Stephen Conroy is already censoring the internet — well his own website at least. Pity he just didn’t delete his whole site. Check out this Whirlpool thread. I find this one rather humorous: if you take a look at the right-hand side there is the “cloud” for searched items, the more searched the phrase or word is, the larger the item is.

Looking at the source code of the site, there is the entire list of words that the script uses to determine the cloud words and how prevalent they are. Basically breaks it down to an array, counts and then sets the size based on how frequent it is, etc. In the script that generates the cloud, there is a line that says basically if the search term is “ISP Filtering” to skip and go onto the next.

The upshot of this is that ISP Filtering will NEVER show up as a term that has been searched for. You might want to ask the minister why he feels the need to deceive his fellow Australians.

In response to Glenn Dyer’s piece on DMG. Vega’s fired pretty much everyone — with more to come in the next quarter — meaning they will run music-only in every shift. They have no programming management in Melbourne.

The reason MMM has languished for such a long time is that the now CEO of Austereo made MMM wage a war against the enemy (Vega) before they began, guessing what sort of music format it would take (sh-thouse).

How can you wage war against an enemy that doesn’t exist, or prove to be a threat, while promoting that guy from programming to CEO when he all but killed a once-strong brand?

(I currently work at one of these stations mentioned.)

It’s very admirable that the University of Melbourne has posted the submissions to its review on the merger of the faculty of music and VCA. On the face of it, there were 358 submissions received, which is a good number. But further examination reveals that the largest number of these submissions are virtually identical, cut-and-paste jobs, with the only individual traits in the first paragraph, which outlines the relationship of the submitter to the VCA (e.g. “I am a 3rd year drama student”, “I am a graduate in puppetry”, etc.)

One needs to wonder at the lack of strategy behind whoever organised this mass response. Apart from being annoying when reading through the submissions, it clearly demonstrates a lack of individual thought from these current and ex-VCA students.

Given that universities are supposed to be a place of research and scholarship, this response in fact strengthens the case for reform of what is essentially a vocational-institute (a TAFE for the performing arts).

If VCA students and graduates believe that quantity of submissions is better than quality of submissions, then they need to get a much broader handle on how the world really works.

Iluka’s intention to de-merge their iron ore royalty is good news for shareholders, however it does not hide the fact that the mineral sands business is a basket case. Reading between the lines of Iluka’s last presentation to investors I am surprised that they have spent $400 million on new zircon-related capital projects. By their own admission, and the fact that Europe is still in recession, Spain and Italy are  not going to be purchasing a lot of zircon, which leaves any growth to be gained solely from China.

While they mentioned that other zircon producers have closed down operations, they forgot to mention that three years ago they were blaming the booming cottage industry from Indonesia for not selling enough zircon — have they factored the return of the small low cost producers? Also they made a lot of statements about supply and demand, reading through their production statements it appears that they have retained high stock levels of zircon when demand is low and have reduced their capacity and stocks of titanium products when the demand is already high. Do they really know their market?

Also in their current market presentation they compared steel production with zircon, which was an interesting comparison, as this time last year they stated that zircon was a late-cycle product, so this year they change the story — good spin!