this lady is crazy

A Christian nurse moved to a desk job after refusing to remove her crucifix at work has lost a discrimination claim against her employers.

Shirley Chaplin, from Exeter, had argued the cross "ban" prevented her from expressing her religious beliefs.
But an employment tribunal ruled that the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospitals NHS Trust, where she worked, had acted in a reasonable manner.
Mrs Chaplin said it was a "very poor day" for Christians in the workplace.

The law doesn't appear to be on the Christian side Shirley Chaplin Crucifix case - have your say

Jane Viner, the trust's Acting Director of Nursing, said it was "absolutely satisfied" with the tribunal's decision.
She said: "These were very serious allegations of direct and indirect discrimination and we're satisfied that the tribunal has completely dismissed them."
She said Mrs Chaplin, 54, was a respected nurse and had a future at the hospital.
Mrs Chaplin, who is intending to appeal against the decision, said: "The law doesn't appear to be on the Christian side."
She said Christians in the workplace would feel "quite persecuted" by the ruling.

hand and arm as a touch screen?!?

more about it here->  http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/19/microsoft.skinput/index.html




Atlanta, Georgia (CNN) -- In Chris Harrison's ideal world, mobile phones would be the size of matchbooks. They'd have full-size keyboards. They'd browse the Web. They'd play videos.
And, most importantly, you'd never have to touch them.
Sound like too much to ask? Maybe not.
Harrison, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University and a former intern at Microsoft Research, has developed a working prototype of a system called Skinput that does just that, essentially by turning a person's hand and forearm into a keyboard and screen.
"People don't love the iPhone keyboard. They use them. But they don't love them," Harrison said in a interview at the recent Computer-Human Interaction conference. "If you could make the iPhone keyboard as big as an arm -- that would be huge."
Using Skinput, a person could tap their thumb and middle finger together to answer a call; touch their forearm to go to the next track on a music player; or flick the center of their palm to select a menu item.
All of these sign-language-like movements, which are customizable, would control a gadget in a person's pocket through a Bluetooth connection.
When fitted with a pico-projector, the Skinput system could display an image of a digital keyboard on a person's forearm. So, using Skinput, someone could send text messages by tappProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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g his or her arm in certain places -- without pulling the phone out of a pocket or purse.
"You could pretty much do a lot of what you do on your iPhone," said Harrison, who says Skinput "is [like having] your iPhone on your palm."
The system, which has been under development for eight months, won't be commercially available for two to seven years, said Dan Morris, a Microsoft researcher who is working with Harrison on Skinput.
Before that can happen, Skinput's sensors need to get more accurate, he said. In a 13-person trial in Seattle, Washington, Skinput was found to be 96 percent accurate. But that test only used five buttons. The system would have to improve for people to make use of a full keyboard, which would be the "holy grail," Morris said.
"The accuracy is good, but it's not quite consumer-level yet," he said.
Skinput is one of a number of prototypes, ideas and near-products aiming to make computing more natural.
These devices seek to move beyond the mouse and physical keyboard, letting people communicate with their gadgets by gesturing, using sign language or, in the case of Skinput, tapping on their hands, fingers and forearms.

High Holy Day for Potheads 4/20

April has two days when many Americans, en masse, engage in something that's plainly illegal but is, they swear, OK to do anyway because everyone does it and it doesn't hurt a soul and it makes you feel just so very happy.
The first of these days has already passed: April 15, tax day, when millions of Americans, according to the latest research, fail to pay billions in taxes. The other day is April 20 -- Saturday -- a day when thousands, if not millions, will "mow the grass." That's a polite way of saying that these folks get baked, blitzed, paggered, blazed, obliterated, perved, shmacked ... in other words, they get high, as 4/20 is recognized by many as "national smokers day."
The term "420" and its attendant traditions date back to the 1970s, but at least some evidence exists -- enough to convince any stoner, at least -- that the term has experienced something of a resurgence in our electronic times.
On message boards and community sites across the Web, it's possible to find people who are "420 friendly," meaning that they'd love to meet you and smoke your dope.
And for such people, 4/20 is the recognized day to get your smoke on. And especially at 4:20 a.m. or p.m. on 4/20, and especially while listening to Phish. This year, dozens of celebrations are planned across the globe.
In San Francisco, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, NORML, will finish up its two-day conference "celebrating persoProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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l freedom."
"Once again we have scheduled the conference to coincide with '4/20,' that date that has become associated in the popular culture as a special day for marijuana smokers -- sort of what 'It's Miller time' has become to beer drinkers," the group said on its site. "We hope to build on that tradition and encourage supporters from across the country to joinProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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s in San Francisco as a way to celebrate 4/20."
The event comes after a week of attention focused on NORML, which spent half a million dollars to run ads (PDF) in New York City asking Mayor Michael Bloomberg to fine and ticket -- rather than arrest -- people caught smoking marijuana in the street. The ads feature Bloomberg's response to a New York magazine reporter's query about whether he'd ever used marijuana. The mayor said, "You bet I did. And I enjoyed it."
Given the nature of the celebration, of course, not all of the scheduled events are so political. Most, it seems, are music festivals that might have been going on anyway, but which promise to have some added pep in honor of the day.
The Web is rife with speculation regarding the origin of the term "420." An old yarn has it that 420 was a California police code cops used when they'd spotted someone getting high, and that drug users co-opted the word. Some think it has to do with Hitler's birthday, April 20th -- which is, not entirely coincidentally, also the day in 1999 that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 13 people, and themselves, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
But the consensus opinion has come to rest on a theory put forth by Steven Hager, the editor of High Times, in the magazine in 1998. Hager told the story of the Waldos, a group of San Rafael High School kids who gave Hager evidence -- letters, and so on -- to show they had created the term 420.
This is how the term began, according to Hager's article: "One day, while (the Waldos) were sitting on the wall, a friend gave them a treasure map to a pot patch on nearby Point Reyes Peninsula. 'His brother grew the patch,' said Steve (one of the Waldos).
"The Waldos decided to meet after school and pick the patch. Since school got out at 3:10, and since some of the Waldos had after-school activities that lasted approximately one hour, someone decided they should meet at exactly 4:20 p.m., at the statue of Louis Pasteur, which was located near the entrance to the school parking lot."
After that, the Waldos -- who have their own site at Waldo420.com -- naturally began using 420 as shorthand for cannabis. The Waldos were big fans of the Grateful Dead, and, as Hager explains in his article, "the 420 expression leaked into the Deadhead community and spread from there."
In an e-mail message, Hager said that the Internet further aided the spread of the term, as "Deadheads were the first big group of Internet users."
Asked what he would be doing to celebrate this year's 4/20, Hager wrote that he will be "in Magic Meadow, near the top of Overlook Mountain, which is just above Woodstock, New York."
And what will people do after 4/20, when pot day is over? They'll smoke more, according to one post on the Bay Area Community site, Craigslist.
"A bunch of 420 worshipers who didn't get enough on 4/20 are meeting at Raleigh's in Berkeley on Telegraph (Avenue at) 5:30 on Sunday," it said. "Come burn in summer with us."

Read More http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2002/04/51986#ixzz0ledqBG8D


PT- when people smoke every day i dont get why one day has to be called pot day? can some one explain?

Air planes go night night?!

LONDON — A cloud of ash from an Icelandic volcano shut down much of air travel to and from Northern Europe for a third straight day and flights were likely to be disrupted through Monday morning as a massive transportation gridlock spread around the world.

 Europe’s major airports — crucial hubs for international travelers and cargo — were closed. Eurocontrol, the European organization for the safety of air navigation, said that about 16,000 flights were canceled on the continent on Saturday.

France’s Prime Minister, François Fillion, who held an emergency meeting on Saturday, announced that Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports in Paris, among others in northern France, would be closed until 8 a.m. Monday. Airports in Northern Italy, including Milan’s Malpensa, were also ordered shut until 8 a.m.,

Actual evidence of the ash was being detected in Britain, where British Airways also canceled all of its short-haul flights until Monday morning.

In addition to shutdowns in Germany, where one Lufthansa official questioned the government’s use of British data for guidance, airports were closed in Belarus and Ukraine as the cloud spread eastward. Adding to the confusion was that scientists were uncertain when the plume, which presents a severe threat to aircraft, would dissipate. Volcanic ash is primarily made up of silicates, akin to glass fibers, which when ingested into a jet engine can melt, causing the engine to flame out and stall.

And one German meteorologist noted that the fine spring weather that reigned much of Europe — perfect flying weather under other circumstances — prolonged the ban on air traffic. The high pressure zone that delivered the sunny skies also helped hold the ash cloud in place, said Helmut Malewski, a meteorologist at the German Weather Service in Offenbach near Frankfurt.

One Icelandic geologist, Magnus Tumi Gudmundsson of the University of Iceland, told The Associated Press early Saturday that activity was increasing at the volcano Eyjafjallajokull (pronounced EY-ya-fyat-lah-YO-kut), whose eruption on Wednesday began disrupting air travel the next day. But in a statement released shortly after noon, a spokesman for Iceland’s Foreign Ministry, Urdur Gunnarsdottir, said that the force of the volcanic eruption under the glacier had been constant during the night until 4 a.m., when it appeared to decrease.

In extending its ban on flights to and from Britain until at least 7 a.m. Sunday, the National Air Traffic Services said that the cloud was “moving around and changing shape.” The British organization said that it had hoped that the cloud would move southward to open some air space, but instead new ash was coming from Iceland.

Britain’s Met Office, the national weather service, said on Saturday that the volcano is still erupting in pulses and evidence of ash dust over the country were now being detected. It said European air travel could be disrupted as a result for several days.

“The volcano has become rather more active this morning,” Barry Gromett, a spokesman for the Met office said Saturday. “We’re getting reports about thin ash deposits from all over the country. People expect to throw back the curtains and to see an apocalyptic cloud but that’s not the case. It’s more like a thin layer on cars.”

The Met Office in London said that a strong westerly wind forecast for the next 12 hours would move the ash initially away from Britain, but it then “curves around” and affect Britain, Scandinavia and Russia. “There’s not much that would indicate a change,” Mr. Gromett said. As Germany entered a second day when every airport in the country was closed to air traffic, the airline Lufthansa expressed impatience with what it suggested was excessive caution by authorities.

Instead of accepting data from British authorities, “it would help to look at other parameters,” said Amelie Schwierholz, a Lufthansa spokeswoman in Frankfurt. German authorities should do their own measurements of the density of volcanic particles, she said.

Ms. Schwierholz noted that a Lufthansa long-distance passenger jet with only a flight crew on board flew from Munich to Frankfurt on Saturday without incident, albeit at a much lower altitude than usual. Lufthansa plans other such “positioning flights,” which are allowed by regulations, so that aircraft will be where the airline needs them when commercial service resumes, she said.

But German officials defended their decision to close the skies. “What’s more important, the safety of passengers or business?” asked Mr. Malewski of the German Weather Service

Cat v.s. iPad!

The recently released iPad is, in the words of Apple cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs, a "magical and revolutionary product." That may be true from the human perspective, but how does the feline species feel about the touch-screen device?

One cat owner aimed to find out. He placed his iPad in front his cat, Iggy, to see just how user-friendly the device really is. Watch below for the results...

why cant the kids stay OUT of rivers!?!

Omg guys the worst day has come. i was on my way to school today and i get in an accident. i mean it was a tad above a fender bender but I'm okay and so was the other person. Idk if anyone has been in an accident before but it is scary as all get out!

any way off to some news

A slip, a scary splash, then a scream. It took just seconds for a two-year-old girl to fall 20 feet into New York's East River waters.

Many reacted quickly to rescue 2-year-old Bridgette Sheriden, but two men reacted even faster: Bridgette's father David Anderson and a still unknown French tourist who, after helping in the rescue, walked way and took a cab to destinations unknown.

Part of the rescue was captured on film by a freelance TV producer, himself visiting the South Street Seaport with his family. The video and a glimpse of the mystery man:

video of the hero

The Good Samaritans
The slip and fall happened on Easter weekend: The little girl and her parents were walking up the gangplank on Saturday, April 3, to board the Peking ship docked at the South Street Seaport. Bridgette slipped through the guardrail and into 48-degree waters.

According to one eyewitness, Anderson emptied his pockets as he ran down the steps, scanned the waters, then dropped feet first after her. He emerged with Bridgette's head resting on his chest. With his right hand, Anderson held onto the dock, resisting the strong East River currents.

Meanwhile, the Frenchman—who onlookers say rushed toward the scene without hesitation—leapt in after him into the cold waters. He apparently helped to keep the father maintain a hold over his daughter. By then, others had formed what the New York Daily News described as a "'human chain' of good Samaritan rescuers." The Frenchmen lifted Bridgette to onlookers, who passed her to her mother.

Two heroes and an Easter miracle
Emergency rescue workers were at hand, and a checkup at Bellevue Hospital established that Bridgette had survived the drop without injury. People have been referring to her rescue as the Easter miracle, especially given what NBC News calls the rule of 50: The average adult has a 50/50 change of surviving a 50-yard swim or 50 minutes in 50-degree water.

Paternal instincts may have accounted for much of Anderson's quick reflexes, but Anderson also had trained as a ski patrol rescue worker in Colorado's Vail Ski Resort, according to former colleagues who spoke to the New York Daily News. Anderson himself broke his three-day silenceon Monday, to talk about those stomach-churning moments. "It was just instant. I knew what I had to do," he recalled. "I just got in. I know I had to get down there."

As for the French gentleman who leapt in, he can claim some personal thanks from Bridgette's mother. "I'd like to offer him my congratulations and best wishes, and I want to talk to him personally," she told the paper.