UK Ministry of Defense Broken by Spoof Video

An anonymous reader submits "It seems that the Royal Dragoon Guards in Iraq decided to make a spoof of a Tony Christie video, which was recently re-released by Peter Kay for Comic Relief. However, the video file was over 50MB and it took out various e-mail systems, including those at RAF Strike Command. Despite the inadvertant denial of service attack, the MoD said the spoof was 'brilliant.'"

Comments

Re:Mail Servers

[Jellybob]

So... what your saying here is that when it happened, the MoD should have said.

"Shit, the mail servers are down. Quickly boys! Pack up and go home, we need the money being spent on our reason to exist to upgrade support equipment."

Re:A lesson in the right thing to say.

[DennisInDallas]

Yes, the MoD done good.

I shudder to think what fate would befall yanks that did the same... probably get themselves locked up right next to the promoters of the gitmo girlie shows.

Re:I suppose you had to be there ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting. As a Yank (Connecticut, even), I can say that some of the humor is lost on me. I did have the presence of mind to search for the video being spoofed, and got to see a clip of it at http://www.wanadoo.co.uk/music/videos/tony_amarill o.htm?linkfrom=broadband_music&link=main1_alsoLink s&article=BBmusic_links_wanadoomusic

I used bittorent to download the spoof and watched it. I see the humor, but in an intellectual way (that is, I didn't ROFL). I think I need to be a bit more immersed in the experience of the original video and surrounding media hype to _really_ get it.

All in all, I do enjoy getting a peek at culture outside my own increasingly insular one.

Thank god(dess) for BitTorrent, or I doubt I'd ever see the new episodes of Doctor Who, a favorite of mine since I first saw Tom Baker play the part in 1977 or so :)

If only I could find functionning servers for the older episodes!

Re:Correction

[Malc]

Have you thought that perhaps the people of England define how English words are spelt, and that it's everybody else who're wrong?

Re:Correction

[WIAKywbfatw]

Perhaps it's not as obvious to you because we're talking about two languages (if you consider them to be two languages) that overlap so much but it's far more obvious when it's, say, Spanish and English.

I'm a native English speaker and my Spanish is pretty good, but the butchery of Spanish that I've seen by most people with similar backgrounds, and the complete disdain they show when someone clearly can't understand what they've said is a sight to see.

How much respect you show someone else's language and culture really plays a big part in how they view you, especially if you are a guest in their country. Like I've pointed out before, this is perhaps a small tip of the iceberg thing but the number of times I've seen Americans laughing at English spellings that aren't common in the US just here on Slashdot has been far too numerous to count.

You might not think so but it's these small affronts that play a bigger part in how we perceive others - ignorant, racist, whatever - than most people truly appreciate.

I'll say it again, it doesn't hurt to respect other people's cultures. After all, what harm can that do?