Hollywood, CA - Paramount announced that it had released the long awaited service pack for the original Star Trek series. Entitled Star Trek: SP1, the patch includes fixes for technical goofs and other errors, which have nagged fans for decades.
Paramount used the latest in digital editing technology to correct the errors and scoured newsgroups and interviewed fans to find all the problems they needed to correct. The service pack is available in DVD, VHS or in digital format from the Paramount website.

Paramount President Franz Pike said, "We fixed everything, from obvious errors like the glaring differences between Shatner and his stunt double to more obscure fixes like removing Spock's 'third ear' in 'The Immunity Syndrome.' We think fans will be pleased."

BB Spot: Paramount Releases Highly Anticipated Service Pack for Star Trek

ATLANTA—IKEA, the rapidly growing Swedish retailer of inexpensive home furnishings, claimed another 10,000 American lifestyles in 2003, according to a report released Tuesday by the Center for Interior Design Control.
"This epidemic of self-assembled, clean-lined modernist furniture is still largely contained to densely populated urban areas, but the danger exists that it will spread to other regions throughout America," CIDC spokesman Chris Greeves said Tuesday. "At the rate it's moving, our nation could suffer European levels of Scandinavian design within a decade."

Greeves said IKEA is not easily controlled, as it spreads largely through word of mouth.

"It passes between rooms until it has infested not only your living room, but also your 1.5 bathrooms, your cleanly appointed kitchen, and then your entire sun-drenched, open-plan loft apartment. In the most extreme cases, it will even spread to the string-light-decorated rooftop patio overlooking your recently gentrified neighborhood."

ONION:IKEA Claims Another 10,000 Lifestyles

w1ld wrote:
] ]
] ] The hosts of the show on WXDJ-FM, Joe Ferrero and Enrique
] ] Santos, fed pleasantries to Castro before breaking in and
] ] calling him an assassin. The conversation ended after
] ] Castro denounced the callers with a stream of
] ] vulgarities.
]
] hahaha...
But when the VOA (Voice of America) broadcast anti Castro propaganda from Key West into Cuba via Radio Marti back between 85 and 95, apparently, that was ok. Given the ongoing ineffective 40+ year trade and travel embargo w/ Cuba, one would think tormenting Castro would be promoted via almost any means.

UPDATE: MIAMI, Florida (Reuters) -- Two Miami radio hosts who duped Cuban President Fidel Castro with a prank call are soliciting pennies from their fans to pay a $4,000 fine proposed by U.S. regulators because of the on-air stunt.

Talk radio host Enrique Santos said the fine made no sense, so he and co-host Joe Ferrero plan to pay it with 400,000 cents, delivered in person to the Federal Communications Commission in Washington.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/South/04/28/castro.prank.reut/index.html

RE: CNN.com - $4,000 fine for station that cranked Castro - Apr 24, 2004

ryan is the supernicety wrote:
] ] She cites another example. In September 2002, The Onion
] ] ran a piece called, "Al-Qaida Allegedly Engaging in
] ] Telemarketing." The piece told of the terrorist
] ] organization's nefarious plan to raise funds through
] ] various phone scams. It also showed screenshots of a
] ] videotape the CIA had uncovered in which al-Qaida's
] ] second in command, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, is seen with a
] ] headset, presumably tricking an unsuspecting victim.
] ]
] ] Thus, upon seeing the story, the Branch County sheriff's
] ] department in Coldwater, Michigan, which had been
] ] investigating telemarketing scams targeting the elderly,
] ] issued an urgent press release.
] ]
] ] "In the course of this investigation, it was learned that
] ] this is going on throughout the United States, and some
] ] of these telemarketing programs are believed to be
] ] operated by al-Qaida," the release stated. "The CIA has
] ] announced that they acquired a videotape showing al-Qaida
] ] members making phone solicitations for vacation home
] ] rentals, long-distance telephone service, magazine
] ] subscriptions and other products."

If you see it posted on the internet, it MUST be true!
Bahahahahahahahaha... I like the Onion even more now than before.

RE: Wired News: Onion Taken Seriously, Film at 11

What was that line from the Monster.com ad from a few years ago? "I want to claw my way up to middle management" :-/

“I thought I was too much of a jerk to ever be replaced,” said Joe Morphy, an unemployed manager. “I figured they could never find anybody who combined my total indifference to employees’ well-being with my astonishingly high level of dishonesty. But they found some guy in Asia willing to be a bigger asshole than me for one-tenth of my salary.”

The crappy manager has been a fixture of the American corporate landscape for many years. Executive MBA programs and a smarmy business culture produced a class of managers capable of doing great damage even when under tight time constraints. Analysts have long believed that no other nation had the expertise and drive to achieve implosions on the scale of Enron or WorldCom. But, many developing nations think they can achieve US levels of awfulness if they focus their resources properly.

Professor Rajiv Mehta of the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore boasts his school is “as out of touch and unrealistic as the best MBA programs in America.” Many of the faculty cut their teeth on driving US high tech companies into the ground. “Management incompetence is a skill like any other,” says Mehta. “It can be taught and fostered to the point where a high level of expertise is attained.”

BB Spot: Lousy Managers Are Next Outsourcing Trend

Awesome new not-for-the-kiddies animated series on SciFi

Seen Tripping the Rift yet?

flynn23 wrote:
] How do you wreck turning into a corner too early?

Hello, State Farm? You're never gonna believe what just happened...

RE: How not to drive a Lamborghini

I can't think of a better way to market your name on sausage than to bring up visions of roadkill..... Yech. It almost reminds me of Apu in The Simpsons claiming that Kwik-E Mart's beef jerky was now "Nearly rectum free"

COUNTRY MUSIC LEGEND GEORGE JONES steps forward onto a new stage—in the kitchen--with his own brand of breakfast sausage. The acknowledged "greatest living country singer" has introduced "George Jones Country Sausage" which Jones aka "The Possum" claims contains pure pork, no possum! The brand has just made its debut in nearly 2000 supermarkets across the country.

Pure Pork, No Possum

WASHINGTON (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
said Thursday that it was about to begin testing a new technology
designed to help more closely monitor and assist the nation's homeless
population.

Under the pilot program, which grew out of a series of policy academies
held in the last two years, homeless people in participating cities will
be implanted with mandatory Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags
that social workers and police can use track their movements.

The RFID technology was developed by HHS' Health Resources and Services
Administration (HRSA) in partnership with five states, including
California and New York. "This is a rare opportunity to use advanced
technology to meet society's dual objectives of better serving our
homeless population while making our cities safer," HRSA Administrator
Betty James Duke said.

The miniscule RFID tags are no larger than a matchstick and will be
implanted subdermally, meaning under the skin. Data from RFID tracking
stations mounted on telephone poles will be transmitted to police and
social service workers, who will use custom Windows NT software to track
movements of the homeless in real time.

In what has become a chronic social problem, people living in shelters
and on the streets do not seek adequate medical care and frequently
contribute to the rising crime rate in major cities. Supporters of
subdermal RFID tracking say the technology will discourage implanted
homeless men and women from committing crimes, while making it easier
for government workers to provide social services such as delivering
food and medicine.

Duke called the RFID tagging pilot program "a high-tech,
minimally-intrusive way for the government to lift our citizens away
from the twin perils of poverty and crime." Participating cities include
New York City, San Francisco, Washington, and Bethlehem, Penn.

Participating states will receive grants of $14 million to $58 million
from the federal Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness
(PATH) program, which was created under the McKinney Act to fund support
services for the homeless. A second phase of the project, scheduled to
be completed in early 2005, will wirelessly transmit live information on
the locations of homeless people to handheld computers running the
Windows CE operating system.

A spokesman for the National Coalition for the Homeless, which estimates
that there are between 2.3 million and 3.5 million people experiencing
homelessness nationwide, said the pilot program could be easily abused.
"We have expressed our tentative support for the idea to HRSA, but only
if it includes privacy safeguards," the spokesman said. "So far it's
unclear whether those safeguards will actually be in place by roll-out."

Chris Hoofnagle, deputy director of the Electronic Privacy Information
Center, said the mandatory RFID program would be vulnerable to a legal
challenge. "It is a glaring violation of the Tenth Amendment, which says
that powers not awarded to the government are reserved to the people,
and homeless people have just as many Tenth Amendment rights as everyone
else," said Hoofnagle, who is speaking about homeless privacy at this
month's Computers Freedom and Privacy conference in Berkeley, Calif.

While HRSA's program appears to be the first to forcibly implant humans
with RFID tags, the technology is becoming more widely adopted as
retailers use it to track goods. Wal-Mart Stores said last year that it
will require its top 100 suppliers to place RFID tags on shipping crates
and pallets by January 2005.

This just does not sound even 1% appetizing.

ST. LOUIS, Missouri (AP) -- As a five-decade livestock producer, Jim Farmer wants his son and two daughters to follow in his footsteps.

He hopes ready-to-eat beef -- in a can -- is the ticket.

Farmer has joined resources with about three dozen other beef producers, including his son and son-in-law, in creating a co-op that aims to turn 1,000 cattle a year into canned beef. Eventually, the co-op hopes to handle as much as 10 times that.

The specially built plant in Montgomery City, about 70 miles west of St. Louis, has begun production. Canned beef has hit the shelves in some Missouri stores, mostly in tiny towns. While it's too early to say what the demand is, farmers like Farmer are thinking big.

Beef in a can ?