Posts by Tony Meyer
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Legal Beagle: Questions, but no answers,…, in reply to matthew,
this is extremely petty behaviour from the National party.
What exactly would have been the right response? The Government doesn't automatically provide the information, and the small volume, broad, questions were denied. Other than the (petty looking) barrage of high volume, specific, questions, how could they get the information? Are you saying that the opposition should simply accept that the Government can deny this information to them in this way?
The Government had (maybe still has) an opportunity to one-up National by simply making all the information available in the way that Graeme suggests. I assume that there's some sort of system available like in an OIA where you can refuse to answer because the information is publicly available. This could have good spin, even: "Government handles more than 6000 opposition questions in a month through increased efficiency and transparency".
By the way, in a piece that is otherwise quite wrong, Ben Thomas at The Spinoff points out that Mallard asked nearly 3k questions the week before Christmas, 6 year ago.
National did poorly in openness a lot of the time over the last decade. This new government should be showing us how much better they are, not that they are worse (or at best, equally as bad). This is an area where I would hope that the Green and younger elements of the Government could have some positive influence over the rest.
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Hard News: All Change, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Martin as minister of education would be terrific.
She’s certainly familiar with the area, and passionate enough, and when talking to her about it she generally sounds good. However, she was Chair of the Mahurangi College Board of Trustees for many years, and that’s not a school that many people would be willing to hold up as an example of where our education system should be heading.
If she was unable to use that governance role to get success there, that doesn’t bode well for a far larger role.
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Hard News: Be careful what you wish for, in reply to Russell Brown,
It makes what happened look much more like a return to the mean as Obama leaves the stage than a Trump surge.
I’m not so sure of this. If you go back to 1972 as a starting point (somewhat arbitrary because it suits my narrative, sure), then you can see a pretty straight line up for the Dem’s – 1976 is abnormally high (post-Nixon), 1996 is a bit low (2nd Clinton), and Obama’s first election is abnormally high. But 2016 is quite low. Following those 44 years, you’d expect the “return to the mean” to be a lot closer to the 2012 number.
(It doesn’t show a Trump surge, either. But it shows a Clinton slump, or voter suppression slump, etc).
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Here's a longer term version of the popular vote for anyone interested. (Source archives.gov, other than 2016, and I had to copy over data, so it's possible I made transcription errors).
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Hard News: What you lookin' at?, in reply to Emma Hart,
I would love it if we had access to something like Syfy TV here.
For what it's worth, The Zone has a large overlap with Syfy, and has a pretty decent mix of content that is very recent (e.g. The Expanse has just started, so is only a couple of months out, stuff like (the not very good) Shannara Chronicles is roughly same day as elsewhere) and older. You need SkyTV, of course, and I'm not sure what the subtitle situation is, sorry.
The Zone has probably saved my Sky subscription. The ex watched a lot of Sky, and the kid did too (but watches nearly 100% online stuff now), so I only had it for the odd TVNZ/TV3/Soho show.
Would totally watch season 2 of "The Blue Rose" if the bastards hadn't killed it.
Definitely. I thought This Is Not My Life had potential as well. I presume there's no more Sunny Skies coming either, and that was good at times.
Isn't this the Golden Age of TV?
Absolutely (although maybe it keeps getting better still?). So much good stuff available internationally these days, and increasingly good access to it, even without bending or breaking rules.
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From what I understand, your last image there should be credited to Jean Jullien.
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Compulsory voting is an appalling idea, and Australia is certainly not a country that has had such success treating its citizens fairly or with the political process that it is an effective role model.
Forcing someone that has no interest or knowledge in voting to vote (even if none-of-the-above style options are available) will merely encourage politicians and the media towards lowest-common-denominator methods aimed at simply having a name that people recognise on the paper. I have never seen any compelling evidence that voting based on hoardings gives a better result for the country than voting based on understanding of policy.
If you want people to vote, then continue making it easier to do so (e.g. the improvements to advance voting this time), spend more time educating people about policy, and give them someone actually worth voting for. [Disclaimer: I spent much time this election deciding between not voting and a spoiled ballot, and if I hadn't wanted to set an example for my child, I would probably not have voted.]
Thankfully, the whole idea has such a natural distaste that it seems unlikely that it would ever get adopted in New Zealand.
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If you'd like to see a hint of the future, I know the (primary school age) Ahuroa kids would be thrilled to have you all come and see You Through Our Eyes at The Estuary Arts Gallery in Orewa in June.
While I'm shameless-plugging, feel free to help them get there.
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OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Rich: in any OS X open file dialog, type / and you get the "Go to the folder" pane, and from there you can paste.
Easy as /, ⌘A, ⌘V.
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I'm pretty sure that Russell is wrong about being wrong about Angry Birds (the update turns a great piece into a not very good one).
Rovio's FAQ is easily found and it clearly explains the requirement for location data: Crysal (the social gaming network; widely used before Game Centre) needs this information (for fairly obvious reasons). If you don't use Crystal, then your location data is not used. You need to explicitly set up and enable a Crystal account, and iOS explicitly asks you whether you want to provide location data, and iOS lets you manage this (per application) in Settings, and iOS adds an icon to the status bar indicating whenever location data has been used, and iOS shows you which applications have recently accessed location data.
iOS is extremely zealous about protecting location data - so much so that it's a bit annoying at the moment, because if an app wants access to the photo library, it also requires location access (because most photos have location data attached); iOS 6 is addressing this.
There is no way that this is improper use. If you don't want to share your location data, then either don't use Crystal, or say 'no' when iOS prompts you. If Rovio are outright lying in their FAQ and are using the location data for something else, then that's another matter entirely, but you are still protected via iOS's privacy features.
As for tracking who you've called, I believe this is simply untrue. As far as I can tell, Russell is basing this on a single, extremely vague, web page (and if you go to the (Fox News) source of that article, it doesn't mention Angry Birds at all). The second-to-last paragraph in that article is almost certainly about Android only (the "list of permissions" gives it away).
Apple does not provide any official API to get access to call history. In various versions of iOS, there have been bugs that meant that a database containing call history information has been accessible inside the app sandbox; I think (but it's not simple to tell) that this isn't the case in the latest version. If Rovio is collecting this information, they are doing so in a way that would likely get them kicked out of the App Store, and are doing things that their privacy policy says that they don't. If there is any evidence of this, I would be very interested to see it.
Apple is far from perfect, but they try pretty hard with privacy (watch Jobs talk about it at D8, and you can see why), and they do a pretty good job. (It's a contrast to Android, since Google wants better advertising, which necessitates weaker privacy - and some people are happy to make this trade).
