Mars Rovers find more signs of water

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Having vented my spleen about the recent elections in Australia in my previous article here’s a more upbeat story.

A heap of sites are reporting that the NASA Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have not only survived their Martian winter hibernation but have now both returned more evidence for water having existed on Mars.

This is a remarkable achievement given that both rovers have survived well past their 90 Martian days “warranty” (Spirit has managed 184 to date, Opportunity 163 as it landed just under three weeks later than Spirit).

A sad day for Australia

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So the Australian public has handed the Liberal party another 3 years in office, swinging firmly to the right. 🙁

They’ve voted against the environment and for postponing the inevitable and continuing to log the old growth forests in Tasmania for wood chips and paper, rather than investing in other industries and diversifying. All they’ve succeeded in doing is swapping stopping logging because of new national parks for stopping logging when they eventually run out of trees.

They’ve voted against integrity in political life, preferring to stick to the “I’m all right Jack” mentality of the conservative side of town.

The scariest thing of all is that the new far-right “Christian” Family First party that has had candidates and volunteers espousing homophobic views such as lesbians should be burnt to death and religious hatred and fear seems likely to gain a seat in the Senate on the back of Liberal preferences, thanks to John Howard saying he’d rather give preferences to them than the Greens!

But this is democracy, and to those who voted for the government all I can say is that I hope you’ll be happy with the country, and the world, you’ve voted for.

– Angry & Saddened of Melbourne

More Software Patents Badness – Sun gives in to Kodak

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Earlier in the week Kodak won a patents case against Sun Microsystems over what appear to be excessively broad and not at all novel patents covering, well pretty much anything that tries to do anything with remote programs, or even other local programs. Well, Sun have decided not to appeal and have settled out of court for US$92 million.

This sets a dangerous precedent, and it’s very likely we’re going to see more legal action over these three patents. Now hopefully the courts will see sense and strike them down, or maybe the Public Patent Foundation will take them on (they beat Microsoft).

If not, then the consequences could be dire, and if you don’t believe me then try these opinion pieces on eWeek and ZDnet.

Electioneering Telephone Spam in Australia

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Well the election here has sunk to new lows, the Liberal party has called in the telemarketers to phone us up in our own homes to preach to us so that we may be converted to their way. Spamming people by email wasn’t enough for them..



The ABC News report gives the background for those who’ve not heard it. The Sydney Morning Herald has a poll gauging peoples responses, whilst I type this there have been 9051 votes, 90% of which voted for the ” I hate unsolicited marketing calls” option. 🙂



Reportedly folks with Caller-ID enabled are seeing these calls labelled as originating overseas, be good if anyone was able to confirm this though!

Sun, Java and software in general looses a bad patent decision

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Groklaw is reporting that Kodak have won a software patent lawsuit against Sun Microsystems and are now claiming US$1.06 billion dollars in damages on Sun’s hardware sales because of an alleged infringement of Java on a patent of Kodaks.

Why are they claiming on Sun’s hardware sales? Because Java can be downloaded for free and Kodak say that Java provides “the engine for such computer equipment”. I can’t believe that a court accepted that as an argument.. 🙁

Australia, are you watching ? This is what’s coming our way now the FTA is entering law, bringing software patents with it..

Outfoxed

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On the 22nd September we saw SBS’s Dateline program which had a report on the documentary Outfoxed about Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News in America.

Intruiged by the reports of blatant bias and propoganda on behalf of the US Republican Party (its President is Roger Ailes, who was a media strategist for Nixon and also worked for Regan and Bush Snr) I ordered a copy of Outfoxed from Amazon, which turned up on Friday.

Donna and I watched it and it’s both illuminating and truely scarey. Fox News is ruled by memos from the top giving direction to its staff about what is and what isn’t news, there are the constant reinforcement about who to vote for with repeated mentions of “Only X days to Bush’s relection” and the indiscriminate mixing of reporting and comment.

It seems that the more you watch Fox News the less able you are to correctly answer questions on the Iraq war (questions of fact rather than opinion), according to a survey carried out by PIPA (available for reading as a PDF file or as a web page from Google’s cache).

So relying on Fox News makes you dumber..

Doesn’t make me feel too good about the upcoming US elections given that Fox News is apparently the most watched news channel. 🙁

A Pleasant Evening

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Donna and I went to visit a friend of ours, Lawrie, in Melbourne last night as he’d kindly invited us over for dinner. A nice meal and some very nice wine led to a pleasant evening of listening to old Pink Floyd (Meddle), Bach and Youssou N’Dour, chatting and playing an ad-hoc version of Whist for three people.

It was pleasantly reminiscent of old times round at Alec Muffett’s place at Church Flats in Aberystwyth listening to old Floyd and drinking his Laphroaig.