A caucus is something most non-Australians may not be familiar with, but it’s fundamentally a government within a government allowing crazed parliamentarians to push batshit agendas that aren’t representative of Australians or the people who voted for them. The caucus can turn on the Prime Minister and screw him over, as we’re seeing for the first time. Kevin keeps pointing out that he was elected by the PEOPLE of Australia and not factional leaders.

While I’d be chuffed to see Australia have their first woman PM, I don’t agree with Gizzard’s coup, as loathsome as K-rudd can be at times with not following through. This is why we should elect the person, not the party, and vote for WHO we want to represent us, not just a brand name with a random and (obviously) changeable line-up. It’s abhorrent.

Ps: Early rumours that he stepped down were incorrect, there will be a secret ballot held by the Labor caucus tomorrow at 9AM.

The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Communication (They don’t represent us, just batshit vocal minorities, I assure you) have stated that all Australian’s should be forced to install anti-virus and firewall software on their computers before being allowed to connect to the internet under a ‘new plan’ to ‘fight cyber crime’. And if their computer did get infected, internet service providers could cut off their connection until the problem was resolved.

Those are two of the recommendations to come from a year-long multi-million inquiry into cyber crime. They spent all the money on K-Rudd’s crack and then did an all nighter the night the findings were due. Results of the inquiry, titled Hackers, Fraudsters and Botnets: Tackling the Problem of Cyber Crime, were released last night in a 260-page report, there is no mention whether it met copyspace clearance however and may have been plagerised from first year ethics students at UWA.

In her foreword, committee chair Belinda Neal said cyber crime had turned into a “sophisticated underground economy”, before taking a rasping breath from the pipe under the table. “In the past decade, cyber crime has grown from the nuisance of the cyber smart hacker into an organised transnational crime committed for vast profit and often with devastating consequences for its victims,” Ms Neal said. I postulate whether she is referring to the ‘russian mobsters’ who ‘hacked’ a dentists website and ‘uploaded child pornography’ to ‘make money’ as Senator Conman Conroy stated when asked why a dentists office was on the super secret government black list.

During its inquiry the committee heard a growing number of Australians were being targeted by cyber criminals and that increasing internet speeds were likely to make the situation worse. Something we don’t inherently need to worry about in Australia given that we still pay several hundred dollars per month for speeds not exceeding ADSL1 technology branded as ADSL2+ with a lot of fine print that anything over 56k dialup ‘in their terms’ is ADSL2+ (forget international standards here folks).

It also heard the problem was costing Australian businesses as much as $649 million a year. Including dentists with large kiddy porn collections replacing their virtual store front. The committee looked at several different examples of cyber crime, including hacking, phishing, malware and botnets. They intently carried out this research by leeching torrents, using Back Orifice on inter-office computers, and asking each other for their banking details from fraudulent hotmail accounts, such as imnotsenatorconroy@hotmail.com.

Among its final 34 recommendations were:

• The creation of an around-the-clock cyber crime helpline. This, I agree with. I don’t pay for phone calls so I will ring them and chant “Cocks, cocks, cocks.” until the end of time.
• Changes to the law to make unauthorised installation of software illegal. What the fuck, seriously.
• Companies who release IT products with security vulnerabilities should be open to claims for compensation by consumers. This I agree with. Microsoft, give me moneys.
• Another of its recommendations was to create a new “e-security code of practice” that would define the responsibilities of internet service providers and their customers. Cocks, cocks, cocks.
• The code of practice would see companies like Telstra give their customers security advice when they signed up and inform them if their computer ever appeared to be compromised. More fine print we won’t read and will click yes to.

For their part, customers would have to install anti-virus and firewall software before their connection was activated and endeavour to keep the software up-to-date. It pisses me off enough as it is when they ask what kind of computer I’m using to access the net, when half the time I’m not even using a computer at all, nor any OS they’d have heard of. Find me anti-virus software for my xbox, or my iPhone hard-booted to run Lunix (yes, Lunix, no, it’s not a typo)  please K-Rudd.

If a customer’s computer was infected by malware, the service provider could introduce gradual restrictions and eventually cut off their internet connection entirely until the machine was “remediated”. This implies that the Government will not only be ‘filtering’ us, but also packet sniffing our shit in a clandestine way.

This entire thing just makes me want to pre-emptively ring that hotline, or maybe Senator Conroy’s office. In fact, brb, cocks, cocks, cocks time.

“The Rachel Corrie has been intercepted 35 miles off Gaza,” a spokesman for the welcoming committee, Amjad al-Shawa, who talked with the boat, told AFP in Gaza City, the vessel 5 nautical miles off coastal waters, thus pushing the case that these seizures in international waters amount to piracy. “Several Israeli boats surrounded them and prevented them from reaching Gaza,” said Mr Shawa.

“They try to take the boat maybe to (the southern Israeli port city of) Ashdod or maybe to another place,” he said. Mr Shawa said communication with the boat had been “completely cut” but the committee would keep trying to reach them. Martin Quigley, a Dublin based spokesman for the vessel, which is carrying 15 people and tonnes of aid for Gaza, could not confirm the information and said he had not been in contact with the boat. “They had agreed to call us the minute they spotted any Israeli ships,” he said, saying he had not been able to reach the passengers on the satellite phone. “It sounds like the phone is off the hook.”

A spokeswoman for the Israeli army denied the boat had been taken over, telling AFP: “No… we are not aware of any information about that”.

Israeli governmental credibility is on the ropes after autopsies on the bodies of nine Turks revealed most were shot in the back of the head or the back, the Turks were killed in an Israeli raid on an aid ship bound for Gaza found they were peppered with bullets and many were shot at close range, a British newspaper said Saturday.  Citing Yalcin Buyuk, the vice-chairman of the Turkish council of forensic medicine, which carried out the autopsies for the Turkish ministry of justice on Friday, the Guardian said the men were shot a total of 30 times.

One 60-year-old man was shot four times – in the temple, chest, hip and back, Buyuk said. A US-Turkish citizen was shot five times at close range in the face, the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back.

Two other men were shot four times, and five of the victims were shot either in the back of the head or in the back, Buyuk said.

Israel has said the commandos only opened fire after they came under attack with clubs, knives, guns and other weapons, although no weapons other than deck poles were found on the vessel, and night vision footage taken by the IDF revealed that the crew only began to try and repel the attackers once weapons fire had already commenced against the unarmed civillians on board the ship.

Bulent Yildirim, head of the Islamic charity Foundation of Humanitarian Relief, which spearheaded the Gaza aid fleet, said activists used iron bars in self-defence after Israeli soldiers fired indiscriminately when they stormed the Turkish ferry Mavi Marmara.

Long have we theorised the above line by a madman bearing a labtern not to be talking about the literal God believed in by so many theists. Instead, we interpret, he is talking about what this god represented for European culture, the shared cultural belief in God which had once been its defining and uniting characteristic.

So to has man thrown off the yolk of theism, every element of the divine has been replicated at large through science, trickery, art, illusionism except one final element; the creation of life.

Until yesterday when flamboyant geneticist Craig Venter held true to the pledge he made nearly 15 years ago, unveiling his magnum opus. This landmark of scientific progress, published in the Journal of Science, stands on the shoulders of his race to decode the human genome in his own laboratory, egotistically his own DNA I might add.

The madman carrying this lantern has indeed created the first instance of purely synthetic life, opening the doors nanoscience falter at with the potential to create designer microbes for special jobs such as production of biofuels, pharmaceuticals, through to filtering contaminents from air and water.

“This is the first synthetic life that has been made, and we call it synthetic because the cell is totally derived from a synthetic chromasome, made with four bottles of chemcals on a synthesizer from information on a computer,” Dr Venter said.

Lauded as a tour de force by Prof. Mattick from the Australian Research Council, Dr. Venters work is as ground breaking as science gets these days, the applications for man made life are phenominal and limited only by our imagination. That being said, mans imagination can often be self destructive, so think of all the fantastic synthesized zombie viruses the US military will make with this!

The bacterium used decoded DNA from Mycoplasma mycoides imprinting the synthetic DNA and inserting it into living bacterium, in this case Mycoplasma capricolum, allowing the bacterium to flourish with both it’s own and the synthetic DNA within, then finally using an antibiotic designed to kill all but the synthetic DNA allowing only the synthesized organism to proliferate and produce protein strands from the original Mycoplasma mycoides creating, simply, artificial life.

Klatu barada neck-tie?

Researchers at Imperva have discovered an ‘experimental’ botnet that uses around 300 hijacked web servers to launch high-bandwidth DDoS attacks.

The servers are all believed to be open to an unspecified security vulnerability that allows the attacker, who calls him or herself ‘Exeman’, to infect them with a tiny, 40-line PHP script. This includes a simple GUI from which the attacker can return at a later date to enter in the IP, port and duration numbers for the attack that is to be launched.

But why servers in the first place? Botnets are built from PCs and rarely involve servers.

According to Imperva’s CTO, Amachai Shulman, they have no antivirus software and offer high upload bandwidth, typically 10-50 times that of a consumer PC. Are there disadvantages to this? There are simply fewer of them, the attacker needs to find vulnerable machines using PHP, and they appear to need manual control, although Shulman did say that attacks could probably be automated using a separate script.

Imperva uncovered the attack by obtaining the server attack source code, which was simply run through Google, revealing a list of servers infected with it. The company was then able to watch as the attacker used a compromised server to launch a real denial-of-service attack on a Dutch ISP. The purpose is probably extortion-related.

The controller of the botent had used the Tor anonymity system to hide his or her incoming connections, which made it impossible to judge location. The servers themselves were lone servers at hosting companies, perhaps ones not carefully monitoring outgoing traffic patterns.

Would hosting companies or website owners know they were being hijacked by one of the Internet’s oddest botnets? Most likely, only if the authorities or third-party ISP comes calling with complaints of unwanted Internet traffic.

The botnet’s GUI hints that the hijack program, and perhaps the botnet itself, was probably created to be rented out to third-parties. A message in the simple interface reminds its users “Don’t DoS yourself nub.”

Brats had to be reassured that the abducted member of staff was safe and well after he was carted off by the aliens. Police contributed to the invasion by providing sirens and flashing blue lights to signify the landing of the craft just before morning classes on July 10. Diana Goss, the headteacher, informed pupils that an alien craft had crashed near the school and pupils were encouraged to “follow a trail of debris” before stumbling across the UFO.

A member of staff was then abducted by aliens before the children were sent back to class. One parent, who did not want to be named (probably out of shame for having a pussy of a kid – ed), said he daughter had come home in tears. She said: “God only knows what the school was playing at. I mean to shock children into thinking that the aliens have landed and have abducted a teacher is just a little too much for seven-year-olds. My daughter was deeply upset by it all and came home looking shell shocked. She wasn’t sure what had happened and really wanted to know that everything was going to be alright.” said the parent, who is clearly as much of a pussy as her kid.

Another parent said: “By all accounts it sounds like something out of that film Mars Attacks or War of the Worlds. I don’t know what the school was thinking.” In 1938 thousands of Americans were left terrified after a broadcast by Orson Welles describing an alien invasion. The War of the Worlds radio announcement on October 30 lasted 60 minutes and was presented as a series of breaking news bulletins – suggesting that aliens really had landed in America.

It should be noted that internet dweebs the world over would clearly not be as scared given our invasion plans on various survivalist forums that already cover zombies, cyborgs, and of course alien invasions.

I’ve always said if they don’t give us what we want when we want it we’ll pirate it. Screw going to the movies, my plasma is higher def than your projector and my sound quality is vastly superior. Screw waiting years to see 20 minute shows stretched to 1.5 hours of adverts, I’ll download my shows and watch them nao kthx. :P Below are the results of News Ltd’s survey, please note a lot of their inferences are based on the assumption that all persons answered honestly (ie: ‘rich get stingy’, more like people lie about their income, etc) so evaluate it with critical thought: -

WHY do people turn to the web to get TV shows, movies and music without paying for them when they know they should?

We asked more than 7000 illegal downloaders to tell us just that. Here’s the breakdown of their answers.

Overview

The online survey was completed by 7324 respondents who said they had illegally downloaded or streamed TV shows, movies or music in the past 12 months.

Respondents were asked to choose the most applicable reasons for illegally downloading or streaming media from a list of about 12 possible choices, for each type of media — TV shows, movies and music.

They were also asked how much they would be prepared to pay for a similar legal and convenient service if it existed.

Some of the key findings were:

CONVENIENCE was as much of a motivating factor as money for people who illegally downloaded or streamed media.

MORE than two-thirds of respondents say they would be prepared to pay for a similar legal service if it existed.

GEN Y is prepared to pay more for legal downloads of TV shows and movies than any other age group, while people between 31 and 50 are more likely to pay top dollar for music.

THE young (under 20) and elderly (61 and over) are least likely to say they would pay for legal content.

TV shows are illegally downloaded more regularly, and by more people, than movies or music.

Click here to read the original story

Read on for more results on each type of media.

TV shows

6694 respondents said they had illegally downloaded or streamed a TV show in the past 12 months. Of these, 86.8 per cent said they did so regularly.

When given multiple choices to explain why they illegally downloaded or streamed TV shows, most respondents chose:

1) I’ll have to wait too long to see it on TV (50.7 per cent)
2) I want to be able to watch it whenever I want (41.5 per cent)
3) It doesn’t have ads (38.9 per cent)
4) It isn’t shown on TV at all (35.9 per cent)
5) It’s convenient (35.6 per cent)

When asked how much they would pay for a convenient legal option, respondents chose:

1) $1 per episode (39.2 per cent)
2) Nothing (33.6 per cent)
3) $2 per episode (18.7 per cent)
4) $3 per episode (8.4 per cent)

Shows not so social: Less than 1 per cent of respondents said they downloaded TV shows to share them with friends.

Movies

5902 respondents said they had illegally downloaded or streamed a movie in the past 12 months. Of these, 72.7 per cent said they did so regularly.

When given multiple choices to explain why they illegally downloaded or streamed movies, most respondents chose:

1) Going to the cinema is too expensive (43.5 per cent)
2) It’s convenient (42.4 per cent)
3) I want to be able to watch it whenever I want (42.4 per cent)
4) It’s free (28.7 per cent)
5) It’s an old movie I can’t find on DVD or Blu-ray (25.8 per cent)

When asked how much they would pay for a convenient legal option, respondents chose:

1) $2 per episode (45.6 per cent)
2) $5 per episode (28.3 per cent)
3) Nothing (21.6 per cent)
4) $10 per episode (4.4 per cent)

Paying promise: More pirates said they would pay $5 per film through a convenient legal service than those who wouldn’t pay anything. The most popular choice was $2.

Rebel retirees?: Respondents aged 61 or above were the most likely of all age groups to say they illegally downloaded movies once a week or more.

Music

5712 respondents said they had illegally downloaded or streamed music in the past 12 months. Of these, 69.5 per cent said they did so regularly.

When given multiple choices to explain why they illegally downloaded or streamed music, most respondents chose:

1) I want it in MP3 format without copy protection (43.2 per cent)
2) It’s convenient (37.0 per cent)
3) CDs are too expensive (36.5 per cent)
4) It’s free (33.2 per cent)
5) I want to know if I like it before I decide whether to buy it (28.2 per cent)

When asked how much they would pay for a convenient legal option, respondents chose:

1) 50c per song (48.8 per cent)
2) Nothing (33.6 per cent)
3) $1 per song (14.7 per cent)
4) $2 per song (2.8 per cent)

The rich get stingy: Respondents with an annual household salary of more than $350,000 were more likely than other income groups to admit illegally downloading music on a regular basis.

The news.com.au illegal downloads survey was carried out between April 16 and April 22 in conjunction with market research firm CoreData.

This information is disemmination of news data as per the Copyright Act.

What’s wrong with this picture? What the fuck is right with it? (If you answered nothing, read on, else beat yourself across the head, re-read, and repeat until enlightenment)

It’s 2010, when our prime minister lied about stopping Japanese illegal whaling, withdrawing our troops from America’s war against adjectives, and getting rid of the vile fuck-the-workers “work choices” scheme … we saw no one swamp the streets to protest.

In 2008 during the mandatory censorship protests we saw only 5,000 mob Town Hall to protest the decay of Internet freedom in our nation not to mention free speech at the draconian hands of Senator-can’t-program-a-VCR Conroy.

What is wrong with a society which has crazed teen girls acting like sleazy 40 year old men with their hand in their pocket over some kid? In what jilted fucked up take of reality do we see people mobbing barricades and police lines over some b-grade net celebrity? When did Australia turn into the US?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware that teenage females are the least intellectually gifted let alone autonomous minority in our society and I’m also aware that they’re brain washed to be the future of mindless consumption technicians that will keep our male workforce subjugated; but there’s something seriously wrong with parents who don’t discourage clearly unhealthy behaviour.

I don’t have children, well none that Centrelink can prove are mine, and I’m personally a fan of ‘late term’ abortions up to the age of 35, but seriously, seeing this in the news disgusted me.

These silly little trollops need to watch less OC/hills/jersey shore and get the fuck back into a classroom or better yet an adidas sweat shop. We boggle our logic to no end trying to figure out why women are paid less than men and have more dick-in-butt ratio in the socio-economic front yet allow borderline psychotic behaviour and encourage hive mentality and worship of TV-told-me-to tin gods. No male would get away with that over any female without their mates outright telling them they’re bent in the head and probably slap them around when they won’t talk about anything but their obsession. Not to mention the extremes many young girls go to (see: changing their online surnames everywhere to reflect obsessed marital fantasies) are just bizarre and unhealthy.

How young females can’t see that there’s no such tangible thing as a ‘fanboy’ but ‘fangirl’ is an ever present term and not appreciate that they’re jipping themselves out of individualistic thought or gender rights progression is beyond me.

Pre-pube girls, grow the fuck up. Pre-pube girl parents, put them in therapy you disillusioned cunts.

REMEMBER: PSEUDOSCIENCE KILLS.
Click here to review individual instances of pseudoscience and alternative medicine being at fault in over 368,379 people dying, 306,096 injured and over $2,815,931,000 in economic damages.

I don’t mean to rag on him too much by the way, he seems to be a TAFE teacher (by Australian standards, or primarily a ‘community college’ instructor by US standards) and has clearly worked with some brilliant chaps too; my disdain isn’t against this individual but merely his actions as a proponent of deadly conspiracy and pseudoscience peddling. That being said he can be found on YouTube making an ass of himself talking about UFOs and conspiracies.

Before reading through this review, or maybe even after, watch this video on critical thinking for a general primer on how to approach … well, just about anything utilising the illumination of critical thought and the scientific mind!

I was cynical from the commencement reading this material, as I have read hundreds of papers debunking magetic therapy, the dedication at the begining of the work mentioning a naturopath was not reassuring. The preface is a very stereotypical opening shot of anecdote, as with most ‘alternative medicine‘ someone always knows someone who X, Y and Z, but sadly none of these people manage to deliver even a scrap of scientific proof nor are any of these wonderous revolutionary discoveries ever distributed to peer reviewed journals where the reading (and commenting) audience are medically or scientifically trained. We all know why that is.

The kicker that already got my eyes rolling out of my head was the defecting Russian scientist, who spoke of awesome ‘energy healing‘ methods through magnetic devices which, when pointed at the ear of a subject with an ear infection for a few minutes, would destroy the infection. If ANYONE can reproduce that in a lab under ANY form of scientific scrutiny, I will gladly sell all my possessions, hand them the cash, then promptly jump off a cliff. I shit you not, I WILL stake my entire life on the fact that ALL alternative medicine is a farce. A dangerous farce at that, killing millions the world over who, through ignorance, or irresponsibility of others putting forth puff where one should be proposing medicine and science, die and cause massive financial, emotional, and general harm to people every day. I feel safe in my bet on this one though: -

“I know of no scientist who takes this claim seriously…It’s another fad. They come and go like copper bracelets and crystals and all of these things, and this one will pass too.” –Robert Park of the American Physical Society.

“Iron atoms in a magnet are crammed together in a solid state about one atom apart from one another. In your blood only four iron atoms are allocated to each hemoglobin molecule, and they are separated by distances too great to form a magnet. This is easily tested by pricking your finger and placing a drop of your blood next to a magnet. ” –Michael Shermer*

“The more extreme claims of magnetic therapy, such as curing cancer by hanging supermagnets around your neck, are not only nonsense but also dangerous, since they may divert patients from seeking appropriate treatment from mainstream medicine. Magnetic jewelry and most other magnetic-therapy products probably are harmless beyond a waste of money.” –James D. Livingston*

By page 4 the author is already claiming magnets are ‘the medicine of the future’, an ongoing cliche comment from all alternative medicine and snake oil peddlers in general. This magnet shit was mostly hashed out in the 70′s, with magnetic rooms, or ion charging units in sweat lodges in Europe would charge tens of thousands for ‘therapy,’ or the pleasure of sitting on a seat awkwardly in the middle of a room in your underwear whilst your healers snort the cash you’ve given them like hoovers. The whole ‘electro’ fad was exhausted by the 1930′s and debunked by most educated fellows.

One can’t go very far in the realm of ‘alternative medicine’ without striking on an Edison or Tesla reference, this work doesn’t disappoint, albeit I did find the uber professionalism of the author in one outstanding statement that pretty much sets the feel for the rest of the narrative of pseudoscience: -

Key sections are noted with a :) symbol to indicate importance.

Brilliant, right? In the 1930′s, as the author even states, such ridiculous claims were put forwards such as Tesla’s high frequency currents “are bringing about a highly beneficial result in dealing with cancer, surpassing anything that could be accomplished with ordinary surgery.” Statements like that are what people term as anecdotal; they’re not scientific, nor is any credential other than that of the conman or his associates put on the line. If it were submitted for peer review scientific journals by modern standards they’d be ridiculed openly and debunked, if not outright exposed, as phoneys. We all know electricity won’t cure cancer. If it did, we wouldn’t be spending billions in cancer research, nor spending even more in socialist states like Australia to fund the treatment of cancer patients if mere electro-shock will cure it.

Tim Harlow, general practitioner, Colin Greaves, research fellow, Adrian White, senior research fellow, Liz Brown, research assistant, Anna Hart, statistician, Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine conducted a large scale scientific examination of energy healing, with a focus on magnets, these findings were published in an esteemed and peer reviewed journal, British Medical Journal, Dec. 2004.

Skip to the bottom of this article to see other findings from other scientists that have been submitted to REAL journals and published BY presses that aren’t owned by those conducting the research.

That being said, we still have some whacky psychiatrists (mostly in Western Australia at Graylands (movies have been made about that place and this practice) who believe that electro-shock therapy is effective in dealing with depression and anxiety conditions. The figures probably come from the fact people will behave the way the doctors want because they don’t want a fucking jumper cable put to their temples again; not to mention in extreme cases these practices cause indirect lobotomies, but have as unpredictable a result as inserting a screw driver into your cars ignition, hitting it with a 20 lb sledge hammer, and hoping it starts.

By page 12 the author had lost me with far too much blatent pseudo-science, so I decided to look into him a bit more, examine his writing style. He seems to apply many footnotes, but I noticed that there are none beyond the 90s if not even the 70s that AREN’T published in some wanky new age touchy feely hippy publication, or vanity pressing. All the rest of the footnotes are from things from the late 1870s through to the 1930s, so we’re already dealing with someone who is structuring their research to suit their argument, as opposed to conducting research to present their argument be it right or wrong.

By page 13 the author is citing conspiracy theory books claiming that there is suppression by ‘big pharma’ to prevent the world being this wonderful utopia as peddled by snake oil salesmen. At this point I realised I could not go any further without losing all respect for myself. Cute read, non-scientific, all point of view, all flawed research.

Further reading:

• Colbert, A. P., Wahbeh, H., Harling, N., Connelly, E., Schiffke, H. C., Forsten, C., Gregory, W. L., Markov, M. S., Souder, J. J., Elmer, P., King, V. (2009). Static Magnetic Field Therapy: A Critical Review of Treatment Parameters. Evid Based Complement Alternat Med 6: 133-139 [Abstract] [Full text]
• Boutron, I., Moher, D., Altman, D. G., Schulz, K. F., Ravaud, P., for the CONSORT Group, (2008). Extending the CONSORT Statement to Randomized Trials of Nonpharmacologic Treatment: Explanation and Elaboration. ANN INTERN MED 148: 295-309 [Abstract] [Full text]
• Rumbaut, R. E., Mirkovic, D. (2008). Magnetic therapy for edema in inflammation: a physiological assessment. Am. J. Physiol. Heart Circ. Physiol. 294: H19-H20 [Full text]
• Barron, M. C., Rubin, B. R. (2007). Managing Osteoarthritic Knee Pain. J Am Osteopath Assoc 107: ES21-ES27 [Abstract] [Full text]
• Pittler, M. H. MD PhD, Brown, E. M. BSc, Ernst, E. MD PhD (2007). Static magnets for reducing pain: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized trials. CMAJ 177: 736-742 [Abstract] [Full text]
• Katz, W. A. (2007). Themed Review: Nonpharmacologic Approaches to Osteoarthritis. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF LIFESTYLE MEDICINE 1: 249-255 [Abstract]
• Kuipers, N. T., Sauder, C. L., Ray, C. A. (2007). Influence of static magnetic fields on pain perception and sympathetic nerve activity in humans. J. Appl. Physiol. 102: 1410-1415 [Abstract] [Full text]
• Bjordal, J, Conaghan, P G (2006). NSAIDs in osteoarthritis: irreplaceable or troublesome guidelines?. Br. J. Sports. Med. 40: 285-286 [Full text]
• Finegold, L., Flamm, B. L (2006). Magnet therapy. BMJ 332: 4-4 [Full text]
• Rubin, B. R. (2005). Management of Osteoarthritic Knee Pain. J Am Osteopath Assoc 105: S23-S28 [Abstract] [Full text]
• Winemiller, M. H., Billow, R. G., Laskowski, E. R., Harmsen, W. S. (2005). Effect of Magnetic vs Sham-Magnetic Insoles on Nonspecific Foot Pain in the Workplace: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trial. Mayo Clin Proc. 80: 1138-1145 [Abstract]
• McDonald, H. L (2005). Patients who wore standard magnetic bracelets reported reduced pain from osteoarthritis of the hip or knee compared with patients wearing placebo bracelets. Evid. Based Nurs. 8: 89-89 [Full text]
• McCrory, P (2005). The power of placebo. Br. J. Sports. Med. 39: 125-125 [Full text]
• (2005). Robin Goodfellow (44-3). Rheumatology (Oxford) 44: 418-418 [Full text]

The 27-year-old was arrested in Las Vegas on Friday and appeared in a federal court, where he was detained until a bail hearing on Wednesday (US time).

A relative unknown only two years ago, Ipswich-born Tzvetkoff shot to prominence in 2008 as the founder of online payment processing company Intabill.

Tzvetkoff’s lawyer, Mace Yampolsky, told The Sunday Mail his client was “distraught” and would apply for bail.

According to a 15-page indictment, Tzvetkoff faces charges of money laundering, money laundering conspiracy, gambling conspiracy and bank fraud conspiracy.

Prosecutors from the US Attorney’s Office allege Tzvetkoff assisted illegal online gambling companies to launder about $US540 million ($A584 million) into offshore accounts.

Tzvetkoff allegedly duped banks – which have bans on internet credit card gambling – into believing the gambling transactions were actually ordinary transactions.

He was then able to use what is known as the “Automated Clearing House system” (ACH) to run hundreds of millions of dollars between the US and a web of companies in the British Virgin Islands.

Emails obtained by the FBI, and detailed in the indictment, allege an unnamed co-conspirator boasted they had hired programmers to develop “unique” websites for shelf companies so if someone was “checking the companies out there is absolutely no way to tie the companies together”.

A minute later, Tzvetkoff replied: “This is all perfect!”, authorities allege.

At its peak, Intabill employed 120 people in its Milton office.

Tzvetkoff made The Sunday Mail’s 2008 Rich List, with a personal wealth of $82 million and appeared to have it all – including an 18-month-old son and partner.

But his world rapidly unravelled last year, when he was hit with a $100 million law suit by business partner Sam Sciacca.

But now he faces an even more serious fight, far away from the rolling surf of the Gold Coast. According to the indictment, he created a number of shelf companies in the British Virgin Islands – complete with phony websites and unrelated names.

Emails in the document allege Tzvetkoff took a lead role in telling Intabill employees to lie to banks about the business.

Another email by Tzvetkoff directed an employee to “buy some shelf companies that the BVI’s (apparently a reference to the British Virgin Islands) will own . . . We need to then rename each company to be called something process related.”

Tzvetkoff’s father, Kim Tzvetkoff, said he was unaware of the unfolding events surrounding his son. “We will do everything we can to support Daniel,” he said.

THE RISE AND FALL OF DANIEL TZVETKOFF

AUGUST 2001: BT Projects founded

FEBRUARY 2007: Online payment company Intabill registered

MARCH 2008: Tzvetkoff buys Hedges Avenue mansion for $28 million. Has additional property portfolio of more than $21 million

AUGUST 2008: Features on Sunday Mail Rich List worth $82 million

MARCH 2009: Buys V8 supercar team, Inta Racing

APRIL 2009: Sacks 96 staff at his Intabill office

JULY 2009: BT Projects placed in liquidation with debts of $80 million

JULY 2009: Business partner Sam Sciacca sues Tzvetkoff for $100 million

JULY 2009: Online poker house Kolyma sues for $52 million

JULY 2009: Sells partnership in Zuri nightclub

AUGUST 2009: Sells 30m superyacht Maximus

NOVEMBER 2009: Hedges Ave mansion sold for $17 million

JANUARY 2010: Files for bankruptcy

APRIL 2010: Charged by US authorities with money laundering. Faces 75 years in jail

In her autobiography, In The Best Interests of the Child, Hetty Johnston, founder of Bravehearts and unquestionably Australia’s most prominent voice on child sexual assault, documents three childhood incidents that, as far as she is concerned, place her within the realm of the abused: the first sees Hetty and her sisters returning from the beach one day when “a man stepped out of a public toilet that happened to be situated in a park on our route and dropped his towel to reveal his nakedness”; the second takes place at the beach also, when an argument with an unknown adult results in the man slapping young Hetty in the face “so hard that I could only see stars for about five minutes”; and the third involves a man at an indoor pool who, while playfully throwing children in the pool, places “a hand in my crutch as he thrust me skyward.

“For me,” Hetty writes, “these occurrences have not left any indelible imprint but they do raise an interesting point. Statistically speaking, I had become the ‘one in four’ girls who had been sexually assaulted before the age of eighteen. But these were statistics I was to discover later in life. Right now, I was just a kid trying to negotiate the adult world. No big deal really.”

This passage is striking. Not only does it reveal to us the relatively commonplace occurrences that pass for “child sexual assault” in the minds of today’s crusaders, but it exposes them as incidents that, as unsavoury as they may be, are almost rites of passage for children of the modern world, blown off as “no big deal” by Hetty Johnston herself, one of the hottest, angriest winds in the current storm of hysteria. Could all this fear and counter-fear be about something which, for the most part, is nothing to get excited about?

To read more, go here: http://blogs.news.com.au/jackmarxlive/index.php/news/comments/the_abuse_of_child_abuse/

The website WikiLeaks.org released the video yesterday after the US army had refused repeated requests by Reuters to provide the footage. WikiLeaks said it had obtained the video from “a number of military whistleblowers” after breaking the military encryption code of a black-and-white video recorded by the gun camera of at least one of the Apache helicopters involved.

The footage shows a group of men walking together on a Baghdad street with no obvious hostile action. The US army crew aboard one of the Apache helicopters assumes they are insurgents and mistakes photographer Noor-Eldeen’s camera slung over his shoulder, with its large lens, for a weapon.

The crew identify what they believe are “five to six individuals with AK-47s” before receiving permission to open fire from ground controllers.

“Look at those dead bastards,” one helicopter pilot says afterwards. Another replies: “Nice . . . good shootin’.”

The video then shows a lone wounded man among the dead, believed to be Chmagh, crawling on the road. The pilots appear eager to shoot again. “All you got to do is pick up a weapon,” one says.

Soon after, a dark van arrives. Two apparently unarmed men get out, pick up the wounded man and bring him back to the van. The Apache crew gain ground control permission to fire again, blasting multiple times and destroying the van.

When a US armoured vehicle later arrives to check the scene, its driver appears to run over one of the bodies. One helicopter pilot appears amused. “I think they just drove over a body,” he says.

US soldiers on the ground discover two wounded children in the van, and orders are given to evacuate them to hospital. “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into battle,” says one pilot.

Reuters news editor-in-chief David Schlesinger said in a statement yesterday that the deaths three years ago of Noor-Eldeen, 22, and his driver, Chmagh, 40, were “graphic evidence of the dangers involved in war journalism and the tragedies that can result”.

A US military investigation at the time of the killings found the Apache helicopter crews involved had no reason to know that Reuters staff were among the group on the street. No action was taken against the crews.

An edited US military report issued yesterday, including statements from the Apache crews, said machine guns and grenades were found near the bodies.

It said the Reuters employees had made no attempt to display their status as media. “Their familiar behaviour with, and close proximity to, the armed insurgents, and their furtive attempts to photograph the coalition ground forces, made them appear as hostile combatants to the Apaches that engaged them.”

The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured.

After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own “Rules of Engagement”.

Consequently, WikiLeaks has released the classified Rules of Engagement for 2006, 2007 and 2008, revealing these rules before, during, and after the killings.

WikiLeaks has released both the original 38 minutes video and a shorter version with an initial analysis. Subtitles have been added to both versions from the radio transmissions.

WikiLeaks obtained this video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers and wish to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work.

For more information on this issue from WikiLeaks go to the site they’ve set up for it’s exposure at: http://www.collateralmurder.com/

Case in point: Venezuela, where we may be witnessing the signs of an Iran-like brouhaha. With its economy floundering, crime rates skyrocketing, and civil unrest escalating, Venezuela isn’t exactly the happiest place on Earth these days. In the face of this discontent, President Hugo Chavez has decided to step up his propaganda game and has unleashed a major campaign to suppress any oppositional media outlets. When five cable stations recently refused to broadcast one of his speeches, Chavez ordered them to shut down operations, a decree that set off a firestorm of protests, police intervention, and the eventual death of two student dissidents.

The catalyst behind most of these protests is, of course, Twitter, which anti-Chavez activists have used to organize demonstrations and to spread their cause internationally. Dissidents have also taken to Facebook, where a group titled “Chavez esta PONCHAO!” (“Chavez, you struck out!”) is already 80,000 members strong. Chavez, not surprisingly, has undertaken efforts to squash this social media mini-revolution, going so far as to equate Twitter, the Internet, and text-messaging (?) with “terrorism”. As FOX News reports, Chavez has promised a “radical” response to the Twitter-fueled uprising, and has already “launched an army of Twitter users to bring down online networks and try to infiltrate student groups.”

Chavez used his weekly propaganda television and radio show ‘Alo Presidente’ to rally Latin America behind the ’cause’ of his Argentine counterpart Cristina Kirchner by making a direct demands to Buckingham Palace.

“Look, England, how long are you going to be in Las Malvinas? Queen of England, I’m talking to you. The time for empires are over, haven’t you noticed? Return the Malvinas to the Argentine people.” ignoring the fact all occupants of the Falklands are British citizens and don’t want a bar of South America and their petty dictators.

Still addressing the Queen, he went on: “The English are still threatening Argentina. Things have changed. We are no longer in 1982. If conflict breaks out, be sure Argentina will not be alone like it was back then.”

He described British control of the islands in the South Atlantic as “anti-historic and irrational”.

Mrs Kirchner sought to win new allies in Argentina’s claims to the islands when she made a direct appeal for support at a meeting in Mexico of the Rio Group of Latin American and Caribbean countries. Venezuela and Nicaragua rallied to Argentina’s side even before Mrs Krichner’s appeal, and it was reported that Brazil was ready to support any resolution backing Argentina’s sovereignty claims.

Argentine anger is likely to increase after Desire Petroleum, the British oil company that has towed a rig from Scotland to about 60 miles off the north of the Falklands, announced on Monday it had begun drilling, the natural gas and oil surrounding the Falklands are naturally the only reason Argentinians suddenly interested, as most South American countries are in dire financial shape.

Argentina is attempting to hamper oil exploration, insisting last week that all vessels using its ports must now seek permission if they plan to enter or leave British-controlled waters. Argentina wants other South American countries to impose its transport restrictions to the Falklands but it is unlikely to win support from those closest to the islands such as Chile and Uruguay.

Chile, Argentina’s traditional enemy, has long been a major supplier to the Falklands. An operations manager of a Uruguayan shipping agency who came out to Port Stanley on Saturday to discuss business was dismissive about the effectiveness of the latest Argentine decree.

Meanwhile, passengers from the British cruise liner Star Princess disembarked at Port Stanley on Monday for a day trip after the vessel reported leaving Buenos Aires with no demand for permission to sail to the Falklands.
Stepping on to the jetty for a few hours watching penguins or touring one of the battlefields from the 1982 war, passengers said the ship’s captain had reassured them several days ago it was “perfectly safe” to get off at when they reached the islands.

However, Maurice and Sylvia Bellamy from Felixstowe reported some unusual Falklands-related advice had been issued over the ship’s tannoy system.
“They told us we had to refer to the islands as the Falklands when we were there but as the Malvinas when we were in Argentina,” said Mr Bellamy, 74.

Argentina wants other South American countries to impose its transport restrictions to the Falklands but this would mean that they, too, could miss out on the lucrative profits from providing refining and port facilities if, as drillers believe, large amounts of oil and natural gas are retrieved off the Falklands.

###
Related Articles
Latin America backs Argentina in Falkland dispute
Falkland Islands: Argentina can’t scare us, say islanders
British cruise ship tests Argentine blockade in Falklands
Shares in oil explorers connnected to Falklands rise
British firms could be hit in Falklands oil revenge

Aboriginal man Steve Hodder-Watt recently discovered the US-based site by searching “Aboriginal and Encyclopedia” in the search engine. He tried to modify the entry on Encyclopedia Dramatica, what the Australian media called ‘a satirical version of Wikipedia,’ but was blocked from doing so.

Hodder-Watt then undertook legal action, that resulted in Google removing the offensive site from its listings. However the site itself remains available by navigating directly to it, naturally.

His lawyer, George Newhouse, said the site was “one of the most offensive sorts of racial vilification you could possibly find”. “It portrays indigenous Australians in the most unsavoury light possible, and you wouldn’t want a child stumbling across it,” he told ABC Radio.

Newhouse said Google agreed to take the link down after he filed an official complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission. “Lo and behold they agreed last night to take down the sites.”

Newhouse later told AAP that he believed any material found to contravene the Racial Discrimination Act should be blocked under the federal government’s proposed internet filter.

The Federal Government plans to introduce legislation this year requiring all service providers to ban “refused classification” material.

What does this mean? Any website with a channer noon spamming ‘niggerniggernigger’ or linking to Electric Retard, etc will get that site blocked by the great Australian firewall?Fuck that, address the problem, don’t ban us all from seeing crap. As much as racism shits me, censorship shits me much, much more. Censorship erodes every demographics rights regardless of age, gender, sexuality or race; it punishes all equally for the sake of the moralist minority.

If it offends you, don’t fucking look at it. Once we start the OMG OFFENSE game on the Internet it’s game over to free speech. Besides, there’s a lot of us out there who enjoy trolling racists, that being said I’m not sure whether ED is inherently racist or more offensive for the sake of causing offence, I’d probably say the latter.

Interestingly the article on news.com.au was pulled due to the comments field being flooded with trolling from btards. :P

In the real world, there’ll probably be a slightly faster iPhone. All things considered, we’ll call it a draw.

But what else can we expect? We’ve dug out the crystal ball (in the knowledge that nobody ever, ever bothers looking back at futurologists’ old work) to bring you this exclusive preview of the months to come. It’s science!

January: Windows 8 is released, several years ahead of schedule. New features include an updated title screen, three new pieces of wallpaper, and a version of Minesweeper with the xyzzy cheat code back in.

Apple counters by releasing a blank CD as the next version of OS X, describing it as ‘the atom bomb in our war against bloat’.

February: Rupert Murdoch gives up on the internet in disgust, citing widespread piracy and the impossibility of selling content online as the main reasons.

As one final act of revenge, he releases the world’s first hard copy of the web. ‘Taste of your own bloody medicine,’ he tells the pirate community, which immediately sets about scanning it in for the torrent sites.

March: Declining advertising revenues finally force change on web services. Around the world, former online millionaires are seen holding desperate cardboard signs reading ‘Will Host Photos For Food’.

April: Google launches Chrome OS, a Linux-based operating system designed to capitalise on what’s left of the web economy. Users aren’t entirely blown away by it, citing its limited features and the inherent benefits of downloadable software over online JavaScript applications, especially in the face of May’s zombie apocalypse.

June: With May officially declared The Month We Never Speak Of Again, the world returns to the important stuff: the brand-new iPhone. New features include a diamond screen to prevent scratching, an updated maps application that tells you where you’re going before you’ve even decided, and an FM tuner.

Worried that the market might be getting oversaturated, Steve Jobs only permits one to be built. Apple fanboys happily queue up for the chance to buy a photograph of him using it.

July: Hollywood finally closes the infamous ‘analogue hole’. Previous attempts at foiling ‘if you can see it, you can copy it’ are declared to have failed due to aiming at the wrong half of the sentence. Giant metal barriers are constructed in front of every cinema screen.

Viewers comment that while this does detract from the experience, it’s still better than sitting through Transformers 2. Pirates continue to rip Oscar screener DVDs like before.

August: First conviction for Skype Rage upheld. The judge says that while he appreciates the frustration new college student Phillip Carmichael built up after listening to his parents saying ‘Can you hear me? Is this coming through?’ for two hours, actually jumping into a car, driving seven hours across the country and murdering them as they continued parroting the question into their cheap microphone was a little too much.

September: Intel fights back against AMD’s latest so-small-you-can-only-see-it-under-a-microscope chip by building one so small, you can’t even do that. At least, that’s what it claims. AMD is invited to prove it’s lying.

October: Scandal rages through the graphics industry as the world’s first completely digital actor turns out to be merely be a deeply unconvincing human.

With his plastic skin, dead eyes and no trace of personality, mournful meat marionette Virtual Actor-One confesses that he thought officially changing his name would be the best way of finding work in an increasingly tech-focused Hollywood. Actor-One’s past roles include the third guard on the right in Tron and the T-Rex from Jurassic Park.

November: Scientists at CERN finally manage to create the elusive ‘god particle’ in the Large Hadron Collider. Fighting promptly breaks out over what it should be called, how it should be studied and how technicians should dress to do so. Luckily, the community soon finds a way to settle the various issues to everyone’s satisfaction. “If only we’d had Halo 3 Deathmatch during the Crusades,” sighs the Pope.

December: Bill Gates announces the discovery of clinical immortality. Everyone under the age of 55 is eligible and anyone can afford it, until someone finally reads the EULA in detail and discovers that the yearly licence renewal fee for their existence is based on an exponential scale. On the plus side, the slave collars are really very fetching.

First published in PC Plus Issue #290

Earlier in the week, Japanese whalers and their puppet ‘research’ groups in New Zealand (who have, off the record, been showing strong pro-whaling flags backing Japan, in exchange for Japanese funding of course) claimed that the Ady Gil pulled in their way at the last minute causing the collision and went as far as demanding that Australia intervene against Sea Shepherd.

Captain Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd announced that $170,000 was pledged in the first few hours after the incident while more was flooding in following the screening of a Sea Shepherd advert featuring Transformers actress Isabel Lucas to replace the $3,000,000 dollar stealth yacht the whalers sunk.

Captain Watson also praised Australian Acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard – who has been accused by Japan of inflaming public opinion and making diplomatic resolution of the whaling dispute harder to realise – for speaking out. “Julia Gillard is the only politician who has had the courage to say something about the illegal activities Japan has undertaken; the rest of them are hiding behind Japan’s kimonos as far as I can see.” It’s a fair call given pre-election promises by Kevin Rudd that he would engage the Japanese illegal whaling activities under the guise of research, amongst other intra-political matters along the employment lines, and delivered on none of them.

Captain Watson was especially scathing of New Zealand Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully, who has said it was not the NZ Government’s responsibility to send armed vessels to protect people “determined to break the law”. “The Minister of Foreign Affairs has made ignorant and unsubstantiated accusations and he should apologise and if he refuses to apologise he should be asked to resign,” Mr Watson said. A fair call given the almost blatent public backing of Japan’s piratical acts over the past decade in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.

“How dare he take Japan’s side in this issue against his own citizens? If a Sea Shepherd ship had rammed and sunk a Japanese ship, there would be no hesitation in sending a Navy ship to the Southern Ocean with a warrant of arrest.” It’s unfortunate no governments are taking any action, especially in light of the new evidence that the Japanese vessel intentionally rammed and sunk the yacht.

Below is the only footage to go by prior to the release of footage from the Ady Gil’s cameraman, yes you have to click this to view it, but here’s two views, one from a Sea Shepherd ship and another from the pirate whalers (language warning ahoy): -

As much as I despise child pornography and those who would produce it or in any way exploit a child, I loath more those who would demand that those facing charges ‘prove’ their ‘innocence’, and equally loath those who would repress art under a moralistic dogma of puritanism last seen amongst the nazi’s.

The report also recommends the introduction of laws making it easier for police to investigate child pornography and for juries and court staff to participate in trials for these offences. This suggestion follows concern within the legal fraternity of the impact that the viewing of child pornography evidence has on jury members, many of whom find the process distressing.

The working party has recommended the law be changed so jury members, prosecutors and court staff are able to view only a sample of images during the trial process.

The assumption is the jury will be shown images and told to assume that there are far worse images, which is somewhat similar to the ‘terrorism’ charges where individuals in this civil liberty stricken nation can be charged and not be told what they’re being charged with, going as far as even refusing to tell the judge what the charges are.

Here I was thinking we voted out the neo-conservative lobby. Besides, what IS art and what IS porn? Can porn be art? Can art be porn? Something tells me the answer to those questions is ‘whichever yields the most convictions’ given that the Australian justice system’s prosecution works on a conviction quota for it’s budget.

Chairman Rudd and his Glorious Workers Party has once again shown us that we don’t have bipartisan politics, but both parties are batshit insane hardline right wingers. As much as I hate talking about politics, and don’t assume I’m a lefty, I’m quite solidly centrist as a civil libertarian.

The 2-1/2-year-old Internet start-up, whose short text messages or “tweets” have become a global social phenomenon, is building up a team focused on generating revenue with a new range of yet-to-be launched products, judging by job postings on the company’s website.

Among the 26 job openings listed on Twitter’s site, four are specifically identified as being devoted to “monetization.” Striking licensing deals are key responsibilities for two other jobs.

“Twitter is looking for new members of our technical staff to work on cutting edge monetization projects,” several of the postings said.

The move to invest in such projects signals that making money is becoming a bigger priority at Twitter, as it seeks to evolve from being one of the Web’s fastest-growing social media firms into a self-sustaining online business.

“The company has crossed into the phase where monetization matters. They’re ramping it up,” said a source close to Twitter who did not wish to speak on the record about its finances.

A Twitter spokesperson said co-founder Biz Stone was not immediately available for comment. The company has about 120 employees, she said.

Tweets, which are limited to 140 characters, have grown into an established communications medium that has played a key role in world events such as the post-election protests in Iran last summer.

“They know they’re here for the long term now, so they need to turn on these monetization engines,” said Altimeter Group analyst Jeremiah Owyang.

Twitter, a privately held company, does not report earnings, but its website says: “While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.”

The company spokesperson did not confirm if that is still accurate.

Twitter struck deals in October — widely reported to total $25 million — to license its data feed to Google Inc and Microsoft Corp, allowing tweets to appear within search results on the companies’ Internet search engines.

The job postings make it clear that generating revenue beyond the licensing deals is one of the 2010 priorities for Twitter, said Altimeter’s Owyang.

Twitter, which recently moved into a larger office space in San Francisco, had 19.4 million unique visitors to its U.S. website in November, according to comScore, up sharply from the 1.5 million visitors a year earlier. Many industry watchers believe the actual number of worldwide Twitter users is much higher, since many people access the service through third-party applications instead of the website.

In September, Twitter raised $100 million in a move that valued the company at $1 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter, from backers including mutual fund giant T. Rowe Price and private equity firm Insight Venture Partners.

Twitter executives have said in the past that the company is interested in offering premium services, such as analytic tools for certain customers, and that it was exploring ways to integrate advertising into the service.

According to the job postings, the company is seeking engineers to build out the infrastructure and front-end features to support monetization systems that include “customer applications and reporting.”

A posting for a product marketing manager for monetization said the person would focus on “enhancing business users’ understanding of the value of Twitter.”

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Richard Chang, Reuters)

Glen Inwood of the ICR, the Japanese government sponsored ‘research’ organisation spoke briefly this morning on the issue, getting railed by reporters and asked many hard questions. He claimed that their research is to ‘establish whether commercial whaling is sustainable,’ and to do this research they need to use lethal research methods, defending the commercial operation stating the IWC set a ‘requirement that the meat goes on the market’ before running the usual fake ‘tradition’ defence that has been debunked by many a researcher interviewing average Japanese citizens on the issue.

It was ironic hearing Glen Inwood spouting that to convince IWC that whaling can be sustained they ‘need to whale,’ and that they were merely trying to ‘obtain data’ on commerial sustainable whaling. One interviewer nailed him, asking “When will you have adequate data?” after citing a list of whales to be slaughtered this ‘season,’ to which he immediately stated “All of your figures are wrong.” and beat around the bush before admitting it is “Indefinite research.”

He stopped short of outright admitting it’s all just a Japanese government sponsored scam, but toes the line of his puppeteers well. The interviewer ultimately asked if he can understand why whaling pisses the average Australian off given that it’s in our waters, illegally conducted, and in a whale sanctuary; he floundered before trying to claim many nations deny Australia’s claim to the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.

He didn’t quite elaborate if there were any nations aside from Japan and Norway, the two nations that still illegally whale regardless of the worldwide moratorium, that deny Australia’s claims to it’s own territorial waters.

He ended stating the usually tripe of the political correctness defence of “It’s a cultural tradition that Australians will need to learn to respect.”

Let’s hope they try and ram a vessel that isn’t 1/10th their size, maybe the Steve Irwin next? They wouldn’t have the gall, IMHO, a tiny fiberglass trimaran is an easy mark.

In Australia, there’s a morning show called Sunrise. It’s a pop vox piece with news, current affairs, and very hack journalism. Normally it’s harmless, but today they had a special on ‘school bullying’, I listened with interest, having suffered at the hands of bullies, and even at times become one myself, it’s an interesting aspect of growing up that people tend to overlook as far as an emotional and psychological developmental factor in life.

I thought their piece was cute, and as always they ran their usual implementing social justice using their huge fan list and a petition, up until I heard the advert they’re running to promote their campaign. This time they’ve gone too far.

They wish to urge the Australian government to appoint an independent regulator for social media sites. No. Sunrise, no. You will get signatures and support from idiots who don’t realise the danger of what you are suggesting. I am sure that Facebook, Myspace, or Twitter as corporations will lose all respect for our molly coddled nation, with our notorious breach of civil liberties as far as Stephen Conroy’s conjob of the ‘great firewall of australia’ as the government intends to censor our net, or the fact our government do not feel our citizens are old or mature enough to decide on their own entertainment with video games and a lack of R18+ (therefore if a game isn’t suitable for 15 year olds it’s banned) but having our government go to these corporations and say “Sup guise, we want this net nanny to sit on your boards or we’re packing up our toys and going home.” is just ridiculous.

Sunrise needs to google “net neutrality” and get in touch with the people it’s attempting to represent in an ad hoc fashion and appreciate that whilst they will always get a ground swell of bleeding heart viewers, they can, and in this instance have, overstepped the mark. We are not a dictatorship, and our Government interferes with the average citizens life far more than it should in any democratic culture in this nation as it is. This is a DANGEROUS PRECEDENT to attempt to set.

Please PASS THIS ON to fellow Australian’s you know, and SIGN THE PETITION countering Sunrise’s attempt to have our social networking sites regulated!