Posts by Simon Grigg
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The Chinese seem to be taking some pleasure in tossing net freedom back at Cameron:
We may wonder why western leaders, on the one hand, tend to indiscriminately accuse other nations of monitoring, but on the other take for granted their steps to monitor and control the Internet.
They are not interested in learning what content those nations are monitoring, let alone their varied national conditions or their different development stages.
Laying undue emphasis on Internet freedom, the western leaders become prejudiced against those "other than us," stand ready to put them in the dock and attempt to stir up their internal conflicts.
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Meanwhile CNN sternly tells us that the always reputable UK press have worked out it's about the rich and 'Respectable' too - all 7 of them - in a particularly odious roundup of the right-wing media's new side-stepping talking point:
Reporter Andrew Gilligan wrote in the Daily Telegraph: "Here in court, as David Cameron condemned the 'sickness' in parts of British society, we saw clearly, for the first time, the face of the riot: stripped of its hoods and masks, dressed in white prison T-shirts and handcuffed to burly security guards.
"It was rather different from the one we had been expecting."
He added of the defendants at Highbury Magistrates Court in north London: "Most were teenagers or in their early twenties, but a surprising number were older.
"Most interestingly of all, they were predominantly white, and many had jobs."
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As wonderful as this is, it's seemingly not about the 'ladies'
until you follow the link on the YouTube page which takes you to this fabulous site:
Pixie Williams was a shooting star of New Zealand music – a clear, bright magical voice, a brief luminous career, a brilliant flash of light that lives on as a memory for some - both distant and familiar.
Man, I love this stuff. Time to re-read Mr. Bourke.
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Betty Swann - it's all about that thigh-shiverin' vocal rasp....
Penny & The Quarters, "You & Me (demo)"
Man, I love that song. And I love The Numero Group for the huge swathes of pure heaven they've unearthed over the years.
Another (from this):
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Russell Brown,
Smaller labels and individual artists -- like the Phoenix Foundation -- will find it harder.
This could be the death blow for many smaller indies who simply don't have the cashflow or reserves to cover it. Insurance may or may not cover it, but that's not really the point as many of these labels are literally hand to mouth and utterly dependent on the immediate buzz that an artist will have generated to get them to the next release.
The multiple collapses of indie distributors over the years have each time taken down a raft of associated small labels, sadly this may be the same.
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Speaker: Listening to Coldharbour Lane, in reply to Biobbs,
I love that Speaker has a guest post from Stella Duffy.
Indeed... thank you. I spent large slabs of time in the 1980s in Coldharbour Lane and it's environs, beginning a year or so after the '81 riots when the scars were everywhere and Railton Rd was still The Front Line.
It was a shattered environ at the time but it bounced back strongly. It's awful to think it's happening again.
I hate that the news is reporting “London on fire” – it’s not.
I sympathise - strongly. #bangkok2010
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Andre Alessi,
Prior to that most providers were still charging per SMS, at anything up to 50-80 c per text (and charged for both outgoing and incoming texts.)
This post, from 2008 seems to indicate that it wasn't until 2007 that AT&T hiked their costs (with the end of Cingular) to those levels, and indeed, in 2002 it was around US$0.10 to send a text - about the same it was in NZ.
But, yes, the idea that you needed to pay when you were sent a txt was a massive barrier and just plain commercially stupid. It effectively stymied the culture for most of a decade (and likely cost the US companies billions I guess).
ETA: International texting has always been hideously expensive in New Zealand, though, and doesn't show any real sign of getting cheaper.
I just swapped to my Thai provider if I needed to send an SMS offshore in NZ. Way cheaper ($0.06). If I was at all smart I'd pick up a dual-SIM machine for return trips.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Andre Alessi,
NZ missed the Blackberry buzz (in part) because we were early adopters of cheap SMS.
Not sure if the word cheap can placed alongside SMS in NZ, nor has it ever been so. I was shocked when I flew into Asia in the late 90s and the various nations were all paying less than a cent a txt - 20c was the standard on a plan in NZ at the time. It was costing me 80c to send a txt to NZ on my NZ plan, but 3c if I used a local SIM.
And everyone, old & young, was txting on multiple handsets when it was still fairly niche in NZ.
Blackberry penetration can be explained fairly easily - they were the first to provide a pre-smart-phone styled handset and ownership implied that you were both well off and an advanced user. I think that was a global perception, but it didn't really ever cross the Tasman.
When the first smart-phone, from HTC (some years before the iPhone rushed in and tried to claim the credit), arrived, they were perceived as being targeted at wealthy kids and housewives. In much of Asia the smart-phone has never really lost that tag. The Blackberry remains the business phone of choice and the Apple / HTC / Samsung etc smart-phone has a slightly toy-tinge about it.
Even in NYC last year, I was advised to take a BB into a meeting. They'll take you more seriously as a player I was told.
I looked sorrowfully at my old Sony Ericsson and tucked it away in shame.
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Hard News: An open thread while I'm down…, in reply to Sacha,
And if footage of it was played three times on TVNZ without such a fee being duly and correctly paid, then APRA would have the station pulled from the airwaves.
Bloody right too :)
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Hard News: An open thread while I'm down…, in reply to Sacha,
Right you are, Sacha, but the whole work was being sung at the time.