RandySF
RandySF's JournalHomeless SF man killed by train after trying to retrieve only possessions from track.
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- The Powell Street Muni Metro Station in San Francisco was shut down for several hours after a man was hit and killed by a train.
Police say the man was hit and killed by an outbound train at the Powell Street Station at about 2:40 p.m.
Moments after this all happened, we were able to talk with a few people who say they knew the man who was killed. They say he is homeless and stored his backpack under the Muni platform along with other people.
Multiple people have told us the man did not commit suicide, but instead was trying to get to his backpack when he was hit by the train.
Police say paramedics quickly arrived, but the man was pronounced dead at the scene.
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=resources/traffic&id=9433696
Open Carry Advocate Arrested On Suspicion Of Gun Threat
A Wisconsin man who recently wrote a column in defense of his right to carry a pistol on his hip has been arrested on gun-related charges, according to The Wausau Daily Herald.
Dereck Simonsmeier, of Schofield, Wis., was in jail Thursday, after being arrested along with three other people following an incident the day before in which a man was allegedly threatened at gunpoint. The group got involved in a dispute between roommates in a private home. Simonsmeier and the other two men arrested were all allegedly armed, and charged with endangering safety.
Police recovered a .40-caliber Glock handgun, a 1300 Winchester 12-gauge shotgun, and a Remington 1911 handgun.
In a Feb. 10 column, Simonsmeier wrote about being asked to leave a Pick 'N Save grocery store while carrying a Remington 1911 "in plain view on my belt."
"I do not carry it to be tough or to start a fight," he wrote in the column. "I carry it because it is my right and to protect the ones I love. Yet even with the welfare of others in mind, I am scrutinized and mocked for exercising my Second Amendment right."
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/simonsmeier-gun-arrest
CO state senator says it was “a good thing” that Aurora killer James had 100-round magazine.
During a Wednesday hearing over a bill to repeal one of Colorado’s recently passed gun-safety laws, Republican state senator Bernie Herpin shocked attendees — and gravely offended an Aurora theater shooting victim’s father — by saying it was “maybe a good thing” that Aurora theater shooter James Holmes had a 100-round magazine.
In 2013, the Colorado state legislature, spurred on in part by the horrific mass shooting at an Aurora movie theater the previous year, passed two gun-safety laws. One mandated universal background checks for gun purchases, while the other limited most ammunition magazines to 15 rounds.
The laws were immediately controversial and ultimately led to three Democratic state senators losing their seats, either through the threat or the reality of recall elections mounted by gun rights enthusiasts.
As a result of one of those recalls, a Republican by the name of Bernie Herpin ascended to the Colorado state Senate. Surprising no one, Herpin introduced a bill to overturn the recently passed restriction on ammunition magazines.
A nearly identical law has already been voted down in the Dem-controlled Colorado state House of Representatives and is certain to fail in the state Senate, which is also controlled by Democrats. But the state Senate held a hearing on Herpin’s bill all the same.
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/13/gop_state_senator_in_colorado_says_it_was_a_good_thing_that_aurora_killer_james_holmes_had_100_round_magazine/
NY Mom Writes Anti-Gay Tirade on 7-Year-Old's Birthday Invite
A mom in Baldwin, New York RSVP'ed to a small child's birthday party invitation with a vile anti-gay screed.
Little Sophia turns 7 in a few weeks, so her two dads decided to throw her a party and invite her friends to celebrate. One of those friends is Tommy, whose mom Beth is apparently a rabid homophobe. She returned the invitation with the following response:
"Tommy will NOT attend. I do not beleive [sic] in what you do and will not subject my innocent son to your 'lifestyle.' I am sorry Sophia has to grow up this way. If you have an issue or need to speak to me: 516-362-1357."
Sophia's dads were understandably furious, so they sent the letter off to local radio station K-98.3, who posted it on Facebook. The station adds that they contacted Beth, who "gave us permission to post her phone number and said anyone who has a problem with what she wrote can call her, too!"
http://www.bilerico.com/2014/02/ny_mom_writes_anti-gay_tirade_on_7-year-olds_birth.php#8oM2om8Wb6iDMTpa.99
Fusion energy milestone reported by California scientists
Scientists are creeping closer to their goal of creating a controlled fusion-energy reaction, by mimicking the interior of the sun inside the hardware of a laboratory. In the latest incremental advance, reported Wednesday online in the journal Nature, scientists in California used 192 lasers to compress a pellet of fuel and generate a reaction in which more energy came out of the fuel core than went into it.
There’s still a long way to go before anyone has a functioning fusion reactor, something physicists have dreamed of since Albert Einstein was alive. A fusion reactor would run on a common form of hydrogen found in seawater, would emit minimal nuclear waste and couldn’t have the kind of meltdown that can occur in a traditional nuclear-fission reactor.
“You kind of picture yourself climbing halfway up a mountain, but the top of the mountain is hidden in clouds,” Omar Hurricane, the lead author of the Nature paper, said in a teleconference with journalists. “And then someone calls you on your satellite phone and asks you, ‘How long is it going to take you to climb to the top of the mountain?’ You just don’t know.”
Hurricane and other scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, home of the multibillion-dollar National Ignition Facility, took pains to calibrate their claims of success. This was not fusion “ignition,” the NIF’s ultimate ambition. The experiment overall requires much more energy on the front end — all those laser shots —than comes out the back end.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/fusion-energy-milestone-reported-by-california-scientists/2014/02/12/f511ed18-936b-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html
Sam Wheeler, Kent State Wrestler, Suspended For Anti-Gay Tweets About Michael Sam
Following the historic coming out of Division I college football player Michael Sam, the social media backlash was both predictable and horrifying. However, one college athlete is now experiencing the repercussions of what can happen when you choose to be homophobic on Twitter.
Kent State wrestler Sam Wheeler has reportedly been suspended from the university's team after taking to Twitter to voice his feelings about Sam's decision to publicly come out.
Through Wheeler's Twitter account has since been deleted, Outrage DC managed to take a screen capture of the initial statements.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/11/sam-wheeler-suspended_n_4768838.html
MIT Mistakenly Tells Some Applicants They’ve Been Admitted
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology sent an e-mail to prospective students, erroneously telling them in a line at the bottom that they had been admitted.
The university doesn’t know how many people received the e-mail, although the number who noticed the line was probably “very small,” Chris Peterson, an admissions officer at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school, said on the admission department’s blog last week.
The mix-up happened when MIT combined two separate lists for an electronic mailing about financial aid. At the bottom was a footer that said “You are on this list because you are admitted to MIT,” according to Peterson. By merging the lists in a program called MailChimp, admissions officers mistakenly imported the footer from a list of students accepted under early admissions.
The note at the bottom was supposed to say “You are receiving this e-mail because you applied to MIT and we sometimes have to tell you things about stuff,” according to the blog.
Such mistakes are occurring more often across the country as university and college admissions offices rely more on electronic communication with prospective students.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-12/mit-mistakenly-tells-prospective-students-they-ve-been-admitted.html
It’s official: Apple sells more computers than all Windows PCs combined
Apple’s Mac desktops and laptops may still count for a fraction of the global market for PCs, but when you tally up all the computers (iPhones, iPads, etc.) on which people actually get things done, the number of computers sold by Apple exceeds the number of Windows-based PCs shipped worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2013.
Or as Andreessen Horowitz mobile analyst Benedict Evans put it:
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This is a pretty good illustration of the scale of mobile: Apple limits itself only to the high end of the mobile market but still sells more units than the whole PC industry.
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There are two ways of looking at this: One is to say, well, so what? What does it mean to compare these two very large numbers (mostly, how many iPhones Apple is selling) to the number of Windows PCs sold worldwide, when these are somewhat arbitrary device categories?
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But the counter-argument is that the tasks we used to conduct on PCs are now being carried out on an ever-expanding variety of other devices, pretty much all of them mobile. And this trend will only accelerate: What share of the world’s “computers” will Apple ship when it unveils its (still rumored) iWatch?
http://qz.com/176380/bings-chinese-search-result-glitch-still-reeks-of-censorship/
Scarborough won't rule out 2016
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said Wednesday that he hasn't closed the door on a 2016 presidential bid.
Asked by radio host Hugh Hewitt if he had ruled out running for president, Scarborough said he "won't rule anything out" and later added, "we'll see what happens."
"No, I won't rule anything out. I've always said and I've always been open about the fact that the greatest job I ever had and the greatest honor I've ever had was being in the House of Representatives," the former Florida congressman said. "It was an absolute thrill and I had to get out because I had young children to raise and I wanted to be back home in Pensacola. No, I've always said I wanted to get back in. It's just a matter of time. We'll see what happens."
Though Scarborough has floated the idea before, his name wasn't on anyone's shortlist until Bill Kristol, the founder of The Weekly Standard, dropped his name in a recent survey for POLITICO Magazine.
Few took Kristol's suggestion seriously -- "Scarborough will get a kick out of being on the list, but almost certainly won’t pull on the snow boots for a trip to Iowa or New Hampshire," the magazine's editors wrote -- except for The Daily Caller, which cited "sources" who said it was "widely believed at MSNBC" that Scarborough was "mulling a presidential bid."
http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/02/scarborough-wont-rule-out-183261.html?hp=r2
Which credit card should I pay down with my tax return?
I've been back to work for less than a year after after being unemployed and racked up a sizable, though not gargantuan credit card balance, which I've been willing down for some time. And, it turns out, I am getting a decent tax return. Right now I have two card balance of roughly equal amounts. Card one has a 10.9% APR, but the balance is not large enough for it to hurt me. Card two currently has a 0% APR, but will hit as high as 18% if I don't get to work on it. Which one should I try to dent?
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