“Yet the one slogan you never hear at the Olympics is that with dreams come responsibilities … And in the global neighborhood, any city’s treatment of its local problems is suddenly a matter of everyone’s concern. So evicting roughly 3 million of the capital’s residents, as Beijing has done, while spending perhaps $200 billion on [...]

Gmail has finally updated its contacts manager so that users can stop it from automatically adding every address they e-mail to their contacts list. I actually really like the way they’ve done it, by adding recently and most frequently e-mailed lists, addresses from which can then be easily transferred to contacts. It’s a long-overdue fix [...]

The security minister Lord West has refused to reject the idea of a proposed Big Brother database, which would hold details of all phone calls, e-mails and Internet use made in the UK. He slithered around the issue, simply saying that it’s “early days”. “We haven’t made a decision” is not a no and is [...]

“Some start-ups choose to develop their products and services in stealth mode in order to avoid competitor attention and build hype leading up to the launch … [But] Building an entire product below the radar, then banking on a one-time launch is a risky proposition … I think that a more open approach, that may [...]

Lol, I love xkcd Original strip here.

I’ve just been playing about with the new Facebook profiles layout, and my overriding opinion is that it’s ugly and badly designed. I get that the idea was to group things into logical areas and get rid of profile clutter, but I find it to be even less intuitive with tabs and filters everywhere, and [...]

“This is voting as handheld therapy to make us (and politicians) feel better. No one – not the Putney Debaters nor the Suffragettes – put their lives on the line for the right to be patronised madly by an aloof and idea-lite elite. They wanted the right to engage in serious politics on an equal [...]

Yet another hostile bid triggers yet another rejection by Yahoo’s battered board. This time, they were forced to reject an offer which would have seen Microsoft take their search division while investor Carl Icahn took the rest of the company. Ars notes that this may just be part of a larger strategy by the hostile [...]

The Mail on Sunday claims to have revealed the identity of elusive graffiti artist Banksy, famous for incredible street art the world over. I really hope Middle England on Sunday hasn’t given the game away - not only because Banksy would charged with numerous counts of criminal damage, when instead he deserves to be recognised [...]

“If we only make standard fare, we cannot beat other studios. There were already adult videos with Lolitas or themes of incest, so we wanted to make something new. A relationship between wife and an old father-in-law has enough twist to create an atmosphere of mystery and captivate viewers’ hearts.”
Time has a bizarre insight into [...]

So true… I’m sure most people who work in an office can identify with this I’m a big advocate of letting people pick one password and stick with it, or at the very least not making them have a different password for every single system they use. The problem with having too many passwords, [...]

“4chan is also very profane. A phrase from Star Wars comes to mind: It’s a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Spammers don’t even bother to spam 4chan; Google started searching it only six months ago. But it is the wellspring from which a lot of Internet culture, and hence popular culture, bubbles. In his [...]

“Not long ago Dr. Joanne Lynn, a geriatrician who pulls no punches in her frequent critiques of America’s sorry system of end-of-life care, looked out from the dais of a Washington, D.C., ballroom at a sea of middle-aged faces: health policymakers, legislative staff, advocates for the aged and for family caregivers — an audience of [...]

Jeffrey Denning blogs for the Washington Times about the latest invention of Lamperd Less Lethal, Inc. The “safety bracelet”, as they’re marketing it, is designed to be compulsory for airline passengers, and would take the place of a boarding pass, contain personal details, and monitor the whereabouts of the passenger and luggage. Oh, and a [...]

The Book of Lost Things
John Connolly

Rating:
Connolly’s adult fairytale is a dark story of a young boy’s progression from child to man, looking at how he copes with wide-ranging issues of death, fear, despair, love and loyalty. An excellent book which I had trouble putting down - see my full review on LibraryThing, here.

Ian Leader writes an interesting blog post on ‘Open Source, Email threading and Gmail Labs’. As he notes, closed-source, ad-supported software may be regarded as a fair trade-off in comparison to open source:
“This is probably a reasonable trade off: after all, users don’t just get free software (zero marginal cost) but free hosting, bandwidth and [...]

As the Olympics near, converns over the effects of pollution in China’s capital are growing. Air pollution has been on the agenda for some time, with the authoritarian government resorting to drastic measures and mobilising armies of farmers to seed clouds, and planning emergency factory closures at a moment’s notice. But the New York Times [...]

From the most excellent xkcd, here.