March 24 2004 -
Romanian villagers decry police investigation into vampire slaying
- By MATTHEW SCHOFIELD, Kansas.com, Knight Ridder Newspapers,
MAROTINU DE SUS, Romania - Before Toma Petre's relatives pulled his body
from the grave, ripped out his heart, burned it to ashes, mixed it with
water and drank it, he hadn't been in the news much. That's often the
way here with vampires. Quiet lives, active deaths...
March 12 2004 -
FBI adds to wiretap wish list
- By Declan McCullagh and Ben
Charny, CNET News.com, A far-reaching proposal from the FBI, made
public Friday, would require all broadband Internet providers, including
cable modem and DSL companies, to rewire their networks to support easy
wiretapping by police. The FBI's request to the Federal Communications
Commission aims to give police ready access to any form of
Internet-based communications. If approved as drafted, the proposal
could dramatically expand the scope of the agency's wiretap powers,
raise costs for cable broadband companies and complicate Internet
product development...
March 08 2004 -
Smith & Wesson Chairman [James Minder]
Was Armed Robber in His 20s, Then, He
Turned Around - Wall Street
Journal, VANESSA O'CONNELL, When he
picked up the phone at his Scottsdale,
Ariz., home last month, James Joseph
Minder realized it was the call he'd been
dreading for the past 20 years. A reporter
with the Arizona Republic had an urgent
question for the 74-year-old chairman of
Smith & Wesson Holding Corp.: Was he the
notorious felon known as the "Shotgun
Bandit" in Michigan decades ago? ...
March 26 2004 -
Congress Moves to Criminalize P2P -
By Xeni Jardin,
WiredNews,
Congress appears to be preparing assaults against peer-to-peer
technology on multiple fronts. A draft bill recently circulated among
members of the House judiciary committee would make it much easier
for the Justice Department to pursue criminal prosecutions against
file sharers by lowering the burden of proof. The bill, obtained
Thursday by Wired News, also would seek penalties of fines and prison
time of up to ten years for file sharing. In addition, on Thursday,
Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) introduced a
bill that would allow the Justice Department to pursue civil cases
against file sharers, again making it easier for law enforcement to
punish people trading copyright music over peer-to-peer networks.
They dubbed the bill "Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft
and Expropriation Act of 2004," or the Pirate Act...
March 10 2004 -
'85 Achille Lauro hijacker
dies in U.S. custody in Iraq
-
David Johnston The New York Times, March 10, 2004, WASHINGTON
Abu Abbas, the Palestinian mastermind of a deadly 1985 cruise ship
hijacking in which an American passenger in a wheelchair was shot and
thrown into the sea, died on Monday in prison in Iraq, a Pentagon
spokesman said...
March 2004 -
City at The Sea
-
![[Click to enlarge image]](../../Science-and-Health/March-2004/boatcity.jpg)
The
Freedom Ship has little in common with a conventional ship; it is
actually nothing more than a big barge. The bolt-up construction and
the unusually large amount of steel incorporated into the ship meets
the design engineer's requirements for stability and structural
integrity and the cost engineers requirements of "economic
feasibility" but the downside is a severe reduction in top speed,
making the ship useless for any existing requirements. For example,
it would be too slow to be a cruise ship or a cargo ship. But what if
this big, overweight, barge was assigned a voyage that required
slowly cruising around the world, hugging the shoreline, and
completing one revolution every 3 years? If the designers then
incorporated the following amenities into this barge, what would be
the results? ...
