Posts by Stephen R
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Finland air now do a direct flight to/from Helsinki to Hong Kong, so my next trip to Finland will be that way. It will probably shave 5 hours off the trip by not having to muck around in Frankfurt or some other hub.
We had some friends from Helsinki come over for a month with their 9-month old daughter, and she learned to walk in our (not child safe) living room. Those friends said the trip back was much worse because the daughter was no longer content to lie down and play with the toys she could reach - she had the ability to explore, and she wanted to use it!
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In Stuff today, Johnkey says our spying is legal, and we've made no secret about how we've shared our data with our intelligence partners.
That makes me feel so much better.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/8895637/PM-Our-spying-is-legal
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Making sure you don't fuck up redaction and erasure of sensitive information is quite a big deal for people in the public service. Accidentally releasing sensitive or private information is something they rightly get hammered for.
I'm lead to believe that there aren't any standard procedures for redacting those documents, but most people know that scanning a printed document is one way to make sure that there are no unseen information being passed on.
I don't really blame the staff for choosing to do that.
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Hard News: Media3: Watching the Fourth Estate, in reply to Sacha,
Echelon
Or in other words, we're already giving them all our traffic, so they don't need to put in effort to spy on us?
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Hard News: Media3: Watching the Fourth Estate, in reply to Russell Brown,
It's worth remembering these things for context.
Indeed. I remember thinking as the news broke that he'd flown to Russia that I wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable going through Russia carrying secrets about the NSA, and then when Snowden disappeared, I wondered if he was being "hosted" by the Russian Intelligence service, whatever that's called these days.
Another interesting quote I saw today was from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/30/berlin-washington-cold-war
The documents reviewed by Der Spiegel showed that Germany was treated in the same US spying category as China, Iraq or Saudi Arabia, while the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were deemed to be allies not subject to remotely the same level of surveillance.
(emphasis mine)
I wonder what we did that makes us more "ally" than the Germans?
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Rob Stowell,
I still find it odd that it's most manifest in concern about 'child poverty' (not that this isn't genuine and terrible.) Adults living in poverty don't seem to matter.
Even bastards who think poor people get what they deserve because they're lazy and shiftless have difficulty saying that the children of those poor people likewise deserve hardship.
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We own a boring (reliable) Toyota Corolla 1600 hatchback. Thinking of getting a Prius, we hired one for a week last time we went to Christchurch. I kept track of the fuel use and distance travelled and decided that it was actually comparable to the Corolla for fuel efficiency per km travelled. And the Corolla (2nd hand, one careful owner) was a lot cheaper than we could get a Prius. I think one difference is that the Prius is a bigger heavier vehicle, so we weren't really comparing apples with apples. Unfortunately for the Prius, we don't need a people mover.
Much as I'd like to have an electric car, or even a hybrid, I can't really afford one yet. I still wait in hope though.
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Hard News: Marshall and the Media, in reply to Raymond A Francis,
May be but my reading of the case suggests it did allow the prosecution make its case when the defence claimed the young people were lying about the teacher supplying them with P
Did it? From the NZHerald article from 2004, the defence were claiming that nothing on the tape suggested Arthur supplied or smoked the drugs. All it did was confirm that drugs had been smoked at the party.
The article also made it sound like the students were put under a lot of pressure to say something that would satisfy the journalist or end up portrayed as crack-whores.
Whether what they said was true or not seems difficult to determine from the summary in the article.
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I have been pretty depressed with all the Citizen Initiated Referenda so far. The ones that were so badly worded people weren't sure what they were voting for, or the ones that say "I vote for feel good". or "I vote for A or B or C or D or ..." such that even people who vigorously disagreed with A would vote for it because they agreed with B or C...
I want there to be changes.
Before you start collecting signatures, I'd like to see someone vet the question. I'd like it to make logical sense. And, much as with The War Prayer I want people to vote for both halves of the equation. I want them to explicitly say "I want people to spend longer in prison and I'm prepared to pay higher taxes to fund it" or "I want there to be budget cuts and I'm Ok with seeing people starve because our welfare system is overloaded".
That our referenda don't include such things seems to me to be a bad oversight.
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to TracyMac,
As for the "geeks = super cool" in terms of their acceptance of queers, eh, I think maybe the "we are awesome liberals" type are - as in, they go beyond "tolerance" to acceptance.
I think it might be related to the Geek Social fallacies. Geeks fairly frequently have internalised the "excluding people is bad" idea, and thus they can be quite accepting of stuff like LGBT etc, but also tolerant of misogyny and other obnoxious social attitudes.