Employees are suing for unpaid overtime resulting from a lengthy boot time of Windows Vista according to The Register.

A number of lawsuits have resulted against major US companies, but primarily call centers are the worst offenders. It seems that employees use time-keeping systems in their PC’s and can not official clock in for work until their computer has fully booted – in some cases taking as long as 15 minutes. The same time lag is also present when employees shut down their machines at the end of they day, accounting for a total of around 2 hours a week of unpaid time.

Total damages could run into millions of dollars – probably would have been cheaper just to install more ram or faster CPU’s in the first place.

Now, I have Vista, and while there are glitches that annoy me, the boot up time is not anywhere near 15 minutes. At times, when it seems to be taking forever, the lag is usually about 2 minutes max, so I am not sure what’s up with these vastly underpowered machines that are taking 15 minutes – regardless, these employees really should be paid for their time, even if it is waiting for the computer.

My question is, how much work time is wasted each week by Vista users circumnavigating glitches in the OS?

Now I’ve heard it all…

Read about this earlier today in The Herald. Usually when there is a police chase, it’s the result of some felon trying to escape his evil doings associated with robbery, murder, drugs, or something along those lines. This is the first time I have heard of one instigated by a man making sweet sweet love to a pasta jar.

Over in Australia police approached a vehicle stopped in a no-parking zone. When they pulled up to the car with their lights flashing, suspect, Keith Roy Weatherley sped away. Police followed in a high speed pursuit, at times reaching a lightning fast 20 km/h (about 12 MPH for all your American readers).

The chase lasted about 10 minutes when Weatherley was finally stopped – he refused to leave the car. Using batons and capsicum spray, they removed him from the vehicle and found a 750ml jar around his “special purpose”, which he continued to use to pleasure himself while police wrestled him to the ground.

After searching his car, police found pornography, a home made sex toy, women’s stockings, and a Jack Russell terrier.

He was fined $600.

You just can’t make this stuff up!

Yahoo News Canada reports that a seventh severed foot has been found on the BC Shoreline along the Straight of Georgia.

The latest find showed the remains of a left foot found inside a New Balance runner, however, it has not yet been confirmed if the remains in this case are human – is it really that hard to tell?

Apparently a right foot was found in a New Balance runner back in May, but police are not saying yet if this shoe is linked to the one found this week – I guess they first need to determine the species of the recent discovery.

In previous finds, two shoes (and feet) found on Feb 8th and June 16th were in deed a match.

This foot marks a total of 7 feet to be found since August of 2007. Officials claim that this most recent foot does appear to have separated naturally. Forensic pathologist and former chief medical examiner, Dr. John Butt notes that the foot and leg will separate naturally from a body in the ground or in water if given enough time. (The same goes for arms, legs, and the head, which will naturally detach.) The feet however, as they are within buoyant sneakers, are what typically turn up on the shoreline. Wonder where the 8th foot is?

It sounds like these feed all have belonged to people who have gone missing in the past, and not detached by some crazy lunatic, but regardless it’s still a little creepy. I think this coming weekend I am going to get my name and address tattooed on the soles of my feet with a “postage paid return to sender” note. If you find one, just drop it in the mailbox.

Please Canada, I’m too pretty for jail, don’t lock me up!

I don’t think I really have much to worry about, but over in Italy a judge has ruled that blogging is the same as publishing an unregistered newspaper – something that is punishable by fines and jail time, 250 Euros and up to two years behind bars! Since the ruling back in September, a second blogger has also been taken down by the Italian government!

It’s rather interesting. Citizens do have the right to free speech dating back to 1948, however, there is also a law in place that contradicts this staging that publishers mush officially register their new publications. How many bloggers in Italy do you think have their blogs officially registered? I am guessing none.

If you look deeper into Italian laws, apparently the vast majority of Italian websites are technically illegal! This means that there are an estimated 5 million illegal websites floating around out there – I hope Italy has a lot of vacant prison cells for all these hardened criminals.

(The Register goes into far more detail, so to learn more about this be sure to take a look)

It’s a sad day for pet lovers around the world. According to MSNBC the world’s ugliest dog (if you can call him that) has died. ‘Gus’ won the title back in June and after a battle with cancer is off to the big dog house in the sky.

Gus was a Chinese crested with a missing eye and a missing leg. You can see by the picture that he had one heck of a face, one only a mother… well… a blind mother, could love.

This poor dog did have one heck of a tough life. Things only started to improve after he was rescued from a bad home. Apparently he was kept in a crate inside someone’s garage. One leg had to be amputated due to a skin tumor, and his left eye was lost in a cat fight.

While I try to write this with a little bit of senseless humor, it really is a sad story. Poor ugly thing – Even though I never met you, you’ll be missed.

Well, I suppose the dead mouse itself is not alive and well, but Japanese geneticists have created healthy clones from mice which were dead and frozen 16 years ago.

An article at National Geographic News reports that the team successfully extracted dead brain and blood cells from the frozen mice. These cells were then injected directly into unfertilized mouse eggs. The result, happy little baby mice primed for poking and scientific testing.

The article goes on to note that this same process could be used to bring extinct species back to life, such as the woolly mammoth. My question: Isn’t this going just a little too far? I saw Jurassic Park, and I have to say, I don’t really have any interest in becoming breakfast for some resurrected 100 million year old dinosaur.

Physicists have made a recent discovery that just might affect you this Christmas. It seems that when you peel scotch tape off of the roll, it emits X-Rays lasting about a billionth of a second long. no need to be too worried though – apparently this phenomenon only occurs within a vacuum.

When the tape is pulled away from the roll electrons jump from the roll to the sticky underside of the tape. When hitting the stickiness of the tape, the electrons slow down and that is when they emit the X-Rays.

Unless you plan on wrapping your Christmas presents inside your Electrolux, you really have nothing to worry about, but its interesting never the less.

I have to say, some people are just idiots. At least Sandor Ferenci, a motorcycle stunt driver from the UK. Ferenci had had friend video him driving at speeds of more than 130 miles per hour. His video was then posted on YouTube.

A random motorist had seen Ferenci driving recklessly and reported it to the police. They went to his home to investigate, and he asked them “Is this about the YouTube video?” Well, the police didn’t know about the video and looked into it.

The video ended up being the final nail in his coffin. He Ferenci was sentenced to 12 weeks in jail, and will also lose his driving privilages for the next two years. He will be required to take a driving test before getting his license back sometime in 2010.

All I have to say is, what an idiot. Posting his crimes online wound up screwing him in the end. While he does deserve what he gets, its amazing how people go out of their way to advertise what they are doing. This isn’t the first, nor will it be the last time when someone posts something to the web and winds up incriminating themselves. Watch out what you post online! That’s all I have to say!

I have to say that PETA’s stance on urging Ben and Jerry’s to use human breast milk as a replacement for cow’s milk in their ice cream is just disgusting. While I am confident that this is something that will never happen, should some how this become a reality, I will switch exclusively to Haagen Dazs. No more “half baked” for me. (sigh)

Now first off, I want to note that perhaps human breast milk would be the more natural choice, after all, that’s what most of us start off living on, and in some aspects, consuming cows milk seems strange – but our lifestyles and culture evolve around drinking and eating cows milk based products, so it just seems normal – after all, we’ve been doing it for centuries.

One of the biggest questions on my mind is however, if Peta finds milking cows to be in-humane what would the millions upon millions of women who then need to be “milked” think if man kind made the switch in their dairy sources… seems to me that milking women for mass production dairy is less humane then milking cows…