have you seen the CieAura Holographic chips? Check them out. It’s insane. I put one on my back, because I have chronic back pain on the right hip, and it seriously just went away. In 30 seconds. I am such a nerd. I bought a pack of 30 of them. They aren’t that cheap, but way cheaper and better than pain killers.

This is from the CieAura website, to give you an idea of what it’s all about.

“CieAura Pure Relief Holographic Chips provide a safe and effective alternative or supplement to current discomfort. Numerous people suffer from discomfort in problem areas such as knees, backs and shoulders. It has been estimated that almost 80% of the world’s population will suffer from back discomfort at some point in their lives. We believe that CieAura PureRelief Chips can be used to manage back discomfort caused by sprains, muscle strains, headaches & athletic soreness.

When the body is in discomfort, energy naturally refocuses on the affected area. CieAura PureRelief Chips, like the needles in acupuncture, are able to refocus the energy when they are placed on the points of discomfort. ”

I went and set up a website and got some 800 Numbers and i’m on my way. Now I can capture leads online or through the phone and track them to the source from which they originate. The cool thing about Touchfon is that they have inexpensive toll free numbers that I can put my own custom greeting on, and it will email me an mp3 of the voicemails as soon as they come in. And the best part? It shows me the number that called. I even put the numbers in my PPC search ads, and people can call them before they click.

SaiHate Farewell

SaiHate-Vocaloid Farewell

SaiHate-Vocaloid Farewell

Whitewater rafting is an exciting adventuret. There are several excellent areas in the country for whitewater rafting, and Jackson Hole is one of the best. With the help of a guide, people of all ages can enjoy the exhilarating thrill of rushing through the rapids of a mountain river.

Jackson Hole, a picturesque and tourist-friendly mountain town in the valley of the Teton Mountains, has long been a favorite vacation destination. The Teton Mountains, which constitute part of the Rocky Mountain Range, have two main peaks and reach a height of 13,772 feet. Running off the Teton Mountains is the Snake River, which is famous for its beauty as well as its world-class whitewater rafting.

Where to Find the Best Jackson Hole River Rafting
Jackson Hole is home to a number of reputable whitewater rafting tour operators, and arranging your trip through one of these businesses is the best way to ensure fun and safety. When going through an established company, you can trust that the raft, paddles and helmets are in good condition, that you’re being taken to a safe but exciting spot on Snake River, and that you’ll be instructed in important safety precautions.

Have fun!

Jackson has a lot of restaurants for a town of 10k people. The restaurants scene is full of mid to high end restaurant/bars with great menus and fine cocktails and wine. Steakhouses are everywhere, and they range from crap, to super fine dining. Ten years ago there was only one Sushi restaurant in the whole valley, now you find 5. I recently visited Blu Kitchen, a small chic little spot with very delicious food.

The more I get around in the world, the more I appreciate the food in Jackson Hole. To learn more about Jackson Hole Restaurants go to www.surfthetetons.com

How could a person who has never heard of redbull seriously think they are aware enough to run the country? I just can’t believe it to be true. I heard about redbull 15 years ago and stopped drinking it over 5 years ago because I believe it to be pretty hard on the system. How can this be true?

^{eSolar employees put the final touches on the mirrors used to focus sunlight.}

eSolar is a startup company which is in the process of building solar thermal power plants. It was one of the first startups to earn financial support from Google. This morning it received $130 millions dollars in funding from Google.Org, Bill Gross’ Idealab, Oak Investment Partners, and other smaller investors. The company says it will have a power plant up and running later this year in southern California.

Designed to address the complex issues surrounding large or utility-scale power projects, eSolar’s distributed solar thermal plants achieve economies of scale at 33 MW, and are modularly scaled to fit the needs of large and small utilities.

In order to deliver on the promise of Big Solar, the typical utility-scale installation faces huge construction costs and requires large tracts of real estate, combined with expensive transmission line improvements to bring the power out of the deserts and into the cities. eSolar’s modular approach stands in direct contrast to this ‘bigger is better’ strategy. eSolar has replaced expensive steel, concrete, and brute force with inexpensive computing power and elegant algorithms. This new method of installing a solar power plant minimizes costly civil construction and the use of heavy equipment, dramatically reducing project cost and deployment time.

Centering on eSolar’s 33 MW pre-fab form-factor, the company’s modular design translates to minimal land requirements. The company’s solar power plant solutions are tailored to fit local resources and produce a low environmental footprint, favoring a straightforward siting and permitting process. Myriad locations combined with a multitude of interconnection options mean that eSolar can deliver more clean, carbon free power where it is needed: near the cities and towns where it is consumed.

Via: Press Release

Straight out of the heart of Copenhagen, comes the Triobike, an innovative cargo bike, that can transform itself into a regular bike and a stroller. It’s no surprise that this bike comes form Copenhagen — the city is filled with urban bikers. With the Triobike, you can transport your kids to school in the cargo bike, then, instead of riding the cargo bike around all day you merely pull out a front wheel from under the cargo bay, put it on the front forks. You can then ride a regular bike or use the cargo section as a stroller.

There’s a short video showing how the bike transforms here.

In Denmark the bike costs about 19,000 kroner for the basic setup, which is about $4000 U.S.

Via: Copenhagenize

Snooping at the passport records of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain by the government a private company contracted by the government is a big deal, but it’s the kind of thing that some politicians are pushing to make easier and more widespread. How? With “Real ID” — the national ID card program that, once upon a time, was the kind of thing that Republicans and Democrats opposed, but now is the greatest new Big Brother kool-ade flavor favored by Republican politicians and neoconservative “thinkers.”

From Ars Technica, we get the quote of the week:

As I’ve reported previously, the major problem with Real ID is that local DMV and law enforcement officials will have access to an unprecedented amount of sensitive information on anyone with a Real ID—scanned copies of any documents used to establish identity, like birth certificates, bank statements, pay stubs, property tax bills, and so on, not to mention driving histories from other states. Now imagine all of that data in the hands of a crooked sheriff who’s fighting off a reformist challenger in a hotly contested election. Do you really want to live in that world?

No.

And maybe we should add to the scenario Jon Stokes paints: private companies contracted by governments. After all, the passport breaches were not done by government employees, they were perpetrated by private individuals working for a private corporation.

In this day and age where our government “outsources” (read: privatizes) so much of its own business, from school lunches to prisons to heavily armed mercenaries in Iraq, where is the line drawn on privacy in a Real ID world?

Time was that this was a country of people free to live their own lives. Now we have a government that seems bent on controlling and tracking us in all we do, as though we were guilty until proven innocent.

The tipping point for this political agenda was 9/11, when foreign nationals already on CIA watch lists managed to sneak in and skyjack their way into murderous infamy. The Bush Administration, with general Republican enthusiasm, reacted by pushing for radical new powers to spy not on foreign threats, but on Americans — none of whom had anything to do with 9/11.

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

-1984, by George Orwell (Chapter 1)

OLEDs are thin, organic materials sandwiched between two electrodes, which illuminate when an electrical charge is applied. They’re so thin, that they could be applied to rooms as a type of wall paper to glow at the touch of a finger or when someone enters the room. Like LEDs they produce light very efficiently. But OLEDs also have to potential to be made at a very low cost, because they can be printed “roll-to-roll” like a newspaper. GE recently demonstrated the first OLEDs to be made in this manner — the researchers worked for four years on this project. See more at the GE Blog.

Via: Groovy Green

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Masanori Naruse jogs every day, collects miniature cars and feeds birds in his backyard, but he’s proudest of the way his home and 2200 others in Japan get electricity and heat water - with power generated by a hydrogen fuel cell. The technology - which draws energy from the chemical reaction when hydrogen combines with oxygen to form water.

Developers say fuel cells for homes produce one-third less of the pollution that causes global warming than conventional electricity generation does. Their plain grey fuel cell is about the size of a suitcase and sits just outside their door next to a tank that turns out to be a water heater. In the process of producing electricity, the fuel cell gives off enough warmth to heat water for the home.

The oxygen that the fuel cell uses comes from the air. The hydrogen is extracted from natural gas by a device called a reformer in the same box as the fuel cell. But a byproduct of that process is poisonous carbon monoxide. So another machine in the grey box adds oxygen to the carbon monoxide to create carbon dioxide, which - though it contributes to global warming - is not poisonous.

The entire process produces less greenhouse gas per watt than traditional generation. And no energy is wasted transporting the electricity where it’s actually going to be used.

Nearly every home in Japanese cities is supplied with natural gas for cooking or heating, which could make it relatively easy to spread fuel cell technology there. The potential for widespread use of fuel cells in bigger or more sparsely settled countries is less certain. Many American homes don’t have gas service, for example.

“There are not any real show-stoppers for this technology being used in the US,” said electrical engineering professor Roger Dougal at the University of South Carolina at Columbia.

Dougal said fuel cells are no more hazardous than any stove or water heater. Their major drawback is cost.

“Ultimately, I expect that some fraction of homes will use this technology, but it will be a very long time before a sizable fraction does,” he said in an email.

Naruse is paying $9 500 (about R74 000) for a 10-year lease on a test fuel cell for his home south-west of Tokyo from Matsushita, which sells Panasonic brand products, plans to offer fuel cells commercially in 2009.

Other Japanese companies working on fuel cells for homes include Toyota Motor, which is developing fuel-cell vehicles, and electronics maker Toshiba. Automaker Honda Motor is working with Plug Power, a fuel cell company in the US, to test a home fuel cell generator that also provides hydrogen as fuel for fuel cell vehicles.

Honda hopes domestic use of fuel cell generators will help make fuel cell vehicles become more widespread because owners can refuel at home. It plans to start marketing the FCX Clarity fuel cell vehicle this year in California; it will lease for about $600 a month.

Fuel cells are expensive in part because they don’t last very long. The latest model from Matsushita, for example, lasts about three years.

But the technology is improving. Matsushita says the savings from using fuel cell-generated power will vary by household and climate, but it promises a cost drop of about $50 a month.

Naruse’s family - with three TV sets, a dishwasher, clothes washer, dryer, personal computer and air conditioner - saves about $95 a month. At the same time, conventionally generated electricity remains available to them, should the power generated by their fuel cell run low.

The Japanese government is so bullish on the technology it has earmarked $309-million a year for fuel cell development and plans for 10 million homes - about one-fourth of Japanese households - to be powered by fuel cells by 2020.

Via: IOL Technology

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More at http://www.theuptake.org “Lobbying is the great evil of modern times” says Brandon Hodge, owner of two stores in Austin, Texas. His locally owned stores “Big Top Candy Shop” and “Monkey See Monkey Do” don’t get a tax break from the Austin City Council, yet the council hands out tax breaks to large corporations.

As Texas votes today, Hodge explains why he doesn’t pay attention to the commercials the candidates put out and why the candidates are not always at fault when there’s “dirty tricks”

Author: Veracifier
Keywords: clinton obama texas sanantonio san antonio primary caucus lobbying taxes
Added: March 4, 2008

Wow, this is a truly non-toxic paint, and it’s going to be sold exclusively at Home Depot. It’s called Freshaire Choice, and it’s a zero VOC paint. According to the EPA, the air inside a home is, on average, two-to-five-times more polluted than the air outside. Paint is a large contributing factor to poor indoor air quality and can emit harmful chemicals, such as VOCs, for years after application.

Another innovative feature of this line of paint is that the tints are also zero VOC. It’s the first paint that can make this claim — on average, up to 150 grams of VOCs are added back into paint once the color is mixed. That means that even if you buy a boutique, all natural paint, as soon as you tint it to the color you desire, you just defeated all the work you put into locating and purchasing the paint (except for naturally pigmented paints, like clay paints).

The Freshaire tinting system uses pre-measured packets of dry tint that color the paint without adding any VOCs to the paint. This zero VOC system is an industry first. No other tint system for paint can make this claim. Another innovation is that the tint comes in a packet that dissolves into the paint completely. By using pre measured, standardized packets, Freshaire ensures consistent colors no matter when you buy more paint. The only drawback to the system is that you can only use the 65 colors that are currently available — so no custom matching.

Freshaire Choice has a GreenGuard certification (one of the most stringent independent test laboratories in the United States).

Freshaire uses 100% recycled materials for the can, the can is recyclable when you are done, 75% recycled fiber material is used for the can’s label, the label is printed with soy ink. Another innovation is that the paint chips are also completely recyclable as well being made from recycled materials. As far as I know, only Freshaire allows you to recycle actual sample paint chips.

The Freshaire Choice Paint will be exclusively available at The Home Depot nationwide beginning April 1, 2008. The one-gallon containers will be sold at a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $35 - 38. The Freshaire Choice Paint product assortment consists of flat, eggshell and semi-gloss finishes, as well as drywall interior primer and ceiling paint. For more information or to request a free sample, visit www.thefreshairechoice.com or call 1-866-880-0304.

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Wow, this is a truly non-toxic paint, and it’s going to be sold exclusively at Home Depot. It’s called Freshaire Choice, and it’s a zero VOC paint. According to the EPA, the air inside a home is, on average, two-to-five-times more polluted than the air outside. Paint is a large contributing factor to poor indoor air quality and can emit harmful chemicals, such as VOCs, for years after application.

Another innovative feature of this line of paint is that the tints are also zero VOC. It’s the first paint that can make this claim — on average, up to 150 grams of VOCs are added back into paint once the color is mixed. That means that even if you buy a boutique, all natural paint, as soon as you tint it to the color you desire, you just defeated all the work you put into locating and purchasing the paint (except for naturally pigmented paints, like clay paints).

The Freshaire tinting system uses pre-measured packets of dry tint that color the paint without adding any VOCs to the paint. This zero VOC system is an industry first. No other tint system for paint can make this claim. Another innovation is that the tint comes in a packet that dissolves into the paint completely. By using pre measured, standardized packets, Freshaire ensures consistent colors no matter when you buy more paint. The only drawback to the system is that you can only use the 65 colors that are currently available — so no custom matching.

Freshaire Choice has a GreenGuard certification (one of the most stringent independent test laboratories in the United States).

Freshaire uses 100% recycled materials for the can, the can is recyclable when you are done, 75% recycled fiber material is used for the can’s label, the label is printed with soy ink. Another innovation is that the paint chips are also completely recyclable as well being made from recycled materials. As far as I know, only Freshaire allows you to recycle actual sample paint chips.

The Freshaire Choice Paint will be exclusively available at The Home Depot nationwide beginning April 1, 2008. The one-gallon containers will be sold at a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $35 - 38. The Freshaire Choice Paint product assortment consists of flat, eggshell and semi-gloss finishes, as well as drywall interior primer and ceiling paint. For more information or to request a free sample, visit www.thefreshairechoice.com or call 1-866-880-0304.

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Sunscreens that pollute the water are not efficient. This is especially true in the ocean, where it’s estimate that 4000-6000 tons of sunscreen wash off swimmers every year. A company called Caribbean Solutions is introducing a biodegradeable sunscreen nationwide.

This sunscreen is free of petroleum derivatives — instead, the active ingredients are titanium dioxide and zinc oxide. These minerals scatter and reflect UVA and UVB rays, while petrochemicals absorb them. Moreover, conventional sunscreens contain four questionable chemicals: octinoxate, oxybenzone and 4-methylbenzylidene camphor, and the preservative butylparaben.

Dr. Celia Ferreira formulated Caribbean Solutions SolGuard (in SPF 4, 8, 15 and 25) with botanical ingredients, including wild pansy, green coffee bean extract and hibiscus. Titanium dioxide and zinc oxide protect from both UVA and UVB rays, while sunflower and cucumber oils soothe and hydrate the skin. The sunscreen is available from Carribean Sol.

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He’s not a natural-born citizen, is he?

McCain’s likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president and the happenstance of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 are reviving a musty debate that has surfaced periodically since the founders first set quill to parchment and declared that only a “natural-born citizen” can hold the nation’s highest office.

Almost since those words were written in 1787 with scant explanation, their precise meaning has been the stuff of confusion, law school review articles, whisper campaigns and civics class debates over whether only those delivered on American soil can be truly natural born. To date, no American to take the presidential oath has had an official birthplace outside the 50 states.

“There are powerful arguments that Senator McCain or anyone else in this position is constitutionally qualified, but there is certainly no precedent,” said Sarah Duggin, an associate professor of law at Catholic University who has studied the issue extensively. “It is not a slam-dunk situation.”

McCain was born on a military installation in the Canal Zone, where his mother and father, a navy officer, were stationed. His campaign advisers say they are comfortable that McCain meets the requirement and note that the question was researched for his first presidential bid in 1999 and reviewed again this time around.

So maybe it’s a gray area. Isn’t this where the self-proclaimed ’strict constructionists’ get all holier-than-thou and demand that the Constitution be interpreted as narrowly as possible?

True conservatives who actually walk the walk and don’t just talk the talk must proclaim John McCain as not eligible to hold presidential office.

Cue the right-wing hypocrisy….

Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, February 27, 2008

Author: Veracifier
Keywords: maples levin sessions waterboarding interrogation article geneva conventions international law torture
Added: February 27, 2008