According to reports in the Associated Press, the setting up of China's Confucius Peace Prize was intended to protest the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize award to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

This year will witness the third Confucius Peace Prize since its setup. However, the previous two award ceremonies of this prize didn't go very well. The laureates selected never showed up nor even cared about receiving such a prize.

Some observers saw the affair as a complete farce. The award was given to a terrified small child, supposed to represent Kuomintang Honorary Chairman Lien Chan at the first ceremony and two Russian hotties, supposed to represent Russian President Vladimir Putin, at the second, which just added to the entertainment value.

The MPAA & RIAA claim that the internet is stealing billions of dollars worth of their property by sharing copies of files. They're willing to destroy the internet with things like SOPA & PIPA in an attempt to collect that money.

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Let's just pay them the money! They've made it very clear that they consider digital copies to be just as valuable as the original. That makes it a lot easier to pay them back in two ways: a. We can email them scanned images of dollar bills instead of bulky paper and b. We don't have to worry about the hassle of shipping huge quantities of cash.

If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.

A very funny story about a man who has seen a problem and is prescribing a "solution" that is 100% wrong and the complete opposite of what needs to be done:

Thierry Breton, Atos’s 56-year-old chief executive officer who is a former French finance minister [...] pointed to a recent study by the business watchdog ORSE, which reads: ‘Reading useless messages is terrible for concentration, as it takes 64 seconds to get back on the ball after doing so. Poorly controlled, the e-mail can become a devastating tool.’

Mr Breton suggested that a real time messaging interface as available on sites like Facebook would be far preferable to email, with staff also encouraged to talk to each other in person.

So an email, that you can reply to at your leisure, wastes time, but an instant message, that calls for immediate attention, does not? Oookay then. As for Facebook, he must have added that for comic effect. Right? Right?

Over the past several years, you've probably seen some of our fun linguistics designs on CafePress or at various conferences. We've now selected some of the funniest, cleverest, and most attractive linguistics items other designers have for sale on CafePress, and brought them together for you in this gallery. Click on the picture to see details or to place an order through CafePress.

Anti-piracy group BREIN is caught up in a huge copyright scandal in the Netherlands. A musician who composed a track for use at a local film festival later found it being used without permission in an anti-piracy campaign. He is now claiming at least a million euros for the unauthorized distribution of his work on DVDs. To make matters even worse, a board member of a royalty collection agency offered to to help the composer to recoup the money, but only if he received 33% of the loot.

The Isolator is a bizarre helmet invented in 1925 that encourages focus and concentration by rendering the wearer deaf, piping them full of oxygen, and limiting their vision to a tiny horizontal slit. The Isolator was invented by Hugo Gernsback, editor of Science and Invention magazine, member of “The American Physical Society,” and one of the pioneers of science fiction.

And then, in a sort of poetic irony that makes this story almost seem like it was pre-scripted to Teach us a Lesson, JAVASCRIPT succeeded in doing what JAVA had intended to do. Microsoft, Java, Sun, Netscape, all were brought low by their hubris. But humble Javascript, the throwaway, 'you get 10 days to make this', blink-tag-replacing runt of a language was able to sneak onto every computer in the world thanks to its clever disguise. Servers are written in Javascript. Databases are built to talk Javascript. The people who build browsers and operating systems move heaven and earth to make Javascript just a tiny bit faster. Java's still out there, of course. In various forms. It probably makes sure your account is updated when you pay your water bill. It's making the underpinnings of your android phone work. It's figured out a way to play host to a zillion new trendier programming languages. But Javascript won the original prize.

Oh look, Microsoft actually has sensible recommendations on applications using customized windows:

Most Windows applications should use the standard window frames. However, for immersive, full screen, stand-alone applications like games and kiosk applications, it may be appropriate to use custom frames for any windows that aren't shown full screen. The motivation to use custom frames should be to give the overall experience a unique feel, not just for branding.

Of course, these recommendations don't apply to Microsoft themselves, only to everybody else. Microsoft Office, anyone? Outlook? Or the absolute GUI monstrosity that is the Windows Media Player? In Microsoft's own applications, there are gratuitous custom window frames everywhere.

Isn't business a lot like Monty Python's search for the Holy Grail? Think about it. We have Arthur as the celebrity CEO, searching for best talent to fill his leadership team. Then the next thing they do is embark on the quest for the elusive strategic objective, I mean, the Holy Grail.

On the quest, they bring in a consultant, Tim the Enchanter, encounter some nasty competition (the French), decentralize and then re-centralize, and eventually get rounded up for fiscal irresponsibility. Isn't the scene where they determine the woman is witch by weighing her with a duck a lot like the way we make decisions in corporations? We'll rationalize anything to justify what we want to do. What about the guards in Swamp Castle who can't quite understand what they are supposed to guard?

Haven't you had conversations and emails just like that?