Not sure what I’m going to do with this site yet, maybe a change of direction.

http://golang.org/

Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

Head over to Intelligent Falling for a dose of rational thought, a slice of atheism and a big bucket full of skepticism.

The cervical cancer jab is ‘AS DEADLY AS THE CANCER’ it prevents against.

Well if anyone reading the story can actually find the quote from the headline ‘AS DEADLY AS THE CANCER’ apart from the bit in the headline where they made it up, please let me know.

Sadly I can see this whole thing panning out into a new MMR scare. It no longer matters what the truth is once the hysterical, conspiracy obsessed anti-vaccination twunts get hold of it.

In an effort to win the “Stupidest Law of the Year” award, the Irish government are to vote on the proposed blasphemy law which will mean people are liable to large fines for commiting the heinous crime of “blasphemous libel”. To even get to this point the proposed plans have made it past the comittee stage of the Irish Parliment which means some of these people actually agree with it.

Honestly does anyone, even the fervently religious believe that gross violations of people’s freedom of speech have a place in law in the modern world? Forgetting the fact that this is almost certainly doomed to failure in any attempt to prosecute due to the very difficult nature of proving the “crime”, why would anyone want to stifle the freedom to question or ridicule opinions?

http://blasphemy.ie/

36. Publication or utterance of blasphemous matter.

(1) A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding €100,000.

(2) For the purposes of this section, a person publishes or utters blasphemous matter if (a) he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion, and (b) he or she intends, by the publication or utterance of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.

(3) It shall be a defence to proceedings for an offence under this section for the defendant to prove that a reasonable person would find genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value in the matter to which the offence relates.

37. Seizure of copies of blasphemous statements.

(1) Where a person is convicted of an offence under section 36, the court may issue a warrant (a) authorising any member of the Garda Siochana to enter (if necessary by the use of reasonable force) at all reasonable times any premises (including a dwelling) at which he or she has reasonable grounds for believing that copies of the statement to which the offence related are to be found, and to search those premises and seize and remove all copies of the statement found therein, (b) directing the seizure and removal by any member of the Garda Siochana of all copies of the statement to which the offence related that are in the possession of any person, (c) specifying the manner in which copies so seized and removed shall be detained and stored by the Garda Siochana.

(2) A member of the Garda Siochana may (a) enter and search any premises, (b) seize, remove and detain any copy of a statement to which an offence under section 36 relates found therein or in the possession of any person, in accordance with a warrant under subsection (1).

(3) Upon final judgment being given in proceedings for an offence under section 36, anything seized and removed under subsection (2) shall be disposed of in accordance with such directions as the court may give upon an application by a member of the Garda Siochana in that behalf.

They picket the funerals of dead soldiers holding signs saying things like “God Hates Fags”, “Homosexuality = Death,” “Fags Die, God Laughs,”. They use their own children for this and are generally a despicible excuse for humans.

so it fills my heart with much joy to see that the Central Arkansas Pastafarians group have been doing a little protesting of their own.

What do you do to make a bunch of soulless nutcases abandon their post at the Convention Center? Send in the pirates!

Yep, the cuckoo Phelps hate group walked the plank this morning after a happy bunch dressed like pirates and holding signs saying “God hates shrimp — Leviticus” and “God hates cotton-polyester blends” stood opposite them at the corner of Markham and Scott streets. The group, made up of Central Arkansas Pastafarians, waved swords and growled “Arrghh!” in a manner that would have made Abbie Hoffman proud.

With cars honking and waving at the pirates and a TV crew giving them all the attention, the Phelps group — with a child in tow, sadly – picked up their “fag” epithets and went away. Pitiful.

[via Arkansas Times]

Service will resume shortly.

Hammaad Munshi, who was taking his GCSEs when he was arrested, was part of a cell of cyber-groomers which set out to brainwash the vulnerable to kill “non-believers”. He was convicted at Blackfriars Crown Court of making a record of material likely to be useful for terrorism over a guide to the manufacture of napalm.

For nearly a year the teenager, whose grandfather is a leading Islamic scholar, led a double life, the court heard. By day he attended lessons at the local comprehensive, and did as he was told. But in the evening, he spent hours surfing jihadist sites and distributing material to others as part of what the Crown branded a “worldwide conspiracy” to “wipe out” non-Muslims.

The court heard that that material contained included instructions about making napalm, other high explosives, detonators, and grenades, and “how to kill”.

Whilst the British media greedily salivates over the juicy headlines they can run, I know I’m not the only person sitting here thinking “What terrorist?”.

I’m not for a minute going to defend any beliefs Hammaad Munshi has or his intentions,of which I’m sure I would disagree with entirely. I disagree with lots of people but simply holding views is not and never should be a crime.

However he has effectively been given a custodial sentence for possessing information which anyone with an internet connection could easily obtain. I could type a recipe for napalm here, does that make me a terrorist? I read the Anarchist’s Cookbook when I was younger, am I a terrorist? I doodled a picture of someone I didn’t like being killed in an amusing way , am I a terrorist?

There is little doubt that this young man has been groomed by extremists and had the potential to commit a crime but we can’t start locking people up for crimes they might commit. What happened to innocent until proven guilty or have we all watched too much Minority Report?

Intervention at some sort of social services level surely would have been far more effective than locking up some teenager who’s mind has been poisoned at a very impressionable age.

But who cares about justice when we can feed the fearful masses a momentary bit of relief because we haven’t caught any real terrorists lately.

The river near us is teeming with the American “Signals” so it didn’t take to long to grab some little monsters.

Our high tech equipment inculded a plumb line I found in a draw with some bacon tied to it, plus a cheap fishing net we bought Sophie. They really are quite stupid and will hang on for quite a while until you net them.

It’s quite strange seeing them appear from the depths, grab some bacon and then head back into the gloom with it like little freshwater lobsters. They really don’t look like they belong in an English river (and I guess these ones don’t), especially when you pull them out as the big ones really are very large.

Anyway, Sophie’s patience was wearing thin so we stopped short of getting a decent meals worth but I may well stick them in the pot tomorrow and see how they taste.

Normal service will resume.

Posting will resume next week hopefully.

Who thought having an extension was a good idea, I’m sure it was nothing to do with me.

Sorry for the lack of updates but I’m struggling to get anything done round here as you need to remove a thick layer of dust first.

I think the worst is over so hopefully life will return to normal soon.

I’d almost forgotten about it but the BBC reminded me with their flying penguins.

Roll on next year’s hilarity.

I do find it strange though how the people of ‘literature’ who so often try to distance themselves from and generally have little good to say about science fiction, suddenly all appear to be fans when someone great dies.

I think this is because his science fiction is often quoted as being more based on ‘fact’ which is true to an extent but that is common to a great deal of science fiction. I hope that his death in part can lead more people to read some science fiction and maybe some of them will start to realise that this is a genre which can be as well written as any great literature.

RIP

This closure puts an end to a great source of high quality streaming videos and one of the best sites around for streaming videos to Xbox Media Center.

Here’s hoping an alternative turns up but considering the costs in terms of bandwidth and storage I can’t see it happening soon.

Stage6.com has been shut down. Thank you for supporting the service.

We created Stage6 with the mission of empowering content creators and viewers to discover a new kind of video experience. Ultimately, the continued operation of Stage6 was a very expensive enterprise that required an enormous amount of attention and resources that we at DivX are not in a position to continue to provide. There are a lot of other details involved, but at the end of the day it’s really as simple as that.

The DivX experience will continue, of course. Every day new DivX Certified devices arrive on the market making it easy to move video beyond the PC. Products powered by DivX Connected, our new initiative that lets users stream video, photos, music and Internet services from the PC to the TV, are hitting retail outlets. We remain committed to empowering content creators to deliver high quality video to a wide audience, and we’ll continue to offer services that will make it easy to find videos online in the DivX format.

It’s been a wild ride, and none of it would have been possible without the support of our users. Thank you for making Stage6 everything that it was.

I may write a short tutorial on how this can be achieved as it’s a pretty useful technique.

So after a bit of hunting around I found the free Wordpress theme Maximum Adsense 02 here.

I quite like the look of it so I’m going to run it for a while and have a fiddle with it to see if I can make some adjustments. If it is causing any really stupid problems feel free to let me know but from a brief test it seems to be displaying correctly in Firefox and IE apart from a few minor post formatting issues.

Might be some strange changes as I randomly change the stylesheet to try and make IE behave.

Best of wishes to everyone I know and all those just reading my tiny space on the web, have a great 2008.

Jay

It has however given me the chance to test my two latest gadgets.

One a GPS system for the car, something utterly amazing which has become so commonplace as to be just another gadget to join the many.

The other is my shiny new Nokia N800 internet tablet which has enabled me to post  this on the move. It is the best mobile web experience I have yet found, add to that the internet radio, media player, rdesktop, ebook reader, rss reader and all the linux geekery you could possibly need then it really is worth the very reasonable £129.99 Play.com are currently selling them for. Better hurry, they won’t last long.

Updates have been a bit slow this week due to lots of festive visitors. Not to worry, the house shall soon be returned to a haven of peace, quiet and Sophie and normal service will resume.

Just time for some brandy and board games before the next round of heart attack inducing food I think.

Hope you’ve all had a good one.

Jay ‘Master of Pies’ D

I’ll also be documenting my own successes and more likely failures but either way its one more thing to keep my brain working after a long day’s childcare.

I really can’t believe two years have passed so quickly and the difference it has made to her.

Happy birthday Sophie.

Looks like the lumbering, hairy knuckled, copyright infringer smashing hand of the RIAA is heading towards Usenet by taking a first shot at the provider usenet.com. I’d never heard of usenet.com but I guess it makes sense for them to take down a provider with the same name as the service for full paranoia propaganda means.

Quite frankly I’m surprised it’s taken so long but I’m not really sure where it will end now they’ve started. In theory if the Usenet providers comply with takedown notices they should be protected in the same way that web host providers are. It would be a very different (read empty) web if every web host guilty of hosting copyright material was shut down.

I’m just waiting for the “Old man beaten to death with legal papers by crack RIAA legal squad for humming tune in public” headline.

Since tv-links was only ever linking to content on other sites which I might add is still available, if this man is charged it could set a rather worrying precedent. Can I get in trouble for linking to a site that hosts pirate material? Can I get in trouble for explaining how to use Google to find pirate material? Will Google be held responsible for automatically indexing pirate material?

More importantly though, I now have to find another site to stream content to my XBMC setup.