Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: After Len, in reply to Mark Graham,
Debt out of control
As Bernard Hickey has said on RNZ more than once, most households would be thrilled to have a mortgage of only double income.
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Hard News: After Len, in reply to James Littlewood*,
But one thing strikes me as odd: Len's council equalised rates before equalising services. This seems to undermine the logic of amalgamation.
What Russell said. The law - Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Act 2010 - only provided for a three-year window to normalise rates across Megatropolis, opening 1/7/2012 and closing 30/6/2015. The Council's only choice was whether to stage the normalisation or to do it as a single big change in a single year.
It wasn't "Len's council" that did it, it was Hide and his mates in central government who wrote and passed the law. -
Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Why leap over there just as the TPP was announced
Quite possibly because the visit schedule was laid down several months ago? You know, just to point out the bloody obvious. Heads-of-government don't just trot off to visit active conflict zones on a whim. Even a fortnight ago nobody knew that the TPP was going to be concluded over this weekend just been. Hell, a week ago it wasn't known.
And it has been in the planning since at least June.Sometimes coincidental timing is a genuine coincidence.
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Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to Ross Francis,
What are the chances of Philip Morris winning? They have already lost Round 1 in the Australian courts. “Clearly, the High Court has decided that there hasn’t been an acquisition of property and so the claims by the tobacco industry that Governments are seizing its property are simply untrue.”
I was just yesterday morning reading an analysis (that I now cannot find!) about the case vis TRIPS (I hadn't realised that Australia is also being subjected to WTO claims for breaching TRIPS), and one key point is that Australia's trademark legislation does not just guarantee mark-holders a right to exclude it also guarantees them a right to use. Which is a problem. My reading of our trademark law suggests we could well have the same problem as we have the same language: (paraphrased) "the owner of a registered trade mark has an exclusive right to use the mark."
However, and hopefully the Edge or Andrew Geddis can weigh in, that could also be spun as a right only to exclusive presentation, not a right to derive benefit.
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Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Have I missed something, then?
No you haven’t – unless I have too. I can find nothing in that document that supports retroactive removal from PD.
I'm another one who cannot derive BoingBoing's interpretation from the source document cited.
Pulling stuff back out of the public domain would be hugely problematic, starting with the question of who's got copyright on previously-legitimate "unauthorised" derivative works made once PD applied. No matter how rapacious the negotiators may be, they are also not utterly ignorant as to the concept of downstream consequences. -
Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to Russell Brown,
It's a real shame the blunt instrument of a 70-year term has got through
But, hey, at least Eleanor Catton's(notional) great-grandchildren* will finally get to make derivative copies of The Luminaries without recourse to the rights-holder!
Remember: it's death-plus-70 years, not just 70 years.* assuming average lifespans all round, of course.
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Legal Beagle: Crowdsourcing Project Cortex, in reply to Bill Eaton,
My thought was that it pointed to quite a lot of non-spooky stuff to do.
Yeah, it does, but Cortex doesn't really fit into the NZISM framework because NZISM is aimed at all the things that happen to bits that are not on the public intertubes. Once it's out in the wild NZISM only applies inasmuch as it sets rules on what can be sent through public networks, and what encryption is required.
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Legal Beagle: Crowdsourcing Project Cortex, in reply to Bill Eaton,
I don’t plan on reading the entire NZISM but it looks perfectly genuine.
NZISM, unless it's changed significantly from the last time I looked at it, is the set of rules that apply to the establishment and operation of computer systems within government vis information security. Things like "you shall not connect computers that access classified information to networks that handle information of a lower level of classification, unless there is a one-way traffic device to prevent leakage from the higher level to the lower level" (paraphrased).
It's not some secret set of instructions about doing spooky stuff, it's a public-record document that tells public-sector IT managers the rules. It's quite boring, to be quite blunt, and certainly not at all revelatory about "sources and methods" or otherwise illuminating about getting hooked up to this Cortex system. -
Speaker: The government's Rules…, in reply to chris,
I wonder if Matthew may have misconstrued my posts to mean I support Paula Bennett’s proposed deregulation of certification processes.
You were very ambiguous in your message, and your implication that everyone should be monitoring what their builders are doing was open to the interpretation that if everyone did just that we would be fine in the face of still more deregulation.
Guess what: if the notional house that I ever get to build gets built, I will still not be inclined to learn enough to be confident in my capability to supervise the builder. And I shouldn’t be expected to.ETA: I was not arguing against making the information more available. From what you describe there is a significant information vacuum. But that does not mean I think that caveat emptor should apply to the multitudes who lack some combination of the time, the inclination, the mental capacity or the physical capacity to become as deeply involved in the process of construction as do you. And you definitely come across as implying that anyone who doesn’t get that deeply involved deserves whatever they’ve got coming.
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Speaker: The government's Rules…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
We need a system that works, not the one we have now, it was working fine until National interfered with it back in the 90s.
That system involved real apprenticeships and strict regulation. We’ve had neither for three decades.
And you're welcome :)