I'll take this one. Historically, New Zealand has one of the best records of treatment of the indigenous population. You could put it down to the fact that New Zealand was pretty much the last country in the world to be colonized by Empire, and that, by the time it was, humanism was coming into vogue. There was a real recognisation of the effects of disease and the introduction of technology (read: muskets) on Maori - especially amongst the missionaries, who were continually trying to save the noble savages from the depravities of their own cultures. And, while it's historical convention to now deprecate the Declaration of Independence of New Zealand, it still says something important about the nature of early race relations in NZ.
I mean, sure, there's the New Zealand wars and the subsequent acts of a settler dominated parliament but, honestly, I think you've got New Zealand confused with other British colonies. Australia has 10,000 to 20,000 aboriginal deaths as a result of direct violence, South Africa and America aren't worth getting into. New Zealand's Te Tiriti o Waitangi wasn't really directly adhered to in the next 130 years, it wasn't intended to decieve, and it's a good example of race relations.
I may well do that. In Soviet New Zealandistan the maximum you can get is 3.5mb/s down (most people are on 2), but the contention rates mean it's more like 1mb/s down. Upload is 128kb/s, but if you're paying more than about NZD$100 (CAD$70) you get bumped to 512kb/s. Again, the congestion makes the extra bandwidth effectively useless.
In terms of transfer, you're looking at a hard maximum of 10GB transfer (combined directions) a month, after which you'll either be paying NZD$0.12 a meg (about CAD$84 per gig) or be limited to 64kb/s in both directions. If you really hunt around you can get a daily limit on the transfer which means you can squeeze 30GB of tranfer out of the ISP.
But the worst bit? Regular outages, lasting for days in some (recent, high-profile) cases. Even the smaller (usually more agile) ISPs are unreliable. And it can take literally weeks to get a technician to an exchange. Kanuckistan sounds like heaven.
Well, when I said it was used less in American English I should perhaps have mentioned where it is used strongly: not so much in Britain as in the remnants of the old empire.
Wiktionary lists it as Australian English, and archaic elsewhere. Being a New Zealander I can say it's quite backed by usage here, as well as over the Tasman. Keeping with the less authorative sources, there's a mention in this article of "Australian speakers who use 'span' as the past tense of 'spin'", and this article (from a Malaysian English newspaper) mentions its use.
As far as more prescriptive sources are concerned, I've only got the concise version of the Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand handy which doesn't list most conjugations anyway. I guess I can say pretty confidently, though, that, amongst the 25 million-odd English speakers in Australasia, nobody would bat an eye upon hearing 'span'.
If only English were so symmetrical. It's either "span" or "spun" for the past tense (note, not for the past participle). Span is used less in American English.
Indeed, the story you outline about settlers 200,000 years ago bears curious similarities to the myth of the Moriori. The Moriori were(/are?) a real race that inhabited the Chatham Islands, but the myth went that they originally inhabited New Zealand too, and were wiped out by the racially superior New Zealand Maori.
See, it's an awful lot easier to feel good about almost wiping out a supposedly inferior race when you've got a nice convenient story to say that they did the same earlier.
Oh, damn, I am totally sorry. A dumbass like me get's quite mixed up when smart people like you start talking not about legislation, but about legislation about legislation. Got meta?
I'll assume we're talking about the American constitution and go ahead and ask you: if the constitution is (or should be) made to limit the role of government to a default deny all, wouldn't *it* need to be amended every time the government needs to pass a novel law?
Besides which, who would be amending the constitution? Oh, that's right, some other group who aren't restricted by a meta-constitution and can pretty much make whatever amendments they like. Another one of those pesky free until not-free situations that you seem to be so concerned the government has.
Bottom line is that abstracting up a level won't save your argument.
The prevailing view of government's proper role these days seems to be to allow everything that is not explicitly forbidden, which is an unwise policy.
Oh, you mean we should be doing:
iptables -F legislation
iptables -P legislation DROP
Surely that's a bad idea. We'd have to have a seperate firewall rule (uh...law) for every legal activity (and there are a whole load more legal activities then there are illegal ones). I'd need to change my iptables configuration every time someone inverts a new word or discovers a new scientific innovation - just to, you know, ACCEPT it.
The wastewater treatment is not cheap either, because brewing produces a lot of it -- rich in yeast...
I don't know about the wastewater per se, but leftover yeast from the fermentation process is in high demand. The yeast is used for a number of batches but eventually produces a different taste. What happens then?
Well, in the antipodes at least, the yeast is used in quite a few food products - Marmite most noticably, but there's these great chips(/crisps, whatever) called GrainWaves with the euphemistic 'yeast extract' in them (the french list of ingredients spells out where the yeast came from). I know one particularly excellent brewery has a close relationship with Sanitarium.
Science is extremely objective...How does it rate for politics, biographies, literature, etc?
So, hang on, you're saying that Wikipedia is less objectively truthful in articles that cover what you admit are more subjective topics? Right or wrong, that seems pretty tautological to me.
Nuclear Weapons are Morally Indefensible
(Argument for the affirmative, Oxford Union, 1 March 1985)
Rt Hon David Lange
Prime Minister of New Zealand
There is an argument in defence of the possession of nuclear weapons which holds that the terror created by the existence of those weapons is in itself the fulfilment of a peaceful purpose: the argument advanced here tonight that that 50 million killed over four years by concerted war in a conventional sense in Europe, and the argument that somehow the existence of this mutually assured destruction phenomenon has since that time preserved this planet from destruction.
INTERJECTION: Sir, the one area of the world do you refer to then? How have those casualties in that area defended by nuclear deterrence? Namely Europe. Not one of those 30 million lived in Europe.
Have you considered the proposition for one moment that that war, that cost those casualties might have entrenched within people the yearning for peace, the growth of democratic institutions, the accountability of political representatives, so that none wishes to wage in conventional or nuclear terms, any war? Why attribute to the presence of that awesome potential clash of firepower a stability which your politicians have been arguing they created?
That's very true. The general gist of the article was against OSS, so I'm not sure that journalist would be any happier with Solaris or BSD based servers.
Still, it's pretty funny that the NBR journalist has overlooked the fact that an Open Source (oh, sorry, the NBR article says I'm not allowed to use Proper Noun Case) webserver is behind the majority of sites on the internet, regardless of their operating system.
And I just love the way he paints OSS as a solution for the irrational, tree-hugging, hippie, communist,... Green Party.
There has already been a fair bit of (poorly researched) criticism of this plan - a good example pointed out to me by the guys at the New Zealand Open Source Society was this article in New Zealand's National Business Review:
Well as long as we're being pedantic, can you use the word 'irony' correctly? Perhaps you're looking for the words 'absurdity' or 'incongruity', but certainly not irony.
Incorrect spelling may show that you just didn't preview your post. Mucking up meaning is no better.
As far as alternative parts of speech go, I find impersonal verbs, particularly found in pro-drop languages, pretty interesting. It leads to the weather verb, which most people just pass off as a peculiarity of English without thinking about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll take this one. Historically, New Zealand has one of the best records of treatment of the indigenous population. You could put it down to the fact that New Zealand was pretty much the last country in the world to be colonized by Empire, and that, by the time it was, humanism was coming into vogue. There was a real recognisation of the effects of disease and the introduction of technology (read: muskets) on Maori - especially amongst the missionaries, who were continually trying to save the noble savages from the depravities of their own cultures. And, while it's historical convention to now deprecate the Declaration of Independence of New Zealand, it still says something important about the nature of early race relations in NZ.
I mean, sure, there's the New Zealand wars and the subsequent acts of a settler dominated parliament but, honestly, I think you've got New Zealand confused with other British colonies. Australia has 10,000 to 20,000 aboriginal deaths as a result of direct violence, South Africa and America aren't worth getting into. New Zealand's Te Tiriti o Waitangi wasn't really directly adhered to in the next 130 years, it wasn't intended to decieve, and it's a good example of race relations.
I may well do that. In Soviet New Zealandistan the maximum you can get is 3.5mb/s down (most people are on 2), but the contention rates mean it's more like 1mb/s down. Upload is 128kb/s, but if you're paying more than about NZD$100 (CAD$70) you get bumped to 512kb/s. Again, the congestion makes the extra bandwidth effectively useless.
In terms of transfer, you're looking at a hard maximum of 10GB transfer (combined directions) a month, after which you'll either be paying NZD$0.12 a meg (about CAD$84 per gig) or be limited to 64kb/s in both directions. If you really hunt around you can get a daily limit on the transfer which means you can squeeze 30GB of tranfer out of the ISP.
But the worst bit? Regular outages, lasting for days in some (recent, high-profile) cases. Even the smaller (usually more agile) ISPs are unreliable. And it can take literally weeks to get a technician to an exchange. Kanuckistan sounds like heaven.
Would I accept 20 hours of downtime a year for my internet connection? Hell yes! Where do I sign up?
Well, when I said it was used less in American English I should perhaps have mentioned where it is used strongly: not so much in Britain as in the remnants of the old empire.
Wiktionary lists it as Australian English, and archaic elsewhere. Being a New Zealander I can say it's quite backed by usage here, as well as over the Tasman. Keeping with the less authorative sources, there's a mention in this article of "Australian speakers who use 'span' as the past tense of 'spin'", and this article (from a Malaysian English newspaper) mentions its use.
As far as more prescriptive sources are concerned, I've only got the concise version of the Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand handy which doesn't list most conjugations anyway. I guess I can say pretty confidently, though, that, amongst the 25 million-odd English speakers in Australasia, nobody would bat an eye upon hearing 'span'.
If only English were so symmetrical. It's either "span" or "spun" for the past tense (note, not for the past participle). Span is used less in American English.
Indeed, the story you outline about settlers 200,000 years ago bears curious similarities to the myth of the Moriori. The Moriori were(/are?) a real race that inhabited the Chatham Islands, but the myth went that they originally inhabited New Zealand too, and were wiped out by the racially superior New Zealand Maori.
See, it's an awful lot easier to feel good about almost wiping out a supposedly inferior race when you've got a nice convenient story to say that they did the same earlier.
Hell, I deserve to be called a dumbass. I spelt 'gets' with an apostrophe. Oh, the eternal shame.
Oh, damn, I am totally sorry. A dumbass like me get's quite mixed up when smart people like you start talking not about legislation, but about legislation about legislation. Got meta?
I'll assume we're talking about the American constitution and go ahead and ask you: if the constitution is (or should be) made to limit the role of government to a default deny all, wouldn't *it* need to be amended every time the government needs to pass a novel law?
Besides which, who would be amending the constitution? Oh, that's right, some other group who aren't restricted by a meta-constitution and can pretty much make whatever amendments they like. Another one of those pesky free until not-free situations that you seem to be so concerned the government has.
Bottom line is that abstracting up a level won't save your argument.
iptables -F legislation
iptables -P legislation DROP
Surely that's a bad idea. We'd have to have a seperate firewall rule (uh...law) for every legal activity (and there are a whole load more legal activities then there are illegal ones). I'd need to change my iptables configuration every time someone inverts a new word or discovers a new scientific innovation - just to, you know, ACCEPT it.
Well, in the antipodes at least, the yeast is used in quite a few food products - Marmite most noticably, but there's these great chips(/crisps, whatever) called GrainWaves with the euphemistic 'yeast extract' in them (the french list of ingredients spells out where the yeast came from). I know one particularly excellent brewery has a close relationship with Sanitarium.
So, yeah. Yum.
Nuclear Weapons are Morally Indefensible
(Argument for the affirmative, Oxford Union, 1 March 1985)
Rt Hon David Lange
Prime Minister of New Zealand
There is an argument in defence of the possession of nuclear weapons which holds that the terror created by the existence of those weapons is in itself the fulfilment of a peaceful purpose: the argument advanced here tonight that that 50 million killed over four years by concerted war in a conventional sense in Europe, and the argument that somehow the existence of this mutually assured destruction phenomenon has since that time preserved this planet from destruction.
INTERJECTION: Sir, the one area of the world do you refer to then? How have those casualties in that area defended by nuclear deterrence? Namely Europe. Not one of those 30 million lived in Europe.
Have you considered the proposition for one moment that that war, that cost those casualties might have entrenched within people the yearning for peace, the growth of democratic institutions, the accountability of political representatives, so that none wishes to wage in conventional or nuclear terms, any war? Why attribute to the presence of that awesome potential clash of firepower a stability which your politicians have been arguing they created?
You can't have it both ways
what simplistic dynamic web page application will come along to replace the original implimentation of PHP?
:-)
Uhhh, Ruby?
That's very true. The general gist of the article was against OSS, so I'm not sure that journalist would be any happier with Solaris or BSD based servers. Still, it's pretty funny that the NBR journalist has overlooked the fact that an Open Source (oh, sorry, the NBR article says I'm not allowed to use Proper Noun Case) webserver is behind the majority of sites on the internet, regardless of their operating system. And I just love the way he paints OSS as a solution for the irrational, tree-hugging, hippie, communist, ... Green Party.
Open source in government: A delusional cheer from the Greens
Among the more irrational claims made against OS in this article is:Looks like someone hadn't seen that Netcraft doesn't confirm it (assuming Apache is mostly run on Linux, right?).
Well as long as we're being pedantic, can you use the word 'irony' correctly? Perhaps you're looking for the words 'absurdity' or 'incongruity', but certainly not irony.
Incorrect spelling may show that you just didn't preview your post. Mucking up meaning is no better.
As far as alternative parts of speech go, I find impersonal verbs, particularly found in pro-drop languages, pretty interesting. It leads to the weather verb, which most people just pass off as a peculiarity of English without thinking about it.