freakn wrote:

I am not sure if this is funny or sad.

It could be meant to be ironic... but somehow i don't think she was trying.

RE: YouTube - Miss Teen USA 2007 - South Carolina answers a question

Bridget Dehl shushed her 21-month-old son, Gavin, then clapped a hand over his mouth to squelch his tiny screams amid the Sunday brunch bustle. When Gavin kept yelping "yeah, yeah, yeah," Ms. Dehl whisked him from his highchair and out the door.

Right past the sign warning the cafe's customers that "children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven," and right into a nasty spat roiling the stroller set in Chicago's changing Andersonville neighborhood.

As far as I'm concerned, there's only one side to this issue. It is completely inconsiderate to take small children that can't be quiet, sit still, etc, into an adult establishment like a coffee shop where they proceed to irritate the piss out of everyone else there.

At Center of a Clash, Rowdy Children in Coffee Shops

Delcan NET, a Canadian company, developed the system which triangulates the location of each driver by monitoring the signal sent from the cell phone as it is handed off from one cell tower to the next. Each phone is uniquely identified and the information is compared with a highway map to record on what road each motorist is traveling at any given time. The system also records the speed of each vehicle, opening up another potential ticketing technology.

A pilot program in Baltimore only tracks Cingular cell phones on 1,000 miles of road. AirSage Inc. has contracted with Sprint to spy on motorists in Norfolk, Virginia and Atlanta and Macon, Georgia.

Wow thats fucked up. AirSage says identifying information is stripped from the data in their pilot in Georgia.

Missouri To Track Through Cell Phones

A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.

The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known.

"We've found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer," said EFF Staff Technologist Seth David Schoen.

According to this page, the Secret Service was the only organization that has the ability to decode the information in the dots. That means that its usage is (was?) limited to investigations on counterfeiting operations and threats against government personnel. That's the only stuff that falls under the Secret Service's jurisdiction.

I would be curious if the FBI has the ability to use this encoding system in investigations. I'd find it strange if they couldn't. Now that the information about how its encoded is public knowledge, its arguable that any government investigative agency could use it. Once the serial number of the printer is obtained, who it was sold to is just a subpoena ot two away.

EFF Breaks Secret Tracking Code in Color Printers

In his book Darwin's Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson, professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University in New York state, says that religiosity emerged as a "useful" genetic trait because it had the effect of making social groups more unified. The communal nature of religion certainly would have given groups of hunter-gatherers a stronger sense of togetherness. This produced a leaner, meaner survival machine, a group that was more likely to be able to defend a waterhole, or kill more antelope, or capture their opponents' daughters. The better the religion was at producing an organised and disciplined group, the more effective they would have been at staying alive, and hence at passing their genes on to the next generation. This is what we mean by "natural selection": adaptations which help survival and reproduction get passed down through the genes. Taking into account the additional suggestion, from various studies of twins, that we may have an inherited disposition towards religious belief, is there any evidence that the Divine Idea might be carried in our genes?

I was recently discussing the need for one to have faith and this article is interesting look at the topic.

EducationGuardian.co.uk | Research | Robert Winston: Why do we believe in God?

Profiteering ghouls have been using debit cards distributed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina - intended to buy essentials for evacuated families - in luxury-goods stores as far away as Atlanta.

"We've seen three of the cards," said a senior employee of the Louis Vuitton store at the Lenox Square Mall in affluent Buckhead, who asked not to be named. "Two I'm certain have purchased; one actually asked if she could use it in the store. This has been since Saturday."

The distinctive white cards were distributed by the Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency and carry a value of up to $2,000.

Wow, nice. Love the gossip pages, sad part is it is most likely true.

Lavish tastes of card-carrying lowlifes

"PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (AP) -- The U.S. Mint seized 10 Double Eagle gold coins from 1933, among the rarest and most valuable coins in the world, that were turned in by a jeweler seeking to determine their authenticity."

...Sounds like more fascist BS to me....

US Mint Seizes Rare Coins

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - It may be
President Bush's nickname for key political adviser Karl Rove, but some editors don't think it belongs in their newspapers.

About a dozen papers objected to Tuesday's and Wednesday's "Doonesbury" comic strips, and some either pulled or edited them.

The strips refer to Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff, as "Turd Blossom."

Some Papers Pull, Edit 'Doonesbury' Strip - Yahoo! News

Researchers at Imperial College London developed a mathematical formula and modelled courtship as a sequential game to find the best way to impress the ladies.

Their results show that offering an expensive present signals the man's serious intentions but he must be wary of being exploited by gold-diggers who will dump him after receiving the gift.

Wining and dining best way to woo women - Yahoo! News

Miami, Florida -- Authorities are sending convicted sex offenders to jail on probation violations for having racy magazines such as Maxim, in the latest crackdown on probationers in the state.

Officers searched the Miami home of Andrew Calderon on May 18 and found a sexy calendar, a racy poster, and a few copies of Maxim magazine. Calderon, 23, was jailed for six days before a judge ordered his release.

What is next? Sending a guy to jail for watching TV?

Weird News - Tampa Bay's 10 News - WTSP