...excuse me?
I don't know what this says about our world, but it's not good, this I know for cetain:
CREATIVE PEOPLE MUST BE STOPPED
Seen on the beltway as a bumper sticker this afternoon.
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Fox takes aim at Doctor Who spinoff; fans wary.
One year after the television show Doctor Who returned to the airwaves, a spin-off show aimed at adult viewers called Torchwood was created as a spin-off. Centered around the character of Captain Jack Harkness, Torchwood follows the adventures, foibles, and WTF moments of a black-ops outfit headquartered in Cardiff, Wales that takes it upon itself to investigate and minimize the impact of alien activities upon the Earth. There is a significant amount of crossover between the two fandoms, so it remains to be seen what they'll think of this...
Word has hit the Net that the Fox Broadcasting Company is …Read more...
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Stem cell research is indeed mighty: it could give us bacon.
Well, kinda. Hopefully soon, but not quite yet.
A team of stem cell researchers at Maastricht University have worked out a way to culture porcine stem cells in vitro to grow edible meat. It's not bacon yet - it's not pork-like, either, but has a texture more akin to cooked scallop - but it's a start. The team hopes to perfect this method so that it could be used to produce edible meat with far less impact upon the Earth's biosphere. As things stand now slaughterhouses and the greenhouse gases produced by farming pigs are a topic of concern to environmentalists, to …Read more...
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Rhianna gave birth!
At 2302 EST5EDT last night, our friend Rhianna gave birth to a 6 pound 14 ounce baby girl at a hospital just outside the DC metroplex. Rhianna and Rab named the baby Skya Danaan MacFadyen.
Welcome to the Earth, Skya.Read more...
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Legal battles over unwarranted search and seizure at the borders are spinning up.
For a couple of years now the Customs and Border Patrol of the United States has had the legal authority to confiscate the laptops of people entering the country to perform forensic analysis on an indefinite basis. If you don't give them your laptop (or you refuse to give them the passphrases to decrypt your data) they can and will send you back or incarcerate you, even if you're an American citizen. They also have standing orders to seize any and all data storage media you're transporting (including USB keys, cameras, cellular phones, MP3 players, and disks) for duplication and …
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Restaurant review: The Virginia Restaurant
I got up earlier than usual this morning to join Hasufin and Mika for breakfast on our day off. The restaurant we were going to visit wasn't open today (it usually isn't on Mondays, actually) so we had to re-work our plans at the last minute. After a little discussion we settled upon a different restaurant which none of us had tried before, a diner not too far away called The Virginian Restaurant in Vienna, Virginia (169 Glyndon Street; Vienna, VA; 22180; phone number 703-938-2333). It's a little greasy spoon-type place just off of Maple Avenue on the other side …
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Boston police fight back against cellphone recordings.
People recording what is going on around them is a relatively new development in North American history. One supposes that you could trace it back to the beating of Rodney King by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department in the year 1991, in which a bystander recorded the incident with a home video camera. Jump forward a dozen years; cellular phones and digital cameras now have the ability to do the same thing but are far smaller and record in much higher quality. With the proliferation of websites like Youtube and Facebook videos of every kind can be made …
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Just when you thought keeping tabs on your kids couldn't get any more creepy.
Taser has become one of the more notorious companies in the United States. Best known for it's (technically) non-lethal electrostun weapons, the name of which has become synonymous for most any stunner, they've recently gotten into the mobile surveillance market with a product they call Protector. This product is actually an app which you install in your kid's mobile phone; it lets you keep an eye on all of the phone numbers which are called or place calls to the phone as well as giving access to all text messages sent or received. Certain numbers can be blacklisted by the …
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Conversation with a Facebook insider.
It seems as if Facebook is everywhere these days. Less involved than Livejournal or Blogger but packing a little more substance than Twitter, Facebook is a great way to goof off when you find yourself with a couple of minutes to spare. Games, quizzes, applications, and toys abound on the service, and it also makes it easy to stalk people you used to go to school with. It also made it easier to hose your social life without having to resort to off color jokes in front of the boss' wife. Their privacy settings (and ambiguity thereof) were infamously poor …
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I have no desire at all to find out how these fountains were contaminated.
There's really no way to start off an article about this other than to lay it out up front: Soda fountains in the Roanoke Valley of Virginia were found to be contaminated with the same bacteria you find in human feces. Thirty soda machines in the area had samples taken from them for analysis and the soda from them was found to be contaminated with a few strains of e. coli, stenotrophomonas maltophilia, klebsiella pneumoniae, and other coliform microorginisms. Oh, and as if that wasn't enough to make you reconsider getting a drink the next time you go to a …
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