A 52-year-old Milwaukee-area man has been accused of faking heart attacks to avoid paying restaurant bills and cab fares.
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An entrepreneur pinged me the other day with an idea that was in the groups sector of the web market (yahoo groups, google groups, meetup, facebook groups, etc, etc). I asked him why the web needed another groups service. And...
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The Number of Americans with Diabetes has grown to about 24 million people, or roughly 8 percent of the U.S. population, the government said Tuesday.
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Running in the seventh lane, Gay was speeding to the lead in the first turn, but on his 14th stride, something went wrong. He went airborne, fell, then laid on the ground in pain, grabbing his left thigh and grimacing.
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Oops! Federal Express accidentally delivered 200lbs of pot to the wrong person in Baltimore, and the recipient tipped off police. Cops then posed as FedEx agents when making the drop-off to the original recipient, who was promptly busted. The sender, however, has not been identified.
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If your going to pick some kinda of sudden sickness to fake your way out of a court appearance, don't choose a heart attack because once they check your vitals its a tough one to stick with.
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The book's main argument is that the convergence of global warming, global flattening (the rise of middle classes all over the world), and global crowding (the population boom) is driving five key trends that will define the 21st century.
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Aliens! Kidnapping! Serial killers! How realistic are your chances of surviving a nightmare movie scenario?
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This video clip shows that Tony Hawk still has what it takes to be highest paid skateboarder on the planet.
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Imagine a store where most of the products are kept in the back. You order from the cashier. The products can't be sold below a legislated minimum price. And the overwhelming majority are made by one of three large companies, which also own the store. Surprisingly, few consumers know this is the set-up.
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Often shark bodies are thrown overboard because they take up valuable boat space and have little value. It’s the fins that are the prize. Of a sharks about 8 fins, only 4-6 of them kept. That means that an entire shark is often killed for 4 or 6 fins.
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An Arizona man has been convicted of negligent child abuse and reckless child abuse for feeding his three children an extreme vegetarian diet.
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Like some human reality shows, "Greatest American Dog" requires the participants, both four- and two-legged, to live together during the competition. R.J. Cutler, the show's executive producer, described the "canine academy" as a shared situation that is fun for the dogs and homelike for the people. Each episode tests a specific quality
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Here's a scenario very likely to happen at a small business this summer: The owner arrives in the morning, and is greeted not only by the company's receptionist, but her exposed navel. And maybe her nose ring too.
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Rising fuel costs have stopped agencies from delivering meals to, or provide transportation for senior citizens.and the disabled. Regarded as superfluous "mouths" by The Rothschild Family led One World Company engineering the dollar collapse; oil pice increases; food "shortage", etc., this is all according to plan
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AFRICANS buy 36 billion bottles of Coke a year. Because the price is set so low—around 20-30 American cents, less than the price of the average newspaper—and because sales are so minutely analysed by Coca-Cola, the Coke bottle may be one of the continent’s best trackers of stability and prosperity.
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In the 1960s, Mao Zedong banned baseball in China because of its Western roots. Even after his death in 1976, the sport never caught on. And yet, because of the marketing potential of the country’s 1.3 billion people, Major League Baseball has invested tens of millions of dollars into seeding the sport in China, league officials said.
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In 2004, Ahmed Ibrahim launched a matchmaking service from behind the wheel of his New York City cab. After four years, 115,000 miles and hundreds of awkward first dates, Mr. Ibrahim has reached a milestone: his first engagement....
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Looking back at the dozen films that truly scared me, is that most really good horror films are low-budget affairs with special effects cooked up in someone's basement. Horror is an intimate experience, something that occurs mostly within oneself, and when it works, the screams of a sold-out house are almost intrusive.
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IT'S an embarrassing gap in astronomers' knowledge. Despite relying on type Ia supernovae as tools to measure the dark energy speeding up the universe's expansion, they still don't know exactly what causes the blasts. Now the picture has got even fuzzier.
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Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it. When I first started out in the real world in the mid-nineties voicemail was an important productivity tool. But now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail. It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it.
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Volcanism has played a more extensive role in shaping the surface of Mercury than scientists had thought. This result comes from multispectral imaging data gathered in January 2008 by MESSENGER, the latest spacecraft to visit the sun's innermost planet.
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Twitter is still far larger than its much younger competitor Friendfeed in aggregate terms. But an interesting trend is developing - many longtime Twitter users are noticing that the number of followers they have on Friendfeed is growing far more rapidly than on Twitter. And the conversations at Friendfeed are better, too. I joined Twitter when [...]
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It's all out there: free cell-phone headsets, help getting refunds from big-name retailers, and, of course, cell phones making popcorn.
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Using polymorph plastic, some curtain rods, electric screwdrivers, motors, and a whole lot of mad-scientist creativity, an Xrobots hobbyist created this organic-looking robot base. By using wooden sockets and curtain rings as hip joints, the designer is clearly going for a human-like creature of doom here. Knee joints are kept moving with four moto
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The nonprofit agency (ICANN) in charge of the Internet's addresses recently lost track of its own.
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A new strain of West Nile virus is spreading better and earlier across the United States, and may thrive in hot American summers, researchers said on Thursday.The virus infected an estimated 175,000 people last year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in its weekly report on death and disease on Thursday.
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My sons Arthur, 5, and Gustav, 3, are obsessed with the New York City subway system. They can barely sit through an episode of “Sesame Street.” But when we go for aimless subway joy rides on the weekends, they sit like little angels, devoutly calling out the names of every station.
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Most of the growing job opportunities are at the non-specialist, or unskilled, end of the field, though they run the full gamut of wage levels. The disappearing jobs are concentrated in the lower third of the pay range, though the field work was done before the onset of the credit crisis, so it precedes recent job losses in the housing and ...
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Amazing. Without a single revision, no call for updates and nary a shift in tenses from present to past, the Seattle SuperSonics' 2007-08 media guide was transformed, overnight, into a history book.
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Catch this Pixar short before it gets ripped from the tubes! A short in the classic Warner Bros. style, Presto is about an elegant magician and his bunny, whose task, naturally, is to come out of a top hat at the appropriate time. "Presto" clearly references Bugs Bunny's man-outwitting wabbit, but with a Pixar twist. Brilliant!
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Parents who had been paying $1,425 a month for infant care would see their costs rise to nearly $2,500 — well above the market rate.
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The nation's largest fireworks display exploded in a spectrum of color over the East River, temporarily stealing the spotlight from New York's world-famous skyline and helping to create a brilliant end to a day of July Fourth celebrations nationwide.
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This A-beta peptide fibril has been rendered in 3-D by a transmission electron microscope, providing the most detailed look yet at the telltale sign of Alzheimer’s disease.
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(But only £6 if you're fully clothed) A job centre has been carrying an unexpected advert - for a naked cleaner. The advert is one you might expect to see in a top shelf magazine or on an X-rated internet site. But the job of naked domestic help is one of the positions Southampton Jobcentre Plus has been offering to the Hampshire city's unemployed.
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The movie "Wall-E," a futuristic tale of a trash-compacting robot, has become a money-making machine at the box office. Here are some key components of robotics:
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Seriously... Wanna take the bet?
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Bonnie Burton interviews actor, author, gamer, and geek-er Wil Wheaton in this month's edition of GEEK. Snip: Geek: (...) I need to know how far you’ve gotten in Grand Theft Auto IV. Wil Wheaton: I haven’t been playing GTA IV that long since the game came out—maybe five hours so far. My progress meter is at like eight percent or something like that. I’ve gotten to a point where the story took a rather shocking and unexpected twist. The character that you control in the game is a very conflicted guy with a pretty complicated and dark history. The guy is more real and has more depth to him than any of the other characters I’ve controlled in GTA. Until last night, I may have played one or two story missions to advance the game, but I really just spend the rest of my time driving around and crashing into cars. I drive cars until they catch on fire. I like to go driving through the parks and hit the pedestrians. I’ve noticed a couple of things like if you’re going really fast and you hit a wall or a tree something like that you’ll fly through the front windshield of the car. So I drove really fast down the wrong side of the street on the expressway and hit a car head-on, and the driver shot through the windshield and landed on the hood of my car. That level of detail is just remarkable. But it suddenly felt weird just driving around the city mowing down pedestrians. Has it started to warp your sense of reality when you’re stuck in traffic yet? I hate driving. I absolutely despise it. I particularly hate driving in Los Angeles. I’ll be out somewhere with my wife and point out things, and tell her if this was Grand Theft Auto we wouldn’t have to sit here like this. We could just drive over that median. Wil Wheaton [ Geek Blog / Geek Magazine. Disclaimer: I have been profiled there previously. ]...

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When Roger Kusch helped Bettina Schardt kill herself at home on Saturday, the grim, carefully choreographed ritual was like that in many cases of assisted suicide, with one exception. Ms. Schardt, 79, a retired X-ray technician from the Bavarian city of Würzburg, was neither sick nor dying. She simply did not want to move into a nursing home, and r
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In his studies of entropy and the irreversibility of time, Caltech physicist Sean Carroll is exploring the idea that our universe is part of a larger structure.
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A comet-chasing spacecraft has been awoken during its years-long journey so it can study an asteroid it will fly past this September. Launched in March 2004, Rosetta will reach its final destination only in 2014, after traveling a total of about 4 billion miles (6.5 billion kilometers). The spacecraft will also fly by asteroid Lutetia in June 2010.
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From the telescope's raw data to the final, fully processed photograph, this feature shows the various steps and how much effort went into assembling the famous image of the Eagle Nebula.
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Clarion West, the famed Seattle science fiction workshop, has suffered a terrible theft: four student laptops were stolen yesterday. Clarion West (like Clarion in San Diego) is a grueling, six-week intensive boot-camp for science fiction writers. Students often quit their jobs and save for years to attend and it goes without saying that they can hardly absorb the cost of a new laptop in the middle of the workshop. I'm flying to Seattle tomorrow to teach the third week of the workshop and I'm keenly aware of the chaos this will have wrought on the students. The workshop's organizers are soliciting donations -- either hardware or cash -- to get the students up and running. The workshop is incorporated as a 501(c)3 charity, so any deductions are tax deductible. I am donating all of my teaching fee to the fund. I hope that some of you will be moved to chip in whatever you can afford, to help fund the instruction of the next generation of great science fiction writers. Here's the note that organizer Leslie Howle has sent around: Four laptops were stolen July 4 from student rooms at the CW residence, and people in the SF community are responding swiftly and generously to help replace the stolen student computers. If you'd like to donate to help the students replace the stolen laptops, please visit our Donate page and use the PayPal button, noting in the "Purpose" field that the donation is for "Computers." This is the first time in our more than 25 years of workshops that something like this has happened, and we're doing all we can to get computers for students so they won't lose any writing time. The theft occurred while students were in class, and was discovered immediately afterwards. I called the Seattle Police Department to file a report, and we've taken steps to increase residence security. News of the students' loss has spread quickly, and I deeply appreciate that friends, alumni, and writers in the community at large are offering donations to help students replace their computers. We'd especially like to thank Jay Lake for his generosity and for alerting others who might donate money or laptops. This community is amazing and wonderful. Thanks for helping this year's CW writers, and for all your support. It means a lot to me, Neile, and all the rest of the CW volunteers and students. You guys are the best. Link...

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The Phoenix was a short-lived 1982 TV series starring Judson Scott as an ancient astronaut named Bennu of the Golden Light. Extraterrestrials had left Bennu behind as a "gift to mankind" but he was woken too early and didn't know his mission on Earth. The show was kind of a cross between The Incredible Hulk and Erich Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods Around 1982, I was really into both of those, so it's no surprise I thought The Phoenix was a real gas. Here's the opening sequence. The Phoenix (YouTube)...

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Webaroo Technology has raised a $10 million round of funding for their product SMSGupShup, an SMS-based community site in India, according to Plugged.in. The round, the third for the company, was co-led by Helion Venture Partners and Charles River Ventures. SMSGupShup is a community site that enables users to join groups according to [...]
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Holiday weekends, especially the ones that bracket the summer months, tend to be stress tests for the tech media. With the proliferation of smart phones, social media aggregators, and of course the Twitter clonestakes, it’s now trivial to get a snapshot of what is going on throughout the “time off.” Is nothing going on? Has the [...]
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Snip from an article in today's New York Times about a slew of designers and firms developing new models of airships. These passenger-carrying aircraft float on the wind, rather than being propelled solely by fuel (more precise explanation here). And, ah, hopefully they don't blow up in the sky or whatever. As the cost of fuel soars and the pressure mounts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, several schemes for a new generation of airship are being considered by governments and private companies. “It’s a romantic project,” said Mr. Massaud, 45, sitting amid furniture designs in his Paris studio, “but then look at Jules Verne.” It has been more than 70 years since the giant Hindenburg zeppelin exploded in a spectacular fireball over Lakehurst, N.J., killing 36 crew members and passengers, abruptly ending an earlier age of airships. But because of new materials and sophisticated means of propulsion, a diverse cast of entrepreneurs is taking another look at the behemoths of the air. Mr. Massaud, a designer of hotels in California and a stadium in Mexico, has not ironed out the technical details, nor has he found financiers or corporate backers for his project — to create a 690-foot zeppelin shaped like a whale, with a luxury hotel attached, that he has named Manned Cloud. And, heh, my favorite quote here: “A dirigible is something magical,” said Jérôme Giacomoni, who was 25 when he founded Aerophile with a friend. “But most of the ideas are crazy.” Why Fly When You Can Float? [NYT] Image: Jean-Marie Massaud. Update: most LOLlable comment in this thread, #4 posted by Chris the Tiki guy... [I]f they're exploring whale shapes, why not other aquatic creatures, like the seacow? That way people can point and say "Oh, the huge manatee!" (...) [I]f Helium is in short supply, I doubt we'll be launching very many lighter-than-air craft any time soon, unless we can figure out how to make hydrogen just as buoyant but less explode-y. Image: found floating (snort) around on the internet, provenance unknown Something Awful Dot Com's Photoshop Phriday....

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This video is not new, but a friend just pointed it to me. It is noteworthy because it shows a dude shooting himself in the chest and not dying. Also, because it includes mock-pizza-boxes crafted for a robbery enactment on television. The mock pizzas appear to be made of palm thatch. How do they do that? Richard Davis, former U.S. Marine and onetime pizza delivery guy in Detroit, survived a gun shootout (he killed three armed robbers when they attacked him during a delivery). He went on to develop new forms of concealable body armor using kevlar. Those products are now widely used by military and law enforcement personnel, and private sector folks who have reason to believe they will be shot. This video tells a bit of his life story. Richard Davis: video [ YouTube, via, thanks, Susannah Breslin ]...

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So somebody else built a successful business on that idea you had three years ago. What does that mean? That if you would just have pursued that idea, you would now automatically be enjoying their spoils? Sorry to burst your bubble, but I really don’t think so.

Ideas on their own are just not that important. It’s incredibly rare that someone comes up with an idea so unique, so protectable that the success story writes itself. Most ideas are nothing without execution.

Just because you thought of a site to share photos with friends wouldn’t have made you Flickr.

But I can see how fooling yourself into thinking otherwise is attractive. When someone else is having success with an idea similar to yours, it’s almost like you’re having that success, if only you would have pulled the trigger on it. It inflates the sense that your brilliant idea really was brilliant and that success was just a binary switch away (pursue/don’t).

On the other hand, it means that you don’t need divine inspiration to start a successful business. Doing well is not restricted only to those who can have paradigm-shifting ideas. You just need to do it better, or actually merely even good enough, to please enough paying customers that income can exceed expense and you’re off to a great start.

You’re probably too young to wear nostalgia gracefully, anyway.

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Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it. When I first started out in the real world in the mid-nineties voicemail was an important productivity tool. I remember people talking about the pros and cons of various enterprise voicemail systems - which had the best forwarding and group messaging, which allowed for archiving, [...]
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Last year on July 10, at the start of the snake season in the mountains around Beijing, Danwei published a field guide to the wild snakes of Beijing, based on Chinese sources provided by Hecaitou.

Today, 'Beijing walker' left a comment to that post:

Hi, I was walking in a gorge about 2 hours north of Beijing yesterday and saw the tail end of a snake.

It was close to a stream at 1pm. I've been trying to find out what this beautiful creature is, but I can't find a photo or description that is like it.

It was dark grey/black with two wide orangey red stripes down the sides. The stripes didn't have sharp edges, just blended back into the black. I saw about 3 feet of him and judging by his thickness, I would guess he was 5 - 6 feet in length. He looked a lot like an Australian Red Bellied Black Snake, except with the red part on the sides, not the underside.

Can anyone help identify it? Thanks.

Please leave suggestions in the comments section below.

This article is from Danwei.org

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Back-room dealings in the European Parliament have resulted in a "three strikes" rule being included in a new telecoms bill -- the rule would force ISPs to kick people who've been thrice accused of copyright infringement off the Internet. If this bill passes, then Europeans' access to the network that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, access to medicine, family, civic engagement, banking, government services, and the whole sweep of human online endeavor would last only so long as they avoided three unsubstantiated accusations of downloading music or video or software without permission. Worse still, the bill is set to be voted upon on July 7 -- that's this Monday. The Open Rights Group has instructions for contacting your MEP. If you live in the EU and you care about your future as a citizen of the information society, call right away and make sure your MEP knows that this matters to you. “One week before a key vote in the reform of European law on electronic communications (”Telecom Package”), La Quadrature du Net (Squaring the Net) denounces a series of amendments aimed at closing the open architecture of the Internet for more control and surveillance of users.. …this set of amendments creates the unprecedented mechanism known as graduated response in European law; judicial authority and law courts are vacated in favour of private actors and “technical measures” of surveillance and filtering. According to rules set forth by administrative authorities and rights holders, intermediaries will be forced to cooperate in monitoring and filtering their subscribers, or they will be exposed to administrative sanctions” Link See also: Three false copyright accusations and we'll cut off your Internet access...

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I just stumbled on Kikkerland's "Anatomic 3-D Puzzles" in a shop and was absolutely enthralled. These are snap-together models (calling them "puzzles" is a little weird, actually) showing the anatomy of various critters, from humans to cows, mammoths, and my favorites, beetles and snails. They're made out of plastic that feels just like the plastic they use for the anatomical models you had in senior biology class, with the same color schemes, but the sculpting is absolutely gorgeous, making them into stylish knick-knacks as well as interesting scientific instructional materials. Kikkerland's online shop carries the whole line, albeit at about 10 percent higher prices than other webstores that carry one or two. My advice is to check out the items here, find the ones you want and google for a cheaper one at another store. Link...

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Charlie Stross's new novel, Saturn's Children, is out -- this is Charlie's Heinlein tribute, and unlike everyone else who does classic, adventure -story Heinlein tributes, Charlie's written a novel in the style of the late, indulgent, sex-saturated Heinlein, from the period before a cutting-edge surgery fixed a problem with the blood-supply to his brain (seriously). Orbit, the book's UK publisher, has also put an excerpt online. Today is the two hundredth anniversary of the final extinction of my One True Love, as close as I can date it. I am drunk on battery acid and wearing my best party frock, sitting on a balcony beneath a pleasure palace afloat in the stratosphere of Venus. My feet dangle over a slippery-slick rain gutter as I peek over the edge: Thirty kilometers below my heels, the metal-snowed foothills of Maxwell Montes glow red-hot. I am thinking about jumping. At least I’ll make a pretty corpse, I tell myselves. Until I melt. And then – Link, Link to excerpt, Link to Saturn's Children on Amazon...

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Yahoo Shortcuts automatically finds and underlines interesting items in articles and provides additional information via a pop up window (Yahoo Shortcuts also refers to shortcuts in Yahoo Search for common things like travel search). “People, places, organizations, and other things of interest are underlined,” says the FAQ. One blogger is pointing out, though, that the tool [...]
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Dave Winer has launched a new tech news site It is called Tech Newsjunk Its like techmeme but exclusively focused on products I like this idea a lot. I wrote recently that I wanted new places to go for inspiration...
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This is something I've been pondering a bit lately. Certainly there are some notable successes with browser extensions: - StumbleUpon - one of the most popular Firefox extensions was sold to eBay last year for a price in the neighborhood...
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