Illusional Reality

Atom-smasher sets record energy levels: CERN

The world's biggest atom-smasher has set a world record by accelerating to energy levels that had never been previously reached, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said Monday. Skip related content
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"CERN?s Large Hadron Collider has today become the world?s highest energy particle accelerator, having accelerated its twin beams of protons to an energy of 1.18 TeV in the early hours of the morning," said the organisation.

A teraelectronvolt (TeV) is equivalent to the energy level of a flying mosquito, while CERN wants to ultimately achieve maximum power of 7.0 teraelectronvolts or trillion electronvolts.

The previous world record was set by a the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's Tevatron collider in 2001, when it reached 0.98 TeV.

I don't know why but everytime I see a story about the LHC I just have to read it, I think its the same twisted reason I (and many others) watch motor sports..for the crashes...

Each time I open the news report I expect to see that Geneva has been wiped off the map or that we're gonna be sucked into a black hole, now that'll be some good reading!

If anyone actually follows this you'll know that a while back I placed a bid on "www.illusionalreality.com", just for those people that would omit the hyphen in the site name, and the people that were squatting on the name asked for $3,500 to release it, it goes without saying that I kindly told then what they could do with it.

I had pretty much given up on the domain name, it had beens years since I tried to originally tried to register and the rights were always renewed but the other day just for fun i did a search on the domain and saw it was available, I think I may have set a record for registration speed, so I am now very very pleased to announce I am the owner of www.illusionalreality.com with not a hyphen in sight.

Since the 1st of September, Eircom have caved to pressure and placed an IP block on Pirate Bay. Eircom is the only ISP that has given in. UPC and BT Ireland explicitly denied the request from the music industry and said they would rather fight the issue in court.

“UPC has informed the rights holders that there is no basis under Irish law requiring an ISP to block access to certain websites and that it will not agree to a request that goes beyond what is currently provided for under Irish law,” UPC said in a statement.

“Should the rights holders proceed with their threat of legal action if UPC fails to block access to Pirate Bay, UPC has every intention of vigorously defending its position in Court,” they add. BT Ireland sides with UPC and said that there is no legal basis for the request to block The Pirate Bay.

What I wonder is if Eircom can be as naive to believe that Pirate Bay is the only torrent site out there? Pirate Bay's undoing was in its fame/infamy depending on your position on the matter.

But theres no need to worry, Eircom have never had the greatest ip security minds behind them, we are after all talking about an ISP that has probably the easiest security to crack around, let us not forget they addressed this my advising us to change our wireless network name and so they may have blocked the direct IP address but there are always proxies, even as I type this I'm searching Pirate Bay thanks to the good folks at Anonymouse

So there we have it folks, another half assed attempt to control our internet freedom...wonder if they'll block my blog next.

This is taken from Yahoo! News..

Italian thief thanks police for rescuing him from his victims

An Italian thief thanked police officers for arresting him and putting an end to a beating from Korean tourists whom he had robbed in Rome, police said on Monday. Skip related content
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"I must thank you, they were massacring me," the 48-year-old criminal told police after he was arrested near the Theatre of Marcellus, one of the monuments in Rome's historic centre.

The thief, from the northern region of Liguria, stole a handbag from a Korean family when they were not paying attention. He threatened the family with a knife when he was spotted and then tried to flee.

Two men from the family, in their twenties, chased him for several hundred metres before they got him down with taekwondo moves. They disarmed the thief and continued to beat him.

A patrolling police officer intervened, separated the three and arrested the thief immediately.

"Normally tourists will just call us and report the incidents," the officer said. "In this case, the two got really excited and could have seriously injured the thief."

The young Koreans left after they got the handbag back. The thief was transferred to a prison in Rome and will face robbery charges.

Armed robbery in Rome experienced a sharp decline last year with 4,246 cases reported in 2008 compared with 5,133 in 2007.

I love it!

I've been eagerly awaiting the release of Windows 7 for a while now, unlike any previous version of Windows I actually feel interested in this one.

Up until recently Microsoft had planned to release a unique version of the browser in Europe dubbed "Windows 7 E", this version was meant to come without Internet Explorer hard coded into the OS but now that plan has been changed again. The new plan is to release the same version of 7 here and the rest of the world but we will recieve a ballot screen offering a choice of browsers.

While personally I don't really care which browser comes preinstalled as the first thing i'll be doing is adding in every other browser but its a real show of how Microsoft are trying to get around European competition laws.

So now all I can do is wait for the first ship dates.