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I signed a paper promising no sex until marriage. The prize for my upstanding moral rectitude? A free chicken sandwich.

There are three kinds of people: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen and those who wonder what happened.

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Mobile phone tracking technology is being put to good use watching how punters migrate around a shopping centre, thanks to gear from Portsmouth-based Path Technologies.

By installing receivers around a shopping centre the company can pick up communication between handsets and base stations, enabling them to track shoppers to within a metre or two - enough to spot the order in which shops are visited. Two UK shopping centres are already using the tech, with three more deploying in the next few months.

This information is used to work out if shoppers are dropping in to visit one particular store, or doing the rounds of 15 different shoe shops before going back to buy the first pair seen. Retailers will pay good money for this kind of data, but while existing solutions are based on counting heads or asking questions of a selected few, watching where the phones go is far more useful.

Dear marketing person - is it really, really so difficult to understand that we just want you to fucking sod off every now and then, and just leave us alone?

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Last March, the NPD Group reported that Apple’s retail market share — its cut of the computers sold in brick-and-mortar stores — had climbed to 14%, a figure that’s roughly double its overall share of the U.S. market and reflects the power of the Apple Store to draw customers and move product.

What NPD didn’t report at the time was the huge growth in Apple’s share of the so-called “premium” computer market — machines that cost more than $1,000.

To some extent, Apple’s (AAPL) share of this market is growing by default. Companies like HP (HPQ), Dell (DELL) and Lenovo ship enormous quantities of PCs at price points between $500 and $750, whereas the only Macintosh that sells for less than $1,000 is the $599 Mini.

Still, Apple’s share of the $1,000-plus retail market was less than 18% in January 2006 according to NPD. By September 2007, it had grown to more than 57%. And in the first quarter of 2008 it hit a record 66%.

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Best, worst or most hilarious iPhone skin ever? VistaPerfection 2.0 is a complete Windows Vista skin for the iPhone with over 90 icons, wallpapers, a dock, sound effects and everything else Vista like the Sidebar and Start menu.

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No torrent site on earth is more popular than Mininova. Surprisingly, however, all the legal pressure seems to have been focused on sites such as The Pirate Bay. Mininova - against all the odds - appears to have stayed under the radar. All that changed today as Mininova is now facing legal action by Dutch anti-piracy agency, BREIN.

[..]

Erik Dubbelboer, one of the co-founders of Mininova, told TorrentFreak that Mininova will not cave in to pressure from BREIN. He expects to have more details about the upcoming lawsuit later this week: “We will proceed to court with full confidence. We operate within the law, as we maintain our ‘notice and take down’ policy. That is, we remove search results if a copyright holder asks us to.”

[..]

Tim Kuik, managing director of BREIN, said that Mininova’s business model is based on illegal activity. “A notice and take down procedure is absolutely insufficient for a site that makes use of unauthorized files, structurally and systematically,” he added.

The announced legal action will focus on the question whether Mininova has to filter their search results or not. BREIN wants Mininova to install such a filter, Mininova on the other hand doesn’t want to censor the search results. The outcome of the case is likely to have a huge impact on the future of other BitTorrent sites, and even sites such as Google and YouTube.

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The researchers polled a random sample of nearly 2000 high-school science teachers across the US in 2007. Of the 939 who responded, 2% said they did not cover evolution at all, with the majority spending between 3 and 10 classroom hours on the subject.

However, a quarter of the teachers also reported spending at least some time teaching about creationism or intelligent design. Of these, 48% – about 12.5% of the total survey – said they taught it as a “valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species”.

[..]

When Berkman’s team asked about the teachers’ personal beliefs, about the same number, 16% of the total, said they believed human beings had been created by God within the last 10,000 years.

Teachers who subscribed to these young-Earth creationist views, perhaps not surprisingly, spent 35% fewer hours teaching evolution than other teachers, the survey revealed.

The survey also showed that teachers who had taken more science courses themselves – and especially those who had taken a course in evolutionary biology – devoted more class time to evolution than teachers with weaker science backgrounds.

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If the “Vista sucks” movement has a public face, it’s the Sony Vaio. No one knows that better than my new friend Jeremy Toeman. In May 2007, this 15-year Windows veteran replaced his old, beloved, XP-powered Vaio with a newer Vaio that came with Windows Vista Business installed. Practically overnight, he told me, his experience went from “awesome” to “awful.” The experience was so terrible, in fact, that after several months of struggling he finally surrendered, putting his $2500 Windows notebook in storage and replacing it with a MacBook last summer.

At first glance, Jeremy’s machine is Exhibit A in the case against Windows Vista. As Jeremy documented in a series of posts, this gorgeous machine was ugly in action: slow to start, sluggish when performing everyday tasks, crash-prone, and overloaded with annoying and unwanted software. But is it really a hopeless case, or was this system done in by the rush to market and a sloppy OEM integration?

It’s a Sony, so I guess you already know the answer. But when you do a clean reinstall, the actual results are pretty interesting. So Microsoft has a problem - their resellers are giving their product an awful image.

[example from the cleanup:]

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The Home Office will create a database to store the details of every phone call made, every email sent and every web page visited by British citizens in the previous year under plans currently under discussion, it has emerged.

The Government wants to create the system to fight terrorism and crime. The police and security services believe it will make it easier to access important data as communications become more complex.

Telecoms firms and internet service providers (ISPs) have already been approached by the Home Office, which would be given customer records if the plans were realised.

The security services and police would then be able to access records for any individual over the previous 12 months by gaining permission through the courts.

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The University of California at Berkeley is being sued for statements on their Understanding Evolution Web site that some religious beliefs contradict science–like the idea that the Earth and living things were finished up in six days. The plaintiffs argue that a government-funded state university cannot claim that “some religious denominations are better than others,” though I certainly can’t find anyplace where Berkeley does so.

I suppose next under the gun will be NASA for its estimate that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, or the US Geological Survey for finding the age of the Earth to be a potentially unholy 4.5 billion years…

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One of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s top financial supporters offered $1 million to the Young Democrats of America during a phone conversation in which he also pressed for the organization’s two uncommitted superdelegates to endorse the New York Democrat, a high-ranking official with YDA told The Huffington Post.

Haim Saban, the billionaire entertainment magnate and longtime Clinton supporter, denied the allegation. But four independent sources said that just before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, Saban called YDA President David Hardt and offered what was perceived as a lucrative proposal: $1 million would be made available for the group if Hardt and the organization’s other uncommitted superdelegate backed Clinton.