Lord Peter Mandelson has become deputy prime minister in the latest cabinet reshuffle, one of the highest positions held by an unelected politician in recent times. Joining him is Sir Alan Sugar, to become Lord Sugar, as enterprise secretary.
"Elections are so passe," said Lord Mandelson, "don't you think? Look at the EU vote. They couldn't think of any proper parties to vote for, so the few who showed up and could, you know, work a pencil voted in the Nazis and those UKIP idiots.
"Clearly, elections are an idea whose time has passed. We need to get back to a monarchy with a solid system of courtiers. Thus, only the unelected can join the cabinet and, in due course, become Prime Minister. Or Grand Vizier, as I prefer to call the role."
Lord Mandelson reassured everyone that Gordon Brown had seen off the latest round of attackers with knives for his back and that Mr Brown was safe in his position for at least another week. "But should he take ill or otherwise be unavoidably detained, in a dungeon or tower or similar, you will be comforted to know that strictly temporary succession plans are firmly in place and he has a deputy ready to do the job pro tempore. Just in case it should prove unfortunately necessary. The moves to allow life peers to relinquish their peerage and, say, re-enter Parliament via a safe seat, are entirely coincidental, though we may sadly have to employ them, say, next year. Purely hypothetically."
Lord Mandelson also reassured everyone that Lord Sugar was not merely waiting for the right moment to break the news to Mr Brown. "Or the cameras."
Lord Carter, the report's author, has now left the Government for consultancies unknown. Lord Mandelson, who has taken over responsibility for digital policy, has been persuaded of the need for a tougher approach after entreaties from starving music mogul David Geffen, who was introduced to him by the Rothschild family. "He warned me in 2001 that these 'MP3 players' would lead to the downfall of civilisation. I understand iPods were popular in the City just before the Great Recession, you know."
Internet piracy is estimated by the movie and music industries to cost them around GBP1.4 squillion zillion a year, ripped untimely from their generous artist-supporting pockets.
Critics have compared the proposals to King Canute, failing to turn back the tide. "So it's up to the Government to supply the sandbags. We have an industry to defend!"
Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, will require Internet providers to record users downloading illegal content. The magical copyright detector, which the music industry just knows the ISPs are being obstructive in not enabling immediately, will be used to send a massive voltage up through serious repeat offenders' Internet connections and into their chairs.
Labour backbencher Tom Watson said the sanctions would attach an "unbearable burden" on an emerging technology with the power to transform society. "Sounds just fine to me," said Lord Mandelson.
Kerry McCarthy, Labour MP for Bristol East, will be in charge of the partyâ(TM)s Internet campaigning ahead of the general election. "Voters will increasingly be searching the web to find out what we think about the issues. If we haven't cut them off."
In other news, the Pirate Party UK, launched earlier in the week, has been increasing its size at 100 new members per hour.
The top category was "pointless babble" tweets, with nearly 98% of tweets being inanity no sane person could want to read, retweets of inanity, links to inanity, retweets of links to inanity and retweets of retweets of links to links to the reretweet itself. And camera phone pictures of bowel movements on Twitpic.
Almost 2% was Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman or retweets thereof and the rest was Warren Ellis posting scatological abuse of his fans.
Botnet command messages were becoming more popular, many disguised as combinations of the syllables "lol" "wtf" "d00d" "RT" and "#fb" or scatological abuse of Warren Ellis's fans.
Twitter's demographics as of June 2009 were 55% female, 43% ages 18 to 34, 78% white, and 99.5% of such short attention spans that Facebook might as well be War and Peace. Botnet readership was considered likely to rise as soon nothing with organic intelligence would be able to cope.
Twitter recently redesigned its homepage, changing the tag "What are you doing now?" to "Post tomorrow's CNN headlines, particularly about #goatse."
Only 98% of Twitter updates are "pointless babble," says a new report that studied 2,000 tweets over a period of two weeks.
The top category was "pointless babble" tweets, with nearly 98% of tweets being inanity no sane person could want to read, retweets of inanity, links to inanity, retweets of links to inanity and retweets of retweets of links to links to the reretweet itself. And camera phone pictures of bowel movements on Twitpic.
Almost 2% was Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman or retweets thereof and the rest was Warren Ellis posting scatological abuse of his fans.
Botnet command messages were becoming more popular, many disguised as combinations of the syllables "lol" "wtf" "d00d" "RT" and "#fb" or scatological abuse of Warren Ellis's fans.
Twitter's demographics as of June 2009 were 55% female, 43% ages 18 to 34, 78% white, and 99.5% of such short attention spans that Facebook might as well be War and Peace. Botnet readership was considered likely to rise as soon, nothing with organic intelligence would be able to cope.
Twitter recently redesigned its homepage, changing the tag "What are you doing now?" to "Post tomorrow's CNN headlines, particularly about #goatse."
Microsoft today heeded the lessons of technological history, taking the popular "preview porn videos in the search engine" feature and turning its Bob Hope "decision engine" into a porn finder at the address explicit.bobhope.microsoft.com, that loads automatically in Internet Explorer whenever you go to a site that doesn't exist.
"It worked for VHS over Beta, porn sites were leading innovators in online payments. It's a natural synergy," said Steve Ballmer, looking somewhat sweaty and flushed.
Porn sites are some of the keenest users of Microsoft technologies, using the undocumented interfaces in Internet Explorer to install helpful toolbars and bulk email tools on users' systems. "It's all about tools," said Mr Ballmer, looking rather too excited. "Our tools have amazed people for decades. Microsoft are famous for the biggest and best tools ever. Developers! Developers! Developers! DEVELOPEEERS!"
Internet Explorer 8 is a vital part of the promotion. After a competition that advertises IE8's superior standards compliance with a site that deliberately breaks all other browsers, a programme to donate eight free meals for the poor for every IE8 download (with the cost of the meals being 10% of the spend on promoting them) and a string of free porn sites requiring a Silverlight download to watch the smut, IE8 Service Pack 1 will include a "boot straight into porn" mode. "We found that was what users really wanted in an operating system. I mean, browser. They're inseparable, you know." It will include the Storm, Conficker and FBI botnets as standard. "If you can't beat âem, join 'em." The system will also set up automatic deductions from your bank account and credit card.
Mr Ballmer promised that Microsoft will, as always, deliver. "Unlike porn sites, we don't just tease -- we really will fuck you. Now bend over."
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.
That's an excellent example of freely interchangeable cut'n'paste trolling of the sort that is spoken of in TFA, yes: it sounds plausible but is loaded with misconceptions that would bog down sincere respondents answering them, and the effort for the poster is Ctrl-V. Perfect trolling.
The Easter Bunny should be discussed in school science lessons rather than dismissed, says the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
"If pupils have strongly-held family beliefs about the Easter Bunny, such ideas should be explored," said Prof William Dembski (D.D, Ph. D. [P.T. Barnum University mail-order]). "Easterbunnyism, Santaclausism or the contemporary militant Tooth Fairy jihadist movement are best seen by science teachers not as a misconception but as a world view. This is more valuable than simply banging on about 'reality.' Reality-based thinking is vastly overrated and certainly won't prepare children for a career in Wall Street or in government."
Simon Underdown of Oxford Brookes University disagreed. "With so much to be crammed into science lessons, it is not a worthwhile use of time to include lessons on Easterbunnyism. We have monthly standardised testing to coach pupils on."
Professor Richard Dawkins is working on a childrenâ(TM)s text on useful ways to quickly construct street-corner gallows and burning stakes for rehabilitation of the religious.
Woulda been nice to add the reasons these browsers exist - e.g. Arora was created specifically as a test wrapper for the Qt WebKit component. In fact, right now I'm compiling the current git of Qt so I can compile the current git of Arora because Ubuntu 9.04 only includes Arora 0.5, which is rather old and rickety...
Camino exists because AOL made an abortive move to make a lightweight Mac Gecko browser and it's still around from that. K-Meleon exists because there was no lightweight Gecko browser at the time, i.e. it's before the mozilla/browser internal fork that became Firefox.
Twitter.com crashed on Thursday at about 3pm BST due to a "denial of twat" attack from thousands of virus-infected Windows PCs under the control of terrorist masterminds.
Stephen Fry has been hospitalised and is queueing messages from his PatientLine text terminal in readiness for the site returning. "Twatter ++ungood sweeties zomg I do believe I'm feeling a little faint."
The source of the attack is unknown, but is hypothesised to be either the Russian Mafia, the Iranian security forces, the Chinese government or Alan Davies recoiling from his latest humiliation on QI.
News agencies around the world condemned the attack, which hits at the root of their online news-gathering processes, and have had to resort to following the Wikipedia "Recent Changes" feed. "Apparently BUSH IS GAY LOLOLOL," says the current CNN front page headline. "Who knew?"
A new site, "Grunter," has attempted to take up the slack. Users of "Grunter" are freed from the wordy excesses of Twitter's 140-character limit and can post one of twelve pre-programmed onomatopoeic noises, such as "mmrph," "huh," "grah" or "tubgirl."
Popular teenage angst poetry blogging and fan fiction site LiveJournal was affected by a similar attack at about the same time, but that attack was considered "just as well, really."
"Part of that pledge is not to sue for anything Mono related."
I know they had to not sue over the stuff in the SMB documentation they released, but where is the pledge for not suing over "anything Mono related"? Your comment is the very first I've heard of such a pledge. I'd like to check precisely what they said, where.
If you mean not suing over stuff in the ECMA specs, that's fine, but doesn't cover quite a lot of stuff that's needed to write a practical working.NET clone. Which is why the Mono team are currently separating Mono out into clear stuff and stuff that isn't covered.
My old work laptop dual-booted Windows XP and Ubuntu. Doing the same stuff in both (browsing in Firefox 3.5, playing music in VLC), on the precise same piece of hardware, I'd get 3.5 hours battery on Ubuntu and 2 hours on XP. I blame the corporate antivirus - McAfee to be precise. It's a goddamn power suck.
Windows can get out the way and let you run stuff as well as Linux... until you put that damn AV on. Which you'd better do. (I'm sure many people will comment they do OK without an AV, but anyone who isn't a sufficiently advanced geek better be running an AV on Windows.)
This morning, our dear leader Steve Ballmer is unveiling our completely new search service, unrelated to anything we at Microsoft have ever done before: Bob Hope.
We spent lots of time listening to you, except when you told us how much MSN Search^WLive Search^WKumo sucked 'cause you're just wrong about that, to learn which buzzwordy Web 2.0 thingies you use search for today. Finding a webpage that has anything to do with the search terms you entered is so passe, dahling.
So today we're introducing a new kind of search, that goes beyond traditional search engines that do tedious things like find stuff, to instead help you make faster, more informed decisions. (Windows 7 is peachy keen, by the way.) We think of Bob Hope as a Decision Engine. We've sued Stephen Wolfram into atomic dust using our patents on FAT and Mono, co-opted the Wolfram Alpha engine and swapped Mathematica for Visual Basic and Wolfram's brain for the exhumed corpse of Bob Hope.
So why did we pick Bob Hope as the new core of our search? We needed a brand that was as fresh and new as our approach. A name that was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world.
And just look at these results!
What do we want? Braaains. When do we want them? Braaains. What do I need to run Windows 7? Braaains. What's Bill Gates got that means you should buy everything you can from the company he founded? Braaains. What's the final proof of Steve Ballmer's equal genius to Steve Jobs? Vistaaa.
This is something new, something improved! You need to try it! It'll give so much more betterer results than that other search engine we can't name because Steve will wedge another chair up our butts! Please, come and try our new and improved service! FOR GOD'S SAKE TRY THE DAMN SERVICE. OR THE PUPPY GETS IT. We're Microsoft. We're serious as a heart attack on this one.
Chrome 3 will include a Theora decoder... a known broken and crappy one from an old FFmpeg build that can't cope with Thusnelda-encoded files, i.e. the close-to-H.264-quality encoder that Xiph and Mozilla have been working on.
After bricking unlocked iPhones, kicking applications off the iPhone store that might even slightly compete with iTunes in the far future and charging developers for the privilege and filing a wave of patents on basic well-known computer science, Apple Inc. today filed a Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission declaring that it was openly adopting Evil(tm) as a corporate policy.
"F*** it," said Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls, "we're evil. But our stuff is sooo good. You'll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It's shiny and it's pretty and it's cool and it works. It's not like you'll go back to a Windows Mobile phone. Ha! Ha!"
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft was incensed at the news. "Our evil is better than anyone's evil! No-one sweats the details of evil like Microsoft! Where's your antitrust trial, you polo-necked bozo? We've worked hard on our evil! Our Zune's as evil as an iPod any day! I won't let my kids use a lesser evil! We're going to do an ad about that! I'll be in it! With Jerry Seinfeld! Beat that! A**hole."
"Of course, we're still not evil, we said so," said Sergey Brin of Google. "You can trust us on this. Every bit of data about you, your life and the house you live in is strictly a secret between you and our marketing department. But, hypothetically, if we were evil, it's not like you're going to use Windows Live Search. I mean, 'Bing.' Ha! Ha! I'm sorry, that's my 'spreading good cheer' laugh. Really."
As Microsoft's search engine share sunk to its lowest level yet, with approximately 8 to 9 queries total worldwide, Steve Ballmer has hooked up with Yahoo! and its 21 queries worldwide.
The press conference was held on a street corner in San Francisco as Mr Ballmer and Jerry Yang sat with their hats on the sidewalk and playing harmonicas with a "WILL WEBSEARCH FOR FOOD" sign behind them.
"Understandably, we expect less activity in the Great Recession," said Mr Ballmer. "Nobody knows what value assets should be ⦠say, you aren't finished with that cigarette, are you?"
Press attendees included a schizophrenic local resident in a tinfoil hat ("to keep Google out"), two teenagers drunk on malt liquor and a policeman keeping an eye on things from a distance. The teenagers taunted, confused and upset Mr Ballmer by suggesting he attempt to locate his own posterior.
"My new search technology is unstoppable! Just look at this netbook!" shouted Mr Ballmer, waving an Etch-a-Sketch in a threatening manner. "IT'S MAUVE! IT RUNS WINDOWS SEVEN! LINUX PUT A RADIO IN MY HEAD! I'LL SHOW 'EM ALL! BASTARDS!"
"Some love stories are eternal," said Mr Yang. "Romeo and Juliet. Heloise and Abelard. Leopold and Loeb. Microsoft and Yahoo."
The UK is introducing CCTV cameras claimed to "predict" if a crime is about to take place and alert operators to suspicious behaviour, such as loitering, apparent thought in public, walking while brown or not spending money fast enough.
Anyone spotted may then have to explain their behaviour to a police officer. "Tough on lack of consumer confidence, tough on the causes of lack of consumer confidence," said Nick Hewitson of EDS Capita Goatse SmartCCTV. ("Consumer confidence" is a technical economics jargon term measuring willingness to casually spend ridiculous sums of cash on idiotic rubbish, particularly while drunk.)
"Only a criminal terrorist paedophile with something to hide could possibly object," said councillor Jason Fazackarley. "Criminals will pay much better attention to their dress and grooming with cameras there. Channel 4 has tentatively offered us a reality TV show. And Channel 5 would quite like the tapes of drunken shagging in shop delivery bays."
The project has been compared to the Tom Cruise science-fiction film Minority Report, in which psychic journalists are arrested on CCTV before they commit the crime of not peppering articles with the most obvious possible cliches copied from other papers.
Slashdot Mirror
Lord Peter Mandelson has become deputy prime minister in the latest cabinet reshuffle, one of the highest positions held by an unelected politician in recent times. Joining him is Sir Alan Sugar, to become Lord Sugar, as enterprise secretary.
"Elections are so passe," said Lord Mandelson, "don't you think? Look at the EU vote. They couldn't think of any proper parties to vote for, so the few who showed up and could, you know, work a pencil voted in the Nazis and those UKIP idiots.
"Clearly, elections are an idea whose time has passed. We need to get back to a monarchy with a solid system of courtiers. Thus, only the unelected can join the cabinet and, in due course, become Prime Minister. Or Grand Vizier, as I prefer to call the role."
Lord Mandelson reassured everyone that Gordon Brown had seen off the latest round of attackers with knives for his back and that Mr Brown was safe in his position for at least another week. "But should he take ill or otherwise be unavoidably detained, in a dungeon or tower or similar, you will be comforted to know that strictly temporary succession plans are firmly in place and he has a deputy ready to do the job pro tempore. Just in case it should prove unfortunately necessary. The moves to allow life peers to relinquish their peerage and, say, re-enter Parliament via a safe seat, are entirely coincidental, though we may sadly have to employ them, say, next year. Purely hypothetically."
Lord Mandelson also reassured everyone that Lord Sugar was not merely waiting for the right moment to break the news to Mr Brown. "Or the cameras."
Seven million Britons face having their internet connection cut off and fines of up to GBP50,000 as Digital Britain is implemented.
Lord Carter, the report's author, has now left the Government for consultancies unknown. Lord Mandelson, who has taken over responsibility for digital policy, has been persuaded of the need for a tougher approach after entreaties from starving music mogul David Geffen, who was introduced to him by the Rothschild family. "He warned me in 2001 that these 'MP3 players' would lead to the downfall of civilisation. I understand iPods were popular in the City just before the Great Recession, you know."
Internet piracy is estimated by the movie and music industries to cost them around GBP1.4 squillion zillion a year, ripped untimely from their generous artist-supporting pockets.
Critics have compared the proposals to King Canute, failing to turn back the tide. "So it's up to the Government to supply the sandbags. We have an industry to defend!"
Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, will require Internet providers to record users downloading illegal content. The magical copyright detector, which the music industry just knows the ISPs are being obstructive in not enabling immediately, will be used to send a massive voltage up through serious repeat offenders' Internet connections and into their chairs. Labour backbencher Tom Watson said the sanctions would attach an "unbearable burden" on an emerging technology with the power to transform society. "Sounds just fine to me," said Lord Mandelson.
Kerry McCarthy, Labour MP for Bristol East, will be in charge of the partyâ(TM)s Internet campaigning ahead of the general election. "Voters will increasingly be searching the web to find out what we think about the issues. If we haven't cut them off."
In other news, the Pirate Party UK, launched earlier in the week, has been increasing its size at 100 new members per hour.
Considering they first sent around inspectors to spy on him for daring to open the box ... fuck 'em. Fuck 'em hard.
Only 98% of Twitter updates are "pointless babble," says a new report that studied 2,000 tweets over a period of two weeks.
The top category was "pointless babble" tweets, with nearly 98% of tweets being inanity no sane person could want to read, retweets of inanity, links to inanity, retweets of links to inanity and retweets of retweets of links to links to the reretweet itself. And camera phone pictures of bowel movements on Twitpic.
Almost 2% was Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman or retweets thereof and the rest was Warren Ellis posting scatological abuse of his fans.
Botnet command messages were becoming more popular, many disguised as combinations of the syllables "lol" "wtf" "d00d" "RT" and "#fb" or scatological abuse of Warren Ellis's fans.
Twitter's demographics as of June 2009 were 55% female, 43% ages 18 to 34, 78% white, and 99.5% of such short attention spans that Facebook might as well be War and Peace. Botnet readership was considered likely to rise as soon nothing with organic intelligence would be able to cope.
Twitter recently redesigned its homepage, changing the tag "What are you doing now?" to "Post tomorrow's CNN headlines, particularly about #goatse."
And they're so much work to change!
On the upside, attacks of flying penises are all but unknown. Nearly.
I made one based on 4chan.
Humanity: LOLBOT! HOW DO WE REVERSE ENTROPY?
LOLbot: i dunno lol
[to be posted uh tomorrow, probably]
Only 98% of Twitter updates are "pointless babble," says a new report that studied 2,000 tweets over a period of two weeks.
The top category was "pointless babble" tweets, with nearly 98% of tweets being inanity no sane person could want to read, retweets of inanity, links to inanity, retweets of links to inanity and retweets of retweets of links to links to the reretweet itself. And camera phone pictures of bowel movements on Twitpic.
Almost 2% was Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman or retweets thereof and the rest was Warren Ellis posting scatological abuse of his fans.
Botnet command messages were becoming more popular, many disguised as combinations of the syllables "lol" "wtf" "d00d" "RT" and "#fb" or scatological abuse of Warren Ellis's fans.
Twitter's demographics as of June 2009 were 55% female, 43% ages 18 to 34, 78% white, and 99.5% of such short attention spans that Facebook might as well be War and Peace. Botnet readership was considered likely to rise as soon, nothing with organic intelligence would be able to cope.
Twitter recently redesigned its homepage, changing the tag "What are you doing now?" to "Post tomorrow's CNN headlines, particularly about #goatse."
Microsoft today heeded the lessons of technological history, taking the popular "preview porn videos in the search engine" feature and turning its Bob Hope "decision engine" into a porn finder at the address explicit.bobhope.microsoft.com, that loads automatically in Internet Explorer whenever you go to a site that doesn't exist.
"It worked for VHS over Beta, porn sites were leading innovators in online payments. It's a natural synergy," said Steve Ballmer, looking somewhat sweaty and flushed.
Porn sites are some of the keenest users of Microsoft technologies, using the undocumented interfaces in Internet Explorer to install helpful toolbars and bulk email tools on users' systems. "It's all about tools," said Mr Ballmer, looking rather too excited. "Our tools have amazed people for decades. Microsoft are famous for the biggest and best tools ever. Developers! Developers! Developers! DEVELOPEEERS!"
Internet Explorer 8 is a vital part of the promotion. After a competition that advertises IE8's superior standards compliance with a site that deliberately breaks all other browsers, a programme to donate eight free meals for the poor for every IE8 download (with the cost of the meals being 10% of the spend on promoting them) and a string of free porn sites requiring a Silverlight download to watch the smut, IE8 Service Pack 1 will include a "boot straight into porn" mode. "We found that was what users really wanted in an operating system. I mean, browser. They're inseparable, you know." It will include the Storm, Conficker and FBI botnets as standard. "If you can't beat âem, join 'em." The system will also set up automatic deductions from your bank account and credit card.
Mr Ballmer promised that Microsoft will, as always, deliver. "Unlike porn sites, we don't just tease -- we really will fuck you. Now bend over."
Picture: Steve Ballmer ecstatic at the fifth great quarterly results in a row.
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.
That's an excellent example of freely interchangeable cut'n'paste trolling of the sort that is spoken of in TFA, yes: it sounds plausible but is loaded with misconceptions that would bog down sincere respondents answering them, and the effort for the poster is Ctrl-V. Perfect trolling.
The Easter Bunny should be discussed in school science lessons rather than dismissed, says the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
"If pupils have strongly-held family beliefs about the Easter Bunny, such ideas should be explored," said Prof William Dembski (D.D, Ph. D. [P.T. Barnum University mail-order]). "Easterbunnyism, Santaclausism or the contemporary militant Tooth Fairy jihadist movement are best seen by science teachers not as a misconception but as a world view. This is more valuable than simply banging on about 'reality.' Reality-based thinking is vastly overrated and certainly won't prepare children for a career in Wall Street or in government."
Simon Underdown of Oxford Brookes University disagreed. "With so much to be crammed into science lessons, it is not a worthwhile use of time to include lessons on Easterbunnyism. We have monthly standardised testing to coach pupils on."
Professor Richard Dawkins is working on a childrenâ(TM)s text on useful ways to quickly construct street-corner gallows and burning stakes for rehabilitation of the religious.
Woulda been nice to add the reasons these browsers exist - e.g. Arora was created specifically as a test wrapper for the Qt WebKit component. In fact, right now I'm compiling the current git of Qt so I can compile the current git of Arora because Ubuntu 9.04 only includes Arora 0.5, which is rather old and rickety ...
Camino exists because AOL made an abortive move to make a lightweight Mac Gecko browser and it's still around from that. K-Meleon exists because there was no lightweight Gecko browser at the time, i.e. it's before the mozilla/browser internal fork that became Firefox.
So what's the story behind Shiira?
It's open source, you know what to do ;-)
LOL at "moonshine" :-)
Good question, actually. I wonder how much attention the EU can officially pay to Microsoft's behaviour outside the EU.
Er, the FAT patent was an actual lawsuit.
But yeah, trying to sue over these patents in the EU would not go well for them at all. Dunno if that would stop them trying in the US.
Do you mind non-obnoxious ads from sites you actually like? Me neither, they're just fine.
What to do:
1. Make your ads not a goddamn pain in the arse.
2. Gently ask adblock-using readers to add your site to their whitelist. DON'T MAKE THIS A POPUP, THAT'S DOING IT WRONG.
Stephen Fry has been hospitalised and is queueing messages from his PatientLine text terminal in readiness for the site returning. "Twatter ++ungood sweeties zomg I do believe I'm feeling a little faint."
The source of the attack is unknown, but is hypothesised to be either the Russian Mafia, the Iranian security forces, the Chinese government or Alan Davies recoiling from his latest humiliation on QI.
News agencies around the world condemned the attack, which hits at the root of their online news-gathering processes, and have had to resort to following the Wikipedia "Recent Changes" feed. "Apparently BUSH IS GAY LOLOLOL," says the current CNN front page headline. "Who knew?"
A new site, "Grunter," has attempted to take up the slack. Users of "Grunter" are freed from the wordy excesses of Twitter's 140-character limit and can post one of twelve pre-programmed onomatopoeic noises, such as "mmrph," "huh," "grah" or "tubgirl."
Popular teenage angst poetry blogging and fan fiction site LiveJournal was affected by a similar attack at about the same time, but that attack was considered "just as well, really."
"Part of that pledge is not to sue for anything Mono related."
I know they had to not sue over the stuff in the SMB documentation they released, but where is the pledge for not suing over "anything Mono related"? Your comment is the very first I've heard of such a pledge. I'd like to check precisely what they said, where.
If you mean not suing over stuff in the ECMA specs, that's fine, but doesn't cover quite a lot of stuff that's needed to write a practical working .NET clone. Which is why the Mono team are currently separating Mono out into clear stuff and stuff that isn't covered.
My old work laptop dual-booted Windows XP and Ubuntu. Doing the same stuff in both (browsing in Firefox 3.5, playing music in VLC), on the precise same piece of hardware, I'd get 3.5 hours battery on Ubuntu and 2 hours on XP. I blame the corporate antivirus - McAfee to be precise. It's a goddamn power suck.
Windows can get out the way and let you run stuff as well as Linux ... until you put that damn AV on. Which you'd better do. (I'm sure many people will comment they do OK without an AV, but anyone who isn't a sufficiently advanced geek better be running an AV on Windows.)
This morning, our dear leader Steve Ballmer is unveiling our completely new search service, unrelated to anything we at Microsoft have ever done before: Bob Hope.
We spent lots of time listening to you, except when you told us how much MSN Search^WLive Search^WKumo sucked 'cause you're just wrong about that, to learn which buzzwordy Web 2.0 thingies you use search for today. Finding a webpage that has anything to do with the search terms you entered is so passe, dahling.
So today we're introducing a new kind of search, that goes beyond traditional search engines that do tedious things like find stuff, to instead help you make faster, more informed decisions. (Windows 7 is peachy keen, by the way.) We think of Bob Hope as a Decision Engine. We've sued Stephen Wolfram into atomic dust using our patents on FAT and Mono, co-opted the Wolfram Alpha engine and swapped Mathematica for Visual Basic and Wolfram's brain for the exhumed corpse of Bob Hope.
So why did we pick Bob Hope as the new core of our search? We needed a brand that was as fresh and new as our approach. A name that was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world.
And just look at these results!
What do we want?
Braaains.
When do we want them?
Braaains.
What do I need to run Windows 7?
Braaains.
What's Bill Gates got that means you should buy everything you can from the company he founded?
Braaains.
What's the final proof of Steve Ballmer's equal genius to Steve Jobs?
Vistaaa.
This is something new, something improved! You need to try it! It'll give so much more betterer results than that other search engine we can't name because Steve will wedge another chair up our butts! Please, come and try our new and improved service! FOR GOD'S SAKE TRY THE DAMN SERVICE. OR THE PUPPY GETS IT. We're Microsoft. We're serious as a heart attack on this one.
Chrome 3 will include a Theora decoder ... a known broken and crappy one from an old FFmpeg build that can't cope with Thusnelda-encoded files, i.e. the close-to-H.264-quality encoder that Xiph and Mozilla have been working on.
They know about the bug ... but can't be bothered fixing it.
So sites with lots of Theora video will have to browser-sniff and suggest Firefox 3.5 to those with Chrome.
How to snatch defeat from the jaws of cluefulness ...
(note also that Chris DiBona mysteriously vanished from the WHATWG list after his FUD was refuted. It would be interesting to hear why.)
Like Intel and AMD give a shit about DeBeers.
After bricking unlocked iPhones, kicking applications off the iPhone store that might even slightly compete with iTunes in the far future and charging developers for the privilege and filing a wave of patents on basic well-known computer science, Apple Inc. today filed a Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission declaring that it was openly adopting Evil(tm) as a corporate policy.
"F*** it," said Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls, "we're evil. But our stuff is sooo good. You'll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It's shiny and it's pretty and it's cool and it works. It's not like you'll go back to a Windows Mobile phone. Ha! Ha!"
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft was incensed at the news. "Our evil is better than anyone's evil! No-one sweats the details of evil like Microsoft! Where's your antitrust trial, you polo-necked bozo? We've worked hard on our evil! Our Zune's as evil as an iPod any day! I won't let my kids use a lesser evil! We're going to do an ad about that! I'll be in it! With Jerry Seinfeld! Beat that! A**hole."
"Of course, we're still not evil, we said so," said Sergey Brin of Google. "You can trust us on this. Every bit of data about you, your life and the house you live in is strictly a secret between you and our marketing department. But, hypothetically, if we were evil, it's not like you're going to use Windows Live Search. I mean, 'Bing.' Ha! Ha! I'm sorry, that's my 'spreading good cheer' laugh. Really."
As Microsoft's search engine share sunk to its lowest level yet, with approximately 8 to 9 queries total worldwide, Steve Ballmer has hooked up with Yahoo! and its 21 queries worldwide.
The press conference was held on a street corner in San Francisco as Mr Ballmer and Jerry Yang sat with their hats on the sidewalk and playing harmonicas with a "WILL WEBSEARCH FOR FOOD" sign behind them.
"Understandably, we expect less activity in the Great Recession," said Mr Ballmer. "Nobody knows what value assets should be ⦠say, you aren't finished with that cigarette, are you?"
Press attendees included a schizophrenic local resident in a tinfoil hat ("to keep Google out"), two teenagers drunk on malt liquor and a policeman keeping an eye on things from a distance. The teenagers taunted, confused and upset Mr Ballmer by suggesting he attempt to locate his own posterior.
"My new search technology is unstoppable! Just look at this netbook!" shouted Mr Ballmer, waving an Etch-a-Sketch in a threatening manner. "IT'S MAUVE! IT RUNS WINDOWS SEVEN! LINUX PUT A RADIO IN MY HEAD! I'LL SHOW 'EM ALL! BASTARDS!"
"Some love stories are eternal," said Mr Yang. "Romeo and Juliet. Heloise and Abelard. Leopold and Loeb. Microsoft and Yahoo."
The UK is introducing CCTV cameras claimed to "predict" if a crime is about to take place and alert operators to suspicious behaviour, such as loitering, apparent thought in public, walking while brown or not spending money fast enough.
Anyone spotted may then have to explain their behaviour to a police officer. "Tough on lack of consumer confidence, tough on the causes of lack of consumer confidence," said Nick Hewitson of EDS Capita Goatse SmartCCTV. ("Consumer confidence" is a technical economics jargon term measuring willingness to casually spend ridiculous sums of cash on idiotic rubbish, particularly while drunk.)
"Only a criminal terrorist paedophile with something to hide could possibly object," said councillor Jason Fazackarley. "Criminals will pay much better attention to their dress and grooming with cameras there. Channel 4 has tentatively offered us a reality TV show. And Channel 5 would quite like the tapes of drunken shagging in shop delivery bays."
The project has been compared to the Tom Cruise science-fiction film Minority Report, in which psychic journalists are arrested on CCTV before they commit the crime of not peppering articles with the most obvious possible cliches copied from other papers.