links for 2009-02-23

"O'Neill sued after Football365.com, a BSkyB-owned news and opinion site, published a reader's comment headlined: 'Martin O'Neill is a total idiot'. The comment appeared in the site's Mailbox section, where readers are encouraged to send 'opinions, rants, praise or abuse'. They are moderated and edited before publication". No comment.

"I used to publish my blog posts immediately after writing them. Now I write, save, reconsider, save, rewrite, save, sleep, wake…oh, and then publish. The more time I build in before publishing a post, the more visitors I get to this blog."

"As usual, the press disagreed about quite simple facts: Chantelle's surname, the number of her siblings, the value of Alfie's mother's house - £250,000 in the Daily Mail, £395,000 in the Mail on Sunday, suggesting 58% inflation in 24 hours, which would have been steep even in the boom years."

"Two of Greece's most wanted men have staged a daring helicopter escape from Athens' highest-security prison - for the second time in three years. Serial armed robber and kidnapper Vassilis Paleokostas and his Albanian sidekick Alket Rizai were days away from trial for their 2006 escape. They fled Korydallos prison after a helicopter landed on the jail's roof and threw them a rope ladder."

"Honesty doesn't pay in this system and the temptations are great. No-one knows who is cheating and who is not, and it is a disgrace that the Parliament has voted to keep auditors' reports secret."

From the comments: "The BBC doesn't have to employ a freelance they can pick who they want. In fact there are too many female autocue readers on the BBC News Channel, particularly when it comes to sport. Male sports should be read by male sports presenters not some pretty lightweight bimbo."

"The BBC’s campaign did nothing to dent the success of the pirates which, by the mid-1960s, had audiences in excess of 20 million. The campaign ended in 1967 with the introduction of the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act, which made it illegal to work for, advertise on or supply pirate stations".

"While you can understand Last FM rushing to back-up data in case people are deleting in a funk and want to come back when they realise it's been a lot of silly fuss over nothing, is it entirely ethical to receive a request to delete an account, chuckle that they probably don't mean it, and store the data instead?"