From YouTube, here.

“The music industry will give up copyright protection on digital music before the end of the year, enabling every downloaded song to be played on every type of digital music player and finally unleashing the profit potential of widespread, legally downloaded, paid-for music .. This is the bold, optimistic prediction of David Pakman, the bold, [...]

“The funeral pyre was moments from being lit when a movement on the bier triggered panic among staff at the crematorium in southern India. Then, as they rushed to examine the elderly woman under the shroud, her three sons suddenly abandoned their ‘mourning’ and fled … In a shocking example of India’s growing disregard for [...]

“Here’s an old economist conundrum about queues … when you queue [for a water fountain] – I get no benefit from your pain. When you pay, I probably do … It may not be a good argument for road pricing, but it does explain why economists tend to think of the price mechanism as a [...]

From CNET News.com, here. Via CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast, here.

“The UK and US have held high level talks on the possibility of putting a ‘Son of Star Wars’ anti-ballistic missile defence system on British soil … An article in The Economist claims Prime Minister Tony Blair has lobbied President George Bush for the system … But government sources have told the BBC that talks [...]

“At a concert by the Palestinian Rapperz (PR) last summer, Islamic youths, outraged by the group’s arm thrusts and crotch grabs, rushed onstage and beat up its four members. Soon after, a Palestinian M.C. known as Sompol was also assailed for immorality … And yet rap is thriving … evolving into a gritty hybrid expression [...]

“A predatory commercial company seeking to scavenge a staggering $55 million from Zambia after buying up a ‘bad debt’ of $3.3 million has been reluctantly awarded an estimated $15 million by a British court … That’s rich pickings from a desperately poor country, and ‘vulture fund’ Donegal International should redeem this shameful episode and not [...]

James Merlin from Minnesota runs the SETI@home screensaver/analysis software on his computers. Every so often, it pings the University of California servers and logs the IP address of the computer it’s running on. When his wife’s laptop was stolen, he checked the SETI@home database and found that his stolen computer was still pinging UC – [...]

Reproduced by permission from Chris of The Book of Biff, here.

“Over the years there have been many great articles extolling the virtues of CSS based design and bemoaning table based design. However there have been very few articles looking at things from the other side of the fence … In order to bring some balance back to the equation, and to have a bit of [...]

“The Cuban government is to migrate thousands of its computers to open-source software, a change that would further distance the communist nation from U.S.-based Microsoft.” I’m really surpised that Cuba doesn’t already primarily use open-source software, what with the US embargo on the country. The ZDNet article is here.

“It speaks volumes when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flies to Jerusalem to try to revive peace talks between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and cannot even get the two to show up when she reads out the content-free joint statement to which they have grudgingly [...]

“On Tuesday, North Korea finally agreed to shut down its main Yongbyon nuclear facility in exchange for energy aid—a shipment of 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil, with more to follow. Just what does one do with 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil? … Not very much. Heavy fuel oil is the cheapest grade of [...]

“The Government’s plan to bring in identity cards has run into further problems after it emerged that the police would be able to use the national database to check fingerprints found at crime scenes.” Not only is the government gradually building up a DNA database of everyone police arrest (even if they aren’t charged, i.e. [...]

“Australia is to ban incandescent lightbulbs in an effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions, with the government saying yesterday they would be phased out within three years … Fluorescent bulbs are currently more expensive than incandescent bulbs, but use only about 20% of the power to produce the same amount of light and last longer” [...]

Photo by Ben Reyes, released under Creative Commons. Original here.

Tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, explosions, floods, anthrax, bird flu… this link provides a worldmap with all the natural disasters and disease epidemics currently in progress highlighted by flashing gifs. Most unnerving is the way that biological hazards are represented by a radiation symbol – at first glance, it looks like Africa’s suffering from a sudden spate [...]

Possibly the best WordPress theme I’ve ever seen (in a very geeky way) CLI 1.0 turns your blog into a command-line. Want to read the next post? Simply type ‘n’ into the green-text black-background interface… The theme is here.

From xkcd, here.