Typical slashdot discussion immediately turns to Linux, FOSS and if Linux us ready for the desktop and if it works well with Walmart printers.None of which is very relevant.
As I read it, the state services commission - the type of government body that supervises other govt departments, has since at least 2000, rolled over government wide contracts for Microsoft every 3 years. Basically since most govt depts were running MS software, then negotiating one government wide agreement covering 10,000+ desktops got bulk discounts from MS. Makes sense.
This year (they started negotiating 2008), MS pretty much didn't bother to discount for the bulk deal; they acted like a monopoly & thought the (smallish) NZ govt would roll over and accept it anyway. Whoops.
With the recession the government was really looking at ways of saving money; and rolling out more MS software with no discount was no discount. So I suspect a lot of departments will just stick with XP/Office2003 or Vista/O2007 (the last deal covered them buying cheap MS products 2006-2009) and not buy as much MS software over the next few years, until MS have an attitude change.
The MS team negotiating this contract will be feeling a little sick right now.. which is good .
I am a New Zealand based developer, and had have sold software to the NZ govt. Previously we sold a Windows desktop app but now (2009) switched to selling a replacement product which is SaaS on a LAMP stack - which tells a story in itself. I think this deal is a good thing as a whole; instead of the department looking at using using some unholy (but cheap) combination of Excel, Access and Sharepoint, they could buy my home-grown solution... which I think is better, but I do have to compete with MS at some level; some potential clients would rather burn hundreds of hours using Excel to crunch data manually than buy our software that does it automatically.
My experience is that government departments are getting a little smarter about purchasing; they all need things like document management systems, so tend to buy Java platform independent solutions and instead of all rolling their own, tend to talk to each other more about sharing solutions. One smallish department I dealt with was proud of having pretty much no printers; every document entering the system got scanned & handled electronically until a letter had to be printed and sent; even then the department mostly replied with emails and txt messages. NZ does do e-govt reasonably well; I can do most interactions with the government online; things like setting up a limited liability company take a few minutes and few bucks online, which does not seem to be common world-wide. I can't think of any government interactions in which I have had to actually go physically to a government office.. the last time was probably 20 years ago, applying for a grant after I left university.
With the move to SaaS suddenly needing MS and assuming there is no important looks less important; which is why this news is news.
You use the word 'Mana' so are obviously aware of Maori.
I would have thought that Maori would have been an obvious example that there was at least some cultures at some times in which cannibalism occurred more than occasionally. The Wikipedia article is good on this: http://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Cannibalism as it does address the argument that cannibalism is almost certainly overstated as slander against other races. Certainly I have personally heard pakeha making racist remarks about Maori being 'primitive cannibals'.
But if you look at the references cited by the Wiki article, there appears to really be tribes that did admit to engaging in cannibalism and evidence that it was relatively common. Not that it occurred that often or that humans were a quick easy alternative to chicken or pig.
They are supposed to be a Microsoft partners. Microsoft were benefiting from having these people talk to clients and sell them every MS product going (I have seen these MCP's in operation & it is not pretty). The MCP's got to use the Microsoft name and resources as a partner; they probably don't get much of a cut on software sales.
Now, if it was Apple, they could try and repossess hardware & get some money back. But this is MS who are probably mostly selling licenses for goods which effectively don't exist and are not in use.
I have no doubt that MS are legally covered, but they are still not playing nice given that they are trying to squeeze money out of their 'partners' for providing nothing; if the end-user company does not exist, uses no licenses, takes nothing away from MS, then they could maybe give there partners a break and rip up the agreements.
But hey, the MCP's decided to play with MS in the first place so can't say I have a lot of sympathy.
Not entirely indicative of your average NZ theatre, but pretty much most complexes with 2-3 screens will have one that is a little more upmarket - though they cost your US$7 or more. Assigned seating is not actually used; you tend to just sit anywhere as there are normally no ushers inside the theatre
Nice when watching a movie like James Bond to be able to order a bottle of wine & have it delivered to your seat.;-)
Oh, and most theatres are staffed by teenagers on minimum wage; I suspect many cam captures are done by staff or friends of staff 'after hours'. The classic digital problem remains; you only need one movie, displayed anywhere in the world without protection and it makes every other theatre's protection & tracking of suspects/customers useless.
How likely is it that they can track everybody, all the time?
1) Where did you get the 50K miles/2K gallon figure from?
2) Unless your current car is going to exist forever, then it will be replaced after some number of miles or years anyway. Look at total energy cost of 2 alternatives - 1 replacing your car in 10 years, vs replacing it now.
a) N miles per year x 10 x 25mpg + energy cost of replacement in 2019 (which may well be higher)
vs
b) Energy cost of replacement in 2009 + N miles x 10 years x 50mpg
I would say b is better. So you are better to replace now.
3) Regulation like needing companies to produce cars that do 60mpg does not work; they already do in most cases; they just sell crappy little cars (often in other markets) that nobody in the US buys & they get a free ride to producing SUV's which are more profitable. Simple taxation of gas to keep the price at a minimum of say $3 gallon (and assign the tax collected to pay for battery research or car company bailouts or whatever) will quickly encourage people to buy more efficient vehicles. Gas prices being high in Europe and Japan has helped their car manufacturers.
Of course in Terry Prachett's Diskworld, they have just such a system; 'the clacks', which apparently works well enough.
In reality, I wonder how the economics of a 17th century system would stack up. They used letters through a cheap & effective postal system, but semaphores would require a lot of semi-skilled (at least literate) people to operate semaphores to transmit/receive/route messages*. Takes a lot of nodes to be useful so I wonder how much communication of the right sort (short telegrams/sms type messages) would be required at the right amount of distance where the speed of transmission would be useful.
Am interested enough that I might see if I can find his presentation to the RS.
*Exercise to the reader to figure out how to automate long distance message handling using 17th/18th century tech. Figure that once you have steam & steam train tech it is easy, but until then... fancy clockwork?
I'm sorry, but I'd expect an article of this calibre out of an 9th-grade journalism class, not a newspaper that calls itself The Herald. For entertainment purposes, let's take a closer look at this story, shall we?
Ok, but the Herald is pretty reasonable most of the time. Like all newspaper they overly simplify, get things wrong, sensationalize but generally they are pretty good at getting basic facts & balance in stories; we are not taking about the "National Enquirer" here
The blaze broke out in a warehouse on the intersection of Ponsonby Road and McKelvie Street and eight appliances and two aerial appliances were used to quell it.
Wait, what? Appliances? Were they throwing dishwashers and blenders at it?
It is a New Zealand story, for New Zealand readers. As a Kiwi, the usage of 'appliances' to refer to 'fire engines' or 'fire trucks' (which may not actually be trucks as such), is pretty standard. A little old-fashioned & formal, but newspapers like the Herald have style guides, which in the Heralds case is a bit granny like.
Firefighters were dampening down hotspots but by 11.30 the fire was out.
It's unclear from this sentence just when the firefighters were dampening down hotspots. Before the fire? After? A week later?
Maybe, but it is short, and conveys the meaning that the fire had died down by 11:30. Bad writing? No so much.
Here's where the real questions start. What what he doing in the building? Was he supposed to be there? How did he get the cut? Did he see/hear how the fire broke out? Isn't the whole point of journalism to answer questions? I would love to see an article that talks about why the author was unable to obtain the most basic facts about the story. Was the writer prevented from talking to the firefighters and police? Okay, that's a good reason but since it's not in the article I have to assume that the writer was just being lazy.
Ok, I know NZ has the reputation that a lost kitten should make the lead news, but a fire at a warehouse that resulted in one guy needing a sticking plaster, won't actually fill the cover page of this, a relatively major (in NZ terms) newspaper. Basically they kept it short & to the point. Now, if the All Blacks had been hit by a meteorite, thus explaining the loosing the world cup, we might have a story...
And by the way, what happened to the good old days when every article came with a by-line so you know who wrote it? You never see those any more unless the writer is gunning for a Pulitzer in some long, drawn-out investigative piece.
Standard suburban story, handled by a junior, and released via NZPA or other wires. Doesn't need a byline unless there was opinion expressed.
And now we veer headlong into the bizarre. As others have pointed out, meteors are not nearly hot enough to start a fire by the time they reach the ground so unless the place was storing flammable materials, a meteor did not start this fire regardless of whatever random passers-by thought they witnessed. (It should be noted that their stories are contradictory, so it's impossible to tell which, if any of them, actually saw or heard the meteor. People routinely make up stories and observations to make their own lives seem more interesting or important, especially in relation to some semi-major happening nearby
Yes, but unlike Slashdot & other news reports, the Herald played this one straight; they reported on what people claimed, but kept to the facts; that the cause had not been determined. Some local idiot thought it was a UFO or whatever, it adds character to say that they the local, thought X, but that is only an opinion.
"They are helping to preserve the life of their patient"
Yes, but we are talking about medical doctors here; not life guards, security guards or police. There job is to treat medical conditions; they should not be in the arms business nor _prescribe_ flak jackets, smoke alarms or door locks.
"Elderly people are often victimized due to their physical inferiority to their attackers, they are easy targets"
. No, they are not often victimized; young males are more likely to be assaulted - try a look at stats rather than making stuff up.
"This is an equalizer. "
. It is a weapon; the little old lady can use it to kill anybody who annoys her, if they are armed or not. In fact the crazy thing is that you are assuming the bad-guys are not armed, (otherwise relative physical strength does not apply).
"Why would you want to prevent a little old lady from defending herself?"
I personally don't; I just don't think that 'medical' care extends that far. And it provides weapons to grumpy old guys, to people who may not remember where their car was parked, less so if the gun was loaded, little old ladies who might be fearful, have poor eyesight and slow reactions when the neighbor pops over for a chat & gets shot etc...
"Also, no weapon is inherently offensive or defensive, it is what the owner intends it to be. Correct me if I'm wrong but the rate of violent crime perpetrated by elderly people probably isn't very high"
Violent crime is maybe not so high, but elderly have high suicide rates including murder-suicides; and you will be helping that. Point is that elderly need community more than firearms.
I made a couple of flights recently. One I just turned up and with electronic ticking, just said my name & I had a bordering pass; no paper work or ID's at all.
The other flight was international; I had to show my password going through security.
Oh.. but then this was in New Zealand.
Since GWB has been in power, I don't feel like travelling to the US; I would travel if I really needed to for business, but say travelling to Europe, I am going via Singapore or another stop-over & not via LA. I hate the idea that even if don't want to enter the US, (just a stop over & remaining in the terminal) I would be forced to give the US govt my credit-card number and finger-prints.
Yeap, I am in Auckland - though I was living in Dunedin when David Gray ran amok. I have been meaning to catch 'Out of the Blue' at the movies as it looks very good - and relevant.
Best comment was from Tame Iti son this morning on the radio; he pointed out that in the last 100 years or so, Maori activists have had huge publicity doing things like attempting to cut down a tree (finished by the Auckland Council), smashing a cup (that is no longer ours), and showing their arse at VIP's. He has a good point; Tame is infamous for many things (including his art exhibition) but violence?
Wait and see the results of the court cases, but 'terrorist' training camps sounds very trumped up when they are breaking down the doors of people like 'Friends of Happy Valley'. And the worst they apparently find is petrol and some old guns? Some random 17yr old kid in Finland just killed more people than any terrorist ever has in New Zealand or Australia.
Aramoana has connections to Finland - David Gray was a loser who was into WWII, Nazi reading like the Finnish guy. I remember at the time, being totally not surprised at the shooting as I had meet some other nutters earlier who were obsessed with guns & thought a mass shooting would happen sooner or later. Infact I suspect I met Gray at a bookshop one day in Dunedin - I remember some very boring/obsessive guy talking to the owner while I was trying to buy some 2nd hand books. After Gray (sadly not before), things like Ak47 replica's 'military style semi-automatics' got much better controlled. Results speak for themselves (and in Australia).
Publicity of suicides like in Finland don't help avoid more shooting; but publicity is hard to stop. Seriously though, WTF is going on when people think its a good idea for a school-kid to own a hand-gun and lots of ammo? Take away the gun & you have another anti-social kid make bad threats on youtube; add guns & you have dead bodies.
You think this guy was worried about the possibility of being shot? He shot _himself_ in the head...and about that give everybody a gun thing.. you want to give people like this guns, but not allow a 17 year old to have sex or buy alcohol or vote, because they are not responsible enough?
thanks, but I live in a country with decent gun control laws and despite having lots of guns and unarmed police, have not had any school shootings. I like that I send my kids to school & don't have to worry about them being shot.
It's not the money spent on Iraq or anywhere else.
You could all be driving fuel efficient vehicles right now without waiting for a few years, if Americans simply made a choice to buy a more fuel efficient car when they buy. The don't; the market for some strange reason penis enhancement chooses to buy inefficient SUV's or 5.8 liter cars rather than 2 litre cars that do the same job.
You don't need any research to make a family sized car that is safe, fast, seats 5 and gets 30+ mpg or smaller cars that get 50mpg; you get need to get the soccer mom to buy the Honda Accord rather than the full sized SUV
"Then again why should we care right? They're not Muslim so it's ok"
Sorry, I think you forgot to ask one small question. How much oil does Burma have exactly?
Now, why should the US care again?
"Look at Thailand's ex prime minister there is an arrest warrant out on him for stealing hundreds of millions of tax payers money and he is suspected of funding multiple bombings in Bangkok"
Er, yeah, but again. How much crude oil does Thailand have?
You see the pattern now? Or do you really still think Iraq was about freedom, democracy or reducing terrorism?
It's pretty hard to take this as too Orwellian, as it's Cromwell in Central Otago (New Zealand).
It classic New Zealand (think LOTR landscapes) where the police & crims tend to know each other and pull a few tricks to keep life interesting. Growing in a small town not to far from Cromwell, the number plates & descriptions of unmarked police cars were often discussed in pubs.
In this case, some crim took it too far by torching one of the local police mufti-cars. The couldn't get enough evidence on the guy, so they probably got a local geek to wire in a couple of off-the-shelf GPS aware cellphone modules (cheap & fun to play with by the way - easy to read current location via a serial interface and transmit via the GSM chipset).
Unlikely for anyone other than the local police to have been involved & it's all a pick of a cock-up rather than a fascist conspiracy. The suspect in this case is taking the piss by selling the bugs on trademe - which guarantees him plenty of publicity.
In the end, while I am aware that if I am a suspect, the police can (and probably will) bug me, read my emails etc, I still think NZ is in a far better place than Australia (or the UK/US). Look at Australia, where a doctor who leant his SIM card to a cousin, got named as a terrorist, imprisoned with high security and then thrown out of the country.
World of difference between small country town pranks and governments spying on citizens (though the SIS have been caught ham-fisted breaking into houses).
I can imagine the first requirement of a US military invasion force, will be to impose California driving laws on the newly conquered country, thus enabling their array of robot trucks.
Thank god my right-hand driving country does not have vast oil reserves; driving on the wrong side of the road would be too freaky.
I get roped into doing support for family & friends, and the typical grandmother PC once degunked, normally has a few card games, maybe a few photo's & a pile of email (all dumped in the inbox along with 2000 spam messages).
When I back up a family computer, (trying hard to ignore the crap pr0n on my father-in-laws 'puter), I typically don't have to compress anything to fit on a 800mb CD - it's often just Outlook Express email & nothing else.
get you grandmother set up with one of these laptops and a gmail account, and they will be happy. No having to pay McAfee or MS for endless updates, makes their life easy. Sure they will complain when they can't run the.SCR Christmas card that some stranger sent them, but quiet & portable will win them over.
Isn't think the Google vision for the future of computing; and Microsoft's nightmare; people using generic, cheap laptops for accessing Google, a PS3/Wii for games and some USB/LAN attached box for your data storage?
8GB - or maybe a few more via the USB port is enough for many people; and for those with video/mp3 collections, plug in an external 500GB HDD; as/when you need it.
I read about this in my local paper, and figured it was not a case of careful analysis showing that OpenOffice was better/worse or more/less expensive than MS Office.
Just another case of a new CIO coming in, seeing something that he didn't know or understand & telling the organization that they need to dish out $$$ to buy 500 copies of MS Office (and no doubt Vista etc) to make him feel more at home. No doubt his ex-workmates at MS would have approved.
The more I see the actions of high paid CEO/CIO, the more I belief the peter principle.
BTW - Doug Wilson was CEO of 'The PC Company'? This was a very successful local assembler of PC's with a good rep that was sold off to Gateway, the owners walked away with big cash, then the company was quickly sucked dry going under only a few years later. Not sure how much part Doug had to play, but would not be surprised to find that he was the CEO who killed the company.
We went through a few thousand vibrator jokes already when this was news in 2006.
A motor with an unbalanced weight to create a vibrator goes a long way back - think steam power vibrators (I'm at work otherwise would provide a link). Pagers and other more non-erotic controllers have had them long before immersion ever thought of a patent.
So a 100 years of prior art for the lawyers. But we are talking about the Dual-shock controller here; as in two vibrating motors in a controller. Immersion patented the amazing technological leap of having two vibrating motors in a controller. You should probably go ahead & make a fortune by rushing out & patenting 3 motors in a controller & 3, 4 and 5 blade razors right now. Apparently n+1 of anything is a totally novel application of technology.
Now if you know of any vibes that have two motors & pre-date the Immersion patent and can show prior-art to a company full of patent lawyers, then good luck.
I have never been fingerprinted before in my life; and the only thing I associate with fingerprinting is somebody being arrested in a police station.
If I have to travel to the US for business; I can live with it - I hopefully won't get sent off to somewhere 3rd world for a few years for holding an anti-bush political stance (at least not yet).
But if I am choosing a destination to travel to for a holiday, or even as a stop over on the way to Europe from NZ (i.e. not even entering the US), I don't want my kids marched off a plane, fingerprinted and photographed by some foreign power for stupid paranoid reasons. Would a US citizen want their kids treated like that by say Russian government agents if they were travelling to Asia?
Question is, while my 6 yr old daughter could be a terrorist threat or a drug dealer, so could any random American citizen. So how long before Bush admin starts thinking that taking 10 fingerprints and DNA samples from all American citizens is a good idea? My guess is that little project is already well under way.
So its probably no big deal to the US - I am just one individual not passing though the US lightly, but don't be surprised that in the future people like my kids have increasing apathy and even dislike of the US. When I was a young kid, I and my school friends all wanted to go to the US and Disneyland; as a sign of the times, my kids are now more keen to go to Paris.
Dell have been selling low-end desktops and laptops at 'The Warehouse' (New Zealand's version of Walmart) big box stores for years.
Maybe just a trial run for Dell boxes through Walmart, but makes sense when you look at the grandmother market - they want to see the box & put one in the trolley to buy; ringing up a customer support person asking talking to there geek grandson and then trying to put in an order for a "Black Modem thingy with 80 mega whatits of floppys and 1 pentiums of RAM" must be scary for some.
You might want to consider the issue of response rates more carefully.
A random sample of 1000 people in a population of 6 million Nintendo owners will give a high confidence interval, (can't be bothered working it out, but at 95% confidence - around 4-5% on a question like Luigi vs Mario).
Your 1% might be 60,000 respondents but the response rate of 1% is highly suspect. What is different about the 1% that respond vs the 99% that didn't respond? In other words the 1% is probably highly different from the target population of all owners - perhaps the 1% is only the 60+yr grandmothers who still find the Wii a novelty & bother responding. It will skew the results badly unless Nintendo can prove by a proper random survey that the 1% or 10% responders just happen to represent the game buying Wii owners perfectly.
Slashdot Mirror
Typical slashdot discussion immediately turns to Linux, FOSS and if Linux us ready for the desktop and if it works well with Walmart printers.None of which is very relevant.
This article gives a better information:
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/tech/813B5F0E4A319412CC2575C0006F561A
As I read it, the state services commission - the type of government body that supervises other govt departments, has since at least 2000, rolled over government wide contracts for Microsoft every 3 years. Basically since most govt depts were running MS software, then negotiating one government wide agreement covering 10,000+ desktops got bulk discounts from MS. Makes sense.
This year (they started negotiating 2008), MS pretty much didn't bother to discount for the bulk deal; they acted like a monopoly & thought the (smallish) NZ govt would roll over and accept it anyway. Whoops.
With the recession the government was really looking at ways of saving money; and rolling out more MS software with no discount was no discount. So I suspect a lot of departments will just stick with XP/Office2003 or Vista/O2007 (the last deal covered them buying cheap MS products 2006-2009) and not buy as much MS software over the next few years, until MS have an attitude change.
The MS team negotiating this contract will be feeling a little sick right now.. which is good .
I am a New Zealand based developer, and had have sold software to the NZ govt. Previously we sold a Windows desktop app but now (2009) switched to selling a replacement product which is SaaS on a LAMP stack - which tells a story in itself. I think this deal is a good thing as a whole; instead of the department looking at using using some unholy (but cheap) combination of Excel, Access and Sharepoint, they could buy my home-grown solution... which I think is better, but I do have to compete with MS at some level; some potential clients would rather burn hundreds of hours using Excel to crunch data manually than buy our software that does it automatically.
My experience is that government departments are getting a little smarter about purchasing; they all need things like document management systems, so tend to buy Java platform independent solutions and instead of all rolling their own, tend to talk to each other more about sharing solutions. One smallish department I dealt with was proud of having pretty much no printers; every document entering the system got scanned & handled electronically until a letter had to be printed and sent; even then the department mostly replied with emails and txt messages. NZ does do e-govt reasonably well; I can do most interactions with the government online; things like setting up a limited liability company take a few minutes and few bucks online, which does not seem to be common world-wide. I can't think of any government interactions in which I have had to actually go physically to a government office.. the last time was probably 20 years ago, applying for a grant after I left university.
With the move to SaaS suddenly needing MS and assuming there is no important looks less important; which is why this news is news.
You use the word 'Mana' so are obviously aware of Maori. I would have thought that Maori would have been an obvious example that there was at least some cultures at some times in which cannibalism occurred more than occasionally. The Wikipedia article is good on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/ /wiki/Cannibalism as it does address the argument that cannibalism is almost certainly overstated as slander against other races. Certainly I have personally heard pakeha making racist remarks about Maori being 'primitive cannibals'.
But if you look at the references cited by the Wiki article, there appears to really be tribes that did admit to engaging in cannibalism and evidence that it was relatively common. Not that it occurred that often or that humans were a quick easy alternative to chicken or pig.
They are supposed to be a Microsoft partners. Microsoft were benefiting from having these people talk to clients and sell them every MS product going (I have seen these MCP's in operation & it is not pretty). The MCP's got to use the Microsoft name and resources as a partner; they probably don't get much of a cut on software sales.
Now, if it was Apple, they could try and repossess hardware & get some money back. But this is MS who are probably mostly selling licenses for goods which effectively don't exist and are not in use.
I have no doubt that MS are legally covered, but they are still not playing nice given that they are trying to squeeze money out of their 'partners' for providing nothing; if the end-user company does not exist, uses no licenses, takes nothing away from MS, then they could maybe give there partners a break and rip up the agreements.
But hey, the MCP's decided to play with MS in the first place so can't say I have a lot of sympathy.
Nice when watching a movie like James Bond to be able to order a bottle of wine & have it delivered to your seat. ;-)
Oh, and most theatres are staffed by teenagers on minimum wage; I suspect many cam captures are done by staff or friends of staff 'after hours'. The classic digital problem remains; you only need one movie, displayed anywhere in the world without protection and it makes every other theatre's protection & tracking of suspects/customers useless.
How likely is it that they can track everybody, all the time?
2) Unless your current car is going to exist forever, then it will be replaced after some number of miles or years anyway. Look at total energy cost of 2 alternatives - 1 replacing your car in 10 years, vs replacing it now.
a) N miles per year x 10 x 25mpg + energy cost of replacement in 2019 (which may well be higher)
vs
b) Energy cost of replacement in 2009 + N miles x 10 years x 50mpg
I would say b is better. So you are better to replace now.
3) Regulation like needing companies to produce cars that do 60mpg does not work; they already do in most cases; they just sell crappy little cars (often in other markets) that nobody in the US buys & they get a free ride to producing SUV's which are more profitable. Simple taxation of gas to keep the price at a minimum of say $3 gallon (and assign the tax collected to pay for battery research or car company bailouts or whatever) will quickly encourage people to buy more efficient vehicles. Gas prices being high in Europe and Japan has helped their car manufacturers.
4) Why did people rate your post 'Insightful'?
In reality, I wonder how the economics of a 17th century system would stack up. They used letters through a cheap & effective postal system, but semaphores would require a lot of semi-skilled (at least literate) people to operate semaphores to transmit/receive/route messages*. Takes a lot of nodes to be useful so I wonder how much communication of the right sort (short telegrams/sms type messages) would be required at the right amount of distance where the speed of transmission would be useful.
Am interested enough that I might see if I can find his presentation to the RS.
*Exercise to the reader to figure out how to automate long distance message handling using 17th/18th century tech. Figure that once you have steam & steam train tech it is easy, but until then... fancy clockwork?
Ok, but the Herald is pretty reasonable most of the time. Like all newspaper they overly simplify, get things wrong, sensationalize but generally they are pretty good at getting basic facts & balance in stories; we are not taking about the "National Enquirer" here
It is a New Zealand story, for New Zealand readers. As a Kiwi, the usage of 'appliances' to refer to 'fire engines' or 'fire trucks' (which may not actually be trucks as such), is pretty standard. A little old-fashioned & formal, but newspapers like the Herald have style guides, which in the Heralds case is a bit granny like.
Firefighters were dampening down hotspots but by 11.30 the fire was out.
It's unclear from this sentence just when the firefighters were dampening down hotspots. Before the fire? After? A week later?
Maybe, but it is short, and conveys the meaning that the fire had died down by 11:30. Bad writing? No so much.
Ok, I know NZ has the reputation that a lost kitten should make the lead news, but a fire at a warehouse that resulted in one guy needing a sticking plaster, won't actually fill the cover page of this, a relatively major (in NZ terms) newspaper. Basically they kept it short & to the point. Now, if the All Blacks had been hit by a meteorite, thus explaining the loosing the world cup, we might have a story...
Standard suburban story, handled by a junior, and released via NZPA or other wires. Doesn't need a byline unless there was opinion expressed.
Yes, but unlike Slashdot & other news reports, the Herald played this one straight; they reported on what people claimed, but kept to the facts; that the cause had not been determined. Some local idiot thought it was a UFO or whatever, it adds character to say that they the local, thought X, but that is only an opinion.
"They are helping to preserve the life of their patient"
Yes, but we are talking about medical doctors here; not life guards, security guards or police. There job is to treat medical conditions; they should not be in the arms business nor _prescribe_ flak jackets, smoke alarms or door locks.
"Elderly people are often victimized due to their physical inferiority to their attackers, they are easy targets"
. No, they are not often victimized; young males are more likely to be assaulted - try a look at stats rather than making stuff up.
"This is an equalizer. "
. It is a weapon; the little old lady can use it to kill anybody who annoys her, if they are armed or not. In fact the crazy thing is that you are assuming the bad-guys are not armed, (otherwise relative physical strength does not apply).
"Why would you want to prevent a little old lady from defending herself?"
I personally don't; I just don't think that 'medical' care extends that far. And it provides weapons to grumpy old guys, to people who may not remember where their car was parked, less so if the gun was loaded, little old ladies who might be fearful, have poor eyesight and slow reactions when the neighbor pops over for a chat & gets shot etc...
"Also, no weapon is inherently offensive or defensive, it is what the owner intends it to be. Correct me if I'm wrong but the rate of violent crime perpetrated by elderly people probably isn't very high"
Violent crime is maybe not so high, but elderly have high suicide rates including murder-suicides; and you will be helping that. Point is that elderly need community more than firearms.
I made a couple of flights recently. One I just turned up and with electronic ticking, just said my name & I had a bordering pass; no paper work or ID's at all. The other flight was international; I had to show my password going through security. Oh.. but then this was in New Zealand. Since GWB has been in power, I don't feel like travelling to the US; I would travel if I really needed to for business, but say travelling to Europe, I am going via Singapore or another stop-over & not via LA. I hate the idea that even if don't want to enter the US, (just a stop over & remaining in the terminal) I would be forced to give the US govt my credit-card number and finger-prints.
Yeap, I am in Auckland - though I was living in Dunedin when David Gray ran amok. I have been meaning to catch 'Out of the Blue' at the movies as it looks very good - and relevant. Best comment was from Tame Iti son this morning on the radio; he pointed out that in the last 100 years or so, Maori activists have had huge publicity doing things like attempting to cut down a tree (finished by the Auckland Council), smashing a cup (that is no longer ours), and showing their arse at VIP's. He has a good point; Tame is infamous for many things (including his art exhibition) but violence? Wait and see the results of the court cases, but 'terrorist' training camps sounds very trumped up when they are breaking down the doors of people like 'Friends of Happy Valley'. And the worst they apparently find is petrol and some old guns? Some random 17yr old kid in Finland just killed more people than any terrorist ever has in New Zealand or Australia. Aramoana has connections to Finland - David Gray was a loser who was into WWII, Nazi reading like the Finnish guy. I remember at the time, being totally not surprised at the shooting as I had meet some other nutters earlier who were obsessed with guns & thought a mass shooting would happen sooner or later. Infact I suspect I met Gray at a bookshop one day in Dunedin - I remember some very boring/obsessive guy talking to the owner while I was trying to buy some 2nd hand books. After Gray (sadly not before), things like Ak47 replica's 'military style semi-automatics' got much better controlled. Results speak for themselves (and in Australia). Publicity of suicides like in Finland don't help avoid more shooting; but publicity is hard to stop. Seriously though, WTF is going on when people think its a good idea for a school-kid to own a hand-gun and lots of ammo? Take away the gun & you have another anti-social kid make bad threats on youtube; add guns & you have dead bodies.
You think this guy was worried about the possibility of being shot? He shot _himself_ in the head. ..and about that give everybody a gun thing.. you want to give people like this guns, but not allow a 17 year old to have sex or buy alcohol or vote, because they are not responsible enough?
thanks, but I live in a country with decent gun control laws and despite having lots of guns and unarmed police, have not had any school shootings. I like that I send my kids to school & don't have to worry about them being shot.
Try it sometime.
It's not the money spent on Iraq or anywhere else. You could all be driving fuel efficient vehicles right now without waiting for a few years, if Americans simply made a choice to buy a more fuel efficient car when they buy. The don't; the market for some strange reason penis enhancement chooses to buy inefficient SUV's or 5.8 liter cars rather than 2 litre cars that do the same job. You don't need any research to make a family sized car that is safe, fast, seats 5 and gets 30+ mpg or smaller cars that get 50mpg; you get need to get the soccer mom to buy the Honda Accord rather than the full sized SUV
"Then again why should we care right? They're not Muslim so it's ok" Sorry, I think you forgot to ask one small question. How much oil does Burma have exactly? Now, why should the US care again? "Look at Thailand's ex prime minister there is an arrest warrant out on him for stealing hundreds of millions of tax payers money and he is suspected of funding multiple bombings in Bangkok" Er, yeah, but again. How much crude oil does Thailand have? You see the pattern now? Or do you really still think Iraq was about freedom, democracy or reducing terrorism?
It's pretty hard to take this as too Orwellian, as it's Cromwell in Central Otago (New Zealand). It classic New Zealand (think LOTR landscapes) where the police & crims tend to know each other and pull a few tricks to keep life interesting. Growing in a small town not to far from Cromwell, the number plates & descriptions of unmarked police cars were often discussed in pubs. In this case, some crim took it too far by torching one of the local police mufti-cars. The couldn't get enough evidence on the guy, so they probably got a local geek to wire in a couple of off-the-shelf GPS aware cellphone modules (cheap & fun to play with by the way - easy to read current location via a serial interface and transmit via the GSM chipset). Unlikely for anyone other than the local police to have been involved & it's all a pick of a cock-up rather than a fascist conspiracy. The suspect in this case is taking the piss by selling the bugs on trademe - which guarantees him plenty of publicity. In the end, while I am aware that if I am a suspect, the police can (and probably will) bug me, read my emails etc, I still think NZ is in a far better place than Australia (or the UK/US). Look at Australia, where a doctor who leant his SIM card to a cousin, got named as a terrorist, imprisoned with high security and then thrown out of the country. World of difference between small country town pranks and governments spying on citizens (though the SIS have been caught ham-fisted breaking into houses).
Thank god my right-hand driving country does not have vast oil reserves; driving on the wrong side of the road would be too freaky.
I get roped into doing support for family & friends, and the typical grandmother PC once degunked, normally has a few card games, maybe a few photo's & a pile of email (all dumped in the inbox along with 2000 spam messages).
When I back up a family computer, (trying hard to ignore the crap pr0n on my father-in-laws 'puter), I typically don't have to compress anything to fit on a 800mb CD - it's often just Outlook Express email & nothing else.
get you grandmother set up with one of these laptops and a gmail account, and they will be happy. No having to pay McAfee or MS for endless updates, makes their life easy. Sure they will complain when they can't run the .SCR Christmas card that some stranger sent them, but quiet & portable will win them over.
Isn't think the Google vision for the future of computing; and Microsoft's nightmare; people using generic, cheap laptops for accessing Google, a PS3/Wii for games and some USB/LAN attached box for your data storage? 8GB - or maybe a few more via the USB port is enough for many people; and for those with video/mp3 collections, plug in an external 500GB HDD; as/when you need it.
Just another case of a new CIO coming in, seeing something that he didn't know or understand & telling the organization that they need to dish out $$$ to buy 500 copies of MS Office (and no doubt Vista etc) to make him feel more at home. No doubt his ex-workmates at MS would have approved.
The more I see the actions of high paid CEO/CIO, the more I belief the peter principle.
BTW - Doug Wilson was CEO of 'The PC Company'? This was a very successful local assembler of PC's with a good rep that was sold off to Gateway, the owners walked away with big cash, then the company was quickly sucked dry going under only a few years later. Not sure how much part Doug had to play, but would not be surprised to find that he was the CEO who killed the company.
A motor with an unbalanced weight to create a vibrator goes a long way back - think steam power vibrators (I'm at work otherwise would provide a link). Pagers and other more non-erotic controllers have had them long before immersion ever thought of a patent.
So a 100 years of prior art for the lawyers. But we are talking about the Dual-shock controller here; as in two vibrating motors in a controller. Immersion patented the amazing technological leap of having two vibrating motors in a controller. You should probably go ahead & make a fortune by rushing out & patenting 3 motors in a controller & 3, 4 and 5 blade razors right now. Apparently n+1 of anything is a totally novel application of technology.
Now if you know of any vibes that have two motors & pre-date the Immersion patent and can show prior-art to a company full of patent lawyers, then good luck.
I have never been fingerprinted before in my life; and the only thing I associate with fingerprinting is somebody being arrested in a police station.
If I have to travel to the US for business; I can live with it - I hopefully won't get sent off to somewhere 3rd world for a few years for holding an anti-bush political stance (at least not yet).
But if I am choosing a destination to travel to for a holiday, or even as a stop over on the way to Europe from NZ (i.e. not even entering the US), I don't want my kids marched off a plane, fingerprinted and photographed by some foreign power for stupid paranoid reasons. Would a US citizen want their kids treated like that by say Russian government agents if they were travelling to Asia?
Question is, while my 6 yr old daughter could be a terrorist threat or a drug dealer, so could any random American citizen. So how long before Bush admin starts thinking that taking 10 fingerprints and DNA samples from all American citizens is a good idea? My guess is that little project is already well under way.
So its probably no big deal to the US - I am just one individual not passing though the US lightly, but don't be surprised that in the future people like my kids have increasing apathy and even dislike of the US. When I was a young kid, I and my school friends all wanted to go to the US and Disneyland; as a sign of the times, my kids are now more keen to go to Paris.
Dell have been selling low-end desktops and laptops at 'The Warehouse' (New Zealand's version of Walmart) big box stores for years. Maybe just a trial run for Dell boxes through Walmart, but makes sense when you look at the grandmother market - they want to see the box & put one in the trolley to buy; ringing up a customer support person asking talking to there geek grandson and then trying to put in an order for a "Black Modem thingy with 80 mega whatits of floppys and 1 pentiums of RAM" must be scary for some.
A random sample of 1000 people in a population of 6 million Nintendo owners will give a high confidence interval, (can't be bothered working it out, but at 95% confidence - around 4-5% on a question like Luigi vs Mario).
Your 1% might be 60,000 respondents but the response rate of 1% is highly suspect. What is different about the 1% that respond vs the 99% that didn't respond? In other words the 1% is probably highly different from the target population of all owners - perhaps the 1% is only the 60+yr grandmothers who still find the Wii a novelty & bother responding. It will skew the results badly unless Nintendo can prove by a proper random survey that the 1% or 10% responders just happen to represent the game buying Wii owners perfectly.