1997 Ford F-150 Nut Shaker
Sold for: $8,500

At last week's Barrett-Jackson collector car auction, some lucky person - we assume the winning bidder really wanted this thing - was able to drive away for a Ford F-150 that had been turned into a nut harvesting machine.

Featured on the TV series "Monster Garage," this Ford pick-up was modified to act as a nut shaker, a machine used to collect tree nuts. The truck bed was removed. In its place, Jesse James and technicians at West Coast Choppers put in a device that grasps the trunk of a tree and shakes it vigorously.

Ripe nuts then fall from the tree and are collected in a large canopy that extends from the truck. The nuts then move to a conveyor belt where they're passed along to a collection hopper.

The truck can harvest nuts from up to three trees per minute.

He said Nuts.. Hahaha

1997 Ford F-150 Nut Shaker

In Memoriam A.H.H.

Just a great work of lit, I must say.

Lord Alfred Tennyson - Biography and Works

Here's a frightening but real proposition: if you are caught breaking certain traffic laws, not only do police have the right to search you—they can go through all your electronic data as well—your text messages, call histories, browsing history, downloaded emails and photos. In a recent academic paper, South Texas Assistant Professor Adam Gershowitz explains that because many traffic violations are arrestable offenses, just as a cop could search your pockets for drugs, said cop can also search your pockets for a smartphone and go through all its contents. The same is true for any standard arrest, and given the amount of data in current smartphones, it's a scary proposition (even for law-abiding citizens like us).

We'll give you the CliffsNotes version of Gershowitz's 30-page article in which he outlines the situation.

The Issue:

While society and technology have changed drastically over the last few decades, the search incident to arrest rule has remained static. Thus, if we think of an iPhone as a container ­­like a cigarette package or a closed box, police can open and search the contents inside with no questions asked and no probable cause required, so long as they are doing so pursuant to a valid arrest.

A Recent Precedent:

The Fifth Circuit's recent 2007 in United States v. Finley is representative. Police arrested Finley after a staged drug sale. The police then searched Finley incident to arrest and found a cellphone in his pocket. One of the investigating officers searched through the phone's records and found text messages that appeared to relate to drug trafficking...­­the court explained that "police officers are not constrained to search only for weapons...they may also, without any additional justification, look for evidence of the arrestee's crime on his person in order to preserve it for use at trial.

The Solutions:

Courts and legislatures can attempt to minimize this invasion of privacy by changing the legal rules to require that searches be related to the purpose of the arrest, by limiting searches to applications that are already open, by restricting suspicionless investigation to a small number of discrete steps, or by limiting searches to data already downloaded onto the iPhone, rather than data that is merely accessible through the iPhone's internet connection.

I guess the larger moral of the story is that if you plan on getting arrested, don't have a smartphone in your pocket with all the seedy plans.null

Cops Can Search You...and Your Phone's Memory

I added memestreams to my facebook account by useing the RSS feeds that I was tipped of to and added the "top topics" feed by useing the Facebook "SimplyRSS" application...

Would be need to add a memestreams app to facebook directly ...

IP addresses, strings of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union's group of data privacy regulators said Monday.

IP Addresses Are Personal Data, E.U. Regulator Says - washingtonpost.com

The iPhone isn’t too crash hot, you know. It’s currently missing 3G functionality and is a closed system that’s hard to work with. Some of this will change soon, as Steve Jobs announced an SDK during his Macworld keynote, but those missing features haven’t and won’t change how Apple is marketing it.

What makes people moist whenever they use the iPhone is its interface, which is a real breath of fresh air compared to the current stale offerings from other handsets.

A lot of big companies such as Google, Intel, Nvidia, LG, Motorola and others have noticed this, and banded together to form the Open Handset Alliance Project (OHAP) to try and solve the problem. They have created Android.

Android was once an idea in a small start up, before its acquisition by Google in 2005. Now it's Linux for mobile devices. This means it’s secure and its application programming interfaces (APIs) offer complete access to the phone hardware. Even third party applications get deep access, which other operating systems can’t provide. It even virtualises everything in the name of speed and security.

For now, the OHAP has only developed phone and web browser applications for Android, however other cool applications are being written by the rest of the open source community. To encourage this, the OHAP has put US$10 million in prizes up for grabs for the most promising applications for Android. And although the applications may be on their way, Android’s core has been here for a while.

And it’s just been hacked to run on standard hardware.

Back in November last year, shortly after Android’s public release, Australian developer Ben Leslie almost got Android running on a Neo1973 phone.

Soon after, as a result of his work, Android was running on an Armadillo 500, a generic board used for prototyping and embedded systems, and more recently, a group called eu.edge successfully booted Android on a Sharp Zaurus. They even suggest that it can run on almost any ARMv5TE based device.

This should open the floodgates for tinkerers (GoogleOS on your PC, anyone?), which might even result in a version of Android forking away from mobiles and into household gadgets.

For the rest of us, and for now, Android is promising a much better smart phone experience than traditional mobile OSes deliver. The interface’s design can be customised, so we’re just as likely to see simplistic but efficient designs as we are to see rich, 3D accelerated portable media centres or iPhone competitors with unlimited flexibility. And with the actual core OS completed, the first consumer OHAP mobiles should be here in the not too distant future.

Enough speculation though: if you would like a share in that US$10m, download the SDK and get cracking. The top 50 applications developed before the 3rd of March get a slice, with another challenge slated later this year. The SDK and details are all available here.

iPhone competitor hacked!

Fears that 2008 will see the looming recession in the US spreading to every other continent triggered a global crash in share prices yesterday, wiping £77bn off the value of the City's blue-chip stocks in the biggest one-day points fall in London's history.

On a day of panic selling, hefty overnight falls on far eastern stock markets prompted a ripple effect through Europe and left the City's FTSE 100 index down 323.5 points at 5578.2 at the close.

Since the start of the year share prices have dropped by 14%, with the near 900-point fall in the FTSE 100 wiping out all the gains of the last 18 months and putting renewed pressure on pension funds. Yesterday's 5.48% fall was the biggest in percentage terms since the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks but less than half as big as the record 12.2% drop in October 1987.

In the City's money markets, traders were betting that the risk of a synchronised global downturn would force the Bank of England to cut interest rates by a full percentage point during the course of 2008 despite its concerns about inflationary pressure. Economists are expecting the toughest year for the UK since the pound was removed from the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.

In the US, pressure is mounting on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates by 0.75 points at its meeting later this month, taking its main policy rate down to 3.5%. Some analysts believe it will be necessary to cut rates to 1% by the end of this year to prevent the contagion from bad loans to subprime mortgage borrowers causing even more damage to the rest of the economy.

Shares in London closed near their lows for the day amid concerns that the market rout would continue today when Wall Street opens after being closed for the Martin Luther King public holiday. Last night, there were indications that the Dow Jones industrial average would open more than 600 points lower.

In other markets, Japan's Nikkei index was down almost 4%, while Germany's Dax and France's CAC index both fell by 7%. With markets in the developing world also suffering, the MSCI gauge of stock markets globally sank 3.3% percent, falling below its 2007 trough to lows last seen in December 2006 and taking it down more than 12% so far this year.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned western countries to expect knock-on effects from the slowdown in the US, the world's biggest economy. "The situation is serious," Strauss-Kahn said after meeting the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. "All countries in the world are suffering from the slowdown in growth in the United States, all countries in the developed world."

After briefly rising above $100 a barrel earlier this month, the cost of oil fell by $2 a barrel to $88.59 yesterday in expectation that weaker demand for energy would push down the price of crude. Mining stocks were among the biggest losers in London amid concern... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

'And in the end the age was handed, The sort of shit that it demanded.'

Three-quarters of corporate travel managers said in a recent survey that they expect airline mergers to result in higher fares and more than half expect the quality of service to suffer.

Those were among the findings in a survey of 98 travel managers and other big buyers of airline tickets by the Business Travel Coalition, a group that seeks to represent the interest of business travelers.

“We’re going to pay higher fares,” said Cheryl Geib, national director of travel and meetings for the accounting firm Grant Thornton.

Pro-merger airline executives have said they hoped to sell big corporate customers on the notion that a merged airline’s expanded route network would make booking travel for a far-flung sales force, say, a lot easier and that redeeming frequent flier miles would also be more convenient.

Delta Air Lines is weighing a takeover of either Northwest Airlines or United Airlines, a unit of UAL. And, should one of those combinations be proposed, Continental Airlines is expected to also consider seeking a merger partner. That could reduce the current six big network airlines — AMR’s American Airlines and US Airways are the other two — to four. And further consolidation would be possible.

But the big customers are wary, knowing that higher fares are the aim, as airlines search for a way to remain profitable in an era when oil approaches $100 a barrel. Nearly every airline chief has said the industry needs to raise fares, and even without mergers they are trying.

In the survey of the travel managers — including a dozen whose departments purchase more than $75 million in airline tickets each year — 74 percent said they would expect higher fares and 53 percent said they would worry about a decline in service.

Many travel managers also noted in the survey that they were worried that mergers would reduce competition and make it more difficult to negotiate discounts.

Many business travelers already believe service is bad. “Customer service? What’s customer service?” one travel manager said in responding to the survey.

Another manager added: “Can it get any worse?”

Kevin Mitchell, who heads the Business Travel Coalition, said airline executives seem to think that full airplanes indicate that customers are happy. “There’s a bit of denial in the industry about customer service problems,” he said.

The airlines’ goals are to cut costs and raise revenue. A hedge fund that asked Delta in November to seek a merger with United estimated that such a combination could reduce costs by $585 million a year and that a merger of Delta and Northwest could reduce costs by $1.5 billion a year.

That would entail reducing the number of flights in some markets, shrinking or eliminating a smaller hub or two — Delta’s Cincinnati hub and Northwest’s Memphis hub have been mentioned as expendable — and using the resulting scarcity of seats to raise fares.

United’s proposed takeover of US Airways failed in 2001 in the face of questions from the Justice Department about its impact on competition.

“That is why they do these mergers — to reduce competition and raise air fares,” said Paul Hudson, executive director of the Aviation Consumer Action Project, a group affiliated with Ralph Nader.

However, the hedge fund proposing a merger of Delta and United, Pardus Capital Management, has argued that at current fuel prices the United States could be facing another round of airline bankruptcies unless there are mergers.

Managers Foresee Fewer Airlines and Higher Fares

The age demanded that we sing
And cut away our tongue.

The age demanded that we flow
And hammered in the bung.

The age demanded that we dance
And jammed us into iron pants.

And in the end the age was handed
The sort of shit that it demanded.

-- Ernest Hemingway

They fear a stock market crash/slip and all I can say is Hemingway said it best,
"And in the end the age was handed, The sort of shit that it demanded."

You give it and get it...

The Age Demanded -- Ernest Hemingway

We apologize for postponing the original date of the Open House, but given the winter weather concerns across portions of the Tennessee Valley, it was the most prudent decision. We have decided on a new date, and hopefully temperatures will be a little warmer in March. The details of the original Open House still hold true, and they follow below.

As part of the five year anniversary of the Huntsville National Weather Service Office, we are hosting an Open House on Saturday, March 8th.

This event, which is free and open to the public, will give you a chance to tour our Operations Area, where we make all our forecasts and warnings. Tour space is limited, so arrive early to pick up your free tour tickets.

Additionally, we will have a childrens area with a bean bag toss, coloring activites, videos, and a hands-on hurricane activity. Nearby, there will be a full size weather safety miniature golf course hole.

Other fun activites include a weather forecasting contest, putting you in charge of making a forecast for Huntsville. In fact, the best forecast will win one of several prizes--ranging from a job shadow with one of our forecasters, to an official NOAA All Hazards Weather Radio.

We will also have a whole area dedicated to hydrology, climatology, and cooperative weather observations. If you've ever wondered how we acquire data, or how we use it, you'll certainly want to pay a visit to this section.

We look forward to seeing you on Saturday March 8th, and if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Saturday, March 8th, 10 AM to 3 PM

National Weather Service Huntsville, AL - 5th Anniversary Open House