RSS feedThe Next Wave of Nuclear Proliferation
This articleâs concern, accordingly, is with what a globally expanded use of nuclear energy would mean for nuclear proliferation specifically (as opposed to the issues of nuclear waste disposal or the risk of catastrophic accident, which also merit serious consideration), and this topic as it centers on state actors (rather than nonstate actors such as terrorist groups).
I’m sitting here with Molly playing with her toys. Well she’s doing the playing, I’m just telling her fictitious stories about all the stuffed animals.
We have a bee on an elastic cord that bounces around like a, well, like a bee really, which is a nice educational touch, because bee in fact do buzz around in the air. So of course like a good parent, I grab the bee and go “bzzz bzzz bzzz”. But the reality for most parents is probably more like “bzzz bzzz bzzz, go away bee, or I’ll get the insect spray and kill you by squirting poison into your face”, which while technically still educational, is still not as preferable as the lie of the good old buzzing bee. “Look at the cute little bee, bzzz bzzz bzzz, look how it sits on your nose and doesn’t sting you, bzzz bzzz bzzz”.
Molly’s favourite though is an animal mobile, a little mirrored carousel with a cuddly pig, chicken and cow hanging from it by coloured threads. Molly loves to kick the animals around, and although she’s still a little uncoordinated at this point, she’s often able to grab one of the animals and put them in her mouth. Again, definitely educational, if not slightly inaccurate. While we do hang them up, we usually do this with the carcass once we’ve brutally killed them. I guess Molly’s just skipping the cooking bit.
So when is a good time to tell her than the bee isn’t really cute and can be a pest, and that the only things pigs, chickens and cows are good for are killing, cooking and eating? Or is it better to just say all this from the start, so that when told later on she doesn’t accuse you of lying? No wonder children are so good at lying, they learn it from their parents.
With the global financial crisis, there’s been talk about saving companies and industries simply because a large number of people work in them. In Australia, Captain Planet (AKA Kevin Rudd) is bailing out the car industry, and one of the biggest reasons is the number of Australians that work in our automotive industries. This reminds me of a quote from Jeremy Clarkson in Top Gear a few years back:
I didn’t even know Australia made cars!
Society moves on. If we were to protect every industry that supported working families, then we’d still have a thriving horse and buggy industry. Technology and knowledge have always dictated the industries we need and don’t need, and like thousands of years of not caring which animals become extinct, we should simply leave it to technological evolution to decide who survives and who doesn’t. Do we really need to subsidise all those hard working morse code operators into the 21st century? I think not.
Sure, there’s argument for subsidising skill transition programs, but transition usually means delaying the inevitable for another generation, which just brings us back to subsidies.
Now I’m a socialist at heart, I stand just to the left of the most left learning person you can think of, so I’d nationalize everything I could if I had the chance, and I care a lot about the plight of families and the blue collar worker, but a career change isn’t the end of the world, and in many cases with outdated industries, the change to a more modern industry can mean improved life style, improved wages, and improved working conditions.
The money should instead be put into education and training for skills in modern industries, and not propping up industries in their death throws who have no way to, or no intention of, paying it back.
But what it really comes down to is, it’s the car industry. These are the people who ultimately provide the planet’s biggest source of pollution, the industry that has a habbit of killing off technology that will bring the end of the internal combustion engine (see orbital engine or Who killed the electric car?). Do we really need to prop them up any longer?
I’ve always been against organised gambling, companies whose only business is to make money off people with poor risk perception.
Gamblers are always the last to know, or they just don’t care, that the industry is designed so that the company wins and the gambler loses. Poker machines for example, have adjustable odds and payout percentage, so that the machine will only payout a certain percentage of what is put in. In most cases this is between 75% and 80%, so put in $1000 over a day, and you’ll end up with $750 by the end. Poker machines are configured so that you will lose.
Let’s move on to Lotto and lotteries. I’ve written about the odds of winning Lotto before, but let’s just reiterate the point. The NSW Lotto site states that odds of winning are about 8 million to one. The odds of being struck by lightning in a given year, are about seven hundred thousand to one, for example. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know anyone who’s been struck by lightning, let alone the 4-5 times it would take to equal winning Lotto.
How about casino games that have a tactical component then, like card games? Well there’s a few elements at work here. Firstly, casino games are set up so that the player has a short term advantage, but a long term disadvantage. So the longer you play, the more chance that you will lose. Remember, casinos are in it to make money by you losing money. Secondly, they do this by taking a cut of each bet or win, reducing the payout below what would be dictated by the actual odds. Bookmakers work the same way, so say a horse wins at 10:1, then the payout won’t reflect 10:1, because the bookmaker needs to take a cut. You’ll get something more like 9:1 or 8:1 instead.
So not only are the odds against you, but they’re against you AND not paying you the correct dues.
Most governments, including our NSW state government, say that gambling is a problem, yet they’re usually the biggest takers of gambling profits. They say they want to help problem gamblers on the one hand, yet they’re continually inventing new ways to optimise their gambling take on the other.
Each year the Melbourne Cup stops Australia. A horse race stops an entire nation. And it’s not a particularly good race to bet on either, most professional gamblers don’t bet much on the Cup, because it’s too unpredictable. Yet generations of Australians are brought up on horse racing as a national sport.
For the past week, since the Melbourne Cup, the NSW TAB have been set up in the middle of Martin Place in Sydney. For the Melbourne Cup you’d probably say yeah OK, while it’s gambling, it’s now a national tradition. Yet since Melbourne Cup day, they’ve remained there to serve all the problem gamblers for the rest of the Spring Racing Carnival.
Even schools stop for the Melbourne Cup now. We’re teaching our children that gambling on the horses is a fun thing. It’s ridiculous.
And yet gambling isn’t our biggest social problem. Tobacco and alcohol are bigger. So why not have two extra special days a year for each of those? We can have Melbourne Cup day for the gamblers, National Smoko Day to publicise smoking, and of course National Piss Up Day, to promote irresponsible drinking. All three days could be pushed in schools, although most schools already have a National Piss Up Day, otherwise known as muck up day.
Organised gambling. It’s completely rigged so that you lose. When will people get it? All it would take is some government funded TV adverts, medicare funded councelling for problem gamers, and restrictions on how much you can bet in a day, and the problem would virtually disappear.
I tend to be pretty passionate about programming language coding
conventions, and communicating best practice can be difficult at times
when there’s a plethora of bad conventions out on the interwebs. And if
universities are actually teaching conventions, then they’re not
teaching them particularly well, or perhaps by lecturers with limited
real world experience.
Consider this code fragment:
// check for aaaa. We need to use bbbb because cccc doesn't dddd
if (condition1) {
// optional comment on code
..code goes here
} elseif (condition2) {
// optional comment on code
..code goes here
}
All good so far, but what if we need to comment on condition2? Not a
comment for the code contained within, but the condition itself. If code
is a narrative (as the analogy goes), then logically the code should
look like this:
// check for aaaa. We need to use bbbb because cccc doesn't dddd
if (condition1) {
// optional comment on code
..code goes here
// check eeee next, because ffff
} elseif (condition2) {
// optional comment on code
..code goes here
}
The code reads linearly, which is what we want, but the new comment in
column 1 breaks the readability. So how about indenting it?
// check for aaaa. We need to use bbbb because cccc doesn't dddd
if (condition1) {
// optional comment on code
..code goes here
// check eeee next, because ffff
} elseif (condition2) {
// optional comment on code
..code goes here
}
It reads better now from condition to condition, but our condition2
comment is now slightly out of scope and our peripheral reading. The
alternative would be to put the comment inside the code block:
// check for aaaa. We need to use bbbb because cccc doesn't dddd
if (condition1) {
// optional comment on code
..code goes here
} elseif (condition2) {
// check eeee next, because ffff
// optional comment on code
..code goes here
}
Now the code isn’t that readable because we get to condition2 and
there’s no explanation of it. Sure we could drop inside the condition to
read it, but it’s still outside the context of the if/else block, plus
it now runs into any comments for the code in the block, which would
mean either an intervening newline, or a combined comment that wouldn’t
read as clearly.
Remember that condition2 isn’t just a simple condition, we said that it
needed to be documented, probably because it needs to call a function or
perform some logic that’s not immediately obvious.
This is a good argument for using newlined elses:
// check for aaaa. We need to use bbbb because cccc doesn't dddd
if (condition1) {
// optional comment on code
..code goes here
}
// check eeee next, because ffff
elseif (condition2) {
// optional comment on code
..code goes here
}
But again, the code’s starting to split apart into illegibility, and
there’s a dozen reasons why newlined conditions are bad anyway.
One argument would be that the code needs to be rewritten so that it’s
simpler. If possible, all the comments could be pulled up into a single
pre-if comment, but the further the else is from the if, the less
readable that’s going to be. If it could be split into a switch
(depending on the language), then that would be an option.
Most switch conventions I’ve seen allow case condition comments to be
above and flush with the case statement, so that would seem to be an
argument for allowing pre-elseif comments, but indented or not?
I could only find two references to this if/else comment case on the
web. The first was on Dave Hyatt’s Surfin’ Safari blog (for WebKit), in
a post by Maciej Stachowiak:
http://webkit.org/blog/25/webkit-coding-style-guidelines/
It shows a comment above an else if condition, however, the code isn’t
clear whether the “comment on else case” (sic) is a comment on the
condition, or on the code within the else. It would seem to imply the
code inside the else, and so isn’t useful to us.
The only other reference I could find was on in the Adobe ActionScript
in Flash CS3 documentation:
The example code shows exactly what we’re talking about, and shows the
case that I’ve always used these past 30 years, an indented comment above the
else/elseif.
So assuming that the convention is that all conditionals have blocks and
that block openings must be on the same line as the condition, which
convention do or would you use?
It’s amazing, but this blog has actually ruined Louise’s social network. Lots of Louise’s friends are reading my blog, which is great. (Where were you 7 years ago when I first started?) But many of my Molly news posts are full of more information and personal thoughts than I’ve even shared with Louise at times. So whenever Louise speaks to someone on the phone, not only have they heard all the news, but sometimes they’re telling Louise additional things about her life. Louise still hasn’t read my blog since going into hospital, so it’s all pretty surreal to her.
Molly’s doing really well. At times she seems to smile, and sometimes even acknowledge that we exist. Not really, but almost. And she’s still not crying much, except when she’s doing a number twos. Very similar to her Daddy in fact.
We’re still pretty sleep deprived, as she’s still on 4th hourly feeds, but we’re dealing with it quite well, and are starting to get into a rhythm. The Olympics on in the background helps, but that just reminds me of how much a hate our free to air TV stations. Insert Channel 7 TiVo rant here.
So finally TiVo is about to be officially released in Australia. And the TV ad for it is attempting to pull the heart strings of any Australian watching the Olympics. Average Aussie householders walking down the street extolling the virtues of TiVo, with the tag line:
We’re Australian and we’re taking control. Join the revolution. TiVo. TV your way.
In case the advert isn’t clear enough, TiVo is being brought to Australia as a Channel 7 joint venture with the U.S. based TiVo company. TiVo of course is a U.S. product that’s been around for almost ten years now, and while it’s easy for people watching the ad to think that Channel 7 and TiVo care about us the viewers and just want to bring this great product into our lounge rooms, the truth is fact much much different.
Ten years of TiVo in the U.S., but not here. Could it be TiVo not wishing to enter the Australian market until now? Could it be some technical innovation that’s only now allowed Australian PAL televisions to work with TiVo? Or is that there’s never really been a market here? None of these in fact.
The only reason we’ve not had TiVo in Australia, is because the free to air broadcasters, especially channel 7 and channel 9, have been preventing TiVo from entering the market for almost ten years, because one of TiVo’s main features, is the ability to skip over ads in recorded programs. Ads of course are the televisions stations’ primary income, so the threat of TiVo to our local broadcasters was and still is, huge.
Yet TiVo went to market in the U.S., so how come it was prevented from doing so here? Well, Channels 7 and 9 found a nice arguably dodgey loophole in our copyright laws. Because their program schedules were devised by them, they apparently thought that they held the copyright to them. And as with most people who don’t understand what copyright is actually designed to do (protect an artist’s right to income), Channel 7 and 9 used their copyright over their program guides (or EPG, Electronic Program Guide) to prevent TiVo from using them.
And of course without a program guide, TiVo can’t be programmed to record anything, and would be dead in the water in the Australian market.
Third parties have in the past set up their own EPGs on web sites, by manually typing in program schedules as they’re published in the newspapers, or by screen scraping web sites which display limited program schedules, such as the television station web sites themselves, but 7 and 9 have shut each of them down as they appeared. In fact 9 are still in court with IceTV, who were selling an EPG with a web site which would act like a VCR for you.
TiVo have been in Australia unofficially for years though. A friend of mine has several, and has been using them successfully for about five years now. Local hackers reprogrammed the TiVo software many years ago, and several web sites have published EPGs for it at various times before being shut down. But it’s not like taking a box home and just plugging it in and it works.
Enter Foxtel’s new iQ box, which basically does the same thing as the TiVo, but only if you have Foxtel. Consolidated Media Holdings (CMH), a Packer company, owns 25% of Foxtel, so of course Channel 9’s EPG is available on the iQ, but Channel 7 and Channel 10 refused to provide theirs to Foxtel, or at least didn’t initially, I’m not sure of the situation now.
So in response, after ten years of aggressively preventing companies like TiVo from entering the Australian market, Channel 7 did a deal to bring them in as a Channel 7 branded product. To 7’s credit, they’ve left in the ad skipping, and it’s going to be a one off purchase for the TiVo itself, although there are rumours that you’ll have to subscribe to the EPG for a small fee. From devil to angel in a single business deal.
And so it is amusing in so many ways, the tag line used in the Channel 7 TiVo commercial. Yes we are Australian and are taking control, but only after Channel 7 had run out of ways to prevent us from doing so. You couldn’t really call it a revolution, and you couldn’t really call the last ten years TV our way. But TiVo is finally here, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s just a shame that Channel 7 is now considered the TiVo champion, when fact they were until very recently, it’s biggest opposition.