Tim's Bits and Pieces

The Chief Commissioner of the Victorian police force is suggesting criminal charges for cops who use offensive nicknames for their internal investigators (the Ethical Standards Department). I posted a comment on the article, but they never published it, which I've included below.

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Wonderful, looks like the Labour government wants to reintroduce compulsory student Union payments for university students. Back to forcing people to pay for services they don't want or need. The student union never did anything useful for me; the only time I was ever in a situation where I might have needed a union, I was forced to join a special "club" as part of being a student, the student union was the actual problem. Sure they called it a union, but it was basically just a special club I was required to join, even if I never used any of their facilities. Isn't the whole point of unions preventing such things? To my mind mandatory union membership is a violation of the very purpose of unions.

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You might be wondering what a web comic, Narbonic, and an intelligence organizations, ASIO, have to do with each other; the answer of course is absolutely nothing whatsoever, I simply don't have enough to say for two separate posts.

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Since I haven't posted for a while, I thought I'd share a couple of interesting posts from other blogs that are well worth a read:

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Slackware now has an official 64-bit port, so far it's only available for people who run -current, but be available as an alternative architecture for the next release (Slackware 13). Whoo!

As promised here's my review of NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, my current web host.

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For your reading pleasure may I present A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages.

The Mises Institute presents and article on Underwriters Laboratories which is well worth a read, particularly if you're the kind that believes that without the Government there would be nothing stopping companies from simply producing unsafe products as a cost cutting measure. While the article in question is certainly biased, it is still worth giving the issue some consideration rather than simply assuming that there would be no protections in place without the Government. Also while such an organization would be prone to bribery and corruption, only the most naive believe that the Government is not prone to such things already.

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I've been thinking about censorship some more since I wrote my last post on the subject of "Censorship and Child Pornography". I was also to some extent inspired by an article by Albert Mohler on Pornography, where he quotes Roger Scruton, a British Philosopher, as saying that "[t]he idea that pornography is 'speech', ...and thereby protected by the [American] Constitution, is ...absurd...". Yet, we all naturally seem to refer to it as if it is. The purpose of the US' Constitution's first amendment was not to protect people's "right" to pictures of naked chicks, but rather to protect their right to communicate ideas the government disapproved of. It's purpose is the free flow of ideas, not of pornography, nor of "art" for that matter.

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You'll notice I'm posting late again, for which I blame C.S. Lewis, and since he's dead he can't defend himself from this unfounded accusation completely serious and non-trivial explanation for my tardiness.

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