Five Minutes

(also known as Adam has just done something really, really dumb)

So our good friends in Tasmania have an election looming. Good for them! Democracy’s awesome.

What’s not so good for them is that free speech is also awesome, and that’s no longer available to them in the political arena courtesy of section 191 of their Electoral Act, which means that all political statements during the election campaign must be authorised. This requires a full name and address, and effectively kills anonymous discourse dead. Digital Tasmania are talking a bit more about this, if you’re interested, and there’s plenty happening to Twitter, too.

As a result, I have decided to authorise anything Tasmanians want to say on-line. I mean, I don’t really care about Tasmanian politics, so I don’t mind authorising everyone and everything.

So, if you want to say something political in Tasmania in the next few weeks but don’t want to post your full address on-line, use my magical automatic authorisation Web site and I’ll authorise whatever you have to say. Promise.

(Side note: whatever you post is trivially publicly accessible. Bear that in mind.)

You what I like when I’m waiting for Windows updates to download? Bonkers conspiracy theories! Nice to see that swine flu is just the latest in the long line of things that can be attributed to the New World Order, Freemasons, the usual. The Amero Freeway bit’s a nice touch.

In related news, my friend Jas has decided that he’s still going to Mexico in three weeks, as the airline tickets were non-refundable anyway. I’m already writing the Darwin Award nomination just in case.

Seen on the GNU home page…

I doubt anyone in recorded history has had to put an NSFW warning on a link to a backtrace and .xsession-errors dump in a bug report, but I’m going to have to here.

The lesson is: don’t paste logs containing references to media files you might not want to admit to having.

With thanks to Davey for the tip. One thing still disturbs me about this: how the hell is A Shark’s Tale sandwiched between Little Miss Innocent and, well, a video it’s probably better I don’t copy the title for? The thought process boggles my mind…

Not sure I want to book those, although it would make travel far more interesting.

From Something Awful’s Worst Pick Up Lines topic:

“I’m sine-squared, you’re cosine-squared, let’s get together and be 1″

So. Using. That. Why yes, I am single. Why do you ask?

Apparently PHP developers swear more than other language users. I’m not particularly surprised by that, but I am surprised that C++ was as low as fourth. Seriously, how many times can you overload each keyword and operator anyway?

Now excuse me while I go cut a blue streak on some PHP.

Why Go?

Beautiful.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/firstgoatse/

It’s nice that we still have our rites of initiation in modern society. I just wish I’d thought of that when I had to write a script about rites of passage a few months back.

With thanks to my man Deg, who pointed this out: Worldometers.

Some of those are a bit depressing, really, like the hunger counter. I’m still not sure if I’d be happier with less perspective.