The best Doughnut story I've heard was in the local rag recently (last year or two.) Apparently some contractors (plasterers, chippies, "allied building crafts") forgot the car-park pass on their van one morning. Rather than waste time explaining this at the gatehouse, filling in forms, et cetera ad nauseam, they decided to show a little initiative and cut through the tangled web of form-filling. They parked up in a nearby side street and attempted to /vault the fence/...

Cue a few dropped cups of coffee, wailing sirens, loosened safeties... that kinda thing ;)

Semaphore flags. ("There's a future for you in the semaphore trade; come up to town.")

Apparently there's some sort of big round building in Cheltenham, too. (Yes, El Reg had this story a week ago.) Everyone knew about that one even when Ordnance Survey maps showed blank white space there; nowadays, it's shown on the local road signs. Hey, it looks like an old-fashioned mainframe tape-drive! To be fair, everyone knows where the MI6 HQ in Vauxhall is, but the MI5 building is less well-known, mainly because it looks no different than many other buildings in the area.

Sitting on your arse all day playing computer games, and never taking any exercise, is obviously unhealthy. Just as sitting on your arse reading books all day (and never taking exercise), or trolling Slashdot, or listening to music, or working on a new interpretation of the mathematics of M-theory. The best advice any doctor has ever given me was when I was unemployed and, yes, sitting on my arse all day, feeling a bit sorry for myself. (Not clinical depression, but some GPs might have just written an SSRI scrip.) "Go outside and go for a short walk every day, 30 minutes will do, just walk round the village, even if it's raining." (I live in the country.) Four days later I felt /amazingly/ better. If you've got kids, try to get them in the habit of having a walk everyday, without making it into a chore - let them discover that it's enjoyable their own way.

Hi! This is your free clue, courtesy of the intarwebs.

In reality, it's not a book but just 12 comics pasted together with a bit of fluff inserted that really didn't have anything to do with the plot.

Youuuuuuu're a moron.

That's the infuriating aspect of this for some of us in the infosec world. This wasn't "selling private data", it was a good old-fashioned blacklist of "troublesome" employees who did annoying things like joining unions, complaining about health and safety violations (construction's very dangerous in the UK, I think it's ~100 deaths a year, and you can work out the ratio of deaths to maimings and career-ending injuries.) What they did was vile and evil, and the companies (huge mainstream FTSE-listed corporations, mostly) should be taken to the fucking cleaners as a clear sign that this sort of thing is illegal for good reasons, and will not be tolerated. However it's got FA to do with "leaking of personal data"; the headlines here, on the Beeb and even El Reg have been totally misleading.

Next month, I could be hit by a bus. If I do, I live in Canada,

After being hit by a bus? Not so much.

Hey, don't take it personally, it's just an observation. There are some very old timber-framed buildings here, too (ISTR there's a Saxon church somewhere in East Anglia, so ~900 years old or so.) Perhaps the distrust of wood is due to the various huge fires, the famous one being London, 1666. However there are far, far more stone built buildings of that vintage still around, precisely because stone's a lot harder to accidentally destroy and needs a lot less intensive maintenance.

One massive disadvantage of stone (not brick) is that it works as a heat pump to extract internal heat and vent it to the outside. Marvellous for those two or three hot summer days we get here once a decade when the temperature reaches 35*C or more -- not so much in the winter. or spring. Or indeed, autumn.

Ever notice that the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data"?

Congratulations, you have just discovered the Keynsian inverse multiplier effect, aka "deleveraging". This is why people who know the markets and understand economics and banking were looking so ashen-faced back in Sept/Oct 2007.

Small robots could build landing site for moon base, and monkeys could fly out of my butt. The odds of it actually happening are about the same.

HP / EDS pulled the same stunt. Oh, except that the CEO's taking a 20% cut in his basic (but pulled a $40,000,000 bonus last year), and there's no vote involved.

http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/19/hp_pay_cuts/

"It's been a rough week for the RIAA as massive layoffs are about to cost many employees their job [...]"

Awwwwwwww. We had a whip-round at the office for 'em. Guess we'll just have to go looking for them on skid row - I hope they remember to wear those ATF-style RIAA jackets and caps so we know who to tip it over. To, I mean, who to tip it TO.

That is almost nutty enough to be interesting, to the extent that I dug up the original paper:

http://pdf.aiaa.org/preview/CDReadyMPDC04_865/PV2004_1419.pdf

Alas only the first page is available; they charge $25 for the full text.

Robert Wood seems to have had an interesting career but to have fetched up in areas that aren't terribly good for his credibility:

(From http://www.majesticdocuments.com/documents/intro.php ):

"Our investigation team, led by Robert and Ryan Woodâ"a father and son team with 50 years of combined UFO studyâ"has applied their skills as both sleuths and scholars. Painstakingly verifying âoedeep throatâ sources, meticulously analyzing old and controversial documents, they arrive finally at conclusions that are as well grounded in fact as they are stunning in their implications. UFO-related secret programs have consumed a significant part of Americaâ(TM)s black budget since the Manhattan Project. [...]"

Oooooh-kay.

"lovestock", eh? ewwww.