Airline Fine For 6 Hour Delay

The Department of Transportation finally fined Continential Airlines and ExpressJet for stranding passengers for nearly six hours last August.  How much was the fine you ask?  $100,000.00 was the fine slapped on their unconsciousable asses.

But they weren’t the only ones.  The company that handled the grounds operation of this debacle also got fined $75,000.00.

You can’t just leave people in a plane for 6 hours.  They left 47 passenagers on the dam plane.  The crew on the ground would not let the people off the plane.

The passengers of Flight 2816 were kept waiting nearly six hours inside the cramped regional airliner amid wailing babies and a smelly toilet even though they were only 50 yards from a terminal. The captain of the flight repeatedly pleaded to allow the passengers to deplane and enter the terminal.

In the morning they were allowed to disembark. They spent about two and a half hours inside the terminal before reboarding the same plane to complete their trip to Minneapolis.

Delisting Newscorp Sites

In perhap a brillent move that could potentialy the landscape of the Internet, News Corp has begun disucssion with Miscrosoft and Google to delist their websites from their two search engines.  Websites such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, 20th Century Fox, and Fox News.  What this will do is perhap take a large portion of free content off the web.

It could enable New Corp to charge for access to their content and help it protect such publications like the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers whose readership is deterorating.  If one can’t get the Wall STreet Journal for free on the web, one might actually start buying it again.

Let see how this all shakes out.

Four Billion Text A Day

According to the wireless industry, in the past six months, Americans have sent an estimated 740 billion text messages, which comes out to 4.1 billion each day.  That averages out to 11.7 text a day for every man, women, and child in the US.

Modern Warefare 2 Break Record

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is setting new industry records.  After setting the biggest ever first day sales total last week, the game continues to break records.

Activision announced that the game which released November 10th, made $550 million in worldwide sales during its first 5 days.  That puts it ahead of the $500 million record set last year by Grand Theft Auto IV.  It is estimated that Activision sold between 8.5 to 9 million copies.

In the first 24 hours of sale, Call of Duty made $310 million in North America and the United Kingdom alone.

Energy Efficient TV

Most power-hungry TVs will be banned from store shelves in California after state regulators adopted a first-in-the nation mandate to lower electricity demand. Given how large the California market is, the regulation could end up as a de facto national standard.

On a unanimous vote, the California Energy Commission on Wednesday required all new televisions up to 58 inches to be more energy efficient beginning in 2011. The requirement will be tougher in 2013, and only a quarter of all TVs on the market currently meet that standard.

The California Energy Commission estimates that TVs account for about 10 percent of a home’s electricity use. The concern is that the energy draw will rise by as much as 8 percent a year as consumers buy larger televisions, add more to their homes and watch them more often.

Commissioners say energy efficiency standards are the cheapest and easiest way to save electricity.

“We have every confidence this industry will be able to meet the rule and then some,” Energy Commissioner Julia Levin said. “It will save consumers money, it will help protect public health, and it will spark innovation.”

Utilities and environmental groups say the TV standards, which mirror the federal standards for TVs awarded the Energy Star label, should head off steep increases in home electricity use and rising electric bills.

“This is a really big deal, because once standards are in effect it will cut California’s power bill by $1 billion a year and avoid the need to build a large, 500 megawatt power plant,” said Noah Horowitz, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We hope in the long term, every TV sold in America will be just as efficient as those sold in California.”

Televisions account for about 2 % of California’s overall electricity use.  Requiring them to be more energy efficient would save enough electricity to power 864,000 single-family homes a year in California by 2023.

An energy-efficient TV would save a household roughly $30 a year per set in lowered electricity costs. If all 35 million TVs watched in the state were replaced with more efficient sets, Californians would save $8.1 billion over 10 years, according to the Energy Commission report.

The electricity savings could also help California meet the goals of its 2006 global warming law, which calls for the state to cut greenhouse gases 25 percent by 2020.

State retailers feel threatened
Some manufacturers say implementing a power standard will cripple innovation, limit consumer choice and harm California retailers because consumers could simply buy TVs out of state or order them online.

The standards would apply to all TVs up to 58 inches, allowing increasing power use for larger TVs.

For example, all new 42-inch television sets must use less than 183 watts by 2011 and less than 116 watts by 2013. That’s considerably more efficient than flat-screen TVs placed on the market in recent years.

A 42-inch Hitachi plasma TV sold in 2007 uses 313 watts while a 42-inch Sharp Liquid-crystal display, or LCD, TV draws 232 watts, according to Energy Commission research.

LCDs now account for about 90 percent of the 4 million TVs sold in California annually.

Some televisions already meet the early standards imposed under the rule approved Wednesday. About three-quarters of the TVs — more than 1,050 models — sold today comply with the 2011 California standards, and more than 300 comply with the 2013 standard, according to the Energy Commission.

Industry representatives have said the standards would force manufacturers to make televisions that have poorer picture quality and fewer features than those sold elsewhere in the U.S.

TVs larger than 58 inches would not be covered under the rule, a concession to independent retailers that sell high-end home-theater TVs. Those sets account for no more than 3 percent of the market.

Commissioners are expected to regulate them in the future.

Recognzing Phishing Emails

Phishing is an attempt via email to trick people into revealing sensitive inforamtion like username, passwords, and credit cared information about them selves by pretending to be a bank or some other legitimate entity.  The emails usually contain a link to a website that appears to be legitimate and which prompts you to provide your information.

Sometimes, these emails will contain a form attached for you to fill out your information.  One common tactic is to pretend to be from the fraud department of a bank or online retailer and ask for information to be provided to avoid identify fraud.

There is also an increasing amount of emails exploiting news of interest and other popular topics to trick people into clicking on links.  One email about swine flue asked people to provide their name, address, phone number, and etc as part of the survey about the flu.  And users of social network are becoming popular targets.  As these users are being directed to fake login pages.

So be careful out there and just don’t innocently give out your personal information to anyone without double checking the request and the reason for it.