Posts by Keith Ng

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  • Speaker: The Hollow Men: Initial Impressions,

    His senior advisor Peter Keenan confided in an email to Bryan Sinclair that he "hated the race based privilege line" and thought it "ludicrous when Maori are largely at the bottom of the heap". They had no illusions about the fundamentally racist character of their policies, and candidly referred to the voters they won from New Zealand First as "red necks".

    Wow.

    Did I say wow? Wow.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 543 posts Report Reply

  • Telecom 1987,

    You know, I've never had a cellular network explained to me before. That was actually really interesting.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 543 posts Report Reply

  • OnPoint: Fisking for Asians,

    Thanks for all the replies - this whole PA System thing is great, but a bit hard to keep track and responsed in any sort of timely fashion.

    I don't really buy into the idea that either N&S or Coddington are deliberately racist, or even that their motives were purely cynical and commercial (I suspect it was an important driver, though). I think that they wanted to ask whether Asian crime was a problem in New Zealand, and that the police concerns were a legitimate starting point.

    Where Coddington went horribly wrong, of course, was failing to interview an actual recent immigrant (and pretending that one Chinese New Zealander who explicitly dissociates herself from those immigrants is representative of those immigrants), failing to talk to the police Asian community liason officer (pretty goddamn obvious, yeah?), chiding the politicians who didn't give her the indignant soundbites she wanted, and refusing to acknowledge the key statistics to the contrary that were staring her in the face (and trying to pretend that they weren't).

    In a sense, I think they missed their own point. It could have been a legitimate story.

    There is a general perception that Asian crime is rampant. Some police are concerned about Asian connections in drug crimes. Yet apprehension stats among Asians are far below averge, and has gotten lower.

    Why?

    Is Asian crime actually uncommon, but just gets more attention (and a higher profile) because they're Asian? Are the police units responsible for Asian crime very concerned about Asian crime because it's their friggin' job description?

    On the other hand, could it be that law enforcement engagement with the Asian community is lacking, and therefore crime is less visible, only showing itself in the high-end incidents?

    Of course, by failing to acknowledge the facts and packing the story with gory case details and dodgy stats, they didn't even attempt to ask any of these questions.

    Hence: N&S - you suck.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 543 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: More than a little odd,

    Hamish:

    Say I want to download a Comedy Central clip @ 40mb. Having full speed on that is great - I download it, I watch it, done. But the problem with P2P is not just that the files are big (say, 3 gigs for a season of... um, uncopyrighted homemade content), but that I can set many, many to download at once, and even when they've finished downloading, the programme will then expend bandwidth sharing it back out.

    It's designed for people to just leave it on and for it to chow up bandwidth (aka. maximum utilisation). That's the distinction between P2P and normal usage, which is very much finite.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 543 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: More than a little odd,

    Far be it for me to argue for Telecom's evil ways, but I can see why they're doing it.

    As a regular bittorrent user (I'm downloading right now), I have more things I want downloaded than I have bandwidth/traffic (i.e. My demand grows to fill all - and I mean all - available supply). I want as much as I can download as fast as I can download it.

    If I was properly uncapped (and traffic was reasonably priced), I'd be at max speed all day, every day.

    Sure, in the perfect world, I'd be able to do that, and just pay for the traffic, but in the real world, an ISP can't provision on the basis that it's going to be actually providing for, say, 20% of its users maxxing out while still providing normal service for the rest.

    Hmm. Actually, that doesn't sound as unreasonable as I'd first thought. I guess it just comes down to our network being shite.

    But at any rate, my point is that bottomless P2P users will chow down any and all available network capacity - so why not discriminate against them when network resources are scarce?

    VOIP is another story, of course. That's just Telecom being evil, and another reason why the company shouldn't be allowed in the internet market.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 543 posts Report Reply

  • Climate change day of action,

    Saturday is the Climate Change Day of Action - what's happening in your neck of the woods?

    In Auckland, they're going to rough up your downtown traffic system a bit, I think:

    http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=1&ObjectID=10408656

    And the usual talkfest:

    http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC0610/S00053.htm

    In Wellington, we're going to have a film/talk fest at the Paramount.

    I'm looking forward to the boffin session with Dr Peter Barrett (VUW, Dr Sean Weaver (VUW), Dr Jim Renwick (NIWA), Jane Desbarats (Ministry of the Environment) and Catherine Leining (MfE).

    Are you going? Are you driving there? Are you going to hoon through the Auckland CBD in your SUV to mow down some goddamn hippies?

    Let us know what's happening in your neck of the woods, and feel free to leave your thoughts here on Saturday.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 543 posts Report Reply

  • The NZ Web's greatest hits (and misses),

    Grant: What about Frogblog, back in its hey-day during the election? I thought that was a worthy daily read.

    OTOH, sometimes I wonder why everyone think they need a website. It's analogous to every company thinking they need a shopfront. Sure, it's handy to be able to access party policy on-demand, but I'm not sure if people go to a political party website looking to be engaged or converted.

    Anyway - my first internet memory is from "Back in the Day", when Xtra was first launched. I was one of the innocent children they herded like sacrificial lamb for their big launch demo. Xtra's "Big Thing" was an ultra-user-friendly graphical interface that would allow users to access everything they ever wanted to find on the interweb (read: a jpg with mouse-over links to 4 different websites).

    I still have the t-shirt.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 543 posts Report Reply

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