I mostly agree, but you'd probably have to allow for junk data caused by other factors. For example, if IIS has a security hold and most of its traffic for a period is a worm spreading, does that make it any more popular? (Same goes for Apache, of course.)
Thanks for the pointer. I wasn't aware of his work and it could actually be relevant to something I'm working on at the moment. I'll make a note of it and look through it more properly on Monday.
I agree. In our research group we've been looking at semiotics quite a lot in the last couple of years, Peircean semiotics in particular. (Yay for triads!)
A place where we've found it to be very applicable is in HCI. eg. We have a couple of papers (and a student's dissertation) that apply Peircean semiotics to user interface metaphors in an attempt to better understand how they work. (This assumes that they do work, which is actually in dispute.)
We also have an investigation of how semiotics can be applied to Extreme Programming, and yet another idea has been to relate it to user interface navigation. Semiotics provides some quite interesting ways to look at things.
In which case, they are blocked by the Wayback machine after the Archive caves in to DMCA notices.
As upsetting as this is, I don't think it's fair to blame the Wayback Machine for this. They have to protect their own interests first to keep the service going at all. Becoming a martyr in a costly legal battle for political ideals may not fit into that. Companies don't have the freedom or flexibility of individuals, and this is the same reaction that nearly every other business and organisation would probably have, short of those whose primary objective is to fight silly legislation. The only difference is that most aren't directly affected by the DMCA.
The problem (temporarily ignoring the Church of Scientology) is the flawed legislation that forces businesses and organisations to do this. The DMCA is the reason that the Wayback machine has to do this.
The Moon does have an atmosphere depending on your definition of the word, but it's not a significant one because its gravity isn't strong enough to hold one for long periods of time.
The "atmosphere" of the Moon is restricted to dust particles that may have been thrown up from time to time by meteorite impacts and haven't yet fallen out of orbit, and possibly a minescule portion of gases that were released by the lunar landers from Earth during the late 60's and early 70's.
The existing form semantics in HTML was developed before anyone had any serious experience with implementing forms. XForms, althogh it's surely useful for general use outside HTML, is hugely overcomplicated for the majority of web browsing.
Personally all that I want is to be able to say things like:
<input type="date"/> and have a calendar drop down for date selection, or
<input type="time"/> and have a box designed for collecting time information, maybe within simple constraints such as "between 9am and 5pm", plus don't forget
<input type="numeric"/> to request a number be entered, with no alphabetic data.
Having to either do server-side checks or write custom client code for these sorts of things over and over again is annoying and complicated, and prone to error. XForms can fix this but it's hugely overdoing it.
I think the main attitude about the monarchy is that it works, so there's really no need to bother trying to fix it. Far beyond Britain itself, there's an entire empire of other countries whose constitutional systems are all tied in with the British monarchy. Removing it would require massive infrastructural changes all over the world. Plus, lots of people like it and they're prepared to pay for it.
A great example of this is the insane media land-grab over Princess Diana's death. Hundreds of thousands of people die in traffic accidents each year - why was hers so deserving of three whole months of media coverage, weeping, wailing, and moaning?
I hardly think you can put that reaction down to having anything to do with the monarchy. The media frenzy was because she was popular and well known. The monarchy merely provided a vehicle that got her to that position, but how she got there wasn't really of interest to the media.
There's no shortage of examples of very similar things happening that had nothing to do with the British monarchy. The USA has at least as many examples of media irrationality in the face of popularity, and probably a lot more. The OJ Simpson trial is the example that most easily comes to mind. All he did was play a game quite well a few years ago, and now that he has a problem everyone wants to know about it. Having details of it broadcast every day for months on most of the major news networks was just silly, in my own opinion... and yet people who had never heard of the guy before he got on CNN (all over the world) were following the news of it because the media told them it was important. It was a murder trial but it was hardly unusual.
You get the same reaction from people whether there's a monarchy or no monarchy.
I regularly have to speed up to get away from psychopathic tail-gaiting rigs, pickups, and SUVs that don't appreciate you doing the speed limit on the open highway.
The defensive driving technique that I was taught for being tailgated is to increase the distance between yourself and the car in front of you. This gives you a larger space to slow down in if there's something up ahead, which (in theory) should also give the person behind you more time to react. In my own experience, increasing this distance just gets them more annoyed at you, so I try to juet let them past whenever possible.
In the unusual cases where I can't pull over or let them pass somehow by changing lanes, my preferred method is to slow right down to a speed where I think it's safe for them to be following me at that distance... which can really irritate them but at least it's safer.
Persistance of information in a changing society
on
OnStar Considered Harmful
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I think that's a general rule with information that's often not taken very seriously.
When I look at my (non-US) government and a large number (not all) of organisations that I give personal information to, I generally trust them. Within certain bounds, it's not very likely that most people will abuse the trust that you put in them. They ask for information because they think it might be useful for what they're doing for you, and that's initially its primary use. There are obviously some exceptions with marketing motivations -- I don't trust spammers with my email address and never gave them permission to use it. Partly that's where privacy policies and legislation should come in where possible.
The problem, though, is that times change, organisations change, the people running them change, societial views change, and ethics change. Data that you've given to an organisation, on the other hand, doesn't change on its own. It stays right there to be interpreted and used in whichever ways the current powers see fit.
Consider how many organisations and governments have changed over the last 50 years. Then consider that most of the information collected 50 years ago is probably still on record. Just because you trusted the people heading an organisation or a committee or a council or a government at a particular time does not mean that those people won't change later on.
Information collected today will almost certainly be on record 50 years from now. In fact, it's likely that much more of it will remain on record than from the past 50 years until now, because digital information is so easy and cheap to manage and manipulate compared with paper.
For the same reasons when I was a membership secretary for a small-medium organisation I felt an ethical obligation to destroy at least the digital membership records of former members a year after they left, unless there was a good reason to keep them. I wasn't going to do anything deceptive with them, but I couldn't guarantee who would be on the committee in five or ten years' time. This isn't the norm with most organisations, though.
Realistically I do trust the majority of people and organisations when they tell me that they wouldn't abuse information that I give them. It means a lot more to me though if they'll commit to destroying it after they no longer need it.
I don't know if this is a problem that can easily be fixed. Realistically information about people is what the world runs on -- it's a fuzzy boundary and matter of opinion that determines how much is too much or what constitutes misuse. If it suits you then you could get all paranoid and not give out any personal information to anyone, but that's not an option for most people and in some situations it's not legal for arguably reasonable reasons.
The most absurd commercial I saw were clips advocating coal energy. The tagline was like Electricity from coal: Cleaner, more affordable and abudantly better.".
I'm not an expert, but from what I understand there are very clean ways of extracting energy from coal these days. It has a bad reputation embedded in many people's eyes from the past, though, so it's not always a politicians' first choice from a public relations perspective.
Whether these cleaner methods for burning it make it more affordable and "better", I couldn't say. I guess it depends on the situation.
One of the biggest problems with MySQL that so many people complain about is that the entire design philosophy is not one that supports data integrity. Take a look at the list of MySQL Gotchas for starters.
The reason that it's satisfactory for slashdot is the same reason that it became popular in the first place. It was one of the first freely available database servers, and it had particularly fast benchmark results for situations that required lots of selects and not many updates. (I might be slightly wrong about the details, so someone correct me if necessary.) The fast-select advantage made it a popular option for websites a few years ago, because they involve just that. Lots of page-views (selects) and not many updates.
On the other hand, the integrity aspect of MySQL makes it a pain to code for. The MySQL credo seems to be that if input doesn't make sense, then try to guess what was meant and don't report it. (eg. Inserting a null instead of reporting an error.) Furthermore, the MySQL parser recognises certain parts of SQL syntax that are ignored, and (again) not reported. Instead, it just doesn't do anything and pretends that it all worked.
So instead of being able to rely on constraints set in the database, as can be done with nearly any other well-used database, it's necessary to put large amounts of integrity-checking code for things as simple as making sure that dates are the correct format. In some ways it's more like a half-built SQL interface to a regular file system than a database, with features for data integrity hacked on here and there if you know how to use them and always use them correctly.
In slashdot's case, don't be surprised if a random comment goes missing every now and again, because the integrity support just isn't there without complicated overhead work that induces possible mistakes. Slashdot can get away with losing bits and pieces of data, but that's not usually the case. If I say that I want to put some data in the database and that it must meet specific rules, it should either put it in or result in an error. MySQL doesn't do this reliably.
MySQL now seems to be living only on it's fast reputation that it had in the past, driven by people who've heard that it's good and it's fast, but don't know the details. By now, other free databases (postgresql in particular) have caught up a lot, and should be preferable in most cases if you're starting from scratch.
Problem: doing this requires first solving the natural-language parsing problem.
I haven't read the details of how they're planning to do whatever they're doing (or the article at all), but natural language parsing isn't necessarily needed for some of this.
In theory, you might be able to split out conversations simply by comparing the differences between emails. eg. Postings that quote and comment on similar-looking text are more related to each other than postings that comment on completely different text. Understanding the syntactic and semantic structures of the text should really even be necessary.
There have been algorithms available for comparing text in this sort of way for years.
It's worth pointing out that the Python implementation may be either disabled or insecure, depending on the python interpreter installed on your system.
The rexec module, which is used by the postgres python code execution handler, has been disabled in Python 2.3 (I'm not sure about 2.4) due to "various known and not readily fixable security holes.
I was initially planning to use python for my postgres stored procedures, but now I'm just using pypgsql and I think I prefer it.
but we also have some efforts that really try to aim at end users, more or less succesfull. allright, it's not as easy as using MacOSX, but it's quite close in many aspects. and quite usable for the novice, especially in the distributions that try to make it simple (xandros, lindows, etc)
I don't think it's being fair to Unix-based operating systems to imply that they're playing catch-up on the desktop. (I know you haven't said it, but that's how your comment reads to me.) To a certain extent KDE and Gnome are, but they don't cover everything.
One of the main reasons that I run Linux on my desktop PC is that I don't really like Windows on the desktop. You're effectively locked into Microsoft's idea of a good UI, which for a variety of reasons I don't like. (Both their UI design and their lock-in.)
By running Linux, I get to choose from a much wider variety of UI's. Personally, I choose WindowMaker.
From a UI perspective, I tend to think that allowing for too much choice and configuration about how things work is a bad thing. But on the other hand, I'd rather be able to choose than be forced to use somebody else's bad design.
For what it's worth, this very short article looks like a cut down version of a press release from Judith Tizard --- New Zealand's minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage.
The original press release is slightly longer with a couple of extra paragraphs on the end.
Yes, he was irresponsible. He also has enough money to pay for his irresponsible act, unless someone insists on tacking on extra costs to "teach him a lesson", which is an authority they simply don't have.
I'm not sure if you missed my (and their) point, or if I missed yours, but they're not leaving him out in the cold and they're certainly not out to murder him, and available information makes that clear. They're looking after him, feeding him and giving him somewhere to live. They've even offerred him a flight back to NZ, and are offering to ship his plane back in the future.
What they're not doing is selling him fuel. And why should they? It's theirs, it's there for other purposes, and he doesn't need it for survival. They obviously don't want to set a precedent that encourages people to randomly turn up and expect a fuel pump on demand.
If he wanted special treatment then he should have arranged it in advance. Good for them.
and that that's the reason they won't sell him fuel, but damn, that's pretty inhospitable.
From what I heard on the radio this morning (in New Zealand), he was quite irresponsible and that's why they're not going out of their way to actively help him. Among other things, he'd only allocated two hours of spare fuel for a journey expected to be over thirty hours, which is just plain stupid in most people's judgement.
What they don't want to do is set a precedent of bailing out stupidity. I think he's getting a good deal with the free board the offer to ship back his plane is just luxury. If they don't want to give him an easy way out by selling fuel, why should they?
If OO competes too well with M$word, then Micro$oft is likely to make their next version incompatible with OO or incompitable enough that people will be reluctant to switch.
Trying to steer away from standards and compatability doesn't always work.
It's intersting to note that back in the days when WordPerfect was the main word processor that everyone used, it too tried exactly the same file format tactics that Microsoft tries today. Before MS Word was popular, Microsoft went to special effort to support WordPerfect formats as reliably as possible. WordPerfect, on the other hand, only supported Microsoft formats on the order of 95%. (After all, why make it easy for customers to switch to the competition?)
There were several things going on, but certainly one of them was that people were deciding to go with the product that would most reliably support both formats than with the product that didn't support key parts of one of them. The result was that MS Word won out, having promoted full compatibility with competitors' products. Meanwhile WordPerfect faded into obscurity.
It might seem to be a disadvantage to be compatible with competitors. Sometimes it's a disadvantage not to be, though. This is especially true if the competitors initially have a market significant enough to be noticed (even if it's small), and offer full compatibility with your product.
Of course, though, Microsoft products are "more mature" and "suited to a professional environment." Sheesh.
Did he give any specific reasons why closed source was more mature? I'm curious if it was the standard reasons given such as having a company guarantee it, or if he actually talked about it in detail.
How about building parks and playgrounds? Contributing to local health programs? Financial aid for economically depressed areas? Charities? Libraries? Help for schools?
Keep in mind that Peter Jackson grew up here and he does live here. He gets on well with people here and he's not just blindly suggesting this out of nowhere.
Despite the fact that you might not know it very well, New Zealand isn't a third world country. It's a well developed OECD country that's certainly not large, but it's not struggling either. NZ has its own standard of defining "poverty" which is essentially separating richer people from poorer people, but it's nothing to do with the same thing in the rest of the world, including the USA.
He's also a film-maker. He could contribute to local health programmes or libraries (and he may already be doing so for all I know), but so could a lot of people. Besides, we already have those things -- there may be ways to improve them but throwing money at them isn't necessarily the answer, and there's no reason that Jackson should make any outlandish effort for something he's not an expert on. If anything, it should be the government doing that using the large amounts of extra money that's been brought into the economy from the revamped film industry.
The museum isn't an empty gesture; it's something that many people here really want, and he knows that. Roughly 20,000 people out of 4 million had some direct involvement in making these movies --- it's unusual for anyone here not to know someone who took part. Personally I know quite a lot of people who worked on it. A much more vast proportion of the population had an indirect involvement, including everything from jogging past the film sets on a Monday morning to debating with many of the actors in the cafe's down town.
Forget about tourism benefits for a moment. Even without them, a museum is something permanent and lasting that would help everyone here remember it all.
Slashdot Mirror
I mostly agree, but you'd probably have to allow for junk data caused by other factors. For example, if IIS has a security hold and most of its traffic for a period is a worm spreading, does that make it any more popular? (Same goes for Apache, of course.)
Thanks for the pointer. I wasn't aware of his work and it could actually be relevant to something I'm working on at the moment. I'll make a note of it and look through it more properly on Monday.
I agree. In our research group we've been looking at semiotics quite a lot in the last couple of years, Peircean semiotics in particular. (Yay for triads!)
A place where we've found it to be very applicable is in HCI. eg. We have a couple of papers (and a student's dissertation) that apply Peircean semiotics to user interface metaphors in an attempt to better understand how they work. (This assumes that they do work, which is actually in dispute.)
We also have an investigation of how semiotics can be applied to Extreme Programming, and yet another idea has been to relate it to user interface navigation. Semiotics provides some quite interesting ways to look at things.
As upsetting as this is, I don't think it's fair to blame the Wayback Machine for this. They have to protect their own interests first to keep the service going at all. Becoming a martyr in a costly legal battle for political ideals may not fit into that. Companies don't have the freedom or flexibility of individuals, and this is the same reaction that nearly every other business and organisation would probably have, short of those whose primary objective is to fight silly legislation. The only difference is that most aren't directly affected by the DMCA.
The problem (temporarily ignoring the Church of Scientology) is the flawed legislation that forces businesses and organisations to do this. The DMCA is the reason that the Wayback machine has to do this.
Thanks for the correction.
The Moon does have an atmosphere depending on your definition of the word, but it's not a significant one because its gravity isn't strong enough to hold one for long periods of time.
The "atmosphere" of the Moon is restricted to dust particles that may have been thrown up from time to time by meteorite impacts and haven't yet fallen out of orbit, and possibly a minescule portion of gases that were released by the lunar landers from Earth during the late 60's and early 70's.
Thanks for the pointers. I'll go and check it out.
The existing form semantics in HTML was developed before anyone had any serious experience with implementing forms. XForms, althogh it's surely useful for general use outside HTML, is hugely overcomplicated for the majority of web browsing.
Personally all that I want is to be able to say things like:
Having to either do server-side checks or write custom client code for these sorts of things over and over again is annoying and complicated, and prone to error. XForms can fix this but it's hugely overdoing it.
I think the main attitude about the monarchy is that it works, so there's really no need to bother trying to fix it. Far beyond Britain itself, there's an entire empire of other countries whose constitutional systems are all tied in with the British monarchy. Removing it would require massive infrastructural changes all over the world. Plus, lots of people like it and they're prepared to pay for it.
I hardly think you can put that reaction down to having anything to do with the monarchy. The media frenzy was because she was popular and well known. The monarchy merely provided a vehicle that got her to that position, but how she got there wasn't really of interest to the media.
There's no shortage of examples of very similar things happening that had nothing to do with the British monarchy. The USA has at least as many examples of media irrationality in the face of popularity, and probably a lot more. The OJ Simpson trial is the example that most easily comes to mind. All he did was play a game quite well a few years ago, and now that he has a problem everyone wants to know about it. Having details of it broadcast every day for months on most of the major news networks was just silly, in my own opinion... and yet people who had never heard of the guy before he got on CNN (all over the world) were following the news of it because the media told them it was important. It was a murder trial but it was hardly unusual.
You get the same reaction from people whether there's a monarchy or no monarchy.
It sounds interesting (especially the magnet-for-uranium bit). Could you perhaps recommend a source for this?
They're thinking of opening up a coal burning plant or two for various reasons roughly where I am, so I'm interested to find out more about it.
The defensive driving technique that I was taught for being tailgated is to increase the distance between yourself and the car in front of you. This gives you a larger space to slow down in if there's something up ahead, which (in theory) should also give the person behind you more time to react. In my own experience, increasing this distance just gets them more annoyed at you, so I try to juet let them past whenever possible.
In the unusual cases where I can't pull over or let them pass somehow by changing lanes, my preferred method is to slow right down to a speed where I think it's safe for them to be following me at that distance... which can really irritate them but at least it's safer.
I think that's a general rule with information that's often not taken very seriously.
When I look at my (non-US) government and a large number (not all) of organisations that I give personal information to, I generally trust them. Within certain bounds, it's not very likely that most people will abuse the trust that you put in them. They ask for information because they think it might be useful for what they're doing for you, and that's initially its primary use. There are obviously some exceptions with marketing motivations -- I don't trust spammers with my email address and never gave them permission to use it. Partly that's where privacy policies and legislation should come in where possible.
The problem, though, is that times change, organisations change, the people running them change, societial views change, and ethics change. Data that you've given to an organisation, on the other hand, doesn't change on its own. It stays right there to be interpreted and used in whichever ways the current powers see fit.
Consider how many organisations and governments have changed over the last 50 years. Then consider that most of the information collected 50 years ago is probably still on record. Just because you trusted the people heading an organisation or a committee or a council or a government at a particular time does not mean that those people won't change later on.
Information collected today will almost certainly be on record 50 years from now. In fact, it's likely that much more of it will remain on record than from the past 50 years until now, because digital information is so easy and cheap to manage and manipulate compared with paper.
For the same reasons when I was a membership secretary for a small-medium organisation I felt an ethical obligation to destroy at least the digital membership records of former members a year after they left, unless there was a good reason to keep them. I wasn't going to do anything deceptive with them, but I couldn't guarantee who would be on the committee in five or ten years' time. This isn't the norm with most organisations, though.
Realistically I do trust the majority of people and organisations when they tell me that they wouldn't abuse information that I give them. It means a lot more to me though if they'll commit to destroying it after they no longer need it.
I don't know if this is a problem that can easily be fixed. Realistically information about people is what the world runs on -- it's a fuzzy boundary and matter of opinion that determines how much is too much or what constitutes misuse. If it suits you then you could get all paranoid and not give out any personal information to anyone, but that's not an option for most people and in some situations it's not legal for arguably reasonable reasons.
I'm not an expert, but from what I understand there are very clean ways of extracting energy from coal these days. It has a bad reputation embedded in many people's eyes from the past, though, so it's not always a politicians' first choice from a public relations perspective.
Whether these cleaner methods for burning it make it more affordable and "better", I couldn't say. I guess it depends on the situation.
You might consider Wikipedia's (meta) page titled Making fun of Britannica before holding it up too much as an absolutely authoritative reference.
See my other comment for my view.
One of the biggest problems with MySQL that so many people complain about is that the entire design philosophy is not one that supports data integrity. Take a look at the list of MySQL Gotchas for starters.
The reason that it's satisfactory for slashdot is the same reason that it became popular in the first place. It was one of the first freely available database servers, and it had particularly fast benchmark results for situations that required lots of selects and not many updates. (I might be slightly wrong about the details, so someone correct me if necessary.) The fast-select advantage made it a popular option for websites a few years ago, because they involve just that. Lots of page-views (selects) and not many updates.
On the other hand, the integrity aspect of MySQL makes it a pain to code for. The MySQL credo seems to be that if input doesn't make sense, then try to guess what was meant and don't report it. (eg. Inserting a null instead of reporting an error.) Furthermore, the MySQL parser recognises certain parts of SQL syntax that are ignored, and (again) not reported. Instead, it just doesn't do anything and pretends that it all worked.
So instead of being able to rely on constraints set in the database, as can be done with nearly any other well-used database, it's necessary to put large amounts of integrity-checking code for things as simple as making sure that dates are the correct format. In some ways it's more like a half-built SQL interface to a regular file system than a database, with features for data integrity hacked on here and there if you know how to use them and always use them correctly.
In slashdot's case, don't be surprised if a random comment goes missing every now and again, because the integrity support just isn't there without complicated overhead work that induces possible mistakes. Slashdot can get away with losing bits and pieces of data, but that's not usually the case. If I say that I want to put some data in the database and that it must meet specific rules, it should either put it in or result in an error. MySQL doesn't do this reliably.
MySQL now seems to be living only on it's fast reputation that it had in the past, driven by people who've heard that it's good and it's fast, but don't know the details. By now, other free databases (postgresql in particular) have caught up a lot, and should be preferable in most cases if you're starting from scratch.
I haven't read the details of how they're planning to do whatever they're doing (or the article at all), but natural language parsing isn't necessarily needed for some of this.
In theory, you might be able to split out conversations simply by comparing the differences between emails. eg. Postings that quote and comment on similar-looking text are more related to each other than postings that comment on completely different text. Understanding the syntactic and semantic structures of the text should really even be necessary.
There have been algorithms available for comparing text in this sort of way for years.
It's worth pointing out that the Python implementation may be either disabled or insecure, depending on the python interpreter installed on your system.
The rexec module, which is used by the postgres python code execution handler, has been disabled in Python 2.3 (I'm not sure about 2.4) due to "various known and not readily fixable security holes.
I was initially planning to use python for my postgres stored procedures, but now I'm just using pypgsql and I think I prefer it.
I don't think it's being fair to Unix-based operating systems to imply that they're playing catch-up on the desktop. (I know you haven't said it, but that's how your comment reads to me.) To a certain extent KDE and Gnome are, but they don't cover everything.
One of the main reasons that I run Linux on my desktop PC is that I don't really like Windows on the desktop. You're effectively locked into Microsoft's idea of a good UI, which for a variety of reasons I don't like. (Both their UI design and their lock-in.)
By running Linux, I get to choose from a much wider variety of UI's. Personally, I choose WindowMaker.
From a UI perspective, I tend to think that allowing for too much choice and configuration about how things work is a bad thing. But on the other hand, I'd rather be able to choose than be forced to use somebody else's bad design.
For what it's worth, this very short article looks like a cut down version of a press release from Judith Tizard --- New Zealand's minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage.
The original press release is slightly longer with a couple of extra paragraphs on the end.
I'm not sure if you missed my (and their) point, or if I missed yours, but they're not leaving him out in the cold and they're certainly not out to murder him, and available information makes that clear. They're looking after him, feeding him and giving him somewhere to live. They've even offerred him a flight back to NZ, and are offering to ship his plane back in the future.
What they're not doing is selling him fuel. And why should they? It's theirs, it's there for other purposes, and he doesn't need it for survival. They obviously don't want to set a precedent that encourages people to randomly turn up and expect a fuel pump on demand.
If he wanted special treatment then he should have arranged it in advance. Good for them.
From what I heard on the radio this morning (in New Zealand), he was quite irresponsible and that's why they're not going out of their way to actively help him. Among other things, he'd only allocated two hours of spare fuel for a journey expected to be over thirty hours, which is just plain stupid in most people's judgement.
What they don't want to do is set a precedent of bailing out stupidity. I think he's getting a good deal with the free board the offer to ship back his plane is just luxury. If they don't want to give him an easy way out by selling fuel, why should they?
Trying to steer away from standards and compatability doesn't always work.
It's intersting to note that back in the days when WordPerfect was the main word processor that everyone used, it too tried exactly the same file format tactics that Microsoft tries today. Before MS Word was popular, Microsoft went to special effort to support WordPerfect formats as reliably as possible. WordPerfect, on the other hand, only supported Microsoft formats on the order of 95%. (After all, why make it easy for customers to switch to the competition?)
There were several things going on, but certainly one of them was that people were deciding to go with the product that would most reliably support both formats than with the product that didn't support key parts of one of them. The result was that MS Word won out, having promoted full compatibility with competitors' products. Meanwhile WordPerfect faded into obscurity.
It might seem to be a disadvantage to be compatible with competitors. Sometimes it's a disadvantage not to be, though. This is especially true if the competitors initially have a market significant enough to be noticed (even if it's small), and offer full compatibility with your product.
Did he give any specific reasons why closed source was more mature? I'm curious if it was the standard reasons given such as having a company guarantee it, or if he actually talked about it in detail.
Keep in mind that Peter Jackson grew up here and he does live here. He gets on well with people here and he's not just blindly suggesting this out of nowhere.
Despite the fact that you might not know it very well, New Zealand isn't a third world country. It's a well developed OECD country that's certainly not large, but it's not struggling either. NZ has its own standard of defining "poverty" which is essentially separating richer people from poorer people, but it's nothing to do with the same thing in the rest of the world, including the USA.
He's also a film-maker. He could contribute to local health programmes or libraries (and he may already be doing so for all I know), but so could a lot of people. Besides, we already have those things -- there may be ways to improve them but throwing money at them isn't necessarily the answer, and there's no reason that Jackson should make any outlandish effort for something he's not an expert on. If anything, it should be the government doing that using the large amounts of extra money that's been brought into the economy from the revamped film industry.
The museum isn't an empty gesture; it's something that many people here really want, and he knows that. Roughly 20,000 people out of 4 million had some direct involvement in making these movies --- it's unusual for anyone here not to know someone who took part. Personally I know quite a lot of people who worked on it. A much more vast proportion of the population had an indirect involvement, including everything from jogging past the film sets on a Monday morning to debating with many of the actors in the cafe's down town.
Forget about tourism benefits for a moment. Even without them, a museum is something permanent and lasting that would help everyone here remember it all.