- Something about Google
- Something about Second Life
- Something about blogs or MySpace being the future of media
- Supposed news story stolen from amusing email chain everyone got last week
- FUD piece about ‘cyber-terrorism’ full of government and security vendor propaganda
- Sycophantic review of tech gadget to get ad revenue
- ‘Staff writers’ story ripped of whichever online news service actually devotes resources to publishing news
- Repeat as necessary.
Archive for February, 2007
How to write the SMH tech section
28 Feb 2007
Seeing through the greenwash
28 Feb 2007After months of swallowing the spin coming from Canberra and Macquarie St, someone in the media actually thought for themselves and the results were not pretty.
The Howard Government is suddenly so eco-aware it converts overnight to nuclear, which uses vast amounts of water and pollutes the never-never. While Morris Iemma’s mob is so drought-conscious, as exacerbated by the Howard Government’s dinosaur commitment to fossil fuels, it feels compelled to desalinate, consuming vast amounts of electricity - you recall Bob Carr’s “bottled electricity” quip - and helpfully resalinating any oceans diluted by those pesky melted icecaps.
Thus, being green, we pursue power that guzzles water and water that guzzles power, all of it profiting government. It’s the carbon tax you have when you’re not having one. Now that’s symbiosis.
Treat the voters like mugs
28 Feb 2007I don’t mean to pick on Tony Abbott specifically, but he keeps giving me such great ammunition. Today’s column draws a contrast between the federal government - which risks losing the next election - and the NSW state government, which everyone expects will win.
This is odd because some of John Howard’s fiercest critics admit (through gritted teeth) he has been an accomplished prime minister. In contrast, no one has a good word to say about the NSW Labor Government, which has “more to do” even by its own admission.
Accomplished slimebag and weasel politician, more like.
After detailing the many failings on the NSW government - in which he is as uncharitable as he is unreasonably generous to John Howard and his band of thugs - he concludes:
If a 12-year-old Government with a leader charitably described as a likeable lightweight can survive under these circumstances, every bad government will conclude you can treat voters like mugs and get away with it.
Well why wouldn’t they, Tony? Your lot have been getting away with it for almost as long.
Actually, I don’t
25 Feb 2007I’ve been told this a nerdish quality, but there are times when someone poses a rhetorical question that I find impossible not to answer. You may also remember in the past I have advocated the death penalty for R&B music, partly as an aesthetic disagreement but more because of the twisted values it imparts to young people.
Having switched the gym for the swimming pool, I no longer have regular opportunities to sample the latest contemporary children’s music. So this may be a little out of date, but I only recently came across this song, called Don’t Cha by the Pussycat Dolls.
The verse starts out with the singer addressing a man who, it rapidly becomes apparent, already has a girlfriend. The gist of her argument is that since it’s obvious we are attracted to each other, there’s no reason we should not fly in the face of however many thousands of years of human evolution through which we learned to defer or deny our animal impulses in order to achieve longer-term or loftier goals . . . and have sex. (But, you know, promoting infedelity is a great way to sell goods and services, so it’s an ideal line of thinking for an R&B song.)
We couldn’t have that
20 Feb 2007The PM complained today that Kevin Rudd is “getting a bit full of himself”. Treading on your turf, is he John?
The ABC bites back
20 Feb 2007It’s become something of a sport among politicians, particularly of the fed Libs, when interviewed by ABC journalists to imply the interviewers are biased. But ABC journos aren’t the sort to put up with this sort of crap from anyone.
The other day Virginia Trioli, after grilling an interviewee with appropriate journalistic vigour, was accused of bias by a caller. She snapped back something along the lines of ‘No I don’t have an opinion one way or the other, I get paid to ask difficult questions’. Right on.
This morning it was ABC Melbourne’s Jon Faine interviewing Alexander Downer about David Hicks and copping more of the same (transcript via Crikey, subscription required): Read the rest of this entry ?
Light entertainment
16 Feb 2007The most entertaining thing I saw on TV last night was Malcolm Turnbull spending nearly 10 minutes avoiding the question of whether or not electricity prices would go up as a result of using “clean coal” technology, specifically carbon capture (transcript and video).
This was the closest he got to an answer:
Tony, once you get the technology working, once you know it works, then the cost will come down. You and I are old enough to remember when a desktop computer cost $15,000. Now you go and buy one for less than $2,000.
Riiiight . . . because a computer is pretty similar to an enormous vacuum cleaner-like thing that extracts carbon dioxide from burning coal, compresses it and buries it several kilometres underground in saline aquifers. (The obvious advantage of this being the companies that bottle mineral water won’t have to pay extra to put the bubbles in.) Of course the technology isn’t proven yet and may or may not work - just like a computer! But let’s assume, for the moment, it does.
We know politicians are never fond of bad news, but people in Australia and other western countries generally seem to be quite comfortable with the idea of paying more for electricity if it reduces greenhouse emissions and stuff, whatever that Al Gore bloke was talking about when got on a crane next to a graph or something. Why not come clean?
Romantic pictures for v-day #2
15 Feb 2007It’s the second annual copyright-ignoring v-day* random image** gallery . . .
*Yes, I know it was yesterday. I wasn’t feeling well.
**Images stol selected from recent livejournal posts.
Jew-run media
5 Feb 2007The story so far:
BBC Middle East editor writes internal memo about Israel-Palestine issues.
Internal memo doesn’t stay internal (such things rarely do) and the usual suspects (ie, Jews) get all huffy about anti-Israel bias at the BBC, which the author of the memo defends eloquently, if perhaps a wee bit disingenuously.
The anti-Israel blogosphere springs into action, complaining voluminously how the evil Zionist lobby thought police are trying to prevent The Truth from ever being heard.
Oh yawn.
