In The News This Week........

So, Ex-Liberal Democrat MP Chris Huhne and his Ex-Wife Vicky Pryce have been released from prison after serving only 62 days of an 8 month prison sentence. There is something wrong with this picture.

 Surely if someone breaks the law, and perverting the course of justice is not a minor offence, and is convicted and sentenced according to the law of the land, they should serve out that sentence in the place that the magistrate/ judge decrees.

What, I wonder, is the point of sentencing a convicted criminal to a custodial sentence as laid down by law, and then telling them they will only serve half of it, and if they behave, only half of that half? And not only are they laughing all the way there, they are sent to a 'prison' which has no bars, no locks, and a set of facilities that a good number of hard-working upright citizens can only dream of, much less afford.

Now supporters of this somewhat  strange way of behaving are saying that it makes sense to give early release because it costs around a thousand pounds to keep a convicted felon in prison each week. Well it would with all the perks the apparently get. Mr Huhne's supporters are saying that he is still not free, because he has to be electronically tagged for the remaining two months of the half of his sentence. Well big deal, I'm sure he will not be inconvenienced in the slightest by that in his million pound Camberwell home, just because he has to stay there from 6pm till 6am.

Only one person I've seen so far has made any sense, and that's Nigel Farage, Leader of the UK Independence Party, and his view was that the sentence should be served out, and that more prisons need to be built to house those convicted of crime. I totally agree.

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It turns out that Stuart Hazell, who has admitted sexually abusing and killing 12 year-old Tia Sharpe, has 30 previous convictions, and has served three prison sentences for drug dealing, assault and possession of a machete. Now how in God's name was he even on the streets, let alone able to get close to a 12 year-old girl?
If his sentences had been served out,  would young Tia still be alive?

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A feelgood story, Britain's young Laura Robson beat Venus Williams in straight sets in Rome. Williams fans will say it was only because she had an long standing injury, pshaa I say, If she has a long standing injury which stops her playing her best, why is she entering events.
At 19, Laura has a great future. Go Girl, Go.

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Commander Chris Hadfield, who up until today has had a five month tour of duty as commander of the International Space Station, has recorded a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" in space. Check it out, its cool. He's a bit of a character, apparently, I'm sure he must have kept the rest of the crew entertained during his tour.
Mr Bowie himself has said that it's "The most poignant version" of the song, Good one Chris, Safe journey home.

What You Learn About Computers From Movies and TV

This was posted by someone on Daniweb, and I think its so funny I'm going to share.....

What You Learn About Computers In Movies
There are some interesting things you can learn about the behavior of computer in movies (and in television). Here's a list of some of the more curious observations about movie computers:

Word processors never display a cursor, but will always say: ENTER PASSWORD NOW.
You never have to use the spacebar when typing long sentences.
All monitors display 2-inch high letters.
High-tech computers, such as those used by NASA, the CIA, or some such governmental institution, have easy-to-understand graphical interfaces.
Those that don't will have incredibly powerful text-based command shells that can correctly understand and execute commands typed in plain English.
Corollary: You can gain access to any information you want by simply typing ACCESS ALL OF THE SECRET FILES on any keyboard.
Likewise, you can infect a computer with a destructive virus by simply typing UPLOAD VIRUS. Viruses cause temperatures in computers, just like they do in humans. After a while, smoke billows out of disk drives and monitors.
All computers are connected. You can access the information on the villain's desktop computer, even if it's turned off.
Powerful computers beep whenever you press a key or whenever the screen changes. Some computers also slow down the output on the screen so that it doesn't go faster than you can read. The really advanced ones also emulate the sound of a dot-matrix printer as the characters come across the screen.
All computer panels have thousands of volts and flash pots just underneath the surface. Malfunctions are indicated by a bright flash, a puff of smoke, a shower of sparks, and an explosion that forces you backward.
People typing away on a computer will turn it off without saving the data.
A hacker can get into the most sensitive computer in the world before intermission and guess the secret password in two tries.
Any PERMISSION DENIED has an override function.
Complex calculations and loading of huge amounts of data will be accomplished in under three seconds. In the movies, modems transmit data at two gigabytes per second.
When the power plant/missile site/whatever overheats, all the control panels will explode, as will the entire building.
If you display a file on the screen and someone deletes the file, it also disappears from the screen. There are no ways to copy a backup file -- and there are no undelete utilities.
If a disk has encrypted files, you are automatically asked for a password when you try to access it.
No matter what kind of computer disk it is, it'll be readable by any system you put it into. All application software is usable by all computer platforms.
The more high-tech the equipment, the more buttons it has. However, everyone must have been highly trained, because the buttons aren't labelled.
Most computers, no matter how small, have reality-defying three-dimensional, real-time, photo-realistic animated graphics capability.
Laptops, for some strange reason, always seem to have amazing real-time video phone capabilities and the performance of a CRAY-MP.
Whenever a character looks at a VDU, the image is so bright that it projects itself onto his/her face.
Computers never crash during key, high-intensity activities. Humans operating computers never make mistakes under stress.
Programs are fiendishly perfect and never have bugs that slow down users.
Most laptop computers are powerful enough to override the communication systems of any invading alien civilization.

Isn't Nature Great (2)

Now I don't know where you'll be when (if) reading this, but as it's the 'World Wide Web' it could be anywhere I suppose, (with a few notable exceptions, North Korea, China etc) and I wonder if you've noticed, the same as me, how the world weather seems to be a bit out of sync with the seasons in the last 20-25 years?

It used to be, when I was a kid, that winter was cold, spring was an improvement over winter, gradually warming and summer was hot, fading slowly into autumn (or fall) and then back to winter. This was the UK of my youth, and probably roughly equated, with regional differences, with your country.

Although my country has now changed, I've been living in Cyprus these past nine years, the weather patterns seem to have changed dramatically. Even here in the middle east as we are it's noticeable how the winter starts later, and therefore ends later, and there seems no gentle few weeks long transition as there was. It's winter one day with temperatures of max 17c, and two days later, we're in 30c sunshine, which peaks in August in the mid-to-high 40's.

Now I'm sure there must be some long detailed scientific explanation for that, but I'm sure 'Global Warming' ain't it! If global warming was all it's cracked up to be, wouldn't we have less rain and cold than we had before. Just a few weeks ago, towards the end of April my mother-in-law was speaking to my wife on the phone, and complaining that it was snowing!    In south east England!    in April!    unheard of... until now. Easter weekends of my childhood were picnic days in the countryside, balmy warmish days, you could even swim in the sea at Easter, the water was warm enough.

Now we are lucky here in Cyprus, one of the reasons we moved here was the weather  and, having got over the initial shock of the warm coming so quickly this year, we know with some certainty that it will last till around the end of November, and we have even spent Christmas day on our balcony in years past. That was until I checked the weather forecast , and they (local met office) reckon we could see an 8 degree drop in temperatures and thunderstorms over the next ten days. Most unusual!

I get to see the BBC world service at work, and see that weather patterns all over are changing and even they say, on numerous occasions, that this weather pattern is 'unusual for the time of year' or that pattern is later/ earlier than usual. Even the Gulf Stream is misbehaving, and is flowing too far north as it reaches Europe, apparently.

What can we do about it? Well nothing of course, its Nature at its best, keeping us on our toes.
Teaching us a lesson, some would say, for all the abuse we've given since... well the industrial revolution I suppose, since the countries in Europe (notably the UK, Spain and France) decided to expand their territories into the 'new world' which was, incidentally, doing very well without us, thank you very much, since we started to cut down the worlds trees, since we began pumping billions of litres of various gasses into the atmosphere because of new industrial processes?

Who knows? 

Isn't Nature great!

Now i'm not a 'nature lover' by any means, but I do respect it, and I am fascinated at times by the things I see.
Consider the humble ant, if you will, and even if you really don't like insects, you have to admire their persistence, strength and intelligence.

I sat on the balcony of my apartment last Sunday with a cup of tea and watched as ants came from the planter in the front, down a half metre high wall, found some crumbs and returned, along the same route, but this time up the wall, carrying what amounts to, in human terms, two people. Now that's some feat, even without the wall!

Put this into human terms. You leave home at 7am. You jog 50km across a barren landscape in search of potatoes, using only your sense of smell. You find (more luck than judgement in our case) a pile of sacks of potatoes, and you lift two of them (56k each) on to your back, and you  jog the 50km back home, remembering the direction and location, somehow, and you manage all this in about 50mins. Sound like you? If it does, enter The Worlds Strongest Man competition, you're a sure winner.

I've also seen, on one of my summer Sundays in the past, a group of ants gather round a piece of vegetation which would, scaled up, be around six metres across and half a metre thick, holding it like firemen around a jump net. In this fashion they carry it, twisting and turning, up the wall. Now the even more amazing thing is the way they all work together on this. When one gets weary (do ants get weary?) it peels away from the piece and another from the following group takes its place, and so on until the wall is scaled.

It might not seem much, as they are only lowly ants, but consider the intelligence and teamwork involved and maybe they are not so lowly after all!

Moving on, there are many creatures, great and small, that I have encountered, since moving to Cyprus, and if you really think about it, each one has its purpose in nature, its 'rasion d'etre.'

Cockroaches, (shudder!) seem to exist only to upset us, but they (apparently) do serve a purpose. In years gone, not so much now, houses and the like relied on cesspits to dispose of  'waste'. Apparently, so I'm told, cockroaches 'eat' this waste, and make cesspits more efficient. Now personally, I'd prefer a good modern system, with water treatment works etc, but we can't always have what we want, so we rely on nature, or we should.

On many occasions I've ventured onto my balcony in the early morning to find a 30cm lizard basking in the sun, I don't know the species, and I know I should find out, ( I think they're Gekos) but it's nice to see, and they eat flies, and other insects, so to encourage them could be good.

Many may be old enough to remember the song by Burl Ives "There was an old lady who swallowed a fly, I don't know why, she swallowed a fly" If you do know it, think about the words, it's a mother nature song. Each creature is there for a purpose, each creature forms a link in the food chain, to eradicate one would mean an abundance and 'plague' of the next, so next time you're having your holiday or weekend BBQ, and are complaining about the flies, remember, to break one link, breaks the chain. If we kill all the flies, the next up, the fly eating creatures starve, and the next down proliferate, so we may end up with a master race of ????