Liquid Black Column

Ok i decided to make my own news column

I will be posting various news stories

Story #1

90,000 Sex Offenders Removed From MySpace

About 90,000 sex offenders have been identified and removed from the social networking Web site MySpace, company and law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

The number was nearly double what MySpace officials originally estimated last year, said North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, who along with Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has led efforts to make social networking Web sites safer for young users.

Cooper said he wasn't surprised by the updated numbers, and demanded that MySpace and rival online networking site Facebook _ which claim to have more than 170 million users combined _ do more to protect children and teenagers.

"These sites were created for young people to communicate with each other. Predators are going to troll in these areas where they know children are going to be," Cooper said. "That's why these social networking sites have the responsibility to make their sites safe for children."

The attorneys general received agreements last year from MySpace and Facebook to push toward making their sites safer. Both sites implemented dozens of safeguards, including finding better ways to verify user's ages, banning convicted sex offenders from using the sites and limiting the ability of older users to search members under 18.

Blumenthal, who received MySpace's updated numbers Tuesday through a subpoena, said the information "provides compelling proof that social networking sites remain rife with sexual predators." A preliminary number of sex offenders found on Facebook was "substantial," but he said the company has yet to respond to a recent subpoena.

MySpace executives said they were confident in the technology they use to find, remove and block registered sex offenders. The company uses Sentinel SAFE, a database it created in 2006 with the names, physical descriptions and other identifiable characteristics of sex offenders that cross-references against MySpace members.

"Sentinel SAFE is the best industry solution to ensure these offenders are removed from social networks," Hemanshu Nigam, the company's chief security officer, said in a statement Tuesday.

MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., has more than 110 million active users worldwide.

A spokesman for Facebook, which claims more than 61 million active users, said Tuesday that protecting its users has always been a priority.

"We have a policy prohibiting registered sex offenders from joining Facebook," said spokesman Barry Schnitt. "We are glad to be able to report that we have not yet had to handle a case of a registered sex offender meeting a minor through Facebook. We are working hard to make sure it never happens."

Still, Cooper said more should be done.

"Technology moves forward quickly, and it's important for these companies to stay ahead of the technology," he said. "And they're not moving fast enough for us."

The push for better restrictions came during a time when social-networking Web sites were seeing exponential growth, with most of it coming in the form of younger users. But along with the younger members came sexual predators who would lie about their age to lure young victims.

Blumenthal and Cooper, who co-chair the State Attorney General Task Force on Social Networking, have led the charge for tougher restrictions to be placed on who joins online social-networking sites.

The Internet Safety Technical Task Force report, commissioned by the attorneys general in 2008, researched ways to help squash the onslaught of sexual predators targeting younger social-networking clients. Enhancing Child Safety & Online Technologies, a report by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force submitted to attorneys general in December, pointed out there was no surefire way to guarantee online child safety.

"Our law enforcement officers investigating these cases tell us that predators are soliciting children on the Internet and in social networking sites," Cooper said. "We're working to provide more law enforcement to protect our kids, but social networking sites and technology companies must do their part as well."

I didn't write this i don't have time credit to
the author of this page http://www.cfnews13.com/News/Technology/2009/2/3/myspace_90000_sex_offenders_removed_from_site.html

Story #2
My Quadratic Formula Solver v1.23
Secrets Revealed...
The Program
:Prompt A,B,C {Prompt is in PRGM under I/O}
:(B2-4*A*C)D {The arrow is STO}
:If D<0 {If is in PRGM under CTL} {< is in TEST }
:Then {Then is in PRGM under CTL}
:Disp "NO REAL SOLUTIONS" {Disp is in PRGM under I/O} {Words within "" are typed using ALPHA}
:Goto 1 {Goto is in PRGM under CTL}
:Else {Else is in PRGM under CTL}
: ((-B-(D))/(2A))E {The is square root}{The first - is the negative sign}
: ((-B+(D))/(2A))F
:Disp "SOLUTIONS",E,F
:Lbl 1 {Lbl is in PRGM under CTL}

Thats it. Thats the exact commands to let you master the quadratic formula.

Serves them sex offenders right!

Sucks that they won't have another way to contact their family in most cases.

Some people just did something stupid, and they are suffering pretty hardcore for it.

Not ALL! Some of those jackasses deserve this. Like, hardcore.

too much free time...

My new stories will be coming soon!

point well proven

Story #3

Army official: Suicides in January 'terrifying'

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- One week after the U.S. Army announced record suicide rates among its soldiers last year, the service is worried about a spike in possible suicides in the new year.


If reports of suicides are confirmed, more soldiers will have taken their lives in January than died in combat.

The Army said 24 soldiers are believed to have committed suicide in January alone -- six times as many as killed themselves in January 2008, according to statistics released Thursday.

The Army said it already has confirmed seven suicides, with 17 additional cases pending that it believes investigators will confirm as suicides for January.

If those prove true, more soldiers will have killed themselves than died in combat last month. According to Pentagon statistics, there were 16 U.S. combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq in January.

"This is terrifying," an Army official said. "We do not know what is going on."

Col. Kathy Platoni, chief clinical psychologist for the Army Reserve and National Guard, said that the long, cold months of winter could be a major contributor to the January spike.

"There is more hopelessness and helplessness because everything is so dreary and cold," she said.

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But Platoni said she sees the multiple deployments, stigma associated with seeking treatment and the excessive use of anti-depressants as ongoing concerns for mental-health professionals who work with soldiers.

Those who are seeking mental-health care often have their treatment disrupted by deployments. Deployed soldiers also have to deal with the stress of separations from families.

"When people are apart you have infidelity, financial problems, substance abuse and child behavioral problems," Platoni said. "The more deployments, the more it is exacerbated."

Platoni also said that while the military has made a lot of headway in training leaders on how to deal with soldiers who may be suffering from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, "there is still a huge problem with leadership who shame them when they seek treatment."

The anti-depressants prescribed to soldiers can have side effects that include suicidal thoughts. Those side effects reportedly are more common in people 18 to 24.

Concern about last month's suicide rate was so high, Congress and the Army leadership were briefed. In addition, the Army took the rare step of releasing data for the month rather than waiting to issue it as part of annual statistics at the end of the year.

In January 2008, the Army recorded two confirmed cases of suicides and two other cases it was investigating.

Last week, in releasing the report that showed a record number of suicides in 2008, the Army said it soon will conduct servicewide training to help identify soldiers at risk of suicide.

The program, which will run February 15 through March 15, will include training to recognize behaviors that may lead to suicide and instruction on how to intervene. The Army will follow the training with another teaching program, from March 15 to June 15, focused on suicide prevention at all unit levels.

The 2008 numbers were the highest annual level of suicides among soldiers since the Pentagon began tracking the rate 28 years ago. The Army said 128 soldiers were confirmed to have committed suicide in 2008, and an additional 15 were suspected of having killed themselves. The statistics cover active-duty soldiers and activated National Guard and reserves.

The Army's confirmed rate of suicides in 2008 was 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers. The nation's suicide rate was 19.5 per 100,000 people in 2005, the most recent figure available, Army officials said last month.

Suicides for Marines were also up in 2008. There were 41 in 2008, up from 33 in 2007 and 25 in 2006, according to a Marines report.

In addition to the new training, the service has a program called Battlemind, intended to prepare soldiers and their families to cope with the stresses of war before, during and after deployment. It also is intended to help detect mental-health issues before and after deployments.

The Army and the National Institute of Mental Health signed an agreement in October to conduct research to identify factors affecting the mental and behavioral health of soldiers and to share strategies to lower the suicide rate. The five-year study will examine active-duty, National Guard and reserve soldiers and their families.



All credit due to original author at
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/02/05/army.suicides/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

interesting........

Story #4
Light shed on the Red Ring of Death

An expert source who's involved with the technical side of Xbox 360 production, has spoken out about the Xbox 360's poor reliability record. The source, who preferred not to reveal their identity, referred to a failure rate of 30% in the Xenon systems that are currently in circulation.
Speaking to 8Bit Joystick (who previously called the Bungie/Microsoft split), the source said of the failure rate: "It's around 30%, and all will probably fail early. This quarter [Microsoft] are expecting one million failures, most of those Xenons ... There's no way to tell when yours might die. But the cooler you can keep it, the longer it will probably last. So stand it up, keep it in free air."
The undisclosed interviewee cited a number of reasons for this laughable reliability rate: rushing launch units onto the market with the aim of beating Sony, poorly staffed and under resourced engineering departments, and design defects in the Xenon systems were all blamed by the source for the now infamous problems with the Xbox 360.
In some good news for Xbox 360 consumers who've bought their system recently, the most recent Xbox 360 model apparently has a failure rate of less than 10%.
However, if you're the sort of person who doesn't want to know what's in your tasty burger, you should probably look away now as the fixing process for broken Xbox 360's is revealed:
"You send in a broken box, you get back a working box (hopefully). So there is a rotating stock of the original units that get repaired and returned to service. Plus, they keep finding these cashes of launch units here and there and [they are] using them too. Didn't you hear during the holidays that bundles were found with units made in 2006? Those were pulled back from the retail channel last spring when the new heatsink was done, and had the new heatsink placed on them and then put into the shipping flow like any other box.
"Back to the rotating inventory of launch units. You risk getting one of those back until the last one is out of the system. I imagine the next big outrage will be when some of the folks who waited until Falcon to buy a console for reliability reasons, and has to send it in for service, gets a Xenon back! Even when all of the Xenons are gone, you will likely get a newer gen repaired one back rather than new. Unless the fail rate gets so low there are none available. I'm holding my breath..."


All Credit to the author of this page
http://www.totalvideogames.com/Xbox-360/news/Light-Shed-On-Red-Ring-Of-Death-12089.html

Story #5

Salmonella outbreak’s pain spreads

The impact of the salmonella outbreak tied to the Georgia peanut processing plant in Blakely deepened Thursday. From metro Atlanta to Kentucky to Washington, officials and consumers worried about the extent of the contamination and how to keep it from happening again.


• For all the latest developments on the peanut crisis and the salmonella outbreak, with an updated list of recalled items, plus background on the scare, go to the AJC's special report: ajc.com/peanuts. Food banks search for tainted items

Volunteers at food banks in metro Atlanta are combing through their stocks to make sure they have not received tainted items.

The Atlanta Community Food Bank is a main provider to food pantries in the region.

Angie Clawson, a spokeswoman for the food bank, said Thursday that it has sent out notices to its clients and is checking its stock. No tainted products have been found so far.

Brian Lowring, who works with Georgia Avenue Community Ministry in Atlanta, said his group is doing the same.

“Any product that would have peanut butter, we don’t put out,” he said.


Few other recalls come close to this

The recall of peanut products because of possible salmonella contamination has mushroomed into one of the largest.

Depending on how recalls are measured, few others come close. If counted by the number of products, more than 1,313 have been recalled as of Thursday. The closest is the 1,177 pet food products recalled in 2007 after melamine was discovered in some ingredients.

If measured in pounds, the February 2008 recall of beef from a California packaging plant would top the list, with 143 million pounds affected.

The current salmonella outbreak has been blamed for eight deaths and 575 illnesses. A June 2008 salmonella contamination of tomatoes and jalapeno peppers made more people ill — more than 1,200.


Peanut Corp. gets booted by the feds

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Thursday it is suspending the company that owns the South Georgia peanut plant linked to the salmonella outbreak from doing business with the federal government for one year.

The USDA said that the suspension begins immediately.

Officials said Peanut Corp. of America, based in Lynchburg, Va., is excluded from participating in federal government contracts or subcontracts. PCA will also be excluded from doing business as agents or representatives of other companies doing business with the federal government.


Kentucky stops distributing FEMA meal kits for storm victims

Kentucky stopped distributing FEMA emergency meal kits for victims of last week’s ice storm Thursday after authorities warned that the meals may include packets of peanut butter recalled because of possible salmonella.

The kits were shipped to Arkansas and Kentucky to help feed some of the 1.3 million people left without power for days at the height of last week’s ice storm. No illnesses have been reported, but several people consumed the suspect plastic packets of peanut butter.

Gov. Steve Beshear ate some of the peanut butter while touring storm damage but said Thursday he feels “pretty good.”

According to an internal FEMA briefing document dated Thursday, FEMA delivered 959,000 meals to Kentucky after the ice storm. National Guard Chief Warrant Officer Connie Vick said meals containing peanut butter had likely been distributed to nearly two dozen counties.

Arkansas received 468,864 meals. State emergency workers there identified four trailers containing food kits but said the kits had not been distributed.


Ag board kicks out Peanut Corp. CEO

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack removed Stewart Parnell, president and CEO of the Peanut Corp. of America, as a member of the Department of Agriculture’s Peanut Standards Board.

The all-volunteer board advises the secretary on quality and handling standards for domestic and imported peanuts marketed in the United States. Parnell was appointed in 2005 and reappointed in October for a second term that was to have run until June 2011.


Georgia decides not to prosecute plant linked to outbreak

Georgia decided not to pursue prosecution against the South Georgia peanut plant linked to the salmonella outbreak because the related state laws were only misdemeanors, law enforcement officials said Thursday.

“Any potential prosecution is most appropriately handled at the federal level,” Vernon Keenan, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said Wednesday after consulting with state and federal officials.

Officials said the two state laws under consideration — a general reckless conduct law and another regarding the adulteration of food — would bring only minor penalties.


Staff writers Craig Schneider and Christopher Quinn and news services contributed to this article.


All Credits to the author of this page:
http://www.ajc.com/services/content/metro/stories/2009/02/06/peanut_roundup.html?cxtype=rss&cxsvc=7&cxcat=13