Posts by Matthew Poole
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Russell, all Aussie cops are armed, all the time (even off-duty). So that picture's nothing special for them. Even those outfits aren't anything unusual, not even here. Dog handlers here wear overalls as their standard-issue uniform. Take away the pistol and the Taser (crouching and standing officers' visible arms, respectively) and that same photo with minor uniform differences could be repeated in NZ with ease.
Still a very different, and distinctly gung-ho, approach. I guess Aussie cops aren't softly-softly types.
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Ralston might've had a better point if he'd objected to the very one-eyed programme to have only women asked at hospitals if they'd been subjected to any kind of domestic abuse (made to feel afraid, been physically attacked, etc). No matter what they were in the hospital for, they were to be asked. And only women. The message that a lot of people took away from that was that trying to get information about violence toward men was just too hard/expensive/pointless/all of the above.
Much as I disagree with the slant, I do understand that an expensive advertising campaign works better if it's got a clear focus. Asking questions that exclude half the population, giving one hell of a selection bias, is just bullshit. -
I went (I think I saw you, Russell. Reddish t-shirt and a floppy grey hat?), and enjoyed myself greatly. My highlights were Pendulum - it's an awesome sight watching about 2/3 of the main field at Ericsson packed with people who're rocking along to one bad - and the Headless Chickens. Neil, well, not so much. Maybe it's just my heathenous, immature taste in music, or maybe I just missed some crucial influence in my early years, but either way he didn't rock my boat the way that it sounds like he did for a lot of others. I stayed for most of his set, then bailed to catch of the HCs. Their performance was great, visually, and the crowd vibe was nice. The only downer was having only a sleeveless t-shirt as the temperature plummeted, and then having to wait in chilly idleness for my flatmate to escape after Prodigy finished.
As for the person arrested for narcotics, my feeling is they probably had something harder than E. Either that or they did something really dumb like blowing pot smoke in a cop's face. The police just don't do anal-retentive at the BDO, seeming to treat it as more of a PR outing and an exercise in visibility-is-a-deterrent, so getting nicked for something means you really earned it.
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And it's only the bottom of that one page that's affected. Very bizarre. Moral: use PAS's proprietary formatting codes, not the proper HTML ones :P
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ummm ummmm umm. I'm telling Russell on you! :P
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Eve's Pantry is a franchised bakery, with tentacles that now spread far beyond the borders of Epsom. They're pretty popular as a catering outfit for corporate morning teas, it seems.
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I'm bowing out. This discussion's got too personal, and I'm not happy about the things robbery's said about me. My position has been explained, and I'm not going to respond to someone who cannot see the clear line between copying and stealing (hint: theft is defined in law, and copying doesn't qualify). Why should I waste my time on some anonymous troll who appears to be out there simply trying to bait a rise?
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You're a what?
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and only benefits the media industry.
it benefits society by enforcing law. rights of ownership. it isn't in societies interest to encourage the breach of it laws by ignoring wholesale infringement. part of this piracy thing is that its taking the piss of law and up till recently there appears to be nothing that could be done about it.
This only holds if you accept that the only model that's good for making money out of music/movies is the current one. If one doesn't, and I don't, then why would one accept that enforcing that model, which is what ISP filtering is all about, is beneficial to anyone other than big media?
Society changes. Change with it or die. Don't expect society to legislate to support the dying model, and don't expect society to wear the externalities of propping up that model, either.
Also, there's a widely-held view that, if a large portion of society ignores a law, the law should be changed. Making the consequences of breach ever-more-draconian doesn't make the law any better, it just makes it more of an ass.
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In the real world, if someone does something that costs them and benefits you, you pay for it.
in the real world business exploits are sometimes expected to take responsibility for the results of their product.
take cigarettes and the tax put on them to cover the health issues the country has to address because of them.Cigarettes are a perfect example. Providing healthcare for smoking-related illnesses costs society. The tax is a way of making smokers pay that cost. In economics lingo, the cost to the country is an externality and the tax is a way of internalising it.
Plus, making ISPs pay for an extortionately-expensive filtering system isn't the same thing. Making them pay a byte tax for all infringing downloads would be, but we're back to the same issue of requiring that it be verified that a user is downloading an infringing file before a tax can be calculated. So, same problem, the costs associated with it will be astronomical and the media industry (I know, Simon, I know, but I'm not going to try and come up with a sentence-long summary of the actual situation just to avoid being overly-inclusive :P ) will demand that the ISPs pony up for the whole lot. That is, fork out for something that is of detriment to the ISPs (expensive to setup, costs to administer, etc) and only benefits the media industry. That's one of those externalities again, only the media industry will fight tooth-and-nail to avoid having it internalised back onto them.