Posts by Kyle Matthews
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That they also don't feel the need to remind people that Sir Geoffrey Palmer is a former Labour Party leader and Prime Minister every time he's interviewed or cited as a legal academic, president of the Law Commission or named partner in ChenPalmer?
I agree that this is the media's fault and they should do better, but the comparison between Farrar and Palmer is a little weak.
Farrar is giving political comment, and he's a national party whatsit right? So the byline should be National Party Flunky or whatever. National Party Flunky relates to the political comment he's giving, so it should be upfront about that.
Palmer tends to give constitutional legal comment these days. Which is because he's a lawyer. The tagline should be his law title or lawyer or constitutional legal expert or whatever. I'm sure what he's commenting on has a political angle, but it's primarily law right? Tagging him with what he used to do 17 years ago is a tenuous.
Does anyone know the rule for using one quote mark - ' - or two - " - ?
As Robyn noted, there are no good rules for this, except, if you're quoting inside a quote, transfer between the two (it doesn't matter which goes outside, and which goes inside). You can't use double quotes inside double quotes, or single quotes inside single quotes. Very very bad, three smacks on the bottom and a bruised shoulder.
So eg. And then Kyle said "Hey Craig, when you said 'That they also don't feel the need to remind people that Sir Geoffrey Palmer..' I thought you made a great point."
However as usual our MSM does not give us enough information to know if he is in the right demographic to be a real risk to his child, which we as a society are rally trying to deal with.
Wow. Yeah, give a person is welfare dependent we should give them longer sentences. Maybe add on 50%. Good plan Kevin.
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Now that we've got those two ideas separate, are you trying to suggest that our right to free speech isn't about freedom?
No, I'm suggesting that your right to free speech isn't linked to how much money you have to spend on spreading your free speech around.
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oh, except ihug still trying to charge me for services i'd cancelled.
Ironically when I shifted my toll calls from Telecom to Ihug several years ago, Ihug sent the notification through to telecom that they were no longer my provider, and Telecom arranged for my calls to go through ihug with whatever they do.
For the next three months or so my toll calls got billed by both companies. It took several phone calls to both, and several grumpy phone calls from ihug to telecom before 1. it got sorted, and 2. Telecom agreed that I should get refunded for the 3 months of their bills that I had paid to avoid disconnection, for phone calls that I had already paid for through ihug.
I find regularly with ihug my broadband just loses its connection. For a while I was swapping to dialup, assuming that broadband was broken. I soon figured out that if I ran the test procedure on my D-Link broadband router, that flicked whatever switch needed to be flicked and it started working again. I still do it about every two weeks or so when I have problems.
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I remember all this. :)
See Grant was cool, and I wasn't. DJing at Radio One was the height of cool. I just got involved in student politics.
Munky Kramp you're right in that they weren't "cool", given that they played, for want of a better description, "funk-pop" which was part of the then-prevalent indie-rock orthodoxy.
Everyone seemed to have an opinion on them though. Typically they were either great, or absolute crap, and not much of the in between.
I never got the labelling that people seem to get into with music. "Oh I don't like them because they're XXXX". I've watched grown adults standing around for hours arguing whether Green Day are punk or not. I didn't get why it mattered, if you like the music you listen to them, if you don't, you listen to something else.
After the gig, they was a keg-party back at Kid Eternity's flat in Park St, just behind the 24-hour dairy. It was a pretty good piss-up and FNM keyboardist Roddy Bottum got so wasted he crashed on couch there.
That must be why the drummer ended up doing the interview on Radio One the next day with "Brian, who notably asked some really good questions." I still have that on tape as well!
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Kyle - it's new paragraph (i) of the definition of publish in clause 4 that extends the reach of the EFB to oral speech. That this is the intention is made clear on page 8 of the report under the select committee's discussion of their new definition of broadcast.
Thanks Graeme. I still don't see how this restricts free speech - maybe Angus will explain his reasoning.
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Actually Kyle you better go read the bill again - especially where it currently explicitly includes Oral Communication in its auspices
Would it hurt to provide a number? The bill is like 50 pages long, and it doesn't actually include the word Oral after it finishes talking about Oral Submissions.
But I've flicked through it again. I don't see anywhere where it says "a person cannot talk to another person about the election/candidates etc", or "a person cannot talk to the news media about the election candidates". Those are the two most important components of free speech. The rest of it isn't so much free speech, as 'money speech'. Which is an important debate to have, sure, but it's not exactly an attack on one of our fundamental freedoms. Money doesn't buy me time on the 6pm news, nor should it. Being 'newsworthy' should.
I'm sure it limits how much you can spend amplifying, distributing, printing etc, your free speech, but having limited reach doesn't make it unfree speech, it just makes it quiet. If I can only afford to print a hundred pamphlets, as compared to a million, that's not a limit on free speech, it's just a limit on being rich. The idea behind this bill, as I understand it, is to bring everyone down to a reasonable level so that money doesn't try and buy elections. That's the debate.
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You presume incorrectly, if they say the same thing. If an AA member wanted to spend on any additional advertising of the AA campaign, they shall not be able to.
You'll have to point me to where it says that, I can't see it.
Unless they want to say the same thing their association says and it relates to an election.
My point was, and is, that money does not equal free speech, and free speech does not equal money. Money equals distribution of that free speech. The EFB certainly doesn't, in any part I can see, say that you can't associate with anyone in particular, nor does it restrict your ability to say stuff, it just restricts your ability to print adverts so that people can hear it. This is not new, we've had restrictions on electoral spending for a while now, they just clearly didn't always work very well.
If I had my way I would limit each NGO to a campaign funding of $X per member. That way all New Zealanders rich and poor can have the same voice and actually have a voice.
That would require all the NGOs to have members - lots of them in fact, in order to be able to spend lots of money. That's not necessarily the model that all of them operate under.
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I ditched ihug for that very reason after 9 years of loyalty. I was paying for 60 gig download and they were throttling it in the name of "prioritising web browsing traffic". Which they weren't, they were killing my entire connection if I was doing any torrent downloads, and my browsing was slower than dialup.
That's interesting, I've never had that problem with ihug. I torrent NHL games down and get roughly 30-40x dialup speeds. It probably could be faster, but taking 2-3 hours to download a 1GB file doesn't seem too bad to me.
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Not really being the hang out at gigs, nor the really into NZ music type, I wouldn't have thought I would have a story for this one. It hasn't turned out to be a golden album or EP story, but blame the band more than me.
In 1993 I moved out of home up in Auckland, and happily moved down to Dunedin, where I got a basic introduction to the Music Scene. Like every other spotty first year I got my orientation ticket (the Lemonheads played that year, but I remember thinking The Muttonbirds topped them) and saw Supergroove (still a sentimental favourite), Head like a Hole (who I actually owned an album of, but didn't know anything about, so I was quite surprised when they wore very little onto stage) and a heap of Dunedin bands.
And Munky Kramp. Munky Kramp seemed to be the defining line in the music scene at the time. You either liked them or you didn't, and I suspect if I'd been more 'in', liking them would have pushed me back out with a heap of people. The hand towel container just outside the Radio One office has graffiti on it where the writer had rewritten their name to express their feelings on the matter. The one I can still clearly remember is "Frunky Manur". For I loved them. Variously described as ska/skate/punk, their music simply rocked, and music didn't rock me often.
To try and get into my new student life in my new city, I tuned my radio to Radio One, and took to recording music that I liked off the radio, in lieu of actually being able to afford it. So there, on this eclectic mix of music, proudly entitled "Music off Radio One B" (tape A, I think has long since died), sits Munky Kramp's 'Eyes that Cry', easily one of my favourite songs, amongst King Missile's 'Detachable Penis', some precious Pixies B sides, a Bob Marley song, Bats, the Fits, Look Blue Go Purple, and a poem that I found quirky about a guy who collected used teabags, dried them out, and used them to make a 'recycled teabag duvet'. Radio One were great then, they opened my eyes to music I'd never heard before (you couldn't get bfm where I grew up, so student radio was something I'd never encountered before).
I only got to see Munky Kramp twice. Once at orientation, and once at Sammy's, now a pool hall, but then still a rocking venue with big speaker stacks (I also saw Faith No More there around the same time). The Sammy's gig was their final outing, they were splitting up. For me it was just like discovering the Pixies at 16, just after they'd pulled the plug, except with the Pixies, I could buy all their recordings. "How can this be finishing just as I've found it?" I stood on the right as they finished the gig, Demarnia was sitting on the stage barely two metres from me, singing while tears flowed down her face. Guitarist Andrew Jamieson threw leftover band posters into the crowd - the ones with a box at the bottom to write in the venue and date/time.
And then it was over. To Mink, and Cloudboy, and the Dark Beaks. And not an album or EP or even cassingle to my name. Just a Radio One version of Eyes that Cry and memories of the singer doing just that on stage.
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Personally, I'm prepared to pay $10 more a month for Telecom/Xtra to have a single point of blame - if the service doesn't work then it's them or the modem, and I have two modems to try.
IHUG now offer single point of blame service. And actually their phone system has worked perfectly for me for the 5 months or so since I got it. Maybe because I didn't need to talk to anyone to set it up.
The great joy at no longer receiving a bill from Telecom...