Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: The Orcon Great Blend 2011 in…, in reply to MikeE,
so can he mix?
Not sure, and it's not really an issue. He'll be the kind of DJ who, y'know, plays good records.
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Speaker: John and Phil meet Bob, in reply to Sacha,
No. Only started appearing at a certain time, is always out by exactly one post, and I’d therefore bet on a buggy CMS update. Probably one line of code.
The only time it’s happened to me was when I did actually click the wrong button.
But ... there was an upgrade overnight that's broken a few things -- including all our audio!
That's being restored now.
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Hard News: The Orcon Great Blend 2011 in…, in reply to Dave Patrick,
"If I find Coulson can I have a biscuit?"
"A PLAIN one!"
It's seriously great, that Downfall mashup.
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Speaker: John and Phil meet Bob, in reply to Sacha,
(hey, when did that attachment button appear?)
Don't know!
You can keep it if you promise to use it wisely :-)
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Meanwhile, Julia Gillard confirms that she's going to ignore her own party membership on same-sex marriage.
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Hard News: The Orcon Great Blend 2011 in…, in reply to Noodly,
On the subject of mashups, and since it's a Friday, here - for your viewing pleasure - is the News of the Screws' Downfall
Oh, bravo sir.
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Cracker: Another Capital Idea..., in reply to James Butler,
(Unrelated: w00t! Attachments on comments! Just because I can…)
Oh! I thought it was just me who had that special power. Things may have changed.
Use it wisely :-)
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I know not everyone cares to be on the Facebook, so here's Luke Greally's latest summary of the case:
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Latest Update: Today Arie Smith was yet again refused any hope of diversion in court today.Cornelius Arie Smith-Voorkamp, a fine young man who has Asperger’s Syndrome, was allegedly caught taking two light fittings from an abandoned earthquake damaged non-residential building in Lincoln Road.
The owner’s, at first horrified that he was being prosecuted for this, were visited by Police and promptly had a change of heart in deciding "court is the best place to sort this matter out".
Please note that Arie was not interested in the many other more valuable items available at the site - his interest was quite focused on a few light fittings and old light bulbs - items for which he always asks permission before taking, but could not on this occasion as the site was abandoned. A second spiteful police charge arises from him being in possession of the necessary tools “for the purposes of burglary”... i.e. a screw-driver and spanner to loosen the light fittings.
Police have now incredibly ignored three separate judge’s urgings to consider diversion on four separate occasions – police interestingly chose to delay the latest court hearing for a while to sheet home to the Judge that the refusal was coming from ‘on high’ - directly by telephone from their National HQ to the judge, so ensuring the judge got the message that more was much much more at stake here than she was apparently seeing, with top brass and legal advisors fully informed and actively engaged, insistent on a very expensive and no doubt damaging trial.
As you can imagine this must be quite hard on Arie, very especially given he is Autistic:
Being beaten by two police
Being imprisoned wrongfully for a week
Being yelled at and vilely tormented by soldiers queued to do precisely that
Hearing a Police Minister express her opinion that you should be locked up for a long-time “with a cellmate” (with the implication of being exposed to rape clear to all but the most naïve)
Having been remanded 6 times in succession... still no sign of a trial date
Having had expert forensic psychiatric evidence tossed aside by Police
Having watched as the judge’s plain common-sense regarding diversion was repeatedly ignored - 4 times
Having already racked up some pretty serious legal costs
Whatever happened to justice ‘swift and sure’?A top expert forensic psychiatrist has advised that under no circumstances should any other plea be entertained than ‘not guilty’, so that plea has now been formally entered on both charges.
On 28th July a pre-trial heaing will occur to discuss with the Judge where to go from here, but not to establish yet a trial date. There will be more torture before that day occurs.
Commentary: The involvement of the Police’s highest ranking legal advisers and other top Police brass in making this bizarre pig-headed decision is not a result of any earthquake crisis or a tightening-up on diversion criteria as claimed. Police know that they need to carefully railroad the process through to full trial to avoid any hint of guilt over the obvious and serious physical assault committed against Arie by two police officers. Otherwise two officers careers might be on the line (one quite senior). Even if Arie’s lawyer was to re-open the matter of encouraging Arie to lay a formal complaint, Police would still be jeopardized by any relative leniency shown when compared to other actual looters. What’s more, the Police involved absolutely hate Aspies and despise any quarter being shown them.
The seriousness of the case that the Police are claiming is NOT evidenced by these factors:
The offence, if any, was outside the cordoned area and trivial.
The offence, if any, was accompanied by Arie being forthright in stating his disability.
The offence, if any, is denied by even the abandoned building’s owners.
The seriousness of the case lies in the fact that:
Police/Army cooperation issues and relations are potentially at serious risk
Several police with more than 25 years service between them are at risk of dismissal
Police fear that any softness on their part will be widely misinterpreted by too many very powerful individuals and interests during this, an election year.
There is one further revelation to surface that will make this matter *much* more serious – and it is NOT that Arie has already received an apology for what he has been put through.
On another matter, we are ALL heartily sick of seeing media refer to Arie as “mentally ill”, or “mentally disabled” or “retarded”. Virtually every device they are reliant upon to perform the work they do is dependant on people like Arie’s inventiveness.
(c) 2011 Luke Greally (ASNZ) -
The Herald's story has been updated with a statement from the police, including this:
But Inspector Erasmus said tonight: "We have met with Mr Smith-Voorkamp and his lawyer twice and no complaint has been made.
"Claims that Australian police or Army personnel were involved are also spurious - neither organisation was involved in the apprehension."
Inspector Erasmus knows bloody well it is not claimed that "Australian police or Army personnel" were involved. The belief that they were had been a misunderstanding on Arie's part when he was spoken to in the first couple of days in custody.
If Erasmus is trying to pull that, I can have little faith in the rest of his assurances. This stinks.
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Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Matthew Littlewood,
In the light of how this scandal has developed over the last few months, particularly considering the latest revelations that the NOTW Private Investigator may have actually intercepted the families of members of the armed forces killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, Assange’s criticism seems increasingly untenable
Assange was still saying much the same thing in an interview in May:
Just a general question on the ethics, and how you derive the ethics of openness, investigation and privacy. Where does one make the ethical distinction between an operation say, WikiLeaks directed towards powerful institutions and processes and something such as the News of the World phone hacking scandal and the processes therein. What is not merely the contingent ethical decision, but what is the deeper political ethical basis on which one would make those distinctions?
I quite like it [the question]. And this probably horrified my British colleagues and my lawyers, but I wrote about the News of the World phone hacking scandal. And what I said back about a year and a half ago is that the British press should be very careful what they are doing in relation to spending time on that as opposed to all the other injustices that they could be spending their time on. Because we had been involved in something called the Petrogate scandal in Peru just a few months before, where we revealed 87 telephone intercept tapes of Peruvian politicians speaking for businessmen. The famed audio tapes. And that was the biggest political story in Peru that year.
And to engender a climate where that is hard to do is extremely dangerous. Now of course, the media abuses people and misuses its power in approximate proportion to the size of the particular industrial grouping. And News Corporation is a very large industrial grouping, and it uses its power accordingly. But when organisations like the Guardian write over a hundred stories about putting in default passwords in to voice mailboxes – because that’s what we’re actually talking about here – they are taking space from other things and they have other agendas at work. The other agendas at work are: attacking a newspaper rival; the New York Times became involved because similarly it wants to attack the Wall Street Journal.
I actually understand where he's coming from. But the "hundred stories" he's talking about represent the real work of investigative journalism -- the persistence and hacking away over time. Nick Davies didn't know when he started what extraordinary things the story held.
Wikileaks doubtless played an important role in Peruvian public affairs by facilitating the release of the tapes. But that's all it did. For Assange to present it as not only more significant but morally better than what Davies and The Guardian did is just delusional.