An Australian film industry group is mounting a case against ISP iiNet, alleging that the ISP did not prevent unlawful sharing of (mainly American) copyrighted movies via their network.

AFART makes a few outrageously silly assumptions in their case.

First and silliest of all is that a download equals a lost sale. I’ll download a lot of things that I’d never go to a cinema to watch. That’s not in any way to avoid paying to view the material- it’s to avoid the ‘cinema experience.’

The nearest cinema is a 1 hour, 70km round trip for me. If the film sucks, I can usually get a refund for the price of admission, but I won’t be remunerated for travel time, fuel cost, annoyance and general inconvenience. Cinemas these days often demand to take possession of patrons’ mobile phones while they are viewing a film, allegedly to prevent piracy with their inbuilt cameras- as if a tiny, low resolution screen-to-camera capture of a movie is in any way resaleable or if watching said copy on the phone’s tiny screen itself is even do-able. Moreover, cinemas won’t guarantee that the content of a mobile phone won’t be browsed while the patron is in the theatre. Cinemas further demand to search your pockets and bags to make sure you haven’t brought any contraband soft drinks or snacks with you, assuring that you will pay $5-6 for a soft drink worth 50c at the local grocery or a similar amount for 15c worth of popcorn. I won’t stand for cinemas treating me like a criminal because I have a phone in my pocket or like a rube who will pay ridiculous amounts for ordinary items at a snack bar.

Screw you guys, I’ll stay home, whether I can or can’t download films off the torrents. My Dolby surround sound with subwoofer and 50″ plasma HDTV provide just as good (or better) a viewing experience than I can get at any ordinary cinema. I don’t have to strain to hear the soundtrack between yowls from some patron’s colicky baby or breathe fumes from enthusiastic perfume wearers- or worse. Moreover, imagine the response of the cinema management and other patrons if you ask to have the film paused while you have a bathroom break or take a trip to the snack bar. At home, I can pause at will and if the flick blows (which is all too common), I can turn it off and delete the file from my dedicated home-theatre PC in the loungeroom, without having to demand a refund, suffer any of the other associated delights of the ‘cinema experience’ nor even so much as having to return a DVD to a video rental shop. If the things I do download were made available online by the studios at a nominal cost, I’d happily pay for them, but Hollow-wood has yet to get the idea that in 2009 with modern home-theatre equipment, cinemas are a dead concept… and that the public are sick to death of crap movies.

Second silliest is the idea that Australian TV viewers are happy to cooperatively wait 6-12 months to view an overseas TV series on local broadcasts, and when we do finally get them, series episodes are often shown out of sequence, with large time gaps between the air dates or episodes are skipped entirely. Shows like The Late Show with David Letterman, The Colbert Report and The Daily Show have the shelf-life of lettuce- they’re not worth anything a week (or even a few days) post the original air date. Australian TV viewers have had quite enough of being treated with contempt by cable and free-to-air broadcasters.

Third silliest is the notion that any ISP has the technical ability to look at my encrypted torrent packets to determine what I’m actually downloading, to verify that it’s copyrighted material and further assert that I have shared a complete copy of said matter with anyone.

To use the words of the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart- AFUCT, y’all just keep on fuckin’ that chicken.

-weez

One of the top 10 most frequently read posts on mgk is Do cellular phone base stations cause brain tumors?, which I wrote back in May, 2006. The short and sweet of it is ‘no, they don’t,’ as there’s simply no medical evidence to support the idea.

However, this lack of evidence of harm doesn’t stop the urban myth machine from propagating rumours. Mainstream media frequently carry these tales, such as this recent example, “How safe is your mobile phone?” from the Sydney Morning Herald, which levers frightening and misleading phraseology:

Handsets from high profile manufacturers such as BlackBerry and Motorola might be beaming out higher levels of radiation than those of some of their peers, says a recently published report.

The SMH story cites an outfit called the ‘Environmental Working Group’ which has released a comparison of the ‘radiation’ from particular makes and models of mobile phones.

I suspect this mythology is mainly due to the use of the term ‘radiation,’ which many people automatically associate with the gamma rays emitted from radionuclear substances like uranium, plutonium, etc.

The term ‘radiation’ simply means the emission of something in all directions from a particular point. ‘Radiation’ does not necessarily refer to cancer causing gamma rays. It can be reasonably said that a candle flame emits ‘radiation’ of light energy, but to my knowledge, no one has ever tried to implicate candles in the causation of cancers.

The reason why there’s no hazard from mobile phones or their associated base stations is that the signals they emit are incapable of ionisation. Ionisation is the gain or loss of an electron from a neutral atom by exposing the atom to energy of some form. If that energy is an electromagnetic emission, the frequency of the emission must be at or higher than the frequency of ultraviolet light for ionisation to occur. Below the frequency of UV, emissions don’t have the ability to knock electrons off the atoms which comprise DNA molecules. At or above the frequency of UV, ionisation can occur, which does have the possibility to damage DNA, resulting in improper replication. This improper copying may express as cancers.

As you see from this chart from the US Environmental Protection Agency (with my added annotation of the relative frequency of mobile phone emissions to other common electromagnetic signals), mobile phone signals (1800MHz or 1.8GHz) are in the microwave region, about 650MHz below the 2.45GHz operating frequency of microwave ovens.

How the concept of mobile phones being associated with cancers entered the lexicon of urban mythology is somewhat mysterious as there’s no medical research or evidence that indicates any correlation- in fact, there’s significant medical research to the contrary, notably this conclusion from the World Health Organisation…

No recent national or international reviews have concluded that exposure to the RF fields from mobile phones or their base stations causes any adverse health consequence.

…and the results of this more than 10-year-long Swedish study into the same, as published in the American Journal of Epidemiology:

Handheld mobile phones were introduced in Sweden during the late 1980s. The purpose of this population-based, case-control study was to test the hypothesis that long-term mobile phone use increases the risk of brain tumors. The authors identified all cases aged 20–69 years who were diagnosed with glioma or meningioma during 2000–2002 in certain parts of Sweden. Randomly selected controls were stratified on age, gender, and residential area. Detailed information about mobile phone use was collected from 371 (74%) glioma and 273 (85%) meningioma cases and 674 (71%) controls. For regular mobile phone use, the odds ratio was 0.8 (95% confidence interval: 0.6, 1.0) for glioma and 0.7 (95% confidence interval: 0.5, 0.9) for meningioma. Similar results were found for more than 10 years’ duration of mobile phone use. No risk increase was found for ipsilateral phone use for tumors located in the temporal and parietal lobes. Furthermore, the odds ratio did not increase, regardless of tumor histology, type of phone, and amount of use. This study includes a large number of long-term mobile phone users, and the authors conclude that the data do not support the hypothesis that mobile phone use is related to an increased risk of glioma or meningioma.

It’s worth noting that the ‘Environmental Working Group’ also oppose fluoridation of municipal water supplies, based on no evidence in particular.

Furthermore, EWG make this statement on their ‘Health/Toxics: Kid-Safe Chemicals Act’ page:

We are at a tipping point, where the pollution in people is increasingly associated with a range of serious diseases and conditions from childhood cancer, to autism, ADHD, learning deficits, infertility, and birth defects.

…also based on no evidence in particular.

If there were anything substantial at all to the suspicion that mobile phones or associated base stations cause any adverse health effects, with the explosion of numbers of the devices in service since the 1980s and most certainly since the introduction of pocket-sized phones in the mid 1990s when they became ubiquitous, you would also expect a correlating explosion in the numbers of brain cancers… and it just hasn’t happened. There simply are no legion lines of people queued for treatment of brain cancers commensurate with the numbers of mobile phones now in service.

It’s worth noting that you rarely if ever hear anyone banging on about brain cancers being caused by microwave ovens, despite the facts that the operating frequency of microwave ovens is 650MHz closer than mobile phones’ emitted signals to that of UV light and that their power output, usually around 1000-1100 watts, is 3 orders of magnitude (x10³) greater than the 600mW (0.6W or 6/10 of 1 watt) maximum emitted by handheld mobile phones. Also, the acceptable signal leakage from microwave ovens (0.2 mW/cm²) is double that of the electromagnetic emissions absorbed by human tissues from a mobile phone pressed to one’s ear (0.1 mW/cm²). I have yet to hear of a P&C group insisting that microwave ovens not be operated within 1km of a school, as was demanded by a Faulconbridge NSW P&C regarding a proposed (and thankfully now approved and soon to be completed) 3-watt output mobile phone tower.

If the net result of this urban mythology and rumourmongering was merely giving people something to talk about around the water cooler, that’d be one thing. However, there’s a real economic cost to such pseudoscience as well as real emotional disturbances to people who really don’t need any. Of note is an attempt to correlate with electromagnetic signals a ‘breast cancer cluster’ said to have occurred at the ABC’s Toowong (Brisbane) Queensland facilities as well as another claimed ‘cluster’ at the ABC’s Southbank, Victoria studios. The ABC abandoned the Toowong facilities in 2006 at a cost of millions of dollars, despite the later finding that the incidence of cancers at both facilities were not abnormal nor statistically significant. That the ABC attempted to be accommodating to their employees is laudable. However, such conciliatory actions merely give conspiracy theorists something to crow about and at the end of the day, do absolutely nothing but feed rumour mills and needlessly deplete the public purse.

People have enough real hazards in this world to worry about. Publicising invented or imaginary hazards not only diverts attention from the real ones, but also desensitises people to valid warnings about such genuine hazards.

-weez

The concept of homeopathic ‘medicine,’ dating from 1796, involves mixing a small amount of a thought-to-be-active ingredient in a water or alcohol solvent and then repeatedly diluting the mixture with more and more solvent until no molecules of the ‘active’ ingredient remain in the solvent. There is no chemical difference between the pure solvent and a homeopathic preparation. Patients are sold the idea that somehow, the ‘spirit’ of the ‘active’ substance is transferred into the solvent.

In double-blind testing, homeopathic treatments have never been demonstrated to perform any better than a placebo. Homeopathy’s only saving grace is that given there’s no difference between a homeopathic preparation and the plain water or alcohol solvent, they’re generally recognised as ‘safe.’ However, they are not recognised as effective. As such, homeopathy is outright quackery.

The ABC reports:

‘Cruel’ parents jailed over baby’s death

By Liv Casben

A couple who relied on homeopathic treatments for their eczema-stricken baby daughter have been jailed over her death.

Thomas Sam, 42, and his wife Manju, 37, were found guilty of the most serious case of manslaughter by criminal negligence.

The judge said their nine-month-old daughter Gloria had suffered helplessly and unnecessarily from a treatable condition and sentenced the pair to a total of 10 years behind bars.

Thomas Sam got the longer sentence of at least six years because, as a homeopath, he had a double duty of care.

Minutes after he was handcuffed, his wife Manju was taken into custody for the first time.

She was jailed for four years.

Their daughter Gloria was so sick with eczema that she constantly cried in pain, her skin broken and oozing fluid, the court heard.

Both parents were well educated and the judge found they should have known better.

They repeatedly rejected conventional medical treatment and instead opted for homeopathic remedies.

Then, against doctors’ orders, they took the baby girl to India where her condition deteriorated.

Judge Peter Johnson concluded it was the “most serious case of manslaughter by criminal negligence”.

The couple wept as Justice Johnson detailed the pain their daughter would have experienced.

He said they should have known just how sick she was.

Instead they delayed her treatment at hospital because Manju said they were tired and jetlagged.

She died three days after being admitted to hospital.

“She was very a very sick infant with eroding skin, her distress would have been apparent to her parents,” Justice Johnson said.

Dejected supporters left court still reeling from the judgment.

For Thomas Sam, his legal fight is not over as he faces separate charges, accused of threatening his lawyers.

There’s a number of terms to describe people who favour homeopathy over science and evidence based medicine; fools, deluded, cranks- and many more.

Now there’s another one: inmates.

-weez

From MoveOn.org:

-weez

Hoping I’m wrong, but I’m anticipating Rudd is going to implement his unworkable ISP level internet filtering scheme. mgk been offline for a couple of days while moving from an Australian-based host which operates servers in Aus & the USA to a US-based host and server. This server will also run my VPN to circumvent ISP level filtering.

-weez

Go Anonymous. 🙂

-weez

I’ve enjoyed single-payer universal healthcare coverage since I was granted permanent residency in Australia in 1997. If I visit a ‘bulk-billing’ GP or an emergency room, I plunk down my Medicare card and it’s all done & dusted.

The last time I used healthcare services in the USA, they demanded either health insurance information, a cash bond or a credit card before they even wanted to hear why I was seeking treatment. That’s reprehensible. Healthcare should be a right, not a privilege affordable only by the wealthy.

Everyone uses electricity and roads and everybody uses healthcare services. We don’t build a separate power grid for every electricity subscriber nor a private road for every road user- why have a private insurer or healthcare provider for every healthcare user?

Yes, you can get private health insurance or be treated in a private hospital in Australia… but why? A parallel private healthcare system simply undermines the public system by diverting participants out of it. The short answer as to why private healthcare even exists in Australia is that right-wing, pro-business politicians and their health industry supporters have wanted to undermine Australia’s public system since its inception- because it doesn’t generate profit for the private healthcare providers and insurers.

Capitalism may work in certain business arenas but it’s got no place in the provision of essential community services which are necessarily used by all citizens.

The completely off-the-rails opposition to single-payer universal healthcare in the USA clearly indicates the threat level to the profitability of private healthcare insurers and providers. Providers and insurers will fight to protect their profits with a million times the effort they’ll put in to providing competent healthcare. This opposition has now devolved into truly batshit-crazy rumourmongering PR campaigns, including ‘astroturfing,’ the formation of industry-funded fake grassroots groups which push the industry’s agenda.
(more…)

Dana McCaffery: died from whooping cough
(image: ABC 7:30 Report)

Another child has died from a common communicable disease which could have been prevented in 10 seconds with a simple injection. Why?

Selfish dummy mummies need consciences pricked

Adele Horin
February 21, 2009

Living in a suburb with lots of white, middle-class, educated mothers may be putting your child’s health at risk. In such salubrious surroundings can be found dangerous concentrations of vaccine-resisters. These are women who spend too many hours on wacky internet health sites and become convinced immunisation is a giant conspiracy.

The educated mother who thinks she knows better than the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists and doctors partly explains why some of Sydney’s richest suburbs have the state’s lowest child immunisation rates.

Parents are being willfully misled by anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists and loads of their crap posted on the ‘net.

Preponderance does not constitute proof. Just because some vaccination conspiracy believing idiot posts a rumour up on an internet website (or hundreds of them, as is the case) DOES NOT give that information more validity than years of independently replicatable, peer-reviewed medical science.

Quoth Meryl Dorey of the Australian Vaccination Network:

“I think most doctors really believe in vaccinations. They’ve been taught to believe in vaccinations and they haven’t done a whole lot of research on their own.”

Vaccination isn’t something you must ‘believe in’ as though it were Jesus, the Tooth Faerie or Santa Claus. There’s solid, independently replicatable, peer-reviewed scientific proof that vaccination prevents communicable disease and protects the rest of the community from the same. Evidence is different than belief.

If you were only killing your own children by denying them proven medical care, that’s horrific and violates your own child’s right to life, but when you don’t vaccinate, you’re not just victimising your own helpless children. You’re subjecting others’ children, some too young to be vaccinated, as was Dana McCaffery, to the same avoidable fates to which you’re condemning your own.

If you don’t want to vaccinate your children or think you can successfully treat them with little drinks of plain water (aka ‘homeopathy’), you’re simply irresponsible. You should go live in a cave- far, far away from anyone you and your biohazardous children can harm. Better yet, your children should be taken into foster care and given the treatment you refuse them. You’re entitled to refuse proper medical care for yourself- but you’re not entitled to deny it to children whom you’re charged with protecting nor to inflict disease on the community at large.

Consider the source; should you put your trust in a physician with 10 years of education in medical science or some schmoe like Meryl Dorey with no more qualification than having a website on the internet ? If you opt for the latter, you’re a child abuser and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near children at all.

-weez

I can count on one hand the number of headlines I’ve read in my lifetime which made me nearly swallow my tongue. Kid you not, I needed a Heimlich manoevre after reading this gem in this morning’s SMH:

Death knell for democracy

Former PM John Howard says a bill of rights would erode Australia’s democracy.

The ABC joins in:

Rights charter the triumph of elitism: Howard

Former prime minister John Howard says the introduction of a bill of rights would represent the final triumph of elitism in Australian politics.

A bill of rights will destroy democracy much like the ill-considered introduction of an atmosphere has caused so many to suffocate.

The Bill of Rights attached to the US Constitution clearly has totally obliterated democracy in that land of oppression, so much so that national constitutions in many countries formed after the United States have emulated its Bill of Rights, in many cases word for word.

US judges, some elected, some not, can order the US government around, under the rule of law. This has had the effect of putting all power in the hands of the President and the Congress, right? No?

John Howard must have a different dictionary than the rest of Australia if he thinks that giving power to the people and constraining government authority, the sole purpose of rights doctrines, is elitist. Mr Howard is entitled to his own opinions but he’s not entitled to his own facts. Elitism is the state of affairs when a few powerful politicians, an actual ‘elite’ group, act in their own self interest over the interest of the people. The extreme right’s bizarro-dictionary apparently disagrees.

Government in western democracies has come a long, long way since Magna Carta, which forced the King of England to obey British Common Law. The Bill of Rights attached to the US Constitution was the next most significant development in democracy, specifically enumerating rights and keeping government in line with the law of the land.

Howard’s assertion that rights doctrines encourage litigiousness is a dirt-common furphy spread by the powerful few. Bills of Rights reduce litigation. When government knows it is constrained, it violates the people’s rights with much greater caution and much less frequency, eliminating the need for quite a lot of litigation.

Self-interested, elitist politicians hate rights doctrines. Makes their job harder. Being a dictatorial autocrat is a cake walk- ask Robert Mugabe. Being a truly representative politician in a liberal democracy is a bit more difficult, but the nature of Australia is slightly different than Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

Put a sock in it and get back to the bowls club, Johnny. Your time on the stage is done.

-weez

I’m disabled as a result of getting plowed off a motorcycle by a drink driver. With several vertebral injuries and having had 6 knee surgeries, the sum of which entail permanent chronic pain, I desperately need disabled access parking under the Mobility Parking Scheme (MPS).

The MPS is a real blessing for people who need it. It specifies not just the existence of disabled access parking spaces but it also exempts disabled access parking users from paying for metered parking- very helpful as MPS users commonly live on the pittance of a disability pension. The exemption from parking fees unfortunately means that MPS permits are widely abused, particularly at metered spaces in urban areas.

There’s a news item on a News Ltd website this morning on the MPS scheme; “Heavier fines urged for abuse of disabled car parking” in which Bill Shorten, the Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities, is quoted as saying that abuse of the scheme is ‘obscene.’ He’s right. I frequently find cars without permits parked in MPS bays.

Dr Rhonda Galbally, who chairs the National People with Disabilities and Carers Council was also quoted in the News Ltd story:

“There is a black market trade in parking stickers,” Dr Galbally said. “People are swapping them, exchanging them and buying them.”

She’s quite right, as well.

However, the story continues:

Dr Galbally called for a crackdown on doctors who are authorising parking permits for people with little or no physical disability.

“The real question should be: can the person walk? If they can’t then they should get a permit.”

This quotation concerned me in no small way. Not every mobility disability entails that the sufferer is wheelchair-bound or even has a visibly obvious disability.

NSW RTA MPS eligibility rules currently specify:

To be eligible for an MPS card, a person must be disabled.

Under current legislation this means someone:

* Who is unable to walk due to the permanent or temporary loss of use of one or both legs or other permanent medical or physical condition; or
* Whose physical condition is detrimentally affected as a result of walking 100 metres; or
* Who requires the use of crutches, a walking frame, callipers, scooter, wheelchair or other similar mobility aid.

MPS cards are also available to people who are permanently blind.

Clearly, whether a person can walk or not is an oversimplification of MPS eligibility. Naturally, I was moved to write a brief note to Mr Shorten and Dr Galbally.

At 6.30am today, I sent my note to Mr Shorten via his Australian Parliament House website contact form:

Being a disabled pensioner who often finds able-bodied people without permits using disabled access parking spaces, I agree with increased penalties for unlawful use of MPS spaces. Yes, increase the fines for illegal use of said spaces (you could start at $500 per incident of abuse)… but PLEASE be *very* careful with eligibility requirements.

[…]I absolutely thank my lucky stars every time I can find an MPS space near where I need to be. The MPS really does make all the difference in the world to me.

However, I’m not 80 years old, I don’t need a wheelchair (yet) and I can get about without my walking stick for very short walks (20-30m or so, once a day). You wouldn’t believe how many self-appointed experts on disability confront me when I park in an MPS space, with their ill-thought notions of what ‘disability’ really is. Not every disability is visibly obvious to casual observers.

When you’re crafting MPS eligibility rules, please use extreme care. Disability comes in many shapes and sizes, but it’s none of the general public’s business what my medical history may be. Being confronted by self-appointed disability experts on the street who think that a person doesn’t deserve an MPS permit unless grey-haired and wheelchair-bound is almost as bad as disability itself.

Yes, I understand that MPS permits are abused, you don’t have to convince me of that. As Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities, you’re in an unenviable position. MPS eligibility should indeed only be granted to people who really do need it, but please don’t craft any legislation which disadvantages folks like me who absolutely need MPS permits but may not fit the uninformed general public’s perceptions of what being disabled actually entails nor empowers those trying to be helpful in protecting MPS spaces from abuse to confront disabled people. I should never be under any obligation to detail my medical history to kerbside inquisitors.

At 6.57am, my phone rang. It was Bill Shorten.

Bill thanked me for my note and said that he agreed with my comments and would use care in crafting any new legislation to assure that people who really need MPS permits would be able to get them.

27 minutes has got to be a new world record for responsiveness from any politician.

Bravo, Bill- and thanks much for the call.

-weez