For those of us "of a certain age", this is a change from sticky back plastic and straws. It's probably "one she made earlier":
The computer runs the Linux Mint operating system, powered by Vegan Solutions's Eldy software
Legendary Blue Peter presenter Valerie Singleton has launched a new computer range specifically designed for older users and technophobes.
(Via Macworld UK.)
ACTA terms may force ISP anti-piracy, 3 strikes rules: "
A leaked set of proposals for the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) suggests the international deal will require harsh online anti-piracy measures. The draft will reportedly force Internet providers in all member states to actively police copyright on their networks. To qualify for safe harbor and reduce their liability, the ISPs would also have to implement 'gradual response' rules like France's three-strike law that initially warn and eventually punish those said pirating content, likely forcing them offline....
The full detail is here: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4510/125/
...is that it can be the equivalent of handing a sharp instrument to a 4-year old and then hoping against hope, that they don't run around, fall over and cut themselves or damage something or somebody as they flail wildly about.
I remember the annual influx of new members to AOL back in the dial-up days and the collective resigned sighs on Usenet from the older veterans as the same old questions were re-cycled, the same mistakes made, the same flame wars started, until eventually, the newcomers "got it" and stopped being a PITA.
And now every man and his dog, irrespective of sanity levels or lack of access to their medication can blog, Tweet, IM and generally annoy reasonable people.
And do these people have any clue about how the Internet works? From the look of a great number of pointers "out there"; apparently not.
I was amused, for at least a second, to see a poorly edited and frankly illiterate attack [an "attack" in that "being savaged by a dead sheep" sense] from a very small blog recently (the normal "I have an axe to grind and just watch me, boy am I going to grind it and because I'm anonymous, I can say what I like" type - unlike say, those people putting their heads above the parapet in Iran, Tweating, blogging and using FB, at great personal risk to life and liberty in an attempt to secure same), where the anonymous owner "confused" my personal blog on which are personal writings with something that was being said by me as part of my day job elsewhere on the web.
An easy mistake to make I suppose. If that is, you're an idiot. Or have forgotten to take your tablets.
[As a side-bar, it's funny to read here that "anonymous" shows one definition given as "lacking individuality, distinction, or recognizability"]
But there you go; there's just no class "out there" anymore, so we have the modern day equivalent of those new AOL-ers I described earlier, coming on-line now, trying to play in the big league and cutting themselves in the process. Democracy (or evolution?) in action I suppose and that's always a good thing, no? One just has to accept with a resigned sigh, that people are people and that they'll say and do the most stupid things.
Feel free to email me at chris[dot]bulow[at]gmail.com, as my blog makes clear, if you disagree.
And I will add finally, that my many American friends find the slang terms to which this person objected (and when "helpfully" defining them, he/she/it almost managed to raise their writings to a believable level of righteous indignation) hilarious when used by a Brit to describe them - they have far worse to say about me. It's Cockney "rhyming slang" and they're fascinated by that stuff.
But that's another story. And another day.
From the pen of the always readable Rupert Goodwins, comes his take on the great news that finally, after all these years, the UK government has pardoned Alan Turing. If you don't know who he is, you should, go investigate:
"I've just written one of my most satisfying stories for years. It wasn't much cop in journalistic terms: rattled off in a few minutes, it was based on a story in another publication and bolstered with a quote from yet another. No phone calls, no fact checking, no independent views. Yet I don't remember being quite so moved by the ordinary process of assembling the sentences for a very long time.
The story, of course, is that Alan Turing has received an official posthumous apology from Gordon Brown. The crime of what happened to Turing cannot be righted by this or any other act, but the symbolism goes a long way to turning a single — if very deep — tragedy into something that can do a great deal of good for a long time.
It is tremendous that as a result of this, more people will know of and perhaps come to understand the importance of intellect in the service of a greater good. The story of Bletchley Park is still new and somewhat raw, but it shows the resilience and capabilities of a free society dedicated to its cause, in the face of a ferocious enemy utterly devoted to injustice and the ascendency of self-serving power.
That this story should be so intimately coupled to the subsequent injustice and abuse of power perpetrated on Turing is both ironic and important. In 2010, it can be hard to imagine a society where homosexuality is criminalised and, by common consent, rightly so — but it takes very little effort to see that such ideas are still widely held, even celebrated, and by groups who claim to support the very principles of freedom, tolerance and liberty that Turing helped to defend.
By officially recognising the injustice, the UK government has said what cannot be said enough: that homophobia is a destructive force that hurts those who hold it — and destroys those against whom it is aimed. We will never be free of prejudice, but we can choose not to follow it, to recognise it for what it is and to fight it. We may not have the genius of Turing to help us or the dangers of wartime to sharpen our resolve, yet we have his example and his fate to remind us why such things are utterly necessary.
With luck, the story of Turing will become part of the body of national myth which celebrates the best of our culture, warns against the worst, and so helps us decide how to behave towards ourselves and others. It's hard to think what could have more potential or lasting importance.
You don't often get to report on that.
A good day."
[ZDNet UK Blogs - Rupert's Diary]
The right in the USA plus the insurance companies are trying anything to attack healthcare reform. In perhaps the most amusing effort to discredit US President Barack Obama's plan for nationalized health care - if not the most ridiculous - US financial newspaper Investor's Business Daily has said that if Stephen Hawking were British, he would be dead.…
(Via The Register.)
From the beginning of time there have been conspiracy theories. Back then, they were pretty basic such as Og and his secret fire. As we advanced as a society, so did our conspiracy theories and the paranoia grew right along with it. From the mysterious Illuminati to the Da Vinci Code to the mystery man on the grassy knoll to the moon landing, almost every major event in history automatically gets a conspiracy theory attached to it. Well what about the minor events? What about the things in life that we may take for granted? That is, by focusing on the large & grand conspiracy theories, are we missing some of the smaller ones that might exist?
In the spirit of keeping hope alive for all conspiracy theorists out there who are slowly having the rug pulled out from under their theories by things like facts and proof, here is a list of 51 conspiracy theories that don’t exist, but probably should. So slap on your foil hat and enjoy!
1. The Military has Alien technology that allows intergalactic Unreal Tournaments.
2. Astronauts on the space station only age one day for every three on board.
3. The moon landing was not a hoax. However, every NASA mission after that is because - let’s face it - how can you top landing on the moon!
4. Publicly released Hubble images are actually the results of Photoshop
tutorials by Industrial Light and Magic interns.
5. The Matrix is a documentary. It’s release was a “glitch.” Think about it, man.
6. Cable companies are working with grocery delivery services to market targeted food advertising to the giant Agra-conglomerates in the United States. You are only safe by “borrowing” your neighbor’s cable or stopping grocery delivery service. Otherwise, they know where you live.
7. The government has secretly taken over all aluminum foil manufacturers to embed transmitters in every roll because for a while there, they weren’t able to read our minds.
8. Tunnels and Bridges give us all Total Recall.
9. Dick Clark is a robot and used his own parts to create his robot son Ryan Seacrest.
10. Jim Morrison faked his death so he could start a successful niche bakery that only sells muffin tops.
11. Star Trek: Enterprise was just a mass hallucination, once we realized that - it was gone.
12. So-called “genetically modified foods” are merely hardier breeds of terrestrial crops harvested from the bowels of our hollow Earth! (bum-bum-buuuuuuuuuuuum!!!)
13. Alex Trebek is omnipotent.
14. NASA has actually landed on the moon on numerous occasions and has built an enormous colony on the dark side of the moon. Remember SC Governor Mark Sandford? He’d actually been at the moon colony and they made up that story about his extra-marital affair to cover it up.
15. In 1919 Babe Ruth wasn’t traded to the Yankees, the Yankees and Boston switched teams. After the 2004 season they switched back.
16. Al Gore invented Global Warming, then invented the Internet to spread the word.
17. Those Hulu commercials? They’re the truth.
18. In 1992 Patrick Stewart and William Shatner had a bare-knuckles boxing match in the basement of a sound stage in Hollywood, the result of which Shatner had to die at the end of Star Trek: Generations.
19. Peter Mayhew is actually a Wookiee, he just shaves for appearances. He lives in the forest and is routinely mistaken for Bigfoot.
20. Space Invaders was created by the Military to train children to defend the Earth against alien ships that attack in rows moving side to side and increasing in speed as they get closer to Earth.
21. By law, there has to be a Gene Hackman movie on any channel at any given time of the day. (See also, the Caine-Hackman Theory)
22. The responsibility for the recovery of the United States banking and financial systems has been secretly been placed in the hands of the Banker from Deal or No Deal.
23. The internet is currently run by a 13-year-old Princeton graduate from inside the hollowed out head of Teddy Roosevelt at Mount Rushmore.
24. The city of Las Vegas gets only half of its electricity from Hoover Dam. It gets the other half from the turbines inside Billy Mays that will continue to run for the next 15 years.
25. Hobbits actually existed. Peter Jackson and Danny DeVito are the last known living members of that race.
26. Steve Jobs is a cyborg built by Bill Gates. He wasn’t sick recently, he just had to get his continuum transfunctioner repaired.
27. The United States Originally had 14 Colonies. One of them was eaten by a giant alien snake which is where the “Don’t Tread on me Flag” came from.
28. Kevin Bacon is CGI created by ILM. Lucas made a deal with Hollywood to include Kevin in all those movies. If you look carefully during the warehouse dance scene in Footloose you can see some pixilation.
29. There are several documents recently discovered by the J.R.R Tolkien estate written in English, Elvish and Dwarfish that speak of a dream he had where Bard the Bowman died and left him 2000 lbs of grain. A willed wheat ton … gives me the creeps just thinking about it.
30. Lake Pontchartrain eats people alive.
31. Keanu Reeves is a Time Lord.
32. The Dinosaurs were wiped out by a doomsday device of their own making. The evidence is the abundance of iridium at the 63 million layer.
33. Every DVR has a chip in it that relays information back to the NSA. Anyone watching FOX News is automatically placed on a watch list.
34. Larry King died in 1991. What you see on Television now is a Henson produced Muppet voiced by Frank Oz.
35. Soylent Green isn’t made from people. It’s made from wheat grass, flour and imitation crab meat.
36. Carl Sagan found a way to travel between dimensions, unfortunately for us the other dimension was more exciting.
37. Our assumptions about Area 51 have all been wrong, it’s actually a giant underground petting zoo.
38. The Twilight Saga is a real story, written to introduce Vamps to tween girls who will be in the majority in the world when they are older and more accepting of their new blood-sucking overlords’ public introduction to humankind.
39. Levar Burton really wanted to play Lando and Billy Dee Williams really wanted to play Geordi. They discuss it frequently on a secret Twitter network run on an HP Superdome that sits in the basement of Barack Obama’s old house in Illinois. Bonus, the real birth certificate is hidden in the Superdome’s 3.5″ diskette slot.
40. There really are desperate, cash-laden Nigerian princes, lawyers for long-dead super-rich British relatives and representatives of unclaimed Canadian and Dutch Lotto funds searching the internet for their money’s rightful home. The banks holding the cash just want you to think they’re all scams so they can stay loaded.
41. Everything you’ve heard about Chuck Norris actually applies to Mr. T.
42. The Earth is a giant computer created by another giant computer to calculate the question to the ultimate answer.
43. MSG, as it turns out, is actually very important to brain development. The Chinese put out misinformation to the rest of the world so that they’ll have a leg up in the New World Order.
44. Speaking of Chinese food, the reason it tastes the same no matter where you go is because it’s actually supplied to each restaurant through giant underground pipes from a central factory in Quebec.
45. Snopes.com is actually run by government spooks so they can cover things up by calling them “urban legends.”
46. We actually hit “peak oil” back in the 1970s, but the oil companies and auto manufacturers conspired together to continue making money. Our vehicles now are actually all fusion-powered, and what you buy at the pump is just water with some smelly additives.
47. San Diego Comic Con is only the cover for an annual Illuminati meeting, where the world’s real money is divided up. The Illuminati are disguised as the booth babes.
48. LOL Cats pictures aren’t doctored. Those are actual cats asking if they can haz cheezburgers.
49. All babies born are being chipped by the government in secret for population control. When they turn 30, they’ll be summoned to Carousel.
50. The most effective torture method used by the military isn’t water boarding, it’s Bedazzling.
51. There are only 50 items on this list.
Do you have any you’d like to add? Leave them in the comments.
Special thanks to the following for their contributions: @hipsterplease, @lmorganjr, @corrinalawson, @jonathanliu, @antonolsen, @jrbooth, @nerdfoo, @dgiancaspro, @cebsilver, KingKen, @tombatron & Pushcart.
Bonus conspiracy tip: In order to counteract the embedded transmitters in the aluminum foil - pour water that has been heated in a microwave over the foil. The radioactive water molecules will disable the device and render your thoughts unreadable and uncontrollable. Remember you can only stop the Conspiracy with uncontrolled thoughts.
Hackers hit MI5 website 2:36PM, Thursday 30th July 2009
Hackers have attacked the MI5 website in an attempt to gather information on people using the site.
The attack was confirmed by the Home Office which called it a "small issue".
A spokesperson says the hackers targeted a vulnerability in the site's embedded Google search engine with a cross-site scripting attack. They were looking to inject code onto the site and redirect users to malicious pages, though the spokesperson denies they got this far.
She was also keen to point out that the website is not hosted on MI5's own servers, and thus sensitive data was never under threat. The issue has now been resolved.
"MI5 takes security very seriously. Its website is secure and hosted in a high security environment," says the spokesperson.
She wasn't willing to offer any further information on the attack, beyond the fact that a group calling itself "Team Elite" is claiming responsibility.
Stuart Turton
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