Bang go Telecom's five-9's of reliability.
At the rough conversion of one hour per decade, they just blew 40 years worth!
I hear that internet traffic between ISPs across town in Wellington was also affected, which rather begs the question about the recent "business" decisions regarding peering.

In relation to the current campaign by farmers about public access, my friend Off-line Peter said:

The small, but very real, problem in the system is that in our zeal to lock up the land we carelessly ring-fenced much of the public estate. Consequently a lot of public land is only accessible through private property.

Farmers who cast themselves as victims of a heartless government in the fight about access, have for years possessed extraordinary and unwarranted powers over these public areas.

They are quick to remind us of the goodwill they exercise in granting permission to a fisherman or tramper to cross their paddocks, without acknowledging the public’s tolerance of a situation where they have power to decide who enjoys the riverbank or mountain wilderness at the back of their property.

Well said Peter ...

For as long as I can remember the Japanese have been killing whales "for scientific purposes".
In all that time I have never hear *what* science they are conducting.
Science is usually carried out to prove or disprove a proposition.
About all they are doing is proving the gullibility of the rest of the world, who have politely stood by and listened to the bullshit and lies as they rape the seas.
... and this latest justification they are coming up with, that the Australians kill kangaroos, is just as fatuous.
Have they NO shame?

At ${WORK} we frequently work in collaborative documents using (shudder) MS-Word. The little red squiggly line often indicates spelling mistakes, and frequently marks technical jargon it doesn't understand.
Sometimes it misses obvious spelling mistakes, but checking in your local dictionary is not the way to fix it.
In this document, three different types of errors are imbedded in the document, and would need to be removed.



How?
1. Has a separate Style applied, which has "Do not check spelling" applied to it.
2. "Do not check spelling" is applied to a selection (the first instance of "fxt")
3. The word "spolling" was added to the ignore list for that document ("Ignore all"; then save document).

Fix:
Any new document that you receive from someone else ... (a real pain):
Tools - Options - "Spelling & Grammar" - "Recheck document" (fixes 3)
"Select all" - Tools - Language - "Set Language" - "deselect 'Do not check spelling or grammar'" (fixes 2)
Review any unusual styles attached to document.

Complain VERY LOADLY about the poor spelling skills of your co-workers.

What the recording industry refers to as "piracy" will only increase and they only have themselves to thank.
So what are the recording "industry" actually contributing to music?
1. Recording Studios
2. Publicity
3. Publishing
4. Distribution
5. Profits = Increased cost to the consumer
6. Copy-protection systems.
If you set your goals modestly, the first four can now be sourced without the contribution of a recording company, and the last two are not in the artists' interests.
As I see it, artists will increasingly work around the recording companies and act for themselves.
They are capable of organising local concerts for themselves and with the increased availability of low-cost technology; self publishing is more of an option.
Distribution? Internet distribution is an increasing reality, allowing purchase of downloads, and ordering of CDs to be posted.
This behaviour will see musicians operating more and more on the local level, NZ being a good size to call "local", but not constraint.
As the big companies continue to pursue DRM, they will more and more protect only the "international mega-stars", many of which are constructs of the companies anyway, while increasingly artists will dodge around the system, and connect directly with their audience.
At the retail level, a limited range of "approved" CDs only will be available from chain stores with bulk purchasing power (check out your local K-Mart or Warehouse CD department as an example).
The power to break free is in the hands of the artists, they just don’t recognise it, because they are being browbeaten by the recording companies to play *their* game.

And what about this Digital Rights Management (DRM) that the big companies are pursuing?
The only thing that these copy protection schemes will do is stop the CD from being played on a whole bunch of machines and prevent the ripping of the tracks straight from the disk.
As Aardvark suggested, even Telecom are encouraging people to connect their CD player to the audio-in port, and record their music onto their computer.
so, instead of taking about 15 minutes to convert the file, it'll happen in real time.
Why is the audio industry spending so much money doing this when it'll fail anyway, no matter what system is used?
Why are they treating every member of the buying public like a criminal?
You know how aggravating it is to insert a new CD, only to hear your drive whirring and grinding, and making noises that leave you wondering if the drive is actually being damaged?
Audio CDs are frequently impulse purchases. While in town, browse a music store and maybe buy something.
If you can't trust that CDs are actually usable in your CD drives, you don't buy them anymore. Bookstores are a more reliable place to spend browsing money now.
"The frustrating thing is that the RIAA then blames these lost sales on "piracy", when it's directly due to their own stupid tricks."
Why spend millions of dollars on a system that may piss people off if it doesn't work properly and is bound to fail?
So what about when I attempt to play a CD from a non-administrative account without the ability to install drivers? Well it seems that DRM is being integrated into the Intel chip, and will create another access level above administrator. Whatever program is on the CD would have a digital signature approved by the vendor. The OS would then trust the executable, even though you might not.
So the system and this access level, controlled by the DRM vendors, will have ultimate control over features even administrator (or root) can't access! One flaw in the DRM, and we can say goodbye to functional anti-virus software, software firewalls and intrusion detection. Unless, of course, those are managed by (and have the privileges of) the DRM system too. Then that will have the effect of making DRM even more complex and create more weaknesses.
Of course, no virus writer or hacker will *ever* be able to exploit flaws in DRM. Yeah right!
... weren't the original computer viruses spawned from software copy protection systems?
(In the tradition of unauthorised copying, bits of this post were plagerised.)

Typical, I pick today to do the updates on my Linux box, and all the update servers are going hard out 'cos Core4 has just been released. Ahhhhh!

In this Herald report

"A new computer program that tracks how people navigate their way around giveaway disks has been attacked for the way it collects information."

These disks send their noxious messages home *without telling you* if you happen to explore these disks on a machine attached to the internet.
In their defence, their "Marketing Manager" (a role which instantly flags ethical standards and intelligence as pre-requisites) is quoted as telling us all the things it doesn't do: no programs downloaded, no personal information gathered, etc. I should bloody well hope not!
But he doesn't seem to understand the ethical difference between tracking web-page usage and covert reporting of a user's session with the contents of a disk.
The information is basically the same, but the means for acquiring the data is VERY different.
A web-page is on a publicly accessible server, and so we are free to examine it *knowing* that the proprietor is watching (just like wares on display on a road-side stall).
With this disk, we are relying on their ethical standards, to *only* report back the navigation route. Establishing such a path for information to be reported without the users' knowledge, leaves an opportunity for abuse to occur if controls on behaviour are not maintained.
Our "Marketing Manager" friend has already alluded to the fact that some of their customers were keen to gather that sort of data.
So the only control is their own self-restraint, no external monitoring: ... and unfortunately uncontrolled businesses are prone to become money-grubbing mercenaries (it's their nature), so the assurances are, basically, insufficient.
Gathering data without consent *IS* immoral, and I suspect there should be some legality that could be stroked here, ... it's still spying.

Now this has got a real select audience ...
Radio-Free RFC

"... sponsored by telnet, bringing you 83 incompatible or inconsequential options since 1983. When you think square pegs for round holes; think telnet"

... sad to say; I found some interesting and amusing listening here ...

... and for all you trivial pursuit freaks.
Wikitrivia is a fine place to waste way too much time!
Now you don't have to wait for "trivs-nite", you can do it at home!

"Wow! Look at the how big that is!"

Getting rid of the chlorine smell after swimming laps.
So after a bit of research (googling) it became evident that the smell is associated with the chlorine attaching to your hair, so the more body hair you have, the bigger the problem I guess; clean shaven girlies are not so troubled by this.
The other interesting fact is that sodium thiosulphate is the key to the solution.
First step: I have run some road-tests with a proprietory product ("UltraSwim" shampoo, sourced from the Swim shop opposite the Freyberg pool) and it works a treat. However at $18 a bottle I'm not keen on keeping this up.
The next step is to source some thiosulphate and concoct my own by mixing it with some (considerably cheaper) off the shelf shower gel at somewhere between 2% to 10% w/w. (As you can see the recipe needs a litttle refining).
The only source of supply I have found so far is $36 for 25Kg of thiosulphate ... a little more than I need I suspect, but what a bargain for a lifetime supply!!!!

The new honey monkey project which is getting some publicity at the moment has severe limitations, if not doomed to failure.
The whole project is limited in scope, it only uses Windows XP systems (O/S specific exploits) and the MS operators are going to pick the sites they go to!
Like that's gonna work ... One of the prime vectors for these exploits involves phishers pointing their e-mail scams to private sites, not site which would be discovered by exploring links.

The only threat to the phishers from this project is that MS might develop a fix to block their latest exploit (a slow response, which they can develop a response to), or start legal proceedings (an even slower process, which will not be able to touch these fast movers in the dodgy parts of the 'net).

The whole thing is more a PR exercise than anything useful!