Or if you are in the UK, watch "Dragon's Den". I guess its the same thing. Which came first, the sharks or the dragons?

For those who've seen neither, entrepreneurs parade in front of four or five potential investors sitting in comfy chairs with big wadges of cash. The entrepreneurs present their product, forget their business plan, stumble their lines and generally embarrass themselves. The investors grill them, and then one by one they all say "your numbers don't add up, I'm out", or "you've not got a product, I'm out", or "you've invested your house in this already? I'm out".

No, a JSON file looks nothing like a CSS file, it looks a lot like a chunk of javascript though....

And now your web server has to do PHP processing on every page and every style sheet, so your load goes up. So you implement some caching. Now you have two problems.

hhuhh huhhh he said "member" hhhh all "member states"... hhuh hey Beavis, check out the state of my member.. hhuhuhuhh

Myth... busted!

Mythbusters tried to yank the axle of a car using a fixed cable but every time either their cable failed or their anchor failed. They busted the rear axle up pretty bad, but never yanked it off as seen in American Graffiti.

Is that the idea? That the HTML behind web pages isn't viewable? That web pages can't be printed? Or can't be viewed after three days?

Just go use a PDF ffs.

You work at a university and you are sorting out the email system? Well, wave bye bye to your job soon, because one day the suits will say "Hey, lets move to Microsoft's Live.EDU" and then the problem is somebody else's. [Or Google mail for organisations, of course]. Either way, the suits will wonder why university IT are doing mundane things like setting up email addresses when that can be outsourced. Cheaper.

"'Advocates of the mandate are full of evangelical zeal and are quick to portray skeptics as wicked and selfish. It's like a secular religion, based on faith in vaccine efficacy and safety.'"

No, its based on evidence of efficacy and safety.

"I myself avoid flu shots like the plague" - so what would you do if there was an outbreak of plague and there was a vaccine for it?

What the heck is a web comic anyway? They're all on the web now. I'd rather see a poll for best non-web comic.

I'd vote for Steve Bell's If... strips as published in The Guardian, but you murkans wouldn't get the jokes. He was also meta before it was mainstream, one of his penguin characters joking in a strip about "the baggy-eyed yanks upstairs" when If... was printed underneath Doonesbury.

The Supreme Court says "any act that has no artistic merit and causes sexual thought". So that's the Daily Mail blocked...

[Source: Bill Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcefX9TPlkY]

I bought a Sony DVR/DVD player about four years ago. It booted up with a choice of EPGs - a plain one, and one with additional functionality and adverts. Yes, half the screen was occupied by ads. After getting annoyed with that after about two microseconds I switched to the plain one.

After a couple of years it started misbehaving, as these things do, telling me that the only thing on TV was 'No Channel Information'. So I thought I'd switch back and see how bad the ad-ridden one was. So I found the setting deep in the unexplored regions of the menu system and flipped.

Same old ad-ridden screen, except this time the ads were blank placeholders. I reckon nobody wanted to advertise there, since nobody was using the annoying EPG...

I did an upgrade from a new OS via a DVD from the Sony web site and it fixed most of the EPG blankness, but the thing has been pretty flakey from day one. I think the initial flakeyness is controlled to be just enough that you don't know if its your own fault for not reading the instructions or if it is genuine faults. Products are always released when the cost in fixing the bugs is more than the cost of handling support calls, right?

Anyway, no more Sony for me.

... they gave the prize to _experimental_ physicists!

In other important geek news: Bruce Perens Still Reading Slashdot.

I tried to find this paper online but I don't think its available as a preprint yet. But I did find that the lead author has been stuffing rats with assorted GMO foods for many years. Sometimes its kidney failure, sometimes its cancer, maybe sometimes nothing happens. The important thing is how many negative results he's had and not published. That's statistical GMO cherry-picking.