Posts by Peter Ashby
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I remember when I was about 11 and we were in the process of moving from Dunedin to Auckland, by train and in Wellington we got taken to a session of Parliament. My overriding memory is looking down from the public gallery and thinking that Rob Muldoon looked to be bigger across than he was tall. I am willing to take perspective into account and conclude we was in fact as wide as he was tall ;-)
Still, a valuable lesson, not least that anybody passing could go in and watch and listen. Something valuable there. Would have liked to have been taken to a jury trial but.
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Sitting next to the G5 iMac I am typing this on is a Centris 650. It has had one new screen and the addition of a CD drive, the Enet is dead necessitating a bridge, but it still works. Used for games and it is the only machine that will print the wife's stamp collection pages with smooth graphics on the laserwriter.
Mind you the iMac is a replacement for a RevB iMac that is now a brick in the attic since the power supply and the motherboard were toast after a power cut (plugged into a surge board).
There are numerous iPods in the family, all still working.
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Oh dear, one Trojan, not yet confirmed in the wild which requires a certified clueless idiot to install it and you posit that in place of a virus?
Last Mac virus I saw was NVir on an old G3 box running OS9. Only possible symptom was it ran a bit slow. We only found out because of a contaminated zip disc put into my G4 tower running that very old public domain virus scanner widget. The machine was riddled with NVir, yet it still ran just fine. Mac viruses, Wooo! Wooo! the bogeyman will get you! the bogeyman will get you! Yawn.
Still if it serves as a comfort blanket for you.
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All tv on p2p will never fly as conceived. The ISPs will disconnect anyone trying it. The ISPs were/are crying foul over the huge spike in traffic after the BBC iPlayer went live. All except VirginMedia the Cable Co (who we are with). We can get iPlayer on the telly via the digibox and the red button. In addition to VM's CatchUpTV service for much of the rest of digital TV and the Beeb.
Cooking steak etc when the latest Dr Who starts? No problem. Watch it again at your leisure. As we did on Sat (the steak was wonderful, aged beef, pink inside done with a blue cheese cream sauce and LOTS of onions, red and white, and mash).
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Sorry, living in SNP governed Scotland has me in a time warp. Still.
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The thing about the wop wops is that no-one lives there, which means that electorally, they don't matter now that we have MMP.
Harsh, but true.Cut the Cable! Indpendence for the South Island!
Lets see how far your spendthrift coal fired electricity ways get you when the hydro and wind power vanishes. That'll learn you to vote for the wrong govt. Varmints....
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Mind you the Windies were incented by the overs in time rule, they saw and see it as directed at their traditional reliance on an all pace attack, and indeed it rather does force a team to have at least a part time spinner/Styris clone to speed things up so I think they have a bit of a point.
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Marks on paper, sure. Let me tell you all about the last elections here in Bonny Scotland. They were for the Edinburgh Parliament under an MMP system and local elections under a different PR system. So multiple ballot papers, problem 1.
Then there was the counting, this was to be done by automatic machines. Best of both worlds you see. It has been decided that we will never actually know the outcome of the parliamentary election as it was voted on. However we are going to go with what resulted because rerunning the election was apparently not an option...
There was a huge amount of spoiled ballots, up to 25% in some electorates but we don't know if they were deliberately spoiled, spoiled due to confusion caused by the multiple ballots or the machines couldn't read/parse them (our equivalent of hanging chads). Then there were the problems with communicating the results over the 'net to the counting centres... Some machines subsequently lost/forgot/mangled the stored counts as they were not designed for storage... It was very bad karma.
And down South of the Border there have been prosecutions over the postal voting they use in local elections. There was genuine and systematic fraud including intimidation and local bigwigs getting people to hand over their ballot papers. Very bad karma there too. Give me a polling booth every time.
Also the fact that the vote here is on a Thursday does not mean the feeling is equivalent to voting on a Saturday in NZ. My wife and I usually get up and vote first thing for eg. Also it might be good for the kids and the teachers, but what about us parents? elections mean someone has to take time off work to look after the sprog monsters. Elections here thus eat into holiday entitlements. We may get 30 working days here but they get eaten into by things like this.
My first vote was a special in North Dunedin in 1984 when we gave Muldoon a record kicking. Now that was an election to cut your teeth on! Later we moved into Michael Cullen's constituency and voted down by the beach, just along from our house. We took the kids, chatted to the elderly people who lived in the sheltered housing around the community hall and it was a very nice, relaxed piece of civic duty. I too have make the trek to NZ House in London to vote too and that is nice in a different way, though not if you are homesick.
I agree with Russel, voting by hand and counting by hand, nothing is broken so don't try and fix it. We don't have to use technology just because it's there. Just because I have a car doesn't mean I have to drive 400m to the shops. I can walk too. My wife has a digital camera (broken the CCD is toast). I have a Canon A1, currently loaded with slide film (Velvia 100 since you ask). When I send it for processing they scan it to CD in 5 different resolutions. So I get slides AND digital copies. I am also still in that space where I consider whether a shot is worth shooting or not. Now why would I want a digital just because I can?
Ditto electronic elections
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@ Donald Mathieson
I wish them well, but hope they can broaden their efforts beyond just promoting scientists to also involving more people in scientific knowledge generation.
What's stopping you? There are a number of people without institutional affiliations getting FoRST etc grants and doing research. If you have a research proposal then write it up and get it submitted.
Of course it helps if you can persuade the funding committee that if they give you the money you will be competent to do the research. Which is why it helps if you have those pesky things like undergraduate and postgraduate university degrees. It's a basic competency bar and if you are doing group work it is a pain to have to hold someone's hand all the time. I know I have done it.
So, get writing that research proposal. May I ask what area it will be in?
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Obviously that it was possible he was. It was simply an example as to why the police cannot trust what someone at the scene tells me implicitly. They may literally have a gun at their heads.