Posts by TracyMac
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I love love love that NZ lolcats use NZ lolspelling
No, unfortunately Colin the Cat seems to be a bit lexically challenged. "Flavr" is spelled the same way internationally.
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Here's another pakeha sticking her hand up for being beaten and abused as a child. Broken nose, cracked ribs, rape, and a residual wariness about big strong rugby-playing men (and no, it's not bloody rugby either), 30 years later. It wasn't booze - my stepfather hardly drank. It's not a "Maori" problem - it is a cultural problem. By that, I mean if a family has a culture of marginal/no employment and economic disenfranchisement, it is hard for non-abusers in an abusive family to get access to resources to get out of it.
As well as the economic disempowerment - and of course more Maori are more likely to be economically worse-off than Pakeha (but I do get tired of the Pakeha underclass being ignored in these debates) - there is always a family background of brutality, often combined with some kind of mental health issues. Someone might be quite determined to give their children a good life, but if you get involved with the borderline or outright sociopathic nutter (or addict) who has no normal affect, and you've got no resources to get out, and you don't think you're worth better than what you're getting now... what exactly do you do?
I think wider family groups need to take responsbility - my mother's nicely middle-class familiy looked the other way because "she had made her bed and had to lie in it". So what if it's "dobbing in" your relatives? If you won't help them yourself, find an agency who will. I also think involving Plunket more is an excellent idea. So many poorer parents never see a Plunket nurse - there are too many slipping through the cracks there, just like children slipping through the cracks with school attendance (another area that needs attention).
Another thing - universal and adequate sex education at school, which talks about all the contraceptive options. The amount of ignorance that still goes on is astonishing. If contraceptive implants and IUDs were made more readily available to those with more chaotic lives, then perhaps there would be fewer children to worry about. Also, let's get rid of so much song-and-dance about sterilisation - I'm 39, and there's no way in hell I can get my "tubes tied", because I'm under menopause age and I haven't had children "yet".
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Not to be too gratuitous here, but this chick digs Robyn Malcolm too. She pwns all in her path. Damn the fact I haven't seen her on TV for over 8 years (except when visiting home, in odd moments) - man, she's getting better with age.
While we're on the topic of unholy same-sex luurrve AND the WRC, I see the French have been doing some exceedingly "arty" promos of the event. Now, if the rugby had a bit more of that kind of thing going on, I might even watch it.
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I'm glad you've picked up on this. The article infuriated me, not least because of the opening sentence:
The removal of corporal punishment in schools has been highlighted as a root cause of the rise in violence against teachers.
Omitting the crucial journalistic principle of "Who?" with the attribution of that kind of provocative statment until further down the page. It should read:
The removal of corporal punishment in schools has been highlighted as a root cause of the rise in violence against teachers, by the conservative family lobby group Family First.
OK, it's a minor point, but how hard would it have been?
As for the utility of strapping and caning, sure, let's model the behaviour we're supposedly trying to get rid of. It was bloody useless anyway. The kids who acted up and got strapped were bragging about it within 15 minutes. For the kids who already suffer from the idea that being tuff and bolshie at all costs is a desirable thing, I certainly didn't get the impression that strapping did anything to mitigate it. Quite the reverse.
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Mmmm, HP Sauce. It's the only thing to have with proper rosti-style hash browns and eggs, or in your bacon sarnie. I have no excuses, I had the habit before I went to the UK.
Also, I'm the person who paid 5 quid in that Kiwi shop by Trafalgar Sq for Watties' tomato sauce so that I could have a proper sausage sammie, and about the same amount for Maggi Onion Soup and Reduced Cream so I could made proper retro chip dip.
Obviously, I'm a food slut (although I didn't get hooked on British Marmite - I stuck to Vegemite from Sainsbury's).
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I agree with the Libertarian argument that we should be allowed to take anything we want, but I think anyone selling mass produced health treatments is under an obligation to provide real clinical information on the effects.
Hm, I would support this in theory if "mass-produced" were well-defined, and to the extent that a maximum dosage is specified. Sometimes "effects" can be vague - how many drugs have all their side-effects listed? A toxicity rating seems useful.
As a qualified homeopath, I really don't want my remedies to come under any such measures. You can't have it both ways - as they do in Australia - either they are sugar-water (placebo), or not. Any serious testing regime would assert that placebo is it. However, anyone prescribing homeopathic remedies here in Oz must take out liability insurance. Just ridiculous.
At present we practice under common law, which says that any person has the right to seek treatment from anyone they choose, so long as the practictioner doesn't promise to cure, or pass themselves off as a member of a professional body (eg. call themselves "doctor" when they are not). That seems to have worked fine to date. It didn't take long for crackpots like Matt Tizard to be deregistered as a GP... it's just embarrassing that he can still call himself a homeopath.
Oh, and as for the "placebo" and "counselling" effects, well, you may be right there. However, remedies appeared to get rid of the ME that someone I knew had been suffering from for nearly a decade, and they most certainly appeared to get rid of the jandice my three-week-old nephew had had since birth. The first instance, sure, placebo is a possibility - but I'm not sure how my nephew "believed" in the remedy. Of course, it was probably a "coincidence" and I have anecdotal "evidence" only, so everyone is free to disregard that as well. :-)
I will say that ethical alternative health practictioners are just as rigorous in their care for the patients as conventional GPs, and more so in many instances.
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Hadyn, done as soon as I can find one of him with a bucket.
Who needs one with a bukkit in it already? Assemble your own! This image reflects Howard's thoughts on the water crisis in Oz (yes, alas, some of us have to live here).
But I do think Hyde would make a slightly better lolrus.
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Rachel sez:
...but if you're publishing links to other websites in your own website, my understanding was that you can only link to the home page of other websites, as linking to specific pages/sections/items within the website does breach copyright unless you have obtained permission.
I might have missed someone else reponding to this, but in short, nup. It's ridiculous, although I have seen some people attempt to claim it. By default, everything on the Internet is assumed to be copyrighted. There is no need to assert an explicit copyright, unless some mumbo-jumbo in the UK copyright law is relevant (there's some kind of qualitative difference if you "assert" your copyright in your own name, which is why recently published books will have that language included).
Anyways, web content is copyrighted whether you read it on the front page, the middle page, or somewhere in the sidebar. If your page is publically accessible... well, it's publically accessible, and thus able to be linked-to. If you do not want the average punter to see it, you put it behind some kind of security.
Fair use provisions come into it as well. Copying and pasting the content of an entire webpage into your own and trying to pass it off as yours is wrong. Creating some kind of iFrame where publically-available remote content gets sucked into your page dynamically (and where it looks like your content) is the same, unless you attribute where the content came from. So too with images. While I don't think "hotlinking" an image (putting an embedded link to it in your page) is technically illegal - since the original link is in your code - it's distinctly tacky (and "steals" someone else's bandwidth). Taking that image and hosting it on your own site without permission is definitely illegal.
I'm sure there are other aspects that other people are more knowlegable about, but linking to any page on the internet that is not protected, and that you are not purporting to have created, is absolutely fine. A link is not the actual content, after all.
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Also with regard to the "copyright infringement", the lawyer says herself it's a parody. While NZ copyright law doesn't explicitly permit use of copyright works for the purposes of satire (as the US law does), I believe it's generally assumed to be part of the common law right of "fair dealing". As you say, there is no attempt to pass off the work as the original creator's, and there is no commercial gain for the deriviative work's creator (although I don't think we have a concept of "derivative work" in NZ law), nor is there any commercial penalty for the copyright holder.
I mean, really, why bother? And the thing about not even realising that YouTube is hosting the content is just bizarre.
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But Apple has nothing to lose from the AAC format starting to crowd out MP3 in the wider (that is, including pirated) market, especially when Microsoft is trying to lock in its own proprietary WMA as the format of choice. And neither do we: MP3 is an outdated technology stuck in a patent mess. There are already quite a few mobile players that support AAC and, significantly, they include most 3G mobile phones.
We have nothing to lose from being locked into a proprietary format that won't play on most devices? Who seriously uses their phones to play music, anyway? I strongly beg to differ.
Yes, a higher bitrate AAC file is going to sound better than 128Kbps MP3. So will a higher bitrate MP3 file. I grant you that the compression algorithm may be better with AAC, but a VBR MP3 is not "outdated" technology and is a significant improvement on a CBR file. So why aren't they releasing them as VBR MP3s if they want to pull in the punters?
I don't see any discussion about truly open formats like OGG or FLAC. OGG, as a compressed format, blows away AAC, CBR (and, often, VBR) MP3, and WMA. Of course, alas, there are even fewer music devices that support OGG - no prizes for guessing why that is.
The upshot is, if you're already an iTunes user, you may make the shift to the new files - it's a start. If you're not an iTunes user, you ain't going to make the shift. I'll stick to ripping my CDs to OGG, and downloading VBR MP3s/OGGs when I can find them, thanks.