John Howard asks "Am I the Problem?"

No John you aren't, it's your government.

Like all political parties that have been in government for too long they look tired, stale and have long since run out of ideas. Last year John Howard looked invincible but if the Liberal party gets desperate about it's prospects for the next election John Howard will be stabbed in the back by his own party, just like Margaret Thatcher was (after a similar length of time as prime minister).

He's stayed on too long and will not go out on a high note (just about every politician that achieves high office makes this mistake). Perhaps John Howard should have done a Bob Carr or Steve Bracks (former premiers of New South Wales and Victoria respectively) and announce, out of the blue, that he's resigning and handover to Peter Costello (who seems to think he's entitled to the job.) But it's too late for that.

Enoch Powell warned "All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs." He was right.

Windows Networking

Can windows computers be networked together or is it just one of those Internet myths?

I once tried to get my desktop and laptop to talk to each other. I spent hours googling, turning off fire walls, trying to follow threads on forums with conflicting advice, following steps on troubleshooting guides, using diagnostic utilities and trying to find out what the error and warning messages actually mean. All to no avail.

I even contacted Microsoft and was surprised to get a response.

In the end I bought a plug in memory stick to transfer files between my computers, they actually work.

I did eventually manage to get my laptop and desktop to talk to each other, I could even print from the laptop using the desktop's printer. But, somewhere along the line either I've inadvertently changed my network settings or installed something that did so now I'm back to square one. I'm not going through the trauma of trying to get the computers to talk to each other again.

By the way I have a FreeBSD server which I run under VMware on my desktop. I can actually log into that server from my laptop across the network but can I see my desktop Windows machine from my laptop? Well, not really. I can see the desktop in the 'Computers Near Me' window, sometimes. I used to be able to browse the desktop from the laptop by using the desktop's ip address. That doesn't work anymore.

So now I'm back to sneaker networking. That works.

Atheism and Freedom

During the past year there has been quite a backlash against religion. I'm thinking here in particular about Richard Dawkins' book 'The God Delusion' and Christopher Hitchens' book 'God is not Great'.

I've been an atheist for most of my life. And as an an atheist I'm free, free of fear (of God, fairies, Flying Spaghetti Monster or any other made up deity) and free to think for myself. I have no need waste my time attending pointless ceremonies to venerate a supernatural creator. I don't have to take the unexplained 'on faith'. I have no fear that I'll be subject to unending torture because I might have missed some pointless ceremony or been judged to have fallen short of a standard of behaviour that just about nobody will ever achieve.

Religion has been and still is used to keep people in line. There's not really much difference between Religious states, Communist states and other fascist states. The fact that Communist countries are 'godless' or atheistic is irrelevant. The object of the fascist state is pursuit of the power to control people's lives not the pursuit of atheism or religion for their own sake.

Am I a moral person? I like to think so. I obey man made laws. I like to think I treat people decently but that's not because of some 'faith' but because I'm a human who's brain has evolved this innate behaviour and whose behaviour has been learnt from his parents, teachers and peers.

Finally as an atheist I don't think that my lack of belief in a supernatural creator should be forced on anybody or that I should be able to 'prove' that a supernatural creator doesn't exist. I would ask those who think that atheists should be able to prove that God doesn't exist to prove that the Invisible Pink Unicorn or the Flying Spaghetti Monster don't exist, I'm sure they wouldn't believe such ridiculous notions.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_spagetti_monster and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Pink_Unicorn