The Blarg of Fosnez

Our routine monitoring of sub-space transmissions alerted Sophos that the loss of the Klingon battlecruiser Klothos was not due to Romulan incursion into the Khitomer system, but a result of trying to remove VBS/PeachyPDF-A from the battle computer using M'swoN'kar after Commander Kor opened an attachment from the system S'cam-419. Immediately our Product Marketing away team embarked on a mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and flog them Network Access Control solutions. Sadly they chose Qo'noS as their first destination and when their severed heads were beamed back to Sophos, the engineering team created this software, not in a spontaneous display of gratitude to the Klingon race (as the Register would have you believe) but to honour their memory. Linkage

A pleasant surprise when I woke up today. An update seems to have been pushed to the HTC Dream in Australia overnight that enabled Latitude on Google Maps . What is latitude? In short it is a location sharing program that sits on top of Google Maps on your phone. It uses GPS and/or Cell Tower Triangulation to detect your location and share it with the friends of your choosing. It is of course, also shared with Google. If you are bumming around in a shopping centre and want to know if any of your friends are as well, it is as easy as firing up the app. So why are google doing this? Well the most obvious reason is location based advertisement, which, like advertisement in games , will be much more important when Augmented Reality becomes commonplace. The question now is... where is my cupcake ?

Startrek-esk holodecks may not be too far away . Watch as the guy suspend dis-belief at about 0:47 and automatically try to balance on the wall. Then pisses himself laughing for being stilly on camera.

There are kids alive today that do not remember a time before the Simpsons was on TV. It will be a rude awakening then, when they turn on Channel 10 and find a " a chatty [news] presentation heavy on sport and with regular headline updates " replacing it. In unrealated news, searches on The Pirate Bay and Mininova for "The Simpsons" rose 286% this week*. *Like all good statistics, this figure may have been made up on the spot.

TechWIRED reports that Unisys will be supplying Queensland Transport with a new type of driver's licence, to replace the current laminated one. The new licences will feature a smartcard that will save facial recognition information onto the chip, which can be used to compare the photo on the card, to the data on the chip, to the data on Queensland transport's servers... I think. Hopefully it will be a contact-required smartcard, and not some RFID fraud-waiting-to-happen card.

In a move that will surprise no-one, the state government is reaching for more power over local governments. In the proposed Local Government Bill 2009 , it would appear that the local government minister (currently our girl Boyle) would have the power to fire councillors . I would be very interested to see how the state government reacted if the federal government had the same power. Sod it, we don't even need state governments in my humble opinion, just federal and local. I can't wait to see Circus-Mouse's response.

Well, I have to hand it to the government, just when you think they have finally moved on from a ridiculous piece of policy, they dredge it back up again, apply some spit and polish and chant " Hail! It is new and shiny! ". The reason for my "Stupidity War" title is simple. Instead of having people drinking measured pre-mixed drinks, with the number of "standard drinks" clearly printed on their sides, all an increased tax does is teach these drinkers to start buying bottles of spirits and mixers. Now really, take a step back and have a think. Which is worse, someone having a 6 pack of vodka cruisers and knowing how many drinks they have had by simple addition, or having someone get a bottle of vodka and some lemonade and try to figure out, while under the afluence of incohol how many drinks they have had based on the amount of booze missing from the bottle? Ask any bottle shop attendant and they will tell you that sales of bottles of spirits have risen pr...