Yup, we should be dead

Dear Friends

Thought this might strike a chord or two!!

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE KIDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE:-

1940’s, 50’s,60’s and 70’s !!

First,
we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.

They
took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a tin, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.

Then
after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints

We had no
childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode
our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking .

As
children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

Riding
in the back of a van – loose – was always great fun.

We
drank water from the garden hosepipe and NOT from a bottle.

We
shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

We
ate cakes, white bread and real butter and drank pop with sugar in it, but we weren’t overweight because……

WE

WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!

We
would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back

when the streetlights came on.

No
one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.

We
would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem

.

We did not have
Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no text messaging, no personal computers, no Internet or
Internet chat rooms……….WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of
trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents

.

We played
with worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

Made up games
with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we

did not poke out any eyes.

We
rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang

the bell, or just yelled for them!

Local teams
had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn

to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

The idea of a
parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

This generation
has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors

ever !

The past 50
years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We
had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we

learned

HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!

And YOU are one of them!

CONGRATULATIONS!

You
might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our

own good.

and
while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.

Kind of makes
you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn’t it?!

PS -The BIG
type is because your eyes are shot at your age

Best Wishes Willie

Kids ‘should set tests’ – Education – News – Manchester Evening News

Not only that, they should mark each others’ tests as well.

No, seriously. This is what the UK National Curriculum advice is for this year.

First the UK has managed to scare the people into doing whatever it wants in the name of security, then it created a nanny state, and now it’s dumbing the people down – apparently people are still complaining too much about having their DNA on file for no particular reason.

CCTV spying on smokers

So now the bastards have made sure that you’re actually outside killing yourself in the rain, wind, sleet, cold, whatever with your cigarette, they’ve decided that the litter you create when you throw away your cigarette butt is aweful enough that they’re going to automatically ticket you for littering after they’ve automatically identified you with the huge CCTV spy network of camera’s they’re placing in front of every pub in Wales.
Run little smoking piggies, run! The government is out to get you…

Google Lunar X-Prize

Google has teamed up with the X-Prize foundation to offer incentives to get onto the moon:

• GRAND PRIZE: A $20 million Grand Prize will be awarded to the team that can soft land a craft on the Moon that roams for at least 500 meters and transmits a Mooncast back to Earth. The Grand Prize is $20M until December 31st 2012; thereafter it will drop to $15M until December 31st 2014 at which point the competition will be terminated unless extended by Google and the X PRIZE Foundation
• SECOND PRIZE: A $5 million Second Prize will be offered as well, providing an extra incentive for teams to continue to compete, and increasing the possibility that multiple teams will succeed. Second place will be available until December 31st 2014 at which point the competition will be terminated unless extended by Google and the X PRIZE Foundation

It worked as the X-Prize to get Burt Rutan’s Spaceship One into space, so why not this? Good plan!

UK Data Protection Act Flaunted

In an interesting art project, where the director wanted to make a movie out of only CCTV footage (which the UK, under the DPA has to provide quickly and for a fixed fee if you want to see your own face with other faces blacked out) about a woman living in a land of faceless people, it turned out that the holders of the CCTV footage seemed totally unaware of the DPA or tried to break it.

PHP compilers

So far as I can find out there are two PHP compilers out there:

Zend Guard, which compiles your code so that it’s optimised, sped up and unreadable. This is run using an Apache / IIS extension called the Zend Optimiser (free).

Phalanger, which is open source and compiles to .NET, allowing the use of .NET classes. It runs on top of the .NET 2.0 framework, so you can run your PHP scripts directly on microsoft windows machines without installing PHP.

Big damn botnet

The Storm botnet is now sending around 2 billion emails per day, has around 30,000 computers hosting the webpage that is linked to in the email, runs at around 10% capacity and blasts anybody who starts looking at it with a massive DOS. This thing can take down just around everything (allthough it doesn’t seem to be doing so) and is way more powerful than the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
The article focusses on the DOS power of Storm, but what if it started doing some more interesting stuff like curing cancer, running folding at home or something?
Pretty amazing – it’s not the first of April, is it?