Posts by Russell Brown
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Speaker: The government's Rules…, in reply to WSW,
I dread to think what would have happened - how long we would have been in dispute with these people - if we hadn't had a neutral Building Inspector.
When we did our extension, we had good builders. And they moaned mightily about having the bloody nitpicking building inspector around, while I thought "this seems good to me."
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Rather than reprint all of the advertising material, they actually just got someone to cross the word out in marker pen on a bunch of them.
That is amazing.
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Hard News: On youthful indiscretions, in reply to Tinakori,
Jeez, Russell,"thing"? Did William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Henry Miller et al die in vain.
Oh, okay. I thought it sounded funny.
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One of Ashcroft's named sources, the dreadful James Delingpole (largely known for his trenchant, idiotic writing in denial of climate change), writes about the drug thing on the Spectator website:
No hard feelings, I hope, Dave. We’ve had our ups and downs but I’ll always remember our Oxford days fondly and for all my harsh criticisms over the years I still wish you well. But one serious point I would like to raise about your misspent youth and mine is this: your cleaving to our current drugs laws is hypocritical and wrong.
Quite soon now our own kids will be up at university — Oxford, hopefully — dabbling with weed. Except it won’t be nice giggly stuff like we used to smoke. It will be that horrible, chemical-y, psychosis-inducing skunk. Strong smoke driving out mild smoke is one of the many unintended consequence of our illiberal drug laws. Make it legal, make it safe, say I: you owe it to your vanished youth.
The belief that there is some malign, deadly, wholly different kind of cannabis called "skunk" is one of the sad side-effects of reading right-wing newspapers.
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This. Good grief.
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Hard News: On youthful indiscretions, in reply to BenWilson,
I'd expect the actual response would be to find a way to personally damage Ashcroft's reputation with a similarly salacious smear, preferably via an unconnected party. We'll probably find out more than we ever wanted to about where his todger has been soon enough. It's probably not going to be hard to find something publicly distasteful in the private life of an English Lord.
He's only a peer by appointment – and even that was a bit of a scandal. Check out his Wikipedia article – he's dodged any number of bullets, but it's not hard to imagine someone, somewhere has something else on him. You're right, this could get interesting.
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Hard News: On youthful indiscretions, in reply to John Palethorpe,
He can't sue, because he'd need to be in court and have his uni days examined. So it sits there. Like a dead pigs head. On his career. Oink.
I think you're right. True or not, suing would be disastrous.
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Hard News: On youthful indiscretions, in reply to Sacha,
Yeah, this part:
The cost of entry, paid by all members of the group, is participation in humiliating acts; acts which will forever wed them to the group, because should they later act in a way contrary to the group’s interests or desires, their “indiscretions” can be brought back to destroy their careers or personal lives.
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Hard News: NZME and you, in reply to Moz,
When I played with an iPhone a while ago the "free" apps I saw all had ads embedded in them.
Isn't that exactly the case with free apps on Google Play?
One complaint from the tech-savvy owner was that those ads were impossible to filter out without breaking the apps.
Well, yeah, iOS is better locked down than Android. Which means you get few malicious apps and is why 97% of mobile malware is on Android. But it's absolutely true that Apple's privacy policy has crippled its iAd business:
Apple's iAd business can grow only if the iPhone and iPad manufacturer will be more willing to share its treasure trove of data. Advertisers can know a lot about their market when they know their location, age, likes, shopping patterns, among others but it seems Apple doesn't want to give them those information.
A new report on Advertising Age has revealed what advertisers think of Apple's arrogance when it comes to its mobile advertising platform and its tight grip on user data. This attitude towards its ad business turns off advertisers and makes them turn elsewhere, perhaps other avenues such as Google, Yahoo, or Facebook that make life a lot easier for them.
While Google raked in a revenue of $3.98 billion from mobile ad and Facebook pocketed $1.53 billion, Apple's mobile ad earnings can be considered meager at $258 million.
You can't turn off ads in ad-supported free iOS apps, no. But you can turn off ad tracking as a system feature.
A senior iAd executive bitched about the privacy policy when he resigned this year:
“I don’t believe they [Apple] are interested in this capability because they have a strict policy around what they do with user data,” Crawford said. “IAd has great assets and great capabilities, but they are going to follow Apple’s policy to the letter of the law.”
In other words, he believes that because iAd doesn’t harvest and share private user information with marketers, that the service is restricted or held back. His suggestion then is that Apple’s moral code gets in the way of a potentially very promising platform.
Personally, I’d rather know that my user data was safe. Drawbridge’s technology – on first read – sounds quite terrifying.
This came just after Tim Cook reiterated the privacy policy.
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Hard News: NZME and you, in reply to BenWilson,
The best value ads are attracted by sites that are basically about the product advertised. They’re high value because the people going to the site are naturally interested in the ads. But what product really has that synergy with people who are interested in the news and general discussion?
Yep, that was precisely our problem.
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