The irises I bought last year from Isabella’s Iris‘s Norma Hart have started to bloom.
First off the rank is Blackout in black and deep purple.
Yum!
Members of the Bits of Freedom group conducted a test to see how much it would take for a service provider to take down a web site hosting public domain material and have published their results.
They signed up with ten providers and put online a work by Dutch author Multatuli, who died over 100 years ago. They stated that the work was in the public domain, and that it was written in 1871. They then set up a fake society to claim to be the copyright holders of the work.
From a Hotmail address, they sent out complaints to all ten of the providers. Seven out of ten complied and removed the site, one within just three hours.
Only one ISP actually pointed out that the copyright on the work expired many years ago.
The conclusion of the investigation is worth reading, it starts It only takes a Hotmail account to bring a web site down, and freedom of speech stands no chance in front of the Texan-style private ISP justice
— via boingboing
A US federal judge has ordered Stanford Wallace, otherwise known as the Spam King, to disable spyware programs that infiltrate computers, track internet use and flood users with pop-up advertising
Proposals by the Security Service to place CCTV cameras in Westminster’s corridors of power have outraged MPs who fear that the proposals for protecting the Commons will enable MI5 to pry into their affairs
A federal appeals court this week struck a blow against Lexmark‘s attempt to protect its share of the lucrative market for refill printer cartridges. The court vacated a preliminary injunction that barred Static Control Components from selling computer chips enabling third-party manufacturers to clone Lexmark’s cartridges
In a decision aimed to response to the retarded monkey boy‘s tighter sanctions, Cuba’s President Fidel Castro announced the end of the circulation of the US dollar within the territory of the island acting from 8 November
FAQs, or frequently asked questions for those scratching their heads at the acronym, are one of those things that can make or break a site.
They should be concise and to the point rather than another grandstanding opportunity for the company CEO who suffers from verbal diarrhoea. We’ve all seen examples that got it wrong, but 400 Monkeys has the best FAQ ever written — via Pagan Prattle
When Georgia woman, Beverly Mitchell, returned home from a 2 1/2 week holiday to Greece, she found that a total stranger had moved into her house, ripped up the carpet, changed the photos on the walls, and was wearing clothes from her closet. The squatter, Beverly Valentine, also switched the utilities over to her own name and installed a washer and dryer — via BoingBoing
A 73-year-old farmer who shot a burglar after being broken into three times could not be criticised for the way he defended his property, a judge has said
A phone that lets you see through clothes is the stuff of teenage boys’ dreams — and now a Japanese developer claims it’s a reality
Flash drives are handy little units and cheap enough to be indispensible. They also come in a wide array of variants.
From the silliness of light up chunks of plastic sushi — via boingboing
To the seriously cool functionality of the FlashPoint, which is a US$99, 512MB USB flash drive, with a twist.
It has a female USB jack, and if you plug any other USB drive into it, any files in your share
directory on the drive will be automatically copied over to the other flash drive. So you can copy all your files even if you don’t have a laptop handy — via boingboing
Scientists from the Australian National University have proved what many have thought for years — platypuses are really weird. Professor Jennifer Graves says platypus have five X and five Y chromosomes, determining sex, not one, and when sperm are made it gets even stranger. What we’ve discovered is that these five Xs and five Ys line up in a great big long chain, that go XY XY XY XY XY XY, and then all the X chromosomes move to one pole, and all the Y chromosomes move to the other,
she said. Professor Graves says there is another unexpected finding. One end of the chain looks like human sex chromosomes but the other end of the chain looks like bird sex chromosomes, so the chain is actually linking a very ancient system of sex determination in birds and probably reptiles too.
The unique status of the Australian mammal is now unassailable
Why?
Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succinctly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.
And because, as the Spanish philosopher Unamuno said,
At times, to be silent is to lie.
London started charging people to take their cars into central London, and guess what? It worked. Fewer cars now enter the charging zone, public transport use is up, travel time is quicker for all road users and the money made from charging drivers is going towards improving public transport even more. What is wrong with this picture? Nothing, which is why other countries are looking at the London experience as a way forward for car-choked cities — via journoz
Tree Frog originally uploaded by Red Wolf
Over the weekend, my evening was disturbed by a loud chittering noise outside. Much like a really pissed off sparrow. I went out, turned on the lights and saw the dogs on either side of a fat green tree frog the size of my fist. Every time the dogs would touch it, the frog would chitter alarmingly.
I didn’t know frogs chittered, but it seems that chittering is the tree frog equivalent of fuck off and leave me alone
because it chittered at me when I tried to pick it up. The noise is probably all that kept it from becoming a late night dog snack and appeared to do the trick as the frog appeared to be completely unscathed.
While I was trying to keep the dogs away, the frog hopped into a corner and climbed up the brickwork, heading for the kitchen window. The dogs can reach the ledge, so I gently prodded the frog to encourage him into the corner. This didn’t work terribly well, as the frog just used my fingers as leverage to head in the opposite direction and slid down the glass towards the curious dogs.
I managed to herd the dogs inside so I could relocate the frog without canine assistance. The frog still didn’t want to be grabbed, but didn’t seem to mind getting prodded onto a plastic dustpan. I moved it into the garden where he’ll hopefully live a long and happy life.
I am now a frog rescuer.
University of Florida scientist, Thomas DeMarse, has grown a living brain that can fly a simulated plane, giving scientists a novel way to observe how brain cells function as a network. The brain
— a collection of 25,000 living neurons, or nerve cells, taken from a rat’s brain and cultured inside a glass dish — gives scientists a unique real-time window into the brain at the cellular level. By watching the brain cells interact, scientists hope to understand what causes neural disorders such as epilepsy and to determine noninvasive ways to intervene — via BoingBoing
The UK government has broken its silence on the Indymedia server raid and is claiming that there no UK law enforcement agencies were involved
. It seems that servers nobody seized the servers
Nigeria’s Ogoni tribe has threatened mass action against the local unit of Royal Dutch Shell if the oil giant fails to withdraw troops from the area within seven days
Australians are among the biggest offenders of using the world’s resources faster than it can regenerate them. Conservation group the World Wide Fund for Nature says in its regular Living Planet Report [PDF] that humans currently consume 20% more natural resources than the earth can produce
According to research published by security firm CipherTrust, all phishing attacks launched across the Internet come from one of just five networks of zombie PCs
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