Posts by Michael Homer
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
However, Fonterra’s group director of communications Kerry Underhill says the dairy cooperative has never, directly or indirectly, requested or paid for posts on the Whale Oil blog and has never discussed the matter with Carrick Graham.
... He says Fonterra hasn't worked with that public relations agency since he has been with the company [since August 2013], and that to his knowledge Fonterra has never worked with the agency or ever requested or paid for posts on any blogs, either in New Zealand or overseas.
... “These things can take on a life of their own, and this is absolutely without any truth or foundation.”
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Hard News: Labour's Fiscal Plan:…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
The trolley cables are owned by Wellington Cable Car Ltd, which is owned by the city council.
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The visualisation's a bit off for MPI - "Border Biosecurity Risk Management" is listed as both increasing and decreasing by 100%, as is "Implementation of Policy Advice" (at least I think those are the same thing both times). LINZ has similar issues - it thinks almost everything is new. Only a few of them are like that though.
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Hard News: Illegal Highs, in reply to BenWilson,
If this was not against the law, they’d be out of jail sooner.
Concurrent sentencing doesn't work that way. Two years for X plus one month for Y is two years in total.
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to Pete George,
Even reporting the intervals isn't overly helpful in itself since (among other things) the proportions aren't actually independent - +1% to someone has to come from someone else, which has flow-on effects elsewhere. They have a pretty narrow range of application and the nuances are pretty subtle. It would be a nice area for an interactive visualisation though.
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Hard News: Poll Day 2: Queasy, in reply to BenWilson,
It’s just the standard binomial proportion confidence interval p ± z * sqrt(1 / n * p(1 – p)). If you know p (the reported proportion) and n (the sample size) you can calculate the confidence interval for any z (“number of standard deviations” – 1.96 for a 95% interval) you like.
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OnPoint: The Big Guns: Truecrypt and Tails, in reply to Gareth Swain,
Public-key encryption isn't generally useful for data at rest. Ordinary ("symmetric") encryption with a passphrase does just as well in that case. The practical benefit of encrypting your stored data then is mostly that it will be inaccessible if your machines are lost or stolen. Truecrypt is one way of doing that.
It doesn't actually hurt to encrypt anything you're sending over a public network, but the tradeoff of effort probably isn't worthwhile most of the time. The most bang for your buck is using SSL connections wherever possible, particularly if you're using a public wifi access point or the like.
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Hard News: The Real Threat, in reply to Matthew Poole,
As Kirk observes, getting SSL hosting means getting a non-shared IP address, and that frequently costs. The bigger cost, though, is getting the SSL certificate.
SNI lets you do SSL virtual hosting and works in most browsers now - basically only Internet Explorer on Windows XP is out. Lately certificate prices are down and IP address prices are up, too. It's getting fairly practical now.
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OnPoint: What Andrew Geddis Said, But…, in reply to Susannah Shepherd,
It would be a very odd RIS that consisted entirely of legal advice (especially on something like the carer legislation). The cost-benefit aspects should be releasable
Most of the statement isn't blacked out - just a couple of whole pages, several isolated paragraphs and parts of sentences, and an entire column of all the tables which is labelled "Contents of this column legally privileged" (including the headings).
I would be really interested in what has been redacted from table 8. The number is clearly a zero, but the row label itself is secret.
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Long Walk to Freedom discusses all that fairly candidly, and if anything you’d think it would downplay it.