Posts by HORansome
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Russell Brown,
Now you mentioned it, yes.
Anyone have the requisite skill to make me a little logo of a jaunty fez suitable for a business card?
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Russell Brown,
"I think you'll find that Mr Dentith of Auckland University's Philosophy department is the kind of public intellectual you're looking for." Russell Brown
I'm so printing that on a business card.
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I wonder how long it will be until he turns up here. I mentioned him once and within days he was trying to teach me the error of his ways.
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Hard News: Like being there, in reply to Russell Brown,
I find that the people who've bought iPads and been disappointed are people whose production machines are laptops. OTOH, I use mine every day.
I'm a laptop user who uses a desktop sporadically at home (for example, right now I'm using the laptop whilst seated at the desk when my desktop is located) and I'm finding that the iPad is beginning to replace my laptop use (it helps that I've been using an iPod Touch for checking e-mails and my RSS feeds for a while now); it's just nicer to use with a great feeling of feedback.
Anyway, today I tried the iPad out on my friend and thesis supervisor, Jon. Jon is totally blind and is still using Mac OS 8 on an old PowerPC Mac because OS X's version of Voiceover, the screen reading software Apple touts, isn't particularly user-friendly for him (it seems designed for the legally blind who have some degree of sight as opposed to people who have no eyes whatsoever). I had heard that Voiceover for iOS was better and it is; Jon had much more success navigating the iPad and launching software than we ever had trying Voiceover on OS X.
Now, I don't know what the user experience on Android tablets is in this regard, but I was impressed (moreso) with how easily it just worked on the iPad. Does anyone know about how such things with respect to other portable devices?
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Hard News: Like being there, in reply to TracyMac,
There was no technical reason for the first iPad not to have USB or SD or HDMI slots, cameras of a reasonable resolution, etc etc right from the outset.
That's wrong for two reasons. There may well have been technical reasons for those features being omitted, given that Apple wanted to make a tablet which was as small and slim as they could engineer it to be. Just because the technology is there doesn't mean you have to put it into a device; you add features based upon what you want the product to do rather than add everything and then try to make it work.
The second reason is, of course, price; you can add features galore and those features, aside from the engineering cost of developing the unit, also increase the cost of the unit.
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Even with the most charitable circumstances, if Aire was beaten by an officer that is the end of that officer's career. And I can imagine circumstances where that might be unjust as well.
There are no circumstance where, if Arie was beaten by a police officer and that act means the end of that officer's career, that such a loss of job would be unjust. Police officers are not allowed to beat up suspects. Period. Full stop. It's never excusable. If it has happened (and, as Russell has argued, it's a likely inference to make), then it should be investigated. That's not baying for blood; that's requiring that the police live up to the standards we expect of them, standards that every officer knows are expected of them.
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After I finished the book last night, I mused on a thought experiment: if a great state was behaving entirely virtuously, and in accordance with its public positions, would its foreign service officials still sometimes need to speak in confidence, if only to help and protect human rights and democratic activists suffering under less enlightened regimes? I suspect they would. Wikileaks itself could not operate without its thoroughgoing internal secrecy. Investigative journalists could not work if they could not keep their sources secret. Clearly, not every secret is a scandal.
I've mused on this, too.
Not every secretive activity by politicians and civil servants is going to be sinister (or morally wrong); without information about how corrupt or closed the political class are the most we can usually say is that if a political activity takes place in secret, then it is suspicious (otherwise, why undertake it in secret?).
So, if the political class want to avoid be tarred with the allegation of such suspicious behaviour, then the burden of proof is on them to provide a good reason for such secrecy being necessary for what they are doing.
Of course, the problem can then become "What if the reason for such secrecy is itself something that needs to be kept secret?"
The example I keep coming back to in my thesis (with regards to secrecy as suspicious rather than sinister) is the Surprise Party; a good (well-planned and executed) surprise party relies on the organisers not just keeping secrets (a suspicious activity) but also sometimes lying about what they are up to (potentially a sinister activity). Yet, with (hopefully) very few exceptions, surprise parties are not malevolent events.
[I think the use of surprise parties as an analogy here is problematic, mostly due to scope. Surprise parties tend to affect a very small number of people whilst the kind of secrecy we're talking about with regards to governments and the like affects much larger groups.]
I think we (the human population as a whole) tend to conflate suspicious activity with sinister activity; not all suspicious activity is actually sinister. Of course, we've probably got more reason to be suspicious of secretive political activity, especially given how conspiratorial our collective political past has been.
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Yeah, the Burgerfuel aioli, like most (but not all) aioli is not vegan, as it contains egg.
Which is a shame, as it's quite tasty.
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Hard News: Because it's about time we…, in reply to Jacqui Dunn,
The Tofu Burger is back and it is just as delicious. It's not universally available at Burgerfuel, however; at the moment you can get it at the Mt Eden, Ponsonby, Parnell, New Lynn, Takapuna and Glenfield stores.
(The tofu is now vegan-friendly as well, by the way. Previously it used a honey-based marinade.)
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Hard News: Because it's about time we…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I keep a Presso in the office for the late afternoon fix. I find it makes something closer to a ristretto than an espresso, but that I don't mind.