Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Sacha,
I should point out that I'm not averse to adversarial judicial systems, on the whole. They are, however, vulnerable to the investigators cherry-picking data. Inquisitorial systems are not vulnerable to that, but instead are vulnerable to the biases of the inquisitor.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Sacha,
Other countries have a fully separate prosecution service, rather than combining the functions as we do.
And we know how well that works in the US.
Also, the Police here only act as the prosecutors for some offences. Serious offences are prosecuted by the Crown, but their case is only as good as the evidence supplied by the Police and that's the failure of any adversarial judicial system. It doesn't matter if you have a fully independent prosecution service, because the investigators are the ones who control the evidence supplied in determining if there's a case. -
Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to Stephen Judd,
in all likelihood, you provision for rather less than theoretical maximum and hope that your users don’t magically all change behaviour and use their full capacity at once.
The industry even has words for the concepts: "over-subscription" for selling more capacity than you have, and "contention ratio" for the relationship between how much you've sold and how much you've actually got.
Over-sub is a sound economic behaviour when one considers that almost nobody uses all (or even most) of their connection's maximum capacity all of the time. Most, in fact, use only a small fraction. The reason that it's total bullshit that ISPs want high-volume users since it makes them money is because the high-volume users are the ones who force ISPs to buy additional bandwidth in order to reduce their contention ratios and give "ordinary" users an adequate experience. Money comes from users who don't use their connections much at all, allowing massive over-sub'ing because the contention ratios don't ever get very bad. -
Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to nzlemming,
Yes, they pay for the pipes, but I understood they also pay for what goes across those pipes
Kinda. Wholesale capacity direct to an international carrier is, generally, un-metered, and purchased by the Mb of pipe size.. It’s just not worth the hassle for big international carriers to worry about metering their wholesale customers’ usage.
Where it gets murky is for domestic links to other ISPs (looking at you, TelstraClear) that don’t make connections to peering points such as Auckland Peering Exchange or Wellington Internet eXchange. To connect to the likes of APE or WIX an ISP pays for a pipe of a given size and then exchanges traffic with anyone else at the exchange for no cost. To exchange traffic directly (instead of via an intermediary such as an international carrier via Australia) with ISPs who don’t peer, however, an ISP will have to pay for a pipe to that ISP and then the ISPs will settle a bill each month for the bytes transferred.
ETA: I realise that a "PE 101" is a bit teaching you to suck eggs, but the backgrounder is useful for others.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Jonty,
Is it a fearful public putting pressure on the media for a quick result that causes the police to finger the poor sod who can't produce an alibi?
Discussion after dinner on Saturday night, involving one of David Tamihere's sons (who's a close friend), another participant said that a former cop client of his has said that a significant reason the client quit the uniform (in the late 90s, IIRC) was a culture of, as soon as the media started getting involved, finding the first likely suspect and then making the case stick. AAT was just the first high-profile case, but Tamihere and Watson were equally-questionable cases that occurred while said client was still a cop.
Te Qaeda wasn't really the cops finding the first suspect they could and fitting up a case around them, more a case of institutional paranoia fuelled by global paranoia leading to a sub-optimal outcome on the back of hastily, shittily drafted legislation.
The Teapot Tapes, well, let's just say that I hope Ambrose sues them for defamation. He's got a strong case, and there's no defence of "I'm a cop". If it was really comparable, we'd have seen it go to Court regardless of Ambrose's protestations of innocence and ready-made "reasonable doubt" defence.
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to Simon Grigg,
seemingly ardent over-zealotry of the US DOD
Perhaps you mean DOJ? Although, from what I've read elsewhere there was a fairly substantial portion of MU's traffic and data storage that went to deployed military personnel for videos of their escapades.
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Hard News: The Very Worst, in reply to Sacha,
How do we “punish” people via loss of liberty and attempt to rehabilitate them without throwing them all in a bin together?
home detention?
Or similar, yes. Use full-on custodial sentences for people who represent a clear threat to society or whose crimes represent such an attack on the well-being of a large number of people that a deterrent message must be sent [ETA: Because white-collar criminals actually do have the opportunity to consider the magnitude of their actions before following through, unlike most other criminals].
Labour’s talk of abolishing prison sentences shorter than six months is positive provided that it doesn’t lead to judges just imposing longer custodial sentences instead of following the spirit of such a change and, rather, imposing non-custodial sentences. I have sufficient faith in the quality of our judiciary that I don’t consider that to be a likely outcome from must jurists, but it’s always a risk if appropriate safeguards aren’t established.
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OnPoint: Some of My Best Friends are Consultants, in reply to nzlemming,
the Ombudsman seems to think so, but nothing is certain with this government.
No, she's quite sure it won't be so based on National's utterances thus far. She wants it to be so, but the current plan espoused by National is to become majority shareholder of something that strongly resembles a fully private company: no Treaty obligations, no pesky Ombudsmen or Official Information Act, etc
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Hard News: The Very Worst, in reply to Scott Chris,
The cold hard truth is that for many New Zealanders they believe that people are sent to prison for punishment rather than as a punishment.
I must be thick. What’s the diff?
If you go to prison for punishment, it means that the system abuses you beyond the fact that you're confined and don't control your daily life. Sanctioned beatings, hard labour, miserable living conditions, shit food (though what I've read about current dietary offerings in prison doesn't lead me to believe that food in prison is even adequate now. Carb-heavy, and very light on the fresh fruit and vegetables), solitary confinement.
If you go to prison as punishment, it means that being subjected to someone else's timetable and not having your liberty is the punishment. You don't run your life, someone else does. The guards aren't allowed to beat you, solitary confinement is for exceptional misbehaviour on your part and cannot be a long-term situation, no hard labour...
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Hard News: The Very Worst, in reply to BenWilson,
Death of the robbers and innocent staff or bystanders is not a common outcome of fraudulent theft.
However, I would be very surprised if the suicide toll of our domestic financial malfeasance scandal is not quite dramatically higher than the death toll associated with all armed robberies in NZ history.
Armed robbery is dangerous, certainly, but let's not kid ourselves that nobody has died directly as a result of the goings-on in our finance companies. We know for certain that there have been suicides amongst the victims, and a range of terminal health effects such as cancer and cardiac problems. Which makes the pitiful sentences dished out to the offenders that much more offensive.