Category: Hell in a handcart

  • This is nearly the ultimate Daily Mail story: Facebook causes cancer

    All that’s missing is a reference to house prices or immigrants. How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer: Social networking sites such as Facebook could raise your risk of serious health problems by reducing levels of face-to-face contact, a doctor claims.

  • Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross and MMR

    I will shut up about MMR in a minute, but I wanted to link to this post by Scots Law Student: Saying that children’s vaccines cause cancer is a sure fire way to terrify parents and this should have been as well received as Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s Radio 2 phonecall. It’s a fair…

  • BadScience.net in MMR quack attack

    When Bad Science’s Ben Goldacre had the temerity to criticise an LBC radio broadcast by Jeni Barnett, lawyers sent him a nastygram. Bad Science is currently offline. As Goldacre writes: It is my view that in this extended broadcast Jeni exemplifies every single canard ever uttered by the antivaccination movement. “It’s a conspiracy by the…

  • Scotland’s new anti-porn legislation. Here we go again

    The Scotsman speaks to Kenny MacAskill, the man behind Scotland’s “even tougher than England’s” forthcoming anti-porn legislation. “We are now in an age dominated by DVDs and the internet. We need to update the law in this global age. England already has some of these laws – but our laws will go further. Our laws…

  • Techradar Tuesday: Don’t blame technology, blame the parents

    Ah, the dangers of a high-tech “toxic childhood”: As much as we’d like to, we can’t protect our kids from everything bad in the world – but what we can and should do is give them the skills and the support they need to deal with the things they’ll surely encounter.

  • Who’s behind the ban on cigarette displays?

    An interesting – and typically angry – post on Devil’s Kitchen by the Filthy Smoker takes a hard look at the new ban on cigarette displays. The extraordinary support for the Department of Health (DOH)’s recommendations can only be explained by looking at the “stakeholders” who got involved. Of the 96,000 responses, only a handful…

  • ID cards: voluntary? Only if you’ve never been on holiday

    Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Clauses in the draft Immigration and Citizenship Bill give state officials the power to make anyone who has ever entered the country, at any time, prove who they are without needing any suspicion of a potential crime. Civil liberty groups warned that the catch-all clauses would effectively cover any…

  • First impressions of the Sanyo Xacti HD-1000 and CA-8 digital camcorders

    I’ve been playing with two video cameras over the last couple of weeks, both by Sanyo and both from the Xacti range: the Xacti CA-8 waterproof camera, and the HD-1000 high definition one. This won’t be an in-depth review, but I think I’ve played with them enough to get a decent picture (sorry) of their…

  • A little rant about the government’s £12 billion interception programme

    I originally wrote this as a column, but couldn’t make it funny… Since 9/11, our government has been rather keen on burying bad news (its phrase, not ours) by announcing really stupid ideas when people are distracted by more immediately terrifying things. So with capitalism apparently collapsing around our ears, cynics would expect something truly…

  • Now I’m nostalgic for “dude, get a Dell”

    The English language has suffered so much violence at the hands of marketers it’s too time-consuming to get irate at all of it. So when Dell decided that “yours is here” would be a good slogan, I ignored it just like a small child screws his eyes shut to make monsters go away. Unfortunately it…