Posts by rodgerd
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Yup, that's how the old wars were fought (including last century's). Just keep throwing more troops at the enemy til someone wins. Nevermind the deathtoll.
A moment's derail: that's simply not true. Medieval European warfare had all sorts of informal protocols around battles, most of which were designed to reduce the overall death toll of wars; a trivial example were sieges, where defenders were expected to put up a both a minimum resistence, and, if releif was not forthcoming, to surrender in a reasonable timefram.
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Oh Che, you're so enlightened. Tell us more!
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This is why we need civil liberties for criminals. If we let cops do what they want with crims, pretty soon some of them will do what they want with the rest of us. Or at least those of us who are too vulnerable to sustain a complaint.
Malcolm, you've touched on something that has made me more annoyed the more I think about it. The focus on the sexual misconduct; the report itself spends quite a lot of time talking on cronyism and other poor or corrupt practise, but there's no coverage of that.
Ask yourself, what happened to the cops who planted the shells in the Arthur Allen Thomas case? Promoted to senior ranks.
What about the guy who ran the Christchurch Creche case? Anyone remember him going on Holmes to give an interview about how the whole bizzo was part of his personal mission to clean up the country as it fell away from the good Christian standards espoused by Graham Capill, all the while shagging the creche mothers?
Was anyone ever held accountable for the David Dougherty fuck-up?
Now, I'm fortunate in that my encounters with the police personally have all been positive, bar one ex-Red Squad member I did a bit of work for once. But serving officers, fine. But there's long being something rotten in the police in New Zealand. It's sad that it takes rapes and group sex to get peoples' attention.
As an aside: does this make anyone feel more or less comfortable at plans to beef up the powers of the even-less-accountable SIS, and to make it easier the police to sieze private property as proceeds of crime?
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I believe that the lower-cut the top I wear and the pushier-up the bra, the less people look me in the face. I'd like a grant to study this, but I believe it's already been done.
I'm more than happy to act as one of the observers in this study.
The thing is, though, you wouldn't have to look to far to find a plethora of people suggesting it's positively a crime against their human rights to suggest that the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more. Sometimes getting people to study the bleedin' obvious can have some value.
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Funny thing is, Viv Richards is saying nice things about New Zealand, and one of the things he likes is that they're getting on with the job without a lot of noise and posturing.
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but my plan for the future is to rip a master to something lossless like FLAC and then transcode to a compressed format, prolly Ogg, as required.
Yeah, what he said. I've started playing with re-ripping my CDs to FLACs. I had been doing 192 kbps MP3s.
Lossy audio compression as the future distribution of music makes me sad. I don't want to sound like one of those $100/m speaker cable nuts, because I'm not, but honestly, there's a lot of music where the difference between a CD and an MP3, Ogg, or AAC rip, even a good one, is glaringly obvious.
(On the other hand, there are CDs I own where it wouldn't matter if it was 64kbps MP3s, because honestly, the recoridng is crap. Rammstein and my Carmina recording, I'm looking at you!)
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I don't see any discussion about truly open formats like OGG or FLAC. OGG, as a compressed format, blows away AAC, CBR (and, often, VBR) MP3, and WMA. Of course, alas, there are even fewer music devices that support OGG - no prizes for guessing why that is.
Interestingly enough, OGG appears to have significan't penetration in the game market; I note it's being used by Guitar Hero II and EVE Online, for example.
"Most devices"? When the iPod has 85% of the portable player market?
You might want to try looking at some worldwide market shares, not North American. The iPod has much lower market penetration in Asia.
I understand why you'd do that if OSS was a primary criterion for you, but not many people are going to do that.
So on the one hand, MP3 bad because of encumberance issues. But OGG is not good because being generally free is irrelevant? I think you need an internal consistency check
but I think if the last few years have proved anything, it's that fewer and fewer people want albums as such.
Which, to me, is rather sad, acutally. I can see the industry becoming even more obnoxiously focused on radio-friendly unit shifters. AC/DC wouldn't lose much if each of their albums were paired down to the 2 or 3 decent tracks on each one, but a lot of bands would.
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Commercialisation of sport is such a mixed blessing
To add to your list: News Ltd's threats to sue the NZRU for making decisions about rugby in NZ (I have been hinking about cancelling Sky anyway, but I most certainly will be if that crap happens).
And, in general, the marketing of sport as something to be consumed, rather than engaged in. Stephen Judd noted in one of the recent music threads that recorded music destroyed the career of the non-superstar professional musician (because people play records instead of paying muscians to perform); professional sports involves the likes of Sky convincing people that sports are something you watch on TV, not something you spend your Saturday doing.
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As far as I'm aware, and I could be wrong, no child has ever been hospitalised or died from a light smack to the bottom or hand.
That's probably true.
As far as I'm aware, no adult has, either. But, oddly enough, I'm not allowed to wander about my workplace swiping my colleagues' arses, and they could prosecute me for assault if I chose to.
Even Walter Mitty wouldn't expect that our rate of child abuse is going to improve if this bill is passed.
So hitting children improves their behaviour, but announcing that people have one fewer defence when they belt their kids between them and jail won't improve their behaviour? An odd chain of thought.
While we're at it, I guess we may as well repeal all traffic laws! They have no effect on the road toll! Only Walter Mitty would say so!
Let's be intellectually honest about the debate.
Feel free to start. Such gems as:
references to the situation in Sweden, our child abuse record as measured by the UN, etc. All of these references may be interesting but they're irrelevant.
Irrelevant because... you say so? So we shouldn't look at other countries and ask how we measure up and see what we might learn from them? Simply announce that our world-leading rates of child abuse are nothing to worry about and do nothing?
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Rugby players can't cope with rain and soccer players can?
Clearly a lot has changed since I was a wee lad and "soccer sissies" was the epithet of choice for round-ball players.