links for 2008-08-14

"Birmingham City Council has admitted sending out leaflets which showed its US namesake's skyline instead". I'll put my money on this being down to typing 'Birmingham' into Google Images and using the result ;-)

Because I'm out of the country I haven't written my usual rant about media A-Level coverage, but from the comments here this says it all: "Why can't all you miserable people just be happy for these students?". Oh, and you can play the annual "spot the boy" competition again - 27 young teenage students pictured in total in this article, all female.

"In July, Sophos reported that Google's blogging site Blogspot.com is now the number one domain for delivering malware. Cluley suggests that 2% of all malware on the web is hosted at Blogspot."

"The buzzword is 'shared services', under which different bodies share corporate functions such as finance and personnel, reversing a decades-old trend of allowing different agencies to do their own thing. However, there is a fine line between achieving economies of scale and returning to a 1960s-style dependence on government-wide data centres."

"Although first proposed to tackle terrorism and serious crime, powers have been extended to cover other criminal activity, public health, threats to public safety and even prevention of self-harm". What, and nobody thought to warn us that this was likely to happen and the proposed anti-terrorism moves were just the thin end of Big Brother's wedge? Oh, hang on...

I think the fact that the title has to clarify what Ham Radio actually was says it all...

"The time for innovation in journalism is over. Its mature. Its been done, perfected, written about, studied, taught, and analyzed for a couple of centuries. It comes down to a few simple things: check your facts; include as many sources as possible; avoid bias; avoid libel. Jesus Christ, these are things a ten-year-old can grasp. The innovation, the ideas, in the Internet age MUST come from the content delivery side."