This may be helpful:

The blog: http://neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk/

BBC story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-18454800

Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/school-dinner-blogger-martha-payne-photo-ban-overturned-7854487.html

Council rebuttal: http://www.argyll-bute.gov.uk/news/2012/jun/statement-school-meals-argyll-and-bute-council

Some of it looks OK. Some of it looks utterly dire, even compared to what I was being forced to eat 35 years ago! It's not a patch on what my local school serves my kids (I've eaten 3 meals with them, paid for I should add!) and down in East Sussex, £2 consistently buys a good healthy and tasty meal. I was so impressed I actually emailed the catering company's Regional Manager (Chartwells who are contracted to provide our school dinners) and East Sussex CC (school meals division) and said I thought it was an apt time to praise there efforts - the email was received with some excitement judging by the reply I just got back :) It's very easy to criticise, sometimes the opportunity to praise is overlooked. Back on topic - full marks to Martha aka VEG - trended on Twitter worldwide today, 1000+ comments on the BBC News story, front page on BBC News and Independent news (web editions). And as someone said, it looks like Argyll and Bute Council have reversed their decision - probably because her MSP (Member of Scottish Parliament) who also happens to be the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning told them to! This sort of story warms my heart - thanks to the Internet, a minor coverup of a small time incident[1] that would have never made it past the local paper now becomes a national and international story. [1] This is a fairly minor event in the grand scheme of things, but is rather symptomatic of the "brush under the carpet" attitude of the authorities in the UK - hopefully this particular event will make other authorities sit up and listen.

Yes - I am Dr Evil. Now where is my... One MILLION dollars?

Despite the fact that you are an obvious troll, your point, lame as it is, demands a response: Why would you want to solder a BGA when you can do so much with an AVR in a DIP package?

I think it is that there is too much brain dead easy entertainment. My kids, given the chance, will ask to watch Netflix, fiddle with their computers (and I mean play online games, not even read Wikipedia or look for interesting stuff on YouTube). Then there is TV with 58 channels and 1% good content (which they will usually not find with odd exceptions). And modern electronics is perceived to be "hard" (well, it is, kind of) so "therefore anything simple enough to be do-able, must be boring". And yet, when I force them to do something like wire up a "2 way lighting circuit" with batteries and an LED, they actually find it interesting. But they are not bored enough by default to seek to do these things for themselves. That I think is the crux of the problem.

Me too. In the UK, HeathKit were pretty big. I remember their Freezer Door Alarm (simple but effective), but the best was their plasma Alarm Clock. Beautiful display (better than LED and LCD), nice and loud, reliable and direct mains driven (no crappy wall wart). Being frequency locked to the mains also meant no long term drift - I even remember the 50/60 Hz jumper setting that was carefully explained in the excellent manual. No shop bought alarm has measured up since - even the 60kHz radio time signal ones mostly have crappy LCD displays with poor backlighting. Doesn't anyone make decent alarm clocks anymore?

In the UK, I use PhotoBox.co.uk. In 2003 (so may have changed) I took pictures of lots of Dulux paint colour charts (the choose'n'mix millions of colour types). I used a cloudy day for even light and set the camera white balance against a grey card for accuracy. I then sent the prints to a variety of printing services from High St to online. Net result - PhotoBox produced prints that were pretty accurate. Other places either saturated the colours to death or had strong colour casts. But long story short, a decent print shop will be easier and better (usually) than trying to print at home. And the prints will probably last longer.

The 3 MIFI dongle will allow a DMZ host - ie forward all ports to an internal machine of your choice. The IP is of course, dynamic, but works well enough with dyndns.

Debian's debirf tool allows fairly painless building of custom bootable ISOs which boot to ramdisk. The ISOs can usually be run through isohybrid for pendrive booting, depending on the hardware and how fussy it is.

From 4.x you can run Windows as a guest VM, and deploy VCenter on this. Then do an RDP desktop share to your MAC.

or is it April 1st?...

Someone is going to find they have a new job soon. Farming rabbit droppings in Mongolia...

Depends... It is possible to get intra-grid oscillation where a phase shift (a phase angle between various points of a large grid is natural and inevitable) starts to destabilise and if the oscillations are not damped by modifying power input in the right places, then things can get bad pretty quick. This is in the UK which is tiny in comparison to the US. Question - is the US national grid one big AC system or a number of smaller networks with DC interconnects[1] [1] DC interconnects are the classic solution to allowing power transfer between grids without requiring syncronisation - eg the GB has DC interconnectors with Ireland, France and the Netherlands. See here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Interconnector

Seriously... If you dispense with use strict/use warnings it handles pretty much like basic with a hint of structure. I was asking exactly the same question the other week with regard to what to start my daughter (aged 7) off on. I went through some mental deliberations and settled on perl. She's taken to it as well as I did Sinclair BASIC at a much older age, She can't write anything from scratch (that would be expecting a LOT of such an age group) but she is happy to type in a short dictated program. She chooses the subject (times tables, Fibbonnaci etc) and I work out a strategy for building the program up a few lines at a time, with it being runnable as often as possible. She's demonstrated that she can modify it for basic parameters, eg which "times table", "max size of Fibbonnaci number). The best one we've done to date is one that picks 2 random numbers and asks a question like "What is X times Y?" It prompts for an answer and checks it with a friendly "yea" or "bad luck" message. It's not pretty, it's not trendy, it's not GUI but in my humble opinion, she is learning what computers can *really* do.

Plenty of UK companies use .com too, despite .co.uk being well established for a long time.