Dinky - FutureMe allows you to send emails to yourself in the future, so you can check up on whether you got the job/partner/house/whatever you’re dreaming about. Or remind yourself to take the rubbish out. As well as that, you can also read other people’s emails to themselves, most are pretty run-of-the-mill stuff but the odd one is amusing.

McDonald’s to launch own clothing range. Presumably they will be predominantly in XL size?

One (annoying) feature of the modern CD is the stupid PC extras (videos, secret web links), of relatively little quality or merit, that come hidden away on them and serve little purpose except annoy you when you try and play it on your computer. They’re crap. But much cooler are their precursors - Spectrum games encoded in audio on Vinyl LPs. I don’t know why, especially as the data would have sounded awful if played by accident on your hi-fi, and most of the extras were crap (though the HAIL SATAN one is a gem), but there’s something wonderfully woo and retro about them.

Spotted this story on the Register about someone who has been sacked from CIS for allegedly posting abusive messages on a web board from work. The scary bit about it is this quote from the (former) personnel manager:

“She was quite clearly identified through her email address and had anyone seen what was being communicated it would have reflected very badly on the chief executive [and] the CIS as a whole.”

The article implies that there was no other evidence it was her who posted the offending material. If so, then the messages could have been anyone who had compromised her account or someone just pretending to be her. Trying to identify anyone using just an email address is ludicrous, you’d have to be a complete incompetent to believe it was conclusive evidence. If there is no further evidence against her, then the CIS should be suitably punished for its stupidity.

Wonderful - a compilation of the “Holy x, Batman!” phrases uttered by Robin in the Batman & Robin TV series. “Holy priceless collection of Etruscan snoods!”, “Holy Robert Louis Stevenson!” and “Holy interplanetary yardstick!” are some of my favourites, though disappointingly there’s no “Holy hand grenade!” or “Holy Roman Empire!”

(via grayblog)

SawStop. A saw that detects what material it’s cutting through, and if it think it’s a finger or some other body part, it stops right away. A really cool video of it in action is available, although they use a hot dog rather than a real human finger, cowards. Apparently it works using electrical pulses and detecting major changes in capacitance. Ain’t technology great?

(via Boing Boing)

So what type of cheese are you?

The New Scientist last week gave us a breathtaking exclusive about intelligent chatbot programs called ChatNannies that could pose as children in a chatroom and detect any paedophiles trying to groom them.

However, his claims of chatbots so intelligent they appear to be human (effectively passing the Turing Test) are quite an achievement, and his claims that he has 100,000 nanies online and has helped police investigations with it look dangerously on the side of fantasy. Cameron Marlow managed to get an interview with the bot but the conversation showed the bot was apparently capable of making tricky moral decisions and understood the concepts of betrayal, friendship and loyalty, making it light years ahead of the current state of the art.

Now suspicion has fallen on the creator, Jim Wightman, including an excellent investigation in this blog into his Usenet postings that revealed he (allegedly) makes spurious claims to have written newsreading software, is a Holocaust denier, and has made death threats. Wightman’s own responses in the comments section of the blog post aren’t exactly measured either.

Though perhaps no indicator of his coding abilities, this weird stuff doesn’t help this guy’s case that he is genuine and onto something big. Certainly to me it looks like a big hoax (seeking attention rather than money, as he’s making no commercial pursuit here), though the Guardian’s ‘Bad Science‘ columnist Ben Goldacre is being given a demonstration, so he’s certainly ambitious. It’ll be interesting to see what happens on the product’s release date on April 2nd and whether his claims actually stand up in the real world.

(via As Above, and I thoroughly recommend reading the two blog entries I mentioned above for their detailed analysis)

Update: Ben Goldacre’s latest column discusses it, and Wightman’s reluctance to have it tested on a standalone, isolated machine, which further raises suspicion. Oh, and last week’s NTK provides a succinct summary of why it’s probably a load of rubbish.