Richard Stallman at UNSW

Stallman gave a two hour talk entitled, “The Dangers on Software Patents”. A more appropriate title would be “Software Patents are Evil and should be Eradicated”. Stallman’s a good speaker, and he makes an argument that most would agree with. Patenting of software ideas is not a good thing in general in terms of innovation, small businesses and so on. And it gets pretty ridiculous when something like Amazon’s “1-click” ordering can be patented. Of course, the illogic of the patenting system is the easy thing to point out. The far harder task is trying to phase out the system, and that’s a political process.

While the message was compelling, the messenger was, well, quite grating. During the Q&A session, Stallman would cut people off mid-question, yell out “No! No! No!” and do everything but give people a chance to have their say, no matter how wrong it may be. Also, branding patent lawyers as “parasites” is okay if you’re addressing a room full of computing science people, but not when half the audience are from the big law firms around. But hey, I know enough computing people to know that some of them can have quite quirky personalities. It’s just a pity that a lot of people were put off by Stallman’s “abrupt” personality.

  12:49am (GMT +10.00) tomorrow  •  Law  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (4)  • 

Before Sunset

Finally got around to seeing Before Sunset, the sequel to Before Sunrise. The basic premise is that in Before Sunrise, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meets with a Parisienne girl, Celine (Julie Delpy) on a transcontinental European train and, on a whim, spend a day together in Vienna. Without swapping any contact details at all, they both agree to meet back at a train station in six months, and then the film ends. Before Sunset is set nine years afterwards (it was also filmed nine years afterwards), and Jesse is in Paris – promoting a fiction book based on his tryst nine years ago, no less – when he meets up with Celine. This time, instead of 24 hours, they have about eighty minutes before Jesse has to be at the airport to catch his plane flight back to America.

At heart it’s a romance movie, but it’s one that perhaps needs an acquired taste. Essentially, the movie is 80 minutes of pure dialogue as Jesse and Celine take a stroll and a chat through Paris. The dialogue is a joy to listen to. Essentially it’s nothing special – it’s the sort of conversation that any two reasonably privileged westerners who are close friends would have. But Hawke and Delpy have an onscreen chemistry. Their conversation (Which they had a hand in scripting) flows, complete with umms and ahhs, pauses and silences. The topics covered are varied. Sometimes the transition between topics is smooth, sometimes abrupt. While sometimes the dialog feels a little too eloquent to be off-the-cuff, for the most part, it simply feels like a real conversation and not a movie conversation. Near the start of the movie, Jesse asks an everyday question along the lines of, “So what have you done in the past few years? What do you do now?” The reply is a genuine response – she gives a mundane description of her job, her studies and so on. Not every exchange is “magical” which I found appealingly realistic.

Also intriguing is observing how the characters have changed in the past nine years; just the little things. They both now smoke, Celine has changed her opinion on reincarnation, we learn about their different worldviews and so on. Of course, it’s the romance part of them that’s the most interesting. About halfway into the movie, we hear what we’ve been curious about all along: are they still single? No. Jesse is married and Celine has a boyfriend, and we suddenly find ourselves in a very Lost In Translation-type scenario.

The movie has an even more ambiguous ending than its prequel, but I did not find this lack of resolution a problem. For those that need closure, like my flatmate, who felt the lack of an ending was “stupid”, the film will no doubt make you feel dissatisfied. For me, I loved this movie. Watching it feels like catching up with a couple friends you haven’t seen for years, over coffee, except you don’t get to talk (and in this aspect, you’re basically an eavesdropper). If you think about it, listening in to strangers’ private conversations for long periods is something you just don’t do in everyday life. It’d get boring, not to mention a little perverse, after a while, but Hawke and Delpy aren’t really strangers to the audience, and they work so well together that the conversation is really entertaining to listen to. Highly recommended.

  8:20pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Movies  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (1)  • 

It’s a Nice, Warm Day

Temperature’s finally broken past the 30˚C mark and is currently hovering around 35˚C! Finally, back to t-shirt and shorts weather.

  1:26pm (GMT +10.00) tomorrow  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Election Blues

There are a great number of people suffering from post-election depression. I must say I was quite taken aback when, about 90 minutes into the tallying, it became clear not only that Labor had lost, but had lost in a landslide. Or, at only 38.2% of the primary vote, you could call it an avalanche. However, most troubling is the Coalition’s control of the Senate means that bills can now move through the legislative process pretty much unimpeded. So much for the advantages of a bicameral legislature. (Think: deregulation of cross-media ownership laws and what that will do to the independence of media. Scary.) The general disappointment was put very well by a friend: “Australians are selfish, concerned with their own lifestyles, their bloody mortgages and generally nothing else. It’s pathetic and I hope they get what’s coming to them… It’s small mindedness at its worst and it’s exactly what Howard has cultivated.” And another, who wrote:

It is sad that it appears that the electorate has only cared about economics and nothing else. It doesn’t matter that we invaded a country based on a lie, it doesn’t matter that our PM lies, it doesn’t matter how our international reputation has been eroded. What only matters is the short term economic welfare of the populace. The result suggests to me that Australians are becoming increasingly complacent, big headed about their standing in the world and more selfish.

It also didn’t help that everyone appears to have been successfully spooked (and misled) about interest rates. Of course, when they rise in the next few months, it will be of little significance. Australians are setting themselves up for a crash landing. People have forgotten what a recession is like, and there could be one just around the corner.

Nonetheless, the people have spoken. At least, if the economy crashes for some reason in the next few years (and hopefully it doesn’t), the Libs won’t be able to pin the blame on anyone else.

As for the other parties, about the only eventuation that was predictable was the utter destruction of the Democrats. It’s a good thing for them that only half the Senate went to re-election. Greens and Family First preferences also had a large impact.

  5:36pm (GMT +10.00) tomorrow  •  Law  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (18)  • 

The Election

Labor’s in trouble…

  7:24pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Miscellaneous  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (2)  • 

Just a Note

There is no Australian Labour Party. It’s the Australian Labor Party. The American form of spelling the word was adopted in 1912 due to the influence of the American labor movement and it was never changed.

  1:07pm (GMT +10.00) tomorrow  •  Miscellaneous  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Interviews All Over

Today was thankfully the last day of summer clerkship interviews for all those commercial law firms. It’s such a long and tiring process. Now begins the one week of waiting and nailbiting to see if anyone wants to employ me during the holidays.

Was told an entertaining story by a Partner I spoke to today. Some firms hold a cocktail party after the second round of interviews and before the offers are extended. Apparently, back in the day when he was applying for a clerkship, this girl, another prospective clerk, got absolutely shattered at the cocktail evening of one esteemed Sydney firm (the waiters kept topping up her wine and she just kept drinking). Eventually, she passed out on the couch in the reception area, and was so paralytic that she had to be carried downstairs into a taxi by a lady from the HR department. Of course, someone that drunk shouldn’t be left to the tender mercies of a cabbie, so the HR lady hopped in the cab and followed her home. Half-way there, the girl vomitted all over the HR lady.

The amazing thing is, the girl still got a job offer with the firm understanding that “these things happen”. Unfortunately, the story got leaked and her colleagues weren’t so nice, and every time she walked into a room, someone would make retching noises. She resigned six months later.

I met Ian Oi today, one of the lawyers leading the team drafting the Australian version of the Creative Commons licence. Really affable guy. That was a pretty cool experience!

  12:57am (GMT +10.00) tomorrow  •  Law  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Republic of Minerva

In the 1970s, a millionaire named Michael Oliver tried to build a new sovereign nation. Not a nation formed by a region declaring independence, but a completely new country. The location where the new country was to be built was in the Pacific Ocean, around the Minerva Reefs, hence the name of the nation being the Republic of Minerva. It was located near Tonga and Fiji. An island was constructed by shipping sand from Australia and dumping it on the reef, whereby a small island was slowly formed. The intention was to make an island which was a tourist destination, while also supporting some other light commercial activities. Minerva then created its own flag, currency and elected a President. It then attempted to declare independence, but as you might imagine, no one really took it seriously.

That is, no one except for Tonga, whose King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV was rather offended by whole incident. (The Prince of Tonga apparently said, “We can’t have people setting up empires on our doorstep”.) Although it seemed that legally no one actually owned the territory in which Minerva had sprang up in, Tonga took steps to extend its territorial sovereignty over Minerva.

In 1972, the King sailed to Minerva on his royal yacht, accompanied by some troops, a convict work detail, and a four-piece brass band, which played the Tongan national anthem as the convicts landed and tore down the Minervan flag. A little while later, the King built their own little islands nearby, named them, and then annexed those islands, and all territory within a 12 mile radius of them (including Minerva) as part of the Kingdom of Tonga.

About ten years later, a group of Americans tried to retake what used to be Minerva, but in came the Tongan troops, and three weeks later they were effectively ejected.

Last year, the Republic of Minerva has somehow been replaced by the Principality of Minerva, self-described as a “government-in-exile”. Minerva is relying on the legal concept of terra nullius (land owned by no one) to stake its territorial claim (this is the same concept used by the British when they claimed Australia, except that it is obvious today that Australia was not by any stretch of the imagination, terra nullius). Looks like Minerva wants to take its case to the ICJ. Pretty amusing, actually. As crackpot as the so-called Minervans may be, it does seem like Tonga did unfairly boot them off and conquer their island. But it’s so small no one really cares.

  12:40am (GMT +10.00) tomorrow  •  Culture  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  •