So, five British yachtsmen have been found in Iranian waters and detained by the Iranians. Now, this sort of thing has happened before. In 2004 eight Britons were held captive by the Iranians because they strayed into Iranian waters. They were paraded on TV, just as these five have been.

I've not seen anything from the Iranians other than, "...'serious' measures will be taken against a UK yacht crew it if is proved they had 'evil intentions'". Where is the government spokesperson saying, "We're sure it's a misunderstanding - an accident - and we'll sort this out as soon as possible." No. Instead they go for the jugular with, "if you're intentionally being naughty, we'll skin you alive," or words to that effect. This alone shows me the childish nature of the Iranian government. They expect the worst, because they think the whole world is against them. We aren't, we just want our people back unharmed, and soon.

If five Iranian yachtsmen were found in UK waters, would we parade them on TV? I doubt it. There would be media footage of them, but our government wouldn't purposely parade them on 'state' TV.

Tony Blair has been ruled out of getting the EU President job! Hurrah!!!

From BBC News:
A French court has convicted the Church of Scientology of fraud, but stopped short of banning the group from operating in France. Two branches of the group's operations and several of its leaders in France have been fined. The case came after complaints from two women, one of whom said she was manipulated into paying more than 20,000 euros (£18,100) in the 1990s. France regards Scientology as a sect, not a religion.

Prosecutors had asked for the group's French operations to be dissolved and more heavily fined, but a legal loophole prevented any ban. Instead, a judge ordered the Church's Celebrity Centre and a bookshop to pay a 600,000 euro fine.

Alain Rosenberg, the group's head in France, was handed a two-year suspended jail sentence and fined 30,000 euros. Three other leading members of the group were also fined.

Ban 'still possible'
Unlike the US, France has always refused to recognise Scientology as a religion, arguing that it is a purely commercial operation designed to make as much money as it can at the expense of often vulnerable victims, the BBC's Emma Jane Kirby reports from Paris. Over the past 10 years, France has taken several individual members of the group to court on charges of fraud and misleading publicity, but this is the first time the organisation itself has been charged, she says.

In the case leading up to Tuesday's ruling, a woman said she was sold expensive life-improvement courses, vitamins and other products after taking a personality test. A second woman alleges she was fired by her Scientologist boss after refusing to undergo testing and sign up to courses. The Church denied that any mental manipulation took place.

The court was unable to impose a ban because of a legal amendment that was passed just before the trial began, preventing the banning of a organisation convicted of fraud. However, that amendment has now been changed. "It is very regrettable that the law quietly changed before the trial," Georges Fenech, the head of the Inter-ministerial Unit to Monitor and Fight Cults, told French TV. "The system has now been put in place by parliament and it is certain that in the future, if new offences are committed, a ban could eventually be pronounced," he said.

A lawyer defending Scientology's operations in France said there would be an appeal. Eric Roux, a spokesman for the Celebrity Centre, urged France to recognise Scientology's "legality". "Religious freedom is in danger in this country," he said.

The Church of Scientology was founded in 1954 by the late science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard, and includes Hollywood stars such as John Travolta and Tom Cruise.
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For shame, France! For shame! Just ban the nutters! :)

You can get your copy here, but if you don't fancy accepting the terms and conditions found in the EULA, why not just grab a copy of it from here.

Now, the terms state the following:
2.1 In order to use the Services, you must first agree to the Terms. You may not use the Services if you do not accept the Terms.
2.2 You can accept the Terms by:
(A) clicking to accept or agree to the Terms, where this option is made available to you by Google in the user interface for any Service; or
(B) by actually using the Services. In this case, you understand and agree that Google will treat your use of the Services as acceptance of the Terms from that point onwards.

if you don't accept the terms on the download page, and bypass them as above, using the software automatically means you accept the terms. However, is it fair to impose terms upon you that you haven't read? I mean, download the .dmg file, install it and run it. Where are the terms? By running it you have automatically accepted terms that the software never showed you. I think that's a bit mean. I would expect the software to show you the EULA upon first launch, wouldn't you?

Trust Microsoft to release the bit of software that's going to save the company, only to totally f**k up the delivery! There are plenty of stories about this on the interwebs.

They used a crap company to deliver a product that had to be downloaded in some non-standard format; they didn't send product keys to loads of people (me included); the unpacking of these non-standard files failed with a cryptic error; you had to download another GB of 'tools' to be able to unpack the data, and then the installer didn't work for many people. What a farce!

US President Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009. Not to take anything away from the fact that this is an astounding award, but why has Obama received it? He hasn't done anything for world peace yet. All he's done is appease Muslims.

On the plus side, giving him - as leader of the country that's invading Muslim countries - this should really annoy them. Like when they got annoyed when Salman Rushdie was awarded a knighthood by the UK :)

Oh yeah, and did you know that the deadline for nominations was barely two weeks after Obama took office? That means he was nominated based upon TWO WEEKS of work. This was purely a political decision, and makes a mockery of the Nobel Peace Prize itself.

Remember when the Irish voted NO to the EU Constitution? Well, the EU didn't like that, and they re-wrote some (10%) of it to make it more appealing to the Irish.

Now, the Irish are having another referendum on this. If they vote NO, the treaty is dead in the water again. If they vote YES, then the treaty is ratified and all 27 states of the EU have signed away lots of power to... Tony Blair.

Okay, if the Irish had originally voted YES to the original EU Constitution, would the EU have pushed for a second vote??? No. It seems that the EU will only accept a YES.

People should think about this before they sign away their national sovereignty. As a UK citizen, my government deemed me and the other 60 million inhabitants incapable of deciding how we want our country to be governed. People should think about that one, too.

Here's how it happened on my Mac Pro (Early 2008 model)...

- BACKUP COMPUTER!
- Put DVD in drive. Run installer.
- Go through the upgrade install.
- Computer reboots.
- Safari crashes. Mail crashes. QuickTime X won't open any files. Computer freezes - mouse can be moved, but nothing works. Nothing can be clicked on.
- Decide to format drive and start again.
- So, insert DVD and run the installer. Click "Utilities..." so I can reboot from DVD.
- Format the hard drive using Disk Utility on the DVD.
- Go through a fresh, clean install.
- Computer reboots.
- Get error message saying, "The Mac OS X installation couldn't be completed."
- Reboot, and the "fontworker" process crashes.
- Continue without a reboot.
- "SystemUIServer" crashes.
- Reboot, and everything seems fine now.
- Restore from my Time Machine backup. All working well.

So, there we go. This is easily the worst experience I've had in installing OS X. I still love it, but I don't appreciate the troubles I've had to install the latest version :(

From BBC News:
The detailed chemical structure of a single molecule has been imaged for the first time, say researchers. The physical shape of single carbon nanotubes has been outlined before, using similar techniques - but the new method even shows up chemical bonds. Understanding structure on this scale could help in the design of many things on the molecular scale, particularly electronics or even drugs. The IBM researchers report their findings in the journal Science. It is the same group that in July reported the feat of measuring the charge on a single atom.

Fine tuning
In both cases, a team from IBM Research Zurich used what is known as an atomic force microscope or AFM. Their version of the device acts like a tiny tuning fork, with one of the prongs of the fork passing incredibly close to the sample and the other farther away. When the fork is set vibrating, the prong nearest the sample will experience a minuscule shift in the frequency of its vibration, simply because it is getting close to the molecule. Comparing the frequencies of the two prongs gives a measure of just how close the nearer prong is, effectively mapping out the molecule's structure. The measurement requires extremes of precision. In order to avoid the effects of stray gas molecules bounding around, or the general atomic-scale jiggling that room-temperature objects experience, the whole setup has to be kept under high vacuum and at blisteringly cold temperatures. However, the tip of the AFM's prong is not well-defined and isn't necessarily sharp on the scale of single atoms. The effect of this bluntness is to blur the instrument's images.

The researchers have now hit on the idea of deliberately picking up just one small molecule - made of one atom of carbon and one of oxygen - with the AFM tip, forming the sharpest, most well-defined tip possible. Their measurement of a pentacene molecule using this carbon monoxide tip shows the bonds between the carbon atoms in five linked rings, and even suggests the bonds to the hydrogen atoms at the molecule's periphery.

Tip of the iceberg
Lead author of the research Leo Gross told BBC News that the group is aiming to combine their ability to measure individual charges with the new technique, characterising molecules at a truly unprecedented level of detail. That will help in particular in the field of "molecular electronics", a potential future for electronics in which individual molecules serve as switches and transistors. Although the approach can trace out the ethereal bonds that connect atoms, it cannot distinguish between atoms of different types. The team aims to use the new technique in tandem with a similar one known as scanning tunnelling microscopy - in which a tiny voltage is applied accross the sample - to determine if the two methods in combination can deduce the nature of each atom in the AFM images. That would help the entire field of chemistry, in particular the synthetic chemistry used for drug design. The results are of wide interest to others who study the nano-world with similar instruments. For them, implementing the same approach is as simple as picking up one of these carbon monoxide molecules with their AFM before taking a measurement.
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Simply amazing! The first image of the detailed chemical structure of a single molecule. It's fantastic what science can do.

So, Snow Leopard is out today. Where's my copy? I don't know. Perhaps it's sitting in a room somewhere in London instead of being in my hands because our postmen/women are on strike? Grrr.