The USS Quad Damage

I saw some statistic which claimed that 74% of pedestrians being hit by vehicles were the fault of the pedestrian. Even if the percent was 0.0001% I’m stumped as to who pays when a pedestrian is at fault in a car accident.

I did some googling and nothing. I do remember seeing something about the NRMA or some similar australian insurance company suing children for damages caused in car accidents that were their fault. However it was in the context of an article condeming the insurer as a money grubbing organisation.

I would assume if some pedestrian steps out infront of you then they’d have to pay or it would be built into your insurance premium as an accident that wasn’t your fault. Thus no no-claim penalty.

Or am I looking at this all wrong and every single car accident where a pedestrian is hit by a motorvechicle is a fault of the driver under the law?

Opera 9.5 was released around the same time as FF3, and sports a bunch of new features. It beats firefox in rendering speed as well as accuracy (Acid3), and does it in a smaller memory footprint. This is nice, and I want that, but I’m not getting Opera 9.5. Opera has always struck me as a scary browser. The features it has are more powerful than other browsers, but require more memory and "rote learning". FF will ask you to "Remember password" if you enter one on a site, but Opera has a "Magic Wand" which AFAIK you have to trigger yourself. The mere fact that it’s called a "magic wand" makes it ominous. I see Opera as I see the ‘vi’ editor. Terse and powerful, but confusing. I like FF for it’s minimalism, extensibility, and usability.

You may not agree with me, but the point is fairly simple: Opera doesn’t float my boat. Firefox does. However, here’s the problem: Opera is written by talented engineers in a capitalist economy. They used to charge for it, but no longer do so (I wonder how they make money, now). Mozilla, OTOH, are a non-profit which is written by (equally talented) engineers who are out to enrich people’s lives. I can donate to the Mozilla foundation, but I don’t think that most FF developers would see that money, since FF is not really about the money. If I paid for Opera, some software engineers presumably would see the money.

I’m an OSS kind of guy. I’m practically a free software kind of guy. The thing that stops me from taking the final step is the Opera factor. I want talented software engineers to benefit from my cash as I benefit from their software. However, how can I do that in a reasonable way? Also, simply by being an awesome free alternative, isn’t FF depriving these software engineers of money? I mean, on the one hand they’re enriching society, but on the other they’re hurting other software engineers, people who they should have a strong empathy with.

I guess I’m arguing that a BSD style license is better than a GPL style license, because with the former, you’re benefitting other software engineers as well as everyone else. By contrast, with the latter you’re only benefitting the users. However, is it really that simple? Should Mozilla be doing things to actively (for lack of a better term) "invite" Opera to integrate itself within firefox itself? Shouldn’t Opera be working with the ‘zilla guys to give a little, and then use that for their own browser? This way, the commercial browsers will always have a competitive advantage over the open source ones, but the open source ones are guaranteed to be able to catch up. Having commercial software "working together" with free software helps everyone. The free software benefits, because more code plops into it. The commercial software benefits, because so much re-use is available, and there’s a sort of "guarantee" that the commercial software will be one step ahead of the free stuff. Is this not the right thing to do?

An interesting read at smh.com.au called For Earth, a carbon price is priceless.

Summerised the idea is that we need a carbon tax to push investment into energy generation that doesn’t emit CO2 as the current fuel alternatives, coal to fuel, tar sands oil extraction, oil shale extraction, all produce alot more carbon dioxide than normal crude from the ground. All of these have fairly low break even points compared to the current price of oil.

After reading it I remembered back to the 1970’s oil crisis’s and how one of the factors screwing up supply back then was artificial scarcity when I think the United States government decreed that already proven oil was to be sold at the pre crisis price and newly found oil was to tbe sold at the market rate. In effect creating an incentive to find more oil. The problem was that those with proven reserves simply stopped selling oil creating an artificial scarcity.

Anyway the idea popped into my head that perhaps one of the factors contributing to record oil prices is that markets are factoring in a future carbon tax. Which would mean that it is beyond OPECs power to lower oil prices. Infact it is beyond any oil producer to lower oil prices because at some point in the future oil pumped from the ground is going to be one hell of alot more expensive thanks to a carbon tax. Or to put it another way the only way oil prices are going down is if world governments decide that there are worse things people can be doing than emitting carbon dioxide and get over this whole carbon dioxide hysteria and tackle some real, present day, quantifiable problems.

Some family in Scotland registered the domain name Narnia.mobi as a gift to their son to use as his email address.

The article proceeds as a normal David vs Goliath battle of some rich corporation vs your poor average person. Obviously they should be able to keep the domain and the people running CS Lewis’s company are evil, evil people.

Hmm. Maybe not. See .mobi is supposed to be specifically used for delivering web pages to mobile internet devices. Infact 100% of the pages published on .mobi domains MUST be tailored for mobile devices. It’s basically the .com .org .net .mil .gov .whatever else of mobile phone devices. The family however is not intending to use it as such and it really should be turned over to the CS Lewis company, perhaps with the family being paid the cost of registration and maintinance of the domain. Atleast at a common sense abstracted public relations media level as the original article intended. Whether or not this is the case under the law is however a whole other story.

My dad’s a lunatic. He told me about this water powered car created by a company named Genepax. I assumed he found this "information" on the webnet, and proceeded to make fun of him. He does this kind of thing a lot.

If you googled genepax you’d find not their website, but a bunch of actual news sources, including engaget and gizmodo, as well as SMH and a bunch of television news sources. Everyone seems to believe this is real.

Let me try that again… Everyone believes that if you put water into a fuel cell which outputs.. water.. the water is somehow generating electricity. There’s only really two buzzwords thrown in between "water goes in" and "Fuel cell". The only thing curiously missing is the apparently miraculous ability of the fuel cell to generate water as it’s output. What gives newspapers the right to just regurgitate a fucking white paper without checking their sources? Exactly how many physicists… or even high school students were consulted about this? My dad’s a fucking retard as is, he doesn’t need a bunch of reputable sources somehow vindicating his beliefs.

Man charged after being clocked at double speed limit.

What a monster. Doing over double the speed limit in a 60 zone. He could have killed someone. Throw the book at him and strip him of his licence forever. Won’t somebody please think of the children. etc,...

Ok so here’s the scenario. A local to Bathurst who probably knows the road inside out and back to front, was on a stretch of completely straight wide road with clear visibility, at a time when pedestrians wouldn’t be wandering out onto the street, at a speed marginally higher than normal highway speeds 123kph vs 110kph, on a road that regularly caters for cars doing upto 300kph.

I suppose we should all thank the police for taking this obviously dangerous and reckless person off the streets whom obviously has no regard for other peoples saftey, trading respect the community has for the police for revenue for the state government. Finally doing all that rather than doing things that the community would actually like the police to do. Like preventing or bringing to justice persons whom commit crimes against property or persons. You know. Crimes with an actual victim and a real cost to the community.

Seth’s written some fairly great financial advice. It’s easy to follow and guaranteed to work. There’s only one problem: No one will listen. Well, no one who doesn’t already know will listen. The problem is simple. Finance has a lot of momentum. You don’t know that you’re getting crushed until there’s nothing you can do about it any more. It’s like… global warming, I guess.

There’s exactly one way to learn about good financial management: Play an RTS against someone who is good, or a skirmish against a good bot. Nothing will show you how much good resource management is at the beginning of a game until the twentieth odd game when you realise that someone wasting that 200 odd req. was what caused the tide of battle to turn. Eventually, you’ll get the hang of getting a good build going. Eventually, you’ll realise what you need to do to stop being overrun—and it’s all about resource management. Don’t get me wrong, there’s often a ton of good battle strategy there too. Knowing when to run away and rebuild your army in DoW is important. But without the economy, you’re not going to win, because the other guy is seriously rolling in it, so he can spam his units against you, and you have to work really hard only to get pwned.

If you want to teach your kids about good financial planning, get em to play DoW.

I didn’t really like men’s tennis. I grew up in the day of Sampras, when he would pretty much rely on his serve to win (not that the rest of his game was bad, but purely because his opponents would see so few opportunities against him that they’d need to capitalise. Agassi was a breath of fresh air in these times, but the most fun guy to watch on a tennis court was Chang, who would chase the ball relentlessly. Unfortunetely, he wasn’t as big as Agassi, and Agassi went on to play for years, but Chang seemed to have only a brief stint on the world stage.

In a period like that the girls comp was much more fun. Hingis was ruling the roost and the Williams sisters had just started playing on the "world stage". Actually, I started watching around the Monica Seles time, and vaguely remembered her being awesome good, and really hated that she lost games against Hingis when she should’ve been doing a lot better. OK Hingis was a bitch, but I really liked her (you could call her a female McEnroe, almost) but anyway. Seeing this sort of tennis was really interesting, and couple that with the fact that you get to see pretty girls in short skirts, well… women’s tennis wins!

Now, Men’s tennis is far more exciting, with people like Baghdadis, Federer, Tsonga, and of course, Nadal. Federer is a fairly boring player, but putting him up as the "perfect player" kinda makes the whole scenario exciting. I couldn’t get enough of the Australian Open Men’s matches this year. It was exciting, heart pounding action from start to finish in most of these matches. Nadal didn’t even get to the final then, and now he’s beaten Federer and become world number one. The runner up was the wildcard, Tsonga, and he played some incredible tennis. I was freaking the fuck out.

Now, the world number one for men is Nadal, and the Women’s number one is Ana Ivanovic. She is pretty much the only reason I watch women’s tennis any more. She also has a blarg. I’m not just talking about how stupid beautiful she is, or how good she is at her game. It’s her flaws that make her really stand out. She pretty much lets herself all hang out, emotionally. You can pretty much see in her eyes and in her game what she’s going though, what she’s thinking. She’s inconsistent and it’s mesmerising. Perhaps it’s just that she’s young and naive (born in ‘87), but it’s this sort of flashes-of-brilliance play coupled with "brain farts" which make the games exciting. You know she’s capable of a lot, but it’s watching her "grow up" which is most exciting.

New site is up. This features a bunch of cool stuff, like the random quote you’ll see on main page. On top of this, the site should no longer look el crappo under internet exploder. Finally, the comments should work as expected. On the admin side, there’s now a GUI editor for writing articles, and other such niceties.

Interesting note: over all these years, I was expecting the database to be gigantic—hundreds of megabytes; gigabytes maybe. Do you know how many megs worth of data we’ve written since 2003?

10 MB. That’s uncompressed SQL, so it includes a huge amount of "INSERT BLAH INTO SOME TABLE". If you zip it up it’s like 2 megs. I felt rather disheartened… Having said that, hooray for easy backups!

Check it out Adidas announces ban on mulesed wool.

What an amazingly brave move by a multinational corporation to decide to ban using mulesed wool, take a bottom dollar hit and promote the apparent well being of sheep.

Oh wait.

Adidas Australia marketing director Simon Miller says the decision will have a minimal impact because the company does not use wool in any of its current products.

So basically supporting environmental or animal activist movements is the new low fat/98% fat free/fat free for corporations. Next I guess we’ll see other corporations jumping on the band wagon such as maybe the Toyota announcing bans on battery feed chickens in their products. Or how one better with Fur distributors selling Fur that isn’t made from battery fed chickens.

I’m sure there’s probably even funnier examples people can think of.

Anyway look there are so many things you can technically claim to jump on the Environmental or Animal Activist banwagons and collect brown, green or furry points that in a few years time I’m sure no one will be able to tell which products actually do the things these activist groups want because their message will be so diluted that it won’t matter anymore. Much like low fat have become or how green or environmentally friendly products are moving towards.

Everyone thinks Top Gear Australia is going to be a waste of time. However, this is how I imagine it turning out (for the purposes of this exercise, I’m assuming the hosts are named Gary, Barry, and Todd):

Australian Roads; outback

Gary in a Merc SLK taking it ‘round a corner. Intense music.

Gary: You can see the grip, even in Australia’s harsh climates and sub-par roads, it handles beautifully.

Camera, in one long shot, goes out of the car, zooms in on the wheels, then zooms back out so you can see Gary through the windshield.

Gary: The engine is vastly superior to the old SLK. With all the work Mercedes have done, this car is their greatest triumph…

Camera goes around the car as it squeals under the pressure Gary’s putting on it. Smoke is coming out of the tyres. We can see a brick house in the distance.

Gary: SHIIIIIT!!!!

Camera goes into slow motion as the music becomes tense. The merc slams into the brick house, exploding into a ball of flames.

Gary’s house, indoors

Alarm is going off (11am), Gary’s eyes open wide, then close half way as he realises it was just a dream. Gary slams on the “off” button and walks into the toilet. A high pitched sound is heard, presumably the tap.

Cafe, outdoors, morning

High pitched sound of a coffee being made. Barry pays for it, grabs it, and goes to take a seat next to an attractive woman.

Barry: Yeah, so I says to the barber, I says…

Cut to Todd; outdoors

Todd is sitting outdoors, with a pen and paper.

Todd: Plexiglass… what rhymes with plexiglass… Mardigras..ss?

phone rings (U2’s “a beautiful day”). Todd picks it up

cut to Barry

phone rings (The Police’s “Message in a bottle”). Barry picks it up

cut to Gary, on the toilet seat

phone rings (Nokia default ringtone). Gary fumbles through his pants on the floor and picks it up

Gary: Hello?

cut to Todd

Todd: Yeah this is Todd…

cut to Barry

Barry: I’ve been selected to host Top Gear Australia!?

cut to Gary

sound of diarhhea

Gary: OMG!

cut to Todd

Todd seems uncomfortable

Todd: Of course, I shall be there at once.

Todd hangs up and starts walking uncomfortably, his legs slightly apart.

cut to Barry

Barry (to attractive woman): I’ve been selected to host Top Gear Australia.

Attractive woman smells a pungent, distasteful aroma

Attractive woman: What’s that smell?

Barry: (concerned) Erm… the smell of (more confident) being selected for Top Gear Australia!

Attractive woman: err.. right.

Barry turns to walk away

Attractive woman: You will change your pants before you go there, won’t you?

Barry: It is my DESTINY!

Triple shot of (ordinary) cars and hosts getting in them.

All three get into their cars to go to the Top Gear Headquarters, and promptly start reviewing them. Fast cuts between their reviews as Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir starts playing.

Gary: It’s amazing that they thought about …

Todd: ... space is quite adequate, but that’s not to say …

Barry: ... incredulous, but that doesn’t we can’t all have…

Gary: ... It’s a car which reminds me of my mother’s soup …

Barry: ... It’s a pretty engine note, but there’s just no power …

Roll start credits. Transition to Top Gear theme as the reviewers pull up to Top Gear Headquarters.

Real Top Gear Australia isn’t going to be anywhere near as good…

Q & A lovingly called “Qanda” by the host, Tony Jones, looks like it’s shaping up to be a great TV program. I’m going to talk through the second show, with some notes:

What’s the effect of Fuelwatch and how will working families deal with increasing petrol prices?

• Fuelwatch was tried in WA and succeeded to some extent (2c/l saving).
• Greens: We should be doing what Germany is doing – getting the biggest fuel users to subsidise those who use cheaper forms of transport.

[SK: This is the thing that shits me about the greens. They talk a lot but don’t give a real plan. How exactly do you do this? The impression I get from Bob Brown is that you spend billions on public transport infrastructure, which makes it cheap to get anywhere, and you tax petrol a lot. This is fine but there’s no transition to it (what do you do for the years where the infrastructure is being built?), and it seems like Labor’s plan is the closest thing to a transition plan. The Greens need to stop lamenting the failures of other parties and think “Right, in 2011 we might be government, how do we split the cash?”]

Side discussion – Governments shouldn’t be leaking documents, this is a sign of a bad government.

• These documents are private and shouldn’t be released, because that would stop people from putting frank opinions inside.

[SK: The leaking side-point went down way too well on all members of the panel for my liking. I’d prefer if all internal chatter was published and monitored. I’d want it to be party policy that all meetings, conclusions, etc. were in the public eye. It wouldn’t really stop people from being frank. Once people got used to the idea that it’s OK to have an opinion and for people to disagree, even though decisions could be made based on facts, it would be fairly simple I’d assume. Private enterprise seems to work on this principle.]

We should try and reduce our reliance on oil.

• Tania’s position is basically that there’s oil relief in Fuel Watch but there’s also money being put into, for example, public transport.
• Bob’s strongest point here is that $9b is going to the fossil fuel industry, which could easily be diverted for better infrastructure and better fuel systems.
• Tania’s response is that $20b is going to infrastructure in general across Australia.

Side discussion – Government is planning a hybrid car (among other things) which are beyond the next election

• Tania dodges question

[SK: I don’t know why she did this. All she needed to say was that this was forward looking, and that’s a good thing. The idea is that the government is putting thought into what to do, which is more important than just focussing on “right now”.]

Side discussion – We’re taxing hybrid cars at twice the rate of normal cars (10% vs 5%).

• Luxury tax of 33% on larger more expensive cars. (SK: Unfortunately hybrids often fall under that tax as well)

Side discussion (fucking politics and not sticking to the point) – Government’s position is inconsistent between raising oil prices (carbon tax) or lowering them (fuel watch).

• Tania says they’re all about keeping a downward pressure on petrol prices.

bq.[SK: This wasn’t really dealt with because it’s basically sassing (Tony Abbott has so much sass he’s pretty much black), but I can understand the ultimate goal here – keep prices high on petrol through tax, but make sure the oil companies aren’t profiteering. However, that’s not what Tania said (wierd).]

NSW Government basically sucks at public transport, why?

• Tania: They’ve been opressed by the Howard government. They will get better now.

Bill Henson is freaking sweet. Is he a pedophile?

• Louise: Bill Henson is freaking sweet. He should be able to do whatever he wants, and we should be pushing the boundaries with art. He’s been charged with child pornography and the work is not “titillating”
• Warren Mundine: It’s OK to be liberal, and sure it’s not tintillising [sic], but the real issue is that we have a society which is concerned about kids, and a lot of children are being sexually abused (case in point: aborigines) so we should at least have an arguement about this, and it’s legitimate to be challenged about whether his work is appropriate.
• Abbott: Kids posing nude is not a good thing to be doing.
• Audience: Does the girl actually have the capacity to consent? Would she look back at the work and regret it?
• Tania: This is important and also an issue with the amount of information that is freely available on the web. Perhaps we should be having conversations with young people about not exposing too much of themselves either on the internet or on photographs.

  [SK: IMHO I agree with Mundine here – it’s a complex issue and we need to talk about it. Amazingly, despite everything, Tony’s views are the most consistent—It’s not appropriate, no questions asked. If I was taking a first stab at the policy writing that would be my “simplest non-trivial” solution. Louise’s viewpoint is very extreme. She either believes there’s some sort of cultural elite who should determine whether a work is appropriate, or she believes that everything is fair game, including child pornography. The real problem here is that it’s hard to define “art”, so a lot of shit could pass through the barriers here. She also doesn’t address consent. I guess since I’m OK with everything being on the web, I suppose I have to be OK with consent.]

Camden is not full of racists!

• Yes it is.

The rest of the questions were trolls or jokes, or side whinges by Bob Brown. Alternately things that didn’t pique my interest. In any case, this was an interesting show, and they have a fairly active forum, etc. This could be something worth joining.

Alastair Girtby was recently dissing Jeff Atwood. Despite everything I’ve said about him I don’t actually mind his blog.

Hmmm… It seems only about half of my prior articles are anti-Jeff. Note to self: change this.

However, this isn’t about Jeff, It’s about me. Specifically about sass. Read the comments from this article:

Princess Skittles

Dan is the best Street Fighter character.

Suiname

if by best you mean worst, then yes Dan is the best street fighter character. I hope he has at least 3 different taunts.

Ty

Why put in a joke character? At least Dan is decent character!

Batzarro(A.K.A Rap-Rock Cameo)

Oooh: I see what you did there!

ZING! It’s especially awesome when you get icons of bald mario, etc. Contrast with the girtby article:

Thanks again. Particularly Chris, well put.

Now if you ask me – there never was such a thing as a pro blogger. It’s a contradiction in terms. It’s like calling someone a professional amateur.

Dave Winer says blogger == amateur because, well, it just is. I don’t buy it. OK, so this a difference of opinion and doesn’t really matter much.

Are you familiar with the “Smackdown” Learning Model? I find it extremely effective for exactly the reasons Kathy Sierra outlines.

Wow, I’ve been … for me unsubscribing was a change in my attitude towards it.

Sorry. My cut-and-paste tool fell asleep and didn’t finish transcribing that quote. Here’s my problem: talking like people do in the latter article makes you more reasonable, and expedites solutions. When you read the trollish comments in Alastair’s blogs, they distract you, and you want to get back to the reasonable comments, so you can think through the issues. Contrast with the prior article, where everyone is poised, ready for the next punch-line. It’s entertaining, but there’s no attempt to address any issues.

I’ve always thought I’ve walked a fine line between clever dialogue and useful content. However, that fine line is very… er… fine. I don’t know whether I’ve missed the mark, and just become a troll. So what do I do? Do I err on the side of boringness or risk not being taken seriously?

Alternately, I could build a sass filter.