Posts by Stephen Judd
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Apropos vetting museum function room bookings: is it really that hard? I bet 99% of bookings are obviously innocuous corporate gigs, social functions, and the like, which would require minimal labour to approve. The odd case like Gage would be well worth taking a few days to consider in order to protect the reputation of the institution and the mental health of the community.
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Steve B: on the war thing, if you were faking up a casus belli, wouldn't you, minimally, try and make it point to the right country? And how does Silverstein's insurance payout provide evidence of anything? Apparently when your house gets burned down Steve, that will make you an arsonist. Or perhaps not -- I'm just asking the question.
This is just bullshit, frankly.
PS: I just looked at the "information liberation" site. What a nest of kookery. If I read there that the sky was blue, I'd look outside to check. If you take the dreck there seriously, what won't you believe?
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I thought Craig wanted to avoid saying "... a better woman than I am" because life is hard enough without becoming an inadvertent transsexual as well.
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No look, you said that ISPs profit significantly "from this traffic", which I assume means illicit sharing of copyright files. That is an assertion which very much requires evidence. I do not think you can simply point to their charging policies and infer that illicit files give them a significant profit. Certainly heavy usage is not profitable to them -- that is why they go to great lengths to discourage it. So I draw the opposite inference to you.
Incidentally, I believe that telcos quite deliberately price broad-band at discouraging levels to slow uptake, because they pay a lot upfront to provision it and only make a profit slowly. So they absolutely don't want lots of people signing on with low margin deals -- much better to have fewer people and charge them more. Broadband isn't the big profit centre people think it is.
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ISPs don't profit significantly, as far as I know. In fact ISPs everywhere try to limit your consumption because of the cost of provisioning bandwidth, and in particularly, they try to limit use of file-sharing technologies* where they can identify that traffic, because the few users who use them all the time consume most of the bandwidth.
*Note that they can identify file-sharing traffic fairly easily, but not which files are being shared.
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In my experience "I'm just asking questions" is a classic conspiracy theory ploy. The person who says that generally just doesn't like the accepted answers, and is counting on the audience being ignorant of them or the evidence that supports them.
I did not hear the interview, but based on what Giovanni writes here, I'm annoyed Gage was lent the credibility of appearing on National Radio at all. Now he can say he's lectured at Te Papa and been interviewed on National Radio and seem just that bit more serious.
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To be credible, voting must be heavily non-trivial to rig.
That's one requirement. Another problem (for me, at least) is that ordinary people ought to be able to verify the legitimacy of the count. With electronic systems, even if they are cryptographically sound, it comes down to competing experts saying "trust us" or "don't trust them." Whereas any crew of reasonable common sense can count papers. I prefer a slower process that everyone can have faith in to an electronic one that can only be assessed by a very few people, no matter how efficient the electronic process is.
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Andre: Poe's Law.
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Thanks philip. NZETC was having a meltdown earlier this AM -- I almost wondered whether people were hitting it too hard trying to get that link you posted.
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Be interesting to learn more about that incident, see if it's similar.
The little I could find Googling before breakfast suggested that text Sorrenson wrote for the 1966 Te Ara encyclopedia of New Zealand entry about native land tenure had been used, unattributed.