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I’m sure i’m not the only one waiting to see the Transformers Movie.

Just to whet your appetite some more, here’s a load of Transformers Movie Leaked Design Images, Toy Prototypes, CGI Images.

Still slightly disappointed at all the changes, my nostalgia demands the originals!

Rumours abound that Peter Jackson could be set to film The Hobbit

Saul Zaentz, the owner of Tolkien Enterprises, and ultimate holder of the film rights to The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings was very recently interviewed about the Hobbit and Peter Jackson’s involvement.

The interview has since been posted on German Rings site Elbenwald. You can read the original article here. It’s in German, so below is a translation of his comments. The translation comes from Jurgen at TheHobbit-Movie.com.

Q: What is with the long anticipated Hobbit-adaption?

A: It will definitely be shot by Peter Jackson. The question is only when. He wants to shoot another movie first. Next year the Hobbit-rights will fall back to my company. I suppose that Peter will wait because he knows that he will make the best deal with us. And he is fed up with the studios: to get his profit share on the rings trilogy he had to sue New Line. With us in contrast he knows that he will be paid fairly and artistically supported without reservation.

Lets just hope the Tolkien Enterprises have enough cash to throw at the movie to keep the effects up to the same standard as the trilogy. I wonder if he’ll be able to get Sir Ian McKellen and Ian Holm back for the Hobbit?

The Guardian is reporting that the new UK Passports have been cracked.

“The Home Office has adopted a very high encryption technology called 3DES - that is, to a military-level data-encryption standard times three. So they are using strong cryptography to prevent conversations between the passport and the reader being eavesdropped, but they are then breaking one of the fundamental principles of encryption by using non-secret information actually published in the passport to create a ’secret key’. That is the equivalent of installing a solid steel front door to your house and then putting the key under the mat.”

I’m glad something like this has come out, i’ve been an opponent of this and ID cards since they were first mentioned. I frankly wouldn’t trust the government to be a ble to file some word documents securely let alone keep track of my biometric information, or be able to cope with 60 million citizen’s biometrics.

Who even came up with the system? The first rule of encryption is obviously to keep the key secure, not to write it on the document in plain text!

“Captain Sensible, the 70s and 80s punk icon has started his own political party, The Blah! Party. He’s campaigning for no-nonsense, straight-talking politics and aims to become the biggest political party in the UK with over 300,000 members. He’s fed up with people marching on Westminster and then nothing happening, so he wants to take the politicians on, on their own turf. Come election time he wants people to vote for The Blah! Party and register a protest vote, then they’ll be forced to listen. Your support would really be appreciated and everybody else who is currently fed up with the state of British politics.”

You just can’t make this stuff up!

tip: Boing Boing

Seems slashdot is all commented out

Last night we crossed over 16,777,216 comments in the database. The wise amongst you might note that this number is 2^24, or in MySQLese an unsigned mediumint. Unfortunately, like 5 years ago we changed our primary keys in the comment table to unsigned int (32 bits, or 4.1 billion) but neglected to change the index that handles parents. We’re awesome! Fixing is a simple ALTER TABLE statement… but on a table that is 16 million rows long, our system will take 3 hours to do it, during which time there can be no posting. So today, we’re disabling threading and will enable it again later tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. We shall flog ourselves appropriately.

Had this happen before, only on an 16bit integer though, sadly not as impressive as 16 million…

Slashdot

Is this the end of the road for traffic lights?

Residents of the northern Dutch town of Drachten have already been used as guinea-pigs in an experiment which has seen nearly all the traffic lights stripped from their streets.

Only three of the 15 sets in the town of 50,000 remain and they will be gone within a couple of years.

The project is the brainchild of Mr Monderman, and the town has seen some remarkable results. There used to be a road death every three years but there have been none since the traffic light removal started seven years ago.

I could get onboard with an idea like this. I’d say the amount of signs on our roads is directly proportional to the how much drivers ignore them. If we were left to think for ourselves I’d agree we’d probably be a lot safer and more friendly to each other.

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