For it has been revealed that Ursula, a spy with the US Defence Threat Reduction Agency - "Our mission to safeguard the US and its allies from weapons of mass destruction" - has been monitoring the island distillery.

Apparently, it takes just a "tweak" - her words - in the process of making whisky and Bruichladdich could be churning out chemical weapons.

Eight weeks later, the first public demonstration was given to the class by using a simple ping packet. With a blinding 2bps speed, the class sat patiently as the packet was received in roughly 140 seconds.

* We want to get the most security for the least trade-off

* Determine the acceptable risk-level

* Figure out the trade-offs

THE BEST WAY TO DO THIS IS TO MAKE THE PERSON WHO CAN FIX THE PROBLEM ON THE HOOK FOR FIXING THE PROBLEM.

We have no choice but to accept some residual risk. "No terrorism is acceptable" in nonsense: there IS an amount of rat-droppings that are acceptable in your breakfast cereal. Some risk is inherent in everything. We've decided that 40k auto deaths/year is OK. In the end, there's an amt of danger that we are willing to accept.

I built, by hand, the first 25 Apple ][s, worked on the Lisa's GUI. I invented the Trashcan Icon.

I had spent the summer of 1979 working for the Fed, debugging 3-Mile Island (I'd been a physicist). Then I wrote a book about it on a 300-baud modem terminal connected to an IBM mainframe using a line-editor. I hit the wrong key one night and trashed 70K words. Hell, Lawrence of Arabia lost a handwritten ms for a 350k-word manuscript.

When I went to work on the Lisa, I was determined that deleting a file would be a two-step process. On some systems, the trashcan bulges (defies physics); on others, the lid goes off (defies my mother). In my version, a fly circled the trashcan. The focus groups thought it was fuckin' awesome. But by turning off the fly, the computer could be made to run twice as fast. They fired me.

I was so wrong. This is a really loving, thorough, adult history of the Haunted Mansion, an appredciation by someone who is clearly a dedicated fan of the ride and who has spent an enviable amount of time talking to some of the principals involved and digging through the Disney archives (the archival material reproduced in the book is stunning, and includes a lot of stuff that I've never seen in a lifetime of Mansion fandom). I'm enjoying the hell out of it. I take it all back. This does not suck. Link

[...W]hen the soundtrack to a new film is released (by far the most popular genre of music in India), the demand for it is immense and the record labels have virtual carte blanche to sell it at any price they wish. However, starting in the 1970s and 80s, enterprising music distributors released cheap cover versions of popular songs (some of which were not covers but outright pirate versions) and significantly expanded the existing market by making music accessible to people who could never afford it before.

In this lobbying campaign, the music industry has also not hesitated to make some rather far-out arguments which tend to appeal to the religious right (which dominates the multi-party ruling coalition in India). These are along the lines of how song remixes are evil and mixing "pure" Indian music with music from other cultures is distasteful and further evidence of how our culture is polluted by American music, etc.

First, component failures are the norm rather than the exception. The file system consists of hundreds or even thousands of storage machines built from inexpensive commodity parts and is accessed by a comparable number of client machines. The quantity and quality of the components virtually guarantee that some are not functional at any given time and some will not recover from their current failures. We have seen problems caused by application bugs, operating system bugs, human errors, and the failures of disks, memory, connectors, networking, and power supplies. Therefore, constant monitoring, error detection, fault tolerance, and automatic recovery must be integral to the system.

Carlson, who hosts CNN's "Crossfire," said on Friday that earlier in the week he jokingly announced what he claimed was his telephone number during an episode of his show, which he co-hosts with Democratic strategists Paul Begala and James Carville, along with conservative columnist Robert Novak. In fact, the number Carlson gave out connected callers to a switchboard at Fox News.

According to Carlson, an unknown person or persons at Fox retaliated by posting Carlson's actual home telephone number on the Fox Web site. Carlson said hundreds of angry phone calls were made to his home, including threatening calls. Carlson's wife and four young children were at home at the time the calls were made. Carlson and Carville on Friday excoriated Fox for the reverse prank, which Carville said "scared young children to death," unnecessarily.

Well, we won! After all the hue and cry over the problems with the proposed standard, the committee has voted no-confidence in the proposal, sending electronic voting-machines back to the drawing board.

This is pretty cool -- chalk one up for the Internet, and for democracy. Thanks, folks.

The IEEE standard will now go back to its drafting committee, Project 1583, which holds its next meeting in Austin, Texas, in October. Once finalized, the U.S. and other governments worldwide will likely adopt the IEEE electronic voting standard, since IEEE sits on a technical advisory board established by the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

"Report-a-mistress is not an attack against mistresses," said Congress representative Kim Lokin.

"We are just looking here at the corruption aspect," Ms Lokin told a local radio station.

"It is not right for an official to use public funds to sustain his questionable lifestyle."

Feature list, from the Nokia website: "Wearable steel-framed display; Choker in two styles: steel chain or matte rubber; You choose the images; One touch reveals a timepiece; Color screen: 4096 colors, 96 x 96 pixels; Controls to browse and delete images."

Link

It's this kind of talk that's getting our troops killed. I may have to make an exception to my unwavering opposition to the death penalty just for you.

Although Davies says he wants to "introduce the character to a modern audience", Lorraine Heggessey, the controller of BBC1, insisted yesterday that she did not expect a gay Doctor Who.

1. Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation.

2. Programmers need lots of power outlets. They should be able to plug new gizmos in at desk height without crawling on the floor.

3. We need to be able to rewire any data lines (phone, LAN, cable TV, alarms, etc.) easily without opening any walls, ever.

4. It should be possible to do pair programming.

5. When you're working with a monitor all day, you need to rest your eyes by looking at something far away, so monitors should not be up against walls.

In a hotly contested lawsuit before a federal appeals court, two peer-to-peer companies are about to gain a vast army of allies: America's librarians.

The five major U.S. library associations are planning to file a legal brief Friday siding with Streamcast Networks and Grokster in the California suit, brought by the major record labels and Hollywood studios. The development could complicate the Recording Industry Association of America's efforts to portray file-swapping services as rife with spam and illegal pornography.

Music executives abroad are scrutinizing the American industry's legal campaign against people who share files on the Internet. But many doubt such tactics would work in their countries, given the relative weakness of laws protecting copyrights and the ubiquity of the activity. "People in their 60's are burning CD's at home," said Gerd Gebhardt, the chairman of the German Phonographic Industry Association. "Housewives, who should be cooking, are burning. It's not like we can go after 80-year-old men or 12-year-old kids. We have to find the right approach."

Because weekly cycles are rarely if ever found in nature, the observed fluctuations must therefore be anthropogenic in origin, the researchers write. In particular, they propose that cloud changes associated with aerosol particles in the atmosphere could be causing the weekend effect, though other pollution processes cannot be ruled out at this time.

Security begins with asking the right question. Asking "how can we keep sharps off airplanes" leads to confiscation of nail-scissors; while asking "how can we keep terrorists from overpowering pilots" leads to reinforced cockpit doors. It's all in the question.

The copyright wars should be asking questions like, "How can we compensate artists?" and "How can we preserve the largest library the world has ever seen?" and "How can we promote Constitutional values like anonymity, due process, and free speech?" Instead, the copyright debate has been hijacked by people who seem to be asking questions like, "How can we alienate 60,000,000 American file-traders?" and "How can we destroy the American legal system with badly conceived laws, suits and lobbying?"

There are better questions -- and better answers.

They already have their own film production company, called 2929 Entertainment, and they own part of Lion's Gate, a film production and distribution company, as well as Magnolia Pictures, an art-house movie company. About 18 months ago they bought Rysher Entertainment, which owns a library of TV shows and movies.

Now, with their own movie theaters, "We somewhat control our own destiny," said Wagner in an interview yesterday. "The ultimate goal is to attract more and more filmmakers. If they work with us and we commit to a project, they already know that (their movie) is going to get a certain amount of distribution right out of the box."

The Web page allows individuals who flew with JetBlue before September of 2002 (when the airline turned over its data to the government) to generate an official request under the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Freedom of Information Act for any data held about them in connection with JetBlue by the Department of Defense (DoD), the Army, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

"After I realized that I personally flew JetBlue during the period in question, I decided to file a personal Privacy Act request for my files," said [Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program]. "Then it occurred to us that people who aren't ACLU lawyers should have an easy way to submit their own requests for their files. So we set up this page so that anyone can exercise their legal right to access files about them being held by the government."

My Jeep is camouflaged to look like a commercial fleet vehicle. I made up a fake company name, appropriated a 1950s-era logo that once belonged to a nuclear energy mutual fund, painted safety stripes on the back, and plastered a fake vehicle number all over the place. I also added flashing yellow lights in the rear window, and a police-style spotlight and rubberized push bumper to the front. VERY FUN accessories ... and useful too (when used with discretion). The spotlight is incredibly versatile -- you can point/rotate it while sitting in the driver's seat -- and it's come in handy countless times for roadside emergencies, setting up campsites, or finding house numbers on dark streets. This urban camouflage guise is very useful for parking in yellow zones, urban/industrial exploration, and crime deterrence. And the thing is... it really works!

The spotlight, bumper, and rear flashers came from my *all-time favorite* mail order catalog: Galls, "The Authority in Public Safety Equipment and Apparel." It's a gold mine, full of handy things that you didn't think you were allowed to buy.-- Todd Lapin

"What we’re seeing right now is really exciting in terms of inventiveness," says [Mike] Dreese [co-founder and CEO of the Newbury Comics retail chain]. "Just think of how far we’ve come since the advent of recording in how we listen to music. Now it’s a matter of the law and certain legal rights catching up with technology. We’re living in an accelerated world, so what we’re experiencing now with the lawsuits, some universities considering a student fee for downloading music, and other possible solutions might have taken much more time. After all, it took something like 40 years of litigation to get the music on radio licensed. Now, within the span of about five years, we’re going to have a completely new technology and possibly new laws in place for an industry. That’s remarkable."

Mrs. Ward was deeply confused by the accusations, which have disrupted her gentle life in the suburbs of Boston. She does not trade music, she says, does not have any younger music-loving relatives living with her, and does not use her computer for much more than sending e-mail and checking the tides. Even then, her husband does the typing. "I'm a very much dyslexic person who has not actually engaged using the computer as a tool yet," she explained in her first interview about the case. (...)

In a number of the 261 lawsuits the industry has filed so far, members of the household other than the named defendant might have had access to the machines, she said. But some of those being sued, she added, are contending that their cases are purely ones of mistaken identity.

That is exactly what Mrs. Ward says happened to her. Not only does nobody else use her computer in more than a passing way, the computer, an Apple Macintosh, is not even capable of running the KaZaA file-swapping program. And though the lawsuit against her said that she was heavily into the works of hip-hop artists like Snoop Dogg, Ms. Ward says her musical tastes run to Celtic and folk.

Have you ever needed to ask for directions while you were driving? Let's say you stopped to ask a trusted authority, like a police officer. You'd expect that officer to be honest, right? Wouldn't you expect him or her to provide you a safe, direct route to where you needed to go? I sure would. But what if that officer instead misdirected you to a shopping mall? A shopping mall, it turns out, that actually paid the officer for every sale that resulted? That would be an abuse of the police officer's authority. It would be capitalizing on your misfortune.

We believe that's what VeriSign is doing with its "Site Finder" marketing scheme. We believe that it is once again abusing the power to oversee all .com and .net domains it was granted by the U.S. government.

One lawyer for the firm said it would seek testimony from 4,000 store managers in a class-action case, resulting in a trial that would last 13 years.

The bad thing about this film is that it never really wants to scare you too much. When you are a kid and you go on The Haunted Mansion for the first time it scares the shit outta you! Waiting in line, standing in that sinking elevator, checking for exits, your heart beating fast, hands sweaty-I wanted that feeling when I saw this movie! Sure you get a few jumps, a few scary looking skeletons but that is pretty much it...

The music was great, assuming we heard the soundtrack that will be in the finished film. The FX although some unfinished were tight. Rick Baker's make up was sweet as always. And the cinematogaphy was great too. Interesting lighting, clean shots, taking great advantage of 2:35.

When you see me going in to the bank and walking out with my new gun in "Bowling for Columbine" – that is exactly as it happened. Nothing was done out of the ordinary other than to phone ahead and ask permission to let me bring a camera in to film me opening up my account. I walked into that bank in northern Michigan for the first time ever on that day in June 2001, and, with cameras rolling, gave the bank teller $1,000 – and opened up a 20-year CD account. After you see me filling out the required federal forms ("How do you spell Caucasian?") – which I am filling out here for the first time – the bank manager faxed it to the bank's main office for them to do the background check. The bank is a licensed federal arms dealer and thus can have guns on the premises and do the instant background checks (the ATF's Federal Firearms database—which includes all federally approved gun dealers—lists North Country Bank with Federal Firearms License #4-38-153-01-5C-39922).

Within 10 minutes, the "OK" came through from the firearms background check agency and, 5 minutes later, just as you see it in the film, they handed me a Weatherby Mark V Magnum rifle (If you'd like to see the outtakes, click here).

And it is that very gun that I still own to this day. I have decided the best thing to do with this gun is to melt it down into a bust of John Ashcroft and auction it off on E-Bay (more details on that later). All the proceeds will go to The Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence to fight all these lying gun nuts who have attacked my film and make it possible on a daily basis for America's gun epidemic to rage on.

Sharman Networks, the company behind the Kazaa file-sharing software, filed a federal lawsuit on Monday accusing the entertainment companies of using unauthorized versions of its software in their efforts to snoop out users.

Sharman said the companies used Kazaa Lite, an ad-less replica of its software, to get onto the network. The lawsuit also claims efforts to combat piracy on Kazaa violated terms for using the network. Entertainment companies have offered bogus versions of copyright works and sent online messages to users. Sharman's lawsuit also revives its previous allegation that the entertainment companies violated antitrust laws by stopping Sharman and its partner from distributing authorized copies of music and movies through Kazaa.

"I haven't seen this noted on Boing-Boing yet, and it seemed worth a mention. ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee has released a memo titled Recommendations Regarding VeriSign's Introduction of Wild Card Response to Uninstantiated Domains within COM and NET. I don't know if reams of emails from annoyed geeks will do any good, but it can't hurt either." Snip:

To gather information on security and stability implications, we invite inputs from all interested parties. Send inputs to: secsac-comment@icann.org. Further, we will meet publicly in the Washington, D.C. area on October 7, 2003, for interested parties to present factual information relevant to the security and stability of the Internet. Details will be available shortly.

Weblogs, Inc. is a B2B Web site dedicated to creating niche Weblogs (a.k.a. blogs) across niche industries in which user participation is an essential component of the resulting product. Weblogs, Inc. is creating a new layer on top of the traditional business-to-business media that:

* saves professionals the time associated with reading dozens of B2B publications by providing a non-stop, top-level summary of the news;
* provides analytical tools that allow users the ability to sort and search stories by subtopics inside B2B niches;
* gives users the ability to participate by engaging in discussions, ranking stories and by submitting their own “blogs” (i.e., pointers and summaries of stories on other sites); and
* promotes fairness and truth in reporting by acting as a public forum where industry professionals can participate.

The Internet will choke under its own success if intelligence continues to be relegated only to the edge of the network. The notion that networks should remain 'dumb' and simply perform transport is outdated. Deploying certain application functions closer to the network core, instead of solely at the edge, relieves pressure on downstream access devices and applications, and allows the network to be more efficient, manageable, resilient and secure. . . .

ChargingPeople is far from the Web standard, even though it solves every single economic issue on the Web today, and several of the aesthetic ones. You make money instead of losing money. You make more money the more readers you have. You don't have to use invasive advertising or promote products you may not personally endorse. The only downside is that your readership shrinks to a fraction of its former glory.

ChargingPeople is especially suited to the independent Web artists out there. First off, only an employee-free operation can hope to make enough money from ChargingPeople to turn a profit right now. Secondly, the independent Web artists are the same ones who are going to write and draw stuff anyway. They've been making comics or writing stories since they were in grade school and they're not going to stop just because they're in QA now. So as long as you're making it, you may as well get what you can out of it.

Down at Marco's, my newly adopted cafe-for-the-evening, a habit is forming. Pico bounds in the arms of someone lovely, Mischa wanders into the bar and receives pizza crust benediction, and Lucy stands outside and watches the passers-by, leaving me, leads taut in three directions, stretched in the doorway, balancing my caffè coretto on the icecream fridge, and trying to remember enough Latin roots to work out what people are talking to me about. It's really quite amazing how long you can keep a conversation going without understanding more than one word in ten. I had a long one yesterday afternoon about hare coursing in Argentina. I think. Still: lovely chap.

My own view of the Metaweb is pretty straightforward: I don't think that the Internet, as it currently exists, does a very good job of explaining things to people. It is great for selling stuff, distributing news and dirty pictures, and a few other things. But when you need to get a good explanation of something, whether it is a scientific principle, a bit of gardening advice, or how to change a tire, you have to sift through a vast number of pages to find the one that gives you the explanation that is right for you. Generally this is not a problem with the explanations themselves. On the contrary, it seems as though a lot of people like to explain things on the Internet, and some of them are quite good at it. The problem lies in how these explanations are organized.

We have been looking for a way to get an explanation system seeded for a long time, and it occurred to us that a set of annotations to my book might be one way to get it started. At first, the explanations here will be strongly tied to characters and situations in QUICKSILVER and so may be of only limited interest to those who have not read the book. However, with a few clicks we might move on to more general explanations. For example, Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle appear as characters in QUICKSILVER, and so early on we might see annotations concerning specific things that they are shown doing in the book. But later these might link to explanations of Boyle's Law. Such an explanation need not refer to QUICKSILVER in any way, and so it could be useful to, say, a high school student who has never heard of me or my book but who needs to understand Boyle's Law and why it is important.

1) How many blogs do you read a day?

2) Please name the three blogs you read most frequently. [What if you read less than three? Then just name the ones you do read.]

3) Why do you read the blogs you read? In other words, what makes those blogs worth checking out on a regular basis?

4) Have you ever read something on a blog that affected your decision-making on what to air/publish? If the answer is yes, can you give an example?

5) How much influence do you think blogs have on political discourse? A lot, a little, or none at all?

Dot-Com Administrator Sued for Alleged Unfair Practices: NPR's Mike Shuster talks with technology writer Xeni Jardin about a $100-million lawsuit against VeriSign, alleging the company engages in unfair business practices. The company was entrusted by the government to oversee all dot-com and dot-net addresses on the Internet -- but some of its competitors feel VeriSign is abusing its power.

The apple and hawthorn maggots are common names for the same species, Rhagoletis pomonella . The pest and the hawthorn plant are native to North America, but the apples they now infest were introduced from Europe around 250 years ago. During the 1860s, in New York's Champlain Valley, some hawthorn flies shifted to apple plants as their host, while others did not."There are no morphological differences between the two, so they are still the same species, but two races can be distinguished by looking at the diversity of protein structures of whole populations and by the specificity of individual flies to different host plants," explained Roelofs, who is the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Insect Biochemistry at Cornell.

Now Congress is starting to waffle on the idea of number-portability -- big-money lobbyists have done their work and turned our elected representatives against us. Escape Cell Hell is the action-center fielded by Consumers Union (publishers of Consumer Reports) where you can write in and tell your Congresscritter not to sell out your interests to the twisted progeny of Ma Bell. Link (Thanks, Matt!)

So far, gym bans on camera phones have occurred mostly outside the Washington area. Celebrity-laden clubs in Los Angeles, including the Sports Club/LA, already have nixed camera phones.

Camera-equipped cell phones have been banned at all 300 clubs in the 24 Hour Fitness chain nationwide. Cameras are not allowed inside those clubs without written permission, and "the new camera-cell phone combinations are no exception to this rule," said spokeswoman Shannon May. The rule appears on signs posted in every club, she said. The chain operates no fitness centers in the District, Maryland or Virginia. But most local workout spots haven't gone quite that far -- at least not yet.

I figured out accidentally a neat trick to find out how often people are searching on your name or seeing pages on which your name is prominent in some fashion. Buy a set of Google AdWords with your name. I composed a goofy ad for my name.

Well, I don't believe you can protect intent to break the law by slapping a copyright on it. And the memos that we posted show that the law has been broken. If you can protect intent to break the law, all anybody would need to do is take their bank robbery plans and put a copyright on it, and then say nobody can look at them because they're copyrighted...

...[T]hey have been aware of these security flaws for years and they have chosen not to correct it. He says something to the effect of, find out what it will take to make this problem go away. [Referring to a voting equipment certifier, Clark tells a colleague to "find out what it is going to take to make them happy."] He says if you don't mention [a problem] you may "skate through" certification. And talking about doing "end runs" is not a good thing either.

And what's disturbing is the very same thing that these memos are talking about -- overwriting the audit log -- in the presentation in which they sold their machines to the state of Georgia they specifically bring up the audit log and say that no human can change it. This shows they made fraudulent claims, frankly.

"(JetBlue) decided against further participation unless federally mandated due to concerns for customer privacy and the uncertainty of the final structure of CAPPS II," the airline said in a written statement.

The query string of the URL contains the usual things such as the Web page URL, the referring URL, browser type, screen size, etc. This query string is built on the fly by about 50 lines of JavaScript embedded in the Verisign Web page.

The Omniture server sets a cookie so that people can be watched over time to see what typos they are making.

The researchers randomly assigned the adults to tai chi chih instruction or to a waiting list. Those who received the tai chi chih training learned the standard series of 20 "meditation through movement" exercises from an instructor with 20 years' experience. Irwin and colleagues monitored immune levels by through a series of blood tests.

It tells you things that Technorati knows about a user. In the simplest case you can use getinfo to find out information that a blogger wants to make known about himself, along with some information that Technorati has calculated and verified about that person.

Favorite TV shows: Curb Your Enthusiasm, Real Time with Bill Maher, The West Wing, Da Ali G Show, Who Wants to Be Governor of California?

Favorite Movies: Hybrid vs. Hummer

About Me: Well, first off, I'm NOT a Fakester. I'm the leading independent candidate in the California recall election. My dream is to unite Californians behind a real vision for California - clean government, clean energy, schools not jails. Check out http://www.VoteArianna.com for more about my platform and to join my campaign to Take Back California. [Extra Note: I would love to add you as a friend, but I'm currently at Friendster's maximum friend limit of 500. Hopefully, I'll be able to add you soon.]

Who I Want to Meet: Arnold, in a debate...but it's not looking good.

"This moblog experiment involved 10-13 y.o. children from the city library of Plessis-Trevise ; they are from a reading club and they exchange each month feelings about new books they are reading. The work is not finished, though. They're going to put add critiques on the book they have read and comments too... this will be THEIR moblog."

For the first time, global sales of camera-enabled mobile handsets surpassed sales of conventional digital cameras in the first half of 2003. According to results reported by Strategy Analytics, mobile phone makers shipped 25 million handsets with built-in cameras worldwide in the first half of the year. This number is compared with four million in the year-earlier period.

The president has declared "major combat over" and sent a message to every terrorist, "Bring them on." As a result, he has lost more people in his war than his father did in his and there is no end in sight.

Military commanders are left with extended tours of duty for servicemen and women who were told long ago they were going home. We are keeping American forces on the ground, where they have become sitting ducks in a shooting gallery for every terrorist in the Middle East.

Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance.

First the bag is positioned at the point where damage has occurred and is inflated until it fits the pipe and irons out any dents.

Steam is then pumped in to glue the new lining to the walls of the pipe, which usually takes around two hours.

By using ultra-violet light to dry the glue this fix time has been cut to just 30 minutes.

Sharp objects or obstructions which cannot be removed with the bag are dealt with using remotely-operated high-pressure water jets.

The lifestyle was hard. Some writers were throwaways or runaways, living wherever they could. Almost all of them were out stealing paint, sneaking into subway yards and tunnels at all hours, and getting into fights with other writers over territory, real and imagined slights, and raids on each others’ paint supplies. They tell wild stories about escape attempts, successful and otherwise, when the police showed up. Although their joy was great when they saw a car they’d painted in use in the subway system, in effect a traveling billboard for their work, there was always a good chance that the cars they’d just gone to so much trouble to paint were going to immediately get hauled into maintenance and buffed straight down to the metal, so that no one would ever see what they did.

Although it's not required or a 'critical' update, this just paves the road for all of Microsoft's software to require DRM technology on your computer. Quote from the details page: 'Installing this client allows RM-aware applications to work with Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) to provide licenses for publishing and consuming RM-protected information.' This, dubbed 'Activation', entails that 'your computer will be automatically connected via the Internet ... in order to create and save on your computer a system component that is associated with your hardware.' Hmmm... me no like ..."

I won't be too graphic about it, but the food -- including yogurt and formerly frozen meat -- was decomposing in an especially pungent manner. Luckily, I hadn't eaten anything in many hours, if you get my drift.

The circuit is now repaired. The foul smell is more stubborn. (There's also a whole industry devoted to "odor control," I've discovered.)

In any event, the experience has convinced me that that the modern home should be more intelligent, and communicative, than it is today.

'Cutting out starchy foods, or any food group, can be bad for your health because you could be missing out on a range of nutrients,' the statement says. 'This type of diet also tends to be unrealistic and dull, and not palatable enough to be tolerated for a long time.'

It adds: 'High-fat diets are also associated with obesity, which is increasing in the UK. People who are obese are more likely to develop conditions such as diabetes and some cancers. Low-carb diets tend to be high in fat, too, and eating a diet that is high in fat could increase your chances of developing coronary heart disease.'