Posts by Rich of Observationz
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I'm assuming they be closing one of the Star Times or the Herald On Sunday within weeks of the merger completing.
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Fairfax in Australia, at least, sees an end to 7 day a week printing.
I'd suggest that a pre-requisite for a paywall isn't just content of quality, but content that enough people require for their work in order to finance its creation (and no usable free competitor). The FT and Wall St Journal have this (mostly to service the finance sector). Probably the New York Times, Washington Post and Economist also. I don't think any other publications in the English language do.
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Hard News: Obscuring the News, in reply to Russell Brown,
As does the Guardian. Must pay them ££ to do so, because it sure damages their brand.
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Hard News: Obscuring the News, in reply to Josie McNaught,
I don't think that /r/nottheonion is the global news adjudicator, somehow.
I'd be quite sure that the Herald's legal department keeps them on the straight and narrow with copyright. All newspapers syndicate their content and have done for over a hundred years, in addition to newswires (Reuters, AP, etc) who produce content purely for syndication (and other purposes). In addition, there is no copyright in facts, so providing the words are my own, I can take facts from any media source and publish them.
The literary/academic concept of plagiarism doesn't really exist in news reporting and never has done. Before the internet, print newsdesks would seek out the first copies of rival papers when they went on sale (usually around 1am in England) and copy any 'scoops' in their later editions ready for commuters on their way into work.
Of course, excessive use of repurposed content with no original input makes for a dull and uninteresting publication, which is the problem here.
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I wonder whether a false value is being placed on those clicks, and whether as advertisers become more sophisticated, click revenue will tail off?
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Hard News: Obscuring the News, in reply to Northshoreguynz,
I'd like an aggregator.
The optimal tool for reading stuff on the Internet was in many ways the first one I used back in - 1993 - xrn.
The killer feature was its killfile => with a bit of regexp-fu, you could consign people, topics and entire ideologies to a world outside your vision. If only we could have that again.
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Have you heard what will happen when companies supplying services online into NZ are expected to collect GST from October 31st?
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It's interesting that in the UK, a much scarier country with 15 times our population, there were a historically high four police shootings in the last 12 months (The long term average is around one a year).
In NZ, there have been five.
The UK police actually document publically how they manage firearms incidents - maybe NZ should take some lessons.
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So this is biology, and I defer to Bart:
the simple linear model from high dose to low dose is wrong, if it was right we would lots and lots more dead radiation industry workers and we don't
But I'd like to see a worked explanation of that. Radiation industry workers (in the modern developed world and absent disasters) are well protected from radiation, and there aren't very many of them. If they had a 0.1% extra risk of getting cancer as a result of their exposure, would we be able to measure that?
Which comes down to a philosophical point - if you were told that visiting Fukushima gave you a 0.1% extra risk of cancer, you might not worry. But if a million people were exposed, then that's a thousand extra deaths.
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There are a range of views, some of which are informed by the nuclear industry (obviously, if you can take a view that moderate amounts of radiation, such as a contained nuclear accident, are harmless, then there would be much less decontamination/evacuation needed after an accident such as Fukushima, the cost of such an accident would reduce, and hence the insurance costs would drop - except that few, if any, nuclear reactors actually carry any liability insurance).
There are various confounding factors around the idea that radiation is beneficial. It's been suggested that Japanese atomic bomb survivors outlived people in other cities not exposed to radiation - but this was found problematic - one issue being that survivors would have been the most resiliant part of the population and received better support and medical treatment post-war.