The Independent has an article on a proposed new law in trigger-happy Texas which would provide immunity to anyone who shoots someone on their property for any reason. In Florida, a similar law means that two gangs who killed a 9-year-old girl in the crossfire of a shootout are both potentially immune to prosecution because [...]

” ‘600: rupees now, save 50,000 rupees later’ is the advertising slogan of diagnostic teams with ultrasound machines that predict the sex of the unborn child”
The Times highlights an abhorrent advertising slogan in its article on infanticide in India. Female foetuses are aborted because men are seen as the breadwinners, and because the family of [...]

“At the Visual Effects Society’s recent conference, Jeff Okun, the organisation’s chairman, showed before and after versions of one of the climactic shots in the Oscar-nominated film Blood Diamond … In the ‘before’ shot Jennifer Connolly, the leading lady, was shown talking on her mobile phone. The digitally manipulated ‘after’ shot showed [...]

I got back from BarCamp on Sunday night, but just haven’t got round to blogging since. It was really great… I learnt tonnes and met some really interesting people (geeks are people too!) and will post some thoughts on presentations when I get a chance this week.
There’s photos on Flickr here, videos on YouTube and [...]

I’m presenting at BarCamp (kinda an ad-hoc technology conference) this weekend, which I’m looking forward to. I’m going to be presenting on the subject, “Offshore Outsourcing and the Value of Test-Driven Development”, based on things I learnt while working as an IDS (IT systems analysis) intern at Procter & Gamble over the summer.
The BarCampLondon2 wiki [...]

“DigiTimes is reporting that Apple will begin shipping larger 15.4-inch MacBooks to bridge the gap between the 13.3-inch MacBook and the 15.4-inch MacBook Pro … Personally, I don’t really think this was a wise decision by Apple. They will lose potential MacBook Pro consumers that require the larger screen but want to get it as [...]

From xkcd, here.

” ‘What is extraordinary is the prosecution admitted there was no search made for spyware — an incredible blunder akin to not checking for fingerprints at a crime scene,’ Alex Eckelberry, president of a Florida software company, wrote recently in the local newspaper. ‘When a pop-up occurs on a computer, it will get shown as [...]

“Britain is backing an experiment to change the way aid is delivered in parts of Africa … The Department for International Development (Dfid) is providing £750,000 to fund a scheme to provide cash payments instead of food to tens of thousands of hungry people in northern Malawi … [This] represents a further shift by Britain [...]

“This is about the day-to-day interactions of a diverse Europe — at work, in school, on the streets … [A] way to make sure every citizen counts? Count them. Literally. Yet some countries don’t collect ethnic data in their census … It’s illegal to collect data on ethnicity or religion in France, Belgium, Denmark, Italy [...]

“The United Nations has welcomed US plans to grant up to 7,000 Iraqi refugees asylum over the next year … The number represents a huge increase on the 463 refugees the US has taken in since the war began four years ago … The UN estimates that up to 50,000 Iraqis flee each [...]

From The Register, here.

“Scientists have shown what happens when an infection-fighting antibody attacks a gap in HIV’s formidable defences … They have published an atomic-level image in Nature showing the antibody, b12, attacking part of a protein on surface of the virus … HIV avoids attack by constantly mutating, but this protein segment is a weak spot because [...]

I was thinking about China’s increasing consumer culture, and it led me to do a bit of reading to find out whether or not people still regard China as truly communist. With all its market reforms, I wondered what makes it socialist, communist or “not-capitalist”. Although no-one seems to be able to give a particularly [...]

From xkcd, here.

“When Bush first came to power, he refused to talk with the North Koreans at all. Kim Jong-il was an evil dictator, and, as Cheney once put it, ‘We don’t negotiate with evil—we defeat it.’ … this deal [agreed on Tuesday] has promise; but it’s nothing that couldn’t have been negotiated four or five years [...]

“The Russian military is reported to be investigating claims that army conscripts were forced to work as male prostitutes in St Petersburg … [It comes after] Private Andrei Sychev was forced to squat for several hours by fellow soldiers and then tied to a chair and brutally beaten up last year … As a result [...]

Spiked has an article on Greenpeace in Germany, and how it may lose its charitable status. I can see the problems associated with the state supporting a group which takes part in illegal direct action. However, the author’s reasoning that a charity which “stands as a barrier to scientific progress” doesn’t deserve state funding is [...]

“Novartis, the Basel, Switzerland, drug giant, has helped uncover which of the 20,000 genes identified by the Human Genome Project are likely to be associated with diabetes. But rather than hoard this information, as drug firms have traditionally done, it is making it available for free on the World Wide Web … ‘It will take [...]

From bLaugh, here.