MegaBus yesterday charged into the ultracheap bus wars with an offer hard to beat - a free ride to the Big Apple.
[MegaBus offers at least one seat per bus on its Boston-to-New York route for $1. Other seats cost up to $14 each way.]
But through Tuesday, MegaBus is offering all seats for free, with a small booking fee.
TOKYO (AP) - A homeless woman who sneaked into a man’s house and lived undetected in his closet for a year was arrested in Japan after he became suspicious when food mysteriously began disappearing.
Police found the 58-year-old woman Thursday hiding in the top compartment of the man’s closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki Itakura from southern Kasuya town said Friday.
The resident of the home installed security cameras that transmitted images to his mobile phone after becoming puzzled by food disappearing from his kitchen over the past several months.
One of the cameras captured someone moving inside his home Thursday after he had left, and he called police believing it was a burglar. However, when they arrived they found the door locked and all windows closed.
“We searched the house … checking everywhere someone could possibly hide,” Itakura said. “When we slid open the shelf closet, there she was, nervously curled up on her side.”
The woman told police she had no place to live and first sneaked into the man’s house about a year ago when he left it unlocked.
She had moved a mattress into the small closet space and even took showers, Itakura said, calling the woman “neat and clean.”
kevin poulsen for wired.
The computer attackers who took down Comcast’s homepage and webmail service for more than five hours Thursday say they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into.
In an hour-long telephone conference call with Threat Level, the hackers known as “Defiant” and “EBK” expressed astonishment over the attention their DNS hijacking has garnered. In the call, the pair bounded freely between jubilant excitement over the impact of their attack, and fatalism that they would soon be arrested for it.
“The situation has kind of blown up here, a lot bigger than I thought it would,” says Defiant, a 19-year-old man whose first name is James. “I wish I was a minor right now because this is going to be really bad.”
The two hackers are members of the underground group Kryogeniks. The interview was arranged by Mike “Virus” Neives, an 18-year-old New Yorker who pleaded guilty as a minor last year to hacking AOL. Neives, who was on the call, is also a member of Kryogeniks, though he and his compatriots say he’s stopped hacking.
Neives vouched for the identities of the hackers. Threat Level also confirmed Defiant’s identity over AOL instant messenger, on a handle that’s known to belong to Defiant.
Neither hacker would identify their full names or locations. Defiant’s MySpace profile lists him in Cashville, Tennessee, but he says that’s incorrect. His girlfriend lists herself in New York. Threat Level expects both hackers’ names and locations will emerge soon.
The hackers say the attack began Tuesday, when the pair used a combination of social engineering and a technical hack to get into Comcast’s domain management console at Network Solutions. They declined to detail their technique, but said it relied on a flaw at the Virginia-based domain registrar.
Network Solutions spokeswoman Susan Wade disputes the hackers’ account. “We now know that it was nothing on our end,” she says. “There was no breach in our system or social engineering situation on our end.”
However they got in, the intrusion gave the pair control of over 200 domain names owned by Comcast. They changed the contact information for one of them, Comcast.net, to Defiant’s e-mail address; for the street address, they used the “Dildo Room” at “69 Dick Tard Lane.”
Comcast, they said, noticed the administrative transfer and wrested back control, forcing the hackers to repeat the exploit to regain ownership of the domain. Then, they say, they contacted Comcast’s original technical contact at his home number to tell him what they’d done.
When the Comcast manager scoffed at their claim and hung up on them, 18-year-old EBK decided to take the more drastic measure of redirecting the site’s traffic to servers under their control. (Comcast would neither confirm nor deny the warning phone call.)
“If he wasn’t such a prick, he could have avoided all of that,” says EBK. “I wasn’t even really thinking. Plus, I’m just so mad at Comcast. I’m tired of their shitty service.”
“They called me back five minutes later and said, ‘We got Comcast’,” recalls Neives.
The defacement message was short and simple: “KRYOGENICS Defiant and EBK RoXed Comcast,” it read. “sHouTz to VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven.”
from my fave industry mag, Variety.
China responds to Stone comments
BEIJING — Thesp Sharon Stone’s suggestion that the Chinese earthquake which killed at least 70,000 people was the result of bad karma has prompted outrage in China, where relief efforts are still ongoing for the millions made homeless by the quake, and is facing a boycott of her movies.
Stone made her comments at Cannes, linking the recent disaster to China’s treatment of Tibetans during anti-Chinese riots in March.
“All these earthquakes and stuff happened and I thought, “Is that karma?” When you are not nice, bad things happen to you. I’m not happy about how the Chinese are treating the Tibetans, I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else. They’re not being very nice to the Dali Lama, who’s a good friend of mine,” she said.
She also said how she cried when she heard of the quake and hoped to help the victims, but these remarks have received less attention in China than her karma comments.
Stone appeared at the Shanghai Film Festival last year and was well-received for her comments about life and love, as well as her praise for China’s ancient civilization.
The timing of the “Basic Instinct” star’s comments is poor, as China continued to mourn its dead following the 7.9-magnitude quake on May 12.
The exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who numbers Richard Gere and others among his friends in Hollywood, has praised the Chinese response to the quake, prayed for the victims and called for a suspension of demonstrations against Chinese rule as relief efforts continue.
“This actress does not deserve our attention. The best way is to ignore her. I will never watch her films in future,” said thesp Liu Wei, while fellow actor Lu Qilong accused Stone of lacking respect.
“Sharon Stone’s remarks made all Chinese people and the world shocked and angry. She does not respect the Chinese people, as well as people’s lives. Sichuan’s earthquake affects everyone’s heart,” said Lu.
“The earthquake is not only China’s disaster, but a disaster for all of mankind. Sharon Stone’s performance shows that not only does she lack love, but she lacks humanity? How could she say such things!” said thesp Tong Dawei.
Super-caffeinated energy drinks, with names like Red Bull, Monster, Full Throttle and Amp, have surged in popularity in the past decade. About a third of 12- to 24-year-olds say they regularly down energy drinks, which account for more than $3 billion in annual sales in the United States.
The trend has been the source of growing concern among health researchers and school officials. Around the country, the drinks have been linked with reports of nausea, abnormal heart rhythms and emergency room visits.
In Colorado Springs, several high school students last year became ill after drinking Spike Shooter, a high caffeine drink, prompting the principal to ban the beverages. In March, four middle school students in Broward County, Florida, went to the emergency room with heart palpitations and sweating after drinking the energy beverage Redline. In Tigard, Oregon, teachers this month sent parents e-mail alerting them that students who brought energy drinks to school were “literally drunk on a caffeine buzz or falling off a caffeine crash.”
New research suggests the drinks are associated with a health issue far more worrisome than the jittery effects of caffeine — risk taking.
In March, The Journal of American College Health published a report on the link between energy drinks, athletics and risky behavior. The study’s author, Kathleen Miller, an addiction researcher at the University of Buffalo, says it suggests that high consumption of energy drinks is associated with “toxic jock” behavior, a constellation of risky and aggressive behaviors including unprotected sex, substance abuse and violence.
A quick reminder: CAFFEINE IS A DRUG.
A DRUG!!!!!
Get over it. Dad’s gonna see this, yell at you, smack your ass a bit and go have a cup of coffee.
Four words you don’t want to hear in space:
“The toilet is broken.”
The crew aboard the International Space Station is working on a problem with the system for collecting solid and liquid waste, which is a trickier proposition without gravity than it is on the Earth. Space toilets use jets of fan-propelled air to guide waste into the proper container.
A NASA status report noted that last week, while using the toilet system in the Russian-built service module, “the crew heard a loud noise and the fan stopped working.” The solid waste collector is functioning properly, but the system for collecting liquid waste was not.
The crew tried replacing one device, an air/water separator, and then a filter, but nothing seemed to bring the toilet back to full operation. Russian mission control told the crew — Russian Cosmonauts Sergey Volkov and Oleg Kononenko, and Garrett Reisman, a NASA astronaut, to use the toilet on the Soyuz capsule that is attached to the station as a lifeboat. But that system has very limited capacity, and so repairing the system has become an increasingly urgent issue.
As so often happens when there’s a plumbing problem, house guests are on the way: the space shuttle Discovery is scheduled to launch on Saturday, with seven astronauts aboard. The shuttle, however, has its own toilet.
Nicole Cloutier-Lemasters, a spokeswoman for NASA, said that mission managers are working on plans to carry replacement toilet parts to the station. In the mean time, she said a temporary work-around has been put in place: “they’re bypassing the troublesome hardware” for urine collection with a “special receptacle” that has been attached to the toilet, she said.
Of all the technological achievements of space travel, none has captured the popular imagination as much as bathroom physics. Mike Mullane, a former astronaut and professional speaker, said questions about the operations of space toilets are the most popular questions from audiences by “more than ten to one” over such questions as “have I seen any aliens” and “did we fake the moon landing.”
Today, I stop shunning the title w00k which some of you have rudely given me.
Due to a series of coincidences, I found myself looking like QUEEN w00k today.
It’s a beautiful day, so I wear my flower child skirt. And what flower child would not put a braid crown atop her head?
It’s a beautiful day, so I take my umbrella out of my bag.
I end up getting out of class and proceeding to plow through the silly students hovering under the entrance. I proceed to get literally soaked through on my walk ACROSS comm ave.
Get on train.
Smiling.
Rain is cleansing. It’s rejuvenating. And lets be honest, it’s just fun.
Get off train. Only 50% of the sky is dropping at once.
Walk home, barefoot. Through puddles. Across streets. Liang laughed at me.
Still smiling.
of course the moment I turned onto my alley, the rain stopped.
don’t care.
I love rain.
Forget aviation hero. On the side, Lindbergh was a Dr Frankenstein figure, who used his mechanical genius to explore the possibility of conquering death - but only for the select few who were considered “worthy” of living forever.
“Beating death was something he thought about his entire life”, says David M Friedman, American author of the new book The Immortalists. “Even as a small child, he couldn’t accept that people had to die. He would ask: ‘Why do you have to die to get to heaven?’”
In the 1930s, after his historic flight over the Atlantic, Lindbergh hooked up with Alexis Carrel, a brilliant surgeon born in France but who worked in a laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute in Manhattan. Carrel - who was a mystic as well as a scientist - had already won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on the transplantation of blood vessels. But his real dream was a future in which the human body would become, in Friedman’s words, “a machine with constantly reparable or replaceable parts”.
This is where Lindbergh entered the frame. Carrel hoped that his own scientific nous combined with Lindbergh’s machine-making proficiency (Lindbergh had, after all, already helped design a plane that flew non-stop to Paris) would make his fantasy about immortal machine-enabled human beings a reality.
At the Rockefeller lab, Lindbergh and Carrel - almost like a real-life Jekyll and Hyde double act - made some extraordinary breakthroughs.
Lindbergh created something that Carrel’s team had singularly failed to: a perfusion pump that could keep a human organ alive outside of the body. It was called the “Model T” pump. In later years, Lindbergh’s pump was further developed by others, eventually leading to the construction of the first heart-lung machine.
“Some people, even academics and science students, are still shocked when they hear about the contribution that the aviator Lindbergh made to developing life-saving cardiac machinery”, says Friedman.
Carrel was a eugenicist with fascistic leanings. He believed the world was split into superior and inferior beings, and hoped that science would allow the superior - which included himself and Lindbergh, of course - to dominate and eventually weed out the inferiors.
He thought the planet was “encumbered” with people who “should be dead”, including “the weak, the diseased, and the fools”. Something like Lindbergh’s pump was not intended to help the many, but the few.
“I wouldn’t say Lindbergh was the philosophical partner of Himmler or Hitler,” says Friedman. “But yes, he certainly admired the order, science and technology of Nazi Germany - and the idea of creating an ethnically pure race.” (BBC News)
Life-forms have been found thriving a mile beneath the seafloor in hot sediments, a new study says.
The finding doubles the maximum known depth for organisms under the ocean bottom—and may be an encouraging sign for the search for life on other planets.
At 140 to 212 degrees F, the microscopic life forms are probably also the hottest life-forms yet found in seafloor sediments, according to study co-author R. John Parkes, a microbiologist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom.
The scientists examined core samples of sediments in the North Atlantic Ocean and found microbes known as prokaryotes.
Many of the prokaryotes share characteristics in common with “extremophiles,” which live in hot springs, both under the sea and in areas such as Yellowstone National Park.
The microbes appear to make their livings by metabolizing methane and other hydrocarbons created as the Earth’s interior heat warms organic material in the sediments, Parkes said.
“That’s what we think they’re using as an energy source.”
The organisms do not appear simply to have been dormant microbes trapped in the sediments, Parkes added, but instead appeared to be thriving.
The discovery supports predictions that as much as 70 percent of the Earth’s prokaryotes may live in seabed sediments, some of which can be several miles thick.
All told, Parkes said, these prokaryotes could amount to 10 to 30 percent of the world’s total living matter.
(NTNL GEOGRAPHIC)
Coca-Cola is phasing out a controversial additive that has been linked to damage to DNA and hyperactivity in children.
Sodium benzoate, soda’s best friend, is one of those terms on the can I am familiar with, but know little about. It is used to stop fizzy drinks going moldy.
Coca-Cola said it had begun withdrawing the additive from Diet Coke in January in response to consumer demand for more natural products. By the end of the year no can or bottle will contain the ‘benz.
Coke plans to remove it from other drinks as well, but as of yet has failed to find an acceptable replacement in those sodas that actually have juice (Fanta, Dr Pepper, Sprite, etc.)
While sodium benzoate occurs naturally in some fruits, it is used in greater strengths by the soft drinks industry.
Research by Peter Piper, a professor of molecular biology at Sheffield University, found that the additive could switch off parts of DNA; that could be linked to cirrhosis of the liver and Parkinson’s disease.
“The Man” (in this case, british govt) argues that while sodium benzoate has been shown to be harmful to yeast cells, human cells are stronger…thus disproving the importance of the study.
Research by Southampton University found that sodium benzoate was one of seven additives - the six others are food colours - hat can lead to hyperactivity in children.
The Food Standards Agency has called for the six colours to be withdrawn from products but not sodium benzoate.