Baby Executed

As reported over the weekend, a 21-year-old man and his son were shot and killed in an apparent home invasion robbery.
http://www.kcra.com/news/14124355/detail.html
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,297027,00.html

The father left his son in the car and walked up to the front door of a friend’s house and was jumped by two gunmen. All three men entered the house and a fight broke-out. The father was killed from multiple gunshots. The baby was in the car and strapped into his baby seat. As the gunmen left the house, they went over to the car and purposely shot the 8-month old infant in the head.

The motive is unknown.

The father was a boxer and had been training for a return to the ring. He had not fought for several years but had aspirations. Police have supposedly ruled-out gangs and drugs. This crime seems like something from a Mickey Spillane novel. Killing a man during a robbery is one thing, but executing his son raises the crime to the level of a mob hit.

I am particularly angry about this crime. Killing a baby in this purposeful manner is a crime that most folks would agree is worthy of a quick trip to the gallows. Part of my emotional response to this is the fact that it happened very close to where my wife works. In addition, I have a son that is two years old.

I hope the police will find the people responsible for this crime and rid our society of such evil men.

Microsoft Office $59.95?

Do you want a legal copy of Microsoft Office Ultimate for $59.95?

Office Ultimate 2007 includes the entire Microsoft Office toolset that students are accustomed to working with and more, including Microsoft Office Word 2007, Microsoft Office Excel® 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 with Business Contact Manager, Microsoft Office Access™ 2007, Microsoft Office Publisher 2007, Office OneNote 2007, Office Groove 2007 and Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2007.

It is available September 20, 2007 to April 30, 2008 from http://www.theultimatesteal.com/ You need e-mail address at college and active enrollment. See Microsoft press release at
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/sep07/09-12UltimateStealPR.mspx

Chain Reactor

For many years the Holy Grail of clean energy has been the search for “Cold Fusion”. The next best thing has just made the mainstream scientific community: seawater. Yeah, all that H2O that has covered the planet for eons has finally been proved to be a potential source of energy.

An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the “most remarkable” water science discovery in a century.

John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn.

The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel.

Rustum Roy, a Penn State University chemist, has held demonstrations at his State College lab to confirm his own observations.

The radio frequencies act to weaken the bonds between the elements that make up salt water, releasing the hydrogen, Roy said. Once ignited, the hydrogen will burn as long as it is exposed to the frequencies, he said.

The discovery is “the most remarkable in water science in 100 years,” Roy said.

“This is the most abundant element in the world. It is everywhere,” Roy said. “Seeing it burn gives me the chills.”

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8RIRI600&show_article=1

If this sounds somewhat familiar, it should. Utilizing radio frequencies to produce energy is the plot of the movie Chain Reaction that was released in 1996. The movie starred Keanu Reeves, Morgan Freeman, Rachel Weisz and Fred Ward.

In Chain Reaction, a group of college students help a professor produce Cold Fusion using water. A radio frequency is necessary in order to sustain the reaction. After this breakthrough is achieved, the lab is sabotaged and Keanu Reeves and Rachel Weisz get chased thru the rest of the film.

Granted it is still early to find a definite power plant design to make this technology commercially viable but see if this idea piques your interest.

The reaction sustains a temperature of 3,000 degrees. So I’m thinking it could be used for a high-pressure steam turbine. If the required radio frequency could be generated naturally, much like to old crystal radios, then you might not need as much battery power to get it started.

The reaction would start in the salt-water chamber. Liquid would be heated to a high temperature and pumped thru to a heat exchanger. On the other side of the heat exchanger water would pump in where it would be converted to steam. The steam would flow into a turbine. Once condensed, the water would be pumped back to the heat exchanger. (See basic design for submarine nuclear power plant for many specifications. This would be smaller scale with different heat source.)

Once it gets going, the turbine could generate electricity to make the whole system run. All you would add is water to top-off the steam system. This would allow for electric cars, self-sufficient energy for homes and it would beat the socks off current solar technology.

Finally we could tell those folks in the Mid-East, “Bye-bye. Enjoy what’s left of the seventh century.”

Hollywood to Kill GI Joe

Liberalism seeks to dismantle the institutions and ideals that made America great. Part of their effort is to redefine words and ideas. The most recent example is being brought to us by the combined efforts of Paramount Studios (the movie home of Star Trek) and the Hasbro toy company.

GI Joe has been killed.

This “Real American Hero” is now too hot for the makers of the forthcoming movie. For Paramount, being an elite American Soldier is offensive to our neighbors in Western Europe and Asia. The Global War on Terror and American Exceptionalism are stumbling blocks for commercial success in Hollywood so GI Joe has been scrapped. The archetype of the American Soldier is being replaced by the international, coed and politically correct Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity—G.I.J.O.E.

No longer will G.I. Joe be a U.S. Special Forces soldier, the “Real American Hero” who, in his glory days, single-handedly won World War II.

In the politically correct new millennium, G.I. Joe bears no resemblance to the original.

Paramount has confirmed that in the movie, the name G.I. Joe will become an acronym for “Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity” — an international, coed task force charged with defeating bad guys. It will no longer stand for government issued, as in issued by the American government.

The studio won’t elaborate, saying filming hasn’t begun and details are still in the works, but the behind-the-scenes rumblings are that the producers have decided to change the nature of G.I. Joe in order to appeal to a wider, more international audience.

The word is that in the current political climate, they’re afraid that a heroic U.S. soldier won’t fly.

Having grownup with the original GI Joe and Major Matt Mason—the cool toys for boys living during the height of the Apollo Space Program—I am offended. As a Veteran, I am outraged at the sacrilege.

We are the greatest country in the world due to two things, Western Christian values and our form of government. The American soldier is the personification of both. He is our ambassador to the world. He equally wields the sword and the plowshare. He is feared by evildoers and loved by the common man everywhere yearning to be free.

Paramount and Hasbro are stripping Joe’s identity and taking with them another incremental step in undermining our culture in the name of political correctness. If they had any brains they would take this opportunity to show why America is the nation that the rest of the world looks to when they get in trouble. Paramount is blowing a golden opportunity.

See the Fox News article http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,296054,00.html

iTunes Burning Limitations

Last week I finally bought a few songs from iTunes.

I was going on a long drive with my two-year-old son and wanted some children’s music that he would like and I could handle for prolonged periods of time. I downloaded about ten songs from The Wiggles plus a few he hears at bedtime every night.

Setting up the account was simple and downloading went smoothly. However using the burner from Apple was a challenge. It turns out that the files that I downloaded were encrypted and can only be played on the iTunes software. Therefore I have to use the built-in burner in the iTunes software. As I have learned from previous brushes with Apple, things not as easy as they seem. Every time I tried to burn a disk using their burner, I got an error and the burning process would close.

The error was as follows:

The last failed audio CD burn had error code 4000(0x00000fa0).

If you read the error message generated by the software you will see the following note:

If you have multiple drives on the same IDE or SCSI bus, these drives may interfere with each other.
Some computers need an update to the ATA or IDE bus driver, or Intel chipset. If iTunes has problems recognizing CDs or hanging or crashing while importing or burning CDs, check the support site for the manufacturer of your computer or motherboard.

Yeah, that’s right! I had to start disconnecting hardware in my computer to get their software to function. Apple writes bad code for a PC and it’s the PC’s fault. How dare we want to use multiple devices in our machines? Bad code and Apple have a rich history. Can anyone say “Safari”? Anyway I did disconnect one of my CDs and only had my burner connected and the disk wrote successfully. Nero, Roxio and several other burning software programs on my computer have never had any difficult knowing which CD was read only and which was the burner.

This problem plus the QuickTime bug I previously wrote about leave me with less than a favorable impression of Apple software.