NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The Bush administration announced new fuel economy rules Tuesday that require improved mileage for the sport/utility vehicles and other light trucks that have captured a majority of U.S. auto sales.

Speaking from Atlanta, Department of Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and Jeffrey Runge, the current administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said that under the new plan, the light truck segment will be broken into six different categories based on weight and vehicle type, with the smallest vehicles forced to get better mileage than larger ones.

ARRGGGG!!!! This only encourages them to make LARGER FUCKING VEHICLES!!!! {head explodes}

-janelane, big business asshole

CNN.com - New mileage rules require only slight improvement - Aug 23, 2005

From form DS-11 for my U.S. passport renewal:

Early in 2005, the U.S. Department of State will begin issuing a new type of passport containing an embedded electronic chip and called an "Electronic Passport".

Issuance of this new passport will be phased in during an 18-month period. It is expected that by mid-2006 nearly all U.S. passports will be issued in this new format. The new passport will not require special handling or treatment, but like previous versions should be protected from extreme bending and from immersion in water. The electronic chip must be read using specially formatted readers, and is not susceptible to unauthorized reading.

Well, if the government says so, then it must be true. :-S Any ideas on safeguarding the illicit chip once I've received my passport?

-janelane, warily

Inconceivable!

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Veteran newsman Peter Jennings was remembered Monday as an outstanding journalist, a hard worker and "a man of conscience and integrity."

The longtime anchor of ABC "World News Tonight" died Sunday, some four months after he announced on the air that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer.

Jennings was 67.

His presence in our lives has already been missed since stepping down from the Evening News. It is a terrible tragedy that such a venerable life has been prematurely extinguished.

-janelane, somberly

CNN.com - Peter Jennings dies of lung cancer - Aug 8, 2005

In the hottest markets, owners whose homes have skyrocketed in value find themselves in a frustrating paradox. They were supposed to be the lucky ones: they bought in frenzied real estate markets like New York and Los Angeles three or more years ago and have amassed hundreds of thousands of dollars on paper.

But as they try to roll that considerable equity into a bigger home, many are unpleasantly surprised to find that the cost of real estate at the higher end has outpaced their ability to buy. For homeowners who have watched the torrid housing market create wealth as if by magic, scanning the classified ads or visiting a few open houses serves as a harsh reality check.

The ugly side of rising real estate prices. Yay for living in Hot-lanta where expecting to pay ~ $1 per square foot won't get you locked away.

-janelane, comfortably

Trapped in the Bubble - New York Times

This case describes the physiological maturation from ages 21 to 28 yr of the bicyclist who has now become the six-time [sic] consecutive Grand Champion of the Tour de France, at ages 27–32 yr.

Physiological study of Lance Armstrong before, during and after cancer. I didn't realize how freaking young he was when he got diagnosed...25?! Men, get thee to a proctologist!

An interesting factoid about Lance is that his resting heartrate is around 33 beats per minute. Which means, when watching TV, the rest of us flabby people are pulling in around 95-110 while his heart's beating every other second.

There's also an interesting summary article at Wired about what the power stat on the previous website means. The guy's just amazing.

-janelane, dreamily

Improved muscular efficiency displayed as Tour de France champion matures -- Coyle 98 (6): 2191 -- Journal of Applied Physiology

When reading the first part of the book, it feels like the author is trying to correct his many years of disservice to the environment as he helped to develop the oil industry. The book makes it clear that man's ego is destroying the planet for no real benefit and Chomat coins the term "egosystem" to describe this. He recounts stories of people he has met from "non-westernized" countries not being able to comprehend why the western lifestyle is so focused on exponential growth and how it could easily be perceived that cars are the dominant species on earth.

This book looks pretty interesting. It appears to be 15% factoid and 85% the-West-is-killing-everything-beautiful-and-good. The author seems to be a bit better with the blame game than the numbers game, though.

-janelane, energy-tech

theWatt: Daily Energy News and Discussion - Oil Addiction: The World in Peril

The data in the government report shows that the rising number of Hispanic children would help lower the rate of smoking among teens. However, teen pregnancy rates would rise and the percentage of students completing high school would fall without changes occurring, said Dr. Duane Alexander, director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, one of several federal agencies that contributed to the report.

"The people who follow population demographics and health disparities are very concerned about this," Alexander said.

The report also found that Hispanic children are more likely to live in poverty and to be overweight.

That's got to be the most depressing information about a demographic that it's members can receive. The study indicates that the only thing most Hispanic children have to look forward to in their teens is living in poverty with their children while obese and without a high school education. Their only positive benefit -- by virtue of the increased birthrate and not their ideals -- is to lower the percentage of smoking teens.

Sheesh, what a bum rap. I have an overwhelming desire to change this outlook, and I'm not even Hispanic.

We need the increased birthrate to deal with the Baby Boomers retirement problem, but at the same time need productive members of society, not an increased drain on society's resources and a bigger gap between the racially-perceived "haves" and "have nots". And changing the tide starts in middle school. While President Bush pushes abstinence, a more realistic approach would be that of the health center at Georgia Tech: a great big bowl of condoms and tons of STD pamplets with scary pictures.

-janelane, econdomizer

CNN.com - Report: Hispanic children's health lags - Jul 20, 2005

USC learned of the breach June 20 when it was tipped off by a journalist, Harrington said. It has since shut down the Web site and has notified people whose names and Social Security numbers were in the database of the security breach.

The university was not able to identify exactly which records may have been exposed.

Notifying people whose data could have been stolen? Fuck Yeah!

-janelane, approvingly

CNN.com - USC�says database hacked - Jul 19, 2005

With regard to credit-report freezes, the bill would require one consumer-reporting agency to notify all other reporting agencies when it receives a freeze request from a consumer, relieving consumers of that burden. Agencies would have five days to apply the freeze and three days to lift a freeze once a consumer provided proper identification. The bill allows reporting agencies to charge "a reasonable fee" for the service, but only for people who have not been victims of identity theft. The latter would get a freeze for free after providing a police report documenting the theft.

Montezemolo said that five days to implement a freeze was too generous -- especially since a lot of damage could be done in that time. She also wanted credit-reporting agencies to make it easier for consumers to unfreeze data, rather than having to wait three days.

One thing the freeze doesn't do is prevent creditors from issuing pre-approved instant credit applications in the mail, which makes it easy for identity thieves who rummage through mail or garbage to find the applications and open credit accounts in a victim's name. The bill provides a special exception to the freeze to allow creditors to access credit reports to prescreen applicants.

A Senate source told Wired News that federal lawmakers adopted the exception for prescreening from a similar clause in the California legislation.

"That's a state statute that tried to balance the consumer-protection issues and the concerns of businesses to be able to market (to consumers)," the source said.

Fuck businesses, especially credit card companies with their pre-screened mail-in applications. It doesn't take a genius to realize that they are entirely profit-driven and, instead of protecting me, would prefer isntead to prey on the hapless consumer who catches the Debt psuedo-virus. What really ticks me off is that they could just as easily mail an information flyer without the added candy for dumpster divers.

-janelane, unimpressed

Wired News: Bill Strives to Protect Privacy

Spyware impairs "users' control over material changes that affect their user experience, privacy or system security; use of their system resources, including what programs are installed on their computers; or collection, use and distribution of their personal or otherwise sensitive information," according to the Anti-Spyware Coalition, which includes Microsoft, EarthLink, McAfee and Hewlett-Packard.

The group hopes the definitions will clear the way for anti-spyware legislation and help create a formal, centralized method for companies to dispute or change their software's classification.

There's been a lot of talk about this in recent weeks, especially the Microsoft bid for adware/spyware/crapware giant Claria (among others, I think). I have to say anyone honestly believing Microsoft would work to create a definition that would pave the way for restrictive legislation needs to pull their head out of the sand. Luckily, Wired includes this little nugget of innuendo later in the article...

Software companies like Claria, which distribute their pop-up advertising software by bundling it with free programs such as peer-to-peer software, adamantly deny their products are "spyware." They point out that users can usually find a definition of the programs' effects deep in the user agreement.

It is unclear what effect the new definitions will have on current anti-spyware programs, such as Lavasoft's Ad-Aware and Microsoft's free AntiSpyware tool.

Recently, Microsoft downgraded the default program action for Claria's software from "Remove" to "Ignore," which prompted widespread criticism.

Microsoft responded by saying that it had changed the handling of "Claria software in order to be fair and consistent with how Windows AntiSpyware (beta) handles similar software from other vendors."

Microsoft is in negotiations to buy venture-capital-backed Claria, according to The New York Times.

But, honestly, what's the worse case scenario here? I mean, could the legislature (or Supreme Court, depending on which side of the barnyard fence you're on) really be so grossly swindled by this collaboration that it passes laws based on their partisan definition? I'm inclined to agree with the article that, at best, such legislation will secure a stamp of approval for these types of bullshit programs. At worst, however, I think that it could give truly malicious programs a narrowly defined facade of legitimacy in the face of supposedly adequate filtering software.

-janelane, subversively

Wired News: Giving New Meaning to 'Spyware'