Posts by Russell Brown
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Muse: What The Frig, Police?, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I’ll hand that question off to Mister Brown, who I believe was reliving his dissolute youth last night. Backward baseball caps on middle-aged men are a crime against fashion, but I’m not sure whether it constitutes grounds for a community moral panic.
It was a varied, but younger and much more hip hop crowd than Public Enemy pulled at the Town Hall last year.
The excellent atmosphere was tested by the venue. The legal capacity of the Studio probably wasn’t breached, but you can only see the stage properly from about 30% of the floor space (which is what makes it such a flawed live venue) – and naturally, everyone wants to be there. It was actually unsafe in the main room by the time the headliner came on. But I felt people dealt with it very well. I got no sense of even incipient violence.
The promoters seemed to have a Moa Beer sponsorship, and sold the product in to the venue. Which was awesome. Having decent beer in plastic bottles was very pleasing. I didn’t see anyone drunk enough to he thrown out.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to HORansome,
Let me put it in slightly simpler English for you, then:
I understood your meaning perfectly well, thank you Matthew. But it seem to me you were using jargon to make your answer seem more substantial than it was.
I do also think Keith's comment was somewhat intemperate.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Keith Hunter,
I have difficulty with HORansome’s “I don’t think the particular candidate explanatory hypothesis you infer from the body of evidence as a whole is the best explanation of the event in question’”.
Me too, to be honest.
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Hard News: War, now and then, in reply to Islander,
and wound up a supplies sergeant in the RNZAF. I think it blighted the last of his short – but very public, prolific & otherwise productive- life.
My grandfather was a skilled brickie, and was required to stay home in case his skills were required. There obviously was no shame in that, and he was a fine man, but I think he may still have carried a sense of failure in being prevented from serving as a soldier.
The RSA culture was so powerful in the post-war years. It can't have been good for a man of his generation to be excluded from it. We also think he had previously been turned down for police recruitment, despite at least one glowing reference that I've seen.
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Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
I don’t think they’ve dropped dramatically, either. International capacity is still quite expensive, and margins are very tight. The less capacity that’s required, the better. A competition over contention ratios would only be good for the very biggest ISPs with the most commercial negotiating power, and I just don’t see them willingly going there.
That’s not really how it is or has ever been though. Right from 1995, when Ihug introduced flat-rate internet while the big guys were still trying to charge not just by the byte but by the hour, it’s been smaller ISPs that have driven market offerings in NZ.
This week, Orcon introduced new monthly caps for its Genius service, including 200GB for $99. Then Snap Internet just turned my 100GB/month deal into 550GB – same price! That’s nicely timed for my upgrade to VDSL, which Chorus is enabling but Telecom shows no sign of offering. And my deal with Snap for unlimited YouTube for $2 a month extra still holds. It’s kinda crazy.
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Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to Andrew E,
@Paul Brislen: I couldn't possibly comment on whether I may or may not have used it to watch a bit of Newsnight the other week. (Newsnight, FFS, why region controls on that?!)
The BBC's affection for region-control in the past couple of years is really, really stupid. You can't even watch programme trailers on its website from outside the UK.
I guess there is some cost in providing access to public service programming -- or, more likely, paying for a CDN to trunk it around the globe -- but there are ways to address that.
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There's a story in the Herald today about the first third-notice to be issued.
There's no information about what music this person was downloading, but persisting with the one form of access that will get you into trouble seems stupid.
I suspect it's one of the people permanently seeding hundreds of albums that Rianz et al have known about for some time. I can't muster much sympathy if that's the case.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Ross Francis,
But here's what lawyer Steven Price has said of Hunter's book on the case:
Keith Hunter actually said on the Media7 recording tonight that he believed the Watson case embodied a greater miscarriage of justice than that suffered by Thomas.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to HORansome,
With respect to the eye-witness testimony, it’s a red herring insofar as if it is meant to discredit the case against Watson, it is the wrong kind of counter-argument to look at as it fails at the job of showing that Watson can’t have been involved; the quality (or lack thereof) of the eye-witness testimony doesn’t in anyway reflect upon the quality (or lack thereof) of the DNA evidence, for example.
True. On the other hand, Hunter's notes for Murder on the Blade say: "The key witnesses make it clear they believe they were tricked into identifying Watson as the killer. They are unanimous that Watson is innocent."
The second sentence is irrelevant -- what witnesses think about a man they didn't see should have no bearing. But if the first sentence indicates the police case was improperly assembled, then that could reflect on the nature of the prosecution.
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Hard News: Did Holopac change everything?, in reply to Stupid,
Tupac's voice could've easily been done with voice morphing technology similar to that allegedly used to create those phone calls from passengers on the 9/11 jets.
Intriguing!