jamotto

Link quote:ORLANDO, Fla. -- Teenagers in Orlando, Fla., are leaping between 80-foot high public parking garages in a new trend called "garage jumping," according to a Local 6 News investigation. Local 6 News reported that the thrill seekers are vaulting themselves between garages in downtown Orlando. Tim Bargfrede told Local 6 News that he was following friends when he attempted to garage jump and did not make it to the other side. Bargfrede fell six stories and was knocked unconscious on impact. "I just didn't make it," Bargfrede said. Bargfrede survived the 80-foot fall but was injured. "The first time I came to the garage after my son's accident, I looked over and I just about broke out in tears," the boy's father Tim Bargfrede said. "I can't believe he actually survived. He looked like he was near death." "He (Bargfrede) is not he first person, he is not the second person, there have been four or five other individuals before him that did this," family's attorney Vincent D'Assaro said. The city of Orlando owns one of the downtown parking lots next to a private parking garage owned by Orlando Tower LP, according to Local 6 News. Orlando Parking Garage Director Samuel Vennero admitted he was aware of at least one other incident where a garage jumper didn't make it to the other side. "I don't think we recognized it before as a danger," Vennero said. There are no safety fences in place on the parking garage. D'Assaro is filing a lawsuit against the city of Orlando and the private garage owner for making little effort to correct a potential deadly risk. "There was a very, very short length of fence that was completely ineffective in preventing this from happening," D'Assaro said. Local 6 News reported that thrill seekers are vaulting themselves between garages in downtown Orlando. Orlando Tower LP, the private parking lot owner, refused to comment about their responsibility, according to the report. Since Bargfrede fell, the City of Orlando erected a partial fence but there's still room for someone to take a dangerous dive. The family says that's not good enough and that both garages need to take responsibility before a garage jumper loses his life.I'm thinking these kids are just way too bored.

quote:Originally posted by Kreij: What a total load of crap. What happened to the PWWYKAP system ? Abandoned long ago i'm afraid.

quote: The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. Spc. Robert S. Pugh, 25, of Meridian, Miss., died Mar. 2 in Iskandariyah, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his military vehicle. Pugh was assigned to the Army National GuardÔÇÖs 1st Battalion, 155th Infantry, McComb, Miss.Link May you rest in peace...

quote:The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. Pfc. Danny L. Anderson, 29, of Corpus Christi, Texas, died Feb. 27 in Baghdad, Iraq, from injuries sustained from small arms fire. Anderson was assigned to the Army's 26th Forward Support Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.Link May you rest in peace...

quote:The Department of Defense announced today the death of two Soldiers who were supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. They died from injuries sustained in a military vehicle accident that occurred Feb. 28 in Bayji, Iraq. Both Soldiers were assigned to the Army's 360th Transportation Company, 68th Corps Support Battalion, 43rd Area Support Group, Fort Carson, Colo. Sgt. Julio E. Negron, 28, of Pompano Beach, Fla., died in Bayji on Feb. 28. Spc. Lizbeth Robles, 31, of Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, died at the 228th Command Support Hospital in Tikirt, Iraq, on March 1. The incident is under investigation.Link May you rest in peace...

Link quote:BERLIN (Reuters) - Astonished German police picked up an 8-year-old boy at 3 a.m. who had accidentally set off to school thinking he was late, authorities said Thursday. "He seemed to have got into a panic he was late and went off to school by himself with his rucksack," said a spokesman for police in the western city of Aachen. "You'd think the parents weren't looking after him, but that wasn't the case here." Police found the boy as he was heading home after he discovered the school was still closed.Now, there is dedication for you.

Link quote:By Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY A growing number of U.S. troops whose body armor helped them survive bomb and rocket attacks are suffering brain damage as a result of the blasts. It's a type of injury some military doctors say has become the signature wound of the Iraq war. Known as traumatic brain injury, or TBI, the wound is of the sort that many soldiers in previous wars never lived long enough to suffer. The explosions often cause brain damage similar to "shaken-baby syndrome," says Warren Lux, a neurologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. "You've got great body armor on, and you don't die," says Louis French, a neuropsychologist at Walter Reed. "But there's a whole other set of possible consequences. It's sort of like when they started putting airbags in cars and started seeing all these orthopedic injuries." The injury is often hard to recognize - for doctors, for families and for the troops themselves. Months after being hurt, many soldiers may look fully recovered, but their brain functions remain labored. "They struggle much more than you think just from talking to them, so there is that sort of hidden quality to it," Lux says. To identify cases of TBI, doctors at Walter Reed screened every arriving servicemember wounded in an explosion, along with those hurt in Iraq or Afghanistan (news - web sites) in a vehicle accident or fall, or by a gunshot wound to the face, neck or head. They found TBI in about 60% of the cases. The largest group was 21-year-olds. From January 2003 to this January, 437 cases of TBI were diagnosed among wounded soldiers at the Army hospital, Lux says. Slightly more than half had permanent brain damage. Similar TBI screening began in August at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., near Washington. It showed 83% - or 97 wounded Marines and sailors - with temporary or permanent brain damage. Forty-seven cases of moderate to severe TBI were identified earlier in the year. The wound may come to characterize this war, much the way illnesses from Agent Orange typified the Vietnam War, doctors say. "The numbers make it a serious problem," Lux says. An explosion can cause the brain to move violently inside the skull. The shock wave from the blast can also damage brain tissue, Lux says. "The good news is that those people would have been dead" in earlier wars, says Deborah Warden, national director of the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center. "But now they're alive. And we need to help them." Symptoms of TBI vary. They include headaches, sensitivity to light or noise, behavioral changes, impaired memory and a loss in problem-solving abilities. In severe cases, victims must relearn how to walk and talk. "It's like being born again, literally," says Sgt. Edward "Ted" Wade, 27, a soldier with the 82nd Airborne Division who lost his right arm and suffered TBI in an explosion last year near Fallujah. Today, he sometimes struggles to formulate a thought, and his eyes blink repeatedly as he concentrates.

Link quote:SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The video game ratings system will add a new category to protect children under 10 from seeing certain kinds of violence, the board that administers the system said on Wednesday. The Entertainment Software Rating Board said "E10+" would mark games that might contain "moderate amounts of cartoon, fantasy or mild violence, mild language and/or minimal suggestive themes." The E10+ rating will reside on the scale between "E," meaning a game is appropriate for all ages, and "T," meaning a game for teenagers. The ratings system also includes "M" ratings for those over 17 and the rarely-used "AO" for adult audiences only. The ESRB said it expected most top sports, racing and adventure games would continue to take an E rating, while racing games with graphic crashes and fighting games with superheroes would likely take an E10+. The ESRB rates virtually every game released in the United States. Its system has been praised by the federal government as one of the most effective in the media industry.

Link quote:By JOHN MILBURN, Associated Press Writer SALINA, Kan. - First by balloon, now by plane, Steve Fossett is once again a 'round-the-world record holder. The millionaire adventurer on Thursday became the first person to fly around the world alone without stopping or refueling, touching down in central Kansas after a 67-hour, 23,000-mile journey that appeared endangered at times by a troubled fuel system. Fossett, who failed five times before successfully circumnavigating the globe solo in a balloon, needed just one try to make the trip in a plane. He holds many other records as a balloonist, pilot and sailor. Fossett's GlobalFlyer, designed by the same engineer who came up with the Voyager aircraft that first completed the trip in 1986 with two pilots aboard, touched down on the center line at the Salina airport at 1:50 p.m. Thursday. Immediately after leaving the cockpit, a jubilant Fossett hugged his wife, Peggy, and was congratulated by Sir Richard Branson, the Virgin Atlantic founder who financed the flight. "That was something I wanted to do for a long time, a major ambition," Fossett said. Although he looked surprisingly fresh, the millionaire from Chicago said he was tired and ready for a bath and a good meal. He planned to rest before attending a celebration for the crew and supporters Thursday night in Salina. "Believe me, it's great to be back on the ground," Fossett said. "It's one of the hardest things I've ever done." Branson grabbed a bottle of champagne from Fossett, shook it up and sprayed down the pilot. "It's been a magnificent trip," Branson said. "He was obviously over the moon about it." Fossett said he survived on 12 milkshakes and water during the flight. He said his main problems were headaches, which went away when he drank water, and a lack of sleep. Fossett used bottles as his bathroom. He said he was overwhelmed by the number of people who watched the flight on television and the Internet, and by the tens of thousands who were at the airport to watch him land. But he insisted his adventures were not publicity stunts. "I would do these things if nobody was paying attention," Fossett said. There had been some doubt Wednesday whether Fossett would make it back to Salina. Fuel sensors in the custom-built plane's 13 tanks differed from readings of how quickly its single jet engine was burning fuel, forcing Fossett's crew to assume that 2,600 of the original 18,100 pounds of fuel "disappeared" early in the flight. It was not clear whether there was an actual leak or just a problem with the sensors, Fossett's team said. Facing a decision near Hawaii about whether to land or press ahead over the vast Pacific Ocean for the U.S. mainland, Fossett told his team, "Let's go for it." Hours later, pushed by strong tail winds that left him with enough in the tanks to finish the global trek, he safely crossed over Los Angeles. Fossett chose Salina because he needed a long runway for the takeoff and landing. The runway in Salina ÔÇö once used to train WWII bomber crews ÔÇö extends about 12,000 feet. Fossett, 60, set his ballooning record in 2002, taking off and landing in Australia. He also has swum the English Channel, taken part in the Iditarod sled dog race and driven in the 24 Hours of Le Mans car race. The GlobalFlyer's trip broke several other aviation records, including the longest flight by a jet without refueling. The record was more than 12,000 miles, set by a B-52 bomber in 1962. Aviation pioneer Wiley Post made the first solo around-the-world trip in 1933, taking more than seven days and stopping numerous times. The first nonstop global flight without refueling was made in a propeller-driven aircraft in 1986 by Jeana Yeager and Dick Rutan, brother of GlobalFlyer designer Burt Rutan.

make sure you send it Return Receipt Requested/Certified Mail

This really sounds like a fan failure to me. The warranty should still apply even if it is OC. In fact, they improve the cooling system so that they can offer you a lifetime warranty in the first place.

Hey, Kal did you ever get this resolved?

Cable can be a great thing, but as more people sign up the bandwidth available to you just keeps going down. DSL is not without it's problems either though. Now I just wish the cost for a T3 line would come down Ok, yea I know I'm dreaming.

Link quote:ESCONDIDO, Calif. - A man who recently had received radiation treatment for a medical condition set off a nuclear alert detector on a fire engine, prompting police to close down a roadway in Escondido while authorities searched for a nuclear weapon. The Rancho Santa Fe Fire Protection District engine crew's radiation monitor sounded Tuesday when the man and his friend walked past the crew on their way to fill a gas can. The Nuke Alert monitor sounded again as the men walked back to their vehicle. Firefighters notified the San Diego County Sheriff's Department after they drove by the men's vehicle and the monitor sounded a third time. Sheriff's deputies pulled over the driver and detained him and his passenger for about one hour while they confirmed that the man was not carrying a nuclear weapon and that he had received radiation treatment, according to Sgt. Robert Healey. The man was described as a Valley Center resident in his late 40s or early 50s. His name and medical condition were not released. The radiation monitor was purchased with Homeland Defense Department grant money and is used 24 hours a day on each fire truck in the Rancho Santa Fe Fire Protection District, according to Capt. Dale Mosby.

Link quote:OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. (Reuters) - The plant that makes 2,000-pound "bunker buster" penetration bombs has stopped production for a second time after workers developed anemia due to TNT exposure, officials said on Wednesday. Manufacture of the weapons -- heavily used in the Iraq war -- was stopped on Feb. 8 after resuming a few weeks before following a lengthy production halt, said Mark Hughes, spokesman for the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant. Blood tests in February found that 17 employees who make the weapons in McAlester had low blood oxygen levels caused by exposure to trinitrotoluene, or TNT, he said. Production of the powerful bombs, which are designed to destroy underground structures, was stopped in August after 34 workers were found to be anemic. It restarted Jan. 1 after installation of a new ventilation system to filter TNT from the air, Hughes said. Initially, practice bombs filled with concrete were made on the reopened line, but when production of bombs began blood tests showed TNT exposure again and the plant was closed, Hughes said. He said the workers did not exhibit weakness, headaches or other symptoms of full-blown anemia, "but blood lab work indicated clinical levels" of the affliction, Hughes said. Anemia is a condition in which the number of red blood cells falls below normal and the body gets less oxygen. Hughes said plant officials are conducting further studies to determine what to do next. The McAlester plant is the primary bomb maker for the U.S. military and employs 1,400 workers at its 70 square mile site in southeastern Oklahoma. Hughes could not discuss how many bombs the plant produces or how many bunker buster bombs the U.S. has on hand, but said production of other types of bombs would continue.

Good to hear!

Link quote:By John Gaudiosi NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Hours before actors James Caan and Robert Duvall walked down the red carpet, press and retailer VIPs lined up in the frigid air of New York's Little Italy recently to get a first look at Electronic Arts' "The Godfather" video game. As locals gathered to see what all the fuss was about, the message was clear: EA was unveiling its new title like Hollywood opens a movie. The game publisher, which has made a mint from such Hollywood-licensed film franchises as "Harry Potter," James Bond and "The Lord of the Rings," is utilizing next-generation technology to bring Francis Ford Coppola's Oscar-winning film to the interactive realm. But the source material is just the beginning of the game experience. The film's distributor, Paramount Pictures, and its Viacom Inc. parent granted Electronic Arts the rights to expand the fiction beyond the scope of the film and Mario Puzo's novel. "We took the movie as a starting point and looked at the story of five families competing for turf," said Hunter Smith, senior producer of "The Godfather" game. "You're not playing the movie game with this experience, you have your own original story that intersects with characters and high points from the first film." Beyond the virtual versions of Caan, Duvall and Marlon Brando, an additional 20-plus actors from "The Godfather" will appear in the game, including Lenny Montana (Luca Brasi) and John Martino (Paulie Gatto). Many characters will receive larger roles in the game since the 40-plus hours of gameplay allow for a longer story line, and new characters -- including a love interest for the player -- will be added. Smith said no dialogue from the film will be used for the game because the sound quality is too dated to meet today's technology standards. Instead, all of the game's dialogue has been recorded anew. Brando spent four hours in a booth reprising his role of Don Vito Corleone before he died last year. "Marlon Brando understood games, and he saw how interactive entertainment could open the door for roles to actors regardless of age and appearance," said EA creative director Philip Campbell, who wrote the game's script with input from novelist Mark Winegardner ("The Godfather Returns"). Duvall and Caan each will spend eight hours recording dialogue for the game, bringing consigliere Tom Hagen and Sonny Corleone back to life. In the game, Hagen will teach the player about the art of negotiation, and Sonny will point out the importance of intimidation. The player will interact with each of these characters throughout the game. To succeed, the player must balance the line between intimidation and negotiation. During the Feb. 10 New York event, EA played a sound bite from Brando that said, "In a game, it's the audience that's doing the acting." Caan took the stage and said that getting into the recording booth was fun and that Sonny's voice came right back. Duvall joined him and added that working on the game was like doing looping for a movie he shot a week ago. EA then showed a scene from the original film between Caan and Duvall, followed by their individual voice recording session, and then showed the in-game sequence. Even on current-generation consoles, the graphics were impressive. Two of the in-game sequences shown featured Xbox (news - web sites) 2 graphics, the first public unveiling of Microsoft's new console that is expected to come out in the fall. Back at EA's Redwood Shores Studio, a team of 100 is working on the first of what is expected to be a new franchise for EA. The publisher has the rights to create multiple games, and Campbell said the mythology will allow future games to go forward or backward in the timeline. The game's expected Mature rating will remain true to the fiction, and EA hopes this offer is something gamers cannot refuse.

Link quote:LONDON (AFP) - The "Cursing Stone" of Carlisle was intended simply as an innocent community art project, harking back to the British city's colourful past. But following floods, disease and a string of other local misfortunes, city elders are considering whether the 10,000-pound (14,500-euro, 19,000-dollar) artwork should be removed and destroyed, a report said on Wednesday. The stone, a 14-tonne granite slab intricately engraved with a 16th-century diatribe against violent raiders, was commissioned by city councillors for the Millennium celebrations. Created by Carlisle-born artist Gordon Young, is now stands at the centre of the city, near its castle. The 1,069-word curse was originally levelled at "reiver families", who raided Carlise and other parts of the far north of England from just over the border in Scotland in the 16th century. However, since the work of art was installed, Carlisle has suffered the worst local flooding for more than a century, an outbreak of livestock disease foot and mouth and a rash of local job losses as factories closed. Even the city's beloved football team, Carlisle United, has endured their own famine of goals, leading them to be relegated from the Football League, The Times newspaper said. Now the local council is to debate a motion about whether to move the Cursing Stone outside the city boundaries, or even destroy it altogether. It was proposed by councillor Tim Tootle, who said he was finally pushed into action by floods which deluged Carlisle in January, killing three people. "Many groups and individuals warned the council that the placing of a non-Christian artifact, based on an old curse on local families, would bring ill luck to the city," he was quoted as saying by the newspaper. "This has (been) seen to be correct." Artist Young -- a descendant of one of the reiver families -- has angrily compared the plan to the destruction of the giant Buddhas in Bamiyan by Afghanistan's Taliban regime in 2001. "It is of that order. They want to smash it to pieces. It is a powerful work of art but it is certainly not part of the occult," he said. "If I thought my sculpture would have affected one Carlisle United result, I would have smashed it myself years ago."

I'm sure this is just stupidity at it's best however, I would have to read the story myself.

quote:Originally posted by LostInSpace: Seeing this game in action proves a point I've been saying for a while now in connection to the Jedi Knight series "Why did they ever choose the Quake III engine for that series (after Dark forces II: Jedi Knight and mysteries of the sith)?". I'm talking about Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy. IMO the Quake III engine stinks. Maybe the license was cheaper. I wouldn't say the Q3 engine stinks. There has been many games that have used it well, Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force being one such game IMO.

Chain Gun video They seem to be having way too much fun.

Have you reinstalled your graphics drivers.

Link quote:It just isn't fair that Windows users get all the viruses. I mean really, shouldn't Linux users be in on the fun as well? Well... thanks to the folks running the Wine project, Linux users can "catch the virus bug" too -- sort of. Linux just isn't user-friendly when it comes to viruses. You have to work to find and run them. It doesn't happen automatically as it does with Windows. The GNU/Linux folks really should improve this glaring discrepancy. While I have friends that collect viruses, I didn't need to bother them. I found plenty by looking through my staggering collection of bogofilter sorted mail. I apt-getted a copy of ClamAV, and after siccing it at my spam-and-other-things-I-don't-want-to-read collection, I yanked out a half-dozen unique, only Windows-compatible, viruses. That "only Windows-compatible" part was about to change. Klez Amazingly, Klez ran, but Wine kept on spewing out errors about "ntdll." After Googling to find out what Klez was supposed to do, I discovered that it's supposed to scour your system for email addresses, then mail itself out in a mostly un-RFC fashion. I didn't want to miss out on this, so I added my e-mail address to a .txt file under ~/.wine/fake_windows/Windows/Desktop/ and re-ran the virus. After waiting for a few minutes, and receiving no mail, I gave Symantec's summary of the Klez virus another look. Klez is so un-RFC compliant that it doesn't even bother to query DNS for the mail server of a given domain. It just tries "smtp.domainname.com." My mail server isn't named smtp.mydomain.com, but the Panix ISP (where I have a shell account) has such a host, so I edited my .txt file and tried again. After waiting half an hour, still nothing. Was networking working with Wine? I downloaded a copy of putty, and that worked. Panix must be blocking Klez via a Postfix regex or something. I give Klez 2/5 Penguins for at least running, but not doing what it's supposed to. MyDoom MyDoom seemed to be a .zip file, (the file command concurred) but Info-ZIP's unzip command couldn't even unzip it. That's about as un-Linux compatible as you can get. 0/5 penguins. Sobig According to ClamAV, I had two different strains of the Sobig worm. Both of them ran. Sobig is supposed to create a winstt32.dat file. There wasn't a file named that anywhere under my fake_windows directory. It didn't send me email either. 2/5 penguins, as it's about as Linux compatible as Klez. SCO worm A virus named after SCO that was designed to DoS attack SCO should definitely be Linux compatible, right? The SCO virus (at least according to ClamAV) is actually just a variant on the MyDoom worm, but unlike MyDoom I was able to unzip this on Linux. Not only does it run, but it actually dumped its payload at ~/.wine/fake_windows/Windows/System/shimgapi.dll! Unfortunately, that's all it did before it terminated. I mean, if it had kept on running, I might have been sufficiently tempted to set my system clock to February 3, 2004, in order to get in on the DoS fun! It must require Windows to bone-headedly execute its payload. I'll give it 3/5 penguins for actually doing something. Plus, whoever modified MyDoom like this actually seemed to put some thought into making it more Linux-compatible. That's what I call progress. SomeFool The SomeFool first-generation worm (Netsky.D according to some folks) actually installs its winlogon.exe file under Wine, and, as an added bonus, seems to get stuck in an endless loop, thus really having a negative performance impact on my Linux machine! I'll give this one 4/5 penguins for not only running and sort of doing what it was supposed to, but actually doing mildly bad things to Linux -- at least until I hit Control-C in the terminal from which I was running Wine to stop it dead. Conclusion Out of the five Windows viruses I ran under Wine, not a single one was able to send email and propagate itself. When I went out of my way to be part of the Windows community by doing my part to propagate Windows viruses (lots of Windows users seem to think this is important, seeing as how they run random executables and use Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer) I discovered that it couldn't easily be done with GNU/Linux tools. Oh sure, I could manually forward these viruses to the folks in my address book, but where's the fun in that? Besides, these viruses usually lie in the From: line and use a handful of different Subject: lines. As a GNU/Linux user, I really don't want to miss out on these important functionalities. I tip my hat to the creators of the SomeFool virus, for actually (albeit temporarily and minimally) affecting my Linux experience. However, if that's the most damage I can get by running viruses with Wine under a dummy account, then it's clear that the Wine developers have a long way to go before Wine is truly Windows compatible.

quote:The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. 2nd Lt. Richard B. Gienau, 29, of Peoria, Ill., died Feb. 27 in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, from injuries sustained when an improvised explosive device hit his military vehicle. Gienau was assigned to the Army National Guard's 224th Engineer Battalion, Burlington, Iowa.Link May you rest in peace...

quote:The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. Spc. Michael S. Deem, 35, of Rockledge, Fla., died Feb. 24 in Baghdad, Iraq, from non-combat related injuries. Deem was assigned to the Army's Special Troops Battalion, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga. The incident is under investigation.Link May you rest in peace...