There is no fucking clue at high political levels about IT integration and how quickly it balloons into an unrecognisable monster, consuming every dollar in its path.

Not much chance then of this coming to pass?:

A recent Treasury report looked at the cost of government agencies' back office functions and concluded they could save between $230 million and $425 million a year.

The savings would come from greater sharing, standardisation and automation of back office processes and systems.

> But, by the same token, it does irk me when people who'd scream blue murder about someone breaching the letter of the GPL seem to act as if the creator's right is valueless.

The GPL is a public good, IPR is a private monopoly.

I'd react differently to them too.

Just a typo among all the good sense, "underwritten" not "unwritten"

Briefly:

1. Recoup costs with fair margin
2. Costs of production by anyone are declining
3. Costs of enforcement by collective are increasing
4. No scarcity of product has been demonstrated

Thus the suggestion would be, and evidence supports, a much shorter term is sufficient.

I've used the example of rail tracks and rail services separation extensively to support structural separation of telecommunications generally and Telecom specifically, thus I have a personal investment in thinking the structural reunion of rail, even under the control of the Government is no great thing.

Structural separation of rail has a chequered history, in the UK it was a disaster when both layers were private and seems to have come right with the non-profit collective model on the bottom and competition on the top.

The flaw, as I see it, in the NZ implementation was the State took over the rails and then inflicted a monopsony on itself by granting exclusive service rights to Toll. Always a dangerous move. Solid Energy I imagine is one customer who would love to have paid OnTrack and run their own trains. Those on the East Coast might have found a way to fund services without having to meet Toll's ROI.

As you note,

We can hardly pretend that the railways and ferries were doing well before the National government sold TranzRail

and we have no guarantee, but certainly a well founded suspicion that once rail is vertically integrated again, it will behave like most, nay all, vertically integrated transport network operators. At least we know we're going to be subsidising rail.

Odd isn't it, just when we cleave Telecom into three, we cleave Rail back into one.

I'm just not sure I need to sign up to a highly procedural "code of conduct" to assert that right.

My feeling about this latest code is about informing participants than justifying assertions by operators, ie there is no need at all, but if you do, you are then bound to implement the procedure.

And one thing that critics and praisers of Tim & Jim's announcement alike miss is that they also offer

an "anything goes" badge for sites that want to warn possible commenters that they are entering a free-for-all zone.

The problem seems to be the interpretation of a Code of Conduct as an imposition, rather than merely an optional piece of consumer information.

Its a sad fact of identity politics, particularly the victimocratic strain, that things can never get better despite the oft expressed demand for same.

Whether unions, feminism or ethnicity, improvement spells the end of the significance of the leader. Where would the Destiny church be if "morality" improved, out of work.

Three major points:

1. Production and Transmission need to be structurally separated and certainly can be with the developments that YouTube and StreamingNet taking care of the distribution. I suspect the output of Maori TV would be far more widely viewed if it weren't tied to the legacy broadcast transmission model. Consequently FreeView is a perpetuation of the limited channel, industry serving model rather than opening up the channels to a wider range of suppliers and is a waste of money and spectrum.

2. If the content we pay to have produced were completely free of encumbrance, and why not, all methods of distribution would be available and used, leading to a far greater return. And if we could avoid the BBC's parochial model by not paying for the distribution, all the better.

3. Has anyone re-examined the nature of "public" broadcasting since the scarcity of channels and cost of production plummeted? I think now we could consider broadcasting the public (with some distributed approval model) rather than broadcasting to the public that which a small segment decides we want to see based on pseudo-commercial incentives (AKA viewers or listeners).