Year: 2007

I’m not a Woman, but I find this a bit condescending.

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If this was being marketed to my 9 year old daughter, I’d be amused, but they are marketing it to adult professional women. WTF?

SiliconValley.com – Hello Kitty dons new pink laptop to woo working women

TOKYO (AP) – Japan’s cutest cat in glittering crystal decorates NEC Corp.’s new pink laptop in the Japanese electronics maker’s latest effort to woo working women.

The La Vie G Hello Kitty model, available for $1,650 by Internet order only in Japan, went on sale Wednesday, and has gotten off to a good start, company spokesman Shinya Hashizume said Thursday, while declining to give numbers.

‘PC users now tend to be men, but we’re hoping to attract women with this product,’ he said.

The laptop, developed in collaboration with Sanrio Co., the Tokyo-based company behind Hello Kitty, uses 299 Swarovski crystals to depict four hearts and the bubbly feline head wearing a pink bow and crown.

NEC is hoping to sell several hundred of the Hello Kitty laptops in the next few months, targeting the summertime when Japanese workers receive their twice-a-year bonuses, Hashizume said.”

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It’s really pretty hideous.

Fraudulent Appraisals, Part One of Many.

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People who have bought houses since 2000 or so, myself included, have bought houses with phony money generated by Alan Greenspan for houses with phony valuations.

Ohio Sues Real Estate Firms for Pressuring Appraisers

By Brian Louis and Sharon L. Crenson

June 7 (Bloomberg) — Ohio, the state with the third highest number of foreclosures, sued 10 real estate companies for improperly pressuring appraisers to inflate home values.

The companies, based in Ohio, California, Arizona and New York, set specific estimated values on properties and communicated a desired price to appraisers, according to the lawsuits filed by Attorney General Marc Dann today. In Ohio, it’s illegal to influence an appraiser. Those sued include seven mortgage brokers, two lenders and an appraiser.

Foreclosure filings in Ohio jumped 135 percent in April from a year ago, pushing the state’s rate to almost two times the national average, according to RealtyTrac Inc. States have opened investigations of mortgage brokers, lenders and appraisers as delinquencies rise across the U.S., led by subprime borrowers.”

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Bandar, aka Bandar Bush, Saudi Prince ‘Received Arms Cash’

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It should be noted that he is so close to the Bush family that he’s called “Bandar Bush”.

BBC NEWS | Business | Saudi prince ‘received arms cash’: “A Saudi prince who negotiated a £40bn arms deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia received secret payments for over a decade, a BBC probe has found.

The UK’s biggest arms dealer, BAE Systems, paid hundreds of millions of pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

The payments were made with the full knowledge of the Ministry of Defence.

Prince Bandar would not comment on the investigation and BAE Systems said it acted lawfully at all times.

The MoD said information about the Al Yamamah deal was confidential.

Sir Raymond Lygo, a former chief executive of BAE, told the BBC’s World Business Report that there had been ‘nothing untoward’ about the arms deal.

‘I was the one who won the contract,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about him (the prince) at all. I would have remembered that name.’

When asked about the secret payments, Sir Lygo said that it was not going on when the deal was signed.

‘I would have known if it was going on at the time. I was not aware of it, so as far as I am concerned it was not occuring.

‘Yes, we paid agents. Nothing illegal about that. It was absolutely in accordance with the law at the time… there was nothing untoward about the deal whatsoever.”

Private plane

The investigation found that up to £120m a year was sent by BAE Systems from the UK into two Saudi embassy accounts in Washington.

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£120m/year. At current exchange rates, that’s about $240 million.

High priced agent. He’s getting more a year than A-Rod, whose agent gets even less than that.

Why We Need A Bill of Rights.

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I’m not suggesting that all, or most, peace officers do this, but this guy busted someone for looking at his dog, and he won’t even get a suspension for this.

The blue wall of silence needs to be eliminated.

This is how people act when they can act with impunity.

Animal cruelty case yields ‘doggone’ dismissal: Rutland Herald Online
June 6, 2007

By Peter Hirschfeld Times Argus Staff

CHELSEA – A woman facing jail time for “staring” at a police dog had charges against her dropped Monday after an Orange County prosecutor viewed videotape of the alleged crime.

Jayna Hutchinson, now of Lebanon, N.H., was scheduled for a jury trial this week on a misdemeanor charge of cruelty to animals.

A Vermont State Police sergeant said Hutchinson was intoxicated and stared at his police dog in a “taunting/harassing manner” last July while officers were in the process of investigating a reported melee outside a West Fairlee establishment.

“Prosecuting a woman for staring at a police dog is absurd,” said Kelly Green, a public defender appointed by Vermont District Court in Orange County to represent Hutchinson. She likened the act to giving a police officer the finger – a form of expression protected by rights accorded under the First Amendment.

“After looking at the video, I did not think it was worthwhile proceeding,” Orange County State’s Attorney Will Porter said Tuesday.

He said it would be difficult to prove that Hutchinson’s behavior met the statutory standard for cruelty to animals, which in this case would have required that Hutchinson “intentionally torment(ed) or harass(ed) an animal owned … by a police department.”

According to an affidavit, Hutchinson approached Sgt. Todd Protzman on the night of July 31 as he and at least three other officers were investigating a fight. Hutchinson, who later registered a .218 blood-alcohol content, told Protzman she wanted to report that she had been beat up the night before by one of the men involved in the fight, according to Green.

Green said the video showed Protzman mocking Hutchinson’s appearance.

“I think his comment about Jayna’s looks revealed the real reason he arrested her,” Green said. “I’d venture a guess to say that if she’d been small and pretty and had been complaining of being assaulted, he may have done more to investigate her claims.”

Porter said he saw no indication of improper behavior by Protzman and that he was doing his best to deal with a very intoxicated person.

“Ms. Hutchinson was very intoxicated. Did he have some abrupt comments toward her? Yeah,” Porter said. “He had some curt responses to get her out of his hair so he could attend to what he was there for.”

Is Bill Clinton a Closet Homophobe?

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Pams House Blend has a number of articles on this.

When you look at the advice he gave the Kerry in 2004 (from Politico):

A version of this story is already in print. In 2004, Newsweek reported, without a named source, that Bill Clinton had suggested Kerry “to back local bans on gay marriage.”

Shrum has more, and different, detail:

…”Kerry, Clinton ventured, should consider defying Democratic interest groups by endorsing the Bush proposal for a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.” Shrum reports that “this was a flip-flop too far for Kerry.”

You also have a report from Newsweek in 2004:

Clinton Advice Spurned. Looking for a way to pick up swing voters in the Red States, former President Bill Clinton, in a phone call with Kerry, urged the Senator to back local bans on gay marriage. Kerry respectfully listened, then told his aides, “I’m not going to ever do that.”

You also have his spinelessness on the Military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

And you have him actively campaigning in the back rooms in 2004 against Howard Dean, because he felt that Dr. Dean’s signature of civil unions in VT would “kill his campaign”.

I don’t think that this from a Sistah Soljah type sense of politics, but rather from a deep seated discomfort with gays.

Why Identity Theft Should Not Be Left to the Private Market

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Because if it is, this will be the rule, not the exception.

Call your congressman and tell him that you should be able to have a credit freeze on demand.

Lifelock Founder a Shady Identity Thief?

By Kim Zetter

The Phoenix New Times has published an investigative piece showing that Robert J. Maynard, Jr., one of the founders of Lifelock, a company offering a service to protect people from identity theft, is himself a suspected identity thief who may have stolen his own father’s identity, has a troubled financial past (including at least two bankruptcies), and was jailed in 2003 for defaulting on a $16,000 Las Vegas casino loan — an incident that the New Times says Maynard has lied about repeatedly to customers and reporters.”

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Tech Companies Want Their Slave Labor

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What this is about is workers being free to tell them to “take this job and shove it”, and not leave the US.

Any visa in which losing your job with a specific employer requires you to leave is a step above slavery.

H1b, L1, and the proposed guest worker program are an attempt to create an underclass of cheap labor.

Tech seeing red over green-card proposal
By Anne Broache
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: June 6, 2007, 4:00 AM PDT

Silicon Valley companies would be forced to compete with fast food joints, shops at the mall and truck-driving outfits for the same pool of legalized foreign hires under a controversial proposal that the U.S. Senate is debating this week.

The prospect of unpredictable competition for a fixed number of immigrant visas based on an applicant’s educational background and work history, which would replace the current employer-sponsored green card system, is drawing stiff opposition from technology lobbying groups that are pressing senators to preserve the current system.”

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Foreclosures hammer Atlanta Area

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Let’s assume $200 for property taxes, association fees, insurance, etc.

This gives a rate over 10.4%.

The banking industry needs to be reregulated.

South metro area hit hard by foreclosures
Planners, credit counselors cite subprime interest rates, job losses, lack of affordable housing

By ERIC STIRGUS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 06/07/07

Teresa Weathers may have bitten off more of the American Dream than she can afford.

Like an increasing number of homeowners, she’s facing foreclosure.

Recently laid off from her job as a mortgage loan processor and unable to find more work, the 39-year-old Clayton County resident is two months behind on the $1,345 monthly mortgage on her $125,000 four-bedroom townhouse.”

The number of foreclosures is particularly startling in the communities south of Atlanta. Nearly 1 in 20 homes in Clayton County is in foreclosure, the highest ratio in the region, according to a recently released Atlanta Regional Commission report.

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This will be ugly

Your FDA at Work: Poisoning your Pets Edition

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This is VERY significant. Acetaminophen is VERY toxic to cats and dogs, and cause liver failure. (It can with humans too, but only with a significant OD)

This is the free market ownership society that the ‘Phants want us to live in.

Texas lab finds pain medicine in pet food
By Karen Roebuck
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Tuesday, June 5, 2007

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is investigating a Texas laboratory’s finding of acetaminophen in dog and cat food, an agency spokesman said Monday.

‘We’re very interested in being able to test these samples ourselves to determine the levels of those contaminants,’ said FDA spokesman Doug Arbesfeld. ‘What’s significant is these things are there. They don’t belong there.'”

The pain medication is the fifth contaminant found in pet foods during the past 2 1/2 months and can be toxic or lethal to pets, especially cats. It is not known if any animals became sick with acetaminophen poisoning, or died from it.

‘We were looking for cyanuric acid and melamine, and the acetaminophen just popped up,’ Donna Coneley, lab operations manager for ExperTox Inc. in Deer Park, Texas, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review yesterday. ‘It definitely was a surprise to find that in several samples.'”

Israeli Phased Array AEW Aircraft

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This is significant, because we will be seeing many smaller nations acquiring C3I capabilities that rival those of the USAF and USN on much smaller platforms.

We are seeing technological developments equivalent to those that have occurred in computing, which allow for weapons design and development without having a building full of vacuum tubes.

Israel gets second AEW Gulfstream-29/05/2007-Flight International

The Israeli air force’s second of four Gulfstream G550 business jets to be modified for use as an airborne early warning aircraft has arrived at Ben-Gurion international airport in Tel Aviv following a mid-May ferry flight from Savannah, Georgia via Edinburgh, Scotland.

Israel Aerospace Industries’ Elta Systems subsidiary will now install a Phalcon-derivative conformal AEW array, with the aircraft to join a first example (right) now in flight test. The Israeli air force’s future AEW fleet will join its three G550s already configured for signals intelligence duties, with these being prepared for operational service. Singapore also recently confirmed its selection of four G550-based AEW aircraft, with these to be in service by 2010.

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Hillary’s Closest Advisor is a Union buster

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Mark Penn is VERY bad news, even if not for the union busting.

He is a serious proponent of Dems running as Republicans (DLC politics).

It’s nice to see that this is getting mainstream coverage now.; I’ve been hearing this on the Blogosphere for months.

A Top Clinton Aide Draws Criticism From Unions – New York Times

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Published: June 5, 2007

The presidents of two large labor unions have written to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to complain that Mark Penn, her pollster and chief strategist, is chief executive of a public relations firm that is helping a company fight a unionization drive.

In the letter sent Friday, which a labor official released yesterday, James P. Hoffa, president of the Teamsters, and Bruce Raynor, president of Unite Here, wrote that they did not want to see Mrs. Clinton or the Democratic Party embarrassed by the anti-union activities of Mr. Penn’s firm, Burson-Marsteller, one of the nation’s leading public relations companies.

“If Hillary is pro-worker and pro-union, she will certainly take steps to rein in Mr. Penn,” Mr. Hoffa said in an interview. “He cannot serve two masters, working for a pro-union candidate and working for anti-union companies.”

In the letter, Mr. Hoffa and Mr. Raynor said, “It is with distress that we write you today,” adding that they valued Mrs. Clinton’s positions on many worker-related issues.

They said the public relations firm’s “activities in the effort to undermine workers’ right to organize at Cintas, a campaign our unions are involved in, is particularly disheartening.” Four years ago, the two unions began a major drive to unionize 17,000 workers at the Cintas Corporation, the nation’s largest uniform rental company. Cintas, helped by Burson-Marsteller, has responded with a vigorous — and thus far successful — effort to resist unionization.

Mr. Hoffa and Mr. Raynor, whose union represents apparel, hotel and restaurant workers, noted that they had learned of Burson-Marsteller’s anti-union activities in an article last week in The Nation magazine. Their action comes as Mrs. Clinton prepares to speak at an A.F.L.-C.I.O. forum on Saturday in Detroit.

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FCC Prudes Get Spanked by Court

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The court basically said that Dick Cheney told Pat Leahy to go Cheney himself, he made the word “Fuck” acceptable.

The FCC Jihad was bad policy anyway, it was just driven by the need to pander to the Republithug base.

Court Rebuffs F.C.C. on Fines for Indecency – New York Times

By STEPHEN LABATON
Published: June 5, 2007

WASHINGTON, June 4 — If President Bush and Vice President Cheney can blurt out vulgar language, then the government cannot punish broadcast television stations for broadcasting the same words in similarly fleeting contexts.

That, in essence, was the decision on Monday, when a federal appeals panel struck down the government policy that allows stations and networks to be fined if they broadcast shows containing obscene language.

Although the case was primarily concerned with what is known as “fleeting expletives,” or blurted obscenities, on television, both network executives and top officials at the Federal Communications Commission said the opinion could gut the ability of the commission to regulate any speech on television or radio.

Kevin J. Martin, the chairman of the F.C.C., said that the agency was now considering whether to seek an appeal before all the judges of the appeals court or to take the matter directly to the Supreme Court.

The decision, by a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, was a sharp rebuke for the F.C.C. and for the Bush administration. For the four television networks that filed the lawsuit — Fox, CBS, NBC and ABC — it was a major victory in a legal and cultural battle that they are waging with the commission and its supporters.

Under President Bush, the F.C.C. has expanded its indecency rules, taking a much harder line on obscenities uttered on broadcast television and radio. While the judges sent the case back to the commission to rewrite its indecency policy, it said that it was “doubtful” that the agency would be able to “adequately respond to the constitutional and statutory challenges raised by the networks.”

The networks hailed the decision.

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Reversing decades of a more lenient policy, the commission had found that the mere utterance of certain words implied that sexual or excretory acts were carried out and therefore violated the indecency rules.

But the judges said vulgar words are just as often used out of frustration or excitement, and not to convey any broader obscene meaning. “In recent times even the top leaders of our government have used variants of these expletives in a manner that no reasonable person would believe referenced sexual or excretory organs or activities.”

Adopting an argument made by lawyers for NBC, the judges then cited examples in which Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had used the same language that would be penalized under the policy. Mr. Bush was caught on videotape last July using a common vulgarity that the commission finds objectionable in a conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. Three years ago, Mr. Cheney was widely reported to have muttered an angry obscene version of “get lost” to Senator Patrick Leahy on the floor of the United States Senate.

“We find that the F.C.C.’s new policy regarding ‘fleeting expletives’ fails to provide a reasoned analysis justifying its departure from the agency’s established practice,” said the panel.

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Another Republican to Cop a Plea

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Two aids of Norton, huh? Wonder when she’s going to do the perp walk.

I have a unique perspective on all this. I went to college, and served on the student senate with, Tony C. Rudy, Tom Delay’s former deputy chief of staff.

I once called %$#&ing stupid on the floor of the senate.

Tony was actually a nice guy once he got off the senate floor.

That being said, I hope that they all roll. They are a part of a cancer that needs to be excised from the body politic.

TheHill.com – Former Norton aide to plead guilty in Abramoff case

June 06, 2007

The Hill has learned that Italia Federici, a one-time political aide to former Interior Secretary Gale Norton, has agreed to plead guilty to tax evasion and obstruction of Congress as part of the investigation into the lobbying activities of Jack Abramoff.

The Republican activist will be the second person with ties to Norton to plead guilty in the Abramoff investigation. Former Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his relationship to Abramoff and Federici. He is to be sentenced later this month.

The Real Estate Crash, Continued

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Note that these are estimates, and the RE industry always has rosy predictions.

This is going to be worse than they are stating, and then you need to add about 5% onto that for the incentives that are being used to move houses now.

Home price drop to be worse than expected, say Realtors – Jun. 6, 2007

Expected drop in home prices nearly double estimate of two months ago; recovery more than year away.
By Chris Isidore, CNNMoney.com senior writer
June 6 2007: 1:01 PM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The outlook for home prices this year – already expected to post the first drop on record – got worse Wednesday as an industry group cut its forecasts for sales and prices for 2007.

The National Association of Realtors said it now sees the median price of existing homes sold falling 1.3 percent this year. That’s almost twice the 0.7 percent drop forecast just two months ago, and is worse than the 1.0 percent drop in prices it estimated in May.

As recently as March, the group was forecasting a 1.2 percent rise in the median existing home price for this year.
Home prices: Where the growth is – and isn’t

New home prices are now expected to sink 2.3 percent, according to the group’s report, much worse than its previous forecast of essentially flat prices for the year.

If home prices fall as is now expected, it will be the first time that’s occurred in the nearly 40 years the group has tracked home sales.

The Realtors also now expect there to be 6.18 million existing homes sold this year, down 1.7 percent from its estimate a month ago, and down 4.6 percent from 2006.

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Rental Properties Suffering Too in Florida

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My guess is that this would apply to everywhere that things got bubblicious.

Houses won’t sell, and the construction workers are going away, so you can’t rent them.

There was a real estate crash in Florida in the late 1920s. It took 10 YEARS for prices to recover, and it is considered a major contributor to the stock market crash of ’29.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Rentals aplenty, but not discounts

By DEVONA WALKER

devona.walker@heraldtribune.com
“For Rent” signs litter lawns in almost every Southwest Florida neighborhood, from canal-front homes in Port Charlotte to the 1960s-style Florida ranch homes off Bahia Vista Street in Sarasota.

The apartment and home rental vacancy rate is at nearly 10 percent because of the mass exodus of construction and service sector workers from the area.

Normally, this would be a sign of rental discounts to come. However, because of a near-perfect storm of issues fueled by rising property taxes and insurance costs, combined with the run-up in property prices over the past few years, that has not materialized.

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This Article is Incomplete. It’s Not About the Fed, It’s about Overseas Investment.

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A lot of this is foreign and domestic investors who are chasing higher rates of return now that rates in Europe are increasing.

It is this, which will produce downward pressure on the US Dollar, which will get our interest rates going up.

The US is dependent on foreign money flowing in for its solvency. We are like a pre-crash Argentina.

Rate woes sack stocks

Major gauges slip as investors eye ECB rate hike, rise in unit labor costs, Lacker comments, home price outlook.
By Alexandra Twin, CNNMoney.com senior writer
June 6 2007: 11:07 AM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Stocks tumbled Wednesday morning as investors absorbed reports that suggested rising inflation, higher interest rates and a bigger-than-expected drag from the housing market going forward.

The Dow Jones industrial average (down 92.49 to 13,502.97, Charts) lost around 100 points, or more than 0.8 percent 90 minutes into the session. The broader S&P 500 index (down 13.41 to 1,517.54, Charts) lost 0.8 percent. The Nasdaq composite (down 22.94 to 2,588.29, Charts) gave up 0.9 percent.
Stocks fell Tuesday as cautious remarks by the Federal Reserve chairman, rising Treasury yields and a strong reading on the economy raised worries that the central bank could raise interest rates later this year.

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Julie Amero Gets New Trial!!!

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This was bullsh%$ from the beginning. The school did not update its filters, and she was told not to turn off her computer under any circumstances.

There appears to be prosecutorial misconduct too.

Hat tip to Lindsay Beyerstein. She really was the person who got coverage of this.

Of course, the poor woman is still out legal fees, and a child. The stress of the trial led to a miscarriage.

TheDay.com – Substitute Teacher Gets New Trial on Porn Charges
By Karen Florin Published on 6/6/2007

A New London Superior court judge this morning overturned the conviction of Julie Amero, who was found guilty of exposing Norwich schoolchildren to pornography on a computer, and has granted Amero a new trial.

Judge Hillary Strackbein said the state had conducted further forensic information that the jury had not heard at the trial. The information, according to defense experts, was that the computer had generated pornographic popups and that Amero, a substitute teacher, was not at fault. Amero had been convicted of four counts of risk of injury to a minor and faced up to 40 years in prison.

She has has been the subject of national attention as of result of the conviction, and seemed relieved after Attorney William Dow explained the judge’s ruling.

“I have a great team behind me and I feel very comfortable with the rulings,” she said before getting into a car with her husband and leaving.

“It was a porn trap,” said Chip Neville, a retired computer sciences professor who had petitioned the office of the Chief State’s Attorney to review the verdict.

“We’re all exposed to this. We wander into the wrong site innocently.”

Neat Tech: Fuel Cell to replace APU

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This is potentially neat, but I’m not seeing where the hydrogen is coming from. Carrying compressed bottles would probably be a lot heavier than a conventionally fueled APU.

Boeing in fuel-cell project-05/06/2007-Flight International
Boeing is collaborating with Sandia National Laboratories to determine the feasibility of using a hydrogen-powered fuel cell to provide back-up in aircraft. This is a new task under a co-operative research and development deal between the aircraft manufacturer and the laboratory signed in 2002.

The project focuses on use of a polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell instead of an auxiliary power unit, batteries or ram-air turbine to provide emergency electrical power for critical aircraft systems. Livermore, California-based Sandia is leading evaluations of electrical and environmental requirements, fuel cell efficiency, and hydrogen storage options and issues.

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