40,000 and counting

Blimey – nearly didn’t spot that one. It turns out that yesterday, d4d had it’s 40,000th page impression. Not bad for six months in existence. Well, it made me smile, anyway.

My head hurts

Via Slashdot, I was just reading about a lens that improves the resolution of an image. The concept of this makes my head hurt. I love this sort of thing. the new discoveries, theories and inventions – but sometimes they’re just so amazingly counter-intuitive that my brain might as well sit down and say “Huh?”

I’m a bad person

Well, following on from yesterday’s post about the domain name idea, all I can say is I’m a bad, bad person. And once it’s confirmed, and the webspace is online, I’ll have to find something to put there. Ideas abound – but bringing them through to reality may be a different matter.

Meanwhile, in a mountain range

And while all attention is on Iraq and America, Pakistan and India go back to “testing” nuclear-capable missiles.

But it’s OK, these nukes aren’t Weapons of Mass Destruction, because everyone’s signed the nuclear treaties, and bought all their stocks from authorised suppliers. Unlike Iraq, who’ve bought from pretty much anyone, including most of the authorised suppliers…

War is business

I do love seeing the excuses that companies churn out when they’re bringing forwards job cuts and so on. Today (in what I suspect will be the first of many) BA announced they were cutting their number of flights, oh, and accelerating their redundancy programme for 3000 people.

Their excuse? “People are travelling less because of the war” So, absolutely fuck all to do with the extortionate prices BA charge then.

Two years ago, everyone and their dog used September 11th as an excuse for fiscal hardships. BA was one of the first on the bandwagon then too – but think about it, did anyone you knew actually decide not to fly because of September 11? Hell, do you know anyone who knows anyone who stopped flying because of it? I certainly don’t, and neither do any of the people I’ve asked about it.

Privacy vs. Big Brother

In a related thing to the one below, I also read that Privacy International released its winner’s list for the UK’s Big Brother 2003 Awards. My personal favourite is the “Dog Poo on a Stick” award, given to the person they most wanted to not even give a gold-plated award to. Step forward, David Blunkett.

Actually, the entire thing makes for an interesting read – I think personal privacy is going to be one of the absolutely huge political issues over the next five to ten years.

Don’t Tell Them Your Name, Pike

Considering how much the US has been bollocksing on about Iraq breaching the Geneva Convention and yadda yadda yadda, I found it particularly interesting to see that today the US Department of “Justice” has ruled the FBI don’t need to make stringent checks on the truth/accuracy of the data they hold on people.

So, along with prisoners kept in Guantanamo Bay not being allowed US justice rights (the last I heard on this one is that “it doesn’t matter about the Geneva convention, these people are terrorists, not POWs” – don’t you just love semantics?) it looks like the US is trying to turn itself into a dictatorship of its own.