256 And this one is just right – Enjoy your Thanksgiving feast today, folks! [COMIC]

The millionaire owner of the UK Segway company has died after apparently riding one of his company’s motorised scooters off cliffs and into a river.

Jimi Heselden, 62, crashed into the River Wharfe while riding the vehicle round his estate in Thorp Arch, Boston Spa, West Yorkshire, on Sunday.

He was pronounced dead at the scene. The scooter was found in the water.

Mr Heselden, who founded Leeds-based company Hesco Bastion, acquired the Segway operation in 2010.

A spokeswoman for West Yorkshire Police confirmed Mr Heselden’s identity.

She said: “Police were called at 1140 yesterday to reports of a man in the River Wharfe, apparently having fallen from the cliffs above.”

She said a “Segway type” vehicle had been recovered. rest

Doutzen Kroes HQ Photo.

Doutzen Kroes Reviews can be seen at eyje.

image: GettyImages

The Queen asked ministers for a poverty handout to help heat her palaces but was rebuffed because they feared it would be a public relations disaster, documents disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act reveal.

Royal aides were told that the £60m worth of energy-saving grants were aimed at families on low incomes and if the money was given to Buckingham Palace instead of housing associations or hospitals it could lead to “adverse publicity” for the Queen and the Government.

Aides complained to ministers in 2004 that the Queen’s gas and electricity bills, which had increased by 50 per cent that year, stood at more than £1m a year and had become “untenable”. rest

I hate motivational sayings I can’t live up to. – Oh God, We’re all going to die [PIC]

A major potential long-term health concern left in the wake of BP’s catastrophic oil spill is the nearly two million gallons of dispersant sprayed over and pumped into the Gulf, scientists say. Much of it was injected into the sea beneath its surface, which made both the amount used, and its use, unprecedented.

In interviews, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and FDA officials repeatedly told Raw Story that dispersant “does not bioaccumulate” in seafood and therefore is not toxic to humans. The two dispersants used during the oil spill, Corexit 9527 and Corexit 9500, contain many ingredients “found in common household products.” And even though there is still no chemical test to detect dispersant in Gulf seafood – though officials said one is coming very soon – sensory tests are effective down to one part per million. rest

I occasionally see messages like this from aimless, excited programmers:
Hey everyone! I just learned Erlang/Haskell/Python, and now I’m looking for a big project to write in it. If you’ve got ideas, let me know!
or
I love Linux and open source and want to contribute to the community by starting a project. What’s an important program that only runs under Windows that you’d love to have a Linux version of?

The wrong-way-aroundness of these requests always puzzles me. The key criteria is a programing language or an operating system or a software license. There’s nothing about solving a problem or overall usefulness or any relevant connection between the application and the interests of the original poster. Would you trust a music notation program developed by a non-musician? A Photoshop clone written by someone who has never used Photoshop professionally? But I don’t want to dwell on the negative side of this.

Here’s my advice to people who make these queries:

Stop and think about all of your personal interests and solve a simple problem related to one of them. For example, I practice guitar by playing along to a drum machine, but I wish I could have human elements added to drum loops, like auto-fills and occasional variations and so on. What would it take to do that? I could start by writing a simple drum sequencing program–one without a GUI–and see how it went. I also take a lot of photographs, and I could use a tagging scheme that isn’t tied to a do-everything program like Adobe Lightroom. That’s simple enough that I could create a minimal solution in an afternoon. rest

Many people who have children who have been sifted through the Florida school system recognize that it is, in some instances, abysmal at best. So, imagine the surprise of some of those parents when the Florida Board of Education actually did something admirable in regard to science education.

It seems a marine science textbook that was being considered for high schools across the state was rejected because it contained pro-creationism material. That material included. according to the Orlando Sentinel, citations of “the work of a man who testified, during an Arkansas trial, for the teaching of creationism in schools.” rest

America is retarded – Like really, really, really retarded [PIC]

Glenn Beck’s Goldline Ripoff: 180% markup on the real value of the gold they scare people into buying. Customer bought $140,000 worth of their gold, when he wanted to sell it back, he could only get $80,000. That’s a $60,000 loss. How many older folks losing their life savings to this scam?