Sigh... so much misinformation.

National debt has not doubled over this time. Soverign debt has increased from 120bn (April) to 134bn (end of July). https://www.aap.com.au/nz-nati.... Also, check out the GDP graphs above.

Big Picture: Personally I am a believer in counter-cyclical spending. Research has shown that the best time for governments to spend is during crises, and then to pay back debt during good times. This keeps the economy going and people in jobs. Fiscal conservatives tend to take the opposite approach, which bucks research (but then they often believe in trickle down too, which is thoroughly debunked).

There's been no evidence that the government "continuously lies to the public". What there is evidence of are human mistakes throughout a complex system - people have escaped, people have been given compassionate leave inappropriately, border workers were not tested enough to name a few.

So lets examine escapees:

People arriving are kept in hotels, which were *never* designed to be secure - in fact just the opposite. It might be impossible to stop escapes 100% without switching to jails, which I dont agree with. However from a risk perspective almost everyone is doing the right thing and staying put. We have had no community transmission from arrivals.

What about testing border workers?

There's been no widespread community transmission from either the people in quarantine or the workers around them. Perhaps we've been lucky... personally I think its working pretty well and getting better.

As to your comment about controlling the media - coming from the Key era when not only was messaging strongly controlled, but access to even Official Information was restricted via a set of games... this government is a step forward so far. I'm not going to say they are perfect by a long shot, but their big picture moves so far have been right on the money.

Actually, both Labour and National (two leading parties) have tended to leave the NZ economy in relatively good shape. National have a brand of providing fiscal responsibility, but if you go back over the last few cycles, both have done a good job (when examining purely on economic strength).

Note that in all cases, they are also at the mercy of global economics.

Personally I prefer a more socialised government providing stronger social services(mental health, cheap healthcare, backstops for people losing jobs etc) plus very strong environmental support, so I tend to support Green/Labour. I too am glad that Labour were in control at this time - National would not have been brave enough to shut the country down for fear of upsetting businesses.

Yeah... so while its true that they will repair... I have been told it will take 2+ weeks, likely much more, to get repairs done. Apparently they will disassemble the mac to examine, *then* they will order parts. They will *not* put it together again so I can keep using it. It must now wait, disassembled, until parts arrive.

Sadly, being without my work machine for many weeks just doesn't work. So I carry an external keyboard everywhere.

If my mac exploded, I would walk down the road and get another immediately. Restore from backup and I'm going within hours. With this maddening keyboard crapfest, I just can't afford the time away.

Checked with 3 certified repair shops here. They will perform the warranty repair, but I need to give them the machine for 7-10 working days, minimum. Could be longer. So I'm out my primary work machine for 2+ weeks!

Turns out they will open it and look, and *only then* order parts. I have offered them money if they will close it up again so I can keep working. Nope. I'm guessing they expect to destroy something when looking inside it.

I don't think Etherium and their Smart Contracts may ever be ready for the prime-time, at least not without a major shift in technology.

The problem is the code that gets written to express a contract. Code *always* has bugs, and it requires a great deal of knowledge and expertise to debug. Often these bugs are just so subtle that they live for years inside code - and often no-one looks.

How is joe-average supposed to invest in and trust a smart contract - there is no way they can verify that the code is correct. I'm a (hopefully better than average) coder and I didn't spot the issue in the Parity wallet that caused a big loss a few days ago (hint - internal methods accidentally made public). I did look. Ditto for the DAO hack.

Bitcoin has a steady code base that is moving forward in increments, being written/managed by a small number of experienced people (theoretically anyone could check it, but realistically only a few do). Its in a much steadier state. Smart contracts are made by anyone. Very few people understand the tech well enough to verify. Probably even fewer actually look. There will be bugs.

Even worse... Etherium devs just keep forking the blockchain each time one of these hacks occurs. I expect they will do the same again. Ick. I suggest avoiding like the plague until they figure out how to remove the chance of bugs in smart contracts.

The first burglar or house fire will remove all your 'backups'.

Personally I load all RAW photos onto my main linux PC (which uses RAID 1 HDDs). The best photos, once edited and polished, are sync'd to the PVR and Mac (where they then move to the iPads for display). I also run full & incremental backups of the PC, Mac and core PVR files via wifi down to a DNS-323 with RAID 1 hidden in the garage.

Lastly I take an encrypted snapshot every month to work.

PC/HDD crashes - RAID will probably save me. No loss of work.
PC explodes - Garage backup will save me. Loss of (at most) 1 days work.
Burglar - Garage backup will save me. Loss of 1 days work.
House and Garage burn to the ground. Loss of at most 1 months work.
Its all automated (except taking the encrypted snapshot offsite).

Have you actually *read* the iPhone contract? I'm surprised they didn't require blood.

When I got my iPhone, I asked to read the contract.
The store workers had never had anyone ask, so they didn't know where it was.
Took them a long time to find a copy.
It was pretty nasty, but from memory (they wouldn't let me keep their
only copy now that they knew where it was) the worst section was something of the form:

"if we suspect you may have altered your phone, you agree to let us cancel
your phone service, and you will keep paying out the rest of your term."

Suspicion (not proof, just if they felt like it) was enough to give them the right
to cancel my phone service (and reclaim the phone phone IIRC) and I had to
keep paying. the monthly fee. And there was no
appeal or ability to protest your innocence.

You are correct - Its the APPS.

If this is a business device, the killer app is OneNote. Sure tablets dont suit a lot of people, but if you want to take notes, do research, read and link information, be mobile etc... Onenote is it. Evernote is not. (right idea, wrong execution). There are also niche applications (medical etc), but from a general business focus... do Onenote.

If its a consumer device - create an open iPad. BUT you will also need to ensure that Music, Reading, Web browsing, Gaming, Sharing work brilliantly. Only Apple has really succeeded with that, as long as you live in their ecosystem. If you can made those apps work openly **and** get the media providers on board, then you stand a chance.

Definition of a geek: You are reading slashdot while at the pub with your friends. Probably on your iphone.

So photo software has been offering facial recognition for a while. When this all gets uploaded to google, you're going to be able to ask (where was X on the given date). Cool. Scary.

I worked in Houston for a few years - over off Nasa Road One.
I used to walk to work - wasn't that far. A mile or so...

Two things stand out:
a) every few days, someone would stop and ask if I was ok and whether I needed a lift.
On one hand, it was great to see so many caring people. But it just shows that they never
saw people walk before.

b) the path actually went up to people's front doors, so I had to either walk on the road, or follow the path into people's
property. Weird. Again - not built for pedestrians.

DARN: Slashcode stole the end of my post...

Can someone propose a cheap system (LESS THAN $300),
that uses low power (LESS THAN 40W full power) and actually move
GREATER THAN 20MB/sec (which of course requires Gbit LAN).

Ok - so we have had people proposing
- buffalo link station
- alix boards
- sheevaplug
- EPIA 5000
- WRT54G
- Mac Mini
among others. The thing these *all* have in common is
completely horrible LAN/IO performance. None (except for a mac mini
and perhaps the EPIA 5000) can come close to saturating a 100Mb LAN.
Certainly only the MacMini has half a chance at making use of a Gb LAN.
Remember this guy wants NFS, so one presumes he actually wants
to move reasonable files around at a reasonable rate.

I've got a low cost LAN drive, and get, at best, 2-3MB/s out of
it over a 100Mb LAN - about 1/6th what I expected. I turned it into
a remote backup drive where the ugly performance is ok.

So lets rephrase the question: can someone suggest a cheap system
( 20MB/sec (which of course requires Gbit LAN).

1) Whatever you do, kids will get around it. You can only do a good job of security a box if you have physical security. And you dont.
2) If you do something and it fails, you are liable. So if some kid gets porn all over his Laptop despite your best efforts, his parents are coming after you.
3) Spend your time protecting your severs and dealing with the fact that you are going to have a lot of worm/virus laden laptops coming into your LAN.