Poor pubs and clubs :~(

I read today with some annoyance the bitching of pubs and clubs about how smoking bans put in place last year have meant that they've lost millions of dollars from gambling revenue.

Club revenue from pokies fell from $295 million in March 2007 to $230 million in March 2008. Total turnover - the amount of money put through the machines - fell from $3.6 billion in March last year to $2.9 billion this March.

[...]

"There is growing evidence that the continuing drop in revenue is not related just to the indoor bans. With petrol prices up substantially this year and several more interest rate increases announced, households are clearly reducing how much they gamble." Some clubs would not survive, [chief executive of Clubs NSW, David Costello] said.

Poor pubs and clubs! Now some of them will have to close, because they can't get their hands on the easy no-need-to-actually-do-anything-but-buy-a-machine money from .... wait, what?! Come on guys, this is freaking fantastic news! Smoking bans, helping gamblers kick their (gambling) habit!

Of course on the second page they mention in one small paragraph that the CEO of AHA, Sally Fielke, said "some venues had reported a rise in food sales since the smoking ban". See, now, this is what I'm Tolkien about.

Put up or shut up, pubs and clubs of NSW/ACT, and find a way to decently earn your income, through, you know, actually providing services rather than leeching off the gambling and nicotine addicts.

Just a heads-up...

Just to let everyone know, this week some rather Important People will be hanging around the hallowed halls of CAPPE. Firstly, Professor Simon Rogerson from the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University in England, Professor Don Gotterbarn, from the Computer and Information Science Department at East Tennessee State University, and finally, Justice Michael Kirby, all of whom are here for a conference on Ethical Governance of ICT and the Role of Professional Bodies which is on Thursday and Friday. Unfortunately it's too late to register for the event, but I'll be sure to keep you all updated (perhaps in real-time, depending on internet access!) on what goes on!

Its virtually war (just)?

I was reading today about the escalation of hostilities between chinese hacker-patriots and u.s. hacker-patriots. <>
Now, there is every possibility that this is a media beat up, grasping at virtual straws in an effort to restore interest in a populace with an imploding attention span. A few years ago, there was a big hack done on some microsoft stuff, using worms or trojan horses or some other techno-monsters. In response, microsoft supposedly sent out its own worms to follow the original worm and patch things up. Or something like that, maybe I'm making it up. But at the time, the idea of virtual warfare really interested me. And then this article reignited my interests.

If this mutual chinese v. u.s./anyone v. anyone else aggression is the beginnings of a virtual war (if being a very big if), then it raises a few questions. In virtual wars, do theories of just war apply? If not, is there a continuum between virtual war and direct warfare, with parallel evolution/devolution of just war theories? With the recent discussions on this blog about neuroweapons, do they sit in the grey area between recognised domains of just war, and virtual war? How do you determine casualties in a virtual war? Is it in economic terms (which seems to miss the point of at least some key elements of just war theories) or does there have to be human (and/or animal) suffering? What of attacks on virtual worlds like Second Life? Do avatars have souls? Can we count our dead if they are only avatars? Do avatars have rights? If not, when do they gain them?

ANSWER ME!

Neuroweapons, oh my!

From this post of Catie's. I'm not going to delve too much into the legal ramifications too much, the article mentioned in the post, and the mindhacks article go into this a lot.

Now this is a juicy dual-use dilemma. White, in his paper, mentions the beneficent side of this technology: enabling people with severe physical disabilities to gain back some of their independence. Specifically, White mentions mind-control prosthetics. Hello bionic revolution! This has numerous potential positive effects on the level of health care in western societies, and White notes that DARPA has plans for using the research to help out veterans. This is great news, to my mind, because the greatest cost to a country in terms of war is not necessarily the death toll, but the number of injuries. Now, I'm not saying that getting hurt is worse than dying (in all cases, at least), but in terms of the burdens inflicted upon the wounded soldier's psyche, the burdens on the health care system, and the families of all those involved. it'd be lovely if a quadriplegic could have some mobility. For a pentaplegics (so neck also immobilised, which often entails lack of speech, and essentially is full paralysis), this could mean better communication with the outside world, something terribly important.

What about the negative, though? Obviously, there is the new set of weapons coming out, which have many implications for what it means to commit a war crime, as White mentions in detail. But I'd like to raise another negative outcome of this new technology. This requires me to digress slightly, to fill in a couple of points about the nature of combat. I'm referring here primarily a conception taught to me by the late Philip D'Alton, who was a lecturer in sociology at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and I had the great fortune to be taught by personally. The conception of war we have, unsurprisingly, is a glorified one. Even to look at the dioramas in war memorials, in all their `realism,' we fail to understand the sheer brutality summed up best by Karl von Clausewitz, the immortal slogan: "War is Hell." We fail to understand that in the scenario of modern war, although casualties may be low compared to the advent of total war, or the analogues we can best envision in nuclear holocaust or world war, injuries are generally present in combat at a 1:8 ratio, death:injury. This ratio, in the case of certain recent maneuvers by the United States military, may be as high as 1:16. So imagine that in the current actions in Iraq, not claiming in excess of 3,000 lives, that between 24,000 and 48,000 men have been wounded in one aspect or another. not all of these are life threatening, and not all of these are disabling, but many are. We here "1 killed, 6 wounded" on the news, those 6 may be cuts and bruises, or amputations, internal bleeding, organ failure, etc. And those of us back home have no conception of this, short of the occasional movie that bothers to go partly into this detail (there have been more recently, but still not many compared to the swathe of rambo-esque movies out there).

So what does it mean for an army controlled from home? What does it mean to have a soldier whose understanding of the nature of war is, even after a tour of duty, no more than a kid's after a run through on a video game (although if you believe Jack Thompson, they are more likely to kill you...)? As war becomes not only more clinical and sterile on our TV screens, inuring many in our society to be tacitly accepting of whenever a country decides to head off to another conflict, but more sterile for the soldiers, it would be my opinion that the normative concepts that stay our hand when we conceive of going to war are eroded, and this is a terrible thing. The foundations of any conception of a Just War rely on an intuition that understands that war is hell. People die, limbs are shot off, landmines tear face apart, people walk in a daze with vital organs spilling out. I'm not sure how many of you, dear readers, have ever actually been in a fist fight of any kind, but for myself at least there is a certain understanding that if that's what getting punched in the face/ribs/ear feels like, getting shot is going to be a darn sight worse.

I'm not one of those guys who disagrees with the conflict in Iraq because I "don't support the troops." I support the sacrifice a career soldier makes in choosing to take the act of killing and dying on as his principal vocation. But what has to remain in the consciousness of those who sanction a war, and in a democratic society the citizen forms a part of that process, is that there is a fundamental aspect of war which, while necessary, should inform our decision. If we take the understanding of suffering away from the process of war, this could be highly problematic.

So, not so much a rant on neuroweapons, so much as a rant on what removing the soldier from combat could mean. It's almost 10, I should, you know, write my thesis. Or something.

How to deconstruct almost anything

"My Postmodern Adventure" by Chip Morningstar.

This is a brilliantly funny essay, for computer geeks and non-computer geeks alike. Also particularly amusing for postmodernists!

http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html

More scaremongering on cyber-terrorism

Watch out everyone, any second now we could all crash and burn due to massive cyber terrorist attacks which might paralyse our entire existence blah blah oh please, this really is the biggest amount of stupid stirring scaremongering...

Today's bandwagon jumper is the SMH with Tom Allard panicking about "cybergeddon" as the dust continues to stir around McClelland's snooping on employees without their knowledge or consent law.

The practitioners, both actual and potential, of cyber attacks are numerous. Nation states, whether acting alone or in alliance with "technopatriots" are using it for espionage and as a potential weapon for military actions.

Organised crime is also deeply involved. The threat of crashing a valuable computer network is a powerful tool for blackmail, as is the pilfering of commercially sensitive information. Commercial secrets can also be sold to rivals.

Come on guys. Any company worth its salt should have some sort of back up contingency plan. I'm sure the US NSA is hardly sitting on its butt wondering why they're losing sensitive information.

But the big problem I have here is just the whole article seems to want to back up the A-G's proposed law, yet all the examples mentioned in the article are about people outside the company ... no, not employees! And if it is an employee it's more likely to be through some sort of horrid virus that's turned their computer into part of a bot net.

Companies need to stop pointing fingers at other people to try to deal with the threat of cyber terrorism. It's like building a safe deposit room without hanging any doors and then trying to foist the protection of it off onto the police. It's just stupid. Companies and governments need to take responsibility for the information that's available on networks that are hooked up to the internet. They need to take responsibility to set up secure networks that are continuously monitored and updated to the latest threats. It'll take a few bad experiences I'm sure but eventually people will cotton on to the notion that cyber-security is your own responsibility, and noone else's -- it's just too risky.

Freedom Of Speech And Body Image

Reading daily papers, as is my want, I wandered into this article, and thought that perchance some might find it interesting.

Those pesky French are developing a law that bans websites from promoting extreme thinness. (see copy of article at the end .) I thought that this was an interesting case in that raises issues of the normative aspects of communication, i.e. annorexia websites, but more importantly, of legal measures being put in place to prevent or restrict such normative affects.
That our sense of self is affected by society around us is probably no major controversy. That laws can be put in place to mediate these affects is quite a different kettle of fish. Should freedom of speech be restricted in support of vulnerable peoples? Is an annorexia website or a photo in a fashion magazine covered by a right to freedom of speech? Are these laws another slide down the slope of the state restricting our access to the internet, and is that a bad thing? etc etc etc

From The Age:
French law to block anorexia websites

Paris, April 17, 2008

IN IMAGE-CONSCIOUS France, it may soon be a crime to glamorise the ultra-thin. New legislation aims crack down on websites that advise anorexics how to starve — and could be used to hit fashion industry heavyweights, too.

The French parliament's lower house has adopted the groundbreaking bill that would make it illegal to incite extreme thinness.

It recommends fines of up to 45,000 euros ($A76,805) and three-year prison sentences for offenders. It next goes to the Senate in the coming weeks.

Fashion industry experts have said that, if passed, the law would be the strongest of its kind anywhere. And given France's longtime status as a fashion capital, it could send shock waves through the industry worldwide.

The anorexia-linked death of a Brazilian model in 2006 prompted efforts throughout the international fashion industry to address the health repercussions of using ultra-thin models.

The bill is short on specifics. Critics noted that it does not spell out who it is targeting or even define "extreme thinness". Doctors and psychologists welcomed the move, but said anorexia's link with media images remains hazy.

French politicians and fashion industry members signed a non-binding charter last week on promoting healthier body images. But the bill's author, conservative MP Valery Boyer, said this did not go far enough.

Her bill has focused attention on pro-anorexia websites that, for instance, give advice on how to eat an apple a day — and nothing else.

Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot said websites that encourage young girls to starve should not be protected by freedom of expression.

Ms Boyer said her proposed law would also enable a judge to sanction those responsible for a magazine photo of a model whose "thinness altered her health".

"That is the objective of this text," she said without specifying who might be prosecuted.

AP