“I must be extra careful not to get pregnant,” said Julie to her best friend June.

“But I thought you said your hubby had a vasectomy,” June responded.

“He did. That’s why I have to be extra careful!” shrieked Julie.

Interesting. Yesterday I entered an order for a new iBook on the online Apple Store (if my iBook had died a month later, I might have begged you all for a birthday gift for my 40th on June 4th).

At first, the status listing showed it would ship “on or before April 26″. Just a few minutes ago, this showed up in my email:

Wij stellen het op prijs dat u voor de Apple Store hebt gekozen.

De vraag naar het door u bestelde product is groter dan verwacht. Daardoor is het
niet mogelijk u het product op de opgegeven verzenddatum toe te sturen. Uiteraard zullen
wij het bestelde product zo spoedig mogelijk verzenden. De verzending zal nu naar verwachting op 3 mei 2005 plaatsvinden.

translation:

Thank you for choosing the Apple Store.

Demand for the product you ordered is greater than expected. Therefore it is not possible to send you the product on the date quoted. Of course we will send you the ordered product as soon as possible. We now expect to ship may 3rd.

I ordered a stock, vanilla 12″ iBook – smallest harddisk (I don’t need more than 30 Gb on my laptop), no memory extension (after-marktet is significantly cheaper, I ordered an additional 512 Mb seperately elsewhere), so basically no ‘built-to-order’ difficulties whatsoever. So there’s a few options:

1. They really are selling more than expected
2. They want to ship it with Tiger, which officially doesn’t ship until the 29th – so I’ll get Tiger pre-installed instead of a coupon (which I would have been happy with, of course)
3. They are about to introduce a speed-bump or similar new hardware. Now traditionally the week after the NAB expo they introduce new desktop machines, and all the rumor sites indicate that new desktop hardware is indeed imminent, if you could call a premature listing at Amazon “imminent”. But new portable hardware, and certainly low-end, is unlikely after the expo.

Any guesses which one it will be?

Yippie! I scored 267 on my first attempt at Guess-the-google

[Quote:]

The BBC has uncovered evidence that the police and security services have compiled lists – some containing names of innocent people – to show to suspected al-Qaeda terrorists when interrogating them. The BBC’s Barnie Choudhury reports.

I met Ghalem Belhadj at his solicitor’s office in Glasgow. A big man, over 6ft, dressed in Islamic silwar-kameez, and beard. There is no doubt he is a Muslim. And he says, with no irony in his voice, that means he must be a terrorist.

Well, that is what Strathclyde Police must have thought for, he says, they bashed down his door and arrested him. Despite his repeated denials he was jailed for three months and then released without charge.

“First time I think it was immigration and after that they give me a sheet of paper in Arabic, it say they stop you and say you are for group terrorist,” he says in broken English, “They stop me, surprised and put me in white suit and they took me to Glasgow to Govan Police Station. ”
….

He believes the intelligence used is flawed because, he says, the police and security services are getting it by putting pressure on vulnerable people such as asylum seekers.

This claim is backed up by Mohammed Asif, a former asylum seeker from Afghanistan who now works in Glasgow.

He says he was approached to become an informant just after the collapse of the Taleban, while seeking asylum.

“A police officer, who was a very close friend of mine, he is retired now, and he said that there are two possibilities that people are talking in the force. Either you get arrested or you work for them. But I am not interested in dirty work,” he said.

With his contacts among the asylum seekers, Mr Asif is in no doubt it is still happening today, especially among the Algerian community. We wanted to take up this point with Strathclyde police but they declined to comment.

We tried to find out what had happened to the 82 on the list. We could not track down 52 of the names. Of the remaining 30, twenty-six were either never charged with or convicted of terrorism. That means almost a third on the list of 82 were innocent of terror charges in the eyes of the law.

In the war on terror the lack of openness by the police and security services about how they obtain their intelligence and its accuracy is understandable.

But among human rights campaigners there remains an uneasiness that innocent people are being added to lists and accused of crimes they have never committed.

Technically, you’d only need one time traveler convention.

[Quote:]

Becta, the Government’s lead agency for ICT in education, is set to release a new report which will say that schools could save significant sums by switching to open source software, eGov monitor can report.

The landmark report will show that OSS can be implemented successfully in schools and present documented examples of cost savings from its use.

Becta’s report, based on a study of 15 schools, will state that open source office products have been demonstrated to offer schools a cost-effective alternative to proprietary software.

Among the key findings will be that primary and secondary schools using OSS substantially reduced the total cost of ownership per PC. Support costs – typically accounting for more than half a PC’s total cost – showed the biggest reduction.

Furthermore, case studies showed that the cost advantages of OSS were often used to increase provision, rather than reduce overall budgets in schools.

It will also highlight that OSS can provide an appropriate infrastructure for schools and is well supported, with good reliability and performance.

When some people say they’re creating a Home Theater, they mean it.

[Quote:]

SP-kamerlid Harry van Bommel noemt de online referendumwijzer ‘buitengewoon selectief en buitengewoon misleidend’. De site van het Instituut voor Publiek en Politiek (IPP) helpt de kiezer zijn standpunt te bepalen bij het referendum over de Europese grondwet.

Zelf kreeg Van Bommel, verklaard tegenstander van de Europese grondwet, bij het invullen van de test een score van 68 procent (eens met de grondwet). “Het IPP kan beter stoppen met deze referendumwijzer”, meent Van Bommel.

Ik heb de “test” ook even gedaan – en kwam op 66 procent uit. Mijn belangrijkste thema’s kwamen in het geheel niet voor in de test – de wijze waarop bijvoorbeeld de Europese Commissie wordt samengesteld, toch het machtigste orgaan in de EU, wordt niet genoemd. Rechten van het parlement om de Commissie te “corrigeren” ook niet. Democratie is kennelijk geen issue voor de grondwet, dus ik blijf een “Nee” stemmer.

[Quote:]

The Inter-American Telecommunication Commission meets three times a year in various cities across the Americas to discuss such dry but important issues as telecommunications standards and spectrum regulations. But for this week’s meeting in Guatemala City, politics has barged onto the agenda. At least four of the two dozen or so U.S. delegates selected for the meeting, sources tell TIME, have been bumped by the White House because they supported John Kerry’s 2004 campaign.

The State Department has traditionally put together a list of industry representatives for these meetings, and anyone in the U.S. telecom industry who had the requisite expertise and wanted to go was generally given a slot, say past participants. Only after the start of Bush’s second term did a political litmus test emerge, industry sources say.

The White House admits as much: “We wanted people who would represent the Administration positively, and–call us nutty–it seemed like those who wanted to kick this Administration out of town last November would have some difficulty doing that,” says White House spokesman Trent Duffy.

Many, many more jewels of graphic design here…