Posts by Paul C. Hartley

Moses' parting of the Red Sea: New sim explains whole thing

Just a point of note...

has nobody noticed that regardless of how strong the wind was blowing, it was traveling in the same direction that they were traveling so they would not be fighting against it or trying to keep upright. It would be at their backs pushing them forward.

On the point that science and faith dont have to be opposed to each other then it just depends upon which arguments faith is going to conceed.

Faith says flood - science says no flood

Faith says world 6000yrs old - science says 4billion yrs

Faith says world flat - science says spherical

Faith says sun goes round the earth - science says earth goes round the sun

Faith says man is created - science says man evolved

Science can proove all that it contends however the tricky thing about faith, and its very deffinition is that it is something that is believed with the absence of or dispite of any form of evidence.

All the greatest scientists were not deists by any definition. Quite a lot of them were by todays standards fundimantialists of their particular religion. Edward Jenner, the guy who came up with genetics was a christian monk to give just one example and Newton - the guy with the apple was most definately what we would call a fundimentalist christian.

The areas that these great scientists are famous for are often quite specific. Take Newton as the example. The major works that he is remembered for were in optics and gravity however the majority of his publications and writings are about the occult and the bible and other batshit insane crap that nobody really wants to remeber him for because it was all twaddle and completely wrong.

As for evolution, Darwin did NOT come up with evolution. not by a very long stretch of the imagination. The idea had been around since the ancient greeks and it was very popular long before Darwin ever set foot on the Beagle. What Darwin did was come up with the key. The one thing that allowed evolution to happen without divine intervention and that was natural selection.

It is for this reason that we refer to his theory as Darwinian evolution or evolution by means of natural selection.

The reaction was quite muted and unassumed when darwin first published his theory. It was only when he published Origins that the shit hit the fan because it was more widely available to read and it was probably the first tme that people not familiar with science had heard of the concept of evolution and so he is eroniously credited with it especially when they didnt read the book but were told what was in it by someone else as is so often the case.

Christianity can not reconcile withe evolution especially fundimental christianity. If man was not created in the garden of eden and Adam did not sin by eating the apple there is nothing for Jesus to be crucified for as a means of paying the price for that original sin and so his death was meaningless and not a sacrifice, doubly so if jesus already knew that he would rise from the dead a couple of days later his wounds healed but most of all alive.

Its like giving someone your last rolo, making them feel guilty about it, but knowing full well that its not really your last rolo because you have another packet that they dont know about

School secretly snapped 1000s of students at home

In his web seminar...

In his web seminar the Tech admin at the centre of this mess, Mike Perbix, explains in great detail exactly how it works.

I dont remember all the exact details but in essence when the laptop is turned on and once it establishes a connection to the internet it will connect to the LANrev server back at the school on a port published on the school's firewall. The LANrev software is running at all times on the laptop and can not be switched off and doing so is an excludable offence under the school rules.

The LANrev software by default sits in remote admin mode so that the school IT admin team can remotely manage the machine. If the laptop has been flagged as stolen then once it has established its connection to the LANrev server the LANrev software on the laptop will kick into remote observation mode and start taking screenshots and photos every 15 minutes and dispatching them to the school LANrev server.

I am pretty sure this system only works when the machine is turned on however I am not sure if it keeps taking snapshots and photos once it has been triggered even when it is not on the net until it is told not to do so when it connects back up with the LANrev server in the school.

I think he mentioned that he could activate the camera at any time on any connected laptop and take snapshots. I think I remember that he was boasting that the camera could be set to take pictures every 15 minutes when not connected to the home network. You and I would presume that the home network was the one at the students home but I suspect that he could have meant the "home" network in the school that the LANrev server was situated on.

It is a while since I last saw the web seminar that he did so I may have some of the details wrong. I last saw it when the scandal broke. The full seminar can be found in 6 parts on youtube by searching youtube for "Mike Perbix LANrev" and you used to (and probably still can although I havent tried) be able to access the seminar through links in the Blog page linked to at the bottom of the article that we are comenting on.

Mike Perbix's web seminar video was at one time part of the promotional material for LANrev however LANrev have now disavowed him and removed the webcam functionality from their product by all accounts

Collisions at LHC! Tevatron record to be broken soon?

we could be GODS!

"They could literally do a few mouse clicks and in a few minutes be at higher powers."

Do they actually mean that with a few mouse clicks they can go from being mear atom smashing mortals to mini universe creating GODS?

Sort of a "level up" kind of operation.

Personally I was hoping they had a huge red double handed lever like the kind that used to be used for operating train signals with a brown cardboard label attached to it with a piece of string that says "DO NOT TOUCH"

Mines the one with the pocket universe in the coat

Bridge made of recycled plastic supports 70-ton tank

@ Dale Richards - And the award for biggest failure to read.

Actually the fail could be all your own.

Jolyon Ralph is quite correct. The M1A1 Abrams uses depleted uranium (DU) ordinance in its anti tank and armour piercing munitions as well as in its own armour. The article only mentions the DU used in the tanks armour so his question is valid

DU is a byproduct of uranium enrichment and reprocessing or spent nuclear fuel taken from nuclear reactors

YouTube Lad from Lagos gets a bite

To be honest....

...it all just has the look and feel of somebody's performing art project.

I couldnt say for sure but the videos are all in HD and all of them have the same kind of look and feel about them. The production quality all looks the same in all of them from the lighting to the look of the house they are in.

All are perfectly framed and nobody is using a crumby quick cam in a badly lit room and they are all word perfect with their monologues.

I recon its a scam all right but the "victim" is the veiwer

Debbie Gibson battles Mega Shark and Giant Octopus

All very good but...

All very good but I didn't see no fricking lasers attached to the fricking sharks head.

I want sharks with fricking lasers on their fricking heads!

US cops called to McDonalds menu cock-up

Tough Call...

This is a tough call.

I maybe wouldnt call the police in such a situation. I would probably refuse to leave the counter and make it clear that the cashier wasn't serving anyone else behind me until the situation had been resolved to my satisfaction. If the cashier didn't like it then I would let McDonalds call the police. Resolving this should not have been difficult.

Technically if the value of the alternative is less than the order then she should be entitled to a refund of the difference. If the alternative is unsuitable then she should be entitled to a refund on the product that can not be provided or allowed to cancel.

Then again here in the UK we have statutory rights and consumer law that guarentees this.

The flame icon because I would always get a flame grilled BK over anything on the McBollox menu any day of the week.

Branson rocket piggyback plane has control 'issue' - report

Consider a name change

Maybe they could consider changing the name of the aircraft from WhiteKnight to WhiteKnuckle

Mines the one with the change of underware in the pocket

Fujitsu boffins build 'god-view' cam rig for drivers

Change of view

Dont you just either cycle through the views by pressing either the black of white buttons or use the left thumb stick

Gov to Manchester: No new trams without road pricing

Its all a scam...

Yes it is true to say that some of the routes into and out of Manchester are congested at rush hour times but the roads are generally clear the rest of the time. In many cases the congestion is purely the result of really bad road layout, daft priorities and poor traffic and parking enforcement.

None of the proposals address the god awful congestion on the orbital motorway. In fact these proposals actually make them worse as drivers wanting to travel from one side of manchester to the other will be inclined to drive OUT to the motorway and then around the outside of the city on the already clogged motorway system.

The vote yes campaign takes great pain to point out who will not have to pay the road toll but in many cases many of these people are the ones who cause much of the congestion. In the north of Manchester it is interesting to note that much of the congestion is in the suburbs and eases as you get closer to the city centre. Much of this is caused by the school run and as these drivers are traveling within the proposed charging zones without actually passing a charging point, they would not be subject to the charge.

Many of the Improvements to the public transport network are truely crap and others are kind of what you would expect as general maintenance of this infrastructure. For instance apparently we will get more yellow school busses but this amounts to a single bus for some areas like the small hamlet of Stockport or the village of Bury (There is irony here as these are two of the biggest outlying towns around Manchester, with Bury being the administrative town for Bury MBC)

As regards having MORE buses. This is not nesseseraly an urgent requirement. What manchester needs are the buses already out there being deployed in a more intelegent fashion - ie, lets not completely jam up the city centre by having a bus route war between two of Manchesters biggest bus companies along Manchesters busiest route all stopping at the same stop in the city centre. When there are more than sixty buses per hour on that single route and only two buses per day on others you need to fire the persone responsible for organising the routes and assignments.

Staying with buses for a minute, these bus companies are private companies with shareholders operating along routes decided by the local transport authority. Why is the government giving them a loan to improve their service especially when this is a loan tha the public is going to pay back by way of the road toll. The reason why people do not like using the buses is tha they are often dirty and crowded and over charging is rife. Why should a 75p fare turn into £1.75 fare because the driver chooses to ring up a ticket for the full route so I end up with a ticket to go eight miles up the road to Bury instead of just half a mile to the stop I want because the driver does not know what stop I am asking for or due to lack of training or an all too common language barrier.

The truth is that the congestion charging project is just one big experiment for the government to try out road charging and how it would work on a large area around a major british city. Too much of the proposal is about giving or lending money to private organisations to get them to improve their service and in all cases the plan is for road users to pay back any loans on these companies behalf.

and no I do not drive into town every day, I use public transport.

Our IT Crowd prize draw - we have a winner

....Matthew Squirrell

No, I'm Sparticus... I mean Matthew Squirrell

Man buys $1,000 worth of iPhone pixels by accident

You could see this one coming...

"I saw this app with a few friends and we jokingly clicked 'buy,' thinking it was a joke, to see what would happen,"

Dosn't the line "I wonder what happens when you press this button?" come just behind "you can not stop me now I am invincible!" and just before "after the war me and my sweetheart are going to buy a small cottage in the country with a white picket fence" and "dont worry, I think its harmless, look its smiling" in the all time top 10 list of things to say just before something really bad happens to you?

Put the app back up there I say. It does exactly what it says on the tin. All kudos to the author.

I work in IT and make a good living out of people who say "I wonder what this button does?" just before something really bad happens.

Mines the red one with "Away Team - Security" written on the back.

IBM solves world's 'paper or plastic' crisis

@ Adam Foxton

"in lab conditions, they've slowed light down to under 30mph"

I heard about this. Didn’t they use speed bumps every hundred yards, those silly bloody one way priority traffic islands, lots of roadside average speed cameras and narrowing of the road lanes by putting in permanent bus lanes at inconvenient places or did someone in traffic management put all of the traffic lights out of sync on major routes at rush hour so that the electrons had to stop every few hundred yards?

If not, why not, it bloody well worked for the council up here in Manchester. Someone will be suggesting the use of congestion charging soon as a means of getting light travelling back at a normal speed again.

Mine is the one with pockets stuffed full of old recycled plastic shopping bags

Brown's aide, Mata Hari and the BlackBerry

A good night out...

...followed by a dodgy Chinese takeaway.

Now that doesn’t happen very often now does it?

Mine s the one with the half eaten spring roll in one pocket and fortune cookies in the other.

US sees first airliner flight with laser defences

All very well but...

What about protection against the much more realistic threat of ....

SNAKES ON A PLANE

Ballmer and Gates defend Vista, drop Windows 7 hints

@ Thomas

Yes you would be correct. Windows 2000 is NT5, XP is NT5.1, 2003 svr is NT5.2 and Vista and Svr 2008 are essentially NT6 as they both share the same kernal so the next bag of spanners out of the mill will either be NT6.1 or NT7 depending on just how long it takes them to get version 7 out of the door.

Israel electric car project aims to wipe out oil

That will stick it to the Yanks big time

Presently just about the entire value of the USD$ is propped up by the price of oil. Oil is traded on the open market in USD$ and as a result anyone who wants to purchase oil on the global markets needs to purchase USD$ to do so.

As the price of oil skyrockets past $100 per barrel the US needs to print more and more USD$ to keep up with demand for more USD$ to sell to people on the world markets so that they can buy oil. This demand keeps the value of the USD$ up (although it has been tumbling recently) and allows the US government to print/create more USD$ to keep it from going bankrupt as it spiralling national debt increases.

If the global demand for oil suddenly dropped and the price of oil tumbled (or people around the world started trading in Euros for oil) then the value of the USD$ would plummet like a stone as there would be a massive surplus of USD$ on the international money market and there could be a real danger of hyper inflation in the US and the US economy could completely crash. If that was to happen then it is likely that it would default on the present massive debts it has and take the rest of the global economy down with it in a bang that makes the great depression look like a bad day at the office.

The rich oil producing nations in the middle east know that this is inevitable at some point in the future and that the oil is going to run out which is why you will notice that countries such as Saudi Arabia are investing their oil revenues and diversifying their national industries away from a dependence on oil production and moving towards a more service based economy that involves shuffling lots of paper and huge amounts of money about and taking a slice off the top.

It is a great irony bearing in mind how Israel owes its existence to the US, that it is Israel that is the country that is starting the ball rolling on kicking the worlds dependence on oil, a process which will knife its greatest ally in the back big time.

Germans send teen tearaway to Siberia

Actually that is a bloody good idea

While the UK dabbled in sending our ner do wells on package holidays to africa the idea is still sound, we just sent them north and not south.

Why not send them to some god forsaken island up in the Orkneys or just south of the arctic circle where it starts to get dark just after lunch, the sheep outnumber the locals who all seam to be related to each other in some shape or form (which incidentally gives them their distinctive shape and form), its at least a three hour sea voyage from civilisation in a small fishing boat on choppy seas to get there, the local tavern brews its own ale from whatever they can lay their hands on that happens to be round and brown and has a hoppy colour and is frequented exclusively by fishermen, they only have one road and its straight and cobbled so there are no corners to hang about on, everyone practices some strange pagan religion that involves building tall human shaped structures out of wicker, electricity is something that hasnt been invented in the particular century they live in and going out in unsuitable clothes and stopping out longer than you should means that the locals will dig you out of a snow drift in june when the weather is a little more mild.

Yes it may toughen them up a bit however they wont want to go back there and a day of meaningful employment in the UK will be a pleasure to do compaired to a day of existance on gulag island.

US woman launches 'Taserware' parties

Is it just me....

Is it just me or is there something deeply disturbing about this article?

Soccer moms with stun guns?

These things kill people. The police are trained how to use them so they keep the killing to a minimum when they tase you pre emptively, but after an evening with Dana burning holes in a cardboard cutout of Debi's ex husband, the girls are ready to go.

As for her mothers 81st birthday present, is she getting her mother a taser or is she going to tase her?

That of course highlights a dilema. If as a member of the public you tase someone to death - pre emptively, when the police turn up will they tase you or just blow your head off Dirty Harry style because you are carrying a deadly weapon?

US navy's robot carrier plane building fast

Why I would want a human pilot

Call me irrational but no matter how good a robot is at piloting a plane I want a human at the helm.

Robots have no imagination or creativity and lack the ability to "think" illogically in a creative way. They can not be reasoned with, they can just run instructions and the way they perform is only as good as the instructions that they are given.

If the computer driving your docklands light rail train has a divide by zero error and you miss your next stop or come to a grinding halt you dont have to worry about the 30,000 ft of air between you and the ground and the crater that the 200 - 300 vehicle you are in is going to make when it reaches it.

A robot at the helm has no feelings either way about becoming one with the earth at high speed from a perpendicular direction however a human usually does and as a general rule of thumb will try to avoid it by all means possible.

The most successful and widely used fully autonomous aircraft used to date is a cruse missile and that is not the kind of cruise I wish to be boarding when I go on holiday.

Beer set to hit four quid a pint

@Martin Benson

>But how much is a pint of London Pride? or any other decent ale?

Nicely put. I would hardly call London Pride a decent ale either. Every pint of London Pride I have ever had has been warm and flat and tasted funny. It makes you wonder why they are so proud of it. The other London beers must be truely awful.

BTW - £15 will get you well and truely plastered as well as a tray of chips and gravy to walk home with on a Friday night up here in the grim north.

Don't give booze to elephants, sobs Paris Hilton

Zombie Elephants...!

"I am indeed happy Hilton has taken note of recent incidents of wild elephants in north-east India going berserk after drinking homemade rice beer and getting killed."

To hell with the rise of the machines, in India it appears to be the rising dead elephants going nuts that the locals are worried about if this story is to be believed.

Begs the question, if elephants are normally grey, what colour are zombie elephants?

21st century travel: building your own warp drive

Of Course

The solution to faster than light travel as everyone knows will no doubt involve nanotubes and phased tachion bursts.

Prince stomps on unofficial websites

The Answer is Quite Simple

The reply to the lawyers letter should be very straight forward.

I would reply "waive my fees for for promotional activities on behalf of you client, web site design, hosting expences as well as fees for time incurred at a given rate for administrating said web site for the benefit of your client, his estate and business interests"

What a dumb ass. The RIAA make the dumb f**k move of the century by suing its customers and this dickhead goes one better and starts attacking his own fan base, suing those who promote his work off their own backs and out of their own pocket.

I say that any rock star that apparently spends all his time trawling the internet, google searching himself rather than enjoying the time honoured tradition of Booze, Bitches and Barbituates normal practiced by rock heros is no hero at all but rather a sad has been.

Simple solution. Guys, take down your web site, stop promoting his stuff. Someone who sues you for likeing his stuff and telling people about it does not deserve the admiration of so many.

Not so much Prince, formaly known as Symbol, more Plaintif soon to be known as Bankrupt or Moron soon to be known as Example.

A Gerald Rattner for the 21st Century in the making.

Facebook mounts Tupperware-style ads push

Sit back with a bowl of popcorn and enjoy...

"If you visit eBay via its sponsored Beacon application, for example, it would feed details of your activities back to Facebook"

Oh I am so looking forward to the headlines of the gaffs coming out of this one.

If you visit Victoria's Secret via its sponsored Beacon application will it tell facebook and all your friends via the newsfeed that you are wanking?

Will all males under the age of thirtyfive who visit victorias secret corporate profile then be sent targeted advertising for kleenex mansize tissues?

Virgin Media downed by Manchester arsonists

@ Nucotech

> "As a minimum personally I would not consider it a proper data centre without full UPS/generator back up."

You would think so wouldn't you? I was thinking along the same lines.

>"The whole system ‘should’ also be tested with a full shutdown (not simulated) at least every six months."

Not always possible when hosting 24-7-365 apps and services.

The other site with the air con problems was a normal office building and the ac was normal office ac controlled from the wall mounted unit. These have a habit of not coming back on after a powercut. The first sign that they havent come on is usually when servers start turning them selves off and someone goes to investigate.

Technically not correct

From what I hear the Miles platting incident was earlier in the day and may not be connected The incident that turned the lights off in the city was caused by an unspecified failure the other side of town a couple of hours later.

One area that did feel the full effects of the outage was Salford Quays which is home to a number of data centres. It is power failures at these data centres which will have caused the internet to go off line.

When the power went back on most equipment came back on however it all turned on at the same time and so came online out of sequence and in some cases some things didnt turn on at all. domain servers would have come on line before DCs and things came on in safe mode etc.

I personally spent all of this morning resolving issues for customers relating to this power failure ranging from firewalls with corrupted configurations, failed VPNs, missing DNS servers, absent databases. In one data centre we had to power cycle the whole of our hosting infrastructure, routers, switches, firewalls, servers, etc to bring it back online in the right order. On another site we had to turn most things off because the aircon had not come back up and the room was like a furnace.

The power outage appears to have been total in some areas with even street lights and traffic signals going off. In one building we look after 30 staff working late were stuck inside the building because the electronic door entry and locks systems were off line and cars where stuck in the carpark because the barriers couldnt be raised.

I have had better Thursdays

Oz 'Family First' candidate sacked for todger-flash email

Apparently...

Not a photo of a fine upstanding member then?

Coat/Door/Taxi

Snooping on users Facebook 'staff perk' - claim

And this is news because?

So admins can access everything on the site and staff can access any profie. How is this different from any other computer system? I would have thought this would be a requirement for policeing the site if reports on the number of sex offenders and kiddie fiddlers on the site are to be believed

Why should staff at facebook be any different to staff at any other internet connected company. Shouldnt they also have the oppotunity to get a rightious bollocking from managers for spending all day messing around on social networking sites when they should be working? I suspect that accessing facebook profiles during work hours and still keeping your job is a "staff perk" at just about any company.

Like eating all the chocolate you can eat when you work in a chocolate factory until you hate the tase of chocolate, I am pretty sure that you can only look at so many pictures of kittens, holiday photos, dumbass teenagers pulling faces into their web cam, sadly tarted up cars, peoples mobile phones and groups of anonymous idiots drunk out of their skulls at parties and night clubs before you want to do physical harm to someone or something. Likewise, reading the mundane day to day happenings of thirty something housewives stuck at home with the kids or the untold pages of teenage angst and irelevent drivel would, I imagine be more like reading the paperback version for the TV show "big Brother" after a while.

There is a big difference between being able to and actually wanting to. Any sysadmin can tell you that.

I would also suspect that some kind of tool that tracks who see's what when and where would also be a requirement for the same reason as above.

Knocking up such an application would not be too difficult either. All it needs to do is read back the site logs filtering on a username or IP address and what it accessed, something that all web sites can do anyway and databases are capable of if you turn on auditing.

You can do all of the above anonymously because you tell your system not to log access by members of the administrators group. Technically difficult this aint.

This isn't rocket science and is only news to the kind of dumbf*ck who puts their entire life up on facebook for all to see and then thinks that only the people they want to see it can see it.

French court says non to pre-loaded Windows on Acer laptop

This is not ACER's fault

The judgement is fair, not so far as it forced Acer to refund the user for the software that he did not want but rather it punished the company for dragging its feet in a simple consumer rights case, however this case highlights a very real problem in Europe regards the sale of both business and consumer computer equipment.

The reason that this is fair is that in europe we have laws that promote competition so it would be fair to say that Acer should really sell a version of its laptop without an OS however the antipiracy bunch say that this promotes software piracy and is bad so the manufacturers are in a way very much compelled to supply an OS on the hardware.

Now if you look at the PC OS market there are a dazzaling number of operating system flavours available, basically the various forms of windows from Microsoft takes a 90%+ stake and the rest is made up from a plethora of different Linux variations. To be fair, when the "no machine without an OS" policy is taken into account, what is being asked for is for manufacturers to make every model available with every possible operating system out there available to the consumer to buy which is just not feasable. If this was to happen the manufacturers would end up with an awful lot of kit that just would not get sold.

The consumer demands that they can walk into any computer shop and hand over their cash for their shiny new computer and go home, turn it on and it works. No messing around with disks and configurations and software etc. The want turn on put name in and internet within five minutes. They also expect their new shiny computer to be cheap also.

The AVERAGE computer user is a complete pleb when it comes to technical stuff and to be fair they have no interest in being any otherwise. What you must consider is that at leaset half the computer users out their are more of a pleb than the average one so the manufacturers make it as simple as possible.

The average computer user also wants windows, it is compatable with their software, their games, their hardware and they know how to use it. A very small percentage of customers may want to use something like Linux instead. It is true to say that they should not have to pay for windows but then the EU should force manufacturers to supply machines without an OS and this is not going to happen until either the customer base wants it or someone gets brave and launches a legal case to force the EU to make it happen.

California clamps down on in-car mobile use

@G R Goslin Re: Fatal

You can have as many fatal road accidents as you like just as long as the fatal injuries dont hapen to you.

Blind Judo master floors tobacco stealing skinhead

He didnt know the rules...

To Quote Pratchett

Rule One: "Do not act incautiously when confronting a little bald wrinkly smiling man,"

Rule Nineteen is: "Remember Never to Forget Rule One. And always ask yourself: How come it was created in the first place?"

Master crim leaves vital clue at scene of burglary

I'm Surpised...

Im suprised his mate didnt video it on his mobile and post it on you tube too.

Aussie stumps $100k for Airbus A380 tickets

What we really want to know is...

$100K - Is this Australian or US? What was the price of his ticket in Beckhams?

How big is his cabin in milliwales and how volumous in grapefruit?

how much leg room does he have in double decker busses?

How high does the plane fly in canary wharfs?

How late was the delay of the iinaugural flight and how long will the flight last in standard conex south central minutes?

How fast does the aircraft travel in sheepsecs?

I wont even ask for the IT angle.

Thieves swipe biker's prosthetic hand

Maybe...

It was stolen by a one armed bandit

I'll get my coat

Bank holiday transport farrago

Details on the TomTom Update...

Users should be OK to use their new TomToms this weekend without the need to update it. I hear that the update simply sets your "home" location to that of your nearest local police station.

I'll get my coat (if I can find it with out my satnav)

Hotmail hack punts person in peril scam

Arm Robbers

Maybe they where one armed bandits!

I'll get my coat...

Pirate Party invades Utah

Why ar pirates setting up a party in Utah?

Simple, its because they ARRrrrr!

I would have thought they would have prefered ARrrizonARrr but I suppose in UtARrr you have all those Mormon women who dress like Olde English servicing wenches and you can be married to lots of them at the same time and not get sent to the gallows. You have the ARrrches national park and of course Salt Lake city which I suppose sounds like a whole boat load of sea salty fun to a pirate but I am sure isnt.

On the down side not much Yo Ho Ho and a barrel of rum going to be going on with the alcohol control laws.

Bummer!

Sorry

I'll get my coat!

Microsoft Windows patent will spy for advertisers

This is just not going to happen

Imagine the kind of asskicking anger and frustration when management at a large organisation such as a bank etc find out that all of a sudden all of their Microsoft productivity software such as office applications on all of their desktops across all of their sites across the world have suddenly started displaying logos and adverts for their direct competitors and it can not be turned off. These management types then find out that they have actually paid for their competitors to advertise on all of their organisations computers. Now if mad hardware specs, compatability issues, stupid bugs and security holes was not a good enough reason not to upgrade to the latest version of microsofts cash cow this would be. It would be a sure fire way of NOT getting people to buy their stuff.

I agree that this is clearly Microsoft getting in on the ground floor and getting the patent in so competitors such as Google, Real and Apple etc all end up licensing the technology to use it in their products.

The risk of the open source mob getting together and stumping up the cash so that every windows PC in the world constantly dishes adverts for linux and other free alternatives to microsoft software is just too great.

Chinese fight rat plague with giant saucepan

Where the market inspectors went wrong...

Surely they should have been looking for wats not rats.

In any case, every fan of Fawlty Towers knows that to a foreign waiter, its not a rat, its a hampster.

Creationists open biblical history museum

Let them have their museum.

What harm will it do to let them have their museum? I say very little. As a devoted Pastafarian I have little interest in parting with my $20 and paying a visit myself and even if I did visit I fail to see how a walk around a building full of rubber animals, robotic manikins and a knock up scale model of a big boat is going to change my fundimental beliefs on the nature of the universe. If years of religious influence and christian teaching throughout my formative years was unable to convince me that it all sounded like it was made up by primative people in the absence of more acurate evidence or explanation I doubt an afternoons walk around this new museum will.

Those willing to pay their hard earned cash to visit this attraction are already converted or favourable to the point of view expressed by the museum. I sencerely doubt that they will be expecting bus loads of muslims to turn up looking for a fun filled and fact packed afternoon (I suppose if they did they would no doubt increase security and ring fence the building with those concrete barriers that you find around american embassies these days)

If you visit their website you will see that they are promoting museum memberships at around three times the price of a single admissions ticket. This would imply that these customers will visit at least three times a year to get their money's worth. This offer is hardly pitched at those who are skeptical or the unconverted now is it?

Lets be honest, this is an exercise in seperating the gullible from their hard earned money by the use of a good story and some well crafted props.

For those who ask there is indeed a spagetti museum, Rome is not just the home of the vatican. The following can be found in Rome, in Piazza Scanderbeg 117, a few steps from the Trevi Fountain, at the foot of the Quirinale Palace.

http://www.museodellapasta.it/index.php

Now if anyone happens know the address of the nearest beer volcano or the fabled stripper factory and is willing to pass it on I would be most thankful.