Ok folks. For those of you who missed it, last week I was in Las Vegas at the Parallel’s convention. I posted some pics and some video, but the highlight of the trip was when I got to go to the Channel 8 studios with my friend Dave Courvoisier and watch him film the nightly news!

As you guys know, at Layered Tech we have some bad ass data centers. So, I’m very used to seeing a lot of technology. But when Dave gave me the tour of the KLAS TV station it was a whole other treat! I’ve never seen so much video recording, editing and broadcasting equipment in my life!
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Wow! I’m not sure if the letter below is legitimate or fabricated. It sounds like it could be from a real Marine, and so I’m going to publish it just in case. Either way, it gives you a lot to think about…

It’s freezing here. I’m sitting on hard, cold dirt between rocks and shrubs at the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains along the Dar ‘yoi Pomir River watching a hole that leads to a tunnel that leads to a cave. Stake out, my friend, and no pizza delivery for thousands of miles.

I also glance at the area around my ass every ten to fifteen seconds to avoid another scorpion sting. I’ve actually given up battling the chiggers and sand fleas, but them scorpions give a jolt like a cattle prod. Hurts like a bastard. The antidote tastes like transmission fluid but God bless the Marine Corps for the five vials of it in my pack.

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Leave it to the Brits to properly report on US news. According to the Independant, California will run out of money in February.

The State of California will run out of money within two months, forcing Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to start settling bills and paying employees by issuing “IOU” notes, his chief financial officer has revealed….

Unless taxes can be raised, or spending reined in, millions of public-sector employees and private contractors face having their salaries paid in “registered warrants,” a piece of paper which the Governor will promise to exchange for cash as soon as he is able.

The effective bankruptcy of an entire state is unprecedented in American history, even during the Great Depression. Yet despite California’s standing as one of the most prosperous regions of the wealthiest nation on earth, its Governor seems powerless to stave off disaster.

So-called “direct democracy,” through which small interest groups can enact laws by making them the subject of an electoral “proposition” or ballot measure that attracts more than 50 per cent of the vote, has severely limited his ability to manage finances.

Property taxes, the mainstay of any state’s income, have been frozen for many homeowners since a proposition was passed in the late 1970s. A separate measure, introduced in the 1980s, means that income taxes cannot be raised without the agreement of two-thirds of the state’s lawmakers.

Meanwhile, a raft of other ballot measures control spending, meaning that only 25 per cent of California’s spending is considered “discretionary”. The rest has been “earmarked” for a particular cause or project….

So to summarize:

• The state is OUT of money.
• They are not allowed to raise income taxes.
• They are not allowed to raise property taxes.
• No one is willing to stop spending!

Well, I guess we’re all about to learn what happens when a state goes bankrupt! As if we couldn’t already learn that from the History channel when every major global power eventually gave up the ghost because they were broke.

California is about to lose it’s place as one of the world’s great super-states. Yee-haw for Texas!

From the BBC:

Fresh clashes have broken out between police and protesters in Athens and other cities, after a night of rioting triggered by the police shooting dead a youth.

Greek authorities say the shooting took place after youths attacked a police car with stones and petrol bombs.

Two police officers have been arrested in connection with the killing of the teenager.

So, just to interpret for you guys, some cops get attacked by a huge group of “students”. These youth are actually anarchists. (And I mean that, politically speaking. There are a bunch of moronic teenagers who think that Anarchy is cool.) But back to the story… the kids are stoning the cops and throwing Molotov cocktails, and one of the cops actually shoots a student.
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Well, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics published their unemployment news yesterday, and it was nothing to smile about.

November 2008 US Unemployment Rate

Nonfarm payroll employment fell sharply (-533,000) in November, and the unemployment rate rose from 6.5 to 6.7 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. November’s drop in payroll employment followed declines of 403,000 in September and 320,000 in October, as revised. Job losses were large and widespread across the major industry sectors in November.

Oh, and by the way, these numbers only count the people who are actively looking for a job. An additional 422,000 people exited the work force for any number of reasons — they went back to school, retired or simply abandoned job searches out of sheer frustration.
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So, the big news of the day – deserving or not – is that OJ is going to jail. No, not for the murder of Nicole and Ron 14 years ago, but this time for a robbery conviction in Las Vegas on last Friday.

The LA Times reported:

Reporting from Los Angeles and Las Vegas — Brushing aside a tearful apology from O.J. Simpson, a Las Vegas judge today sentenced the former football star to at least nine years in prison for the kidnapping and robbery last year of two sports memorabilia dealers in a casino hotel room.

Under the sentence handed down by Clark County District Court Judge Jackie Glass, Simpson would be eligible for parole in 2017. The maximum time he could serve is 33 years.

The sentence came after an emotional address in which Simpson sought to justify his conduct at the Palace Station Hotel & Casino. His eyes red and his voice wavering, the NFL Hall of Famer said he went to the down-market hotel in an effort to recover family heirlooms, including his slain ex-wife’s wedding ring, to pass down to his children.

“In no way did I mean to hurt anybody, to steal anything from anybody,” Simpson said. “I just wanted my personal things.”

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From the Associated Press:

Mass. man ticketed on a gridlocked highway while wife in labor on way to hospital
Dec 5, 2008

(BOSTON) A man in Massachusetts is appealing a $100 ticket he got for driving to a hospital in the breakdown lane of a gridlocked Boston highway while his wife was in labor. John Davis of Dracut says his wife Jennifer’s contractions were three minutes apart on Nov. 18 when a state trooper pulled them over for using the breakdown lane.

The couple says the trooper made them wait five to 10 minutes while he wrote a ticket for another car on Route 2, asked to see Jennifer’s belly to prove her pregnancy, then issued them a ticket.

The couple made it to Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge. Their daughter was born five hours later.

State police say no discipline is likely for the trooper.

I sure would love to see one of Colby Jones’ cartoons about this one!

Recent deaths during “Black Friday” sales give a whole other meaning to the phrase, and they illustrate how completely out of control some people are getting based on the mindless greedy rush to get a deal.

A worker at a Wal-Mart in Nassau County, N.Y. was trampled to death on Friday as a crazed crowd of shoppers broke down the door and proceeded to run right over him. The exact Wal-mart location is 77 Green Acres Rd, Valley Stream, NY‎ (at the Green Acres Mall), and here it is on a map:

A Wal-Mart worker died after being trampled when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island, New York, store Friday morning, police and witnesses said. The 34-year-old worker, employed as an overnight stock clerk, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the Valley Stream store opened at 5 a.m.

Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.

“He was bum-rushed by 200 people,” said Jimmy Overby, 43, a co-worker. “They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too…I literally had to fight people off my back.”

A 28-year-old pregnant woman was knocked to the floor during the mad rush. She was hospitalized for observation, police said. Early witness accounts that the woman suffered a miscarriage were unfounded, police said.

Three other shoppers suffered minor injuries, cops said.

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What is up with all of the wackos when it comes to President Elect Obama?

• Verizon Employees busted spying on Obama cell records
• Uproar in Maine over Obama assassination sign
• SC priest: No communion for Obama supporters
• Election spurs ‘hundreds’ of race threats, crimes
• Sowell compared Obama to Hitler, Mao, other dictators, and Jim Jones

This is not the way to treat the President of the United States you retards.

I told you guys we were in a recession back in March, but now I fear we could move from a recession straight into a depression. Things could get really bad… Let’s examine shall we?

In economics, a depression is a sustained, long downturn in one or more economies. It is more severe than a recession, which is seen as a normal downturn in the business cycle. The mother of all modern depressions was of course the “Great Depression”:

The Great Depression was a worldwide economic downturn starting in most places in 1929 and ending at different times in the 1930s or early 1940s for different countries. It was the largest and most important economic depression in modern history, and is used in the 21st century as a benchmark in how far the world’s economy can fall. The Great Depression originated in the United States; historians most often use as a starting date the stock market crash on October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday. The end of the depression in the U.S. is associated with the onset of the war economy of World War II, beginning around 1939.

The depression had devastating effects in the developed and developing worlds. International trade was deeply affected, as were personal incomes, tax revenues, prices, and profits. Cities all around the world were hit hard, especially those dependent on heavy industry. Construction was virtually halted in many countries. Farming and rural areas suffered as crop prices fell by 40 to 60 percent. Facing plummeting demand with few alternate sources of jobs, areas dependent on primary sector industries such as farming, mining and logging suffered the most.

The majority of countries set up relief programs, and most underwent some sort of political upheaval, pushing them to the left or right. In some states, the desperate citizens turned toward nationalist demagogues – the most infamous being Adolf Hitler – setting the stage for World War II in 1939.

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Is a Water powered automobile too good to be true? Well, not according to Japanese company Genepax. They claim to have built a car that runs on water and air alone.

The system can generate power just by supplying water and air to the fuel and air electrodes, respectively, the company said at the press conference, which took place June 12, 2008, at the Osaka Assembly Hall.

The basic power generation mechanism of the new system is similar to that of a normal fuel cell, which uses hydrogen as a fuel. According to Genepax, the main feature of the new system is that it uses the company’s membrane electrode assembly (MEA), which contains a material capable of breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen through a chemical reaction.

Though the company did not reveal the details, it “succeeded in adopting a well-known process to produce hydrogen from water to the MEA,” said Hirasawa Kiyoshi, the company’s president. This process is allegedly similar to the mechanism that produces hydrogen by a reaction of metal hydride and water. But compared with the existing method, the new process is expected to produce hydrogen from water for longer time, the company said.

With the new process, the cell needs only water and air, eliminating the need for a hydrogen reformer and high-pressure hydrogen tank. Moreover, the MEA requires no special catalysts, and the required amount of rare metals such as platinum is almost the same as that of existing systems, Genepax said.

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I just got this press release e-mailed to me from the City of Frisco, TX (my home town). I have not edited a single word of the release, you’re seeing it as I got it.

This has to be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen a city put out. I love the commentary at the very end of the announcement:

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The following information is distributed from the City of Frisco’s News and Information service.
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FRISCO POLICE OFFICER CHASES AFTER HIS OWN STOLEN TRUCK

(October 28, 2008)On Saturday, October 25, 2008, at approximately 10:44 p.m., Frisco Police Officer Jerry Varner was directing traffic at the intersection of Main Street and Coleman Street for Edgefest II when he observed a maroon short bed Chevrolet pickup truck approaching the intersection. Officer Varner thought the truck resembled his own truck and as the vehicle came closer to him, he realized it was his truck. The truck was being driven by a male subject that Varner did not give permission to take the truck.

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