The judge has also: Ordered details on any other subjects caught in the illegal surveillance, allowed for Dotcom and his co-accused to sue the New Zealand police and spy agency for damages and allowed for those damages to include a copy of all data seized during the raid
(Echelon is an intelligence network of five countries: New Zealand, The United States, Australia, Canada and Britain)
Current politics in New Zealand are unlikely to see this a terror or hacking issue. This is the agency responsible for the jobless, and they are a very low priority mainly used for political diversion.
There is no excuse for some of the security errors we have seen. Especially not government incompetence being equal or greater.
It is true that startups should not concentrate on perfect security, as supplying something the buyers want should be absolute priority number one, but even then there's no reason to not at least get the basics right if there is any kind of sensitive data involved.
Working out the licensing for this is quite the challenge.
It uses a duel licensing (AGPLv3 / Commercial) setup. How AGPLv3 applies to web applications is a significant grey area, and could imply an expectation that all javascript code of the application needs be AGPL also.
Answers in the forum are vague and no clear indication has been given to when a commercial license is is not required.
TL;DR: Want to use this in a web app? Pay for a commercial license or consult a lawyer
It'll let you know what you can charge based on your circumstances - consider it a bottom line figure. Markets are such that supply and demand will alter this (if your skills are short supply, like being one of the few developers in the area, it's likely you can charge more)
It wasn't done in the same bills related to Christchurch. Rather, during the 'overtime' to deal with the aftermath of the Christchurch quake, this bill was promoted quickly also.
Doing this speeds up the process and avoids a huge amount of oversight, consideration and public input, and has very much caught the NZ public by surprise.
It's unlikely we (NZ public) will get organised enough to change this, and past laws with significant public outcry (which this doesn't have yet) have stayed without review, as referendum's are not binding in NZ.
NZ does have a major point of difference from the US - the courts will often "award" the costs of the case from a successful defendant to the originator.
This tends to discourage abuse of the legal system for intimidation, as there is a risk it will backfire on you and you will end up paying for all lawyers involved.
It's a much smaller risk to the side with money. If you didn't have that much money to begin with, you may not even be able to afford defense, or you have to rack up huge lawyer bills for an uncertain outcome. And in the case of companies you can't even represent yourself, you have to have a lawyer. Also, awarding costs may or may not happen and is separate from the outcome of the case. So it might discourage _some_ abuse, but not much.
Lately, I see we don't give points for meaningfulness more than for popularity.
Perhaps we could measure meaningfulness by the size of the tree of replies and assign karma according to that. That would even solve the post-to-upvote ratio problem.
I just don't know what to do with the downvote-for-disagreement thing. Not everyone regard it as a problem, but I'm not sure I agree.
The very best submissions get virtually no discussion.
One measurement to make might be the votes divided by comments.
Let V = votes
Let C = comments
Let IT = 1.0
Let R = V/C
If R > IT then the article is "worth IT"
Let "the paper it's written on" be 0.1.
If R < "the paper it's written on" then it's not worth the paper it's written on (not that it's written on paper, but you get the idea).
But all this is tinkering around the edges, and doesn't feel like it's significant. Perhaps a new model of how a site like this works at all is necessary.
"The very best submissions get virtually no discussion."
I'm not sure I agree with you on that. The best stories produce a high volume of high-quality discussion. Your proposed algo punishes submissions that generate discussion, which seems to be the opposite of what's desirable.
I have to agree with RiderOfGiraffes -- an article with a high number of comments relative to points usually indicates that the article is more opinionated than informative, since most everyone who upvoted it posted their personal reaction to it. Although they are popular, I feel these are usually low-value articles and discussions.
Additionally, it's very hard to have a high-quality discussion that is also high-volume. Once an article's comments get over several pages long, you can be sure that most commenters are not reading everything before commenting, so you get a lot of similar comments. Sometimes this is valuable (e.g. "Ask HN"), but most of the time it just worsens the signal-to-noise ratio.
Maybe we just need a semantic distinction between editorials (opinion pieces) and articles (investigative/fact-laden pieces)? Perhaps make editorials count for less, in the same way self-posts currently do?
I think those good stories that generate good discussion still get more points than comments. With the really good stories, no matter how many people comment, more people upvote, because there are lurkers.
It's not perfect, but I'm finding it a pretty good predictor.
Judging meaningfulness by the size of the tree won't work. Looking at which threads have a large number of replies, that's more of an indicator of controversialness.
(Echelon is an intelligence network of five countries: New Zealand, The United States, Australia, Canada and Britain)