The Times has previewed its new paywall system, to keep readers, search engines and other criminals from using it to download cars, to the sound of champagne corks popping at the Guardian, Telegraph and BBC.
The newspaper will now require payment of £1 a day for its unique and high-quality editorial viewpoints, as taken from the Sun and rewritten in big words. The site also blocks anyone under 18 from registering, in order to keep the paper's quality demographic aging nicely.
"I firmly support this move," said everyday citizen on the street and certainly not Guardian editor at all Alan Rusbridger. "In fact, it should be ten pounds a day. Ten pounds a story. Then people will really see it as high-quality merchandise and not rewritten press releases and news feeds with Mr Murdoch dictating the editorial page."
"It's ours," said James Murdoch, frothing slightly. "You thieving bastards steal our copyright every time you save a copy into your heads! Well, we'll fix your little wagon. It's a pound a day plus a pound a copy behind your eyes plus a pound a copy you talk about with anyone else plus a pound a copy just fucking because. It's for me and Dad and you can just fuck off. And when we buy the BBC we won't let you watch that either. Arseholes."
"OK, the champagne is Thunderbird Sparkling," said Mr Rusbridger. "Times are tough, you know. But I have complete faith we're on the right path and the Times is doomed. I told ’em, I told ’em. Spare fiddy pee for a Polly Toynbee column? God bless you, sir!"
"I am one hundred percent behind paying for quality journalism," said free culture activist Hiram Nerdboy, 17. "That's why I just gave fifty quid to Wikileaks."
Note that MSDN is frequently a tissue of lies and only useful for vague guidance rather than as any sort of reliable source - so Wine development these days is mostly test-driven, such that Wine aims to give the same results on the project's tests that it does on Windows. There's even a testbot to automatically run new tests against a pile of VM installations of original Windows.
They don't ensure any such thing. They ensure their patent pool holders won't sue you over H.264; but buying a licence from them does not mean they'll protect you against others suing you over H.264.
I did say YMMV;-) The incident that really unimpressed me was a three-way issue between Red Hat and HP over Ethernet bonding on RHAS 2.1 on a DL580, where each blamed the other and we got nowhere at all.
This is what I like(d) about Sun on Sun x86 - even running Red Hat, they support the whole stack. With Solaris in particular, we got a kernel developer working on our case when we hit an obscure but nasty ZFS bug.
Whole-stack can lead to monoculture, but as I said above, playing Dell and Sun off against each other works well. And we happily ran RHEL/CentOS on Sun hardware or Solaris on Dell hardware where appropriate at the time. All pretty good, actually.
That's why Oracle's inept fuckery is really pissing me off.
There's a reason I always search docs.sun.com from Google;-) It's also until now been good for finding firmware upgrades. (e.g. every X2200/X4500/X4600 shipped with firmware so immature it would be Not Fit For Purpose if UK consumer law applied; Sun won't send a field engineer until you've upgraded the firmware, or tried and failed to do so. Fantastic boxes once that's done, of course.)
I've dealt with Red Hat support. They're really fucking awful and eminently not worth paying a penny. (YMMV.)
The actual reason to buy a copy of Red Hat is (1) you're running Oracle and want a supported OS (1a) you're running similarly pricey proprietary software and want a supported OS (2) you have a paranoid whose fears you have to assuage (3) you think giving Red Hat at least a bit of cash is a good thing and you can convince someone who signs the cheques to do so.
My experience concurs with most of that, except that CentOS is just fine for production machinery.
We run a lot of Java on Solaris. Mostly that can be moved to Solaris x86, which is a supported platform on Dell. Until Oracle think they can screw Dell out of pennies too. Then we have to move it to (ew, icky) Linux.
(Moving Java from Solaris to Red Hat is actually something I have done. The Java is easy, the Unix glue is all different.)
HP or Dell blades are damn fine too, if you're willing to pay VMware the big bucks for the nice version. (VirtualBox is ludicrously unrobust rubbish and I really think Sun bought a pup.) That takes care of Solaris x86, Linux and Windows nicely.
In my experience, both Dell and Sun are about equal as x86 server suppliers, on quality of hardware, price and quality of service. They were quite good to play off against each other too.
(Dell's desktop build and service is shit, their server build and service is excellent. In my experience. YMMV. Etc.)
HP are about the same as either. IBM are better on quality and service but pricier.
It's certainly been my consistent experience that expertise in development carries over flawlessly to the realm of law, and that computer science degrees should come with a free Ll.B.
The Australian Senate is elected by proportional representation per state. Senator Fielding represents those constituents, otherwise discriminated against, who remain climate change sceptics, evolution sceptics, ten-finger sceptics, outbreeding sceptics and walking upright sceptics.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has announced that the Australian government will build a new $43 billion national broadband network, connecting 90% of homes to 100-megabit fibre internet. "We believe that fast broadband is absolutely essential for our nation's future", he said.
"Telstra has raised issues with the amount of bandwidth usage this will produce, given we're still hooked to America by tin cans and string, but our Great Firewall of Australia Internet filtering project should keep usage down to reasonable levels at near-dialup speeds. We promise you won't go over your download cap."
The Great Firewall will reliably block all illegal material, child pornography, terrorism and unAustralian thoughts.
"Not only are the contents of the list illegal," said Senator Stephen Conroy, " but revealing the list is also illegal, and so is linking to someone linking to someone claiming to reveal the list. So we're blocking Google Search. Having to use Anzwers should keep usage right down."
Calling it, the "single largest infrastructure decision in Australia's history," Mr Rudd said the project would employ up to 37,000 people a year monitoring citizens' net access, reading their email and correcting spelling errors in their football forum posts.
A consultative process will determine the regulatory framework for the network. "We're considering getting Senator Fielding to do it personally," said Senator Conroy, "since he's the dickhead who demanded the censorship in return for his votes. Hopefully it'll melt his brain. Bloody balance of power. At least Xenophon's bloody sane."
The thing is that Google trounces all comers when it comes to text search... but its image search is still sorta crappy. So Bing has a possible way in there: be better at something. Of course, being Microsoft, they have to try to pull in a gratuitous dependency on another company product.
Perhaps they need a new slogan. "Bing! It's still better than Cuil!"
Joseph Ratzinger has resigned as Pope and revealed his role as a deep-cover atheist operative, who worked many decades to discredit the Catholic Church and cause people to leave.
"I'm profoundly sorry I couldn't just pull the plug on the whole rotten edifice," said Mr Ratzinger, 83, of Rome. "I'd have gone the way of John Paul I. But I've worked hard to cause the terrible truth to expose itself to the world."
Soon after joining the Hitler Youth, the young Joseph Ratzinger was recruited directly by the atheist pagan Hitler to advance the ideals of Darwinian evolution, the worship of atheism, the Thule Society, the World Ice Theory and the collective Aryan unconscious. "We knew the key was getting evolution in there. My previous deep-cover report, Gene 'Pius' Pacelli, was as enormously helpful as ever, slipping it into Humani Generis in 1950. And getting away with it!
"From there it was simple — letting reason and thought in the door meant that people would actually apply joined-up thinking to Catholicism, something it had no hope of withstanding. I mean, say something really blatantly stupid like 'atheism is the cause of the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice,' put our sexiest underage agents into the choirs and see how long before the world's howling for your blood.
"And what happened to the bloke who wrote that British Foreign Office memo? They shuffled him sideways to another job! Honestly, real life outdoes jokes every time."
Mr Ratzinger plans to retire to his home town of Marktl in southern Germany. "It's a great relief to come clean after all this time," he said. "I'm very much looking forward to using this 'penis' thing at long, long last. Woo hoo, bevy of bouncing buxom Bavarian babes, here I come! So to speak."
Richard Dawkins, who had recently revealed his Doctorate in Divinity, was more than a little put out. "I'm most annoyed no-one made this much fuss when I said I liked Christmas services at my local Church of England. I'm trying to give as many clues as possible here, you know." He retreated to his office with a bottle of Irish whiskey and a Vicar of Dibley box set.
Microsoft is improving its stratospherically successful "decision engine," Bob Hope, with a feature that allows you to "visual search" on "web" "sites."
"This is what happens at the cutting edge of research, y'know," said marketing marketer Yusuf Mehdi at the Tech Crunch 50 conference yesterday. "You can use Microsoft Search to 'search' for any page on the Information Superhighway! And it's really quite amazing what's out there. Man. That's actually our slogan — 'Microsoft Search: It's Really Quite Amazing What's Out There. Man.'"
The "search" feature is part of technology acquired in the deal with Yahoo! "We bought this fantastic thing they were working on. It's a directory of links to web pages. People put stuff into classifications. You can 'crowd-source' it, you know! You visualise what you're looking for, type it in words and this stuff shows up. Amazing! I don't know how anyone never thought of it before. We have about fifty precomputed 'searches' in there at the moment, with more to come. Windows 7! The 'wow' starts now! You know, sometimes I wonder how people even managed to use computers before Windows 7."
Search requires installing Microsoft Silverlight,.NET 3.5, the latest service packs and Windows Genuine Advantage. Office 2007 is also recommended. It runs best in Internet Explorer 8 on a Windows 7 computer. "We don't see how Goog— that other company can possibly compete. Theirs doesn't use anything extra. How the hell are you supposed to get people hooked like that? They just don't have a business model."
Microsoft has unveiled its new Zune One and Zune Two mobile phones for unusually stupid social-networking enthusiasts in their late teens and early twenties with a higher income than their IQ.
Team leader Roz Ho said the company had tried to create a Microsoft gadget that people actually wanted to have, like the XBox 360, but that actually worked properly.
"Get your Friendster and your MySpace!" said Ms Ho. "We studied consumer habits and built the perfect phone for the, uh, 'social generation,'" she air-quoted, "to make it 'fab' and 'bling' — I mean, of course, 'Bing!' — for people too dumb to work an iPhone to share their lives moment to moment."
The handset is of simple design for simple people. The keyboard engages caps lock at random and interjects common "chat" acronyms like "LOL" and "OMG" and "RTFM" should too many words in a row be spelt correctly. A breathalyzer automatically switches on the video camera in the event of excessive alcohol consumption so that the skin tone detection algorithm can send the user's breasts to her entire address book. As well as the usual daily crashes, the Blue Screen of Death can be invoked by the user so as to have a suitable excuse not to answer a text. Later revisions of the phone may include making voice calls.
"We are excited to be the exclusive carrier for this exciting new Microsoft phone in the exciting US," said John Harrobin, Senior Vice President of Paperclip Filing, Morning Drunkenness and Excited Press Release Quotes at Verizon Wireless. "Because we fucking hate you people. We really do."
Roz Ho was previously leader of the Microsoft team that lost all the data on everyone's T-Mobile Sidekick phones last year when the systems team was told not to bother with backups.
So much for nine years of my resume... time to read up on that "Leengux" rubbish the kids are on about so much these days. This is Unix, I know this! That, on the other hand...
ALING, Heathrow, Thursday (NTN) — Prime Minister Gordon Brown has condemned Iceland's terrorist attack on British air travel and their refusal to refund tourists' air tickets.
The UK government used anti-terrorism laws to freeze all British-held assets of Umhverfisráðuneyti, the Icelandic Ministry Against the Environment, after minister Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir threatened to further unleash the power of the Katla volcano in the wake of the devastation to school holidays caused by Eyjafjallajökull.
Thousands of confused and angry passengers wandered around Britain's becalmed airports today trying in vain to find out how long the disruption caused by the ash cloud might last. "Can't we just, you know, give the planes a try?" said Brenda Busybody, 54 (IQ), of East Cheam. "I wanted to go and rest on holiday, and Monday I'm back to doing nothing in the office. I pay my licence fee!"
The Prime Minister offered his outrage and sympathy, in lieu of money or anything useful. "This is fundamentally a problem with the Icelandic-registered El-stodth Thyonustah Voweld," said Mr Brown, attempting not to choke on his own tongue. "They have failed the people of Iceland and they have failed the people of Northern Europe! You pay my licence fee! Er, hold on..."
Icelandic Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir also offered her sympathies to British travellers. "But, you know, we're still pretty upset about the cod."
Slashdot Mirror
The Times has previewed its new paywall system, to keep readers, search engines and other criminals from using it to download cars, to the sound of champagne corks popping at the Guardian, Telegraph and BBC.
The newspaper will now require payment of £1 a day for its unique and high-quality editorial viewpoints, as taken from the Sun and rewritten in big words. The site also blocks anyone under 18 from registering, in order to keep the paper's quality demographic aging nicely.
"I firmly support this move," said everyday citizen on the street and certainly not Guardian editor at all Alan Rusbridger. "In fact, it should be ten pounds a day. Ten pounds a story. Then people will really see it as high-quality merchandise and not rewritten press releases and news feeds with Mr Murdoch dictating the editorial page."
"It's ours," said James Murdoch, frothing slightly. "You thieving bastards steal our copyright every time you save a copy into your heads! Well, we'll fix your little wagon. It's a pound a day plus a pound a copy behind your eyes plus a pound a copy you talk about with anyone else plus a pound a copy just fucking because. It's for me and Dad and you can just fuck off. And when we buy the BBC we won't let you watch that either. Arseholes."
"OK, the champagne is Thunderbird Sparkling," said Mr Rusbridger. "Times are tough, you know. But I have complete faith we're on the right path and the Times is doomed. I told ’em, I told ’em. Spare fiddy pee for a Polly Toynbee column? God bless you, sir!"
"I am one hundred percent behind paying for quality journalism," said free culture activist Hiram Nerdboy, 17. "That's why I just gave fifty quid to Wikileaks."
Note that MSDN is frequently a tissue of lies and only useful for vague guidance rather than as any sort of reliable source - so Wine development these days is mostly test-driven, such that Wine aims to give the same results on the project's tests that it does on Windows. There's even a testbot to automatically run new tests against a pile of VM installations of original Windows.
One showed up on MP3, and Microsoft had to pay up a bundle on top of their original MP3 licence. Is H.264 simpler or older than MP3?
They don't ensure any such thing. They ensure their patent pool holders won't sue you over H.264; but buying a licence from them does not mean they'll protect you against others suing you over H.264.
I did like the build. The shipping firmware was unmitigated shit though. The Sun field engineer was rather curt about it.
The Sun blade servers weren't cost-effective for VMware when we were looking because of VMware's per-CPU-package licensing (wut). Annoying.
I did say YMMV ;-) The incident that really unimpressed me was a three-way issue between Red Hat and HP over Ethernet bonding on RHAS 2.1 on a DL580, where each blamed the other and we got nowhere at all.
This is what I like(d) about Sun on Sun x86 - even running Red Hat, they support the whole stack. With Solaris in particular, we got a kernel developer working on our case when we hit an obscure but nasty ZFS bug.
Whole-stack can lead to monoculture, but as I said above, playing Dell and Sun off against each other works well. And we happily ran RHEL/CentOS on Sun hardware or Solaris on Dell hardware where appropriate at the time. All pretty good, actually.
That's why Oracle's inept fuckery is really pissing me off.
Mod parent up. This is what it feels like. Except that I would phrase them as "Oracle are acting like Oracle" stories.
There's a reason I always search docs.sun.com from Google ;-) It's also until now been good for finding firmware upgrades. (e.g. every X2200/X4500/X4600 shipped with firmware so immature it would be Not Fit For Purpose if UK consumer law applied; Sun won't send a field engineer until you've upgraded the firmware, or tried and failed to do so. Fantastic boxes once that's done, of course.)
I've dealt with Red Hat support. They're really fucking awful and eminently not worth paying a penny. (YMMV.)
The actual reason to buy a copy of Red Hat is (1) you're running Oracle and want a supported OS (1a) you're running similarly pricey proprietary software and want a supported OS (2) you have a paranoid whose fears you have to assuage (3) you think giving Red Hat at least a bit of cash is a good thing and you can convince someone who signs the cheques to do so.
My experience concurs with most of that, except that CentOS is just fine for production machinery.
We run a lot of Java on Solaris. Mostly that can be moved to Solaris x86, which is a supported platform on Dell. Until Oracle think they can screw Dell out of pennies too. Then we have to move it to (ew, icky) Linux.
(Moving Java from Solaris to Red Hat is actually something I have done. The Java is easy, the Unix glue is all different.)
HP or Dell blades are damn fine too, if you're willing to pay VMware the big bucks for the nice version. (VirtualBox is ludicrously unrobust rubbish and I really think Sun bought a pup.) That takes care of Solaris x86, Linux and Windows nicely.
In my experience, both Dell and Sun are about equal as x86 server suppliers, on quality of hardware, price and quality of service. They were quite good to play off against each other too.
(Dell's desktop build and service is shit, their server build and service is excellent. In my experience. YMMV. Etc.)
HP are about the same as either. IBM are better on quality and service but pricier.
Speaking as a Solaris admin of nine years, this is the best news Dell and Red Hat could ever get.
It's certainly been my consistent experience that expertise in development carries over flawlessly to the realm of law, and that computer science degrees should come with a free Ll.B.
Yes, dear, that's right. They said Galileo was wrong TOO you know!!!1!!11!!11!
Personally, I'd always take the opinions of a random Slashdot commentator over those of someone who works with this stuff every day.
It is possible - just a possibility, you'll note - that you have somewhat less expertise in antitrust law than the antitrust prosecutors do.
Apple officially adopted Evil(tm) as policy long ago.
The Australian Senate is elected by proportional representation per state. Senator Fielding represents those constituents, otherwise discriminated against, who remain climate change sceptics, evolution sceptics, ten-finger sceptics, outbreeding sceptics and walking upright sceptics.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has announced that the Australian government will build a new $43 billion national broadband network, connecting 90% of homes to 100-megabit fibre internet. "We believe that fast broadband is absolutely essential for our nation's future", he said.
"Telstra has raised issues with the amount of bandwidth usage this will produce, given we're still hooked to America by tin cans and string, but our Great Firewall of Australia Internet filtering project should keep usage down to reasonable levels at near-dialup speeds. We promise you won't go over your download cap."
The Great Firewall will reliably block all illegal material, child pornography, terrorism and unAustralian thoughts.
"Not only are the contents of the list illegal," said Senator Stephen Conroy, " but revealing the list is also illegal, and so is linking to someone linking to someone claiming to reveal the list. So we're blocking Google Search. Having to use Anzwers should keep usage right down."
Calling it, the "single largest infrastructure decision in Australia's history," Mr Rudd said the project would employ up to 37,000 people a year monitoring citizens' net access, reading their email and correcting spelling errors in their football forum posts.
A consultative process will determine the regulatory framework for the network. "We're considering getting Senator Fielding to do it personally," said Senator Conroy, "since he's the dickhead who demanded the censorship in return for his votes. Hopefully it'll melt his brain. Bloody balance of power. At least Xenophon's bloody sane."
The thing is that Google trounces all comers when it comes to text search ... but its image search is still sorta crappy. So Bing has a possible way in there: be better at something. Of course, being Microsoft, they have to try to pull in a gratuitous dependency on another company product.
Perhaps they need a new slogan. "Bing! It's still better than Cuil!"
Joseph Ratzinger has resigned as Pope and revealed his role as a deep-cover atheist operative, who worked many decades to discredit the Catholic Church and cause people to leave.
"I'm profoundly sorry I couldn't just pull the plug on the whole rotten edifice," said Mr Ratzinger, 83, of Rome. "I'd have gone the way of John Paul I. But I've worked hard to cause the terrible truth to expose itself to the world."
Soon after joining the Hitler Youth, the young Joseph Ratzinger was recruited directly by the atheist pagan Hitler to advance the ideals of Darwinian evolution, the worship of atheism, the Thule Society, the World Ice Theory and the collective Aryan unconscious. "We knew the key was getting evolution in there. My previous deep-cover report, Gene 'Pius' Pacelli, was as enormously helpful as ever, slipping it into Humani Generis in 1950. And getting away with it!
"From there it was simple — letting reason and thought in the door meant that people would actually apply joined-up thinking to Catholicism, something it had no hope of withstanding. I mean, say something really blatantly stupid like 'atheism is the cause of the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice,' put our sexiest underage agents into the choirs and see how long before the world's howling for your blood.
"And what happened to the bloke who wrote that British Foreign Office memo? They shuffled him sideways to another job! Honestly, real life outdoes jokes every time."
Mr Ratzinger plans to retire to his home town of Marktl in southern Germany. "It's a great relief to come clean after all this time," he said. "I'm very much looking forward to using this 'penis' thing at long, long last. Woo hoo, bevy of bouncing buxom Bavarian babes, here I come! So to speak."
Richard Dawkins, who had recently revealed his Doctorate in Divinity, was more than a little put out. "I'm most annoyed no-one made this much fuss when I said I liked Christmas services at my local Church of England. I'm trying to give as many clues as possible here, you know." He retreated to his office with a bottle of Irish whiskey and a Vicar of Dibley box set.
Microsoft is improving its stratospherically successful "decision engine," Bob Hope, with a feature that allows you to "visual search" on "web" "sites."
"This is what happens at the cutting edge of research, y'know," said marketing marketer Yusuf Mehdi at the Tech Crunch 50 conference yesterday. "You can use Microsoft Search to 'search' for any page on the Information Superhighway! And it's really quite amazing what's out there. Man. That's actually our slogan — 'Microsoft Search: It's Really Quite Amazing What's Out There. Man.'"
The "search" feature is part of technology acquired in the deal with Yahoo! "We bought this fantastic thing they were working on. It's a directory of links to web pages. People put stuff into classifications. You can 'crowd-source' it, you know! You visualise what you're looking for, type it in words and this stuff shows up. Amazing! I don't know how anyone never thought of it before. We have about fifty precomputed 'searches' in there at the moment, with more to come. Windows 7! The 'wow' starts now! You know, sometimes I wonder how people even managed to use computers before Windows 7."
Search requires installing Microsoft Silverlight, .NET 3.5, the latest service packs and Windows Genuine Advantage. Office 2007 is also recommended. It runs best in Internet Explorer 8 on a Windows 7 computer. "We don't see how Goog— that other company can possibly compete. Theirs doesn't use anything extra. How the hell are you supposed to get people hooked like that? They just don't have a business model."
"Fuck! Even in the future, nothing works!"
This is why sysadmins will always have work.
Microsoft has unveiled its new Zune One and Zune Two mobile phones for unusually stupid social-networking enthusiasts in their late teens and early twenties with a higher income than their IQ.
Team leader Roz Ho said the company had tried to create a Microsoft gadget that people actually wanted to have, like the XBox 360, but that actually worked properly.
"Get your Friendster and your MySpace!" said Ms Ho. "We studied consumer habits and built the perfect phone for the, uh, 'social generation,'" she air-quoted, "to make it 'fab' and 'bling' — I mean, of course, 'Bing!' — for people too dumb to work an iPhone to share their lives moment to moment."
The handset is of simple design for simple people. The keyboard engages caps lock at random and interjects common "chat" acronyms like "LOL" and "OMG" and "RTFM" should too many words in a row be spelt correctly. A breathalyzer automatically switches on the video camera in the event of excessive alcohol consumption so that the skin tone detection algorithm can send the user's breasts to her entire address book. As well as the usual daily crashes, the Blue Screen of Death can be invoked by the user so as to have a suitable excuse not to answer a text. Later revisions of the phone may include making voice calls.
"We are excited to be the exclusive carrier for this exciting new Microsoft phone in the exciting US," said John Harrobin, Senior Vice President of Paperclip Filing, Morning Drunkenness and Excited Press Release Quotes at Verizon Wireless. "Because we fucking hate you people. We really do."
Roz Ho was previously leader of the Microsoft team that lost all the data on everyone's T-Mobile Sidekick phones last year when the systems team was told not to bother with backups.
So much for nine years of my resume ... time to read up on that "Leengux" rubbish the kids are on about so much these days. This is Unix, I know this! That, on the other hand ...
ALING, Heathrow, Thursday (NTN) — Prime Minister Gordon Brown has condemned Iceland's terrorist attack on British air travel and their refusal to refund tourists' air tickets.
The UK government used anti-terrorism laws to freeze all British-held assets of Umhverfisráðuneyti, the Icelandic Ministry Against the Environment, after minister Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir threatened to further unleash the power of the Katla volcano in the wake of the devastation to school holidays caused by Eyjafjallajökull.
Thousands of confused and angry passengers wandered around Britain's becalmed airports today trying in vain to find out how long the disruption caused by the ash cloud might last. "Can't we just, you know, give the planes a try?" said Brenda Busybody, 54 (IQ), of East Cheam. "I wanted to go and rest on holiday, and Monday I'm back to doing nothing in the office. I pay my licence fee!"
The Prime Minister offered his outrage and sympathy, in lieu of money or anything useful. "This is fundamentally a problem with the Icelandic-registered El-stodth Thyonustah Voweld," said Mr Brown, attempting not to choke on his own tongue. "They have failed the people of Iceland and they have failed the people of Northern Europe! You pay my licence fee! Er, hold on ..."
Icelandic Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir also offered her sympathies to British travellers. "But, you know, we're still pretty upset about the cod."