Laws to suppress knife crime could increase hostility among the young, the Children's Commissioner says.

06:40 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Read carefully: this isn't about XP vs OSX, it's about IE7 vs. Safari. Then take a look at the client list of the "independent" user experience guru and you'll understand what is meant by the marketing term "astroturf".

A benchmark test for rich internet application (RIA) frameworks claims Apple's OS X lags Microsoft's Windows XP on Intel when rendering HTML, being just over half as fast.

18:55 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

Let me see if I understand this. A guy gets a severe back injury, and his doctor won't give him anything for the pain, probably due to fear of the DEA. He then goes and orders the painkillers himself from an online pharmacy. He accidentally overdoses. And dies. And it's the online pharmacy's fault.

Right.

What a great excuse to expand the monopoly of brick and mortar pharmacy's, local doctors and drug companies. All the while fighting the good fight in the "War on Drugs".

It makes me sick.

Nancy Fitzpatrick tried to kill herself. A man died in a pool of vomit. Both had bottles of prescription drugs shipped to them without seeing a doctor. Fitzpatrick blames online pharmacies for being the new drug pushers. "They need to be stopped," she told CNN.

06:24 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Makes you wonder about other rating programs, doesn't it?

The Financial Times has the story that billions in incorrect AAA ratings given out by Moody's were the result of a coding error in its computer models. "Internal Moody's documents seen by the FT show that some senior staff within the credit agency knew early in 2007 that products rated the previous year had received top-notch triple A ratings and that, after a computer coding error was corrected, their ratings should have been up to four notches lower."

06:21 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

Maybe somebody in the government is growing a brain, after all. I'm just surprised that Indiana isn't in the running for a final spot - it'd be just the sort of stupidity I'd expect from "My Man Mitch" in an election year.

AP - The Bush administration relied on a flawed study to conclude that research on a highly infectious animal disease could safely be moved from an isolated island laboratory to sites on the mainland near livestock, congressional investigators concluded in findings obtained by The Associated Press.

06:10 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

This is so patently ridiculous that it has to go into humor - although I daresay the authors wouldn't appreciate it's placement.

Two scientists write that obese people are disproportionately responsible for high food prices and greenhouse gas emissions because they consume 18% more food energy due to their greater body mass -- and require increased quantities of fuel to transport themselves and the food they eat. 'Promotion of a normal distribution of BMI would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food,' write the authors, Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts of the evocatively named London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

20:01 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

Our chickens are indeed coming home to roost ...

Food inflation is the highest in almost two decades, driven by record prices for oil, gas and mounting global demand for staples such as wheat and corn, and for proteins such as chicken. And that's reaching into Americans' backyards.

19:57 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Ever see Training Day? Still think it was fiction?

A jury on Tuesday convicted an Atlanta police officer of lying to cover up the shooting death of an elderly woman during a botched drug raid.

06:09 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link