A poor woman from Newcastle had a stroke last year, when she awoke first she had a few problems with her voice but when she returned home the real extent of the problem became aparent.
She is suffering from Foreign Accent syndrome, first encountered in World War 2, which changes her accent from a Geordie twang into a fairly strong Jamacian/French Canadian. Its an extrodinary condition and while its humorous to begin with, after a while im sure it’ll be a nightmare.

[ BBC News | Video Interview ]

A council has apologised to a woman who was fined £60 after workmen painted a disabled bay around her car. After parking legally, the woman then went to the hairdressers for a cut and blow, only to return to her car with a fine and freshly painted lines around her car.
The fine has been revoked
[ BBC News ]

I’m sure many of the geeks out here know about this Net Neutrality thing thats going on right now, but for those who dont, heres the beef.
Some time last year the CEO of AT&T asked the world why the internet should be allowed to use their pipes ( Cables transmitting the data) for free, this sent shockwaves through the internet. Internet service providers would like to be able to charge Web sites for access to their customers, while web sites that could not pay the new fees would be accessible at a slower speed, or perhaps not be accessible at all.

This tiered system provides a number of threats as service providers could, for example, shut out Web sites whose politics

Google Labs have created what appears to be a clever little set o’ widgets.
Its now possible to write an AJAX enabled website using Java as its base language, which then gets translated into HTML, and Javascript. Creating a neat way of developing ajax sites without the headaches of browser quirks and odd effects.
The Kitchen Sink demonstrates all the widgets avaliable to the user, and its darn impressive, the source code is avaliable here.
I cant play with this at the moment due to exams, but its compatabilty with Eclipse is handy for me personally, but its not IDE focused. While it may not provide all the functionality you want from an AJAX site

3 seconds past the second minute of the first hour, on Thursday the 4th day of May, Two thousand and Six.
Doesnt look that good does it?
how about like this:
01:02:03 04/05/06
doesnt happen every day… well, not quite like that anyway

You know the anti spam measures used on websites, those annoying boxes of garbled text convoluted in such grotesque manners to usualy require concentration and a level of guesswork that just isnt needed in the modern day.
Enter Oli, a random guy who got fed up of the boxes filled with symbols and wanted a new method of authentication. In a stroke of genius (althou ive seen similar methods, but nothing this cute) he created the Kitten Authentication System. All you need to do is click the three kittens on the page to be authenticated, simple yet adorable

[ Kitten Authentication ] [ Kitten Auth Demo ]

“In 2007 leaping his way onto the silver screen, the greatest hero in american history….”

The Simpsons Movie… Coming Eventually..

Ok, as Linzi had a go at me about my previous rant and i want to clarify my position about the issue of creationism in science class. Its NOT about creationism per say, its about the political correctness of forcing a belief issue into a class not suited to its teaching. I am against the idea of what is basically a story in the media pushing the idea that our schools need to reform their approachs to the teaching of these subjects. Yes teach creationism, i think its a damn find principle, as is evolution theory, but dont mould them together to make the polititians go “Look at us creationist types, we’re keeping your loud outspoken members appeased”
And in

“Creationist theories about how the world was made are to be debated in GCSE science lessons in mainstream secondary schools in England.
The subject has been included in a new syllabus for biology produced by the OCR exam board, due out in September. “
BBC News

Farewell sensible studies placed into their own sensible categories. Science is taught in Science classes, Religious/Belief matters are taught in RE classes. This Cross mix of ideals is going to make students get so damn confused about what is Hypothesis based on repeatable observations and evidence with Hypothesis based on opinion and conjecture. Science classes are based on evidences and experimentation which produce facts, two parts hydrogen, one part

After news that the Beeb were looking into streaming out BBC 2 over the net a few months ago, a trial was setup. Now while this needed registrations and suchlike it was a bit of a flawed system. Locked into Windows Media Player, the interface was buggy, it wasnt that fun to use.
However, the boffins at BBC R&D have been tinkering away and have released a Trial Multicast of BBC and ITV channels. Yup, ITV are involved as well, this is how big this move is. The multicast trial is only avaliable to users of certain multicast enabled ISPs, if your isp is one of these :

JANET
C & W (but not Bulldog)
clara.net
NetServices Plc
PlusNet
Zen