Posts by Moz
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Hard News: Friday Music: Better Bit…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Yes please :) Allegedly me email address should be visible to you in my profile now. But not to spammers.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Better Bit…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I strongly suspect that's a matter of "when", not "if".
I fear that they will have the same problem that I do when it comes to actually getting the files, though.
Because I am somewhat anal about tagging and naming files, it's actually very easy for me to eliminate crap-p3's that I have lossless equivalents of so I did that a long time ago. Leaving me a whole pile of stuff that I struggle to find. Every now and then I score something. For example, Te Kupu was amazingly helpful and sent me a pre-release copy of "Dedicated", the Upper Hutt Posse best of CD to replace the album+EP that I had. But some people just vanish and you eventually get one song on a compilation if you're lucky ("...but I can write songs ok" is a favourite). Munky Kramp, Lea Maalfrid... good luck find them anywhere else (I have other Demarnia Lloyd songs, but not from that band).
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I'm sorry, lossless or nothing. I've been through too many cycles of upgrading lossy files and I'm over it. Yes, when sending stuff to my phone/phablet I repack it to mp3, but for archival storage the difference between 550GB of FLAC and 200GB of lossy stuff is about $20 these days. I'm not so poor that saving $20 is worth the hassle of faffing around like you're doing. And computers are so fast that when filling a 16GB card with mp3s the bottleneck is the USB part, not the decompression-recompression part.
I would be tempted by a similar service for lossless files, because I do still have a big pile of mp3s floating around. Partly due to my giving away my vinyl when I left NZ and then trashing my CD collection once I'd ripped and scanned it. FWIW I offered the relevant scans to flying nun since they seem to be missing artwork for the digital downloads they sell.
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The goods new (for me) is that I got an email back from Matthew @ the nun saying that yes, FLAC conversions are ongoing and three of the four albums I was considering getting the stupid plastic trinket versions of are up now as FLAC, the other one he's missing a track from but expects to have it on Friday.
Friday! I have to wait until Friday! Waaaaah!
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Oooh, shiny shiny downloads. Flying Nun now sell FLAC (forgive me if this is old news). I'm excited. And $52 worth of music richer! Best of all, according to the download window in 5 minutes I'll be able to listen to it! Jiggling in anticipation!
Good to see the label doing new and interesting things. But also being able to buy some of the more obscure music is good, even if it's just one track on a compilation (WSSOES are still a fave, and Starless Road, and... you know, maybe it's not such a bad thing that the selection is currently a bit limited)
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OnPoint: Because Statistical Rigour, in reply to Steve Parks,
That's my view. What we can learn from the data published so far is that... the bought media have no clue when it comes to statistics but will do anything to get a reader. Well, we can reiterate that point. Most of us already knew that.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Dubious achievements, in reply to Simon Grigg,
And score it is too - a support gig gets you a pro-rata % of the APRA fee, so if you play 10 songs and the main act plays 20, you get 10/30ths of approx 2% of the gross ticket sales - yay.
Hence the popularity of short songs in the punk world? Pink Floyd played 12 songs in a three hour set, but we played 24 songs in our 20 minute set!
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I'm in favour of adding the referendum to whatever general election comes up after parliament et al come up with the referendum question. Letting parliament decide is too likely to result in a supermajority in favour of disadvantaging recalcitrant small parties.
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Legal Beagle: MMP Review: Trusting Voters, in reply to Moz,
Ok, having used lunch to feed this into a wee spreadsheet I get this:
Raw percentage of the vote:
National 45%
Labour 25%
Greens 20%
Maori 4%
ACT 1%
Mana 1%
Winston 1%
Xian 1%
minors 2%As above, assume that ACT, Mana, Winston and Colin Craig win their seats on about 1% of the vote each, and there's another 2% to microparties.
That gives these seats:
National 55
Labour 31
Greens 25
Maori 5
ACT 1
Mana 1
Winston 1
Xian 1Which actually doesn't give an old-style overhang at all, it's very close to perfectly proportionate. On raw % times seats National would get 55.5 seats but rounding up gives 121 total. They have the smallest fractional seat entitlement so I've dropped one off theirs.
By sheer coincidence this will likely give the government we have right now, since Maori Party are the key seats and they're currently with National.
File is up at http://www.freefilehosting.net/trusting-voters if anyone wants to play (it's a very simple open office spreadsheet)
To get an overhang we'd need Maori Party to get 5 electorate MPs on noticeably less than 4% of the vote, which is IMO vaguely plausible (which actually doesn't change the above anyway). Or, as Rich said, Labour to hang on to all of their current electorates and get a worst-case party vote.
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Legal Beagle: MMP Review: Trusting Voters, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
How about this for a scenario. Posit that Labour continues their current form and gets a solid 25% of the vote, but doesn't hold on to enough electorates to create an overhang{1}. National screw up and only get 45% of the vote. With the new rules and soome careful cups of tea ACT, Winston and the christians get one seat each on about 1% of the vote each. Maori Party get 4 Maori seats and 2% of the vote, while Mana get 1 seat and 1%. That's... 76% of the vote. Leaving The Greens with 20% and parties not in parliament with the other 4%.
I'm guessing that gives us 5 "hang" seats (Maori + Mana) and 115 proportional seats to spread around the remaining 89% of the vote. Can you wangle those for me, I really should be working. Thanks.
{1} the new-style overhang meaning "more MPs than their vote would get them", not "more than 120 seats in the house".