"Honey - where's my super suit?"
"Why do you need to know"


...my favourite lines from The Incredibles, which I saw at the cinema last night. Very taken by Syndrome's gorgeous henchwoman 'Mirage' (left). Outstanding animation, but the film is over long at 120 minutes; cinematic experience ruined by having to sit through 20 minutes of adverts and the sound being out of sync. Will probably buy on DVD.

One of the UK's most senior lawyers has quit his job in protest over the Blair Government's draconian internment law. Recently ruled as 'unlawful' by the House of Lords, Ian MacDonald QC described the detention without trial of foreigners suspected (but not necessarily proven) to be terrorists as a "blot on the legal landscape".

BBC NEWS | UK | Lawyer resigns over terror laws

Installing PERL on my home server last night and ran into the old 'Error 500' problem which can basically mean all sorts of things. In this instance, after an hour's fiddling, I found it was down to the shebang line in my script only pointing to the folder perl.exe was in and not to the program itself. Once I'd changed it to:

#!C:/Appserv/PERL/bin/perl.exe

...the script worked.

The Longer Range Impact of November 2nd Vote

With the Blue States in hand, the Democrats have firm control of 80% of the world's fresh water, over 90% of our pineapple and lettuce, 93% of the artichoke production, 95% of America's export quality wines, 90% of all cheese production, most of the US low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools, plus Stanford, CalTech and MIT. We can live simply but well.

The Red States, on the other hand, now have to cope with 88% of all obese Americans (and their projected health care cost spike), 92% of all US mosquitoes, 99% of all Southern Baptists, 100% of all Televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.

A high price to pay for controlling the presidency. Unattributed.

The UK is not going to be able to meet its own targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions - 20% of 1990 levels by 2010 - but will probably match its Kyoto commitment. But at least we're doing something: the US government still thinks the whole global warming problem doesn't exist, stating today that its based on 'bad science'. Perhaps when Florida disappears under the ocean they'll start to listen - by which time it will probably be too late.

BBC NEWS | Politics | UK 'failing on greenhouse gases'

That's not to say the British government shouldn't do more. Car engine sizes are getting bigger and more powerful and yet nothing has been done to try to limit this, or a least further penalise drivers who choose to purchase these vehicles.

Apple are in trouble with the European Commission for charging us Brits too much for single music downloads. We cough up 79p but the French and Germans only have to pay the equivalent of 68p. In the USA its a mere 51p a track. I guess its in line with the rip off prices were are expected to pay for music CDs (not that I buy many of those these days).

BBC NEWS | Business | Apple iTunes 'overcharging in UK'