SEE HERE

“The 100 dogs were shot dead over two days after an expected post-Olympics boon in dogsledding business at an adventure company didn't pan out. Most died instantly, but others suffered — like the one that ran away with its "face blown off and an eye hanging out."

The gruesome event was described in documents awarding compensation to a worker, who claimed post-traumatic stress disorder for having to shoot the dogs after bookings dropped sharply for a tour operator following the 2010 Winter Olympics.

"He had to chase her down and finish her off," Marcie Moriarty, general manager of cruelty investigations for the B.C. Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said of the wounded down that was run down and slain.

Moriarty said the slaughter left her sickened and said it is the worst investigation she's ever done. Both the British Columbia SPCA and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are investigating the slaughter.

Moriarty said all the other dogs would have seen the incident in which the one dog did not die instantly from the single gunshot to the head and ran away from the worker…”

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-- You will love it. Watch now.

“TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM -- You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION -- You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when the cow drops dead.

FRENCH CORPORATION -- You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION -- You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create clever cow cartoon images called Cowkimon(tm) and market them world-wide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION -- You have two cows. You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

A BRITISH CORPORATION -- You have two cows. Both are mad.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION -- You have two cows, but you don't know where they are. You break for lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION -- You have two cows. You count them and learn you have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 12 cows. You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION -- You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you. You charge others for storing them.

A HINDU CORPORATION -- You have two cows. You worship them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION -- You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim full employment, high bovine productivity, and arrest the newsman who reported the numbers.

AN ARKANSAS CORPORATION -- You have two cows. That one on the left is kinda cute.

ENRON CORPORATION -- You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public buys your bull.

ARTHUR ANDERSON, LLC -- You have 2 cows. You shred all documents that Enron has any cows, take 2 cows from Enron for payment for consulting the cows, and attest that Enron has 9 cows.”

READ HERE

-- Eurovision 2011 will be taking place in Düsseldorf, Germany this year and one of my friends has a chance to be the one to represent the country of Lithuania in the contest! There were 70 songs originally submitted to LRT for consideration in the 2011 selection. These 70 then became 43 after a special jury selection. There will be a total of three semi finals. Three songs from each semi final will directly qualify to the final where the finalist well be selected. So now you can see that I'm not just giving her a plug, because I know her, she actually is amazing!

"It has long been true that California on its own would rank as one of the biggest economies in the world. At present it would rank 8th, falling between Italy and Brazil on a nominal exchange-rate basis. But how do other American states compare with other countries? Taking the nearest equivalent country from 2009 data reveals some surprises. Who would have thought that despite years of car-industry hardship, Michigan's economy is about the same size as the whole of Taiwan's."

-- Can't vouch for the accuracy here. Seems like they are using GDP only, not PPP, or even GDP (PPP), but it's interesting in any case and the accuracy of such things is always arguable.

READ HERE

-- HAHA... So good, so which pale kid is faster???

“Daniel Arsham’s apartment in Brooklyn is the only pint-sized place we’ve ever wanted to live in. It’s a mere 90 square feet -- that’s about big enough to fit a toothbrush -- but the decor’s so sleek and minimal, we’d trade in our own sardine can in a heartbeat.

The apartment’s a loft attached to the offices of Snarkitecture, the cool-kid architecture firm where Arsham is a partner, and it’s basically just a room that serves two functions: sleeping and dressing. But oh, what a room it is.

The walls look like great big, pixelated screens that fade from gray to white as you approach the ceiling. On closer inspection, the pixels are actually ping-pong balls -- a whopping 25,000 of ‘em.* We half expect someone to come out and call a Powerball winner.

The rest of the place is a study in simplicity. Arsham’s got a bed with some built-in shelves and a dresser, where he keeps a few clothes. To enter the loft, he climbs a ladder through the office’s employee bathroom.

The apartment -- which Snarkitecture designed -- was built in two months for less than $100 a square foot. That’s about $50 cheaper than your average loft. Impressive. Then again, by the looks of it, all they really had to do was shop at the local sporting goods store…”

SEE HERE

“Last week the BPI released their overview of 2010 sales volumes in the UK. As always, their press release was filled with claims that piracy is ruining their industry and most mainstream media was quick to republish this propaganda. However, we can use the very same data to show that more music is being sold than ever before, and argue that piracy is likely to have had very little impact.

The PR people within the music industry are masters of spin. They can take any type of data and make the public believe that piracy is killing their business. For years they have fought against this imaginary enemy, and every press release issued is filled with complaints about illegal downloading.

We’re not going to argue about the exact impact of piracy in this article, but we do want to balance out the music industry’s propaganda a little bit. By doing so we hope to show that the music industry isn’t doing so badly as they claim. In fact, year after year more music is being sold.

What’s changing is the type of music consumers buy, and this change is driving revenue down. The question, however, is whether piracy has anything to do with this change. We doubt it, and we’re going to show why…”

-- A bit old, but the article I posted below reminded me of this.

READ HERE

“When federal authorities shut down five Web sites last month on suspicion of copyright infringement, they gave no warning and offered no details of their investigation, and they have not filed any criminal charges since.

John Morton, right, director of customs enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security, with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., announced the seizure of 82 Web domains last month.

But after the seizure warrant used in the operation was released last week, the operators of several of the sites said in interviews that they were innocent of infringement, and criticized the investigation for misrepresenting how their sites worked.

In a 69-page affidavit seeking the warrant, an agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the unit of the Department of Homeland Security that did the investigation, said the five sites — rapgodfathers.com, torrent-finder.com, rmx4u.com, dajaz1.com and onsmash.com — were used “to commit or facilitate criminal copyright infringement.”

The agent also said the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade groups for the major film studios and record labels, had confirmed that the music and movies on the sites had not been released with the authorization of their copyright holders.

Yet after being shown the affidavit, the operator of dajaz1.com — a widely read hip-hop blog that posts new songs and videos — disputed many of the warrant’s examples of what it called copyright infringement. He said that, like much of the material on his site, the songs had been sent to him for promotional purposes by record labels and the artists…”

READ HERE

-- The sun goes up, the sun goes down, the tide comes in, the tide comes out, there's no miscommunication...

“Scientists are predicting that the world's largest super-volcano in one of America's most popular national parks could erupt in the near future.

Yellowstone National Park’s caldera has erupted three times in the last 2.1million years and researchers monitoring it say we could be in for another eruption.

They said that the super-volcano underneath the Wyoming park has been rising at a record rate since 2004 - its floor has gone up three inches per year for the last three years alone, the fastest rate since records began in 1923.

It would explode with a force a thousand times more powerful than the Mount St Helens eruption in 1980.

Spewing lava far into the sky, a cloud of plant-killing ash would fan out and dump a layer 10ft deep up to 1,000 miles away.

Two-thirds of the U.S. could become uninhabitable as toxic air sweeps through it, grounding thousands of flights and forcing millions to leave their homes.

But hampered by a lack of data they have stopped short of an all-out warning and they are unable to put a date on when the next disaster might take place.

When the eruption finally happens it will dwarf the effect of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which erupted in April last year, causing travel chaos around the world…”

READ HERE

“A cluster of 300 artificial islands off Dubai's coast in the shape of a global map is stable, its developer Nakheel insists, despite a court claim alleging that "The World" was neglected and eroding away.

"There is no issue with the stability of The World islands that are approximately 70 percent sold and handed over," a Nakheel spokesman said when asked about the allegations.

"The island purchasers (have) the responsibility to proceed with their developments in due course," he added.

The islands, many of which represent individual countries and which can only be accessed by boat or helicopter, were meant to be one of the Gulf city-state's crowning developments.

Builders have announced plans for a few of the islands, but development has yet to begin on most of them.

A company contracted to provide logistics support to the islands filed a claim with a tribunal that handles cases related to the emirate's troubled Dubai World conglomerate, alleging that third-party developers had not been encouraged to develop the islands, and said they were being hit by erosion…”

-- Who would have thought!?

READ HERE