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If you wouldn't mind just watching this guy play 100 famous guitar riffs in one take, I'm feeling a sudden urge to grab my Fender Stratocaster.
comment posted at 9:06 AM on Jul-8-12

Quartavious Davis of Florida, now twenty, has been sentenced to 162 years without parole for his role in several armed robberies during which he discharged a firearm but no one was hurt. He was a teenager at the time of the crimes and had no previous record. The Supreme Court has recently ruled that mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment." Davis was 18 and 19 at the time of the crimes, and the sentence was discretionary, so this ruling does not apply.
comment posted at 2:41 AM on Jul-5-12

Isaac Asimov has a weakness for the US national anthem.
comment posted at 11:51 PM on Jul-3-12

The Codeless Code. An illustrated collection of (sometimes violent) fables, concerning the Art and Philosophy of software development
comment posted at 7:17 PM on Jul-3-12

"Indeed, in this year when the United States is engaged in a ferocious campaign for the presidency, the question that ought to be asked is: How does the U.S. electoral system compare to Mexico's? I undertook a comprehensive study of the electoral systems in North America, and the good news is that the United States came in third. The bad news is that there are only three countries in North America." ___With Mexico in the aftermath of yesterday's federal and state elections, Robert A. Pastor observes 8 things the U.S. election system could learn from Mexico's.
comment posted at 9:35 PM on Jul-2-12

Please quit posting pictures of your debit cards, people.
comment posted at 9:02 PM on Jul-2-12

"Flawed satnav instructions are the scapegoat for ridiculous round-trips, buses wedged under bridges, and ambulances taking life-threatening diversions. But few understand or appreciate how far mapping companies go to ensure the accuracy of the data they’re providing."
comment posted at 5:46 AM on Jul-2-12
comment posted at 8:45 PM on Jul-2-12

Last year the CEO of Barclays Bank, Bob Diamond, told MPs that “There was a period of remorse and apology for banks. I think that period needs to be over.” Yesterday, Barclays was fined £290M by UK and US regulators for manipulating the key LIBOR lending rate.
comment posted at 8:38 PM on Jun-28-12
comment posted at 7:27 PM on Jul-5-12

Fundamentalist Christian schools in Louisiana will soon be citing the existence of the Loch Ness monster as proof that evolution is a myth.
comment posted at 11:27 PM on Jun-27-12

This past Friday, after a five hour trial in which Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo had less than two hours to mount a defense for, the congress and senate of Paraguay, in a close to unanimous vote, relieved the president of his duties. The election of Lugo, a former priest and a vocal advocate for the poor in Paraguay, a country in which a small handful of elites own close to 80% of the land (much of it given away in the 35 year Stroessner dictatorship) had officially brought an end to the 60 something year rule of the right wing Colorado Party (35 of those under Stroessner).
comment posted at 6:03 AM on Jun-27-12

"So, the Shard: it's expensive. It's off-limits. It's largely owned by people who don't live here. And it is the perfect metaphor for what London is becoming."
comment posted at 4:23 PM on Jun-26-12

There are fears for the future editorial independence of the BBC after news journalists were ordered to come up with money-generating ideas for the corporation, a leaked email reveals. BBC bosses have told reporters to think of money-making schemes and present them to their line managers at forthcoming job appraisals – raising concerns that the organisation's prized editorial standards will be compromised by commercial imperatives. The 2,400 staff working in the BBC's Global News department, including the BBC World Service, have been told that they must now "exploit new commercial opportunities [and] maximise the value we create with our journalism".
comment posted at 4:39 PM on Jun-25-12

For the past 4 days, up to 12 million NatWest / Royal Bank of Scotland customers have been unable to pay bills, move money or get paid due to a technical problem. Customers have been unable to complete on house purchases and some are stuck because they can't pay hotel bills abroad. The new mobile banking service has also been affected. The bank has called in 7,000 staff to open all weekend as problems persist.
Just three months ago, the State-controlled bank outsourced nearly 300 back-office roles to Hyderabad in India.
comment posted at 2:07 AM on Jun-24-12

Wellcome Image Awards 2012 "Wellcome Images is the world's leading source of images of medicine and its history, from ancient civilisation and social history to contemporary healthcare, biomedical science and clinical medicine. More than 180 000 images ranging from manuscripts, rare books, archives and paintings to X-rays, clinical photography and scanning electron micrographs are available on the Wellcome Images website." (Previously & Previously) [cortex, is that you?]
comment posted at 1:59 AM on Jun-23-12

4 years later, Matt Harding has a new Dance Video. Here are his older records of Travel around the World: 2008, 2006 and the original from 2004-5. What a life!
comment posted at 2:23 PM on Jun-20-12

Julian Assange has breached his bail conditions in London and is currently petitioning for asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy. It is uncertain whether asylum will be granted, though Assange has a personal friendship with Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador. If his asylum bid is successful however, it is unclear how he would get from the safe haven of the six room embassy office to Ecuador without being arrested by British authorities. Such stalemates have happened before. Cardinal József Mindszenty was unable to leave the US Embassy building in Budapest for fifteen years after being granted asylum. The Siberian Seven were a group of seven political refugees who lived in a twelve foot by twenty foot room in the basement of the US embassy in Moscow for five years after being granted asylum in 1978. And in 1989, Chinese scientist and political activist Fang Lizhi was granted asylum at the US embassy in Beijing following the Tiananmen Square Massacre. He lived in the office for thirteen months before being allowed safe passage to Britain.
comment posted at 2:46 PM on Jun-20-12

Borrowing a name from another product, Microsoft today announced it's first ever hardware products running a mainstream version of Windows, and the first designed for Windows 8: The Microsoft Surface, in ARM and Intel flaovours. Hands on. Video highlighting the stand and covers.
comment posted at 3:57 AM on Jun-19-12
comment posted at 10:19 AM on Jun-19-12

Calm.com
comment posted at 11:25 PM on Jun-6-12

LinkedIn has spilled 6.5 million unsalted SHA-1 password hashes.
comment posted at 11:11 AM on Jun-6-12

Soo Bin Park in Nature has reported that South Korean highschool textbook publishers will be removing examples of evolution due to demands of creationist groups
comment posted at 10:42 PM on Jun-5-12

Bootstrap is Twitter's toolkit for creating rich and more consistent web interfaces across browsers and devices. The Bootstrap ecosystem offers, among other things, an iconic font, themes, a customization generator, themes for Wordpress / Drupal + / Joomla, templates for Fireworks / Photoshop, a button generator and a jQuery UI theme. How to get started? Check out this tutorial or this series or even this. Built With Bootstrap has lots of examples on how developers are putting Bootstrap to good use.
comment posted at 1:16 AM on Jun-6-12

Eduard Anatolyevich Khil, aka Mr. Trololo, has died at the age of 77.
comment posted at 8:27 PM on Jun-4-12

Why Windows 8 Scares Me - and Should Scare You Too
comment posted at 7:27 PM on Jun-1-12

Louisiana monks go to court to sell their caskets. “The number one thing you should do as a public interest litigator is to get monks as your clients in every single case.”
comment posted at 10:00 AM on May-30-12

Dumb, Drunk and Racist - Joe Hildebrand, writer for the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, has a new TV show coming up on Australian TV, called "Dumb, Drunk and Racist", which was the phrase famously used during a training session in an Indian call centre about Australians. The show features four Indians from varying backgrounds visiting Australia - looks like very uncomfortable viewing (if you're Australian). (Slightly NSFW because of drunken boob-showing).
comment posted at 11:01 PM on May-28-12
comment posted at 11:02 PM on May-28-12
comment posted at 4:33 AM on May-29-12
comment posted at 9:29 AM on May-29-12

A 73 year old returned, making it seem easy, yet increased traffic left four people dead this weekend. Traffic jams at Mount Everest.
comment posted at 9:00 PM on May-23-12
comment posted at 11:25 AM on May-24-12

The ad is the work of two of the most fearsome players in Republican politics: Larry McCarthy, the producer behind the infamous Willie Horton commercial in 1988, and Crossroads GPS, the political battle squad founded by Karl Rove. Here it is.
comment posted at 10:56 PM on May-22-12

Joyce Banda, who was recently sworn in as Malawi's first ever female president has announced plans to repeal her country's laws against homosexuality in her first state of nation address. She said: "Some laws which were duly passed by the august house... will be repealed as a matter of urgency... these include the provisions regarding indecent practices and unnatural acts." More than two-thirds of African countries have laws criminalising homosexual acts with imprisionment, abuse and even murder being served as punishment to generally widespread public support. This, coupled with Malawi hosting the African summit in July makes Banda's move all the more laudable.
comment posted at 9:00 AM on May-21-12

How Fast Do You Read? Compare yourself with national averages. Compare yourself with Anne Jones, a Champion Speed Reader who consumed the last Harry Potter book in 47 minutes, about 1 page every 3.75 seconds.
comment posted at 5:51 AM on May-18-12

"I can say with confidence that rich people don't create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small," said über-rich venture capitalist Nick Hanauer in a March 1st TEDx talk, which TED is refusing to put on its website.
comment posted at 10:07 PM on May-16-12

"A Harvard MBA Pays Down $101K Of Debt." Two years after he graduated from Harvard with an MBA, Joe Mihalic, now manager of strategic alliances and business development at Dell, vowed to do “everything in my power–short of lying, cheating, and stealing–to pay down" his student loan debt, (then totaling 90K,) "in the next ten months.” After applying for a weekend delivery job, he also decided to chronicle the steps he was taking on a blog: "No More Harvard Debt." First page of posts is here. Penultimate post explains his process: "Mission Accomplished."
comment posted at 7:55 PM on May-16-12

Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin has renounced his U.S. citizenship ahead of the company's IPO so as to avoid paying capital gains taxes on his shares, which could be worth as much as $3.84 billion.
comment posted at 8:48 PM on May-14-12
comment posted at 9:45 AM on May-15-12

Millions may know him best from one of the only lines he delivered in the Blues Brothers movie: "We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline". Others who notice these things will remember him as the guy who also played the bass in the Blues Brothers band. And those for whom Stax records and the Memphis sound are important will know him as the four-string foundation of the great Booker T and the MGs, and the man who lent his solid, no-frills bass lines to many a tune by soul luminaries Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and lots of other greats. Memphis-born bassman Donald "Duck" Dunn has died while on tour (along with fellow legend and bandmate Steve Cropper) in Tokyo. RIP, Duck Dunn, and if there's any goat piss in heaven, I know you're gonna turn it into gasoline up there, too.
comment posted at 9:10 AM on May-13-12

#Popleveson: the Twitter meme from Court 73 Robert Jay QC, the lawyer at the heart of the UK's Leveson Enquiry into press standards has a particular way in which he asks questions which was yesterday applied on-line to top pop hits. The Guardian collects some of the best.
comment posted at 8:23 AM on May-13-12

Argentina passed a new gender identity law that gives people the right to legally designate a new gender regardless of whether they have taken hormones or undergone surgery. The law was drafted (and promoted) with help from the Argentine Transvestite, Transsexual and Transgender Association, which is led by Marcela Romero a transwoman who was recognized as "Woman of the Year" by the Argentine National Congress.
comment posted at 12:00 AM on May-12-12

On Sunday, Vice President Joe Biden went on Meet The Press and expressed his support for same-sex marriage rights. This led to several days of press speculation that Biden had blundered and gone off-message from an Administration that had rather carefully refused to take a strong position on the issue, and the media began to pursue Democrats over the issue. In response to this, today President Obama said: "...for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married."
comment posted at 7:59 PM on May-9-12

Everything you know about buttermilk is wrong.
comment posted at 6:15 AM on May-9-12

The frequent fliers who flew too much. American Airlines said that for a single payment of $350,000, you could fly with them anywhere, first class, for the rest of your life. Why were they so surprised when a few people... well... did?
comment posted at 2:26 AM on May-7-12

Battleground is hulu's first exclusive scripted original series. A mockumentary drama/comedy depicting a Senatorial campaign in Wisconsin, the show has a run of 13 episodes this season, 12 of which are already available on hulu (the season finale will be released May 8). Happily, the first six episodes are also available on YouTube. 1: The Pilot, 2: Who Is Claire Villareal, 3: Hold The Whipped Cream, 4: The Comment, 5: They'll Burn Your Eyes, 6: Polls Close At Six
comment posted at 7:50 AM on May-9-12

McDonald's, a sponsor of the Olympics since 1968, will open a two-story cathedral-like restaurant that seats 1,500 customers, at London's Olympic Park. A group of British doctors say that the mega-McDonald’s sends the wrong message about obesity.
comment posted at 6:43 PM on May-2-12

Remember all that porn found on Osama bin Laden's computer? It may not be all porn.
comment posted at 2:15 AM on May-1-12
comment posted at 2:44 AM on May-1-12