Posts by Chris Waugh
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Life about to stop being so still.
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Hard News: Snowden and New Zealand, in reply to david kinniburgh,
hey need more customers in Asia to improve their falling revenue and expand their market.
Most of these customers will now be asking questions about the security of their data, and are unlikely to accept CISCO going “Shock Horror” but doing nothing.But hang on.... Hasn't CISCO being supplying to China for years? And doesn't their kit enable both my access to PAS and (most of) the rest of the internet and the government/Party to monitor what I'm up to and put a nice, big, Great Firewall around me? So, um, I may well be misunderstanding the situation, or even have it all wrong, but right now my reaction is shock, horror, and that all lower case with nothing to indicate any more than a "ho hum" sigh.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Content with…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Some of these guys have nearly 20 million followers. If the single biggest source of Likes for every single one of them is a Facebook hype-shop in Mexico City, that starts to smell pretty bad.
That's roughly the population of Mexico City. So either they do an awful lot of touring around the Distrito Federal or "starts to smell pretty bad" is unnecessarily polite.
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Hard News: Snowden and New Zealand, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Having the supply of money, fuel or groceries dry up might actually convince NZers not to vote for the government that caused such a situation.
Well, there are two key differences between NZ and China. Perhaps a more realistic comparison would be this: I can only see things like YouTube, the NY Times or the Guardian if I turn on a VPN to put me virtually on the other side of the Great Firewall. That censorship is done for a variety of reasons, some of which are somewhat legitimate (though not so much in the cases of those three websites I just named). What would be to stop the GCSB from playing silly buggers with the internet, leaving the supply of money and similar necessities untouched, but severely restricting access to less essential services, selling this silly buggeriness to the public as necessary for the maintenance of national security and public order, until the ISPs comply with GCSB's demands? Much of the political and public opinion groundwork for such a scenario has already been done....
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Hard News: Snowden and New Zealand, in reply to Idiot Savant,
The government can hardly shut down the entire NZ internet, and if a civil disobediance campaign is widespread enough (people refusing to fill out the forms, refusing to fill them out accurately, and refusing to speak to SIS snoops seeking to check referees), then that is the option they will face.
Why not? China shut down the entire internet in Xinjiang over race riots in Urumqi a few years back. Perhaps a little more likely would be the government making business very difficult for a few telcos to scare the others into line along with nice, friendly ministers telling the public that if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear... But still, it's just a matter of pulling the plug, and then what's the public supposed to do?
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Somebody’s been at work on this.
That car could be better camouflaged.
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Speaker: Sponsored post: Speed and Safety, in reply to tussock,
So they raised the limit to 120k, from 100. After a year, they had less accidents, less injuries of all types, about the same serious injuries, and a few more deaths.
So.... people generally drove more safely and had fewer problems, but when things did go wrong they went much more spectacularly wrong?
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Not still life (one of those purely accidental shots - the camera battery was flat, and the cellphone was in one of those moods for reacting slowly, and I had given up and was putting it down as it took the picture).
Still life. Still posing.
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Traffic cop at work.
Altar for the little people?
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Hard News: The sphere of influence, in reply to BenWilson,
Is a K+R sound unusual in Chinese?
Yeah, it's a consonant cluster that doesn't exist in Mandarin. Neither sound on its own is a problem for Mandarin speakers, the Mandarin versions being close enough to their English equivalents.
