Dear Forest...I should have KNOWN that your extreme attention to detail in the genealogies :) would be symptomatic of something... now I know what it is... aiks.. mate.. bless you and all...BUT...

can you try the 'HEADLINE' and subtext method ? I simply feel weary even looking at all that part 1 to infinity there.. try to put your thoughts into READABLE bites mate..... condense condense condense... u know.."Locationx3" thats what it's all about..

I have to disagree on principle with Ginx though :) I think ur quite smart.

Time continues to dilate!

A screenshot taken of a newly refreshed page of the OLO article discussion index at 1649 Mon 10 Sep 2007 showed the 15th post to the thread of Andrew Murray's article "Direct democracy comes to Australia" ( http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/index-articles.asp ) with a red posting recency flag reading "62 minutes ago".

A subsequent screenshot, also of the newly refreshed article discussion index at 1659 Mon 10 Sep 2007, ten minutes later, still showed 15 posts to the discussion, but the post recency flag was now black and reading "2 hours ago".

This means the red flagging was removed around 50 minutes BEFORE IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN.

The first screenshot showed the 13th post to the thread of "The hidden assaults" with a red posting recency flag reading "104 minutes ago". The subsequent screenshot showed the 13th post to "The hidden assaults" with a black posting recency flag reading "2 hours ago". The red flagging on this thread was also removed early, but only to the extent of around 16 minutes before time.

Different threads, and/or different posters, are being given differential treatment, but there seems to be no apparent rhyme or reason to the extent of early removal of the red flagging between different posts.

Even Einstein may have been confused!

What on earth is going on?

Oh, and something I have wanted to be able to say, but have never had the words for: Hi, Ginx! Woof! Woof, woof!

Now perhaps I am looking at all this differential post recency flag falling the wrong way.

Could it be that, perhaps unbeknown to OLO, the site's software has been so written or cracked that it is possible for a sort of panel of post adjudicators to be sitting, somewhere outside of OLO (perhaps in the groves of taxpayer funded academe), and effectively rating posts for potential destructiveness of governmental impropriety? The rating being delivered in accordance with the number of minutes early that the flag falls.

Why didn't I see that earlier?

Why didn't I imagine a sort of panel of Dickos, with perhaps the odd Fat Controller or two, looking at how close to the bone some comments might be getting? I mean, if you just let posts run on their merits, golly, whole droves of hack journalists might be rendered even more useless than they may already be. Talk about Australia idle!

Yesterday, Wednesday 12 September, saw the continuation of early red flag falls.

A post to the article comments on "Direct Democracy comes to Australia" made at 11:32:27 AM was shown in a screenshot of a newly refreshed page to have had the post recency flag change to the black "2 hours ago" reading by 1:11 PM by my computer time. This means the red flag was down at least 20 minutes early; just exactly how much earlier I can't be sure.

In another instance, a post to the topic "Flight 93 ......" in the General Discussion area was red flagged at "51 minutes ago" when by my computer's time it was 5:42 PM. A subsequent screenshot taken at 6:31 PM showed that post as having been made "2 hours ago". Only 44 minutes had elapsed between screenshots. "Flight 93 ...." should at that point have been reading, in red, "95 minutes ago". Its flag had gone down at least 25 minutes early.

Why cant the flags be tied to the posting timestamp? The posting limit warnings clearly are.

Until the next anomaly, cheers.

The States of the Nation: A Parable for Our Time - Part 7

The week ending Saturday 15 September was one for the books in at least one of the Original States of the Indissoluble Federal Commonwealth, wasn't it!

St Peter of Queensland, Earl of Traveston, Lord of all the Rings, and Count of the First (and Second) Water, pulled the plug!

Who would have thought?

It was astounding to see how little the Public Purveyors of Lies had to say about it all. But Peter did leave behind the Bee-Attie-Tudes on OLO, which he had inspired. See:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=884#15532

No doubt all will come out in the wash. The real reasons behind the sudden departure, that is. Certainly it would appear as if daggett of OLO had had a substantial hand in it. In the moment of its happening, however, it was almost as if Joh had reached out from the grave and delivered a ghostly tap on the shoulder to one who so clearly aspired to be like him, effectively saying "Its time".

Wonder why the ghost of the old bible-bashing bastard was so convincing?

Before his demise, Joh had come to understand about censuses. (You could read about censuses, and the things that accompanied them, in the Bible, if you wanted to: there were at least three referred to, two under David, and one under Augustus. All involved the taking of names. But I digress.)

Joh's discomforters had recollected that names of Ozzies had commenced to be collected with the censuses in the Kingdom of Oz some time in the 1970s. They also recollected that by no later than 1989, the "census walks" had been brought into correspondence with the "habitation review walks" of the Electoral Commission (or maybe it was vice versa). They noted that the Census was a potentially good source of names for the Keepers of the Books of Names to keep. For a start, there was Felix the Cat. You know, the one that got out of the bag!

TBC

The States of the Nation: A Parable for Our Time - Part 8

Joh's discomforters remembered that back in 1991, a year which, quite apart from being numerically palindromic was also a census year, there had been a bit of a hoo ha over something that had been done by a TV/radio shock jock called the Human Headline, one Derryn Hinch.

A short piece of reportage contained within the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald made mention of a claim that Hinch, who at that time appeared on Channel 7, had bum-drummed the public with respect to the address to which persons not comfortable with the confidentiality of information on their census forms in the hands of census collectors could post their forms. As a consequence, so the Herald article claimed, something of the order of 200,000 census returns had been delivered to a wrong address. An un-named spokesperson for the ABS was quoted as saying that those who had followed Hinch's advice had in fact placed the confidentiality of the information in their returns at greater risk through posting them in, rather than returning them to a census collector.

That same year, 1991, at around the same time of the year, also saw the inadvertent release, in digital format, of the entire collection of electoral rolls containing all the confidential entry information in relation to electors normally privy only to the AEC, to political parties. Then Australian Democrat Senator Karin Sowada blew the whistle on this little inadvertency in Parliament. Everyone had to give the confidential digital roll information back. Of course, no copies would have been made beforehand, would there! That would have kept the bastards all honest, wouldn't it?

Should it have ever come about that information, the source of which could only ever have been from confidential census forms, was to have been detected in an electoral roll information context, a good explanation existed to explain the leakage: all those returns delivered to a wrong address!

There was only one problem: the Herald story was a beat-up.

TBC

The 29th post to this topic was posted at 8:02:21 AM on Saturday 15 September 2007. A screenshot taken 11 minutes later also showed the 37th post to the topic "Is there a god?" had been posted 19 minutes before.

A subsequent screenshot taken at 9:16 AM by my computer's time (there is a two to three minute difference between my time and OLO time, mine being behind) showed the 37th post still being the last to the topic "Is there a god?" but having had the red post recency flagging taken down and displaying in black "2 hours ago".

The two screenshots were taken 63 minutes apart. When the first was taken the 37th post to "Is there a god?" had already been posted for 19 minutes. 19+63=82. When the second screenshot was taken, the 37th post to "Is there a god?" should have been displaying in red "82 minutes ago". The red flag had fallen at least around 38 minutes earlier than it should.

A screenshot taken at 9:54 AM showed the red post recency flag on the 29th post to the topic "Subtle OLO censorship? ...." standing at "113 minutes ago", giving every indication that the red flagging was operating as it should for this poster/thread, red still showing with only seven minutes still to go to the two hour mark.

The last screenshot, taken at 9:59 AM, showed the 29th post to "Subtle OLO censorship? ...." as having been made "2 hours ago", which, with the slight time difference between my computer and the OLO clock taken into account, was as it should have been. The same screenshot showed the 37th post displaying a post recency flag of "3 hours ago". Only 125 minutes had elapsed since the 37th post had been posted, but it was now displaying "3 hours ago", seemingly implying that in fact the red flag had fallen 55 minutes earlier than it should have, rather than the "at least 38 minutes earlier" previously deduced.

Happy debugging!