The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of conspiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sceptics. But last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy.

Now, even the doubters are acknowledging that here is a small box with apparently inexplicable powers.

'It's Earth-shattering stuff,' says Dr Roger Nelson, emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the United States, who is heading the research project behind the 'black box' phenomenon.

'We're very early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here. At the moment we're stabbing in the dark.' Dr Nelson's investigations, called the Global Consciousness Project, were originally hosted by Princeton University and are centred on one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. Its aim is to detect whether all of humanity shares a single subconscious mind that we can all tap into without realising.

So I laid it on thick. "Son, we're human beings, the same as you are. You can't paint a whole group of people with one big brush. I became a cop because I wanted to help. I wanted to make my father proud. He died in the line, trying to save a woman from a gang of attackers, and I..." this is when I start to cry.

He had no idea what to do. He put his hand on my shoulder, and I cried harder. Eventually I managed to pull him into a hug. While he was nervously patting me on the back, I stuck my finger in my mouth and got it real wet with spit. Then I stuck it in his ear and gave him the nastiest wet-willy anyone has ever given anyone.

He was like "WHAT" and I was laughing, man, because who would ever believe him?

"A police officer gave me a wet willy!" wouldn't last a minute in court. And people would think twice about pirating music if it called down the wrath of the RIAA in the form of crooked police officers grabbing them outside their schools or daycares and giving them painful and embarassing wet willies. Think about that.

This is broken for many reasons. Here are a few:

* Citibank UK online spawns a small window all its own, regardless of the size of your screen. This window is too small to accommodate both the little toy keyboard and the login screen, so that the keyboard is always overtop of some key piece of information. Here you can see it almost completely obscuring the Login button. It would be reasonable for Citibank to let me choose the size of my online banking window, but if they've decided that I'm not old enough to make that kind of decision for myself, the least they could do is not throw unnecessary interface clutter at me.

* The DHTML keyboard doesn't work in some browsers. In Safari, all but the last row of keys is offscreen, with no way to move the keyboard.

* By not allowing me to use my keyboard to enter my password, the system precludes my using long, impossible-to-guess (and impossible-to-remember) passwords that I store in an encrypted password locker. Instead, I have to choose a much weaker, human-memorable password.

* Finally, this thing can't possibly be usable by blind people or people with physical disabilities that make fine mouse-movements difficult. The fact that you need to use their toy keyboard every time you complete a transaction makes this doubly/triply obnoxious.

Having gone through the legendary bullshit involved in opening a bank account in the UK, I'm loathe to try to terminate my Citibank account in favor of another UK banker, but if they keep on reducing the usability of their Internet service, I might just brave it. 112K JPEG Link

Update: Emmet adds, "One of the way this little on-screen keyboard make the password less secure is that it do not seems to allow for mixed case passwords nor it allow to enter accented letters. This mean that the actual key space is greatly reduced and will make guessing password easier."

Update 2: Joe sez, "Typing a password on a keyboard is secure because it's very difficult to observe the movements of ten fingers at the same time. Following a single mouse pointer on the screen is much easier. I suspect that the rate of key logging attacks is much lower than rate of observed password attacks."

Update 3: Brian points out that Bermuda's Butterfield Direct has an even more abusive toy keyboard, requiring you to enter both your login and password with it, and masking every character as you type it. Kevin adds, "To make matters worse, if you have to type/click a double character (such as 'ss') in Bermuda's Butterfield Direct, the second click will produce two characters ('sss') if you click too quickly.  Because the characters are masked, you can almost never catch this activity and are consequently told by the website that your username or password is incorrect."

Update 4: Kelly sez, "I have similar so-called security frustrations with my ING Direct savings bank account. They have this similarly tedious and user unfriendly design for their PIN code entry. It is an on-screen numerical keyboard, with the numbers randomly assigned to each key. Thus, instead of the top line being 7 8 9 it might well be 4 9 0."

Swap Magic arrived with no fuss, thankyou ESKent; your name and site are not glamorous, but you are true to your delivery word. It arrived with 2 discs (CD version and DVD version), plus the slide tool and an entertaining and not particularly helpful instruction sheet ("If it broke up, don't be frustrated - a little super glue can turn around the situation").

Most importantly though, the one instruction you really need - which way to jam the slidetool into the machine - isn't mentioned. After half an hour of wiggling, one broken-off tray cover (damnit), it all suddenly clicked. Then I played Katamari Damacy for approximately three hours solid, so I am serene.

This then is the story of refreshement, of Coca-Cola a quality product, pure and wholesome. A story of a friendly product, delicious and refreshing. A story of partners in progress with all Philippine industry providing employment for thousands of people in many industries, contributing to the progress of the country, and in the future as it always does, Coca-Cola will continue to bring more pleasure, more enjoyment to more people everywhere and Coca-Cola is everywhere in the Philippines.

Perhaps the most curious thing about Lovecraft is that much of what aficionados love about his work is exactly those things his detractors list as faults. Take, for example, the fact that while Lovecraft is usually described as a forefather of modern horror fiction, his stories are, to put it bluntly, not very scary. Wilson complained, with perfect justification, that Lovecraft ladled on the frightful adjectives and adverbs when describing -- or even just hinting at -- the nightmarish realizations that typically confront his protagonist at a tale's climax. In "The Lurking Fear," the narrator, recounting his sensations as he is about to discover something awful, explains, "I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time."

Lovecraft's narrators routinely rave about the "hideous," "monstrous" and "blasphemous" nature of their revelations. Wilson went on, again quite reasonably, to observe, "Surely one of the primary rules for writing an effective tale of horror is never to use any of these words -- especially if you are going, at the end, to produce an invisible whistling octopus." That octopus crack is a particularly low blow, since the most celebrated of Lovecraft's stories and novels partake of what has been dubbed the Cthulhu Mythos, an alternative mythology involving an enormous and malevolent being whose tentacled head resembles a cephalopod.