Eideard

Microsoft said today that it is scrapping its aging Windows Live Spaces blogging technology and will instead make WordPress the default blogging option for Windows Live. It’s the latest move by Microsoft to use Windows Live to connect to other leading Web services, rather than rely on its own, less popular options.

For example, Microsoft has shuttered its not-so-widely-used Soapbox video-sharing site and now gives users of Windows Live Movie Maker the option of posting to Facebook or YouTube. Within Windows Live Photo Gallery, people can post to Windows Live, but can also share photos directly to Facebook and Flickr.

“There are 30 million people who are actively using Windows Live Spaces and have been eagerly awaiting the next set of new blogging features,” Microsoft’s Dharmesh Mehta said in a blog post. “For these customers, Windows Live and WordPress.com have worked together to build a simple way to move your blog posts, comments, and integrated photos right over to WordPress.com and start taking advantage of all their new features…”

Microsoft said that users can start migrating their Windows Live Spaces blog to WordPress today and that WordPress will be the default option when its updated Windows Live Writer blogging tool comes out later this fall. Windows Live users will also be able to send an update to their friends when they have a new blog post, Microsoft said.

I continue to be astounded at Microsoft business incompetence. This begs the question of what is it they actually do with all their employees. I realize their pay sucks compared to many other high tech firms; but, still – they continue to flounder with semi-established packages – then, relent and let them die.

Though I am pleased to see their clients arrive as an addition to the WordPress community.

The family of an obese woman whose body was ‘too fat’ to be cremated is suing a French crematorium for discrimination.

Danielle Pelabarrere, 63, who weighed 22-stone, died of a heart attack in Merignac, near Bordeaux on Saturday.

When her husband Andre booked her coffin into the local crematorium however, he was told it was two inches too wide to fit into the incinerator. The family also tried crematoriums in neighbouring French towns, but none were able to help.

Only Toulouse, which is 100 miles away, said it had an incinerator large enough to take the three-feet wide coffin. Mr Pelabarrere is now demanding compensation from the crematorium “for its inability to meet our needs.”

“It is an outrage. She was mocked for her size in life, and now she is being mocked in death,” he said.

Jean-Claude Oruezabal, the Merignac crematorium manager, denied discrimination. “We accept people and coffins of any size in principle, but in this case it just wont fit and there is nothing we can do”, he said.

I must admit that being a grillin’ and chillin’ kinda guy, at first I thought they were worried about fire spreading to the rest of the building from a fat flare-up.

But, suing because the chosen casket doesn’t fit into the furnace is absurd. They could have put her into the oven in a shroud – or a little judicious squeezing into a narrower casket. I’m willing to bet none of these alternatives were acceptable to the family. Which makes their lawsuit even more ridiculous.

During an open book exam on agent guidelines covering domestic investigations, “a significant number of FBI employees engaged in some form of cheating or improper conduct,” a Justice Department report has found.

The Office of Inspector General found agents and analysts broke rules by consulting with others about the exam, using and sharing answer sheets and in some instances even using a computer system flaw to reveal the correct answers to questions.

The test was open book, but FBI employees were required to take it on their own and the last question specifically asked each test-taker to certify he or she did not consult other people in arriving at answers.

In some instances, FBI officials became suspicious when employees finished the exam in less than 20 minutes when most employees needed an hour and a half or more…

The report did not give names of employees who are alleged to have cheated, but it said among those are several top level officials at the Washington field office including the assistant director in charge there. The assistant director at the time was Joseph Persichini, who retired before the investigation and disciplinary decisions were finalized.

According to the report, three other top officials in the Washington office acted improperly, including the legal adviser…

The test was only about civil liberties and whether or not agents understood that freedoms, privacy and other rights should not be violated.

Nothing important.

The phone for listening in on anyone is in the lower lefthand drawer

Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally…

There is not yet agreement on important elements, like how to word statutory language defining who counts as a communications service provider, according to several officials familiar with the deliberations…But they want it to apply broadly, including to companies that operate from servers abroad, like Research in Motion, the Canadian maker of BlackBerry devices…

Several of the proposal’s likely requirements:

¶ Communications services that encrypt messages must have a way to unscramble them.

¶ Foreign-based providers that do business inside the United States must install a domestic office capable of performing intercepts.

¶ Developers of software that enables peer-to-peer communication must redesign their service to allow interception.

RTFA. Please. Lots of anecdotal information. Nothing that reassures me – or suddenly provides a leap of faith and trust in our government to do the right thing.

May as well start cranking up, now, to finance constitutional challenges, folks. Unless you believe that Congress – our elected heroes, the White House – more elected heroes, will change political horses in mid-stream and decide that protecting any right to privacy should be superior to government snooping.

Aliens have landed, infiltrated British nuclear missile sites and deactivated the weapons, according to US military pilots.

The beings have repeated their efforts in the US and have been active since 1948, the men said, and accused the respective governments of trying to keep the information secret.

The unlikely claims were compiled by six former US airmen and another member of the military who interviewed or researched the evidence of 120 ex-military personnel.

The information they have collected suggests that aliens could have landed on Earth as recently as seven years ago. The men’s aim is to press the two governments to recognise the long-standing extra-terrestrial visits as fact…

One of the men, Capt Robert Salas, said: “The US Air Force is lying about the national security implications of unidentified aerial objects at nuclear bases and we can prove it.”

He said said he witnessed such an event first-hand on March 16, 1967, at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana which housed Minuteman nuclear missiles…

Col Charles Halt said he saw a UFO at the former military base RAF Bentwaters, near Ipswich, 30 years ago, during which he saw beams of light fired into the base then heard on the military radio that aliens had landed inside the nuclear storage area.

He said: “I believe that the security services of both the United States and the United Kingdom have attempted – both then and now – to subvert the significance of what occurred at RAF Bentwaters by the use of well-practised methods of disinformation.”

Well! I think we should get right on this. Right after our governments complete their mutually self-assigned task of tidying up the world.

Wait. Maybe that’s the plan?

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

France’s ex-justice minister Rachida Dati mixed up the words “fellatio” and “inflation” – which sound similar in French – during a TV interview.

She told Canal Plus: “I see some [foreign investment funds] looking for returns of 20 or 25% at a time when fellatio is close to zero.”

Within hours, the video was an internet hit on websites such as YouTube.

Ms Dati, now a Euro MP, later laughed off the whole episode saying she had spoken too quickly…

The French word for fellatio is “fellation”, which sounds similar to the word “inflation”.

Ms Dati left the government last year amid criticism of her management style, and gossip about her clothes and love life.

She is now an MEP and serves as mayor of Paris’s seventh arrondissement.

At least she sees the humor of mispronouncing a word – and doesn’t try to pass it off as a neologism.

The American rightwing still has the market cornered on infallible.

Holy Roddy McDowall. Christine O’Donnell doesn’t understand why monkeys can’t turn into people right before her eyes.

Bill Maher continued his video torment of O’Donnell by releasing another old clip of her on his HBO show on Friday night, this time showing one in which she argued that “Evolution is a myth.”

Maher shot back, “Have you ever looked at a monkey?” To which O’Donnell rebutted, “Why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?”

The comedian has a soft spot for the sweet-faced Republican Senate candidate from Delaware, but as he told me on Friday, it’s “powerful stupid to think primate evolution could happen fast enough to observe it. That’s bacteria…

In the Republican primary, O’Donnell beat Congressman Mike Castle, who had the temerity to support stem-cell research and acknowledge global warming. O’Donnell’s numbers are dropping, while Castle is still beating the Democratic candidate, Chris Coons, by almost 20 points in a theoretical matchup.

In 2007, O’Donnell frantically warned Bill O’Reilly, “American scientific companies are crossbreeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains…”

Dr. Irving Weissman, director of Stanford’s Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, did the first experiments injecting human brain-forming stem cells into the brains of immune-deficient mice 10 years ago…

Dr. Weissman is sensitive to ethical questions and has tried to ensure that “the nightmare scenario” won’t happen: putting embryonic stem cells into mice at the earliest stages, which could give rise to every tissue in the body including human sperm and eggs, which could lead to two mice mating and the early formation of human fetuses in the body of a mouse.

He is working toward breakthroughs on multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, spinal cord injuries, strokes, breast cancer and a host of other diseases, and is worried by the retrogressive attitude about science and medicine among the new crop of Tea Partiers…

Dr. Weissman said, “The question they should be asked is, if it were their child or wife or selves or parents and there was this whole list of diseases treated by stem cells, would they deny these therapies?”

RTFA. Lots of details about individual Congressional races, individuals so concerned with ideology they refuse to face their world-class ignorance. Though, as usual, we have to face the concern that our whole electorate is focused wholly on the very slowly-growing economic rebound. Even that reflects our nation’s collective ignorance of history, previous battles through recession and rightwingers who could care less.

The trailer for Michael Jackson: The Experience claims the game “will electrify the world.” At the very least, it’ll piss off the downstairs neighbors.

The first video for the new dancing game, released Thursday by gamemaker Ubisoft, depicts people on the street re-enacting the late Michael Jackson’s famous moves, paying particular homage to the iconic video for early ’80s hit “Billie Jean.”

The message of the trailer is that before all the private ugliness and his untimely death, the King of Pop brought smiles to the faces of millions and inspired more than a few to moonwalk.

With the wild success of Just Dance, there’s a chance that Michael Jackson: The Experience could be another smash hit for Ubisoft.

The major stumbling block in my mind is convincing today’s kids to try listening to music that isn’t made by Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber. There’s a good reason that Harmonix’s Dance Central draws, mostly, from the last 10 years of pop: Kids don’t always go for old tunes.

And if you rely on crusty folks who remember the old days to drive sales of your game, you risk a mediocre showing. So-so numbers won’t cut it when you’re licensing expensive music from rights-holders with lots of caveats about how their likenesses can be used.

We’ll find out, soon, won’t we? I think the reviewer is a stiff.

Just look at the tracks that are popular with Guitar Hero. The same people who play air guitar in the bathroom will dance with Michael Jackson in the living room.

A group of Jewish activists set sail for the Gaza Strip on Sunday, intent on defying an Israeli blockade and highlighting the suffering of Palestinians who live in the territory. Nine activists from Israel, Britain, Germany and the United States left Famagusta port in northern Cyprus with a small quantity of aid aboard their British-flagged catamaran, “Irene…”

“I want to raise my voice against evil and draw attention to 1.5 million people under siege. This is inhuman,” said Rami Elhanan, an Israeli peace activist who lost his 14-year-old daughter Smadar to a Palestinian suicide bomber in 1997.

Israel, whose Gaza policies have been under international scrutiny since its marines killed nine Turkish activists in brawls aboard an aid ship on May 31, dismissed the Irene mission as a “provocation…”

“Israel doesn’t have moral borders,” said Reuven Moskovitz, who at 82, is the oldest member of the group and a Holocaust survivor.

“I’m going because I am a survivor. When I was in a ghetto and almost died I hoped there would be human beings who would show compassion and help.”

Moral borders don’t mean a hell of a lot to Israel – or that nation’s patron saints in the White House and Congress. Not in a long, long time.

Would the Israelis attacks Jews on a mission of mercy? They already have done so plenty of times inside that nation’s borders, inside the borders of the lands they occupy. There have always been Jewish activists opposing Israeli imperial dreams. You just don’t get to see them in our obedient media sources.

He provided his own transport to matches

His songs are usually belted out from the plush red seats of the Royal Albert Hall, rather than the football terraces.

But it has emerged that Sir Edward Elgar, the composer of Land of Hope and Glory, penned the world’s first football chant. Titled “He Banged The Leather for Goal”, the theme was written more than 100 years ago in honour of his beloved Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Elgar fell in love with football in February 1898, when he was in the crowd at Molineux for a game between Wolves and Stoke City, two of the founder members of the Football League.

He was inspired by rugged striker Billy Malpass who was celebrated in newspaper headlines the next day.

The reports told of the way he “Banged The Leather for Goal” and Elgar was so taken by it that he put the lyric to a short piece of piano music.

While modern football fans are often associated with loutish behaviour and drunken singing, academics say that terrace songs are an important part of our history.

Professor Steven Mithen, author of The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, said: “Football chants are a very sophisticated activity.

“They come from a point in our evolutionary past before language, when we used music and chanting and dance to bond as social groups.”

Explains church revivals, as well. Though, since my wife is a Wolves fan – I won’t carry homespun anthropology any further than that.