Gov. Bob Taft was charged with four criminal misdemeanor counts Wednesday for failing to report dozens of gifts that included dinners, golf games and professional hockey tickets, deepning a scandal that has rocked Ohio's Republican Party.

Hey Bob Taft, thanks for carrying Ohio in the closest race EVER!

Only about half of this year's high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level science and math courses, according to a yearly report from ACT, which produces one of the nation's leading college admissions tests.

Many Going to College Aren't Ready, Report Finds

In the endless conflict between law enforcement officers and driving enthusiasts, technology has given an edge to the combatants on both sides. Consumers have been able to purchase more accurate, longer-range detectors with nearly each passing year, while the police have been armed with guns that can minimize the time for detection across a growing spectrum of frequencies.

2005 Radar Detector Buyer's Guide - Motor Trend News

"Although in some ways it's 60 years too late, it's gratifying to see that this blatant instance of injustice has finally been recognized for what it was -- a legal lynching," Vodicka said.

Every once and awhile, a restless soul finds peace.

Maid pardoned 60 years after execution

However, the situation changes for the opposite, when a man reaches the mysterious age of 33 years. When a man gains life experience, he realizes that he does not need his wife's appraisal; a man becomes tired of his wife's dominating position in the house. As a rule, a man realizes his own importance in the family in his thirties. On the other hand, a woman is already used to being the first in everything: she definitely starts acting adequately in an attempt to preserve her family leadership. It is easy to imagine, what happens in a once friendly and happy family afterwards. The vast majority of divorces is registered with 30 or 40-year-old people.

Despite the broken English, I can definitely relate to this article's conclusions.

Men physically unable to repulse potential lovers, psychologists say

It is noteworthy that a combination of features as depicted on these morphed photographs is impossible to find in any of living people. A human face can be wrinkless if only it is a digitalized picture. There are no perfect eyebrows, eyes or lips either. One may thus conclude that the woman on this picture is an absolutely unnatural, albeit a beautiful individual. Natural beauty cannot compete with digital perfection: the latter always wins, although it does not exist in reality. The top five of the computer pageant was made of only digital pictures. Furthermore, 79 percent of original male faces and 70 percent of original female faces were described as "not pretty" or even "ugly."

This is interesting not only from the child-adult combo (I think humans are programmed to think that babies are beautiful otherwise you'd have very little impulse to take care of them), but also the social consequence of this instinctual "feature". If we continue to develop a society where images and media is bombarded into our conscience with unreasonable or impossible physical specimens, what impact will that have on mating, psychology, and productive society?

Underestimating their own beauty, humans fall victims to glossy magazine covers

What started as a sale turned into a mob scene as thousands of people pushed their way through the Richmond International Raceway gates to buy a $50 iBook laptop computer from Henrico County Schools this morning.

Just wait until it's oil, or food, instead of laptops.

Mob scene, several hurt in rush for cheap laptops

“When power’s out, the first 24 hours can be crucial to saving lives,” says Lyon. “If the system is already in place, and if a disaster strikes and takes out power, our network will still be operational. They are also very portable, so if FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] has a supply of them, they can move into an area that has lost power and set it up very quickly, mobilize search and rescue, do resource management. The infrastructure would already be in place, it could be functioning with VoIP all the time. For instance, the tsunami area… it would have made a major difference in that area. There are smaller examples all over the world.”

BRILLIANT!

Boulder Gets Solar-Powered Wi-Fi

For almost an entire decade, innovators in digital media distribution were chilled by the aggressive tactics of the entertainment industry to protect their analog interests. For many years, we essentially saw a lockdown on Internet distribution of media. Practical licenses for legitimate Internet distribution were forbidden, while lawsuit after lawsuit was wielded as a blunt tool and a stern warning against those creators (aka innovators) who had their sights set on staking a claim in the wild west of online digital media.

I hope Travis is correct. He's wrong about broadband penetration (it's not quite 50% of internet users, and it's woeful compared to total population in the US). But he makes a great point about $100M in content purchasing = $1B in technology purchasing. That's a *very* interesting data point.

Fighting the final digital battle

Technology evolves. Good technologies and products usually survive; poor ones usually go extinct. But not all of the technologies and tech products that have swirled down the drain of the tech gene pool deserved their fate. Here are some big, and some small, ideas that we thought we'd have with us forever, but that unfortunately have gone the way of the dodo.

Some of this list is fluff, but they hit the nail on the head for a few items (#1, 4, and 5, plus the hint that's burried in #2, 3, and 6)

Top 10 tech we miss