The Null Device
Posts matching tags 'rumours'
2007/11/11
When the Bush administration recently extended daylight saving time in the US by several weeks, it claimed to be doing so for environmental reasons. Of course, not everybody believes this, and some claim it was due to lobbying by the confectionery industry for more trick-or-treating time on Halloween:
Sweet manufacturers wanted a Daylight Saving Time extension so that the clocks were turned back after Halloween. The extra hour of daylight on 31 October would mean more time when parents could safely let their children go trick or treating, with resulting enhanced sales for the basketfuls of candy traditionally handed out to them.
2005/1/18
A compelling argument claiming that Yahoo! will buy SixApart within six months. Which, given Yahoo!'s tradition of clueless heavy-handedness, means that TypePad and LiveJournal will be steamrolled into an all-new, cut-down and obnoxiously ad-saturated Yahoo! personal publishing solution for those who don't know any better. (See also: eGroups)
Link via David Gerard, who speculates that the smarter rats aboard the LiveJournal ship will already have sensed what's in the offing and made developing a method of cryptographic cross-site authentication their priority; this makes sense, as it will allow people to jump ship to their own LJ-based servers and keep the social-network functionality that made LJ useful, without having to get all their friends to agree which server to be on.
2003/2/18
New claims have emerged that the Queen Mother, who died in her sleep last year aged 101, was euthanased with a massive dose of heroin. It is claimed that she saw it as her duty to avoid dying at an inappropriate time (such as her daughter's jubilee), and thus elected to die a "mercy death" beforehand. Euthanasia is somewhat of a tradition in the British monarchy; the terminally ill George V. was euthanased with cocaine and morphine, so that his death would make the morning papers rather than the "less appropriate" evening ones. Nonetheless, royalists are outraged by the allegations. Euthanasia and assisted suicide are currently illegal in Britain, with terminally ill commoners forced to travel to places like Switzerland to die with dignity.