- A false sense of security -
The real danger of social networks is complacency, not cancer, says Bill Thompson
- Ryanair mulls charge for toilets -
Irish budget airline Ryanair has said it is considering charging passengers for using the toilet while flying.
Chief executive Michael O’Leary told the BBC that the Dublin-based carrier was looking at maybe installing a “coin slot on the toilet door”.
- Leeds Carnegie: Beware the Bees’ sting -
Leeds Carnegie will be aiming to avoid a giant-slaying in the second city this weekend – and it won’t be a place for the faint-hearted, according to Brummie Leigh Hinton.
All-conquering Carnegie visit the parochial surroundings of Sharmans Cross Road to face National Two title chasers Birmingham and Solihull in the last eight of the EDF Energy National Trophy on Saturday (kick-off 2pm).
- UK government backs open source -
The UK government has said it will accelerate the use of open source software in public services.
Tom Watson MP, minister for digital engagement, said open source software would be on a level playing field with proprietary software such as Windows.
Open source software will be adopted “when it delivers best value for money”, the government said.
- ”Rents down’ amid flooded market -
The cost of renting a home has dropped as frustrated property sellers have been flooding the market, according to two separate surveys.
Owners were choosing to let rather than sell, having accepted that property prices were likely to stay low for some time, said property website Globrix.
- Sounds of Brass hits top 10 -
Phillip Hunt’s weekly hour long ‘Sounds of Brass’ radio programme, which is broadcast on nine BBC Local Radio Stations throughout the West of England, has entered the BBC IPlayer Top Ten.
- Ryanair and the ‘idiot bloggers’ -
Ryanair has confirmed that one its staff abused a blogger who questionned the airline site’s credentials.
But far from apologising for the volley of abuse, Ryanair today dismissed bloggers as “lunatics” and “idiots.”
Monthly Archives: February 2009
Bill Hicks has me convinced
Even when I was a kid and had some semi-regular visits to Sunday School at our local church (United Reform you know – I’ve always been a non-conformist) I never really believed all that crap about Adam and Eve.
What? We all descended from one man and one woman? And she was made from one of his ribs? Really?
It’s a stupid idea but there are plenty of people that still think that this is literally true. Not so many in the UK, perhaps, but plenty in the States. Us so-called Church of England lot prefer to take our Old Testament with a pinch of salt. It’s all “metaphorical” you know.
Of course it is.
Anyway, a certain person of a Toxic mindset posted a video recently of a performance by the legendary Bill Hicks, and he says it much better than me.
[Careful - lots of extremely rude words]
Thanks Bill. I can hardly believe it’s been 15 years since his death but the world of comedy is much worse off without him in it. There was nobody quite like him.
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Tips on sartorial elegance
I’m not one to be too fussed about being smartly dressed or wearing fashionable clothes but I do like the look of some of this “geek chic” stuff.
I’m not a 100% full-blown geek but I like to dabble. I had a ZX81 back in the day followed by a ZX Spectrum, and I’ve had a love of computers ever since. Not a physical love, you understand. That would make me a nerd.
Anyway, I was reading this article by Wil Wheaton, he of Stand By Me and STNG fame-dom, and he linked up the following t-shirt:
That thing, right there. is all kinds of awesome. I ordered one (sorry Jo) and it’ll be with me in 1-3 weeks.
There’s some great stuff on that site too. Clothing to warm a geek’s heart.
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A small observation
I was driving in to work this afternoon and I was overtaken by a guy in an Audi TT. I quite like the TT (this was the old shape) but this one had been ruined by the owner’s decision to add a personalised license plate.
There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but this one was “T7 SCX”. He’d also added the obligatory “screw” into the number plate so that the C looked like an E. “TT SEX”. I see what he did there.
The first word that came into my mind when I saw that was: “cock”. I’m sure that his Lordship Jeremy Clarkson would agree.
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Bookmarks for February 19th through February 23rd
- Techcrunch are full of shit -
On Friday night a technology blog called Techcrunch posted a vicious and completely false rumour about us: that Last.fm handed data to the RIAA so they could track who’s been listening to the “leaked” U2 album.
I denied it vehemently on the Techcrunch article, as did several other Last.fm staffers. We denied it in the Last.fm forums, on twitter, via email – basically we denied it to anyone that would listen, and now we’re denying it on our blog.
According to Ars Technica, even the RIAA don’t know where the rumour came from.
- CBS, Last.fm deny passing user data to RIAA -
The news cycle spins fast and flimsy these days. Late Friday night, TechCrunch posted an unsourced rumour that CBS-owned Last.fm handed a “giant dump” of user data to the RIAA. The music org was said to have requested the data, which could be used to find users who are listening to as-yet-unreleased tracks, after U2′s upcoming album was leaked two weeks before release.
But Last.fm came out fighting. After its New York-based CBS (NYSE: CBS) spokesperson told TechCrunch “To our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA”, Richard Jones (pictured), one of the three remaining co-founders in London, wrote in the site’s comments after midnight: “I’m rather pissed off this article was published, except to say that this is utter nonsense and totally untrue. As far as I can tell, the author of this article got a ‘tip’ from one person and decided to make a story out of it. TechCrunch is full of shit, film at 11.”
- Whitbread winner Nolan dies at 43 -
Award-winning Irish author Christopher Nolan, who was almost completely paralysed by cerebral palsy, has died at the age of 43.
A family spokesman said he had ingested food into his airway, and died in Dublin’s Beaumont hospital on Friday.
The writer was physically disabled at birth. He wrote by tapping a keyboard with a device strapped to his head.
- Easy login plans gather pace -
Plans for a system that would allow people to use one username and password across the internet have moved closer with a number of popular sites agreeing to the scheme in recent weeks.
Earlier this month Facebook became the most recent site to sign up to OpenID, joining the board of the scheme that provides users with a single digital identity which can then be used across many websites.
How long has Open ID been about? Let’s see if it starts to catch on
- WATCHMEN is fucking awesome. -
I got to see a special advance screening of Watchmen yesterday, at a taping of MTV Spoilers. They showed us the whole movie, and then ran some clips from the new Harry Potter, the Land of the Lost, and the new Star Trek movie, followed by a Q&A with Zack Snyder.
I know a lot of people want to know about Watchmen, so I’ll just cut to the chase right away: It’s the best movie inspired by a graphic novel that I’ve ever seen. It could have gone wrong in a thousand different places, and it didn’t. I’ve wanted to see this movie for twenty years, and it was entirely worth the wait. Hear me now, my fellow geeks: you have nothing to worry about. Watchmen is fucking awesome.
- So, does Twitter give you cancer? -
Can Twitter give you cancer? That was the question racing (usually accompanied by the tag “rubbish”) over social networks today, based on a new article in the journal Biologist, and then covered by some organisations (sample headline: “How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer”).
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Links for February 18th
- Novelist Pratchett becomes a Sir -
Author Terry Pratchett has been knighted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace for services to literature.
Sir Terry, 60, was named in the New Year Honours list.
- Wonder twins telescope sees star’s dying gasps -
500 light years away, the star T Leporis is dying.
It used to be much like the Sun, but the store of nuclear fuel in its core is running out. Due to the nuclear processes going on deep inside it, its energy production has vastly increased, blasting out thousands of times the energy it did when it was a stable star. The outer layers of the star absorb this energy, and, like a hot air balloon, expand hugely. Even though it is now far, far brighter than it used to be, the expansion actually cools the star’s surface. It has become a bloated, swollen red giant.
- Not safe for work: the git that keeps on giving -
Remember: if you steal a man’s fish, you’ll make him hungry for a day, but steal his nets and you’ll keep him hungry for a lifetime.
- 50 Mobile phone apps to change your life -
If you’ve recently got a new phone for Christmas, be it an iPhone, G1, Nokia or a spiffy BlackBerry, we bet you didn’t know it could change your life.
Download any of these apps and become more efficient, thinner, fitter and better at saving on the go, so you’ve still got time to sit around in your pants whenever you feel like it.
- Maybe Facebook should just offer a loyalty card instead -
Facebook has more than 150 million users. You would think that that must be valuable. The problem that “social networking” sites are throwing up, though, is that while you might have a lot of users, how do they ever become something that’s actually valuable?
- New law making it an offence to photograph a policeman should worry us all -
More than 300 photographers descended on New Scotland Yard this morning to protest about a new law that could criminalise anyone taking a photograph of a police officer. Section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act, which came into force today, permits the arrest of anyone taking photographs of the police, the armed forces, or the intelligence services which are “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”. Now a policeman might not be your first choice of subject but this should concern us all.
- Babies’ gestures partly explain link between wealth and vocabulary -
Babies can say volume without saying a single word. They can wave good-bye, point at things to indicate an interest or shake their heads to mean “No”. These gestures may be very simple, but they are a sign of things to come. Year-old toddlers who use more gestures tend to have more expansive vocabularies several years later. And this link between early gesturing and future linguistic ability may partially explain by children from poorer families tend to have smaller vocabularies than those from richer ones.
- Creationists are still denying Darwin -
The fundamental ideas behind the theory of evolution have been scientific gospel for decades – and yet creationists refuse to go the way of the dinosaurs. Who exactly are they? And just what do they believe?
- Facebook ‘withdraws’ data changes -
The founder of Facebook says the social network will return to its previous terms of service regarding user data.
In a blog post Mark Zuckerberg said the move was temporary “while we resolve the issues that people have raised”.
Users had complained after new terms of service seemed to suggest Facebook would retain personal data even if someone deleted their account.
- Westboro Baptist Church justifies UK picket -
This is the full text of the Telegraph’s correspondence with the Westboro Baptist Church, about its plan to stage a picket in Britain for the first time. The church has threatened to demonstrate outside the staging of anti-homophobia play The Laramie Project at a school theatre in Basingstoke, Hampshire on Friday.
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Links for February 17th
- BBC – Newsbeat – Technology – Sky to replace 90,000 HD boxes -
Thousands of Sky+ HD customers are to have their boxes replaced after a fault was discovered by manufacturer Pace.
- Food intolerance test – Watchdog -
Julia Bradbury went under cover to reveal how a ‘food intolerance’ test available from high street gyms, spas and chemists is a waste of money.
It’s called the Kymatika K-Test and is marketed as a ‘revolutionary’ non-invasive way to diagnose food intolerances. The test costs on average £30, and, according to the company that developed it, is the culmination of three and a half years of dedicated research.
However, when Julia took the test twice in the same afternoon, she got very different results.
- Facebook terms of service compared with MySpace, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter -
With today’s outrage over Facebook’s newly altered Terms of Service at its peak, I figured I’d do a quick comparison of their terms of service as regards user-uploaded content to the terms specified by other social networking sites, just to see if said outrage is fully justified. It looks as though the finger-pointing at the Bush robots.txt file wasn’t justified, for instance, and I was guilty of spreading that story.
Conclusion? Go ahead and be outraged. Facebook’s claims to your content are extraordinarily grabby and arrogant.
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Bookmarks for February 15th through February 16th
- NABBC National Convention -
A bright but cold morning recently greeted the delegates for the 2009 National Convention of the National Association of Brass Band conductors (NABBC) at their convention venue in Lincoln.
Our band performed at this event. We were delighted to be conducted by the legendary Major Peter Parkes
- Don’t be bitter as Twitter gets fitter -
Click reporter LJ Rich talks about Twitter and whether the surge of interest in it is improving or impairing the micro-blogging system.
- Join the Internet Blackout – Protest Against Guilt Upon Accusation Laws in NZ -
Join The New Zealand Internet Blackout to protest against the Guilt Upon Accusation law ‘Section 92A’ that calls for internet disconnection based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny. This is due to come into effect on February 28th unless immediate action is taken by the National Party
- Join New Zealand Internet blackout protest against insane copyright law -
Reason didn’t work and the Parliamentary process failed, which is why we in New Zealand now have arguably the world’s harshest copyright enforcement law. Sections 92A and C of the amended Copyright Act establish a guilt upon accusation principle that can see anyone accused of “copyright infringement” getting his or her Internet connection severed.
- Npower urged to drop ‘juice’ row – Npower seem to think that they came up with the term “Juice”. They’re idiots
- 50 Wonderful, Inspiring Photoblogs -
A photoblog is a very specific type of blog. Its focus is photography, and there are typically few words beyond a caption and comments. Photoblogs are easy to set up and maintain, and they make great photo galleries for photographers who are put off by the complexity of HTML coding or installing a CMS such as WordPress.
It’s because of this simplicity, not to mention the development of free yet sophisticated tools like Pixelpost, that photoblogging has exploded in popularity over the last few years. Photoblogs.org, for example, lists over 32,000 photoblogs! That’s a lot of photos, and a lot of photographers vying for your attention.
Dedicated as ever to making your life easier, we’ve handpicked over 50 brilliant photoblogs for your viewing pleasure.
- Galaxy has ‘billions of Earths’ -
There could be one hundred billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy, a US conference has heard.
Dr Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Science said many of these worlds could be inhabited by simple lifeforms.
He was speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago.
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Links for February 12th
- Appreciating evolution on Darwin’s 200th birthday –
Today marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, and later this year will see the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species.
- Millions ‘opt for DIY dentistry’ –
Millions of people in England have resorted to DIY dentistry, a survey by consumer magazine Which? suggests.
The poll, of 2,631 adults, found 8% had tried to fix their own dental problems – and a similar number knew somebody who had tried.
Of those who admitted trying the DIY approach, one in four had tried to pull out a tooth using pliers.
- Charles Darwin: a Fulcrum Appreciation –
February 12th 2009 sees the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth. Along with Isaac Newton he was one of the greatest British scientists, though his science is still controversial. To some he was a great scientist and to others the devil incarnate!
A religious perspective on the work of Charles Darwin
- Russian and US satellites collide –
US and Russian communications satellites have collided in space in the first such reported accident.
A satellite owned by the US company Iridium hit a defunct Russian satellite at high speed nearly 780km (485 miles) over Siberia on Tuesday, Nasa said.
- ‘Heat the Hornet’ by Richard Dawkins –
How can you say that evolution is “true”? Isn’t that just your opinion, of no more value than anybody else’s? Isn’t every view entitled to equal “respect”? Maybe so where the issue is one of, say, musical taste or political judgement. But when it is a matter of scientific fact? Unfortunately, scientists do receive such relativistic protests when they dare to claim that something is factually true in the real world. Given the title of Jerry Coyne’s book, this is a distraction that I must deal with.
- In pictures: Stamps honour Darwin –
A series of stamps is to go on sale commemorating the British scientist Charles Darwin, 150 years after the publication of his seminal work on evolutionary theory – On the Origin of the Species.
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Happy Birthday. 200 Today!
February 12th 2009 would have been Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday if he’d have somehow evolved into some Methuselah-like being.
He was one of the most important scientists of his era – if not any era – and his discoveries that formed the Theory of Evolution have transformed how we understand the world around us.
Today is Darwin Day and I, for one, will be sinking one or two in his honour. Sorry I forgot the card though.
Also, Happy Birthday wishes to my sister-in-law Marie who isn’t anywhere near 200 today.
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