Posts by Paul Brislen
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
That would seem to be the ideal response. Instead of hand-wringing, how about actually enforcing the liquor laws as they are supposed to?
Interestingly (or not, YMMV) I saw a UK TV show about policing in Yorkshire the other day and aside from the accents (and the incredibly pale skin) it looked a lot like K Road to me.
I lived on Queen Street for many years and rarely did I feel unsafe - that was quite some time ago no.
-
very well done. Now to see whether the standard of drinks are the same at Flower St...
-
Actually I heard from a number of disgruntled voters about the apps which seemed to forget all the standards around accessibility for disabled viewers. Much grumpiness.
-
Hard News: Disrupting the Television, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Pausing aside (my memory must have emphasised it more than is needed), my point was that TG wasn't defending the practice, she was instead saying it was at an end and they'd try to be simpler, easier to deal with.
Clearly that wasn't the case, but I never felt she deserved ridicule for saying what I thought needed to be said - that telcos had been screwing customers gleefully for years (and not in a good way).
Now ridicule for other things, yes. Yes indeed. Telecom at the time was shockingly arrogant towards both customers and competitors and when the hammer fell it did so after more than a decade of last chances. I was pleased to play my part in that and I'm pleased it's a game we no longer have to play to quite that degree.
-
Actually the Gattung quote is usually taken out of context.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10380894
has the story but you don't get the real flavour for how she's saying it. Sadly it's disappeared from YouTube.
She was referring to a history that she was glad to see the back of.
"Think about pricing. What has every telco in the world done in the past? It's used confusion as its chief marketing tool. And that's fine," she said with a huge pause after the word 'tool'. She went on to say:
"But at some level, whether they consciously articulate or not, customers know that's what the game has been. They know we're not being straight up."
and that was her point, that customers knew they weren't being dealt with honorably.
I'm no Telecom apologist - far from it, she and I had the most outrageous shouting match sitting on the couch at TVNZ one day - but on this one I couldn't bring myself to write nasty stuff about her use of confusion. I agree with her actual sentiment and it seemed wrong to hold her words against her on that score.
-
Hard News: Disrupting the Television, in reply to cphilpott,
I have to believe that yes it would - I don't steal TV because it's free, I steal it because I can't get it any other way. There will always be those folk who decide to flout the law regardless and I have no sympathy with those that are getting copyright notices for downloading music that is readily and cheaply available (although selling your soul to Rhianna is not exactly cheap in my book)...
The problem currently is that we are training an entire generation of customers that copyright has no monetary value, and that the only way to enjoy content is to steal it. That worries me an awful lot.
-
Teapot vomit. Keith, I love you and want to marry you.
or similar.
-
Best of luck. It always rains when I move house - hopefully that won't be an issue.
-
Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to Andrew E,
I use TunnelBear myself and it's very handy for those "I'm sorry you can't watch that video in your territory" moments. Stupid morons. TB offers an easy to use console and from memory if you tweet about how cool they are you get 1GB of data free each month.
It is quite slow though so I use it just for those short-run movie trailers/BBC news clips etc that won't play because I'm a dirty foreigner.
-
And for those that don't watch television, can I just ask why? Because as far as I can tell we're living in a golden age of television drama.
Breaking Bad, Doctor Who, Boardwalk Empire... there are plenty of shows that you wouldn't have seen only five or six years ago, plenty of use of television as a medium (as opposed to screening stage shows or chopping down movies to fit) and I'm loving it.
What I don't love is the nonsense that goes with it, but television as a medium is actually really rather good at the moment.