slash.dotat.org is owned and operated by Mark Newton, who can
be reached as newton@atdot.dotat.org.
The slash.dotat.org webserver is prototypical at the moment. More
will be available here later. Trust me. Even though I've been saying that for
three years now, trust me.
The assertion that "all men are created equal" was of no practical use
in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the
Declaration not for that, but for future use.
-- Abraham Lincoln
Mark's links
I consider myself to be a free speech advocate, which is somewhat
interesting in Australia. Unlike our colleagues on the other side
of the pacific, Australia does not have a constitutional bill of
rights -- There is nothing in our constitution to guarantee freedom
of speech without interference from our governments.
Working under censorship is like being intimate with someone who
does not love you, with whom you want no intimacy, but who presses
himself in upon you. The censor is an intrusive reader, a reader
who forces his way into the intimacy of the writing transaction,
forces out the figure of the loved or courted reader, reads your
words in a disapproving and censorious fashion.
-- J. M. Coetzee
However, the High Court has found that the constitutional right
to elect governments implies a right to freedom of political
speech; The Victorian Government apparently assumes that that
right only exists until someone complains about it, though: Witness
the Rabelais
saga if you require evidence to back that statement up.
Online freedom of speech is perhaps my greatest passion. There is
a world-wide attack on the independence from interference which
allowed the Internet to prosper in the first place. Do-gooders all
over the planet believe that they have a better understanding of
what should or shouldn't be read and written than you or I do. As a civil libertarian,
I find these people highly obnoxious and unbelievably arrogant.
Their implicit message ("You're too stupid to decide what to read and
publish for yourself") should be offensive to everyone no matter
what they believe about this issue.
[ The censors will tell me that they're more concerned about what
other people read and say. In fact, they almost always talk
about the great unwashed masses of other people, even though
it's their own insecurities which they are attempting to censor. These
people refuse to believe that their position can be taken personally,
even though (from my position) it comes down to a question of what
they think I should or shouldn't be allowed to do. ]
In any case, below you'll find a collection of links to various civil
liberties organizations which you can peruse at your leisure.
You can also find my tretise on PICS,
the Platform for Internet Content Selection, here.
My submission to the Senate Select Committee on Information Technology
is here.
Less serious links:
- The Dilbert Zone
- slashdot (and yes, before you ask, I got my domain first)
- A friend of mine had a baby: Article here
- Miscellaneous pictures of various choir-related items from mid-1998
- My Beloved
- FreeBSD SysVR4 Emulation Project
- The notes from a talk I presented at the local LinuxSA group in July 1999, on the subject of FreeBSD for Linux Users.
- Source code for the presentation server which produced the notes at the link above.
- I bought a Digital Camera. The novelty hasn't worn off yet, so I'm snapping loads of pictures. Here's the output from a hike at Mount Lofty and a 30th Birthday Party I attended.
- I went on holidays over Easter, which provided more opportunities for
exercising my poorly-developed camera skills (poorly developed... camera skills... geddit? Huh, huh? Sigh). Pictures enclosed. I captioned them at 4 in the morning on July 2nd 2000 while I was pulling a 33 hour day at work thanks to some tax changes wrought by our oh-so-lovely Government, so perhaps they're slightly more sardonic than usual. But only slightly.
- My brother's Aussie F1 GP Photo Album
- Directions to the LinuxSA Installfest.
- Of course, those directions are obselete now, because the InstallFest has been and gone. Here's what it looked like when it was happening on Sat 15th July 2000.
- Peter Temple's Atmospheric Sounding (NEW! Now with National data!). Using data obtained from a weather balloon launched every few hours, these plots give glider pilots an indication of how high the thermals are going.
- What I do on my weekends: 1, 2, 3. (MPEG, 1.3 Mbytes each). You can do it too if you want.
- 2004 Flinders trip: Pik 20D Wave Flight (17 MBytes), Wilpena Pound South Face (17 Mbytes), Stemme S10-VT Wave Flight (28 Mbytes). They're all medium-quality Quicktime.
- Presentation notes from a talk at a LinuxSA meeting about Internode Nodemap.
- The Australian Aviation Security Quiz -- Find out exactly how safe you really are!
- Search this site.
Mark Newton, webmaster@dotat.org
