Swine Flu
I’d been trying to find a way to describe my opinions on the hand-wavy-ness about the swine flu that’s been popping up everywhere on the web over the last twelve hours. XKCD got there first and did it better than I could have.
XKCD gets it right again
This blog has turned into an other-people’s-stuff reposting service. When I get home from Vilnius I’ll do something about that. For now, though, enjoy XKCD’s latest (click for embiggenment).
Propping up the straw men, exploding Andrew Marr
Andrew Marr, former BBC politics editor, amongst other things, has written a piece for the BBC about "The danger of worshipping Darwin". Now, as if that wasn’t enough to raise red flags in the heads of all those who accept evolution through natural selection as being the current best explanation for how life as it [...]
Even the coppers hate the no-photographing coppers law
From BoingBoing: Peter Smyth, Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation … thinks the law is ridiculous — and this is just stupendous. Smyth says that there’s no evidence that terrorists use photographs to plan attacks, admits that this is an invitation for scared officers to abuse the law, and says that it will needlessly create [...]
Photographers’ protest against Counter Terrorism Act
Here’s a video (via 1854.eu of the protest held on Monday, Feb 16th by photographers, professional and amateur alike, against the Counter Terrorism Act, part of which makes it illegal to elicit information about a police officer or member of the armed forces. Our fear is that with this law Police will be able to [...]
A quick note
Back from Lexington; tired, grumpy, ready to eat brains (though I might have to have diet brains because, as always seems to be when I go away for work – and especially to Americky – I’ve put weight on again). More on that another time, perhaps. But I just wanted to say that the Bishop [...]
Here we go again
From BBC News: A prayer group in Washington DC is claiming the credit for the recent sharp drop in the US price of petrol. Rocky Twyman, 59, a veteran community campaigner, started Pray At The Pump meetings at petrol stations in April. So, market forces anyone? Well… Mr Twyman is sceptical that market forces might [...]
So I’m in there with Satanists now am I?
Well, it doesn’t entirely surprise me that someone lumps us atheists into that category, but still. Birmingham City Council has put in place software that blocks people from looking at atheist websites whilst allowing some other belief systems through (link, via Pharyngula: The authority’s Bluecoat Software computer system allows staff to look at websites relating [...]
Launchpad to be open sourced
Mark Shuttleworth, spaceman, ideas man, Ubuntu founder and fearless leader at Canonical Towers announced yesterday that Launchpad will be open sourced within the next 12 months. This is pretty cool news. With Launchpad, we make a big deal of supporting free and open-source software. Our aim is to provide a central platform through which people [...]
Urgent Ubuntu security notice
This will only apply to Ubuntu users (server or desktop). Anyone who's not one can probably look away now. An urgent Ubuntu Security Notice, USN-612-1, has just been put out. The full notice is here. An extract of the salient details: A weakness has been discovered in the random number generator used by OpenSSL on [...]
Now, just a minute…
The headline sounded promising: "‘Respect atheists’, says Cardinal." Unfortunately, and somewhat predictably, the story itself is a little different from what the headline suggests: "I want to encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem because the hidden God is active in their lives as well as in the lives of [...]
Shuttleworth: “Ubuntu ‘reaping Linux dividend’
There's a nice story on the BBC news site: The public perception of open source software is changing fast, said Mark Shuttleworth, who leads distribution of the Ubuntu operating system (OS). "There has been a sea change in the way people think of Linux, which is very healthy," he said. "We have seen a real [...]
And yet more photography gubbins
So, after my two posts about this topic yesterday I thought I'd shut up about it for a while. However, in the post this morning, along with my copy of Practical Photographer (which reminded me that I'd forgotten to enter the competition to win a Nikon D300, which I'd been coveting. Meh.) was a letter [...]
More photography gubbins
Oh, and whilst we're on the subject the photography stuff I posted about earlier, there's a petition on the Downing Street website that UK citizens and ex pats can sign: We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to clarify the laws surrounding photography in public places. Through history, we have documented the world around us, [...]
RedHat runs for the hills
Jorge Castro just sent me a link to this story from El Reg. From TFA: "The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today's Linux desktops simply don't provide a practical alternative." So now you know. Hardy comes out next week, by the way, so feel free to [...]
And you tell me it’s the law
… when it really isn't. So, finally, someone in a position of influence is doing a bit of stomping about over the recent trend towards the Police (or, worse, people who think they have the same authority as the Police) stopping people from taking photographs, having them deleted or even seizing equipment from photographers whom [...]
A wee rave about Hardy
I shouldn't be writing this now; I should be packing for Edinburgh, where I'm going to be going for the weekend. But I felt that it was my duty as a Canonical employee and moreover as an Ubuntu user to state the following: Hardy rocks! Now, okay, it's still in beta, which by necessity means [...]
Hardy har har
I'm – to use an American expression – jonesing to install Ubuntu 8.04 (The Hardy Heron) Beta, which has just been released (massive props to the distro team for their typically herculean effort). And this time it's going to be a full install, not an upgrade. See, when I upgraded to Gutsy during its Beta [...]
Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Rest in Peace
From BBC News: British science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90… Sir Arthur's vivid – and detailed – descriptions of space shuttles, super-computers and rapid communications systems were enjoyed by millions of readers around the world. He was the author of more than 100 fiction [...]
That religion stuff, and what I meant to say about it
It won't have escaped your notice that I started to write a comment piece on this news story but my blog client (which I really do need to write something about in the not-too-distant future since it's something that I've written and could possibly turn out to be quite useful to a fairly small subset of the Open Source community) fell over. Before it retired to that great stack trace in the sky, however, it managed to vomit up the beginnings of my post onto the internets (a fact about which I have filed a bug) and as a result managed to make me look like both a bit of an idiot and a bit of a bigot. I'm used to the idiot part. I don't like looking like a bigot.
Anyway, since it had made it onto my blog (and I never bothered to check that it hadn't, it also ended up propagating across the interwubs to LiveJournal, where a good friend of mine commented:
All of which, plus the fact that it was late and I was tired and lacking in the brain power necessary to sling a sentence together, let alone make a point about religion, left me thinking that I should probably re-write the post, or at least some of the post, and actually make clear my thoughts on the matter, which, exploding blog clients aside, I'd hitherto failed to do.
Jun 08, 2008 | Categories:Uncategorized | Tags: annoyances, atheism, comments, friends, human rights, in the news, me, opinion, posts that started out differently, religion | Leave A Comment »