The introduction of that law in 1991 didn’t actually reduce deaths, so what’s the point? There’s more to it of course, and that site does a good job of gathering the info.
Helmet Freedom – about Australia’s mandatory bicycle helmet law
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Ubuntu 11.04 on an old Dell Inspiron 8500
Phoebe’s EeePC 4G still works fine after 3 years, now running Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick – but the screen is just way too small. Apart from local apps, quite a few sites such as ABC4Kids have Flash games that require at least 1024×768. So, time to try something new, preferably without spending any money…
I have an old laptop I don’t use any more, a heavy Dell Inspiron 8500 which has a 15″ ultra-high resolution screen: max 1920×1200. At that resolution the pixels are ridiculously small so I toned it down even beyond 1680×1050 to 1440×900.
Installing Ubuntu 11.04 Natty on it was fairly straightforward, but even from the LiveCD the screen looked distinctly messy with vertical lines in various spots, and after a while the screen would lock up:
[drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0 GPU lockup - switching to software fbcon.The proprietary NVIDIA drivers make even more of a mess, but the older free nv drivers work fine. To make them work, you need to -apart from installing them- make sure the nouveau drivers definitely don’t get loaded.
- sudo vim /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-graphics-drivers.conf
- Press i (insert mode) and add this line: blacklist nouveau
- Press Esc, :wq <enter>
- sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-nv
- sudo reboot
If it all works you could do
- sudo apt-get remove –purge xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
Daylight Savings Time Explained – and Queensland
Coming from The Netherlands (Amsterdam is 52 degrees North) which has had daylight savings since 1940s, I didn’t consider it a fuss also having having it here.
The problem in South-East Queensland where I live is interacting with the Southern states in summer, both in person (cross-border trade like produce that needs to get to a market) as well as over phone. Essentially the SE-QLD people have to work for an extra hour in summer to accommodate.
The video below makes very good points though, even if some examples are US-centric. It covers a lot of ground and the analysis of the original reason (more daylight to reduce energy use from artificial light) is interesting: it makes sense if you spend most of your day outside. However, most of us don’t do that these days (sadly, but fact) so considering the common use of air-conditioning in our parts which actually increases our energy consumption, and the relative efficiency of modern lighting compared to the heaps of other energy-guzzling stuff… does it really make sense to have Daylight Savings?
I’m not so convinced now. To fix the practical problem, QLD might need to convince the other states to ditch DST… reduced energy consumption might be an interesting argument for NSW and perhaps SA, less so in VIC/ACT. Anyway it’s a completely different perspective, and I reckon it deserves some consideration.
Corporate Personhood
A few days ago I spotted a picture of a T-shirt (curious how that works these days) with the following phase:
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property.
Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person.
I believe that’s rather relevant, in many countries corporations are essentially regarded as people and have all kinds of rights that frequently get abused – this because a company is nothing like a person. The “free trade” agreements between countries provide sad but excellent examples of how corporate personhood goes wrong – I think free trade is a good idea, but right now it ends up only benefiting big corps to the detriment of everybody else including those who actually create/grow the value.
So about that phrase, I was kinda curious where it came from and it appears to originate from a study about 10 years ago by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), one resulting article suggesting to Abolish Corporate Personhood. Also see a timeline on personhood rights and powers.
There’s an insightful analysis in the article of how it all happened, as well as a review of the American constitution and its amendments in the context of people’s rights – the term democracy doesn’t appear, and the amendments merely deal with govt not being allowed to legislate against things, it does actually explicitly guarantee the freedoms that people often talk about. An interesting nuance.