“The English — a gentle people with a deep sense of justice and fairness, difficult to rouse and slow to criticise but, when the time comes, a people stubbornly determined to do what is right.” - George Orwell
The English drinking tea:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRj2K0ulD8Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSSwrPT-ewE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljqQc7hjhoU
From a few years ago.
“I don’t think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn’t becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it’s very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people ‘over the Internet.’ They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans ‘over a cup of tea,’ though each of these was new and controversial in their day.” - Douglas Adams
“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!” - Orson Welles
Wife’s office: Nodepony in the wild.
“Anyone who slaps a ‘This page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.” - Tim Berners-Lee
Here’s the plan for our new internet washing machine, Senator Conroy, and it now washes 10 times faster!
Hiding RC content behind a firewall doesn’t make it go away. Delete, don’t block.
Australia is proud of its many unique attributes and achievements. The landscape, the people, the sporting legends and so on.
A few years ago we achieved something special. Former Senator and Minister for Communications Richard Alston was given the accolade of the World’s Greatest Luddite for his complete lack of understanding of the internet. Alston is:
…behind a number of proposals in Australia that would seem to point to an overwhelming miscomprehension of the Internet. He also appears to view himself as a moral crusader in which he will cleanse Australia while the rest of the world descends into hell.
+1 for Aus.
In 2009 Senator Stephen Conroy trumped this by being voted Internet Villain of 2009 by the ISPA in the UK. The ISPA said:
“This was awarded for continuing to promote network-level blocking despite significant national and international opposition.”
+1 for Aus.
At the time, Conroy was working for this man, the former Least Interesting World Leader. Yet another achievement we can proud of. Kev is an interesting bloke that likes a fair shake of the sauce bottle but doesn’t like people making their own choices about what they read or see on the internet. He was also the Most Censorious Leader In The Western World.
+1 for Aus.
Kev achieved massive popularity on the social network Twitter. I can almost hear you asking how someone so terminally boring could manage such a feat. Easy. Buying pre-made list of Twitter followers, the digital equivalent of childhood imaginary friends, is no big deal. That probably made him the World’s Saddest Leader too.
+1 for Aus.
Our 2010 replacement for Dear Leader Kev is Dear Ranga, Julia Gillard. The mining corporations and the right wing factions of the Labor Party - and possibly others - decided the engineer a party coup and install her in the PM’s office. Gillard, who previously had zero interest in Twitter, suddenly became everyone’s best friend. At the time of writing she had 12,012 imaginary friends, many of them young women who squeal with much delight at being followed by Gillard.
Has Julia been buying follower lists too? Or maybe she has Labor staffers furiously clicking the follow button on Twitter in a shabby and cynical astroturfing exercise. Twitter follower lists are also available from offshore sources where third world workers are paid a pittance for each new friend they follow.
Which is it, Ms Gillard?