Downtime

Well over half of people will dispense with Christmas card this year and send a text message instead. According to a survey carried out by www.rightmobilephone.co.uk  people only seem to bother sending cards to family members. Downtime thinks it's better to send neither because it is the thought that counts after all. Bah Humbug.

The Catholic Church is receiving tutoring from internet experts about how best to communicate in the modern world. Officials from the likes of Google, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia are helping Catholic officials in Europe in a four day conference. Where God has failed technology will succeed they hope. Downtime thinks the Catholic church has more fundermental theological problems which will take more than a You Tube video to fix.

 As virtualisation of just about everything gains popularity due to cost saving in the enterprise world, health and safety red tape has succeeded in making bonfire night virtually pointless.

Organisers of a Guy Fawkes party in Devon say safety officials have forced them into a virtual bonfire.

Revellers will have to make do with projected image of a bonfire on a giant screen, electric heaters and bonfire sound effects because of the mountain of paperwork needed to organise the real thing.

A fugitive from justice was arrested after alerting the US authorities to his whereabouts through Facebook.
Maxi Sopo, who was wanted for falsely obtaining more than $200,000 in credit, wrote a number of extravagant boasts on his Facebook profile after fleeing to Cancun, Mexico.
Status updates from Mr Sopo said he was "loving it", described himself as "living in paradise" and said he was "just here to have fun".
Not content with publicly disclosing the information on the internet, Sopo added a former justice department official to his friends list, who promptly tipped off his old employer.

The Register brings news that Japanese programmers have developed an algorithm which can tell, just by listening to your voice, if you are about to die.
The software was developed by trawling through six months' worth of records from the Yokohama ambulance service, corelated with data filed by paramedics about how alive the caller was when they arrived.
Of course the program will be of literally life-saving value in helping ambulance services decide which emergency calls should take priority.
However, technologies have a habit of straying from their original application and, just as the space programme gave us the non-stick frying pan, Downtime can not shake the uneasy feeling we may be seeing the Japanese doomware pressed into the service of some gruesomely sadistic TV gameshow in the very near future.