Have you ever wondered what Star Trek would look like if it was done on a really low budget, in Turkish? Wonder no more.

Kirk decides to go down to a nearby planet and assembles an away team of Scotty, Mr. Spak, Dr. Makkoy and an unnamed guy in a green shirt who they hope will act as a human speed bump if any creatures on the planet rush them. The teleportation effects are, like all Turkish special effects, a strange combination of retarded and rad. The four men stand as still as possible while the camera goes out of focus. Ten seconds later, the film gets scratched in their general area and they run out of frame while the guy holding the camera hits pause and unpause. This gives more of the impression that something’s wrong with your VCR than of people being transported through space. Miniskirt technology is a much higher priority among their people than visual effects.

I think BBC2 should make up for the way they mess us around with Buffy by screening this show.

Danny O'Brien has been watching the Elcomsoft trial.

The Defence [...] claimed Elcomsoft produced the software to expose weaknesses in e-book products. They introduced Dmitry's Defcon speech as evidence for this. Dmitry's speech is rather dry (apart from a hilarious moment at the beginning where another Defcon attendee forces him to say "Where are the nuclear vessels in Alameda?". I laughed a bit too loudly in court here.)

I'm afraid I'd probably have laughed quite hard too.

John Rhys-Davies is interviewed at CHUD today.

Q: Do you find that you now have kids coming up to you on the street? A new generation of fans?

Davies: No. How dumb do you have to be? Thirty years trying to be recognized and you bury yourself in a full prosthetic for three major movies. My career is over. All I should be offered now is the chance to play dwarves in German porno films with a strap-on. Now that's the real insult, isn't it?

Having a PC which runs 37 different operating systems – from MS-DOS 6.22 to Windows 1.01 to QNX 6.2 to BeOS 5.03 – is pretty impressive. Crazy, but undeniably impressive. I just hope the owner doesn't get a nastygram from Microsoft's lawyers demanding that he produce valid licenses for a dozen different Microsoft operating systems. I know he thinks he's picked up licenses from his various PCs over the years, but I'll bet there's a clause in the licenses for each permitting installation only on the hardware with which it was supplied.

Unfortunately, the PC has to be rebooted to get from one operating system to another. It would be much more impressive if the system ran an emulator so that the user could run them all at once. (Even as I type this, I guarantee that a geek somewhere is working on the problem.)

One more thing. The guy who did all this is just 18. Just think what he'll get up to once he grows up!

Yann Arthus-Bertrand has taken some tremendous pictures of this planet we're living on. His View of the Day feature is going into my daily viewing list, right alongside Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Best 404 Page Ever? I'm not sure about "best" – not in a world with this – but it's certainly one of the classiest.

Contrary to Katie's comment, the image she links to in this entry isn't really a sign that she's been working on her research paper for too long. It is a telling comment on how really lousy Microsoft Word is at cleaning up after itself.

Who Killed William Robinson? is a tremendous little site which allows students to browse primary documentation regarding a murder in British Columbia in 1868. Well designed and quite fascinating.

The only drawback is that the site only allows those with passwords access to the "interpretive essays" produced by the students for whom the site was created. When I tried clicking on the link anyway but failed to enter a valid password, I was greeted by a dialog box stating:

Incorrect: One percent has been deducted from your final grade.

Ooh, that's strict!

If you were running a marathon would blogging be the first thing on your mind?

For this guy the answer was "Yes".

I can't quite make my mind up whether blogging while running is heroic or crazy. But I'm erring on the side of "crazy."

The Moon's shadow moves over Africa during last week's solar eclipse.

I love this sort of image, a reminder that we're all sitting on a big ball of rock with another ball of rock orbiting it. And then that pair of objects is in turn rotating round a big ball of very hot gas which provides us with light and heat. Which is in turn part of one arm orbiting the big black hole at the centre of our little spiral galaxy. Which is in turn part of a Local Group of galaxies. (And so on…)

I could equally well have posted the same thoughts last week when this APOD was published.

What can I say? I love celestial mechanics!

Laura Miller reviews The Matrix and Philosophy.

It sounds as if the essays are pretty variable in quality, so I think I'll watch out for this one in my local library rather than rush to Amazon to buy a copy. I'm quite happy with the notion of exploring the deeper implications of works of pop culture, but for me the concept works better when applied to a TV series. (See, for example, Roz Kaveney et al, Reading The Vampire Slayer.)

A recursive portrait.

My head hurts…

Just a quick note of apology for not really keeping up with comments over the last couple of days. I'm going to try to catch up with my comments (and email) tomorrow.

While I'm on the subject of comments, I spent a little while earlier this evening installing Brad Choate's Sanitize plugin for Movable Type, which makes it safe for me to let users add HTML tags to spruce up their comments. The comments form now lists the tags I've enabled.

(Those of you who don't know any HTML should just carry on entering plain text comments as normal.)

Of course, if I don't start responding to comments again soon then you'll all stop posting them and the issue of what tags I'll permit in comments will be moot…

Scott McNealey on PowerPoint:

We had 12.9 gigabytes of PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought, What a huge waste of corporate productivity. So we banned it. And we've had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned PowerPoint. Now, I would argue that every company in the world, if it would just ban PowerPoint, would see their earnings skyrocket. Employees would stand around going, "What do I do? Guess I've got to go to work."

And yet, Sun's very own StarOffice/OpenOffice suite still includes a presentation graphics package very much like PowerPoint.

Ben Hammersley points out evidence from Cory Doctorow of just how determined the MPAA are to drag Jon Johansen into court in response to his attempt to make it easy for Linux users to play – not copy – DVDs.

I asked a lawyer-friend about this today: if Norwegian law doesn't have the "anti-circumvention" stuff that the American DMCA has, what has Jon been charged with? It turns out that the MPAA insisted that Jon be prosecuted and that the best the Norwegian prosecutors could come up with is a statute forbidding intruding on a computer, so they charged him with hacking his own PC.

Having just downloaded the latest TV listings for DigiGuide, I'm rather concerned that the BBC2 broadcasts of Once More With Feeling, the musical episode of Buffy, are scheduled to take up 45 minutes on Thursday 19th December and just 40 minutes on the early Saturday morning repeat on Saturday 21st.

The BBC web site only shows schedules a week ahead, and the BBC's Buffy micro site only confirms that the musical episode has been pushed back a week by snooker and makes no mention of running times.

I know there's a 42-minute cut of the episode, but I was expecting that the BBC would show the extended version, which runs about 8 minutes longer. Hopefully this is just a screw up by DigiGuide or whichever BBC department supplies them with listings. I'd hate to have to wait for the season 6 DVD to see the musical in full.

Leslie Harpold's Hoopla Online Advent Calendar is up. Very nice indeed.

From the Plain English Campaign:

An unnamed lawyer's suggested replacement for the word 'container' in a patent application.

'a receptacle having at least one exterior surface and a plurality of walls defining a discrete object receiving volume.'

[...]

A proposed employment contract for management consultants Gleeds Group.

'13. Waiver

'No forbearance of failure by the Employer at any time to require performance of any provision of the Agreement or to enforce strictly the obligations of the Employee or to take action to suspend the Employee or to determine the Agreement forthwith upon discovering cause therefor shall effect the right of the Employer so to do any time and no waiver by the Employer of any condition or breach of any clause whether by conduct or otherwise shall constitute a continuing or further waiver of any such condition or breach or as the breach of any other clause.'

Spammer Alan Ralsky probably won't be doing any more press interviews for a while. In the wake of an interview a couple of weeks ago in which he bragged about his spamming, claiming that the profits from just one series of spam messages (or rather, as he prefers to call them, "marketing messages") funded the addition of a new wing to his house, anti-spammers have tracked down his new house's postal address and subscribed him to every junk email list they could find.

Naturally, now that Ralsky is receiving all this unsolicited mail he's threatening to sue for harassment.

I'm as disappointed as Max at the prospect that Will Smith will star in an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Robot stories.

But Max didn't mention the very worst element, the one that turns this news from a disappointment into a surefire calamity: the latest draft of the script was written by Akiva Goldsman.

Yes, I know he got a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for A Beautiful Mind. He also wrote Batman Forever, Batman and Robin and Lost in Space. You tell me whether this man should ever be let near a science fiction film again.