Until now, Fred Thompson has escaped any serious controversy but recent drug accusations reach to the top of his presidential campaign.

According to the Washington Post, Thompson's campaign co-chairman Philip Martin pleaded guilty to selling 11 pounds of marijuana in 1979 and then pleaded no contest to charges of trafficking cocaine, bookmaking and conspiracy in 1983.

Thompson said the old crimes are an unfortunate result of campaign dirt digging.

"Phil, I'm sure, knows that he should have told me about this. But, he thought it was over and done with and forgotten about," said Thompson. "But, of course, nothing is ever

If you cant stand the heat get your head out of your ass and stay out of our kitchen ... *grin*

Paper: Close Fred Thompson Aide Sold Drugs - News Story - WSMV Nashville

1895: Inventor George Selden receives the first U.S. patent for an automobile.

Who the true inventor of the automobile actually was remains clouded in the murk of history and a tangle of bureaucracy. Gottlieb Daimler of Germany often gets the credit, but a number of people, including Selden, had been working on gasoline-powered vehicles at the same time -- perhaps even earlier.

Selden's case for priority wasn't helped by the fact that it took him forever to get his patent. He built his first horseless carriage in 1877 and filed for a patent in 1879. But a succession of tweaks and amendments -- mostly of his own doing -- delayed patent issuance until 1895.

While Selden was an inventor, the subsequent tale of his automobile is a story more about legal maneuvering than about innovation, and in this Selden was overmatched. After selling his patent rights in 1899 to the Electric Vehicle Company in exchange for a piece of the action, Selden and EVC found themselves suing Henry Ford and several other automobile makers for patent infringement.

The case dragged on for eight years. Selden (who had trained as a lawyer) and EVC won at the lower-court level but ultimately lost on appeal. Ford convinced the appellate court that because his automobiles were powered not by the EVC's two-stroke Brayton engine, but by the four-stroke Otto engine, the Ford was an entirely different product.

The loss drove Selden and EVC from the field, but he did begin manufacturing trucks as the Selden Truck Sales Corporation.

An interesting historical sidelight: Selden's father, Henry, was Abraham Lincoln's first choice to be his vice presidential running mate during the 1864 election. The elder Selden declined the honor, however, and so missed the chance to become president of the United States when Lincoln was assassinated the following April.

Nov. 5, 1895: First U.S. Automaker Gets Off to Slow Start

iRobot's soap-opera-esque trade secret and patent lawsuits against rival Robotic FX entered a new phase last night, as the US District Court in Boston handed down a preliminary injunction preventing Robot FX from acting on a $279M contract to build Negotiator robots for the Department of Defense. Saying that Robotic FX CEO Jameel Ahed's admissions that he'd destroyed evidence "profoundly undermined" his credibility, the judge ruled that there was enough of a likelihood that iRobot would win its trade secret case to warrant an injunction -- the idea being to keep Robotic FX from gaining any benefits from a possible theft. The judge didn't make the exact terms of the injunction public, but she did order a trial to begin no later than April 4 -- which means there's still a lot of drama to come.

iRobot wins injunction against Robotic FX ...

A hobby historian has discovered the oldest known recipe for German sausage, a list of ingredients for Thuringian bratwurst nearly 600 years old.

According to the 1432 guidelines, Thuringian sausage makers had to use only the purest, unspoiled meat and were threatened with a fine of 24 pfennigs -- a day's wages -- if they did not, a spokesman for the German Bratwurst Museum said Wednesday.

Medieval town markets in Germany had committees charged with monitoring the quality of produce. Thuringian bratwursts, which are made of beef and pork, are symbols of Germany's cultural heritage and ubiquitous snacks at football matches.

Historian Hubert Erzmann, 75, found the ancient recipe, inscribed with pen and ink in a heavy tome of parchment, earlier this year while doing research in an archive in the eastern town of Weimar, museum spokesman Thomas Maeuer said.

"The discovery shows that there were already consumer protection laws in the Middle Ages," he said.

The instructions go on display Thursday in the Bratwurst Museum near the eastern city of Erfurt, Thuringia's capital.

Historian finds oldest recipe for bratwurst...

The following imagery was taken on October 26th.

San Diego 2007 Wildfires

The site moderator of waffles.fm, the invite-only replacement to OiNK, on Friday tells THREAT LEVEL that the illicit music-sharing site already has some 1,700 exclusive members in less than 24 hours of sporadic operation.

Thousands of invitees are waiting in the wings, as registration is tentatively closed because of server capacity, says site moderator Dead1, who in an exclusive interview with THREAT LEVEL spoke on condition that his real name not be published. "We've closed invites due to the extreme amount of traffic," Dead1 says.

Many of those invited were former members of OiNK, he says, and thousands of torrents are being uploaded and seeded.

"We were getting upwards of 100 torrents a minute uploaded," Dead1 says.

The site, running on servers in Amsterdam's Ripe Network Data Center, was the subject of a denial of service attack following its initial launch Thursday, says Dead1. The DoS attack was at 90MB/s per second, he says.

"That's pretty big. Whoever did it was pretty pissed off, to put it politely," Dead1 says. "They said they were upset they weren't sent an invite."

The response to waffles from the BitTorrent community has been overwhelming, he says. When the site went live Thursday, it crashed after its servers were clogged by a barrage of 300 registration requests a minute. "It's unbelievable," Dead1 says.

The music-sharing-only site, launched nearly two weeks after British authorities raided and shuttered its predecessor OiNK, is a non-profit operation run by a network of 10 people in their twenties or younger, Dead1 says. "It's purely a hobby," he says. "It's for fun."

"Most of the staff is in Europe. A couple are in America. A few are in Canada," he adds. "They're scattered everywhere."

Dead1 says waffles will attempt to follow in OiNK's footsteps and is not affiliated with any other torrent-tracking site.

"When the link went down, everybody was pretty pissed," he says.

The site is looking to upgrade its servers again, Dead1 says. For now, the site runs off two server boxes, each with 3 gigahertz, dual core Pentium processors, and 4 GBs of RAM, he says.

"We're not doing this for the pirated material. You can get that anywhere," Dead1 says. "We're doing it to increase the popularity of artists everywhere no matter who they are."

Oink Wannabe -- Waffles.fm -- Scrambling to Fill Membership Orders; Feeding Frenzy Underway

A subject of morbid but peculiar fascination. It's certainly unwholesome to relish the stories of those who are like us, and perhaps greater than us, but who come to spectacularly bad ends, yet such stories provide a certain satisfaction. As we make our way through our own careers in engineering, and deal with our own inevitable failures, there's some comfort in knowing that no matter how badly we screw up, we won't get killed for it. Unlike these guys.

So here's a list of the tragic and failed from newest to oldest. Most were brought down by their own characters, some by bad luck or malice. Biographies and pictures (when completed!) lie behind the links.

Kinda odd... good reading ... :)

Doomed Engineers

Guinness World Records has recognised folding@home (FAH) as the world's most powerful distributed computing network.

FAH has signed up nearly 700,000 PS3s to examine how the shape of proteins affect diseases such as Alzheimer's.

The network has more than one petaflop of computing power - the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

"To have folding@home recognized by Guinness World Records as the most powerful distributed computing network ever is a reflection of the extraordinary worldwide participation by gamers and consumers around the world and for that we are very grateful," said Professor Vijay Pande of Stanford University and a leader of the FAH project.

PS3 network enters record books

This fall, Nashville Public Library becomes only the second institution in the nation to host for a full year, “StoryBooth,” an outpost of StoryCorps, the acclaimed national project that encourages Americans to listen to each other by sharing the stories of their lives in sound.

Cool! :)

StoryCorps in Nashville

A brand-new laptop PC for $150 including a 1.5GHz Intel Celeron processor, 14” screen, 256MB of RAM, wireless connectivity and a Fedora Linux operating system pre-installed. If you think it sounds to good to be true, you’re not the only one – and its 6-week lead time on deliveries means the Medison Celebrity has almost 2 months in which to make blind sales before the first orders actually hit buyers’ doorsteps and we can find out whether the company delivers what it promises. Still, if it’s true, this has to go down as one of the most amazing pricing offers of recent times, and if positive customer reviews start coming in, you’ll have to get in line behind us!

Medison calls it “the laptop for everyone” – and at a frankly ridiculous price of $150, the Celebrity is certainly affordable enough to make that claim. The basic but functional setup looks like a very workable system – and at that jaw-dropping price, would be an absolute no-brainer.

The website, however, and the somewhat dubious Swedish company behind it, are yet to gain the confidence of many would-be buyers. The company history states that Medison is 11 years old, and all its previous work is in the internet, media and education fields – no mention is made of any prior manufacturing efforts.

How are they making such cheap laptops then? Let’s consult the FAQ: “We see this from a democratic point of view where we believe everyone should be able to afford to have a laptop. The other reason is that we have our own plants where we assemble our laptops.”

They’ve certainly got my attention, but I’ll personally be waiting until I hear from somebody who’s actually seen one before my credit card comes out

Bargain or baloney? Medison Celebrity, the US$150 “laptop for everyone” - gizmag Article