Y’want salt rubbed in that ?

A small exhibit at the MoB of political cartoons by Sean Leahy.

There’s a lot of wit, and some impressive drawing skills, the highlight for me were a few pages from his scrapbook.

I was very disappointed with the size of the exhibit.

Talking with Terrorists

There’s been a lot of heat generated by a South Australian senate hopeful requesting that Australia sit down with the alleged JI head and talk peace, apparently talking to murderers is just not the done thing.

Except that it has been done before, with numerous terror organisations, like the IRA, the Tamul Tigers, the Palestinians, the ETA, not all with great success, but the point is that it was OK to talk to those terrorist organisations, but not the current crop?

Although it’s a bit of a stretch to call the Solomon Island militiamen terrorists, they’re still murderers, and we were talking to them.

Prosecute the premeditated murderers of innocent people to the full extent of the law, but don’t lose the possibility of persuading those contemplating these barbaric acts from doing so.

Python Pam is off.

There’s one package to do PAM stuff in Python, PyPam. Upstream is in a deplorable state, only working with python 1.5. The Debian maintainer has kept it up to date with Python, but for some reason patches haven’t been sent upstream.

So blah, the easy way of doing intranet authentication is to attempt authentication against the IMAP server, which is actually supported by Python.

The Corporation

So I was led to believe this film was interesting and worth watching, by someone who shall remain nameless.

The first third or so of this film was interesting and thought provoking, it had a simple formula and it was basically working towards it, with interesting interviews and commentary.

Somewhere about a third of the way through it goes off the tracks and we’re talking about IBM being Hitler’s right hand man (the book has been out for at least five years, don’t waste my time, I’ve already read it), anti-trade protests (I hate preaching to the choir, films are meant to make us think), spineless governments (we *are* in a democracy, if the democracy is weak, you’ve only yourself to blame) and communism (eh?).

It was good to see the fact mentioned several times that consumers still actually have the ultimate power.

See the first hour, then walk out.

Zatoichi

A fun, energetic patchwork of a film. The musical interludes were well done. The script joined the different threads of the story in a very seamless way.

The computer graphics of the fight scenes (this *is* a Samurai movie after all) were a bit dodgy.

It did feel overly long at several points, feeling like it should have ended at the previous scene.

Patent law reforms needed to boost biotech: ALRC

Interesting stuff: Australian Law Reform Commission media release

Sourced from Government media Releases which is strangely empty of attacks on Labor given that the campaign is now official..