Informative, and the first time I've seen "writing in the margin of a Bible" and "shot glass" in the same short post!

Ran across this rather late, but very interesting!

Technically of course the villain leaves stop the trains from stopping, That's why they stop running occasionally :- )

In the Netherlands, they have special Sandite trains which run every day, especially through wooded areas, before morning rush hour, and during the 'slippery periods' before every evening rush hour again.

The dutch wikipedia article is pretty good: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladde_rails Similar English page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_rail

No need to start a cross-strait argument about whether the UK, or Dutch system is better :-)

Good thread. I refreshed my read of Bruce's snake oil warning signs. With the 500 contest slots filled in 4 days, let's hope the best solutions get a smart-trust way to do anonymous cash which would please even Bruce, and have less overhead cost than 1.6 cents per penny. Maybe Bruce even threw his hat in the ring, now that his new book requires less dedicated effort.

Well said. The leader has a target, the up-and-comers have a David v. Goliath media appeal. In olden days IBM ruled the mainframe market. Companies like Amdahl had a lot of positive press. Even within IBM an OS like MVS was the biggie, and something like VM/CMS the underdog. No different now. The media flavour of Google stories has changed over the year, as they've grown, and reached more and more into our virtual pockets, picking us over for every tidbit of personal information they can get their hands on. Very similar story with Facebook (they're maybe even more into our info-pockets). The exception is our $ pockets, but media are starting to trumpet more what /. has known for years: If you're not paying the company, you are the product. Apple is a bit different yet, as others have said, but even there media are starting to at least acknowledge the insane per-gadget profits Apple makes. With a change in leadership, they will receive more critical purview.

Remember, too, that m/Media is changing in front of our eyes. The way I see, if I can read it, it's media, though maybe not Media :-) With tons of m/Media at my fingertips, I am more likely to be able to find out both (or >2) perspectives on any news story/company/agency/dictator/country. Discerning the t/Truth is a separate question, caveat lector because the communis opinio isn't always what it's cracked up to be :-)

Excellent question, and many good comments already. I would think about how much time you want to spend on it, and how dependent you want them to be on you, if the world keeps going after the current end-time prophesies :-) I am on the board of a small Christian teachers college which had its own catalog for years. After a lot of research/thinking by the Librarian we switched to an OPALS hosted solution, supported by a small Canadian company - that was important for us since we're in Canada. Pretty happy with it after a couple of years. No server, no backups, no securing a website, fairly simple customization, reasonably small annual fee, and we get our entire catalog on CD twice a year, for backup, and in case something were to happen to the company (a regular occurrence in the ILS business, see http://www.librarytechnology.org/automationhistory.pl - a good site!) For OPALS, start at: http://opalsinfo.net/

I've grown to really like NoScript for this. VirtualBox was simple when I clicked, and only got distractedly highlighted when I temporarily allowed it to execute scripts. Cheers!