Publicly whoring onesself out for politics

Quoting from here:

The Conservatives said the bill, as it stood, was an “Amstrad” when “we wanted an IPod”.

Why compare Sky digiboxes to music players?

Of course, whoever came up with this probably doesn’t know or care that Amstrad are still going and have been making set top boxes for Sky for ages. They were probably inferring PCs from 20 years ago. If I were to reinterpret their analogy in this way then it would be an analogy between a well-known, understood, documented, agreed-upon, standardised, tested and universally relevant computer: the “IBM Compatible”, which we would now call x86, which for some reason in this argument is specifically referring to one sold by the Amstrad company rather than any of the identical such units shipped by other companies; and on the other hand would be a locked-down, secret, proprietary, incompatible, unknowable, vendor-controlled, feature-stripped computer: the iPod. Yes I’m a freetard, but the point of discussing a law is to debate the freedoms and restrictions it implies, so those are the only relevant characteristics we can use when interpreting this analogy.

Give me such an Amstrad and I’ll plug in a few hundred GB of storage and use it as a file server. Give me an iPod and I’ll most probably try to blend it, since it’s fun to watch the glowing screen bouncing off the blades. Apparently some people actually buy iPods, but I can’t justify that price just for a few seconds of blending fun. Maybe I could think of a different use for one if I happened to get one, but I can’t fathom any at the moment. It’s too glossy to make a good doorstop, since it would just slide over the carpet, even if you jammed it right under the door.