Posts by BenWilson
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OnPoint: #WTFMSD: "Damning", in reply to Matthew Poole,
But they're still quite certain there's been no privacy breach.
I thought they just had no evidence of it. It's on the public if they can't tell the difference between "No evidence of x" and "Evidence of no x". Ironically, since the term "conspiracy theory" came into existence, there's been a tendency to equate them.
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Hard News: Media3: Whistleblower Season, in reply to Steve Barnes,
How do you Knock on a Bouncy Castle?
You drop it, in the direction of the try line.
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"Big Data". Love the term. Especially since you always want your big data to be actually small. Is that a thumb drive in your pocket or am I just not your type?
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Hard News: Media3: Whistleblower Season, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
"David isn't sure he spent much time with him at all," the source said. "He remembers the previous leader Helen Clark a lot better."
Yes, Key just melted back into the long line of other Johns, like the 251st guy in Annabel Chong's lineup (or perhaps the 50th, scholars dispute this point).
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Hard News: Media3: Whistleblower Season, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
It’s not like he just uses the wrong words, but he also seems to use the wrong worlds!
Yes, maybe on Planet Key, pigs fly like bats, leaving thick deposits.
I suspect John Key’s porn star name would be a mere anagram – Honey JK… – and that he’d be comfortable with that.
Nah it's John "The Don" Key. He thought it referred to his knob, but actually it was because he was always responsible for the ass.
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The irony of denigrating a man's intelligence with a malapropism.
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OnPoint: #WTFMSD: "Damning", in reply to FletcherB,
What if "they" aren't as incompetent as you suspect, and they do indeed detect that you have more data than you admitted...
The pile of legal doo-doo would be roughly the same as the pile involved in taking the documents that actually were sensitive, by the thousands. If they were going to come after you for anything, it would be that, not withholding non-sensitive information for the purposes of checking whether they cover incompetence with lies.
If they do detect it, then they'd probably also detect that the documents are not important, and I'd think they'd probably just proudly tell you they detected them, in the hope that you report that there are limits to their incompetence, and that they are not liars. Rather than antagonizing you in a story that's already extremely embarrassing to them.
Of course there always was a chance that they would just go for Keith, and he could have been completely ruined by this scoop.
Perhaps a more "safe" way of doing what I'm saying would have been for Keith to simply have deleted a random number of files from his stick*, then given it to them, saying "Here's all of it, and I deleted a random number of files. Now, you tell me what that random number is. If you can't then it's clear that not only have you left this open, but you can't tell how much of the data has been accessed". Then they could either take up the challenge or not, and the scoop would have just that little bit more information on the extent of the breach. If they could provide that random number, then everyone could feel just that little bit happier that these files haven't been got at by whosoever felt like it for over a year.
Hindsight - always 20/20.
*ETA OK, just to be safe, better would be to copy a random number of them to another stick, then hard-format the old stick, then smash it to pieces with a hammer, and give them both the new stick and the crumbs of the old one. Just so that they can't somehow go through the stick OS and find the deleted entries.
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Legal Beagle: MMP Review #1: The Party…, in reply to Steven Peters,
Yes the need for coalition is a great leveler. The more parties in parliament to add to the coalition mix, the richer the recipe, the larger, more equitably shared and more nutritious the pie.
Not sure, really, how it would pan out. My support for it is more from the "right to representation" angle than it is from the "it will certainly work well for minorities" angle. How it evolves is out of the control of system designers, since people and parties change their positions over time.
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Legal Beagle: MMP Review #1: The Party…, in reply to Steven Peters,
is it is correct to say that because a party seeks to represent an ethnic group, it is thereby defined as 'single issue', as you assert
I don't really know either. "Single issue party" is a difficult concept to formalize. You could say that the ALCP encapsulates an entire stoner world view and way of life, and probably has stoner economic policy (which might even work). Also, very often the major parties seek to crystallize their difference down to a single thing "Iwi vs Kiwi", "Steady as she goes", "Looking after the little guy", etc and that might actually be quite powerful with voters.
That said I don't think the concept of broad vs targeted appeal is totally meaningless, just because it is imprecise. I guess I'd call an ethnic minority party a single issue one, to the extent that they make their only point of difference that they are the representatives of that minority, and don't make it clear what their intended policy is. This is more tenable outside of power than in. The Maori Party, for instance were pretty clearly "The party that's all about Maori" with "Who move mountains to repeal the F&S Act". But after becoming a part of successive government coalitions, and having to actually take on positions of responsibility and make choices, it's become clearer what their more general position is, and I'd say that's why Harawira broke off, when it became clear to him that it wasn't really about representing Maori as the poorest people in this country, and more about furthering the interests of tribal power.
Again, I don't actually think this is bad. They actually achieved their biggest aim, the repeal of what they perceived as another illegal land acquisition. To be honest, they managed to convince me of that, and they probably wouldn't have been able to without gaining power.
This was a big win for Maori, and MMP made it possible*, National needed the Maori Party to make their coalition stronger, and ended up repealing something that had, ironically, been put in place as a reaction to Brash's alarmist reaction to the absence of such an Act, and how Maori might be able to exclude "middle NZ" from access to beaches. In other words, they wielded substantial power for a time.
However, there being a Maori Party hasn't done much to reverse the fuxored position of Maori in NZ, they're still the demographic with most of the worst outcomes. IMHO, that's what Harawira's real point in breaking away is. To give them a wake-up call about what Maori really need.
*ETA: Actually, now I think about it, the only way MMP helped is that it makes coalition a near certainty. Maori Party actually got its seats FPP style and could have won those under FPP. But if we had FPP, chances are those 3 seats would not be needed, and either Labour or National would get an outright majority nearly every election.
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OnPoint: #WTFMSD: "Damning", in reply to Sacha,
except oneself, grasshopper
Sure, although from a personal ethical point of view, you'd know:
1) The data was harmless
2) You had already seen it
3) You did not intend to use it, because of 1) and 2), for any other purpose than establishing whether incompetence was followed by cover up, which would actually be a good thing to know.ETA: It could also be a good thing for other people to know.
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