Posts by Stephen Judd
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Party at the Elders!
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I never saw that follow-up at the time. Rich, do you know what I look like?
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(I also became a master at hiding whatever book I was currently reading under my desklid or in my lap or inside a ring binder).
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Which is not a reason to hold a kid back but is a very good illustration of why you should teach kids as individuals and not expect 30 little people to all be working at the same level all the time.
That's true, but if you do have 30 kids, it's just not going to happen. How many minutes of personal attention could each child get every week?
I was way too self-educated to get anything out of school until I encountered subjects where reading things myself didn't work so well (eg foreign languages). I spent most class time daydreaming and then annoying teachers by producing the right answer when called on anyway. I got very little out of school academically except a counter-productive faith in my own cleverness and a profound mistrust of authority. In retrospect, I feel very sorry for my teachers.
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Giovanni: I meant it in a purely innocent and statistical sense :D
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Geoff: I have a greater than average number of legs.
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Lyndon: bravo, sir. I believe that should get a special judge's award for outstandingly non-compliant entry allowed on grounds of brilliance.
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Matthew, does your definition of "response" include the Iraq and Afghan wars? If so, I would agree with you. I was more thinking of domestic measures. Kyle, yeah, that was indeed my point.
Eg, if you were vigorously pursuing a policy of airport screening, you wouldn't employ minimum wage drones from a private firm. You would have undercover police and military everywhere, and a high proportion of random passengers would get an extensive grilling designed to unsettle them and detect the nervous and untruthful. Which is why there hasn't been a successful attack on a plane leaving Ben Gurion ever.
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I've observed many times that if Israel, Spain, or even the UK, responded to their historic (in Israel's case on-going) terrorist situations with the same vigour
Matthew, have you been to Israel?
At minimum your bags are searched on entry to any public building - hospital, shopping mall, whatever. There is an active secret police and censorship regime - trifling in comparison with its neighbours, but onerous compared to most Western democracies. And there is unlimited "administrative detention", ie imprisonment without trial, which includes citizens.
The difference between the US and the Israeli security approach is that the US implementation is crap (eg their ludicrous airport theatre, lack of Arabic speakers in intelligence agencies, unwillingness to impose costs on business) whereas the Israelis are effective, which in turn reflects the relative severity of the threats they face.
Apropos Europe in general, a German friend of mine who moved here recently was aghast at how lax we are. To her, registering with the police on arrival is just common sense... my pointing out that the imperial secret police thought so too fell on deaf ears.
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This ties together several discussion threads in the last few weeks.
DNA samples of about two million Kiwis should be destroyed or transferred to a secure authority to avoid possible abuse from the dizzying pace of technology, the Privacy Commission says.
The DNA samples taken from a heel-prick test of babies born since the late 1960s is "banked" indefinitely as part of the National Screening Unit's Newborn Metabolic Screening Programme.
Originally intended to check for childhood diseases, the samples have also been used in paternity cases and to identify crime victims.
But Privacy Commissioner Marie Shroff has cautioned that the indefinite retention of heel-prick blood samples "presents risks for the programme's participants and potentially the programme itself".
Personally I'm very pessimistic about holding back attacks on privacy. If you look at the circumstances in which our current civil rights were established - gross abuse, often amongst civil strife - it was obvious then what the potential harms were. I don't think we'll get people behind privacy rights or surveillance restriction until gross abuses are obvious and widespread.
Alternatively, perhaps I should be optimistic. Apparently most people have great faith in the state agencies that would collect and use such data. Maybe they're right and I'm wrong. How neat that would be.