Bush vs. Left Wing Bloggers

America must surely be the only democracy in the world where "left wing" is used as an insult. I would have thought the McCarthy mindset might have faded just a little by now.

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American Nuclear Weapons Safety

Well this is terrifying. Pakistan is concerned about the safety of the US nuclear weapons procedures. Especially since a B-52 has been sent into the air with a payload of nuclear weapons by mistake in 2007... Nobody on board knew that they were carrying nuclear weapons.

I think the quote below shows the remarkable arrogance of the US military in a very succinct way.

"Iqhman added the Pakistani government would be willing to offer technical advice and assistance to the United States on improving its nuclear weapons handling procedures. Speaking anonymously because of the issue's sensitivity, senior Pentagon officials said it is Washington's role to give, not receive, advice on nuclear weapons safety and surety issues."

Oh dear.

Full article

This is awesome.

Automated advert placement is the best comedy invention since the whoopie cushion.

Inappropriate Ad

I love the Japanese!

Two different pranks on this clip that you could only get away with in Japan. I wish we could just laugh at stuff like this in England without health and safety concerns.

Secret Spaces - Brittania Manor

That's one hell of a house. I wonder if it ever gets boring activating all the secret latches.

Copyright gone all wrong?

This is an interesting article about how an average American (I'm sure it's roughly the same for the UK too) racks up millions of dollars of copyright infringement liability in an average day, even if he doesn't go near one of the much publicised file sharing networks.

It's not exactly scary, because it's never going to be enforced, but it does show just how broken the system is.

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Inventive use of technology

I was looking for some software that would move my mouse periodically to prevent a time out on a Terminal Services connection when I came across this:

Inventive!

Things like this always make me smile :-)

DRM Hell

A good, real-world example of DRM doing what it does best: being eeeeeeevil.

Baseball fans in America who have purchased videos of full games of baseball, from the MLB no less, have found that the DRM license server (which is used to ensure that only those people who have paid can see the footage) has been shut down. As a result all of those videos will now no longer play.

I think there are two key questions raised by this:

1) Will this push honest consumers more towards illegal pirate copies of games taken from HD TV recordings?

2) Why the hell would anyone want to watch a baseball game twice?

Yet again DRM proves that it makes only the honest suffer and makes people suspicious of downloadable content.

Source (Via Digg)

Japanese crazy taxi extreme prank!!!

What. The. Hell.

I don't think he was too happy. I'm guessing he didn't tip the driver.

Neil Gaiman does Sherlock Holmes. Very well.

My wife got me a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories set in the Cthulhu Mythos for my birthday (along with the Wiiiiiiiii) and the first story in the collection is by Neil Gaiman, probably my favourite author.

I've just found out that it's available on his website as a pdf. Well worth a read.

Also interesting is the wikipedia page on the story, though not until after you've read the story as it's very spoiler-heavy.