Posts by Matthew Poole
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ISP monitoring is going to be all about movies and video files, and the fringe benefit winners on that game may well be music copyright holders
And I wish I had faith that our elected representatives would have the spine to tell the various major players in the media industry that wholesale deep-packet-inspection is not OK! Sadly, I don't. They'll drop to their collective knees and collectively swallow just as fast as they can get the authorising legislation written. Then they'll make the ISPs foot the bill for what will be a very expensive undertaking (tracking torrent traffic to ensure that you're not chasing someone who's downloading, say, FreeBSD (as I did this afternoon) is a very, very intensive exercise on several fronts), and that'll be that.
I've seen zero evidence that my cynicism is misplaced. If Labour were happy to fellate big media, National won't be any less hesitant.
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David, all sounds good. I wouldn't endorse RAID particularly, was just talking of boot disc mirroring technology. For Apple, I have no idea what they have.
Unless you have a Mac Pro, or an X-Serv, they have nothing. It's hard to mirror disks in a system that can only hold one disk at a time :P
Really, something like Time Machine is the way to go. RAID gives you availability, by keeping multiple live copies in the system in case of a disk failure. It doesn't, however, ensure accuracy or accessibility of data. ZFS is good for in-system accuracy and availability, but doesn't protect against physical destruction of the system and also isn't widely available outside FreeBSD and Solaris.
My solution is weekly rotation of flash drives into my safety deposit box. It's not perfect, but I know they're secure and I know that they're current-ish.
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When you're calling someone out, it helps if you spell their name right ...
Oooops, yes. Indeed. Apologies for the spare 's', Mr Grigg.
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The Creative Freedom Foundation website was launched today by a group of artists to advocate a more reasonable view of copyright -- and, in the first instance, to kick off a "Not in My Name" campaign against Section 92 of the copyright amendment bill.
Paging Simon Griggs. Would Simon Griggs please report to this campaign immediately, to put his money where his mouth is.
Unless, of course, he actually does agree with the tactics of big media. -
Is a flashing question mark the user friendly Mac equivalent a Blue Screen Of Death? Or of the noted Yugoslavian, Kernel Panic?
No, the Mac version of the BSOD is the MLSOD, or Multi-Lingual Screen of Death. Which is simply your computer telling you, in about a dozen languages, that it's had a whoopsie and needs to be kicked.
I've not encountered this flashing question mark, despite having witnessed both RAM failure and HDD failure in my 24" iMac. So I'm not sure what its PC analogue is. At a guess it's close to a drop-to-debug panic. -
The old Freeview box you could just turn off then on again from the remote to fix it, but not the new Zinwell - it needed the whole unplug from the wall thing.
Unplugging Macs from the wall is a good way to reset any latent hardware issues. Several times I've had to unplug my work workstation, because the damned thing has refused to start. Removing all power for 10-15 minutes is a sure-fire way of establishing if your Mac is simply being a temperamental over-large paperweight or if it's actually in need of professional assistance.
As far as your HDD goes, Russell, I'd still take it in to be checked unless this permissions thing is some kind of known Mac fubar'd-ness. When disks misbehave it's frequently a sign of impending death, and in your position I'd much prefer to have a tech run a diagnostic over it and pronounce it cured (or not) than to have it die catastrophically at an unexpected moment.
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Rochelle Hume, deceived partner of police informer Rob Gilchrist, totally pwned him after she realised what was going on -- gathered evidence by tapping his phone and installing a script on his computer that forwarded his emails to her.
The righties in The Standard's comment are making much of the fact that she may have breached the law. I would submit that that would be a spectacularly messy prosecution to bring. You could put a price on the movie rights.
That's a pretty clear breach of the bit in the Crimes Act about illegally interfering with a computer. The "colour of right" bit doesn't extend to vigilante justice that intercepts communications. She's probably safe against "illegally accessing a computer system", since the law provides that misuse of a system to which one has been granted proper access - and one assumes that he explicitly asked her to fix his computer, and probably allowed her to use it, too - cannot then become misuse if it's used for some other purpose.
It would be messy, though, and I can't see the Police pursuing it with any real vigour unless he complains loudly, and then goes public when they do a half-arse job and don't really push the matter.
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To me that's not really the question. You could be a perfectly good Minister of Education (or indeed, something else), without having been part of the system. How many Ministers of Police are ex-police officers? Ministers of Defence ex-military?
Yeah, but tell that to the people who insisted that Aunty Helen had no place telling them how to raise their kids because she has none of her own. It's exactly the same thing. I happen to agree with you, but plenty of people expect that <Minister-or-whatever-of-their-pet-peeve> has inside experience.
Also, when it comes to teaching, it's not hard to find MPs with direct experience who can head the education portfolios. Finding former cops and soldiers is rather more difficult.
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When my daughter was mainstreamed at her local school in 1989, the Minister of Education, speaking on Morning Report, called me a zealot because I was insisting that my daughter "who would never learn anything" was "sucking up money from other kids."
He's now Speaker of the House.Not that I doubt your story, because it sounds entirely credible, but those facts don't stack up. National didn't becoming the governing party until 1990. Lockwood Smith was indeed Minister of Education in that government, but he couldn't have been speaking in that role in 1989. So was he speaking as Education Spokesman? Or did you get your years wrong?
As I said, I'm not doubting you. Just wanting to clarify Mr Smith's exact role at the time. -
I heard some of the debate on the 90-day bill, and recall the point was strongly made that the 13-week stand-down won't apply if you are terminated within the trial period. "To enourage beneficiaries to take the risk", or some-such phrasing.
Yes, I'm sure many of us heard it. But it's not in the legislation. Welcome to the pitfalls of rushed drafting that doesn't get examined before being passed. This hole is large enough to drive a 747 through, and if National were half as bloody smart as they think they are they would've seen it.