Cool: An Austrian specializing in daring stunt jumps donned a carbon fiber wing and flew across the English Channel on Thursday after being dropped from a plane (from Associated Press, via Yahoo News).

Department of Homeland Security: New Department + Same Bureaucratic Process = Even More Bureaucracy (and more of the accompanying waste/inefficiencies)

The move to pull marshals from those flights was particularly disturbing to some because it coincided with a new high-level hijacking threat issued by the Department of Homeland Security. That warning memo said that 'at least one of these attacks could be executed by the end of the summer,' according to a source familiar with the document

(from MSNBC).

An odd 'collective mind' approach to prediciting the future - The Case for Terrorism Futures:

Projects similar to PAM, like the Iowa Electronic Markets, which speculate on election results, have been surprisingly reliable indicators of what's going to happen next.

The price of orange juice futures has even been shown to accurately predict the weather, noted David Pennock, a senior research scientist at Overture Services who has done extensive surveys on the reliability of such markets

(from Wired).

RIAA will take 2191.78 years to sue everyone:

Reader Michaela Stephens says that if the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is right and that 60 million US folk are file sharing, it's going to take the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) a mighty long time to get round to them all.

She said: 'I pulled out my calculator to see just how long it would take the RIAA to sue all 60 million P2P music file traders at a rate of 75 a day. 60,000,000/75 = 800,000 days to subpoena each person or 800,000 days/365 days in a year = 2191.78 years to subpoena each person'

Obviously the RIAA won't sue everyone, but the fact someone did the math, is kind of amusing (from The Inquirer).

Scientists bend sunlight to the operating theatre:

Israeli scientists have devised the ultimate in blue sky thinking - a beam of sunlight as a surgeon's scalpel. A team at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba report in Nature today that they used solar surgery to burn away a tumour-sized lesion on the liver of an anaesthetised rat

(from Guardian Unlimited).

More Flash Mobs:New Yorkers become a mob for fun: "In the latest occurrence, about 200 people converged on a Central Park ridge across from the Museum of Natural History on Thursday. Once in place, the mob tweeted like birds and crowed like roosters, chanted 'Na-ture,' and then dispersed" (from Reuters, via Yahoo News).

Napster Ready for Holiday Relaunch - 'The fallen song-swapping service, which was knocked offline last year after a prolonged legal battle with the record industry over copyright infringement allegations, will re-emerge as a legal paid music service Napster 2.0' (from PC World, via Yahoo News).