Proposed Metro stirs up the Inner West

the proposed CBD Metro from the city to Rozelle is creating ongoing controversy in the Leichhardt Council area, with councillors holding widely different views. The two Labor councillors both maintain strong support for the project, while the Greens, the Liberals and the Independent councillors are opposed.
Locals are worried about the the effects on traffic near the station, and about the nuisance and noise that will be generated by the five year construction program. Leichhardt Mayor Jamie Parker (Greens) said “ A Childcare centre, local businesses and the local neighbourhood centre are all under threat by the proposed Metro, and questions about traffic, the lack of parking and whether such a huge expenditure would be better spent in the north west remain.” He noted that the Metro would carry up to thirty thousand passengers per hour but that buses at a Rozelle terminal could only handle three thousand.
But Cr Darcy Byrne (Labor) said “ I strongly support a metro system for Sydney and the CBD Metro is the first step. The CBD Metro will see fast trains going from Rozelle to Town Hall and Central every 2 – 3 minutes, this will be fantastic for the Rozelle, Balmain and Lilyfield communities.” Cr Lyndal Howlison (Labor) also confirmed her support for a Metro system, pointing out that Sydney’s existing heavy rail structure is creaking at the seams. She noted the serious crowding and difficult access in peak hour at Wynyard or Town Hall as examples. “Sydney has outgrown those stations. This situation must be addressed before more people are brought into the CBD on trains.”
Other councillors do not share this enthusiasm. Cr Gordon Weiss (Liberal) is a representative of the ward that includes Balmain. He also is concerned that the position of the station under the intersection of Balmain and Victoria roads will cause traffic problems. Cr Weiss noted that Compulsory Acquisition Orders are expected for the properties on all four corners of the intersection to provide the superstructure for the station. He said “The project cost is blowing out before they even start work. It is the wrong place to be spending this huge sum of money”, and said that it might not even happen “as the government doesn’t have the money for it and it is hard to imagine another private public consortium after the disasters of the Lane Cove Tunnel and the Cross City Tunnel”. Cr John Stamolis (Independent) also in the Balmain ward agreed. “Public transport to the inner-city certainly needs to be improved but this could be best done by innovative and cost-effective solutions such as a light rail extension, improved ferry and bus services. Terminating a metro service at Rozelle is problematic. Residents have expressed concerns to me about all these issues.”

Shooting through to Dulwich Hill by tram

A protest in support of extending the existing Metro Light Rail from Lilyfield to Dulwich Hill met Bob Carr when he launched the Museum of Sydney’s exhibition Shooting Through on a tram.
The EcoTransit Sydney community group made sure placards calling for “Light Rail Now” were always in view of the TV cameras there for the exhibition’s opening. To a chant of “17 million not 4 billion” protesters wove through the crowd with a large polystyrene model of a Metro tram held over their heads, and handed out copies of the EcoTransit Sydney (ETS) newsletter and a flyer outlining how Carr had promised to extend light rail in 2000, but did not follow through.
Leichhardt Mayor Jamie Parker spoke passionately in support of the new line and compared the $4Bn price tag for the mini metro to Rozelle with the $17 m required to extend the existing Metro Light Rail.
“An extension to Dulwich Hill is a must and we need another line to the Quay as advocated by Clover Moore,” Parker said.
The mayor described light rail as a cheap, low-cost and low footprint technology and said the extension would take less than a year to fit out and should be started immediately. “Most of the infrastructure already exists, and all inner-west councils are committed to this in a completely non-partisan way,” he said. “Let’s make sure that trams are not just about the past; they are also about the future.”
ETS spokesman Gavin Gatenby said the Government had failed to tackle this issue.
“We have been campaigning for a year. The tracks are there, the infrastructure is there, and it’s all in good condition. It just needs the government to make a decision. All we get is evasions and excuses. In Europe and America and other places light rail systems are the way of the future, because they work, because they are cheap, and because they are people-friendly.”
The exhibition was opened by Jill Wran, wife of retired premier Neville Wran, and former premier Bob Carr. The museum is run by the Historic Houses Trust and its chairman thanked curators and museum staff for their two years of work putting the show together.
Carr talked about growing up in Matraville catching trams to school, and gave an anecdotal overview of the huge tram network that existed in Sydney until the sixties. He did not discuss new tram lines, and did not respond to the ETS flyer.
“This is a government without guiding intelligence,” said Gatenby as ETS packed up its placards. “The advantages of light rail seem to be obvious to everyone except them.”
Check http://www.ecotransit.org.au/ for details of the light rail proposal, and http://www.hht.net.au/ to find out about the Shooting Through exhibition.

Sequestration

The Cold Equations

click here for site

It’s All Right Ma, I’m Only Dyin’

Conroy’s Curtain or The Great Aussie Firewall

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
“Who watches the watchmen?”
- Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347

The Rudd Government’s plans to begin compulsory content control for Australian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) this year (with the stated aim of preventing the spread of child pornography) have been met with shock and disbelief by technical experts, FOI lawyers, and civil libertarians alike.
On 10 November last year Senator Conroy released an Expression of Interest seeking participation of ISPs and mobile telephone providers in a live pilot of the forethcoming mandatory system to be run early this year.
According to the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s (ACMA) last report, about half the sites on the blacklist fell under the heading “RC – Child – Depiction.” The rest were X-rated and other legal material, as well as nudity, violence, crime and sexual fantasy.
Until now ISPs have been able to ignore the (ACMA) blacklist of web pages.
The reaction from ISP’s and IT professionals has been negative. Critics of the scheme say the filters will slow internet delivery speeds, block access to legitimate sites and be pointless because the same material will be able to be found somewhere else.
Telstra has refused to take place in the pilot. “Telstra is not in a position to participate in the Government’s Internet filtering trial, primarily due to customer management issues,” a Telstra spokesperson said.
iiNet manager Michael Malone stated he has enrolled to prove “how stupid it is.”
iiNet’s website states “The government has said ‘The pilot will specifically test filtering against the ACMA black list of prohibited internet content, which is mostly child pornography, as well as filtering of other unwanted content’. iiNet believes ‘unwanted content’ can be interpreted to mean anything the government of the day wants. This is absolutely unacceptable. We have no objection to appropriate legal process, but will not accept that an anonymous government official will make a call on the basis of his or her own judgment.”
Colin Seeger of Electronic Frontiers Australia, an online freedoms and rights advocacy group, said “Senator Conroy has consistently referred to stamping out child pornography when defending this scheme to the public and to the Parliament. The plan is being represented as a ‘cyber-safety’ measure for young people, protecting them from pornography, violence and terrorism. Unfortunately We don’t know the full extent of it because the contents of the ACMA blacklist are not available due to special changes of the FOI act. It seems safe to assume that the Government could expand its blacklist and use the filters to block material they object to, such as negative political speech.”

Mass-transit Mayhem

The recently-released PriceWaterhouseCoopers report, Cities of Opportunity, contains bad news for transport planners in Sydney.
The comprehensive analysis of 20 cities examined ease of doing business, tourism, community standards, infrastructure and green qualities. It rated Sydney overall as very good averaging fifth in the world and coming top in housing, entertainment and life expectancy. But the city came last in one indicator: transport and infrastructure.
Sydney Chamber of Commerce’s Patricia Forsythe says Sydney’s mass transit system is a major throttle. “All these other cities have been building infrastructure to support their communities, metro rail in particular,” she said. “We are so far behind. You can’t be way out in front in terms of sustainability, global readiness and yet come last in public transport if you want to send a message to the world that this is a great place in which to invest and live and do business.”
NSW Transport Minister David Campbell stated that the government was aware of the problem. “The government will bring on line next year the Epping to Chatswood rail link and there are also 600 rail carriages on order,” he said.
Greens Senator Scott Ludlam called for a senate inquiry into mass transit and major investment in the nation’s public transport.
“We are initiating an audit of all public transport in his country. Australia needs to clearly understand what public transport exists, what condition it’s in, where the gaps are, and what can be done to increase its usage in the community,” he said. “We are working to shift federal funding away from roads to public passenger transport which does not currently receive any federal funds, leaving this vital responsibility entirely to the states.”
Meanwhile Greens MP Lee Rhiannon has criticised the NSW Government’s recent passing of the Transport Administration Amendment (Metro Rail) Bill 2008 which establishes a separate Sydney Metro Authority to manage plans for a CBD metro.
Ms Rhiannon said the Bill was misguided, expensive and went against the worldwide trend to integrate transport management in cities. “Sydney needs a single transport co-ordination authority, not another separate agency going about its business in isolation,” she said. “The Greens support the extension of public transport, but this $4 billion CBD metro project is not the solution to Sydney’s transport crisis. The government could deliver a better outcome at a fraction of the price by extending the existing light rail service.”

Minister Snubs Light Rail Again

Transport Minister John Watkins met with representatives of the public transport advocacy group EcoTransit on August 15 to discuss a proposal to extend the Sydney light rail system.

The Minister later said in a statement about the meeting that Eco Transit had presented a “number of interesting ideas to extend light rail services throughout Sydney”.

“I know many inner-west residents want the Dulwich Hill – Rozelle line to be integrated into Sydney’s public transport network because Balmain MP Verity Firth, Marrickville MP Carmel Tebbutt and Canterbury MP Linda Burney regularly discuss the community’s concerns with me,” Mr Watkins said. ”However as it is a freight corridor I will have to investigate whether it can be be excised from the Metropolitan Freight Network and retained in RailCorp’s control. “

EcoTransit’s Leah Mason, who met with the minister, said this was typical because transport planning was done in several different government departments, and the RTA and branches within RailCorp had conflicting claims on resources.

“The government definitely seems to have an ideological problem with light rail. There have been many studies done in the last decade, most showing its feasibility but the only project that has been built is the Central to Lilyfield section,” Mason said. “And this is going great – passenger patronage has doubled over the last year and the Metro company is very keen to extend the line to Dulwich Hill. I think the problem is with a government and a bureaucracy whose planning is done by people who don’t get out enough.”

In his statement, Watkins said that although this line seemed under-utilised at present, it might be needed as a possible rail haulage route to remove spoil from excavation works for the $12 billion North-West Metro. “Also the future of the rail corridor can’t be decided until the results of the $30 million West Metro Feasibility Study are in,” he said.

But Greens MP Lee Rhiannon believes light rail has few friends within the NSW government. “Former Roads Minister Carl Scully dubbed it ‘a pipe dream’ and Transport Minister John Watkins is on record as saying ‘it’s a bad answer for Sydney’. But higher oil prices are here to stay. Light rail is a far better investment for the future than roads,” she said.

In a statement last month Ms Rhiannon said the government had defeated by one vote a move to allow the release of documents that would reveal details of major road plans for Sydney. The Greens have been trying for a long time to get information on the planning of the M5 East, the Cross City Tunnel and the Lane Cove Tunnel.

“The community has not been informed by the government about any of the new plans that may concern them. Turning around the RTA once it’s committed to a road proposal is like trying to turn around a massive tanker without tugs,” Ms Rhiannon said. “Given the failure of recent large scale road projects the public is right to ask to know more. Documents should be made public so the community can decide whether Sydney’s motorway plans make sense.”

Darwin’s big One-Five-Zero. The Consensus.

Eccles snipped this jewel of information in to provide a good rocket up the previous example of FUD. (His Old Dad asked of him ‘how come we didn’t see about it on the telly?)

Happy evolution! The theory’s 150th anniversary

By John Timmer | Published: July 01, 2008 – 01:44PM CT

Major scientific theories have an impact that spreads beyond the scientific community itself, as they change the way society views the world around them, influencing culture, language, and countless other things. Quantum mechanics has indicated our world is dominated by forces that are fundamentally probabilistic and indicates that there are limits to the precision with which we can measure nature; both of these ideas have profound philosophical implications. But quantum mechanics was built through decades of experiment, and it took a while for its findings to leech out into popular culture through things like the frequently (mis)used term “quantum leap.”

Evolution has had an even more profound affect on culture, as it inspired misguided cultural movements almost immediately, and remains controversial outside the scientific community to this day. It’s also far more personal than quantum mechanics, since it doesn’t just speak of the universe, but of our own place in it, and how we got here. Its import was apparent to society almost instantly, and its acceptance within the scientific community spread widely and rapidly, helping turn biology into a scientific discipline, rather than an exercise in cataloging.

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the first publication of the Theory of Evolution, an event that’s the proximal cause of so much social and scientific upheaval. Next year will see anniversary celebrations of Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th year since the publication of The Origin of Species, but, as far as public awareness is concerned, events started on July 1, 1858, when the Linnean Society of London hosted a reading of papers by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace that described evolution by natural and sexual selection.

To an extent, evolution was a pretty poorly kept secret; Lamarck had suggested a theory based on evolutionary change, but the mechanism he proposed had failed experimental tests. Darwin had started to consider natural selection as far back as the 1830s—one of the two texts appearing under his name dates from 1839—and Wallace had written a paper describing common descent three years earlier. Darwin had also made some of the foremost scientists in London, including Charles Lyell, aware of his work, and had an extensive correspondence with American biologist Asa Gray, who provided him with supporting data; a letter to Gray appears as the other text presented on Darwin’s behalf.

Wallace happened to be in the field in Indonesia and was left out of this loop, scientifically. But he recognized many of the same ideas that Darwin had, and independently arrived at evolution by natural selection, which he set down as a paper. Having exchanged letters with Darwin following his earlier publications, Wallace sent the manuscript to Darwin, asking that he try to get it published. Darwin agreed but his friends, anxious to see him recognized for his own work, arranged to have his two papers read into the record simultaneously.

The impact may have been mild at first; the Linnean Society mentions that the papers were a last-minute addition to the program:

None of those attending that night, apart from the Officers of the Society, knew of the changes to the programme and those papers, read by the Secretary of the Society, came at the end of a long session. It is doubtful that many in the audience were able to take in the full import of the message they contained.

Still, because the papers relied on data that everyone was well aware of, and tied together so many intellectual loose ends, the basic concepts received overwhelming acceptance as they gradually made their way through the scientific community. A few holdouts resisted evolution for decades, but the scientific community rapidly left them behind.

The Origin of Species put all these ideas before the public a year later, which may have been a more significant event overall. But part of that book’s intellectual heft came from the fact that Darwin’s ideas had already found significant support within the scientific community, and that support was built on the basis of the papers presented 150 years ago today.

An example of modern educational thinking

Notes from a distance learning course for mature-age students at Murdoch University…

Do you have an Attitude? Or a world view – or is it just shared assumptions

Time isnt a thing, its just an idea. Sense of how Australia was 300 years ago, how would you feel before we became a nation.

A Walnut was good for the brain in the old days because it resembled it in it’s crenelated appearance. Ha Ha how funny now that it turns out that walnut enzymes are good for you ha ha

Gravity doesnt exist, God doesnt exist, money doesnt exist. They are just ideas. Gravity is what Newton Came up With to explain something. It’s just a theory. Since the time of enlightenment – Instead of us using God we are using Science to explain things

search for perfection ratio – measure by reason.

Look at things in ratio – science is just another way of looking at things.

The Modern World View: Its my mind that allows me to think who I am it is not my soul. Newtown and Locke reinvented causes Aristotelian, and Gallileo – Isaac Newton managed to look at the moon.

The earth is the center of an enclosure and It took them more than 200 years to work out what that meant

Then of course Einstien came along and… well its a fabric if you like – the fabric of space time!

its the latest theory!

Newton had gone back to the greeks then came up with atoms

John Locke extended the idea of atoms to the social contract – Individuals as atoms

how different is a world view from an individuals

In the modern world the existentialists With quantum shift – yes -Its a post modern world view

Walnuts – other ways to know the world – environment, Bodies!

Post-Modern sense of self we celebrate

so there we are. the sense of self changes over time but you can be the author of your own narrative.

(See above for a different point of view – ecc.)

A correspondence with Kevin Rudd, PM

Australian Government

Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet

ONE NATIONAL CIRCUIT BARTON

Reference:C08/34222

Mr XXXXXX XXXXX

XX XXXX XX XXXXXXXXX XXX XXXX

Dear Mr XXXXX

Thank you for your letter of 15 June 2008 to the Prime Minister regarding his comments about Bill Henson’s photographs. I have been asked to reply on the Prime Minister’s behalf. I apologise for the delay in responding.

The Prime Minister expressed his personal reaction as a parent to the photographs that were shown on television on 23 May 2008. On the question of the law and how that applies, the Prime Minister indicated that is properly in the hands of independent processes completely removed from any politician’s personal view. I understand that following advice from the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions, the NSW Police has indicated that it will not be laying charges in relation to the images in question.

Thank you again for taking the time to write to the Prime Minister with your views. Yours sincerely

XXX XXXXXX

XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX Legal Policy Branch

14 July 2008

Postal Address: PO BOX 6500, CANBERRA ACT 2600

Telephone: +61 2 6271 5111 Fax: +61 2 6271 5414

www.pmc.gov.au ABN: 181 080 0191

ORIGINAL MISSIVE:

Dear Mr Rudd,

You and your party colleagues were voted into power last November with a very convincing majority. You were handed a mandate clearly enfranchising the new government to repair the mess left by ten years of selfish Coalition polity.

We live in a sophisticated and urbane community, noted for its modern attitudes and its patronage of the arts. Australia has some of the world’s leading arts practitioners, including a disproportionally large number of actors, musicians, writers, artists and photographers. Unfortunately any claim you may have had to be sympathetic with the arts community has been nullified by your extraordinary description of the Bill Henson photographs in an interview on Channel 7 (of all places) as pandering to paedophilia and “absolutely revolting” – a term more usually used to describe scenes of blood, vomit, mutilation, torture or excreta. Particularly as you had not seen all the photos in context. Or maybe had not seen them at all, but only seen an edited selection of pieces, I am not sure.

I may have had some reservations about the possible pornographic content of the pictures, as most people would after the outcry that went up. But next day when I heard Betty Chucher (ex NGA chief) describe the pictures as innocent, and highlighting the innocence (not the vulnerability) of the subjects, I realised that something was wrong. When the police case was given up as hopeless and the arts community rallied round it became clear to me that you had made a very serious mistake in taking this stand, and particularly in describing the pictures as depriving children of the innocence of childhood, whatever that may mean.

Art has never been easy or conventional. Knee-jerk reactions have been going on for thousands of years. There have always been people eager to find moral fault with new developments in art, and the police are always ready to enforce the law.

Mr Rudd, you have no express mandate to tell us what or how to think. You can tax us, and fulfill all the other duties of civic governance. But you do not have any authority in matters like this, whatever you may think. Paedophilia is an awful sort of sexual sickness that has been going on since monkeys came down from the trees. Were it not for the unveiling effect of the internet we would probably still not be aware of it’s true extent. Paedophilia resides in the person, not the object. A doctor may look at a photo of a boys genitalia in a very different way to a scoutmaster or a priest. Or an arts patron.

Just be very clear on this. I am in no way excusing paedophilial behaviour. It is ultimately as horrible for the practitioner as the victim – a very grubby business. I suspect the child molester is often more a case for psychiatric help than police action, but no doubt there are some sick criminal elements exploiting this human weakness, as always.

What I am saying is lay off on the heavy handed opinions. As a committed christian leader of a secular state where the great majority of people have little or no religious commitment you must tread a very fine line. I really think you got a little bit too enthusiastic about these photos out of context and in my opinion you certainly made a prize fool of yourself. If you want to retrofit the moral environment please make broad, uplifting statements, not this kind of sniping from the morning news desk.

Your refusal to revise your “absolutely revolting” opinion when asked about it after the heat had died down was unfortunate. This is a very polyglot culture, and despite the fact the moral right squawks the loudest doesnt mean they are representative of the “community” as a whole.

Trojan Steeplechase

Eccles has just installed his first virus checker (the impeccable Kapersky Labs) after getting snagged by a couple of trojans. They couldnt do what they wanted because I keep an eye on unusual activity on our LAN for him and can often crack them by booting in Safe Mode and using Stinger, for example. Most importantly he has Mike Linn’s “Startup Manager” installed which would come up with a message like “The application xfs3124mz wants run the program bed327.exe at startup  – allow or disallow? “. Startup Manager is an essential tool for XP – not sure about Vista.

It seems people most at risk from computer viruses are big corporations with poor security, followed by downloaders of cracked software, pornography, DVD movies and music.

Last year Slashdot.org reported:

The problem of drive-by downloads from seemingly safe websites is worse than previously thought, according to Google, which counted hundreds of thousands of such malicious sites in a recent study.

In addition, the malware spread by such sites appears to be creating botnet-like structures, placing compromised user machines under the control of remote attackers, Google said.

“Computer users have become the target of an underground economy that infects hosts with malware or adware for financial gain,” said researcher Provos in the report. “Even a single visit to an infected website enables the attacker to detect vulnerabilities in the user’s applications and force the download a multitude of malware binaries.”

This situation is a direct result of Web 2.0, Google found. The typical web portals  now uses many complex applications on top of the simple web browser, allowing user feedback for instance, but since those applications are often not kept up to date, it is a cinch for hackers to compromise them.

The most common compromise methods containing trojan programs included web server security, user-contributed content, advertising and third-party widgets. (like the “click here to win a prize” boxes). Some previous studies, including 2005 report from the University of Washington, have found that many thousand websites carry malicious downloads such as spyware or adware.

But Google’s study found a higher proportion of malicious sites: around 450,000 sites that were successfully launching , and another 700,000 URLs that seemed malicious but about which researchers had lower confidence.

The figures were based on an initial analysis of several billion sites already crawled by Google, followed by a more in-depth analysis of about 4.5 million URLs, Google said.

Trojans were the most frequently installed type of malware, with more than 300,000 URLs – This  malicious code puts users’ systems under remote control, Google said.

“Frequently, this malware allows the adversary to gain full control of the compromised systems leading to the ex-filtration of sensitive information or installation of utilities that facilitate remote control of the host”, Provos wrote. “We believe that such behavior is similar to our traditional understanding of botnets.“

The main difference is that web-based malware infections are pull-based and as a result the command feedback loop is much looser, he said.

On the other hand, “the population of potential victims is much larger as web proxies and NAT-devices pose no barrier to infection“, Provos wrote. “Tracking and infiltrating botnets created by web-based malware is also made more difficult due to the size and complexity of the web.”

Hackers use scripting languages to determine which vulnerabilities are present on a visitor’s computer and use the information to request appropriate exploits from a central server, Google said.

Malware binaries also change frequently, possibly to thwart detection by anti-virus programs, the study found. Google said it marks potentially dangerous pages with a label which can allow users to avoid exposure to such sites.

Refer to Wikipedia for an example of a “botnet”

The Storm botnet or Storm worm botnet is a remotely-controlled network of ” zombie” computers (or “botnet“) that has been linked by the Storm Worm, …

Scary reading!