How would you like the U.S. government to send you a check that would pay for five years’ worth of gasoline?
Well, it can be arranged.
Not everyone is eligible, of course. But if you use a vehicle 100% for business and purchase it, new or used, from a select list of big-time gas-guzzlers, Uncle Sam is ready to help you out.
Aaron Roe(bot) Fulkerson Open source entrepreneur and digital viking.
About Me
I am a founder and the Chief Executive Officer of MindTouch, a popular open source business application and collaboration platform used by millions. Read more.
SUV owners get free gas — courtesy of Uncle Sam
April 26, 2005 — Aaron FulkersonNASA Is Said to Loosen Risk Standards for Shuttle
April 22, 2005 — Aaron FulkersonASA officials have loosened the standards for what constitutes an acceptable risk of damage from the kind of debris that led to the disintegration of the shuttle Columbia as it was returning from space two years ago, internal documents show.
The move has set off a debate within the agency about whether the changes are a reasonable reassessment of the hazards of flight or whether they jettison long-established rules to justify getting back to space quickly.
Experts who have seen the documents say they do not suggest that the shuttle Discovery – scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on May 22 – is unsafe, but a small but forceful minority say they worry that NASA is repeating a practice that contributed to the Columbia disaster: playing down risks to continue sending humans into space.
The documents were given to The New York Times by several NASA employees, who asked not to be named, saying they feared retribution.
Documents that had been revealed earlier showed that NASA was struggling to meet safety goals set by the independent board that investigated the Columbia accident. The new documents suggest that the agency is looking for ways to justify returning to flight even if it cannot fully meet those recommendations.
Gates, Dell big givers to DeLay | News.blog | CNET News.com
April 21, 2005 — Aaron FulkersonInteresting piece in today%u2019s New York Times reports that Michael Dell and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contributed “at least” $350,000 to the DeLay Foundation for Kids. Much ado about nothing? All depends on your view of corporate largesse.
This could be nothing more than simple acts of kindness by rich philanthropists. But as the Times’ piece notes, DeLay’s foundation lets fat cats curry favor with a very powerful member of Congress “in a way that skirts campaign finance laws.”
Meanwhile, DeLay is in hot water for possible ethics violations and a couple of his political intimates were indicted for illegal fund-raising.
NOOO Bill, say it isn’t. You corporate fat cat pricks. But it’s for the children, right.
The Seattle Times: Politics: DeLay blasts Justice Kennedy
April 20, 2005 — Aaron FulkersonThe Seattle Times: Politics: DeLay blasts Justice Kennedy
The House has no power over which judges receive lifetime appointments, but DeLay has called repeatedly for the House to find a way to hold the federal judiciary accountable for its decisions.
“The judiciary has become so activist and so isolated from the American people that it’s our job to do that,” he said.
Sheese, Tom Delay really doesn’t understand checks and balances does he? Moreover, wasn’t he the one who spearheaded the Schiavo debacle. Talk about out of touch with the American people.
Political Statement Yields Ridiculous Sentence
April 20, 2005 — Aaron FulkersonAn aspiring physicist was sentenced Monday to more than eight years in prison and ordered to pay $3.5 million for his role in a spree of arson and vandalism that targeted gas-guzzling Hummers and other sports utility vehicles.
Rejecting pleas for clemency from William Cottrell, a 24-year-old doctoral candidate in physics at the California Institute of Technology, U.S. District Judge Gary Klausner added more time to the sentence after finding that Cottrell was trying to sway consumers with his anti-SUV message.
The slogans Cottrell spray-painted onto vehicles included “Fat Lazy Americans,” “No Respect for Earth” and “SUV Terrorism.”
Nobody harmed, yet a PhD candidate in Physics gets a sentence equivalent to that of a Rapist or Child Molester. EIGHT YEARS!! WTF is this shit!
John Bolton is an Asshole
April 19, 2005 — Aaron FulkersonA Texas businesswoman has written to the Senate foreign relations committee that John R. Bolton is unfit to serve as UN ambassador because he threatened, berated and harassed her in a dispute over an overseas contract.
The face of evil, or the face of tasty fried chicken?Adobe to Buy Macromedia for $3.4B
April 18, 2005 — Aaron FulkersonAdobe Systems agreed to acquire rival Macromedia for $3.4 billion in a deal that sets the stage for a showdown with Microsoft in the graphics software space.
Whoa, what a shocker! What does this mean for SVG?
NCSU Pirate Captain Ready To Take Office
April 15, 2005 — Aaron FulkersonWhil Piavis’ campaign as “The Pirate Captain” made quite a slash with students. On-campus voter turnout was up almost 10 percent. He said he wants to keep students interested in the politics of the university.
“We felt a giant squid had eaten part of our spirit, so we decided to find the squid and get our spirit back,” Piavis said.
Quick, UNC needs a Ninja King to combat this.
Randomly Generated Paper Accepted to Conference
April 14, 2005 — Aaron FulkersonSome students at MIT wrote a program called SCIgen – An Automatic CS Paper Generator. From their website: SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. What’s amazing is that one of their randomly generated paper was accepted to WMSCI 2005. Now they are accepting donation to fund their trip to the conference and give a randomly generated talk.
Firefox and Opera Fail the Acid2 Test
April 12, 2005 — Aaron Fulkersonnaylor83 writes “Four weeks ago, Opera’s CTO Håkan Lie put forward the Acid2 challenge to the IE developers at Microsoft. The Web Standards Project has now silently published the promised browser test. Somewhat surprisingly, both Opera and Firefox fail to correctly render the test page. Obviously though, they’re no where near as lousy as Internet Explorer. More screenshots are available at my blog, as well as at other people’s.
Spammer gets nine-year jail term
April 11, 2005 — Aaron FulkersonDuring his career as one of the world’s most prolific spammers, the prosecution claimed that James amassed a fortune of some $24 million. According to prosecutors, he was churning out up to a million emails a day. Despite a response rate of 0.3 per cent he was bringing in around $750,000 a month.
Amongst the ‘products’ offered via his mass emailing were pornography, fake products and work-at-home schemes which purported to allow people to earn up to $75 an hour working from home. The prosecution had told the jury that in a single month Jaynes had received 10,000 credit card orders – each for the scam.
Although a resident of Raleigh, North Carolina, Jaynes’s trial took place in Loudon County, Virginia – the home of AOL. He was tried under State Law, which makes it an offence to use false internet addresses and aliases to send mass emails. James was convicted under this law of using the AOL servers to send the spoof emails.
Jeese! That’s a ton of money. You would think the guy would have been intelligent enough to call it quits after the first few million.
Hitachi Eyes 1TB Desktop Drives
April 4, 2005 — Aaron FulkersonHitachi Global Storage Technologies will later this year begin selling hard drives based on perpendicular recording, a yet-to-be commercialized recording method…Hitachi is due to announce Monday.
The company is already testing sample drives based on perpendicular recording and says the technology could allow for 1TB desktop drives or 20GB Microdrives in 2007.
Perpendicular recording is perhaps the most significant near-term step in the evolution of hard drive technology. The method is similar to the longitudinal recording used in today’s drives in that it relies on magnetically charged particles for data storage. In today’s drives, the north and south poles of the magnetic particles run parallel to the disc but in the new method they are arranged perpendicular to the disc, as the name suggests.
…
“Without [perpendicular recording], existing technology will stall at about 120- or 130 gigabits per square inch,” says John Best, chief technologist at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. “Longitudinal recording is running into significant problems with bit size.”
Wired News
April 1, 2005 — Aaron FulkersonCommentator and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan cut short an appearance after an opponent of his conservative views doused him with salad dressing.
“Stop the bigotry!” the demonstrator shouted as he hurled the liquid Thursday night during the program at Western Michigan University. The incident came just two days after another noted conservative, William Kristol, was struck by a pie during an appearance at a college in Indiana.
