meehawl

As Oil Prices Soar, Restaurant Grease Thefts Rise

The bandit pulled his truck to the back of a Burger King in Northern California one afternoon last month armed with a hose and a tank. After rummaging around assorted restaurant rubbish, he dunked a tube into a smelly storage bin and … vacuumed out about 300 gallons of grease. The man was caught before he could slip away. In his truck, the police found 2,500 gallons of used fryer grease, indicating that the Burger King had not been his first fast-food craving of the day … Cooking oil rustling has become such a problem that the owners of the Olympia Pizza and Pasta Restaurant in Arlington, Wash., [have] been hit seven or eight times since last summer by siphoners who strike in the night. “Fryer grease has become gold”

Tags: The Simpsons, biodiesel, grease, peak oil by mike
No Comments »

The cost of insuring against default on the bonds of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and other big banks and brokerages has surged over the last two weeks, threatening to reach the stress levels seen before the Bear Stearns debacle. Spreads on inter-bank Libor and Euribor rates in Europe are back near record levels … there are now concerns that the [US] Fed itself may be exhausting its $800bn (£399bn) stock of assets. It has swapped almost $300bn of 10-year Treasuries for questionable mortgage debt, and provided Term Auction Credit of $130bn.

Tags: Bear Stearns, Euribor, Federal Reserve, Lehman Brothers, Libor, Merrill Lynch, economics by mike
No Comments »

Why do the perceptions of “quality” in notebook PCs vary so much? People love brands. Many Apple fans insist that because Apple is such a stickler for control, its notebooks are therefore much higher “quality” than others. The truth is that most branded notebooks are manufactured mainly by a small group of Taiwanese OEMs such as Quanta, Compal, Wistron, Inventec, and ASUSTek.

The quality difference between brand models tends to be determined by which OEM did which production run. Dell sources its notebooks from a variety of OEMs so Dells’ notebook range quality tends to exhibit a wide distribution. Apple gets pretty much all its notebooks from Quanta, so its quality spread is narrower and more predictable. That is to say, some Apple runs from QUanta will fall below the industry mean, and some above, but the perception of their individual quality levels will be consistently tighter than Dell. Psychologically of course, people tend to remember bad experiences over good, and exceptional experiences over average, so it’s possible than in real brand terms having a wider “normal” distribution of average quality machines actually ends up making your “acceptable” performance invisible in wider terms.
For the record:

• The main customers of Quanta are HP, Dell, Acer and Apple.
• The main customers of Compal are Dell, HP, Toshiba and Acer.
• The main customers of Inventec are HP and Toshiba.
• The main customers of Wistron are HP, Acer and Lenovo.
• The main customers of ASUSTeK are Toshiba and Dell.

Source

Tags: ASUSTek, Acer, Apple, Compal, Dell, HP, Hewlett-Packard, Inventec, Lenovo, Quanta, Taiwan, Toshiba, Wistron, notebook PC by mike
No Comments »

The vast disparity in can-wealth distribution is difficult to understand for many Americans. Most people, according to the report, cannot relate to the lifestyles of the super-poor, who never have to go to work, pay a mortgage, or struggle to find money for rent.

Tags: The Onion, class, funny, recycling, wealth by mike
No Comments »

When you provide your information through Google Health, you give Google a license to use and distribute it in connection with Google Health and other Google services. However, Google may only use health information you provide as permitted by the Google Health Privacy Policy, your Sharing Authorization, and applicable law. Google is not a “covered entity” under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and the regulations promulgated thereunder (”HIPAA”). As a result, HIPAA does not apply to the transmission of health information by Google to any third party.

The new Google Health is such a bad idea in so many ways it’s difficult to know where to begin. One thing I noticed in the presentation is there is no granularity and no user-configurable permissions control or data sequestering. It’s a typical Google totalising info grab. You link your private data to Google, in some cases information from HIPAA-constrained hospitals or insurers, and in return Google snarfs it up and reserves the right to promulgate it throughout its promiscuously monetising network. They are doing it wrong.

Tags: Google, Google Health, HIPAA, data privacy, healthcare by mike
No Comments »

A man, woman and two teenage children apparently shared a house in Necedah Township, Wisconsin with a corpse for two months before authorities found the body. At least one of the adults in the house insisted the dead woman inside wasn’t “fully dead,” and that they could pray her back to life … [Police] found Middlesworth’s remains in a heap on what appeared to be a toilet. Police reports indicate the smell of decay was “overpowering” … Police say Lewis then refused to talk to them without her “superior.” That turned up out to be Alan Bushey, who police say also goes by “Bishop John Peter Bushey.” After Bushey arrived, Lewis told deputies that Middlesworth passed out a couple of months prior, and that Lewis had propped her up on the toilet. She then claimed “Bishop Bushey” told her that God would raise Middlesworth from the dead, and that Lewis and her children prayed for days in hopes of that happening. Police also interviewed the teenagers, who told them Bushey convinced them to be quiet about the body. They say Bushey told them demons were making it appear that Middlesworth was dead, and that if her death was discovered, the children would be sent to public school and be forced to get jobs.

Tags: Christianity, Sweet Zombie Jesus, Wisconsin, religion by mike
1 Comment »

For all the talk of America’s growing reliance on computers, advanced sensors, and stealth technology to prevail in warfare, it has been oil above all that gave the US military its capacity to “project power” onto distant battlefields like Iraq and Afghanistan. Every Humvee, tank, helicopter, and jet fighter requires its daily ration of petroleum, without which America’s technology-driven military would be forced to abandon the battlefield. No surprise, then, that the US Department of Defense is the world’s single-biggest consumer of petroleum … The average GI in Iraq now uses about seven times as much oil per day as GIs did in the first Gulf War less than two decades ago. And every sign indicates that the same ratio of increase will apply to coming conflicts; that the daily cost of fighting will skyrocket; and that the Pentagon’s capacity to shoulder multiple foreign military burdens will unravel. Thus are superpowers undone.

Tags: Afghanistan, Gulf War, Iraq, Pentagon, US, United States, geopolitics, oil by mike
No Comments »

Many of those fish you can see in such glorious abundance in Spanish markets … come not from European seas but from the coasts of the continents of the poor: Africa, South America and parts of Asia … Since 1979 the EU has negotiated deals on fishing rights with a string of impoverished African countries. Despite the EU’s own studies indicating massive and quite possibly irreversible damage to fish stocks off west Africa, these deals continue to be struck. In 2002, the year an EU report revealed that the Senegalese fish biomass had declined 75 per cent in 15 years, Brussels bought rights for four years’ fishing of tuna and bottom-dwelling fish on the Senegal coasts … among the millions of Africans who depend on fish as their main source of protein, consumption has declined from 9kg per year to 7kg.

Tags: EU, European Union, Senegal, fishing, food by mike
No Comments »

Microsoft is vacuuming up way too many programmers. Between Microsoft, with their shady recruiters making unethical exploding offers to unsuspecting college students, and Google (you’re on my radar) paying untenable salaries to kids with more ultimate frisbee experience than Python, whose main job will be to play foosball in the googleplex and walk around trying to get someone…anyone…to come see the demo code they’ve just written with their “20% time,” doing some kind of, let me guess, cloud-based synchronization… between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy.

Tags: Google, Microsoft, Python, software by mike
No Comments »

Diamorphine, also known as heroin, was first synthesized for commercial use in 1897. The men who discovered it, Felix Hoffman and Arthur Eichengrun, had also, a couple of weeks earlier, invented aspirin; for some years, heroin could be bought over the counter and aspirin required a prescription.

Irony is intense here, and the article is “technically” correct in that heroin was first synthesised in 1897 for commercial use. However, G.H. Beckett and C.R. Alder Wright were the first people known to have actually synthesised heroin, a generation earlier in 1874.

Tags: Arthur Eichengrun, Aspirin, Bayer, C.R. Alder Wright, Diamorphine, Felix Hoffman, G.H. Beckett, acetylsalicylic acid, diacetylmorphine, heroin by mike
No Comments »