MMM: Toyota Volta
01/10/2007
A three year old concept, apparently. Quite nice, but something just isn’t right about it.
MMM: 2010 Camaro
01/10/2007
It looks like the US has found it’s muscle car feet again, after years in the wilderness. The new Camaro will look a lot like this, albeit with a b-pillar.
Sadly the Challenger will gain a pillar too, but I can’t see it taking too much from these cars if they don’t screw with the concepts too much.
Swirling Vortex of Doom
29/09/2007
Worth posting for the title alone.
Damn Interesting: Early in the morning on November 21, 1980, twelve men decided to abandon their oil drilling rig on the suspicion that it was beginning to collapse beneath them. They had been probing for oil under the floor of Lake Peigneur when their drill suddenly seized up at about 1,230 feet below the muddy surface, and they were unable free it. In their attempts to work the drill loose, which is normally fairly easy at that shallow depth, the men heard a series of loud pops, just before the rig tilted precariously towards the water. (more…)
Frattinising
27/09/2007
 European Commissioner Franco Frattini to Reuters:
“I do intend to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector… on how it may be possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism.”
Will he prevent himself?
How do people as stupid as this get into such positions of power?
(Via EDRI.)Â
Billions over Baghdad
27/09/2007
Read this article please. It’s long, but worth the read. Who needs oil?
Vanity Fair: Between April 2003 and June 2004, $12 billion in U.S. currency—much of it belonging to the Iraqi people—was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad, where it was dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Some of the cash went to pay for projects and keep ministries afloat, but, incredibly, at least $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed. Following a trail that leads from a safe in one of Saddam’s palaces to a house near San Diego, to a P.O. box in the Bahamas, the authors discover just how little anyone cared about how the money was handled.
Sorry
25/09/2007
I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 using WordPress Automatic Upgrade and forgot to reset the permissions on my cache directory afterwards. So the plugin isn’t seamless, but it does make things a hell of a lot easier.
“Dear Mr. Prime”
25/09/2007
We have received your accident-claim reports for the month of June—they total 27. I regret to inform you that GEICO will not be able to reimburse you for any of those repairs. I feel that I have sent the same letter to you once a month for the last six months, and I am now sending it again.
Since becoming a GEICO customer in January of this year, you have reported 131 accidents, requesting reimbursement for repairs necessitated by each one. You have claimed not to be responsible in any of them, usually listing the cause of the accident as either “Sneak attack by Decepticons” or “Unavoidable damage caused by protecting freedom for all sentient beings.”
[…]