Free Republic

Good News and Bad News Fakikeng,South Africa : 33 year-old Hein Wagner of Cape Town –blind since birth – has set a new land speed record for the visually challenged: driving 167 mph across a remote airstrip in a “borrowed Maserati V8 Gran Sport”. Wagner was accompanied by a sighted person, who acted as navigator,and the episode – staged to raise money for charity – was filmed for the Guiness World Book of Records. ( The bad news is: Mr. Wagner wants to set a speed record in an airplane next. ) Los Angeles: Those opposed to the idea of...

WND Exclusive CONTROLLING THE SUBSTANCES Big money in Mexican meth New laws cut down on U.S. labs, but drugs still flow Posted: August 19, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com While new state and federal laws are cutting down the number of U.S. meth labs, the deadly drugs continue to flow into the U.S. across the porous border with Mexico, say law enforcement authorities. The federal anti-meth law was recently amended to permit states to impose their own stiffer restrictions and penalties. In Oregon, for instance, legislators now require cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine, a principal ingredient in methamphetamine, to...

Former police chief Haulk files to run for CIty Council By PETER J. HOVANEC -- MONROE (Aug. 5, 2005) With about three hours left in the municipal filing period, the races keep getting more interesting. On the last full day of filing, former Monroe Police Chief Bobby Haulk joined the race for Monroe City Council. Haulk retired in June from after being ousted by the former city manager and many of the council members he is looking to join. Haulk first retired Oct. 28, reportedly after being given an ultimatum by the council to resign or be fired. He was...

High speed actuators enable the robot’s fingers to move through 180 degrees in 0.1 second (Image: Akio Namiki/University of Tokyo) If robots are to inherit the Earth, then they should at least be able to catch. So say the researchers behind a bot that can match the most skilled human baseball player faced with a hurtling ball. The robotic catcher, developed by scientists at the University of Tokyo, Japan, can comfortably grab a ball careering through the air at 300 kilometres per hour, or 83 metres per second, its creators say. And, of course, the robot never gets tired...

Sailors who traditionally dumped barrels of oil into the sea to calm stormy waters may have been on to something, a new study suggests. The old practice reduces wind speeds in tropical hurricanes by damping ocean spray, according to a new mathematical “sandwich model”. As hurricane winds kick up ocean waves, large water droplets become suspended in the air. This cloud of spray can be treated mathematically as a third fluid sandwiched between the air and sea. “Our calculations show that drops in the spray decrease turbulence and reduce friction, allowing for far greater wind speeds – sometimes eight times...

U.S. won't cut troop levels in OkinawaThe Yomiuri Shimbun The United States, citing a possible surprise assault on Taiwan by China's special forces as a realistic scenario, has told Japan it will be difficult to reduce or relocate to the Japanese mainland any of its marine corps combat units stationed in Okinawa, government sources said Wednesday. Washington has made this position on the marines in Okinawa known to the Japanese side through bilateral talks including consultations over the realignment of U.S. troops and their bases in Japan, the sources said. The United States has about 18,000 marines stationed in Okinawa....

Light Speed a Barrier? To go, the children of tomorrow may have had to discover what is believed impossible today -- how to travel faster than light. Mel Zisfein, deputy director of the national Air and Space Museum, and an aerosynamicist amoung other things, has noted a similarity between the way most people today regard "C," the speed of light, and the way many people a generation or so ago regarded "a", the speed of sound. For this publication, he sketched the illustrations which appear on the following page, and drafted the following... "Some people used to look at...

Metropolitan Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey yesterday outlined a plan to expand the District's use of speed and red-light cameras, but was not aware of details to reimburse a private contractor for issuing as many as 103,000 traffic-camera citations a month. Chief Ramsey said the police department is preparing to add at least 10 red-light cameras to the 39 devices already installed at city intersections. He said police also will add several speed cameras, including two new vans to monitor motorists in construction zones. "We are implementing these program expansions with the strong support of the communities who will benefit...

SAN DIEGO -- If you're light, it's fairly easy to travel at your own speed -- that is to say 186,282 miles per second or 299,800 kilometers per second. But if you are matter, then it's another matter altogether.Nothing we know of zips along more quickly than light. Einstein, nearly 100 years ago, said it's not possible. For us, the speed limit makes strange sense: Go faster than light, and you could return before you've left, become your own grandpa, or perform other leaps of cosmic logic.Fast forward a century. Astronomers are now measuring stuff -- material, matter, things --...

Speed cop pulls twins A Canadian policeman had to look twice after booking identical twins for speeding on the same day - in the same car. Constable Chris Legere pulled over an 18-year-old woman, from Akwesasne, for driving at 96mph in the morning, reports Canadian Press. Hours later, the same car was stopped by Legere for travelling at 92mph in the opposite direction. He thought at first he'd caught the same person twice but an identification check showed that it was her twin sister. "They don't only share the same birthday but they share the same offences," said Const. Joel...

Tourists run for their lives as the first of six tsunamis starts to roll towards Hat Rai Lay Beach, near Krabi in southern Thailand. One woman runs towards the waves. Photo: AFP The woman continues to run as the wave advances.Photo: AFP With the waves engulfing boats, the woman makes contact with her group. It is not known if they survived.Photo: AFP

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) -- International Speedway Corp. has paid $100 million to buy land in Staten Island to build a New York City track.  The company, which owns or operates 11 of NASCAR's major tracks, hopes to build a $600 million facility on dormant industrial land. Officials said Wednesday it could represent the largest construction project the motorsports giant has undertaken, nearly triple the amount it spent to build tracks in Kansas City, Kan., and the Chicago area.  Lesa France Kennedy, president of the family-controlled ISC, said the company has to complete a feasibility study before deciding whether to...

Albanian terrorists take Greek bus hostages My Sat news is reporting 2 Albanians took an unknown number of hostages on the bus. Bus driver escaped. A wave of such terror attacks hit Greece in the 90s. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ned=us&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=Bus+hostages+Greece&lr=&sa=N&tab=nw

I have experienced a slowdown after 10.3.6 - tearing my hair out not wanting to revert to 10.3.5. OnyX - ran it many times - no joy. Finally got a tip to run it in a different mode. About OnyX... • OnyX is a maintenance and optimization tool for Mac OS X. It provides access to some hidden features of the Finder, Dock, and Safari, shows the different logs, allows removal of certain files and folders that may grow cumbersome and more... • OnyX is Freeware, gratis and freely usable; you may copy and distribute it at will. You can...

Tank vs. Crank Stormin' Norman's 68-ton grunt meets Jay Leno'stank-powered torpedo, for no particular reason.Hollywood's cheapest commodity is the story pitch. Some are gems. Most are stinkers. Ours to NBC Tonight Show host Jay Leno was somewhere in between.The story starts in Leno's garage in Burbank, California. He's a fellow with a taste for gonzo vehicles and a job that lets him eat big. Perhaps you've heard about the motorcycle with the helicopter turbine engine? How about the Rolls-Royce Phantom stuffed with a 27-liter Merlin V-12 from a World War II Spitfire?Not long ago, while inspecting these and other oddballs...

Crystal methamphetamine -- or "speed" -- seems to be a driving factor behind higher rates of sexually transmitted disease among gay and bisexual men.In one study from San Francisco, gay men who visited a health clinic were twice as likely to be infected with the AIDS virus if they had recently used the illegal drug. And they were nearly five times as likely to be diagnosed with syphilis.Armed with the new statistics, federal health officials said Wednesday they're searching for effective ways to cope with what they see as a growing threat. Among other things, researchers are studying the...

This is a cool site that tells you how fast you're really connected/surfing at. You can aim it at the US, the whole world, or several different nations. I'm on DSL at the outer radius of the service area. I get 300-450kbps if I plug right into the test line on my Network Interface Box. If I plug straight into my phone lines I get about that speed, but eventually it drops the connection. It will hold it if I plug it into a splitter with a phone in the other port, but it only runs 100-150kbps. -Eric

During rush hour recently in Shanghai, China, I traveled 19 miles in 7½ minutes. I wasn't flying, exactly. I was aboard a high-speed magnetic-levitation transportation system. Now I can't help but ponder more efficient ways of moving people into, between, within and around our cities -- especially when I'm stuck in traffic. Let's face it: American transportation problems result from our love of private automobile ownership and the government policies that enable our oil addiction. Driving cars in cities is like using a pair of pliers to bang a nail into a wall -- the wrong tool for the job....

Group to Propose New High-Speed Wireless Format Thu Aug 12,12:46 PM ET LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A group of technology companies including Texas Instruments Inc. (NYSE:TXN), STMicroelectronics (STM.PA) and Broadcom Corp. (Nasdaq:BRCM), on Thursday said they will propose a new wireless networking standard up to 10 times the speed of the current generation. The group says they are submitting a plan for a new standard for a popular short range wireless networking technology known as Wi-Fi -- which is used in airports, hotels and coffee shops to access the Web without wires. The group, calling itself "WWiSE," said their version...

Kerry is again spouting off like a forgotten teakettle boiling over on the stove -- hot air and moisture, but no substance. As with the professional stage magician, Kerry's campaign is based on misdirection, illusion and quick changes. In January of 2003 Kerry Said: "Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime. ... He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation. ... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction ... So...

Speed of light may have changed recently 19:00 30 June 04 The speed of light, one of the most sacrosanct of the universal physical constants, may have been lower as recently as two billion years ago - and not in some far corner of the universe, but right here on Earth. The controversial finding is turning up the heat on an already simmering debate, especially since it is based on re-analysis of old data that has long been used to argue for exactly the opposite: the constancy of the speed of light and other constants. A varying speed of light...

Speed and Power: Complements, Not Substitutes June 2004 By William R. Hawkins Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wants to radically restructure the U.S. military, particularly the Army, to put even more emphasis on the speed of strategic deployment. Under the so-called "10-30-30 plan," major forces must be capable of deploying to a distant theater in 10 days, defeating an enemy within 30 days and then be ready for redeployment to a new battle somewhere else within another 30 days. This is a much more ambitious goal than the previous standard of being able to deploy a corps-sized force of up...

Derailed Amtrak Train Traveling Near Speed Limit Wed Apr 7, 2004 11:26 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An Amtrak train was traveling one mph under the speed limit before derailing in a Mississippi swamp, killing one person and injuring dozens of others, investigators said late on Wednesday. The National Transportation Safety Board said data recordings from the City of New Orleans showed the Chicago-bound train was clocked at 78 mph just 10 seconds before the engineer activated the emergency brakes at 6:33 p.m. CDT/7:30 p.m. EDT on Tuesday. The train with 61 passengers and 12 crewmembers jumped the tracks in...

<p>SACRAMENTO (AP) -- California's high-speed train project is running short of cash and staff and may not have the resources to keep its office manned or complete an environmental study, its executive director said Tuesday.</p> <p>"We are just this much short of basically closing the door," Mehdi Morshed told members of the California High-Speed Rail Authority's board.</p>

A physics professor will try to turn back time in an experiment at the Miami Museum of Science. It's back to the future all over again -- at least, that's what Carlos Dolz has in mind. The Florida International University physics professor plans to take time to task at 10 a.m. Wednesday, when he presents an experiment that involves using acceleration to speed up a digital clock by four seconds. Dolz's experiment -- which takes six hours to finish -- will become part of Playing With Time, the current exhibit at the Miami Museum of Science. Dolz, who has been...

7 teenagers die in Millington joyride Why? By Chris Conley Contact March 1, 2004 A late-night joyride turned to tragedy when a 15-year-old crashed the car he was driving into a tree near Millington, killing himself and six friends. A passing motorist discovered the crushed car and the teens on Chambers Road, between Quito and Epperson Mill roads, about 2:30 a.m. Sunday. Police said they did not know exactly when it happened. The teens, all students at Millington Middle School, were dead when police arrived. They were identified as Michael Fradella, 15, the driver; and passengers Trey Hannah, 15; Lauren...

<p>LANCASTER, Pa. — Barry Landis was doing 109 mph when the radar detector on the dash of his '97 Dodge Avenger started to beep and blink. That's when he saw the police cruiser.</p> <p>Why was he driving so fast? Because he was in such a good mood.</p>

Apple To Build A Second Supercomputer At Virginia Tech ROANOKE, Va. (AP)--After building one of the world's fastest supercomputers on its first try, Apple Computer Inc. is again teaming with Virginia Tech to make another high performance machine using its new 64-bit Xserve G5 computer. Xserve, a thinner, more compact machine designed for clustering with other computers, will replace the supercomputer Tech built in November using off-the-shelf G5 PowerMacs. Tech project leader Srinidhi Varadarajan said the university will upgrade from PowerMacs to Xserves in April or May. Tech is still negotiating the price with Apple, though Varadarajan said Monday any...

EU plans charter flights to speed up deportations By Stephen Castle in Brussels 24 January 2004 Charter flights are to be used to repatriate failed asylum-seekers and other illegal immigrants under a new €30m (£20m) initiative announced by EU ministers. A new European agency for border control will co-ordinate returns by EU member states in an effort to help stem the rising numbers of economic migrants crossing borders. While control of the repatriation policy will remain with national governments, the agency will arrange charter flights if groups of countries have sufficient numbers of people to return to make economic sense....

Hehehehe... Scanner traffic - ISP-BOLO Large, Blue tour bus with John Edwards on the side, Northbound on I-35 at the 156 milemarker, with off duty trooper following in excess of 90MPH... Apparently, speed limits don't apply to Presidnet wannabe trial lawyer's bus drivers :)

Bob looked haggard but was feeling fabulous. Chewing gum at a manic clip, circling the labyrinthine halls of the West Side Club on a recent Sunday afternoon, he had been awake since Friday, thanks to a glassine pouch of crystalline powder he had tucked beneath the mattress of a room he rented in this Chelsea bathhouse. The powder, known as methamphetamine, or crystal meth, had helped Bob conquer a half-dozen sex partners during a 35-hour binge. Like many of the men cruising the two-level club lined with closet-size cubicles, Bob, a 37-year-old advertising copywriter, was "tweaking," high on a wildly...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) -- States that raised their speed limits to 70 mph or more have seen a big jump in traffic deaths, according to a report Monday by an auto safety group.</p> <p>Some 1,880 more people died between 1996 and 1999 in the 22 states with higher speed limits on rural interstates, said the study, compiled by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, funded by insurers. It was based on data collected by the Land Transport Safety Authority of New Zealand. Congress repealed the 55 mph national speed limit in November 1995.</p>

Virtual hurricanes have appeared in computer models of the Earth's climate for the first time. The swirling storms are visible in the first results from the Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan - the world's fastest supercomputer. The results, being presented at a workshop in Cambridge, UK, on Wednesday, are "really quite staggering" says Julia Slingo, Director of the Centre for Global Atmospheric Modelling at the University of Reading, UK. Whereas most climate models divide the Earth into blocks measuring hundreds of kilometres across, the powerful Earth Simulator can run models with cells as small as 10 kilometres. This means that...

WALDO, Fla. - Much like U.S. 301 splits this north Florida town down the middle, a billboard warning that the town is a speed trap has residents divided. In the latest salvo of an 8-year-old war with police Chief A. W. Smith, AAA has erected a black and yellow billboard on the highway between Waldo and Starke, northeast of Gainesville. "Speed Trap," the sign says in black block lettering inside a bright yellow diamond. Beside it, yellow on black, is the word "Waldo." Under that: "6 miles ahead." A similar billboard warns motorists about Lawtey, about 20 miles north of...

<p>Dan Knights has about 150 pounds and a few gazillion brain cells on his Rubik's Cube, but it's not always clear who has the upper hand in the relationship.</p> <p>Like some kind of time-traveling ambassador from 1982, the 24-year-old takes his cube everywhere, whether he's visiting a friend or his favorite cafe or just walking down the sidewalk near his North Beach home.</p>

Government Ratings I was amused recently to see that the federal government has rated vehicles on their propensity to turn over. Their ratings are based on a math formula, not on a field test. But who needs the federal government to tell them the obvious? Anybody with sense enough to pour rain out of a boot knows that a tall vehicle will tip easier than one built low to the ground. After all, racing cars are not built low to the ground just for looks. Anytime a vehicle gets into a turn, centrifugal force and gravity have a contest. Gravity...

Well the answer is that the photon travels as a wave and does somehow manage to do what seems quite impossible and go through both slits and interfere with itself. If we cover one slit then we know which one it goes through and indeed the interference patterns vanish. Even more strange is the fact that it we put a detector on one of the slits to tell us whether the photon goes through that slit or the other one then the interference pattern vanishes. The act of observing the electron makes its wave nature collapse into a particle. The...

Woman thought she could not be arrested at home A US woman led police on a high-speed police chase to her house - because she thought she could not be arrested at home. The woman, of Alexandria, Louisiana, told officers she had seen someone avoid arrest in a similar manner on a TV show, reports The Town Talk newspaper. But once she pulled into her driveway, officers from four agencies surrounded and arrested her and she now faces charges including speeding, reckless driving, and failure to give way to an emergency vehicle. The chase began when a police officer noticed...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 May 4 A Sonic Boom Credit: Ensign John Gay, USS Constellation, US Navy Explanation: Many people have heard a sonic boom, but few have seen one. When an airplane travels at a speed faster than sound, density waves of sound emitted by the plane cannot precede the plane, and so accumulate in a cone behind the plane. When this shock wave passes, a listener hears all at...

U.S. Aerospace Prowess Hinges on New Projects, New Hires posted: 03:50 pm ET 08 April 2003 COLORADO SPRINGS, CO -- The U.S. government needs to fund bold new space projects if its aerospace industry is to continue to attract the "best and brightest" young engineers and scientists to its ranks, executives from several of the largest aerospace companies said Tuesday. Speaking at the 19th National Space Symposium here, senior executives from Boeing, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, and Northrop Grumman Space Technologies presented a sober assessment of an industry that is seeing new graduates pass it by even as large numbers...

Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission Moves Ahead; NASA Approves Full-Scale Development for APL-Managed New Horizons The solar system's farthest known planetary outpost is closer to getting its first visitor. This week NASA gave The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Southwest Research Institute and their partners the go-ahead to start full development of the first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. The New Horizons spacecraft is scheduled to launch in January 2006, swing past Jupiter for a gravity boost and scientific studies in 2007, and reach Pluto and its moon, Charon, as early as summer 2015. The arrival date depends...

NASA Researchers Put New Spin On Einstein's Relativity Theory Albert Einstein might be astonished to learn that NASA physicists have applied his relativity theory to a concept he introduced but later disliked namely that two particles that interact could maintain a connection even if separated by a vast distance. Researchers often refer to this connection as "entanglement." Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., have discovered that this entanglement is relative, depending on how fast an observer moves with respect to the particles, and that entanglement can be created or destroyed just by relative motion. This might change...

Adml Sir Michael Boyce, the Chief of the Defence Staff, tells John Keegan that, with two exceptions, the Iraq war has gone generally to plan Things have gone generally according to plan in Iraq, the Chief of the Defence Staff, Adml Sir Michael Boyce, told The Telegraph yesterday. The chief exceptions to that were in the timing of the British advance to Basra and the organisation of the campaign in the Kurdish region. Originally the British planned to advance on Basra about two days later than they did in practice. The timetable was advanced because of the Iraqi missile bombardment...

Thursday, 6 March, 2003, 08:51 GMT Net speed record smashed By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor Scientists have set a new internet speed record by transferring 6.7 gigabytes of data across 10,978 kilometres (6,800 miles), from Sunnyvale in the US to Amsterdam in Holland, in less than one minute Using a quantity of data equivalent to two feature-length DVD-quality movies, the transfer was accomplished at an average speed of more than 923 megabits per second, or more than 3,500 times faster than a typical home broadband connection. Les Cottrel, of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (Slac) Computer...

Context  Previous studies have reported that early initiation of cannabis (marijuana) use is a significant risk factor for other drug use and drug-related problems.Objective  To examine whether the association between early cannabis use and subsequent progression to use of other drugs and drug abuse/dependence persists after controlling for genetic and shared environmental influences.Design  Cross-sectional survey conducted in 1996-2000 among an Australian national volunteer sample of 311 young adult (median age, 30 years) monozygotic and dizygotic same-sex twin pairs discordant for early cannabis use (before age 17 years).Main Outcome Measures  Self-reported subsequent nonmedical use of prescription sedatives, hallucinogens, cocaine/other stimulants, and opioids; abuse or dependence...

Physicists leveled heavy criticism Thursday on a report from last week that claimed the speed of gravity had been determined by observation and was equal to the speed of light. One physicist called the interpretation of the finding "nonsense". Others were more diplomatic, suggesting that the experiment, involving observations of the bending of light from a distant galaxy as the light sped by the planet Jupiter, had instead measured other phenomena. The brewing controversy, which illustrates the fits and spurts with which science sometimes grudgingly moves forward, appears to have ground to a stalemate for now as the two scientists...

SUV drivers go off-road Sunday, January 05, 2003 Last week I reported in this space how New Jersey is the birthplace of revolution against a leading irritant in modern life, the cell phone. This week I'm proud to report that our state has accomplished another historic first in the fight against irritating technology. The Garden State seems to be the first state in which a public official has gone on television to tell SUV drivers to please stop running off the road. The historic event occurred last month, during the first of the many snowstorms we've had this season. So...

Preliminary court-martial proceedings begin next month against two U.S. fighter pilots involved in a tragic incident over Afghanistan that cost four lives and exposed a little-known fact about the way America fights its long-distance air wars. Majs. Harry Schmidt and William Umbach are facing up to 64 years in prison for a friendly fire incident over Kandahar, Afghanistan, on April 17 that killed four Canadian soldiers and wounded eight others. When the two were sent on their mission over Afghanistan and Iraq, the Air Force gave them $30 million F-16 fighter jets, laser-guided precision munitions, state-of-the-art technology, and something that...

Police Seek Camera Shooter LONDON (Reuters) - Police hunted for a marksman with a grudge on Monday after two roadside speed cameras were shot to pieces in rural east England. Norfolk police said a sniper, probably armed with a high-powered air rifle, riddled the cameras with pellets causing 70,000 pounds ($111,000) worth of damage. The attacks happened days before a number of newly installed cameras were set to go live at accident black spots in the area. "You often have to worry about the mentality of people who do this sort of thing," Bryan Edwards, spokesman for the Norfolk Casualty...