Rupert Murdoch is threatening to stop all his publications appearing in Google News. That will raise the quality of Google News. The bias in his rags does this Australian dinosaur no favours.

I was about to list some of my old computer science books on eBay, but they wanted me to list them with free postage. I have asked for that in the Post Office before now, but they just laughed.

Presumably the idea is that I will include the postage in my starting price, and then eBay can charge their percentage final value fee on the postage as well as the item. Greedy.

Anyway, I have listed the books on Amazon instead. Their charges are fair, and visible when you list the item.

I'm building up to an intellectually stimulating post, by playing a little Spore in between putting stuff on eBay. As you may be able to see, I just terraformed this place to T1 for its inhabitants, and plonked a monolith in their town. Then I gave them some crop circles to look at, and will now wait to see if they are nice guys when they evolve...

This scam looks quite realistic, and could potentially be VERY nasty indeed. The clickable link goes to somewhere in Russia, that will attempt to run a PHP program on your computer.

Avoid!

I'm going to keep it simple because Alan Johnson has problems understanding science, evidence, truth, and above all he seems to have enormous difficulty understanding classifications. Or perhaps he is being bullied into doing stupid things by somebody who wants to "send a message" to us. Anyway, here we have a nice simple example...

A zoo decides to classify its animals, like this...

• A Dreadfully dangerous animals that will kill you if they get the chance
• B Fairly dangerous animals that might be able to give you a painful bite
• C Tame animals that you could keep as household pets

The zoo has a lion. It's quite obviously extremely dangerous, and they put it in group A. Pretty sensible, really.

They also have a few skunks. These don't hunt to to kill, and will only bite you if you really annoy them. They also happen to be able to spray you with an awful smell. Are you with me so far, Alan?

For the benefit of those who like fluffy pets, the zoo has a pussy cat. It can bite and scratch a bit but can not sensibly be described as dangerous. The zoo lets children stroke it, but has a notice on the wall saying it might bite and scratch if they abuse it.

Now I'm pretty sure you can all, except possibly Alan and Gordon, see what I am getting at here. For Gordon and Alan, this is a metaphor for what you are doing with cannabis.

If some cartoon maker comes along and paints the pussy cat black with a white stripe along its back, only Pepe Le Pew is going to believe it is a skunk. It is in class C, no matter how you paint it. Got me?

And, by the way, Gordon, only morons believe that skunks are lethal. Sure, they're pretty stinky, but I don't think a skunk ever killed anyone.

I'm a bit baffled, I must confess, at the fury that has broken out here. On occasion, I have pointed out to people that they have forgotten to separate their tags with commas, resulting in a huge tag that will never, ever, match anything else in the universe. So a five word, fifty character limit on tags seems quite sensible to me. The message telling me about this had a huge list of long tags I had used, and to be honest, none of them were actually written for the main purpose a tag should have.

Which is...

In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system.

Thanks to Wikipedia.

In fact, I was only bothered at all by the loss of a couple of them, the one which said "09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0" which has great sentimental value, and the one which said "Mind you don't step in the Griffin".

I can still find all the posts I have made about politicians eyes by searching on "eyes". So what remains is still a tag system, and the blog servers now hold considerably less inappropriate cruft. So probably searches will be a lot faster too, and that is good.

Update: see! They have noticed the fuss, and have an answer.

It is clear now that Alan Johnson wants to be our next mad eyed prime minister. We already know that he does not believe in science, or actual truth, or evidence, preferring rather the views of the "one-eyed Scottish idiot" (© Jeremy Clarkson) who has been told by his god that something called skunk has actually killed people. His complexion tells us he thinks alcohol is a vitamin, don't you think?

Well, I don't think we need all these politicians. Ever since 1958, I have believed that it would be a good idea to get a committee of proper scientists to run the world. How could it be any worse, apart from anything else?

Here, you could have seen a comment I left on a spammer's blog page, but blog.co.uk have sensibly deleted the blogger who did it. May they rot in the bit-bucket!

The BBC version naturally makes more sense than the Daily Mail version.

All we need to know about the Daily Fail's reporting is the biased and incorrect headline "Sacked: Drug tsar who claimed Ecstasy, cannabis and LSD are less harmful than alcohol". He was not a "tsar"; that is the title of the person the government employs to carry on the "War on Drugs". He did not "claim" anything. He showed it, using science. And alcohol is much more harmful than those other things.

That is what makes this so awful. The useless Jacqui Smith deliberately ignored proper scientific evidence because it didn't fit in with the stupid view that alcohol and tobacco are safe. And now we have Alan Johnson, who sacks scientists because their results don't fit in with what he tells us must be true.

We are expected to believe people who have been fiddling their expenses, telling us lies to get us into wars, and other things they have kept hidden, and not believe scientists. Well I am not falling for that rubbish, Johnson, as I am not stupid. No doubt, I will be shipped off to the re-education centre soon enough...

After all, our government ignores it, time after time, quite blatantly. Take for example the Phorm scandal, where BT spied on its customers. The government was told quite clearly to make BT stop doing this, but of course, the government was already planning to do it as well, so they ignored the law. And they are still ignoring it, in spite of the final warning.

Today, telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding said: "Ensuring digital privacy is a key for building trust in the internet. I therefore call on the UK authorities to change their national laws to ensure that British citizens fully benefit from the safeguards set out in EU law concerning confidentiality of electronic communications."

Europe tries to protect us from the Stalinists, but what was the response?

The Home Office, which is responsible for RIPA, said: "We are firmly committed to protecting users' privacy and data.

"We are considering the Commission's letter and will respond in due course."

I have looked for acrostics in this message, but can't find them. All I can see is a total contempt on the part of our elected government for European law, wherever it attempts to stop their move towards a totalitarian police state.

So, tell me, clearly, why I can't pick and choose which laws I obey and which I just ignore?