You forgot the wonderful work she did for Chileans herself

Having stopped those cursed Spaniards from prosecuting that poor sick Pinochet chap.

Truly her life will be long remembered by freedom loving people everywhere (in their darkest nightmares)

I presume God doesn't want her and hell won't have her @ this point (cf Mr. Frankie Boyle on the subject)

title

I assume claiming that stuff was beer was the reason for the refusal

Replacing hideous Excel macros is a job description

Curiously one of the first contracts I had many, many years ago was replacing an Excel model that took over an hour to run. It was core to this business' oppperations, replaced it with a smal DBI Perl app and stuck on their app server it took under 2 minutes to run. Job too 2 weeks, most of which was spent unraveling years of Excel macros conflated into a hideous mess in order to derive a spec for the code. it's now internally supported and running fine.

If you need a supercomputer to run your macro, consider writing a program ;)

Surely they want people to read their sites, no?

If so, links to topics I'm interested in are surely a good thing for the original publisher.

Or do they want me to wade through an acre of "Celebrity big x factor come dancing with the stars" news in order to find content that interests me?

Quite a lot of idiots out there then

What really scares me about this story is the number of people who will click on a link in SPAM.

@Goat Jim: Presumably these users' boxes are already on one or more botnets already.

Christ on a bike how many idiots are there out there, sigh.

Mines the one with the LART sticking out of the pocket

Ahern is trying to court the religiouos right vote

Unfortunately the majority of the population are small minded half wits, (Ireland has this in common with every other democracy however, as Churchill put it "democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried"). Ahern's party (Fianna Fail) are about as popular as a flatulent pit-bull with swine flu in a lift at the moment and so he resorts to this blatant attempt to shore up FF's core vote. He's also positioning himself for a leadership challenge within FF. This legislation won't pass as FF's coalition partners (Green Party) would never support it.

Expect it to quietly disappear after European and local elections.

Pragmatisim wins out over ideology

MS have realised that reinventing the wheel isn't necessarily a good thing, particularly given some of their attempts, so they, in common with every other business are using open Source software to lessen the strain "in these difficult times".

Hopefully they come to realise that lots of people are now using it and perhaps a bit of interoperability might be a good plan, though Rob and Loony have valid points which shouldn't be forgotten.

Trying hard not to gloat here, but any time someone suggests that Open Source is not a feasable way to go, I'll be able to point @ MS themselves. Common sense is prevailing, oh crap the world must be coming to an end, so is it pig sniffles or an asteroid?

@ Richard Kay & Carlo Graziani

This is the correct solution, however learner distros should enable fail2ban by default. It should be part of the meta package in ease of use distributions

Forget source and too lazt to Google

Meat is murder, but a bacon sarnie is justifiable homicide;)

I now have plans for the post-(traditional Good Friday piss up )-breakfast

PS. Does any other civilised nation pander to Christians to the extent that it is illegal to sell alcohol while the Christians are mourning the death of an itinerant Jewish philosopher?

Waste recycling costs will also have to be factored in

Given recent performance of the ISS what hope for the bogs on the curry laden mission

Anheuser-Busch make beer?

Of course Anheuser-Busch can't get a trademark for beer under the Budweiser name they should also be done under trade description for referring to that rice based swill as beer in the first place.

The merkins can make beer, they just choose not to export it (Fat Tyre, Sierra, Red Tail...) The bland watery crap they export should not carry the honorific beer, nor indeed the name of the brewery that the useless twat who founded the co. was expelled from. </rant>

I've been testing it and it's not bad

Seems to work well for me, faster than IE7 and FF certainly, but the addons in FF just make it so handy to use. I can customise the hell out of how I use regularly visited sites, block all advertising, only allow Javascript from a limited set of sites ...

IE8 on the other hand seems to be a peace offering, a Microsoft product that obeys open published standards and for that it is welcome. Most sites just have to remove the ieSucks.css and ieSucks.js files and they will work well with IE8.

If sites remove all their IE workaround code people will discover that IE(6|7) are unusable and the impetus to move to IE8 will increase.

Still don't trust the bastards though.

Tested on http://acid3.acidtests.org/`20%

Flies through the Acid2 test but fails worse then Firefox on Acid3

OK, Windows has it's security problems

But this update was flagged all over the net and even on the mainstream media, it's hard to believe that this is because sysadmins are failing to deploy the update.

Personally I suspect that this is caused by machines that fail the WGA test and as a result can't get the patch.

Is there any data on what machines they scanned?

You can tell they intend to work with others

From the http://www.documentinteropinitiative.org/ site

"/If you have specific questions about Office’s ODF implementation, or if you need further information about the notes themselves, please post questions to the MSDN interoperability forum."/

The MSDN interoperability forum returns an 404

Who'd a thunk it

So people who do stuff feel better about themselves than those who watch the dreary tedium that passes for entertainment in Telly land.

How do they get they fill in the grant applications without bursting into tears?

After all these "researchers" can hardly believe they are doing useful scientific work, can they ?

@@AC

As you say yourself there is absolutely no proof of the link, however there is a link between a failure to immunise and the ability of a pathogen to live in human hosts and so be transmitted throughout the comunity leading to outbreaks of diseases fatal to children.

Of this we are very sure and so as you say, in the absence of evidence to the contrary we shouldn't play with children's futures by failing to immunise our kids on the basis of a rumour.

St. BillyG because this is the first time I've approved of his behaviour in a very long time (~DOS 6.2)

"Simplify" unix management

This could lead to great savings, after all if we could simplify Unix management by getting rid of all those complicated switches and things you have to use in the CLI then we could dispense with those expensive Unix admins and get a load of MSCEs in to look after the systems.

So who's going to write the front end for ip then ;) Should be a piece of cake if we just strip out all those things that W2K3 can't do,

Hotmail! for! the! 21st! Century!

Wow, MS are to become the largest users of open source software on the planet, and pay US$44.6 bn for the privilege or will they migrate to their own dogfood and bring Yahoo! up to the wonderful standard we have come to expect from Hotmail.

Icon, 'cos Bill runs BSD now

As Anglo culture takes over, will we lose the tenets of these cultures

I mean really, which of us would like to see a culture whose language that gave us "barbecue, burrito, cocaine, hammock, salsa, siesta, taco and, of course, tequila" disappear, think of what else they may add to Fridays if they're left at it.

Icon, because mono-culture is bad

@ Mike Street

"classical artists make most of their money from appearances (i.e. by playing) rather than recordings"

Same is true of the vast majority of other musical artists, it's the recording companies that make money from the CDs, the cost of promotion, advertising, video production et al being taken from the artists royalties.