November 23, 2009
I've left it a bit before adding my observations to the blogosphere.
Boy there is a lot of silliness about this. Trawling the blogs I was amused to notice that news reports were hailed as "balanced" in proportion to their alignment with the bloggers views. The News themselves were pretty much in favor of the sensational ... I'll take one example from the NZ Herald:
The crowd gathered in Queen St on Saturday for the hour-long "March for Democracy" to protest against the Government's refusal to back a $9 million referendum that asked New Zealanders if smacking should be illegal.
Eighty-seven per cent of people who voted said it should not, but the law removing the right of a parent to use "reasonable force" to correct a child - which was controversially changed more than two years ago - has not been reversed.
This is an error of fact. The referendum did not ask if smacking should be illegal, instead, it asked if a light smack should be a criminal offense. The exact wording was ambiguous so it is not actually possible to know what 87% of respondents (about half the country) meant when they voted "no". The Herald reported this at the time, so the journo did not spend enough time in the morgue. Hell, even Wikipedia gets it right.
In addition, the advertising for the march was also misleading - making it ambiguous what people thought they were marching for. It appears that the march "for democracy" means that participants think that the referendum should have been binding and that, by ignoring it, the government is being undemocratic.
In fact, the referendum was clearly represented as non-binding right from the start, and it got the response it did because the organisers chose to be dishonest about the way they went about it. The Herald on Sunday has a very nice editorial on why referendae should not be binding.
Fortunately, the march was fairly low key - high estimates of the turnout suggest only about 4000 people marched.
Yep, that's right, only 4000. You have to see this in perspective. By comparison, around 5000 bikers, in Wellington, protested the ACC levy increases - an issue which surely affects a narrower band of people.
There's an interview:
Stanmore Bay businessman Stephen Hobbs said he was there to support "democracy".
But does Mr Hobbs support or oppose the move to remove reasonable force as a statutory defence in child abuse cases? We don't know. Has Mr Hobbs even read the bill? (See below)
"If the referendum asks for something it should happen. There's no point in ignoring it.
And at the time, the referendum was not ignored. Fact is that the bill in question does not criminalise good parents. Nothing needs to be done. Therefore nothing should be done. If the referendum organisers wanted to get the bill overturned, then they should have asked "do you think the anti-smacking bill should be overturned?"
"In New Zealand at the moment we have a country being run by minority groups."
Well yes: this is a system of government called "Democracy". If Mr Hobbs expects a democratic country to be ruled by a majority then it is no wonder he is upset.
Hobbs said New Zealand had a "PC system" that was "frightened to step on the toes of minorities".
MMP means that minority parties have influence, since a major party needs these guys to form a government. Even in FPP, a close-run election can be decided by special interests. Bottom line is that we are all a minority in something, yet we feel that our particular minority should be honored.
For example, the referendum which is allegedly being ignored was backed by the Kiwi Party (a party with no seats), FFNZ (an organization of Christians who are concerned that the amendment means they have to "spare the rod") and the ACT party. All these are each minorities whose toes the government was too frightened to step on.
The 4000-odd who, it seems, misunderstand the referendum results to mean that the bill needs to be repealed, are clearly a minority themselves - according to Mr Hobbs, the government should ignore them.
Taking the march, like the referendum, at face value, would suggest that the marchers think the referendum should have been binding.
Jenese James' blog also comments on the hysteria about the whole issue. Glad I'm not the only one. Unfortunately, she than undermines the whole thing by referring to pseudo, and just plain junk, science. The ideology is not so bad, just leave the astrology out of politics and I'll feel better.
As promised, here is a look at the actual bill in question:
Crimes amendment act 2007.
Section 59: Parental Control
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Every parent of a child and every person in the place of a parent of the child is justified in using force if the force used is reasonable in the circumstances and is for the purpose of—
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preventing or minimising harm to the child or another person; or
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preventing the child from engaging or continuing to engage in conduct that amounts to a criminal offence; or
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preventing the child from engaging or continuing to engage in offensive or disruptive behaviour; or
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performing the normal daily tasks that are incidental to good care and parenting.
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Nothing in subsection (1) or in any rule of common law justifies the use of force for the purpose of correction.
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Subsection (2) prevails over subsection (1).
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To avoid doubt, it is affirmed that the Police have the discretion not to prosecute complaints against a parent of a child or person in the place of a parent of a child in relation to an offence involving the use of force against a child, where the offence is considered to be so inconsequential that there is no public interest in proceeding with a prosecution.
It is kind of difficult to see what good parents are being prevented from doing here.
The "anti-smacking" bill does not outlaw smacking, in fact, it provides four very broad ways that smacking could be used. 59.2 basically says you can use physical discipline as a means of control, not correction. 59.4 says that this is not intended to apply to minor cases. A "light smack" would be, by definition, so inconsequential that there is no public interest in proceeding with a prosecution.
You can see why 59.4 is important.
I really do not want to keep blogging this stuff - but at least it makes a change from Software Freedom. The next referendum is about MMP.
November 18, 2009
Karmic Koala is out and I have successfully upgraded my Aspire 4315 machine. Upgrading naively from the update manager was almost flawless. There are a lot of extraneous files after the upgrade, get rid of them with:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get autoremove
The following issues have been found and fixed:
Audio: sound is erratic or non-existant where it was perfect before. May be accompanied by high CPU use and hangs. Not all programs effected, only those depending on libSDL. This is due to increasing maturity of the pulse-audio sound server, which is a good thing. The issue is with the pulse-audio dependencies resolution which should be a quick fix. The solution is to install the pulse-audio sdl libraries.
sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio
This should take effect right away.
File Sharing: if you had folders shared via samba, eg. ~/Public, you may find that the share is no longer available. If you try to modify the share you get an error message that smbd is not running. This is because samba is not starting properly. The solution is to reinstall smbd:
sudo apt-get reinstall smbd
This worked right away for me but you may need a reboot. Remember that samba impliments Windows-style networking which is known to be temperamental.
Pro-Smacking Zombie Lurches On
I see there is a protest march due at the end of the month about the, so called, anti-smacking legeslation. The allegation is that the Prime Minister is ignoring the trong message sent in the recent referendum on the subject.
I thought the advert on the march was misleading as it did not actually say what the march was all about. Instead, it attempted to curry support by talking about democracy. This is reminiscent of the misleading wording of the referendum itself - which attempted to obtain extra "no" votes by making it difficult for people of good conscience to vote "yes" even when they agree with the current law. Now, the pro-smacking lobby are claiming that the majority New Zealanders want the law changed to restore "parental discipline" an a statutory defence against assault of a child.
Let me repeat that - the pro-smacking group want to allow child abuse by parents who are prepared to say that it was for their child's own good.
But lets have a look at the referendum: the question was Should a light smack, as part of good parental discipline, be a criminal offence in New Zealand?
Status quo is that this is not a criminal offence. Thus, the overwhelming "no" vote, if taken at face value, indicates that the legislation should remain as is.
However, it is silly to take this at face value because the whole campaign was misleading from the start. It is not actually possible to determine why people voted no - some people will certainly have returned a no vote because they want the old legislation restored. This sort of problem is why scientific surveys always have a lot of questions.
Considering the range of possible motivations, we really need more information - which means a second referendum. An expensive prospect considering that we expect the government to reign in expenditure in these times. Maybe later. Right now, the best we can really do is try to take the possibilities into account when considering the results. Vis:
The huge no vote indicates that New Zealanders are concerned that normal parenting could, inadvertantly, lead to good parents being criminalised for good or pragmatic discipline practises. This is a valid concern: when you are a parent you don't want to worry that some busibody will dob you in just because you lost your temper a bit in the supermarket.
The correct initial response to that concern is to check the legislation, previous case history, and police procedures, to see how likely it is that good parents will be criminalised under this legislation. This appears to be what the government has done. The reported result has been that good parents are not being criminalised and the risks of this happening in the future are very low.
When we think about it, this is abvious. The Judge comes from a generation where much harsher practises were the norm. Is he really going to pass a harsh sentence, thus condemning also himself? The jury includes parents just like yourself, many with harsher practises though custom or otherwise. Are they going to pass a virdict which criminalises themselves also?
Hence: status quo remains.
Seriously, if the pro-smacking/abuse lobby wants to make headway in this, they have to stop trying to manipulate the legislative process with trickery, misdirection, and just plain old FUD. When they start being honest, they may discover that regular Kiwis are quite OK about child abusers having to work harder at their defence. The trouble is, that is exactly what they fear.
November 13, 2009
On the software front - I should really weigh in on the Windows 7 thing, but I'd rather talk about the latest Ubuntu release. Still, here goes...
What I've heard about Windows 7 is that it is lightweight, and secure.
Dispite press to the contrary, Win7 is about the same as Vista, without the annoying bits. It still needs about the same hardware, but most punters won't notice because they've already upgraded. AFAIK: the version on the netbook is especially cut down - like the XP netbook edition. It is not the same as the version you get at Dick Smith. Which is to say - all the hype about Win7 being "lightweight" because it is on the netbooks is rubbish. Note: I have yet to see a Win7 netbook with a solid state drive.
You'll still have to squint at the tiny desktop - Netbook OS of choice is still the Ubuntu Netbook Remix becouse it is designed to take account of the small screen. GNU/Linux will run off a solid state drive - the original netbooks ran linux from 2gig of flash memory - and has special parameters to conserve power and save wear and tear on the hardware. Typical battery life under windows is 1.5-2 hours, under gnu/linux you get 4-7 hours.
Unlike Vista, whos security had apparently been cracked a day before its release, Win7's security has apparently been hacked almost a decade ago - which is to say, it has been shown to be vulnerable to WinXP viruses and malware. Follow this with licencing reminiscent of NT and it is just more of the same from Microsoft.
What concerns us here is that the attacks on freedom and on the marketplace are worse than ever. We hear that IE is even more tightly integrated into 7 than in any other offerings - this, despite the many anti-trust rulings against MS on this very subject. We are told this is "a good thing", yet the US DoJ and the EU both say that it is criminal. IIRC: DOCX is set to be a standard for Outlook, so not only are people sending DOC attachments, but the actual email will be in DOC format too - a huge boost to vendor lock-in.
C'mon folks, we knew this was going to happen! Sales figures are showing that a big chunk of the World are just bending over once again and crying out: "thank you sir, may I have another?"
November 6, 2009
Managed to survive another Guy Folks day intact. This year it really payed to wait 'till the last minute to buy the fireworks - Supermarkets were doing 2-for-1 deals in tha last few hours. Even so, I decided to have a quieter night this time and just go for the sparkler pack.
Last year I had rockets, and there were a lot of misfires as well as one rocket launching horizontally and a tree catching fire. This year it was wet wet wet. No fires around here, and the fireworks were overall a better quality - no misfires.
And that's the excitment for a month at least.
I have managed to got all my assignments in to be marked, not all the marks are back yet though. I seem to be able to get a B+ in my sleep but anything higher involves much harder work. Ho hum, we'll see. I'm already looking at courses for next semester, maybe a summer-school.
There are a bunch of seminars to attend late this month - 19th and 20th. The first is about research and thesises and dissertations and all that jazz that I've been working towards and the other is about how to get an academic career. Mostly they are opportunities to network, get to know those worth knowing and so on.
My agent called - I thought I'd been forgotten. They wanted me to get my photos renewed and there is a TV series coming up so I get to stay tuned. I'd love to do a TV series.
Apart from that I've been messing about running errands, paying bills, same old same old.
I did not blog about Halloween like I usually to, so i'll do it here.
Down here the Halloween festival occurs at the wrong end of the year. It is a spring festival. I did a Jack-O-Lantern and a bowl full of marshmallow eyeballs outside for the kiddy-winks and the overall costumes were much improved from last year. Cathy got dressed in a Spider-Witch costume from the Warehouse and had an early party with the girls. I had movies on DVD:
Hard Candy: a sort of Red Riding Hood updated, where a 13 year old meets up with a 30-something man she met in a chatroom, goes back to his place, only it turns out that
she's the predator here! LRRH turns the tables on BBW and then the fun starts.
Series 7: A marathon of series seves of a reality show in which contestants chosen at random from the general population are armed and set hunting each other. Last one alive gets to continue to the next season.
Hellraiser: still amazingly creapy despite being heavily dated. The first is the best of the franchise which just got sillier with each installment. It is not Clive Barkers demons that provide the horror, but what the normal folk get up to.
The lantern left me with a lot of pumpkin after hollowing out that I did not want to just throw away. I decided to make pumpkin soup. What you need to know about this is that I do not like pumpkin, as a rule. But maybe I could make a pumpkin dish that I did like?
Well, it worked. Here goes:
Pumpkin - chopped.
Carrot - sliced (about 2:3 carrot:pumpkin)
Garlic - roasted - the whole cloves are wrapped in foil with a bit of pepper and oil, and roasted until they smell nice, then chopped up.
Butter - a goodly knob.
Cream - I used half a bottle to a large saucepan. Rule of thumb - imagine you are adding cream to a large cup of coffee.
Basil and Rosmary to taste.
That's basically it. Boil it all up until you no longer see any pumpkin lumps. Serve with a swirl of cream and a knob of butter. If you are worried about vitamins, just hald back a third of the carrot/pumpkin mix util you only have a few minutes to go.
Mine turned out quite thick. You'll notice that this recipe has no measurements in it: I did it all by smell and taste. A bit of red wine helps - added to the cook not to the pot.
Tonight I'm doing Lamb Leg steaks and mint sauce cortesy the Mad Butcher. After the clouds and rain, it was a wonderful day which I have spent totally blissed out. Which means I got absolutely nothing done at all.
Cheers.
