Posts by izogi
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The driver licence thing reminds me of going to a bar in Arizona and trying to order a beer.
My partner has an exchange student friend with whom she was trying to get into a Wellington pub a few years ago, using a passport as a photo ID. The bouncer told them that if they were going to forge a passport, they should choose a country that actually exists. Apparently the Republic of Estonia doesn't.
I think she felt very insulted about that, but they went to another entrance without further problems.
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II have been travelling in the USA for the last three weeks. I used the BART train system in SF and the Amtrak routes in and out of SF too. To buy tickets just insert your credit card in this handy machine. No authentication required. None. I think I remember doing this in Europe too.
When I visited New York in January I found the whole CC thing very uncomfortable, maybe because of how I've been conditioned. I handed over my credit card at Toys R Us in Times Square, and they were confused about what I was trying to do when I picked up the keypad thingee to start entering a PIN. I'm not sure they even knew what it was for, and I doubt it worked for authorisation, at least. They just got me to sign for approval, which I'm never very comfortable with. Then there's the whole pre-approval sequence in restaurants where you might sign off paying for the meal, but a tip gets extracted after you've left. The whole thing just feels wrong... but perhaps it's just me.
But I was also surprised just how much that whole system still relies on cash-in-hand. In NZ I've walked around for 2 months with a $20 note in my wallet that I've never touched, because EFTPOS is accepted nearly everywhere with few exceptions, and I'm just so used to seeing the amount being charged, keying in a PIN to authorise it, then insisting that I get my EFTPOS receipt back from the retailer. In New York, that idea of electronic smaller transactions seemed inconceivable and credit cards appear to be treated as a big special thing for spending larger amounts, where it's just acceptable to have a flimsy authorisation system because nobody's ever known anything better.
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Copyright is a funny thing. You make something, you own it.
Hmm, maybe a big legal assumption there. But yeah, it's a funny thing one way or another.
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Live there for a while: you'll never hear anything on the news channels about any other country unless the story is something disastrous.
So it doesn't get better? I struggled to watch any channels (news included) during the 3 weeks I spent in NY earlier this year. In my short experience the whole thing was completely overrun by commercials for health insurance and pharmaceuticals. I wonder if it'd have been more bearable if I'd paid for some of the non-free channels.
To be fair, I struggle to watch television news here, too, but that's mostly for the content between the commercials, so not quite the same.
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Just as I would be indigent if I got stopped in the 50 zone. I'm not going to because the cops use their judgement but in other cases I'd get a ticket.
Although I suppose it's another thing a police officer could pull you up on if they weren't sure (just yet) exactly what else to stop you for. I can't say to what extent this happens, or if it does at all. I'm sure some people believe it does.
On the topic, I've personally had positive experiences with the judgement of police in traffic enforcement. 3 months ago I was pulled up for the first time in 10 years for doing 63 in a 50 zone while I was changing lanes to avoid the parked police car (which I realised in my mirror), and I thought I probably deserved a ticket. The guy spent a few minutes checking records, suggested I be careful, and let me go.
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Great article, Keith. Thanks for putting it together, and thanks to others for links to some other very insightful commentaries. Just to respond to Ethan:
What's to stop the Chinese student replying, 'Well, it seemed to work pretty well for your ancestors coming to New Zealand in the 19th century, didn't it?'
In a few words -- perhaps the fact that we're still arguing about those events and 150 years later we're devoting billions of dollars of resources towards trying to resolve past injustices on behalf of the Crown and its former subjects?
In more words --
You could also ask many of the Maori descendants what they think about the colonisation of the 19th century, and most would probably say that the outcome was grossly unfair to them for all sorts of reasons. Being of European descent I'm glad that I live in New Zealand. It's where I was born and grew up and I like it, and I consider myself a native New Zealander. That said, I have no doubt that there were fundamentally different ways of thinking from both sides, people on both sides who knowingly took advantage of fundamental misunderstandings, and that a lot of questionable things went on.
It's far too late to resolve things with simple compensation. 100+ years after the events, many of the problems caused by initial injustices have grown a lot more complex and harder to deal with. But if so many people today didn't care about exactly the things to which you've referred, then we certainly wouldn't be experiencing so much debate and publicity today. If Maori people had been absolutely culturally suppressed and extinguished in the same way that I expect the CCP wants to do to Tibetans, then I think a typical Chinese student wouldn't have even heard of historical NZ colonisation issues.
The Crown and colonists had similar attitudes back at the turn of the century, and mis-applied Darwinism was also very popular. Maori culture and ethnicity would just die out when integrated with the overwhelming "superior" culture of tea drinking British. That would be sad but would happen regardless, just as it was sad that New Zealand native birds would probably die out to make way for the "superior" British birds, except for those that could adapt to their English farm and country garden environments into which they were going to turn most of New Zealand.
Personally I'm glad we grew out of this attitude, though. Maori culture didn't die out, the world became more politically correct. I suspect that now the Crown is regretting how its descendants handled things, and everyone in New Zealand is paying the price if they hadn't already.
I'd be interested to see whether Tibet will simply disappear in the long run, or if the native Tibetan people and their descendants will eventually come back to haunt the presiding Chinese overlords 50 or 100 years from now if and when the majority attitudes change. Time will tell, I guess. The major difference that I can see between the two is that the descendants of most Maori people had an agreement in writing, however ambiguous, and that might be what's helped them the most in the long run for getting recognition.
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The magnitude of the electoral funding reform debate, and people's very polarised opinions, just demonstrates how hugely money influences an election. This is the case whether it's directed at flooding the population with misleading advertising and sledging of the opposition, at defending against the other side doing exactly that, or (occasionally) at simply trying to get above all the noise to inform the public that a candidate or party actually exists.
The bottom line is that elections these days are almost never decided on well informed debate and accurate knowledge of the candidates. Personally I find this very disappointing.
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I've seen lots of arguments about US copyright law (against extensions), most of which trace back to the statement in the US constitution which states that copyright law is specifically to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". It's a fairly straightforward (albeit ineffective) argument that constantly extending the copyright term probably doesn't provide an incentive to create new things as much as to keep living off the old things.
In New Zealand Law, from a layman's perspective, I've had some trouble finding a written justification for having intellectual property laws at all. There's a lot of documentation about what IP laws are, but it's unclear why they're good to have or what the reasoning is for having them. The best New Zealand based explanation I can find is given by MED on their website, where it's stated that:
This exclusive right is justified on the grounds that IPRs give creators and innovators an opportunity to make a return on their investment in creativity or innovation, and provide an incentive for creative or innovative activity that might not otherwise take place.
Even having seen this, there aren't any sources clearly provided so it's difficult to tell if it's the actual reason for IP laws, or if it has simply been written by a lawyer in an attempt to justify laws that we already have.
Sorry if this is a silly question, but can anyone point me to some references in New Zealand that authoritatively justify IP laws for New Zealand's benefit?
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I think I also struggle a little bit with the detailed sourcing thing, because it's not something you do in journalism (I did no university study either). To me, a nicely written article with lots of external links is more useful than a piece of crap that's been sourced up the wazoo.
I think this is a lot of the reason why I don't spend as much time editing Wikipedia articles any more. One thing I've enjoyed about Wikipedia has been the ability to quickly get useful information about casual topics that don't tend to have authoritative sources. I won't cite Wikipedia or rely on it for something critical without independently checking the facts, but I still use it frequently for quick reference. By the standard of the current policies, though, I suspect that the majority of Wikipedia articles probably shouldn't be there. Just knowing that makes it less motivating for me to edit, because for many topics, the standards are too high for the time I want to spend, and it'll be a matter of time before someone decides it's not worth having.
That said, for topics that don't fit well into this model, the same foundation hosts several other sites, none of which, unfortunately, are well known. If you have a current event, a lot of people might argue that it fits better into Wikinews than Wikipedia. (Note: Even Wikinews policy suggests that you request an interview rather than write an article about an event you were involved in.) Similarly, Wikipedia has policies against writing instructional text, but that same text might fit well into Wikiversity or Wikibooks.
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I've encountered a few overzealous Wikipedia editors in the past, including someone who was trying to claim that the Aramoana Massacre wasn't notable on the grounds that there are mass shootings in the USA and around the world every day.
My worst experience was to find myself in an edit war with an anonymous dialup vandal (although I know who he was) who had a personal vandetta against several of the organisations I'd authored articles about. He did more than simply vandalise the articles and submit bogus deletion nominations with personally abusive comments, too. The subject of at least one of the articles turned up and actively asked to be removed from Wikipedia because they saw it as the focal point of a lot of harassment that they were receiving outside of Wikipedia. DDOS attacks on their web server, and the like. Unfortunately they took a lot of useful and interesting scientific information away simply to try and remove attention from themselves -- they just got fed up and decided to back down.
My suggestion is to try to avoid situations where people can make it personal. When I edit Wikipedia articles these days, I try to stay away from articles that are too close to home or which I care too much about. It simply becomes too frustrating if you happen to run into someone who wants to fight with you.
I think the main thing that keeps most editors happy is to try and cite authoritative sources, ideally in a proper References section, and preferably from sources that aren't web pages or weblogs. Officially, Wikipedia will tolerate a low standard of writing style (as it can be cleaned up, I guess), but it won't tolerate lack of authoritative sources. Recent non-negotiable wikipedia policies stress this very strictly, even though it's ignored by a lot of editors, but a few people will still go around enforcing it.