Working Democracies, Working Activities

[tcpip]

In a working democracy, new and minority opinions can sometimes make an impact. Sometimes this isn't such a good thing; in Australia (due to some amazingly crap preference deals by the Labor Party) we ended up with Stephen Fielding who not only turned up to parliament when it was possible he had swine flu, but also tried to tell Al Gore that global warming wasn't real because mean temperatures over the last 15 years had not increased at the same rate as carbon content. In other instances, the effect however can be very good; such as the recent successes of the Swedish Pirate Party. As a working democracy develops there are bifurcations; in this comparison reactionary and radical, but because the latter have determined more appropriately what the middle ground should be in accord to technological changes their general success is more likely.

There have been some significant work changes in the past couple of days (nota bene: thanks to those who posted in the f-locked entry). The operations manager in the systems team has decided to take up a secondment role at VLSCI, a planned high-performance computing facility which will be one of the most powerful worldwide. Having spoken to the members of the staff I have decided to apply for vacant position that will result. On a related work-issue, spent yesterday at Deakin University's Waurn Ponds Campus in Geelong; somewhat isolated, the place had all the characteristics of a high-tech research institution in serene and beautiful surrounds. Purpose for the visit was to teach bioinformatics post-graduate students how to use Linux and scientific computing on our clusters. Class was very well received with the main complaint being that they wanted more. Afterwards had a late lunch with Christophe Lefèvre.

Comments

[enrobso.livejournal.com]

I would wish you the best of luck on the work related matter, but I don't think luck should be involved in such things, so instead I'll say that I hope your abilities are recognised.

I was out in the Waurn Ponds area myself last week and I was struck by how much less isolated Deakin's campus is becoming as Geelong inexorably expands Westward.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

*nods* The suburban sprawl was on the edge of the campus grounds. But those grounds themselves are very extensive and the campus buildings are set quite far back from the entrances.

Luck is not often a factor in such things, I agree - except perhaps a person who is supportive/against) getting sick and not being able to sit on the selection committee. Whether my talents - and commitment - is recognised however is certainly, as you say, something I have to show.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I posted this on libertarianism, but I suppose I could also jot it down here.

I tend to feel the basic tactical problem with the Swedish Pirate Party is that it's a single-issue party. It's incredibly unclear what it has to say on practically every other hot topic on the table, which in turn suggests that everything aside from its particular bailiwick is either going to be completely random, or (in the European parliament) will follow the Green party line. Voting for them in European elections, for the most part, can thus be almost indistinguishable from simply voting Green.

Let's assume for a moment the Pirates get into the Swedish parliament, and want to do something other than shout and flail their arms. They'll naturally want to get into government. But you need two things to do that -- the numbers to make a difference, and something to offer the other parties. At first glance it would seem that a party without a platform would be a fine partner, because they might be expected to yield in most issues, those presumably being unimportant to them. It's doubtful that would happen in practice, legislators being people, and people tending to have opinions about things. So in reality the Pirate Party in its current incarnation would just represent a wild card: a shamble of opinions nobody can anticipate.

Add to this that the absolute only thing that they are interested in is unlikely to gather too many plaudits from either the SAP or the four Alliance for Sweden parties, what you have there right now is a party extremely likely to be excluded into the opposition for all time, bar some sort of internal reform that will make it fall in line with the tastes of the major parties. (And specifically the SAP.)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I think there is cause for optimism for the SPP, even as a single issue party for a number of reasons. Firstly, there is the relative importance of information technology issues to the economy. Secondly, some of the concepts employed in that debate can be transferred to other issues (I doubt, for example that the SPP is a particular fan of tariffs on imports for obvious reasons). Finally, the conceptual framework which SPP members operate with is also transferable e.g., notions like locally autonomous networks with communication protocols., legal frameworks based on object-orientated modularity, abstraction, inheritance, and polymorphism., avoidance of race conditions and sanity checks on legal codes - and so forth.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

If they want to get anywhere they'll have to tell that to the public and to the other parties. Voters can't afford to speculate. I just don't see them being much more than a topic of public debate in the national elections unless they formulate a general political programme of some persuasion.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

OK, you've got me inspired. I'm going to write up some material and bounce around the ideas with the Pirate Party of Australia and other like minded individuals. There is, of course, the material from the Electronic Frontier Foundation from the last decade that might be helpful too.

[lardarsegreg.livejournal.com]

That class (and especially your reaction) reminds me of a scene from Oliver Twist.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Heheh.. "More? You want more?!"

It went well.. Before the class started we asked for a head count on who had used Linux and the command line. A couple of nervous hands were half-raised; keep in mind these were science postgraduate students.

By the end of the class they had logged in, copied a file from the desktop to the cluster, edited it on the cluster, copied it back, created a directory, moved the file, used find to locate the file, grep to search it and then delete the directory. Then they loaded a module, submitted a job and - with x-forwarding - viewed the graphic results on their desktop machines.

A good result for their first exposure!

[lardarsegreg.livejournal.com]

Worryingly, I know grep but not find. Anything I should know?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

'Find' is a file searcher, an alternative to 'locate'.


Examples here: http://linux.about.com/od/commands/a/blcmdl1_findx.htm