Posts by Russell Brown
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to BenWilson,
Using one’s own experience and position as a scientist to justify more science spending is like turkeys voting against Christmas.
So we should only countenance the arguments of people who have no direct experience in the field in question? That’s an odd argument.
Presumably, then, we should ignore anything teachers have to say about education policy.
-
Hard News: Disrupting the Television, in reply to Peter Calder,
A related question about having to buy the whole nine yards when you only want 2.5cm or so … what possible reason is there (other than that telecoms companies are bastards) for not being able to buy a given amount of date for use on a mobile device and using it at any rate you want?
Yes, they're bastards. There's no bloody excuse for having data allocations expire after a month -- and it doesn't happen in many other countries. But Vodafone does let you spend as little as $20 for 250MB, which is okay for trips away.
I tend to use my iPhone as a Wifi hotspot for my iPad now, given that I generally can't use up all the data on that either.
-
Hard News: Disrupting the Television, in reply to Alice Ronald,
And my thing is music, mostly because I have friends who are musicians. My flatmate, who’s worked in television, won’t pirate TV shows, but is happy to download music.
There are massive grey areas in music. Lots of what I find via places like the Hype Machine and Soundcloud is of uncertain status, but it's basically tolerated, either because it drives music discovery or because rights-holders can't be bothered to chase up every obscure remix and re-edit.
I have occasionally picked up very obscure albums from specialist MP3 blogs. But I will (almost) never torrent music or use Megaupload-type sites to grab whole albums, let alone artist catalogues. It's nasty, impersonal and basically a dick move.
I might, of course, feel differently if I was 18 and had no money.
-
Hard News: Disrupting the Television, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But for TV programs especially good ones the problem I have is who will pay to get them made?
We don't do movies in our house. And I feel no guilt at all about grabbing documentaries that won't screen here for years, if ever.
-
The thing coming through from TV sources today is that it's probably the overseas producers who've complained about Fyx. The current distribution system provides them with big chunks of cash, up front, from a small number of rights-buying customers (i.e.: domestic broadcasters).
Could they make the $100m they earn from New Zealand rights annually by dealing with individuals? It's not actually clear they would.
-
Hard News: Disrupting the Television, in reply to Simon Lyall,
Although I’m not a lawyer so I don’t understand exactly what section 2 and 3 mean (especially the blanket exclusion of photographs).
We lean fairly heavily on the fair dealing provision at Media7, but we are a media review show.
In Jackson's case, his pics were picked up and used as feature content, which clearly isn't in the spirit of the law.
And no, I don't get the blanket exclusion of photos either.
-
Hard News: Disrupting the Television, in reply to Tom Semmens,
so once I find someone in Russia who likes Super 15 and All Black rugby enough to stream it live (or with a short delay, I am not fussed) reliably, I will take great pleasure in phoning Sky and telling they can shove their monopoly right up their arses.
The more mainstream solution would be to force Sky into a regulated wholesale market, like the one overseen by Ofcom in Britain, which prevents the kind of predatory bundling Sky does here. So a third-party fibre service provider would be able to pay a fair price for parts of the Sky service -- say, Sky Sport One and Two -- and onsell them to its customers, rather than having Sky dictate (as Telecom did in the 90s) the entire market to its advantage.
But, hey, whatever works for you :-)
-
We've been shooting the breeze online about about Nikolai Tesla.
It strikes me that he's precisely the kind of brilliant individual who achieves what a building full of common-or-garden smart people could not.
Anyway, it's a great read:
Oddly enough, it leaves out the breakthrough I learned about recently -- the one that led to the MRI scanner.
-
Goddamn hipsters staggering round in the goddamn dark.
-
OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Bart Janssen,
This is the bit that is causing difficulty. I, and I believe Lucy as well, am saying that there is more than just a quantitative difference at the top end, it’s a qualitative difference in ability. In my experience those people can never be replaced by any number of good people.
That's been my experience in various settings.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 808 809 810 811 812 … 2279 Older→ First