Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Party Zone is Courtenay Pl, it doesn't matter if you're a drunk looking to score or just after a nice martini you go to the same place.
For a "nice martini", can I recommend various far better bars on Cuba St?
For a "drunk looking to score", can I recommend Auckland? Or Courtenay Place, if that's too far.
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I understand that "stupid and energetic" was the main qualification for a post in the Key cabinet. Along with an inclination to view things from helicopters.
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the students from the 'better schools' often perform worse at Stage I than their rivals because they think that, having been to a better school, they can coast at uni.
Also they lose the intensive support and supervision they had from the school, which might have helped them to overachieve at NCEA.
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VW wanting dosh for the Kombi reference...and Kraft Corporation wanting their cut for the Vegemite namecheck?
I'm surprised the BBC didn't demand a radio edit. They made Ray Davis change the lyrics of Lola to "we drank champagne it tasted like cherry cola" in order to remove a brand name. (The song predated the launch of actual Cherry Cola by some years).
Possibly neither the Kombi or Vegimite were actively marketed in the UK at that time.
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Is there some kind of event on in Wellington this weekend? There seem to be a lot of very drunk people. Lower Hutt Anniversary?
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'Of course there are extra-terrestrials among us - they are called Hungarians" - Enrico Fermi
He was of course referring to Edward Teller.
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Just back from Kiwiburn, so I don't know much about the details on the iPad. Apologies if this was discussed somewhere in pages 3-10.
Basically, it's a locked device, right? Apps have to be approved by Apple and distributed through the App Store.
For me, that's a worry. Having devices in mass consumer hands that can be programmed to do anything by anyone with the skills is important.
What's the betting that Apple will try and move the App Store paradigm up the functionality chain until either Mac OS is a locked system, or the Mac is replaced by machines running an iPad derived OS?
Once that happens, it'll be easy legally and commercially for Microsoft to do the same thing with Windows. (It's already trivial technically) You then have an ecosystem where all software has to be released through monopoly channels that decide what is and isn't acceptable.
Sure, we will still have Linux. But that will never reach more than a tiny percentage of personal computing devices. Apps like BitTorrent will be stuck in a ghetto of geek usage, and the majority of users will be stuck with the apps that the powers that be want us to have.
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It's always interested me that we have this whole South American influence in Welly, just because somebody chartered a boat called "Cuba" to check out the site of Wellington in 1840.
I guess we are lucky the Scunthorpe didn't win the bidding.
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Making your own soap use [sic] fat & caustic soda
Yes, I've seen such soap described as "organic".
This despite the fact that much production of NaOH still uses the mercury cell process, which is one of the main causes of environmental mercury pollution. It would in theory be possible to source NaOH that's guaranteed to have come from a more modern (diaphragm/membrance cell) plant, but you can bet the kind of hippies that make organic soap would have no clue about this.
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There has never been a tradition of absolute land ownership in the English (or indeed most other) political systems. Land has always been held subject to community rights (access, works, common grazing). Originally, many of these rights were held by local and national rulers, but with democracy, they have passed to the community.
The idea of absolute landholding is pretty much unique to settler states.