Posts by Chris Waugh
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Hard News: Bishop Brian: It's worse than…, in reply to Sacha,
Chris, if you had seen the way they inserted their bigotry forcefully into politics during that time - including their infamous blackshirted march - you would understand the cynicism.
Fair enough (edit to make it clear: I understand the cynicism better now, thanks). I remember reading about that march and thinking it seemed pretty creepy, but relying on news reports means I miss a lot of the wider context. Which is one reason I keep lurking around here - but that's a whole other issue.
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Watched that Campbell Live video and I have to say full credit to Metiria Turei, she was the only politician who held her line and stuck to her principles.
Now, for those trying to draw links between the Salvation Army and Destiny Church, can I just say, as a 6th generation Sally (although somewhat lapsed and not practicing for quite a few years) that for all your arguments about homosexual law reform (which I support - just to keep that clear), I can raise you many more stories of what the army got wrong. But that's not the point.
The Sallies are a charity providing social services. They are bound by legislation governing charities and the services they provide. They do have to meet the requirements of the government agencies they work with. If they do not meet those requirements, they do suffer the consequences.
I am not going to compare the Sallies with Destiny Church, as Destiny has emerged as I have been in China and the only information I have comes from what I have seen online. I will only say that writing them off as 'Density' is not helpful. Meet them, talk to them, walk in their shoes, and then decide whether or not you can pass judgement.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to recordari,
I don’t know about god (no really, I don’t), but I think this proves beyond all reasonable doubt that hell exists.
Oh, Hell exists, alright (note the name of the railway station). Nice enough little town, I was there for a couple of hours all up - a brief stop on the way into Trondheim, another brief stop on the way back up north - nearly 11 years ago now. My two biggest memories - the iced tea was stacked next to the fridge, and the railway station had a sign I'm sure many find amusing:
"Hell: Gods Expedition"
I was told the 'Gods' is a deliberate spelling mistake, there should be a 't' in the Norwegian word for 'Goods', apparently, something like 'Godts'.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Islander,
Ah, thanks.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Islander,
Another matter: in the far South, we never called Pakeha – Pakeha. We called them takata-pora…
I take it 'takata' is cognate with 'tangata'? And 'pora' is 'foreign' or 'foreigner'?
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Incredibly well and very beautifully written.
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The beauty of my job is that so long as I show up for my classes and put in an honest effort, get translations done promptly, hand in grades at the end of the semester, and am generally available to help out with all the various admin, management, interpretation, and whatever other tasks the boss assigns me, nobody really cares where I work from or how I use my time. There is an office available for the use of the foreign teachers, but no requirement to be there.
But I am jealous of those who do have a space they can close off and claim as their own for work time. Translation requires a lot more of my concentration than the various other tasks I do. The office is ok for translation, but the constant coming and going and the ease with which people can intrude on my translation time looking for help with various other things gets a bit distracting. So work from home, right? A concept I love in principle. Trouble with rural Chinese family for working from home, though, is that they simply have no concept of personal space. All space is family space. Noboby gets their own room, there is no office. So on a couple of occasions I've had to get grumpy in a "shut up or bugger off and let me concentrate" kind of a way.
I do find I have to draw a sharp line between work space-time and not-work space-time for the maintenance of my own sanity. It's hard to maintain, though, when any time I'm awake and any space I happen to be in can be work space-time. So in the warmer months once I've managed to escape the classroom or office I will often sit in the garden with a book completely unrelated to anything work-like and quite resolutely distract myself. Very refreshing. It would be nice if Beijing's winters weren't so bitterly cold and I could do that year round.
I do find keeping to a schedule to be utterly essential. Having classes at fixed times is largely what keeps me functional during term time. Holidays are difficult, though.
I find the internet to be both tremendous help and terrible hindrance. It's a tremendous help in that there are so many resources that are so useful for translation (NO! Not Google misTranslate!) - and things like creative applications of features of things like Wikipedia, Baidu Baike and image searches that can be helpful in quite surprising ways. It's also very distracting. Sometimes that's good in that my brain is tying itself in knots over some particularly difficult phrase, and a few minutes allows my subconscious to untie the knots and get things flowing again, but it's so easy to dive down some rabbit hole and get lost chasing tangent upon tangent upon tangent...
I can certainly see how kids can help set a schedule, but the problem I have right now is that one month old babies follow their own rules. Oh, and if anybody has any good tricks for persuading her that her newfound talent for aiming her spewed up milk so that it hits everything but the cloth daddy put over his shoulder precisely to catch her spew, your help would be appreciated.
And after 11, coming up 12 years of this lifestyle I'm starting to think I'll never be able to do one of those jobs I've heard of that requires you to spend entire days in an office. That and my past trouble finding work in Aotearoa (New Zealand - entirely dependent on internation trade for its economic wellbeing, but, no, we don't need people skilled and experienced in foreign languages) leave me wondering if, when we return to NZ in a couple of years time, there'll be a big enough market in Auckland for a freelance Chinese-English translator and English teacher to feed his family... I don't see why not.
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Hard News: The file-sharing bill, in reply to jo kerr,
The problem for the government is that they have now taken responsibility for policing internet content and in doing so entered an impossible arms race.
Hmmm... The Chinese government is pretty good at that internet policing thing...
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Thank you, glennd and Matthew Poole, my questions have been cleared up. And that demonstrates the beauty of PAS.
So if use of a VPN is going to force an ISP to work very hard to track down the illegal downloaders (and clearly its already hard enough even without a VPN), and VPN use is so common among, for example, China-based expats who want to keep up with the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, that it seems clear the technical barriers to using a VPN are very low (like, if you can use a credit card and perhaps download and install a bit of software, you're good to go), what's to stop internet users in NZ using VPNs to continue on as per usual?
Then how do they resolve the difference in geographical and virtual location? Could somebody given an infringement notice then say, "Well, no, my body may have been in NZ, but because I was online in China/Chile/Britain/generally somewhere else, you'll have to sue me under their laws"?
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See, this is one of those discussions that I, as an expat lurker, really love about PAS, because the collective intelligence that gathers here adds serious content to the reports I read in the Herald or Stuff (see that other thread... )
I believe the first question from my non-lawyerly mind is answered, and this does seem to be a presumption of guilt thing. The next question for you lawyerly types is: Is this presumption of guilt really allowed under NZ's constitutional law? Is the presumption of innocence and the onus of proof being placed on the prosecution embedded deeply enough in our constitution for this law to be thrown out by the courts? Is that even possible in the NZ system?
And for the technical types: I have heard of a Firefox add-on that is a proxy or VPN that puts you virtually within the Great Firewall of China. I have had no reason to try it being within the GFW myself, but I have heard of its existence. Everybody I mention this to says, "Why the hell would you want that?" because everbody I know wants out of the GFW so we can read all that unharmonious stuff you lot outside the GFW have easy access to, but the point is this: China's IPR enforcement is a tad on the lax side, and being within the GFW allows one to take full advantage of Baidu MP3 searches (for the time being... their current legal troubles may change that) or watch anything posted to Youku, Ku6, or Tudou, when those of you outside the GFW may well receive messages to the effect of "You lot in IPR respecting jurisdictions are shit out of luck with those kinds of searches. Go and pay for it" when you search for whatever the latest TV/pop music sensation may be.
I've never quite managed to figure out how these things work, as there are physical cables that bring the physical signals bearing the information I want physically into the PRC... but if I can put myself virtually outside China and others can put themselves virtually inside China, each to take advantage of the particular advantages the virtual location offers, how is it that ISPs are expected to match the particular streams of electrons or photons flowing through the pipes with the IP addresses, which I presume are of a virtual rather than geographical nature?
Those who know the technical side seem to think this law unworkable enough. How much more unworkable does it get when we throw such things as VPNs into the mix?