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  • 28Jul
    Illegal’s Boycott Arizona By Leavinghttp://peacemoonbeam.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451af9f69e20133f23ba9eb970b-pi
    Phoenix, AZ – Thousands of illegal immigrants are showing their outrage with Arizona‘s controversial new SB-1070 law by boycotting the state and moving elsewhere. One example of those who are punishing the state by leaving is illegal immigrant Manuel Renaldo. As he loaded his stolen car with his family of twelve’s belongings, Renaldo told this reporter through an interpreter, “It’s a matter of principle, ‘homes.’ I refuse to be supported by someplace that treats me like a criminal.” The affects of the exodus are being felt by Arizona retailers, who report dwindling beer thefts and spray paint and ammunition sales dropping. Also hit hard are Arizona hospitals, who have reported a dramatic decline in births and emergency room visits by illegal aliens. “We’re ecstatic,” said one administrator for Banner Health in Phoenix. “At this rate we may see a profit one day.” The boycott/exodus of Arizona by illegals is expected to grow exponentially leading up to the law’s starting date.
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  • 24Jul

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  • 21Jul

    The new program was able to translate the 3,000-year-old language using the computing power of a laptop.
    By Bryan Nelson
    Credit to Mother Nature Network

    UGARITIC: Related to Hebrew, deciphering the Ugaritic language has been crucial to clarifying Old Testament text. (Photo: Wiki Commons/CC License)

    A project led by professor Regina Barzilay of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may be the first to show how ancient, lost or unknown languages can be decoded using a computer program, according to National Geographic.
    Earn up to

    The MIT team was able to decode the “lost language” of Ugaritic, an ancient Semitic language used in Old Testament times, using no more computing power than that of a laptop. The program took no longer than a few hours to link most Ugaritic symbols to their Hebrew equivalents.

    Ugaritic text was nothing more than a series of dots and wedge-shaped marks to linguists and scholars when it was first discovered on clay tablets in 1928, excavated from the rubble of the ancient city of Ugarit by French archaeologists. Even though the language is closely related to Hebrew, experts did not decipher it until 1932.

    It took only hours to accomplish what took linguists years to complete, leading scholars to hope that the new computer program can be a prototype for a more powerful system to decode ancient languages that remain a mystery to scholars. In other words, it may not be long before computers become modern day versions of the Rosetta Stone.

    “Traditionally, decipherment has been viewed as a sort of scholarly detective game, and computers weren’t thought to be of much use,” Barzilay said. “Our aim is to bring to bear the full power of modern machine learning and statistics to this problem.”

    But some experts remain skeptical. Richard Sproat, an Oregon Health and Science University computational linguist, notes that “in the case [of Ugaritic], you’re dealing with a small and simple writing system, and there are closely related languages. It’s not always going to be the case that there are closely related languages that one can use.”

    For example, a language like Etruscan, which was used by ancient Italians around 700 B.C., is known today from scant written examples and shares no relation to any other known language, except for a few words adopted by the Latin language (e.g., the name of the city of Rome comes from Etruscan). Deciphering Etruscan symbols could potentially give historians invaluable contextual clues about the region before Latin superseded the earlier language.

    Barzilay thinks the MIT program can be upgraded to decode languages like Etruscan by scanning multiple languages at once and taking contextual information into account. At the very least, such a program could reveal new, obscure clues that scholars can use to learn more about ancient unknown languages.

    Credit to Mother Nature Network

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  • 08May

    Ever wonder what is on your magnetic key card?

    Answer:

    A. Customer’s name
    B. Customer’s partial home address
    C. Hotel room number
    D. Check-in date and check-out dates
    E. Customer’s credit card number and expiration date!

    When you turn them in to the front desk your personal information is there for any employee to access by simply scanning the card in the hotel scanner. An employee can take a handful of cards home and, using a scanning device, transfer the information onto a laptop computer and go shopping at your expense. Simply put, hotels do not erase the information on these cards until an employee reissues the card to the next hotel guest. At that time, the new guest’s information is electronically overwritten on the card and the previous guest’s information is erased in the overwriting process. But until the card is rewritten for the next guest, it is usually kept in a drawer at the front desk with YOUR INFORMATION ON IT!

    The bottom line is: If you have a small magnet, pass it across the magnetic strip several times. Then try it in the door, it will not work. It erases everything on the card.

    Or…..

    Keep the cards, take them home with you and destroy them. NEVER leave them behind in the room or room wastebasket, and NEVER turn them into the front desk when you check-out of a room without erasing the information. They will not charge you for the card (it’s illegal) and you’ll be sure you are not leaving a lot of valuable, personal information on it that could be easily lifted off with any simple scanning device card reader. For the same reason, if you arrive at the airport and discover you still have the card key in your pocket, do not toss it in an airport trash basket. Take it home and destroy it by cutting it up, especially through the electronic information strip!.

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  • 27Apr

    I have been on facebook for about a year now… I joined facebook, at my husband’s urging, you have probably heard the the conversation it goes like this…
    Honey, you will like this facebook thing, you can keep in touch with friends, find old friends, communicate with others, keep in touch, and see what everyone is up to..its great, try it ……So I tried facebook, and I do have fun, I have several people that I razz and others that I reach out to every so often to just say hi…It has replaced email for me in most cases….you can even IM people who are on facebook…However here is my demon….A very nice lady from church sent me an invite to Farmville, now I had several other invites in the past and just turned it down, I was not interested, however I felt obligated when the person from church sent the invite…I don’t usually get swayed that way, just because the church lady is doing means I have to do it…but I decided to accept….

    Here is where the demon comes in ….once you join you have to go to your farm daily and plow and plant and harvest, and then take care of the animals, then you have to have a place for the animals, then you of course have to have a place for your imaginary farm person to live… And as you acquire things the more work you have to do…..So for those of you who play farmville let me tell you where I stand : I am at level 33, I own 3 cottages,1 farmhouse, 1 estate, 1 barn, 1 chicken coop, 2 dairy farms, 3 silo, and horse barn, and a nursey barn for the foals, a Maison(I don’t even know what that is, but I have one), 8 sheep, 16 goat, 9 bulls, 62 chicken, 35 cows, 18 baby cows, 6 deer, 6 rabbit, 2 turkeys, 5 penquins, 2 dogs, 5 cats, 1 turtle, 1 goose, 2 swans, 15 ducks, and a fruit stand, a flower stand,1 tractor, 1 harvester, and many other small things….so after taking care of everything you have on your farm, you then go and visit your friends farms to gain xtra points and to find special goodies….All of this of course takes time and you are also scanning your friends post to see if they are giving away goodies for your farm like gas and animals, and points…all of this is very time consuming…I have over 30 neighbors…

    So to get back to my reason for this post…1st the person that invited me does not even play…..2nd my husband who said facebook would be fun, had no idea what he was starting….and last, all of the nice things I have on my site, and how I have it layed out is like a real farm, it can get kinda depressing….like is there anyway I can live in farmville, things just seem so much easier there. You need food click on it, you need things harvested click on it….If only real life could be more like farmville….

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