Placing this debate in the geo-political context is important - the internal pressure in most EU countries to assert their 'national identity' (real or imagined) is becoming stronger. The perception of French culture outside of France is determined mostly by watching movies I imagine - 'hey, look at all those quaint cobble stone streets, the laid-back cafes etc - we have to go there on holiday next year!!'.

The same kind of thing has been happening here in NZ - although there is no 'culture' to speak of here, the revenue from attracting tourists is ginormous and important to local economy. The govt here recently increased a taxpayer rebate for movie makers with a 'good chance of commercial success' from 15% to 25%. Yes, from taxpayer money. Apparently this is reason James Cameron decided finally to locate the new Avatar movies here.

Nobody here is complaining about where their tax dollars are going - either because they support this move, or they just don't care. Either way, if the situation was changed to taxing youtube video consumption I'm sure there'd be a riot.

yeah I know. I work in health, and we only take on HR staff who've been to medical school or can otherwise prove they have a workable theory on how to cure AIDS.

where I work all job descriptions and advertising that HR draft have to be checked off by the hiring manager - so this doesn't ring true for me. I'd pick that up in a flash and insist that 'essential skill $FOO' was moved to 'desirable skill $FOO' exactly as I told them it should be.

Right - so we're all agreed that neither android or ios fully respect our privacy?

Great, so all we need to do is stop using their products and they'll change their ways!

Right?

btw my niece thinks this is totally cool

You make an excellent point, that is often overlooked in these kinds of debates: there is no faceless spying organisation who we can consider like the Borg, it is always made up of individuals, who for some reason make a conscious decision to engage in this shitty and destructive behaviour.

I've often toyed with the idea of 'outing' people who 'innocently' contribute to the efficiency and organisation of horrible organisations like the NSA. You know - here's John, he's a nice guy, he plays softball and likes Miller Lite, his favourite movie is Deliverance, and during they day at work he spies on your email and helps innocent arab-looking people get fingered in US airports.

I'm being melodramatic but you get the point - we should hold the worker bees of these organisations to account, rather than just say 'the NSA sucks'. These people are all around us and this system could not work without them. They deserve our hatred.

+1 to this, except I'm using the gargoyle build on my tp-link.

the features on it are amazing - I have a lodger who wants to use my whole data allowance in a single day. I set gargoyle to cap his usage at x GB per month, and once it's hit he gets 32kbps. I could have set it to kick him off the lan completely but I'm a nice guy.

Not quite as nerdy as OP requested but cost $50 and damn it just works

hey thanks a lot, that's really helpful.

this whole issue came up again recently when our regional health boards decided to budget for a windows 7 upgrade. The amount of money involved is truly mind-boggling, and a vocal minority of senior docs asked about using this as an opportunity for migration to a linux environment instead. It was rejected without any investigation! There are some nuances in our set up which makes the staffing issue much harder, but still... in a 'competitive' environment where we have to do a full options analysis for spending even $10k, it's incredible that somehow the business case for windows 7 apparently just 'wrote itself'.

I'd really like to know some detail on how a migration like this works.

I work for a large healthcare organisation and - being a linux fan myself - often wondered about how it could work. Even if there were support from senior managers, there are some really practical issues to overcome...

• What about windows-based third party software? We have heaps of proprietary software for different clinical applications that will only run on windows...
• What about IT staff? We have a huge team of people with windows admin skills. Moving to linux - do they get retrained, or sacked and then we have to hire a possibly smaller team of linux admins. Do any/enough even exist in a small south pacific island nation like NZ to make this feasible??

I'd love to see some real gritty detail about exaclty how a project like this is done, and the challenges that were overcome. I know the article talks about a staged approach which makes sense, but I don't see any mention of what happened to their helpdesk teams. Grateful for any pointers.

I'd like to vote for the wonderful TP-LINK TL-WR1043ND.

Currently US$53 at amazon, I have it running the excellent Gargoyle firmware and having all kinds of fun playing with user quotas and the QOS. You can put DD-WRT on it too with some cautions.

serious question though; I thought that in order to be elected as an MP in NZ you had to be a citizen, whereas Dotcom is merely a Resident??

so for example in my iphone setting wi-fi menu, there is a button 'ask to join networks'. Underneath it says

So where the network is unknown, it won't connect automatically. But you're saying it will still nevertheless broadcast my MAC to available APs??

While I disagree with exactly what you say, I very much agree with the general thrust - balance is everything.

I work in healthcare and, more and more, I see greater and greater value attached to individuals who know not just medicine - but, medicine and business, or not just IT - but, IT and economics, and law.

On a personal level, I can say that speaking to such individuals is also much more rewarding.

err no, the driving force of our consumer culture is me and you spending our money on all this shit. No one is forcing us to do it.

I agree about disrespect and disdain but I don't believe that (what I would call) the current 'youth' generation of 18-24 year olds, about to enter the workforce really have any conception of the possible reasons put forward by parent.

I'm generalising wildly but my experience has been almost without exception that they are:

• uninformed about current affairs
• mostly uninterested in current affairs
• have no reference point to judge whether or not their freedom has been 'stolen' and thus be angst-ridden about it
• self-centred and with a huge sense of entitlement gained probably by their parents constantly telling them they're THE BEST and they can 'do anything'
• Most of all, with little humility

Rightly or wrongly, I grew up with an acute sense that I probably wasn't the best at anything - and that's fine. I was pretty good at a few things. But most of all, I think that being aware of this has allowed me to just get on with people even when we're different. I see a lot of workplace conflict being mainly about extremely poor social skills. And innovation - at some point - always has to be about working with other people.

This site was the only thing that makes my dealings with repulsive MBA fucks bearable.

I try them out in meetings and actually heard them repeated after. Seriously.