My My..

As an economic immigrant myself, I like to think that I have some idea of the issues associated with the subject.

There is no doubt that two factors do tend to cause some confusion in this debate.

1.. The type of person who migrates is probably a little different than the person who does not. (This is before we consider race or other factors).

2.. When you come into a new situation, you often see things that the folk that have lived there don't. The New Zealand farmers have an expression that I will dilute to "There's nothing like a stranger to make you think". In other words a tourist quite often asks dumb questions that give you a new perspective on what you are doing..

So you have people coming in who are different and asking dumb questions or worse.. seizing opportunities missed by the locals and this is unsettling.

At this stage a lot of people would criticize the locals for not being accommodating. I believe there is a need for folk that just stay and be. They are the folk that underpin society.

Newbies to any society should make the majority of concessions and should respect the contributions made to provide the fertile soils they can till.

You have forgotten

The whole purpose, and only purpose of the law is to shift the cost of policing from the rich (who benefit) to the poor (who don't).

Remember the Law has nothing to do with Justice.

It's the same the whole world over

It's the poor what gets the blame

It's the rich what gets the pleasure

Ain't it all a bloomin' shame?

A light observation...

As such a late-comer to democracy (when did blacks get full rights in all electorates?) the United States Citizen still has a belief in the law that beggars Saints in their God.

I have travelled with truck drivers and such in the southern states who thought that not paying taxes was the equivalent of being a traitor..

I'm afraid there are 1.5 billion commonwealth citizens who will never understand them .. But still think they are pretty! :-)

Lewis IS the Green Lantern!

http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/5379003/Deadly-radiation-pockets-found-at-Fukushima

We know that REALLY BAD nuclear accidents will hardly ever happen. But same morons who place reactors on the sea shore and earthquake faults are the same folk calculating the risks...

My problem is this: If the worst happens, I feel sorry for the folk that die within a short time of the event. But I feel obligated to ensure that nothing my generation does should lead to folk dying for thousands of years... High Level Waste - Even a relatively small number of tonnes will do this.

Of Course...

I hope we can now rely on Lewis Page to address this issue ..

He can tell us how we are all being ridiculous and ignorant even caring about it!

So what if a 70 year old grandmother gets bankrupted because she has to fight a spurious court case over her grandsons internet use? Its not as bad as someone being murdered is it?

Comparisons like the above help us put our worries in perspective and Lewis is the expert at these.

Lewis knows that the authorities always act with our best interests at heart, are absolutely far thinking and competent so his defence of Sony and their ilk should make for authoritative and soothing reading.

We know in the future that any article by Lewis will be the reference work on the subject and will reflect the only right thinking on the subject. This will be regardless of anyone having other opinions, knowledge or experience. So I look forward to him taking this issue with his usual even handed approach.

I guess my concerns are:

1.. Park your Nuclear Power Station on the beach and then don't allow for tsunami... Hmmm pretty dumb for a country that invented the name of the phenomenon...

2.. Lie to the public about whats going on in such a way that you are found out almost immediately and so lose any credibility.

3.. With nuclear power the problem is not the likelihood of radiation release killing people immediately. Its an accident poisoning a wide area of ground for generations. Comparisons against Dam disasters or equivalents neglect this aspect. Shit happens - but with a nuclear accident it just keeps on keeping on...

Oh... and by the way.. as an occasional Christchurch resident I can assure everyone that the magnitude of the quake has less to do with any damage than you would imagine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercalli_intensity_scale

The Japan had a slightly smaller MMI on average than the Christchurch shake because it was deeper and further away. The tsunami though caused the enormous tragedy.

Its a shame the designers didn't look back through Japanese history.

Just my thoughts

I don't have a tablet but the tablet I will buy will have:

1.. The best resolution

2.. Oh, hang on, 1 just disqualified everyone else!

Why isn't Xoom half Apples price? It should sit way under Apples pricing umbrella as it is less sophisticated in terms of design and usability and it is the pretender to the throne.

To compare Apple with anything else, for a start it has to have an equivalent display. Thats pretty much what a tablet is.

Of course

The Cubans have proven that the V8 can actually last forever - properly maintained.

Also the straight six flathead...

I have not seen the figures.. How many tonnes of CO2 did that last Icelandic volcano spew?...

"gams developers?"

I leave THAT to folk with more wit than me...

The Dorian Gray Defense

I am so good looking.. I cannot be guilty of anything...

Well, hell.. I agree. Let her go, you monsters!

I dont have any problems using a Microsoft Browser

Its just that its soooo sloooowwwww compared to Chrome or Firefox.

If Microsoft want their product used, maybe they should be trying to deliver a better product?

I remember...

The Callan episodes where his death gets faked.. and then he came back. The pathos of Lonely being at the side of the grave..

Brilliant. He was one of those very few number of actors where you will watch anything with him in it - simply because you know he is in it.

I never knew how much of a fan I was till he died..

Pre-emptive multitasking?

If Windows really had a proper implementation of preemptive multitasking it would be fantastic. As someone who has used mainframes and mid range machines which have real operating systems - You have to gasp at the resources microsoft steal to do very little as far as an OS is concerned.

Just imagine if Windows really had a supervisor - If it could manage I/O controllers.. It will never happen but still one can dream...

Imagine if your mouse never stuttered, attaching additional USB devices did not slow or stop running processes, loading a DVD happened without disrupting a business program. Wouldn't it be great if networking was assigned to a separate I/O processor managed by a supervising windows process. Evidence show Windows is decades away from this...

@dale_richards

"If SuperFetch is doing its job properly"

- Which it never does because its not designed to make things faster. Its designed to load stuff into memory, slowing your currently running processes with its excessive I/O.

Simply put. If SuperFetch worked on Vista, there would be a way of turning it off to prove it.

Give me unallocated RAM because Microsoft software does NOT reliably free the RAM stolen by its processes because it thinks it would be a good idea to load them.

Because you can't turn it off and prove its effect, SuperFetch remains a tax on your machine..

If you believe otherwise, thats it. Belief.

Vista runs slower than XP on the same hardware. Thats all the proof I need about "SuperFetch"

@dale Richards

Sorry - I was just shown how to disable "SuperFetch" on Vista.

Unfortunately there is no way (that I know) of stopping Exchange and SQL Server from indulging in the same activity...

Chrome does worse

By displaying the sites last visited on its new tab, Chrome shows your boss you are looking at job sites, your children you look at porn sites or your wife you are looking at new boat sites!!!

Opera defaulted to allowing me to choose what appeared - Chrome is to bloody clever by half! I will be deleting it.. Another example of a company moving from listening to its users to telling its users ...

As tempting...

As it is to ask whether the donors name was Lily...

I concur with the general tone. Steve is a talented guy who has made some brilliant decisions and created some really neat stuff.

If I had his money I would feel a responsibility and a desire to spend the rest of my time with my family - if he goes into work it just pure passion.

Stay as well as possible for as long as possible Steve.. You have been an inspiration for a long time..

Well..well..well..

Gartner says:

I will give a decent donation to a charity if people can point to a real prediction Gartner has made that they have not been paid for.

AS/400 vs ?

The AS/400 was to many customers the Vista of IBM. Slow, overpriced, buggy, with difficult and time consuming management processes.

Although you are correct in saying that the AS/400 was a continuation of S/38 technology, most applications for the AS/400 were originally written for the System /36 which the AS/400 was meant to replace. It didn't. In fact the System /36 continued to be sold as an AS/400 model for the next ten years. Some applications were re-written for RPG/400 but most large packages still had huge amounts of S/36 code.

The AS/400 was the death knell for IBM in the small to medium business. It should have been a lesson for all OS suppliers. The new version of the software should be faster, with more features and better value for money. IBM went away from that with its s/36 customers.

64p for connection?????

You can buy a cell phone for that in 3rd world countries like New Zealand

Could somebody please?

The way that politicians get away with gouging the public is by hiding behind titles (Minister of Fiddles) or by articles like this that will not name them. Can someone please list the names and electorates of these miscreants?

It all down to you evil bandits who believe in and support democracy. I just wish it was only you they stole from.

Stable and completed code for Windows ...

Hey!

Thats fantastic! Stable and completed code for Windows!

Thats enough trolling I guess...

Seriously, when is Microsoft going to develop any form of respect for its customers again? At the moment shutting down or starting up Vista is a gamble as to how long it will take, memory is stolen by processes you dont want running, and everything is just kludgier than it should be.

They should realise that if they delay their customers by 30 secs by loading crap in the background thats millions of productive man hours wasted. Now if a machine takes 5 minutes to start up or shut down ...

How about they write a small kernal OS with genuine pre-emptive multitasking?

BTW neither Linux or Windows has pre-emptive multitasking.

Maybe they could ask for help from IBM's mainframe division? In the 80's and 90's those guys wrote amazing capabilities for machines with a lot less power than is now required to run Vista.

Of course it would be scary to run a desk top where programs opened quickly and crisply and they disappeared completely as quickly when you did not want them any more...