Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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Hard News: Competing for Auckland,
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it would be sweet if Bernard Orsman and his paper stopped treating local government - not just in Auckland but the other local authorities in it's circulation area - like some ghastly reality show/popularity contest.
New Zealand's Got Auckland's Next Top Got Mayoralty Quest
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Field Theory: Mr Collins in Japan,
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You're right - I didn't even check the Wikipedia Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilians_in_Japan
There is a significant community of Brazilians in Japan, consisting largely but not exclusively of Brazilians of Japanese ethnicity. They also constitute the largest number of Portuguese speakers in Asia, greater than those of formerly Portuguese East Timor, Macao and Goa combined.
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Field Theory: Mr Collins in Japan,
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I haven't been following this story too closely, but Japan is a very conspicuous place to be a foreigner, especially if you don't speak the language - and it's a difficult language to learn. The idea that a bunch of Brazilian criminals could all move over and set up a protection racket targeting sports stars is - to me - highly implausible.
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I don't have anything against soft-news stories per se, but they do seem to act as a gateway drug to anti-journalism: advertorials (the lavish news coverage of the KFC double-down burger was probably the nadir of this in NZ journalism) and faux-controversies ('was New Zealand originally settled by a race of Nodic immortals? John Ansell says Yes!').
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Legal Beagle: Kim Dotcom: Questions and Answers,
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Thanks Graeme - you're a (domestic) national treasure.
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Legal Beagle: Kim Dotcom and the GCSB,
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I've known a few people that worked for GCSB - they used to have a very high turn-over rate due to a dysfunctional culture. I'm not sure if this has been resolved.
The complaint I always heard from staffers and ex-staffers is that the organisation consists of (a) computer scientists and mathematicians working for (b) ex-military officers with no background in those fields, and that this worked about as well as you'd expect it to.
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Are the values clustered to the bottom left the special schools?
Yep. I have no idea why they're in the data set.
Most of the other low scoring, high ratio schools are remote rural low decile schools with, like one teacher and eleven students. Amazingly they aren't delivering a comprehensive education.
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Hard News: Tired and emotional, for reals,
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Apparently the APEC gig was pretty shitty, with sleep-deprived journalists left waiting outside meeting rooms for six hours without access to food or water. I can see how irritating it must be to put up with that then read criticism of your work from someone back home, no matter how accurate the criticism might have been. And I could see why Armstrong wanted to hit back, no matter how foolish it made him look. It was really up to his editor to exercise some judgment and refuse to run the piece.
I guess that didn't happen because John Armstrong is John Armstrong. In the political blogosphere he's a bit of a joke: someone who writes light-weight color-pieces about the House and obsequious praises of whoever happens to be in government (people who allege Armstrong is 'tory' or 'pro-National' should go back and read his cringingly fawning columns about Helen Clark in the early 2000s).
But in the press gallery he's well liked and hugely respected. He has access to the highest levels of government, and is very influential and well-informed. People were probably a bit taken aback when Campbell and Edwards criticised his reporting, and thrilled when he deigned to retaliate.
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It's big news for physicists because it helps validate the standard model. If they didn't find it they'd have about a century of really hard work ahead of them.
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Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…,
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The ISPs make no more money from the downloading of illegal content than they do from legitimate content. It’s clear you’ve never worked for an ISP or even talked to one..
I work at a university. I know how much traffic was used up by file-sharing before proper safeguards got put in place, roughly 1% of which were legitimate linux distros, ect, and the rest of which was Avatar torrents. It’s true that ISPs make the same amount of money transferring the linux distros as they do from pirated material, but the amount of people who want the former compared to the latter is tiny.