Totally Useless Facts
Friday, January 28, 2005, 07:37 - Miscellaneous
On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year.Los Angeles's full name is: "El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de losAngeles de Poriuncula" and can be abbreviated to 3.63% of its size, "LA."
Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the body to squirt blood 30 feet.
A pig's orgasm lasts 30 minutes.
Some lions mate over 50 times a day.
The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.
All of the clocks in the movie "Pulp Fiction" are stuck on 4:20.
No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
The original name for butterfly was flutterby.
More Totally Useless Facts.
New desktop components
Thursday, January 27, 2005, 08:15 - Personal
Last Friday I ordered hardware components for my new quiet desktop PC. I already received the case (Antec SLK3700-BQE), CPU (AMD Athlon64 3200+ S939) and harddisk (Maxtor DiamondMax 10 200GB SATA).I'm still waiting for the remainder of the parts. Especially the mainboard (Asus A8N SLI Deluxe) is currently very hard to get. It supposedly is a great mainboard and stores are selling them much faster than Asus can supply them.
I was promised that my mainboard would ship this Friday, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. It's a pretty important part of the new PC...
Dinner talk...
Wednesday, January 26, 2005, 08:44 - Humor
Thank you Poland again
Tuesday, January 25, 2005, 06:42 - The News
Yes! Again thanks to Poland the software patents were removed from the agenda of today's meeting of Ministers of Fishery.But the race is not won yet:
"it is still not unlikely that the directive could reappear on an unrelated Council meeting as an 'uncontroversial' A-item, i.e. scheduled for adoption without vote."
Thai elephants toilet trained
Sunday, January 23, 2005, 23:15 - Humor, The News
Diew, a five year-old Thai elephant, demonstrates how to use and flush a toilet at an elephant camp in Chiang Mai province, in northern Thailand. Having taught Thailand's elephants to paint, dance and play musical instruments, their Thai handlers are now toilet-training the beasts, media reported.
Source: AFP
Wife recovers from coma after husband's suicide
Sunday, January 23, 2005, 00:28 - The News
An Italian man committed suicide out of grief over his comatose wife. Several hours later the woman came out of the coma she had been in for four months after having had a stroke.The man, 71, had visited his 67-year-old wife at least once a day. They had spent their whole lives together and had no children. He was very pessimistic about the chance of her recovery and finally took his own life in their garage. Some twelve hours later, the woman awoke and asked about her husband.
What a tragedy.
Software patents again
Saturday, January 22, 2005, 07:03 - The News
After the failed attempt in December, the European Commission tries again to sneak in the software patents directive. Thanks to Poland the decision was postponed last time. Now the EC added it again at the last moment to the agenda for the meeting on Monday of the Council of Ministers of Agriculture and Fisheries.It is added again as a so-called 'A-item' that is normally not discussed or voted on, but accepted by acclamation. But there SHOULD be a discussion, as there are a lot of people that at least have doubts or are plainly against the patents.
Dutch minister Brinkhorst is in favor of the proposition, but the Parliament asked him to withold any further support. So far he has refused to comply.
Appearently there is a very big lobby active to get the patents directive approved. The big companies like to try to register a patent for everything they can think of. And then sit on the patents and/or sue anyone who might be violating it.
But small companies and individuals who come up with great pieces of software don't have the money to register patents or to buy licenses.
Obviously the big companies have a lot of cash to spend on persuading governments to accept the directive. I hope Poland or anyone else will put their foot down again to prevent this bad thing from getting accepted.
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