Paul Smith's Blog

So for those that don't know how right-wing and reactionary the Daily Mail is check this e-mail that one of their writers sent out. From: rsreply@dwpub.com [mailto:rsreply@dwpub.com] Sent: 13 February 2008 15:57 To: (hidden) Subject: Response Source - Diana Appleyard , Daily Mail (Request for personal case study) PUBLICATION: Daily Mail (Request for personal case study) JOURNALIST: Diana Appleyard (staff) DEADLINE: 14-February-2008 16:00 QUERY: I am urgently looking for anonymous horror stories of people who have employed Eastern European staff, only for them to steal from them, disappear, or have lied about their resident status....

So the government have been drafting out proposals that, at least at the moment would force Internet Service Providers to side with the big content companies, and would place sanctions on ISPs that fail to tackle piracy. I don't know who they've got putting these plans into place, but they're technically unworkable. How do you determine a packet being sent over a network contains illegal content or not? Short answer, you can't....

This afternoon the government will bring a bill to parliament that will nationalise the troubled bank Northern Rock. Only the Tories are expected to oppose it. Virgin's bid for the bank - frankly an insult to the taxpayer was, as even the treasury admitted "out of the ballpark". I wish I could of seen the look on Richard Branson's face when the Alistair Darling told him the government wouldn't accept his ridiculous offer - expecting the taxpayer to prop up his attempts at profiteering what planet is he living on?...

STS 122 launched yesterday on time (to my surprise after the weather forecast), and will, with the space station be visible over the UK. This evening (8th) the ISS will pass overhead at about 17:55 (and later at 19:25), and the space shuttle will probably be between 10 and 20 minutes behind it. Tomorrow (9th) the shuttle will be docking with the space station, I haven't been able to find out at what time, but if they haven't already docked by tomorrow evening they will be much closer in the sky, hopefully only a few seconds apart or less....

The number of wireless networks around here is slowly growing, there was just one insecure network a couple of years ago. I just checked now, and I can find 6 other wireless networks, there's probably more during different times of the day. The lower six networks shown here are all insecure. Three have no security what-so-ever, and the other three use WEP, which was part of the original 802.11 standard from back in the 90s and deprecated about 5 years ago as it can be broken in just a few minutes....

So I was half watching Watchdog yesterday, and a caught the presenter mention something about proving things about psychics, which sparked my interest. Somebody sent them in some amulet to heal his aura, whatever that is. To which Nick Campbell said: "If anyone tries to charge you for this sort of thing, psychic or not, they saw you coming" That's a pretty crappy attitude to have. You could say the same thing about anything, if you gave a company money for a ticket you never got, they saw you coming....

Update: This is part of a fairly long series now, click here for the full list of articles in this series. Questions for Evolutionists, whatever an evolutionist is, from Mr Kent Hovind. I'll just go and find a biologist to tackle his attempt at disproving evolution by natural selection. Oh wait hang on... 1. Where did the space for the universe come from? That sounds like a cosmology question Kent. The universe doesn't displace anything, and as such requires no space....

So last night, after constructing a new holder for my 3x barlow lens out of cardboard I decided to have a bash imaging Mars. The rolled up bit of paper I had used for my images of Saturn and the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle, had failed. This is the result, almost 2000 frames. Must say I am a bit disappointed - perhaps I need to make a few modifications to my rolled up cardboard adapter, it could do with being about 5mm shorter just so I can make sure it is in focus....

So the Catholic church is on the move to try and shoot down the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill which will come before parliament later this year. Normally I wouldn't be too bothered about them up to their usual ideological agenda stuff - after all if I went after them on every single little thing they do, I'd be spending every waking minute on it. But they've stepped over the line on this....

So my sister got a new laptop a week or two ago. I of course have the job of sorting it out, of which I'm only to happy to oblige. In the end she went for a Dell Inspiron 1720. It has Windows Vista Home Premium on it, which is somewhat annoying as I have to actually work at the machine instead of being able to use Remote Desktop - track pads always make my fingers hurt after a while, luckily I've had a wireless mouse sat unused for about a year here, so what better way to try that out....