Category Archives: Physical

Airliner shootdowns ought to be technically impossible

Using missile to shoot down an airliner ought to be made impossible.  It may be a lack of imagination on my part, but I can’t think of a circumstance where a military force needs the ability to shoot down civilian aircraft.  There aren’t a lot of manufacturers of surface-to-air missile systems, regardless of their level of sophistication and range – shoulder launched or vehicle-mounted – so changing those designs to prevent civilian shootdowns ought not be a big deal. Admittedly there are many more means of bringing down aircraft beyond SAMs, but not a lot of them have the reach to bring down cruising airliners.

Civilian airliners have carried IFF transponders since World War II, so there’s the infrastructure in place already for the identification of non-military aircraft.  Furthermore, it’s a violation of Article 37 1.c of the Geneva Conventions to pretend you’re a civilian – that is, it’s a war crime with all the international condemnation that goes with that, so it’s reasonable to make weapons that refuse to down aircraft that identify themselves as civilian.

So, why is this still happening?

Tap and Go causes crime: duh

Ken Lay says that in the last year in Victoria, 11500 extra crimes caused by Tap and Go cards have meant that the crime rate in Victoria has gone up (5%) rather than down.  These additional “crimes of deception” and are apparently tying up police.

It’s slack. Totally slack. There’s no control over it. And what are we finding? There’s been a huge spike in different offences committed to facilitate it; cars being broken into, mail stolen, handbags grabbed, purely because of industry introducing a new practice without any regard to security.

We have taken the view we should be taking on industry over this because our concern is they’ve introduced new practices with no regard to the implications on security and there’s no prevention measures, which is at times bogging down our members in work and time that could be better spent on some really serious type of investigations or responding to critical issues.

Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana

And the ABA says “no ways!” and says that dollar value of fraud is down since chip-in-card (neglecting that this isn’t about that) but allowing that losses following theft are up 35% (to only $20m/year).  And ignores all the crime that would be associated with obtaining the cards.

Australian electoral fraud

An undamaged security cable tie

If the security cable tie isn’t pulled tight engaging the teeth, it can be pulled right off. If it was secured, it would have been damaged while being removed (with scissors).

I did scrutineering at the last Victorian state election, and apart from the shocking level of informal voting and above-the-line voting, there was another shock.

Electoral fraud – or the possibility of it.

The nice thing about living in Australia is that we take our democracy seriously, and we balance being able to prove that what the outcome was with ballot secrecy. Nobody, no level of government or industry, no individual, will know how you voted without you telling them. Yet at the same time we can have confidence that our electoral system is not being rorted; our governments change back and forth, and each time it does representatives of both sides keep a close watch on the activities of the employees of the AEC and VEC, eyeballing each individual vote and knowing that they are all distinctly different from the others in spite of being a collection of handwritten marks on a slip of paper.

To minimize the risks of ballot box tampering, at the start of voting the ballot boxes (just big cardboard boxes here in Australia) are sealed shut with serialized cable-ties. An independent somebody witnesses this when an Electoral Commission employee does this (typically the first voters who wandered into the polling station), and their details are recorded (by details, I think that means signature, but it could be actually enough to track the person down afterwards) and they sign the form that records the sealing of those particular ballot boxes.

So how come they use cable ties that can be “done up” and yet the teeth don’t engage – thus leading to an unsealed ballot box? Is it too much to ask for a cable tie with teeth on both sides?

I should have kicked up a fuss, but it was a safe booth in a safe seat, and who needs the hassle?

Anyways, the reason I relate this story is that I’ve been seeing comments along the lines of “this is the 21st century, why they hell are we using pencil and paper?”  Because, dickwads, computers don’t leave a fucking audit trail.  There’s no scrutineering of electrons.  How the hell are you meant to verify that Clive Palmer didn’t in fact get 98% of the vote?  You can’t.  Interesting that Clive Palmer owns the company that supplied all of the (suspiciously cheap) voting machines to the AEC, but that hasn’t got anything to do with it. And the cost! Pencils are 10c each, paper is about a cent a sheet.  A shitty computer is $500, and requires a bunch of electricity. “Do it on the Internet, or use smart phones!” I hear you say. No, because while nearly everyone can move a pencil around, significantly fewer can use their computer to vote. And there’s no connection between how you voted, and the counting of votes. The announced result could be anything, and there’d be absolutely no way of proving it wrong.  So, yes, computers are shiny and clearly the best way of implementing a voting system, if you want an electoral system you can’t actually trust.

Flooding with water

So, looking at properties, and a number are down on the floodplain near the local moving body of water, a river/creek.  I wonder to myself if the area is at any risk from floodwater; should I even bother looking at the area?

The council, being the government body most connected to the area, ought to know.  It doesn’t; it can’t tell me except to tell me if a specific property has a flood-overlay, which says that modelling has determined that it is at risk of a 1 in 100 year flood.

What is the 1 in 100 year flood event?

The 1 in 100 year flood event is the storm that happens on
average once every one hundred years (or a 1% chance of
occurring in any given year).

Now, that means in any given year there’s a 99% chance you’re not going to get flooded.  In 100 years, that means a 0.99100 or a 36.6% chance of not getting flooded. A 2/3 chance of having water washing through your home at some point there.  Basically, that’s a guarantee that in the next century your home will be damper than normal – because the 1 in 100 year events are calculated off historic data, not forward climate models.  And the forward models say that things are only going to get more extreme; have you noticed how 1 in 100 year events seem to happen to the same place every decade or so?

In fact, pretty much anyone you talk to – water utilities for example – will only talk about 1 in 100 events. Vital government infrastructure (stuff that has to keep operating the event of a flood disaster, like hospitals and my home) has to be above the 1 in 500 line. From what I’m told, they calculate this on a site-by-site basis rather than having a map (they’re not building a bunch of new hospitals, so it’s easier that way).  Sites aren’t rated as being 1 in 110 year, you’re either in the 100 year box or not rated at all.

The gist of what I was able to read into the subtext of the hints being passed in my conversation with a town planner specializing in flooding was: Floodplains get flooded, even in cities, even if there’s a wetlands further upriver that could absorb a sudden influx of water, even if the sides of the creek are quite steep and the channel is surprisingly broad, and even if there are barricades; If you don’t like that, don’t live there.

So I won’t.  It makes searching for a home so much easier, even if the homes out of the floodplain are more expensive and built on those annoyingly sloped hill things.

Actually, this reminds me of the 1972 Elizabeth St Floods my Mum told me about getting caught in. I would never have guessed a major street in our CBD could turn into a river – and then it happened again in 2010.