I wish the mods would realise this is supposed to be a free country and not old russia.

Well, it finally happened: They do evil. Boy do the new layout suck, for me its 50% less screen space. Their lame (as in bad) page design causes it to close be unreadable and some functionality is way down.

I rue the day when Google Groups 1 is gone - pity i didn't buy stocks, i could have sold them again!

So... can you buy advertising time IN CNN programs?

MWR - stands for Morale, Welfare and Recreation. Its the people in the American Navy who try to live up to their name by entertaining the troops. They've just struck a deal with enterprising Firefly fans who've donated 250 DVD sets of the series. So through the Navy's "Afloat" library program, US sailors around the world will be able to enjoy Firefly during their downtime (meanwhile Joss Whedon is working on the motion picture).

Quality Television, much loved by US viewers.

VirtualDub is a great and free video capture and editing open source utility. However the author announces that he won't support DivX 5.1 in any way, shape or form in VirtualDub. It's not that he is boycotting it, its just that after he installed the codecs and tried to play something he was greeted with the message: "Debugger detected - please close down and restart" - A userspace driver (even the free version) with a protection wrapper. He can't debug Virtualdub AT ALL when the codec is installed because it triggers on load, in fact you can't debug any programs if you hover over an avi in the open dialog, explorer load the codecs to dislay information and the codecs terminates your application.

He does not this is a good choice on the part of Divx Networks, I agree!

Damn, is a lot of the web written by incompetents. And i'm not talking about the content, but the composition of HTML. Even if you are just a bit myopic it can be though reading all the small letters that usually ensues from misuse of Stylesheets (in MSIE you can't change the font size if someone twit has specified an absolute font size) - but now the progressive Brits have made it a crime if you don't design your pages properly - God save the Queen!

Mod me up before I get labeled a troll ;-)

Snopes is a site, perhaps trusted to much by too many, which claims to debunk urban legends, and apparently if they are wrong they just try to change history:

The Agonist was apparently first to mention it: After 11th of September, Michael Moore was claiming on TV that Saudi royals and members of Bin Ladens family were secretly flown out of the country by Bush's special order during the ban on air travel. Snopes, debunker of all evil slammed Moore and expressed harsh words wich boiled down to "He's full of shit". Well, now he's been proven right! And Snopes just edits the page and goes in to denial about the whole thing. And what's also interesting is that the Google cache of the page has suddenly disappeared! Of course some people claim Google are closed friends with the spy community, though i suppose there are always conspiracy theories. And so people start to analyse,talk and rumminate about Snopes, Google, Moore and Bush and his Saudi friends.

I like Tom Tomorrows comment: See, when Michael says it, he's a crazy truth-distorting axe-grinder. But when much of what he said turns out to be true, suddenly it's "subjective political issues outside of the scope of this page."

Edit:Sean-Paul (The Agonist) points out that it was actually Tom Tomorrow who was the first to point this out.

If an Internet explorer gets tired of all the plugins which would like to install themselves, he can go to security and specify that ActiveX plugins should not be installed.

Guess what happens then? When you come across a page where there is such a plugin, Internet Explorer opens a message box which says:

"Your current security settings prohibit running activex controls on this page.
As a result, the page many not display correctly."

And then an OK button.

So if you don't want Flash installed, you'll get this damn message box on every damn page.

Now it could either be that Microsoft are a bunch of incompetent wankers (which seems likely) or they are just a bunch of amoral twats who wants to force this shit on us (which also seems likely).

So i ask myself, instead of hackers wasting time cracking the latest release of "Little Bo peep and her sheep on vacation", why don't someone make a truly usefull hack and get rid of this annoying behaviour?

(Caveats to spammers: I know you can use proxies, other browsere etc - don't bother)

Ruefull goodbyes

Firefly Support reports that a Firefly movie is now certain. Adam Baldwin, who played Jayne, has confrimed this on the Official Fox board (which is still around). Being a movie this will take longer, it is expected to be ready in 18 months.

A DVD release of the series is set for release later this year.

Or how to predict the succes of your Marriage in several easy equations. These researches believe they have a mathematical model of marriage.
Can Psychological applications of dynamic nonlinear models work? Apparently, because by now they are able to predict who will get a divorce with 90% certainty. From the Chronicle of Higher Eduction

Joss Whedon's 'anti-Trek drama' Firefly, by many called the best new sci-fi series, met with an untimely end last year despite making more money than Whedons two other shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. A hit with the critics and many internet users, the program was Foxed by being preempted, not promoted with episodes shown in a peculiar order (with the Pilot show as the last episode!) Several episodes weren't shown at all, but now the British ScifFi channel has bought the entire series and starts showing it beginning May.
The moderator of the official Sci-fi UK board confirmed this today. Fans are already hoping that the previously unaired episodes will leak across the pond.

A review of thousands of declassified government documents and interviews with former policymakers shows that U.S. intelligence and logistical support played a crucial role in shoring up Iraqi defenses against the "human wave" attacks by suicidal Iranian troops. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague.

Interesting - of course it's a bit of a downside that you can't even start using the stuff before they come running and take it back.