Vancouver is facing the worst outbreak of syphilis per capita in the developed world, with city health officials fearful of a looming epidemic of the sexually transmitted disease once thought almost wiped out in North America
My latest aggregator toy is nntp/rss. It’s a Java-based bridge between RSS feeds and NNTP clients, enabling you to read your favorite RSS syndicated content within your existing NNTP newsreader. RSS feeds are represented as NNTP newsgroups, providing a simple, straightforward and familiar environment for news reading
Having learned nothing from the UK beef industry’s battle with BSE, the US agribusiness mouthpiece has announced that not only was the suspected animal still slaughtered for human consumption, but its remains went back into the food chain as animal feed. Nice head in the sand tactics, guys
Meghan Stapleton, a Santa hat-clad reporter for the NBC television station KTUU in Anchorage found her way into the national spotlight while taping a scene with a young reindeer named Blitzen at the Santa Claus House in North Pole. Seems the reindeer took a dislike to tacky feel good stories and tackled the silly bint on camera
It has been in place for only a few weeks, but ‘Don’t Miss a Sec’, a contemporary art installation that is in essence a one-way mirrored loo on a construction site near the Thames, has been raising heated, even violent emotions. While it may provide a fine opportunity to indulge in voyeurism and exhibitionism at the same time — like going to the toilet in the bushes, if the bushes were in the middle of the street — in reality the experience is proving prohibitively unnerving to some
In this case Toys ‘R’ Us advertises using a giraffe mascot named Geoffrey. But Toys ‘R’ Us does not own the rights to that mascot, instead Geoffrey, Inc — a Toys ‘R’ Us subsidiary — owns them. So the toy store ‘licenses’ the trademark from Geoffrey, Inc, at a hefty rate, then calls that a business expense and deducts from its pre-tax income. Since Geoffrey, Inc isn’t a Louisiana company, Toys ‘R’ Us argued that it doesn’t need to pay Louisiana taxes on it’s income. The judge disagreed
Maids in Hong Kong can draw a higher salary if they’re computer-literate enough to defrag hard-drives, reinstall operating systems, and do other sysadminly chores. But some have rebelled against the shift to computer-literate cleaners
Rocket have a Xmas game that pretty well mirrors the reality of surviving the office break-up party.
Amuse yourself by shaking the crap out of the occupants of the snowglobe. Hear them scream as they thump off the walls of their glass domed prison.
And my favourite… prepare to be sucked into the addictive joy of Shuffle the Penguin.
No one expects to lose much sleep over it but, for the record, NASA has been sued by three men from Yemen for invading Mars. The three say they own the red planet, and claim they have documents to prove it.
We inherited the planet from our ancestors 3,000 years ago,
they told the weekly Arabic-language newspaper Al-Thawri, which published the report Thursday. Adam Ismail, Mustafa Khalil and Abdullah al-Umari filed the lawsuit in San’a, Yemen, and presented documents to the country’s prosecutor general which they say proves their claim. There was no word on whether they had paid the appropriate inheritance taxes.
An appeals court upheld a verdict to clear Jon Johansen, a 20-year-old Norwegian, of DVD piracy charges on Monday, dismaying Hollywood studios who cluelessly claimed that the decision would encourage hackers
As Wal-Mart stores continue to spread across the US, community opposition is also mounting from critics who say its ‘always low prices’ mean always low wages for nonunion workers and that its famous ‘rollbacks’ on goods roll over local businesses and economies
New Communications Minister Daryl Williams is tipped to close the Government’s National Office of the Information Economy in early 2004 and extend a moratorium on new free-to-air TV licences later in the year
Finnish architect Matti Suuronen designed this UFO shaped dwelling in 1968, initially for use as a ski-cabin or holiday home.
The idea behind the design reflects the optimism of the sixties. At the time people believed technology could solve all problems for the human race. The ideal was of a new era, a space-age, where everybody would have more leisure time to spend on holidays away from home.
The Futuro house was completely furnished and could accommodate eight people. It was constructed entirely out of reinforced plastic, a new, light and inexpensive material back then. The plan was to mass-produce it, so it would be cheap enough to house all people around the earth. Because it was so light-weight, it was easily transportable by helicopter. Mobile living was the new possibility for the future. People could now take their moveable home with them, to wherever they went, and live like modern nomads.
Unfortunately the 1973 oil crisis spoiled all these plans. Prices of plastic raised production costs too high to be profitable. Only 20 Futuro houses were ever built.
A spammer’s claim to his clients that he had an agreement with anti-spam technology vendor Brightmail to not block his traffic was contradicted by Brightmail officials. Notorious spammer, Scott Richter, is currently being prosecuted for fraud and his claims against Brightmail are part of his defence
Spam is robbing Australian businesses of at least $2 billion annually, according to one estimate — and there’s little governments can do about it
Optus is planning to double its revenues to about $11 billion annually in the next seven to 10 years and is considering using offshore call centres as early as next year as part of its growth push — you have to wonder if this plan is less about the money and more about solving the problem of their current dodgy locally outsourced call centre generating more complaints against the company than all other services combined
I’ll be spending this xmas pretty much by myself (as my girlfriend is visiting her family in Casino), so we had xmas before she left, and I netted some nice stuff:
- Large metal cocktail shaker in the form of a penguin
- Cocktail knickbacks (Hawthorn strainer, lemon zester, muddler, ice tongs, and that cool airlock thingy that sits atop a bottle of spirits and lets you pour a shot at a time)
- Shorts that appear to be brown but apparently fade into a camouflage pattern as the years wear on
- Lots of books (Nietzsche, James Joyce, and HG Wells mostly, plus a big tome of Norman Spinrad’s bitchy critical writing)
- And I finally cracked and bought myself a GameCube and a big stack of games: Metroid Prime, Pikmin, Animal Crossing, and Sonic Mega Collection (a disc of twelve old sonic games which are just as fresh as the day I first played them)
Have you folks gotten anything yet?
Dodgeit allows you to create throw-away email addresses (for crappy registration sites), and then delivers the email that comes into the resulting mailbox as an RSS feed that you and everyone else who can guess at your throwaway email addy can read
In the midst of a film industry crackdown on digital movie piracy, filmmaker Robert Greenwald is urging rampant, unauthorised copying of his documentary criticising the Bush administration’s reasons for invading Iraq The 56-minute film, Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War, concludes that President Bush and his team distorted intelligence data and misled the American public ahead of the March invasion that toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein
The recording industry can’t force Internet providers to identify music downloaders, a federal appeals court said Friday in a major decision shielding online privacy while undercutting the industry’s anti-piracy campaign
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