Posts by Matthew Poole
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So that's why it'd be better if there was more than one carrier, right?
Of course. But right now, there's precisely one GSM carrier with an available network.
The Apple website is saying you can get it from Vodafone and...that's it.
Surprise surprise. As above, we have a single GSM carrier. Who else would supply the phone? Vodafone can licence retailers to sell the phone, as they do with DSE and everyone else who currently sells phones for use on the network. Given that their network of retail stores is pretty small, they're unlikely to go down the path of only selling it themselves or through the Apple store. There are several retailers that are both Vodafone and Apple resellers, and they're perfect candidates to carry the iPhone.
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But will it really only be Vodafone? Because that, if I may be so bold, sux.
My understanding is that Vodafone don't have an exclusive deal, as opposed to AT&T's lock on the official iPhone market in the US.
Not that it'll be much use other than with Vodafone here, until NZC gets online and Telecom get their non-CDMA network built.
As one of the guys here at work pointed out, the handset cost is of far less import than whatever kind of rapeage goes on with data pricing.
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Or do you think it is fine to break the law
Where was the illegallity? Not exercising all the powers the law grants you, because you don't think you actually have those powers, isn't illegal. It may or may not be entirely moral, depending on whether one takes the view that the ASC willfully decided that they lacked the power to inquire fully (and even if the original Committee was wilful in their decision, it's incredibly unlikely that anyone now sitting was party to the original decisions), but it's certainly not against the law.
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His rhetoric on trade has been explicitly protectionist;
He's a candidate for the American presidency, remember. They're the biggest bunch of protectionists out. Look at their history in front of the WTO.
Between the blue-collar lobby on one side and the farm lobby on the other, no candidate can possibly get elected if they campaign on a platform of addressing America's awful trade policies. Obama just happens to be a little more honest about it.
As for the whole left-wing, right-wing thing, take a look at the Political Compass analysis of where the various candidates fall. Obama is to the left of Hillary, and waaaaaaaaay to the left of many of the Republicans. It's all relative. As the analysis says, in any multi-party social democracy all the major players would be considered to be conservatives. But by the grace of America's two-party system with a conservative electorate they actually consider Obama to be hanging out with Karl and Iosef. Of course this is the same country where McCain, with the most conservative voting record in the Senate, isn't considered to be conservative enough by some Republicans.
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I've paid well over $4 for two litres of milk very recently. Maybe it as at the corner dairy. Maybe it was at New World in Birkenhead. I don't remember.
Ah, New World. That'd do it. My flat shops at Pak'n'Save, and gets 3L bottles of milk for about $4.30.
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And that ban was put in place for a very good reason. I was living in London in 1987 when the Kings Cross fire happened. And that was started by a dropped cigarette.
In the space of 30 months, two smoking-related fires in the UK (King's Cross in November '87 and Bradford City in May '85) killed over 100 people. I'd say that a mere ban on smoking on the Tube was a pretty restrained response, really.
There are plenty of examples of real crypto-fascism by the powers-that-be in the UK, without people needing to try and make out that smoking bans based on clear public-safety grounds are somehow impinging their rights.
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He's basically saying that it doesn't matter where the carbon is - ground, plants, cow, air.
Clearly it does matter where the carbon is. If we burn a big forest, all the carbon gets released into the atmosphere. That's an environmental problem.
Think about the relevant ages of the carbon sources. Trees live decades, if not centuries. Grass, particularly in a pastoral setting, gets cropped after a few months at most. It never gets a chance to be a long-term sink.
How many millennia worth of carbon is locked into a coal seam or an oil field? That's why it's a problem that all that carbon gets released in a matter of hours when they're burned. Overall the world is a carbon-neutral system, but we're changing the balances in a very short period of time by digging up and burning carbon that's been locked up over very, very long periods of time.
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The Greens really want the dairy farmers to be spending some of their new found wealth cleaning up their environmental act
And rightly so. The farm runoff issue is a pretty big one. But the Greens need to work out which farm pollution sources are real, like pasture runoff, and which are just bollocks, like my post above about CO2 and methane emissions from livestock.
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One other thing the Greens need to get real about is making farmers pay for the emissions of their livestock. As pointed out in this article by an associate professor at U Auckland, animals don't generate CO2 and methane from nowhere. They take it in through their food and release it subsequently. They're not dredging up deeply-sequestered carbon deposits from millions of years ago, they eat grass, that's probably only a few months old. At worst they should be carbon-neutral, and if that article is correct they actually sequester carbon back into the ground.
I realise that it's good for the Greens to have our farmers become less efficient on the global scene, because of their radical anti-free-trade/anti-globalisation stance, but for those of us who don't live in some economic la-la land it's good that our primary produce is amongst the most efficient in the world.
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The crap psychic auditions for the next series Sensing Bullshit are next door, and the long-distance psychoanalysis isn't working for you either. I do try to do people the courtesy of fairly and accurately engaging with what they actually say, and would appreciate it being returned.
Craig, sorry if you found it that offensive. I was trying to provoke a response, because you never do justify why you think it's OK for National to be six months out from an election and still have told us nothing about their policies except that, in very broad brush strokes they won't sell the railways back, they'll put $1.5b into an FTTH network, and they'll give us tax cuts that amount to more than $10.2b over four years.
Pardon me for being desperate to understand how you think that's acceptable in a democratic system that should hold its elections based on policy not popularity.