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Archive for June 2nd, 2012|Daily archive page

today’s news … Saturday, June 2, 2012

In Uncategorized on June 2, 2012 at 6:00 am

today’s news and information gleanings from here and there! 

Quote for today… “The future ain’t what it used to be.” - Yogi Berra

  • Yikes! Cannibalism in Harford County, Maryland! – FOX43
  • SUGAR COPS! “Just how far would a government go to protect us from ourselves?” New York wants to “stop sales of large sodas and other sugary drinks, in a bid to battle obesity.” – LawOfficer.com

Queen Elizabeth II attends a dinner with The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, 5th Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland at the Caledonian Club on May 30, 2012 in London, England. (Pool / Getty Images)

  • “OK, so what are the Brits celebrating this weekend? They are rejoicing at the fact that Queen Elizabeth II has been on the throne for 60 years this year, having inherited the job upon the death of her father, George VI, in 1952. It is a bit confusing because George (“Bertie” of King’s Speech fame) actually died in February 1952, but the actual formal coronation did not take place until June the following year (1953). But, let’s face it, you can’t really have a party in London in February.” – The Daily Beast
  • The rest of the story (We posted this story earlier this week : Harrisburg cop is pain in his wife’s butt – Harrisburg Patriot-News), as Paul Harvey used to say, is that the cop was “under the influence of alcohol.”Here’s the link to that story at FOx43

Chinks in the armor?

In Everyday Living, Opinions on June 2, 2012 at 5:22 am

In this photo illustration, a Facebook logo on a computer screen is seen through a magnifying glass held by a woman in Bern May 19, 2012. Credit: Reuters/Thomas Hodel

Reuters: “Facebook goes down temporarily“

This 24/7 Wall St. article identifies possible chinks in the Facebook armor.

“‘Earlier today (Thursday), some users briefly experienced issues loading the site. The issues have since been resolved and everyone should now have access to Facebook,’ company spokesman Michael Kirkland told Reuters. It is hard to imagine that Facebook’s luck could get much worse, but it did.

“On the back of a bungled IPO, a sharp drop in the firm’s share price, and legal suits and investigations of all kinds, Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) maintains its most tremendous strength. More than 900 million members can get onto the site at one time or another to “talk” with their friends and family, and anyone else who will listen. The site is available 24 hours a day, which is how much time some people spend on it. Facebook is worth $75 billion now, based on its sales, still a tremendous amount, because of the promise those people hold for advertisers and e-commerce companies.

“It is not unusual for large sites to go down. The problem plagued Twitter two years ago. Twitter fixed that problem before it alienated a lot of users. But its shows that huge online businesses are not immune from outage problems.

“Facebook faces at least two challenges in keeping its site up all of the time. There is only a remote chance either would happen. Facebook’s track record for being permanently on is extraordinary, given the load of users it handles. But among the risk factors in its document in SEC filings for its IPO is this:

“Computer malware, viruses, and computer hacking and phishing attacks have become more prevalent in our industry, have occurred on our systems in the past, and may occur on our systems in the future. Because of our prominence, we believe that we are a particularly attractive target for such attacks.

“One, less sinister challenge is that Facebook’s own internal systems could falter because of software or server problems. Like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and other sites that serve hundreds of millions of people, Facebook has a bullet-proof IT structure, unless some small problem in its systems causes a breakdown.” To continue reading this 24/7 Wall St. article click here.

Daily Beast: “What bath salts will (and won’t) make you do.”

In Everyday Living on June 2, 2012 at 5:15 am

“The chemicals in bath salts seem to be cousins of the amphetamine agents that debuted as crystal meth. Most contain a synthetic designer drug that can induce a mind-rattling hallucination—but they’re unlikely to unleash an epidemic of cannibalism.” – The Daily Beast

Diane Machen, a criminalist with the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office, holds samples of bath salts and synthetic cannabinoids that are examples of designer drugs targeted by lawmakers. Machen testified on two proposals that would help define and outlaw the synthetic drugs at the Legislature in Carson City, Nev. on Tuesday, March 15, 2011. (Cathleen Allison / AP Photo)

“The recent story from Miami of Rudy Eugene, the man who ate part of the face of Ronald Poppo, represents a remarkable moment in U.S. news. It merges seamlessly the irresistibly lurid, the uncomfortably lurid, and the so-completely-lurid-as-to-be-no-longer-faintly-comic in a single ultramodern, even futuristic story. It’s all here: we have security cameras (what were they doing there?), insanity, tragedy, dangerous new synthetic drugs, and a video record of the entire affair.  How much excitement can we pack into a single sad tale?

“Plus everything about the drugs in question—so-called ‘bath salts’—is all-American. ‘Bath salts’ are a home-brew product right out of Breaking Bad: a hallucinogenic powder made by some lost chemistry major with pushy friends and serious debts. But please note that the implicated “bath salts” have nothing to do with actual bath salts, those crystalline things your parents brought your creepy aunt in New Jersey every time they visited. No these bath salts never were meant to soften the skin, if that was the hope of the creepy aunt.

No, the current rendition of ‘bath salts’ is part of another proud American tradition—false advertising. The drug dealers who make the stuff found a simple loophole—make a street drug with an enormous profit margin but give it the name of a boring household product, just to keep it below radar. And it worked, for a few years; who knew why teens were suddenly so interested in running to the convenience store for bath salts when they weren’t spending any time in the tub and who cared? A perfect ruse in all ways, relying on the winning combo of inattentive old people and sneaky kids—though it is likely that the publicity around the case will lead to a crackdown against their production and a wising-up by parents and cops everywhere.

In addition to all the side stories, the awful tale raises a basic question: could all the drugs in the world make a person want to eat another person? This is not as simple as we would like. Our fascination with and repulsion for cannibalism reach far back, farther even, than its tepid cousin, vampirism. It seems human have been worried about eating each other for the longest time, a primal yearning and repulsion Read the rest of this entry »

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