moonbuggy

`A disabled man who was injured when a windblown tree crushed his trailer killed himself as he lay trapped in the wreckage on Christmas Day, authorities said.

The injuries that Richard Payne suffered when the tree fell early Sunday were not life-threatening, Island County Coroner Robert Bishop said Monday. The cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Bishop said.

However, it did not appear that Payne had any means of summoning help, sheriff’s spokesman Jan Smith said in a statement. There was no phone in the trailer and no nearby neighbors in the remote wooded area at the south end of Camano Island.’

`A naked man in Lake County, Fla., claiming to be Satan was arrested after he threatened to kill a sheriff’s deputy and then injured the man in a neighborhood street, according to a police report.

Officers responded to complaints of a naked man screaming in the streets Monday in the area of Wall Street and Grant Avenue in Eustis, Fla.

When deputies arrived, they found Roy Lee Henson walking with his boxer shorts around his ankles and screaming wildly, according to the report.’

`Along with deadly features like satellite navigation, 80-watt per channel premium audio with six-element speaker system, a cold-weather comfort package which includes foot-warming system channelizing engine-heated air over the rider’s feet and is controlled by a fairing-mounted lever, the new Honda Gold Wing comes with first protection airbag system.’

`The moon is a scientific laboratory of extraordinary facility, richness and benefit. The history of our corner of the solar system for the past 4 billion years is preserved and readable in the ancient dust of the lunar surface. This record is lost on the dynamic and ever-changing surface of Earth. Other planets do not record the same events affecting Earth and the moon, including impacts, space particles and the detailed history of our sun. The recovery of this record will let us better understand the impact hazard in the Earth-moon system as well as unravel the processes and evolution of our sun, the major driver of climate and life on Earth.’

`Lyon County authorities were desperately looking for a woodcutter Thursday who reported possibly cutting his leg off with a chain saw before the cell phone connection died.

The man called 911 at 11:56 a.m. and said he may have cut his leg off and needed an ambulance, Sheriff’s Capt. Jeff Page said.

“He said he was dizzy, there was lots of blood, and then the phone went dead,” said Page, who listened to the taped call several times.

“He sounded pretty distressed; pretty shook up,” he told The Associated Press.

Dispatchers were unable to get the man’s location before the communication ended.’

Possibly cut his leg off? It doesn’t seem like there’s much room for speculation on the wood cutters part. Either the leg is off or it’s on. [shrug] :)

`The closest most people will ever get to remote Papua, or the operations of Freeport-McMoRan, is a computer tour using Google Earth to swoop down over the rain forests and glacier-capped mountains where the American company mines the world’s largest gold reserve.

With a few taps on a keyboard, satellite images quickly reveal the deepening spiral that Freeport has bored out of its Grasberg mine as it pursues a virtually bottomless store of gold hidden inside. They also show a spreading soot-colored bruise of almost a billion tons of mine waste that the New Orleans-based company has dumped directly into a jungle river of what had been one of the world’s last untouched landscapes.

What is far harder to discern is the intricate web of political and military ties that have helped shield Freeport from the rising pressures that other gold miners have faced to clean up their practices. Only lightly touched by a scant regulatory regime, and cloaked in the protection of the military, Freeport has managed to maintain a nearly impenetrable redoubt on the easternmost Indonesian province as it taps one of the country’s richest assets.’

`The Home Office has lodged an appeal against a High Court ruling that an Australian man imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay has a right to British citizenship.

David Hicks, 30, was detained in Afghanistan in 2002 and has been held by the US at Camp X-Ray in Cuba. [..]

The Home Office accepted Mr Hicks was entitled to citizenship but said it can refused or withdrawn because of the charges Mr Hicks faces.

A Home Office spokesman said: “The ruling by the courts was a disappointment. The Home Office was granted permission to make an appeal and we have done so.”‘

`Just yesterday we could report about how Crotale reached a new milestone with 4Ghz with a Celeron M 1.4GHz. We didn’t think he would stop there and he didn’t. He kept pushing that poor processor even further and has now reported in 4159 MHz! That’s a 197% overlock and if he can’t go any further than this I have to say it would be a very sad ending as he is so close to pass a historic milestone with a 200% overclock. We’ve also received a new runner up with Andreas “himura” Johansson who has overlocked a Celeron M 1.5 GHz to 3.6Ghz, a 140% overclock. Impressive is the least we can say about what these guys are doing.’

This is what I should have asked for for chistmas. :)

`In an unusually candid admission, the federal chief of AIDS research says he believes drug companies don’t have an incentive to create a vaccine for the HIV and are likely to wait to profit from it after the government develops one. [..]

Tramont is head of the AIDS research division of the National Institutes of Health, and he predicted in his testimony that the government will eventually create a vaccine. He testified in July in the whistleblower case of Dr. Jonathan Fishbein.

“If we look at the vaccine, HIV vaccine, we’re going to have an HIV vaccine. It’s not going to be made by a company,” Tramont said. “They’re dropping out like flies because there’s no real incentive for them to do it. We have to do it.”

“They will eventually — if it works, they won’t have to make that big investment. And they can make it and sell it and make a profit,” he said.’

`Talking Head Vibrators are the first of its kind vibrator that delivers audio as well as physical sensation—offering different sound chips for different moods, and with the ability to record a voice yourself with a recordable sound chip, coupled with a state of the art silicon vibrator with “rabbit” feature that brings an extra new dimension to your sensation.’

with sample audio clips.

So, I’ve been fiddling with compressing my pages to reduce bandwidth. I had been using ob_gzhander, which compresses pages at the script level, but the other day I figured out how to get zlib.output_compression working, which compresses pages at the web server level. [ini_set wasn’t working, but I figured out I could enable it via .htaccess.]

I tried the different compression levels and recorded the compressed page size and the page generation time for each level. I used my November 2005 archive page for the test. Here’s the results:

So it turns out the default level of compression, which appears to be compression level 6, is a good choice to use. Interestingly, my page generation time increases when I don’t compress the page. Since the compression is done by the web server and not PHP, compression should have no effect on the generation time. This suggests there’s probably something wrong with my page generation timer code and that it’s waiting for some action from the client.

I’m sure no one but me cares. :)

`Marluddin Jalil, a Sharia judge who has ordered the punishment of women for not wearing headscarves, was uncompromising: “The tsunami was because of the sins of the people of Aceh.”

Thundering into a microphone at a gathering of wives, he made clear where he felt the fault lay: “The Holy Koran says that if women are good, then a country is good.”

A year after the disaster which many see as a divine punishment, emboldened Islamic hardliners are doing their best to eradicate sin — and women are their prime targets.

With reconstruction slow, irrational fears of a second tsunami high, and nearly 500,000 still homeless along 500 miles of coastline, the stern message falls on fertile ground. A Sharia police force modelled on Saudi moral enforcers enthusiastically seeks out female wrong doers for public humiliation.’

‘Hardman actor Sylvester Stallone was knocked unconscious in a boxing ring making the new Rocky movie.

He was left flat on his back for several minutes with cameras still rolling because the crew thought he was acting.

Fortunately, he came round and later made a fully recovery.’

`The daughters of a Brooklyn woman who died of burns after puncturing a clogged aerosol can of Aquanet hair spray have filed a wrongful death suit against the manufacturer. [..]

When the can’s nozzle became clogged after she had sprayed on some of the product, Squicciarini picked up a can opener from a kitchen drawer, according to court papers filed in the Brooklyn Supreme Court suit.

“With the can opener, Lorraine Squicciarini opened a hole in the bottom of the Aquanet can in an attempt to clear the nozzle,” according to the complaint. “The contents, including vapors and highly flammable and explosive materials,” spurted from the can. [..]

The suit against Unilever USA by Lorraine Squicciarini’s daughters, Barbara Squicciarini of Staten Island and Marisa Ciancimino of Hazlet, N.J., does not specify damages, but Schoen said he will seek $10 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages. [..]

Schoen said he researched earlier cases of injuries involving Aquanet and determined “the printed warning against puncturing the can, which was insufficient then, remains insufficient.”‘

Strange but interesting.

`As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held “theory of gravity” is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

“Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, ‘God’ if you will, is pushing them down,” said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.’

`One of the most controversial episodes in France’s recent history is to come under legal scrutiny after a judge opened a formal inquiry into allegations that the French Army conspired in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. [..]

An estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the violence that followed the death of Juvenal Habyarimana, then the Rwandan President, in an aircraft crash. The majority of the victims were Tutsis, slaughtered by the rival Hutu tribe. The 2,500-strong French peacekeeping force sent to Rwanda by M Mitterrand is accused not only of failing to stop the genocide, but of actively participating in it. [..]

Although Michèle Alliot-Marie, the French Defence Minister, described the claims as outlandish, the prosecutor decided that two witnesses were sufficiently credible to warrant an inquiry.

One is Auréa Mukakalisa, who was raped by Hutu militia in a refugee camp set up and controlled by the French Army. “The Hutu militiamen entered the camp and designated the Tutsis, who were forced to leave the camp by French soldiers,” Miss Mukakalisa, who was 27 at the time, said. “I saw the militia kill the Tutsis who had left the camp. I saw French soldiers themselves kill Tutsis using knives.” Her brother, Felicien, was one of the victims at the Murambi camp. His body has never been found.’

`Australian farmers could be about to get an unusual new weapon to protect their crops from rampaging kangaroos.

Researchers in Melbourne have found that these voracious marsupials can be scared off by the thumping sound of their own large feet on the ground.

[..] a recording of a ‘roo thumping its foot appears to have been quite a breakthrough. This is the noise these macropods make when they sense danger before taking flight.

Using the animal’s own alarm system could be what irate farmers have been looking for. They often complain that kangaroo numbers have reached plague-like proportions. Several million are shot dead every year as part of an official cull.’

`A church-controlled radio station has apologised for a stunt in which a radio comic posing as Spain’s prime minister called Bolivia’s future president.

Spain and Bolivia have accepted the apology from Cope radio.

The station’s comic, pretending to be Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, telephoned Evo Morales.

He implied that Bolivia and Spain would join a left-wing axis involving Cuba and Venezuela. [..]

When Mr Morales said he had received many congratulatory phone calls, the fake Zapatero said he imagined he had not been called by US President George W Bush.

“He hasn’t called me yet either, and I’ve been in office two years,” the fake Zapatero added.

The real Mr Zapatero angered the US by pulling Spanish troops out of Iraq immediately after taking office in 2004.’

`Dialing a wrong number landed a Des Moines man in jail.

Police said Randy Wessel thought he was calling his buddy, but he actually called someone else. Wessel then told the person on the other end about some criminal activity.

The person on the other end of the phone was an undercover police officer.

Wessel is now charged with theft for stealing a car from a pizza deliveryman.’

`The aunt of rock star Sting got a letter from the Queen on her 100th birthday — but no card from her famous nephew. [..]

Former actress Rose — who lives in a nursing home in Exeter, Devon — said “it would have been nice” if Sting had remembered her big day.

But she added: “I realise that he’s busy being a rock star.”’

`The Family Medicine division of the Harbor UCLA Hospital has turned back several donations from companies in the adult industry. [..]

Miles said she is on the neighborhood council in the Harbor-Gateway area, and in September she distributed 25 letters of request to local mainstream companies at a Chamber of Commerce meeting.

“Everybody was going to help me at the meeting back in September, and then when it came time to ante up, only one person, Costco, gave me three lousy wrapping papers,” Miles told AVN.com. “The rest of them said they didn’t have any money in their budget this year.”

“I wanted to help [the families] so bad, so I called people in the adult industry that I haven’t even spoken to in almost four years, and for them to get a slap in face was very hard for me to take. I felt so horrible.”’

`Police in Scotland said they were hunting a man who staged an armed robbery while dressed in a bright pink dress and brown wig. The robber escaped with about 4,000 pounds (5,840 euros, 6,932 dollars) from an amusement arcade in Glasgow after threatening two female members of staff with a knife and tying them up, the police said.’

Stop the brats getting their christmas presents early. By killing them.

`Japanese electronics maker Toshiba launched two MP3 players in October that run on DMFC fuel cells, using methanol as fuel. The larger of the two devices has a hard drive and an edge length of more than 12 centimetres. The fuel cell has a ten-millilitre tank offering an active life of up to 60 hours, Toshiba reports.

The smaller device is no larger than a pack of gum, offers Flash storage, and holds 3.5 millilitres of fuel – good for 35 hours of musical enjoyment.

Canon has announced plans to operate its printers, cameras, cellphones, and MP3 player using so-called PEM fuel cells. A prototype was presented in early November in Tokyo. Unlike many of their competitors, Canon’s developers have cast their lot with hydrogen energy sources.’

`Selling My Kid’s XBox 360–$100

My kid has been an absolute terror for the last month. He has been demanding more and more from my wife while constantly pestering us to give him his X-box 360 early so he can play it. Last night was the last straw when he kicked my $2000 stereo system after I refused to give it to him early. [..]

To purchase this system, you must be able to pick it up at my house or at work during normal hours. Call in advance so I can get the wife to take the kid out for a drive or distract him downstairs.

I am asking $100 cash. I will also need you to bring a bag of charcoal so I can fill the box up with. Let me stress again that you will get the full contents of the box-the 360, controller, headset, those cords, etc. YOU WILL NOT GET THE BOX, as we will need it along with the charcoal for a little x-mas surprise.’

`This one is puzzling thousands of people. St. Bernard Parish, virtually wiped out following Hurricane Katrina, is seeing the spontaneous growth of watermelons. They’re everywhere! It’s a post-Katrina phenomenon that has even the experts baffled.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Dr. Ron Strahan of the LSU Ag Center as he surveyed the watermelon infestation.’

`Five workers at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory are being monitored after an accident resulted in plutonium being found inside their noses.

Details of the accident inside building TA-55 Monday are sketchy, but lab official Kevin Roark verified automated sensors picked up the plutonium release, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday.

Four other workers in the room weren’t contaminated and no contaminants escaped into the environment, Roark told the Chronicle.’

Gotta watch what you snort, obviously.

`A man was electrocuted by 69,000 volts of electricity after he tried to steal copper wire from an electrical substation near Bellmead on Friday.

The man, who police have yet to identify, was cutting the copper wire off functional transformers at the substation behind the old General Tire plant on U.S. Highway 77, about a half mile north of Orchard Lane shortly after noon when he was hit by the surge, according to Steve Anderson of the Waco Police Department. [..]

“It’s like a blast of fire going through you, essentially,” Flores said.

Anderson said he was amazed at the man’s disregard of posted warning signs.

“If you’re going to be stupid, you’d better be tough,” he said.’