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This is because of New Zealand's tax system.
http://www.med.govt.nz/templates/Page____12961.aspx
Once you subtract the excise diesel is more expensive

The current NZ proposals include: right to fair hearing before an independent tribunal; anonymity protection for the accused until the tribunal orders otherwise; and no disconnection of service without a court order. Seriously, you have a problem with that, you're hard to please. The Creative Freedom Foundation is all for it.

Meanwhile, the government is actually asking for our input on the next ACTA round.

I sent mine in yesterday. If you haven't sent yours by the time submissions close at the end of this month, pardon me if I don't have much sympathy for your opinion.

"...divide the Joes into two groups: those who can afford the pricier version, and those who cannot. If you only have the pricier version, you lose the latter group. If you only have the cheaper version, you lose part of your profits from the former group. By having both, you improve your profits."

and what I said ...

"differentiate their output so as to take away as much consumer surplus possible under the demand curve" ... describe the same thing.

You described the mechanism, I summarized the effect.

Observe: http://www.med.govt.nz/upload/45393/fig3.jpg

"That's not how demand curves work. Not at all."

That's exactly how demand curves work.

So basically he doesn't know whether their datacentres are plugged into coal power plants or nuclear plants, he's just making wild assumptions?

If they're located in the United States then they're almost certainly getting some percentage of their power from coal. If they happen to be getting a large percentage from hydro-electric, then they're driving up the cost and possibly preventing other consumers in the general area from getting 100% of their energy from hydro-electric. Same goes for nuclear.

Plus it's making it sound like Google gets the job done redundantly and you get the result from whichever does the job the fastest, which is obviously balls.

While it's true that Google doesn't use competing servers in that sense, it is true that a single will burn cycles on multiple machines. This description of Google's architecture talks about how a given query's terms are queried in different "barrels", which presumably may reside on different machines. In order to achieve the sort of latency they do, the process is a great deal more complicated than, say, a single query on a local database.

That's funny because mine generates 0g per hour. It's called nuclear power.

Where do you live that has 100% nuclear power? How was the nuclear plant constructed? How was the uranium mined and processed? How do the plant employees get to work? Nothing is free. If you really do live somewhere with 100% nuclear power then, yes, your footprint is much smaller than someone consuming coal-based power. But it's not non-existent.

Let's overlook the fact that most of electricity in New Zealand is produced by hydropower stations.

Were all the recipients of these tweets located in New Zealand? No. You also exaggerate the extent to which New Zealand is powered by hydro power. The latest statistics I found indicate about 54% of Kiwi power is hydro-electric. Another 11% is geothermal and wind. 24% is natural gas and 10% is coal.

I wonder where you are getting your dates from. ACTA hasn't been finalised, and the NZ Ministry of Economic Development has stated they will make the decision to join the proposed agreement once the public has commented on the final version.

MED's ACTA FAQ

Despite the secrecy surrounding ACTA, the NZ government does have a process that it has to abide by to make ACTA legally binding. Violate any one of those steps, and it could void the enforcement of ACTA in NZ.

Judith Tizard was hoping to push this through by the end of the year, but it seems ACTA negotiations haven't been speedy. I haven't seen anything which suggests that ACTA would be ready by then, or that the government have voted on it before it was dissolved.

It is possible that you're thinking of the Copyright (New Technologies) Ammendment Bill, the Copyright (Artists' Resale Right) Amendment Bill, or the Protocol ammending the TRIPS Agreement, all of which are something entirely different.

Bets that this judge is some OAP who was shown by his grandson how you could "google" someone...

Actually what's particularly interesting about this case is that the judge also teaches Information Technology and has written a text-book on cyber law in New Zealand, and he's made a submission to the NZ government about spam legislation which I haven't read, but you could probably look at if you want some guideline idea of his IT competence.

One of New Zealand's media commentators with a lot of IT experience (Russell Brown, for whom I have a lot of respect) threw in a few comments over here, and wasn't immediately condemning of the actions of the judge. Brown commented that he thinks this judge probably has more technical knowledge of the Internet than any other judge in the country, and coming from him it's either quite compelling or very detrimental to every other judge.

New Zealand's had problems in the past with courts trying to suppress names, particularly in cases when there's been international interest in the case, because the suppression orders only apply in New Zealand. I don't understand what he expects to achieve except possibly hoping that jurors won't be able to hide at home and google the names as easily during critical points in the trial, especially since the details of this trial are unlikely to gather much interest outside NZ. I think Brown's theory that this is an experimental act from the judge to see what happens sounds fairly feasible.

No nukes (one thing I disagree with, what are you going to use, coal?), Copyrights are longer than I'd like, but better than here (see http://www.med.govt.nz/templates/Page____7290.aspx#P11_1466). I don't know what their enforcement against P2P-type stuff is like. I know there is a FOSS community down there. In fact, the hard drive in my laptop burned up while in Auckland, and I got in touch with the Auckland university LUG, and one of them met me and gave me a Knoppix boot disk to use. I should state my sense of "Freedom" emanating from the place is nothing substantive, but is a purely subjective feeling I had while there.

Of course, not the Barbados ministry that I linked to, but perhaps the ministry I meant to link to.

The rationale of the previous government for removing the prohibition on parallel importing was to ensure that New Zealand consumers could access imported goods at world-best prices by promoting a more open and competitive environment. The suggestion that some copyright products were more expensive in New Zealand than in other countries was based on analysis contained in Parallel Importing: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation. The general conclusion of the report was that lifting the blanket parallel-importing ban on all copyright goods was likely to provide net gains to the New Zealand economy as a whole. There was, however, some suggestion that the availability of parallel imported copies of major new release film titles for rental in advance of New Zealand theatrical release was contributing to declining cinema box office takings. [Legislation addressing this] subsequently passed as the Copyright (Parallel Importation of Films and Onus of Proof) Amendment Act 2003.

How about the guy that dismissed the Internet as a peripheral player in the burgeoning technology scene until the end of 1995!?

From Judith Tizard's Amendments Proposed for Copyright Act:

"Prohibit the supply or manufacture of devices, means or information that circumvent technological protection measures, where circumvention could enable infringement of any of the copyright owner's exclusive rights, and provide criminal penalties for large scale commercial dealing in circumvention devices, means or information; "

ISPs are commericial enterprises that deal in large scale supply of information/data. Bye bye Internet. ;-)

Why not give people the right to format shift, the review panel says, we're all doing it anyway, and everyone assumes it's legal, not to mention that the recording industry is not out of pocket if someone format shifts.

Also not surprisingly, RIANZ (NZ's RIAA) is opposing it like crazy because of some nonsensical argument about... well... I don't know... the end of the world occurring if someone makes a copy of a CD they already own for personal use.

Read the government's web pages about it here. The relevant part is under "New Exceptions".

Under current patent legislation in New Zealand there is no inventive step requirement for something to be patentable. However this requirement will be added if the proposed Draft Patents Bill is passed into law.

You cannot blame MS for playing according to the rules; nor can one blame the policticians for being accomodating and writing the rules to benefit such a generous contributor.

You can blame yourself if you're against software patents but don't take action.

I wrote to the NZ Herald last week with the idea for the article that got slashdotted today!

I also made a submission to the government on the NZ Draft Patent Bill. I argued the same point made in the article:

"Patents allow firms to create artificial legal barriers that can hinder or prevent community-based peer-production ...

Allowing software patents is a decision favouring one form of software production over another."

Hahaha, you are kidding, right? Go read at the WIPO site as well as the New Zealand Min. of Econ. Development and educate yourself on difference between the right to exclude others from making/using/selling the invention nationally and internationally.

I am so disgusted with you that I even went to this link to pull a quote for you:

"A patent will only protect your invention within New Zealand. To obtain overseas patent protection, two options are available:

* Filing applications with intellectual property offices in overseas countries of interest; or
* Filing an International Application under the Patent Co-Operation Treaty (PCT). "

Now stop talking about how cheap is it to obtain internationally applicable patent protection through the New Zealand system and instead fuck off, pardon my French.

Hahaha, you are kidding, right? Go read at the WIPO site as well as the New Zealand Min. of Econ. Development and educate yourself on difference between the right to exclude others from making/using/selling the invention nationally and internationally.

I am so disgusted with you that I even went to this link to pull a quote for you:

"A patent will only protect your invention within New Zealand. To obtain overseas patent protection, two options are available:

* Filing applications with intellectual property offices in overseas countries of interest; or
* Filing an International Application under the Patent Co-Operation Treaty (PCT). "

Now stop talking about how cheap is it to obtain internationally applicable patent protection through the New Zealand system and instead fuck off, pardon my French.

The copyright modification as proposed allows people to make copies for personal use. Big Deal. It ALSO has standard DMCA-like wording about copy protection and reverse engineering. So we have a right to make a copy, but if there is copy protection, then there is no legal means to make that copy. It's still an ass. Still, the bit about limiting liability for ISPs at least shows some thought went into it.
See the proposed amendments

Mercury Energy's network planners made judgements based on the information provided by the cable asset managers. If the network planners had been aware of the actual loading capability of the underground cables the network planning and contingency planning approaches may have been different. This may have avoided the loss of supply to the CBD. This is considered to be one of the central issues to the failure in supply.

I do remember Challenger, but I think NASA was and still is largely a government bureaucracy devoid of a mandate or reasonable mission. You can't blame privatization when the government still holds the monopoly seventeen years later.

They cut back on maintanance and instead of three main feeds, they had one. It blew up.

Sorry but you're wrong. Go read the final report. They did have multiple lines going into Central Auckland (see this section of the report, pages 34-39). It is true that maintainence had been cut back. One failed, and placed increasing loads on the remaining two (if I recall correctly) lines. After about a week of increasing load, these two lines failed as well. So yes, one failed and it caused two others to fail later. But to say they were totally inept and had only one line for central Auckland is just wrong. And it was only the central city. Auckland is a very spread out city, and greater Auckland in fact covers four cities. It was only the Central Business District that was affected.

Aucklands failure was human in origin however. It sounds like todays failure in Niagara was of natural origin (lightning strike), and could perhaps be compared to the Canadian powercuts caused by the ice storms of 1998.

Cheers Gav

They cut back on maintanance and instead of three main feeds, they had one. It blew up.

Sorry but you're wrong. Go read the final report. They did have multiple lines going into Central Auckland (see this section of the report, pages 34-39). It is true that maintainence had been cut back. One failed, and placed increasing loads on the remaining two (if I recall correctly) lines. After about a week of increasing load, these two lines failed as well. So yes, one failed and it caused two others to fail later. But to say they were totally inept and had only one line for central Auckland is just wrong. And it was only the central city. Auckland is a very spread out city, and greater Auckland in fact covers four cities. It was only the Central Business District that was affected.

Aucklands failure was human in origin however. It sounds like todays failure in Niagara was of natural origin (lightning strike), and could perhaps be compared to the Canadian powercuts caused by the ice storms of 1998.

Cheers Gav

• Should format shifting of sound recordings for personal use be a permitted act?
  
• If so, what limitations should apply?
  
• Is there any economic loss to copyright owners arising out of format shifting of sound recordings for personal use?
  
• If so, should a levy scheme apply to remunerate copyright owners for potential lost revenue?
  

Hopefully it's not too late for the New Zealand version.

NZ's copyright law sucks at the moment.
We can't even copy a CD to tape, to listen in the car. Backup copy? Yeah right!
From here:

But what about making a copy for personal use?

"The law says this is illegal. In some countries it is permitted, but we are not one of them."

Hopefully the discussion paper will result in some good legislation, but somehow I doubt it :(

Tim.

...and following up on it, here's the more detailed link about the rights of users under copyright law in New Zealand.

For the record, there's a section in the New Zealand review titled New Exceptions or Permitted Uses. At least they're thinking about the rights of the user not being trampled on.

Our Economic Development ministry is looking at the same thing. They are trying to work out whether to ratify the treaty, and by how much.

We get until October though :)

See here for more info.
Sounds like the usual WIPO stuff, protecting technological measures, etc.

We need to create a resource for those fighting this sort of legislation. What is currently around?

There is stuff like http://opendvd.org and the like which is great. We need a repository of information to fight this stuff.