Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Digital divide still alive and well.
Maybe part of this is the way the medium dominates the message.
If you have a group discuss the internet, chances are they'll probably include people who know how TCP/IP works and the details of HTML.
A group discussing television will most likely not include anyone who knows about quadrature modulation or white balance. In 1937, it would have done, but now, it's about what's delivered, not how it gets there.
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Can people vote several times a day?
I doubt they'd want to. They'd vote something like once a year for senior management and supervisory roles and on broad policy mandates.
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I think it's one of the great myths of capitalism that because our pension funds have a few thousand dollars each invested in corporations like Telecom, we have "ownership" of them in any real sense.
There is no form of control over the business direction and no concept of balancing the interests of the shareholders as customers and owners.
I'd suggest an entirely different model. The community take the firm over (for as little cash as possible) and vest it back to its employees and customers. Each employee / customer gets an equal share and an equal vote. Profits get split out in the same way.
Same for every other big business. Companies can choose to remain traditionally structured, but if they do they'll be taxed into bankruptcy.
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Just how much does the average tourist-cyclist pay towards this?
What is this, Kiwiblog?
The amount you contribute doesn't change your basic right to use public facilities. All roads (except the few motorways) are open to all classes of traffic. Everyone is entitled to use those according to the road rules, whether they're a tourist/dolie who's paid nothing or a truck company paying thousands.
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it is *physically impossible* to slow down sufficiently on some of the corners on SH63
At 20kph, you can stop in 10m, or about 2 car lengths. From my memory of driving that road, there aren't any corners where you can't see 2 car lengths ahead.
Is the actual problem that you feel you have a right to tool around at 80-90kph regardless of the road conditions?
If there was a single cyclist in their lane and a full width truck coming the other way, you'd still crash if you couldn't slow down. Same for a broken down vehicle, or a rock on the road.
Where I come from, there are many roads that are one lane wide between high banks. Better be prepared to stop on those, or hit an oncoming car.
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two cyclists, complete with pannier bags (i.e taking up the north lane) round a blind corner.
The road code (pg20) says that two cyclists *can* ride next to each other legally.
Almost all sealed roads in NZ, especially state highways, are at least two lanes wide, so there is room for oncoming traffic. All vehicles are required to travel at a speed where they can stop in the distance they can see - so on a blind bend, you should have slowed down such that you could easily slow for the cyclists, and wait for it to be safe to pass.
Having said that, NZ drivers are a bunch of inconsiderate dicks, and a sensible cyclist should realise this and make allowances.
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I recently wrote a chunk of assembly - to process the output of an array of optical shaft encoders. It was quite fun, and I do think the GOTO was unfairly ditched on the whim of a single Dutchman.
If one wants to learn programming with the aim of creating useful code and/or earning a living, a knowledge of basic algebra is pretty much a prerequisite. Then being able to work a spreadsheet is a good next step. Following on from that, I'd reckon most languages are ok, though I would say that Basic is less scary than most. In a different direction, SQL is also an option.
However, a kid with Asperger's should be right at home in the Ruby community, so maybe that's the way to go.
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Technology like Scorch and NZ Wireless are good for people living in remote places like the back of Karori where you can't get ADSL. That kind of thing has a limit of around 2MBit/s (as opposed to a mooted 100MBit/s from FTTH). LTE and LTE Advanced may get to those 100MBit rates, and we might see fibre-to-the-lamppost being used. That would remove the need for home wiring and fluffing around with wireless hubs.
However, building such things isn't straightforward (not to mention making a return out of them) as Telecom's issues with XT have shown.
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The reason we don't get many bombs in NZ is twofold:
- nobody has sufficient of a grudge to risk jail/death (or indeed to court it with a suicide attack).
- it's quite hard to obtain/make explosives and detonators, and to fashion them into a viable deviceNo doubt one day, we'll get some nutter like David Copeland who will combine madness with the ability to make a bomb. Like Copeland and Timothy McVeigh, it's statistically likely they'll come from the Whale Oil end of the spectrum.
But I don't think that justifies giving up our freedoms, even if placing DPF's commentators in perpetual preventative detention is quite attractive.
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Traders here are too small to justify the expense of putting a full trading system into the US, but that doesn't mean they don't want every ms of advantage they can get their hands on from this side of the world.
I had assumed you were talking about Australia. NZ has very little international trading activity. That which there is (banks doing client FX deals and the like) isn't that sort of supercomputer quant stuff.
(Our stock exchange is a room above a pub - literally)
If one was setting up a computer based trading facility for a boutique hedge fund, it would be cheaper to put it in a hosting facility in the US than to install it in an office here.
Then again, if this cable is really only going to cost $900mln, then 1.8mln retail customers in NZ paying $10 a month for international bandwidth would probably pay for it.