Paul Smith's Blog

According to MP Madeleine Moon at least, who will raise the issues with the police following several suicides. From the BBC article: Mrs Moon said she was growing increasingly worried by the appearance of so-called "memory walls" on networking sites like Bebo, where members leave messages to mark the death of a friend. I fail to see how that is a problem, or how it promotes suicide in any way. I've used this blog to post messages remembering the deaths of people I look up to....

The left has taken a very anti-nuclear stance on how to develop Britain's electricity supply going forward. A lot of this comes from misconceptions about nuclear power. Typically when one mentions you're in favour of a new generation of nuclear power stations you're instantly met with some nonsense about 500,000 deaths thanks to Chernobyl. Firstly that argument is a complete non-sequitur. Modern reactors, and even Britain's existing nuclear reactors cannot fail in such a manner as one of the reactors at Chernobyl did in 1986....

Gordon Brown has at last revealed his socialist side. If the prospects for the least fortunate are to be as great as they can be, then they must have the final say—and that requires a massive and irreversible shift of power to working people, a framework of free universal welfare services controlled by the people who use them. But socialism will have to be won also at the point of production—the production of needs, ideas and particularly of goods and services....

So I've been playing through Crysis which is a fantastic game. But yesterday I noticed something, something BAD. WHAT THE HELL IS THAT? The Moon!!!!! Ahhh Jesus. For us to see the Earth facing side of the Moon completely illuminated, it must be opposite the Sun in the sky. In daytime like this picture shows it is impossible to have the Moon fully illuminated. In reality the Full Moon will be rising just as the Sun is setting and vice versa - opposite positions in the sky....

Internet Explorer 7 is now the single most used web browser out there, (at least according to Net Applications), December marked the first month where it surpassed Internet Explorer 6. I still think it is disappointing it took this long, just over a year. Hopefully Internet Explorer 8 will be able to eclipse 7 much faster, targeting multiple browsers is annoying, but at least we can say IE6 is no longer the market leader....

I was invited to attend the Yeovil Trades Council meeting yesterday. I was pleased to see the discussion was very open and it sparked a debate about being in or out of the Labour Party, one I've had with myself prior to joining for many years. I wasn't able to get all of my thoughts out at the meeting on this, so here they are. A couple of comrades brought up the point that because the Labour government was carrying out a neo-liberal agenda, which is perfectly true, such as moving the postal service in the direction of privitisation etc, they shouldn't have our support and we should attempt to form a new party....

Other than the small news item that Internet Explorer 8 is under development, the IE team today announced the first real details, they've said the current build of IE8 in standards mode successfully renders the Acid2 test. This means that it is more standards compliant than both Firefox and Safari. Hopefully Microsoft can find away to ensure both good standards support, as well as solid backwards compatibility and hopefully a beta version isn't too far out....

I will not be buying, nor recommending that anybody buys any more products from this company. No doubt many of my readers are aware of my long running battles with the GeForce 5 series on Windows Vista, which eventually made me so fed up I blew £1600 on a new Tablet PC (without any nVidia junk in I might add). nVidia right up to the launch of Windows Vista said they would support the GeForce 5 series on Windows Vista....

According to Microsoft's website, PlaysForSure is being re-branded to Certified for Windows Vista. Now PlaysForSure was created so you could see if devices would be compatible between different music stores and so on, both have the logo on and they both work together. Simple, it avoided as much lock-in as possible for a DRM system. It was a breath of fresh air from how extreme Apple are, everything of which they do is to lock you into them, and them alone....

Incredible, just tonight I stumbled upon the Yeovil Psychic Society's website. These people claim they are "Challenging the Accepted". Apparently these guys have been around for 30 years now. I wish they came upon my radar sooner. I say we get some rational people together and found a Yeovil Sceptic Society, we can claim we're "Challenging the Bullshit". Just a few things they've got wrong as I quickly went through their latest newsletter....