Kevin Rudd, commenting on the similarities between his problems in making parliament do as he says, and Obama’s predicament in passing his agenda in the US:
“But he has health reform on his agenda on Washington. We have health and hospitals reform on our agenda here in Australia. He has a thing called a troublesome Senate.
“I have a troublesome Senate as well.”
Kevin Rudd was commenting on how he understands the reason for Obama’s delayed visit and how “Australia would fit in with the President’s timetable”. So does Kevin really think that bowing to Obama (that would make a change from Obama’s habit of bowing to everyone…maybe we can have a bow-off) and insulting his own Senate will make the Senate more likely to agree with him, or is his plan to somehow make Obama the new Australian Senate?
I’m not a big fan of air travel. I’m not what you would call a “nervous flyer” but I’m not really at ease on aeroplanes either. I just don’t like the idea of having that much distance between myself and the ground, and the air pressure changes annoy me along with the bits of turbulence…flying through cloud bothers me because it removes my ability to check that we’re still a reasonable distance off the ground, and then, well this will sound nuts, but there are no signposts at 40,000 feet, and so the lack of noticeable direction bothers me.
Anyway, with that in mind, you can probably understand how something like this disturbs me in more ways than I dare to count.
An investigation is underway after a child was heard giving instructions to a pilot from the air-traffic control tower at one of America’s busiest airports.
In a recording that has been confirmed as genuine by the Federal Aviation Administration, the child makes five transmissions from John F Kennedy International Airport — with the pilots in each case all responding enthusiastically to him.
The child is clearly under supervision and being fed lines, but even so, should not be in that position. Whilst the fact that a child was in a position to give orders to pilots is a concern unto itself, the fact that the child speaks, like most children, in a not-entirely-clear voice, is a bigger concern to me due to the increased likelihood of a misunderstanding.
This disturbs me too much to think about, so I’ll turn my attention to something more palatable: the TV news set in the video.
Admittedly at this size it doesn’t come up all that brilliantly, but it’s an interesting set due to the way that it’s designed to have many different angles which all look vastly different, unlike many news sets which are designed to look like you’re stuck in one corner of a room.
I’ve highlighted the important bits here. The Red box shows the female anchor who is presenting to the camera in front of her. The view has changed changed from the camera in front of her to this overview camera, and in a moment it will zoom in on the green box where a reporter is standing in front of another camera and is about to present to it. In the yellow box, a male anchor is standing by for his next appearance.
Given the shape of the set, it wouldn’t surprise me if off-screen there is another part of the set which is used as a backdrop for some other locally-produced program. It’s not uncommon for sets to be used for multiple shows, but it is fascinating to see a single set used for the one program but with a completely different “look” depending on the angle, and especially fascinating to see the overview of the set.
Or maybe I’m just easily distracted in an effort to not be disturbed by the news story.
And it’s not as if you even need to check the news or Exhibition Park to know it. It may be under new management, but it hasn’t attracted a less hoonish crowd. (As in previous years, I am not implying that all attendees are hoons or acting like idiots, so don’t even go there.)
The increase in buffoonery on the roads of Canberra…well the inner north at least, is quite noticeable. Dickson around lunchtime was pretty bizarre from what I saw, and when I took Nattie for a walk this evening, Ainslie Avenue and surrounds weren’t an awful lot better. Notably, the majority of people that I noticed doing bizarre and stupid things had interstate number plates.
A word to the foolish (because the wise don’t need words): the police have the power to confiscate vehicles and it really is a long walk back to pretty much anywhere from Canberra. I should know, given that I walked and hitch-hiked back to Canberra from Sydney in March last year.
That’s a headline you’d never see in New South Wales, but it’s the state of affairs in Arizona where the whole implementation seems to be so badly botched that the speed camera program may very well be axed.
PHOENIX (AP) — More than a year after Arizona became the first state in the country to deploy dozens of speed cameras on highways statewide, threats to the groundbreaking program abound.
Profits are far below expectations, a citizen effort to ban the cameras is gaining steam, the governor has said she does not like the program, and more and more drivers are ignoring the tickets they get in the mail after hearing from fellow speeders that there are often no consequences to doing so.
“I see all the cameras in Arizona completely coming down ” in 2010, said Shawn Dow, chairman of Arizona Citizens Against Photo Radar, which is trying to get a measure banning the cameras on the November ballot. “The citizens of Arizona took away the cash cow of Arizona by refusing to pay.”
The Arizona Department of Public Safety introduced the cameras in September 2008 and slowly added more until all 76 were up and running by January.
Supporters say the cameras slow down drivers and reduce accidents, but opponents argue that they are intrusive and are more about making money than safety.
[..]
The cameras led to more than 700,000 tickets to drivers going 11 miles per hour or more over the speed limit from September 2008 to September 2009, the most recent data available, according to the Department of Public Safety. The mandated fines and surcharges on all those tickets would total more than $127 million, but they had generated just $36.8 million through September, Lieutenant [Jeff] King [photo enforcement district commander for the Department of Public Safety] said.
Some of the people who got those tickets are contesting them in court and could end up having to pay the fine, but many of them have gone unpaid because drivers know they have a good shot at getting away with ignoring them. When people get tickets, they can pay without question, request a court date and fight the ticket, or simply ignore the ticket because law enforcement cannot prove they received it. The ticket becomes invalid if a violator who ignores it is not served in person within three months. It is nearly impossible to say how many people have ignored their tickets because courts do not track the figure.
Yeesh. Over here the authorities just assume that you receive the notice and suspend your licence if you don’t pay. It seems to me that this is the main cause of the apparent failure of the speed camera program. If the tickets were enforced, people would be paying them.
Somebody really stuffed the implementation of this program…I wonder who it could be?
While certain to increase, that $36.8 million in revenue through September will still fall far below the $120 million a year that former Gov. Janet Napolitano hoped to put in the state’s coffers when she ordered up the program in early 2007.
Oh…well that explains it. Janet Napolitano, the Obama administration’s National Security Nit-Wit (as Mark Levin so accurately put it yesterday)…the woman who said “the system worked” after a terrorist managed to get explosives on-board an aeroplane and use them on a flight in to Detroit on Christmas Day. The only reason many people didn’t die on that day is the heroic actions of other passengers.
Clearly Janet Napolitano’s definition of “work/worked/working” in the case of national security and for speed camera programs differs from the definition which can be found in English dictionaries.
When I was gasping in disbelief about how slow the Associated Press and other national news agencies were this morning in covering the Las Vegas courthouse shooting, I completely lost it and burst out laughing when I saw a particular story from AP on the CBS website which was about three and a half months late.
Yes, you read that right…three and a half months late!
On September 24 last year, the Sun newspaper in the UK ran a story about the people who live underground in Las Vegas which was subsequently picked up by The Drudge Report and led to an hysterical conversation between KXNT’s Casey Hendrickson and Heather Kydd:
Lost Vegas
From PETE SAMSON
US Editor
in Nevada
Published: 24 Sep 2009
LOVEBIRDS Steven and Kathryn share a well-organised home in bustling Las Vegas.
They have a neat, if compact kitchen, a furnished living area, and a bedroom complete with double bed, wardrobe and bookshelf featuring a wide selection including a Frank Sinatra biography and Spanish phrase book.
And they make their money in some of the biggest casinos in the world.
But their life is far from the ordinary.
Because, along with hundreds of others, the couple are part of a secret community living in the dark and dirty underground flood tunnels below the famous strip.
Rather than working in the bars or kitchens they “credit hustle”, prowling the casinos searching the fruit machines for money or credits left by drunken gamblers.
Despite the risks from disease, highly venomous spiders and flooding washing them away, many of the tunnel people have put together elaborate camps with furniture, ornaments and shelves filled with belongings.
Casey and Heather’s conversation about the “zombies” of Las Vegas was so amusing that the story stuck in my head quite prominently. So you can imagine how surprised I was when I spotted this story from AP on the CBS website this morning:
LAS VEGAS, Jan. 4, 2010 Las Vegas Tunnels a Refuge for Homeless
Hundreds, Many Struggling with Addictions, Live in a Pitch-Black World, Surviving Off the Excesses of the Strip Above
(AP) Underneath its glitzy casinos, far from the bright marquees, there is another Las Vegas, a pitch-black, dank underworld virtually unknown and unseen by those who live, work and play above.
About 300 people – mostly men battling demons of various addictions – live in the underground storm system built to protect the desert playground from the infrequent cloudburst.
There’s no sign or word of welcome down here. Drug use is nearly universal. Most people carry makeshift weapons and the police don’t often come unless they’re called.
But the denizens have found a haven in the labyrinth of concrete tunnels that snake beneath the city and its suburbs.
I suppose it’s possible that the Associated Press don’t believe in electricity and had to have the story sent from the UK by boat before they could consider running a similar story…but seriously, three and a half months to run a story? I don’t care why it took that long…that’s just late, so late that the late note from Mummy Associated Press just can’t be accepted.
Ernie Dingo, clearly as upset as I am that The Great Outdoors was axed, and yet abysmal rival travel show Getaway is still on the air, has worked out why Aboriginal society, especially in rural communities, is portrayed as having a drinking problem…it’s all the white man’s fault.
INDIGENOUS icon Ernie Dingo has hit out at hypocritical “white people” who lecture Aborigines about alcohol consumption.
“What you should be worrying about is who is giving them access … who sells alcohol? Not black people,” Dingo said.
“We (indigenous people) don’t have a problem. Our problem is to say ‘no’ to you blokes, to white people … ‘no’ is not really part of our cultural background.
“There are more white alcoholics than there are black people in this country, so don’t come at us with restrictions and Aboriginal laws about alcohol.”
Mmm, perhaps…but there are more drunk or drugged Aborigines on a per-capita basis…and Ernie, mate, you’re not the only one being restricted. We have RSA, and more importantly, if you had bothered to check the news this week, the Police are cracking down on alcohol-fuelled violence with “Operation Unite” at the moment.
There is still a big difference though. As a percentage of population, alcohol-fuelled violence isn’t a massive problem in white society…or even in urban mixed society. The whole reason for the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention was that entire settlements were being overrun by alcohol-fuelled violence, child abuse, and child neglect.
As for that ridiculous argument that you don’t know how to say “no”. We gave your people school so that they could learn the word “no”, along with the rest of the language…but who has the higher truancy rate, white people, or Aboriginal people…yes, that’s right, the latter.
If you insist on running with the “we can’t say no to anything you offer” line, well perhaps we shouldn’t be offering Centrelink benefits to you…or maybe we shouldn’t be offering you citizenship. We could just build a big fence and give you the Northern Territory.
More seriously though…if it as all the fault of white men as Ernie claims, isn’t it therefore also our responsibility to intervene?
Ernie, I appreciate that you were using the bizarre statement to promote your musical which nobody has ever heard of…but for you, one of the leading examples of an Aboriginal bloke who is decent, to come out and make one of these stupid “all white men are evil” statements, does nothing to promote harmony between white and black people…if anything, it hinders it drastically.
And I really shouldn’t have to say this…but anybody who complains about my use of “white” and “black” in this article, will have their comments deleted. I see no reason why it should be OK for Ernie Dingo to use that language, and not OK for me to do the same.
With New South Wales Premier Nathan Rees facing the possibility of a leadership challenge, Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has thrown in her two cents worth on Nathan’s performance as Premier:
“Obviously Nathan Rees has been doing a wonderful job in the state of New South Wales”
Source: 2GB 11am news
Julia, please just go on your taxpayer-funded holiday and leave the commentary to the sane.
Remember the plane that went AWOL last week? The one where the pilots couldn’t get their story straight as to whether or not they had been having an argument or been sleeping when they flew past their destination and ignored calls from air traffic controllers?
Yes? You do? Great. Well, as if that wasn’t bad enough, it has since come to light that, not only were the pilots breaking company policy by using laptops in the cockpit and having a rather passionate training session with the company’s new crew-scheduling program (I would have thought that missing the airport and not noticing it for an hour was a big enough breach of company policy), but that the Federal Aviation Administration also broke their own procedures relating to unresponsive aircraft.
The Federal Aviation Administration violated its own rules by taking more than 40 minutes to alert the military after losing communication with a Northwest Airlines flight last week, according to officials familiar with internal reviews under way at several federal agencies.
[..]
In a statement to The Wall Street Journal Wednesday evening, FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt said air-traffic controllers “should have notified [the military] more quickly that the plane was not responding.” Local controllers apparently became so focused on trying to re-establish contact that they failed to alert higher-level FAA managers about the problem in a timely manner.
Sorry, but I don’t buy that. If you’re on the phone and the line becomes silent, you don’t sit there saying “hello? hello? hello?” for 40 minutes; you hang up and, if necessary, attempt to re-establish communication by actively dialling the other person’s number. I don’t believe for one moment that “local controllers” (note the plural) would put their collective jobs on the line by deciding to not inform their superiors to an unresponsive plane for 40 minutes. It seems much more likely that the FAA simply didn’t notify the military in a timely manner.
This story has already gone well beyond bizarre with its escalating revelations. If it keeps going at this rate, we’ll probably find out on Monday that the FAA did actually notify the military on time, but the reason the air force planes were kept on “stand by” rather than taking to the skies is that it was a national holiday for air force pilots, and the janitor couldn’t work out how to start the plane.
In a way though, I am glad that all of this has happened. Nobody was hurt, and the many flaws in the current implementation of the procedure for dealing with unresponsive aircraft are coming to light. In theory, this should all lead to safer air travel.
It’s not the first time that this sort of test has been done, and it probably won’t be the last either, but it’s time to knock the stupid theory on the head once and for all.
ABC TV’s Hungry Beast program have found that a carrier pigeon is able to transport a 700MB file between two rural towns, more quickly than a car or the Internet. Apparently this makes pigeons faster than the Internet, supposedly dispelling Kevin Rudd’s theory that we would be worse off under a Liberal government which he seems to think would replace the Internet with carrier pigeons.
In terms of raw throughput, they may be right. The pigeon took one hour and five minutes, which is an average speed of 179.5 kilobytes per seconds. The car took a bit longer…and here’s where the test falls down on throughput…the Internet connection dropped out a number of times and didn’t finish the download, which says more about the phone line used for the Internet connection than anything else.
As it happens, the test is very wrong on throughput, at least in areas with ADSL 2+. On my home connection, I can regularly get downloads of a bit over 2 megabytes per second (2,000 kilobytes per second), which is more than ten times the speed of a pigeon.
That said, the pigeon test can be debunked even further, as the test only takes in to account raw throughput of large files, and completely ignores the way that the Internet actually works.
Take what happens when you visit the home page of this blog for example. Firstly, your web browser sends a request to the server for the page, then the server sends the raw HTML code of the page back to your browser. Your browser reads this, and generates a new request for the css stylesheets as well as every single unique image on the page (16 at the time of writing) as well as all of the embedded content such as YouTube videos of which there are a few, and the servers responsible for these images and embedded content send the requested data back to your browser. If you then go and watch one of the YouTube videos, the browser has to request that, and YouTube’s servers send the data back to your browser.
On the Internet, this doesn’t take very long. Requests go back and forth in moments, and it’s the larger bits of data (images, videos etc) which take time to download due to bandwidth restrictions.
You try doing that with a set of carrier pigeons. This site is hosted on a server in Melbourne, and I’m in Canberra, so your calculations will vary depending on your location, but let’s assume that the news report is accurate and that pigeons fly at about 130km/h (which sounds dubious to me, but we’ll run with it). Melbourne is about 650km away if you go in a straight line, so it would take a pigeon five hours to travel that distance.
Imagine that. You request my website at 7am on Monday, the pigeon arrives in Melbourne at midday, and returns with the HTML code of the website at 5pm. Your browser then requests the css stylesheet and, say, nine images, because you only have ten pigeons at your disposal…they are a finite resource after all. The pigeons arrive in Melbourne at 10pm, and get the data back to you at 3am Tuesday. You now have the stylesheet, so the formatting looks about right, and you have some of the images, although some of the formatting images are linked from the stylesheet so the site is still a bit odd in many places. Your browser requests the rest of the images and the embedded YouTube players, the pigeons get to Melbourne at 8am, and bring the data back to you at 1pm.
So, the total time required to load just the front page of this website via courier pigeon is 30 hours. This would not get any faster if you had more pigeons either, as you wouldn’t have known about the formatting images until you got the stylesheets back.
Thanks to browser caching of formatting images and stylesheets, you might be able to reduce the loading time of subsequent pages on this website to twenty hours, but that doesn’t really make the site any more useful to you.
And just think…if it takes that long to load a domestic webpage, how long would it take to load a website from overseas? It’s about 15,000 kilometres to the US, which is roughly 23 times the distance from Canberra to Melbourne, so if we multiply the domestic loading time of 30 hours by 23…ye gods! It would take 690 hours (28 days and 18 hours) to load the front page of this website. Yes, that’s right, a month to load one page.
And none of this even takes in to account the extra hours required for DNS lookups before you can even send a request to the appropriate server.
All I can say is thank God the ABC and their pigeons don’t run the Internet!
And with that, I’m back. The whole catching up on sleep and getting my energy back thing has been a limited success, but I am now back to being able to put my thoughts in to writing without having to spend a week working out how to word it, so we’ll call it a success.
I’ve got a lot to get through, and seeing as blog posts with multiple short stories in them seem to be the flavour of the trimester on about half the blogs I read, and it’s convenient in this case, I’ll bite and run such a post here.
***
Sleep? Hmmm, well it’s 3:32am as I type this and I last finished sleeping at 8am yesterday. You do the math. That said, in the last few nights I have had dreams where I:
1. Was in a repeat episode of Third Watch. Nobody could be bothered attending to the emergencies as they all knew that the people survived the episode, so why bother risking injury doing the stunts again?
2. I plunged to my death in a taxi, on a wet night where the left half of the road had been washed away. A very vivid and disturbing dream.
3. KXNT’s Alan Stock was elected as Chairman of the Nevada Action Committee, although what this actually achieved is beyond me, because the only thing he was required to do as part of this job was take five minutes out of his show each morning to read the KXNT phone number over and over and over and over and over (we’ll come back to this in five minutes when he’s done with the phone number)
***
Speaking of KXNT, their traffic bed (the music they play under their traffic reports) is one of the bits of music which I managed to get stuck in my head this week. I also managed to get the First Option Mortgage jingle stuck in my head for three excruciating hours, and get it stuck in somebody else’s head simply by mentioning it on Facebook. Apparently it’s called “ear worm”. I also had another song stuck in my head, but I dare not try to remember what it was lest it happen again.
***
Frasier and Seinfeld repeats at 7:30pm and 8pm weeknights respectively on Go! Channel Nine receive my perpetual thanks for this.
***
There was some Bollywood movie on SBS Two the other night. I watched ten minutes of it near the beginning during which time the married couple managed to patch up their differences, and the wife declared that she didn’t really care about her husband’s flaws anyway. How they could drag that about the next three hours is beyond me, and I’m glad that I didn’t stick around to find out. The ten minutes was good for a laugh though.
***
Cisco have calculated (which is probably code for “guessed”) that the average broadband Internet user downloads 11.4 gigabytes per month. I average 20-25GB per month and will probably start doubling that in the not-to-distant future if one of my household projects gets off the ground.
***
Facebook have decided to preserve the accounts of deceased members, minus status updates and other “sensitive data”. This intrigues me as I have often thought about what would happen to this site and my other online data if I were to cease existing for whatever reason. I would like to keep it all online permanently, but am yet to find a viable solution. The National Library’s PANDORA project archives the essence of this site, but seems to have a lot of broken links and missing data, which is hardly surprising given the sheer size of this site (6.97GB and growing). Preserving this site is a work in progress…I suppose I’ll just have to stick around for long enough to ensure that it happens.
Anyway, if and when I shuffle off this mortal coil, I’m happy for my Facebook account to be preserved as some sort of shrine, but I don’t want anything to be removed from it. How does one go about sharing this wish with Facebook. One’s will?
***
Speaking of the dead, Yahoo have finally killed off Geocities. I’m glad that I was reminded of this imminent death the other day, as I had one page on there which I needed to save. I’ll republish it on here at some stage.
***
Monash Drive has been removed the ACT “National Capital Plan”. The proposed road had been slated to run along the foot of Mount Ainslie behind Hackett, Ainslie and Campbell, roughly in-line with the already cleared sections which the high voltage power lines use. Politically, the road was never going to happen, which is a pity because it could have reduced a lot of congestion, especially in the years ahead.
***
We’ve been following Barack Obama’s approval ratings here for some months now using the figures from Rasmussen, who had the polling figures closest to the outcome of last year’s election. That said, the other polls are interesting as well, especially when you consider that in the Gallup poll, Obama has recorded the worst third quarter of an elected president in recorded history. A nine point drop in his approval rating in the space of three months.
***
The White House have declared war on FOX News, claiming that they’re not a news organisation. The White House clearly can’t tell the difference between news programming and opinion programming, even when it’s pointed out to them. Funnily enough though, the other networks have defended FOX. Late last week, White House officials tried to ban FOX from a White House Press Pool interview session, but the other networks wouldn’t have a bar of it, quite clearly telling the White House that “if Fox can’t be a part of this, then none of us will interview your chap”. It worked, and the White House backed down, for now.
Here’s the point. FOX out-rate every other cable news network consistently, partially because of their news programming, and partially because of their opinion programming. People want to watch it. The White House don’t like the opinion programming as it is often critical of the Obama administration, unlike others such as MSNBC whose opinion programming often favours the Obama administration. The other networks know that if they let the White House exclude FOX, then they are all trapped in an unwritten “do as we say, or we cut your access” agreement. It is an attack not only on FOX, but on every other network, on freedom of the press, and on freedom of speech.
Glenn Beck, on one of FOX’s opinion shows, put together a rather amusing piece on the War On FOX which had me in hysterics when I first watched it.
One wonders if people would have voted for Obama’s “new era of bi-partisanship” if they had known that “bi-partisan” is defined as “the other side will do as we say, therefore we all agree”.
***
The ANZ Bank have a new logo, and a TV ad which looks strangely familiar…I’ve seen the whole “life juggled above head, but we can make it easier” ad before, I just can’t remember where. Anyway, the logo, is it just me, or does it look like somebody chucking a tantrum after being kept in line for an hour?
***
Channel Seven have announced their new digital channel, to be called “7TWO”, on (you guessed it) channel 72. I’m not in the least bit surprised that regional affiliate Prime aren’t putting it to air straight away, I mean Prime own the “6″ channels in digital TV land, and it would look rather silly have 7TWO on channel 62. I suspect that Prime are working on their own branding of the new station…PRIMExtra perhaps?
***
RIP Don Lane, one of the great entertainers, who passed away at the age of 75.
***
Remember when the Large Hadron Collider was about to be turned on for the first time and people were afraid the world was going to end? It amazed me how many people who believed that, were subsequently placated when it was turned on, broke down, and the world didn’t end. The whole cause for concern was for when it would finally reach the actual colliding stage, which it never did.
733-KXNT, 733-5968, 733-KXNT, 733-5968 (Alan’s still going…)
***
Clive Robertson filled in for Tim Webster on 2UE and 2CC’s afternoon show yesterday. What a relief! Tim Webster, as much as like him personally, has bored me to death of late…I can not listen to his show any more, I just can’t. Tim is much better suited to a news-based show than the lifestyle-amalgam show that he is now presenting. Clive, however, suits the format perfectly, and is brilliant afternoon entertainment.
Memo to 2UE for next year’s lineup: Breakfast with Mike Jeffreys, Mornings with Stuart Bocking, Afternoons with Clive Robertson, Drive with John Stanley, Nights with The Two Murrays, Overnights with Jim Ball.
***
And now at 6:18 it’s time for KXNT’s traffic and weather together on the eights, here’s Tate South (finally, Alan’s morning Chairman task is finished, which means that I can wrap up this blog post).
***
There was an ad on TV last night for that boat from Victoria to Tasmania and back, in which they advertised the rate for taking your car with you as being an “each way” rate (eg. “x dollars each way”). Sorry, but does that mean it’s the return rate (you can travel each way for this amount) or the one way rate (each way costs x dollars)?
***
Congratulations to Chris Matlock, KXNT’s Radiostar competition winner for this year. I listened to the entries of the 20 finalists when I was last in Deniliquin, and Chris was my favourite from the start, so I was very pleased to see him win. Chris will have his own show soon, apparently, and will start off co-hosting with Ciara Turns on “Sundays with Ciara” on Sunday, November 8 between 10am and 1pm. That will either be 4am-7am or 5am-8am Monday, November 9 in Canberra, depending on whether daylight saving has ended in the US by then.
***
And finally, Lord Christopher Monckton spent much of the latter part of last week and the start of this week outlining the issues with the proposed Copenhagen climate change treaty which, don’t forget, is designed to stop a warming which hasn’t happened in about the last decade. The main points:
1. The setting up of a world government, with binding power over all countries.
2. Some peculiar scheme to send all the money from the western countries to the developing countries, to pay for some supposed “climate debt”.
Glenn Beck interviewed his lordship last week, which makes for very interesting and enlightening listening.
Part one:
If you ever needed proof that the whole global warming thing has everything to do with social change, and nothing to do with climate change, you now have it.
The Canberra Times have an amazing scoop today. They have caught ABC TV’s head of news Craig McMurtie admitting to, uh, well, nothing.
I don’t know how they came up with that caption, because Craig is only mentioned once in the article, talking long ago about events of long ago.
ABC News Coverage head Craig McMurtrie told Media Watch at the time the new system would ”benefit our editorial content” and the glitches were ”teething problems”.
I don’t even see how an image of Craig is relevant to the story considering that he is one of a number of talking heads in the story, and none of them are really relevant, pictorially at least, to the story of ABC TV’s Canberra newsroom adopting the Ignite automation system which has already been adopted in all the other capital city studios.
That said, if you’re going to have a picture for the sake of having a picture, then I suppose you might as well make it of a person who said nothing to you, and insinuate them saying nothing in the caption.
Apple’s shareholders might want to go and buy shares in law firms, because the lawyers are the only likely winners in a bizarre case like this.
WOOLWORTHS insists its new logo is a stylised W, or a piece of fresh produce; Apple thinks it is an apple, and the California-based technology company wants to stop Australia’s largest retailer from using it.
Apple has mounted a legal challenge to prevent Woolworths from using the logo that now adorns its trucks, stores and products, arguing it is too close to its own.
Apple will have to convince IP Australia, the federal government agency that governs trademarks, to knock back Woolworths’s application – first filed in August last year – to trademark its logo.
Now, even if Woolworths do decide to go in to selling their own computers, do you really think anybody will confuse the Woolworths logo (left) for the Apple logo (right)?
Didn’t think so.
Personally I can’t stand the new Woolworths logo as I was a fan of the old logo:
However the new logo is similar to their really old logo which I’m having trouble tracking down at the moment, and that alone should give Woolworths enough of an historical precedent to knock Apple’s challenge on the head.
I wonder how many people do get to work two hours late because they moved their clock in the wrong direction at the start of “dalight saving” (is that the process of saving daleks from the light?).
It could be a subtle way of saying “we’re not going to listen to Universal Music Group’s complaints any more”, but I doubt it. The “spotlight” section on YouTube today is supposed to feature Australian music artists…
The last time I saw a “spotlight” was on Talk Like A Pirate Day. It looks like somebody changed the spotlight title and forgot to change the contents.
Rather sued CBS and its top executives in 2007, claiming he had been removed from his “CBS Evening News” anchor post over a report that examined President George W. Bush’s military service.
The Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court — New York’s trial-level court — said the complaint “must be dismissed in its entirety.”
The five-judge panel ruled unanimously that a lower court “erred in declining to dismiss Rather’s breach of contract claim against CBS.”
The court said there was no breach of contract, because CBS still paid Rather his $6 million annual salary after the disputed 2004 broadcast under the “pay or play” provision of his contract.
On the other hand, perhaps it helps if, when filing lawsuits, you’re not being insanely greedy. He was being paid $6 million per year to do nothing and he still wants more? Go and get a job if you want more…oh wait, he did…he’s now the anchor for cable network HDNet.
If I were him, I’d just be happy that somebody still wants to employ me at age 77.
The ANZ Bank have a new logo, and a TV ad which looks strangely familiar…I’ve seen the whole “life juggled above head, but we can make it easier” ad before, I just can’t remember where. Anyway, the logo, is it just me, or does it look like somebody chucking a tantrum after being kept in line for an hour?
