Peanut Butter News

Full Story at msnbc.com

Kansas City, Mo., plans to close nearly half its public schools by fall. Illinois’ governor wants to raise state income taxes by 1 percent to continue funding schools and prevent the layoffs of thousands of teachers. Hawaii, President Barack Obama’s home state, has whacked 17 days from the school year and says it’s not done with educational cost-cutting.

From Maine to Wisconsin, Florida to California, school districts across the country are taking drastic measures to deal with school budget cuts made severe by the recession and its aftermath. Msnbc.com asked readers how their school district is coping, and one clear lesson emerged — cuts in education make no one happy.

Full Story at wciv.com

Colleton County, SC – Authorities say a 21-year-old man was arrested in connection with the shooting death of his brother in Colleton County on Wednesday.

The Colleton County Sheriff’s Office have charged Eric Plant with the death of this 21-year-old brother Joshua Plant.

According to investigators, on Wednesday, police received a call from Eric Plant stating that his brother, Joshua, was shot as they were at a home on Black Creek Road in Colleton County.

Full Story at CNN.com

(CNN) — The past 12 months have been a banner year for cyber crime. And that could be bad news for the future of e-commerce.

“At current trends, in three or four years people will start to think twice about transacting on the Web, individuals and businesses,” said Michael Fraser, director of the communications law centre at the University of Technology Sydney.

“The way it’s trending now, the Web could be so full of rubbish that people won’t trust it,” Fraser said. “That could destroy the potential of the whole knowledge economy, which so many developed economies are counting on for the competitive advantage.”

Full Story at CNN.com

(CNN) — About 70 students at UC Santa Cruz in California avoided arrest early Sunday morning when they surrendered the administration building they had occupied for three days, according to a school spokesman.

But, school officials said in a statement, “students who participated in this incident face possible criminal and/or student judicial sanctions.”

Kerr Hall, the Santa Cruz campus’ administration building, won’t be ready for its normal duties Monday, the officials said, because some areas — particularly the second floor, which school officials said might not be ready for several days — were damaged and left in disarray.

Full Story at CNN.com

(Wired) — Google is set to become your new phone company, perhaps reducing your phone bill to zilch in the process.Seriously.
Google has bought Gizmo5, an online phone company that is akin to Skype but based on open protocols and with a lot fewer users. TechCrunch, which broke the news on Monday, reported that Google spent $30 million on the company.
Google announced the Gizmo acquisition on Thursday afternoon Pacific Time. Gizmo5’s founder Michael Robertson, a brash serial entrepreneur, will become an Adviser to Google Voice.

It’s a potent recipe — take Gizmo5’s open standards-based online calling system. Add to it the new ability to route calls on Google’s massive network of cheap fiber. Toss in Google Voice’s free phone number, which will ring your mobile phone, your home phone and your Gizmo5 client on your laptop.

Full Story at msnbc.com

Anywhere between an estimated 600,000 and 1 million players who use Microsoft’s Xbox Live gaming service will be cut off from the service because they have modified their game consoles or played games that were illegally downloaded from file-sharing sites, according to the company.

“All consumers should know that piracy is illegal and that modifying their Xbox 360 console violates the Xbox Live terms of use, will void their warranty and result in a ban from Xbox Live,” Microsoft said in a statement Wednesday.

Full Story at  CNN.com

But, so far, there have been several hitches in that plan. Not everyone has access to a computer and a broadband connection. Some governments still censor the Internet. And of course, we don’t all speak the same language.

For the World Wide Web to be truly global, shouldn’t Chinese speakers be able to chat online with people who only speak Spanish? And why should an English speaker be barred from reading blogs written in Malagasy or Zulu?

Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. are two Web companies trying particularly hard to make this happen, and they’ve released a number of updates to their translation services in recent weeks.

Full Story at CNN.com

Delicious,” he says, kissing the tips of his fingers on one hand, making the universal sign for good tasting food.

William tells me he went out on a boat with some friends a few days ago and shot the whale. I’m not sure how I feel about this.

Welcome to Greenland. On this remote but enormous island subsistence whale hunting is allowed.

This was just the memorable start to an extraordinary journey.

Cameraman Neil Bennett and I had traveled to the small town of Tasiilaq in southeastern Greenland to meet up with the Arctic Sunrise, a ship belonging to the environmental group Greenpeace. Read Neil’s blog on filming in challenging conditions

Full Story at CNN.com

But a pair of glasses developed by Joshua Silver, a physics professor at the University of Oxford, offers an affordable solution.

The glasses can be adjusted to the right strength by the wearer, without the need for them to visit an optometrist.

A major reason for that is a chronic shortage of optometrists — in Ghana, for example, there is just one for every eight million people. That makes it incredibly difficult for ordinary people to visit an optometrist, without which it’s impossible for them to get glasses.

But Silver thinks he may have come up with a solution to the problem. His self-refraction glasses mean people can correct their vision without needing an optometrist (see Fact Box).

“Take a Sub-Saharan country where there is one optometrist for every million people; those people will never see an optometrist, so how will they get eyewear?,” he told CNN.

Full Story at CNN.com

Water is the most abundant resource on the planet, yet less than one percent of the Earth’s freshwater supply is readily available to drink, according to the World Health Organization. Lack of accessible or clean drinking water, exacerbated by drought, is crippling communities in many developing countries.

“In your lifetime, my lifetime, we will see water be a really scarce, valuable commodity,” Kamen says.

Those are scary words from the man whose creations include the Segway personal motorized scooter and the Luke (as in Skywalker) prosthetic arm. But the forward-thinking inventor and his team at DEKA Research in Manchester, New Hampshire, aren’t sitting around waiting for the world’s wells to dry up.

Full Story at CNN.com

Books are being pushed aside for digital learning centers and gaming areas. “Loud rooms” that promote public discourse and group projects are taking over the bookish quiet. Hipster staffers who blog, chat on Twitter and care little about the Dewey Decimal System are edging out old-school librarians.

And that’s just the surface. By some accounts, the library system is undergoing a complete transformation that goes far beyond these image changes.

Authors, publishing houses, librarians and Web sites continue to fight Google’s efforts to digitize the world’s books and create the world’s largest library online. Meanwhile, many real-world libraries are moving forward with the assumption that physical books will play a much-diminished or potentially nonexistent role in their efforts to educate the public.

Full Story at CNN.com

Businesses that try to push products on consumers with automated and unsolicited calls will face fines of up to $16,000 per call, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

“American consumers have made it crystal clear that few things annoy them more than the billions of commercial telemarketing robocalls they receive every year,” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said in a news release.

Calls from politicians, public service announcements and “informational” calls will be exempt from the new rule. A call alerting a traveler that his or her flight has been delayed would still be allowed, for example.