The Bodies Were So Hot That Police Could Barely Touch Them
You always think that the dangerous time for being in a plane is when it’s in the sky or landing - not during take-off.
A jet owned by the troubled Spanair airline overshot a runway at Madrid’s international airport and exploded into flames.
…
“The scene is devastating,” said Pablo Albella, a Madrid city emergency rescue worker. “The fuselage is destroyed. The plane burned. I have seen a kilometre of charred land and few whole pieces of the fuselage.
“It is all destruction,” he added.
A police officer said the bodies were so hot that police could barely touch them and told El Pais the shattered wreckage bore no resemblance to a plane.
smh.com.au reports that no Australians were involved - presumably because they are all in London in IT jobs or drinking booze.
The flight was a code-share with Lufthansa. I have flown with Lufthansa a couple of times. One time, a few years ago, they refused to let me listen to my iPod because “Even though it is legal in the EU to use an MP3 player onboard, in Germany it is illegal.” If they spent less time on irrelevant crap and more time looking at the safety measures of their codeshare partners, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.
I am really getting sick of getting these pornographic “Contact details requests” on Mac Skype. It wouldn’t be so bad if they actually wanted to shag me but they only want to use me for my money.
Seriously though, I cannot find a way to prevent these appearing on Skype on my Apple Mac - unless I hide myself from being online altogether or choose Do Not Disturb, which means friends cannot contact me.
I wrote to Skype support and they gave me Windows only instructions on how to block contact pop-ups - stupid arses, given that they know my version of Skype is Mac. When I followed that up with “There is no such configuration option for Mac”, they ignored it.
While Windows users have an option to block these pop-ups, Mac users don’t. I don’t have Skype-Me set, so I am not receiving them because of that.
There is a serious side to this: If this was a family Mac and children were playing games or using iPhoto, the “calienter mujer - sexy dirty bitch xxx” pop-up could appear at any time. That’s bad enough, but since the default is to let dirty bitch see my computer is online and allow contact, kids could very easily get exposed to pornographic chats by just clicking OK.
I’ve tried raising this again with Skype and they didn’t respond. I contacted the news desk at The Register, The Guardian, and The Sun and only The Register responded - however it seems they then got sidetracked with the latest iPhone rumour and stopped following it up.
Skype exposing kids - and innocent me - to pornography. It’s only a matter of time before pedophiles catch on and I hope then that Skype gets sued to the heavens in a high profile case - because if they ever claim they didn’t know, I’ll be the first one providing evidence that they did know they were exposing children to sex and refused to do anything about it… and I’ll be keeping my emails to show The Register, The Guardian, and The Sun also ignored the issue.
I took my D40x to Nikon with a CCD problem last week - bright pixels on photos. This is the second time I’ve had the problem since buying my camera in November last year. The first time they just mapped out the bad pixels in software. This time they agreed to replace the CCD.
All well and good (except for the 1000+ photos I took in Hiroshima which are partially ruined with white and blue dots - not visible on the reduced size photo above), .. or so I thought. Today I was supposed to collect the camera and I received a call from Nikon: “The camera will not be available until July 31st because there is a crack on the casing so the top of the casing needs replacing.” They then told me that I need to pay 3000 yen (about 30 USD) to have the casing replaced.
I am 99.9999% sure there was no crack on the case when I gave my camera to Nikon - I would have noticed if there was. Trouble is, it is my word against theirs, and dealing with someone who only speaks broken English, it is difficult to get any point across. I can say that I’m sure that there was no crack and that if there was, they would have noted it down when I gave them the camera. They can say “well we didn’t do it”. It’s also deeply suspicious that they didn’t call about it until the day I’m supposed to pick up - spanks of someone dropping the camera after fixing it and trying to cover their tracks.
What worries me more, though, is the lens: If my camera has been subjected to enough force to crack it under Nikon’s care, what has happened to the attached 900USD lens? The 18-200 VR lens might not show any cracks on the outside and might appear to be functioning correctly on quick inspection, but there are plenty of bits inside which could feel the effect of a knock. Misalignment. Back/front focus issues. VR issues. All difficult to detect and prove. Nikon are probably going to argue about the crack, so I doubt they will take responsibility if the lens has problems. Should have kept the lens myself.
On the positive side though, apparently Nikon has also replaced the external display LCD which had a faulty pixel. When I bought my Nikon I returned it to the store the next day because of the faulty pixel. The store agreed to replace it, but the replacement had focus issues with one of my lenses (hence my worry about lens issues now) so I kept the one with the faulty LCD.
Oh well, no point fretting about things. What will happen on Thursday will happen. Hopefully everything will be hunky-dory and they will wave the charge.
