Mr Bush said the interrogation of the terror suspects would have to end if the new laws were not passed. “This programme won’t go forward if there’s vague standards applied like those in the Geneva Conventions,” he said.
From The Guardian
Vague like this?
(Article 17): “No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.”
From the Geneva Convention
If you can’t prove someone is guilty then you HAVE to et them go. Otherwise we’re all guilty.
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Bush, President Bush, Geneva Convention
Large groups of Muslim protesters that is not Popes. Popes are found in that chimenea in the Vatican everybody knows that. I think there’s a crack team of Muslim protesters ready to go at any moment. Remember that scene from life of Brian? The crack suicide squad. I think there must be a crack protesters squad.
[ENT DAY]
[Phone rings]
Mohammed picks it up
[Mohammed] ‘Mohammed have you seen what the pope might have said?’
[Mohammed] ‘Was it against Allah?’
[Mohammed]‘No I’m not sure exactly what he said I’ve not read it or checked for myself but I know what must be done’
[Mohammed] ‘We must protest in the streets’
[Mohammed] ‘Yes that’s right, a large protest with banners condemning the Infidel’
[Mohammed] ‘I’ll sort the boys, the BBC and the AP photographer you bring the posters’
[Mohammed] ‘Shall I bring the Effigy and US flag?’
[Mohammed] ‘Nah, I’ll pick one up at the Infidel and Spencers before we start’
[Mohammed] ‘Super see you at three, usual place’
I’m a technology fanatic. I like to, actually love to, play with new bits of electronic equipment. The shear excitement of picking up a small PDA like piece of technology that tells you how to get from the end of your street to your granddad’s house is something I can’t explain. I can’t explain it because if I think about it the whole idea becomes preposterous. I could navigate blindfold from anywhere in the north of England to that destination. I’d manage if you dropped me in Scotland or the south, though I might not take the most direct route.
Still, playing nearly three hundred pounds for the privilege of having an American voice tell me to take the third exit at the turning circle is, for me, nothing short of mesmerising. I can read maps in fact I love maps. In idle hours I could spend ages just looking at the various ways to get from here to there. However having an electronic device to tell me how to do it, and berating it as a useless piece of shit when it doesn’t choose the route I would have, is nothing short of genius.
The Navman I have is collecting a signal from three of the twenty-odd satellites in orbit around the globe and from that telling me exactly where I am. From time to time it’s a few meters out and asks you to return to the nearest road but generally it’s spot on. Not bad considering the size of the aerial, about 1in square, and the size of the earth, considerably more than 1in square.
Mobile phones are another technological gem. I have to admit that I don’t like my current phone. A Motorola Razr V3. Its battery life fluctuates between ten minutes and ten days and the menu system is a maze of myth and unreality that only the people who designed it truly understand. But look at it another way, this thing can ring in thousand annoying tones or vibrate gently on your leg. It can take pictures and send them electronically to anywhere you choose. It can communicate with laptops to become a pseudo modem. It can surf the web. If you are in range of a telecommunications network it can carry your voice into space and back down again. Can you imagine that we take this for granted now? Your voice is turned into bits and bounced off around the globe barely 100 years since Marconi or Tesla or somebody invented radio. Not the same thing I grant you but you see the connection.
The title of this post is the text message I received while I sat in a bar in Antequera. It had travelled the distance between Leeds and this provincial Spanish town in a matter of seconds. With the instruction followed I keyed the green call button. The phone’s processor whirred into action and contacted the nearest friendly phone mast and sent a signal on the most efficient route to it’s destination. That signal arrived in Leeds some seconds later and the processor in another mobile phone stirred. The technological processes involved are amazing but taken for granted now, however, I still can’t get over it when I think about it. All that’s really happened is that a string of 0s an1s have been generated and counted and exchanged electronically but there I was talking to my uncle who had the burdensome task of telling me that my granddad’s life had ended. Quietly and peacefully, in his sleep, he slipped away before dawn on Saturday. Right now I never want the phone to ring again.
Well Morrisons have branched out.
* Only one enrtry per household
I suppose I should be more interested in the whole Wi-Fi hack but with people like John Gruber out there I can just read his blog and find out all I need to know. As is customary though, Crazy Apple Rumors has the most appropriate post on the whole subject.
A: Anyway, to sum up, it’s day 11 and we don’t know anything more than we knew on day 1, but we’re still having fun with it.
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Apple, Black Hat, Wi-Fi, John Gruber, Crazy Apple Rumors
Now that everthing to do with WWDC has passed I thought I’d upload the pictures I took while not “on duty” and it turns out that this is the only one I still have. For those of you with inquisitive minds this is Mark Hattersley editor of Mac World UK I can’t really remember why we thought this was worthy of a picture but then it was a rather surreal meal. Jon Honeyball PCPro contributing editor, amongst many other things, kept falling asleep at the table. Meanwhile I had one of my laughing fits about something the Spanish editor of Mac World said. I can’t for the life of me remember what it was. It certainly wasn’t anything to do with punctuation on the radio. But my God it was funny. I had to excuse myself from the table and go to the gents to control my fit of giggles. Pathetic I know but my body did think it was 3pm in the morning sometime between noon and 5am on Tuesday. That’s jet lag for ya.
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Apple, MacUser, WWDC, Mac World, Broccoli
Writing an eight page feature is not always fun. Travelling to London, New York then San Francisco and back in just four days to research it certainly isn’t. For my troubles I ended up with a blister on my ass cheek about four inches in diameter from sitting in the ‘economy long-haul position’ for a total of thirty hours. I also completely lost any idea of what day or time it was for about three days after I returned. Still, if somebody asked me to do it all over again I would without hesitation. I’d wear thicker, possibly padded, underpants on all the flights but I’d definitely be there.
You see, for me, there’s nothing quite like the buzz of wandering into Borders or Smiths and seeing something you did on the cover of a magazine. It’s so easy to become blasé about what you do. However, I still think it’s a great privilege to be able to write for other people. They might not agree with you or think you can’t write for toffee but hell it’s causing some emotional response at some level and how many jobs elicit that kind of feedback? Probably loads now I come to think of it but still it’s pretty cool.
Go an buy a copy from your local newsagent (at a very respectable £3.95) Or Subscribe and get a rather spiffing free gift, if you’re in the US download it from Zinio.
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Apple, MacUser, WWDC
