Can this story be verified? It’s outrageous. It has to be a hoax.

In an apparent move to stave off defections to competitors, Google announced it is giving all its employees a $1,000 cash bonus and a raise of 10 percent, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The raises, which take affect January 1, 2011, apply to all 25,000 employees at the Internet giant, according to an e-mail to employees penned by Google CEO Eric Schmidt and first revealed by Business Insider. “We want to make sure that you feel rewarded for your hard work,” Schmidt wrote. “We want to continue to attract the best people to Google.”
Yikes! Pretty generous! That’s $25,000,000 in cash bonuses!
Washington State University police are trying to find out who hijacked the school’s computer system last Friday and broadcast on classroom video screens throughout the day a bizarre rant by someone wearing a “V for Vendetta” costume.
The hacker took over the large video screens in 34 classrooms in two buildings on the Pullman, Washington, campus, Tom Ambrosi, WSU chief information security officer, told CNET today. “They played the video once an hour throughout the day,” until campus employees managed to shut it off shortly before 5 p.m. PST.
The video duplicates a scene in the movie “V for Vendetta” in which a masked vigilante broadcasts his anti-government message on British television. The WSU incident took place on November 5, which was Guy Fawkes Night, named in honor of a conspirator in a plot to assassinate King James I and blow up the UK Houses of Parliament in 1605.

A Chinese activist who campaigned for compensation for victims of a 2008 contaminated baby milk scandal has been jailed for two-and-a-half years. Zhao Lianhai, whose child was among the 300,000 made ill by the milk, was convicted of inciting social disorder.
Mr Zhao founded a website to provide information for parents after it was found milk formula had been laced with the industrial chemical melamine to give it a high protein-content reading. At least six babies died.
“It is such a harsh sentence,” Mr Zhao’s lawyer Li Fangping told the Associated Press news agency.
He wasn’t an “activist” he was a dad. The Chinese have some explaining to do. The Chinese love children possibly more than any other culture (hence the population).
With the help of the Swinglet CAM you can create your very own local aerial map a la Google Maps, or monitor wildlife distribution in a given area, or maybe just get a feel for what’s going on in the neighborhood. The small, unmanned aerial vehicle can take off and land on its own and its integrated camera will snap high resolution images along a predetermined flightpath or as directed by remote control.
Swiss sensor manufacturer senseFly sees the Swinglet CAM high resolution aerial photography drone being useful for such things as traffic monitoring, security applications, mapping, crop monitoring and wildlife watching. It comes packed in a suitably-sized case, has a wingspan of 80cm (31.4 inches) and weighs 500g (17.6 ounces). Its Li-polymer battery will power the UAV for 30 minutes which is said to give it an operational range of up to 20km (12.4 miles) and a top speed of 30-50kph (up to 30mph).
Unfortunately, the price of USD 10,600 (not including laptop and other accessories and freight) is a little hard to take.
In theory, humans can have innate predispositions to certain stimuli. These reactions would be vestiges of natural selection, in that early humans who had the most successful gut reaction would gain an evolutionary advantage.
[…]
Researchers at McGill University asked 82 males to listen to a script reader while they sorted photos. Some of the photos were images of meat, while others had neutral images that were unlikely to provoke any particular reaction in the participants. […] Instead, the pictures of meat actually made the subjects less aggressive. That certainly suggests the subjects did have some kind of innate reaction to the meat, but not the one the researchers expected. After all, ancient humans would have associated meat with hunting and the competition for and protection of food resources.
[…]
Kachanoff is pretty sure he knows why the experiment produced those results. He simply showed his subjects the wrong sort of meat: “We used imagery of meat that was ready to eat. In terms of behaviour, with the benefit of hindsight, it would make sense that our ancestors would be calm, as they would be surrounded by friends and family at meal time. I would like to run this experiment again, using hunting images. Perhaps Thanksgiving next year will be a great opportunity for a do-over!”
Perhaps this should become a new military tactic. During a fire fight, hold up meat so the enemy becomes tranquil and you can kill their asses. Of course, that means our troops need anti-meat goggles to keep them fierce. Hmmm… I smell government contract (ie,$$$$$) on the barbie!
When Nancy Pelosi ruled the House of Representatives with an iron fist, one could chuckle at Republicans who came to committee hearings quoting scripture as the rationale for their positions on energy policy. But now, when one of those very same Republicans is in the running for the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce committee, it just doesn’t seem so funny.
[…John Shimkus, R-Ill] starts by quoting Genesis 8, Verses 21 and 22, in which God makes Noah a promise.
Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though all inclinations of his heart are evil from childhood and never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done.
As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease.
Shimkus continues: “The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.”
I’m glad that John Shimkus can sleep at night, faithful that that God’s word is “infallible, unchanging, perfect.” But for those of us who are less confident in humanity’s ability to keep from massively screwing up, the thought that the Bible will be determining government energy policy is massively ulcer-inducing.

This is a gem. She does not quite understand exactly where Iran is, methinks. At least this woman keeps a clean house. And there is this even weirder more ominous post:
Found by Hunter Hillegas.

click ► to listen:
Right click here and select ‘Save Link As…’ to download the mp3 file.
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- Contrails getting attention.
- Google adds dumb feature to results. I complain bitterly about this and other new features.
- Apple launching newest iOS this week.
- MSFT sends out patch for nasty outlook bug.
- Call of Duty is killing.
- Bubbles from the black hole in the center of the Milky Way.
- Colored e-paper? How?
- AMD expects to make chips for the tablet market.
- MSFT sues Motorola over onerous patent royalties.
Microsoft’s pursuit of software counterfeiters begins in Dublin, at one of the company’s 10 crime labs.
Donal Keating, a physicist who leads Microsoft’s forensics work, has turned the lab into an anti-piracy playpen full of microscopes and other equipment used to analyze software disks. Flat-screen monitors show data about counterfeit sales, and evidence bags almost overflow with nearly flawless Windows and Office fakes. Mr. Keating serves as the CD manufacturing whiz on what amounts to Microsoft’s version of the A-Team, clad in business-casual attire.
The undercover operative of this group is Peter Anaman, a lawyer who was born in Ghana and educated in England; he taught hand-to-hand combat to soldiers during a stint in the French army and then taught himself how to write software. […] Through three online personas — two female and one male — Mr. Anaman chats with and sometimes befriends hackers in Russia and Eastern Europe who use stolen credit card numbers to set up hundreds of Web sites and offer products from Microsoft, Adobe and Symantec. “It is part of gathering human intelligence and tracking relationships,” Mr. Anaman says.
[…]
“We used to remove 10,000 links a month,” Mr. Anaman says. “Now, we’re removing 800,000 links a month.”He describes the groups behind these sites as “part of the dark Web,” saying they have links to huge spam, virus and fraud networks. Microsoft’s tests of software on some popular sites have shown that 35 percent of the counterfeit software contained harmful code.

It might seem a long time, but the Media Tablet marketplace did not exist until April this year. It soon became obvious that Apple’s iPad had catalyzed yet another major computing trend – by Computex, almost every device manufacturer in the world had a tablet coming. Last month, Gartner Group predicted the 20 million sales expected in 2010 will grow an order of magnitude over the next four years. Now Gartner has gone a step further. “It is not usually the role of the CEO to get directly involved in specific technology device decisions, but Apple’s iPad is an exception,” says the report. “It is more than just the latest consumer gadget; and CEOs and business leaders should initiate a dialogue with their CIOs about it if they have not already done so.”
Media tablets are slate devices that support touch and run a lightweight OS such as iOS, Android, WebOS or Meego. Apple’s iPad is a media tablet and Samsung’s recently-released Galaxy Tab and the Cisco Cius are other examples.
…and so many people said the iPad wouldn’t sell. It’s been a complete game changer.


In theory, humans can have 












