V for Vegas posted:

Wang is the pinyin spelling of the character 王 (Emperor). It is pronounced 'wong' in Chinese and the Chinese do not really have a sound that matches the hard, nasal Australian 'wang'.

Penny Wong's last name is 黃 which is Huang in pinyin.

Mr Chips posted:

Except that the Shanghai ranking doesn't seem to look at teaching at all, and it's only 30% on the THE rankings (even then it's just a survey on perception of prestige, ffs). Anything that includes education is going to favour small universities like Cal Tech which only admit high achieving students, so Australian unis will struggle due to their relatively large and generalist student populations.

Some rankings also include metrics like 'research $$$ won', which means that a fluctuation in exchange rates can substantially affect a whole country's standing, despite little actual difference in research quality.

ewe2 posted:

Right, so just remember Wang/Huang is pronounced like Aung San Suu Kyi. Pinyin isn't the fix-all it promised to be I guess, but at least it's better than Wade-Giles. It's so irritating to keep seeing Wade-Giles especially from Taiwanese writers - I'm reading a rather good ebook on Guan-yin, spelt variously Kwan-yin or Kuan-yin/Kuan-shih-yin, and it's Wade-Giles and I give up trying to pronounce any of it.

MC Eating Disorder posted:

Anyway if you're like most Australians who find out they're 1/8th aboriginal or whatever your reaction is more likely to be 'sweet I can get those abbo benefits now' followed by impotent rage at Centrelink and accusations of some conspiracy against white people so it's not like a magic empathy ticket for indigenous Australians or anything

I, Butthole posted:

More likely Pyne doesn't want a soundbite of him saying "wang" out there on the internet. He knows what we do.

Gough Suppressant posted:

There's no way in hell Pyne is that self aware

V for Vegas posted:

Got any of that Sing-tao beer?

Looks like Hockey might get up on some of the defamation points. One of Fairfax's best defences was that you can't just look at the headline 'treasurer for sale', but you have to read the entire article which gives context. But, Hockey is also suing that the advertising boards out the front of newsagents with the headline only is a separate 'publication' and contains no such context.

Smegmatron posted:

The best outcome is that the herald loses and sets the precedent that the poster board headlines are highly actionable publications and the daily telegraph immediately goes out of business under the weight of twelve billion defamation claims.

ewe2 posted:

V for Vegas posted:

Wang is the pinyin spelling of the character 王 (Emperor). It is pronounced 'wong' in Chinese and the Chinese do not really have a sound that matches the hard, nasal Australian 'wang'.

JosephWongKS posted:

The other way around, actually. 王 (Emperor) is pronounced "wang" in Putonghua / Mandarin Chinese / 普通話 (i.e. the official language of PRC and Taiwan), and Putonghua / Mandarin Chinese / 普通話 does not have a sound that matches "wong". For the sake of clarity, in this case the "wang" is pronounced as "wah-ng" and not "when-ng".

However, 王 is pronounced as "Wong" in Cantonese (i.e. the dialect spoken in Guangdong).

Endman posted:

The funniest thing about sandstone universities is that UTAS is one of those.

dordreff posted:

But has it changed your views on cyanide suppositories?

Goffer posted:

Question about metadata - is it possible to set up an application or plugin that will spam/touch websites, send emails to ministers, etc to overload/fill up databases? It would be really nice to have a backup 'gently caress you' option when it passes. Sort of like a digital protest down Swanston st bringing everything to a stop.

ISP's could probably just cancel an account when something like that happens for too long though

Graic Gabtar posted:

wot

JosephWongKS posted:

The other way around, actually. 王 (Emperor) is pronounced "wang" in Putonghua / Mandarin Chinese / 普通話 (i.e. the official language of PRC and Taiwan), and Putonghua / Mandarin Chinese / 普通話 does not have a sound that matches "wong". For the sake of clarity, in this case the "wang" is pronounced as "wah-ng" and not "when-ng".

However, 王 is pronounced as "Wong" in Cantonese (i.e. the dialect spoken in Guangdong).

V for Vegas posted:

I think this is going to turn on whether the imputations were conveyed. If they weren't, then game over for Hockey. If they were, I don't think the QP defence will stand up. Not because of maliciousness (which is a very high bar of itself) but that you really have to show you did everything possible to clear the story first. That's where the comment by White J that the email to Hockey's staff didn't contain 'the sting' of the article was quite telling. That was a nod to the fact he may be considering Fairfax fell short of the QP requirements.

Goffer posted:

Question about metadata - is it possible to set up an application or plugin that will spam/touch websites, send emails to ministers, etc to overload/fill up databases? It would be really nice to have a backup 'gently caress you' option when it passes. Sort of like a digital protest down Swanston st bringing everything to a stop.

ISP's could probably just cancel an account when something like that happens for too long though

quote:

If your first instinct upon hearing about the Rudd-Conroy plan to censor the internet is to email Stephen Conroy, your local member and Labor senators from your state to protest, wait up.

Or, in fact, do it anyway, then read this.

Let me explain some facts about writing to ministers, drawn from my sordid, blood-soaked and adventure-filled time as a public servant.

For a start, understand that few ministers if any read their correspondence. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s that it’s not humanly possible to read even a fraction of the amount of emails, faxes and letters they get. So the chances of you directly influencing a Minister with your particularly brilliant insight into the issue are zip. Deal with it. Things don’t work like that.

Their staff will read correspondence, but only when considering a reply prepared by their Department.

And that is only a small proportion of the actual volume of correspondence received. Some is answered directly by bureaucrats. But much of it is simply binned. Don’t waste your time sending off a letter pre-prepared by some enthusiastic online advocacy group, where you sign at the bottom, endorsing the nicely-phrased sentiments at the top. They’re called “campaign” ministerials and are binned without being read or replied to (but please don’t tell the Friends of the ABC, who rely heavily on that technique, and haven’t had a letter to Canberra read for two decades).

Most non-campaign letters and emails - some departments still won’t reply to emails but demand your snail mail address, perhaps out of residual loyalty to Australia Post - are answered using what’s called “standard words” - a reply that ostensibly covers the issue raised but which normally says as little as possible. They say as little as possible because the mindset of bureaucrats and ministerial advisers is to keep as many options open as possible, except when there is a particular message that the Government wants to hammer.

Standard words are worked up by bureaucrats and edited and signed off by the Minister’s staff when they’re happy the words are risk-free or convey the desired message. In most departments, they are then loaded into electronic ministerial correspondence systems. This means a bureaucrat doesn’t even need to cut-and-paste into a Word document, merely tell the system to use a particular set of standard words under the name, address, salutation and opening paragraph, which have all been electronically entered already.

So if you send off an angry email or letter about net filtering, all you’ll likely get is an automatically-generated reply giving you the standard words on the issue. There’ll be minimal human involvement in the writing of it until it is stuffed into an envelope and dispatched.

You may not think it’s very democratic or consultative, but it’s a drat sight more efficient than processing correspondence by hand.

But if you can’t have any impact on policy, you can have an impact on the level of resources used to answer your letter. And that resource is the time of bureaucrats - the same bureaucrats who advise Conroy on policy, and implement his decisions. In most Departments, ministerial replies have to be approved by SES Band 1 officers before being sent to the Minister’s office, which means many replies consume the precious time both of senior bureaucrats and ministerial advisers. Many Departments also have formal agreements with Ministers that a certain proportion of correspondence will be answered within a certain period of time. If they’re not, more people have to be put into answering correspondence.

So if you want to consume as much of the Department of Broadband’s time as possible, here’s what to do. There’s not much you can do to avoid receiving a standard reply. But you don’t have to confine your missive to net filtering. Throw in some other topics. That means someone will have to put together a reply using standard words from different areas, which is a lot more complicated and can’t be done automatically. Ask about the rollout of the National Broadband Network (NBN). That means someone in the NBN area has to provide some words. Ask about Telstra. That’s another area entirely that has to provide input. If there’s three or four topics in your letter, bureaucrats will start arguing to avoid having to be responsible for it. The NBN area will tell the net filtering area it’s their responsibility to collate the response. The net filtering area will try to off-load it to the Telstra area. A Band 1 in one area will make changes and the whole lot will have to be re-approved by a Band 1 in another area.

Throw in something on Australia Post. Ask about something obscure. They may not have standard words at all and someone will have to actually prepare a proper reply.

You see, once your letter stops being a standard rant about filtering and requires actual work, the amount of time taken to prepare a response can snowball dramatically.

You can also use the Government’s system for allocating correspondence. As a start, always write to your MP first, even if it’s a Coalition MP. They will send the letter to Conroy and ask for a response to provide to you. MPs - even Opposition MPs - must get a response no matter what, as part of the civilities of politics, and it normally has to come from the Minister himself. But write to other Ministers as well. Ask Kim Carr what the impact of filtering will be on Australia’s IT industry. Ask Jenny Macklin what impact she thinks it will have on families. Ask Robert McClelland what the penalties will be for breaches of the mandatory filtering requirements. And ask Kevin Rudd how a Government that understands the need to bring Australia’s online infrastructure into the 21st century wants to drag it back to the 19th when it comes to content regulation.

All of those letters will have to go from the recipient’s department to Conroy’s Department for a response, then back to the originating Department, where they might add some additional material of their own. If you come up with a particularly complicated issue, the bureaucrats might start disagreeing with each other. Innovation bureaucrats might think Broadband’s net filter standard words doesn’t quite answer your question and want something else.

And don’t ask the same questions in different letters, otherwise they’ll bin them and tell you they understand you’ve separately written to your MP/another Minister/Kevin Rudd and here’s your job lot reply. Ask different questions and raise different issues.

And be pleasant. Apart from anything else, if there’s too much abuse in a letter, it gets thrown out (quite rightly). But these are decent, hard-working bureaucrats and regardless of what you think of Stephen Conroy, they deserve civility and respect.

Most of all, get your friends, acquaintances, family members, work colleagues, passing strangers, all writing. The bureaucratic capacity to handle ministerial correspondence is a lot like the net filters trialled earlier this year. At low levels of traffic they work OK, but once the traffic picks up, things start to choke up. That’s when Stephen Conroy and his office might start to notice that things are slowing down.

TheHeadSage posted:

Sending emails to ministers is a good idea, but everything else is a bad idea. All the metadata is going to be stored with the ISPs anyway, so you're really doing nothing but driving up the cost of your own internet bill as ISPs purchase more storage in order to store your poo poo.

Goffer posted:

Yeah I guess they're going to make ISPs pay for it then it's not really hitting them where it hurts.

Goffer posted:

Question about metadata - is it possible to set up an application or plugin that will spam/touch websites, send emails to ministers, etc to overload/fill up databases? It would be really nice to have a backup 'gently caress you' option when it passes. Sort of like a digital protest down Swanston st bringing everything to a stop.

ISP's could probably just cancel an account when something like that happens for too long though

Mr Chips posted:

Vagueness of the requirement aside, another lovely thing about collecting this IP address logs as metadata is it lack of precision and inability to expose intent, which lends itself to abuse. Things like "an ISP account in your name was used to contact a server hosting kiddie porn" is something that metadata can be used to imply, even though you were not actually accessing the material in question. Never mind that the data itself will not be santised, so they'll be collecting all sorts of erroneous info.

Cartoon posted:

The problem is that the vagueness can be 'tightened' by Ministerial decree and only once the regulation has been gazetted does the senate have the opportunity to strike it down. This is some of the worst legislation ever put before an Australian parliament.

Kommando posted:

Brisbane Breakfast Meet with a Minister.

Seriously, I want some suggestions of where you people are happy to go. Since I live in the Stafford electorate, anywhere is close to me and I have a car.

Those goons without cars and personal transport options, where is easy for you to get to because if you want to attend, you have to be able to get there.

Who wants to come, how many do I book, where and when.

All my saturdays are free and I wake up early anyway.

Mithranderp posted:

a single web host can host a multitude of different sites from a different IP, right?

Mr Chips posted:

Yes, multiple domain names can point to the same IP address. Just to make things more interesting, a domain name can also point to multiple IP addressess. And then there are CDNs that further muddy the water. Might just be easier for Aussie content hosts to shift their operations to NZ / Singapore than try and operate here.

This legislation may impose on web hosting providers a requirement to log all incoming access requests. It's hard to tell, of course, as every potentially affected business has to submit a plan for capturing the data to the AGD for approval. Of course, there's SFA info out there on what an appropriate plan looks like, and I suspect there will be a huge backlog as thousands of ISPs, hosting providers and comms providers have to submit their plans.

gently caress, will mail server admins have to record metadata for every single piece of spam their users receive?

Kommando posted:

Brisbane Breakfast Meet with a Minister.

Seriously, I want some suggestions of where you people are happy to go. Since I live in the Stafford electorate, anywhere is close to me and I have a car.

Those goons without cars and personal transport options, where is easy for you to get to because if you want to attend, you have to be able to get there.

Who wants to come, how many do I book, where and when.

All my saturdays are free and I wake up early anyway.