No worries. Tourism NZ is already planning it's next promotion around this one: "Visit NZ - Free accommodation and food!*"

*Some conditions apply:

• - Must bring encrypted electronic device, but no password or key
• - Places are limited. First in first served
• - Eligibility will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Judges descision is final
• - Three months maximum stay
• - Must be 18 years or older

The first thing I thought was "wouldn't it cool if this could answer my emails!". Given the banality of most emails, and the terseness of the medium, most people wouldn't even notice the difference between me or a bot answering. That leaves me more time to do real work. Most of my bosses emails are along the lines of "how far are with this project?" and "can we have a meeting about this?", and most of my responses are along the lines of [delete], [ignore], "still working on that", "OK, finished", and "of course we can have another meeting". It would be great if something took a meeting request from my boss, checked my diary, confirmed and recorded the date and time, or suggested some other date and time if not available. Even a dismal bot should be able to pull that off convincingly. And given the shitty replies I get from tech support I'm surprised if companies aren't doing this already.

I can't even control my meat arms when I',m sober.

Your rant is based on a figure derived from an annual report of the National Crime Records Bureau of India. That figure is for reported rapes. Yes, India does appear to have a relatively low rate of reported rapes. But that doesn't mean that the actual rape rate is low for so many reasons. Reported rapes are a subset of all rapes. The more unreported rapes there are, the smaller that subset.

If there is a stigma associated with rape, for example if a young woman can't find a husband if everyone in her village knows she was raped, then there is a strong incentive not to report a rape. If a woman knows the perpetrator will blame her, and the police are likely to believe the perpetrator is right, then she may simply not bother to report the rape. Most rapes are committed by a relative or close friend of the family, so there may be family pressures not to report the rape. Rape within marriage is not even considered rape in India, so there is simply nothing to report because a judge can't do anything. I am sure there are many more reasons why a rape would not be reported.

So, officially a woman is raped in India every 20 minutes. In reality? Probably a lot more. The fact that so many women feel they can't even report a rape deserves everyones outrage. Maybe if India was a little less concerned with how the rest of the world sees it, and a little more concerned with actually solving its problems, then the rest of the world wouldn't make such an issue of it.

It really should be a big deal. We still have major cred overseas as that tiny country with the balls to tell the yanks to fuck off with their nukes. They still haven't forgiven us for that. Yet here we are helping them damage our own reputation as a fair, fearless, and independent nation. I guess we don't need our reputation when negotiating trade deals with other countries anymore. Maybe if we grovel really hard the US will throw us some scraps instead. Look at Australia (six prime ministers no less) begging Indonesia to save the lives of two of it's citizens on death row, a year after Australia was revealed to have spied on Indonesias’ president on behalf of the US. We don't need that. Reputation matters.

I am really happy the jury acquitted the activists who sabotaged the Waihopai spy station. It shows we haven't gone completely limp yet.

Good idea. Took me a few millets just to get my head around the summary.

I found a fairly in-depth interview with this guy where he admits he actually wants to be famous. Check this out:

There are too many other nuggets in there, here is just one...

Gonna have a real hard time finding work now buddy. And you can forget about finding a girlfriend for a long time too. Sadly, I don't think this is the last we hear of this scum.

Dammit. Commenting to undo 'Troll' mod. Sorry.

That brings back childhood memories. I spent part of my childhood in Holland. There is a lot of water, and in winter it freezes thick enough to walk on. So I had to ride my bike on the ice of course :-) The hard smooth surface offers very low roll resistance. I learned the hard way you can't accelerate too hard, or brake too hard, or turn too sharp... then bad things happen. That just leaves going crazy fast in a straight line.

Dang, you must think humans are special or something. I can't think of a single period in history when people weren't mindlessly killing each other, let alone other animals.

Right now we have Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Central African Republic, and Israel vs Palestine. Mexico just killed 43 students, plus countless other drug cartel related deaths we never hear about. A few years ago it was Libya, Egypt, and Mali. Since the end of the second world war... Pol Pot comes to mind, for killing 25% of the people of Cambodia in the 1970s. Rwanda genocide wiped out between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Rwandans during a 100 day period in 1994. Vietnam War, nuff said. The first and second world wars were simply meat grinders. The Nazis hardly even bothered to disguise the herding and butchering like animals of thousands of civilians per day.

Humans are animals. We strut around in our fancy clothes, scratching ourselves, picking our noses, and pointing bang sticks at the other tribe.

Some links to pages describing Tempora.

I think the fact that UK Defence officials issued a Defence Advisory Notice to the BBC requesting they don't mention certain espionage programs, which may-or-may-not exist, basically confirms that they in fact do exist. It's damn near an official acknowledgement even. Same goes for the US Army restricting personel access to The Guardian website since they started mentionain PRISM and Tempora. Well done chaps!

Sounds like my boss :-)

I should add:
7) Is obiedient, listens, and doesn't talk back.
8) Stays technically current, but not on company time.
9) Gives their manager credit for good results. If the manager gets promoted, they will want you right behind them, making them look good.

Agreed. We need transparency so we can hold people accountable. It would help level the playing field and rebuild some much needed trust in the government too.

Too many countries have secret laws and secret courts giving thier secret services immunity from their countries own laws. If it looks like these agencies are breaking laws, it is because they ARE, and because they are ALLOWED to do so. But the average citizen is not allowed to know the content of these secret laws, or witness secret court proceedings. I want to see these secret laws so I can know exactly what laws the secret services are allowed to break. I want to be able to print some of these laws, walk into my nearest politicians office, drop it on his desk, and have a very frank discussion about it. Who voted for these laws, why, do they even know the content themselves, what are they going to do about it, etc.

There must be ways to see a copy of every secret law. National Library? University law libraries? Do law firms have access to them? Lets shine a light on the cockroaches and watch them scuttle.