Cynicism is the last refuge of the idealist

Hikers have found the body of a World War II airmanfrozen in a glacier which is reminiscent of the way Captain America was brought back to life in the sixties

Hikers found the frozen body of an airman while scaling Mount Mendel Glacier in the Kings Canyon National Park. Now, the military is working to find out who this airman is and whether he was ever reported missing.
It’s believed the airman has been frozen in the glacier for decades until a pair of climbers got much more than ever imagined on a hike.

From The Times - a survey seems to suggest that religgious belief is bad for the overall health of sociey

It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality< …>

Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.
“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”

Now tell me something I don’t know.

To poke my oar in the water: There’s nothing wrong with faith per se, it’s just that montheistic religions are arranged in a pyramidal fashion with God at the top with a tier of priesthood above the commoners telling them what to think.

It seems to me that all forms of priesthood are inherently bigotted, narrowminded and fail to stand up for what makes the religion wonderful in the first place.

And the one thing that most of these intecessionary religions have is that they restrict access to the afterlife, telling people they are damned and going to Hell for whatever reason suits the priesthood

And it doesn’t matter what religion you come from - there is as much potential for vile bigotry in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, even Buddhism.

It’s not the message that’s wrong, it’s the people who claim for themselves the right to declare themselves messengers.

Let me be clear, I have met wonderful people filled with beautiful faith from all branches of reliogious belief and it can be a beautiful thing. It’s just when you get people commanding what can or can’t be taught in schools, whether it is the theory of evolution; sex education or just racial and cultural tolerance you know society is in trouble

Interesting article over ateWeek regarding the Prepcon-3 convention in Geneva where the international community is calling for the US to give up it’s unilateral control of the Internet.

Now is it any surprise at all the the US isn’t paying ball??

Afterall this conference was organised by the UN. Hmm let me see can I remember the last time the US bothered to listen to the UN - let me see any wars going on in the world where the US ignored the will of the UN???

What about the Kyoto protocol on climate change???

Does any seriously expect the US to do anything other than what it always does

Nope, didn’t think so

Eolas Wins Round vs. MS in Browser Patent Fight

glad to hear that Microsoft aren’t getting things their own way in the fight agains Eolas - the US Patent Office has rejected Microsoft’s attempt to squash a patent which could cost Microsoft hundreds of millions of dollars.

A Microsoft spokesperson admitted the decision was not promising. “This is disappointing news, but we are committed to seeing this case through to a successful resolution,” she said.

I guess that’s Microsoft speak for ‘we’ve been found guilty before and avoided being punished, so it ain’t over till Bill gates sings’

Microsoft’s court trial isn’t bound by the decision of the PTO, and could come to a different conclusion, though “such cases are rare,” Crouch said.

I guess we should prepare to hear about Microsoft lobbying the fool on the hill and all his cronies to make sure they get off

Evil evil, I hate them

Warner raises decapitation strategy for Apple

It’s obviously the week for the arrogance of the record companies to show through - today’s batch of idiocy comes from Michael Nash, Warner’s digital strategy chief.

What if Jobs says 39 cents or 29 cents per download - what then? The industry can say, OK we’ll cut him of - very few people people buy music from digital downloads,” said Nash, who pointed out that most of the music on iPods is from their own collections.

Now there’s a good way to encourage people to buy in to digital downloads - threaten to stop them happening

And how about this little corker

“It’s going to be difficult to get the consumer to stop thinking about owning music, and think about paying for participation instead,” said one executive.

So actually these arrogant bastards really want to get us enslaved to paying them over and over again for their music - they need to go out of business, all of them

Ballmer: Microsoft Is Intent to Deliver Value

I’m sorry - does my hatred of the Beast of Redmond show???

Steve Ballmer, henchman extraordinaire to Bill Gates admits that Windows (spit) Vista (double spit) is just a poor copy of OS X - his justification - that enterprise managers don’t keep tabs on what’s happening in the Mac world - so that justifies plagiarism, does it, the ignorance of IT managers

Some Microsoft critics say that many of the features in “Longhorn” already exist in other operating systems. How do you respond to that?
I don’t hear that from enterprise customers. They don’t look at the Mac. They just don’t. Some people will say some of the features are kissing cousins to features they’ve seen elsewhere, and that is true. I’m not apologetic about the fact that we should, in a way that doesn’t offend anyone else’s intellectual property, study and learn and benefit from the work others have done.

I’m sorry but I can’t wait till the rest of the world wakes up and stops buying their bug-ridden insecure bloatware

In fact, I’m not sorry - this is a rant saying wake up world and put these people out of business

LXer: 10 Days as a Windows XP User: A GNU Perspective on Things
As if we need any reminding of the dangers of using windows - the tale of woe of a Linux user’s experience of installing windows XP on his machine

I do not consider Windows ready for the desktop. I found it difficult to use, buggy and lacking in security. I also found technical support lacking.

While Windows captured a significant portion of the desktop market, the product is clearly not a good fit for consumers who do not understand the risks associated with logging on to the Internet. The costs of providing aftermarket products can run higher than the price paid for the hardware.

As a gloating Mac user, I can definitely confirm that I have had a very similar experience when trying to sort out my brother’s laptop which was infested with spyware, viruses and trojans and is still disinfecting itself nearly two weeks later. My brother is virtually technically illiterate and so was not aware of the dangers of connecting to the internet. He was so fed up with the level of infection of his old Windows Me laptop that he went and bought a Win XP machine from Dell and was attacked within 30 seconds of connecting to the Net - how bad is that??

This story just get’s juicier - a quote from Macuser follows:

Suspicions that elements of the record industry are becoming increasingly divorced from reality were given further weight last week when Tommi Kyyrä from the Finland offices of the IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industries) justified DRM technologies on CDs by saying that consumers have no automatic right to be able to play music on computers.
‘Now, we need to understand that listening to music on your computer is an extra privilege,’ he said. ‘Normally people listen to music on their car or through their home stereos. If you are a Linux or Mac user, you should consider purchasing a regular CD player.

Hmmmmm. Maybe we should just get a list of all your artists and boycott them - what these arrogant greedy bastards need to learn is that they don’t have an automatic right to our money

How’s this for being greedy??

The big record companies, in addition to the gazillions of pounds they bleed from consumers by charging so much for digital downloads, now think they should be entitled to a share of teh profits from the iPod

“Not all songs are created equal — not all time periods are created equal,” Mr. Bronfman told those assembled at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia investor conference. “We want, and will insist upon having, variable pricing.” His words were reported in an article on the Red Herring Web site.

Mr. Bronfman then upped the ante by describing his industry as “the arms supplier in the device wars between Samsung, Sony, Apple and others.” He insisted: “We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don’t have a share of iPod’s revenue. We want to share in those revenue streams. We have to get out of the mindset that our content has promotional value only.”

As for variable pricing, Mr. Bronfman was quick to point out that “some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more. I don’t want to give anyone the impression that $0.99 is a thing of the past.”

the sheer greed of these people stagger me - they know that they are enjoying their last gasp of having any large-scale earnings since it is only a matter of time before they are superfluous and are trying to wring every lastdrop out of the stone before they go bankrupt

Everyone knows that it is inevitable that piracy will rise once again if they put the prices up - it is a ridiculous position to take

What’s going on - why can’t I get in???