Teenagers and young children searching and downloading the latest tunes over the Internet are being exposed to pornographic images and websites.

The popular Internet tool LimeWire is at the centre of the pornography scare.

Searching for Britney Spears and even children shows The Wiggles and HI-5 return explicit images, and links to child porn websites.

That’s just a tad too selective…in truth, searching for anything on LimeWire is likely to produce results which aren’t what you’re searching for, and if you’re lucky you might find what you’re looking for as well.

But who came up with this astonishing revelation? The next paragraph of the article should clarify that:

Detective Superintendent John Kerlatec, commander of the child protection and sex crimes squad, says police are seriously concerned about file-sharing programs like LimeWire and their capacity to expose children to inappropriate material.

“Police have previously received reports and conducted investigations into the receipt of this kind of material,” he told News Ltd.

Well, good luck Detective Superintendent John Kerlatec, organisations with much more money to play with than you will ever see (the RIAA for one) have been doing their best to get rid of file sharing for many years.

For better or worse, where there is file sharing, there will be unsavoury content, this has been known for a very long time, so why it has managed to make the news today is beyond me. Surely Kevin Rudd has said something on his latest overseas trip…even if he was just ordering dinner, it would be more newsworthy than this tripe.

Update: news.com.au are claiming to have an exclusive on this story, and their article even links to the Limewire website. Does this mean that the folks at news.com.au want people to download Limewire and search for The Wiggles and HI-5, and then follow the yellow brick road to the content that the article whinges about?

While we’re at it, would somebody like to wake a sub-editor?

In April, ?? men were sentenced to jail in Queensland and the Northern Territory for also accessing child porn via LimeWire.

End Update

Samuel

I could be mistaken because there appear to be satellite issues tonight causing parts of words to be replaced with blips and blops, but did I hear you refer to "talkbock radio" at the top of the show? Could this be related to the "Bock of the 90s" from one of your previous haunts?

In regards to tennis at the Olympics…I can't stand tennis! Golf and Lawn Bowls need to be added to the Olympics, shall I leave it in your capable hands to organise that? I can see it now, Stuart Bocking, Australia's first golfing gold medallist.

Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Canberra ]]> http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2008/08/talkbock-radio/feed http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2008/08/petrol-confusion http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2008/08/petrol-confusion#comments Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:12:26 +0000 Samuel http://samuelgordonstewart.com/?p=2469 Caltex successfully convinced me yesterday that they do not use logic when deciding on petrol prices. I was fairly convinced of that already, but they made sure of it yesterday.

According to 2UE’s Tim Webster, all the Caltex stations he passed in Sydney were selling unleaded petrol for 146.9 cents per litre. In Weston yesterday the Caltex Woolworths petrol station were selling unleaded petrol for 139.9 cents per litre, a price which was repeated at another Caltex just off Drakeford Drive. Oddly though, another Caltex near Drakeford Drive was selling it for 143.9 cents per litre.

As for today’s prices…I don’t want to know, as it would only make me try to find logic where this is none.

If only I had a recording of that conversation Glenn Wheeler had with a petrol company spokesperson just before Easter (at least I think it was just before Easter). That was one of the most amusing and confusing conversations I’ve heard and I think Glenn was right when he summed up the petrol company’s explanation as something along the lines of “take a number, divide it by five, add a couple tomatoes, a pineapple, a coconut, and an onion, and hey presto! It’s a perfect petrol price”.

I wonder if it would be more cost effective to buy crude oil and refine it myself?

Samuel

I was in primary school and was reluctantly taking part in the weekly school swimming trip to the AIS pool in Bruce. For one reason or another I was relegated to the half-length pool and the supervising teacher encouraged me to swim from one end to the other and back again. I’m not entirely sure why, but I decided to try to swim that distance as quickly as possible…perhaps I thought that the quicker I did that, the sooner the torment would be over.

Anyway, swimming as fast as I could, I managed to swim the entire 50 metres in just over five minutes, which means that I had reached the incredible speed of just under 10 metres per minute. It may have only been five and a bit minutes, but it felt like half an hour.

Not surprisingly, the teacher also agreed that swimming wasn’t my forte. I still had to go on the weekly swimming trips, but I didn’t have to enter a pool again.

Incidentally, whilst reading that, did you read “forte” as “for-tay” or “fort”? You may be interested to learn that technically, the correct pronunciation is “fort”. Answers.com explains with help from the American Heritage Dictionary:

USAGE NOTE: The word forte, coming from French fort, should properly be pronounced with one syllable, like the English word fort. Common usage, however, prefers the two-syllable pronunciation, (fôr’tā’), which has been influenced possibly by the music term forte borrowed from Italian. In a recent survey a strong majority of the Usage Panel, 74 percent, preferred the two-syllable pronunciation. The result is a delicate situation; speakers who are aware of the origin of the word may wish to continue to pronounce it as one syllable but at an increasing risk of puzzling their listeners.

Samuel

What I can’t work out is why Endeavour Carpets would want to pay for an advertisement claiming that “Independent Carpets is the only place to go”. The only possibilities that springs to mind are:

1. Nobody noticed the error
2. It’s a deliberate tactic to confuse the listener and get the store’s name firmly implanted in the listener’s head.

Can anybody shine some light on this?

Samuel

“Buy” might be the wrong word as I don’t intend on charging the recipient.

Samuel

That day will be slightly closer tonight after he adds New Zealand to his rapidly growing “I’ve been there” list.

Samuel

Further update 3:30pm: Apparently it’s a truck which has run off the road, and it has hit a building. End Update

4pm Update: The truck has damaged a store and spilled a large amount of fuel in the process. According to 2CC, ActewAGL claim that power has been restored to most businesses, but 20 or so businesses will need to wait until the power pole is repaired this evening. I had a look on Google Street View and it would appear that the power poles on that corner carry a lot of power lines, so I’m not surprised that so many businesses were affected by the crash. 1WAY FM are running scheduled programming, so I can only assume that they have power.End Update

Correction 4:14pm: 1WAY FM’s part of Fyshwick was not affected by the power outage. They’re just having Internet connection issues. Apologies for any confusion. End Correction.

Samuel

That photo reminded me that I’ve been meaning to check for a video of Framey on State Focus for a while, and this morning I spotted the following extract which originally aired on the 6th of July.

It looks like Mike is enjoying hosting State Focus, but he doesn’t look comfortable reading the autocue. Firing question off with some degree of ad-libbing makes Framey look more “at home”, hopefully the autocue part of his job will become more natural as time goes by.

Whilst on the subject of Framey, apparently he filled in for Graham Robinson on a Sunday on 2CC a few weeks ago. I missed it as I was sleeping at the time, I would have called in otherwise. As for the question of why I haven’t called Graham on the weekend yet…well I’m rarely able to call on a Saturday during the Weekend Magazine, and I don’t really have much to contribute to the gardening show or The Tradies Post…I do listen though.

Samuel

Ms. Clark claims that Deborah Cameron’s success this year on ABC 702 Sydney’s morning show is “a survey glitch”. She is referring to the latest survey in particular where Ms. Cameron had the attention of 10.1% of the Sydney audience, putting her in second place behind 2GB’s Ray Hadley who was in the ear of 13.7% of Sydney listeners.

Ms. Cameron is relatively new to the airwaves, having taken over the morning show at the beginning of this year as a replacement for Virginia Trioli, leaving her newspaper journalism role to do so. It has been widely noted that Ms. Cameron doesn’t come across as a “polished” radio presenter, and perhaps that is part of her charm and part of the reason for her success. In many ways I think talk radio presenters sound more credible when they sound like they are ad-libbing rather than reading a piece of paper.

Anyway, back to my point. Angela Clark claims that the latest survey is a glitch, but I would like to know what she makes of the trend.

Virginia Trioli scored 7.2% in the final survey of last year. This year Deborah Cameron’s ratings have been:
Survey 1: 7.9%
Survey 2: 8.0%
Survey 3: 7.7%
Survey 4: 9.4%
Survey 5: 10.1%

The clear trend here is upwards, and if there was a “glitch” in the data used in survey four, then I would have expected survey five to deliver a lower percentage, not a higher one. To explain, the metro markets such as Sydney generally use two reporting periods per survey. Survey one only has one reporting period, but that is shared with survey two which uses reporting periods one and two, survey three uses reporting periods two and three, survey four uses reporting period three and four, and so on. If reporting period four was abnormally high, then it should have been balanced out by reporting period five, but it wasn’t, so the trend is an upward one.

This all makes me wonder what Ms. Clark expects me to make of 2CH’s unexpected success this year, especially considering that Macquarie have publicly expressed their pleasure with 2CH’s results:
Survey 1: 5.6% (9th)
Survey 2: 5.4% (9th)
Survey 3: 6.7% (7th)
Survey 4: 7.3% (6th)
Survey 5: 7.1% (6th)

The trend here is an upward one, and for a station which works with a minimal budget and virtually no promotion, it’s an impressive jump, especially considering that they are now ahead of six of the eight other music stations.

That said though, if 2CH’s trend isn’t as strong as Deborah Cameron’s trend, and Ms. Cameron’s trend can be written off as a glitch by Ms. Clark, surely Macquarie should be wary about praising 2CH’s wonderful upward glitch. Or does the goose live under separate conditions to the gander?

Samuel

In the last few days I’ve been wondering whether I am alone in my quest to use proper English in text messages and instant messaging. With a few minor exceptions, I tend to use full sentences and words, plus punctuation, in text messages and instant messaging. I’m fairly certain that, in doing so, I’m placing myself in a very small minority, but I’d be interested to see whether this is true. As such, the poll for this week:

The last poll’s results:

I can’t be bothered going through the logs to check, but I’d say that it’s a fairly good bet that somebody was having a bit too much fun finding ways to vote multiple times in that poll.

Results of previous polls can be seen by clicking here.

Samuel

As I said a few weeks ago, Michael Thompson left 2CC for 2GB and he has been intermittently bugging me to give the award to The Bee Gees. As you wish Michael.

The feature song is First Of May.

When I was small, and christmas trees were tall,
We used to love while others used to play.
Don’t ask me why, but time has passed us by,
Some one else moved in from far away.

Now we are tall, and christmas trees are small,
And you don’t ask the time of day.
But you and I, our love will never die,
But guess we’ll cry come first of May.

The apple tree that grew for you and me,
I watched the apples falling one by one.
And I recall the moment of them all,
The day I kissed your cheek and you were mine.

Now we are tall, and christmas trees are small,
And you don’t ask the time of day.
But you and I, our love will never die,
But guess we’ll cry come first of May.

When I was small, and christmas trees were tall,
Do do do do do do do do do…
Don’t ask me why, but time has passed us by,
Some one else moved in from far away.

Samuel

The offer by Pakistan to give each and every one of our cricket players a "presidential style security team" is very generous, but it doesn't change the fact that DFAT considers it to be a dangerous country.

I don't think that Cricket Australia have any right to decide whether the team go or not. It should be up to each individual player to decide whether they want to go in to a dangerous situation in which they have a decent chance of not coming home in one piece.

It's either that, or add a clause to the players' contracts which says something along the lines of "Thou shalt go wherever the chaiman of Cricket Australia decrees".

Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Canberra ]]> http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2008/08/cricket-in-pakistan/feed http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2008/08/the-global-warming-test http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2008/08/the-global-warming-test#comments Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:51:13 +0000 Samuel http://samuelgordonstewart.com/?p=2456 How much do you know about Global Warming/Climate Change?

To find out, and brush up on what you don’t know, take The Global Warming Test.

Update: Link corrected, sorry about that. End Update

For the record, I correctly answered nine out of ten.

(Thanks to Jim Ball for the link).

Samuel

So, today is the 13th of August, and it is a most wonderous day in the history of radio. Without cheating and going to wikipedia for the answer, would anybody like to guess?

If you need a clue, it happened in 1954.

There’s no prize on offer…to see the answer, simply highlight from here
Answer: On August 13 1954, for the first time ever, the Pakistani national anthem was broadcast by Radio Pakistan, Pakistan’s official broadcaster. The next day, they celebrated their seventh birthday.

If this year was 2004 and we were celebrating the 50th anniversary of that amazingly wonderful day, I might consider playing the Pakistani national anthem myself. Can somebody remind me to do that in 2054?
to here.

You didn’t know the answer? Well, you should have been listening to Jim Ball’s show this morning. Tsk tsk.

Samuel

I then said to her “Don’t mind me, I’m just telling myself off for going completely cuckoo.”

Could this be a sign that I have finally lost it? (On the assumption that I had “it” to begin with).

Samuel

Seeing as it's Mark Knopfler's birthday, do you think there is any chance of you playing Going Home, the theme of the Local Hero (John Stanley's theme music)?

I'd be ever so appreciative if you could, it's a great piece of music.

Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Canberra

For those of you who are wondering what I’m going on about, here’s the best version of the music that I can find on YouTube.

19 countries in nine months? No wonder the solution to everything is a website with a list of prices…the Internet's the only way Kevin 07 can keep up with the latest news in the country he's supposedly running.

I wonder if anybody's told him that there's an entire department of diplomats and he doesn't have to be the ambassador to everything? And um, when do I get my share of the frequent flyer points from all of these trips that I'm helping to pay for?

Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Canberra ]]> http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2008/08/kevins-frequent-flyer-points/feed http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2008/08/sevens-olympic-coverage http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2008/08/sevens-olympic-coverage#comments Mon, 11 Aug 2008 09:00:15 +0000 Samuel http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2008/08/sevens-olympic-coverage Good evening Gibbsy and Russell,

I tuned in to a few minutes of the swimming last night and I have to agree that Bruce's commentary was flat, which surprised me as he covered the 2006 Commonwealth Games in partnership with the late great Clinton Grybas and their commentary was spectacular. That said though, I'd prefer a flat Bruce over Ray Warren whom I just can't stand commentating anything let alone swimming.

Personally I think Seven should have outsourced the AFL coverage to Fox and simulcast the matches much like they do with the Sunday game in some markets when Fox have the more relevant match for the region. Doing this would have enabled them to send Dennis Cometti to the Olympics to relive his fantastic swimming commentary of the 2000 games.

I don't really care about the Olympics though so I'm glad that Dennis is here doing a great job with the AFL. I'll be interested in the Olympics once they add golf and lawn bowls to the schedule.

Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Canberra ]]> http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2008/08/sevens-olympic-coverage/feed http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2008/08/two-reasons-that-my-olympic-boycot-could-be-slightly-difficult http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2008/08/two-reasons-that-my-olympic-boycot-could-be-slightly-difficult#comments Sat, 09 Aug 2008 07:21:02 +0000 Samuel http://samuelgordonstewart.com/?p=2450 The amazingly amusing statements coming out of the Chinese media are just too good to resist:

The People’s Daily, a newspaper controlled by the ruling communist party, has made the rather bold declarations that last night’s opening ceremony is a “potential turning point in world history” and “will become an important page in the history of world civilisation”.

Meanwhile The China Daily (with information courtesy of official Chinese news agency Xinhua) reports that:

Beijing fired over 1,000 rain dispersal rockets on Friday evening to blow away rain clouds for the smooth opening ceremony of the 29th Olympic Games at the National Stadium, confirmed the local observatory on Saturday morning.

It was the largest rain dispersal operation in China, and the first time that such technology has been used to ensure the weather condition for Olympic opening, said Chinese meteorologists.

“We fired a total of 1,104 rain dispersal rockets from 21 sites in the city between 4:00 p.m. and 11:39 pm on Friday, which successfully intercepted a stretch of rain belt from moving towards the stadium,” said Guo Hu, head of the Beijing Municipal Meteorological Bureau

Apparently the weather bureau had forecasted rain which leads me to wonder why, if they were so confident of their technological achievements, they didn’t issue a forecast of “it would rain, but we’ll make sure it doesn’t”, and why we have only been told about the 1,104 rain dispersal rockets after the event.

Perhaps this perplexing sentence explains it:

“Under such a weather condition, a small bubble in the rain cloud would have triggered rainfall, let alone a lightening,” said Guo, whose team had monitored the movement of the rain cloud heading for Beijing from 7:20 am Friday.

With English skills as excellent as those, a forecast of “rain avoided due to rain dispersal rockets” would probably have come out as “fire of rockets raining away” which could very easily have alarmed the international media who had already reported on a terrorist threat against the opening ceremony.

As much as I really don’t care about the actual sporting events of the Olympics, I have to admit that the reporting of it and the bizarre stories being produced by China’s bizarre media are most enthralling.

Samuel