Posts by Paul Ryan

Dad who shot 'snooping vid drone' out of the sky is cleared of charges

Re: Kiwi Anti Drone Methods

Nice to see the kids at my old school are keeping up with modern issues like privacy.

Penguin pays $75m to settle ebook price-fixing case

Re: Who gets the cash?!

A good, and legal, way to improve their ebook sales and profits would be to drop the nationality restrictions on their ebooks. There's quite a bit from Penguin owned imprints that I'd love to actually pay for, but they don't want my money because I'm not in the US. Go figure.

Dotcom bail survives appeal, extradition hearing in August

Re: Re: As far as anyone here can tell...

I wish you were right about how much money I have. I made no comment whatsoever about whether the charges are justified, just about how the course of supposed justice has been perverted to harass him. If there are charges to be answered, then they can give him the same rights as any of us would expect if charged, not make a huge public circus aimed to hurt and humiliate before there's even a trial. There's time enough to do that when and if he's found guilty in a court of law, rather than in a trial by media before he's even extradited.

To be honest I don't think much of Mr. Dotcom, but I find the blatant timing and behaviour of the NZ Government and police in this matter, looking to be basically bought and paid for by gold old Uncle Sam, to be no better than his behaviour if he is indeed guilty of the charges that have been made.

As far as anyone here can tell...

... the US wants him and the NZ government is doing its best to bend over backwards. As soon as Mr. Dotcom got through this appeal, the prosecutor reveals that the US government is now looking at charging his pregnant wife.

Then there was the 'accidental' release of the information about the firearms in the safe room, without mentioning that they were locked in a gun safe and belonged to someone else... the assaults on people present for the initial arrests... the police refusing to even allow Mrs Dotcom to call an ambulance after being forced to stand outside under guard...

This isn't about justice, it's about making an example of someone who annoyed the big money media in the US and then making his life a living hell while he waits months for an extradition hearing, and frankly I'm ashamed that both the government here and the police are busy going along with it.

Chrome 13: Google uncloaks search click prediction engine

Duke? Nah...

I bet Google isn't offering to pay for the extra wasted bandwidth for people who have data caps.

Aussie online shoppers take $AU6 billion offshore

Yes, it's a title...

I can't speak for Aussie online retailers from personal experience, but not long ago I was looking for a recently released book here in New Zealand. Ordering online from the big local chain estimated a 10-15 day delivery period, and was the retail price, though shipping was free. OTOH the Book Depository in the UK had the same book, for NZ$3 cheaper, free shipping, and a 7-10 day estimated delivery time. Guess where my money went? The local online businesses are often their own worst enemies.

Facebook plugs email address indexing bug

They definitely record email searches.

I've never used Facebook, but I've gotten the occasional invitation to join. What bothers me is that it 'suggests' people as friends to contact. The people in question are indeed people I know, but to my knowledge have absolutely no connection other than that they know me, and presumably have all done a search on Facebook for my email at some point.

Poor porn protection hurt Firefox 3 uptake

Thoughts...

First thing for people working on providing new features should remember:

People hate change for the sake of change. They usually don't mind genuine improvements, but change just because it's change and therefore cool tends to get hackles raised.

Second thing for people working on providing new 'improved' features should remember:

It shouldn't be hard for users to figure out how to turn them off if they don't like them. Just because the programmer thinks he's had a great idea doesn't mean everyone else is going to agree with them.

The Firefox people seem to have forgotten that. I don't particularly mind their new location bar behaviour, but the DNS cache has had me seriously considering alternatives that don't lock in an error received from my ISP's DNS lookup for a minute or more while I repeatedly try to reload the page from a domain which worked a few minutes ago. That's despite going into the Firefox hidden config stuff to manually set the DNS Cache storage time to 0.

Expenses row MPs warned to change cash card PINs

A solution from fiction...

In a kingdom in one of David Eddings' books, the prospective politician was selected by lot, then put under immediate guard to stop him escaping. If elected, all his property was immediately sold and the value put into the public funds. He would be under constant guard until his term was over.

If at the end of his term of service things had gone well, and there had been improvement overall, he got the value of his contribution back, plus the same percentage as in the economic improvement. If things hadn't gone well during his term he lost the lot and got turfed out on his ear with nothing. And the tax rates were fixed, so elected politicians weren't able to raise them to fake an improvement that way.

Might be a nice system to see, both in the UK and here in NZ.

AT&T feeds metered internet to American gamblers

Re: NZ

And the capping issue in NZ is why I'm still using dialup. It's cheaper, and I don't have any data cap to worry about exceeding.

Sarko demands withdrawal of voodoo doll

No sense of humor...

...At least the NZ crowd don't seem to complain about the dog chew toys made to look like them. http://www.stuff.co.nz/4702958a6160.html

Ubuntu zoo preps for new arrival

@ BOBSta

For Q, there's always the Quagga, an extinct relation of the zebra.

Ohio table-shag man gets six months

Odd...

Wasn't it the neighbours who recorded him and thus were "disseminating harmful material"?

Canadian runs up $85,000 mobe bill

The problem with gouging and unethical behaviour is international.

There was recently a similar case here in New Zealand where someone got caught by the fine print, and the company was billing him for the last week's 'free' downloads, about NZ$85k. He estimated that it would be NZ$300k or more if they billed him for the entire month.

The kicker was that he was using a prepaid phone, and was in the habit of putting between NZ$10 and NZ$20 onto his account per month. He assumed, naturally enough, that if he exceeded the amount on his phone then he wouldn't have any more wireless access. But despite the fact that the company in question, Vodaphone, shouldn't have allowed further access once the prepaid amount was gone, they still were going to bill him for the entire lot.

They canceled his bill once a consumer rights TV program got onto the case on the victims behalf.