I wasn’t aware of this earlier, but apparently on November 16 this year Hawaii brought in more stringent smoke-free laws to prevent people from smoking in public places. People can smoke outdoors however 20′ away from any building entrances. It’s a good thing as people are getting influenced by passive smoking if people are allowed to smoke indoors.
Japan itself was pretty strict when I went there last November, they even have special public outdoor smoking zones to prevent other people outdoors (especially in heavy pedestrian areas) having to deal with other people’s smoke. It was quite odd to see maybe 20 to 30 people in a small corner all smoking away. I think it’s the right way to go, however there’s always the pro-smokers who object to the inconvenience of having to take a walk before lighting up (with any luck, they’ll realise when they can’t walk without breathing hard that they should consider quitting).
Read about it from the Washington Times here.
muslix64 was annoyed that his legitimately bought HD-DVD drive and movie decided that his non-HDCP monitor wasn’t safe enough to play back high definition content. So he cracked the HD-DVD encryption system known as AACS within 8 days after sniffing the keys out from memory on his PC from a legitimate player. Read about it here.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Weta Workshop, well known for their work on Lord of the Rings have been picking up some local film work in New Zealand. Their latest project is Black Sheep which, well… I’ll let the poster image below explain it all.
Some quotes from the trailer:
“What are you doing in here?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Looks really bad, but hey, it’s a throwback to the good old days when Peter Jackson was doing Bad Taste and Braindead. The main movie web site is here. Thanks to TwitchFilm for the heads up.
According to recent surveys in the UK, an overwhelming percentage of 82% of people believe religion causes unnecessary division among the UK population while only 16% think otherwise. Meanwhile, only 33% of UK citizens are religious however only 13% observe weekly Church going attendance, while the majority of UK religious people have diminished to attending Church only on special occasions or not at all.
Read about the survey in the Guardian here.
Peter Gutmann does a lengthy exposé on what he’s found with Vista and how it handles premium content protection. Personally, my guess is that those clever guys in the Asia-Pacific region will find ways around it and before long, unprotected premium content will be filtering through on disc in the usual locations. If you really want to take out piracy, you need to hit the source rather than the consumers. Anyhow, Peter’s got some good points and in the long run, it’s bad for consumers all up. Think I’ll stick with Mac OS X, thanks.
Read about it here.
Apparently, in USA being an atheist is now the greatest impediment to a career in politics, with only 10% of the US population identifying themselves as atheist. The LA Times decided to clear the score by explaining some of the common myths surrounding atheists (presumably, Richard Dawkin’s “The God Delusion” and other books targetting religion is encouraging them). My favourite is Atheism provides no basis for morality. Last time I checked, atheists do not have texts inciting them to intolerance, violence and cruelty as an excuse to do bad things, nor the fear of not getting into Heaven (or whatever reward is offered) to do good deeds.
Read about some of the common misconceptions about atheism from the LA Times here.
The RIAA has had a setback in their file sharing [extortion] cases where they accuse people of file sharing with little proof besides “we know you’ve file shared”. Judge David G. Trager has made it tougher on the RIAA (presumably, to stop frivolous law suits from the RIAA showing up all the time) by making sure the RIAA has enough proof on hand to show that the defendant has actually file shared and has shared files available from their computer.
Read about it here.
VMware has released the beta of Fusion, their virtualisation technology product for Mac OS X. This lets you run Windows, GNU/Linux and other IA-32 based operating systems on Intel based Macintoshes without having to reboot like in BootCamp. Looks like Parallels has got it’s competition cut out for them - let’s see who can start taking advantage of hardware acceleration for games first!
Get the beta from VMware here.
Robin Hayes, one of the highly placed US politicians has come up with his own ideas about how to win the Iraq war. Mostly, that spreading the message of Christianity will save the day. Astute writers at the BlueNC point out that in Iraq, they already have a saviour and it’s not Jesus Christ. It also seems to be playing into Al-Qaeda’s propaganda that USA was merely in Iraq to take over and that it’s a modern day crusade. (This time, it’s not holy relics of the cross, it’s WMD’s they’re looking for).
Read about it here.
If you felt praying to just one god was getting your message lost in the spam, here’s a handy list of gods and goddesses to route your claim through more directly. Kind of makes most modern religions look boring!
List of Gods & Spirits
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