And Slaters Go Plop

This is dangerous stuff. The combination of whatever political or economical interests that the US may have in the Middle East with the Religious Right’s beliefs that God wants a war against Iran.

Sal and I went to the NZ premier of Eagle vs Shark last night at the Civic. I recommend it.

If you want to be the next president of the ‘US and A’ you’ll want to have been an ex-military Christian. If you want to completely ruin your chances just say you don’t believe in God. If you are an atheist in America you are ranked below homosexuals, Muslims, ex-drug users, divorcees, smokers, the uneducated and the unfaithful.

Source: New York Times

There’s a disturbing new trend in the wacky world of Ajax where it is used for faux-pop-up-images. Check out this and this and click on an image to see what I mean.

The net result that it takes a lot longer to show the image and it breaks the back button (click it and you end up on two steps back rather than one).

When I say it takes longer I mean a lot longer. In FireFox 2 on Ubuntu 7.04 it takes 9 seconds to load an image where it only takes < 1 second with Javascript disabled.

Now, I’ve used Ajax on plenty of sites and am the first to admit it has its uses but how could anyone think a 900% performance hit would be in any way justified?

A fine example of self indulgent technomasturbation.

If you ever get the error “tar: z: Cannot Open: No such file or directory” when attempting to uncompress a file via the command line you need to gzip it first.

So first type gzip -d your.file.tar.gz and then type tar -xvf your.file.tar (notice the missing .gz).

In the event of a large-scale civil emergency a good policy to adopt would be to have house #1 of each street be the go-to place for information and supplies. The people from #1 houses can meet at the nearest school hall or church and easily spread information throughout the community. This should help to cut down on the mass confusion that would be caused if, say, everything electronic was to be destroyed.

The key is to be able to instantly build a decentralised network of support units that don’t rely on technology more advanced than walking and talking.

They must, must, must provide magazines and a chair or two for uncomfortable spouses.

I came across this interesting article entitled “Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature”.

1. Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)
2. Humans are naturally polygamous
3. Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy
4. Most suicide bombers are Muslim
5. Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce
6. Beautiful people have more daughters
7. What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals
8. The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of
9. It’s natural for politicians to risk everything for an affair (but only if they’re male)
10. Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist

I really want to see this. It’s showing in a couple of weeks at the New Zealand Film Festival.

The topic of ‘child faith’ has interested me since I read about Richard Dawkins’ views on it in The God Delusion. How old is old enough to be able to make an informed decision to be a Socialist or a Liberal Democrat or a Christian or a Secular Humanist or a Muslim?