Sideswipe

When smoking was sexy and didn't make your toes drop off

Modern-day book burning: A bill has been introduced to Congress that would ban anyone under 18 from logging on to MySpace or other social networking services from all US school or library computers. It's a result of paranoia about these time-wasting sites being "a happy hunting ground for child predators", says bill-pusher congressman Michael Fitzpatrick. The bill would ban access to chat rooms and could block a variety of online forums such as photo-sharing site Flickr and video-sharing site YouTube. Online encyclopedia Wikipedia gets a pardon, thanks to an exemption for non-commercial sites. And news sites that allow people to log in and create profiles and comment might also be affected.

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The racist chants of football hooligans could be stopped by a new sound system that neutralises chanting with a carefully timed echo. The Dutch researchers say the echoes trip up efforts to synchronise a chant, neutralising an unwelcome message without drowning out the overall roar of a crowd. People become confused if you feed their speech back with a delay and to chant in time a person must keep track of several different sound sources around them.

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Overheard on a bus to Browns Bay via Albany: A finance company worker is asking a colleague "how he had changed a customer's life". The colleague's response: "By turning them down for more finance and forcing them to go to another lending agency to get even deeper in debt."

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Australian company Erudi Quium teaches businesses how to comply with the Fair Trading Act. So what does their name mean? Compliance Through Understanding! So why didn't they say that in English?

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Reuters reports on a study showing CEOs at 11 large US companies were paid a total of $865 million over the past two years, while presiding over a collective loss of $640 billion in the value of their firms' shares. Among the 11 companies cited as having the widest gap between CEO pay and performance were Lucent Technologies, Home Depot, Hewlett-Packard and Wal-Mart Stores.