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More fun than phone hacking …….
January 3, 2012 | 
Author A twelve year old kid got a rude awakening when he asked an iPhone a simple question 'how many people are there in the world ?'
Given Apple's legendary technology. he presumably was expecting an answer with several billions in it -
Instead, the automated voice recognition system, SIRI, told the boy ' to shut the fuck up, you ugly twat '.
According to reports in the Telegraph, Charlie Le Quesne was out shopping with his mum.
They were visiting a Tesco store in Coventry, UK, when he started playing with a store demo iPhone, which then started answering back.
Apparently SIRI can be programmed with the users name, so when you ask it a question it replies to you in a nice personalized tone.
Someone in Tesco or Apple obviously took it a stage further, adding their own seasonal greeting.
Could catch on !
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Here weee go, here weee go …………
Not being too concerned with the global meltdown, Dutch National Railways have been concentrating their managerial efforts on a more pressing domestic issue, trains without toilets.
Being careful to reassure people that no particular incident has led them to address this issue, they have announced that toilet-less commuter trains are to start carrying emergency plastic bags that people can urinate into.
The idea being that if your train breaks down somewhere for a few hours then, stranded passengers can somehow, somewhere use these so called 'wee bags ' to alleviate themselves.
A report by the BBC says that these so called 'wee bags' are made by a firm called Travel John (!) and are attached ' to a spout and filled with a powdered substance that turns into a gel'.
Any one not lucky enough to be stranded on a dutch train can buy their own wee bag from Amazon for just over a fiver, or fourteen quid for a pack of six if you're a frequent traveller ( or drink a lot )
Bake a Cake – America’s new Racial Profiling
Republicans, ok Republican students, have come up with a novel way to sell stuff – they base the price you pay on what colour you are, yes really.
Republican students at the University of Berkeley at California are organising a 'bake ' as some form of protest, and are charging people different prices to buy their goodies based on what race they are.
White people pay $2 per pastry, Asian people pay $1.50, Latino's pay $1, African American's pay $0.75 and American Indians pay a whopping $0.25 per pastry.
And if that wasn't bad enough, all women get a twenty five percent discount !
Organisers are referring to this as an 'increase diversity bake sale' and have come up with some guff about it being a form of political protest.
If you think Perry, Bachmann et al are pretty grim, wait a few years ………..
via Reuters
Kiss of Death
Kissing people as a form of greeting is something you tend to associate with Europeans, probably the French or Italians mainly,probably not with the Germans so much .
It is seemingly quite a major issue, apparently, with a leading German referring to people greeting each other at work with a kiss, as a form of terrorism.
According to a report in Management Today, Hans-Michael Klein (presumably not related to Melanie) is saying that Germans in offices are getting fed up with people going round kissing each other, and generally being too friendly.
Klein is chairman of a thing called the Knigge society, referred to as an 'etiquette watchdog', and is reporting mounting concern at the practice.
They've come up with a great solution, which is to put a note on your desk saying you don't want to be kissed – but that may be too late !
Perhaps you should wear a clove of garlic round your neck instead.
Trust me, I’m a er….. doctor, policeman, burglar !
Police in various cities in Turkey have been out testing just how gullible their residents are .
In one city, Gaziantep, they dressed up as doctors by putting on white coats and wearing stethoscopes round their necks.
They then went round houses, knocking on peoples doors, telling them they were doing a survey on high blood pressure, and giving them a pill to swallow.
Apparently 86 percent of the people they visited swallowed the pill immediately !
In another city, in Adana, Southeast Turkey, police went round local homes, pressing peoples intercoms saying, 'I'm a burglar, please open the door' , and guess what, most people did .
Police said they were stunned – really good for community relations.
Pack up yr troubles……..
Sounds like an idea George W Bush would have been proud of .
Apparently the probation office in a county in the UK have been giving out tents to homeless ex-offenders to sleep in, when they have been unable to find them any overnight accommodation.
Nottingham probation office did it a few times last year, and expect to do it even more often this year, as cuts deepen.
Their logic is that if someone leaves their office with nowhere to sleep that night, they are more likely to re-offend.
Giving them a tent and a sleeping bag makes that less likely, apparently.
Difficult to fault the logic, but a pretty sad indictment of the state of the country – don't despair though, there's a royal wedding coming up !
America’s new secret weapon …….
Who said american's weren't resourceful – bet this could save loads
off their $640 billion defence budget !
You didn’t die in vain ….
Swimmers at a leisure centre just outside Birmingham, UK will now get fit knowing that, in part, their increased energy levels will come from more than just their own efforts.
The local authority in Redditch has come up with the bright / tasteless idea of diverting what they call 'waste heat' from a crematorium to heat the swimming pool and health centre which happens to be next door.
Lot of guff from the council about energy efficiency, and how this is done a lot in Sweden.
Truth is that schemes like this will come to symbolize the meaning of the phrase 'anything goes' in a very austere and bleak cut driven England of 2011.
