FAQblog

Wow – I thought this had to be a hoax, but it’s not.

Perhaps in a subtle swipe at the one-man Apple support team that is Steve Jobs (see here, here, here or create your own email from Steve here), AT&T responded to a customer sending two emails of suggestions to their CEO with informing him that they would consider a cease and desist order if he continued to email them!

Engadget has asked the question about why they took that course of action, and no doubt at some stage, a PR spin story will come out about either (a) they want to avoid their CEO being hassled by the great unwashed so that he can focus on delivering real value to the company; or (b) this was a mistake by a junior employee who has since been retrained in how to deal with that kind of situation again.

You can hear the threat here.

An interesting move from the EU this week, regarding data retention rules.

At a time when Google is being hounded for “accidentally” capturing public wi-fi traffic when it was photographing the streets, the EU is asking for search engines to retain search history for even longer than they do at present.  Just in case any law enforcement folks want to have a trawl through it to look for anything incriminating.

Of course, it’s only to protect the children – will someone please think of the children!!

More on Slashdot.

Yesterday, I wrote about #fruitbatgate (as it seems to be known on Twitter).

On May 17th, the university published a fuller statement, which can be found (with the correspondence) here.

The whole correspondence makes interesting reading – it is particularly disturbing if a precedent is set that university colleagues in the same department are now forbidden from discussing peer-reviewed research that has been published in established and respected journals.

Last November, I wrote about scientific research that showed that fellatio in fruit bats increased the sexual performance of the male (in terms of copulation time).  Thankfully, I don’t work for University College Cork, which has disciplined lecturer Dylan Evans with a two-year period of intensive monitoring and counselling after discussing the paper with one of his colleagues.

A week after showing the paper to a female colleague, he suddenly found himself accused of sexual harassment.  Despite the fact that he was cleared of the charge, he has had a censure imposed by the university’s president Michael Murphy.

The whole curious saga is discussed in New Scientist.

I can’t even remember how I found this one – Spanish artist faces hefty fine for cooking Christ.

TV station interviews artist five years ago, and shows stills from video that he made in 1978 – and now they face fines of 192000 EUR (for him) and 144000 EUR (TV station) for doing so.

It’s just the whole bizarre notion of “cooking Christ” that gets me – here’s the video of it:

Enjoy!

Genius, but NSFW!

Who says that scientists research stupid things, eh?

Linky.

My sister just sent me this, which made me chuckle (particularly the spelling ) …

…this blog is a target for spam comments.

No ideas how / why they get targetted, but this one does, and yet my work blog doesn’t. Not that I’m complaining, you understand, I just wonder about these things some times.

With the rush to re-release every possible version of Hallelujah last Christmas, it’s just possible that you may have missed the best of two versions. Coincidentally, they are both by the same people, the wonderful Amateur Transplants: