Posts by nzlemming
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Tom Beard,
Or, to be fair, that they can’t find it in the Character Map application or don’t know that it’s ā in HTML. Or that it gets mangled by your braindead word processor or CMS. It may be much easier in many workplaces than it was when I was at TPK 5 years ago, when even for an organisation with a Māori kaupapa it was a nightmare trying to get consistency
One of the reasons people think any diacritical is sufficient for te Reo is the font butchery that Reddfish did in the 90's, hacking the glyphs of letters with the trema (which most people call an umlaut or diaerisis) to extend a line between the dots. Of course, that was only the visual representation and only worked for printed documents. Most people don't realise that computers recognise the code that creates the letter, not the glyph itself (except in OCR terms, and then the computer is recognising the glyph in order to turn it into code - just wanted to note that before someone called me on it). So all those words with macrons in printed government papers regularly became metal band names when they hit the web, and a different display mechanism recognised the code.
The solution to this is Unicode fonts everywhere, but they're still disseminating (meh, it's only been 12 years...)
</fontgeek>
As to non-use, I put that down mostly to ignorance and laziness, with emphasis on the ignorance. Once you know, there really is no valid excuse for not using the macron.
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Hard News: Playing the Man, in reply to Russell Brown,
Rounds of staff training have been undertaken to increase awareness in respect of the OIA and Privacy Act have been conducted. These have included lawyers and staff from the Ombudsmen’s office.
Wassamarra? The can't just issue orders, FFS?
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Hard News: Playing the Man, in reply to Sacha,
Given Field-Marshall Brownlee's extraordinary powers under CERA and his reputation as a bully, that's hardly reassuring.
That's just response times, I think. I suspect the qualitative measure might be less flattering, but you'd have to ask I/S about that.
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Hard News: Asking for a Contribution, in reply to Islander,
’ I was kind of glad when it went extinct
Well, I'm glad there's something we can agree on ;-)
I remember buying a bottle of Lammerlaw for my dad, a confirmed Glenfiddich drinker. He looked askance at it, being an NZ label, but I was able to persuade him to try it. I'll never forget his eyes going wide. It's quite possible that that was the first day he truly saw me as an adult.
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Hard News: Asking for a Contribution, in reply to Islander,
Well, you can, but then it is no longer a single malt – it is a blend, by definition.
PS The Lammerlaw is fucking awesome! I could never understand how the people responsible for that could also produce the execrable Wilsons standard blend. And 45 South? Let's just not go there.
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Hard News: A welcome return - and pirates!, in reply to Rich Lock,
Ninjas 1, pirates 0.
Undoubtedly, the cops were ninja in disguise.
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Hard News: Asking for a Contribution, in reply to Russell Brown,
PA-blended single malt
Say what now? A whisky is blended OR it is single malt. Perhaps you meant "PA-Branded"?
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Hard News: Asking for a Contribution, in reply to Sacha,
Looks like a good crew involved in that. I've got a lot of time for Minne B.
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Oooh! Oooh! A copyright thread!! :-D
I don't download anything I can buy and bugger all that I can't. I have more CDs than I can listen to and plenty of DVDs that I bought to watch "someday" already - I don't really need that many more. Maybe I'm a nostalgia freak but I just don't need the newest latest band or TV show as soon as it's broadcast ;-)
It pisses me off when the maximalists insist that those of us who talk about changing copyright to better reflect the digital age just want everything for free. I pay where I have to and don't where I don't (unless I want to, which does happen now and again) and that applies to just about anything - music, film, vegetables or clothes.
There's plenty of material available under Creative Commons or in the Public Domain and I do download a lot of that. Jamendo is a great music community and you get to hear a wide variety of music. And a ton of video at the Internet Archive and other places. I don't actually need to download anything.
I've used torrents precisely twice in my life and blew my data cap by inadvertently seeding a copyright-free movie that chewed through 10GB overnight. That and a deeply felt unease about letting just anyone access my computer for any reason keeps me away from that stuff the cool kids do. Colour me old ;-)
That said, there are occasions when I do download. When I need a piece of out-of-catalogue music or sound that just is not available for sale anywhere, I will find a source (often a movie) and rip just that bit. NZ doesn't have a fair use law (we need one) and fair dealing doesn't always cover that. But, if I could buy it, I would.
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Hard News: A welcome return - and pirates!, in reply to BenWilson,
They still need a ship. It’s not real until there’s an actual pirate ship.
Oarsome!