Posts by Rich of Observationz
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When I was a kid in England people would pack solvent for tar on clothes as part of the standard kit to go to the beach. (this was after the Torrey Canyon wreck, plus ships would pump their bilges and pollute the sea with oil).
That ship had maybe 2000 tonnes of oil. A supertanker has over 500,000 tonnes, and the Deepwater Horizon disaster spilt more than that.
It's kinda ironic that the whole high-carbon beach house/4WD/powerboat lifecycle that many NZers aspire to inevitably fucks up the same environment they're enjoying.
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I'd commend this. I would have given it more time myself, but I have too many other projects on.
I'm particularly keen on the idea of making the use of VPNs more accessible.
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Hard News: Thinking Digital, in reply to BenWilson,
it's actually not likely they will crack public key encryption after all
With passwords on files, it's typically conventional encryption.
In current practice, it's feasible that future machines will be able to brute-force whatever p455w[]rD you've used. The key length is limited by memory and typing time. People might however have huge amounts of key material in a separate device (phone, dongle) if it became necessary. You could even envisage a one-time pad with enough material for all the documents one created in a career.
(The thing with one-time pads (keys of the same length as the document, never reused) is that although you *could* brute-force them with a suitable computer, you'd wind up with every possible document of the chosen length. So versions of your future decrypted email would include the phrases:
"John, get some milk on the way home"
and
"John, murder McCully after cabinet"and you wouldn't be able to tell which).
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We would not have been granted the tournament without stadium upgrades
Our government could have got together with the Aussies, Brits and South Africans and agreed not to be kicked around by Big Sport. Then the IRB would have had a choice of either pulling their (substantial) necks in, or holding future tournaments in places like Dubai and Hong Kong where the weather's unsuitable and the local team couldn't qualify for a lunchtime touch league.
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sucking up to whoever the VIPs were
The only person of any note who could be identified attending was Prince Albert of Monaco. I guess we have trade with the Monégasque, but it mostly consists of Key’s wealthy mates stuffing their cash their out of reach of the NZ taxman.
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Hard News: Winning the RWC: it's complicated, in reply to Sacha,
Was it good - sure.
Could it have been done for much, much less - undoubtedly?
(Charging for fan-zone tickets would have deferred the cost and contained the numbers. We could have had every game in existing stadia - just with slightly smaller crowds - who could in turn have been transported more easily.
If the government threw a few million at BDO or Homegrown, they could have free admission, too. But they don't - and I wouldn't really expect them to)
Also, if you're having a thing, and using your own money, then that's up to you. If you're taking *my* money to do it, then I think that gives me locus standi to criticise.
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Hard News: Thinking Digital, in reply to Russell Brown,
And both my published Spectrum games work on emulators that can be downloaded from a range of sites.
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Encryption will always be an arms race, no matter what technological breakthroughs are made
Current technologies provide a huge disparity between the work factor of encryption and cryptanalysis. (this assumes the algorithm doesn't have a bug or backdoor known to one or more TLAs). Most breaks into encryption systems result from incorrect "packaging" rather than frontal assault on the algorithm.
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Hard News: Thinking Digital, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Pretty much all document formats (including ODT) allow encryption. I think it's a job for Archives NZ to ensure that key public records are held in unencrypted form on a secure, redundant and maintained database.
If one is concerned with the preservation of all the cruft, notes and ephemera that fill public servants PCs, in order to drive some kind of future archaeology, then that's different. I do know if you make said workers use rubbish like LibreOffice (I have used this extensively and have detailed experience of how crap it is) they will make alternate arrangements and you'll find the docs migrated to personal Macs and the cloud.
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David Farrar was able to basically kill it
Is this some new constitutional change, possibly passed under secret urgency? Farrar gets a veto over Labour policy? Great.
My suggestion would be an opt-out levy with an indemnity from legal action for non-commercial file-sharing as a quid-pro-quo. $10 a month, and no-one can take you to the Copyright Tribunal (unless the violations are being done for gain, obviously).
If a customer doesn't want to pay, they can assent to an agreement that they are liable for any file-sharing and opt out of the levy.