Bear's Blog New Zealand (Beta)

Softly, softly

The wave of crimes happened in South Auckland ([1],[2],[3]) are, yes, very sad, especially when all three victims are ethnic minorities.

However, I have no reason to panic.

If my memory serves me right, the crime rate have been gradually decreasing since the abolishment of capital punishment. Read the rest »

shocked

I am absolutely shocked to see ban on sex selective fertilisation is recommened by the Bioethics Council, a ministerial advisory committee to be loosen.

Whether this happens in mother's womb, or in vitro fertilisation, the practice is highly unethical, and very wrong to allow people playing god, unless it is necessary treat a genetic disorder or disease.

What fundamentally wrong about this, is that all the reasoning for this recommendation is based on the assumption that a child is the property of his/her parents so parents have the right to choose between a boy or girl, just as the freedom of choice people exercised in clothing colours when they are shopping around.

It doesn't take a moment to realise that this is very wrong.

If every one wants to exercise the freedom of choice, then the unborn babies are also human being, they also should have the right to choose whether he/she wants to be born as the child of such parents, or choose not to be born.

But babies cannot speak. So at end of the day it's the group who cannot stand for themselves suffer.

Apart from ethical issues, this will also create gender imbalance in our population.

One of the reasoning the bioethical council used to justify this selective fertilisation is that parents who had three boys or girls should have the right to have a opposite sex baby.

I have serious question on those councillors' professionalism in this field. Yes that is the fact, but the larger fact is that if I got three boys, it is very likely that a family somewhere else in New Zealand also got three girls, thus maintaining an overall natural balance.

If every one who got three boys or girls go for sex selective fertilisation, the gender balance would not become a problem. But the problem is, not everyone will act in this selfish way.

This issue has to be consulted properly, not just a report or 700 people's opinion.  Any rush on rule changes will cost us our country's future.

Sex selective fertilisation should only be allowed if it is for the well-being of the child, not parents.

8 million

That's the number of total download in yesterday's "firefox 3 download day".

Other source says that the market share of Firefox 3 reached 4% at end of the day. Quite amazing, really.

However, the firefox team still needs to keep up with the updates. I've also heard many complaints saying that it crashes regularly or incompatible to Silverlight.

Non of those happened to me, yet. What I see is a huge improvement on reducing memory leak and faster rendering speed. The only problem is, firebug plugin has yet to release a Firefox 3 compatible version.

Overall, I would highly recommend this version for people still on Firefox 2 or IE.

wow

It's around 9.40 NZST at the moment. The Firefox download day has just started about 4 hours ago. I checked the stats:

Total Downloads Region Downloads

1,423,547

New Zealand

3,628

Seems the 1.5 million Firefox 2 download record will be easily passed. I expect the number to rise rapidly in few hours as the sun rises in Asian countries such as China and Japan.

I'm in my work place so I don't have the privilege to install it now , but would definitely recommend the network administrator to upgrade Firefox on everyone's computer later.

1.4 million, that's definitely a huge number for just 4 hours' download. Friends in China who waited the download to start says the website was totally crashed before anyone can start.

Wonder if this would also set another world record: largest scale of DDOS attack in the world.

It's fine now, I downloaded it in less than half a minute.

Join us to crash the server, it's not too late.The download will end in 3.16am (UTC+8) if you are in China, or 7.16am tomorrow (NZST, UTC +12) if you are in New Zealand.

The latest near-real time download time can be found herehere

Tomorrow is the day!

The long expected Firefox 3, will be officially released on 17 June 2008, which is ... tomorrow night or early Wednesday in NZ.

There were several beta and RC versions available. I did not try it since I'm not that kind of guinea pig type software enthusiast. However, from other people's comments, I expect the Firefox 3 to be something worth you to download, and have a try (if you never used firefox before...)

I'm a long time Netscape - Firefox user. I enjoyed Firefox with its high flexibility - you can almost add any function you can imagine to your browser by simply install a plug-in.

Another reason is just do my small bit to prevent a monopoly. Netscape has been put down by AOl, which is a sad story. However, it's legacy, and the <blink> tag, continued in Firefox.

Of all the visitors to my Chinese and this blog, roughly 25% of them are using Firefox. It's a high percentage considering that Internet Explorer had a several year monopoly over the market.

The Firefox 3 release also got something quite special ... It will attempt to become "the most downloaded software in 24 hours" in Guinness World Record. 1.3 million people worldwide have pleaded that they will become part of this "download day".

Great idea to increase Firefox's publicity.

Great telly tonight

When people talking about BBC made drama, the first thing jump up in my head is that old "coronation street".

Life on Mars is quite different, though.

It's about police procedure, but with a bizarre twist: a 21st century DCI found himself woke up in 1970s after a car crash, become a DI, and confused whether he is really back in time or just in a deep comma that everything he experiences is not real.

It has a right mix of policing, fun, history, love and self discovery. The modern DCI, Sam Tyler, is in the journey to discover what happened to his family, and himself in the past.

The drama is not an attempt to portrait the 70s accurately, but has a quite wide range of music and references to current affairs and events in the 70s.

I usually only watch documentaries and news on telly, but this one is too good to miss. Season one of the series finished airing on TV ONE last year, Season two starts tonight at 8.30pm.

Highly recommended.