The BBC is reporting a further step in the peace process in Northern Ireland:
The British Army’s emergency operation in Northern Ireland comes to an end at midnight on Tuesday after 38 years. Operation Banner is the Army’s longest continuous campaign in its history with more than 300,000 personnel serving and 763 directly killed by paramilitaries. A garrison of 5,000 troops will remain but security will be entirely the responsibility of the police.
Long may it stay that way!
Back in February 2006 I blogged about a BBC news report, commenting:
To give you a feel for how much power China needs they are currently, on average, bringing on one new power station a week!
Well 18 months later the BBC now says, as part of an article about China’s attempts to cut emissions by 10% between 2005 and 2010:
However, with China now building about two new fossil fuel power stations every week, Western environmental commentators say it will be all but impossible for it to achieve that reduction.
If that is correct and their building program has doubled in 18 months and if it follows a sort of Moore’s law for power stations then we’re looking at around one new power station a day by the end of the decade.
So Kevin Andrews reckons that Dr Haneef leaving a country that has treated him as shabbily as Australia is “suspicious” does he ? It couldn’t have anything to do with Dr Haneef trying to go and see his newborn baby that he was on his way to visit when he was arrested on bogus evidence; that must be just a smokescreen, Mr Andrews ?
Now he claims he has some “secret evidence” that he can’t tell us about, though he’d like to. I suppose this is the same sort of evidence that said there was WMD in Iraq and Children Overboard then..
Quit now Kevin, get the pain over with. This time you and your party have failed to create yet another scare story in the run up to an election and the voters can see right through you.
Updated: This ABC news report makes some more interesting points.
On Saturday, Mr Andrews said Mohamed Haneef had no choice but to return to India. “I have indicated that the Commonwealth has no objection to Dr Haneef leaving, indeed the effect of the visa cancellation is that he should remove himself, he should depart Australia in any event,” he said. But yesterday, the fact Dr Haneef did leave the country so swiftly was being cast by the Minister almost as a sign of guilt.
It also points out that his statement that Dr. Haneef’s baby was born a month ago was also wrong, his daughter was born just 6 days before his arrest.
Incompetence or dissembling ? You decide.
So it appears the Federal governments attempts to censor the internet at ISPs is not dead after all..
Coonan said one privately funded trial had been cancelled, but the planned pilot managed by the ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority) will go ahead as planned. The tender for companies wishing to take part closed last week and three bids were received, according to the government.
What they are going to be testing out is..
Under the ACMA scheme, ISP-level filtering products will be tested on blocking “inappropriate and illegal content”, whether such products would clog ISPs’ networks and if such products have improved since the government last examined their capabilities in 2005-2006.
Picking up on something that Alec wrote about flooding and now being not a good time to be in insurance, I always think that the Monster Raving Loony Party had the right idea in their 2001 UK election manifesto.
Under a Loony government any prospective home purchaser be issued with a full description of such dictionary terms as ‘floodplain’, ‘coastal erosion’ and ‘exposed headland’. This will save time explaining why they have no house anymore after nature takes charge of the environment. In addition to this policy, building on floodplains in future will be restricted to large houseboats with recoiling tethers like dog leads. These houses will be able to float up with the floodwater and land safely again in the same place when the water subsides.
I’ve been looking at the BBC Hereford and Worcester website flooding photos of the areas near where we used to live, before emigrating. I’ve linked to some of the more interesting ones from Upton below.
Attribution/credit for the photos are available by clicking on the images through to the BBC site.
From the website of New Scientist, an article called Meat is murder on the environment describing the publication of a peer-reviewed paper called “Evaluating environmental impacts of the Japanese beef cow-calf system by the life cycle assessment method” by Akifumi OGINO, Hideki ORITO, Kazuhiro SHIMADA and Hiroyuki HIROOKA:
Their analysis showed that producing a kilogram of beef leads to the emission of greenhouse gases with a warming potential equivalent to 36.4 kilograms of carbon dioxide. It also releases fertilising compounds equivalent to 340 grams of sulphur dioxide and 59 grams of phosphate, and consumes 169 megajoules of energy (Animal Science Journal, DOI: 10.1111/j.1740-0929.2007.00457.x). In other words, a kilogram of beef is responsible for the equivalent of the amount of CO2 emitted by the average European car every 250 kilometres, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.
That’s actually likely to be a conservative estimate too..
The calculations, which are based on standard industrial methods of meat production in Japan, did not include the impact of managing farm infrastructure and transporting the meat, so the total environmental load is higher than the study suggests.
Food for though ?
Thankfully at least one Australian paper has picked up on the recent OECD broadband report so we can get some idea about what it says for Australia. Telstra comes out really badly (surprise surprise), for speed in the national carrier stakes..
In a comparison of download speeds offered by incumbent national suppliers such as Telstra in October last year, Australia pulled up second last with its fastest offering of a 1.5mbit/s DSL package. While speedier packages were being offered by other suppliers at the time, our national carrier lagged that of most other developed countries, pulling up in the second last spot just ahead of Slovak Republic, and behind Turkey.
For pricing in general across ADSL providers we’re about average..
In terms of lowest monthly subscriptions costs for a broadband package, Sweden claimed the cheapest package at $US10.79, followed by Denmark at $US11.11. Australia sat in the middle of the pack at $US21.10, but behind New Zealand, which had an offering at $US16.86
which surprised me..
Just to show what not to do when writing drivers, this just in from LWN:
A LinuxFR reader has sent out an alert (in French) about the Samsung SCX-4200 printer driver for Linux. It appears that the driver author had some trouble with the Linux permission model; the response was to make a few applications run setuid root. A quick look at the install script shows that the affected programs are xsane, xscanimage, and the major OpenOffice.org components. The script also replaces some CUPS executables and does some other fun things. This seems like code to avoid for anybody wanting to run a remotely secure system.
Ugh.
For those who may be puzzled by the issues raised by the ABC showing of “The Great Climate Change Swindle” you might like to read this BBC News Report detailing research published in one of the Royal Society’s journals (you can read a PDF copy of the paper free of charge).
A new scientific study concludes that changes in the Sun’s output cannot be causing modern-day climate change. It shows that for the last 20 years, the Sun’s output has declined, yet temperatures on Earth have risen. It also shows that modern temperatures are not determined by the Sun’s effect on cosmic rays, as has been claimed.
You may also like to read New Scientist’s “Climate change: A guide for the perplexed” and “The 7 biggest myths about climate change” to get an idea of the facts behind the issues.
Update: John Dalton has a nice writeup from his point of view called “Who’s Being Swindled ?“