moonbuggy

‘Some teens fashioned a small car to drive backwards and sideways. They take it on the street and go wild. Very entertaining.’

(9.9meg Windows media)

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‘Scientists who questioned mankind’s impact on climate change have received death threats and claim to have been shunned by the scientific community.

They say the debate on global warming has been “hijacked” by a powerful alliance of politicians, scientists and environmentalists who have stifled all questioning about the true environmental impact of carbon dioxide emissions.

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change.

One of the emails warned that, if he continued to speak out, he would not live to see further global warming.’

‘Halliburton, the big energy services company, said today that it would open a corporate headquarters in the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai and move its chairman and chief executive, David J. Lesar, there.

The company will maintain its existing corporate office here as well as its incorporation in the United States. [..]

The announcement about the Dubai move, which Halliburton made at a regional energy conference in Bahrain, comes at a time when the company is being investigated by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegations of improper dealings in Iraq, Kuwait and Nigeria. Halliburton has also paid out billions in settlements in asbestos litigation.’

‘These guys dare their friend to climb into the dryer all the way and close the door. Turning the dryer on was not part of the deal and when that happens, the prank back fires, painfully.’

(3.4meg Windows media)

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‘The diploma is mostly in Swedish so here’s the translation for the ones who do not speak swedish:

“To the King of Sweden Carl XVI Gustaf,
We hearby give you this diploma as a sign of our appreciation.

We have in a great cooperation made remarkable progress in the fight for positioning Sweden as a prosperous nation regarding technology and culture.

In these progressive days we’ve spread more files than ever. We’ve made history.
We now have the honour to report that The Pirate Bay now archives 200 000, by the citizens donated, documents of culture and we’re tracking more then 500 000 cultural treasures globally.

This is a new world record.”‘

‘Developers have turned a house into an island in China after the owner refused to move out.

The villa now stands alone in a 30ft deep man-made pit in Chongqing city, reports Jinbao Daily.

The Chongqing Zhengsheng Real Estate Company wants to turn the area into a £40m ‘Broadway’ square, including apartments and a shopping mall.

But the owner of the villa says he won’t move out unless the company pays his price – the equivalent of £1.3 million.

“The villa owner refuses to move, so the real-estate developer has had to dig out all around it to force him to,” says a saleswoman at Weilian Real Estate Sales Company.’

This lecturer reads back some of the feedback he’s gotten over the years. It’s pretty hilarious.

I should grow a moustache. :)

(6.2meg Windows media)

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‘An elite group of Native American trackers is joining the hunt for terrorists crossing Afghanistan’s borders.

The unit, the Shadow Wolves, was recruited from several tribes, including the Navajo, Sioux, Lakota and Apache. It is being sent to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to pass on ancestral sign-reading skills to local border units.

In recent years, members of the Shadow Wolves have mainly tracked smugglers along the US border with Mexico.

But the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan and the US military’s failure to hunt down Osama bin Laden – still at large on his 50th birthday on Saturday – has prompted the Pentagon to requisition them.

US Defence Secretary Robert M.Gates said last month: “If I were Osama bin Laden, I’d keep looking over my shoulder.”‘

‘The actor Sylvester Stallone has been charged with importing a banned human growth hormone into Australia.

He was stopped by customs officials at Sydney airport last month after the banned substance was allegedly found in his luggage.

Stallone, 60, flew into Australia to promote his latest film, Rocky Balboa.

Customs officials said they found 48 small bottles of the hormone after searching the star’s luggage, and later carrying out a raid on his hotel room.

Human growth hormone is considered a performance enhancing drug and cannot be imported into Australia without a special permit.’

Followup to Customs raid on action man Stallone.

‘Israel has recalled its ambassador to El Salvador after he was found drunk and naked apart from bondage gear.

Reports say he was able to identify himself to police only after a rubber ball had been removed from his mouth.

A foreign ministry official described Ambassador Tzuriel Refael’s behaviour as an unprecedented embarrassment.’

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‘”I am not the Cookie Monster,” said Tory Caruth, laughing.

But cookies are why he spent time in the Will County Jail after the Girl Scouts sued him in small claims court.

Girl Scouts of Trailways claimed Caruth never paid for 118 boxes of cookies his daughter ordered five years ago.

The 40-year-old Joliet trucker is listed on permission forms as his daughter’s guardian responsible for payments. The 118 boxes were valued at $354 when the order was placed in January 2002. Caruth claims that money was turned in to the organization.

While his name is on the documents, Caruth said he never signed the forms, which state “failure to turn over or any misuse of these funds on my part will result in legal action taken against me by Girl Scouts.”

“I never ordered, never signed for and never received any cookies,” he said.’

‘Microsoft has admitted that its Live OneCare security suite has been accidentally deleting some users’ Outlook and Outlook Express e-mails.

According to postings on Microsoft’s OneCare forum, erasures have been caused when the antivirus program finds a virus in an e-mail attachment. Instead of then quarantining that single e-mail, users have reported that entire .pst or .dbx files — the personal folder where non-Exchange Server users’ messages and other details are kept — have been quarantined or, in some cases, even deleted.’

‘An ex-con and former mental patient who won a landmark state Supreme Court decision in 2004 that allowed hundreds of mental patients to stop taking forced medication appeared in an Alameda courtroom Friday on charges that he killed his roommate in September.

Kanuri Qawi, 46, was charged with murder in the fatal stabbing of his roommate, John Laird Milton Sr., 59, whose body was found Sept. 13 in their home on Moonlight Terrace at Dignity Commons, a housing facility for veterans at Alameda Point, the site of the former Alameda Naval Air Station. [..]

The court said Qawi had been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic and had been medicated against his will between 1995 and 2004.’

It starts off a bit slow.. :)

(4.4meg Windows media)

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‘After giving birth to a premature baby on an East Oakland street, police say the mother ripped the umbilical cord and walked away Friday afternoon, leaving the newborn boy dead or dying in a puddle of blood.

The 4:39 p.m. incident in the 1400 block of 65th Avenue left witnesses and veteran investigators stunned.

“It’s just crazy,” said Oakland police Sgt. Tony Jones of the homicide detail. “Once she started spitting out the baby, you have some obligation to get it some type of medical attention. She didn’t do that.”’

‘A push is under way for Tasmania to become the first state or territory to ban homework in public schools.

Tasmanian State School Parents and Friends president Jenny Branch has begun a campaign to stop teachers setting homework in primary and high schools.

“I really want someone to show me homework is beneficial,” she said. “If it is not, I don’t think we should be having it.

“I don’t want to see kids coming home and doing useless homework. I want them outside playing.

“There are quite a few reports out there saying it might not be beneficial – so why are we doing it?”‘

‘Own a piece of Ted Haggard history from Mike Jones.

The table where it all happened.

Table is about 10 years old with a few tears but totaly usable.

Will autograph table if requested and in June an autographed book “I Had To Say Something” by Mike Jones will be sent.

All proceeds benefit ‘Project Angel Heart’, who provides people living with HIV/AIDS, cancer and other life-threatening illnesses nutritious home-delivered meals.’

more at the wiki.

Looks like a slow moving flying-fox to me. They’ve got a rope and they’ve got a pulley.

And the police are just idiots. :)

(13.8meg Windows media)

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‘An abandoned consignment of marijuana with a street value of $20m (£10.3m) was found in California when a policeman went to check on a lorry.

The vehicle was unlocked and the engine warm, but no-one was in the cab.

The patrolman found plastic-wrapped bundles of the drug in the back of the rental vehicle near Los Angeles after smelling marijuana, AP said. [..]

He suggested the engine might have overheated, causing the vehicle to be abandoned along with three tons of marijuana on a slip road in the city of Ontario late on Wednesday.’

‘A Sikkim Police constable guarding the Dena Bank treasury at Daryaganj in central Delhi went berserk early Sunday morning, killing five of his mates after they allegedly tried to sodomise him while on night duty.

The police received a call at 4.52 am from constable Nari Lepcha, one of the guards deployed at the treasury, that his five colleagues had been murdered. After racking their brains for almost 12 hours, the police realised that it was Lepcha himself who had brutally murdered all of them.

After hours of questioning, Lepcha admitted that he killed his fellow guards because they tried to sexually assault him after consuming alcohol. [..]’

‘Exactly three months ago I released a thorough prototype of a game called Manufactoid. It was a fresh new take on the engineering puzzle game genre, but was somewhat hastily coded; many puzzles required “stacking” conveyers, something that makes no sense in real life, serious performance issues destroyed gameplay if you had too many blocks on the screen at one time, the programming system was difficult to use and explain, there was no way to save or load your work, and there weren’t enough puzzles!

Luckily for anyone who actually played Manufactoid and found at least one of these issues, I’ve written a new version of Manufactoid!’

This looks a bit interesting, in a nerdy sorta way. :)

Australian’s are fucken funny. :)

(3.3meg mp3)

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‘A 57-year-old Swiss man has gone on trial in Thailand on charges of insulting the king after allegedly defacing portraits of the monarch.

If found guilty, Oliver Jufer faces up to 75 years in prison – 15 years on each of five charges.

King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who has been on the throne for 60 years, is revered in Thailand.

He and other members of the royal family are protected by lese-majeste laws barring any criticism of them.’

‘The Israeli army is investigating whether its troops used two Palestinian children as human shields during a house search operation in the West Bank, after claims by the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem.

The use of human shields to deter gunmen from opening fire on soldiers has been banned by the Israeli supreme court and forbidden by the army. However, the practice, in which soldiers force Palestinians to approach, enter and search buildings where they believe a gunman may be hiding, remains common. [..]

Mr Amira’s cousin, 15-year-old Amid Amira, told B’Tselem that soldiers also forced him to search three houses, making him enter rooms, empty cupboards and open windows. And an 11-year-old girl, Jihan Dadush, told B’Tselem that soldiers took her from her home three days later, on February 28, forcing her to go into a neighbouring apartment ahead of them. [..]’

‘A 75-year-old man with terminal cancer has been sentenced to 15 years in prison, and he never even got his $3 back.

John Paul Kent had prepaid $40 to gas up his Oldsmobile Delta 88 last summer at a gas station near his Jensen Beach apartment. He became angry when a clerk couldn’t open the cash register to give him his $3 in change.

Authorities said Kent left the store and returned with a nine-millimeter pistol. He then fired five shots into the floor.

This led to a six-hour stand-off with deputies outside his apartment, which was located in a retirement community.’

Hooray for the Japanese.

‘Within the last five years, pets have finally overtaken farm animals in the pharmaceutical marketplace, claiming 54 percent of spending for animal drugs, according to the trade group Animal Health Institute.

Keeping more than 130 million dogs and cats alone, Americans bought $2.9 billion worth of pet drugs in 2005. Though equal to only 1 percent of human drug sales, the market has grown by roughly half since the year 2000.

“As more and more drugs are being developed for people, more and more drugs are being developed for veterinary medicine. It’s really a parallel track,” says Dr. Gerald Post, founder of the nonprofit Animal Cancer Foundation.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved more than 40 new pet drugs over the past five years.’

‘The common view that nerves transmit impulses through electricity is wrong and they really transmit sound, according to a team of Danish scientists. [..]

The physicists say because the nerve membrane is made of a material similar to olive oil that can change from liquid to solid through temperature variations, they can freeze and propagate the solitons.

The scientists, whose work is in the Biophysical Society’s Biophysical Journal, suggested that anesthetics change the melting point of the membrane and make it impossible for their theorized sound pulses to propagate.’