Posts by Russell Brown
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Well, I'm not sure whether a 10-storey high stadium -- which will be kinda permanent, right? -- is such a crash-hot idea, let alone a "legacy". A 10-storey anything in a residential suburb -- albeit one where there is a long-established venue like Eden Park -- is going to be more eyesore than legacy as these people envision it.
Yeah, they should have built it somewhere where a 10-storey building wouldn't tower over everything for miles around. The CBD, for instance.
Oh hang on ... sorry.
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Hey, well spotted. The "epg" in the URL stands for Electronic Programme Guide and it appears to be a web instance of the Freeview EPG. Anyone know how long it's been there?
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OMG, you obviously also didn't see the sex scene between Ant Starr and Mrs Havoc, which was not so much graphic as so intimate I was nearly embarrassed.
If it's the one I'm thinking of, I thought it was sweet.
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Oh and one more thing totally unrelated but mentioned way back...how on earth do Warners get away with retailing the 4 CD Flying Nun set for $150+ !! What a scam....
I think the packaging is pretty expensive. I gather it costs them $90 to produce.
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E.g. "New Zealand has high rates of imprisonment and high rates of recidivism. I draw only one conclusion from that : the system isn’t working."
You may think that's an OK thing to say but on various levels it's crazy. (1) Clark indulges in the fallacy of thinking that you can draw any conclusions about imprisonment rates without knowing how much crime there is ...No she doesn't. It's quite reasonable to say that a corrections system that produces very high rates of imprisonment and high rates of recidivism is not filling its purpose.
(Collins sometimes makes an analogous mistake of drawing conclusions about divorce rates without knowing how many rotten, divorce-worthy marriages there are). If the underlying behaviors are very bad then even very high imprisonment (divorce) rates might be too low.
What a strange comparison. The corrections system is directly shaped by government policy, and paid for from the public purse. The size and nature of the prison muster is determined far more by policy than by the underlying crime rate. You need only to look at the US experience with various forms of gimmick sentencing to see that: they're not sending people home from overcrowded prisons in California and Texas because the crime rate is so much greater than it used to be, but because their systems have been compromised by stupid sentencing laws. The 2004 American Bar Association report was quite enlightening.
So, yes, in that sense it is "the system". You just need to decide what sort of system you want.
OTOH, since the reform of divorce laws (1975?) I don't think government policy has had much impact on divorce rates. And for all the people publicly agonising about "skyrocketing" divorce rates, they've barely changed in the last quarter century. Last year there was exactly half a divorce more per thousand marriages than there was in 1981: 12.4 vs 11.9.
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Williamson ranks up there with Max Bradford for successful sector reform.
Burrrrrrn!
True, though. Interestingly, the only two old-school holdouts on telecoms regulation in the National caucus were Brash and Williamson. So Brash goes and the Moz gets a promotion ...
I guess the best you can say about Williamson is that at least he's not one of those economic liberals who contrives to be a social conservative.
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. For digital downloads, I find www.beatport.com hard to beat, 320 kbps MP3s with no DRM. Soulseek also rocks.
My music buying behaviour this year has been influenced quite a lot by emusic.com. Not only is it much cheaper than buying CDs, it's leading me to some good stuff - and, again, it's DRM-free high-bitrate MP3s. I'm actually not sure yet how much shopping I'll do with iTunes, but I'm not likely to drop my emusic sub.
BTW, I was pleased to discover that emusic.com has the new Fuckpony EP. Thanks for the tip on that one, Simon. Young people these days just don't know what house music is any more, mutter, grumble, etc ...
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Well, Bill English did that when I interviewed him on Tuesday. You see! It CAN happen!
New name: Slick Willie!
I'll leave the serious discussion about the party leader with a deputy who is more experienced and assured than he is for another day.
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What does the aggregator actually do?
Are they just a payment engine to save Apple from having to maintain accounts for thousands of people?
Or do they do traditional record company functions like A&R, plying radio station people with gurls and drugs, etc?They just interface with the iTunes people (and in Jiggy's case, The Orchard). Any marketing away from that is up to the label.
But iTunes is a different business in every territory, and if the aggregator can establish good relationships with most or all of them, then it seems to me that the 20% of receipts is pretty good value. IANAL, but Loop's contract seems pretty straightforward.
You'd have to ask Mikee about the gurls and drugs though ...
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A reader among the select band of us on Wired Country has pointed out that they've quietly reconfigured their service.
It was 2Mbit/s synchronous, now it seems to be 3.5Mbit/s down (although I'm only getting 2.5 at the moment) and 850k up.
They really are men of mystery at Wired Country. But my favourite P2P application is running nicely ...
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