Politics

Who else is sick of Malaysian politics?

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Just adding a link to an editorial in WauBebas.org that I agree with wholeheartedly. I don’t think there’s any need for me to summarize what’s been happening. All I want to add is that in my opinion, the failure is much more on the part of the Pakatan Rakyat than on the Barisan Nasional. The BN is a known quantity. Sleaze on their part at least is expected. The PR however had a chance to make a real difference following the General Elections of 2008 but flubbed badly. Instead of settling down in the constituencies that they did win and trying to do a good job at running them, proving in the process that the PR is indeed capable of governing, under Anwar Ibrahim they’ve been obsessed with winning power at all levels everywhere.

Well, that’s backfired badly on them, and the tit-for-tat attacks and grandstanding have only made Malaysian politics that much dirtier. The PR should have been patient instead and trusted that if they’ve demonstrated their competence and maturity, the Malaysian voters would justly reward them at the next GE. As it stands now, what they’ve done is shown that they’re really just as messed up as the BN. As Wan Saiful Wan Jan wrote:

With so many opposition MPs in the federal parliament and the various state legislative assemblies, Malaysian politicians had a golden opportunity to strengthen the role of the Opposition. But no one seems interested in pursuing this agenda. Opposition parties at the state level, from both the National Front and the People’s Coalition have failed to organise themselves accordingly. Most cannot even form a functioning state shadow cabinet.

It is the same case at Federal level. In the eyes of the public, Anwar’s People’s Coalition, has been focusing more on luring National Front MPs to defect. They continue to fail to form a cohesive shadow cabinet. At times, statements made by People’s Coalition MPs have been at odds with each other, even though they are on the same team.

At the same time, it’s become clearer that the global economic recession isn’t abating anytime soon. Instead of constructively engaging with the public about what’s happening and what the government should be doing to weather the bad economic times, our newspaper headlines are instead filled with sex scandals, who has the right to stay in the official Menteri Besar’s residence in Perak state and whether or not there’s an assassin running around trying to kill the Chief Minister of Penang. It makes for lurid reading to be sure, but it’s not what we should all be really talking about.

Personal Life

A word of warning about Facebook

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In case anyone’s interested, here’s a low-down on a controversy that’s been simmering over the Terms of Service (ToS) of the popular social networking tool Facebook. This started on Sunday when a post on The Consumerist publicized a change in Facebook’s ToS that most people have overlooked. According to The Consumerist:

Facebook’s terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.

Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg subsequently offered an explanation on Tuesday, saying that the change merely reflected a “fundamental reality” of how services like Facebook work. Basically he claims that Facebook is worried that if a user who has uploaded content subsequently closes his or her account, that content would still be available to the other Facebook users that the original content owner shared the content with. This change in ToS therefore serves to protect Facebook in case of legal claims from users who close their account but are unhappy that their previously uploaded content might be in the hands of other people.

A blog, Razzed, then rebutted Zuckerberg, arguing that Facebook could have used legal language similar to those of e-mail companies who only act as intermediaries to transmit content from one user to another without needing to claim any legal rights over that content at all. According to this view, Zuckerberg’s assurance that Facebook won’t do anything with its users’ content against their will amounts to an empty promise without any legal backing behind it.

My own view: the vast majority of users on sites on Facebook probably don’t care about what happens to their content once it’s uploaded. As the saying goes, once you upload something onto the net, there’s no way of taking it back. Since they don’t have any way of monetizing the content that they upload, the legal status of ownership claims over that content shouldn’t matter to them either. However, those who do have a way of monetizing their intellectual property, or plan to do so sometime in the future, should probably think carefully before trying to popularize their stuff on Facebook. This could include people like artists, musicians, writers, photographers and software programmers etc. It’s likely that uploading their stuff will be harmless for them too, but you probably don’t want to leave this to chance.

Games

Space Rangers 2 AAR Part 3

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Lots of combat in my ongoing Space Rangers 2 game from 3307 to 3312. I’d finally managed to join a proper military operation to liberate a system in the game, but while it was success, taught me to pay attention to which system is actually being liberated. You see, these operations start by docking with the military base organizing the expedition. When you agree to join in, you’re placed in suspended animation until the date and time of the attack, and then the entire base warps into the target system held by the Dominators. Then everyone undocks from the station and proceeds to kick Dominator ass.

The battle itself went well enough, as by that point I’d upgraded to a great combat ship with max weapons slots and a special +15 to shields, which means any incoming damage is reduced by a further 15% in addition to the base defense of my shield generator. I did need to redock with the station for repairs once, but overall, destroying all of the Dominators garrisoning the system was fairly easy, and I happily hopped over to one of populated planets to be properly congratulated and feted.

Continue reading Space Rangers 2 AAR Part 3 →

Religion

Maker of “Fitna” film denied entry into UK

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Remember the post I made a while back about the short film Fitna made by Dutch MP Geert Wilders? In that post, I condemned that film for its amateurish over-simplification of the facts around Islam and pointed out that it’s just as easy to find nasty stuff written for a more barbaric time from the Christian Bible. This time around though, I find myself having to defend him because I do think that this is a free speech issue and hateful as his message is, he has a right to express his views.

As far as I can tell, the British government basically offers two basic justifications for denying Wilders entry into the UK:

  1. Free speech does not extend to shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre and Wilders’ message amounts to that.
  2. Allowing Wilders to enter the UK and express his views would threaten the public security of the country.

To the first justification, I retort that Wilders’ message in no way resembles shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre. One of the defining characteristics of the crowded theatre scenario is that it compels people to take immediate action. There is no such immediacy here and all parties will have plenty of time to reflect upon Wilders’ message before making any decisions or taking any action. Furthermore, freedom of speech is curtailed in the crowded theatre scenario only if the speaker is falsely shouting “fire”. If the theatre actually is on fire, the speaker does have the right to shout “fire”. This means that the authorities must actually prove that Wilders is making a statement that is factually incorrect to deny him freedom of speech.

The second justification basically amounts to caving in to potential terrorist threats. The line of thought seems to be that if the UK allows Wilders in to spread his message, it would make the UK a higher priority target for terrorist attacks than it already is. That’s a pretty sad position for a democracy to take. The responsibility for any attacks made by terrorists lies only on the terrorists. As abhorrent as Wilders’ message is, as far as I know, he has never advocated any violent action against Muslims. All that he has done is to try to change the laws of the Netherlands to better respond to what he sees as a threat to his country.

I happen to disagree with his assessment but from my point of view, he has done nothing that would justify depriving him of his rights. The correct response to someone like Wilders is not to prevent him from speaking. It is to ignore what he says. By making a big fuss of Wilders’ attempts to speak in the UK, the British government has simply played into his hand and given him what he really wanted all along: more publicity than he deserves.

News & Politics

Rethinking savings

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I’ve been meaning to make this post for a few days now, but work prevented me from finding the time to do it. It also feels particularly funny to write a post like this on a day when the banks in Malaysia have announced cutting interest rates and penalties for credit card holders to reduce their debt. (For the record, reducing these charges only encourages accumulating more debt, but then again, the government is probably thinking that increasing consumption, even if it has to be fueled by increasing debt, is a good thing in a depressed economy.)

My subject today is savings. Now, traditionally, people think of savings as an unalloyed good. That’s the whole point of the parable of the ant and the grasshopper after all. However, one thing that people don’t usually think about is that ultimately savings equal capital, as in the capital of capitalism. This is because unlike the ant storing its food for winter, nowadays, we don’t save money by stuffing cash under the pillow. At the very least, we put it the bank and expect the bank to pay us interest for the privilege of safeguarding our money for us. For those who aren’t risk adverse, there’s no end to the array of possible investments your friendly financial planner is willing to sell to you.

Continue reading Rethinking savings →

Games

Space Rangers 2 AAR Part 2

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Just a quick update on my Space Rangers 2 game from the year 3303 to 3306. As I noted in my previous post, I’ve been meaning to get more involved in combat, and this I did. Combat in this game isn’t terribly involved. Each ship has a limited number of weapons slots, from 1 to 6, and basically the more weapons you mount, the more firepower your ship can muster. Your accuracy and mobility skills make a big difference of course, and your defensive options including armour which blocks a fixed amount of damage and shields which block a percentage of all damage, but in actual play, it’s a simple matter of choosing a target and shooting it until either one of you dies or someone runs away.

This process is prolonged by the fact than any combatants can always dock at a friendly planet or base to make repairs. This means that very often, actually destroying an enemy can involve chasing it down, shooting it until it’s smoking at which point it’ll run to get repaired and you’ll need to wait until it takes off again. Repeat until you destroy the enemy or it runs out of money for repairs.

Continue reading Space Rangers 2 AAR Part 2 →

Fun

Giant Spider attacks Liverpool

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I’ve been terribly busy at work lately and don’t the time to write any lengthy posts. In the meantime, here’s a photo of a giant spider attacking Liverpool. In reality, it’s a giant robot spider created by a French group called La Machine as a giant piece of street theatre. As this article notes, using public funds in this way in these depressed economic times is sort of questionable, but then again public funds have rarely been used to make something more spectacular than this. Check out the original article for tons of good photos.

The unexamined life is a life not worth living