Senate IT Committee: System outage woes

The irony: Trying to get information about a bill about making the internet safe, from the Senate committee responsible for IT, and I keep getting server-side IT errors at the last step! And that wasn’t the only committee affected.  Hours and hours out of action…

Onto the litany of woes….

Yesterday (2007-05-26), I was trying to view a copy of the Inquiry into the Provisions for the Communications Legislation Amendment (Content Services) Bill 2007 by the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (Australia), because submissions are due on by the 28th, and I’d misplaced by other copy.

By the way, what are weird combination of topics for one committee!  Perhaps it’s so people (with a government arts grant) singing opera about climate change out in the bush, using a webcam in their mobile phone to broadcast it out to the internet can be totally covered by one committee… Go figure.

The aim of the bill is to make the internet and other services (such as mobile phones) safer for children so they do not accidentally come across noxious content.

Climate change may not be our worst problem

Worrying about carbon emissions in 2050 may be moot.  Other resource limits might have knocked us out before then, according to New Scientist 2007-05-26, "Earth audit", citing research from Tom Graedel at Yale, the US Geological Survey, and others.

Uranium for power generation?  We have somewhere between 20 and 60 years worth, assuming the population doesn’t grow.

So, we go solar power, or use fuel cells?  We use LCDs rather than old TV sets?  We have computers to control more efficient usage?  Right?  Wrong!  They need materials that are also running short.

Even if the figures are only half-right, even throwing in optimism about miracles from laboratories, the report makes for depressing reading.

Look at the birth notices in today’s paper.  By the time those kids are old enough to need their own laptop or phone with an LCD screen, you might not be able to buy one.

I’ve reworked the data into a table that is easier to read.  Along with details about the assumptions, I’ll raise some sticky issues about these figures that were not raised in the New Scientist report, and the follow up with a few implications that come to my (lay) mind.