Posts by Peter Graham
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Let me put this into a slightly different context. Nobel laureates Alexander Fleming, Ernst Boris Chain and Howard Florey were drawing academic salaries and research budgets during the Great Depression.
if you're one of the uncountable millions whose lives have been improved - or even saved - by Penicillium-derived antibiotics, you tell me if that was a good investment.
And PAS relies on a technology invented at CERN.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Paul Campbell,
And don't insist on taking a cut on everything that I do - sell your hardware for enough that you make a profit and be done with it
Apple claim to make very little money from the app store.
Assuming you don't mind your laptop being slow, having the design values of a Christchurch 19-year-old's Subaru, more stickers than my record box and spooling the fan up to 737 levels every time you give it any work to do, then yes, there are competitors.
I've never bought a laptop or really used one, but Windows laptops do seem to be mostly terrible.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Russell Brown,
You’re right, but access to the address book isn’t the same thing as malware.
I think an app copying my contacts without my knowledge is malware. Similiarly, I don't want an OS to send location information to its creator without at least telling me first.
computer programming will have become a privilege, to be exercised within the limits set by corporate society.
That's my problem with Apple.
I have the same problem with Apple so I don't use Apple products. There are plenty of competitors so I don't see this being a problem.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire,
I am not at risk of downloading malware via the iTunes Store
It is possible to get malware from the iTunes Store, although there might be much less than in Play or whatever Google is calling it today. It's simply not possible for Apple or Google to guarantee that an app isn't malware.
Also, I believe iOS allows any app access to your address book without requiring any privileges. I think that's most likely a genuine mistake, and it's going to be fixed in the next iOS, but the idea that iOS protects you from malicious apps in a way that Android doesn't is simply false.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Er that is rather the thing we don't want to do. The police should not be allowed to dispense punishment; that is not their role.
They decide punishments when they put people through diversion, don't they?
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Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
I don't object to subscribing to HBO to get the latest episodes of things. I object to paying for other crap I don't watch to get it.
Would you be happier paying the same price and not getting channels you don't want to watch?
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Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Given that I can watch Game of Thrones in America for $25/month
For the latest episodes? And is that full cost of basic pay tv + whatever premium channels you need to buy?
If you've seen that Oatmeal cartoon of trying to buy G of T in the US online you'll see we're not the only ones who struggle with this model. You can buy the cable TV service online, but the content will be delivered by cable TV to your TV. Not quite what we're after.
That Oatmeal comic is really silly. Game of Thrones was available to him, he just didn't wan't to pay the price. That's a pretty weak justification for piracy. HBO use an aggressive pricing model where you have to pay for an HBO subscription if you want to watch HBO shows as they come out. If you don't want to pay that much you can wait and buy a DVD later. This is pretty much the same pricing model that the novels use, and I've never heard anyone justify pirating novels because they didn't like the pricing model.
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Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to 3410,
I suppose you'd argue that legal = legitimate, but if I wanted to watch legal and fresh episodes of Game of Thrones, as far as I know, the *only* way is to pay Sky about $1000 a year. Screw that.
So you could pay $250 to watch Game of Thrones now. Or you could wait a year and buy the dvds for $60.
The are plenty of production companies that screw over their New Zealand customers. HBO isn't one of them.
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Legal Beagle: MMP Review #2: Dual Candidacy,
When Damian Christie asked the four candidates featured on the Ōhariu electorate special of TVNZ7's Back Benches to raise their hands if they wanted people to vote for them, only two of them did. Lots of people stand knowing that they won't win, but putting your name forward for election when you don't even want to win seems almost dishonest, and I'm not sure we should be writing our electoral laws to benefit those who wish to run in order not to be elected.
I think the Ohariu campaign was because we use FPP for electorates. The Greens wanted their supporters to vote for Charles Chauvel so Peter Dunne didn't return to Parliament. National wanted their supporters to vote for Peter Dunne to give themselves a natural partner in Parliament and hopefully pick up another MP from list votes. The only way for them to achieve this in FPP was to ask people not to vote for them. Or not run at all, I guess, but they might feel that is worse than running but not trying very hard. If we used instant run-off instead of FPP then candidates could campaign for first choice votes without fear of vote splitting.
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Hard News: The Huawei Question,
There's at least on example of a private company spying for a government: Xerox spied on the Soviet Union during the Cold War.