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Linux is like the Mooncup: a nice idea, but messy and not for the squeamish. In fact, Linux can be likened to a Mooncup-using redhaired hippie girlfriend who lives in a house in the country she built herself from twigs and has very strong ideas on how everything should be and has all her original body hair. The sex is fantastic, but only if she thinks the astrological conditions are perfect. And the house has a hand-dug latrine, so she's propped a toilet bowl on top and thinks that's "user friendliness."

Windows, however, is like a nice normal bottle-blonde girlfriend who has a proper office job and dresses cleanly from Primark and has a sweet smile and lives in a proper bedsit and knows everyone and how to act normally and is accepted in society. She gets headaches a lot and fits of rage where she smashes everything and there's an odd smell of decaying human flesh coming from the drains and the toilet backs up every now and then filling the entire block with sewage and bits of bodies, but this is entirely normal and nothing to worry about.

Yeah, I'm sure Arnie would have done even better on Facebook. "Join 'Amend der constitution for me.' 100,000 members. Dis time it's personalized."

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has hailed spectacular, record-breaking public demand for identity cards and will allow people to pre-register within the next few months.

"I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they have nothing to hide and want me personally to have every detail of their lives and pressing ten-pound notes into my hands for their very own precious pink and blue card," she said, taking another hit of her pipe.

The first biometric cards are being issued this month to foreigners who can be forced into it. They will be issued to young people on a voluntary basis from 2010, per every teenager's dream of having their every movement tracked.

People applying for cards and passports from 2012 will have to provide fingerprints, photographs and a signature, which Ms Smith believes will create a market worth about £200m a year by the "mended windows" theory of economics. "It takes money that was being wasted on food and rent and puts it into circulation for the betterment of the whole economy, particularly our dear friends at EDS Capita Goatse."

The Home Office is talking to retailers and the Post Office about setting up booths to gather biometric data. "We're sure everyone would be happy with having their fingerprints taken at Tesco when they get their shopping."

In her speech, Ms Smith rejected claims handing enrolment over to private firms would compromise security. "We're introducing new certification authorities and so forth, which will mean that masses of data never leaves our offices and the BNP never gets a database of every immigrant in the country or anything like that."

Conservative Supreme Court judges want to uphold an FCC crackdown on the use of salty language during daytime and early evening hours.

U.S. Solicitor General Gregory G. Goatse said the strict regulation of broadcast TV preserved it as a "safety zone" for families with children. "They'll never hear the foul shit they'd hear on the Internet, on cable or, God fucking perish, the schoolyard."

The Federal Communication Commission imposes heavy fines on broadcasters who broadcast any of "shit," "piss", "fuck," "cunt," "cocksucker," "motherfucker" or "tits," though saying them in sequence functions as a First Amendment "cheat code" and is allowed as artistic expression. Broadcasters can be fined more than $325,000 for a single utterance of the F-word, even some fuckhead blurting it out on a live broadcast.

Chief Justice John G. Lemonparty Jr. and Justice Antonin Stilea dominated Tuesday's argument and strongly supported the FCC.

Stilea said he understood that foul words would be heard at a football or baseball game. "Those assholes ain't fit for polite company. But TV's a different fucking one cup of two girls. TV coarsens the public debate, not like that fucking Internet thing. I'm not persuaded by the argument that people are more accustomed to hearing this shit than they were in the past."

During Tuesday's argument, only Justice Ruth Bader Tubgirl, waving her naked hairy butt at the courtroom, suggested the court delve into the 1st Amendment issues that underlay this dispute. It is "the fucking huge pile of elephant dung in the room," she said. "I can't believe this fucking retarded goddamn bullshit."

BOOTH OF DESPAIR, Ohio, Tuesday - Americans today committed egregious acts of democracy to elect the next failed administration and the next failed Congress.

In a fabulous upset, almost no-one could bring themselves to vote directly for either of the official candidates, instead opting for a write-in vote. Popular write-ins included "the black guy", "the old guy", "McCain from 2000" and "Tina Fey." The seventeen votes for "The Invisible Man" were tallied for Joe Biden. Several tons of Liquid Paper needed to be scraped off voting machines.

The winning candidate turned out to be Noneof Theabove, 46, of Dogshit, Nebraska. Apart from the Presidency, Mr Theabove won 72% of Congressional seats and all Senate seats up for election this year.

Mr Theabove's policies include drinking, shouting abuse at the television and inchoate existential despair. "He completely embodies the national mood," said Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, just before applying for a new job flipping burgers.

A majority of US soldiers in Afghanistan stated the place was "just fine, really" and they were learning to speak Pashto rather than returning. Canada looked south and snickered, though not very much as they still had Stephen Harper to cope with. The Kingdom of Mexico stated its "regret" today that it has had to close its borders to American refugees.

Remember that the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion declared Twitter a terrorist weapon. God forbid they discover pen and paper. Or modulated farting, for that matter.

You mean, it fails to compete with free? Will it just drive users to BitTorrent the way NBC insisting on Silverlight for the Olympics did?

This is obviously quite the coup for Microsoft and the Silverlight platform, which has up to now been a "nobody cares" platform. The main effect of their previous big user, NBC for the Olympics, was to drive people to BitTorrent.

I fully understand that NetFlix wouldn't be allowed to make Hollywood movies available without some sort of DRM. But do they remember they're competing not with DVDs by mail or DVD rental, but with unlocked BitTorrent downloads?

How usable is NetFlix via Silverlight? Does the DRM have little enough pain-in-the-butt factor to compete with free?

I think I covered that one when they tried floating the idiot notion that terrorists are hiding terrorist messages in child porn.

Annual reports from Whitehall departments show that the government has lost all data it ever held on anyone.

Losses have occurred through couriered unencrypted disks, misplaced memory sticks, lost laptops, briefcases left on trains and files falling down the side of the tea machine. "The real scandal is that a train was running for them to lose a case on," said a source whose name has been lost.

Treasury minister Jane Kennedy said the HM Revenue and Customs breaches did not necessarily result in data losses, or at least any that they have records of. HMRC said it takes data losses and security breaches "very seriously" and thoroughly investigates any breach that it does not lose track of.

Information Commissioner Richard Thomas has served enforcement notices on various departments for their data losses, but the departments in question could not find their office addresses to accept the notices. They noted, however, that Mr Thomas' call was very important to them, and that he had been placed in a queue.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith reassured citizens that plans for an all-encompassing ID card linked to biometric passports and a universal medical record with the NHS would not change because of these losses. "We won't even be thinking about them."

You should have been running OpenBSD, daddy.

MAN ON FIVE, Cook County, Monday (NNN) — The McCain campaign is looking at an Electoral College strategy heading into the final two weeks that has virtually no room for error.

"Democrat voting fraud is famous since Tammany Hall," says Republican strategist Karl Rove. "So we'll win without votes."

Voting machines have been remotely reset and the counts adjusted. "Diebold have come to the party big time." Touch screen machines for West Virginia early voting offer voters "McCAIN" or "REPLY HAZY, TRY AGAIN LATER."

The rolls will be thoroughly checked for voter fraud. "If the typeface or font size is different on their driver's licence, Social Security or the voter roll, that's obvious blatant fraud. A typical Liberal knife to the heart of democracy."

The party will check for dead voters as well. "We're making the safe assumption that all registered Democrats are dead. If they're not, we'll correct that." Governor Palin has long dealt with Democrat moose in Alaska. "You betcha!"

All residents of properties whose mortgages were underwritten by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac will be assumed to have voted Republican. "We own the houses, of course we own the votes. It's nonsense to say otherwise."

Finally, under USA-PATRIOT, Obama supporters will be deemed associates of associates of terrorists. The offence will carry a penalty of one day's imprisonment: November 4th.

Mr Rove is confident in the future of our democracy. "One man, one vote. That man being me."

OMG, Onoez, Sunday -- A report by the US Army 304th Military Intelligence Battalion identifies Internet technologies such as Twitter as potential TERRORIST tools.

Twitter users reported the July Los Angeles earthquake faster than news outlets, and TERRORISTS protesting at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis used it to provide information on police movements.

Other technologies were also examined for their TERRORIST uses. "Email could be used for TERRORIST messages, the anonymous troll comments on Slashdot could be used for TERRORIST data exchange and GPS trackers could be used to find our asses. We are also examining the dangers of YouTube pratfall videos, cat macros and pencils and paper.

"There is terrible, terrible danger that if people can communicate they may say something TERRORIST," said the report. "As such, our forces have secured the offices of Twitter and its financial backers are awaiting trial for funding TERRORIâ""

The report cut off at this point, replaced with a Fail Whale.

"We have buttiduously canvbutted the industry, buttessed what is available and buttembled the finest selection of private contractors for this buttignment. The filters will buttociatively clbuttify all communications and filter then, I can butture you, rebuttemble them with surpbutting exacbreastude in any quanbreasty. Consbreastuents can be rebuttured that a mulbreastude of industry compebreastors will butture quality and keep our clbuttrooms safe. EDS Capita Goatse will not embarbutt us."

(Inspired by Daily WTF.)

Microsoft has released eight patches for applications with an insufficient number of security holes.

"Our market is the enterprise," said Microsoft security marketer Jonathan Ness. "Information technology professionals know that Windows is the greatest IT job creation scheme in history. Without Patch Tuesday, there's no reason for the experienced IT worker to spend his time hiding out in the server room watching progress bars and getting over his hangover. Also, you can't tell people a virus ate their mail, you actually have to get it back for them."

Several faintly cat-piss-smelling Linux users pointed and laughed in a nerdy bray at the news and a much larger number of annoying Mac users showed off their new model iPod Nanos.

MAN ON FIVE, Cook County, Monday -- The McCain campaign is looking at an Electoral College strategy heading into the final two weeks that has virtually no room for error.

"Democrat voting fraud is famous since Tammany Hall," says Republican strategist Karl Rove. "So we'll win without votes."

Voting machines have been remotely reset and the counts adjusted. "Diebold have come to the party big time." Touch screen machines for West Virginia early voting offer voters "McCAIN" or "REPLY HAZY, TRY AGAIN LATER."

The rolls will be thoroughly checked for voter fraud. "If the typeface or font size is different on their driver's licence, Social Security or the voter roll, that's obvious blatant fraud. A typical Liberal knife to the heart of democracy."

The party will check for dead voters as well. "We're making the safe assumption that all registered Democrats are dead. If they're not, we'll correct that." Governor Palin has long dealt with Democrat moose in Alaska. "You betcha!"

All residents of properties whose mortgages were underwritten by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac will be assumed to have voted Republican. "We own the houses, of course we own the votes. It's nonsense to say otherwise."

Finally, under USA-PATRIOT, Obama supporters will be deemed associates of associates of terrorists. The offence will carry a penalty of one day's imprisonment: November 4th.

Mr Rove is confident in the future of our democracy. "One man, one vote. That man being me."

MAN ON FIVE, Cook County, Monday -- The McCain campaign is looking at an Electoral College strategy heading into the final two weeks that has virtually no room for error.

"Democrat voting fraud is famous since Tammany Hall," says Republican strategist Karl Rove. "So we'll win without votes."

Voting machines have been remotely reset and the counts adjusted. "Diebold have come to the party big time." Touch screen machines for West Virginia early voting offer voters "McCAIN" or "REPLY HAZY, TRY AGAIN LATER."

The rolls will be thoroughly checked for voter fraud. "If the typeface or font size is different on their driver's licence, Social Security or the voter roll, that's obvious blatant fraud. A typical Liberal knife to the heart of democracy."

The party will check for dead voters as well. "We're making the safe assumption that all registered Democrats are dead. If they're not, we'll correct that." Governor Palin has long dealt with Democrat moose in Alaska. "You betcha!"

All residents of properties whose mortgages were underwritten by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac will be assumed to have voted Republican. "We own the houses, of course we own the votes. It's nonsense to say otherwise."

Finally, under USA-PATRIOT, Obama supporters will be deemed associates of associates of terrorists. The offence will carry a penalty of one day's imprisonment: November 4th.

Mr Rove is confident in the future of our democracy. "One man, one vote. That man being me."

Obviously, Microsoft is anti-free enterprise today.

They just don't understand that it's not a zero-sum economy, and others' freedom of enterprise with their enterprising efforts is good not only for everyone else, but for them.

Without the pirates, would they have known to sell Windows for $3 in China? Of course not!

REDMOND, Indian Ocean, Monday - Microsoft has announced that today is "Global Anti-Piracy Day," with the aim to raise awareness of the damage to software innovation caused by robbery and murder on the high seas.

"Robbery, rape and brutal murder on the high seas is just like people copying that floppy," sobbed billionaire Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. "You wouldn't steal a patented software process, why would you steal a cargo ship?"

Piracy off the coast of Somalia has made these the most dangerous waters for software development in the world. The pirates use hacked zombie PCs, sometimes impounding codebases and programming staff at the point of their Heckler & Koch MP3s and demanding warez before they are released.

A famous attack late last year against one luxury system was foiled when the crew scared the pirates off with the Righteous Mathematical Stentor, an ear-splitting acoustic device developed in Massachusetts as a "non-lethal" free software advocacy weapon.

Somali clan leaders have agreed to end over two decades of Unix wars in the country and have made attempts to address the piracy problem. But the tremendous lawlessness off the long eastern Somali coastline reflects the difficulty of controlling the flow of information on the Internet.

In one breakthrough, pirate chiefs have resolved that they will never pirate Windows Vista or Office 2007. "Not even with your dick."

Consider the economic benefits of spam! MessageLabs reports that Egham, Surrey, on the suburban outskirts of London, is the town that receives the most spam in Britain.

"It's not like there's much else to do," says Boris Busybody, 77 (IQ), of Egham Hythe, idly whirling his four-foot penis around his head in a desultory fashion. "Expanding your manhood, growing your breasts, increasing your sperm ... the Lib Dem phone calls get a bit much. That's Doctor Busybody, by the way. My Ph.D arrived last week."

Spam has revitalised the local economy. Busybody has given up cab driving and is now working a lucrative job processing payments from home after he sent them his bank details in response to an urgent security message. "I had that King Otumfuo Opoku Ware II in the back of my cab once. Very generous and helpful fellow."

The Egham Tourist Board has seized the day, with plans for a 50 foot tall penis sculpture at Junction 13 of the M25 on the exit ramp to the town. The sculpture will be encircled by a genuine imitation Rolex and spray a fountain of Spermamax, obtained at a very reasonable rate from a Canadian pharmacy. "You will search an hour for your underwear in the ocean of our spam!" is to become the new town motto.

"I did get a good one the other day," says Busybody. "Barrister Matthew Sergeant Busybody of MessageLabs said we could promote our town to millions of people just by sending them an advance fee to process our incoming email. The stuff they try! â(TM)Scuse me, V!k@grk@ kicking in, got to go have sex again. Sorry."

TERRORISTS are used to disguising their faces and fingerprints. But what TERRORIST will think to disguise the rest of their body? p.s.: Look over there! TERRORISTS!!!

Somehow I can't see this not being abused or twisted. I'm sure the UK government will happily participate with the current Home Office plans to monitor all emails and phone calls that they're trying to soften us up for. After that, it's a matter of international "harmonisation."

Somehow I can't see this not being abused or twisted. I'm sure the UK government will happily participate with the current Home Office plans to monitor all emails and phone calls that they're trying to soften us up for. After that, it's a matter of international "harmonisation."

Full version up now:

Microsoft today announced the release of version 2.0 its world-beating Silverlight multimedia platform for the Web. As a replacement for Adobe's Flash, it is widely considered utterly superfluous and of no interest to anyone who could be found.

"We have a fabulous selection of content partners for Silverlight," announced Microsoft marketer Scott Guthrie on his blog today. "NBC for the Olympics, which delivered millions of new users to BitTorrent. The Democrat National Convention, which is fine because those Linux users are all Ron Paul weirdos anyway. It comes with rich frameworks, rich controls, rich networking support, a rich base class library, rich media support, oh God kill me now. My resumé's a car crash, Google won't call me back. My life is an exercise in futility. I'm the walking dead, man. The walking dead."

Silverlight was created by Microsoft to leverage its desktop monopoly on Windows, to work off the tremendous sales and popularity of Vista. Flash is present on a pathetic 96% of all computers connected to the Internet, whereas Silverlight downloads are into the triple figures.

"But it's got DRM!" cried Guthrie. "Netflix loved it! And web developers love us too, after all we did for them with IE 6. Wait, come back!"

Similar Microsoft initiatives include its XPS replacement for Adobe PDF, its HD Photo replacement for JPEG photographs and its earlier Liquid Motion attempt to replace Flash. Also, that CD-ROM format Vista defaults to which no other computers can read.

In a Microsoft internal security sweep, Guthrie's own desktop was found to still be running Windows XP.

Al-FAILda.

Al-FAILda.

Yes, really. Apparently.

In one of the most transparently stupid "LOOK! TERRORISTS!" stories to date, The Times has "exclusively" published a report claiming terrorists are hiding their secret terrorist messages inside child pornography. Because, y'know, obviously you're going to hide your messages somewhere already illegal rather than in wedding photos or LOLcats.

I'm pleased to say that the commenters on the article - and UK newspaper online comments are one of the purest sources of raw stupid on the planet - are already condemning this as obvious Home Office press-release ware.

The Times has been spotted running press releases for the Home Office before with jawdroppingly stupid scare stories. Coincidentally, the Home Office's call for the police to be able to hold people 42 days without charge just got rejected. Obviously not linked.

I wrote a blog post on it, but I'm not sure it's obviously a parody of a stupid thing that someone actually tried to seriously push.

So I'm going to dream with pixelations and a little note saying "Buffering ..."?

Of course if I was a real geek, I'd dream in blocky ASCII teletype softcore pinups.

"Your evil is weak, old man! If you destroy me, I will ... What am I saying, you can't destroy lunch."

"DEVELOPERS! Nobody sweats the details of evil like Microsoft! Weâ(TM)ve worked hard on our evil! Our Zuneâ(TM)s as evil as an iPod any day! I wonâ(TM)t let my kids use a lesser evil!"

"Ah, but we're working on a new approach. We're not evil."

"Just creepy."

"But in a totally not evil way."

"We have buttiduously canvbutted the industry, buttessed what is available and buttembled the finest selection of PFI contractors for this buttignment. The filters will buttociatively clbuttify all communications and filter then, I can butture you, rebuttemble them with surpbutting exacbreastude in any quanbreasty. Consbreastuents can be rebuttured that a mulbreastude of industry compebreastors will butture quality and keep our clbuttrooms safe. EDS Capita Goatse will not embarbutt us."

The plans have attracted wide criticism. "It will only give supersbreastious rebutturance to medireview thinkers. Automated systems won't solve human problems like loveual harbuttment. Mbuttacring the written word into a Picbutto painting is not the anbreastank missile of Internet safety."

Unions also butterted that such close buttessment of staff in the workplace would hamper efficiency and could verge on workplace harbuttment. "Watermeloning cranberries."

The government was unfazed. "Butterting free speech is one thing, but a triparbreaste committee considers that that does not justify mere pbuttive breastillation at the expense of others."

The first filtering offices will be set up in Arsenal, Penistone and Scunthorpe.

We need a complete database of everyone! Just to make sure!

Oh, of course we'll run it on Windows. It's incredibly secure, and no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft!

LOOK OVER THERE! TERRORISTS!!

Protect it with DRM! No-one will ever break that!

(written in response to this fabulously awful idea)

They'll just lose the data anyway.

Perhaps if they DRMed it that would keep it safe ... Until the RIAA sued them for accessing their own (copy of your) data.

I was waiting for Windows 3.2! Maybe if I get two and a bit of those, I'll have a Windows 7 ...

I'm sure President Palin will fight back the ice fantastically efficiently, for the good of the economy. You betcha!

Windows 7 is actually the .1 release of the third version of NT. (No wonder they finally gave up and just called the next version "Windows".) But then they started the NT line with the first release being "3.1".

Going back in history, dBase II was actually the first version of dBase. For just this reason: no-one trusts a 1.0.

In open source, it goes the other way - the project has to just about take over the goddamn world before they'll admit it could possibly be a "1.0" release.

Summary: version numbers are marketing just like everything else.

"Us" being the news media. Quite simply, he needs to create a more compelling narrative on change and get angry about something. Our ratings depend on it. Attack ads! Push polls! We need material!

We need the argument that this is an election with two choices - not just one popular dynamic guy and one old past-it guy. That's not a compelling media narrative!

Obama's 2:1 advantage in the Electoral College is far too confusing for our viewers. We need to re-run polls until we get one with a 1% change, never mind the 3% error margin. It's sooo close! Experts say it's a wake-up call! Better keep your eyes glued to the screen! Oh my goodness!

If Obama can just pull ahead between now and November 4, he may become President Barack Obama ... Or not! Who knows? You need to keep watching! Right here! Stay tuned!

With Windows %NEXT_VERSION%! I'm sure they won't mind doubling the memory in them.

I have commended your brilliance elsewhere.

"The day an AI passes a Turing test, is the day humanity has become so stupid it can't tell man from machine ~ Exitar"

I have a present for you.

Mostly it was just stupid. It was Microsoft snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: really pretty good hardware, but with mediocre firmware and terrible, terrible on-PC software. If they'd just left the thing hackable, every Leengux weenie in the world would have bought one to Rockbox it. But nooo, control took precedence over making some actual money.

Another example is the Xbox 360 - a great console with great games, they were even going to make a profit from it ... until they cut corners so badly that this joke is instantly understandable and its reputation was almost irretrievably trashed. Maybe they'll get it back with the super-cheap low-end model, we'll see.

Microsoft do some great stuff. But jeez, they need to get better at it.

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