Students protest balluting Vista?

Carphone Warehouse snaps up AOL. One brand, slightly used, and a few customers:

Hmm - that's nearly £200 per customer. Not exactly a bargain...

James

Ah, but carphone warehouse haven't acquired normal subscribers, these AOL subscribers are a special breed.

Its a bit like someone bragging about having ten hard drives in their machine, then you find out that they've got ten lots of 2GB HVD SCSI drives.

Shaliblov

Astronomers hunt for new moons orbiting Saturn. This, for some reason, has enraged at least one reader:

I'm still smarting from Pluto's demotion. I'm still awfully tempted to Paypal-fund something like the launching of a hailstone made of piss into the exactly right orbit to have it officially declared as a planet.

So now if boffins come along and name some fist-sized hunk of ice a new moon of Saturn I'm _really_ going to lose faith in them. If they claim Saturn has a new moon, it better be BIG, and they better do a good job of explaining why they never saw it before.

Because I'm really starting to think that what we have here is some badger-ific collective-intelligence wiki-stronomy.

Arah Leonard

Students at Reading protest the imminent closure of the department:

Since these are students protesting, not full fledged members of the intellectual elite, should not the subheading read 'boffins-in-training protest', or perhaps 'boffinlets protest'?

Lee

Physics students protest at Reading! They're physics students, build a superweapon! North Korea can do it, why can't they? Apathetic bloody students. I've got no sympathy at all. About time they got a taste of real work.

Cydergoth

NASA invests in developing "ballutes" to use as heat shields. That's a ballon crossed with a parachute, so...

"Paraloons" has a far better ring to it.

And the occupants of said craft would have to be paraloonies.

Ben

A new week is proposed to take account of the modern world:

You forgot "Crash Saturday" (when wathever was screwed up on tuesday goes hopelessy horky-dorky) and "Reinstall Sunday"... 'nuff said...

Davide

In response to letters earlier in the week, Sebastien has a question about comets. He might not know it is a question, but see what you think:

A short answer on the comment about comets crashing down the Earth : HAHA waht.

Aren't comets made mostly made out of ice water and carbon dioxyde ice? Interspersed with rocks yeah, but a threat to our beloved dirtball? I kind of remember them being quite small sized, maybe hundred metres, but not-quite-kilometre sized? Also: the darned things DISINTEGRATES against strong solar WIND, so what about atmosphere entry?

Humpf, anyway, nice try at (shamelessly) plugging a book, and fear-mongering.

Sebastien

Who wants to take this one? Yes, you at the back...

And finally, God has given his backing to Andrew Orlowski's long-running anti-blog campaign, and, through an evangelical church, has condemned blogs as "un-Christian". Marvellous.

Much as it always makes me groan to see the latest thing a conservative evangelical church has felt the need to condemn, and much as the subject of blogging didn't need a Christian (or Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist etc etc) critique, I have to say, there ain't no arguing with Proverbs 17:27-28. If there's one piece of advice my life would have benefited from taking, that has to be it.

Keith

So advised, we'll call it a day for the week. More on Tuesday, though. ®