I applaud the Pentagon for its decision not to go ahead with an online terror attack betting system. The system was supposed to provide insight into possible terrorist attacks and assassinations by allowing people to buy futures contracts on various scenarios. The thinking seems to have been that if a spike is seen on a particular contract, it may be an indication that those in the know are trying to make money before carrying out the dastardly deed itself.
This plan looks strangely similar to an illegal scheme reported on CNN recently (sorry – I can’t find the link) where web sites were taking bets on the date particular government officials would die. The punter choosing the closest date won the pot. The idea here, however, was to encourage assassination by building up a “reward” which the perpetrator could claim.

Another product containing our chips and software has hit the market in the UK. Look for the Packard Bell-branded FreeView boxes in your local electronics retailer.

As many of my friends will tell you, I’m a fan of a good cup of coffee. While on business trips, therefore, I tend to suffer due to the appallingly awful stuff that US hotels try to pass off as my favourite caffeinated beverage. As a result a Starbucks in the airport is usually a welcome sight.
This Friday, I succumbed to temptation and bought my usual Grande Mocha in Chicago O’Hare. I am used to paying in excess of $3 for a Starbuck’s coffee but this one came in at $4.17. How can I justify paying more for a single cup of coffee than I often pay for my whole lunch?
The whole issue of coffee pricing has been important to me for some time now. A while ago, I started running a fair trade coffee stall at church as part of the Presbyterian Coffee Project. This project aims to ensure that coffee farmers, long taken advantage of by unscrupulous middlemen and profit-hungry corporations, receive a fair price for the coffee they grow. Aside from being the moral thing to do, the beans make a darn good cup of coffee and actually cost less than the loose beans sold at our local supermarket.
If you live in the UK, you are fortunate enough to be able to buy fair trade coffee from Cafe Direct in many supermarkets. As far as I can tell, there are no fair trade brands easily available in Texas stores but you can buy direct from Equal Exchange on the web via their store on Yahoo!.

A story on Yahoo today questions the merits of putting so much emphasis on developing hydrogen powered vehicles. While the idea of a vehicle dumping nothing other than water vapour into the environment sounds great, I have yet to hear how the hydrogen fuel is to be generated without dumping a lot of other nasties. Solar or wind power used to electrolyse sea water may be one nice clean solution but I get the feeling that burning coal or oil to generate the power would be the most likely means in the short term. Kind of defeats the purpose, methinks.
Given the current reliance on petrol and diesel as a fuel source and its ready availability, I would be a lot happier to see equivalent amounts of money pumped into gasoline fuel cell and hybrid motor technology.

How much did the war in Iraq cost and what else could the same amount of money have bought? This rather sobering site offers an answer.

A process of deduction (cross referencing friends names with the offenders listed in the Register) leads me to believe that this is where the photos of the offence were posted. Unfortunately, the “Shenanigans” album was edited yesterday and, presumably, the photos of interest were removed.

I read this story yesterday in the newspaper but now it has reached The Register so it must be big news! Just how daft are these guys? I just wish I could find the site they posted the photos on.

I always look forward to the
Masked Engineer columns in TV Technology magazine. Recently, he has been commenting on the FCC’s attempts to impose digital TV transmission here in the USA.
Looking at the situation here, I see one enormous difference compared to the so-far rather successful transition in the UK. There is absolutely nothing in it for the consumer in the USA. Some hardened videophiles would argue that you get better picture and sound using digital transmission but for 99% of the punters watching TV at home, this makes no difference at all. They have the choice to go out and spend several hundred dollars on a digital TV settop box and what do they get for it? Essentially exactly what they had before – the same number of terrestrial channels with the same content.
Back in the UK, spending 99 quid on a converter gives you access to the usual 5 channels plus a dozen or so more that are only available on digital. There is some incentive for a consumer to buy the new hardware since it gives them more than they would have had without it.

I just found this gem from the BBC on Friday. I can’t help wondering if the sign was intended to impress the parishioners or stop the preacher….

Taking advantage of a 3 day weekend, I’ve taken the plungs and upgraded my Windows PC to XP. I’ve been putting this off for months, since, given the amount of software I have installed and the number of weird and wonderful hardware devices I have, I was sure I would end up in upgrade hell. Thankfully, however, it was trivially simple and the result is surprisingly good so far (only 1 crash in 24 hours and that didn’t take the machine down).

Windows 98 SE had been unbelievably unstable for me recently. It would take 3 or 4 reboots to get the system up and running whenever I had to shut it down and I was getting “Blue Screens of Death” most days. 3 years of use plus many software package installations had left the machine with terminal bit-rot. Hopefully, XP will prove to be a far more usable platform.

After the upgrade, I only have 2 problems – I can’t find an XP driver for my Minolta Dimage Scan Dual II slide scanner and my old answering machine software (PhoneTools) no longer runs. I can fix the second problem by throwing money at it (no free upgrade from BVRP ) but the first could be trickier. Time to continue the driver search. I wonder if I can move the scanner over to Linux instead?