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FOXNews.com – Texas Begins Evacuating as Hurricane Ike Intensifies to Category 2 Storm in Gulf – Local News | News Articles | National News | US News
McALLEN, Texas — Officials prepared Wednesday to evacuate the first of 1 million Texas residents who could be in the way of Hurricane Ike as the Category 2 storm charged into the Gulf of Mexico and toward the U.S. coast.

Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center predicted Ike, which has already left at least 80 people dead in Cuba and the Caribbean, would feed on the Gulf’s warm waters and intensify before slamming into the area near the southern Texas city of Corpus Christi early Saturday morning.

As of 2 p.m. EDT Wednesday, the storm’s top sustained winds measured 100 mph. It was located 255 miles west of Key West, Fla., and was moving toward the northwest at about 13 mph.

If Texas officials order a mandatory exodus, it would be the first large-scale evacuation in South Texas history. State and county officials used to let people decide for themselves whether to leave a hurricane area until just before Hurricane Rita struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. Now county officials can order people out of harm’s way.

Click for the latest on Ike at MyFOXHurricane.com | The Weather Undergound | The National Hurricane Center
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The evacuation would affect the impoverished Rio Grande Valley, home to many immigrants who have traditionally been fearful of evacuating out of concern they could be deported if stopped by authorities. Some county officials say they will visit immigrant neighborhoods and forcefully urge people to clear out.

Gov. Rick Perry has already declared 88 coastal counties disaster areas to start the flow of state aid, activated 7,500 National Guard troops and began preparing for an evacuation, lining up “buses rather than body bags.”

Texas emergency officials were taking no chances with the lives of its medically fragile citizens. Residents with special needs in the Corpus Christi area were set to begin leaving by bus for the central Texas city of San Antonio on Wednesday, and the state said it would open up a northbound shoulder on an interstate highway beginning at 9 a.m. for people who wished to begin leaving.

Texas officials were encouraging residents in the path of Hurricane Ike to do three things — listen to what local officials say, monitor weather reports and gas up, now.

Ike has already killed at least 80 people in the Caribbean and ravaged homes in Cuba. As it left Cuba Tuesday, the storm delivered a punishing blow some towns that already suffered a direct hit from Category 4 Hurricane Gustav on Aug. 30.

Federal authorities gave assurances they would not check people’s immigration status at evacuation loading zones or inland checkpoints. But residents were skeptical, and there were worries that many illegal immigrants would refuse to board buses and go to shelters for fear of getting arrested and deported.

“People are nervous,” said the Rev. Michael Seifert, a Roman Catholic priest and immigrant advocate. “The message that was given to me was that it’s going to be a real problem.”

One reason for the skepticism: Back in May, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the Border Patrol would do nothing to impede an evacuation in the event of a hurricane. But when Hurricane Dolly struck the Rio Grande Valley in late July, no mandatory evacuation was ordered, and as a result the Border Patrol kept its checkpoints open. Agents soon caught a van load of illegal immigrants.

Biggest ‘Big Bang Machine’ switched on – LHC- msnbc.com
After 14 years of preparation, a new scientific wonder of the world opened for business Wednesday with the official startup of Europe’s Large Hadron Collider.

The $10 billion particle accelerator is the biggest, most expensive science machine on earth, designed to probe mysteries ranging from dark matter and missing antimatter to the existence of extra, unseen dimensions in space.
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Scientists, journalists and dignitaries watched from the control room at Europe’s CERN particle-physics center on the French-Swiss border, near Geneva, as beams of protons were sent around the collider’s 17-mile (27-kilometer) underground ring of supercooled pipes for the first time.

“Today is a great day for CERN,” the organization’s director general, Robert Aymar, told the crowd in the control room as the startup process began. The turn-on proceeded slowly, with controllers checking the alignment of the beam at each stage of the route.

Although the actual subatomic collisions aren’t due to begin until next month, CERN designated Wednesday’s “First Beam” as the official occasion for celebration. For the more than 10,000 scientists, engineers and other workers involved in the project, the Large Hadron Collider represents a revolutionary new research opportunity as well as an unprecedented engineering achievement.

“The combination of the size, scale, complexity and technology — well, the comparison I always use is the pyramids,” Peter Limon, a U.S. physicist from Fermilab who played a part in building the device, said during a pre-startup walkthrough. “This is what we do today comparable to the pyramids of 4,000 years ago.”

The LHC is designed to do things the pyramid’s builders never imagined.

Once the machine is in full operation, two streams of invisible protons will be whipped up in opposite directions around an underground racetrack to 99.999999 percent of the speed of light. When the two waves of protons slam into each other, scientists expect particles to melt into bits of energy up to 100,000 times hotter than the sun’s core — a state that should replicate what the entire universe was like just an instant after it came into being.

How can the Large Hadron Collider possibly perform such feats? That’s where the wonder begins.

Going down …
No one was allowed in the underground tunnel for Wednesday’s maiden run, but a visit during the final phases of the LHC’s construction provided an inside look at the wonder at work.

During the seven-year construction phase, components of the collider and its detectors had to be lowered down piecemeal from CERN’s assembly halls, then put together in underground caverns as big as cathedrals.

Arts, Briefly – Fox Tops Ratings for Monday Night – Brief – NYTimes.com

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” and “Prison Break” lifted Fox to No. 1 in the ratings on Monday among adults 18 to 49, winning their respective time slots in that demographic despite struggling in total viewers. According to Nielsen’s estimates, the second-season premiere of “Terminator” drew 6.3 million viewers at 8 p.m., while “Prison Break” garnered 6.5 million at 9. NBC, meanwhile, led the night in total viewers, thanks to “Deal or No Deal” at 8 (9.6 million). The network’s “America’s Toughest Jobs” at 9 and “Dateline” at 10 delivered 6.5 million and 6.2 million viewers. In the 18-to-49 set, NBC trailed behind Fox and CBS, which broadcast a lineup of all repeats. ABC was fourth with the finale of “High School Musical: Get in the Picture” at 8 (4.1 million), followed by the “CMA Music Festival” from 9 to 11 (5.8 million). Meanwhile, CW fared well, maintaining relatively strong ratings after last week’s season debuts of “Gossip Girl” and “One Tree Hill.” Each show averaged 3.2 million viewers this week. In Nielsen’s final cable ratings for last week, “The Closer” led over all, attracting a season’s best 8.1 million viewers on Monday at 9 for TNT. It was followed by “Raising the Bar,” TNT’s new show from Steve Bochco, which set a record with the highest ratings for a new series premiere on cable (7.7 million).

I have to say that this is some way to see if Apple really created this product. I think Apple is on the way out but that’s just me
rammy

FOXNews.com – British Man Says He Invented iPod in 1979 – Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News
Hey, Steve Jobs, you didn’t invent the iPod — I did.

So says Kane Kramer, a luckless Briton who claims he developed a portable digital music player way back in 1979.

Sketches posted on Kramer’s Web site show a rectangular device, dubbed the PIXYS, with a large screen on the upper part of the face, a four-way directional pad below that and a headphone jack on the very top.

It looks more like Microsoft’s Zune than an iPod, but the resemblance to either machine is striking.

Accompanying the sketches is a PDF of an undated 9-page typewritten document proposing a data delivery system called IXI, whereby music stored on a centralized server would be transmitted over telephone lines to record shops.
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At the shops, PIXYS owners would pay to have their devices refilled with new songs. Unfortunately, the PIXYS could hold only one four-minute song at a time, so customers would have to keep coming back an awful lot.

London’s Daily Mail, always ready to wave the Union Jack in the face of boorish Americans, claims that Apple “admitted” Kane had “invented the iPod” when it had him testify about the PIXYS and IXI regarding an iTunes patent-infringement lawsuit from a third party.

The Daily Mail also said Kramer and his family had recently had to sell their home, and that he’d seen “not a penny” from the iPod’s success.

But in fact Apple admitted nothing by having him testify on its behalf and paying him a consulting fee.

Demonstrating “prior art,” or that an invention had been thought up before either the plaintiff or defendant got around to it, is the first line of defense in a patent-infringement case.

Apple, in fact, never claimed to have invented the portable MP3 player. There were plenty of other models, mostly made by small Asian companies, that had been on the market for years when the first iPod went on sale in late 2001.

And any chance Kramer would have of suing anyone is long gone — his British patent for the PIXYS and IXI expired in 1988.

I believe that Hurricane Ike will hit north Texas with thundering winds and Tornadoes, me and nibbers will be doing BlogTalk Radio show on Hurricane Ike like we did with Hurricane Gustav. Tracking Ike puts Ike in North Texas sometime Saturday night. We are now preparing for the bad weather stay tuned for more details.

FOXNews.com – Hurricane Ike Emerges Into Gulf, Targets Texas – International News | News of the World | Middle East News | Europe News
McALLEN, Texas — With Hurricane Ike steaming into the Gulf of Mexico, Texas emergency officials Tuesday stood ready to order 1 million people evacuated from the impoverished Rio Grande Valley and tried to convince tens of thousands of illegal immigrants that they have less to fear from the Border Patrol than from the storm.

Emergency planning officials were meeting all day to decide if and when to announce a mandatory evacuation for coastal counties close to the Mexican border.

With forecasts showing Ike blowing ashore this weekend, authorities lined up nearly 1,000 buses in case they are needed to move out the many poor and elderly people who have no cars.

Click for the latest on Ike at MyFOXHurricane.com | The Weather Undergound | The National Hurricane Center

Farther up the coast, officials in the county surrounding Corpus Christi planned to begin busing people who have special medical needs inland on Wednesday.

Federal authorities gave assurances they would not check people’s immigration status at evacuation loading zones or inland checkpoints. But residents were skeptical, and there were worries that many illegal immigrants would refuse to board buses and go to shelters for fear of getting arrested and deported.

“People are nervous,” said the Rev. Michael Seifert, a Roman Catholic priest and immigrant advocate. “The message that was given to me was that it’s going to be a real problem.”

One reason for the skepticism: Back in May, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the Border Patrol would do nothing to impede an evacuation in the event of a hurricane. But when Hurricane Dolly struck the Rio Grande Valley in late July, no mandatory evacuation was ordered, and as a result the Border Patrol kept its checkpoints open. Agents soon caught a van load of illegal immigrants.

It would be the first mandatory large-scale evacuation in South Texas history. State and county officials let people decide for themselves whether to leave a hurricane area until just before Hurricane Rita struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. Now county officials can order people out of harm’s way.

Hidalgo County Judge J.D. Salinas said if an evacuation is ordered this time, county officials will visit immigrant neighborhoods and forcefully urge people to clear out.

After Hurricanes Katrina and Gustav, “there were a lot of immigrants who said, `I’m not going to go,”‘ said Salinas, the county’s top elected official. “It’s going to be hard.”

In Washington, Rear Adm. W. Craig Vanderwagen, assistant U.S. health secretary for preparedness and response, told reporters: “In storm events, if people are trapped it doesn’t particularly matter to those of us in the humanitarian assistance world which side of that border they come from. We will do what we need to do to evacuate the people who need to be evacuated.”

At 11 p.m. EDT, Ike was about 120 miles west of Havana, Cuba, moving west-northwest near 9 mph with sustained winds near 80 mph. It was expected to cross the Gulf of Mexico, strengthening to a Category 3 with winds of up to 130 mph.

Forecasters said that it could hit on Saturday morning just about anywhere along the Texas coast, with the most likely spot close to the Corpus Christi area.

Areas from Matagorda Bay to Corpus Christi and south to Brownsville — about 250 miles of coastline — were told to prepare for possible mandatory evacuation.

On Tuesday, Ike roared across Cuba, ravaging homes, killing at least four people and forcing 1.2 million to evacuate.

The Rio Grande Valley is still soggy from Dolly, which flooded the region, damaging hundreds of homes but killing no one. Many homes still have blue tarps on their roofs.

The Rio Grande Valley’s residents are among those least equipped to handle hurricane flooding. It is one of the poorest parts of the country, with one-third of all families living below the poverty line, compared with 10 percent nationally.

Colonias, or ramshackle communities often lacking sewer systems and paved streets, dot the Valley. Even an ordinary rainstorm can fill yards with disease-ridden sewage from flooded septic tanks. Many of the poor lack health insurance.

Mexican officials said more than a dozen dams in the northern state of Chihuahua were at capacity or spilling over, heightening fears of flooding on the American side of the border.

Gov. Rick Perry declared 88 coastal counties disaster areas Monday to start the flow of state aid, and began preparing for an evacuation, lining up “buses rather than body bags.”

The Dallas-Fort Worth area sheltered about 3,000 Hurricane Gustav evacuees last week and is prepared for up to about 20,000 people this time, said Steve Griggs, a county official. The downtown convention center would again serve as the main shelter.