Posts by Matthew Poole
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It still amazes me that when we look at the rest of the world with Free Trade Agreements with the US, that we still want one. Go on, take everything.
What amuses me is the people who were so thoroughly opposed to our FTA with China, convinced we would be shafted completely and given token treatment, are often the ones so desperate for us to get an FTA with the US. Given that AUS-FTA is widely considered to be the template for all future developed-nations bilateral FTAs with the US, we're better off with China than with the US. Our FTA was concluded after AUS-FTA, but completes sooner, drops tariffs lower, covers more areas, has fewer exceptions, and is projected to have a greater level of economic benefit.
Who's being fucked by whom, exactly? -
Oh, and ACTA as it stands could see this wonderful development overturned. We're now leading the developed world on the matter, but ACTA could force NZ to re-allow them.
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When ACTA first came to public notice, people were worrying that they'd be stopped at the border so their MP3 player could be searched for contraband music. I pooh-poohed them then, and I'm glad I did. The reality of ACTA is far, far scarier than any unrealistic suggestion that customs officers might want to check everyone's MP3 player on arrival - I say unrealistic because there's no way they could ever search even 1% of arrivals without jamming up the entire border control area.
What is entirely realistic is that US interests could see Pharmac gutted (as was demanded of Australia's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme as a condition of AUS-FTA); criminal penalties for circumventing copy protection on BluRay disks or e-books you own so that you can back them up or use them on, say, Linux; three-strikes disconnection policies; statutory damages for personal file-sharing, even in the absence of a profit motive or demonstrated financial harm. -
So you're saying it's up there with "may interfere with our navigation systems"?
Given that I haven't seen discussion of systematic testing to prove that cellphones can't interfere with aircraft nav systems, I'd say it's even less reliable.
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Have you noticed how cell phones are banned at petrol stations?
Electrical charge + petrol = Bang.
The "ban" on using cellphones at petrol stations is unsupportable by any amount of evidence and testing. This extends right up to dousing the inside of a caravan in petrol, tossing in a bunch of cellphones, and then ringing them to try and cause a fire. No result.
The Taser thing, on the other hand, is just bloody stupid. Western Australian police last year put out an operational instruction not to use Tasers on people who had poured petrol over themselves after an Aboriginal man combusted in similar circumstances. It's inconclusive if it was the Taser or the cigarette lighter in his hand that caused the fire, but the result was the same and the SOP change is logical. You certainly won't find any fire fighters who can be convinced that the discharge of 10s-of-000s of volts of electricity can be considered to be intrinsically safe.
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I find it unlikely that any NZ ISP would have the ability to throttle customers based on the site they're going to.
Site? Yes, quite easily, but it's not normally done. Protocol? Yes, absolutely, and done by the vast majority of ISPs to varying extents, especially to things like BitTorrent.
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I might if knew what that meant. :)
Your distance to cabinet, quality of your line etc. "It's you, not xtra".
What Kyle said. Go into your DSL modem's admin interface and look at things like connection speed, error counts, line noise (if the modem shows it)...
Also, how long's the connection been up? When was the modem last rebooted? A lot of modems re-train connections if there are errors, and do so at a lower speed. If the errors are transient, that means that you're now connected slower than maximum for something that's no longer a problem. If the errors are constant, you've likely got a line issue.I'm well-known on here for being far from Telecom's biggest fan, or most ardent defender, but my experience with Big Time doesn't mesh with yours at all. Our connection's performance is exactly what was advertised ("managed" P2P except during 0200-0700), and better than we expected from an uncapped service. If you're having real problems with speed, I would be very hesitant to blame Xtra until line and hardware issues have been ruled out.
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with slightly less heavy throttling between 0200-0700
I don't know what you're seeing, but I have confirmed to myself that the throttling goes away entirely after 0200. I've seen torrents coming in with a combined rate (several simultaneously) in excess of 10Mb/s. Not bad for a connection that's training up at 13Mb/s.
I've also seen, during the day, torrents coming in at 1Mb/s. The throttling is very variable, and appears to be largely controlled by demand. If I were you I'd be looking closely at my connection characteristics, rather than leaping to blame Xtra.
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My flat is on Big Time (Xtra's replacement for Go Large), and I have to say that we're quite happy with it. Yes they throttle torrents except between 0200-0700, but when they take the cap off the data just hoofs on in. For other stuff, it's generally very responsive, even in peak use periods. No data cap is a wonderful, wonderful thing, too. Nobody here worries about what they download, now much YouTube they watch, or what OS updates/versions they might want to download. I've pulled in five OS DVDs in a week in the recent past. How many of you would dare to do that on your home internet connections?
Trying to drag this back to the original point, 10Mb/s is actually not a very impressive target when one considers that it's being set for several years from now. We should be aiming to have a national mean connection speed of at least 25Mb/s, and a median that's more like 40Mb/s, or even more. FTTH will allow gig, and that's what the true aspiration should be.
One of the things I'm finding most depressing about a lot of the debates going on in NZ at present is that they seem to be premised on "Aim low. That way you cannot fail to achieve your goals." We should be shooting for the moon, so that even a failure will be impressive. Instead we're aiming low and not even achieving mediocrity. -
laws can and often do serve the interests of the powerful, but they also serve the interests of those who have no power and no allies.
This is worth repeating. One of the reasons that societies with laws and state-sponsored enforcers can prosper is that it's not necessary for people to spend their days defending their property. Rather, the state provides a protection service and this allows property owners to dedicate their efforts to providing goods and services to others.
Abolition of laws and their enforcers would force people to spend their time defending their property, rather than engaging in productive pursuits that enrich society as a whole. Anarchism may be a nice thought, but it rarely stands up to any kind of real scrutiny. Unless, of course, the proponent fancies a society that stagnates in all fields of endeavour, be they scientific, industrial, or philosophical. I cannot think of a single major advance in human development that has come from a society that lacked any kind of hierarchy and enforcement of strictures that would be recognisable as laws in a modern context. Even Ancient Greece had judicial and statutory systems.