Posts by veti 4489 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
No, parliament's duty was - is - to govern the country. The referendum was advisory only, it didn't change anything about "their duty".
As for being sacked, that's for their voters to say - MP by MP, constituency by constituency. Nobody else has that right.
Because no-one bothered to take him to court over it. Duh. Assuming there was any such court in those days, before the "Supreme Court" existed.
If no-one feels strongly enough even to try to stop them, then the person who acts, wins by default. And you can't (re-)litigate it now, because the cause for action no longer exists.
It seemed to me that that remark, from someone working in investment banking of all industries, suggested a great obliviousness to the big picture.
If investment bankers, even in the noughties, didn't think all the time about risk, then they deserved everything bad that happened to them and so much more.
Hello. Welcome to IT. I see you're new here.
It's theoretically possible that at some time, someone, somewhere has sold someone a piece of software that wasn't broken, but I've never heard of such a thing and frankly I doubt if it's ever really happened.
The problem with that proposition is that nuclear power has, in its 70-plus-year history, never yet been "done right".
And there is no reason to believe it ever will be. Or can be.
Every generation, no pun intended, of reactors has been claimed to be the greatest thing ever, completely safe, completely clean and ridiculously cheap. That was Magnox, it was AGR, PWR, ABWR. And each time, that promise has turned out to be false on every count. If you think "thorium" is the magic word that's going to break that pattern, I have an Internet to sell you.
Logitech make the bestest mice. Hands, no pun intended, down.
My version has the best of both worlds - ball and lasers. And it works on any surface, including my knee.
i see your point, but how exactly can you avoid it? Any government may decide to come after you. Case in point, the US government has been picking fights with several US companies (Amazon, Ford, Microsoft). It's not clear to me how hosting their data anywhere else would make any of them more secure against gov't-level interference.
Particularly if the gov't is prepared to ride roughshod over the law, in which case - even if your "rights" are cast-iron in legal terms, it can still take years to assert said rights.
Basically, there's no realistic defence against government-level attacks on your business. At least, not in the sense of preventing them. There are some mitigation strategies, but I'm not sure if "hosting your own data" would qualify as one.
Yeah, I'm sure suing the senior scumbags will work out for him. Surely he knows their names and addresses, what specific laws they broke in whatever jurisdiction they happen to be in, and I'm sure his inbox is overflowing with offers from high-powered lawyers eager to help him out...
Seriously, where does anyone imagine this idiot is going to get $9m from?
Another way of putting that would be, we need better AIs.
A problem with the present generation is that they, by default, tend to treat all input as equal; it's all learning, right? If we could instil them with a child's ability to lend greater weight to some sources (like parents) than others, that might give us a way to teach them "values" that they could then use to filter their wider input.
Of course there will follow much mud-slinging about whose values should be instilled, but we get that anyway about children, so I don't see why that should stop anyone.
Meh. The Americans are the ones who have turned their backs on the South Pacific, why should we care what they think any more?
And Bridges is a loser, but he's right: it makes perfect sense for NZ politicians to form relationships with powerful figures in the Chinese government. After all, it's an extremely stable government - someone with power there now is very likely to still be in place after the next two NZ elections, which is more than you can say for the US.
Let's be clear, there were horrible people on both sides. Sure there were racists voting leave. I'll bet there were some voting remain as well.
And let's not forget, other "remain" voters included - David Cameron, Tony Blair...
So trying to smear "everyone who voted the other way from you" by describing (what you imagine to be) the worst of those people, is not an exercise that is going to go well for anyone.
"Eternal vigilance" is good. "Revolutionary fervour" is the last thing you need.
The trouble with revolutions is, they happen, and then everyone pretends everything is different - whereas in fact all that's happened is a change of personnel in certain positions. But everyone has fought the good fight, they're feeling good and upbeat and optimistic, and if you try to tell them that nothing has really changed - they won't take it well.
"The 24/7 news cycle" will have forgotten about this story by the end of today. That's what it's for. If you think the action happens "before the story fades", then I'm not surprised you're disappointed.
If you want to achieve - anything, you need to keep your attention focused on it after everyone else has moved on. That's how you achieve anything.
Alphabet (Google) spent $20 million on lobbying last year, enough to put it in the top 10 contributors.
If they all have to pony up $100 million, that would be extortionate. (Yes, I know what you're thinking. But let's try to keep the orders of magnitude within the bounds of plausibility.)
Seriously, what law is there obliging them to keep every email for that long?
I know if someone asked me to produce my business emails from ten years ago, I'd laugh in their face. I'm reasonably sure that information no longer exists, unless maybe in the NSA's database of course.
And there was I suspecting that the truckers' traditional love of caffeine had more to do with not being allowed to sleep more than about three hours a day...
Things are somewhat different now - but that's quite a recent change, and old habits die hard.
Err... you don't think healthcare is linked to corruption and extortion? Suggests you haven't been paying much attention lately. And healthcare is tied to public health, which is necessarily a public (shared) good - if there's an outbreak of, say, cholera in your city, it's very much in your own interests that it gets dealt with quickly and effectively, even if you and yours may have ironclad health insurance for yourselves.
Now all they need is a robot to cook the "meal", one to package it into the greasy paper bag, and one to extend it out of the kiosk into the driver's window. Then more to take customers' orders at the desk, process their changes-of-mind, accept their payments, smile at them, and above all, clean the damn' restaurant. Continuously.
The fully automated McDs may be a horrifying vision or a utopian ideal, but either way it's some way off yet.
As I interpret it, what's happening is that - well, farmers need to be subsidised somehow. In the EU, that happens by taxpayer-funded subsidies handed directly to farmers. In NZ, it happens through (indirect) price controls artificially inflating prices, so the buyer (rather than the taxpayer) pays.
But the need for someone to pay that subsidy isn't going anywhere. Assuming you want there to be a UK farming sector - and I don't know of anyone who doesn't want that - then someone is going to have to pony up the money currently coming from the EU to support them. Direct government subsidies (as now, but paid directly by the government) would presumably be a good deal - but it would further dent the UK budget. The alternative is basically to double the price of everything.
Not so surprising. Both Stallman and Microsoft have been mellowing.
Of all the tech giants, currently I regard Microsoft and Apple as the two most likely to be on my side on any given issue. (Because they give me the option of being their customer rather than their product, that's why.) They're no longer the threat they were - if only because they're no longer in a position to be.
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