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Showing posts from August 1, 2004

Halliburton may not have been entirely honest with their accounting

According to Reuters, Halliburton and several top executives intentionally engaged in "serial accounting fraud" from 1998 to 2001, including when it was led by Vice President Dick Cheney. Yet another reason to remove these two from power.

The injuries continue

The deck is progressing nicely, and as well as the assorted collection of split nails, embedded splinters, scuffs and scrapes, I sliced my left knee open on a joist hangar last night. I'll be able to rightly claim a lot of blood, sweat and tears went into this project when it's finished :-)

You have GOT to be joking....

At a reception in Germany, Bill Gates said he was interested in buying Nintendo. Not "a" Nintendo. Nintendo the company. Microsoft have gone into damage control, and Nintendo are denying the rumour. Microsoft didn't deny any of the quotes or conversations from the German magazine's story though. They claim it was all in jest, but knowing how Microsoft operate, you've got to wonder. Are they planning to buy out Nintendo as a way of shutting down half the competition the loss-making abomination that is X-box? I take issue with one of the phrases in the article : Microsoft's superior hardware . So wait - selling off-the-shelf computer commodity parts for massive losses is superior hardware? That's so typical of Microsoft. If you can't beat'em, buy'em and close 'em down. Can we say "alienate"?

No more smiling on your passport photo. And comb your hair, you wanker.

With immediate effect, no-one can be shown smiling in their passport photograph. All passports issued from today must show the bearer "looking straight at the camera, with a neutral expression, with their mouth closed". The Home Office said the move was essential to fight fraud and keep terrorists out of the country. Miserable f*cking killjoys. There's nothing else to say, although how it can be "essential" to look miserable on your passport photo I don't know. They claim it's so that the biometric digital information about your face, which will be stored on a chip in your passport from next year, will match up with face-scanners at the airports. Obviously they're reckoning on everyone looking miserable coming through the airports as well then. Here's a thought. Smile for your original photos, and then smile at the face scanner when you go through an airport. Really - it isn't that difficult.

3-to-1

That's today's ratio of bullshit-to-partial truth coming from the Bush camp. To quote: "Knowing what I know today we still would have gone on into Iraq. He had the capability of making weapons of mass destruction (lie) . He had terrorists ties (lie) ... the decision I made is the right decision (lie) . The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power (true) ." Then he went on to spurt: "It is a ridiculous notion to assert because the more the United States in on the offense more people want to hurt us." Pardon? It's not ridiculous at all. The US invaded a sovereign nation on a lie, a nation that has never attacked America. That's pretty offensive, and it doesn't surprise me that in this new breeding ground for anti-American sentiment, people want more than ever to attack the US.

Lady Oppression

In a graphic example of the American's (and in particular, the New Yorker's) inability to grasp irony today, the statue of Liberty re-opened. You have to go through a security check to get on the ferry. Then you have to go through a body scanner and a bomb-sniffer, and have all your bags checked to get in to the pedestal. There are armed guards on the ferry and at every corner on Liberty Island. Oh, and the statue itself isn't actually open - only the pedestal. Yes sireee. Truly "free". If there's one bullet-point item that shows that the terrorism tactics have worked, it's that the most icon symbol of freedom and liberty is closed to the public. And the part that is open is equivalent to an Orwellian state.

Lori Hacking is dead.

From my previous post on the matter, it seems option (1) was a non-starter. So it's (2) or (3) - she's dead, Mark Hacking has been arrested for her murder, so I suspect she was going to tell on him, they got into an argument, and he murdered her. The parading around naked at the motel was probably to ensure that he would be committed to a mental institution before they found she was murdered, so he can use an insanity plea to lower the sentence from murder to manslaughter. The sick thing is that if they find her body and she proves to have been pregnant, he'll get a double charge. The sick bastard is going to rot in jail.

Terror alert raised to Tang.

El Busho's numbers aren't doing so well, so to scare up some voters, they've raised the terror alert to Tang today. The threats are very specific to key, named buildings in NYC and on the east coast. This means one of three things: (1) the dept. of Homeland security has overcome the massive hurdle of bureacracy and got it right (2) the dept. of Homeland security are being fed very accurate and totally misleading information to put them off the scent of where the attack might really be (3) the dept. of Homeland security are about to manufacture a truckbomb outside a public building and blame it on Al Qaeda (1) is possible. (2) is more likely. (3) is total conspiracy theory, but if the Bush campaign are desperate, I wouldn't put it past them. I guess the key will be if there is an attack and the building is empty at the time, (3) will look more and more suspicious.

Dead Clie

Yoink! I went to use my Clie this morning and it was totally dead. I mean completely toast. The battery had drained and wiped all the data. A re-sync with the desktop restored almost everything. Fortunately, I have something called Backup Buddy on the Clie too, and that caught the very latest changes and stored them on the memory stick. Phew. What I don't understand is the battery was full on friday, and now it's dead. I hope the Li-Ion battery didn't just expire :-(