Posts by Nick Melchior
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Hard News: Media3: Standards Showdown,
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Good post Russell. I think you're missing a word in para seven however - education Vaimoana Tapaleao?
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Hard News: Disrupting the Television, in reply to cphilpott,
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This is true to a point, but HBO are hardly running out of cash at the moment and I know a lot of people who get Sky more or less for SoHo. But I would be enourmously surprised if HBO did any research whatsoever about creating HGOGo for Australia.
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Hard News: Disrupting the Television,
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The Gordian knot is a good metaphor here because millions of people are simply slicing through it. So it may be complicated but the only option is to provide legal alternatives because the current ones aren't working.
For example: I work for a publishing company that, by and large, signs global rights for our books. We've got global sales and marketing and we sell our books everywhere. In some cases we act as the local agents for other publsihers who don't have a presence in some territories where we do have one. This requires pretty serious investment but if we only did it for ebooks, it would require a lot less.
A US publisher, Tor, publishes lots of books I want to read and I want to read them on my Kindle. Unfortunately, they only get US rights to the ebook (or in many cases short fiction I can read for free on their website). I emailed them about this and they said 'contracts are tricky' but didn't answer any more emails after I explained what I do for a living.
So how do I get Tor books? Well, generally I tell Amazon I live in the US and get the pricing there. But sometimes I order the book in physical form and other times I pirate it.
It's in the interests of content companies to sort this out. If HBO made HBO Go available without a cable subscription anywhere in the world I'd sign up tomorrow (especially if they made the Xbox app available in Australia). But there are obviosuly deals or other itnerests that prevent this so they don't...
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The Specials didn't play Ghost Town in Melbourne either...
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Bart Janssen,
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I have no problem with attempts at conversion, within proper bounds. A healthy society will always have people trying to convince others of new (or old) ideas and so it should. It's the proper bounds that mean that the kids can still play.
As for Ross' idea of getting rid of Chrimas and Easter, I don't think so. I've lived in Singapore twice in my life and while there is a ot of things about their society I wouldn't emulate I think their practise on religious holidays is pretty spot on. Cover off every major group (in their case Christian, Muslim, Hindu and "Chinese"/Buddhist) and then have a smattering of shared national holidays. In NZ's case, that means more or less what we have and I don't think anyone is really suffering because of it.
I'm an atheist - hardcore and dogmatic. But I don't care about Easter or Christmas - we have widespread, largely secular traditions built around both holidays (eggs and presents) and they're not doing anyone any harm.
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else,
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Well said Russell.
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Hard News: Fridays are still for the music, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
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When they pull themselves into a standing position and waddle around a room holding on to things. Before they can walk independently.
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Hard News: Because it's about time we…,
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I'm not a coffee drinker but an espresso machine was part of my wife's requirements for moving to Singapore in 2009. But there's quite good coffee in a number of places in Singapore now. It's almost all Australian in origin (owners/barristas etc) and tends to be in odd places due to the price of commercial rent. But Starbucks (and the local Starbucks, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf) are on every corner.
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Hard News: Public Address: Technical Profile,
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I actually read the site quite a lot from by BlackBerry here in Singapore so I'm surprised that 100% are new visitors. It might be the way the IP is calculated/assigned perhaps?
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I'm not sure that his No1 problem is actually a problem.
I'm not sure it is either but it's the source of considerable grievance in the community (at least to tell from my discussions with relatives etc) If we get to keep MMP by getting rid of that one small issue then I'm all for it!.