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Har!
Thanks, TUAW
New York deserves the money since it’s not their choice to host them here, but do they really expect the trials to last more than a year? How much are the legal fees going to be? Is this listed as a stimulus (ie, shovel ready) project for NY?
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Wednesday said the costs of hosting the federal trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other suspected September 11 plotters would top $200 million annually and formally requested that Washington cover the costs.
“New York’s financial resources are in short supply, and we have been forced to reduce our Police Department’s headcount,” Bloomberg wrote in a letter to White House Budget Director Peter Orszag dated January 5 and released to media on Wednesday.
“Securing the trial will require us to pull existing personnel from crime prevention efforts around the city and require significant overtime expenses,” the mayor wrote.
“As 9/11 was an attack on the entire nation, we need the federal government to shoulder the significant costs we will incur and ease this burden.”
Bloomberg estimated the cost for security would be $216 million for the first year and $206 million annually thereafter. Noting the city was not seeking a “blank check,” he said policing the 2004 Republican Convention cost New York $50 million. He said that event lasted one week while the trials could last years.
Ah, were I still young, thin, handsome, and a tad less bald.
Brothel owner Bobbi Davis got the go-ahead Tuesday to hire what her website cheekily calls “a few good men.”
Her Shady Lady Ranch is searching for “service-oriented” guys willing to become Nevada’s first legal male sex workers.
[…]A county board’s vote Tuesday affirming that Davis could offer “shady men” to her clientele followed months of rancorous debate among the state’s legal brothel community. The industry, in its own peculiar way, is somewhat conservative: Considered an anachronism of bawdy mining camps by some Nevada newcomers, it often balks at change.
[…]
George Flint, longtime lobbyist for the Nevada Brothel Assn., has said that allowing male prostitutes could be the industry’s Pearl Harbor. He has hinted that brothels possibly offering gay sex — a choice each prostitute, as an independent contractor, would be free to make — might sour some legislators on the entire brothel system.
Nevada lawmakers are notoriously skittish when discussing the birds and bees. The Legislature, even when severely cash-strapped, has repeatedly declined to tax the brothels (which are banned in Reno and Las Vegas) for fear of, well, legitimizing the business.
[…]Davis and her husband, Jim, merely hope to boost business. Their small outpost near Death Valley, about 150 miles northwest of Las Vegas, offers as many as five women, relies heavily on travelers and has gotten some requests for gigolos.
- Android Nexus phone in the news. Getting sued over the name. Selling the thing online too.
- Junk all over CES.
- Samsung rolls out e-reader.
- Toshiba rolls out 3-D TV.
- Taylor Swift working for Sony.
- HP concentrating on touch. I have my thoughts on the matter.
- Cisco trying to do a video phone. Sheesh.
- Quadracopter flying around CES.
- Samsung rolls out ultra slim blu-ray player.
- High-def Nintendo DS?
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This ad is causing a bit of a stir here in Oz and on the webitubes. Racist? Meh. Stupid? Definitely.
UPDATE: KFC have withdrawn the advertisement — Personally I think cultural differences between the US and Oz are to blame here and that the producers of the ad didn’t intend a racist subtext, if one actually exists.
Suspected hazardous material at a California airport turned out to be honey.
Los Angeles, California (CNN) — The substance that spurred an evacuation at a California airport Tuesday was simply honey, the Kern County Sheriff’s Department said. The security scare happened after Transportation Security Administration agents found what they believed to be a potentially hazardous substance inside a passenger’s luggage.
“None of the items inside the bag contained explosive or hazardous material, and the liquid inside the five bottles was identified as honey,” the sheriff’s department said in a statement. The Meadows Field Airport had been evacuated and shut down for several hours Tuesday morning after authorities found what they called a hazardous substance.
The man whose bag was flagged, told authorities that he had honey packaged in five bottles, Deputy Michael Whorf, spokesman for the Kern County Sheriff’s Department told CNN. The 31-year-old man cooperated with authorities and was released with no charges against him, Whorf said.
No charges? In Kern County they usually trump up some charges. Never go there! It’s worse than Alabama in the 1930’s. This sort of idiocy is typical.They cannot even run a simple machine.
Found by Jason Baker.
 
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Obvious question time: how soon will health insurance companies require the overweight to wear one of these?
The fight against fat is going high-tech. To get an inside look at eating and exercise habits, scientists are developing wearable wireless sensors to monitor overweight and obese people as they go about their daily lives.
The experimental devices are designed to keep track of how many minutes they work out, how much food they consume and even whether they are at a fast-food joint when they should be in the park. The goal is to cut down on self-reported answers that often cover up what’s really happening.
In a lab in this Los Angeles suburb, two overweight teenagers help test the devices by taking turns sitting, standing, lying down, running on a treadmill and playing Wii. As music thumps in the background, wireless sensors on their chests record their heart rates, stress levels and amount of physical activity. The information is sent to a cell phone.
I wonder how this would fly if they wore them going through security at an airport?
At least nine Detroit area high school juniors are in trouble for wearing sweat shirts bearing a design that evokes the terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.
Dearborn Public Schools spokesman David Mustonen has told The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press that the shirts the boys wore to Edsel Ford High School on Monday are “offensive” and in “poor taste.”
The boys are Arab-American, as are about half the school’s 1,700 students. They belong to the 2011 class. On the shirts, the number 11 resembles two buildings, with the school’s “Thunderbird” mascot flying toward them.
Click pic to embiggen
I, for one, welcome our traffic overlords. All your base traffic are belong to us.
They note the hum of your passing tires. They adjust to meet your needs. They sense your mounting frustration. It won’t be long before they also know how many people are in your car and just where you’re headed.
Traffic systems — and the stoplights that are their highway sentinels — are complex networks that must be synchronized with Balanchine precision or rush hour will descend from the normal headache into commuter hell.
Very few Montgomery County drivers even knew that traffic signals talked behind their backs until a communications glitch in November threw the whole system out of whack and caused almost two days of complete chaos on 3,500 miles of roadway.
Right now you may have a Global Positioning System device that communicates with satellites in real time as you drive. Soon your car’s own computer will be able to gather GPS information and data of all sorts and share that with all the cars around you and with traffic control signals.
You’ll get feedback. It will warn you of dangers — cars too close or too fast — and suggest alternate routes when congestion lies ahead, as many GPS systems already do.
And it will give traffic flow experts a wealth of information they’ve never had before.
Japanese ship sinks whale protest boat Ady Gil – The Age — Another salvo in the war on the yearly Japanese ‘scientific research’ whale cull. The link contains some video. Another video report here.
UPDATE : This video more clearly shows the Japanese ship closing on the Ady Gil. It was shot from another SS vessel.
The high-tech stealth boat Ady Gil was cut in half and sunk by a Japanese security vessel in Antarctic waters today, dramatically upping the stakes in the annual struggle between whalers and protesters.
Sea Shepherd group leader Paul Watson told Fairfax Media the $1.5 million Ady Gil was sinking, but its six-man crew had been rescued and was uninjured.
Earlier today, the fleet was contacted for the first time by the Ady Gil and Sea Shepherd’s “secret” third vessel, the Bob Barker.
Captain Watson, aboard the Steve Irwin, said he was still 500 nautical miles from the scene.
“This seriously escalates the whole situation,” Captain Watson said of the collision.
The ICR said the Ady Gil came “within collision distance” directly in front of the Nisshin Maru bow and repeatedly deployed a rope from its stern “to entangle the Japanese vessel’s rudder and propeller”.
The statement accused the activists of shining a laser device at the Nisshin Maru crew and launching acid-filled projectiles, one of which landed on the vessel’s deck.
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