Posts by Matthew Poole
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That would be like selling the roads
The man who looks likely to be the IT Minister in a year's time wanted to do exactly that! His road-to-Damascus conversion, as quoted in the same Herald article that talks of Ratcliffe's short-sighted notions, is rather hard to swallow when one considers just how far he bought into the slash-burn-privatise ideology.
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Rich says:
I'm unconvinced on the upgradability of passive networks. If it gets built out with 100G bandwidth say, wouldn't all the users need to upgrade equipment at once for 1G bandwidth?
Sounds right, yes. But when you're starting from a position of nothing, and the marginal cost to go from 10Mb-100Mb-1Gb for the consumer equipment is very low, it's a much easier situation to deal with. Specify that the minimum level of equipment that can be attached (similar to the TelePermit system) must be capable of connecting at 1Gb. I understand the hesitation, but I don't think it has to be a total show-stopper. TCL are delivering non-uniform connection speeds over their shared-medium cable network, so it's definitely possible to do so.
Briso asks what kind of speeds people want. I respond, something that takes into account that HighDef media is already here, and will only become more prevalent. TVNZ's On Demand is a nice service, but it's only marginally usable with current connections. What will happen to its utility if HD becomes the format in which everything is recorded and made available and we're building for today's low-def content? We've already got media companies talking about doing on-demand movies, and saying that it's just not going to happen here in the near future because of the data caps, but what they often don't mention is that for many people downloading a movie over a period of many hours just isn't going to be a winner. 10Mbps sounds fast now, but it really isn't. Really, really isn't.
I was devastated to read in the Herald that Mark Ratcliffe (head of Chorus) "believes that 20 Mbps will be fast enough to meet most customers' needs into the future, including watching TV programmes over the internet and downloading entire movies in a matter of minutes." Why devastated? Because it's precisely that kind of short-sighted thinking that's got us so utterly fucked now on any number of fronts, not least of which is Auckland's transport network as well as our telecommunications situation. When Intel says that HD TV streaming will require around as much bandwidth as the head of Telecom's network devision says will suffice for customers into the future, I have to ask what hope NZ has of ever having a quality internet experience. -
The standard parole conditions apply for a minimum of six months from release - even for those released at the absolute end of their sentence.
And if they break them...? "You're a very naughty boy, you drank alcohol after serving all 10 years of your 10-year sentence." I'm actually rather disturbed by that, in all honesty, because that's further punishment of a person who's served their time. If you're actually paroled, in the usual sense of the term, then impose conditions by all means. But a person who's done all their time shouldn't then be subjected to further impositions on their legal activities (which is usually what parole conditions entail), such as having a drink or travelling wherever and whenever you desire.
Supervision of sex offenders judged at risk of reoffending makes sense, and I understand the reasons behind it, but it still makes me a little uneasy.I do think we should adopt American-style (or at least American TV-style) sentences.
I want to ditch this nonsense of concurrent time for sentences other than open-ended ones. That a person can be convicted of 20 representative charges of burglary then be eligible for parole in two-and-a-half-years-divided-by-two is a complete farce. Even if they only get nine months for each charge that's 15 years served consecutively, out in eight if they behave and get parole at half time.
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Also illegal. You can't supervise people beyond the length of their sentence. Once the X years that the judge ordered them to serve is up, they're free to go, unrestrained and supervised by the state. That's why parole kicks in earlier, you can't start it after the 15 years are up.
Exactly. Not that the legality matters to SST. A sentence is x days/weeks/months/years, as set by a member of the judiciary. Parole isn't their sentence ending, which seems to be the belief of some people, a belief that the MSM is apparently quite happy to reinforce.
Also, following that through, how would it work for people on PD or life sentences, which are effectively open-ended? The high-profile cases like Burton and Bell to the contrary, most people doing a life sentence have the standard 10-year non-parole that's set in the law and they don't reoffend in any meaningful way once released. To take her stance would mean that those people will be locked up forever because their sentence has no end and they're now not allowed out until their sentence is completed.Either she completely lacks any ability for analysis and long-term perspective, or McVicar may as well have his hand up a fundamental orifice and be using her as a ventriloquist's, well, dummy.
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Am I the only one who wonders, whenever Rita Croskery is quoted, if she's been so thoroughly manipulated by McVicar that she actually doesn't understand what she's saying?
I understand her grief, but some of the things she comes out with are far to the right of loony. For starters "her" idea of abolishing parole entirely and then having prisoners subjected to "supervised release" when they've done the full length of their sentence. Talk about missing the point!
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And yes, the gay panic defence was absolutely disgusting and I hope it gets excised from the case law at the earliest possible opportunity.
Don't say that too loudly around McVicar and the rest of the SST/Family Fist crowd. You'll be contributing to the moral decline of society if you don't let God-fearing heterosexual males beat the life out of any of those limp-wristed nancy boys who makes a pass!
</completely unveiled sarcasm>There're a goodly number of crimes on the books that should be removed/rewritten. One that really gets up my nose is the decision by our wonderful leaders (and this goes for pretty much every party) to continue the inequity that says that males cannot be raped. We can be sexually violated, with the same book penalties as for rape, but "sexual violation" just doesn't have the same emotional connotations in society's collective mind.
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I heard that the developer had basically been let off.
Quite aside from the court-imposed penalties, he had to front to a "restorative justice" meeting with the locals where he was roundly abused by all and sundry. Sounds like it actually went a bit OTT, but the basic message was, "The people whose community you've just deprived in the name of crass lucre think you're utter scum."
Some more of that, along with a complete prohibition on name suppression for people found guilty of environmental "crimes", would do wonders for the subdevelopment community's propensity for running rough-shod over the natural features of their latest targets. -
I'm reminded of a land developer who willfully cut down ancient Puhutukawas and had no penalty.
Where was that? You're not thinking of the development in Royal Oak? There the offender was ordered to plant replacement pohutukawas, and tend to them for the next 25 years. Smack in the middle of the section he'd planned to subdivide, which was why he'd cut the originals down in the first place.
As justice goes, it was a remarkably creative solution by the court. There was some token (quite a few thousand dollars, but little more than nuisance value to a man who owns a fairly hefty chunk of Newmarket) monetary penalty, but the order to rectify his environmental vandalism was just so perfect that I think it's the kind of sentence that should be passed more often. -
As far as getting their names removed as co-authors goes, NZ copyright law provides for a moral right to not be misidentified as the author of a work. From the Copyright Act 1994, s102(2) says "A person has the right - (a) Not to have a literary ... work falsely attributed to him or her as author".
Of course the flaw with this is that Heartland isn't based in NZ, making our copyright protections rather impotent. Europe has similar courses of action, the US doesn't. So it's certainly not a slam-dunk that Heartland can misattribute authorship of the paper without consequence, but actually forcing them to do anything could be tricky.
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Isn't the issue then that the slower freight trains can't deal with the greater camber?
Also, I don't know what they have inside them (because, actually it doesn't make any sense) but Wikipedia reckons the NIMT EF-class electrics are a touch heavier than the DXInteresting indeed. Maybe they've just got lots of steel to make them heavy? :P That'll learn me to listen to my flatmate, though his point about power:weight issues for electrics is still somewhat valid. He didn't actually say you couldn't get heavy electrics, or that they couldn't be more powerful that diesels, just that heavy haulage trains aren't commonly electric because diesels have lots of weight inherent in their design. I didn't even realise that there was electrification of NIMT over any significant distance.
As for the camber thing, someone posted a quote further up (look about page 5) saying that the camber was a cheap-arse design decision early last century. The rails could've been cambered, but it would've cost money so it wasn't done. Such an illustrious history we have of being fucked over by cheapskate designers and polly tubbies (yes, Craig, that "we" includes you).