While Apple still maintains a death grip on its no-porn policy for its iPhone and iPad apps, the adult entertainment industry is swarming to make money from the iPhone 4's FaceTime video-conferencing feature.

According to the fair and balanced people at Fox News, companies have begun placing ads on Craigslist in at least five cities, looking for models who can offer some sexy-time chat to paying customers over FaceTime, which allows iPhone 4 users to have video chats over a WiFi connection.

While it's nothing new to make money by performing erotic acts on webcams, the iPhone porn pioneers are betting on the iPhone's popularity and portability to make a profit.

Says one porno guy through his mustache. "A phone is such an intimate thing, you usually don't lend it out or have someone else use it... It has a very personal feel -- your mobile phone to hers."

One problem with FaceTime, says porn star Teagan Presley, is that... well, it's only intended to show your face:
You can have the phone on your face, or other body parts, but not both at the same time... Most customers want the full package, and it's going to be difficult holding a phone.

iPhone 4 Offers New Look for Porn Industry [FoxNews.com]

Google’s Nexus One phone is going where few smartphones have gone before. A group strapped the Nexus One to the back of a rocket and launched it from the Nevada desert into the atmosphere to test the device’s performance up in the air.

The Mavericks Civilian Space Foundation, a group of rocket enthusiasts, used an Intimidator-5 rocket to send the device 28,000 feet into the atmosphere.

“The purpose of flying the Nexus One is to find a low cost satellite solution,” says Thomas Atchison, chairman of the Mavericks Foundation. “The radio, processing power, sensors and cameras in smartphones potentially have the same capability as those in satellites.”

The idea is to drive down satellite cost by using off-the-shelf products and components, says Atchison.

“Today’s satellites are the size of Greyhound buses,” he says. “But I believe they are going to get smaller and more frequently deployed. This is a  first step effort.”

The Nexus One piggybacked on a rocket that’s being used as part of a project called Clotho that’s trying to find out how far off the earth’s surface life exists.

The test flight with the Nexus One was to see how the device behaves under a high-G environment, says Atchison.

“If you put a Nexus One in orbit, how will it perform?” he says. “How does the device handle the thermal temperature and vibrations. We wanted to see the results.”

The resulting video from the Nexus One is below. As expected, the video is a lot of shaking, blue sky and blobs of light but it is still fun to watch. An earlier test brought Nexus One back with a shattered screen but the device did well on its second flight.

James Dougherty, one of the participants in the project, shows the payload with a biosampling module and the Google phone.

See Also:

• Extreme Hobbyists Put Satellites Into Orbit With $8000 Kits …
• The $150 Edge-of-Space Camera: MIT Students Beat NASA On Beer …
• DIY Freaks Flock to ‘Hacker Spaces’ Worldwide
• Water-Cooled Supercomputer Doubles as Dorm Space Heater

Photo: The shattered Nexus One post launch (jurvetson/Flickr)

[via Make and Droid Ninja]

Jess took her ailing mom to see an American Idol concert in Massachusetts but was mistreated by employees who were less than willing to accommodate her mom's special needs. The next day she took to Twitter, fired off a couple complaints and spurred Live Nation to make things right.

Here's her story of how Jess bent the mighty near-monopoly to her whims in fewer than 280 characters:

Early last week, a friend, and I attended the American Idol's live tour. My mother is on oxygen and is awaiting a lung transplant, so we wanted to arrive there early to ensure we got a space near the door. The doors opened at 6:30, and we got there at about 5:30 or so. We got to the gate and realized there were no benches or seats anywhere for my mom to sit in while we waited. There was a plastic lawn chair just inside the venue's handicapped entrance, so a I approached the security guard, and explained that my mother was handicapped and asked him if we could use that chair since no one had been sitting in it. He told me there was no way that he would let us use that chair, he said that "there are rocks in the parking lot, go sit on one of those".

I thought that was incredibly rude, but I knew I was getting nowhere with this guy, so I just walked away. As I was walking away, he starts talking to the ticket taker that was standing at the gate with him. He says "These handicapped people want everything. First they want chairs, then what? If you're so handicapped don't come this early, or better yet don't come at all". The 3 of us are obviously very angry at this point. I walk up to him and the ticket taker and tell him that it's not cool that he is making fun of handicapped people, especially while he is working at the handicapped entrance. He and the ticket taker just laugh at me. My mom yells at him "I hope you never become handicapped" and he yells back "I hope I do!".

At this point I begin trying to get this guy's name, none of the other employees will tell me, so I do the next best thing. I take a picture of him with my cell phone. He asks a nearby police officer what he can do if someone is trying to take a picture of him that he doesn't want taken. The officer says nothing and ends up walking away. I get the picture, and a picture of the ticket taker and that's that last time I saw him. He walked away and never came back. I posted the photo on twitter immediately and tagged @liveNation in the tweet.

Once inside the venue we seek out the guest relations department. We end up talking to the assistant general manager of the venue who says she knows exactly who we are talking about and says she will speak to him. She apologizes and offers us an upgrade to our tickets. We were sitting in section 8, so we were thrilled to get an upgrade to section 2.

We didn't let this bad experience stand in the way of us enjoying the concert. We all had a great time. But it's not over yet. When we arrived home, I checked my twitter. My post to @livenation had been retweeted by some of my followers, and I had a response from livenation asking me to email them more information. So I emailed them my story, along with the photos I took of the employees.

The next day, around 7 p.m. at VP from Live Nation called me to apologize. He said he spoke with the security guard, and said that while our stories were a bit different, he pretty much confirmed what happened. He then told me that the security guard was terminated, and the ticket taker was relocated to a different department. He a also invited us back to the Comcast Center to give them another chance, and sent us 3 tickets to see Rihanna and Ke$ha in a couple weeks.

Through the power of Twitter, and the excellent customer service of live nation, my problem was fully researched, investigated, and resolved within less than 24 hours.

The two posts that got the ball rolling are here and here.

Twitter has proven to be an effective customer service outlet. If you've used it to set a corporate monolith straight, share your story in the comments.

British motorist Kevin Wright was so outraged at finding his car booted he grabbed a chain and threatened the nearby boot-man, denting his van, then set upon the boot with an angle grinder. All this over a Peugeot 205. [SWNS] More »
Ben Wojdyla

Gray Davis now more popular than Arnold in California.

Arnold is now clocking in at a non-Terminating 19%.

California - Gray Davis - Arnold Schwarzenegger - United States - Politics

U.S. military restrictions on the media are partly to blame for making Afghanistan and Iraq seem like bloodless wars to most Americans. But the media -- especially the TV networks -- are not blameless. Editorial decisions have contributed to the antiseptic view of the wars that most of us have, at least those of us who haven't fought there or who haven't had friends or family killed or wounded.

If you want to see the wars as they are actually happening, or as close to it as the military will allow, you have to turn to al Jazeera or other foreign press. Case in point: this video report from the British Guardian chronicling the grisly work of a special forces helicopter rescue team in Afghanistan's Helmand province. Really worth your time (probably NSFW due to the language):

Afghanistan - Iraq - United States armed forces - Warfare and Conflict - Afghanistan Civil War

It’s an important part of our socialization as humans to be able to read, interpret, and understand each others expressions. Even a vaguely perceptive person should be able to tell the different between someone being happy or angry from a familiar display of facial movements. Mind reading may not exist as such, but some people are able to seemingly read people’s minds through microexpressions – the sort of involuntary reactions we have, even for a second or less, that betray our true feelings.

Instinctively, we may be able to figure out basic emotions (and whether they are genuine – such as whether or not a person is “smiling with their eyes“), but what about when people are fighting or masking what they truly feel? Turns out we still can’t help but give clues. Becoming fluent in expressions is the basis of the TV show Lie to Me, in which Dr. Cal Lightman (played by Tim Roth) and his team assist in investigations through applied psychology.

You can also see just where you fall in the range of perception with this interesting facial expression quiz. How well did you do? Which ones had you stumped?

Want to build the home of your dreams and can't find enough land for it? Try moving to Tampa. The area has 27,923 building lots, enough to keep homebuilders busy for nine years. That's assuming anyone actually wants to build something, of course.

According to the Tampa Tribune, under normal circumstances, the area should have just a two-year inventory of housing lots, and builders are struggling.

The only builders having success now, said Jack McCabe, a Florida real estate analyst, are ones that bought lots for fire-sale prices during the downturn. Those builders have a competitive advantage, he said.

Even so, there are thousands of foreclosures and short sales on the market for steep discounts, and new homes often can't compete on price alone, said McCabe, of McCabe Research & Consulting.

"In most Florida markets, at least 40 percent of the properties listed for sale are distressed," he said. "It's really difficult for a builder to construct a home and sell for a profit in an environment where distressed homes dominate the market."

That's even better news for would-be buyers, though not necessarily for builders. "There's nothing on the immediate horizon that would make any builder say, 'Wow, now is the time to start building," says McCabe.

Tampa has 9-year supply of homesites - Single Family, Lots, Economic Development [Builder Magazine]

A new category of shaping garments proposes to do for the buttocks what the brassiere has done for the torso: “you can lift it, round it and shape it.”

“It’s part of the whole outfit,” says Ms. Benson, a 25-year-old assistant to a music manager. Wearing the Booty Pop brand of underwear, which contain egg-shaped foam pads to plump up the posterior, “I look better, I feel better, and as a result, I act better,” she says…

The backside has a complicated back story. Large behinds historically have been celebrated as sexy in Latin American and African cultures, even as they were viewed with suspicion further north.

The garments are not conceptually new; Frederick’s of Hollywood sold equivalent items fifty years ago.  Skeptics of the recent trend argue that the padded garments are not practical except under heavy fabric such as denim.  But late-night informercials claim that the enhancements replace expensive cosmetic surgery; the Booty Pop company expects to sell a million copies this year.

More information at the Wall Street Journal, which includes an explanatory video.  Image: Sweet Apparel LLC

This is awful:

Latiana Walton went through most of her labor at Stroger Hospital with an arm and leg chained to her bed, she remembers.

As contractions surged through her body, she could not move or change position to relieve the pain. A Cook County correctional officer repeatedly refused to remove the restraints, she said, even when a doctor objected, saying that he was unable to administer an epidural.

"I actually said to the guard, 'Where am I going?' I'm crying. I'm in pain," recalled Walton, 26. "'I'm not going to get up and run out of the hospital.'"

On Aug. 27, 2008, Walton, who had been arrested after she missed a court date on a retail theft charge, became one of an estimated 50 women who give birth every year while in the custody of the Cook County Jail.

Shackling women during labor is illegal; Illinois became the first state to ban the practice in 1999, and nine other states have followed suit. But more than 20 former jail inmates, including Walton, have filed lawsuits since 2008 against the Cook County sheriff's office, which runs the jail, alleging that they were handcuffed by the wrist or shackled by the leg while giving birth. Most of these women, according to their attorney, had been arrested for nonviolent crimes and were awaiting trial...

Officials at the sheriff's office say their policy follows the law. A pregnant woman can be restrained, according to the policy, until a medical official confirms that she is, in fact, in labor. "When does 'labor' begin? Our officers aren't trained to know, the state law doesn't say, so we rely on medical personnel to advise us," Steve Patterson, a spokesman for the sheriff's office, wrote in an e-mail. "Once a medical person advises us someone is in labor, restraints of whatever sort are removed."

But the plaintiffs' attorney argues that restraints were, in his clients' cases, removed too late or not at all. He contends that sheriff's officials interpret "labor" as the moments immediately before birth, and that guards sometimes deny requests by doctors and nurses to remove the handcuffs and shackles. "When you talk to these women, they say, 'Yeah, when I'm delivering and I'm pushing, that's what they consider labor,'" said plaintiffs' attorney Thomas G. Morrissey. "They remain in shackles and handcuffs until the baby is about to be delivered."

At risk of getting overly high-minded here, this seems like the sort of thing that goes hand in hand with a generation of tough-on-crime talk, and a country willing to put 1 in 100 of its citizens behind bars. It all can have a dehumanizing effect. These aren't people first, they're criminals first. Clearly there's something larger at work when law enforcement officials see a woman in labor not as as a mother-to-be in need of medical attention, but an accused thief and flight risk in need of shackling right up until delivery.

The Cook County lawsuit echoes a story last November from Maricopa County, Arizona, where sheriff's deputies kept a suspected illegal immigrant shackled to her bed while she gave birth. And of course in Maricopa County, of all places, there's ample evidence that Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his deputies see immigrants as something less than human.

A bear cub in Anchorage, Alaska managed to get trapped in a salmon net and couldn't get out. Seeing the trouble a local hopped into his Ford Super Duty to help the distraught momma bear get him free. More »
Ben Wojdyla

Why rent the cow when you can borrow the milk for free? That seems to be the mindset of many Americans, as a new study claims that more DVDs are borrowed from libraries each day than are rented via Netflix, Redbox or Blockbuster.

According to the survey released by the Online Computer Library Center, public libraries in the U.S. lend an average 2.1 million videos/day, which edges out the 2 million discs shipped by Netflix and almost as much as the combined total of DVD rentals at Redbox (1.4 million) and Blockbuster (1.2 million).

Netflix shrugs off the idea of libraries as competition to their business. "I think of libraries as places for books," explains a rep for the company. "It's free, so it's a whole different model."

Another recent report says that libraries have doubled the size of their movie collections over the last decade -- and library users have taken notice.

Says one librarian:
Friday nights, the hour before we close, it's like a video store... People are running to get their movies before the weekend.

How many of you are scoring movies from your local library? Just remember to return the DVDs or you might be arrested.

Study: Libraries Top The Competition In Lending Movies [Courant.com]

Dentures that once belonged to Winston Churchill are in the news after fetching £15,200 in an auction.

In his wartime radio broadcasts, Churchill’s distinctive voice was instantly recognisable. He wanted it to stay that way, so he had his dentures designed specifically to preserve his lisp…

“Without them, ‘Fight them on the beaches’ would never have sounded the same. They were vital to the war effort.”

“Churchill used to flick out his dentures when he was angry and throw them across the room… My father used to say he could tell how the war was going by how far they flew.”

Link.

Citrix shares are up some 16% Thursday after a trio of analysts upgraded or slapped the buy button on the shares.

Matt Phillips

Senate Dems turn down Republican request to open senate probe into bogus New Black Panther Party voter intimidation / DOJ coverup / why can't we have our own US Attys firing scandal too case.

New Black Panthers - Republican - Electoral fraud - Politics - Nationalism

The term "deer caught in the headlights" exists for a reason. Although they might look cute, deer are the dumbest animals on the planet. Here are some tips on how to avoid hitting them. More »
Ben Wojdyla04053665321839006969

Have you ever heard of latex decay? Apparently, it's a problem that plagues area rugs from Pottery Barn manufactured during a certain period. It happened to Victoria, and a simple call to the company got her a replacement rug costing $100 more than the one she already had. Not only was there no charge to her, but since Victoria doesn't have a car, Pottery Barn paid for UPS pickup of the old rug and delivery of the new one. Lovely.

I bought an area rug from Pottery Barn in the winter of 2005. My living room subsequently had something of a rubber smell to it, but I blamed the cheap (not Pottery Barn) pad that I had under the rug rather than the rug itself. My sister apparently had the same problem with her PB Kids rug that was purchased around the same time, and blamed other new stuff in her daughter's room -- until she had a rug cleaner come in and he recognized the odor immediately and pointed out that older PB rugs have a latex decay issue. She brought the rug back to her PB kids store and they exchanged it without issue.

I had bought my rug online (and live in a city without a car, so bringing it back to the store wouldn't be easy). So I called PB customer service. The very nice rep that I talked to, Robin, had definitely heard of the problem before. She said that the defect was not harmful, just annoying, and she offered to replace the rug. She was able to look up my original order and purchase price. I called back the next day and told her what rug I would like in exchange. It cost $100 more than my original rug. She put through the order immediately with no charges or shipping fee, and told me to call when it arrived so she could arrange for UPS to pick up the defective rug.

The new rug arrived a few days later, and unfortunately it wasn't the color I thought it was and didn't match our furniture. I figured I'd be in charge of paying shipping for the return, so I stopped by the local PB store to see if they could take it back. If they could, I figure I could somehow make the trek rather than paying shipping. I emailed Robin to see if this would work with my order -- I received an email in reply that UPS could come tomorrow to pick up both rugs, and the new new one (that *was* more along my color scheme) would be shipped shortly.

I'm incredibly pleased. Not only was the original exchange process harmless, but it was above and beyond for PB to exchange the rug I've had for several years for one of greater value, and to pay for the exchange shipping of the rug that just didn't work in my living room. They've definitely earned my loyalty!

Every war must end, instructed the U.S. strategist Fred Ikle. But leftover unexploded ordnance can be a war’s legacy, particularly when small and unstable munitions lay around areas where civilians rebuild their lives after the fighting stops. That’s why a new international ban on cluster munitions will take effect on Saturday. The U.S., however, isn’t part of the accord.

More than 30 countries have ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions — the threshold for it entering into force — and over 100 have signed it since 2008. Holdouts include Russia, Israel and the United States. All three of those countries have used cluster bombs in the past decade: Russia during its conflict with Georgia in 2008 (Georgia also used cluster munitions against Russia); Israel during its conflict with Hezbollah in 2006 (Hezbollah also used cluster munitions against Israel); and the U.S. during the initial phases of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. (Neither the Taliban nor Saddam used cluster bombs against U.S. troops.)

There are a variety of cluster bombs, but they generically work like this: the munitions spray out smaller bombs across a given target, so you can cover a wide area and take out enemy vehicles, weapons, and, of course, fighters with a single, relatively small burst. Some versions, like the Wind Corrected Munition Dispenser, equip the bomblets with tech to control their trajectory, making them more like smart bomblets.

The case against their use is well known: cluster sub-munitions are, in effect, the world’s deadliest duds. The bomblets have a failure rate of up to ten percent by some estimates — and can act as unexploded ordnance, going off in civilian areas after a battle has concluded, similar to landmines. The Cluster Munition Coalition, a group opposed to the weapons, estimates that 60 percent of cluster-bomb casualties are injured “while undertaking their normal activities.”

In 2008, the Pentagon agreed to scale back its use of cluster weapons, pledging not to use any bomb with a failure rate higher than 1 percent after 2018. So why isn’t the U.S. on board with an outright ban?

According to the Pentagon’s 2008 policy, cluster munitions are actually humane weapons. “Because future adversaries will likely use civilian shields for military targets – for example by locating a military target on the roof of an occupied building – use of unitary weapons could result in more civilian casualties and damage than cluster munitions,” the policy claims. “Blanket elimination of cluster munitions is therefore unacceptable due not only to negative military consequences but also due to potential negative consequences for civilians.” In other words, it’s better to use a cluster bomb on enemies using a building than to blow up the entire building.

Cluster opponents don’t buy it. “The vast majority of U.S. allies have banned this weapon,” Thomas Nash, the coordinator of the Cluster Munition Coalition, said in a statement e-mailed to Danger Room. “In line with his rhetoric on multilateralism, Obama needs to bring the U.S. in line with other nations that respect international law and the protection of civilians in armed conflict.”

While the Pentagon argues against ruling out the use of cluster bombs, the military is experimenting with potential replacements. For instance: a warhead that sprays tiny darts called “kinetic energy pellets” at a target. These pellets act like bullets, not explosives, so there isn’t a danger of delayed blast if civilians later come into a pellet-littered area.

Credit: Globalsecurity.org

See Also:

• After Cluster Bombs: Raining Nails
• Pentagon: Cluster Bombs ‘Save Lives’
• Georgian Cluster Bombs Killed Civilians: Report
• Georgia Used Cluster Bombs in August War, Too (Updated)
• British Cluster Bomb Row
• When It Rains, It Pours (Bombs)

Atul Gawande's articles on healthcare for the New Yorker are all top-shelf, but his most recent piece on modern medicine's difficulty in dealing with patients who are likely to die is a doozy and a must-read.

Almost all these patients had known, for some time, that they had a terminal condition. Yet they-along with their families and doctors-were unprepared for the final stage. "We are having more conversation now about what patients want for the end of their life, by far, than they have had in all their lives to this point," my friend said. "The problem is that's way too late." In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one's final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or "It's O.K." or "I'm sorry" or "I love you."

Warning: it's good, but you'll probably be crying by the end of this article.

Tags: Atul Gawande   death   healthcare

After the 1975 death of a girl who was running to catch an ice cream truck in nearby Rotterdam, the dairy jinglers were banned from the streets of the town of Niskayuna, New York. This week, the town board voted 3-2 to let them back in for a month of probation.

Voting against lifting the ban, primarily for safety reasons, were board members Liz Orzel Kasper and Jonathan McKinney.

Before the meeting, McKinney argued that nothing has changed in 34 years to convince him that reversing the ban was a good thing. "I think it's more dangerous now because of cellphones and texting," said McKinney, adding that he was fielding more calls from Niskayuna residents expressing anxieties over safety and quality of life issues.

Ice cream vendor Brian Collis, president of Mr. Ding-a-Ling, noted his company's safety record which he said dates back to 1987 without an accident. He also stressed that his drivers receive safety training and background checks. Outside of town hall he offered free ice cream to youngsters....

Resident Craig Taulsen seemed to be the voice of reason.

"Can we use a little common sense here?" he asked. "It's an ice cream truck ... it's not the end of the world."

I wrote about ice cream truck bans here.

Via Free Range Kids.