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Via SMH

Navy closes for Christmas

NAVY chiefs battling a staffing crisis have taken the unprecedented step of ordering a two-month shutdown over Christmas, and have told personnel with child-care problems that they can work from home.

The navy has also ordered all ships not deployed on operations home for Christmas to try to combat a 2020 shortfall in trained personnel.

In addition, the number of sailors forced to stay on board ships docked in their home port on “duty watch” as sentries will be reduced from previous levels of 15 to 20 people to a skeleton staff.

On the bright side, docked ships still look scary, even if there’s no one to drive them

Memories of my youth: Take on Me: A-Ha

But just when you thought it couldn’t get any better:

“The pilot will specifically test filtering against the ACMA blacklist of prohibited content, which is mostly child pornography, as well as filtering of other unwanted content,” Senator Conroy told Parliament.

Yep, now it’s “unwanted” content as well. Feeling like a fascist totalitarian society already? I’d say China, but I’m not sure they’re always quite so bad and blatant, because they at least go through the pretence of making most of their filtered content illegal under local laws.

I’m guessing then that perhaps the Liberal Party might find themselves blocked, after all their criticism would be “unwanted” by the Government. Newspapers; press the button, not looking for you.

That might be a little extreme, but here’s the catch: The Government won’t disclose who gets on the list and under what grounds, so it really does smell like fascism.

This is a joke that just when you think its bad, it gets worse again. Surely there must be some Human Rights treaty Australia has signed up to that the Government has now breached, and a Pro Bono lawyer who is willing to take the good fight to the United Nations or similar?

(the quote is via News.com.au who we’re not linking to after they threatened us over some pictures we ran on The Inquisitr, and who despite numerous requests continue to lift stories and the odd pic themselves unattributed from The Inquisitr….actually, maybe news.com.au SHOULD be in the filter )

Internode is the local distribrutor and has it for $299 here.

I’ve had mine for at least 6 months, and I love it, but the widget/ content side is overated. Why the hell would I wan’t to browse RSS feeds or weather from my alarm clock when I usually have my iPhone and Macbook Pro sitting next to it

Still, nothing quite like waking up to 977 The 80’s Channel every morning

(via Core Economics)

The thing is I hadn’t broken it. They’d failed to detail the embargo time properly. The original email said midnight, September 11, and was for an Australian site (the intro of the press release read Melbourne, Australia). It didn’t say midnight September 11, US Eastern or Pacific. I posted it at midnight, September 11, Melbourne time, which just happens to me my time, so I sort of knew what time that was.

In retrospect it was probably an unintentional oversight on their behalf, and I won’t name the PR firm, but I take issue with being accused of breaking an embargo and damaging the prospects of their client because they fucked up.

I’ve actually asked the company to please consider removing me from future distribution lists. I would have likely written the post anyway in this case because I love nothing more than promoting local sites (well, as long as they haven’t taken funding from Jordan Green), but the traffic benefits for me doing so were marginal at best, and although it may have been a somewhat interesting story for some, ultimately choosing to write it is doing them a favor, not the other way around, although you’d never know by the way they seemingly deal with bloggers.

I’m really starting to get tired of the whole embargo thing again, although in some regards I guess I never was not tired of it to begin with. I’m tired of getting people asking if they can send things through if I agree to respect an embargo. I WILL RESPECT YOUR EMBARGO AS MY DEFAULT POSITION. STOP CLOGGING MY INBOX.

But there is one exception, and that’s AOL, who I’m guessing will probably never send me a thing again. I’ve had two recent releases under embargo from AOL. The first story involved a 1 hour chat with them on the phone, and a considerable amount of effort into the post. One site broke the embargo by 6 hours, and others followed. By the time we hit the story it was too late. The second time I went to write the story 2 hours before the embargo time, and I found out that AOL had actually broke its own embargo. The last email I wrote to AOL was that while I’m happy to receive their correspondence in future, I reserve the right to randomly post the story at any time before the embargo.

The problem with embargoes is the haphazard way they are enforced. The first company got really shitty with me breaking their embargo (even though it was their fault), but other companies just shrug their shoulders when someone breaks it. And the end result is a complete and utter joke.

I’ll still consider stories under embargo, but from now on I’m going to ignore or request removal from distribution lists where the embargo is not enforced (and regularly broken by others), or as the case may be, I get blamed when I was actually doing the right thing. Life’s to short for these stupid games, and although I’m always interested in story ideas, PR folk need blogs and bloggers in general more than we need them.

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Until the day I die I’ll always remember that my great-grandfather died on the Western Front, and that my Grandmother lost her father at such a young age, and her speaking of it when I was young (she has since passed on). We are the last generation to have met or have spent time with those who remember the Great War, but let us hope that future generations will never forget the sacrifices made by an entire generation for freedom.

The one fact that always startles me from an Australian perspective: 216,000 Australian casualties at a time the country had a population of 4.5 million. They say that no town was left without a casualty, and that 1 in 6 Australian families were directly affected, and that everyone knew someone in that total. There are towns today in France that still proudly fly the Australian flag in remembrance of their sacrifices.

Hon Kevin Rudd MP
Prime Minister
Parliament House
CANBERRA ACT 2600

Dear Prime Minister

I read with interest today your Government’s $3.4 billion proposal to bail out the Australian car industry. No doubt your Government is concerned about the welfare of the unionized employees at these plants, and in related parts industries.

While some may argue that the payment is corporate welfare, your decision follows the billions spent previously by the Howard Government, and before that under Keating and Hawke on the industry as well, so it certainly is not without precedent.

However, my concern as a taxpayer extends to the Government handing over money to these companies for nothing in return. Mitsubishi received significant contributions from both State and Federal Governments, and yet still closed their Australian manufacturing plant, and I take from the current round of funding that there is little or no guarantee that Ford, Holden (General Motors) or Toyota won’t do the same thing.

My suggestion to you Prime Minister is that instead of handing over this money without condition, that the Australian Government would be better placed acquiring one of these companies instead. Not the Australian concerns, but the American holding companies.

The market capitalisation as of close of business Friday for General Motors was $2.8 billion USD, and Ford $4.87 billion. General Motors would be the more appealing acquisition of the two, due to the lower acquisition cost, its historic relationship with Australia (producing the first locally made car) and the fact that it actually makes a half decent local product, unlike Ford over the last 20-30 years.

As taxpayers it is not unreasonable to expect something in return for the investment of our money. Despite being of the right, the American Government has taken stakes in banks as part of the financial bailout. For an Australian Government of the left to take a similar step in the car industry would not be difficult by comparison.

I look forward to your consideration of this idea, and hopefully one day seeing the Australian flag fly over the automotive plants of General Motors in Michigan.

Yours sincerely
Duncan Riley
CEO Nichenet Pty Ltd, Editor The Inquisitr.

Here’s some choice questions from the ABC’s Ticky Fullerton. I can’t embed the video unfortunately, but if I find a copy I’ll add it later. Full transcript here.

Opening question
TICKY FULLERTON: You are in Australia, of all places, during US election week. What will an Obama government do for corporate America?

WTF? You’re interviewing the CEO of Microsoft, and you ask him about Obama???

TICKY FULLERTON: The next stage for business users in particular could be Cloud. What is Cloud, and won’t it cannibalise some of your existing products?

“Cloud”???? Oh, THE CLOUD….just bizarre. Ballmer responded extremely well

TICKY FULLERTON: Microsoft Outlook has become the lingua franca of communications; you captured the world with it really.

How are you going to keep that loyalty, when you now have companies like Skype, like other telcos going for the customer and going for the directory?

Ummm, Outlook has a 27% market share, and recent numbers show Hotmail is used just as much in business. But comparing Outlook to Skype and telcos? WTF x100???!!!!!

TICKY FULLERTON: Yet you say nothing is given. I mean, looking forward we’ve got voice, we’ve got face and expression, handwriting recognition, and what they call the new wireless direct neural interfaces.

Where do you think the drivers of value will be in these spaces and how is Microsoft going to grab the drivers?

I just don’t get this at all. Looking forward we’ve got voice???

TICKY FULLERTON: How much of a threat is open source code? I know it’s been around for a while. I think the Queensland Government is looking at it now.

But in this time of global meltdown, could we see emerging markets like China and India looking at the free alternative and being a threat to Microsoft?

I think she means Open Source software….or maybe it’s just random parts of free code

TICKY FULLERTON: The other battleground is the mobile. Windows mobile is growing rapidly as the market grows.

Do you accept the criticism that perhaps once again you haven’t been listening to the end customer as well as say Apple, in terms of functionality and simplicity?

Windows Mobile isn’t growing, and it’s still a small player, unless she’s talking about a specific country. talk about slanted facts though.

TICKY FULLERTON: Back to Australia and the long awaited broadband tender, which seems awfully laboured. Do we seem very troglodyte to you?

WTF WTF WTF WTF. Some Australian angst thrown in with something Ballmer would no little about. He responded like a gentleman though.

If this is the current state of reporting at Aunty….well, OMG