Posts by Finn Higgins
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Michael, that's my point - I'm not telling you to trust rumours from anybody, I'm suggesting that in the absence of evidence one shouldn't pre-judge either party to be guilty of anything, or assume them incapable. You can't change your position depending on whether the accusations are being made by the police or against them.
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Innocent until proven guilty.
Quite right. But we do have a process for establishing innocence or guilt, so I'm fairly keen on letting that process run in the absence of any public proof of wrongdoing on either side.
For the most part the public response has been fairly measured, but I think that "string 'em up!" talk on either side - whether directed at the police or the accused - merely reflects existing prejudices.
Unfortunately there's a lot of people accusing the police of all kinds of things that are far from substantially proven, while simultaneously poo-pooing the (suppressed, but seemingly at least somewhat substantial) police evidence against the accused.
Yes, it's a fact that the police can sometimes act in a concerted way to attempt to find evidence supporting a prior conclusion. You can't assume a police charge to equate to guilt, which is why we have courts.
But arguing that police misconduct should be assumed in any particular case is a bit dodgy - this is again an allegation, and it has to be proven before it can be taken as fact. Ironically, attempting to accuse the police of this kind of politically-motivated prosecution without substantial evidence would leave you arguing a position not dissimilar to the one Clint Rickards has been taking.
Oh, and Kowhai - I will ask for more specifics for you.
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kowhai, there was a fairly sizable manhunt on last week for Wellington's headlines-for-a-day escaped axe murderer which I'm fairly sure is what johnno is referring to. But I have an ex-cop at a desk next to me here, and asking him he's pretty much said the same thing - he has recollections of near-identical operations around Levin during the 1990s when dealing with offenders believed to be armed and dangerous: roadblocks, locking down an entire small township, armed police in black, photographs of vehicle occupants etc.
Oh, and Michael - reporting somebody's assessment of the strength of police evidence is not the same as reporting that (suppressed) evidence - it's like the difference between somebody who's seen a pre-release screener of a film saying "It's crap" versus them actually giving you a copy of the film to watch yourself. Johnno's point is an interesting one, and I valued what he had to say.
Nobody has to trust the veracity of what he's saying - this is the internet, after all - but it's an interesting thought experiment to consider the current situation from that perspective.
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Depends on your technical perspective. If you're writing code so you're the only guy who understands it, it's all good. If you're teaching yourself Maori it's also good. If you want Pakeha code review, it probably doesn't help much. Except in one thing - everyone will always know 'who wrote THAT piece of code???'.
I'm generally of the opinion that it's a bad idea to write code (for paid work, at least) that is only intended to be understood by you. It increases the likely ongoing expenses and risks involved in owning the code for the client, and therefore decreases the value of you writing it.
(As for knowing who wrote a bit of code, that's what version control and comments are for, not weird variable names)
But with that said, in the context above it's fine. All the code is doing is obfuscating an email address anyway, so non-obvious names would be in line with the purpose of the code. And Maori is a cooler kind of cryptic naming than "j" and "k"...
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I'm always of the view that claiming your IT manager to be an internet security whiz is something of an open invitation for anybody that way inclined to try some SQL injection into the contact form. Security is something you do, not claim to do...
Just on a novelty note:
var ingoa = "office";
var paewhakaata = "kingstrat.co.nz";
...I don't think I've ever seen variable names in Maori before. Not a very good practice from a technical perspective but interesting to see.
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I'm pretty much over the whole self-pitying anti-Police leftist thing.
Seemingly the Indymedia crowd are too this morning, now they're drifting into asian migrant bashing instead... Oh Indymedia, you're so progressive!
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I was wondering where the Churchill quote would go & I think a comparison with Churchill as Clark and Ghandi as Iti could be done as a question of home rule applies to both.
Are you making a concerted effort to make each and every post more fatuous than the last, or does it just come naturally? What on earth would be gained from such a comparison other than a realisation that the situations are totally unrelated?
Tame Iti as Ghandi? He's even further from being Ghandi than he is from being Michael Collins...
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Well the UK went for over a thousand years (up to about 1840) with no organised police force.
And was a delightful paradise, where the workers lived in happy equality free of imposition of force from moneyed elites...
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Michael, your posts could be described as many things but "objective" is certainly not one of them. I wouldn't get into that argument were I you.
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tussock, do you have any evidence for the chronology you're asserting as fact? Or are you just leaping to conclusions? Or to put it less charitably, making stuff up?