Dvorak News Blog

Parents Excluded From School Events Because Pedophiles Might Get In

By Uncle Dave Wednesday July 15, 2009

Pesky parents wanting to actually be involved with their kids and their school activities. Who do they think they are?

More than 270 pupils from four primary schools in Bedfordshire took part in the East Beds School Sports Partnership Athletics Day. But there were no spectators present because the organisers said allowing them would make it impossible to prevent “unsavoury” characters from attending. A risk assessment concluded that the host school, Sandy Upper School in Biggleswade, could not “guarantee the children’s safety”.

Parents have condemned the ban.
[…]
Paul Blunt, development manager at the East Beds School Sports Partnership, said the “ultimate fear” was that a child could be abducted.

“If we let parents into the school they would have been free to roam the grounds. All unsupervised adults must be kept away from children.

“An unsavoury character could have come in and we just can’t put the children in the event or the students at the host school at risk like that. The ultimate fear is that a child is hurt or abuducted, and we must take all measures possible to prevent that.”

3-year-old floats down river on toy truck

By Eideard Wednesday July 15, 2009

27 Comments

A Canadian boy celebrating his third birthday was unhurt and apparently unfazed after he floated 12 km down a river riding atop his toy truck, said police.

The boy’s family was camping at a popular park near Fort St. John, in northeastern British Columbia, on Sunday when the boy wandered off unnoticed and somehow entered the nearby Peace River, Royal Canadian Mounted Police said.

The boy’s parents at first thought he was playing with other relatives at the campsite. But police were later alerted and had begun a search when a boater found the boy, and the toy, about 12 km away.

After a nearly two-hour journey down the swift-moving river the boy had no injuries, and was apparently unaware of the danger he had been in.

“He was very excited to see the police,” said RCMP Constable Jackelynn Passarell.

A local news report said the boy also made sure the boater who found him also retrieved the toy truck.

His parents surely got their money’s worth from that toy truck.

Video – Space Shuttle Booster Rockets Camera

By Gasparrini Wednesday July 15, 2009

18 Comments

Watch the launch of the Space Shuttle from the point a point of view located in the booster rockets. Tomorrow will be the 40 years since the launch of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.

What’s Happened To All The Toxic Assets?

By Uncle Dave Wednesday July 15, 2009

18 Comments

iPhone Wrecking Cell Phone Industry — That’s Such A Shame

By Uncle Dave Wednesday July 15, 2009

14 Comments

Gimme an f’n break! The US has the worst, most expensive cell phone service and providers in the world. Anything that causes a shakeup in this industry is nothing to cry over. Unless you’re one of the crappy phone companies.

While many iPhone owners hail Apple as saving them from greedy cellular carriers, an analyst now says the company has overturned AT&T and the entire wireless industry — and not always for the better.

Analyst Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research likens the relationship between Apple and AT&T as that between the former and music labels dating as far back as 2001, when Apple first had to ingratiate itself with labels as it incorporated music CD ripping into iTunes. Apple at first won important concessions and praise from its partners, only for them to regret it later as the iPod maker’s popularity left these companies at the supposedly smaller company’s mercy.
[…]
As late as this spring, AT&T has continued to praise the iPhone as virtually saving the company from the US economy’s fallout by driving customers to its network and encouraging them to spend more on data plans. But with the launch of the iPhone 3GS in June and the 3G congestion problems in the months leading up to the handset’s debut, AT&T was increasingly cast as Apple’s anchor — keeping a good device locked to a carrier that doesn’t enable features like MMS and tethering.

“Apple has stolen the march, and in the process has recast AT&T from hero to villain,” Moffett says. “At Apple’s June developer conference in San Francisco, where Apple unveiled its new [iPhone 3GS], AT&T was roundly jeered at every mention by the more than 5,000 application developers in attendance… even Apple itself seemed uncomfortable talking about its U.S. partner.”
[…]
Now, the Cupertino company has “radically tilted” the normal balance of power against AT&T and cellular networks as a whole.

And then there’s what’s predicted when Apple finally opens up to other carriers.

Bumper to Bumpers Pinup Series — Now on Cage Match

By hhopper Wednesday July 15, 2009

10 Comments

(Click photo to see pinups.)
Girls and cars… what more could a man want?

Market Mystic Speaks

By John C Dvorak Tuesday July 14, 2009

23 Comments

He brings up an interesting point. The official way to calculate unemployment (U3) has been so messed with that nobody wants to hear it anymore because everyone knows it is a bogus figure. Enter U6, a more old-fashioned calculation which determines true unemployment. Apparently at least one pundit is pegging it at over 30-percent soon!

Found by John Ligums.

Win 7 Rumors

By John C Dvorak Tuesday July 14, 2009

4 Comments

Comcast moving ahead with more partners in IPTV move.
Apple sells and moves 1.5 billion apps from app store in one year!
MSFT Office under attack by cyber-criminals.
Win 7 Rumors about advance release are bogus.
Samsung does deal with Blockbuster.
Pandora says regular radio should pay same fees.
Netbook sales increasing.
Oracle says Sun will make them more money despite fact Sun blew another quarter.
HTC attacked via Bluetooth.

click ► to listen:

Right click here and select ‘Save Link As…’ to download the mp3 file.

News Headline of the Day… Plane Downed by Thrown Bridal Bouquet?

By McCullough Tuesday July 14, 2009

15 Comments

The traditional throwing of a bride’s bouquet for luck ended in disaster at an Italian wedding when the flowers caused a plane to crash. The bride and groom had hired a small plane to fly past and throw the bouquet to a line of women guests, Corriere della Sera reported.

However, the flowers were sucked into the plane’s engine causing it to catch fire and explode.

The aircraft plunged into a hostel. One passenger on the plane was badly hurt. But about 50 people who had been in the hostel escaped unscathed, as did the pilot. The incident happened at Montioni park in Suvereto, near Livorno, where the wedding reception was being held, Corriere della Sera said. A passenger on the aircraft, named as Isidoro Pensieri, 44, had the job of throwing the bouquet as pilot Luciano Nannelli flew past.

It is believed the bunch of flowers became entangled as it was thrown, and was sucked into one of the engines.

Ms Pensieri suffered multiple fractures and a head injury. She was taken to hospital in Grosseto by helicopter and then transferred to another in Pisa, Italian media reported.

I think an annulment is in order…

Is Obama’s Pick for Surgeon General “Fit” for the Job

By McCullough Tuesday July 14, 2009

90 Comments

As President Obama is looking for ways to improve the quality and financial aspects of medicine in the United States, he has now nominated Dr. Regina Benjamin for the job of Surgeon General of the United States. Dr. Benjamin is a rural physician from Alabama. She first came onto the national scene when her clinic in Bayou la Batre, Alabama, was first destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and then burned down after being rebuilt. She is a recipient of the 2008 MacArthur Foundation’s so-called “genious grant”, a half-million dollar grant given to people who make a difference in the world. There is no doubt that Dr. Benjamin has the know-how and will have the resources to take action on all sorts of health issues in the country. The question is how much cooperation we, the public, and we, the public health professionals, can give her.

Losing weight as a nation should be our Manhattan Project, something we can all rally behind and contribute to. Drop the rate of obesity and we drop the rates of heart disease, diabetes, and maybe even cancer. Get smokers to quit and the rates of lung disease (and the loss of productivity) drop dramatically. Help drug users get clean, and we get rid of crime. Teach effective sexual health, and there will be less unwanted pregnancies (in turn, less abortions, less sexually transmitted diseases). The list goes on and on…

Dr. Benjamin and others in leadership positions in Public Health will need all the help they can get from the American public and those of us in Public Health. After all, you can take the horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink… Unless you trick it into losing weight.

I dunno….does anyone else see a problem here? Should the Surgeon General be a role model for a healthy lifestyle? What if she was a smoker? Am I just being too nitpicky?

What do you think? So many questions.

BBC WMD Mole Dr. David Kelly Murdered?

By John C Dvorak Tuesday July 14, 2009

20 Comments

A group of doctors in the UK are mounting a legal and political campaign to overturn the suicide verdict in the death of a British doctor who was found dead shortly after exposing falsehoods about the justification for the Iraq war.

Dr. David Kelly was found dead in 2003 in a forest near his home in Oxfordshire. An inquiry into his death concluded that he had bled to death during a suicide attempt.

But 13 UK doctors are now challenging that assertion — and in doing so, renewing suspicions the doctor may have been murdered after it was revealed he was the mole for a BBC report that said evidence used to launch the Iraq war had been “sexed up.”

Earlier this month RAW STORY reported that Kelly had been working on a tell-all book about the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the existence of “germ warfare plans.”

Listeners to No Agenda knew this all along.

Passengers Freak as SW Airlines Flight Puts the Top Down… Mid Flight!!!

By McCullough Tuesday July 14, 2009

32 Comments

What started out as a smooth, easy trip from Nashville to Baltimore quickly turned into a frightening flight for more than 100 passengers on a Southwest Airlines flight Monday. A 1-foot-by-1-foot hole developed on the top of the plane at the base of the vertical stabilizer and exposed passengers to the evening sky. Passenger Michael Cunningham said he heard a loud boom, and then looked up and saw the hole in the plane’s cabin. Cunningham snapped photos after the hole opened up.

“All of the sudden, the loudest noise I ever heard came out of nowhere,” he said. “There was no pop, no creak, no explosion-like noise. There was just a loud roar. It took me a couple of seconds to wake up. I got the baseball cap out of my face and I look up and there’s the sun coming through the ceiling. …I saw sky where I shouldn’t be seeing it.”

The 737’s cabin suddenly lost pressure and oxygen masks fell from above. Passengers were instructed to put them over their noses and mouths. The plane made an emergency landing at 6:15 p.m. at Yeager Airport in Charleston, W.Va.. Incredibly, no one was injured. Airport spokesperson Mike Plante said the passengers were remarkably calm as they waited for another plane to take them on to their true destination.

The passengers finally landed at BWI just before 10:30 p.m.

“As soon as we got to the airport in West Virginia, everybody cheered, everybody high-fived the captain. Some gave him hugs,” Cunningham said. “But it was great crew, great flight crew, great flight attendants. Everybody just did what they needed to do and everybody was fine.”

Holy Schnikey! Is there an extra charge for the “fresh air”?

Unemployment Scam Numbers

By John C Dvorak Tuesday July 14, 2009

22 Comments

Two interesting articles:

Factors showing real unemployment is higher than official figures.

Production workers have nothing to do.

# 185,000 workers in the June number were the product of statistical sampling, but could not be verified by the government.
# Companies are asking employees to take unpaid leave.
# 1.4 million unemployed workers weren’t counted because they’re not searching for work.
# Part-time employment has doubled to 9 million.
# The work week is 48 minutes shorter than when the recession began.
# The number of long-term unemployed (4.4 million) is at an all-time high.

Exxon investing $600 million for prototype facilities making biofuels from algae

By Eideard Tuesday July 14, 2009

36 Comments

Need I repeat myself? Greentech will succeed when and where it’s profitable.

The oil giant Exxon Mobil, whose chief executive once mocked alternative energy by referring to ethanol as “moonshine,” is about to venture into biofuels.

On Tuesday, Exxon plans to announce an investment of $600 million in producing liquid transportation fuels from algae — organisms in water that range from pond scum to seaweed. The biofuel effort involves a partnership with Synthetic Genomics, a biotechnology company founded by the genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter.

Another venture founded in science and technology that papier-mache pundits lampooned as unrealistic and too far ahead of its time.

Despite the widely publicized “moonshine” remark a few years ago by Exxon’s chairman and chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson, the company has spent several years exploring various fuel alternatives, according to one of its top research officials.

“We literally looked at every option we could think of, with several key parameters in mind,” said Emil Jacobs, vice president for research and development at Exxon’s research and engineering unit. “Scale was the first. For transportation fuels, if you can’t see whether you can scale a technology up, then you have to question whether you need to be involved at all.”

He added, “I am not going to sugarcoat this — this is not going to be easy.” Any large-scale commercial plants to produce algae-based fuels are at least 5 to 10 years away, Dr. Jacobs said.

SarahPAC takes in $733,000 –- donates $10,000 to candidates

By Eideard Tuesday July 14, 2009

33 Comments

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who’s leaving public office in two weeks, raised nearly $733,000 since starting a federal political action committee.

Documents filed Monday with the Federal Elections Commission show Palin, who pledged to keep her hand in politics even though she’s stepping down as governor, has donated $10,000 to federal candidates through SarahPAC, USA Today reported. Her political action committee was established in January.

Palin gave $5,000 each to Arizona Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who tapped her to be his running mate during the 2008 presidential election, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

SarahPAC ended June with nearly $457,000 cash on hand, USA Today reported.

Maybe Levi knows exactly what he’s talking about, eh?