Olive Jones, teacher who proselytised to a 14-year-old pupil with leukaemia, turned into 'victim of political correctness' - http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.com/2009...
Sad to get a story at a time like Christmas, when we should surely be people of tolerance and mutual faith, regardless of beliefs in sky fairies; it doesn't quite work reflexively though
- Chris Applegate
"An Italian singer wrote this song with gibberish to sound like English. If you've ever wondered what other people think Americans sound like, this is it." - oddly listenable
- Chris Applegate
"How could we possibly have any idea how the war is going, here or anywhere else, when the bad guys seem only to die in groups of 30?"
- Chris Applegate
Yes - excellent idea, this: "Extend the Freedom of Information Act to all bodies undertaking public services, including private contractors and Private Finance Initiative providers. Private companies that provide public services receive taxpayers' money and so should be subject to the same scrutiny as public sector bodies. In particular, private contractors should not be able to hide their operations behind 'corporate confidentiality' clauses."
- Chris Applegate
"There's a hell of a lot of good writing out there that isn't produced for someone willing to make a profit; it's about time the NUJ woke up to it. And if you don't want us, it doesn't matter, because we're coming anyway, and we can succeed with you or without you." - another fine post from Anton
- Chris Applegate
BERG's new data visualisation tool looks nice, but it itself is nothing without the text commentary on what the semantics of 'inadequate' etc are
- Chris Applegate
An excellent dissection of the Paul Clarke case by Jack of Kent. For what it's worth, I'm not jumping to conclusions on this one - the only account we've heard has been the defendant's, and even that has holes - for example, why did he keep it for several days? And he has not yet been sentenced yet, only convicted, so to say he's facing five years is speculation. Regardless of his story or indeed his background (which is dodgy to say the least), however, the more important point is the inflexibility of the justice process in this matter - even if Paul Clarke is guilty as sin, the same process can be used on any of us, regardless of the circumstances.
- Chris Applegate
A "fundamental design feature of the system" is that it can only take 130 simultaenous users; the Co-Op's Internet banking has 20,000 registered users.
- Chris Applegate
Most interesting fact about the top films of the 2000s: "Only one movie on the list was made from an original screenplay: Finding Nemo...the rest are all sequels or adapted from books, TV shows, amusement park rides, etc. Out of the top 50, only ten are not franchise films."
- Chris Applegate
Best bit: "When I was at school I learnt how to code. But we don't teach kids programming any more. We teach them how to use Microsoft Office. So by the time they get to university, teenagers haven't had the do-it-yourself coding skills that a generation of early adopters have benfited from."
- Chris Applegate