I wish to bring this demoscene demo to your attention, particularly to that of hairyears

I have very little sympathy for anyone who prats about, or damages, or attempts to damage, railway infrastructure and who then gets killed by a train. If it happened to more of the malefactors, it might encourage the others not to do so...

And when I'm feeling particularly misanthropic I think the same about the really stupid ones who delay trains by sheer force of idiocy.

The camera records at 2 megapixels, which is quite impressive for something this small and the resolution is 640 x 480 at 30 frames per second all of which is saved to micro SD card.

I think they may find that 640 x 480 is about 0.3 megapixels, not about 2 megapixels.

Looks like a nice toy, but there are not two megapixels being recorded in there.

When the business you work for has enormous financial liabilities, shrinking market share and business volumes, and there are many alternatives to your business for customers to use, it may not be so clever to go on strike.

It's quite easy to subtlely edit this SciAm article into feline domestication of humans.

"In all likelihood, then, some people took kittens home simply because they found them adorable and tamed them, giving cats a first foothold at the human hearth."
->
"In all likelihood, then, some kittens inflitrated human homes simply because their appearance meant humans found them adorable and cared for them, giving cats a first foothold at the human hearth."
etc

I, for one, have always welcomed my new feline overlords.

Every time I think that CSS [1] and Macrovision and DVD region encoding are dead and gone, their putrid corpses rise up again and try to fuck with me!
I have to try two separate pieces of software to try to get a copy of my DVD onto my iPod so I can watch it. Merely trying to read them gives me corrupted data unless I use some appropriate hackware.
Even today I have to have several DVD drives to be able to watch all my DVDs (from various "regions") which I purchased entirely legally.

The media industry clearly hates its customers more than any other industry, ever. It hates me, this customer, more than local government hates me. More than the taxman hates me. More than nationalised railways hate me. More than Ryanair hates me. Noone else actively works harder to stop me using the goods I've paid for.

Fuck this shit. I'm seriously going to think about not buying more DVDs.

And I'm NEVER buying into bluray until it's very thoroughly cracked. And even then, its putrid corpse probably try to fuck with me, so why risk more pain?

Piracy, still the better choice!

[1] Content Scrambling System

The father of Damilola Taylor is repeating his call for the death penalty to be reintroduced after the latest killing of a 17-year-old boy.

So, Mr Taylor, you're suggesting we consider executing a 13 year old boy?

If I have the choice between buying the same CDs from:
A small specialist retailer who I know supports the music scene I enjoy and who sells a wide selection of music that I like online, and whose credit card processor needs me to sign up for Verified by Visa, and

Amazon (who don't require VfV or even the entry of any card numbers),

then I will choose Amazon.

Remember, retailers, if you want to live in a world with Amazon, you have to be at least as easy to use as Amazon.

(I did try Play.com too but they didn't have stock of what I wanted)

Summary: Most excellent, go see it.
( Details without spoilers... )

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16910-chemical-caterpillar-points-to-electronicsfree-robots.html

Next stop, mobile slimy artificial creatures to rule us all!

If anyone out there feels like giving me an invite code to Dreamwidth, I'd like to have it to check it out.

So, Amazon decided to remove the sales ranking (thereby removing the chance to feature in bestseller lists, any sales feedback to authors, etc, etc) from many (but not all) books about non-heterosexuality, as well as some (but not nearly all) books with any general possible sex-related content. Note the affected books about teh gay weren't all sexual.
Cockup or conspiracy, you may ask? I certainly did. I checked a load of books - looking for anything with "bisexual" in the title will easily find you some examples, there's no sales rank for most of them.
Mark Probst (I don't know him other than discovering him when looking for info) got a reply from amazon that the removal of sales ranking information was to "exclude 'adult' information" "in consideration of our entire customer base". I doubt this, and that it's more in consideration of the loud moralising minority.
Amazon claim "It's a glitch".
I am thinking it is a cockup in the magnitude of their conspiracy, and that there is an underlying situation of arbitrary classification which has now misfired seriously for the first time. See here for an earlier example.
The problems and dangers of having a single large private company, run out of a country with an aggressive moralising minority, able to affect the visibility of books to a large proportion of the book-buying public (enough that they can affect a book's publishing viability) are left as an exercise for the reader.

PM plan for compulsory volunteers.

I do not think that word "volunteer" means what the BBC seem to think it means.

A hotel that charges £15 per hour for wireless Internet access. That is the highest, most ridiculous charge I have yet seen for hotel internet access.
A four-star hotel shouldn't be charging for Internet access. It should be providing it free, along with towels, sheets, electricity for the lights, and all the other things we expect a hotel to provide.

Have a think about how many news stories you see which fit a model like "Ardent theists attempt (possibly succeed) in action that treats women as inferior to men".

I notice that a large proportion of people I know who think that the UK should become a highly-regulated and nationalised place, didn't live in the 1970s. I suggest they go look at how well that went before they try to take us back there.

You should all (perhaps unless you have already done so) obtain and read A Separate War and other stories by Joe Haldeman.

The dreaded problem when disassembling and reassembling a complex piece of equipment is to end up with the equipment reassembled but some screws left over, with no idea where the screws are supposed to
Therefore it would be particularly evil to surreptitiously add screws to the workspace of someone who is disassembling a complex piece of equipment, to guarantee they will have a screw left over at the end.

Verified Irritated By VISA and all the similar ideas are a definite discouragement from using credit cards online.
I'm not sure that discouraging use of the cards that they earn their fees from is the intention of card issuers.[1]

[1] Please do me the courtesy of assuming that I am familiar with the background of VfV, how it is implemented, the likely implications for consumer liability, who is forcing its adoption, and that it is possible to be exempted.

(Warning, their web page is a Myspace page, so it is overdesigned and plays music at you immediately)

Ashbury Heights are very moreish. I expect the peanut gallery to say "and the music's not bad either", but since I heard the music before seeing the picture I'll just say that their tunes are quite excellent.