Posts by izogi
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: A Work of Advocacy, in reply to Rich Lock,
@Rich of Observationz:
I prefer Reno 911
@Rich Lock:
Rashomon 911?
I'm sure if I could just see it, I'd prefer the one and only True Reality Show that follows a regular honest officer of the law who's been humbly working for two decades under most people's radar.
I know. Those threads. I'll shut up now.
-
As DPF was quoted:
"Overall I’d say those on the “Internet side” got around 80% of what we wanted, and the rights holders didn’t get anywhere near what they wanted."
Although nobody should ever be under an illusion that this is as an adequate measure of fairness and compromise. Otherwise all a petitioner needs to do is demand increasingly ridiculous changes with the knowledge that they could never be legislated in the requested form. No surprises here, in fact.
-
Cracker: Send in the Clowns, in reply to Emma Hart,
I'd watch a lot more 7 if it did. It was only a few weeks ago that we taught the TV to watch Media7 and Hindsight for us so we didn't have to remember when they were on.
I've not been very organised with TV for a while, but when we finally bought a digital TV a year ago, I found myself watching just as much (problably more) of 6 and 7 as any other channel because I'd usually just flip to the digital guide to see what was on. Media 7 and Back Benches were both priorities if they happened to be there, so thanks guys.
Now I'm in Melbourne and with about 2 to 3 times as many free channels (sadly still few with anything good on them), the digital guide thingee in our TV has an annoying habit of not populating with a channel's schedule until we've actually switched to the channel. I downloaded an app for my Android phone called IceTV (not sure if this works in NZ) that'll tell me everything on during the day that I've flagged an interest in, ordered by start time. Channels and browsing TV guides in the traditional way don't mean much to me now.
-
Cracker: Send in the Clowns, in reply to Sue,
so that within the space of say 24 hours you have 4 or more chances to catch a show and 4 or more within the week.
Though in these situations I frequently had the misfortune of finding the same show for the 3 or 4 times I managed to sit in front of the TV. I think something more TIVO-like is the way to go, so as not to have to bother arranging one's life around the schedule at all.
-
Hard News: Time to get a grip, in reply to Idiot Savant,
No. section 137 of the Electoral Act 1993 requires that list vacancies be filled from the same party list as the departing member - that is
I think one of the things here is that Labour's list was drawn up when Labour was in government and hoping to remain in government. It made perfect sense (to Labour) to keep all these people on the list so they could stay in government and keep doing whatever they were doing previously, which might have made sense if people actually liked the party enough to vote it back in.
Labour's now in a different situation where it makes more sense to bring in new people, but at the same time it's being stung by the list that had to be drawn up before.
A party definitely shouldn't be able to change its list after an election and there'd need to be caution about how much a party can influence its list members, but maybe all that's needed is a better protocol for individuals on the list to declare early on what they're likely to do post-election depending on the outcomes, and remove themselves afterwards if and when they're definitely no longer interested. If the 5 or so people ahead of Louisa Wall had declared 2 years ago that they'd moved on and weren't interested in returning, perhaps even officially withdrawn themselves from the list, the consequences of an MPs resignation would have been clearer much more quickly and there wouldn't be so much of a media circus around it today.
-
Hey @Garth, I almost bought an HTC Desire but if it helps with research the main negative thing I've heard about them (including the HD I think) are problems some people have had with very low amounts of internal memory left-over for apps once Android's been installed. (It's been on the order of about 100MB, more or less, depending on the details of how it's been set up.) You can stuff in an SD card but it's significant with Android because most/all apps need to install at least partly on internal memory for whatever reason. It really mostly matters for people who like hacking their phones or running lots of apps, but I heard it from someone who does and he was finding it very frustrating. Another one to look at is a Samsung Galaxy S (or whatever's replaced it), which is similar but doesn't have the memory issues so much... probably pricier though.
I don't think it's so much smart-phones that have revolutionised things as smart-phones combined with social media (like Facebook and Twitter). Most people I've seen using smart-phones, and maybe 50%+ of people around Melbourne seem to have them if the sitting-on-the-train crowd are anything to go by, are frequently using them in combination with both of these, and other similar stuff on the side, and it's changed everything so that people are really never out of touch. Every time someone stops with nothing better to do (train, bus, whatever), they're pulling out the phone to catch up with anything important going on with the world and people they know.
-
I shifted to Melbourne a couple of months back and I've had a flashy Android phone for a few weeks now. My old phone in NZ was a solid $50 Nokia brick on a prepay account. I didn't feel like paying through the roof for a phone when I didn't really care about using it anyway.
Over here I'm getting my phone through my employer, and the simple fact of having a smartphone with 3GB of pre-paid data each month has already radically changed how I do things from day to day -- I can completely appreciate how people react in a disaster scenario. I spent a lot of time checking for updates from various sources about what was happening back home soon after the Christchurch earthquake, I've so far used Google's annoying-lady-voice nav app a couple of times to figure out how to get somewhere, and at the airport the other day I just sat in the terminal streaming the BBC trying to figure out what was happening in Japan. It still feels nowhere near as solid and reliable as the Nokia brick.
It's interesting to see the market split. It wasn't until I bought my phone that I've noticed just how specifically popular iPhones seem to be in Melbourne. I can sit on the train and be surrounded by 4 people all tapping away on iPhones or listening to music on iPhones or playing games on iPhones. (I'm tapping away on my Android phone and naturally feel cooler.)
-
Hard News: About Arie, in reply to John Greally,
Arie Smith, "Face of Looting", turns out to be, in my opinion, yet another actual Christchurch Earthquake hero for the sacrifice he is choosing to make - he has chosen to hold off making a complaint about Police behaviour because of stress and his support for the excellent job the Police are doing in Christchurch.
I can't pretend to know what's going through Arie's mind or what advice he's been subjected to, but for myself I think that if I'd been humiliated in front of a media circus in the way that he was, I'd want it to go away as quickly as possible rather than dragged out in a high profile investigation.
I sympathise with Arie and his family, but police are given extra special rights over other people in the community and they're supposed to be able to be trusted. If there are cops out there bashing people without reasonable cause (and this hasn't yet been established) then they need to be investigated and dealt with -- screw what Arie wants, in the nicest possible way. The issue's much bigger than just Arie and his family. Otherwise it's unfair and dangerous for the next person this cop or cops decide to beat up next time he or she is faced with an unusually stressful day. It's also unfair to all the good police out there who have to be tarred with this kind of brush when trying to work in their communities.
-
Hard News: About Arie, in reply to Sacha,
The Stuff website doesn't always label which Fairfax newspaper the stories are from - in this case, neither of them.
But it's listed in the More Headlines page for the national section of the DomPost on Stuff. It doesn't show up in the equivalent page for The Press, so I'm guessing it's at least meant to be accurate for different papers.
Also, this link works, with 'dominion-post' in the URL.
I haven't actually looked at the DomPost, though. They're hard to come by in Melbourne.
-
Hard News: About Arie, in reply to Russell Brown,
I suspect it would be very good for Arie if he was to hear – at the expense of whatever government – a sincere apology from those who had custody of him, and for them to hear just how awful he was made to feel. [--snip--] And, naturally, substantial media coverage.
Russell, I'd like to see justice clearly and visibly done here wherever it lies and you may be right, but do you think this would out-weigh (for Arie) whatever effect there could be from prolonged dragging of this issue through the likes of Laws and every other prat who'd happily burn all looters at the stake after a prolonged incarceration "with a cellmate" without considering context? I doubt most of those people will be swayed by revelations of a beating by police (pathetically many would cheer it) or a point that he has aspergers, and I'd have thought it could just drag things out.