Well briefly this year's Christmas episode of Doctor Who was in my opinion a load of crap and Catherine Tate was even more bloody annoying than I'd expected her to be. Yet another proof that RTD shouldn't fucking write these episodes as if we needed more proof.
And yet I was still excited by the trailer for the forthcoming Third season of the show. I'm a fucking lost cause really.
My own contribution is to reprint this Sagan related urban legend.
Once upon a time, Carl Sagan met the pope (John Paul II) and asked him what he would do if somehow science convincingly and irrefutably disproved the foundations of Christianity. The Pope proceeded to lecture Sagan for about 15 minutes about why this was impossible.
Later, Carl met the Dali Lama and asked him the same question about Buddhism. His reply was that he would immediately tell everybody, because it would mean millions of Buddhists would be living their lives incorrectly.
Not unfortunately the scrapping of a plan for a government computer the size of a building like they had at Bureau West near where I live.
In fact the government has announced that the proposed National Identity Register which underpins their ID Card scheme will not be created anew so as to be clean and error-free but instead will be constructed from the current databases of various government agencies.
The information will be stored in three separate databases including the Department of Work and Pensions' Customer Information Service, which holds national insurance records, and the Identity and Passport Service computer system.
Mr Reid denied IT companies had wasted millions on preparation work for an entirely new system, saying the industry had been consulted on the move.
The government has reportedly spent about £35m on IT consultants since the ID cards project began in 2004.
"Doing something sensible is not necessarily a U-turn," Mr Reid told reporters.
"We have decided it is lower risk, more efficient and faster to take the infrastructure that already exists, although the data will be drawn from other sources."
So we'll have a National Identity Register that is as full of errors as the current ones are, hardly the 'Gold Standard' for identity that the Home Office proudly announced it would be is it.
This news comes as Home Office Minister Liam Byrne published a Strategic Action Plan for the National Identity Scheme and the Borders, Immigration and Identity Action Plan, which follow the wider Home Office review earlier this year and signal the countdown to the introduction of ID cards to UK citizens in 2009.
The Strategic Action Plan being the document where the new plans for the National Identity Register are laid out. Instead the press release focuses on the part of the plan that describes how the fingerprinting of foreign nationals will help secure Britain’s border and crackdown on illegal working and fraudulent access to services. Immigration Minister Liam Byrne said:
We’re determined that Britain won’t be a soft touch for illegal immigration. Compulsory biometric identity for foreign nationals will help us secure our borders, shut down access to the illegal jobs, which we know attracts illegal immigrants, and help fight foreign criminals.
But all this is completely irrelevant when we are talking about the establishment of a biometric based National Identity Register of UK citizens.
As NO2ID theorize this is about the establishment of the 'database state'.
A major criminal investigation into alleged corruption by the arms company BAE Systems and its executives was stopped in its tracks yesterday when the prime minister claimed it would endanger Britain's security if the inquiry was allowed to continue.
The remarkable intervention was announced by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, who took the decision to end the Serious Fraud Office inquiry into alleged bribes paid by the company to Saudi officials, after consulting cabinet colleagues.
It would appear that the lobbying of the company and the Saudi government has finally payed off and the government has pulled the plug as it were on the inquiry. The Serious Fraud Office issued this statement.
The Attorney General had apparently consulted with the prime minister, the defence secretary, foreign secretary, and the intelligence services, and they jointly decided that "the wider public interest" "outweighed the need to maintain the rule of law".
So BAE Systems can now in my opinion be considered above the law, but then that has seemed always to have been the way when it comes to British arms companies, at least under the previous Conservative government.
Current favourite waste of time whilst at work is the Miniclip game Acid Factory. Like all great games nowadays it contains zombies. Sweet! Should keep me sated with zombie killing until I can afford an Xbox 360, Dead Rising and a HDTV to go with it.
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
Personally I'm on the fence between outright Atheism and Agnosticism.
Alex Tew of Million Dollar Homepage fame is at it again with yet another million dollar idea and now one lucky visitor to his site will get to share the wealth this time.
Pixelotto offers visitors to the site the chance to win $1,000,000 – just by clicking ads on yet another 1000px by 1000px webpage.
I reckon the clever little bugger has struck gold again with this idea by giving visitors an incentive to click the ads now the outgoing traffic should be greatly increased in comparison with the Million Dollar Homepage.
The only downside I can see for advertisers is again getting lost in the chaos, I'm sure those that invest a great deal of money and purchase large chunks of virtual real estate will see that investment pay off as users are in my opinion more likely to click to win on the larger more obvious ads. Lastminute.com seem to share my view as they have beaten the rush and droppped a packet on ten thousand pixels in the centre near the top of the page.
I've rewatching season five of the tv show 24 in preparation for the imminent start of season six and I'm starting to feel some pity for the character of Rick Burke.
Who is Rick Burke you wonder?
He is the CTU interrogator/torturer played by Martin Papazian. Why should I feel pity for a torturer though? Well as if his occupation wasn't bad enough it seems that half the people he is asked to 'interrogate' by his superiors in CTU are entirely innocent and have no information at all for him to extract from them.
Not only that but when he does actually have a genuine suspect to interrogate, Christopher Henderson, Burke is knocked out by Tony Almeida before he can finish the job.
I had initially thought that Burke was in season four also but he is in fact the second iteration of a character whose sole purpose is to take over the role of torturer from Jack Bauer so that Bauer's heroics are not so diminished by carrying out such acts as they have been in previous seasons.
The season four CTU chief interrogator was an Agent Richards as portrayed by Butch Klein who has the thankless task of torturing Richard Heller and Sarah Gavin, who of course were innocent of conspiring with the terrorists.
