Posts by Rich of Observationz
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I could suggest one alternative:
- offer as an option on ISP accounts a copyright indemnity fee (maybe 10% / $5 a month or so)
- users paying this fee would not be liable for any non-commercial file sharing they indulge in
- users opting out of this fee would be liable for disconnection, etc.
- the fee would be distributed through a collecting society based on a statistical analysis of content being shared in NZ. -
I'm sure that John Key has plenty of opportunity to fish from his Omaha and Hawaiian dachas, should he be of a mind to.
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s/06/05 :-)
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Just read the Michael Lewis article on Iceland. Two things occur:
If Don Brash (or John Key) had been elected in '06, that could well have been us.
Also, how bad is it for the Icelanders? They've had a fun few years, the fish are still there, the geothermal steam still comes out of the ground, and they've got working rights in the EU. Worst case, everyone goes bankrupt. The houses are still there and they can squat in them or whatever.
Maybe Iceland will now invent a new form of f..k you socialism.
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Here's the latest installment: central bank independence.
Britain tried fixing interest rates by fiat for many years. It did not work well.
I tend to like the German economic model, which combined a strong independent central bank with social and industry policies which cushioned the impact of monetary policy.
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Hopes for the presidency of Barack Obama were always bound to be inflated
That's what happens when you try and have an elected god.
But you have to get down into the comments to appreciate the true level of paranoia at play
Madder than a bag of Bjorks. It's only the internet that gives these people credibility beyond their log cabins in Idaho. Mind you, if they were Muslim kids fantasizing about deposing the government, they'd be in Guantanamo 2.0 faster than they could spell plutononimum.
tech guru Douglas Rushkoff
Hang on, is that the same guy as Ecstasy Club author and sometime Genesis P. Orridge sideman Douglas Rushkoff? What has he ever built/designed/coded? he's a great author, but designating someone a "tech guru" because they write vaguely futurist books is like calling Tom Hanks an astronaut.
The debt burden, as a proportion of G.D.P., is in the region of 355 percent
Which is like having a mortgage of 3.5 times earnings - people seem to mostly be able to service those. Or at current interest rates, the US has to put around 15% of GDP into servicing the interest (public and private).
I don't think that's unsustainable. Whether a system that has 10% of the population as rentiers, 90% as serfs and a negligible proportion as aristocrats is sustainable is another matter.
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Love to hear a "more market" solution to either of those.
Abolish public healthcare, so that obese poor people die, preferably before breeding.
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did you actually work on any Y2K projects?
97-99, I was a consultant for an information delivery firm. I had to handle a bit of the paperwork from our customers (mostly banks) who wanted to know a bunch of answers, many of very dubious relevance.
That firm didn't have any major issues in Jan 00.99+, I was building a search engine firm. I didn't pay much attention to Y2K - I don't think we had much of an outage, maybe one bug I had to fix in January.
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Sure, the problem was real. What I dispute is that, even if people had been a great deal slacker about Y2K, there was ever a chance of a real disaster.
Nuclear plants and aircraft have rigorous quality processes - it's unlikely that they would ever fail catastrophically. (For one thing, most of them are built on an "essentials only" approach - if the system doesn't need to know what day it is, it won't).
Also, I've worked in IT for 25 years. I've found arrogance, stupidity and groupthink to be extremely prevalant in the industry - both amongst those who consider themselves "geeks" and the increasing overburden of the dedicatedly non-technical that the industry seems to have acquired. Sure, there are professionals around with a constructive approach to solving problems, but they're the minority and have been for some years.
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I have to say the successful avoidance of chaos was one of the greatest geek triumphs I've ever witnessed. Years of effort all over the world, no stuff ups and unsurprisingly widespread skepticism afterwards.
I think it wasn't so much that a lot of computers would have problems (as they did last year on a smaller scale with the DST change).
It was the concept that without computers having the correct time, we would suffer a disaster on a par with earthquakes. We wouldn't - we might have gone back to 1973, when computers were mostly in back offices and used in batch mode. Banks could work without computers - you let people have $300 a day and mark their chequebook. So could shops - you mark prices on the stock and add the bill up manually. Most industrial plant doesn't need to know what day it is - that factory could have been set to 1-Jan-1990 and would have rattled on regardless.
It's the same sort of geek arrogance that suggests that the Internet is an essential public utility.