Dan Price’s blog
Weblog of a cyber-geek

Can this really be true? Well I’ve just listened to the recording myself on the BBC’s iPlayer service and it is genuine. It is strange that a man who declared “we’re bigger than Jesus” and “Imagine a world without religion” believes strongly in Christ’s teachings and even said that the Beatles were essentially a Christian band trying to push a Christian message.

Of course, this is somewhat watered down Christianity. While Lennon obviously admires Jesus’ teachings, he doesn’t say anything about accepting Him as a personal saviour and also said he follows Mohammed and Buddha. It’s certainly reassuring that Lennon admits he’s not against God but against the hypocrisy in the Church: “…the hat wearing and the tea parties…”.

I feel a bit daft now, given my rant about Lennon here!

This is somewhat of a conspiracy, but it is truly strange that on June 6th 2006 (06/06/06), George Bush announced a plan for a biometrics system to be implemented in the USA to track all immigrants.

666 (Greek passages read 616) is supposed to be the “Mark of the Beast” or the “Number of the Beast”, mentioned in Revelation 13. The passage:

““And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”
Revelation 13:16-18″

In general, I’m not one for conspiracies. However, surely it’s a bit strange that on 06.06.06., George Bush gives a speech about immigrants and ID cards, including mentioning biometrics:

“What really Congress needs to do is to use a biometric technology to create a new tamper-proof identification card for every legal foreign worker,” he said. “We need a tamper-proof card. If you’re here legally working, here’s your card, and you got to show it. And a business owner has got to call for it, and if they hire somebody without the tamper-proof card, they’re in violation of the law and will be fined.” (Taken from New York Times article).

YouTube also had a video of Bush announcing this plan:

Perhaps this is just a massive coincidence, but it’s interesting at least. On a date some associated with the Antichrist and the Mark of the Beast, Bush talks about bringing in a new ID system for immigrants, meaning they won’t be able to work without having ID on them. ID cards are becoming more popular, with governments assessing whether or not to implement them on a national scale so that we are all watched. Some have even suggested chip implants into our arms or other areas of the body so that we can be scanned and our identity validated. Who knows? Perhaps one day, we will have chip implants in our right hands or even implants into our brains (a suggestion made not long ago on a BBC documentary). Is this passage coming true today?

Until now, I was fairly undecided about wind farm technology and whether it was worthwhile given the large lobby against all wind farm development. This however has all changed since a planning application was submitted to build a wind farm fairly near to my home.

In the past, I largely agreed that wind farms, particularly on-shore ones, were an eye-sore, were unreliable with electricity generating times (i.e. when the wind doesn’t blow, there’s no power being generated) and that they were noisy.

However, an application has been submitted to my local council to build a wind farm at Reeves Hill. I was tempted to go down the typical “not in my back yard” route but instead stepped back and looked at the situation for what it is: (more…)

If you live in the UK, then it’s hard to miss the controversy that the Archbishop of Canterbury has caused by what he said on BBC Radio a couple of days away. For the uninformed, the Archbishop said that he thought it was “unavoidable” that some aspects of Sharia (Islamic) law were adopted here in the UK to “retain social cohesion”. Of course, just about all parties in parliament have jumped on the bandwagon, distancing themselves from his comments with some even calling for him to resign.

As per usual, the BNP (British National Party), a bunch of racist scum, are having a field day purposely misinterpreting and broadcasting his remarks simple to gain further support for their Neo-Nazi policies.

Sharia law is a practical code of ethics/law that some Islamic countries use to live out Islam in their daily life. On the whole, it gets bad press because it doesn’t treat women as equal to men and it even supports public executions and whippings. (more…)

Firstly, I KNOW I’ll get some stick for this. John Lennon has plenty of fans, particularly for one of his best known works, “Imagine”.

I must admit that I’m a fan of the Beatles - I love their music and I think they were generally good guys. However, I just listened to John Lennon’s Imagine on YouTube and then looked up the lyrics to double check.

I’ve got to say I’m appalled by the song. Not because it’s anti-establishmentist, something that I’m not overly bothered about, but because it’s against religion. I’m not a fan of “religion” really - the word itself conjures up pictures of fanatics, priests performing meaningless ceremonies and profiteering. However, I do believe strongly that people should be allowed to believe what they want as long as they are given options - for example, being informed of other faiths as well as their own or their parents.

“Imagine” is strongly against religion entirely:

“Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky”

…”Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too”

The rest of the song, fine I’ll tolerate, but not this. John Lennon appeared to be such a liberal, yet at the same time believed that religion/faith should be removed. Isn’t that a contradiction? Surely its up to a person to look deep into their heart and make their own decision about faith and God - not have some anarchic atheist mob forcibly making people believe what they wish. Brainwashing with religion is as bad as brainwashing with atheism - by default people are generally agnostics when they are born and then are pushed one way or the other by the society they believe in.

John Lennon called himself liberal and peace-loving yet any act to remove religion or force people to believe atheism would be entirely against peace. To me, John Lennon seems to have been a hypocrite.

I await criticism on this, because I know I’ll receive it…

“Conservatipedia” sounds just like another web 2.0 site jumping on the bandwagon, and with such a name would obviously be targeted towards a right wing audience. The name simply suggests that it’s a right wing site about politics, perhaps discussing the different ideologies on this side of the political spectrum.

However, if you actually go over to this site, you quickly realise this isn’t a place for moderate Conservatives to air their views, but for far right wing Conservatives, perhaps even Fascists, to indoctrinate their viewing audience with absurd ideas about a number of topics. (more…)

Student governor results

I’m sure you’ve all been eagerly anticipating the announcements of the results of the student governor elections that I stood for at my college - if you haven’t, then I’ll announce them anyway. The waiting is over!

The result: victory!

Yep I won the student governor elections for the college so now comes the real part - actually doing the hard work.

Open Source search

I’m sure you’ve at least heard of this, if not been bombarded with it already. Wikia Search, currently in Alpha, is the hot news right now. It’s attracted a lot of criticism by bloggers and the tech industry however. The concept of the site is that it is open source, meaning that the code and algorithms behind the search engine can be viewed by anyone. This is a clear contrast to Google which keeps a lot of the information regarding it’s algorithms secret.

The idea does seem to be jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon a bit and I’m unsure whether it will catch on among the non-techie crowd who make up the majority of web users. However, if the site can prove that it’s search results are of a better quality to Google (which is asking a lot), then it may be able to compete successfully with the giants (Yahoo, Ask, MSN as well as Google).

Inactivity - I’ll start off by apologizing for the long period of inactivity since my previous post. This is mostly due to a lack of enthusiasm to do anything worthwhile, serious boredom, a hectic few weeks at college and the transition to a new server for my hosting company. Anyway, I hope I’ll be able to blog a bit more now as college winds down.

Programming - I’ve been busy doing a bit of programming recently at college for the course. We’ve focused on Visual Basic.NET since it’s supposedly one of the easiest languages to learn and fairly easy to code in (since you don’t need to focus on hand-coding the GUI). (more…)

The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), long le creme de la creme of British television has announced today it is going to make radical changes to cover a £2 billion budget shortfall.

This means axing huge numbers of staff, approximately 1800, and selling off the cherished historical home of the organisation, the Television centre.

The full story of the news is here (more…)