grahambinns.com

From Religion News Blog (link):

Nebraska Democratic State Senator Ernie Chambers has decided to go straight to the top in an effort to stop natural disasters from befalling the world.

...

The suit asks for a “permanent injunction ordering Defendant to cease certain harmful activities and the making of terroristic threats.”

...

Chambers also cites that the, “defendant directly and proximately has caused, inter alia, fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornados, pestilential plagues…”

Unfortunately, it's not quite as good as it first sounds:

Chambers says he isn’t suing God because he has any kind of beef with the deity. He says the suit is to fight possible laws restricting the filing of frivolous lawsuits.

Oh well. But, the thought occurs, what if he were to win?

Dead man wakes under autopsy knife (Reuters , via BoingBoing):

"I woke up because the pain was unbearable," [he] said, according to a report on Friday in leading local newspaper El Universal.

Pretty high on the oops list, that one. 

Cory Doctorow on the Beeb's new iPlayer and DRM in general in Guardian Unlimited today (link):

The DRM business model is the urinary tract infection of media experiences: all of the uses that used to come in an easy gush now come in a mingy, painful dribble - a few pennies out of your pocket every time you want to watch a show again, hit the pause button, or rewind.

 My sentiments exactly.

The news just came through that Dell have officially unveiled two systems available in Europe (including the UK) with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) installed on them. This is very cool, and represents another step along the road to fixing bug #1. From the press release (ubuntu.com):

Dell today unveiled two consumer PCs in Europe – the Inspiron 6400n and the Inspiron 530n – with the Ubuntu 7.04 Linux operating system factory installed. Available now in the United Kingdom, Germany and France, the systems are Dell’s first steps to meet the needs of the Linux enthusiast community outside of the United States.

Information about the systems can be found in the following locations:

• General information: www.ubuntu.com/dell
• In France (from August 8th): www.dell.fr/ubuntu
• In Germany (from August 8th): www.dell.de/ubuntu
• In the United Kingdom (from August 8th): www.dell.co.uk/ubuntu

[The Disclosure Bit]

I am an employee of Canonical, the company that supports and backs Ubuntu. Yes, Canonical is the really-cool-company I've mentioned. I work as part of the Launchpad development team. So now you know.

You'll all remember, no doubt, the fuss that kicked up when Livejournal owners SixApart started censoring and disabling journals based on some fairly specious grounds (and which, eventually, led to them back-pedalling at great speed).

Well. dear reader, it looks like it's happening again. From CNet:

The most recent saga over user-generated Harry Potter artwork appears to have started late last week, when at least two users, "ponderosa121" and "elaboration," reported receiving notices from a LiveJournal abuse team member who informed them that their accounts had been "permanently suspended." (One user tracking the situation says an "undetermined" number of other Harry Potter artists have also been suspended in recent weeks, but we've yet to get official confirmation on that.)

The reason for the deletions? The users' journal entries contained "drawings depicting minors in explicit sexual situations," which represented a violation of LiveJournal's policies, according to copies of the letters posted by their recipients.

Let's hope it takes less time to sort out this time around.