Posts by Stephen Judd
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Those bizarre pants - really, aren't they jodhpurs?
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"So is this our OJ Simpson trial?"
I don't think so. Public consensus seems to be that OJ did do it. My initial, gut reaction, was that in the Kahui case defence made Macsyne King look pretty suspicious. And I think a lot of people think that.
"In both instances, the public comment seems to be overwhelmingly running against the verdicts."
Is that really true? I confess I haven't been following commentary elsewhere, but I'm surprised to hear that. I thought this was one of the more convincing acquittals of recent times.
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Our justice system depends on the police doing their jobs properly. When they don't, people walk free.
No, the police can do their jobs properly and still the defendant walks free. Unless "properly" means "without any human error", in which case, we wouldn't need trials.
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In Germany, the model for our MMP system, one reason the threshold is set at 5% is to make it hard for extremists to get in. Another is that people lost faith in the Weimar republic because of the succession of unstable governments that arose from strict proportionality with no threshold.
Now you might say "tough shit about stability - if governments can't do much, who cares?" Well, someone up-thread mentioned Israel as a country with a similar electoral system but a lower threshold, and again, stable government in Israel is hard. In order to achieve some ability to govern, large parties let small extremist parties hold the government to ransom, resulting in very extreme policies in some areas that almost no one wants.
When you look at the range of parties and people we have in our Parliament now, it's not too bad. Certainly a great deal better than in FPP countries. 5% seems like a modest and sensible compromise to me.
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feminism still largely blames men for everything
I thought, and I could be corrected, that actual feminism, unlike your straw-feminism, blames a thing called "patriarchy", and it's perfectly possible, not to mention depressingly common, for women to be agents of the patriarchy almost as much as men are.
I'm sure that if I had a huge business exploiting class of person X, I could find a few members of class X willing to front for the business in return for money and privileges. (And then I'd hold those front X-es up as examples of how free from exploitation class X was).
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What about nutrition, daleaway? My understanding is that there is a fixed amount of stored fat you have to have for menarche. Once a girl has reached that amount, then periods will start.
If children are bigger younger (not necessarily fatter, just being proportionately larger would do the trick) then menarche is going to come earlier and earlier.
The girls in my daughter's school were definitely showing signs of puberty faster than my peers were in the 70s, but they were also markedly taller and heavier on average too.
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you'd rather see a rabid jackal head up the Labour Party than Goff.
Where can I sign up for the Rabid Jackal?
I find Phil Goff's track record in Justice of readiness to toss my civil liberties aside quite worrying. He strikes me as a classic authoritarian. Goff's pandering stance (terror!) was a major factor in my not voting Labour in the last two elections and if he were to lead Labour I can't see myself coming back to the fold.
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I'd love 100MB up/down. That way I might finally get a deceny ping to US game servers....
What's the minimal latency from here to the US West Coast? Speed of light is about 3000000km/s, distance point to point is about 11000km, so I reckon it's going to be at least 60ms, even if it's fibre all the way, owing to the overhead of switching steps + the irreducible 30ms. (I believe fibre is even slower than that, refractive index etc....) More bandwidth is not going to help much; you need to crack on to changing the speed of light.
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Paul B: a couple of years ago I visited my sister in Long Island, NY, where Verizon (or Vonage? can't remember, started with V) was providing fibre to their house, with a rate of 50Mbps down, 10 up. I did a download to my laptop from a local Debian mirror and had the unusual experience of see the laptop's ethernet card max out. Web browsing was amazing - pages seemed to load in a snap. It made for a marvelous user experience. Their household had VOIP phones too. I would certainly like 50Mbps to my house. Dunno what I'd pay for it though... make me an offer.
The other day someone on the ProjectX blog was quoting a person from Trademe about download speed. They said that users seemed to have a pretty fixed mental budget for time they would spend on the site, so the faster they could browse, the more browsing they did before moving on. So there is a monetary incentive for content providers to try and get out of the bandwidth arms race: skinny pages = (more revenue generating page views + lower bandwidth costs) = profit.
As far as putting my money where my mouth is, I pay through the nose to get 4Mbps down/2 up from TelstraClear, which in my mind provides a minimally acceptable user experience for browsing and certainly beats the pants of ADSL when it comes to uploading content to Flickr, websites etc. I am unwilling to pay another $20 per month for 10Mbps, because I won't use the extra data allowance that comes with it. (Why oh why can't providers decouple bandwidth from data caps in their plans?)
If I could get the same or better bandwidth from another provider who weren't bastards about peering, and didn't have a broken proxy cache I would move in a heartbeat. (TC's cache keeps serving me stale pages from certain sites, I think it does the wrong thing with Etags and cache headers).
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Rita McCroskery is being exploited.
There is no reason to ask her what she thinks - it's not as though she has special expertise, or even anything new to say - other than to expose her pain yet again for the pleasure of the reader, and enable the reader to experience the thrill of vicarious condemnation once more.
Likewise, if there is any hope of turning Kuariki into a reformed citizen, is relentlessly pursuing him going to help or hurt that reformation?
This is a perfect example of why "tabloid" is a derogatory term.