Jun 06 2008

AP Technology NewsBrief at 2:16 pm EDT

Published by Wilmot under Uncategorized

(AP Online Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Intel, AMD hit with subpoena in FTC probeSAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) _ Intel Corp. and its much smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. have been subpoenaed by the Federal Trade Commission about possible anticompetitive behavior in the microprocessor market, the companies said Friday. The move by the FTC to escalate its probe to a formal investigation is the latest in a series of legal challenges facing Intel, the world’s largest computer chip maker. Antitrust investigations of Intel have been launched in several countries, including the U.S., based on complaints by AMD of unfair business practices that have stunted its growth.
New play explores what search reveals about usPHILADELPHIA (AP) _ They are an unquestionably bizarre set of Internet search terms: Mange. Human mold. White camellia. Dying Elmo. Could those words also be clues to finding a missing person?
Icahn recommends Yahoo set a $49.5B sale priceSAN FRANCISCO (AP) _ Activist investor Carl Icahn wants Yahoo to tell Microsoft it’s willing to be sold for $49.5 billion, about $2 billion above Microsoft’s last offer for the Internet pioneer. Icahn recommended the sales price, which works out to $34.375 a share, in a letter he sent Friday to Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock. It is the billionaire’s latest salvo in a campaign to replace Yahoo’s board and fire CEO Jerry Yang unless the company works out a deal with Microsoft before Yahoo’s annual shareholders meeting Aug. 1.
Phila. newspapers run ads about fake airline Derrie-AirPHILADELPHIA (AP) _ Derrie-Air has been exposed. Readers of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News opened their papers Friday to see ads for a new airline called Derrie-Air, which purportedly charges passengers by the pound.
FCC chief’s free broadband plan delayedWASHINGTON (AP) _ A plan by the nation’s top telecommunications regulator to provide free wireless high-speed Internet service hit a snag this week over concerns about possible interference and a proposed censoring feature that upset free speech advocates. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin told The Associated Press on Thursday that the plan will not be voted on at the June 12 meeting as first promised, but he hopes to present it to the full commission in July.

tmcnet.com


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May 29 2008

Power failure hampers air traffic controllers at San Diego facility

Published by Phyllida under Uncategorized

Radio and radar systems were down for three hours early this morning. Up to 24 planes were affected. Had it occurred at peak time, one controller said, the danger ‘would have been incalculable.’
As many as two dozen flights in Southern California airspace were affected by a power failure that shut down radio communications and radar for three hours at an air traffic control center in San Diego.
Workers at a Southern California Terminal Radar Approach Control facility in Miramar immediately began using their cellphones to alert controllers at nearby air traffic communications facilities, including the Los Angeles International Airport tower and the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale.
The power failure occurred this morning shortly after midnight, causing immediate shutdowns of radio and radar equipment at Miramar center, said Melvin S. Davis, a facility representative for Terminal Radar Approach Control for Southern California, which serves airports in Los Angeles, Burbank, Ontario, Orange County, Palm Springs and San Diego.
“As an air traffic controller, I’m used to certain sights and sounds that, even in a crazy environment, give me comfort,” Davis said. “When everything went dead, my heart stopped and my next thought was, ‘This cannot be happening.’ “
Had it occurred at peak time, he said, “the danger to the flying public would have been incalculable.”
The radar and radios came back online about 3 a.m.
At least two dozen flights were in the air during the outage and an undetermined number were delayed on the ground because of it.
Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said a preliminary assessment was that the switches for the power used for radar and radio were “in the off position.”
“We don’t know why,” he said.
Gregor said about a half-dozen cargo flights were delayed.
“You never want to have an outage, but if you’re going to have one, that’s the time to have it,” he said.

latimes.com


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May 28 2008

Bush compares today's wars to World War II

Published by Katey under Uncategorized

President Bush, who will address the more than 1,000 graduates of the U.S. Air Force Academy today in Colorado Springs, Colo., will draw comparisons to the wars of his tenure to World War II in his speech, the Associated Press reports.
Bush will link the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to postwar Germany and Japan six decades ago.
“America has assumed this obligation before,” Bush said in prepared remarks released by the White House. “After World War II we helped Germany and Japan build free societies and strong economies. These efforts took time and patience, and as a result Germany and Japan grew in freedom and prosperity and are now allies of the United States.”
The result, Bush says, was “generations of security and peace” in the United States.
Among today’s graduates at the ceremony is Sean Ketterick, a Reicher Catholic High School alum who was the vice-wing commander this spring semester. That’s the second highest ranking a cadet can achieve. We had a story about him Sunday.
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wacotrib.com


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May 25 2008

Events calendar

Published by Flynn under Uncategorized

15th annual Carmel Art Festival. Today through Sunday, May 18. Live music, gallery receptions, demonstrations and contests at Devendorf Park, between Ocean Avenue and Mission, Carmel. Featured events include the plein air contest, Carmel youth art show, sculpture in the park, sculpture withindoors, quick draw and kids art day. For a full schedule visit www.carmelartfestival.org or stop by the information tent at the festival. 642-2503.
Agricultural History Project presents “Day on the Farm.” 10a.m.-3p.m. today at the Agricultural History Project site, 2601 E. Lake Ave., Watsonville. Farming and blacksmith demonstrations, horse-pulled hay rides, children’s games and soap, candle, cheese and butter making to show how people lived before the industrial revolution. 724-5898.
49th annual Castroville Artichoke Festival. 10a.m.-6p.m. today in downtown Castroville. Continues 10a.m.-5p.m. Sunday, May 18. Featuring an artichoke parade today at 10a.m., an artichoke eating contest, cooking demonstrations, wine tasting, an art competition, a classic car show, live music and more. $8 adults, $4 children 12 and under. 633-2465 or www.artichoke-festival.org.
“Wild About Quilts” free family fun day. 11a.m.-3p.m. today at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, 165 Forest Ave., Pacific Grove. Meet quilt artists, create quilt patterns, print digital photos onto fabric and enjoy local bluegrass musicians and storytellers.
Free. Bob Snyder at 648-5716, PGMNH at 648-5716 or www.pgmuseum.org.
“Everything but the Kitchen Sink” rummage sale. 8a.m.-1p.m. and 3-4p.m. today at All Saints Episcopal Church, Seccombe Hall, Dolores Street and Ninth Avenue, Carmel. Items half-off between 3-4p.m. Free leftover items from 11a.m.-1p.m. Sunday, May 18. 624-3883.
Salinas Valley Fair. Today through Sunday, May 18, at the Salinas Valley Fairgrounds, 625 Division St., King City. Barrel racing, bull riding, motorcycle races, a wild west show, live music, karaoke, a petting zoo, and more. General admission: $7 adults, $5 seniors (60 and older), $6 students 13-17, $4 youth 6-12, children 5 and under free. Parking: $5. 385-3243 or www.salinasvalleyfair.com.

montereyherald.com


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May 24 2008

Events on Long Island

Published by Dayton under Uncategorized

BAY SHORE Boulton Center for the Performing Arts “Big Laughs in Bay Shore III” presents Lenny Marcus, Mike Burton and Tom Daddario. May 30 at 8 p.m. $20. Boulton Center for the Performing Arts, 37 West Main Street. (631) 969-1101; www.boultoncenter.com.
WESTBURY Capital One Bank Theater Artie Lange, stand-up. May 18 at 7 p.m. $51.50 and $61.50. Don Rickles and Joy Behar, stand-up. May 31 at 8 p.m. $51.50 and $61.50. Capital One Bank Theater, 960 Brush Hollow Road. (516) 334-0800; www.livenation.com.
brENTWOOD Ross Memorial Park Spring Arts Festival, featuring musical theater, stories, games and more. May 18, noon to 5 p.m. Free. Ross Memorial Park, Brentwood Road and First Avenue. (516) 983-4437.
EAST FARMINGDALE Arena Players Second Stage Theater “The Pied Piper,” by the Arena Players Children’s Theater. Through June 1. $9. Arena Players Second Stage Theater, 296 Route 109. (516) 293-0674; www.arenaplayers.org.
EAST HAMPTON Guild Hall Children’s Fiesta, featuring arts and crafts workshops and a performance by Anna E. Kravis, with bilingual sing-alongs and puppetry, in celebration of Latino culture. May 18, 2 to 4 p.m. Free. Guild Hall, 158 Main Street. (631) 324-4050.
EAST MEADOW Eisenhower Park Big Apple Circus presents “Celebrate!” May 31 through June 15. $15 to $52. Eisenhower Park, Merrick and Stewart Avenues. (516) 572-0218; www.nassaucountyny.gov/parks.
GARDEN CITY Long Island Children’s Museum “Wings of Wonder.” Make a butterfly using oil pastels and waxed paper. Tuesday through Friday 2:30 p.m. Free with museum admission. “Family Gardening: Planting a Container Garden.” Learn how to choose, design and maintain a miniature container garden. Tuesday, 6:30 to 8 p.m. $10 and $12. “High School Musical,” by the Cultural Arts Playhouse. Ages 5 and up. Friday through May 25. $17 to $20. “Nandalala Dance Drama,” traditional dance from South India presented by the Sri Bharatha Kamalalaya Classical Dance School. Ages 5 and up. May 24 at 2 p.m. $2 and $3. “Nature Wonders.” Learn about animals during the winter months and their re-emergence in the spring. Ages 5 and up. May 25 at 3 p.m. $2 and $3. Long Island Children’s Museum, 11 Davis Avenue. (516) 224-5800; www.licm.org.

nytimes.com


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May 14 2008

Economic Consequences Of Sky-Rocketing Oil

Published by Rae under Uncategorized

Ages ago, in the basement of our five-story walk up, my father’s sideline was packaging matzo farfel. I would help him mangle the matzos there and then sell farfel door-to-door like encyclopedias. Any housewife worth her salt fried up matzo brie fritters for her family over Passover using Old Ben’s farfel.
It was my bad luck to hail from the East Bronx, far from Texas oil field country. I could’a been another Boone Pickens instead of a nerdy old MBA squinting at spread sheets with 40 lines of numbers filling the page.
Fast-forward to the presidential primaries: While my little lady was canvassing for Hillary in the Indianapolis suburbs (10 hours, daily) she noted pickup trucks sitting in driveways even though nobody was home. Families now carpool to work, their gas guzzlers abandoned.
Our airlines mothball in the desert more 20-year-old 737s and MD-80s, trimming the seats that would have been flown with these old and inefficient planes. Few of these carriers make the cash flow to replace these oldies with Boeing’s (nyse: BA - news - people ) fuel efficient 737-900s.
Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil (nyse: XOM - news - people ), with momentous generosity to shareholders, kicked up its quarterly dividend from 35 cents to 40 cents a share–still under 20% of current earnings power. The company will spend an incremental $5 billion per annum looking for more oil because it failed to increase production the past five years.
Was Exxon expecting $60-a-barrel oil–what we had little more than a year ago?
Delta Air Lines (nyse: DAL - news - people ) owns and leases over 100 16-year-old Boeing 757s–with just a dozen fuel-efficient aircraft on order–out of a 600-plus fleet. Fuel hedges for the rest of 2008 cover less than half the fleet’s consumption and were written around gas pegged at $2.75 a gallon. Jet fuel this week sold at $3.41 a gallon, and Delta burns 500 million gallons quarterly. You do the arithmetic. The airline’s fuel bill ballooned over $500 million during the March quarter, year over year.

forbes.com


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Apr 05 2008

Air quality issues could impact town's decision on CATS bus

Published by Melany under Uncategorized

Losing the 83X Express bus from Mooresville to Charlotte could make it difficult for the region to lower its air pollution to federally-mandated levels by 2010, says an environmental official.
Alan Giles of Mecklenburg County Air Quality said Tuesday if the Charlotte Area Transit System’s (CATS) express bus to and from Mooresville is eliminated due to a lack of funding, it will contribute to the region’s already unhealthy air — and could, in fact, make the situation worse.
“If we put 83X out of business, that would put 28 tons of air pollution back into the air,” said Giles, whose office is affiliated with the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the Environmental Protection Agency.
At a Mooresville town board meeting last week, two commissioners recommended that, because of the expense and reduced ridership, Mooresville should halt its funding of the bus this summer.
The 83X makes four non-stop round trips each weekday between Mooresville and Charlotte.
Commissioners have not yet voted on the $95,586 subsidy request. CATS officials said last week that if Mooresville doesn’t fund its half of the service, CATS will likely have to drop the service since Mecklenburg County cannot fund it alone.
The Charlotte region is currently considered part of a non-attainment area under the federal Clean Air Act, which is an area of the country that is considered to have unhealthy air, but the region is supposed to achieve attainment by 2010.
Giles said losing the bus would mean adding nitrogen oxide, volatile organic compounds, and carbon monoxide back into the atmosphere, which could threaten the region’s attempts to make that 2010 deadline. 
“Adding any additional nitrogen oxide pollution to our air will likely have a negative impact to attain this federal health-based standard for ground level ozone,” he said. “It may not be a make or break, but it will be hard to attain.”

mooresvilletribune.com


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Apr 05 2008

Meet the military museum's honorary chair Tuesday

Published by Lashay under Uncategorized

Meet the military museum’s honorary chair Tuesday
Those of us connected to the Military Heritage & Aviation Museum felt quite honored a couple of months ago when Sean O’Keefe agreed to be our honorary chair. Among many other positions, he served as the 10th administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, comptroller and Chief Financial Officer of the Department of Defense, and Secretary of the Navy. He also served on the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations staff was staff director of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. O’Keefe was presented with the Distinguished Public Service Award in 1993 by President Bush and Secretary Cheney.
O’Keefe will be in town this week, and we’re holding a reception for him in the museum on Tuesday from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. At 4:30, he’ll share some anecdotes of his life while he held some of those positions. This event is free and open to the public, so please come and see what makes this man so special.
And we’d like to meet you! The museum is looking for a few good men … and women. We’d love to have some additional assistance. You don’t have to be a veteran — just willing to help with showing off our museum as a guide, or reorganizing our exhibit displays, or arranging new displays, or helping to catalog artifacts, or lots of other things. If you’re at all interested, give me a call at 941-575-9002, and we’ll see how we might put your talents to use.
The move into Fishermen’s Village has proven to be a worthwhile venture and is the reason why we need more volunteers. From December through February, 19,071 people walked through our doors. These visitors were from every one of our United States and Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Poland, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, Philippines, Russia, Puerto Rico, England and Canada.

sun-herald.com


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Apr 04 2008

Shockingly unprepared for the coming end of oil

Published by Bradley under Uncategorized

VANCOUVER — Minivans, global air travel and the transport of goods by diesel truck soon will become the stuff of yesterday as the world adapts to depleting oil reserves.
The planet, posits a new book by two Canadian academics, is on the cusp of a revolution in transportation that will steer people away from petroleum-fuelled vehicles and into ones that are either battery-powered or connected to electrical grids.
Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight without Oil, by Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl, is one of the most thought-provoking books to cross my desk in a long while. Gilbert is an urban issues consultant and former York University professor and municipal politician in Toronto. Perl is director of SFU’s urban studies program.
Their book is an eyebrow-raiser, portraying a future that’s around the corner as oil production is projected to hit a peak and start declining around 2012. In adapting to peak oil, the way we move ourselves and domestic and international freight will change as dramatically as when the horse and buggy gave way to the car.
Vehicles gradually will be replaced by Personal Rapid Transports — one- to six-person cars, linked to overhead power grids, that move along streets in designated guideways. More LRTs and subway systems will be needed. Air travel will again become a preserve of the rich. Railways will be reconfigured to run on electricity.
“Electricity is the ideal transport fuel for an uncertain future.” Meanwhile, the internal combustion engine, powered by gasoline that will be unaffordable even if it’s available, will go the way of the dodo.
None of this is wild speculation or the stuff of 2050. The authors say we’ve got to act now to the avoid the conflict and chaos that will ensue if oil demand doesn’t drop in tandem with its declining availability and affordability.

canada.com


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Apr 01 2008

A Dangerous Level of Sulphuric Gas Not Enough to Deter People in …

Published by Linsay under Uncategorized

Tourists are fighting for elbow room to witness the eruptions at Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano despite toxic fumes and the occasional raining of rocks.
Don’t think volcano watching is by any means passive. While Hawaii’s famous trade winds have been pushing the toxic air and ash towards the sea and the lava flow hasn’t quite made it past the rim of the Kilauea’s crater, park officials are staying ever vigilant, as they admit it could change at any time and they are monitoring the volcano’s activity from minute to minute. A change in activity could mean evacuation of at least 10,000 residents, but oddly no mention of a contingency plan for the tourists. Very interesting. Perhaps Hawaiian natives still sacrifice foreigners to the volcano gods. How retro.
If inhaling possibly lethal sulphuric gases or being fed to a volcano doesn’t appeal to you, you can watch from the safety that is the Internet below.

lostweekend.tv


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