Heeft u 21 minuten over?
“Nee, natuurlijk niet! 21 minuten! Zo lang zit ik niet eens op de wc!”
Oh… heeft u dan wellicht zin om een vragenlijst in te vullen?
“Vragenlijst? Wat voor vragenlijst?”
De vragenlijst gaat over problemen die voor de hele Nederlandse samenleving en dus ook voor � belangrijk zijn.
“Bla bla bla, dus… En waarom is dat allemaal nou weer nodig?”
21 minuten is opgezet om de burger de kans te geven op een directe manier invloed uit te oefenen op het Nederlandse beleid!
“‘directe manier invloed uit oefenen’… Heet dat niet gewoon stemrecht, ofzo? Of hebben ze stiekem, terwijl ik toch een keer 21 minuten op de wc zat, de democratie afgeschaft ofzo?”
Nee nee nee, natuurlijk kunt u ��k stemmen, maar het gaat hier om een vragenlijst! Een VRAGENLIJST! Een echte!
“Zout toch op met je vragenlijst, man!”
Maar maar, het heeft zelfs een comit� van aanbeveling! Met klinkende namen als Job Cohen, Annemarie Jorritsma, Prem Radhakishun en Yvon Jaspers!
“Yvon Jaspers? Die kinderprogrammadoos? Nog meer van die klinkende namen, vriend?
Ja ja! Eh… Ed Nijpels! Hans van Mierlo! Eh…. Ali B.!
“Wat?! Ali B.? Waarom zeg je dat niet meteen? Ik doe mee!”

[Quote:]

Nederland valt massaal over de beslissing van het Cals College in IJsselstein om de Nederlandse vlag op de tas van een leerling te verbieden.

“Waar gaat het met ons heen als we niet meer trots mogen zijn op ons vaderland?”, klinkt het van alle kanten. De 16-jarige Patrick Balk en zijn vriend Mark de Mooij kregen vorige week vrijdag van de schooldirectie te horen dat ze ‘ernstig moesten overwegen’ om de Nederlandse driekleur van hun schooltas te verwijderen, omdat het provocerend kon overkomen aan het adres van vooral de Marokkaanse medeleerlingen. De twee leerlingen vatten het dringende verzoek van de schooldirectie op als een verbod.

[Quote:]

De nieuwe elektronische identiteitskaart die in Belgi� wordt verstrekt, wordt ge�ntegreerd met MSN Messenger van Microsoft.

“Op die manier zetten Microsoft en de Belgische overheid samen de stap naar een nieuw, veiliger internet.” Met deze woorden kondigden Bill Gates en de Belgische minister van Informatisering Peter Vanvelthoven dinsdag hun samenwerking aan.

Erg grappig!

[Quote:]

Sam – let’s call our interviewee Sam, it’s suitably anonymous – lives in a three-bedroom semi-detached house in London, drives a vintage Jaguar and runs his own company. But “it’s not not all rock and roll and big money”, says Sam. What isn’t? Spamming websites and blogs with text to pump up the search engine rankings of sites pushing PPC (pills, porn and casinos), that’s what.

For that’s what Sam does, pretty much all day long. He – we’ll use the male notation, it’s easier – would do this anyway for fun, but it’s more than fun; he says he can earn seven-figure sums doing this. Sam is a link spammer. He’s unapologetic about it. Skilled in Perl, LWP and PHP, Sam’s first professional programming was done aged 13, when he sold some code to a gaming company. He’s 32 now, and spoke to The Register on condition of anonymity.

My server logs know this asshat intimately. Blocking him has been very easy, fortunately.

[Quote:]

Iraqi officials say President Saddam Hussein has won 100% backing in a referendum on whether he should rule for another seven years.

There were 11,445,638 eligible voters – and every one of them voted for the president, according to Izzat Ibrahim, Vice-Chairman of Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council.

The government insists the count was fair and accurate.

admit it – I had you going for a while, right?

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To tech industry observers, the Mac’s tepid sales in 2004 were something of a surprise. During the same year, the iPod experienced phenomenal sales; Apple saw a 500 percent increase in sales of the music device in the winter quarter of 2004 compared to same quarter in 2003. In 2004, the company sold several times more iPods than it did Macs, meaning that the device was purchased by millions of people who didn’t own Macs. Their only association with Apple came through the brilliant music player, and some analysts and Apple execs thought it was natural to expect some kind of “halo effect” from the iPod — all those Windows people with favorable impressions of the iPod might consider switching to Macs.

But that halo didn’t seem to work. For some reason, in 2004, vast numbers of Windows people didn’t look at their iPods and decide to buy Macs. Why not? Perhaps the answer lies in what Jason Snell, the editor of Macworld magazine, says is the essential difference between Windows people and Mac people: Mac people love their computers on a personal, emotional level. Windows people, on the other hand, prefer to think of their machines as office tools, gadgets no more special than the stapler. Windows users don’t expect much in the way of quality, beauty or elegance from their machines; if they did, they’d be Mac people. Instead, they expect their PCs to perform a great many tasks, and they’ve resigned themselves to having to labor over those tasks.

This is not at all how we think about our iPods. The iPod is a consumer electronics device; it does one thing, plays music, and it does that one thing extremely well. The device is also intensely personal: People buy the iPod as much for form, for the way you look when you carry it around town, as for function. Your Windows PC, by contrast, is all function, no personality. Computers are the workhorses of our lives, slaves to the routine and the mundane. You do your taxes on your PC. You pay homage to John Coltrane on your iPod. Thinking about it this way, it seems clear why Windows people didn’t look at the iPod as a first step to the Mac: In the mind of the typical Windows user, there’s no clear connection between a desktop computer like the Mac and the iPod. The two exist in separate product universes. The iPod is sublime. Your computer is a chore. Why would you ever associate the two?

But the Mac Mini, Snell says, eases the mental transition between the iPod and the desktop machine. Indeed, one way to think about the Mac Mini — and the way that Apple may be thinking about it — is as the iPod of computers. Yes, the Mac Mini can do everything that any other Mac can do; it’s a full-fledged computer. But “there’s a big part of Apple that wants to be a consumer electronics company,” Snell says, and the Mac Mini has the look and feel of a consumer electronics device — a friendly, personal thing that will be marketed mainly for its core functions, its facility with your pictures, movies and music.

“I was visiting some friends this weekend,” Snell says, “and they’re PC people, they don’t own Macs. But one of them was describing going to a friend’s house to use iPhoto so she could make a photo book for their daughter’s birthday. They loved the Mac, and they were seriously talking about buying a Mac Mini.” What’s interesting, Snell points out, is that these people didn’t want the Mini for its intrinsic computer power; they were going to keep their PC up and running. They wanted the Mini as a household digital hub, as an appliance, rather than a computer, that made it easier to play with their photos.

Windows users often think about the buying of a Mac as a terminal decision. Indeed, you don’t just “buy” a Macintosh; in jargon that Apple has popularized, you “switch” to the Mac, you make a change to your life in order to reorient yourself to a whole new platform. Put that way, buying a Mac is a huge decision; it involves learning a new operating system, transferring files, and buying new, expensive software to replace the software on your Windows machine. But if you think of the Mac Mini as an appliance, as a device for photos and making movies, you can conceive of using the Mac without “switching,” Snell notes. You can use the Mac alongside your Windows computer, in much the same way you can use an iPod in your Windows home. Stephen Baker, an analyst at the NPD Group, a market research firm, echoes this thought. “The whole ‘switching’ thing isn’t the way to look at this,” Baker says. “People who are buying these are not switching all their Windows PCs to Macs. As more and more households get more and more kinds of computers in the house, they have a range of PCs for different uses. It’s reasonable to expect that the Mac will be part of that range,” he says.

Senior Filipino police officer Omar Taribul smiles before wearing his new dentures at the police headquarters in Manila January 31, 2005. Philippines’ First Gentleman Mike Arroyo gave away free dentures to police officers in the capital as part of his project, ‘A New Smile for the Toothless’, to help them regain their self-confidence.

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Abstinence-only sex education programs, a major plank in President Bush’s education plan, have had no impact on teenagers’ behavior in his home state of Texas, according to a new study.

Despite taking courses emphasizing abstinence-only themes, teenagers in 29 high schools became increasingly sexually active, mirroring the overall state trends, according to the study conducted by researchers at Texas A&M University.

“We didn’t see any strong indications that these programs were having an impact in the direction desired,” said Dr. Buzz Pruitt, who directed the study.

The study was delivered to the Texas Department of State Health Services, which commissioned it.

The federal government is expected to spend about $130 million to fund programs advocating abstinence in 2005, despite a lack of evidence that they work, Pruitt said.

I think I need a new “Duh!” category on my weblog…

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The way many high school students see it, government censorship of newspapers may not be a bad thing, and flag burning is hardly protected free speech.

It turns out the First Amendment is a second-rate issue to many of those nearing their own adult independence, according to a study of high school attitudes released Monday.

The original amendment to the Constitution is the cornerstone of the way of life in the United States, promising citizens the freedoms of religion, speech, press and assembly.

Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.