moonbuggy

‘A charter school alerted authorities to a 29-year-old sex offender who tried to enroll there, pretending he was just 12, in what sheriff’s officials said Friday may have been an attempt to lure children into sexual abuse.

The Yavapai County sheriff’s office also said Neil Havens Rodreick II conned two men he was living with and having sex with into believing he was a young boy. One of them, 61-year-old Lonnie Stiffler, called himself Rodreick’s grandfather when he tried to enroll him at Mingus Springs Charter School as “Casey Price.”

“This is the weirdest case I’ve seen in 18 years,” sheriff’s spokeswoman Susan Quayle said. “If it wasn’t so sad it would be funny.”‘ [..]

Stiffler and Robert James Snow, 43, “were very upset when the detectives told them they had been having a sexual relationship with a 29-year-old man and not a pre-teen boy,” Quayle said.’

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This guy has had his Xbox 360 break twice. The first time Microsoft sent him out a box to ship it back to them in for repairs. Apparently they’ve changed their policy now and the customer has to provide the box and ship it to Microsoft, and Microsoft will ship it back in the same box.

Unfortunately, this guy isn’t particularly happy about not getting a free box, so he’s soliciting donations to buy the biggest box possible [a cargo shipping container, basically] just so Microsoft will have to pay to ship it back to him.

`Since 2002 Skyacht Aircraft, Inc. has been developing a new type of aircraft called the Personal Blimp. The goal of this work has been to create an aircraft capable of quiet, steerable, sustained, and affordable flight. When the first Personal Blimp, named the Airship Alberto, made its first flight on October 27, 2006, it became the first and only aircraft to meet this seemingly straightforward goal.

The Personal Blimp uses hot air (rather than Helium) for lift and virtually silent electric motors for propulsion. To put it another way: the Personal Blimp is a hot air balloon that can be maneuvered about in nearly perfect quiet. Passengers in a Personal Blimp have a serene experience of flight unavailable in any other type of aircraft.’

‘We got activity out here but I don’t think we need to report it.. It appears to be fornication.. We’re taping it..’

Hooray for FLIR, I suppose. :) The guys on the radio back at base seem pretty keen to make sure they get a copy of the tape made.

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`Let me tell you why they are so cool.’

`The thing is, if you carefully construct an example document, you can get a compression ratio much higher. How much higher? MUCH, MUCH higher. For example, if you created a PNG image containing just one colour repeated over and over then you could easily get a 1000:1 ratio. For a text document containing 1 character repeated over and over, it’s possible to shrink 100Gb to about 6k. Think about that, it is a huge difference: 1.7e7:1.

That’s all well and good as an interesting experiment, but what does it mean for an average user? Imagine I had constructed one of those zip files that had shrunk 100Gb down to 6k and I sent you that file. If you trusted me, you might try to open it. Therein lies the problem [..]’

`The graph shown above relates the arithmetic mean IQ measured in various country’s populations, to the fraction of each country’s population that believes religion is very important.

The green diamonds represent individual countries; the yellow line is a linear regression (y = mx + b), calculated by the least squares method. The United States data point is circled in red.’

The gist is that religiosity is inversely proportional to intelligence. I’m not all that surprised. [shrug] :)

Stephen Colbert describes the recent renaming of Cingular to AT&T and gives a summary of the current telecommunications industry in the US.

(3.3meg Windows media)

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`A California man faces up to 101 years in federal prison after a jury found him guilty of sending out e-mail scams as well as related crimes. [..]

Goodin, who was arrested last year, was found guilty of operating a sophisticated phishing scheme, the prosecutors said in the statement. As part of the scam, he sent e-mails posing as AOL’s billing department to trick people into giving up their credit card information, according to the statement. He then used the credit card data to make purchases, prosecutors said Tuesday.’

`You don’t find fans of Cartman and Kenny on the Parks and Recreation Commission in the central Ohio city of Marysville. The panel has decided it’s time to rename a local park that has come to be known as “South Park.”

City administrator Kathy House says having a park with the same name as the popular but often controversial cartoon show has become inappropriate.

One member of the parks commission says they wanted to get away from “South Park” — far away.’

`China last week successfully used a missile to destroy an orbiting satellite, U.S. government officials told CNN on Thursday, in a test that could undermine relations with the West and pose a threat to satellites important to the U.S. military.

According to a spokesman for the National Security Council, the ground-based, medium-range ballistic missile knocked an old Chinese weather satellite from its orbit about 537 miles above Earth. The missile carried a “kill vehicle” and destroyed the satellite by ramming it.

The test took place on January 11.’

Sometimes when you fly sideways around a corner at high speed you don’t see large animals standing in the middle of the road until it’s too late. :)

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`The rules are simple: I put the self-timer on 2 seconds, push the button and try to get as far from the camera as I can.’

‘.. is an art intervention that involves placing a gigantic banana over the Texas sky. The object will float between the high atmosphere and Earth’s low orbit, being visible only from the state of Texas and its surroundings. From the ground the banana will be clearly recognizable and visible day and night; it will stay up for approximately one month.’

`A man who ran several marathons while claiming disability benefits has been given a 10-month prison sentence.

Paul Appleby, 47, from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, started claiming benefits in 1994 – saying he needed a wheelchair or walking frame to walk.

But Appleby, who claimed £22,300 in total, joined a running club in 2001, competing in road races and marathons. ‘

This is an old trailer for the first Star Wars movie. It makes the whole movie look stupid, so I assume they came up with a better one before the movie was actually released. :)

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`The “reckless” action of the party host precipitated the explosion that killed a 22-year-old New Milford man and injured several others last fall, according to a lawsuit filed in Danbury Superior Court.

The legal action, filed on behalf of Darren Snyder, a 36-year-old restaurant owner who was hurt in the blast, identifies Matt Johnson as the person who tossed an empty beer keg into the fire during a pig roast on his parent’s Aspetuck Ridge Road property in October.

After cooking for several hours, the stainless steel keg blew up, taking the life of another party guest, Sean Caselli.’

`It ranks among the most enduring mysteries of the cosmos. Physicists call it the Fermi paradox after the Italian Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, who, in 1950, pointed out the glaring conflict between predictions that life was elsewhere in the universe – and the conspicuous lack of aliens who have come to visit.

Now a Danish researcher believes he may have solved the paradox. Extra-terrestrials have yet to find us because they haven’t had enough time to look. [..]

He found that even if the alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, – Nasa’s current Cassini mission to Saturn is plodding along at 32km a second – it would take 10bn years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore just 4% of the galaxy.’

`After a losing a pile of money at a casino, a man drove directly to the Casino Control Commission and put his name on a list of people banned from the casinos for life.

It’s a decision he immediately regretted – even more so when he learned that in this case, what happens in Atlantic City does not stay in Atlantic City.

The state commission, identifying the man by his initials, S.D., on Wednesday rejected his bid to become the first person allowed to gamble in the state again after placing himself on the list.

The self-exclusion list was established in 2001 as a way for compulsive gamblers to avoid the temptation. People can choose to be banned for one year, five years or life. There are about 525 people are on the list now – about half for life.’

This is a blanket specially designed for people who don’t wanna bother getting dressed when friends come over. It actually looks like it works fairly well. :)

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`New research shows that the level of nicotine in major brands of American cigarettes has gone up by 11 per cent in the period 1998 to 2005. [..]

The scientists examined annual data submitted by tobacco manufacturers to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH). [..]

Upon analysing the data the scientists found that the manufacturers have increased the level of smoke nicotine yield in cigarettes by an average of 1.6 per cent for each year between 1998 and 2005. And they did this in two ways. First by directly altering the concentration of nicotine, and secondly by changing the design features to increase the delivery efficiency of nicotine.’

`Three thieves who allegedly stole 14 global positioning system devices didn’t get away with their crime for long. The devices led police right to their home.

Town officials said the thieves didn’t even know what they had: they thought the GPS devices were cell phones, which they planned to sell.

According to Suffolk County police, the GPS devices were stolen Monday night from the Town of Babylon Public Works garage in Lindenhurst. The town immediately tapped its GPS system, and it showed that one of the devices was inside a house. Police said that when they arrived there, Kurt Husfeldt, 46, had the device in his hands.’

Some guys change the Windows shutdown sound on their friends lap top, then film him using the computer in a library.

Baa!

(3.0meg Windows media)

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`Everyone knows to keep their curtains closed, drink lots of water and wear sunscreen on a hot day.

But there are other dangers hidden in garages most people would not even think about in the heat.

An Alfredton family learned this the hard way on Tuesday when Ballarat’s maximum temperature topped 38C.

Jan Cornish said she was shocked on that night to discover a can of paint remover stored in the garage had exploded.

Unfortunately the liquid did exactly what it was made to do on two cars – stripped paint.’

`Invoking Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Hankey from the television series “South Park,” the lawyer for an ex-professor accused of leaving dog feces at a congresswoman’s office said her client’s actions qualify as protected speech under the First Amendment.

Kathleen Ensz faces a misdemeanor charge of “use of a noxious substance.” She is accused of taking dog feces from her backyard, wrapping it in a political mailer from Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, and leaving it at the Republican’s office, according to court documents.

Ensz, a Democrat, was angered by repeatedly receiving mailings from Musgrave, the documents said.’

This woman is driving through a gate, but doesn’t do a particularly good job. I bet she was surprised. :)

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‘Reversing itself, the Defense Department says an espionage report it produced that warned about Canadian coins with tiny radio-frequency transmitters was not true.

The Defense Security Service said it never could substantiate its own published claims about the mysterious coins. It has begun an internal review to determine how the false information was included in a 29-page report about espionage concerns.’

Follow up to: Canadian coins bugged, U.S. security agency says

`It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their "immortality". The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.’

`New Zealand policeman, constable Jonathon “Jono” Erwood has been discharged without conviction by a judge at the New Plymouth District Court and has been allowed to keep his job after he arrived to a car crash scene drunk. [..]

When constable Erwood arrived at the double fatality July 9, 2006 crash scene on his day off he was taken aside by another police officer and breathalysed and then charged with drunk driving.

The judge who discharged him, Louis Erwood, said that constable Erwood risked his life by responding to the accident. “There was nothing personal in this for you and it reflects a commitment to your job which you should be proud of.”‘

Surprised the baby is even alive, really.

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