Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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Cheers Kracklite - I've listened to a few of the long now seminars (mostly the singularity ones) but missed that one. Downloading it now . . .
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But it's not like anyone here is thinking about Africa... or are they?
Great. Now I've got that stupid Toto song stuck in my head.
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The technology for 3d virtual worlds just ain't there - there's simply nothing you can do in 'Second Life' that you can't do using some other superior technology. Want to have an online meeting? Use an access grid. Want to watch a band you can't see in the real world? Go find 'em on YouTube.
In the next few decades we'll probably have nanobots that can interface directly with our brains and produce truly immersive virtual reality. Then we'll be able to do cool stuff like attend real time concerts and meetings - but of course, everyone will just use it for the amazing real time shooters and spectacular pornographic possibilities.
In the meantime . . . Get a First Life
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The Standard. Pfft - at least David Farrar is a lickspittle for an opposition party and can thus reasonably be said to be performing some kind of public good in holding those in power to account. Is there anything more wretched and pathetic than being a sock-puppet and apologist for a sitting government?
On the other hand, maybe the anonymous hobgoblins at the standard are getting $120 an hour for their efforts. I could respect that.
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Were they really concerned that a National Party flush with cash, but limited to spending $2.4m on advertising (or a group of EB, limited to $120,000), would hammer home their financial advantage by spending millions outside the cap on fleets of megaphoned cars and running their advertising over PAs at public events?
Maybe they were: ACT had some guy in a van driving around doing this during the last election and its a pretty common political advertising technique in other countries - the communists in Japan do it all year round; I'm not sure how effective this would be in New Zealand though, its more likely to alienate voters than persuade them.
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To be fair, [Minto] is now calling for a public inquiry with full disclosure.
I'm not sure that's going to work out so well for him; I think he's basically a good guy and for obvious historical reasons he simply can't bring himself to believe that the police might be right and his fellow activists might turn out to be dangerously deluded liars.
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In terms of other comments the whole demonstration/hikoi the whole event took at least 4 hours and despite the anger it was determined peaceful and lawful by the police. Is it too much too much to ask that the tv news media spend 5 seconds on that side of it.
I think that if you go to the TV3 and TVNZ web sites you'll see that they spent considerably more than 5 seconds on that aspect of the protest - but that like everybody else in the country that watched the coverage you only remember the sensational images that the news shows lead with, that made the march look more like a Hamas funeral than a Hikoi.
Not really an option once they'd already arrived in Wellington, and for anyone in a position to discuss it with them beforehand, what if they'd refused to listen and just insisted that nobody can tell them how to dress?
Then surely its their freaking fault that they wound up as the lead item on the news and not the big bad media's?
The special pleading going on here is reaching self-parody levels: if people decide to stockpile guns, train how to use them and muse about murdering people for practice it's the fault of the police for listening to them; if people dress up as terrorists and dance around in front of a TV camera its the fault of the media for putting it on TV!
The cognitive dissonance around here is deafening.
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I'd respectfully suggest if you smuggled a camera into the Press Gallery Christmas party you could paint a vastly entertaining, but ever so slightly misleading, picture of the media as a pack of drunken, bitchy priapic lunatics.
I've only been to a couple of gallery functions (including one where Dame Silvia threw us all out of Government House at about 9:30 PM) but I think you'd be disappointed. If you smuggled a camera into the beehive annex I think you'd mostly just get a picture of a bunch of people who work long days and then go home to their kids.
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__It's pretty precious to blame the media for the coverage of the Hikoi - if you give them a choice between showing 1450 people marching peacefully and 50 jackasses dressed as terrorists__
What would you suggest the 1450 should have done about the 50?
I guess slowly and patiently explaining to them that dressing up as terrorists is not a great way to convince people you're not a terrorist is too obvious a place to start.
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In terms of the media will screw you every time. I participated in the hikoi and I don't believe that there was a fair representation of what went on.
It's pretty precious to blame the media for the coverage of the Hikoi - if you give them a choice between showing 1450 people marching peacefully and 50 jackasses dressed as terrorists leaping around directly in front of the cameras then anyone with a shred of common sense knows which way the story is going to be told. I know that in theory the decision to dress as terrorists was supposed to be some brilliant witty comment on the police but back in mean ol' reality it was simply stupid and staggeringly self-defeating.