`Young adolescents who wear T-shirts and hats packing an alcohol brand name are more likely to start drinking, a new study finds.
The study was based on a survey of more than 2,000 students age 10-14 in New England. Surveys were done in 1999 and again one or two years later. The results were announced today.
Rate of drinking among those who owned a branded item was 25.5 percent, compared to 13.1 percent of those who did not own a branded item. After controlling for other risk factors for drinking, students who owned alcohol-branded merchandise were 1.5 times more likely to initiate drinking during the study period than those who did not.’
`A bus driver in Britain – who was caught playing video games at the wheel instead of watching the road – has been sacked, the transport authorities said on Monday.
Passengers in Blackburn, in the county of Lancashire in north-west Britain, reported the driver after hearing sound effects of the game coming from the driver’s compartment.
They claimed the driver was using a PlayStation Portable (PSP) when he should have been watching the road.’
`Budget constraints are forcing some FBI agents to operate without e-mail accounts, according to the agency’s top official in New York.
“As ridiculous as this might sound, we have real money issues right now, and the government is reluctant to give all agents and analysts dot-gov accounts,” Mark Mershon said when asked about the gap at a New York Daily News editorial board meeting.
“We just don’t have the money, and that is an endless stream of complaints that come from the field,” he said.’
How fucken much does it cost to run a mail server? Stupid.
`An employee at a Davie Burger King might have needed just a bit more customer service training before the company put him in a drive through window to serve customers. Police say the man burst into a rage, jumped out of the drive through window, and attacked two of his customers in their truck…over change.
Employee Michael Perez had been working at the Burger King for just four days, when he apparently had a whopper of a problem as he was serving the Gillis family at the store’s drive-through window. Perez and Kevin Gillis got into an argument over the coins used for Gillis’s change.
Police surveillance tape shows what happened next. [..]’
`A German court ordered viagra to be given to a stallion after his new owner claimed he was impotent and refused to pay the full asking price.
The buyer of the horse called Vedor paid just a tenth of the price of over 4,000 euros ($6,700), claiming it had only one testicle and failed to get frisky with a female pony.’
`Dutch schoolchildren as young as 12 are being treated for addiction to a powerful home-grown marijuana which is up to 20 times stronger than imported varieties, an addiction clinic in the Netherlands has revealed.
But while the age of regular and dependent cannabis users has dropped sharply in recent years, the dangers and health hazards of soft drugs have been “completely underestimated” by parents caught “in a flower- power time warp”, Dr Romeo Ashruf, an addiction specialist, said.’
`Samsung has launched what it reckons its the world’s first 32GB NAND Flash-based hard disk drive replacement unit. The company claimed the so-called “solid state disk” can access data three times faster than an HDD can and write files one-and-a-half times more quickly – though we don’t know what HDD spec it was comparing its product to.
The SSD is a 2.5in form-factor product that operates at 5V and connects across a 66MHz Ultra DMA parallel ATA bus. Samsung said the unit consumes just five per cent of the energy it takes to run a hard drive.’
`Older women who say talk shows and soap operas are their favorite TV programs tend to score more poorly on tests of memory, attention and other cognitive skills, researchers reported Monday.
That doesn’t mean that daytime television is a brain drain, they say, since it’s not clear that there’s a direct relationship between the two.
But the findings do point to some association between TV choices and intellectual function, and that could prove useful in evaluating older people for cognitive decline, according lead investigator Dr. Joshua Fogel of Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.’
‘I suppose across the world their are various ways to greet someone. Looks like Italy is definitely the friendliest. This is Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi greeting a traffic cop just before he gets in his limousine.’
Watch this video and laugh. Then imagine John Howard doing the same thing and laugh a second time. Go on, you know you want to.
(1.4meg Windows media)
see it here »
`North Korea suggested Tuesday it had the ability to launch a pre-emptive attack on the United States, according to the North’s official news agency. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the North had built atomic weapons to counter the U.S. nuclear threat.
“As we declared, our strong revolutionary might put in place all measures to counter possible U.S. pre-emptive strike,” the spokesman said, according to the Korean Central News Agency. “Pre-emptive strike is not the monopoly of the United States.”
Last week, the communist country warned that it had the right to launch a pre-emptive strike, saying it would strengthen its war footing before joint South Korea-U.S. military exercises scheduled for this weekend.
The North’s spokesman said it would be a “wise” step for the United States to cooperate on nuclear issues with North Korea in the same way it does with India.’
`The concrete goes on forever, vanishing into the noonday glare, 2 million cubic feet of it, a mile-long slab that’s now the home of as many as 120 U.S. helicopters, a “heli-park” as good as any back in the States.
At another giant base, al-Asad in Iraq’s western desert, the 17,000 troops and workers come and go in a kind of bustling American town, with a Burger King, Pizza Hut and a car dealership, stop signs, traffic regulations and young bikers clogging the roads.
At a third hub down south, Tallil, they’re planning a new mess hall, one that will seat 6,000 hungry airmen and soldiers for chow.
Are the Americans here to stay? Air Force mechanic Josh Remy is sure of it as he looks around Balad.
“I think we’ll be here forever,” the 19-year-old airman from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., told a visitor to his base.’
`Strategy Page columnist James Dunnigan says that CROWS (Common Remotely Operated Weapons Systems) — which are big guns manned remotely by someone inside an armored vehicle with a joystick and live cam — have proved highly successful in Iraq because the soldiers operating them grew up playing (presumably first-person shooter) video games. Experienced gamers have no difficulty gaining total situational awareness and whipping around the video camera on the guns, spotting hints of trouble and blasting anything that moves.’
`One third of French people say they are racist, a French human rights watchdog said on Tuesday, after a survey that showed an increase from last year in the number of people who acknowledged being racist.
Some 33 percent of 1,011 people surveyed face-to-face by pollsters CSA said they were “somewhat” or “a little” racist, up 8 percentage points from last year, according to an annual report by the National Consultative Commission for Human Rights.
The poll asked the question “When it comes to you personally, would you say you are …” followed by a list of options: somewhat racist, a bit racist, not racist, not very racist, not racist at all and don’t want to say.’
`The human death toll from the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu reached 103 after five people died from the disease in Azerbaijan, the World Health Organization said Tuesday. WHO said seven of 11 patients from Azerbaijan had tested positive for H5N1 in samples checked at a major laboratory in Britain. Five of those cases were fatal.
The sources of infection were still under investigation, but officials suspected a connection to the feathers of dead swans.’
`Ben Worthen of CIO has an interesting post about who in the context of the Net Neutrality debate. He worked with Lumeta’s chief scientist Bill Cheswick to create a map of the North American Internet backbone, including 134,855 routers, colored by telecom company (Verizon, AT&T, Qwest, Level 3, Sprint Nextel, cable companies, smaller players).’
`A bill that allows public high schools to offer classes on the Bible sped through the House Monday, passing overwhelmingly with no debate.
The legislation, which passed 151-7, would allow high schools to form elective courses on the history and literature of the Old Testament and New Testament eras. The classes would focus on the law, morals, values and culture of the eras. [..]
The proposal also requires that the courses should be taught “in an objective and nondevotional manner with no attempt made to indoctrinate students.”‘
`Spoke POV is an easy-to-make electronic kit toy that turns your bicycle wheel into a customized display! The project includes a free schematic design, open source software for uploading and editing stored bitmap images, and a high-quality kit with all the parts necessary to build your own.
Tired: A red blinker on your seatpost
Wired: Programmable full-wheel images in any color’
`Troops began delivering aid Tuesday to an estimated 7,000 people who lost their homes to the cyclone that battered Australia’s northeastern coast.
No one was killed when Category 5 Cyclone Larry came ashore near Innisfail early Monday, and only minor injuries were reported. But the storm flooded streets, tore roofs off homes and flattened sugar and banana plantations.
“There most certainly would be around 7,000 people … that are effectively homeless,” federal lawmaker Bob Katter told The Associated Press. “They’re sitting in four walls but no roof.”‘
`The state Government has asked the Lane Cove Tunnel’s operators to consider not opening it until after the March election, fearing a repeat of the Cross City Tunnel outrage when surrounding surface roads are narrowed.
The company now wants to open the new tunnel in December – five months ahead of schedule – but this raises the prospect of road closures during the state election campaign in February and March.
“When we told them we were targeting a December opening, that sent them into a real tizzy,” one source told the Herald. “After the Cross City Tunnel experience, they have gone weak at the knees. They didn’t say they wanted a delay, but they said it would be better if it opened on schedule.”‘
`An HIV-positive man who admitted having sex with his 8-year-old stepdaughter over a two-month period was sentenced in a San Mateo County courtroom today to 16 years in prison.
Frederick Torralva, 53, pleaded no contest today to one count of engaging in three or more acts of substantial sexual conduct with a child under the age of 14, the San Mateo County district attorney’s office reported.
He also pleaded no contest to the special allegation that he had knowledge that he was HIV-positive at the time of the crimes against his wife’s child, according to the district attorney’s office.’
Cunt.
`With almost daily reports of more private information being pumped from personal computers and splashed over the Internet, there is a growing unease that Japan is under insidious attack from within.
The culprit is a digital worm that infects computers using the file-sharing Winny software, a Japanese computer program that, like the infamous Napster, was designed to allow people to easily swap music and movie files. [..]
The list of betrayed secrets is long and getting longer: personal details of 10,000 prisoners from a Kyoto prison officer’s computer; information about crime victims, informants and statements from suspects uploaded from a policeman’s home computer; access codes to 29 airports from an airline pilot’s PC; and the details of surgical procedures on 2,800 patients at a private hospital from the computer of a clerk. All have found their way onto the Internet.’
`Mike Herchenbach was sure he would get a fine. He’d pay a couple hundred dollars, like his roommates, and go on with his life, even though he wasn’t at the party that got out of hand at his rental house. After all, his name was on the lease.
But what he didn’t expect, and hardly believed, was what Lancaster County Court Judge Gale Pokorny had in mind as his punishment for maintaining a disorderly house last Oct. 2.’
‘A group of college students set out to prove their thesis that dizzy girls running down hallways are stronger than concrete walls… They were wrong.’
(2.4meg Windows media)
see it here »
`An Afghan man is being tried in a court in the capital, Kabul, for converting from Islam to Christianity.
Abdul Rahman is charged with rejecting Islam and could face the death sentence under Sharia law unless he recants.
He converted 16 years ago as an aid worker helping refugees in Pakistan. His estranged family denounced him in a custody dispute over his two children.’
`Student athletes, musicians and others who participate in after school activities could increasingly be subject to random drug testing under a program promoted by the Bush administration.
White House officials say drug testing is an effective way to keep students away from harmful substances like marijuana and crystal methamphetamine, and have held seminars across the country to promote the practice to local school officials.
But some parents, educators and school officials call it a heavy-handed, ineffective way to discourage drug use that undermines trust and invades students’ privacy.’
`NASA, the American space agency, has unveiled plans for one of the largest rockets ever built to take a manned mission to the far side of the moon.
It will ferry a mother ship and lunar lander into Earth orbit to link up with a smaller rocket carrying the crew. Once united they will head for the moon where the larger ship will remain in orbit after launching the lunar lander and crew.’
`A third student stepped forward yesterday claiming a Queens gym teacher threatened him with a knife in class.
The 17-year-old autistic boy told investigators that Mark Omeltchenko, 45, pointed a knife at his neck and put him in a headlock during the same workout session in which the teacher allegedly threatened two other students, law-enforcement sources said.
The new complaint says the boy – like the two girls, ages 14 and 15, in his Aviation HS class – didn’t want to participate in drills Thursday morning and that set off the teacher, according to a spokesman for District Attorney Richard Brown.’
‘If wheel chair break dancing becomes a sport, this guy wont be going to the Olympics. How ironic would it be if while performing a wheelchair stunt this guy fell on his neck and became paralyzed?’
(2meg Windows media)
see it here »
`// Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
// by William Shakespeare
// ported to ActionScript 2.0 by Satori Canton – ActionScript.com [..]
var summer:Object = {};
var thee:Object = {};
summer.name = “Summer Day”;
thee.name = “Thee”;
summer.lovelyness = 9;
thee.lovelyness = 10;
summer.temperature = 98;
thee.temperature = 98.6; [..]’
`Internet service providers (ISPs) will be forced to block violent and pornographic material before it reaches home computers if Labor wins the next federal election.
Under the policy, announced by Opposition Leader Kim Beazley today, international websites would be banned by the Australian Communications and Media Authority if they contained graphic sexual or violent material, rated R or higher.
The bans would be maintained by ISPs.’
