Geek News Roundup for 12/20/09 -- IM IN UR BLOGZ, NJOYIN MOAR FREEDUMZ

Remember 2012?  Of course you do, it was in all the theatres just a short while ago.  One of the things that occurred as a result of sudden neutrino radiation or whatever it was, was that the Earth's magnetic poles flip flopped around, until the south pole found itself in Wyoming (or Illinois or another one of those US states).  Well, it looks like the movement of the Earth's magnetic poles is happening, but not to the extreme that happened in the year 2012, in the movie.  Although our physical maps won't change, and the North Pole will remain firmly within Canada, the magnetic North Pole seems to want a Russian vacation.  Apparently, magnetic North was lazy until 1904, when it started to wander, then it sped up in 1989, and is currently fleeing Canada at quite a fast clip.

And what would you do when you're fleeing something, say... the law?  Would you hide?  Go find adequate cover?  Move out of the country?  How about... update Facebook?  It's such an addiction that my mother gets on Facebook and stays up all night.  Well, apparently, criminals can get addicted as well.  Now, you'd think that this would be a case where the police zoom in on a stupid criminal using a public library to access the site, right?  ...not really.  He's still at large.  What this tells you about the British police, I'll leave up to your imagination.

Being addicted to Facebook is one thing, but how about being addicted to alcohol?  The writers of Star Trek used their imagination and solved this problem for our future selves by coming up with Synthehol, which is a non-alcoholic alcohol.  It's synthetic and doesn't give you a hangover, so it has to be good, right?  And to make sure that there'd be a market for it, they outlawed real alcohol, making drinks like Romulan Ale illegal.  Well, welcome to real life, where such a thing couldn't possibly hap- uh, I guess it is happening.  So eventually, someone will come home from work and kick back in their armchair with an artificial beer while watching a football game, an episode of Trailer Park Boys, or the American-Mexican border.  As if the United States needed any more xenophobia.

The one person in the world who is probably the least xenophobic ever has got to be Santa Claus.  For years, people have been trying to figure out how he delivers gifts to everyone in the world.  However he does it, I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas.  Everyone except the bastard who tried to take down a plane during Christmas.  Seriously, what the fuck, man?  Not only did you try to take the plane down over Canada, but you also tried to do it when people should've been celebrating the holiday season.  I'm glad that you're so piss poor at terrorism that all you did was set your pants on fire and get tackled by other passengers.  Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, you suck.

NORAD sucked, this Christmas.  But only if you were a Linux user.  I wonder how hard it is to program one of those .kml files.  Sounded like more trouble than it was worth for them.  Maybe they were told that .kml files required lots of bandwidth or something.  It seems to work on ordinary sheep customers, so who knows?  (I know a guy who used to work for an ISP, so I could ask him.  Come to think of it, I have a neat idea for a series of articles for January, or maybe February.  I could try to bust some myths about throttling and other misconceptions in the computer world...  Sorry, was I thinking out loud?)

Meanwhile, yet another article busting myths about girl gamers has surfaced.  And last but not least, I want a pet foxie!

Bonus article: As a Canadian blogger, I now have less to worry about in regards to free speech!  I wonder how that works, since I'm currently writing for an American blog.