Every year, as the Queen's New Year honours list approaches, the Today programme sets out to nominate the great successes of the past year.

But this year, with the great and the good having presided over what might be one of the worst recessions since the Great Depression, we thought it might more suitable to celebrate lack of achievement.

"There are advantages to sitting around and doing nothing," says Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler magazine, which has been promoting the cause of idleness since it first went to press in 1993.

"All the great creative breakthroughs come when people are sitting around, or lying in bed in the morning half awake.

"Idleness is a wellspring of creativity, is enjoyable for its own sake and there are health benefits as well."

BBC - Today

merry christmas

The parliament justly thought, that the king was too eminent a magistrate to be trusted with discretionary power, which he might so easily turn to the destruction of liberty. And in the event it has hitherto been found, that, though some sensible inconveniences arise from the maxim of adhering strictly to law, yet the advantages overbalance them, and should render the English grateful to the memory of their ancestors, who, after repeated contests, at last established that noble, though dangerous, principle.

From Hume's History of England

A Sheffield man who lent a penniless Australian tourist �5 to pay for a ferry trip in 1969 has been repaid his debt nearly 40 years later.

While Jim Webb was out, a card and �200 was hand delivered to his home by Gary Fenton, to repay the money he borrowed when they met in Ostend, Belgium.

A note inside read: "To Jim Webb, a good man. From Gary Fenton, a tardy payer of debts."

BBC NEWS | England | South Yorkshire | Man's �5 debt repaid 39 years on

A message from a bicyclist to nearby drivers...

To: Drivers From: Bicyclists

When pasting text default to plain text.

When I am pasting text from one window into another window, I almost never want to preserve the font and formatting from the previous window. I'm moving information into a different context. The first context has a particular look and feel. The new context invariably has a different look and feel. I want the information that I'm adding into the new context to fit the overall look and feel for the new context, not the old one. Therefore, text should default to pasting as plain text (or "paste and match style" as Apple calls it). I should not have to click on "Paste Special..." and then choose "unformatted text" from a menu and then click OK, every time I want to paste something. That's too much clicking. The extra clicking should be preserved for the rare case where I do want the formatting preserved. If most users feel differently about this, at least make the default behavior configurable!

Things I wish Microsoft and Apple would do differently #7432

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Legendary pinup queen Bettie Page died of pneumonia at the age of 85 in a Los Angeles, California, hospital Thursday, a week after suffering a heart attack, according to her agent. "She captured the imagination of a generation of men and women with her free spirit and unabashed sensuality," said agent Mark Roesler in a written statement. "She is the embodiment of beauty." Page, said to be one of the most photographed people of the past century, became a recluse in recent decades. Yet, her images continued to be used around the world to market Bettie Page action figures, clothing lines and other merchandise.

R.I.P.

1950s pinup model Bettie Page dead at 85

Native Client is an open-source research technology for running x86 native code in web applications, with the goal of maintaining the browser neutrality, OS portability, and safety that people expect from web apps. We've released this project at an early, research stage to get feedback from the security and broader open-source communities. We believe that Native Client technology will someday help web developers to create richer and more dynamic browser-based applications.

I picked up on this through a digg link to an ars technica article. I'm sure people have seen it but since I know relatively fuck all about security but since there are people like Decius, Acidus, et al here I was wondering what people think
edit oops do the recommend then see I should have checked discuss lol

nativeclient - Google Code

Ben Laurie:

One simply cannot properly secure a general-purpose operating system.

We suggest a solution that involves taking both the Blue Pill and the Red Pill: providing the trusted path by means of a separate device with a secure operating system, used in tandem with the existing general purpose operating system.

Choose the Red Pill and the Blue Pill

Scientists in Austria say they have found a basic form of jealousy in dogs.

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Test reveals dogs' jealous side