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Fat shoplifters on the rampage
A GANG of oversized women shoplifters has been terrorising shopkeepers and supermarkets in the South African port city of Durban over the past two months, police said.
...
[Inspector Michael] Read said "several arrests have been made but some of these women are still at large."

Khouri, now 34, spent much of 2003 retelling this story, reducing listeners to tears and anger, in interviews, book festivals, bookshops and other events. She toured the world with the story, from appearing on network television in the US to being selected for a citywide book club in Adelaide.
While making her new home at a secret location in Queensland and fearing for her life, Khouri became a standard-bearer for oppressed Arab women and triggered a publishing trend of similar books.
The truth is very different, and may affect Khouri's legal residency status in Australia [my emphasis].

Harmony Technology breaks the lock-in that has been a leading factor in the success of the Apple iTunes Music Store. The iPod outsells other players by a wide margin, and iPod customers have been forced to use Apple's online music store because the iPod supports only the company's Protected Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format. Now iPod owners will be able to purchase music from the RealPlayer Music Store, which uses a much higher-quality format--192Kbps RealAudio 10 AAC.

This should be fun to watch.
Cause Real didn't break just Apple's DRM, they broke their business model. After all, the whole reason to keep Fairplay proprietary is so that only music purchased at iTunes plays on the Pod *and* the only place iTunes music plays is the pod. Which means: lock-in. Once the pod people have enough invested in iTunes music files, they will have no choice but to buy ipods to listen to it. But Real's process involves downloading the music to the PC in Real-format AAC which is then converted to WMA or Apple AAC/Fairplay. The purchased file apparently stays in the neutral format. Hence, no pod lock-in for music purchased from Real.

The article states "iPod customers have been forced to use Apple's online music store because the iPod supports only the company's Protected Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format." This is untrue.
The iPod supports MP3 (32 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible, AIFF, WAV and Apple Lossless audio formats in addition to AAC (with and without FairPlay DRM). I find it in poor taste that technolgy news writers (not just this one) mislead their readers with such mis-information.
Because of such reporting there are many people who believe that iTunes can only work with the iPod. iTunes can work with a wide array of portable digital audio players that support MP3s.
The limitations and lock-in have to do with FairPlay managed AAC files sold through the iTunes Music Store. There are ways around this however.
Of course you already knew all of this.

Is Warren Beatty the worst actor of all time?

Not surprisingly, Beatty is a multiple-Oscar winner.

It is a sensitive topic. Melbourne's Greeks still claim they hold the title, noting that they are a very close community and mostly still speak Greek, while those in North America "speak American" and have lost some of their heritage.

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) - Four learning-disabled students sued the organization that administers the medical school admission test, alleging they were denied extra time to take the exam in violation of California's disability laws.

It was due to Lysenko's efforts that many real scientists, those who were geneticists or who rejected Lamarckism in favor of natural selection, were sent to the gulags or simply disappeared from the USSR.

And in Russia, 'global warming' has been likened to Lysenkoism.

'That ideological base can be juxtaposed and compared with man-hating totalitarian ideology with which we had the bad fortune to deal during the 20th century, such as National Socialism, Marxism, Eugenics, Lysenkoism and so on. All methods of distorting information existing in the world have been committed to prove the alleged validity of these theories. Misinformation, falsification, fabrication, mythology, propaganda. Because what is offered cannot be qualified in any other way than myth, nonsense and absurdity.'

The purpose of this web site is to provide an exchange of information, news and ideas regarding the current proliferation of windfarms particularly in some of the most beautiful parts of Britain - Wales, the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands to mention but a few.

A famous man once said, we've just declared the UN an outlaw organization, the bombing starts in five minutes.

You cannot tell a man that saving him and his family from torture, humiliation and death was a mistake and it should’ve not been done because it’s illegal. This is almost an insult to Iraqis to hear someone saying that this war was illegal. It means that our suffering for decades meant nothing and that formalities and the stupid rules of the UN (that rarely function) are more important than the lives of 25 million people.

AUSTRALIAN Federal Police are waiting to interview a man who allegedly terrorised passengers on a Bali-bound tourist flight from Perth.
Official sources say David Mann, 31, told passengers that he had explosives, and lunged past flight attendants towards the cockpit of the Garuda Indonesia flight on June 30.

In all, 10 million Ukrainians, most of them peasants, died as catastrophic, stupid and cruel collectivization policies were imposed by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin on the richest, most fertile, wheat-exporting breadbasket in the world. In the decades before World War I, its annual grain exports regularly vastly outstripped those of the American Midwest.

The Trail Goes Cold (5/20)
Federal investigators say the United Nations has turned over just 20 percent of the paperwork they requested for their investigation of fraud in the Iraq oil-for-food program. And investigators say that the documents the UN did turn over are riddled with errors.

25 years ago today, the space station "Skylab" crashed to Earth between Perth and Kalgoorlie. Not only was this the first time a space station had crashed into the Earth, but it also marked the first time that anything important ever happened in Western Australia.

Tracking the broadcaster's chronic bias is intensive work. Denials are easy because distortions derive from the wickedness that lurks in the hearts of men and women. But on its own, the way gauche reporters and presenters feel free, night after night on its 7pm news, to give a twirl to the news on the basis of personal prejudice and ideology, is symptomatic of deep-seated intellectual malaise.

E N G I N E E R S have cleared the air in the Burnley Tunnel by finding a better way to suck out the fumes.
A trial that changed the flow of air in the underground road has cut smog by 85 per cent.
Trucks were the main cause of the visible haze that used to last an average of 59 minutes a day.
By turning the large exhaust fans on and off at certain times, City-Link has cut the smog to an average of 9 minutes a day.
The chief executive of CityLink, Brendan Bourke, said thanks to engineers the efficiency of the ventilation system had been dramatically improved.
Engineers changed the speed of airflow by running more fans in one part of the tunnel and fewer in the other, he said.

Australia's already low fertility rates would plummet as obesity rendered more women unable to fall pregnant.

Polycystic ovaries are two to five times larger than normal ovaries, and they have a white, thick, tough outer covering. This condition is commonly called Stein-Leventhal syndrome, and usually develops shortly after puberty.
A woman with polycystic ovaries stops menstruating, menstruates erratically, or may not have ever menstruated. She will gain weight, eventually becoming obese. She may develop excessive amounts of facial or body hair (hirsutism). Some women exhibit virilization, or development of male characteristics.

In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible [my emphasis]. The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. This reduces climate change to the discernment of significant differences in the statistics of such ensembles. The generation of such model ensembles will require the dedication of greatly increased computer resources [my emphasis, again] and the application of new methods of model diagnosis. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive, but such statistical information is essential.