Posts by Matthew Poole
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In terms of what people in IT can do as a protest, is not possible to refuse to do IP address lookups to ID people? or to 'break' that system so nobody else can? Obviously you would want to check the details of your employment contract first, perhaps couch it as a work to rule?
Having been employed under the terms of several contracts for jobs that related to looking up IP addresses against login databases, I can safely say that many IT workers in NZ have a clause that states, roughly, "and perform any other such request as may be reasonable and legal in the circumstances." So "work to rule" won't fix it, because "rule" includes doing IP lookups.
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what do people, who rely on meds to continue everyday living, do in the (likely) event of disasters?
That's a very good question, and one that I worry about too (for myself as a chronic asthmatic, and for family and friends). I don't have the answer.
Speaking from my experience with the Fire Service, and noting that this is from Auckland but expecting that it's probably similar throughout the country, it goes kinda like this:
The DHBs have arrangements with St John for emergency supply of essential pharmaceuticals. Where it's not available at the scene (and, let's be realistic, other than insulin and nebulisers there's not much non-emergency care medication that they carry) it can be receipted from a hospital pharmacy and delivered by ambulance.
In the event of a localised (eg: suburb-or-smaller) emergency necessitating evacuation of residents, a person who can identify to the emergency services that they have a specific and immediate need, and prove their identity, will get access through these agreements. In the first instance, approach ambulance, fire or police (in that order) personnel and let them know. They can then get things started. Ideally the person will be able to get to a pharmacy, but if they've got nothing other than personal ID then the supply agreement will have to be utilised.
If there's a major emergency, a hospital is really the only option if ordinary methods of filling a prescription aren't possible. Again, ID will be necessary. Expect to wait. They will help, but between triage, management of patients, etc, it won't be quick. Nobody who's that dependent on medication should let themselves get below a 72-hour supply. 96 would be safer. "Expect to be on your own for up to three days" is the message from CDEM, so that's the guideline that should be followed when getting prescription refills. -
Just stop buying CDs for a month, don't go to the movies for a month.
Stick it to 'em where it hurts, in their greedy pockets.YFR!
They'll just blame it on "t3h p1rat3z!" and use it to justify demanding further draconian measures to protect their dying business model. It's an unfortunate situation that the ordinary measure available to consumers to express displeasure with a company/industry simply plays right into the hands of big media by giving them diminished sales figures to wave at the pollie tubbies as they seek new-and-improved copyright law to further-criminalise their erstwhile customers.Plus, unless the boycott is long-term, people just catch up their purchasing once the term is over. It's one of the big flaws in the "boycott petrol purchases for a day" theory for getting petrol prices down. People just defer the spending and the impact is negated. It needs to be a long-term, nation-wide boycott for it to hurt enough. And, of course, they'll just rush off to the pliant pollies, wail and gnash, and get served up more statutory delays of their inevitable-and-long-overdue demise.
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Scratch that, figured it out :)
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On s92, how can I set my gravatar to be black?
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Whereas Tapu Misa thinks Emery's got off rather lightly, it seems. I'm tempted to agree with her, especially with the prospect of parole in a year's time. Where's McVicar and his outrage at parole for violent offenders? Oh, that's right. It's flip-flop man and his rubber "principles".
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Kevin, the reporting rate is going up, certainly. Can you prove that incidence of violent crime is also going up? Of course you can't. There's a reason that murder is used as a good measure of overall crime, especially violent crime, and that's because murder is a crime that tends not to suffer from non-reporting. But, of course, the media don't tell us that. Please, point me to regular articles that explain that the murder rate in NZ is decreasing, is in the bottom quartile of the world, and is nominally at about 55 +/- 8 in any given year. I've not seen them, and I do try to read crime stories because I'm curious as to the hysterical tone that's frequently adopted.
Oh, and you might be interested that the first stats site I looked at to confirm where we sit in per-capita crime rates (in 2006 we were second, behind Dominica, and in good company in the top 15 with the likes of Finland, Denmark, Norway, the US, Canada and France) had this wee note down the bottom: Crime statistics are often better indicators of prevalence of law enforcement and willingness to report crime, than actual prevalence.
Also, one of the comments was quite worth reading: Less corruption, higher rank in crimes per capita. You can't bribe police and other authority here as much than many other countries. Worth thinking about, innit. -
By joke, did they mean Emery should have gotten a longer or shorter
sentence?Longer. Not entirely convinced that the verdict would've been the same if the ethnicities had been reversed, either.
And McVicar has openly spoken out in Emery's favour; he also disses the Cameron family's grief as "misdirected guilt".
Yeah, I thought he had. He hasn't said a thing about the sentence, though. At least he's confirmed that he's only interested in the white middle-class, though.
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Or yes, you wait goodness knows how long before it turns up here. Maybe the delay is not as bad as it used to be, but a delay all the same. If it does turn up, that is, and is not buried somewhere...Bah.
And no matter how keen the programming staff at the TV stations are, there will never be more than 24 hours in a day. 16 if you discount all the time that's devoted to adverts. So they can't show us everything, regardless of how much we rant and wail, especially with so few channels on which to screen shows.
The delay is ridiculously variable. Take my Flashpoint example, where we were screening it so close behind the US that, when there was a break in production, we ended up screening ahead of the North American market because the newly-produced episodes could be shown here as a continuation of the series. Conversely "Cops with Cameras" opened on TV1 on Monday night, and when I got curious as to what it was about I found that we just saw an episode that screened in the UK the best part of two years ago. Some shows are better, some are worse. It's certainly improved from the days when if we were seeing things more recently than five years late it was worthy of remark, but we also have the fucked-up situation (fucking cheers, NZ on Air!) where the local talent of FotC is screening in the US but not yet on TV here. As you say, they then wonder why we bypass the official channels. boom boom :P
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What would they have thought of the Bruce Emery verdict? It seems to have become some kind of litmus test on law and order politics.
Was discussing it with one of them last night, and he said the sentence is a joke. McVicar's remarkably silent on the topic. Bad case of double standards, perhaps? It's hard not to believe that he'd be railing something awful if it was a brown man who'd killed a white boy, regardless of the activities that lead up to the stabbing.