Guido: Geek Note : Service Interruption PossibleSir Paul McCartney's estranged wife Heather Mills has accused the media of "pushing her to the edge", likening her treatment to that of Princess Diana. In an emotional interview on breakfast TV station GMTV, she also accused "a certain corner" of fuelling negative coverage about her in the press. She added she had received death threats and been "close to suicide". Mills, whose divorce from the ex-Beatle is going through the courts, called on the public to stop buying newspapers. She said: "I've had worse press than a paedophile or a murderer and I've done nothing but charity for the 20 years. "They've called me a whore, a gold digger, a fantasist, a liar," she added, complaining that she had endured "eighteen months of abuse [and] 4,400 abusive articles".What a lot of hassle and all she's likely to end up with is a measly £60,000,000.
Not to stoke any of the inane conspiracy theories running wild on the Internet, but if Osama bin Laden wasn’t on the payroll of Lockheed Martin or some other large defense contractor, he deserves to have been. What a boondoggle 9/11 has been for the merchants of war, who this week announced yet another quarter of whopping profits made possible by George Bush’s pretending to fight terrorism by throwing money at outdated Cold War-style weapons systems.
He complains about visibility and I can only assume (in all seriousness) that the man needs to get his eyes checked out. Personally, I like the look of the folders and the icons and they all seem perfectly visible to me, even without my readers on. But if you want big bold folders and icons it's not a difficult job to change them if you want. Some of my desktop icons are colourful animals and cakes (not that I find that it helps me remember what they contain) which is just a throwback to the days when I thought such things were, erm, cool. Visibility also depends on your desktop image. I don't like the galactic default image with Jaguar which, I'm sure, was chosen largely to look good in pre-sale screenshots. I now have a plain blue/grey background and the dock, all the files and the icons show up perfectly. So, if you have visibility problems my advice would be -change the backgound!
The moan that really did it for me was Neuberg's complaint that he can't run Classic (OS9) anymore. Classic doesn't run on Intel based Macs but did on older PowerPC Macs, until now that is. Neuberg has data in HyperCard (!) which he likes to peruse now and then and he uses FrameMaker to create PDFs and large documents. Fair enough, FrameMaker is still widely used by technical writers but if you are going to moan at anyone you should really complain to Adobe, who stopped support for FrameMaker for Macs in 2004. ...if Leopard trusts the service (it's a root process, or it's signed with an acceptable crypto signature), it will have access through the firewall. Since Leopard ships with cryptographically-signed binaries/packages, I guess I'm not seeing the problem - if Jo(e)-evil-cracker already has 'root' on the system, the firewall isn't going to help save the system, after all... Perhaps Heise are just used to using Linux, where the firewall trumps all ? You could argue that the 'Block all incoming connections' is badly worded, but you could argue that reading the documentation for a new firewall would be a useful thing to do as well.Exactly!
The member of the royal family at the centre of an alleged sex and drugs blackmail plot is reportedly on the verge of going public after being named on American television's leading news channel. A British commentator named the person during a live broadcast on cable news broadcaster Fox News. Nicholas Davies, the author of three books on the royal family, revealed the name during a phone interview on the channel's Live Desk show. A "senior Palace source" has been quoted as saying that the option of going public was becoming "increasingly tempting" for the person involved, according to the Telegraph.I thought this story about blow jobs was quite an old one, wasn't it? It was Prince Charles who was the guy supposedly on the receiving end of a bit of oral according to the previous story and I'm assuming it's still him in the latest one. What does fascinate me though is the response from Davies. If 'X' hasn't done "Y' then there can't be a video in existence showing 'X' doing 'Y' , so how exactly does a blackmail attempt even get off the ground? Or have I missed something?Speaking from his Surrey home, Davies told host Martha MacCullum: "These socialites demanded $100,000 (£50,000) not to release a video which they claimed (name) engaged in oral sex. "This is absolute nonsense, (name) would never be involved in anything like this. It is a con trick which exploded in their face."
A cookbook featuring Maw Broon's favourite dishes has been criticised by health experts. The collection includes recipes for the fried, fatty and sugary foods which have sustained the comic strip family for 70 years. It has reached number two in the Scottish best-seller list, outselling books by celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson. Nutritionists have warned that the Broons' diet could lead to obesity.
Nutritionist Carina Norris told BBC Scotland: "Taken as they are, all these things like fried and sugar-laden food, are very bad food and there's no way I could recommend them as a nutritionist. "Clootie dumpling is high in sugar and although it's natural sugar, it really bumps up the calorie count and there's a lot of fat in there as well, so if you eat that very often, you could well end up being obese.
She said: "I think if someone followed the recipes in this book, solely, it would be a very unhealthy diet, but I don't think that's what this book's about. "I think it's more a bit of fun and will end up being given as a gift book, maybe as a bit of a joke..."Hey, well done dearie. You finally got it. These are CARTOON characters and the book isn't really meant to be used by anyone as a basis for their diet! Jeeezus Wept! What next? Warnings in The Dandy?
Dennis, my favourite blogger, has returned and now he's ON SPEED!, well, sort of.Anyone who watched her for any length of time had to notice that beyond pleasant looks (sic!) and a fairly good voice, Malkin didn't have what it took to make it on talk television. She was argumentative to a fault, utterly humorless, and had real trouble managing conversations and guests... largely because she had major problems thinking on her feet. All of that combined to make her ripe for a cancelled in-less-than-a-season type of failure on the only cable news network anyone actually watches.
Michelle isn't the brightest thing on two feet, but she is nothing if not commercially attuned. And she does have an ego. My take is that once she'd figured out she didn't have the Right Stuff, she looked around for a way out that didn't drive home the obvious fact that she stunk. And wouldn't you know it, along comes loogie hockin' Geraldo Rivera... all fat, dumb and happy. Michelle then had everything she needed to beat a strategic retreat while waving the flag of victorious outrage to the faithful.
Time can make every war seem like a good idea, or at least like not an obviously bad one. The progress of civilization being what it is, and people’s ability to gin up strong feelings about events far away in space and time being what they are, it can all start to seem For the Best. Some wicked regime gone (and don’t suggest they would ever have gone away without being conquered! Except for maybe Soviet Russia, but….), new buildings built, the dead largely forgotten.
Of course, such judgments depend on when you look. U.S. meddling in Iranian affairs seemed like a good idea to most until 1979; and Iraq today, or tomorrow, may seem like a victory until someone radicalized by the invasion and occupation dirty bombs New York in 2020.
After all, we can be pretty confident, barring eco-catastrophe or full-on nuclear World War III, that things will, someday, be better in Iraq—on the whole, for most people—than they are now, than they were in 2004, or than they were under Saddam.
But if that’s the only bar that has to be jumped for people to decide that that means the Iraq invasion was a good idea, a settled victory for American military might, that’s setting a scarily low threshold for waging war.
Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has accused Britain of not doing enough to fight international terrorism, which he says could take 20 or 30 years to beat.
He was speaking in a BBC interview ahead of a state visit to the UK - the first by a Saudi monarch for 20 years.
Remind me again, where did most of the 9/11 terrorists come from?
Peter Voser, finance chief at Europe's biggest oil company, Royal Dutch Shell, warned the industry not to bank on record crude prices to drive revenues in the future, as prices rose to a record high of more than $91 a barrel in New York. He said the oil price was being driven up by speculators and political factors, rather than any fundamental problems with production and supply, and called predictions that the price per barrel would hit $100 "too speculative". "To be honest, we find it hard to explain the oil prices," said Mr Voser. Prices rose 1pc to $91.40 a barrel yesterday as concerns grew that supply from the Middle East could diminish with political uncertainty.It doesn't seem that long ago that people were getting agitated at the prospect of oil at $60 a barrel and then $70 a barrel. The price hit $92 yesterday before dropping back slightly to just over $91 and it would be a brave man that placed a bet on it not reaching $100 in the near future.
