SLOW DOWN!!!! Speeding Cushion Disappeared On April Fools Day
By Rob Taylor

Up until now drivers have had a cushion of five to ten miles per hour over the speed limit when driving. Those extra few miles were called a “Speeding Cushion”.

Starting on April 1st the cushion was removed nationwide largely because of the recession and the cities and states need for money.

"Most people, if they're stopped now, are getting a ticket even if it's only a minor violation of a few miles per hour, ” James Baxter, president of the National Motorists Association, said on CNN recently.

Last year, The Journal of Law and Economics looked at speeding violations in North Carolina and found that tickets rise along with local budget shortfalls. "Specifically, a one percentage point decrease in last year's local government revenue results in roughly a 0.32 percentage point increase in the number of traffic tickets in the following year," the authors wrote in their study. "There is ample anecdotal evidence that local governments use traffic tickets as a means of generating revenue."

Another study, from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, found that a 6.4 percent increase in speeding tickets in the state was likely related to a 10 percent decrease in revenue growth the previous year.

A USA Today report found that a number of cities and states are using speeding tickets to make up for slim budgets. But some experts say the opposite may actually be true. The chairman of the National Troopers Coalition, Sgt. Michael Edes, said enforcement may actually be down because budget shortfalls leave fewer troopers on the road.

"A lot of states have cut [trooper] positions or frozen positions," he told USA Today. "Several states have grounded their aviation unit, so they're not doing as many speed details."

To be safe, though, it may be a good idea to assume that there's a "zero tolerance" policy at work. So Vanity Fair has compiled a list of helpful tips for drivers looking to avoid a speeding ticket.

First on the list? "Move yourself to a place where you don't have to drive to begin with," the magazine suggests. "New York City is nice, and our governor isn't that much more pathetic than most."
 

Where Top Speed Is Too Fast

By Rob Taylor

This is a picture of the Bugatti Veyron. At $1,700,000 it is the most expensive new car you can buy. Some antique cars are more expensive but this is for a new one.

If it is stalled in traffic the ride is absolutely no different from riding in a 2006 Kia but once it is on the open road it is an entirely different animal with a top speed of over 200 miles per hour. Pretty cool huh? 

Well, there is a down side to driving that fast. If you’re driving it at top speed the Veyron will run out of gas after just 12 minutes. True, you would have covered about 40 miles but in the scheme of things that really isn’t that far. 

But, even the down side is a good thing. According to some estimates if you drive this car at top speed for fifteen minutes the motor would run (if it had the gas), the body would be in one piece but the tires would catch fire. The driver should thank his lucky stars that he ran out of gas three minutes earlier huh? 

Editor’s note: WE tried but we could not find a car dealer in Erie who could sell us a Veyron for any price.

Is Na’vi The New Klingon?
By Rob Taylor

Within hours after the movie Avatar was released to theatres the website Language Log was flooded with comments from people who were showing an extreme interest in the new language ---Na’vi – the alien language spoken by the blue skinned characters in the film. One visitor named Prrton posted a rather lengthy posting in the new language and here it is…with the translation:

"Ngaru ätxäle … oel set futa Hal'liwutta tsayeyktanru ngal peng futa lì'fyati Na'viyä nume nereeiu a ngeyä wotxa lì'utìtäftxurenu sì aylì'uyä sänumeti perängey ayoel. Ayoel nereu a tsa'u ke tsayängun lu txo ayoel pänutìng futa rawketi sayi nìwotx ulte Eywafa ke txayey. Kawkrr!!;-) Eywa ngahu."

Or, in English:
"I now ask you to tell the Hollywood bosses [Hal'liwutta tsayeyktanru] that those of us who want to learn the Na'vi language are waiting (impatiently) for your full grammar and lexicon. We promise to raise a lotta hell if what we want is not forthcoming, and 'by Eywa' we wont stop. Ever!! ;-)"

This phenomena has happened a couple of times before. When Star Trek, designed by Marc Okrand, started hundreds of thousands of ST fans picked up on a new language – Klingon. There are people who can carry on hours of conversation in the language and one family was arrested for teaching their children Klingon in place of English. There is actually a 195 page dictionary to translate English to Klingon.

The second time was with the release of the Lord Of The Rings films. People were attracted to and began to learn a melodic language from the film. That language was Elfen. For those of you who don’t know that was the language spoken by the fair-haired, always clean Elves in the movie. Although not quite as popular as Klingon websites, recordings and dictionaries have been produced and Elfen has, to a great many people, a real language to the point where they are also able to speak for hours in the Middle Earth language.

From reports on the web it is possible that Na’vi will become more popular that Klingon and Elfen combined.

In the forum on learnnavi.org fans on Na’vi have posted more than 153,000 posts suggesting that people learn the new language…including people who have never learned a language before. Yes, there are people who never learned Spanish in school but they are being lured to learn Na’vi.

Learnnavi.com has a lot more than just a forum. It has two “books”, in PDF form available on-line for free…a Na’vi/English dictionary and Na’vi In A Nutshell as will as “classes” in Na’vi syntax and Grammar. They have also posted guidelines for picking a "correct" Na'vi name and compiled warnings about common beginners' errors.

On the publicity circuit, James Cameron frequently made proud mention of the fact that he hired a linguist to create a realistic language. (He said he wanted to "out-Klingon Klingon.") His move paid off in that people who notice these things like the result. They've embraced it with gusto, and now they want the rest of it. The most likely explanation for the delay in working out how to release the Na'vi language to the world is not that the Hollywood bosses didn't want fans to do it but just that they haven't gotten around to thinking about it. But Hal'liwutta tsayeyktanru be warned: The natives are getting restless and they did it on their own…without Hollywood’s help.

So, if you’re interested in learning a language…check out Na’vi. It might be fun to learn and you could really have fun messing with your friends.

Pimp Your Gig!!

HMS Titanic Crash Predicted In A Short Story

In 1898, a short story was written by Morgan Robertson about how a ship named the "Titan", collided with an iceberg and sank with heavy loss of life. The story was called "Futility", and it closely resembled the Titanic disaster. Both ships were British and sailed in April with a top speed of 24-25 knots. They had the same passenger capacity of 3,000 but sailed with a little over 2,000. Also they were between 800 and 900 feet long and driven with triple propellers. Here's the clincher; both ships sank after being pierced by an iceberg on their starboard side.

Talking About The New IPAD
By Christopher Vallieres

A piece of technology on the horizon is definitely a forward thinking device, an implementation of the mid '60s sci-fi TV series, Star Trek, in which Captain Kirk is often seen reviewing and signing orders on a tablet device.

Apple is boldly going where no one has gone before with the release of its iPad.
The iPad weighs in at 1.5-pounds, .5-inches thick, and with a 9.7-inch LED multi-touch screen has the sleek futuristic look of a prop from Star Trek.

While not actually from Star Trek, the new Star Trek movie does make an appearance on Apple’s website for the iPad where it uses screenshots to display the video playback quality of the device.

This new device fills the gap between the iPhone and the Macbook.

Two weeks to the day after Apple began accepting online orders; nearly 240,000 iPads have been pre-ordered by technology-hungry consumers.

Technology has become an integral part of life for most today. From work, to education, to social and personal uses, technology makes life-altering appearances on a daily basis.

Portability and functionality are the hallmark of the iPad.

“I travel every week to Cleveland for work,” said Meadville resident Dusty Johnson.

“I can only take a limited number of things with me and due to its compact size and light weight I would love to have an iPad over my clunky laptop. Having the ability to surf the Internet and watch high quality video would make passing time in a hotel room easier.”

For those familiar with the functions and programs of Apple products.

Users will still get great features such as: Mail, Safari, Photos, Notes, Calendar, App Store, Maps, and video playback but, users will now get iBooks. The iPad will function as an eReader via the iBookstore.

The iBooks app uses the ePub format, which is the most popular open book format in the world. That makes it easy for publishers to create iBooks versions of favorite reads. Users will be able to add free ePub titles to iTunes and sync them to the iBooks app on an iPad, according to Apple’s website.

The iPad opens new doors for application developers. Developers for the iPhone now have a new market for their apps.

Running on the iPhone operating system, it offers nearly full compatibility with Apps from Apple’s App Store.

“Since all iPhone applications are compatible with the iPad, it instantly gives me hundreds of thousands of new potential customers, said Jake Leveto, President/Owner of Nuclear Nova, an application developer. “The increased size and processing power allows me to add graphical enhancements to my game that I initially had to remove for the iPhone version in order to make the game run at a reasonable frame rate.”

The iPad offers a 1GHz Apple A4 custom-designed, high-performance chip. The A4 is a system on a chip, or SOC, that integrates the main processor with graphics silicon, and other functions like the memory controller on one piece of silicon.
This device may be able to stir up profits in a downwardly spiraling newspaper industry

“Newspapers think it’s their salvation,” said John Hanchette, Pulitzer Prize winner and Professor at St. Bonaventure University. “They’ll be able to get a lot more content on there; it is a lot more accessible with a lot more news papery layout.”
The tech-savvy and newcomers to the Internet have already flocked to the free content available on newspapers’ websites, which the papers are currently giving away for free.

A daily newspaper app developed by a newspaper could allow an easier way to charge for content of the news and open up new and viable advertising revenue.
“This will be more like the regular format,” said Hanchette. “Advertisers are lining up like crazy.”

Although the potential boost in sales for newspapers comes at a price. It’s the basic principle of paying vs. not paying. Conventional wisdom dictates that what you pay for should be better than what you get for free. The newspaper industry must produce more creative and unique content if they want people to pay for it.
Technology has become an integral part of education today. The generation gap between students born into technology and teachers scrambling to catch up is diminishing. Clearly, devices such as the iPad could potentially work its way into the classroom.

Students, for example, are using their smart phones for more than just phone calls and text messaging. These devices are designed to do so much more but the negative aura surrounding a student using a phone in class is lending a hand in the development of devices such as the iPad.

“People being afraid of cell phones and stuff and that’s why we have iPads and mini-laptops and net-books there is such a stigma of using smaller technology,” said Edinboro University Professor Jim Wertz.

“Nobody would think anything of it if you put the tape recorder on the table and started to type, but the minute you pull out your phone and do one of these [makes a ghost texting gesture] then it becomes kind of an issue,” Wertz said.

Because of its larger size and inability to make phone calls, the iPad it may get a free pass and grace its way into conference and classrooms and provide a new way for people to integrate even more technology into their lives.

“What’s happening now is that there are so many teachers who are afraid of it and so many students that don’t use it [technology],” said Wertz.

The technology that has recently emerged isn’t a Star Trek phaser or a teleportation device but is instead the tablet style Apple iPad.

This device could create revenue for the dwindling sales in the newspaper industry, integrate our classrooms with technology and allow social users the mobility to curl up with an eBook to pass time in a hotel room.

Funny Pics Of The Week

I had no idea the church was that helpful!

Thank God!!!!!

 

Funny Video Of The Week