Shimano Inter-8 Premium (identifiable by its red stripe) is our smoothest, most rugged and most versatile gearing. The planetary gears are cold forged and heat treated to take long term abuse, and the hub internals are designed to handle inputs that would exceed what could be exerted by most any rider. The Outback’s 8-speeds offer a gear range comparable to 20 gears on a 24-gear chain bike, including multiple climbing gears for demanding off-road performance. With the tough, aluminum enclosed shaft drive and all-internal gearing, this bike also offers 13” of ground clearance and the durability to take crashes that would otherwise cripple fully exposed chains and derailleurs. In short, this bike is ideal for anyone who wants all the pleasures of mountain biking without the hassles of greasy, maintenance-prone chains and derailleurs.

Smart!

Chainless Mountain Bikes

CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug. 26 (Reuters) - Venezuela's government temporarily suspended permits for foreign missionaries on Friday, four days after the American evangelist Pat Robertson called for the assassination of President Hugo Ch�vez.

LOL!

Venezuela Will Tighten Rules on Admitting Foreign Preachers

The decision to introduce cellphone service in the city's underground subway stations touched off a flurry of interest in the telecommunications industry yesterday, as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority began soliciting bids for a 10-year contract that will involve immense technical complexity and probably be worth $50 million to $100 million.

So far, they're only talking about stations, not tunnels.

Race Is on for Cellular System for the Subway

People like Ms. Skhakhane have made Africa the world's fastest-growing cellphone market. From 1999 through 2004, the number of mobile subscribers in Africa jumped to 76.8 million, from 7.5 million, an average annual increase of 58 percent. South Africa, the continent's richest nation, accounted for one-fifth of that growth.

Asia, the next fastest-expanding market, grew by an annual average of just 34 percent in that period.

Cellphones Catapult Rural Africa to 21st Century

NASA has decided to develop a 100t to low-Earth orbit (LEO) in-line heavylift booster using a highly modified external tank and new five segment solid-rocket boosters (SRB), Christopher Shank, special assistant to NASA administrator Michael Griffin, has revealed to Flight International.

These are the same ones that were in the spaceref and nytimes stories a month or so ago. They were supposed to make some kind of public announcement the week of 8/15/2005 but I never saw it.

Now we'll see if Congress is willing to foot the bill to put these up.

NASA picks rocket for return to Moon

Miller has one very bold idea: He wants to build a new town where there is none, a community that would be carved out of the farm fields and draw hundreds of people from across the nation ... maybe even the world.

What would set this town apart is it would be home to deaf and hard-of-hearing people who want to live together. They'd raise their families here, send their kids to school and share a common language: sign language.

Shouldn't we be working to integrate these people into society better rather than partitioning them off even worse?

Wasn't there a story recently of parents living in some such enclave fighting to keep their children from having surgery to fix a correctible cause of some such handicap?

RE: A town for the deaf? | The San Diego Union-Tribune

There are lots of jabber clients, even for cellphones -- Palm, J2ME, Symbian, WinCE, etc.

Jabber Clients

Decius wrote:

They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free. Google Talk enables you to call or send instant messages to your friends for free–anytime, anywhere in the world.

Google reinvents another wheel. They seem to be doing a lot of that. This particular wheel, however, is rather plumbed. If anyone actually tries this thing and can tell me what, if anything, is new about it, I'm curious.

The only point I've heard so far is that it uses Jabber. Hrm... See, the reality is that due to a number of decisions that various players have made, the actual standard for IM is, in fact, AIM. This is not the best outcome in the world, as AIM is not an open standard, but it is a standard. I would prefer that Jabber were the standard, but I'm not going to switch to using something that can't communicate with a number of my friends simply because I've got a chip on my sholder about standards, or because I think Google is cool.

There's no "switch" ... there are a number of good multiprotocol clients out there. I can be reached on jabber, btw, as
bucy -at- club.cc dot cmu.edu.
gloop.org will be getting its own one of these days...

RE: Google Talk

Japan's space agency plans to launch an arrow-shaped airplane at twice the speed of sound high over the Australian outback as early as next month in a crucial test of the country's push to develop a supersonic successor to the retired Concorde.

From what I've heard, the concorde was not very nice in the passenger cabin. Boeing seems to be betting that people would rather have a more comfortable ride than a faster one. Not to mention the huge premium you have to pay to build and operate a supersonic jetliner.

Japan to Resume Supersonic Jet Test

Two brains are better than one. At least that is the rationale for the close - sometimes too close - relationship between the human body's two brains, the one at the top of the spinal cord and the hidden but powerful brain in the gut known as the enteric nervous system.

The Other Brain Also Deals With Many Woes