paradigm.

Until you have worked 36 hours, non stop trying to rescue a business who are going to go under and everyone is going to loose their jobs, stop telling me I should spend my time 'understanding about what the non-programmer thinks and feels'. Try and have a little empathy for the programmer who worked all night so you could get paid when payroll was down, then came in in the morning, looking like shit, to make sure everything is ok only to cop a serve about how much effort he puts into his appearance.

In case you didn't realize it wasting time trolling through registry entries or recovering data or work out why NTFS filesystem performance falls off after some timed license event ain't how I want to spend my day. Making IT easy for you, is hard work and, occasionally, just a little gratitude instead of perpetual whining would make a great change.

As a Software designer I already have to spend all my time figuring out what the non-programmer 'wants and needs' because they don't know. No one spends any time thinking about how Joe Programmer/Administrator 'thinks and feels' about executing the DR plan all weekend because, hey we just lost all of the 'insert critical data type here', they just do it.

I.T people have made the biggest contribution to making your life better through their professional and volunteer efforts so you can sit on a phone scrolling through your inane life on the bus. You are usually too busy looking at your phone to notice them passing you on the street - hint: its the guy *not* staring at his phone. So don't come here telling me what you think about the MS hate train, because it is clear you don't know. But even more so don't tell me about a 'common lack of understanding about what the non-programmer thinks and feels' until there is actually something common about it. You don't listen, you won't learn - so feel free to enjoy your choice until you realise why it's not such a good idea, then take responsibility for your choice by paying the bill and not complaining about how much it is to free you from the choice you locked yourself into.

Until then, if you want me to know how you 'thinks and feel', then just raise a job ticket, we get a pretty good idea from that.