When it comes to being tactile, the British are notoriously, well, hands-off. So what leads hundreds of people to travel to a giant hall in London all for a hug?

"Yes," replies the bus driver, somewhat wearily, for the third time, "this does go to Alexandra Palace".

Amma, the "Hugging Saint", is in town. And this procession of slightly disoriented passengers are among the crowds making their way to be embraced by her at the north London venue.

BBC NEWS | Magazine | A hug from Amma

So, yes, the version after IE7 is IE8. We looked at a lot of options for the product name. Among the names we considered and ruled out:

Of course, some people care about other aspects of IE8 much more than they care about the name. As I’ve walked different people through the plan, I’ve gotten “Does it have feature X?” “When is the beta?” “When does it release” and even the more thoughtful “What are you trying to accomplish with this release?”

You will hear a lot more from us soon on this blog and in other places. In the meantime, please don’t mistake silence for inaction.

Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager

Dear Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager Internet Explorer Team.

Fuck you

Fuck you for thinking a browser with some tabs and RSS support somehow warrants praise
Fuck you for Notepad as "View Source"
Fuck you for the CSS hacks I shouldn't have to do
Fuck you for your phony adoption rate and security comparison reports
Fuck you for the hell that is IE/JavaScript debugging

Fuck you for winning the web browser wars and then stagnating innovation
Fuck you for 6 years of inaction and silence
Fuck you for telling the world how the web is going to be
Fuck you for your utter contempt of web developers and web standards

Fuck you Dean Hachamovitch and fuck the team you lead. You are hurting us far more than you are helping us

This shit has got to end

Sincerely,
Billy Hoffman

Fuck you Dean Hachamovitch

Let’s say you were born in China. You’re an only child. You have two parents and four grandparents doting on you. Sometimes they even call you a spoiled little emperor.

a look at the modern chinese political/economic system which makes it sound like the old imperial system has returned except there isn't an emperor in the old sense but that the old confusian bureaucracy has after a 1000 years finally taken full power under a nominally communist banner
it's fasinating the way the chinese culture assimilates and defeats invading forces (the mogols, the manchu and communism) then reemerges slightly different but essentially the same. This gels with my knowledge of fighting chinese style via tai chi

Of the softest things in the world,
Nothing is softer than water.
Any hard objects in the way
Will be defeated by water.
Water never changes.
Hence soft defeats hard
Weak defeats strong.
Everyone knows this
But few practise it.

from Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching (Section 78)

The Dictatorship of Talent - New York Times

British Asian intelligence and security officers have spoken to the BBC about their work in a bid to broaden recruitment among ethnic minorities.

Two MI5 agents were permitted to talk for the first time in the hope of attracting more ethnic minorities into the security service.

They told Asian Network their job was to protect the UK, not target Muslims.

Meanwhile, a Muslim officer of the security service MI6 has told Radio 1 about her work recruiting spies.

note Asian in UK English usually means of Indian or Pakistani decent ie the Asian sub continent not the Far East which in UK English is referred to as the Orient (although technically orient just means asia - it's a usage thing)

BBC NEWS | UK | Asian MI5 and MI6 officers speak

Recently there has been a sharp increase in the amount of abusive language on the New Scientist website. No, it's not because our writers have become degenerates, it's because we rolled out a new commenting facility on all articles, giving people the chance to share their thoughts and opinions across the site.
...
My pet theory about why people behave so rudely is that online commenting is treated, by most people, like a pub conversation – they don't necessarily expect to be taken seriously and the social rules are fairly relaxed. And yet, because comments appear in cold text without important cues like friendly body language, they can easily seem more offensive than if they would otherwise. As a result some people get annoyed, and the flaming and trolling begin.

guilty as charged
I know i've been immensely rude to other memestream users sometimes after coming in from the pub and having had a few drinks i've said things i would never say to a person's face or on sober reflection -- partly out of fear of being thumped whereas online i am physically safe

New Scientist Technology Blog: Don't flame me, bro'

I went through about a year back in the early part of the decade trying to work with desktop linux on a laptop. It didn't work very well. Eventually I got a mac. The trouble with Apple is that about 30% of the hardware they produce has serious design flaws. After many years of dealing with them I'm tired of the high cost of their stuff and the annual week without a computer.

So I thought I'd give Ubunto a try. I'd been told by many people that it "just works." I installed it on a pretty run of the mill Dell laptop. It did not "just work." Within a few minutes I'm googling around for long winded explanations of how I have to configure this and compile that and download this other thing in order to get this OS working on this extremely ubiquitous hardware.

This HOWTO describes how to get Wifi working on your Dell Inspiron E1505/6400 laptop using Ndiswrapper.

Im sorry, but if in 2007 you STILL have to compile something in order to get a basic thing like wireless networking working on an extremely popular hardware platform, LINUX WILL NEVER BE SUCCESSFUL ON THE DESKTOP.

Ubuntu sucks, nothing has changed.

SO this, in the end, is what love is.

Former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's husband, suffering from Alzheimer's disease, has a romance with another woman, and the former justice is thrilled — even visits with the new couple while they hold hands on the porch swing — because it is a relief to see her husband of 55 years so content.

What culture tells us about love is generally young love. Songs and movies and literature show us the rapture and the betrayal, the breathlessness and the tears. The O'Connors' story, reported by the couple's son in an interview with a television station in Arizona, where Mr. O'Connor lives in an assisted-living center, opened a window onto what might be called, for comparison's sake, old love.

Old love: It has its rewards, they say - International Herald Tribune

In its final and most powerful report, a United Nations panel of scientists meeting here describes the mounting risks of climate change in language that is both more specific and forceful than its previous assessments, according to scientists here.
...
The panel presents several scenarios for the trajectory of emissions and climate change. In 2006, 8.4 gigatons of carbon were put into the atmosphere from fossil fuels, according to a study in the proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which was co-written by Dr. Klepper. That is almost identical to the panel’s worst case prediction for that year.

Likewise, a recent International Energy Agency report looking at the unexpectedly rapid emissions growth in China and India estimated that if current policies were not changed the world would warm six degrees by 2030,

U.N. Report Describes Risks of Inaction on Climate Change - New York Times

In 2005, a year after Ellie Grossman, a doctor, met Ray Fisman, a professor, on a blind date, she was talking to her grandmother about her guy.

“Never let a man think you’re smarter,” her grandmother advised. “Men don’t like that.”

Ray and Ellie “had a good laugh, thinking times had changed,” he recalled. The pair went on to marry — after she proposed.

But now, he says, “it seems like the students at Columbia University should pay heed to Grandma Lil’s advice.”

Mr. Fisman is a 36-year-old Columbia economics professor who conducted a two-year study, published last year, on dating. With two psychologists and another economist, he ran a speed-dating experiment at a local bar near the Columbia campus.

The results surprised him and made him a little sad because he found that even in the 21st century, many men are still straitjacketed in stereotypes.

Should Hillary Pretend to Be a Flight Attendant? - New York Times

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) have successfully performed the world's first high-definition image taking of an Earth-rise* by the lunar explorer "KAGUYA" (SELENE,) which was injected into a lunar orbit at an altitude of about 100 km on October 18, 2007 (Japan Standard Time. Following times and dates are all JST.)

Kaguya (Selene) Images of Earth-Rise Over the Moon | SpaceRef - Space News as it Happens