Posts by Moz
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Che,
So it's clearly an "us or them" situation, and we should let the traditional owners decide who gets to stay?
To quote the chart-topping Hip-Hop artist Ozi Batla "Enough is enough, whiteys go pack your stuff, Don't wanna live in England? That's f*ing tough". http://www.allthelyrics.com/lyrics/the_herd/
Note that you're seeing a News Limited view of the situation, but then that's what Stuff gives you these days. The original story was not very exciting at all, there was no ban so who cared. But once The Daily Terrorgraph got hold of it things heated up nice and fast.
FWIW there's a huge pile of people in Sydney who would just like the "patriots" to crawl back under their rocks, including the wonderful letter in "The Age" from a WWII veteran bemoaning the disrespect shown to the flag by the drunken thugs. There was a well-attended anti-racism day at Cronulla Beach recently, and lot of other agitation. As usual, that's not what gets the media attention. Sorry about that.
Other things not getting reported also bother me - the "middle-class white christians" who gang-raped a woman in Darling Harbour last year, then the complainant lost the will to continue the complaint... that story disappeared from the media very quickly. The ongoing battles inside Australian Muslim communities about who represents them (and who doesn't). Dog-whistling is always news though.
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I can't help feeling that someone in there has got the hates for labour so bad that anything, anything at all that will twist their knickers seems good. Maybe they think there's a big group of rich, right-wing Maori out there that have been hiding for the last 200 years...
Or perhaps "politics consists of repeatedly doing things that haven't worked in the past hoping that something will chasnge".
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Same nonsense from the developers in Sydney and Australia generally. The cause is fairly widely acknowledged to be a rush of cheap lending when finance was deregulated and the generous subsidies from Howard (capital gains tax is at half the normal rate on your primary dwelling, but the tax is not enforced so lots of people evade it).
What Sydney does have is really good PT in places, and Auckland-grade PT in the rest. If you live near a rail line then by and large you're whisked into the central city to work with great speed and convenience. Buses still suck somewhat, of course, but nothing sucks as badly as driving into the city. For the other 2 million people who work in Sydney... better hope it's near a train line. The govt keep trying to increase driving and starve PT, because privitising PT works even worse than private roads (and given the fiasco of the Cross City Tunnel that's saying something).
The endemic corruption in Australian govenrment makes it unlikely that anything will be done to change things. Developers fund state and local govt, many councils are composed of developers, federal govt cannot see past dollars and votes. Just like the other trashers... who will keep voting themselves bread and circuses and screwing their kids until they die, whining all the time about how hard their lives have been.
What I'd like to see is a focus on higher-density living via triple bottom line housing requirements, specifically focussed on a mix of pricing (social bottom line) energy and water efficiency (environmental bottom line) and let the other bottom line look after itself. Instead we have huge pressure to reduce or ignore the first two and focus entirely on the latter.
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Don't forget the Netherworld Dancing Toys comeback For Tomorrow, a paen to the new retirement savings program.
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Russel, I was sure from your title that you were talking about Che Tibby on drugs.
Disappointed.
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<quote> I suspect people like Microsoft would also get upset, as it would very likely mean that you could legally run a cracked copy of Windows that had the activation (etc) disabled.
Actually, I don't think it would. When you agree to a Microsoft OEM license, it explicitly says that it is licensed to the machine and not the user - there are other kinds of license that you can purchase from Microsoft that don't have this restriction. </quote>
The problem is when your machine will not run the MS software that you have licenses for. Those subscribed to Dave Farber's IP list will have seen the recent thread on Windows Media Player where a guy tried to reinstall WinXP on a Sony laptop and failed - he had a valid CD and the license key on the device, but the key wasn't compatible with the CD. Now, the new law would make it legal for him to circumvent the activation in order to run his legally acquired software on his legally acquired device, rather than purchasing an extra install CD.
I am in a similar position with one PC that I've been having hardware problems with - I've reinstalled XP so many times after replacing parts that I now have to activate it over the phone, and MS tell me that despite the license being to the case if I change too much inside that case it becomes a new computer and requires a new license. Luckily their call centre doesn't operate that way and I've been able to active XP each time so far.
I'm also concerned about how many of these new rights will evaporate in the end-user "contracts". You know, the document that you can only read after you've agreed to it and which overrides any supposed "rights" your local government has signed away to the US on your behalf. I think that those should be outlawed (you should have to sign the license before purchase, and a copy kept by the licensor to prove that you're bound by it).
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Clarke, I agree. It would be really good to see something like that in law. I expect it would be vigorously presented as a removal of existing rights by the copyright intermediaries however, on the basis that they can currently write whatever contract they like and the new law interferes with this. I suspect people like Microsoft would also get upset, as it would very likely mean that you could legally run a cracked copy of Windows that had the activation (etc) disabled. So some tweaking would be needed just to avoid a huge slanging match.
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DPF,
"In fact the intro to the bill specifically says actual circumvention is not prohibited."Correct me if I'm wrong here, but where the text of the bill explicitly disagrees with the introduction I thought the introduction has no force? It's only when there's a question of how something should be interpreted that weight can be given to the intro?
In this case "to facilitate the actual exercise of permitted acts where TPMs have been applied" will die in the face of 226C - it's an offence to help anyone break a TPM unless the person is a library, archive or educational establishment. Which is astonishingly narrow given the claim in the introduction.
So while you or me may have the right to rip our new HD-DVD disk to our portable video player, there is no legal way for us to obtain the software to let us do that. As well, 226G means that you'd have to keep the TPM, regardless of whether it's supported by your portable device, you can't decrypt it and store it in an open format.
226G.2b "does not know AND has no reason to believe... enable infringement" wipes out the possible exemption there.
Again, you'll know this and I don't, but can the committee completely rewrite the bill? Substantive rewrites require a new bill to be submitted? Specifically, they can't amend it to say the opposite of what their incoming draft said. So in this case it starts as "Big Media is in charge" and the best they can do is water it down to "most of what Big Media says (without a couple of minor sections)".
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I find the whole debate quite entertaining. I'm beginning to believe that ethinicity is what other people call you/me/us. In Australia I'm definitely a kiwi, while Maori friends are maori kiwis, and the yellow peril... she's asian. Or maybe Chinese. Or maybe not, that depends on her accent and where she claims to be from (say "Uhm frum Nuw Zulund" and you're a kiwi).
Ethinically I'm about half northern englander (despite the distance, there are ethnic differences between various Engs), some muddy fractions scots, gael and irish, as well as a bit of french if I read the whakapapa correctly. But in terms of "ethnic identity" it's more confusing - I speak more French than gaelic although I understand more irish/scottish than I do French, and I understand more Maori than either. Since I grew up in white New Zealand I suspect I'm a New Zealander of some sort. Pakeha? Nelsonian?
I'm surprised no-one has questioned why Chatham Islanders or Moriori aren't in those statistics - do they get subsumed into Maori? By whom?
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From Sydney the perspective looks a bit different. The Opera House is up for major refurbishment because it's never actually been suitable for opera and the users are getting sick of it. So after years of controversy as it was being built, heaps of whining afterwards because it's a better sculpture than music venue we now reach the point where we're asked to spend $700M to allow opera and dance to occur in the second hall.
Then we have Olympic Park, a concrete wasteland consisting of a large pit (where they burned the taxpayer dollars during the games) surrounded by rarely-used sporting facilities and a train station. More than 5 years after the games and we're *still* wondering whether there's going to be any further development aside from increased car parking (because Sydneysiders can't be expected to use public transport, that's for visitors and poor people). They gave us the venue for the Cycle Messenger World Champs for next to nothing because it was unused. Any other questions?
That said, Darling Harbour and surrounds does work quite well and the proposed site in Auckland is a hole just waiting for something useful to be built there. And sorry to break it to you aesthetes, a stadium is always going to look like a donut. It might look like a donut with decorations, but the donut is inherent in the purpose. Better to keep that shape than pretend that you're building a decoration then find that you can't fit the stadium into what's been built. Like they did with the Sydney Opera House.
My bias is towards the stadium as proposed, provided people focus on what it is going to be used for after the cup. There's definitely the option to combine the best of several ideas - surround it with public space, make sure the public transport is accessible and working, add things that will get used all the time (meeting spaces, offices, kayak rental as in Wellington, whatever), and I think you've got a winning concept. Perhaps even design it to resemble Southern Cross Station in Melbun or something. But don't screw up the basics. And don't let it sit in committee for 10 years like Te Papa, where it'll get abraded down to expensive blandness. I'd rather have one controversial designer than 20 committee members as long as the basic functions are there.