Radiation prediction

More Australians will die from cancers caused solar radiation (skin cancer) over the next month than Japanese will die over the next year from cancers from the nuclear reactor problems.

Stuff happens

Tony Abbott was stitched up nicely today by a Channel 7 "reporter". For some reason, the tool asking the questions thought that saying "Shit happens" was being insensitive.

Well, putting on my old giggle hat and writing as a rather useless part time soldier, I have only one comment to make - what a load of crap.

Soldiers have a vernacular all of their own, and most of it is incredibly offensive. We use the term "swear like a trooper" instead of "swear like a teacher" for good reason. Soldiering is hard work -physically and mentally harder than just about any other occupation - and it comes with a reasonable risk of death, injury or wounding. Soldiers think, talk and joke in a way that would make many civilians fall over in astonishment. The black humour of soldiers is something to wonder at - shrinks would call it a "coping mechanism".

Soldiers train and train and train and train - and then train some more - because the battlefield is one big bucket of "shit happens". Even though I was just a humble chocko that never had to run around a two way firing range, I was trained quite thoroughly to deal with and handle the wide variety of shit that comes your way on operations. And funnily enough, we used to regularly use expressions like "shit happens", because incredible as this might sound - shit happens in war! War is messy and unpleasant and things rarely go to plan.

Take the ending of the siege of the Iranian Embassy in London by the SAS. You had the best train assault teams in the world doing the work, and they were equipped with the best stuff available at the time. They'd rehearsed the entry many times, yet when they actually started blowing stuff up, one bloke got tangled in his ropes and was nearly roasted alive when flash bangs set the curtains on fire.

Even when you have a well planned op, with highly trained troops, good intelligence and the best equipment, things still go pear shaped. Shit happens - it's how you deal with it that matters.

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PS - the SAS op was called "Operation Nimrod". We used to use the term "nimrod" to denote a complete and utter fuckhead - like Mark Riley. Some crafty sods have been vandalising his Wikipedia entry - at 11.39 yesterday, someone added this to his entry (which has since been locked down):

He is a total fuckface who had [[sex]] with [[Julia Gillard]] in return for a bullshit story about Tony Abbott

Wasn't me by the way. And I don't believe this accusation for one moment. For crying out loud - who would want to screw Gillard?

The SMH is full of crap

Nasty little story in the paper today about Vodafone - unfortunately, someone at the SMH has decided to juice up the story to make it sound much worse than it really is.

THE personal details of millions of Vodafone customers, including their names, home addresses, driver's licence numbers and credit card details, have been publicly available on the internet in what is being described as an ''unbelievable'' lapse in security by the mobile phone giant.

No you twit, they are not "publicly available". You need a username and password to access them. If they were publicly availably, I'd be looking up some people I don't like right now.

The Sun-Herald is aware of criminal groups paying for the private information of some Vodafone customers to stand over them.

Which criminal groups and when? How many times has this happened. Once? Twice? Provide some proof, not idle gossip.

Other people have apparently obtained logins to check their spouses' communications.

"Apparently" - which means it's gossip. No proof offered.

Personal details, accessible from any computer because they are kept on an internet site rather than on Vodafone's internal system, include which numbers a person has dialled or texted, plus from where and when.

They're only accessible from any computer if you have a username and password.

The full extent of the privacy breach is unknown but The Sun-Herald has learnt that possibly thousands of people have logins that can be passed around and used by anyone to gain full access to the accounts of about 4 million Vodafone customers.

This is really beating it up - "the full extent of the privacy breach is unknown" - makes it sound really bad. Plus the bit about "possibly thousands of people have logins" - of course thousands of people have logins; they've got thousands of employees and agents and call centre staff.

Professor Michael Fraser, the head of the Australian Communications Law Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney, said that it appeared to be a major breach of the company's privacy obligations and ''unbelievably slack security''.

Whenever a story needs a bit of credibility, always ask a professor.

''The fact you can look up anybody as easily as that seems to be a gross breach of privacy and resulting in an almost negligent exposure to criminal activity,'' said Professor Fraser, who also heads the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network.

''Customer information is accessed through a secure web portal, accessible to authorised employees and dealers via a secure login and password,'' he said.

The revelations come as Vodafone is facing potential lawsuits and widespread customer dissatisfaction with network access.

Irrelevant. If your story doesn't have enough heft, add in some bad news from elsewhere.

More than 9000 customers have joined a class action and the company has set up a number of taskforces to try to fix the problems.

In this new saga for Vodafone, dealers have revealed that they are frequently asked to do ''favours'' and to pass on their login details.

Ok, so dealers are frequently asked to do favours. The point is, do they actually provide the favours, or do they knock them back? Cops are also asked all the time to do favours like this on the police system - but as they know all access is monitored, they knock them back (the stupid ones don't, get caught and are sacked and charged).

Because the customer database is not an intranet (internal company system) and instead on the internet, users with a password can log in to the portal from anywhere, then access any customer's information.

So what? That's the whole idea.

Vodafone retailers have said each store has a user name and password for the system. That access is shared by staff and every three months it is changed. Other mobile dealers who sell Vodafone products also get full access to the database.

I'd imagine so. How are you supposed to connect new customers and help existing customers if you don't have access to the database? Duh.

Anyone with full access can look up a customer's bills and make changes to accounts. Limited access allows searching by name, which takes much longer and is more involved but can be just as effective when done correctly. ''It's scary stuff in the wrong hands,'' one dealer told The Sun-Herald.

Ooh, it's "scary stuff in the wrong hands". Sounds like the sort of quote you'd make up on a slow news day. Is it really scary stuff that I can walk into a store and ask the dealer to make changes to my account? I would have thought that is good stuff.

Disclaimer - I don't use Vodafone as their country coverage is not as good as Telstra. I don't particularly like or dislike them - I just hate media beatups.

Heavy firepower?

Another week, another pile of steaming drivel from our local press.

I do not have a link to any of the articles, but at least two papers this week said that our diggers in Afghanistan have been using their heaviest firepower yet - some 81mm mortars.

Heavy firepower - pffft!

When I was a chocko, we had a couple of these in our Regiment, and they were assigned to the support platoon, which got all the heavy stuff like the mortars and the anti-tank weapons. It was heavy in the sense that if you had to carry it, it weighed a tonne. But it was "man portable", which essentially means some poor bastard trudging along with a big lump of stuff being carried in the least uncomfortable manner.

There was no comfortable way to carry it - it was simply a matter of lugging it in a manner which hurt the least.

We never really got to use the mortars, the excuse being that we did not have enough grunts to properly fill out our infantry companies, so there was no point in having a support platoon as well.

I think the real reason is because that Fat Bastard Beasley was Defence Fuckup at the time, and we didn't have any money for shooting off training rounds, let alone the real thing.

Anyway, I would not be describing them as a heavy weapon. Big arsed artillery of the 155mm range? Yes, that's heavy. 500lb or 1000lb bombs? That's heavy. An 81mm mortar is just a grenade launcher that packs a bit more punch and shoots a bit further.

I wonder if there is a single working journalist in this country today who has ever had any connection, however, tenuous, with the military.

Doubt it.

For the children

A nice little story in the Silly today about a drug bust in suburbia.

The stupid Minister for Police though couldn't help himself. He just had to wheel out this shopworn old line:

$1 million dollars worth of drugs that could have been sold to our kids is now off the streets...

Oh please, stop going on and on about how nasty, predatory drug dealers are stuffing drugs down the throats of our kids.

Dealers do not push drugs onto people they don't know. People who want drugs search out dealers in order to score. Getting stoned takes a bit of effort.

The idea that the Minister is pushing - that a goodly chunk of this ganja would have ended up in the bongs of children - strikes me as absurd. The odd kid might be a complete wastoid, doing his best to fuck up his life in the tried and tested manner, but I suspect that most kids that smoke a bit of dope do it on an occasional basis - like at a party - rather than as an everyday habit.

I did that. Didn't see much wrong with it, except that it made me sick.

Most of the dope that was siezed was probably going to find its way into the hands of adult bong heads. I've known a few people in my time that smoked once a day, or in some cases, half a dozen times a day. I'm not sure it the latter mob are still alive. And frankly, it wouldn't make much difference to the world if they spent their short and rather fruitless lives sitting around the living room on a filthy couch, packing another cone.

I suspect that the stoners that I knew when I was younger smoked more dope between them in a day than all the school kids in the surrounding suburbs did in a month.

All this bust has done is to put a small crimp on the intake of a bunch of middle aged hippies. Leave the kids out of it.

Infuriation

So we've had a wet week. Woopey-doo. Get used to it, assuming the drought is over.

The Stupid Moaning Herald had some photos in it on Friday of various groups of people "struggling" to get home in the rain.

God, the hardship of it all. How terrible it is to get wet shoes or wet hair once in a while. Or perhaps the horror of an umbrella turning inside out is too much for some people, forcing them to spend the rest of their life indoors, shuddering each time a butterfly goes past. For crying out loud, most of us shower once or twice a day - getting wet is something we actually look forward to (unless we are a stinking, lentil eating hippy). Copping the odd soaking from lovely, pure rainwater falling from the heavens should be a luxury, not something to "struggle" against.

Hell, people pay a fortune to drink water that has not been chlorinated to death by our water distribution system. Then nature provides it for free, and the media get upset at the idea of some of the cleanest possible water dribbling down your face.

Some people will never cease to shit me, especially attention seeking, fear mongering Fairfax journalists.

I can't find the photo online, but the fishwrapper edition had a photo of a cyclist "struggling" home towards Manly in the rain. He was riding through a puddle that was probably up to the bottom of his pedals.

Phooey. Happens to me all the time. The drainage around Five Wog is so crap, the merest dribble of rain causes oxbow lakes to appear on most of the bike paths. My bike shoes are interchangeable with my flipper booties as far as I am concerned. If you go out in a vehicle without a roof or windscreen, you can expect to get wet from time to time. Or sunburnt. Or besplattered with bug intestines.

That's Gaia for you. Given how much the SMH staff seem to love Gaia and whales and all that, I am amazed that they should put such a doom laden spin on every shower of rain.

I hate them more and more each day.

Silly new stories, briefly

People, not cars

Yes, we're heard that one before. Hell will freeze over first.

As for this: and create lively spaces to meet and connect socially.

What that means is create spaces where the mentally ill and the work shy can annoy the living hell out of everyone else.

Vandals drown

Hooray. Although the SMH calls a drunken spree of wanton vandalism "an adventure". Maybe I'll have to go visit their editor and have "an adventure" in his office with a can of pain and a half litre of vodka. I'm sure he won't mind some hijinks.

The kicker - the survivor was 27. Aren't people supposed to have grown out of this sort of thing by that age?

Leichharct council and long waits

Leichhardt are officially the slowest council in NSW. That's no surprise to anyone that has ever read the minutes of a council meeting. It's also the most wooly headed council, and the mayor allows all sorts of unnecessary crap onto the agenda. The agenda is in fact just a pile of mad agendas being pushed by fringe groups. I'm amazed they ever get around to reviewing DA's.

Resuscitation, Danish style

Is the SMH the stupidest paper in the country?



Maybe someone mistranslated a word, but last time I fired a rifle, it was not refered to as "resuscitation". That's what you did if you shot the wrong person and wanted to stop them from karking it.

And what is wrong with jailing criminals?

The Stupid has an article today about how NSW leads the stakes in jailing people for certain crimes.

Some incredibly stupid statements are attributed to an academic:

"The result of that has been it affects the NSW taxpayer and affects the services - including roads and the hospital system - because more money is going into jails in NSW when there are some reasonable alternatives," (The criminologist Paul Wilson, from Bond University in Queensland).

My suspicion is that the type of people that he refers to are already a burden on the taxpayer in some form or another. They're probably public housing users, big consumers of Police and hospital emergency time, addicted to welfare rather than work, and all sorts of social services only exist because of these people. Think of DOCS and all the other do-gooder agencies.

Putting them in prison is not cheap, but leaving them to roam the streets is not cheap either. If we locked up a large number of criminals for a long time, would we see a reduction in the demand for all the above mentioned services?

I believe so. Although shrinking a government agency is never easy, so we'd probably continue to have bloated departments full of people suddenly not having much to do.

NSW reported the highest imprisonment rate in Australia as a proportion for sexual assault (with 93 per cent of people convicted of those offences being jailed), robbery (82 per cent jailed) and more serious robbery offences (84 per cent). More people were jailed for breaking and entering and burglary offences (77 per cent) than in all other Australian and international jurisdictions, including the United States (72 per cent) and England (70 per cent).

That makes me feel much better. I like the fact that we lock the buggers up more than anyone else.

The report confirmed a "generally high rate of recidivism" in NSW, showing that jail was not resulting in rehabilitation.

No, what that means is that we are not locking them up for long enough.

The report also showed that many people in NSW were receiving short custodial sentences. In 2006, 27 per cent of the NSW prison population were serving a sentence of less than two years.

I can't understand why we're not locking burglars up for say 5 years at a stretch. The longer they spend behind bars, the fewer people they can rob. They'll eventually reach an age where they are too old to climb through windows or over fences, and their burgling days will be over, and we can cease to lock them up.

If some people have to spend 90% or more of their life from the age of 15 to 45 behind bars, I am not going to weep.

Opinion is not news

"Opinion", "blogs" and "letters" are not news.

They are opinions, not facts.



No wonder the SMH has turned to shit.

Stupidest headline today

SMH ran this story today:

Shot 'multiple times'.

It turns out that A man has been shot in the leg and abdomen...

So being shot twice is now morphed into "multiple times". And in case you are thinking, "Aha, maybe he was shot six times in the leg, the story goes on to say:

Police said a Bonnyrigg man in his early 40s was shot once in the leg and once in the abdomen

Two shots do not equal multipe times. And nowhere in the story does it provide an attribution for the quote of "multiple times". The Silly could get away with it by saying that a bystander said those two stupid words, but they do not identify anyone in the story as uttering them.

Why is it so difficult for the Silly to grasp such simple concepts?

Not the news

I was strolling through World Square this morning when I spotted four camera crews outside an internet cafe. I had a look through the window and spotted at least half a dozen Federal Police inside. I had no idea what it meant. Kiddie porn? Asian sex slave trafficking? (it is a favourite haunt of Koreans). Al Queda bomb making?

It turns out it was music and film piracy.

Get this item though from the SMH:

It is understood that heavy duty electronic equipment was discovered at the premises and that employees at the internet cafe were hired to scour the web for suitable material to download.

"Heavy duty electronic equipment"? What the fuck is that? Death rays? MRI scanners? Amplifiers stolen from Spinal Tap?

What a ridiculous thing to write. The editor who approved this should be strung up by his thumbs.

My guess is that it is "beeping stuff with coloured lights on the front and we don't have a clue what it does". Could have been a lava lamp for all I know.

I did spot one Fed that had long hair pulled back in a pony tail. The resident cyber-geek in Plod land I suppose.

What the whole scene was lacking was a couple of rows of patrons lined up on the footpath out the front, face down with their hands cuffed behind their backs. Now that would have made a great scene.