From the rbike list at work ... They get these things up to 80mph!

World Human Powered Speed Championships 2005 photos

A JetBlue airliner whose front landing gear became stuck at a 90-degree angle after takeoff landed safely Wednesday night after circling the skies over Los Angeles for nearly three hours. Many of the 140 passengers watched live coverage of their plight on television monitors embedded in the backs of seats.

I watched this live on CNN this afternoon (while working out at the Gym at Google, no less).

Plane Lands Safely in Los Angeles After Landing Gear Becomes Stuck

Just when it seemed Bay Area home prices couldn't jump any higher, they bounded to another new peak in August, although sales counts hovered below record territory.

The median price for a single-family home in the nine counties reached $651,000 last month -- more than three times the national median and nearly 19 percent above last August's price, according to real estate research firm DataQuick. In July, the median was $643,000.

Still red hot, but slowing / Home prices hit new heights in August, but buyers seem less rushed

That backed-up commute traffic really is getting worse, Bay Area transportation officials said Wednesday, speculating that it's evidence the economy is finally pulling out of the slow lane.

For the first time since 2000, traffic congestion in the nine-county Bay Area increased last year, according to an annual report from Caltrans and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the region's transportation planning and financing agency.

BAY AREA / Traffic gridlock breaks trend -- it's worse / Congestion is up by 4% after declining in previous 3 years

CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug. 26 (Reuters) - Venezuela's government temporarily suspended permits for foreign missionaries on Friday, four days after the American evangelist Pat Robertson called for the assassination of President Hugo Ch�vez.

LOL!

Venezuela Will Tighten Rules on Admitting Foreign Preachers

Miller has one very bold idea: He wants to build a new town where there is none, a community that would be carved out of the farm fields and draw hundreds of people from across the nation ... maybe even the world.

What would set this town apart is it would be home to deaf and hard-of-hearing people who want to live together. They'd raise their families here, send their kids to school and share a common language: sign language.

Shouldn't we be working to integrate these people into society better rather than partitioning them off even worse?

Wasn't there a story recently of parents living in some such enclave fighting to keep their children from having surgery to fix a correctible cause of some such handicap?

RE: A town for the deaf? | The San Diego Union-Tribune

Decius wrote:

They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free. Google Talk enables you to call or send instant messages to your friends for free–anytime, anywhere in the world.

Google reinvents another wheel. They seem to be doing a lot of that. This particular wheel, however, is rather plumbed. If anyone actually tries this thing and can tell me what, if anything, is new about it, I'm curious.

The only point I've heard so far is that it uses Jabber. Hrm... See, the reality is that due to a number of decisions that various players have made, the actual standard for IM is, in fact, AIM. This is not the best outcome in the world, as AIM is not an open standard, but it is a standard. I would prefer that Jabber were the standard, but I'm not going to switch to using something that can't communicate with a number of my friends simply because I've got a chip on my sholder about standards, or because I think Google is cool.

There's no "switch" ... there are a number of good multiprotocol clients out there. I can be reached on jabber, btw, as
bucy -at- club.cc dot cmu.edu.
gloop.org will be getting its own one of these days...

RE: Google Talk

The Bush administration is expected to abandon a proposal to extend fuel economy regulations to include Hummer H2's and other huge sport utility vehicles, auto industry and other officials say.

Unfortunately for Detroit, the only place they're making money anymore is SUVs and big pickups... and Japan is starting to eat into that as well.

Fuel Rule Change for Big S.U.V.'s Seen as Unlikely

James Doohan, who faked a Scottish burr to create one of television's most endearing characters, Chief Engineer Montgomery (Scotty) Scott of the U.S.S. Enterprise, died at the age of 85.

This happened July 20th, apparently. His ashes are going to be shot into space by Space Services Inc which provided that same service
for Gene Roddenberry and Timothy Leary awhile back.

James Doohan, Scotty on 'Star Trek,' Dies at 85

Hot Coffee. Everybody's getting some this summer.

I'm not talking about the beverage, rather the on-screen sex in the videogame "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" that has triggered a Federal Trade Commission probe and inflamed the passions of the U.S. Congress.

It seems like a lot of prudes have been really pissed off about
GTA for a long time but until now haven't really been able to do much about it since it was clearly labeled, etc. But now that Rockstar has actually done something wrong, all of these people are pouncing on the opportunity to make them pay. I saw another article somewhere mentioning a class-action lawsuit that's brewing, now.

'San Andreas' Rocks the 'Righteous'