Posts by Stephen R
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Southerly: My Life As a Palm Tree, in reply to Emma Hart,
As long as we were home for dinner, nobody really cared what we were doing.
The only time my Dad got upset was when we told him we'd been digging caves in the hillside next to the creek out the back of the neighbour's place.
That was the week that some kids had been digging caves in a sand-dune and it had collapsed and killed them. I think it touched a nerve.
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Hard News: The Real Threat, in reply to Rob Stowell,
As is 'there is no evidence Jon Stephenson was spied on". Which is quite compatible with: he was spied on, we know it, but we've destroyed all the evidence...
One of the games played in our household at the moment is "With what technicality can this denial be true, while at the same time not be an actual denial".
It's disturbing a) how many denials don't actually deny what they're accused of, and b) how rarely the initial denial is followed up by the reporters to whom it is given. -
Quote from Stuff
In response to written questions last week, Carter said a request from investigator David Henry for Vance's phone records had been declined.
and once he'd "accidentally" got the records
Henry immediately returned the records without viewing them and made it clear he had neither sought nor wanted them, Carter said.
Does that make sense to anyone else? It looks like a contradiction to me which implies one of those statements is incorrect.
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http://www.salon.com/2013/07/29/can_apple_and_google_be_trusted/
“Strongly encrypted data are virtually unreadable,” NSA director Keith Alexander told the Senate earlier this year.
Unless, of course, the NSA can obtain an Internet company’s private SSL key. With a copy of that key, a government agency that intercepts the contents of encrypted communications has the technical ability to decrypt and peruse everything it acquires in transit, although actual policies may be more restrictive.
PGP encrypted mail is still reasonably secure, but HTTPS might not be. The problem with PGP mail is maintaining your list of public keys for the people you want to talk to, (if you can get your correspondents to take the whole thing seriously enough to install pgp) and managing my keys across the wide variety of computers, tablets, phones etc that I use on a daily basis to access my mail.
Security, ease of use, or cheap price. Pick one.
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Which is why my sign on Saturday said "METADATA MATTERS - Peter Dunne should know"
My beloved told me I was being too intellectual...
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Went to the march in Wellington on Saturday. I would have said there was about 2000 people, but stuff reported "500", though I don't know where they got that number from.
Only some of the speeches made me cringe. Russel Norman impressed me as a public speaker. Then, to top it off, the news on Sunday reported that they were spying on John Stephenson because he was a subversive for telling people what they're doing...
*sigh*
I have some sympathy for the defence force, but only some. They've been sent to Afgrandstand, they haven't been given the resources to keep prisoners they capture. They're not allowed to give the prisoners to people who will mistreat them (which, unfortunately, appears to include the US and the UK). So what can they do?
a) shoot them all (take-no-prisoners).
b) let them go (take-no-prisoners lite)
c) hand them to whoever will take them, and pretend not to know what happens next.If they choose c) as the least bad option (from their point of view), and the press reports that and makes them look bad, I'm not surprised they feel a bit upset; but mostly I blame the government(s) who put them in that situation. If we can't trust the people we're fighting alongside not to torture people, then we shouldn't be fighting alongside them; but that's a political decision, not a military one.
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The embed looks borken to me...
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Hard News: Who else forgot to get married?, in reply to wendyf,
My daughter's partner, paramour, lover, whatever, says I can refer to him as a son-in-law.
Until my brother-in-law got a civil union, we used to refer to his partner as the outlaw...
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Hard News: Who else forgot to get married?, in reply to Dave Kelly,
I like the Icelandic system. Daughters get as their surname their mother's first name with -dottir on the end. Sons get as their surname the father's first name with -son on the end. So a family with two parents and a child of each sex has four surnames. This shows links of descent, but not biased to one sex, and doesn't make surnames precious. Perhaps consequently, I'm told, the Icelandic phone book is sorted by first name
We had a long conversation about that with a local when we were there in April. Yes, the phone book is sorted by first name, and the family we visited for dinner had 3 different surnames on the front doorbell. The father (Jon Siggimund <someone's> son) decided Jonson was a boring name for his children, so they were all named Siggimundarsson (don't trust me on the spelling))
It's more traditional for the daughters to be <fathername>-dottir, but some newfangled types are occasionally trying for using the <mothername>-dottir formation. I get the impression it's not that common at the moment.
Generally, the first son will get the father's father's first name, and the second son will get the mother's father's firstname, and after that it's a bit weird. (Yes, this does lead to family trees with Johan Gunnarsson having a son called Gunnar Johansson who has a son called Johan Gunnarsson.)
Often a dead Uncle without children might be chosen to be named after, or a son getting a name that used the masculine version of a beloved grandmother or great aunt. The names are recycled so a family will traditionally have a small number of names used.
They also have quite strict rules about giving names that are feminine to girls and masculine to boys. There was a court case in the last few years for a family who named their daughter after a (female) character in a book that used a name that was not a traditional female name, and the state refused to register the name on her birth certificate because it wasn't "proper". Apparently her documentation just called her "girl" (in Icelandic) until she was in her teens and the court case finally allowed her name.
Iceland is a fascinating place...
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When my partner and I got married, it was never seriously considered that either of us would change our names (by anyone except for her mother, who seemed to expect it).
Our paranoia is such that the only time we really care is when travelling overseas, when we always take a photocopy of the marriage certificate. In the event of one of us ending up in an accident and unable to say "S/he's with me" we can show that we're actually next-of-kin entitled to visit in hospitals etc.
Thus far, it's never been a problem, but then, I've only once had to use my international drivers permit (NZ drivers licence being acceptable on it's own everywhere except booking a car through a tourist information center in Iceland so far).
What annoys my partner is that things like airlines demand titles, and she a) hates being called "Mrs" and b) dislikes being called "Miss" or "Ms". Thus far it has not been enough motivation for her to chase a doctorate...