Kiwiblog

Poneke laments how Waterfront Watch’s campaign against the Wellington Hilton, has meant no waterfront development is likely for a decade. Instead we are left with those awful tin sheds.

Bruce Simpson at Aardvark covers the efforts of Associated Press to claim that even using their headlines is a breach of the US DMCA. This may be very significant if bloggers are not able to significantly quote articles in order to critique them.

Whale Oil detects more links between The Standard and Labour or more specifically labour.co.nz. The Standard responds. A great thread for those who get hot with talk of DNS and MX records

The Economist looks at the school system in Finland and Sweden.

And since I’m coming this far north, I want to take in Sweden too. That social-democratic paradise has carried out school reforms that make free-market ideologues the world over weak at the knees. In the 1990s it opened its state-education system to private competition, allowing new schools to receive the same amount for each pupil as the state would have spent on that child.

The Dim-Post has some solutions for the South Auckland crime wave:

• Limit numbers on all polytechnic courses teaching home invasion and armed robbery techniques.
• Increase existing levels of sedatives and oral contraceptives in Manukau water supply.
• Create an economic disincentive to homicide by amending the Emissions Trading Scheme to double carbon fees on vehicles used during a murder
• Introduce cultural sensitivity training to South Aucklands migrant communities teaching them to be more open and tolerant towards the kiwi tradition of random assault and pointless execution style killings.
• Point to multiple Asian murders as irrefutable statistical evidence for sending ‘em all back.

Also, finally not a blog but of interest to EFA watchers is this note of a meeting between Federated Farmers and the Electoral Commission over the EFA.

Bruce Simpson writes on Aardvark about Usenet:

Usenet newsgroups used to be one of the cornerstone parts of the internet.

What started out as a relatively small collection of NNTP-based message exchange groups quickly grew into a massive list numbering over 100,000 separate areas of special interest.

Back in the early to mid 1990s, when usenet was at its peak, I used to spend at least an hour a day trawling through my favourite newsgroups discussing things such as guns, engineering, science and other subjects.

Indeed, I made many very long-lasting friendships through usenet and the information I gathered there was invaluable.

But I’ve been awfully busy for the last few years and hadn’t really spent any time in the newsgroups until last week when I decided to revisit my old haunts.

What a horrible shock I got.

Gone is the wealth of friendly discussion, gone are many of the old faces, gone is the useful information that used to proliferate. All of this wonderful stuff seems to have been totally eclipsed by an incredible tide of spam. So much spam in fact, that I doubt I’ll ever use usenet again.

It used to be that anyone posting spam to a usenet newsgroup would immediately be pounced on by system admins and dealt with in a very short space of time.

Now it appears as if nobody really cares.

Usenet looks to have become a ghost-town.

The occasional on-topic post appears, like a ball of tumbleweed rolling through a sea of decaying infrastructure and snake-oil salesmen.

I was also a Usenet regular from 1996 to 2004. More than a regular. I helped set up some new nz.* groups, took part in efforts to fight against spammers and other Usenet vandals, and even helped newbies by answering questions in the new users group. And met some very fine people through Usenet. I used to spend almost as much time on Usenet as I now spend blogging.

But once I found blogs, I started to use Usenet less and less as the signal to noise ration was so much higher on blogs than in Usenet.  And one day I suddenly realised I had not been into Usenet for over a month.  Today I only check it out a couple of times a year.