h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/apr/01/cameron-shaun-ryder-advise-tories#start-of-comments

Problem is...it's just too damn believable.

B

Have you seen the Google quest thing? I'm sure that's an April fool...

However, this one made me laugh more:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/9178489/Linda-McCartney-memorial-wood-is-destroyed-by-disease.html

No?

B

Thanks for the reminder on April.

I'll be sure and guard myself.

Well, not even h2g2 is free of it. There are photos of Dmitri and Elektra on today's Front Page - and the articles to go with those photos.

Post 2, that was supposed to have been 'April fool's day'.

I have seen the front page.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17576745

Any takers? I REALLY don't know!

B

This Cornish pastey tax has been the best April Fools so far... Though the spoof trailer for the re-branded Archer's on BBC Radio Four was rather amusing.... Too amusing in fact to have been taken seriously by anyone as a real plan by the Beeb...

It's going a bit far, but then I know that our government is currently being attacked by EU bots for not recording emails, browsing data, mobile phone calls, sms etc for at least six months. That 'real time' spying would be the next logical step, but I don't think they're so far yet.

If that is an April Fools story (and it bloody well better be), it even took NPR in. It was the second story during their news bulletin at the beginning of All Things Considered this morning.

Thing is, we're quite happy to let Google read all our emails so they can tailor ads to them. I trust corporations far less than I do Whitehall.

This was first announced back in 2009:-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8020039.stm

and similar intent in 2008 here:-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7507627.stm

It was originally proposed that a computer programme would monitor stuff looking for keywords/phrases or 'unusual speech patterns'. It would be physically impossible for the billions of e-mails to be read in the conventional sense hence a reliance one would think on software doing it.
Lets face it, it happens now with search engines and advertising as well as on places like FB and twitter.
Frankly the minute you connect to the web means you're being seen/watched/read by someone somewhere. No such thing as private on t'web.

Comercial snooping only wants to make money selling us stuff, governments want to detain some of the population illegally for years without trial. That's quite a big differnce... albeit a rahter sipmplistic one.. Quite how we're meant to trust any arm of the government who can even propose introducing such a thing, whilst critisising it whenever anything remotely the same occurs elsewhere in the world..
If the plan is serious to go ahead, we'll distoy the goverments ability to do it, within days, by generating faulse data to such an extent they'd quickly have to cover the entire country in servers just to store the vast amounts of data... I can't recall where, but that technique worked well in some smallish European country of late when their goverment tried to do something simular... ultimately the goverment backed down...

Y'all aren't paranoid. They are spying on you. They're listening to your phone calls and reading all your email.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

Goodluck to them. If they've been listening into my phonecalls I'll probably have sent em proper apricot on a phonebox loopy by now...

The return to the politics of fear beloved of Herr Blair.

Time to make a stand - though in fact its the civil service who are really keen to do it - not politicians.

Not long ago, I read about some study using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, real time MRI rather than just static pictures) to look at the brain activity and development of different types of people. Of course, any time I read about such studies using fMRI I break out my skeptic hat as usually these studies make claims that they can't really back up.

Well, this last one really fed into my confirmation bias as I'm sure it did for those doing the paper. And hey, it might just be legitimate.

They found that comparing the brains of self identified liberals vs. conservatives showed a correlation that indicates more development in the parts of the brain associated with empathy in liberals and more development in the parts associated with fear response and aggression in conservatives.

I just can't help but think there may be something to this one.

Something with respect to left and right groupings in politics, people tend to position themselves in public assemblies where they can hear the best, those with right ear dominance on the left, those with left ear dominance on the right.