Would you please not undermine the union?

I was tempted to stick this under politics, but I think its too obvious for my political readers, and it is more of a rant than anything so it is going under general. I was reading Phil Plait's (aka the Bad Astronomer) blog, as I do every day. One of his entries was titled "Wipe England off the map". On a brief side note, I do wonder what sort of feedback he would have got if it said wipe Israel off the map....

Saturday, 14 June 2008 · 3 min · Paul Smith

For the attention of TheDailyCreationism

For those who read my blog a couple of years back you no doubt remember a series of posts I did countering the mis-information spread by somebody who went under the handle thedailycreationism and bigbangisamyth, he ran a few different blogs and often moved around between them (I have no idea why). But after a while all the posts dried up, much to my disappointment as he was a good source to use for topics to write about....

Thursday, 12 June 2008 · 1 min · Paul Smith

Counter-Terrorism Bill passes by nine votes

The government won by nine votes. 37 Labour MPs rebelled (thanks comrades), I'm sure many Labour Party members will be keen to see which lefties caved and voted with the government on this. Hopefully the Lords will chuck it out - I never thought I'd hear myself say that. John McDonnell: Any attempt to present this as some sort of victory for the Government will ring absolutely hollow. There will be widespread consternation among our supporters in the country seeing a Labour Government prepared to use every tactic available in its determination to crush essential civil liberties, which have been won by the Labour movement over generations....

Wednesday, 11 June 2008 · 1 min · Paul Smith

42-day detention and our civil liberties in general

I originally wasn't going to blog about this, my views are already pretty well known (major assault on our civil liberties over the last decade), but something just forced my hand. It was a blogger on LabourHome. I genuinely thought before now the people who supported the government on this issue in this party just didn't care one way or the other, and so they'd go with their party "loyalties". I never expected anything this extreme....

Wednesday, 11 June 2008 · 3 min · Paul Smith

Men don't have fewer ribs than women

Let's clear this little thing up, as I heard it again today - somebody claiming men have one less of rib (I assume they mean a pair) than women. This is false, we both have 12 pairs of ribs. This myth is probably even more widespread than the 10% of our brain nonsense - the same nonsense that is used to claim the existence of whatever paranormal ability anybody cares to come up with....

Saturday, 7 June 2008 · 1 min · Paul Smith

Acupuncture - the BBC nails it

It's very rare I read an article in the mainstream press which makes so much sense, and tackles a scientific topic so well. Simon Singh +1 point(s), but as he's the co-author of 'Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial' maybe he should get an additional point. Ever since receiving my first ever acupuncture session last month, I have been repeatedly asked whether or not it was effective. [...] [W]hy on earth should my personal experience be important, when we have evidence from tens of thousands of patients who have received acupuncture during carefully observed scientific trials?...

Friday, 6 June 2008 · 2 min · Paul Smith

Why isn't my computer seeing more than 3 or 4GB of RAM?

Increasingly I'm running into these sort of questions in technical communities, to the point where its happening several times a day. Questions like: "I've 4GB of RAM, but Windows only shows 3GB" and "My PC's got 8GB of RAM but it only shows 3.1GB" etc This stems from the fact that a 32-bit computer (sometimes referred to as x86) only supports a 4GB (2^32) address space. So why doesn't 4GB of RAM show up?...

Thursday, 5 June 2008 · 4 min · Paul Smith

May Manifesto petition reminder

Just a heads up to those who didn't see the entry on the Yeovil CLP blog about the May Manifesto petition, which outlines the following changes to policy: Nailing the 10p tax mistake by the introduction of a fair tax system removing the low paid from taxation and ensuring the wealthiest and corporations pay their fair share An increase in the basic state pension, immediately restoring the link with earnings, lifting people off means tested benefits and providing free care for the elderly An immediate start on a large scale council house building programme and assistance for those facing repossession Immediate end to programme of local Post Office closures and liberalisation of postal services An end to the privatisation of our public services A new pay deal for public sector workers to protect their living standards and tackle low pay Abolishing tuition fees and restoring maintenance grants for all students Scrapping ID cards and abandoning 42 days detention Introduction of a trade union freedom bill and measures to protect temporary and agency workers Rejecting the proposals to renew Trident You can stick your name on the petition by emailing info@l-r-c....

Wednesday, 4 June 2008 · 1 min · Paul Smith

HTC officially announce 'Raphael' as Touch Pro

Nice. Well I'm impressed. So here's the official specifications of the Touch Pro where they differ to the Touch Diamond, looks like some of the leaked details from my previous post were a bit on the low side! Five-row qwerty keyboard. ROM: 512MB. RAM: 288MB. Battery: 1340mAh. TV-out! MicroSD slot (SD 2.0). Camera flash. We can also see from the images that the corners are rounded, this isn't specific to the devices manufactured for T-Mobile, so that's good....

Wednesday, 4 June 2008 · 2 min · Paul Smith

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 in August

The IE team have announced a refinement for the release date of IE8 Beta 2 which is due in August. Unlike Beta 1 this isn't solely targeted at developers and designers. So along with that announcement is a general call to get the interwebs up to date to make sure they don't break due to IE8's new standards support. All the websites I handle are of course ready and have been for months....

Tuesday, 3 June 2008 · 1 min · Paul Smith