moonbuggy

`A Shawano probation and parole agent who was fired in 2004 for accessing Internet pornography and other inappropriate sites for hours a day over at least five months has his job back – with a raise.

He also will receive a year of back pay. [..]

The department must also pay any medical expenses for DeLeon that would have been covered by the state’s insurance plan during his yearlong absence, the arbitrator ruled. The order prohibits DeLeon from using the Internet.’

`The map depicts all of the continents, including Australia, North America, and Antarctica, in rough outline.

An inscription identifies the map as a copy made in 1763 of an original drawn in 1418. [..]

But experts have dismissed the map as a fake.

They say the map resembles a French 17th-century world map with its depiction of California as an island.’

followup to China map lays claim to Americas.

`A normally pleasant billy goat turned gruff and, for his troubles, was zapped three times with a Taser gun. Dodge the billy goat snapped a leash and charged at Dawn Pinette, knocking her to the ground Wednesday about 35 miles west of Charleston.

“All I could do was grab his horns and scream bloody murder,” Pinette, 38, said.

Her daughter called police and Colleton County Deputy Jeff Scott arrived to try to help Pinette up. But the goat bullied his way in and the deputy used his Taser.

At first, Pinette thought the goat was dead.

“Within a few seconds he was back up and going after him again,” she said.’

`A US Environmental Protection Agency has found possible links between non-stick cookware, cancer and birth defects and is now asking manufacturers to start winding down production. [..]

Non-stick pots and pans are supposed to be good for you, as they need less fat to cook with.

But the coating contains a compound that the US environmental protection agency has warned may harm our health. [..]

Vet Naya Brangenberg says vets have long known that the fumes from cooking with non-stick pans can be deadly to household birds.

“They’ll have a sudden accumulation of fluid and blood in their lungs, and this fluid will cause them to have a similar effect to drowning, where they can’t absorb oxygen from the air and they will drown to death.”‘

`Dr. Benford derived a formula to explain this. If absolute certainty is defined as 1 and absolute impossibility as 0, then the probability of any number “d” from 1 through 9 being the first digit is log to the base 10 of (1 + 1/d). This formula predicts the frequencies of numbers found in many categories of statistics. [..]

Given a string of at least four numbers sampled from one or more of these sets of data, the chance that the first digit will be 1 is not one in nine, as many people would imagine; according to Benford’s Law, it is 30.1 percent, or nearly one in three. The chance that the first number in the string will be 2 is only 17.6 percent, and the probabilities that successive numbers will be the first digit decline smoothly up to 9, which has only a 4.6 percent chance.’

`A judge who sentenced three teenagers to probation threw them in jail after he saw them ridiculing him and drinking alcohol on a Web site.

The girls appeared before Troy District Court Judge Michael Martone last spring for drinking at their high school prom.

He gave them probation and ordered them not to drink alcohol again. [..]

But several months later he searched for his name on the Internet and came across a Web site posted by one of the students. [..]’

`A pilot who claimed to have lost his plane when he had to ditch it in the sea has been charged with insurance fraud after it was found hidden in a shipping container.

Howard Jamison, 46, claimed to have surfed ashore on a piece of the plane’s floor after the engine on his Cessna failed six kilometres off New Zealand’s South Island coast in 2004.’

‘Barely two months ago, the 38-year-old French divorcee received the world’s first face transplant and this exclusive photograph reveals the full extent of her remarkable transformation.

Last May, she had a wide, tilted nose, a prominent chin and thin lips. Today, the donated face of suicide Maryline Saint-Aubert has given her a straight and narrow nose, a neater chin and a fuller mouth.

Despite the prominent surgical scars, Miss Dinoire and her doctors say they are delighted by the results.’

followup to Face Transplant Patient Smokes Again.

‘Trembicky.com is a site where tenants can share horror stories about lousy landlords they’ve had.’

`Alberto Gonzales spoke before law students at Georgetown today, justifying illegal, unauthorized surveilance of US citizens, but during the course of his speech the students in class did something pretty ballsy and brave. They got up from their seats and turned their backs to him.

To make matters worse for Gonzales, additional students came into the room, wearing black cowls and carrying a simple banner, written on a sheet.

Fortunately for him, it was a brief speech… followed by a panel discussion that basically ripped his argument a new asshole.’

An interesting use of eBay.

Some poor cunts are no doubt shitting themselves at the moment, waiting for the police to arrive.

Update: The auction is no longer listed on eBay, but Google has a cached version.

`Sam Tabor, a professor of experimental nuclear physics at FSU and director of the university’s Superconducting Accelerator Laboratory, recently performed the experiment at the GSI laboratory in Darmstadt, Germany, in collaboration with the international team. In the experiment, a cigar-shaped atom was created using a particle collider. To the scientists’ surprise, this atom demonstrated a novel kind of radioactive decay by spitting out two free protons at the same time.

Radioactive decay normally involves the emission of one of three types of particle: a helium nucleus consisting of two protons and two neutrons, an electron or a photon. Exotic atoms engineered to contain fewer neutrons than in the atom’s natural state were expected to break down by emitting protons one at a time. But the correlated two-proton decay hadn’t been seen before and represents a new form of radioactivity.’

`An officer was sent to a home on 10th Avenue shortly after 8:30 a.m. A man there told police a sick squirrel was in his backyard ”shaking, crying and [with] saliva coming from its mouth,” police said.

The officer instead found two squirrels mating.’

`A man who held up banks by claiming he had a bomb in a bag was arrested after police found the bag actually contained books, including a phone book that had a mailing label with the man’s full name and address.

“It was clearly not his best move,” Lawrence Police Chief John J. Romero said.’

Interview with and story about those NAZI twin folk singers from the US.

(23meg Flash video)

`Defence lawyers for Saddam Hussein Wednesday distributed copies of a lawsuit against President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair for destroying Iraq.

The suit accuses Bush and Blair of committing war crimes by using weapons of mass destruction and internationally-banned weapons including enriched uranium and phosphoric and cluster bombs against unarmed Iraqi civilians, notably in Baghdad, Fallujah, Ramadi, al-Kaem and Anbar. [..]

The suit also accuses the U.S. president and British prime minister of torturing Iraqi prisoners, destroying Iraq’s cultural heritage with the aim of eliminating an ancient civilization, and inciting internal strife.

Bush and Blair were also accused of polluting Iraq’s air, waters and environment.’

`A prostitute who bit her client’s penis so hard he required an operation has denied grievous bodily harm with intent.

Prosecutor Matthew McNiff told the jury Louise Jowett carried out the attack because Brett O’Leary, from Clare, near Haverhill, told her he had no more money to give her after already paying her for sex.

Outlining the case Mr McNiff said 22-year-old Jowett, who denies the charge, had bitten and continued to bite Mr O’Leary for up to 45 seconds during the assault. The force and determination of Jowett’s attack was said to have led to Mr O’Leary requiring an operation.’

`Joshua Philip Martin was in his fourth day on the job as a rescue-squad worker in Russell County when, in a playful mood, he decided to reach into the front seat of the ambulance and zap one of his co-workers with the defibrillator paddles. The rookie’s mistake was fatal.

Yesterday, in Russell Circuit Court, a judge convicted Martin, 25, of involuntary manslaughter, warning the burly but pink-faced young man that when he returns to court in March, he likely will be sent to prison. He faces a maximum sentence of 10 years.

The target of Martin’s prank was Courtney Hilton Rhoton, a 23-year-old mother of two small children who had worked her way through school to become an emergency medical technician. She went into cardiac arrest seconds after Martin placed the paddles on her chest and shoulder. Three days later, on June 4, she died.’

Take photos of celebrities. Not so easy..

`The Czechs do like their weed. A 2005 report by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction found that 22% of Czechs between 16 and 34 had smoked marijuana at least once during the previous year, the highest percentage in the European Union. The nation’s cannabis culture is imbued with the whimsical ethos of the hippie movement: guys growing dope in fields, on balconies and in bathrooms, and sharing with friends. [..]

“I’ve never paid for pot and I never would,” said Filip Hubacek, a university student majoring in social sciences. “I don’t mind paying for my gym, but not for my pot.”‘

`The Clock, as its designer Danny Hillis calls it, will stand over 60 feet tall and keep track of every second, minute, day, century, and millennium for at least 10,000 years. Over that time, it will function with near perfect accuracy by occasionally resetting itself automatically using the warming heat of the desert sun. Its pendulum will be powered by the Earth itself – by temperature and pressure changes during the desert night. But its many faces will require winding. Thus if forgotten it will enter a long silence but continue to mark the years as they pass.’

`Deputies say a 16-year-old has been arrested for beating his grandmother with a two-by-four for refusing to give him $100 for beer. [..]

Investigators say Cass went into his 60-year-old grandmother’s bedroom Thursday and asked her for $100 for beer. When she refused, he allegedly placed a razor blade on her throat and demanded she take him to the bank to get the money, deputies said.

“When the victim arrived back home she locked all of the doors,” deputies reported. “The defendant arrived back home and kicked the front door in. [..]’

`U.S. and Mexican officials on Tuesday were investigating a bizarre encounter between Texas lawmen and heavily armed intruders who were wearing Mexican military uniforms while evidently escorting a caravan of sport utility vehicles that was smuggling marijuana into the United States. [..]

Although no shots were fired and no one was hurt, the episode — along with an incident in November — heightened fears that Mexican traffickers and U.S. border agents are headed for a potentially deadly confrontation. American officers, who have long complained about being outgunned along the border, point out that the armed men seen Monday were riding in a military-style Humvee equipped with what looked like .50-caliber machine guns.’

`What high-tech product advances the fastest? It’s probably the hard drive. The capacity doubles easily every two years and sometimes every year, faster even than the chip progress described by Moore’s Law. The first drives took up storage closets. Now, a 5GB drive can fit in a phone. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, which has made drives for years and also now owns IBM’s drive division, recently collected pictures from hard drive history and made a calendar. Here are some highlights.’

`The USS Ronald Reagan can single-handedly take on a nation’s armed forces but met its match in Moreton Bay’s jellyfish.

The slimy invertebrates were being sucked into the 97,000 tonne ship at such a rate generators were constantly switched over and local fire crews placed on stand-by as the creatures disabled full on-board capacities. [..]

The world’s largest aircraft carrier was due to leave Brisbane at 8am today after the 6000 crew enjoyed five days of shore leave.

The jellyfish have exposed the giant ship’s weakness, a humble button, screw or piece of litter can bring the 332-metre behemoth to a standstill. ‘

`Kazakhstan is on a nationwide hunt for dozens of “radioactive dollars” circulating in the country’s financial system.

The Kazakh central bank said in a letter to financial institutions the radiation level of the U.S. dollar notes was 100 times above normal. A Kazakh citizen brought them into the country in November, it said.

“(The dollars) pose a direct threat to people’s health,” said the letter, obtained by Reuters Wednesday.’

`Investigators want to know how a male inmate wound up in a female holding cell with 13 women.

It happened at the Cumberland County courthouse, where inmates were waiting to go before the judge. Deputies say Michael Harris was behind bars with the women for hours before anyone found out. They’re looking into whether anything sexual happened between them.’

`This is an incomplete selection of search results which Google.cn self-censors working together with the Chinese government. Google does not censor access to the site itself, it only censors the site within the search result; access to the sites is blocked by the Chinese government.’

`In the ongoing effort against movie piracy, top providers have become gleaming targets. Largely responsible for introducing highly sought after material, top providers are a highly competitive entity that prioritize public recognition over associated risks. Earlier this morning, several top warez providers found themselves shut down at the hands of local police and the entertainment industry. [..]

Rumors of the bust began circulating online today, as members attempted to warn each other. According to warning notices online, the following top providers have, for all intents and purposes, been eliminated; RELOADED, KNIGHTS, TFCiSO, Cinemaniacs, German-Friend, ParadieseBeach and Klapsmuehle. In addition, the leader of RELOADED was reported as arrested during the raids. It should be noted however, the GVU has not confirmed the closure or arrest of anyone associated with RELOADED.’