03 Jul 2006
With injuries up, feds eye fireworks laws

Man Picking His NoseMore Safety Nazis™ on the loose: but I sincerely wish the executive director of the American Pyrotechnics Association would shut up, before she gives the bureaucratic bozos any ideas for mandated warning labels:

"The largest safety problem is product misuse rather than product failures, [Julie] Heckman said. "It's teenagers having bottle rocket wars, parents giving sparklers to 2-year-olds and people having too much to drink and putting firecrackers up their nose."

Warning: Placing fireworks up your nose, especially while drunk, can cause spontaneous rhinoplasty!

AP - On the eve of the nation's noisiest holiday, the Consumer Product Safety Commission responded to growing fireworks injuries by quietly reopening the question of how it should police explosives for backyard entertainment.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

21:15 /Humor | 1 comment | permanent link

Afghan 'Starbucks' proves a hit

While the news from Iraq seems to grow more dismal on a daily basis, the rap from the real frontlines of the war on Al Qaeda seems to grow a bit more positive. This is a Starbucks I'd be at every day, too. Sounds like a hoppin' place!

A coffee shop called Starbucks bang in the middle of Kandahar is hardly something one takes in one's stride.

(link) [BBC]

07:12 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

A Search Engine That's Becoming an Inventor

As the article points out "In many ways, it still has the head of an graduate-school project grafted onto the body of an multinational corporation." This will be their salvation in a world dominated by traditional corporate behemoths. The only way to beat these huge monoliths is to be lithe and quick, to think fast and act faster. So far, for Google, so good ...

When Google was a graduate-school project being run from a Silicon Valley garage, its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, built their own computers out of cheap parts meant for personal computers. They wanted to save money, and they felt that they could design a network of computers that would search the Web more efficiently than those available from traditional manufacturers.

(link) [NYT > Home Page]

07:07 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link