Microsoft beats Apple, files iPod patents

CBC News

There are likely some red faces at Apple Computer.

Apple took too long to file a patent on part of its blockbuster iPod music players, so Microsoft jumped in and beat Apple to it.

Tech pundits are snickering at the prospect of Apple having to pay Bill Gates big royalties on the hugely popular iPods, which account for more than a third of Apple's revenue.

On Tuesday, technology lawyer John Ferrell said Apple still has a lot of options, and this isn't a knockout blow. He said Apple could file a declaration stating it invented the technology before Microsoft filed its patent request.

The company could also alter the patent claims so they don't overlap Microsoft's. Ferrell estimates it could be at least another six months before it's all sorted out. Full Story

You got to love it,,ms is so worried about their patents,they put spyware in their updates.Then they turn around and steal ipod's shit,,,big biss,,,got to love it ,,,,NOT..

Well,more Bush bashing (in his own words) ;)

The following assertions were collected from public statements made by George W. Bush and his official spokesmen since 1997. Originally from Harper's Magazine, May 2004.
SourcesThe President of the United States is not a fact-checker.

I'm not a statistician.

I'm not a numbers-cruncher.

I'm not one of these bean counters.

I'm not very analytical.

I'm not a precision guy.

The President is not a micromanager.

I'm not a member of the legislative branch.

The President is not a rubber stamp for the Congress.

I'm not a censor-guy.

I'm not a lawyer.

I'm not a doctor.

The President is not an economist.

I'm not a stockbroker or a stock-picker.

I'm not a forecaster.

I'm not a predictor.

I'm not a pollster, a poll-reader guy.

I'm not a very good prognosticator of elections.

I'm not a committee chairman.

I'm not of the Washington scene.

I'm not a lonely person.

I'm not a poet.

I'm not a very good novelist.

I'm not a textbook player.

I'm not an emailer.

I'm not a very long-winded person.

I'm not a very formal guy.

I am not a revengeful person.

I'm not an Iraqi citizen.

I'm not a divider.

I am not a unilateralist.

I'm not a tree, I'm a Bush.

LOL,at least he has not said"I'm not a crook" ;)

Bits and Bytes

Some Random stuff found surfing ;)

Siberia's Rapid Thaw Causes Alarm -- (BBC -- August 11, 2005)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4141348.stm
The huge expanse of western Siberia is thawing for the first time since its formation, 11,000 years ago. The area, which is the size of France and Germany combined, could release billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This could potentially act as a tipping point, causing global warming to snowball, scientists fear.

Scientists Sound Alarm on Arctic Ice Cap -- (CBC News -- July 29, 2005)
http://north.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=arctic-ice-29072005
Satellite data for the month of June show Arctic sea ice has shrunk to a record low, raising concerns about climate change, coastal erosion, and changes to wildlife patterns. The National Snow and Ice Data Center in the United States uses remote sensing imagery to survey ice cover at both poles. The center says 2002 was a record low year for sea ice cover in the Arctic, since satellite observations began in 1979. There's evidence that may have been the lowest coverage in a century. Now scientists fear this year could be worse


'Strange Things' Along Pacific Coast Waters -- (Associated Press -- August 2, 2005)
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8796487/
Marine biologists are seeing mysterious and disturbing things along the Pacific Coast this year: higher water temperatures, plummeting catches of fish, lots of dead birds on the beaches, and perhaps most worrisome, very little plankton - the tiny organisms that are a vital link in the ocean food chain. "The bottom has fallen out of the coastal food chain, and there's just not enough food out there," said Julia Parrish, a seabird ecologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.


Can you say "Global Warming" ?

Are You a Science-Fiction Scholar?

Take the test ;)

Mine was

Are You a Science-Fiction Scholar?
Feet on the ground, but reaching for the stars.
You talk the talk, but would you know what to do in an alien invasion? You got 10/11 correct.

YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT

In a case argued before the Supreme Court last Wednesday, Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement explained that coercive interrogations in no way violate the rights of detainees. He claimed that the constitutional violation at issue in Miranda v. Arizona occurs only in court, if and when the prosecution tries to introduce a suspect's coerced statements as evidence.

Put bluntly, you have no right to remain silent. What you have, instead, is a right not to be criminally prosecuted on the basis of your coerced statements. If the government is correct, then the language of the Miranda warnings is wrong. Full Story

I was digging around and found this.Other than that,I'm going to keep silent on it ;)

Rove gets a raise.

I'm not makeing this up,I think the folks in D.C. have cooked what little brains they had in the heat ;)

Top White House staff, including Rove, get annual raises
John Byrne

The top pay for senior White House aides, including Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and Legislative Affairs Director Candida Wolff, mushroomed to $161,000 at the beginning of July, according to a list sent to Congress and obtained by National Journal,RAW STORY can reveal.

Democrats raised the issue on the Democratic Congressional Campaign website Wednesday morning. "Long live the era of personal responsibility!" they wrote. Rove and Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff Scooter Libby both got raises; each has been questioned by a grand jury about their role in the outing of a covert CIA operative.

"The top salary, paid to 19 aides, is up $4,000 from last year, barely matching the annual inflation rate," penned National Journal reporter Alexis Simendinger. "At the low end of the pecking order, some young staff assistants and correspondence aides earn $30,000 for the honor of sitting on the fringes of history."

Long May You Fly !!

Another bloger was bitching about the money the U.S. is spending on the space program,,,,get a brain!!





Warning,Rant ahead!!




We send people into space useing what is early 1970's technology after it was raped by the bureaucrats and politicians.Then the nomral guy on the streets,wonders why the shuttles fail.Duh....,they were made to last about 20 years(before they got cut),,,,anybody out there what do the math?Add to that the shit happens factor,you can do your best but random crap happens.Go ahead and "get the but it should not have happened"and "we should have fixed that before it failed"out of your mind,hind sight is always 20/20,we are human.
It is a frontier,people die,but that has not slowed down the human race up intell now.Think about it people,how many died founding the U.S. or any other country?LOL,do you think if you saw everybody killed in a auto wreck every day,would you stop driveing,or would you keep on doing what you have to do ?
Yes, the folks that strap a small nuke to their asses and then ride it into space are brave (IMO and hero's)are they braver than the folk's that put themselves into the hole of a 1800's sailing ship or walked across a iceage land bridge?Good question,but I'll let somebody else spilt that hair.
Realy,they all come down to one thing,resources.Very,simple realy.
Whithout numbers it is easy to see.

x = earth and it's resource's
y = is the number of humans


x (earth)is what we started with,,,it's not growing
y keeps getting larger


So,leaveing out alot of crap and double talk:

As time goes by,every person(y) gets a smaller peice of the pie(x),,want to guess what thats going to do for the human race?I will pass on the bitching about use of resourses and help for the 3rd world countries(and are the 3rd world countries going to help the problem?....another rant),Yes,the U.S. and other 1st world(is that a word?)use more of the worlds resourses,,,,,,and everybody else wants the tech we have,,,not going to happen inless we can make the (x) bigger.
How can any bureaucrat,politician,or anybody with a thought in their head for the next generation,say that we are wasteing money on space?

I could go on for a hell of a long time,,but one last thought.Do you what your kids,and grandkids looking back and calling you a bunch of loses,nuts(or worse),,,Hmmmmm,that is saying if there are people here.


Think,
DDNC

'Star Trek' Engineer James Doohan Dies

Wed Jul 20, 7:24 PM ET


James Doohan, who played engineer Montgomery Scott, the scrappy Scotsman who repeatedly gave the Starship Enterprise "all she's got" in the original "Star Trek" TV series and motion pictures, died Wednesday. He was 85.


Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. at his Redmond, Wash., home with his wife of 31 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease, he said. Full Story


We will miss you Scotty ;(

More IT jobs going "off Shore"

Outsourcing overseas? How about only 3 miles from the U.S. coast?

What San Diego-based start-up SeaCode Inc. plans to do is nothing if not novel: anchor a cruise ship three miles off the coast of Los Angeles, fill it with up to 600 programmers from around the world, eliminate visa restrictions and make it easy for customers to visit the site via water taxi. The two men behind the venture -- Roger Green, who describes himself as an IT and outsourcing veteran, and IT consultant David Cook, whose job history includes a stint as a ship captain -- recently discussed their plan in an interview with Computerworld.

What is the business model? Green: The promise of the benefits of outsourcing in distant lands doesn't come free. Most of the gotchas are related to the geography and to the cultural difference.


What are some of those gotchas? Green: Communicating requirements, doing knowledge transfer [and] managing the project are very difficult to do even when you are in the same building, [let alone] when it's across the world.

That's the same argument made by nearshore providers in Canada. Cook: But we offer the price of India with the proximity of the United States -- that's the differentiator.


I see a lawsuit or two comeing ;)

Pentagon to share data with civilian agencies

WTF?
I just got done reading the "Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support" Link
I don't know if I should grab a gun or a beer.It is new Pentagon strategy for securing the U.S. homeland.The paper is asserting the president's authority to deploy ground combat forces on U.S. territory "to intercept and defeat threats."
Ok,it's the same goverment double speak,but they are talking about useing DOD assets to gather info on "terrorists" and putting boots on the ground in the U.S.,well and good,but who is to say who is a "terrorist".Read between the lines,and it is anybody old George W. says.
There is no over site provided for at all.I think they might have a problem getting around the "Posse Comitatus Act",but looks like they are going to pack the Supreme Court with who they want.LOL,but then the court has never been able to do much after the military is on the ground.

All Hail emperor shrub........


Screw it I'm going for a beer ;)

PC run amok!!

Ok,this realy is getting to be way to PC for me ;)

BBC edits out the word terrorist
By Tom Leonard
(Filed: 12/07/2005)

The BBC has re-edited some of its coverage of the London Underground and bus bombings to avoid labelling the perpetrators as "terrorists", it was disclosed yesterday.More

Well,what else you going to call them?I could think of a few things,,,but it's mostly a G rated blog ;)

Man arrested for hopping on to home Wi-Fi network

OK,if you have ever doubted that Fla. has taken over the job of nut house for the US from Ca. you should check this one out ;(

By Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service
July 07, 2005

A man who allegedly accessed a home Wi-Fi network in St. Petersburg, Florida, from a parked car got logged off the hard way: He was arrested and charged with a felony.

Benjamin Smith III, 40, was arrested on April 21 outside the St. Petersburg home of Richard Dinon and charged under a Florida law that prohibits unauthorized access to a computer or network, said George Kajtsa, the police department's public information officer. A pre-trial hearing in the case is scheduled for Monday, according to the state attorney's office for Pasco and Pinellas counties.

Dinon saw Smith sitting in a parked sport-utility vehicle in front of his house and wondered what he was doing there, then saw he was using a notebook computer, Kajtsa said.

"What made him suspicious was, every time he looked toward the car, the guy closed the lid on his laptop," Kajtsa said. Dinon called police. When they came to the scene and approached the vehicle, Smith closed the computer again. The police asked him what he was doing and he finally owned up to it, Kajtsa said. Smith was arrested and the PC seized and sent to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement as potential evidence. More

I know they have Cox cable down there,,are they going to bust all the users,who pick-up the network from down the street instead of their own?LOL,another dumb law that can not be used for anything useful ;)

Your Out ;)

Anybody up for some penguin baseball :)

Take a swing or 3

Lawyer leads double life as porn star

Hmmm,I thought it was the same thing,,,just screwing people in another way ;)

By Gina Keating
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - When his mother found out what porn star Ron Miller does for a living, she was heartbroken. She never wanted him to be a criminal defense lawyer.
"My mother cried a lot about that," Miller said recently between appearances defending accused felons at a Los Angeles courthouse. She had hoped he would be a high-rolling civil litigator,
Miller, who appears in adult videos as "Don Hollywood," has carved out a special niche of notoriety on the fringe of Hollywood's dream factory. In a town where many long to quit their day jobs for the glamour of a career in entertainment, he has managed a unique dual track: litigator and porn star.
Miller makes his rounds at the Van Nuys courthouse three days a week with a certain extravagance of manner and a diamond ear stud that set him apart from the rumpled lawyers with whom he has shared a counsel table for the past 30 years.
At a recent court appearance, he sported a black pinstriped suit and crocodile-skin cowboy boots, with case files under his arm and a defender's zeal in his heavy-lidded blue eyes.
Most of Miller's legal colleagues know about his other job. The one that sometimes sees the 56-year-old sharing a massage table with a porn starlet and cooing: "You're working on a 'get out of jail free' card," as the cameras roll.
But aside from knowing looks or good-natured jokes, Miller said his eight-year adult film career has drawn no objection from clients, colleagues or the California bar association.
"There are just some places I don't want to go," Deputy District Attorney Ann Marie Wise said when asked about her opponent's avocation at a recent court hearing. Full story

Starwars in earthly polltics ;(

I like starwars has much as the next guy,but this is getting out of hand.The folks over at Move on .org,have made a starwars ad about the filibuster fight going on.Check it out here .
But then again maybe we should give every member of the House and Senate a lightsaber,when they are elected then lock them all in a room,intell nobody is left standing.Repeat every 4 or 6 years and sooner or later we will run out of politicians(I can dream). ;)

Who pulled the drain plug ?

How do you lose a lake? ;)

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian village was left baffled Thursday after its lake disappeared overnight.
NTV television showed pictures of a giant muddy hole bathed in summer sun, while fishermen from the village of Bolotnikovo looked on disconsolately.
"It is very dangerous. If a person had been in this disaster, he would have had almost no chance of survival. The trees flew downwards, under the ground," said Dmitry Zaitsev, a local Emergencies Ministry official interviewed by the channel.
Officials in Nizhegorodskaya region, on the Volga river east of Moscow, said water in the lake might have been sucked down into an underground water-course or cave system, but some villagers had more sinister explanations.
"I am thinking, well, America has finally got to us," said one old woman, as she sat on the ground outside her house. Full story

Mystery of German exploding toads

I was digging around at the BBC,when I came on this. ;)

Toads in an area of northern Germany are being killed off by a mysterious disease - they are exploding.
Thousands of the amphibians have died in recent days in a pond in Hamburg's Altona district, with their bodies swelling to bursting point.

The toads' entrails are propelled for up to a metre (3.2ft), in scenes that have been likened to science fiction.

Scientists are baffled. Possible explanations include a unknown virus or a fungus in the pond.

"You see the animals crawling on the ground, swelling and then exploding," German conservationist Werner Smolnik told AFP news agency.

The bodies of the toads expanded to three and a half times their normal size, he said.

"I have never seen such a thing," AFP quotes veterinarian Otto Horst as saying. The site - which has been dubbed "the pond of death" - has been closed to the public.

The exploding toads have also crossed the border north into Denmark, according to Danish Radio.

It reported that a large number of toads that live in a pond near Laasby in central Jutland have started to suffer the same fate as the German amphibians.

The toads crawl onto the land, swell up and explode in the middle of the night, the radio said. Full story

Hmmmm,Toad suicide bombers?

I don't think I saw this on CNN

Bogus mariachi bands rob music-lovers

By Catherine Bremer
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - In the latest crime ruse to hit Mexico City, thieves are dressing up as mariachi musicians in embroidered suits with wide-brimmed somberros to rob unsuspecting music-lovers.

Mingling among the roughly 1,700 licensed mariachi who serenade people with raucous folk songs in a central city square are hundreds of "pirate" mariachi more adept at picking pockets than strumming guitars, city officials sayMore

And I thought just haveing to listen to it was a crime

The Garden Gnome

Think I should put one in my front yard,,,just for the hell of it.




Get one over here and alot of other with great useless junk

Top Ten Favorite Words (Not in the Dictionary)

OK,so now we all know the english language is going down hill. ;)

Merriam-Webster asked visitors to their site to submit words which were not in the dictionary.

1. ginormous (adj): bigger than gigantic and bigger than enormous

2. confuzzled (adj): confused and puzzled at the same time

3. woot (interj): an exclamation of joy or excitement

4. chillax (v): chill out/relax, hang out with friends

5. cognitive displaysia (n): the feeling you have before you even leave the house that you are going to forget something and not remember it until you're on the highway

6. gription (n): the purchase gained by friction: "My car needs new tires because the old ones have lost their gription."

7. phonecrastinate (v): to put off answering the phone until caller ID displays the incoming name and number

8. slickery (adj): having a surface that is wet and icy

9. snirt (n): snow that is dirty, often seen by the side of roads and parking lots that have been plowed

10. lingweenie (n): a person incapable of producing neologisms

- Top Ten Favorite Words (Not in the Dictionary)

And Off We Go ......

Here you will find the output of my demented mind.
The wife starts bloging and I get hooked on that little button at the top (Next Blog),,Damn,,,it's like eating peanuts,,,can't eat just one.
I have no idea where this blog is going or what it will end up being about,so I guess you will have to keep checking in.