The strangest stories of 2007

 

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Posted on 20 Dec 2007 at 17:15

7. Road signs warn drivers to ignore sat nav
Sat navs may be excellent at getting us from A to B, but apparently they also have a wicked sense of humour: wedging trucks on roads too narrow for them for example, or sending one ambulance driver hundreds of miles in the wrong direction. To combat this, a village in Wales posted signs telling drivers not to trust their sat navs. So there you have it; back to maps everybody.

8. The truth behind the million dollar laptop
It's the old, old story; a firm nobody's ever heard of claims to be building a jewel encrusted laptop packed with bleeding-edge technology at its state-of-the-art manufacturing premises in London. PC Pro investigates and finds what looks like a three-bedroom terrace just off the Fulham Road. How many times have we heard that old chestnut?

9. Hackers "nuke" Czech beauty spot
In a protest against.. erm... something, Czech hackers hijacked a webcast showing off local beauty spots and inserted images of them being nuked. Unfortunately the webcast was subsequently relayed to national television, leading to no little confusion among the lovely folk of the Czech Republic. What happened to marches and placards, eh?

10. Kazakhstan: home of £11,000 broadband
If you thought you were paying over the odds for a decent broadband connection spare a thought for the citizens of Kazakhstan who pay £1,600 a month for their 1.5Mb/sec connections, and a whopping £11,000 for a 6Mb/sec connection. That's right 6Mb/sec, a speed we'll be seeing in the UK shortly after hell freezes over and pigs don jetpacks.

11. Lords considered rewriting internet
In an effort to prove they weren't completely out of touch with reality, The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee seriously considered fixing the internet by throwing the old one away and building a new one. Unsurprisingly, once their grandchildren had shown them how to switch their computers on and order their medication online, they dismissed the idea as a bad job.

Author: Stuart Turton