In other news the trainer of an extremely poisonous jellyfish at the same facility was almost stung to death recently, even though he had been training with the same jellyfish for weeks and had formed a 'special-bond' with it!! Apparently the jellyfish became agitated when forced to jump through a flaming hoop.

Pro Tip: If an animal has the word "killer" in it's colloquial name you probably should skip the whole making friends bit...

What a great talk!

Hey guys! The GOP is relevant again!

Haha, just kidding they are still a bunch of homophobes and racists.

The death of a luge competitor who left the track at high speed has cast a shadow over the Winter Olympics in Canada ahead of the opening ceremony.

Georgian Nodar Kumaritashvili's sled flipped and he smashed into a steel pole at the Whistler Sliding Centre, killing the 21-year-old.

It happened hours before the ceremony to open the Vancouver Games.

Georgia confirmed they will compete in the Games as a tribute to him and will march as scheduled at the ceremony.

Kumaritashvili's sled struck the inside of the track's last turn during his sixth and final training run, sending his body into the air and over a concrete wall.

His sled remained on the track, and the visor from his helmet appeared to continue down the ice.

Who designed this crap? Unpadded steel beams on the side of the track? I mean, WTF? These guys travel at over 90Km/h!

The poor guy might have survived if there had been plastic barriers or something on that corner. Not good enough. :-(

The light of the entire universe concentrated into a ring... Sounds impressive until you realise that the guy who made goatse simulated this years ago!

'Nuff said, check the tag.

Suddenly my mad raving about the Google omni-surveillance doesn't sound so crazy...

Why are people even discussing (in the comments) whether seatbelts work or not?? You people suck.

*FACE-PALM-TO-THE-MAX*

Interesting! I wonder what Internode thinks about this.

More politicians should do this.

Click the image above to see the Gizmodo post.

"And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM."

"Do you realize how ridiculous that is? Programmers with free time did more to help you get quality products than you ever did by buying the broken gear in the first place."

"Get it together: every single one of these consumer electronics companies should be approached as the enemy. They work for us. Hold their feet to the fire when they say their product is going to change even a small part of our lives. Circle back again in six months when they're shilling the incremental upgrade and ask them why the last version didn't cut the mustard."

Guess where the previous quotes are from? No, they are not from the venomous article linked to above. They are actually from this post from 2007.

Hmm. I wonder who wrote those powerful words? The words calling us all to hold device manufacturers accountable for their DRM ridden and crippled-by-design hardware. Manufacturers who intentionally lock us out of our own systems until, *gasp*, the hackers fix them for us?

Oh wow! It was by the very same Joel Johnson who recently unleashed the hell hounds upon any developer/tinkerer who dares question the almighty Apple. If you read Joel's recent rant against developers, geeks, shade-tree tinkerers and people who just sort of like freedom, it sounds like he has finally graduated to smoking pure Koolaid crystals (or is that 'krystals'?)

"Stop trembling, start creating", he says.

Joel doesn't get it because he is an end consumer. He lives in the world of 'tech', he writes articles about 'tech' but he doesn't actually create it.

His blog posts are spawned directly from the hard work of developers and designers who create on a daily basis. These are people who dream large, people who can see about 1000 years further into the the future than he apparently can. These are people who aren't happy with the state-of-the-art even when they created it less than a second ago.

But he doesn't get that. In this article he basically wrote the English degree equivalent of 'CRY MOAR' which, last time I checked, didn't actually solve any problems.

From his rant:

"Consider a path that will truly inspire the coming generations of tinkerers and engineers: Working your ass off to make a product that competes with Apple on every count that matters—design, ease-of-use, a simple marketplace, customer satisfaction; you know, everything—and does it with the open-source licenses and values you claim to believe in; or fight to change the broken copyright laws that demonize the tinkering in the first place."

So because we are not all starting our own mobile hardware/software companies to compete with the company that seems currently unassailable by even Google, the company that controls the entire internet, we are snivelling little whiners and should shut up. I like the logic there. And by like I mean, 'dislike'. Google may be a problem eventually, but when you are stuck between a rock and a place that allows you to run multiple applications at the same time....

Joel, perhaps you need to ask the guys at Giz to pull up your article from '07 so you can have a re-read. Or you can drink more Koolaid. Or whatever.

Leave the real innovating to us and we'll let you know when the next thing is ready for you to blog about. Maybe you can write it on your iPad with the handy keyboard accessory!

Mark L Polansky, Commander of the STS-127 mission to the International Space Station has only one line in the short, shakily shot film, "Yeah baby, I'm here to fix the CO2 scrubber -- If you know what I mean".

Hurry up and make this a reality already. I need spare hearts to make up for all the KFC I have eaten over the last 10 years. :-)

+1 from me.

The music on this album is so diverse, I thought I liked the Wu-tang dubstep album that came out recently but '8 Diagrams' is heaps better.