Saw this pop up on New Scientist...

Should doctors assume that people are happy to donate their organs unless they make the effort to opt out?

That's the scenario being considered in the UK, as a means of reducing the widening gap between supply and demand for donated organs. At the moment, a dead person's organs cannot be taken unless they registered themselves in life as a donor.

"Around 8000 people in the UK need an organ transplant [each year], but only 3000 transplants are carried out," said UK health minister Alan Johnson on 20 September, announcing a reappraisal of "presumed consent" by the government.

The British Medical Association (BMA) welcomes the rethink. "We believe that a system of presumed consent, with safeguards, will help to increase the number of donors available," says Vivienne Nathanson, head of ethics at the BMA.

The answer, obviously, is yes. The dead don't need their kidneys, or hearts or anything else, the living should take what they need.

Sadly every time this does make the rounds, it's always the same, some right-wing, usually religious organisations have a whinge about it and the plans are shelved. This time let's shelve the religious nuts and save some people's lives.

I'd also however, like to see the opt-out reversible if it will save someone's life, somebody shouldn't be dying in a bed opposite a corpse who thought that they need their lungs in the afterlife.

This guy has turned from a fairly balanced geek into an absolutely opinionated ass. In his latest blog entry he installed the beta version of Windows Vista Service Pack 1, and then complains because it hosed his machine, it booted to a black screen - which strangely I've heard no other reports of. What do you think the beta means Chris?

He's been ranting for months about Windows Vista failing in the market, why? All because he had some issues when he first got it - his printer didn't have drivers. My 10 year old Deskjet works fine! May be you should shop around for printers that have solid driver support for multiple platforms.

Some of his readers/viewers point out to him the stupidity of his ways, and counter the XP/Apple fanboyism creeping into his stuff.

G.J.Edwards wrote about his experience with Windows Vista:

I have absolutely no idea what all you people are talking about. In April this year I bought a relatively inexpensive Compaq laptop pre-loaded with Vista Home Premium, I THINK IT IS BRILLIANT, everything works very well, the built in security features gives me a lot of confidence and the step-by-step operating instructions are clear and well thought out.
The updates download automatically without any problems and I have downloaded numerous programmes e.g. open office and Picasa without any trouble.
I think that "the average PC user" like myself just want something that works, whereas the Anoraks want to find problems so they can write about it.

Then Gordon points out about warning Pirillo about installing beta software on a production machine (common sense).

Chris, I watched you install that BETA version of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista on your Ustream.tv web site live.

I questioned your actions in live chat about installing beta software on a production Windows Vista computer at that time, yet you ignored my comment in live chat.

You lost credibility, Chris, since beta software was not meant for use on a stable production Windows Vista machine.

I also have no doubts what-so-ever that Chris provided no useful feedback to Microsoft about this, people like this shouldn't be allowed pre-release copies of Microsoft software, because obviously they don't get it, nor the point of a beta program.

I think Windows is in huge huge huge trouble.

Pirillo, get real, 90% market share, that's huge huge huge trouble? Windows Vista is the best operating system to date, and tens of millions of people agree.

So I was browsing the politics forum and came across somebody who said the following:

Yes, I have [heard of socialism in one country], but I don't buy it. I was reading a book which was written by Edvard Radzinsky on Stalin. His book discusses these comments and many other issues. His book was based on recently released Soviet Archives. Archives, which have not been known until years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. My opinion is that Stalin was a genuine marxist who sought global revolution. A mass murderer, who had his own reasons for his purges, but was geared towards a world proletariat revolution.

How wrong can you be. Stalin in favour of world revolution? Hang on, the same man who did coin socialism in one country, the same man who did shut down the International, the same man who gutted the Communist Party in the purges of Marxists and internationalists, the same man who put down revolutions in Eastern Europe when the Red Army liberated them, and installed Stalinist regimes, for the sole purpose of keeping the working class down, because he knew that such ideas would spread to the USSR and would threaten the bureaucracy.

Yes that sounds a lot like a man in favour of world revolution.

This is just sick, watching this made my blood boil. Tasering some guy for asking John Kerry some awkward questions. The guy half way through his question had his microphone cut, he was then grabbed from behind by the goon squad.

What's worse is nobody in the audience defended him from those "police officers". Somebody in the audience would of been well within their rights to point a gun at those things and tell them to let him go.

This has come up several times at the US Supreme Court. "Citizens may resist unlawful arrest to the point of taking an arresting officer's life if necessary." from the case of Plummer v. State, 136 Ind. 306.

Ofcom has said the BBC launching an HD channel would not cause a "significant" negative effect on commercial stations and green lighted the move to launch BBC HD on Freeview.

However due to lack of space on the radio spectrum it will only be for four hours a day, between 02:00 and 06:00. Something that won't change until we stop wasting bandwidth on analogue transmissions, which is planned nationwide for 2012, although some more advanced, modern and developed regions of the country will be doing it in 2008 and 2009.

I say we turn off analogue NOW. Scrap all these rubbish channels like QVC, Bid TV and Price Drop TV, just by taking those offline we'd have enough bandwidth for one HD channel running all day long. Then cut back on the amount of +1 channels which everybody is wasting bandwidth on, and kick Murdoch's crap off Freeview too.

Come on Ofcom stop pussy footing around and free up the spectrum, and don't think about giving it to mobile phone companies if they're only going to waste it on low-speed data services.

OK so the pressure has been building for a while for me to join one of these social-network things.

Catherine said I should join MySpace, which I did, but being owned by King Murdoch and having no improvements made to it in years, and the bad UI, and that stupid astrology nonsense being forced down your throat with no way to turn it off, I just never bothered doing anything with it.

After being destroyed from the first Facebook I've re-created myself on the new Facebook, all well and good much easier to use than MySpace, and much less annoying.

However, I have two key faults with it.

1) The United Kingdom is not listed on the countries list, not even Great Britain. What the hell? The name of the country I live in is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

2) The options for political views are a JOKE. We've got:

Very liberal.
Liberal.
Moderate.
Conservative.
Very conservative.
Libertarian.

What is this some united right-wing front organisation? They might be able to get away with this sort of thing in the United States where everybody's politics are essentually the same mass-produced mass-marketed nonsense, but I'm in Europe, we have a broad spectrum of political views here.

I propose they should add:

Socialist.
Communist.
Anarchist.
Nationalist.
Fascist.

In that order of priority, yes it would be nice to let the BNP goons use nationalist and fascist.

There's already one group on there with over 5100 members demanding that socialist be added to the list, you can see that here.

On a lesser note, Jedi isn't listed under religions, surely if something is good enough to be on the 2001 UK census it should be on their list of religions.