Posts by Aidan
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Sacha,
dancefloors
squeegee-mops
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Emma Hart,
Mass hysteria, whatever the focus, makes me fucking uncomfortable.
Oh I dunno. I recall being one of many in a frankly fucking awesome Violent Femmes gig in Wellington (1992?). The energy in that crowd was incredible. All singing along ... they'd hold off on a line, we'd sing, they'd laugh, the crowd was euphoric.
I don't understand others obsessions, but I can relate to the experience.
Not that this has a great deal to do with the topic of this post ....
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Check this out. NDS withheld "fixes" for piracy of DirecTV services for 15 MONTHS to depress the share price for a Rupe takeover:
http://www.afr.com/p/business/marketing_media/how_nds_made_the_price_right_ePmeEzXgttjzE6bPMHsoVO
General Motors were the ones who lost out. I'm thinking there might be some serious lawsuits. News sold NDS a couple of weeks ago to CISCO for $5bn -- they might be a little pissed about these revelations affecting the value of the business. Again, possible lawsuit? As they own the company, presumably they might have access to a great deal of incriminating material.
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Murdoch’s whining about piracy is well founded. News was executing pirate attacks against rivals and knew just how damaging they could be.
What a massive bastard. Imagine having him as father. Yuck.
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This is huge. More evidence they have done the same thing elsewhere, specifically Australia:
http://www.afr.com/p/business/marketing_media/pay_tv_piracy_hits_news_OV8K5fhBeGawgosSzi52MM
Wow. Murdoch is screwed. His cash cows will be taken away from him. Might not happen right away, but if this pans out there is no way he can be allowed to retain control.
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I imagine there will be much interest in the evidence NDS gave in their defence against the Echostar lawsuit.
Potential perjury?
While it is probably true that Rupe has plausible deniability with respect to this dirty business, his corporations have demonstrated an alarming habit of using dirty tricks against competitors.
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Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to Angus Robertson,
The eurozone could monetise their debt (print lots of money) and then in a few years we can have essays looking at the tracking of 10,000 euro notes near to the Swiss border. Probably much of southern Europe (Giovanni included) is angling for this print lots of money option, but the Germans have very deep cultural misgivings about it.
Austerity seems preferable to all of those.
They don't have to print the money, just have the option of doing so. This removes a great deal of the risk and their borrowing costs go down. They are in a self-fulfilling debt crisis because the ECB is unwilling to actually be a banker of last resort.
Get that sorted and then tell those recalcitrant fuckers in the German Finance ministry to suck it up and target the simply ruinous inflation rate of 3-4%.
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Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Truly, the US dollar should have collapsed by now. How can you have Washington and West Virginia in one currency union?
I didn’t even know there was a term “optimal currency area” until a year ago, but even I know that this is silly. The US has a federal government. It redistributes taxes into social programs, amongst other things.
It also has a bank of last resort that will print money if it has to.
Edit: Ooops .. did I misunderstand, was that the point of your comment? If so, sorry.
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Southerly: Village People, in reply to James Green,
I know I’ve said this at length elsewhere, but there really is a lot to commend in terms of the layout of Twizel. A town deliberately engineered so that walking or biking was enormously more direct than travelling by car. This was principally achieved by having all the roads in shallow wide loops, with interconnecting greenspace and walkways linking the loops.
Looks spookily like my neck of the woods, Canberra.
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The time portal might have been for passionfruit? Or are they rare beasties in the land of the frost and snow?
My (now 10) year old has had his own electric drill for 2 years now. Managed not to make any large holes in himself or his friends/sisters (mutually exclusive).
One day while fiddling with my 12v Li-ion drill he accidentally pulled the trigger, which promptly spun around and clocked him a nasty blow in the temple. After that lesson the drill we bought him was a nice wee one like this:
http://www.ozito.com.au/12v-lithium-ion-cordless-drill
but was only 9V, with a great deal less torque.
He has built two sets of shelves, a go-cart and numerous contraptions, but nothing with the finish of that box.