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Transportation

Submission + - Steve Fossett may have faked his own death (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by
GBC
GBC writes: "New claims are being made that Steve Fossett may have faked his own death. Fossett, the first man to fly non-stop round the earth in a hot air balloon, went missing last September when his final flight in a light plane over the Nevada desert went missing. His disappearance led to a massive search which has been covered previously on Slashdot — here, here, here and here. He was declared dead on 15 February 2008.

Lieutenant Colonel Cynthia Ryan of the US Civil Air Patrol, said "I've been doing this search and rescue for 14 years. Fossett should have been found. It's not like we didn't have our eyes open. We found six other planes while we were looking for him. We're pretty good at what we do."

Robert Davis, an investigator acting on behalf of insurers Lloyd's of London states "I discovered that there is absolutely no proof that Steve Fossett is actually dead. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I'm a man who deals in facts, and I don't really care if he is alive or dead, it make no difference to me. What I am interested in is the truth — and a proper criminal investigation of this man's disappearance was never undertaken by law enforcement or officials in the state of Nevada." Of course, according to the article, Llyod's may have to make a £25m payout if Fossett is dead, so it is in their interests that he not be.

News Of The World lists some other revelations uncovered by the investigation including Fossett having mistresses, possible massive divorce payouts and not having any emergency kit with him on the flight — but it is News Of The World, so take that as you will.

What do you think — did he fake his own death or is it just that they haven't found the body yet?"
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Spore creatures now outnumber Earth species

Submitted by GBC
GBC writes: AFP is reporting that, as of a week ago, the number of creatures in the "Spore" database exceeded the number of known species on Earth. They are created using "Creature Creator", which is available in a free (with limited parts) or paid download at the Spore website. Will Wright seems extremely happy with the progress so far: "We hit 100K in 22 hours and a million by the end of the first week. The numbers are just blowing us away." It looks like EA/Maxis have a potential bestseller on their hands based on those numbers. So have you played God and created anything so far?
Movies

Submission + - Uwe Boll responds; declares his genius.

Submitted by GBC
GBC writes: Following up from the story earlier this week about a petition to get Uwe Boll to stop making films, Boll has posted an expletive-filled video response in his defence. In the one-minute video, he manages to call Michael Bay a "fucking retard", says that Eli Roth makes "the same shitty movies over and over again" and insults George Clooney. Oh and he also says he is "the only genius in the whole fucking business"!

Slashfilm has a story on the video here as well as a response from Michael Bay and Eli Roth (who calls it "the greatest compliment ever").

It is hard to be too sympathetic though, given Boll bought the petition upon himself by saying he would stop making films if it got to one million signatures. What do you think of his and the other directors' responses?
The Internet

Submission + - 3 Mobile launches new Skype mobile phone (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
jnaghdi
jnaghdi writes: "Mobile phone provider 3 has launched a new handset that will allow users to make free calls over the internet via telephony service Skype. Users will also be able to use Skype's instant messaging service, 3 said.But while people using Skype on their computers are able to make cheap global calls to any phone number, this will not be possible via the new 3 handset.Skype has about 246 million registered users worldwide and is one of the firms reshaping the global phone industry."
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - DNA Pioneers says Blacks make poor employees (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: London's Science Museum canceled a Friday talk by Nobel Prize-winning geneticist James Watson after the co-discoverer of DNA's structure told a newspaper that Africans and Europeans had different levels of intelligence.

James Watson provoked widespread outrage with his comments to The Sunday Times, which quoted the 79-year-old American as saying he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really."

He told the paper he hoped that everyone was equal, but added: "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."
Movies

Submission + - Lucas To Make New Live Action Star Wars films

Submitted by DrNASA
DrNASA writes: An article that quoted George Lucas as saying that SpiderMan 3 is a 'silly movie' also had this interesting bit of King Geek speak: "And here's a little news: Lucas tells me he will make two more live-action films based in the "Star Wars" era. "But they won't have members of the Skywalker family as characters," he said. "They will be other people of that milieu." " TFA — http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,270874,00.html
Biotech

Submission + - Alcohol and tobacco more dangerous than ecstasy

Submitted by GBC
GBC writes: The Lancet [lancet.com — free registration required] has published an article about a rational system for drug classification in the UK.

The article claims that "In the UK, the total burden of drug misuse, in terms of health, social, and crime-related costs, has been estimated to be between £10 billion and £16 billion per year."

It proposes that drugs should be classified by the amount of harm they do, rather than "A", "B", and "C" divisions in the UK Misuse of Drugs Act. The three main factors that determine the harm associated with any drug of potential abuse are: physical harm to the individual user caused by the drug; tendency of the drug to induce dependence and addiction; and effect of drug use on families, communities, and society. Each of these factors is further broken down into three sections.

Based on assessments from independent experts and specialist addiction psychiatrists, drugs were then ranked according to these nine parameters. Alcohol and tobacco are considered alongside other drugs in the rankings.

Of the twenty substances examined, alcohol was ranked fifth most harmful (behind heroin, cocaine, barbiturates and street methodone) and tobacco came in ninth (behind ketamine, benzodiazepines and amphetamine).

4-MTA, LSD and Ecstasy (all considered "Class A" drugs under the Act) all ranked lower than alcohol and tobacco. From the article: "Overall there was a surprisingly poor correlation between drugs' class according to the Misuse of Drugs Act and harm score."

As someone who supports an end to the "War on Drugs", it would be nice if this article leads to a more rational examination of drug policy both here in the UK and abroad; I am not holding my breath though.

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