The terrorists have won

For the last seven-plus years, the US government have been chipping away at the human rights of everyone entering or leaving the country. This article is the most eloquent description of the results of this process of security theatre.

Give up Al Qaeda, you've won. Not by destroying things, or spending money, but by getting the idiots on Capitol Hill to destroy the liberties of their own citizens.

P.S. Over 20 years ago I visited the Soviet Union, at the height of the Communist regime, and my experience of travel to, around and back from that famously restrictive and 'dangerous' country was easy. Yes, the boarder guards were quite meticulous in their examination of your passport, but at no time did it feel like someone was about to turn an Uzi on us, or send us off to Siberia forever. I'll bet the victims of the article above couldn't say the same for their experiences at JFK airport.

'Chicanegate'

The FIA (or at least their proxies the race stewards at the Belgian Grand Prix) have done it again: making decisions that appear to almost all commentators to favour Ferrari over McLaren. Some people fired off rants within scant hours of the decision, others have taken a little longer.

In the light of Massa's 'unsafe release' exiting the pits in Valencia (which earned him a mere fine, but a GP2 competitor at the same event a stop-go penalty!), contrasted with Hamilton's 25 second penalty for 'not slowing down enough' (what, a full car length and 6.7km/h slower isn't slower enough?) after using the escape road in wet conditions!

Come on, this may be a perception, but there's more evidence gathering almost every race weekend now. The FIA is rotten to the core - it's clearly more interested in helping Ferrari than being fair. And the Mosley affair hardly adds to the lustre of the organisation, whatever the 'democratic vote' of the strangely represented federation said.

Google Chrome

Yes, everyone is writing about it, but is everyone writing sense?

No.

Thank goodness for people like Ted Dziuba at the Register. Even if his article has little flecks of spit around the edges where he gets a little "wound up", shall we say.

Basically, a whole load of should-know-better tech journalists have been writing all kinds of rubbish and hyperbole about Google's latest beta product, some even going as far as to suggest that it is an operating system... oh my Lord, could they be further from reality? It's an application, in the same sense as Firefox, notepad or Microsoft Excel. An operating system is concerned with hardware and providing services to applications, like those I just mentioned.

Addendum: another blogger's comments on the same TechCrunch article that got Dzuiba going.