The Clever Shark

US forces to leave Saudi Arabia altogether. Wahhabi shocker.

Our friend the Iraqi Information Minister is back and apparently starting a new job doing PR for Microsoft. It’s a natural step really, and a considerable increase in the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) part of the job, but that seems to be Comical Ali’s bag.

Itanic hardware x86 emulator so bad Intel writes software emulator for it. Opteron marketing evidently scaring bejeezus out of Chipzilla.

RIAA looks at Iraq; evidently wants to maintain this whole Axis of Evil thing. Just the thing we need: Hilary Rosen as the travelling Ill-Will Ambassador. Evidently there’s not enough hate for America in the Middle East, but that’s about to change… look for really crappy, over-marketed music for the tone-deaf coming out of Baghdad in the near future.

Man pulled over for DUI check flees to freedom of PD parking lot; wanted to ‘finish smoking his crack’. Sometimes they just write themselves, that’s all I can say…

Arab News calls for an end to Israel scapegoating. Somewhere Satan reports that his place is getting “a bit drafty.” Yup, read it twice, I found it hard to believe the first time around. Is the Middle East getting “destabilized” into a sort of peaceful existence?

Pak PM rings up Indian counterpart. Surprisingly, does not ask if latter’s “fridge is running.” Seriously though, this is actually a pretty major bit of news for these two nuclear neighbors who haven’t been on diplomatic terms for a long time. Hopefully this will lead to better relations down the line.

This has to be the crappiest disguise in the history of self-concealment. Seriously, did this guy honestly believe he was going to fool anyone by dressing up like this for his sex offender registration?

Read the fine print. Apple’s new music service may sound attractive, but it uses yet another closed, proprietary format. This is not the first time Apple uses “soft goods” in order to sell hardware, nor is it likely to be the last. I’ll stick to MP3 myself thank you very much, and will continue to shun any service which considers me a thief who needs to be restrained by formats I can’t use on the hardware I already have.

Module Madness and Semantic Stupidity If XHTML is supposed to be a transposition of HTML to the XML standard, and the XML standard is modular, why is XHTML not modular? And why does the W3C seem to have given up on modularity for XHTML 2.0 by requiring a DTD which isn’t even really necessary? Tristan Louis ponders these questions.