Russell Coker wrote: That'll take a while (i.e. years, maybe decades), especially if it's continuously filibustered by vested interests (e.g. linfox). It'd be better to reuse existing solutions as much as possible. (In the same way it'd have been better to tweak oyster or octopus than design myki from scratch.)

On Mon, June 30, 2014 12:46 pm, Russell Coker wrote: Getting a little tangential to the subject heading, one of the remarkable things about the Vietnam war was how the intelligence agencies were reasonably well aware of the situation on the ground (c.f., The Pentagon Papers), but politicians continued to lie about the real situation. "Lie" in this context (as Hannah Arendt's essay "Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers") means, "politicians engaging in public relations". Rather than provide the truth about the situation, the politicians seem to had deluded themselves into thinking that if local morale was altered to believe that they were winning the war, then the war would be won in Vietnam too. They were existing in a "defactualized world". We may recall, in a similar manner, the notorious Auckland blackouts, beautifully illustrated in Paul Fenwick's "An Illustrated History of Failure". The real problem was the electricity grid was carrying 150 MW of load on four main cables that could manage 110 MW. Network engineers had been aware of the problem for some time and even in the 1980s recommendations were made to make contingent upgrades. But management decided against informing the public of the need to engage in load reduction as it was deemed that this would cause bad publicity. So then a cable failed, increasing the load to 150MW on 85MW; then another to 150MW on 65MW and still nothing was done. Not surprisingly all cables eventually failed and when confronted with the reality of the situation, the electricity company's official response - contrary to the truth which they knew - was that El Nino was to blame. -- Lev Lafayette, BA (Hons), GradCertTerAdEd (Murdoch), GradCertPM, MBA (Tech Mngmnt) (Chifley) mobile: 0432 255 208 RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt

On Mon, June 30, 2014 4:43 pm, Rohan McLeod wrote: In this particular case they were lying AND deluded. They knew what the facts were but deliberately chose not to relay them, and they were deluded enough to think that this would make a difference on the ground. -- Lev Lafayette, BA (Hons), GradCertTerAdEd (Murdoch), GradCertPM, MBA (Tech Mngmnt) (Chifley) mobile: 0432 255 208 RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt

On Fri, 4 Jul 2014 12:34:13 Carl Turney wrote: To paraphrase the original question "why are you STILL asking about this when it's been explained to you already?". That's totally different. The neo-confederacy movement is about the exact same things that the original confederacy was about. Oppressing non-white people. Instead of slavery there are non-white people earning lower wages, doing less desirable work, and living in the worst parts of town. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Immediate_Causes_Which_Indu… The neo-confederates have been very successful in convincing people that the US civil war wasn't about slavery (the above URL is one of many showing that it was about slavery). http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/04/27/strange-fruit-lynching-in-a… http://asr.sagepub.com/content/70/4/633.abstract While the electrion of an Afro-American president is a loss to the racist Americans, the leaders of the racist organisations have done well from it. One thing you need to keep in mind is that these people aren't just motivated by money and power. They are motivated by the perceived social status that they get from oppressing other groups. To treat black people as equals is something that they regard as a loss of status. The Tea Party pretty much control the Republican party now and that's largely due to racism, so the extreme right-wing isn't doing too badly. Last time I checked with the current level of health care in Australia on average we need 2.1 children per woman to sustain the population level, and the average birth rate was lower than that. But I doubt that you have ever seen a protester with a "few babies". I've lived in London, Utrecht, and Amsterdam. Those cities are in many ways better than any Australian city due to the smaller urban areas. When you have multi-story apartment buildings with good public transport you can more easily get to wherever you want to go and less land is used overall. A large part of farmland is wasted. For example growing grain to feed to cattle. If we had better legislation regarding humane treatment of animals and food safety (two issues which are closely related) then meat would be more expensive. Economics would lead to the demand for meat decreasing which would decrease the need for farmland. Does anyone even say that in Australia? The way our society works is that old people use their savings and/or pension to pay for themselves. Our culture doesn't demand that people support their old relatives. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/