I’ve been looking at some of the hilarious video satires that increasingly pop up on YouTube and Google Video. here, for example, is a Bush ‘State of the Union’ Address ingeniously doctored. And here is a German video showing that Dubya is in fact a remotely-controlled robot.
On the other hand, here is Dubya doing an hilarious double act with comedian Steve Bridges at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
This is simply wonderful: a flight simulator written in Flash which uses Google Earth to provide the backdrop. I’ve just flown round London!
Thanks to Tom for finding it.
This morning’s Observer column…
Dr Godfrey sued for defamation and, in 1997, won. Demon appealed but then unexpectedly decided to settle, paying Godfrey damages and costs. As a result, a chilling legal precedent was set which essentially undermines Gilmore’s blithe confidence in the ability of the net to overcome censorship. Godfrey v. Demon Internet established the principle that if you complain to an ISP about something hosted on its servers and the ISP does nothing about it, it can be held liable in subsequent proceedings.
Every since then, censoring the web has been child’s play, at least in the UK and Europe. Here’s how it works. If you don’t like something someone says about you on a website, get a lawyer to write a ‘notice and takedown’ (snotty, in other words) letter to the ISP that hosts the site. Seven times out of 10, the ISP will pull the plug on the site without further ado – and certainly without considering whether your complaint has any merit.
You think I jest?
From a New York Times report…
The Conference Board, a private research group, found that at the start of the summer, 40 percent of consumers had no plans to take a vacation over the next six months — the lowest percentage recorded by the group in 28 years. A survey by the Gallup Organization in May based on telephone interviews with a national sample of 1,003 adults found that 43 percent of respondents had no summer vacation plans.
About 25 percent of American workers in the private sector do not get any paid vacation time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Another 33 percent will take only a seven-day vacation, including a weekend.“
The idea of somebody going away for two weeks is really becoming a thing of the past,” said Mike Pina, a spokesman for AAA, which has nearly 50 million members in North America. “It’s kind of sad, really, that people can’t seem to leave their jobs anymore.”
Shrinking-vacation syndrome has gotten so bad that at least one major American company, the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, has taken to shutting down its entire national operation twice a year to ensure that people stop working — for about 10 days over Christmas, and 5 days or so around the Fourth of July.
“We aren’t doing this to push people out the door,” said Barbara Kraft, a partner at the firm in the human resources office. “But we wanted to create an environment where people could walk away and not worry about missing a meeting, a conference call or 300 e-mails.”
Ye Gods! What a country. I have a friend who’s a senior executive in a major US corporation. He gets two weeks of holiday a year, and reports that his colleagues get annoyed by his refusal to take a laptop away with him.
Apropos my post about Boeing’s decision to drop in-flight wi-fi, James Cridland, who’s a serious earner of air miles, has an interesting view about the service.
As someone who’s used Connexions (the brand it went under) twice, there’s very little wrong with the service. The $20 for a flight’s worth of internet – nearly nine hours – seemed quite reasonable; it was reliable enough to make VoIP calls from while in the air; and it made a long flight much more bearable. If making flights like that in future, I’d make my choice based, to a large part, on whether the flight had internet access.
The problems with the service were pretty simple: power sockets. Wifi saps your battery, and without the business class power socket, you’re paying $20 for about an hour of use. That’s clearly not great value. If there were more power sockets in planes, and it was promoted more heavily to passengers before getting on the plane, then it would be onto a winner. I do hope the service is bought; it’s an excellent thing and a real boredom stopper.