Panic ensues in rush for cheap laptops

Tuesday, August 16, 2005; Posted: 2:05 p.m. EDT (18:05 GMT)
RICHMOND, Virginia (AP) -- A rush to purchase $50 used laptops turned into a violent stampede Tuesday, with people getting thrown to the pavement, beaten with a folding chair and nearly driven over. One woman went so far to wet herself rather than surrender her place in line.

"This is total, total chaos," said Latoya Jones, 19, who lost one of her flip-flops in the ordeal and later limped around on the sizzling blacktop with one foot bare.

More than 1,000 people turned out at the Richmond International Raceway in hopes of getting their hands on one of the 4-year-old Apple iBooks, which retail for between $999 and $1,299. The Henrico County school system was selling 1,000 of the computers to county residents.

Officials opened the gates at 7 a.m., but some already had been waiting for hours in line. When the gates opened, it became a terrifying mob scene.

People threw themselves forward, screaming and pushing each other. A little girl's stroller was crushed in the stampede. Witnesses said an elderly man was thrown to the pavement, and someone in a car tried to drive his way through the crowd.

Police would not immediately comment on the number of or extent of injuries, though witnesses said they mostly had scrapes and bruises.

"It's rather strange that we would have such a tremendous response for the purchase of a laptop computer -- and laptop computers that probably have less-than- desirable attributes," said Paul Proto, director of general services for Henrico County. "But I think that people tend to get caught up in the excitement of the event -- it almost has an entertainment value."

Blandine Alexander, 33, said one woman standing in front of her was so desperate to retain her place in line that she urinated on herself.

"I've never been in something like that before, and I never again will," said Alexander, who brought her 14-year-old twin boys to the complex at 4:30 a.m. to wait in line. "No matter what the kids want, I already told them I'm not doing that again."

Jesse Sandler said he was one of the people pushing forward, using a folding chair he had brought with him to beat back people who tried to cut in front of him.

"I took my chair here and I threw it over my shoulder and I went, 'Bam,"' the 20-year-old said nonchalantly, his eyes glued to the screen of his new iBook, as he tapped away on the keyboard at a testing station.

"They were getting in front of me and I was there a lot earlier than them, so I thought that it was just," he said.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/08/16/computer....y.ap/index.html
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Geez......I wonder what would have happened if they were giving away Laptops? 
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I saw a show last night called Robot Chicken. The whole thing is stop-motion animation using dolls that are made to look like celebrities fro the most part.

One had a guy talking to a pirate who had a steering wheel attatched to his crotch.
"What's up with the steering wheel?"
"Arrrrr, it's drivin' me nuts!"

Yes, it was another example of barto's "it's drivin' me nuts" joke.
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August 16, 2005—Speeding from the scene of the crime, a Chinese boy tows a floating plastic bag of stolen natural gas last week. Flouting a government ban, farmers around the central Chinese town of Pucheng frequently filch gas from the local oil field.

As Chinese industry booms and automobile use spreads, the country as a whole appears to be on a feverish quest for fossil fuels. Oil consumption rose by 11 percent last year, and the number of private autos hit 14 million in 2003—and is expected to rise to 150 million by 2015. (See "China's Boom Is Bust for Global Environment, Study Warns.")

China National Offshore Oil Corporation dropped its bid for U.S. oil and natural gas company Unocal earlier this month. But the China National Petroleum Corporation, the country's biggest oil company, has now joined with an Indian company in an effort to buy PetroKazakhstan, a Canadian company with oil fields in the central Asian country of Kazakhstan.

—Ted Chamberlain

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20..._gas_theft.html

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That kid better hope that a 'almost blind woodpecker' doesn't decide to start pecking away on that 'log'!     
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At first glance I would have sworn that gasbag was LP.
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Computer Geekery for the Well Armed Dummy...

Described below are several methods for shooting yourself in the foot using various programming techniques.

C You shoot yourself in the foot.

C++ You accidentally create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical care is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, "That's me over there."

FORTRAN You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception handling ability.

Cobol USE HANDGUN.COLT(45), AIM AT LEG.FOOT, THEN WITH ARM.HAND.FINGER ON HANDGUN.COLT(TRIGGER) PERFORM.SQUEEZE RETURN HANDGUN.COLT(45) TO HIP.HOLSTER.

LISP You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...

Basic (interpreted) You shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol until your foot is waterlogged and rots off.

Basic (compiled) You shoot yourself in the foot with a BB using a SCUD missile launcher.

FORTH Foot in yourself shoot.

APL You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.

Pascal The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.

SNOBOL If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.

Concurrent Euclid You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.

HyperTalk Put the first bullet of the gun into the foot left of leg of you. Answer the result.

Motif You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet, and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.

Unix % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o % rm * .o rm: .o: No such file or directory % ls % XBase Shooting yourself is no problem. If you want to shoot yourself in the foot, you'll have to use Clipper.

Paradox Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can, too.

Revelation You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.

Visual Basic You'll really only appear to have shot yourself in the foot, but you'll have had so much fun doing it that you won't care.

Prolog You tell your program that you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't permit it to explain it to you.

370 JCL You send your foot down to MIS and include a 400-page document explaining exactly how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.

Apple We'll let you shoot yourself, but it'll cost you a bundle.

IBM You insert a clip into the gun, wait half an hour, and it goes off in random directions. If a bullet hits your foot, you're lucky.

Microsoft Object "Foot" will be included in the next release. You can upgrade for $500.

Cray I knew you were going to shoot yourself in the foot.

Hewlett-Packard You can use this machine-gun to shoot yourself in the foot, but the firing pin is broken.

NeXT We don't sell guns anymore, just ammunition.

Sun Just as soon as Solaris gets here, you can shoot yourself anywhere you want.

Ada After correctly packing your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream, and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover you can't because your foot is of the wrong type.

Access You try to point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all your Borland distribution diskettes instead.

Assembler You try to shoot yourself in the foot, only to discover you must first invent the gun, the bullet, the trigger, and your foot.

Modula2 After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.

csh After searching the manual until your foot falls asleep, you shoot the computer and switch to C.

dBase You buy a gun. Bullets are only available from another company and are promised to work so you buy them. Then you find out that the next version of the gun is the one that is scheduled to actually shoot bullets.

PL/1 After consuming all system resources including bullets, the data processing department doubles its size, acquires 2 new mainframes and drops the original on your foot.

Smalltalk, Actor, et al After playing with the graphics for 3 weeks, the programming manager shoots you in the head.

HTML <a target ="http://body /lower-half/leg/foot.appendage">Shoot here</a>

Java The gun fires just fine, but your foot can't figure out what the bullets are and ignores them.

MOO You ask a wizard for a pair of hands. After lovingly handcrafting the gun and each bullet, you tell everyone that you've shot yourself in the foot.

Smalltalk You daydream repeatedly about shooting yourself in the foot.

Perl You shoot yourself in the foot, but can't figure out how you did it so you find a dozen new ways to do it.

Python You shoot yourself in the foot and everything goes so smoothly that you go ahead to to shoot yourself in the other foot then your legs, then your torso and then your head. Problem solved.

Occam You shoot yourself in both feet at the same time with the same pull of the trigger. You have no idea how it happened, but it did.
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Yeah just like the whole "here are 10 kids of people binary" thing robotboy wants us all to think he came up with all of that sh!t above rather than supply a link.

What an asshole.
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Some of my fondest software engineer memories are of writing assembly language programs and debuging them using the front panel switches on a Harris /5. By the time I left we we had auto code generating, smart editors, symbolic debugggers, and remote debug. Didn't have to go anywhere near the lab, could observe the simulations operation from across the country.
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Can't remember where I saw it, but there was a quote by Bjarne Stroustrup (the "inventor" of C++) who said, "With C you can quite easily shoot yourself in the foot.  With C++ you can just as easily blow off your whole leg." Or something quite similar.
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Russ, did you see this story?

Airborne Laser Pod

Also on that Thunderbird story, are the F-16 wingtip missile rails ejectable from the cockpit?
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That applies to those in Illinois too. My brother went ahead and had it tatooed on his hand.
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Was that before he found Jaysus?
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15-Year-Old Burglar Dies After Being Shot By Woman

POSTED: 6:27 am EDT August 25, 2005

LOS ANGELES -- A 15-year-old boy shot during a California burglary has died.

Police said a 59-year-old woman returned to her South Los Angeles home Tuesday morning after a walk and was confronted by a boy wielding a tire iron. She shot him with a handgun she keeps for protection. The woman wasn't hurt.

The district attorney's office will determine if the woman will face any charges.

Authorities aren't releasing the boy's name.

http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/news/4894207/detail.html

Tire iron eh? Fork him.

We had two young guys in Chicago that wheeled a disabled old woman around her apartment so they wouldn't have to search for loot. She went to a drawer, pulled a gun and shot one of them in the neck. I can't remember what happened to the other. Fork em both.
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Good on her.

Heartwarming, really.
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Good luck with the California courts.
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Hope she gets the Robert Blake jury.

We just passe a no retreat self defense law, that includes being in your home, on property, or in an automobile, similar to the one passed in Florida.
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Hope she gets the Robert Blake jury.

We just passe a no retreat self defense law, that includes being in your home, on property, or in an automobile, similar to the one passed in Florida.
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DAs have to be the first line of defense for regular people. These things should not ruin people defending themselves by even getting to a jury.
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