Category: General

Next gambling and porn…..

MILLIONS of Australians who tape TV shows and copy CDs will soon get the right to do it with a clear conscience.

All the nets abuzz about the disturbances at Cronulla in Sydney, and the reaction of the main stream media compared to bloggers has been amazing. Whilst the mainstream media seem to label what occured at Cronulla as “rascist riots” parts of the Australian blogosphere seem to be the only people supporting the PM in reporting it for what it was, a law and order issue. What’s even more amazing is how focused the MSM is on Cronulla and yet if you dig deep enough into the MSM reports you’ll find that people of Lebanese decent have run rampage throughout other parts of Sydney since. But of course, apparently burning the Australian flag and beating people up because they are Anglo-saxon in origin doesn’t constitute racist violence according to the Sydney Morning Herald, because it appears that racism can only be done by white Australians.

The language is also interesting. The MSM is so quick to label “white” Australians and yet the Lebanese youth who started this whole thing are labelled as “Middle Eastern”.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not condoning the violence, it was clearly wrong, but what makes 5000 mostly law abiding Australian citizens gather at Cronulla in the first place? Its a law and order issue where young Australian’s in Sydney feel that their streets are no longer safe and they see no other alternative to take action. Sad, but true. The true criminals are the members of the Government of New South Wales that so poorly provides protection for its citizens. When 12 and 13 year old girls are spat at and called sluts at a beach in Sydney, and surf lifesavers are attacked by gangs doing nothing more than trying to protect the lives of others, something is truly wrotten in the state of New South Wales.

I’d also question the motives of the NSW Premier Morris Iemma. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to work out with a name like Iemma he’s not exactly a Smith or a Jones. The ALP in Sydney is racked with ethnic branch stacks (Mark Latham’s words) and he owes his position as Premier to the ethnic community. Despite the absurdity of what he is saying, he is choosing to take sides in an attempt to gain even more support from the community he relies upon to be elected. So much for governing for everyone! And of course now there are a pile of extra police in Cronulla….where were they when people were being attacked by Lebanese gang members?

PS: I’m a Shire boy from way back. Left about 9 years ago but grew up in the area. Cronulla was my local beach.

Food for thought.

Chinese ‘farms’ amass avatars and virtual gold for gaming sale

No wonder so many people in World of Warcraft don’t say a lot to each other.

Good news for Firefox fans, NASA has dumped IE in favour of Firefox.

I really, really love this.
http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?whse=&topnav=&prodid=11098104
Check out the games list, amazing classics. Mortal Kombat, 1942, Ghosts N’ Goblins (ok I played this on the Amstrad 6128 mainly, but I did play it in the arcade on occasion), Asteroids….

There are two games they are missing though. Pacman, which I played on the Atari, and Outrun, which I spent countless dollars playing in the late 1980’s, back in the days that arcade games cost 20 cents. I can remember when they started making some games 40 cents and I was outraged. A few years back I walked into a TimeZone nearly by accident, and most of these sorts of games now are gold coin games: $1 or $2 a go. It must be a lot harder for kids these days.

Got to love this, with everyone running around yelling the sky is falling in, or in this case, the planets going to bake with global warming, New Scientist reports that there is a risk of a miniice age. Sometimes I wish people would actually start taking a serious look at history. I heard some idiot on the ABC the other day ranting about how this year in Australia was the hotest on record, and yet the conclusion was based on….wait for it….50 years of records!! Any ametuer scholar of history knows that Europe went through intense cold periods during the second mellinium, as well as other periods which were warmer. No one stops to think and ask whether the warming/ cooling phenomenon is just part of the earths natural changes, do they!

Well, finally, finally the 5 1/2 million WOW patches downloaded and late last night, after some serious blog work I logged in and set up my character. I’m apparently a night elve (or was it elf??). First impressions, compared to say Second Life, the customisation options for characters are very limited.

So off I went, there was a large mountain and roaming animals, and a whole lot of other players who had absolutely no idea what they were doing. I gathered this is where newbies must start. A number of people tried to get me to join their groupings (I’m not sure why). Eventually I found a quest, and once having got it had no idea how to actually find the creature I was to look for. By this stage it was getting late, and I was slaying things for the fun of it, all the while with no idea how to actually do the quest, until I realised one of the little blips on the mini-map was the target! One quest down, and I’m on level 2. Second quest was to slay a few animals, which I was still doing before heading off to bed.

More thoughts: very rich environment visually, and the graphics are way, way smooth compared to say Second Life. Nice background music as well. Getting the hang of the game though is a little weird, I’m guessing that its all about going on quests and what not, and building up your levels, so I’ll keep trying and see what happens. As a fan of CIV and SimCity style games (how many people can remember gems like A-Train and Transport Tycoon?) I’ve never really been into this style of gaming, which is why I suppose I want to keep going at it so I can finally understand what the appeal is to people. I’m thinking of it as a personal challenge, a be it one that also gives me some R&R as well.

A little tidbit: I bought World of Warcraft on Saturday, and thought to myself last night (Sunday) that I’d install it and have a go. Its now Monday night, and I’m still not playing it. Install with 5 CD’s took about 1 hour, then the 1st patch was about a 250mb download which took a bit over 2 hours. That was Sunday gone. Now its Monday night, I’m just finishing up a bit of b5media work and I think to myself “I’ll check out World of Warcraft”….and what do I find: more patches. One downloads and installs in a couple of minutes, which is fine, now I’m downloading another one which is ?? out of 22,000 odd I don’t know whats, but it looks like its going to take hours at this rate. Given I’ve already signed up I’m half tempted to take it back, 1 day in and I still cant play the thing because of all the patches that need to be downloaded. Its really, really bad.

Admission time here: as a kid I was a huge lego fan: I had an extensive lego railway and town, probably 10 sq metres of it atleast, and probably more, it actually took up a whole room in a house we once lived in. So as much as my son owns megablocks and lego, this sort of makes me sad, and yet happy at the same time, given that lego has lost the plot from what I can see. Read here. In the old days of lego you could build a town and buy a post office, a train station, hotel, etc, etc… today I don’t recognise lego, its Harry Potter and space stuff, none of the basic stuff from what I can see, and its all very, very complicated. The wonder of lego for me as a child was that I could get pieces to build a town of practical items. I could drive the cars around on the Lego Road maps (which all connected up) and on which you could put your lego buildings. It was magical, in a practical, real life sense. Today they’ve just seem to have lost the plot. One lego peice doesn’t fit with another in terms of theming any more. No wonder kids are buying megablocks.

This is leadership:

The Register: An extraordinary criticism of Tunisia?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢s approach to the Internet was fired at its president Zine Ben Ali at the opening ceremony of the World Summit in Tunis this morning.

Swiss president Samuel Schmid drew huge applause from the back of the room when he directly criticised Tunisia?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢s controlling Internet policies. “It is unsupportable that the UN still has members that imprison their own citizens because of what they have written on the Internet or in the press,” he said. “Everyone should be able to express their views freely.”