`The idea emerged after Jonathan “Yoni” Shimshoni and a team of aspiring inventors in Israel watched a television documentary about victims trapped on the upper floors of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Shimshoni recalled seeing the towers ablaze and thinking, “This is nuts. This shouldn’t have to happen.”
The team came up with a $1 million escape device with expandable cabins that could be lowered like lifeboats outside a high-rise in distress.’
`Dennis Crouch had already slashed himself. And when he refused to drop his knife, Daytona Beach police Officer Betsy Cassidy decided she had no choice.
“Taser! Taser!” Cassidy shouted as she sent a two-pronged wire, packing 50,000 volts, at Crouch’s chest. What happened next stunned everyone.
A Taser probe pierced the pocket of his khaki shirt — and ignited the butane lighter inside. Crouch’s pocket exploded in flames.
“The subject,” recounted Sgt. Al Tolley in a subsequent report, “immediately dropped the knife.”‘
`Coinciding with the recent 50th anniversary of Silicon Valley, today IBM announced a chip-making advance that will allow it to create semiconductors with wires less than 30 nanometers wide — one-third the width in today’s industry-standard chips — which should keep Moore’s Law (the density of chips doubles every two years) in effect for several more years, according to experts.’
`Broadband customers of Australia’s largest ISPs can use peer-to-peer file-sharing services such as BitTorrent and Kazaa without being throttled by their ISP, at least for now.
Australia’s largest internet providers say they are not limiting peer-to-peer file sharing traffic on their networks and have no immediate plans to impose restrictions on the activity.
However, some say they have the means to apply limits if that is required in the future.’
`The pastor of a charismatic Christian church attended by the Plano mother on trial, accused of fatally cutting off the arms of her 10-month-old daughter, told jurors Wednesday that mental illness is really demon possession that cannot be cured with psychiatry or medicine.
“I do not believe that any mental illness exists other than demons, and no medication can straighten it out, other than the power of God,” said Doyle Davidson, the 73-year-old minister of the Water of Life Church that Dena and John Schlosser attended several times a week.
Dena Schlosser, 37, is on trial for capital murder in the slaying of her daughter Margaret in November 2004.’
`Police say the driver charged with the smash that killed six teenagers and left one fighting for his life has appeared in court at least eight times since 1992 for driving while disqualified.
And it alleged his four-year-old son was sitting on his lap at the time of the crash. [..]
Towle, 34, who was released from jail three months ago after serving 18 months for a firearms-related offence, held his head in his hands and ran his fingers through his hair yesterday as he faced up to the full horror of the charges against him: six counts of culpable driving causing death, four counts of negligently causing serious injury, one count of failing to stop and one of failing to render assistance.’
`Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday warned U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice not to “mess with” him days after Rice described Venezuela as a menace to regional democracy.
“Don’t mess with me, Condoleezza. Don’t mess with me, girl,” Chavez said during his weekly Sunday broadcast, sarcastically offering her a kiss and jokingly referring to her as “Condolence.”
The warning comes days after Rice described Venezuela as one of the “biggest problems” for the Western Hemisphere and promised to develop regional alliances as part of an “inoculation” strategy to expose what the State Department calls anti-democratic behavior in Venezuela.’
‘Downed racer avoids other bikes by doing the skatman. If racing doesn’t work as a career, dancing might. Skibby yibby yibby dome da da da I’m a skatman!’
(3.1meg Windows Media)
see it here »
`A 23-year-old woman has been given a landmark payment of £20,000 for being bullied as a pupil at her south Wales primary school more than 12 years ago.
Sophie Amor won the settlement after taking action against Torfaen Council for seven years of bullying which she said destroyed her life.
Ms Amor attended St Peter’s Church in Wales School in Blaenavon and said she was bullied from the age of four to 11.
Torfaen Council agreed to an out-of -court settlement but denied liability.’
‘This kid can’t wait a few minutes for his computer to warm up. He’s totally freaking out. Calm down kid, internet porn isnt going anywhere.’
Crazy Germans. This kid is gonna choke on his own tongue from screaming so much if he’s not careful.
(7.3meg Windows Media)
see it here »
`Global supercomputer leader Cray has announced that the “Red Storm” supercomputer installed at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico is the first computer to surpass the 1 terabyte-per-second (1 TB/sec) performance mark on a widely used test that measures communications among processors in high-performance computing (HPC) systems and provides a key indication of the total communication capacity of the network.
Red Storm posted 1.8 TB/sec (1.8 trillion bytes per second) on the PTRANS interconnect bandwidth test that is part of the High Performance Computing Challenge (HPCC) test suite. By comparison, this figure represents 40 times more communications power per teraflop (trillion floating point operations per second) than the PTRANS result posted by an IBM Blue Gene system that has more than 10 times as many processors.’
`A mathematical proof is irrefutably true, a manifestation of pure logic. But an increasing number of mathematical proofs are now impossible to verify with absolute certainty, according to experts in the field.
“I think that we’re now inescapably in an age where the large statements of mathematics are so complex that we may never know for sure whether they’re true or false,” says Keith Devlin of Stanford University in California, US. “That puts us in the same boat as all the other scientists.”
As an example, he points to the Classification of Finite Simple Groups, a claimed proof announced in 1980 that resulted from a collaboration in which members of a group each contributed different pieces. “Twenty-five years later we’re still not sure if it’s correct or not. We sort of think it is, but no one’s ever written down the complete proof,” Devlin says.’
‘Sexually abusing a teenager is less serious a crime if the girl is not a virgin, Italy’s higher court said on Friday in a controversial ruling that immediately drew a barrage of criticism.
The court ruled in favor of a man in his forties, identified only as Marco T., who forced his 14-year old stepdaughter to have oral sex with him after she refused intercourse.
The man, who has been sentenced to three years and four months in jail, lodged an appeal arguing that the fact that his stepdaughter had had sex with men before should have been taken into consideration during his trial as a mitigating factor.’
`A heavyweight couple caused a pub ceiling to collapse by frolicking together in a shower.
The pair checked in to the The Black Horse Inn in Taunton, Somerset, and spent an afternoon drinking in the bar.
They then went upstairs and got in to the shower together.
Their amorous behaviour caused some damage and water started to pour down into the bar below.
The couple left early the next morning, but not long afterwards the ceiling collapsed, leaving landlord Steve Ball with a £5,000 repair bill.’
`Stress, obesity and a lonely couch-potato existence make for miserable lives. And that’s just the start of the tale of woe for the nation’s dogs and cats.
“What happens to our pets mirrors what’s happening in human lives,” says Jon Sellors of insurer More Than. “Obesity in pets is getting to be a really big issue. When we spoke to vets recently, 80 per cent of them reported seeing increasing numbers of obese pets. Yet 90 per cent of owners believe their pets are not overweight.”‘
`An American pay TV boss accused of defrauding the Pentagon will be extradited from Australia to the United States to face fraud and money-laundering charges. [..]
Hermanowski allegedly siphoned more than million (.8 million) in an elaborate cable-TV racket during his time as chairman of US company Americable, court documents state.
He allegedly billed the US Department of Defence for TV systems on military bases that he never built, and is accused of laundering million (.1 million) in 1995 and 1996 by endorsing fake invoices and depositing cheques into his personal bank accounts.’
Pictures of a bunch of strange looking buildings.
Some a pretty cool, others are pretty ugly.
`Radiation detectors in Britain recorded a fourfold increase in uranium levels in the atmosphere after the “shock and awe” bombing campaign against Iraq, according to a report.
Environmental scientists who uncovered the figures through freedom of information laws say it is evidence that depleted uranium from the shells was carried by wind currents to Britain.
Government officials, however, say the sharp rise in uranium detected by radiation monitors in Berkshire was a coincidence and probably came from local sources.’
`A student being asked to remove a T-shirt with a lesbian slogan has sparked a protest at a school in Melbourne’s northwest.
About 30 students at Strathmore Secondary College last week rallied behind Year 12 classmate Stephanie, 17, after she was told by teachers to change out of the T-shirt for school photos.
Stephanie, who did not want her surname published, said she had worn a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Nobody knows I’m a lesbian” to school on several occasions without concerns being raised by staff or fellow students.’
`Below is a ten minute “see-for-yourself” report that conclusively shows that Vice President Dick Cheney’s claims to Kennedy County Sherriff’s Deputies in south Texas is a total fabrication.
A massive cover-up has been conducted concerning the shooting. We know that most of the facts that have been told to the public are manufactured frauds. Cheney claims that he shot Whittington at 90 feet, ballistic tests from the spread of the shotgun pellets to their penetration depth is 100% conclusive.
Harry Whittington was shot at close range, between 15 and 18 feet, not the 90 claimed by Dick Cheney and the Secret Service. It is now clear why they refused to let Sherriff’s Deputies interview Cheney for over 13 hours and why they claimed that Whittington’s injuries were superficial when in truth they were grevious.’
(28.9meg Quicktime)
followup to Cheney shooting victim says sorry – to Cheney.
`Not only are physically unattractive teenagers likely to be stay-at-homes on prom night, they’re also more likely to grow up to be criminals, say two economists who tracked the life course of young people from high school through early adulthood.
“We find that unattractive individuals commit more crime in comparison to average-looking ones, and very attractive individuals commit less crime in comparison to those who are average-looking,” claim Naci Mocan of the University of Colorado and Erdal Tekin of Georgia State University.
Mocan and Tekin analyzed data from a federally sponsored survey of 15,000 high-schoolers who were interviewed in 1994 and again in 1996 and 2002. One question asked interviewers to rate the physical appearance of the student on a five-point scale ranging from “very attractive” to “very unattractive.”
These economists found that the long-term consequences of being young and ugly were small but consistent. Cute guys were uniformly less likely than averages would indicate to have committed seven crimes including burglary and selling drugs, while the unhandsome were consistently more likely to have broken the law.’
`The Touch Rubik’s Cube puts a new twist on the classic puzzle game. It uses six different materials: metal, wood, textile, stone, rubber, and plastic, engaging users to use their senses. This also enables blind persons to enjoy the wonders of a Rubik’s cube.’
`Jacqueline Dotson and her six-year-old daughter had to be cut out of their vehicle after the accident in which Dotson veered into the median and over-corrected, rolling her truck over the guardrail and landing upside down after flipping several times.
Several people stopped to help, and it turns out, the good samaritans may very well have saved Dotson’s life. Sheila Vice, a nurse’s aide, and an off-duty EMT from another county stopped to help, and put a tourniquet on Dotson’s arm to stop the bleeding. Her arm was found near the accident still clutching a cell phone.’
`In 1970, a bizarre gardening accident embedded a small nail deep inside Guy “Bud” Hart’s body.
More than 35 years later, the nail made an unexpected return, much to Hart’s surprise.
The Placerville man was stunned earlier this month when a coughing fit expelled the inch-long sliver of metal, completing its decades-long trek inside the 84-year-old’s body.
“I didn’t think something like that could happen,” Hart said.’
`For the second time in recent months, somebody broke into a 16-year-old girl’s home and stole her prosthetic leg — including one that had been donated following the first crime, authorities said.
The thieves took a $12,000 cosmetic leg and a donated $16,000 leg that Melissa Huff uses to play softball, her mother, Lisa Huff, said. She said a camera in the room was untouched.
“It’s insane. Who hates her that bad?” Lisa Huff said. “I went back to the girls’ room and the room was trashed. Mostly Melissa’s stuff.”‘
`The note inside the house made it clear to Cowlitz County sheriff’s deputies that they had the right place: “Do not open door & let anyone in! Stolen Stuff visable.”
Within a day, investigators confirmed that antiques, furniture, jewelry, credit cards and at least 19 guns found in the home of Gerald Levertt Mack had been stolen from at least 12 people, deputy Charles J. Rosenzweig said.
“Nothing like helping us figure out what’s going on,” Rosenzweig said.’
`A group of New Zealand school children have found the remains of what is believed to be a 40 million-year-old “giant” penguin, a report says.
Had the species of penguin survived to the present day it would have looked “many men in the eye”, the Waikato Times report says.
The remains were found last month near Kawhia, on the west coast of the North Island, by children looking for fossils for a nearby natural history museum.
“I went ‘oh my God’, and just about keeled over on the reef,” group leader Chris Templer recalled saying when several bones were seen sticking out from a sandstone platform uncovered by the tide.’
`A family in Hilo, Hawaii, has sued a doctor after the man admitted he implanted a screwdriver into the neck of a patient, instead of titanium rods, according to a Local 6 News report. [..]
Doctor Robert Ricketson said that during a surgery on Iturralde, a nurse told him there were no more titanium rods for his neck.
Ricketson said he did not feel he could risk keeping the man under anesthetic with an unstable spine for any longer so he made the decision to substitute the rods with a screwdriver, according to the report.’
`Japan’s obsession with camera-equipped mobile phones has taken a bizarre twist, with mourners at funerals now using the devices to capture a final picture of the deceased.
“I get the sense that people no longer respect the dead. It’s disturbing,” a funeral director told the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper.
At one ceremony several people gathered round the coffin and took out their phones to photograph the corpse as preparations were made to begin a cremation, she was quoted as saying.
“I’m sure the deceased would never want their faces photographed,” she said.’
