Products to avoid as if your life depends on it.
 

Following an incident in which a foil punctured the FIE transparent visor mask, the FIE has removed their required use at FIE competitions.

The International Fencing Federation (FIE) announced that the use of the transparent visor masks would no longer be required at foil events pending an investigation into the causes of an accident where a foil broke through the Lexan protective plate during a foil bout at the European Junior Championships.
On November 1st, the Swedish Fencing Federation (www.fencing.se) reported that
the Lexan visor of a fencing mask was penetrated during the men's foil competition at the European Junior Championships in Odense. The fencer was not fatally injured but the incident is considered very serious.

The dirty little secret was that the FIE pushed this piece of crap on the fencing community to increase the watchability of fencing. It is the equivalent of Fox sports glowing puck. Fencing is not a great spectator sport if you lack background, mandating a clear mask so you can watch competitors mutter about directing isn't going to help. TV before safety f'in French MBA's. ;)

Ain't the same.

WTF? A foil broke it? What would an epee do? Dumbarse MBAs.

An epee would've gone right through the kids head.

We just had a lexan bowl shatter at our house the other day.

Something tells me this is counterfeit Chinese lexan. I'll take bets.

A remarkable outcome of this evaluation was that material used is
not Sabic Innovative Plastic polycarbonate with brandname
LEXAN. The visor was manufactured by means of an injection
moulding process stead drapeforming. Material used was an
uncoated polycarbonate.

We're halfway there already.

Perhaps this is the rest of the journey?;)

Now now, no lunging to conclusions....

touché

I see your point.

. . .no matter how you slice it.

:stickpoke

i'm still on the fence ing

I saw something the other day that's got to be one of the worst ideas for humanity ever.

So there are these websites (there are several, but I won't even link to any of them) that sell various high-dollar items under a modified "auction" setup. The price starts at basically nothing, and each bid bumps the price incrementally by 10 cents. BUT, it costs a dollar to bid, and every bid adds 30 seconds to the auction time to give everyone else a chance to respond.

So let's say you've got a group of people bidding on a new PS3, with a starting price of $5. If the final closing price is as low as $75--which is of course far less than retail value--that means the website actually got paid a total of $700, a dollar for every dime bid all the way up. And there are dozens of schleps who paid who-knows-how-much for their bids and didn't win the item.

But here's where the real schadenfreude comes in: there is a list of everyone who has bid on an item, and how many times. In just a few minutes of wandering around this site, we found an auction where there were basically only two primary bidders left going back and forth over an electronics item whose actual worth was about $300. The auction value was slightly over $200... and each of these guys had bid over 200 times each. So no matter what, one of them was going to pay more than $100 over the retail price, and the other was going to pay hundreds for nothing. Neither of them was going to walk away from it. It's like you can watch people's lives being ruined right in front of you, 30 seconds at a time.

Some people like to play with sharp sticks but I still don't see the point of it.

Seriously, that new mask looks like it's from the original series of Star Trek's decompression chamber.