Too Busy For Words - The PaulWay Blog

Don't give us that claptrap about "this is what women want". Don't give us some excuse about what sells or what your surveys have said. This is so obviously a sexist, demeaning bunch of claptrap that it's insulting to look at. It's shallow, it's boring, and it's painfully one-sided in its portrayal of women. No women scientists, leaders, or workers; no current politics, economics or public interest; nothing, in short, in common with the other readers of your paper.

Please grow a backbone, get rid of your demeaning sexist view of women, and start writing real content. Your women readers will thank you for it.

This post has also been sent to the Daily Mail Online editor.

Your sincerely,

Paul

Tom Morris recently observed that it comes down to privilege: the people who don't have to worry about being taken seriously and don't get sexually harrassed at conferences don't know what all the fuss is about. They don't see the lovely invisible glow that surrounds them, coming mainly from their background - they're white males from the middle and upper classes. Tom points out that they - we - like to tell ourselves that really we had it tough, and really we're here because of our hard hacker cred, but actually we only got that because we got the computers, and that's more to do with being white and male and having parents that could afford computers and going to schools that had computers. Let's face it, if your elder brother kicks you off the computer every chance he gets, you're not going to get much of a chance to use one no matter who you are.

I think you can see this, also, in the variants of the Four Yorkshiremen Sketch that one almost inevitably hears when a group of geeks get together. A sample dialogue goes something like:

• Joshua: Yeah, you can't beat the old platforms. I remember learning to program on a 386.
• Obadiah: 386, eh? We couldn't afford one of those. We had a 286 with a broken memory controller thanks to IBM.
• Ezekiel: Memory controller! Luxury. We had an 8086 with 128 kilobytes of memory and we ran Windows 1 on it. When we got an upgrade and could put an extra 128 kilobytes of RAM chips into the sockets by hand we thought we'd died and gone to heaven.
• Joshua: Well, when I say a 386, it was only emulating a Z80 with 48 kilobytes of RAM.
• Josiah: We had the school's Z80 confiscated from us. We used to write programs on pieces of paper and have other people act as parsers for us until we got our access back.
• Obadiah: Well, of course, we had it tough. We had to program on punched cards, and we only had a stanley knife to cut the chads out.
• Ezekiel: Oh, aye, punched cards. We used to use them, but we only had four of them, and if we wanted to use a fifth card we'd take the first card and sticky-tape the chads back in.
• Joshua: And if you tell the young people of today that, they won't believe you.

One thing that I recently learned - in perhaps a bit more blunt way than I really wanted - is that sometimes even when you can see a solution to a problem, it still won't actually get solved. In the FOSS community we have a tendency to try and solve every problem: it's almost inevitable that given a group of hackers and suboptimal situation - trying to work out the cost per person at a restaurant, or waiting a long time for a change of lights at an intersection, or seating people at a theatre - a "friendly" discussion will ensue on how to "solve" this "problem". Any slight problem - from not getting a T-shirt that fits correctly for one's body type to not being able to watch a video when one wants - becomes something that must be solved. And when that solution is not enacted by those in the power to do so, it is seen as some kind of malicious assault on not just oneself but the whole principle of efficiency and reason, Hanlon's Razor not withstanding.

There is one fundamental problem with this view: it is utterly wrong.

It is another day's labour to talk about the problems that this behaviour causes. To relate it to the problems of fairness and equality, it is, I believe, a mistake to see these as problems one can "solve" in the same sense that one solves a problem with software by submitting a bug report, a patch, or working with the maintainers. And I'm not talking about solving social problems with technical solutions (although some have proposed them).

Put simply, the problems we have with a lack of fairness and equality, particularly in gender, are only solved by a long, hard, tedious process of gradually educating people, by trying to right individual wrongs over and over again, of continually trying to make people aware of the problem they are so determined to ignore. There's no magic fix. This, or any other blog post, will not make everything work. No cunning argument or cogent example or impeccable logic will convert everyone. It's a long, boring, degrading process - but the alternative is to see equality and fairness eroded away over time.

And, worse, there are people who will never concede that there is a problem, who are mysoginst bastards, who will always assert that they're being perfectly reasonable even when being completely sexist. There are people who we cannot change, and who expect that we must change. And we have to accept and allow those people to be a part of our community. We can, as Matt Garrett has, choose who we personally want to associate with, but in my view that makes us a little less tolerant and a little more like the people we hate in the process.

So we must continue to support women - to support all the groups that are ill-treated or neglected by the communities in which we play. We must keep on patiently reasoning with people who object to whatever encroaches on their sense of entitlement. We must keep writing the anti-harrassment policies, and keep on enforcing them. We must persevere to make the world a better place.

I'd also add that we need to remember that the opinions that a person may have do not summarise them completely. As Rusty says, just because you're a great coder doesn't mean you're not a crackpot. Likewise, just because someone is a crackpot - or expresses views we disagree with - doesn't mean they don't write good code. (And sometimes someone we agree wholeheartedly with at a deep philosophical level also writes crap code, but that's another story). We don't even necessarily have to agree with all the other people who are similarly disposed to want more equality and fairness. We all play our own parts, in whatever ways we can and for whatever causes we believe in.

These are tough problems, and there aren't easy solutions; but we can't let that lack of easy solutions put us off trying to make it better.

Now, we know that Apple works very hard to maintain that emotion-steeped, intellect-free connection to their fanboys - even their programming howto videos come across more as marketing hype than real useful information. The amusing thing is that even there, in my opinion, they still outshine Linux zealots for pure fact-free, judgemental thinking. Linux zealots are much worse than Apple fanboys for telling everyone to convert to free open source software whenever someone complains about any other product, though, so that's kind of evened up. To go a step back from the great T-shirt slogan "No I Will Not Fix Your Computer", we need to stop trying to fix everyone else's problems, or assuming that we have to (or even can).

The really funny thing to me, in this competition of eagerness, is how Microsoft has really given up. The "Mac Vs PC" ads did wonders for that emotional image-based buy-in for Apple, but I wasn't really expecting Microsoft to embrace the image too. They have, though - Microsoft seems to be making no effort to be anything but conventional, slightly stuffy, older and prone to clumsiness. Worse, they've inspired the GNOME 3 developers: Microsoft started "reinventing" the Windows interface and throwing in pointless, ugly, hard to use changes to its Office suite about eighteen months before the GNOME developers started telling everyone that making things more difficult was the way of the future, as far as I can see.

Microsoft is also engaging in exactly the same tactics it used twenty years ago that got it in trouble with the US government. It's paying Intel and AMD a lot of money to create "Windows-Only Processors", on the amazingly naive notion that somehow the rest of the world a) can't read machine code, b) can't reverse engineer, and c) gives a toss, given that those processors are slower, more power hungry and less innovative than ARM processors these days. It's been waging this war on other operating systems via UEFI and presumably thinking that at some point the Linux community will just give up, rather than doing what it's done for the last 20 years and work a way around the problem. It keeps utterly failing to get any real traction with its phones and tablets. It's only now started to try and market a costly product that vaguely duplicates what you get for free with Google Docs.

Personally, I think this is due to Bill Gates leaving. I think he knew that Microsoft was heading toward a brick wall and it was just too big, stupid and uncoordinated to think to take its foot off the accelerator pedal. They've bled money in court cases, in DRM systems that no-one's wanted, in aborted projects (e.g. Pink) and just in sheer lack of anything new. Even that famed vendor lock in gradually erodes - look at how abysmally Vista did in the business world, even if you disregard the various organisations and government departments that are going with Linux on the desktop. And without someone with the fame, or even the charisma, of Gates, they're just hand-waving and hoping that someone cares about them.

Ultimately, I believe that free software won't "win" any more than Apple could "win" the phone market. It'll be part of the ecosystem. As more and more people learn of the advantages of using free, open source software, I think it will be more popular - really, it's problem in not reaching a wider audience has been obscurity rather than active oppression. And I think there's still the emotional attachment to free, open source software, but it's the same emotional attachment one has to science - it's cool and majestic but also based on principles we know and can see. The more Apple and Microsoft try to eliminate their competition, the more they lose the respect of their fans.

The absolute last thing they should do^[1], in my opinion, is offer any form of rebate or cash back on buying an electric vehicle. We've seen this time and time again: offer a rebate on LPG fitting for cars and, mirabile dictu, suddenly the cost of fitting LPG to cars goes up by almost exactly the same amount. Offer a $4000 bonus for first home owners, and the entire housing market jumps up by $4000 (hurting just about everyone else even worse). In my opinion this is a classic tactic suggested by the industry in question when it wants to make it sound like it's working with the Government to do something to help, but make sure that it gets a lot more money in the process. It's not a bad policy for the Government, since it gets a cut of their business taxes anyway.

The second last thing is to make other 'cash back' or discount gestures to electric car buyers that aren't going to be permanent. The wailing and gnashing of teeth when the Government cut the Solar Panel Rebate was heard throughout the land - it bootstrapped the industry, yes, and that was a good thing, but when the rebate is dropped it then makes the Government look uncaring for the people it was only recently helping. If it's something I pay yearly, like registration, I don't want to find out that it's suddenly gone up because I was one of the first to do something that other people finally joined in on.

It's also trivial in comparison to the cost of the whole vehicle, especially when looked at in total. The Government putting $10,000 into paying all road-worthy electric vehicles' registrations doesn't, one has to admit, have much sound-bite potential. And when the vehicle is $50,000, a saving of $500 is but 1% - you save more than that in choosing to not get the luxury leather seats. And for people like me building a vehicle it's at the wrong end of the process - I've already committed over $12,000 to the bike now, I'm not going to hold off registering it because I can't afford the rego.

What's left? Really, as far as I can see, there are two major remaining options left to get more people to buy electric vehicles. One is to actually mandate their cost, so that they actually are cheaper. The other is to massively subsidise a new electric car industry in Australia to compete with the existing manufacturers - their price can be lower because their costs are subsidised by the Government.

Both of those, as far as I can see, aren't going to happen. The first would have every petrol car company screaming blue murder about price fixing and uncompetitive practices. And the second would ... yeah, have about the same effect. And take much longer. In the plus column, building a new industry producing cars that we know there will be a big demand for in the future is what Tesla did five years ago; with car manufacturing plants closing across the country, getting them going again with electric cars would be a big boost to employment and the manufacturing sector. But not even a Labor government is going to suggest that we do this; it's just too much like British Leyland^[2].

Electric vehicles still suffer from an image problem, despite the in-roads that the Tesla Roadster has made. New cars like the Renault Fluence, the Holden Volt and the Holden Commodore conversions are looking more like standard cars, and have standard abilities such as towing a trailer. But these are still relatively expensive; fortunately, there's a way the price can come down. Meanwhile, with the Leaf and the iMiev looking like bubbles of plastic and the Twizy looking like the designer was from a magical land where it never rained and never got below 20°C or above 30°C, we've got a way to go yet before people can accept that electric cars are ordinary, working cars.

At the EV group meeting we had a speaker from Better Place. Unfortunately I missed his main presentation but the question and answer session was fairly lively^[3]. One of the things Better Place is putting forward is switching batteries rather than recharging in the car. The Fluence and the Commodore conversion will support this; Better Place is obviously working with other manufacturers to get them to use the technology.

The two big questions with that are: is there going to be competition to Better Place, and is there going to be a standard for removable car batteries. Some kind of competition is good, so that Better Place don't get a monopoly on the technology and then limit access. And that competition needs a set of standards on how batteries are designed, manufactured and instrumented, so that we can rely on being able to plug in a battery and having it work and not lie about its charge state

My question to the Better Place representative, that followed on from those two principles, was: hobbyists want to get in on this technology too. We know it's easier for you to deal with major manufacturers, but if you lock out the very people that have been leading the way, you'll alienate a group of enthusiastic potential customers. This happens all the time, so it's not going to stop us building electric vehicles, but it's disheartening when you can see the prize in front of you but you're barred from taking it.

The strategy that Better Place is taking is that the car is cheap but you pay to change the batteries over. This has the feel of the "razor and blade" problem, but it is a reasonable way to lower the price of the vehicle. But even when we lower the price down to comparable to a current petrol car, EVs are still going to have lower range for the next five or so years while lithium battery technology ramps up. In that time, there's really not much the Government can do to get more people to buy electric vehicles.

Actually, there is one: use them themselves. If the Government were to start converting their fleets to electric, there'd be numerous benefits. The cost per car would come down, as manufacturers could commit to larger production numbers and shipments. More people would find out about electric cars, find that they're pretty decent vehicles, found some of their myths dispelled, and got used to their foibles (e.g. the quiet). The Government can show that it's reducing its carbon footprint and pay less in carbon tax and fuel. And in three to four years' time we'd see a further flow-on effect as the leased fleet got sold into the general used vehicle pool.

Overall, it sounds like a win to me. Let's hope that writing to my local Federal member has some effect.

[1]: of course, there's even worse that they can do. They can do nothing. They can charge more for registering electric vehicles since they don't pay fuel tax. They can offer massive subsidies to the fuel industry to keep it going. I'm positing that the Government actually wants to promote electric vehicles, for example as part of its carbon reduction strategy

[2]: it's a bizarre world when it makes sense for the Government to do something because the commercial operators are too inherently conservative and resistant to change to actually try to keep their industry alive and move with the times.

[3]: as you'd expect from a bunch of people who have been saying "come on, everybody, electric cars are the future, let's move now, let's not get trapped into depending on oil!" for the last twenty years.

Dear people,

Many people have those little e-tags in their cars these days. They allow us to drive along tollways without having to stop and throw money into a machine. Another area where people have to stop their cars and throw money into a machine is in parking stations. We also have to grab the card that it spits out, carry it around and remember to pay for it before we leave, and if it doesn't validate or we lose it we have trouble getting out. However, you people have the solution for that.

Instead, we could drive up to the entrance gate of a parking station, the toll sensor would go 'beep', the boom gate would open and we'd drive in. Then, when we wanted to leave, we'd drive up to the exit gate, the toll sensor would go 'beep', the boom gate would open, we'd drive out again and the parking cost would automatically be debited to our account.

This would save us lots of time - time otherwise spent getting a ticket, paying for it, and feeding it into the exit gate. It would save you a lot of cost maintaining and repairing those machines. I'm sure you're already doing data mining on the journeys people take - this gives you a lot more interesting data. And you get a lot more people wanting to use your e-tags - people who like the convenience of being able to drive right into a shopping centre but aren't already toll users.

Go ahead and use this idea, I don't need any credit - just improve the planet.

Have fun,

Paul

His idea seemed to be that public property was a real problem - that it made things difficult because then you had to have laws and police and you had people sponging off the public good and abusing public property. Then you had to pay all these taxes to keep everything going and it was all very draining and stopped people just doing whatever they wanted with their stuff. Yes, a nice straw man argument, but then the alternative completely baffled me. According to him, in addition to owning your own property you'd also have to be a kind of shareholder in the road in front of your street, and the footpath, and the fences between your neighbours and yourself.

What baffles me here is that he clearly didn't see this going much further. Presumably he stays in his own street, grows all his own food, has an amazing naturally-occurring spring of fresh water in his back yard, and doesn't use electricity or the internet. Because as soon as you start looking at where all those things come from, you realise that they're all some kind of shared property. Once you drive outside your street, you need to be a shareholder in the company that owns that street, and so forth. I can only assume the pundit doesn't have any friends, because they moment they come and visit him they're going to have to pay a fee to his street-ownership-company to get there and park. He may well never use a public hospital, gone to a public school, gone to a public park, flown in public airspace, used the public radio spectrum, or have to claim unemployment benefits, but only because he's most probably a well-off white male.

I'll hopefully save my readers the tedium of reading through the first course in a standard lecture on Government and Democracy. It's just incredibly irritatingly bizarre to hear someone spout this kind of nonsense which almost naturally disproves itself. He probably even thinks the world will be a better place if they followed his philosophy. I'd like to invite him, publicly, to stop using all our public resources and only use the ones he actually privately owns. Then, when the oxygen starts running out in a couple of hours, he may like to reconsider. Meanwhile, get off my public broadcasting network and pay for your own publicity yourself.

You see these people in every role from the people that knock on my door and try to tell me to believe what they believe, through lobbyists and radio "entertainers" who wilfully exclude certain things from their arguments but are only too happy to criticise their opponents, to the run of the mill ordinary people who are outraged that people could be against gambling, drinking to excess, speeding, or whatever it is that they want to do. It's particularly pernicious in people we're dealing with personally, but aggravating when it's someone on the TV or in public life spouting their fallacious arguments and ignoring their own contradictions when we can't say a thing against it.

The fundamental contradiction is that they're ready to prove you wrong but won't accept the same in return. They use every trick in the book to avoid this - wilful misunderstanding of your arguments, using fallacies and specious logic, criticising your method of arguing, constantly turning arguments back on you, sidestepping or mis-answering your questions, and so forth - the catalogue is is too vast even for a Wikipedia page. You can't disprove them with logic. You can't be illogical or they point out the logical fallacies in your argument. You can't declare their beliefs invalid because that's too arbitrary. You can't reason with them, and yet if you don't you're portrayed as being unreasonable. You can't make up things like Pastafarianism without being, in some small part, the kind of thing you hate - and they don't see the relevance of your ridicule or see the parallels anyway.

Rusty and I debated a term for these people. When a person consistently does things that sane people wouldn't do, we call that person's behaviour insane. Yet to use the term "illogical" for who shuns logic consistently is more of a once-off offence descriptive of individual incidents rather than ongoing behaviour, and something that can almost be excused - like not sticking exactly to the speed limit. I thought that "alogical" would be a better coining - a deliberate absence and eschewing of logic. But sometimes these people can sound perfectly reasonable, and use very precise logic in disproving things they don't believe in.

Where is the balance? How do we deal with these people? Because I do believe that they are as much a danger to the social health of a community as office psychopaths are to workplaces. When these people can tell armies to go to war, make multi-billion dollar spending decisions based on pure fictions, and dictate how people are allowed to live and behave, their decisions cannot be based simply on whatever they believe and no argument will be entered into. As a society we need to see that there are rational, reasonable foundations for the principles governing our lives.

At the base of it I don't want to get into an epistemological debate - endlessly answering the questions 'why do you believe that' and 'what basis do you have for that'. Yes, at some point we have to have certain fundamental beliefs that may not be justifiable, or may even have a justification but be completely arbitrary, personal decisons (like my preference for blue over cyan, for example). How do we separate the preference of someone who says "I think someone who kills someone else is wrong and should be punished" from those that say "my magic book says that only men and women can get married" for example?

The only hope I have in this is that rationality and sense is gradually prevailing. We might rail against people who deny that climate change is man-made or who believe that the rapture will take them up to heaven according to the evidence in some pseudo-mathematical formula, but these are already far progressed from the kind of crank beliefs of centuries ago. No-one believes in spontaneous generation - that maggots are literally created from nothing in the presence of rotting meat. The belief that the earth is flat is rare to the point of extinction. Even school dropouts don't believe that the only elements in existence are fire, water, earth and air. These were all serious propositions debated by intelligent, reputable people - today we know them to be bunkum.

Likewise, in everyday life people tend to use rational thinking rather than magical. Everyday people no longer throw spilled salt over their shoulder to ward off the devil. Normal adults do not attribute stomach pains to demonic influences or yellow bile. People no longer use leeches to cure anything that isn't treated with cod-liver oil or tincture of sulphur. People do not say "bless you" when someone sneezes in order to ward off the devil stealing your soul from your nose. People walk under ladders with due care. Most superstitions are amusingly enjoyed rather than carefully observed.

While we obviously still have some distance to go, I think we are seeing reason and sense triumph over bigotry and alogical thought.

Yes, that's a snide comment on the "convoy of no confidence" that's decided the best way to keep their generous handouts is to bring the traffic in Canberra to a standstill. But shorn of the inflammatory language it's a legitimate question. These people obviously feel they have a legitimate complaint. They think that the best way they can bring attention to their plight is to cause a big news story.

The problem here is that this is the same logic terrorists use. It's the same logic lobbyists use. It's the same logic the rioters in London used. It's the same logic that Martin Luther King used in the cause of racial equality. It's the same logic GetUp uses all the time in getting signatures on petitions and donations for advertising.

My question is really: is it valid? Is the right way to get your cause heard to shove it in everyone's faces? Does this not merely render us vulnerable to everyone with a loud mouth and a radical cause? How do we protect freedom of speech and the right of the citizens to have representation of their causes without also surrendering it to those louder than us?

Never mind the conflation of "Canberra" with "Government" in every non-Canberran news story I've ever seen - as if it was even possible that the entire 350,000 people living here decided, as one, to knobble the trucking industry. Never mind the howling rhetoric, invoking everything from the Eureka Stockade to the Dockyard Strikes in trying to justify the Convoy's actions. Never mind the hundreds of millions of dollars the trucking industry gets in handouts to keep it profitable, while it screws ever-longer shifts and ever-tighter margins out of its employees.

Sadly, I fear it won't matter how irrelevant, stupid and aggressive these drivers are - all that will be reported by the conservative leaning press in Australia is that there was this big protest about how totally unfair the carbon pricing is to all those poor ickle struggling truck drivers. Every person I've seen commenting on the ABC news stories that is against the convoy can state facts in support of their argument. Every person I've seen commenting in favour of them evokes some brave, Patersonesque "little aussie battler" in a truck struggling against some improbable mad-scientist figure determined to cause their demise. Forget the facts, forget the reasoning, forget the mountains of scientific evidence for a carbon pricing scheme, forget the numbers showing how most industries and most people won't suffer under the carbon pricing scheme, let's imagine we can drag the country back to 1980 when the world hadn't heard of the ozone layer using some sort of magical thinking that ignores evidence. It's pathetic. Millions of people marched to protest against the war in Iraq and the news services passed by. Now a couple of thousand get all the air time they want. Trial by media indeed.

Let me say that never have trued words been written than Cory Doctorow's introduction to "Makers":

There's a dangerous group of anti-copyright activists out there who pose a clear and present danger to the future of authors and publishing. They have no respect for property or laws. What's more, they're powerful and organized, and have the ears of lawmakers and the press.

I'm speaking, of course, of the legal departments at ebook publishers.

Ah, but the wily legal departments were ahead of me again - they had encrypted the books using some Adobe encryption thing that FBReader didn't understand. There is, it would seem, no way to decode these things with out an "approved" player, and Adobe do not support the Samsung Galaxy S yet.

So I did what any sane, computer literate person would do at this point: I found a copy of the books on the internet and downloaded them for free.

This is the fundamental equation that the legal departments have yet to figure out: broken versus working. We're happy to pay, but not for something that doesn't work - and I mean it has to work everywhere. Every-****ing-where. Because if it doesn't, you've just made people go and find it somewhere else that does. It may not even be for free on the internet, it may be from your competitor's site. But your customers will leave you if they can get it working somewhere else. Figuratively, I went to a store, gave them some money, they popped my book in a bag, swapped that bag for a bag exactly the same weight and size filled with confetti, and gave it back to me.

It's not even "expensive and broken" versus "free and working", because we've already established that I wanted to pay for the ebook. I want to support Charlie Stross, and I want to support a bookstore and a publisher that will sell me a book in electronic format. Cory Doctorow covers all the things I want to say about ebook licensing, restrictions, and that kind of stupidity in his introduction, so I won't bore you with them. But I don't want to take Cory's bargain and buy a printed book, making the publisher think that dead tree accretions are more popular than ebooks. I want an ebook that works.

So, given the choice of the unpalatable, the unwanted and not paying the author a cent, I will choose the unpalatable. I will buy what ebooks I can. If they are shackled with digital restrictions, I will find a free version and download it afterward. And I will find them, because they will be there. Hopefully, some day, the publishers will save me the trouble of fixing their mistakes.

Reading it, however, I felt no real surprise and only a sense of sadness. The idea is that for retail stores to push "the experience" rather than just the price. People would go to Myers to meet and hang around with the purchasing elite; you might sip champagne and hear string quartets play while discussing fashion and homewares with the staff and like-minded shoppers. The article listed this consultant as having helped Microsoft, Borders and other large corporations come into the internet era.

Really? Even Apple fanatics don't go to Mac shops to hang out with people who also purchase Apple equipment. As far as I can see, people going shopping would rather not meet any other shoppers in their perambulations through the store - they'd rather have staff who pop up when requested, disappear when ignored, and know enough to answer questions correctly. Shopping as a social experience is done with friends, not complete strangers; even for exclusive fashion stores the idea is to be seen and to enjoy the exclusiveness, not to sit around and chat with random people. The whole idea is absurd.

Now, admittedly, my experience with exclusive fashion stores is pretty much nil, and my method of shopping for most of these items is antithetical to any idea of socialising: I work out what I want, I go in, I look at all the available options, I choose what I want (if anything), I pay and I get out. I don't mind being at least polite in a store - if someone's obviously curious about an item that I have some experience with I'll happily answer their questions or even offering a bit of advice if someone has a question that I can help with. Even at computer fairs, where I have been known to wander around checking random prices without any intent to buy those things even in the near future, I don't tend to socialise. But I still think most people would agree that they don't want to have social interactions in a store that are irrelevant to what they're looking for.

And the thing that really gives this away as a stupid con is that it's really actually almost what the stores do already. Marketing for those stores has always emphasised the look, the fashion, the style - carrying the bag of a designer clothes store through the mall has always been a statement about your fashion sense and purchasing power as much as it has been to own the thing in the bag. This "new strategy" doesn't change their mode of business, it just puts a new marketing pitch on it.

So it's really doomed to fail also, because it fails to acknowledge why people are shopping online: for the price. They know what they want and now they want to find somewhere that can give them one as cheap as is reasonable. We haven't suddenly turned into a society of asocial bastard shoppers; we're actually sick and tired of greeters, salespeople that are in your face when you want to browse and never there when you have a question, demonstration devices that don't work or don't allow you to test the device fully, and the whole ghastly traffic / parking ticket / crush of people / bland muzak / endless tramping experience. I'd rather spend that two hours shopping online, in my own home, in my comfortable clothes, sitting down, listening to my own music. Experience? No amount of champagne, exclusive brands, new seasons catalogues and perfectly groomed, charming salespeople can outweigh all the awfulness of going shopping in a modern mall.

My advice, for free (because it's the internet), to those stores is simple.

Sell the things that people want to buy from a real store. Then make the experience of buying in a store as easy and practical - I won't say enjoyable - for your customers as possible.

Seriously, most of it flows naturally from there. Don't bother with selling DVDs at Myers when they're already cheaper at JB Hifi and cheaper still online. The entire mall, from the entrances and parking spots to the locations of the toilets and price of the coffe, is part of the experience - don't decorate up to your front door and leave the rest as a hollow, concrete wasteland. Emphasise how safe it is to shop in a store, how the customers details and credit card information is secure. For the things that you do specialise in, make sure your range is good. For some things you can probably allow people a cheaper price if they don't buy one in the store but have your mail-order section post it to them (after all, that one hasn't been sitting in your valuable shop space). Make it easy for people to buy stuff from you online, too - use the technology where it works rather than avoiding it.

And make sure your staff enjoy their work. Putting pressure on them to sell a certain amount every $time_period makes them desperate, and customers can spot this three quarters of a league off in heavy fog. Avoid the cliched, inappropriate Americocentric selling techniques and manner of the eighties and nineties. You should see your staff as people to get involved in the whole process, rather than cloned droids with no personality.

I don't want retailers to die off. I think having a physical shop front to go and try things at is a useful thing: there are plenty of things that I want to try out or try on, or have a knowledgeable person on hand to ask questions about. And for things like warranty claims, purchasing compatible accessories, and finding out new brands or types, a shop front is much more convenient than an internet retailer. But I've bought things through the internet - I would have never thought I would have bought online: TVs, perfumes, fruit and veg (can't find a link, because it was long ago in Brisbane), even peppermints, as well as all the things we now buy and take for granted will be available on the internet - computer parts, books, CDs, and all sorts of neat gadgets. I've bought these things at shop fronts, too, so it doesn't have to be the death-knell of the retail industry.

And what's the next thing? What happens after the internet makes getting almost anything you want available easily from almost anywhere? I see a long process of things gradually getting easier to find, marketplaces consolidating, and drop-shipping mega-sites becoming more comprehensive, but that just increases the existing players. Where we pay money for formatted, compiled data - books, videos, music, etc. - it'll be distributed directly to you via the internet; these things will get more available and cheaper as competition and opening up of markets gradually overcome the idiocy of digital restrictions and market segmentation.

And the end, really, is the post-scarcity society: where you can have anything made available for you at close to zero cost, and the work you do participating in the society is valued enough to pay for that cost. Which is really the digital economy applied to physical things, because practically speaking we already have a system to distribute copies of data throughout the world at near enough to zero cost. Post-scarcity will happen - in some things it can be said to already be here - it's just a question of when.

To reuse Linus's quote: we don't aim to be the death of retail stores. That will be a totally unintended side-effect.

But the worse is yet to come. This place uses billions of tax-payers money and its budget continues to expand. Even revealing the name of this organisation or any substantiated claims can be considered treason and is a criminal offence. The money gets used on projects that regularly get cancelled, delayed and changed and often end up costing orders of magnitude more than originally budgeted. Any questioning of the spending is considered unpatriotic. Powerful people with distinguished careers have stood up to this organisation only to find themselves cut off and facing the sharp end of the law.

How does society get rid of this cancer? The theoretical function of this organisation and its actual activities are so different as to almost be antithetical. Yet it seems impossible to actually change it, fix it or remove the harmful elements from it. Surely the only thing to do is to scrap the entire thing and start afresh. Yet that too would be considered heretical or traitorous by some. What can we do?

Imagine the terror that the world could be brought to with this new technique. All it would take would be a couple of drops of sugar solution or vitamins into the town's water supply, and tapping the reservoir in a specific way, to cause mass outbreaks of disease and poisoning (for if the toxin creates the antitoxin, something beneficial must create something harmful). A couple of taps by a nefarious homeopathic passer-by on your glass of water and whatever good elements that were in it could be instantly transformed into a deadly drink. And it would be completely indistinguishable from ordinary harmless water.

If, of course, homeopathy was actually true.

The question I want to put to a homeopathist is: how do you remove the memory of all the other stuff from the water? Surely just as you're tapping the water to activate the memory of the antitoxin of arsenic or hemlock or whatever, you're also activating the memory of the antitoxin of the urine and whatever else has been put in that water over time, diluted over centuries and millennia of use. I mean, there are lots of other questions to ask - how do you know you've processed the water enough? How does the toxin create the antitoxin? How does the memory stay in the water? Why do you continually refuse to go with any kind of scientific, double-blind trial of your medicine? and so forth. But I'd like to know why it is that they can be so sure that this phial of water is just carrying the one specific treatment and is now not just a broad-spectrum cureall for every disease and illness that have ever been in the water at all?

It's all garbage. The sooner these deluded people are taken out of the system and prevented from administering placebos to people that need real medication, the better.

So why, why, are Senator Conroy and Prime Minister Rudd continuing to not only support it but insist that it be put in place?

Every time this issue comes up, at work or with friends, that is the question on everyone's lips. Why does the minister continue to insist that it must be put in place? Why are they ignoring the overwhelming technical flaws in its implementation? Why do they even think that it will do what they say it will, when everyone else has positive proof that it won't? Why are they defying the wishes of the actual citizens who voted them in, 90% of whom don't want any internet filtering? Why?

I think we can conclusively say, from the evidence of Stephen Conroy's and Kevin Rudd's words, that this has gone beyond a debatable issue. They continually label everyone else's views as extremist and denigrate opposition as supporting the things they claim the filter is against. They continually ignore all the evidence that says that the filter will not work and insist that it will. This is no longer reasonable - this is dogma. They have an absolute and unwavering faith that the filter will work - that it must work - and nothing is going to change that view at all.

No protest will work. No petitions will sway them. No carefully crafted arguments will change their mind. Stupid attempts to DDOS Government websites will only make them more committed to ignoring all nay-sayers. Don't bother to blow up a bus or threaten to start shooting parliamentarians, it won't change their minds. In my opinion they will be ignoring their friends, their fellow Senators and Ministers, and they will be talking to all of them trying to convince them of the truth of their dogma, so while we should all write to our representatives in the houses of parliament - local, state and federal - little will be done by this; we will get form letters but the volume of complaints will make some small difference.

So what do we do now? How do you win an argument with a person who denies everything you say is true and calls you a supporter of the bad guys? How do we, the people of Australia, conduct a Representative Democracy when our elected Senators and leaders refuse to listen to us?

What do we do?

There is a small but thriving market here for batteries, motors, controllers, and most importantly the peripherals that bind them all together. The problem for most hobbyists - and that which puts them off committing more money sooner - is that each one of these parts has to be individually sourced, often from the USA or China. Few people like paying thousands of dollars, including lots of shipping fees and import duties, and waiting weeks or months in order to find out whether the part they've ordered works with their planned setup or not. Having a local supplier would mean a lot more purchases.

Sure, there's EVWorks over in Perth. Dennis has been relatively helpful to my enquiries and stocks a good range of batteries and other things. I'll probably buy most of my stuff from him. But he's very busy, not only with running the store but with his own instals, and I still begrudge having to freight a hundred odd kilos of batteries across from Perth to Canberra. Having a supplier in Sydney or even Melbourne would cut down on that considerably.

If I was able to, I'd do it; but overcommitment and inexperience prevent me from pursuing it. So I'll have to hope that someone else takes up the baton.