Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has demanded that several lunchbox manufacturing companies and retailers remove lunchboxes containing lead from store shelves or face legal action.
Certain manufacturers and retailers have been distributing and selling lunchboxes containing lead -- one in particular with significantly higher lead levels than allowed under state environmental and consumer protection laws, Blumenthal's office said. The lead is found in the lunchbox liner - in the vinyl, where it is a commonly used stabilizer.

Connecticut Orders Lead-Laden Lunchboxes Off Store Shelves

The Incredible Hulk appeared Tuesday on the Senate floor, adorning the necktie of Sen. Ted Stevens - a familiar sign that the veteran from Alaska is pumped for the fight to open part of an arctic wildlife refuge to oil drilling.
But to hear his colleagues tell it, Stevens is more like the Grinch who would steal Christmas - and New Year's, if need be - to collect on his end of a vote-swapping deal he struck with two Democrats 25 years ago.
"A promise made is a debt unpaid," Stevens, 82, is fond of repeating. "This is a debt unpaid to this Senate, to the country, to Alaska."
Back in 1980, the deal went like this: Vote yes on setting aside 19 million acres of wilderness, said Sens. Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington and Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, and Congress will support permission to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Stevens agreed. Tsongas and Jackson, meanwhile, died before Congress could grant permission to drill.
Their debt survives, Stevens insists. And he's playing procedural hardball to make the Senate pay up.

For Stevens, drilling in Alaska is personal payback

If you don't remember Karma from when it was on Second Avenue, that's OK. Because now owner Terri Sanford has given Karma a second life in East Nashville — and no one is happier about it than Terri herself. "This is what I'm supposed to be doing," she says.

We agree.

Wow! Good to see that someone is making Nashville work for them... again.... :)

Storefront: Karma

NINJAM is a program to allow people to make real music together via the Internet. Every participant can hear every other participant. Each user can also tweak their personal mix to his or her liking. NINJAM is cross-platform, with clients available for Mac OS X and Windows.

NINJAM uses compressed audio which allows it to work with any instrument or combination of instruments. You can sing, play a real piano, play a real saxophone, play a real guitar with whatever effects and guitar amplifier you want, anything. If your computer can record it, then you can jam with it (as opposed to MIDI-only systems that automatically preclude any kind of natural audio collaboration1).

NINJAM - Novel Intervallic Network Jamming Architecture for Music

Google Base arrived recently, sharing the same domain as gmail, so cross site security holes in Google Base will allow access to all the gmail emails, as well as XSS phishing attacks using the google brand. Of course as you would expect for a new product from a major internet company, there’d obviously been no security testing whatsover and there were trivially obvious XSS holes in it.
Like the yahoo programmer last week, the incompetent google base programmer had simply taken a parameter from the querystring, and written it unencoded into the document. So a query *removed* performed the alert, this was fixed about 5 hours after I reported it, showing again that google don’t care about the security of our data enough to not release clearly insecure software.

More Google security failures

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been shot dead, according to Wikipedia, the online, up-to-the-minute encyclopedia.
Apparently, the assassin was a "friend" of the victim of a recent controversy which ironically, smeared former Robert F Kennedy aid John Seigenthaler as a suspect in the assassination of both Kennedy brothers. That claim, which the site carried for several months, along with the assertion that Seigenthaler had lived in Russia, was eventually proved false.
"At 18:54 EST on December 12, John Seigenthaler's wife, who was infuriated at Wikipedia regarding the recent scandal regarding his role in the Kennedy Assassination, came into the house, where Jim was having dinner. Wearing a mask, he [sic] shot him three times in the head and ran," reported the online reference source.
The free-for-all, write-it-yourself website prides itself on its fact checking.
Wales made his fortune in bond trading before setting up the Bomis pornography ring. A long time devotee of Ayn Rand, Wales recently criticized the decision to grant federal funds to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, according to reports on a web discussion board.

Wikipedia founder 'shot by friend of Siegenthaler' (dead)

Now that the weather's turned cold, you might be tempted to warm up your car and leave it unattended before you drive to work. But be forewarned that you may end up losing your car or even receive a ticket for a little known law.
In a Hermitage neighborhood, four cars with the keys left inside were stolen in one week. Three of the owners wanted to warm up their cars in the morning, and when they came out their vehicles were gone.
"If someone wants a car, all they have to do is hang out in a certain area. If they stay at a market, someone will come in and leave their car running," said Det. Randy Eatherly, Metro Auto Theft Division.
Metro Police have been busy issuing $20 tickets to motorists who leave their running cars unattended. Police say you would be surprised at how many drivers do not complain about the tickets. The drivers are usually just happy they are able to drive their vehicle away instead of reporting it missing.
Police say they usually don't write tickets if motorists leave their car running in the driveway. However, if the thefts keep occurring, they say they might start issuing those tickets as well.

Motorists ticketed for unattended, running vehicles

I grew up with a Commodore 64 as my best friend. The C64 offered a new world to escape to from the banality of 5th grade. This is a story I always tell and people respond with a blank stare eventually uttering, "What was the point? That's pretty stupid." So you just shouldn't bother reading this.

When I was ten I acquired a 300 baud modem. Services like Quantum Link (later to become AOL), which were primitive chatroom networks, soon lost appeal after I was repeatedly kicked off for excessive cursing. I started logging on to local BBSs (bulletin board systems) where a SysOp (one lonely guy) set up his computer to receive other users one at a time. The BBS’s featured message boards and download/upload areas. I was still involved in the real world of life, not totally ensconced in the world of computers, but I was looking for a way out, something new that would let me escape the constant ridicule of being fat and weird. Unfortunately these local BBSs were not the answer because they were usually run by old geezer hobbyists and most of the BBS members were from his close circle of friends. On the message boards they usually talked about RUSH.

I was always scouring the cheapo software bins where budget companies like Mastertronic would sell their games for $10 a piece. There was something enticing about these games in that they were obscure and were the effort of a couple people rather than a whole design team. Even if the game was absolute crap, it was a more personal and interesting experience than dropping $40 on a fancy multi-disc game from Electronic Arts. Like my record hoarding and MP3 collecting these days, it was like finding a treasure in a garbage dump.

Free cracked games were easy to come by with a modem. With a snail-slow 300 baud modem, it usually took about two hours to download 160 blocks…but the magical world that opened up by acquiring cracked games was more than worth it…and it wasn’t about the games.

Keep reading ...

My Commodore 64 Secret Life

For several years now, an Australian scientist named Cameron Jones (and a lot of other people) are applying fungus and molds to the playing surface of CD, specifically to play with the mold's audio properties. And you'd be surprised what it sounds like. Rather than muffling the audio, it adds echo, audio holes and glitching, all effects that people pay good money to achieve electronically. Jones and his fellow molecular remixers also use microscopically thin layers of plastics to effect audio, not to mention movies, photography and artwork.

Jones did a one-hour DJ set at a club in which he played only songs which had been altered with fungus, bacteria or synthetic nano-substances. Here are a few MP3 samples from his set, all for download...

This now this is what I call a bio-remix... lol :)

A Musical Fungus Among Us

With luck, you have found this site via either my original Stompbox How-To or the article I wrote for Make: Magazine. I've put up these pages under the stompboxnetworks.com name as the original URL (moro.fbrtech.com/~tora/EVDO) was rather ugly. All the old project pages are mirrored here now.
If you just wandered in here from a web-search or a curious click, you may be wondering just exactly what a 3G/Wifi StompBox is. A Stompbox is a home-brew WWAN (Wireless Wide Area Network) router. In more human terms, it's a compact little box that gets data from cellular towers and re-shares it for multiple computers to use.
To use it all one does is plug it in to the cigarette lighter of a car (or a 12v supply when at home). It automatically boots up and links in to a cellular data service, turning itself into an access point. Turn on your laptop, join the network and voila -- you're on the net! It's just like using a hotspot (such as they have at Starbucks and airports), but it goes anywhere you car goes. Some people have even hauled them around in backpacks to make themselves into a walking network access site.

The Stompbox 3G to WIFI hotspot