Modern trainers cause running injuries:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1170253/The-painful-truth-trainers-Are-expensive-running-shoes-waste-money.html#ixzz0NlLw3XJN

BS-1363 for everything right now.

Our newest building has a lot of sockets with a new European power plug topology, where you jam it in and rotate it.

I can't find anything about it on the web, though.

I use magnets for whiteboards, and thumbtacks for pinboards and cubicle walls. Blu-Tac, putty, or similar for other surfaces.

This poll is really revealing the most common wall surfaces used for sticking notes to, not people's stiction preferences.

As I understand it, the US mainstream media is almost entirely owned by a small handful of companies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownership

They often have a vested interest in the stories they choose to report on or avoid.

e.g.

> Reporters Steve Wilson and Jane Akre were first asked by FOX News and later bribed,
> to downplay a story they had on a cancer-causing growth hormone called Posilac
> which is growth hormone for dairy cows which is absorbed by humans through milk.
> The reporters decided to blow the whistle on FOX News and filed a law suit.
> After the ordeal was over, it was discovered in the appeals court that it's
> actually not against the law to falsify the "News."

http://behavioralhealth.typepad.com/markhams_behavioral_healt/food_and_drink/

> a pay-per-month model of getting access to a DRM-free library does sound good

Q: So, how much is that?

A: It's basically infinity dollars.

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2009/05/20090515.jpg

Back in University, I had a friend doing Civil Engineering.

He had a clip from the yellow pages on his dorm room door. It read:

"Civil Engineering: See - BORING."

Here are a couple of good opt-outs for the UK:

Telephone Preference Service - no more junk phone calls.
http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/

Mail preference service - no more junk mail (snailmail).
http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/mpsr/

Anyone got any more?

Ever seen 'Survivors' (1975) ?

Here's the opening sequence, depicting the accident with the bottle, and the subsequent rapid spread of the disease.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNjjnwCJqCY

> The soul of juggling is passing objects between two or more jugglers (I humbly assert).

Absolutely yes, amongst the juggling population in my vicinity this seems to be generally regarded as the ultimate expression of the art.

Some jugglers like 4 count with tricks best, but there's a notable resurgence of interest in passing with both hands - 3 count and other such patterns.

Nice to hear from another juggler here on Slashdot. :)

As a juggler, it's a little annoying when people use juggling as an analogy and get it wrong. So here's an explanation of juggling and how to do it, whether it's clubs or tasks.

It's all in the throw, not in the catch. If the throw is perfect, the catch happens without any corrections or concious thought.

You may have two hands, but your two eyes can only look at one thing at a time. Jugglers just peep at the object as it arcs over and downwards, and that's enough to tell them where and when to stick out a hand and catch it. This has been confirmed experimentally using opaque glasses to block off the view of the objects except around about the top of the arc.

Once you get beyond juggling three objects, you peep at the object but then you have to remember how it's falling while you peep at another, before you stick out your hand to catch the first object. So 1) consistency is hugely important and 2) you have to practise daily until it's completely automatic.

The most important tool for juggling is gravity. That's how jugglers stack the objects and know where and when they'll fall. If gravity wavered, it'd bring the pattern down. You have to know what to expect. Remember in Firefly how something unexpected would happen, and it'd turn out they'd prepared for that contingency? Same thing, really.

Now let's apply the theory of juggling to 'juggling' a bunch of tasks. You have to be able to give each task some impetus and then move on, knowing the point at which you'll have to return to that task. You have to have some method, equivalent to the way jugglers use gravity, that smoothly handles the tasks while your attention is elsewhere. Finally, you have to make it funny. Or perhaps that only applies to juggling? Well, analogies can only be stretched so far.

The elucidating comment I've read on this so far was from http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/85nk2/spitzer_the_aig_bonuses_are_a_smokescreen/c08bmtg

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About the current CEO:

        * He's being paid 1 dollar a year.
        * He gets no bonuses, either way.
        * He gets no stocks.
        * He didn't sign these contracts, he inherited them.

About the people who tanked AIG:

        * They are gone.
        * They were few.

About the people who received the bonuses:

        * They did not kill AIG
        * They were offered these bonuses last year, to stay for another year, and clean up the mess.
        * They reduced $2.7 trillion of shit to $1.6 trillion of shit.

About the bonuses:

        * They are less than .1% of the bailout money.
        * They were offered last year, to retain people until they cleaned up the mess.
        * They were NOT meant to retain people for next year.

What if we didn't pay them?

        * The people who are (successfully) cleaning up the mess, would leave.
        * Then, they would sue (rightfully so).
        * AIG would have to try to replace them, while trying to prevent losses on the suddenly 'unmanaged' accounts.
        * AIG might be forced into bankruptcy, for defaulting (aka: we lose).
        * AIG might survive, but take further losses, and need more help (aka: we lose).

Personal thoughts:

        * We should have let them fail, but we didn't, it would be idiotic to let them fail now.
        * The current CEO deserves nothing but respect, but instead, he gets death threats.
        * The people who stayed on, and cleaned up the mess, deserve to be well paid. They saved us a ton of money, and the bonuses are marginal in comparison.

Analogy:

The people from FP (financial products) are the burger flippers at McDonalds. The people who got the bonuses work the counter at McDonalds. The burger flippers made some seriously shitty burgers. They got fired. The counter crew has spent the last year trying to find places to safely unload those burgers (worm farms, bacteria labs, etc.) It was a dirty job, and Mike Rowe wasn't available.

Yes, I'm contradicting a post I made yesterday. I watched the full hearings on C-Span today http://c-span.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-R-16464, and learned a hell of a lot from them. Yeah, I changed my mind, but that's what I do when I learn that the facts don't match my perception.
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