"A Japanese navy destroyer has collided with a commercial vessel off southern Japan, starting fires on both ships and injuring three crew members, defense officials said Tuesday.

The destroyer JS Kurama collided with the South Korean container ship Carina Star on Tuesday night in the Kanmon Strait near the southern main island of Kyushu"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091027/ap_on_re_as/as_japan_warship_collision

"Two Northwest Airlines pilots who flew 150 miles past their destination because they were focused on laptop computers instead of cockpit displays may have opened a new avenue of concern for safety regulators — distracting personal electronic devices on the flight deck.

The pilots of Northwest flight 188 told the National Transportation Safety Board that they were so engrossed in a complicated new crew-scheduling program on their laptops — a cockpit violation of airline policy that could cost them their licenses — that they lost track of time and place for more than an hour until they were brought back to alertness by a flight attendant on an intercom."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091027/ap_on_bi_ge/us_northwest_flight_overflown

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23231

On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Unlike the British government, which, to its great credit, allowed public debate on the idea of a central data bank, the NSA obtained the full cooperation of much of the American telecom industry in utmost secrecy after September 11. For example, the agency built secret rooms in AT&T's major switching facilities where duplicate copies of all data are diverted, screened for key names and words by computers, and then transmitted on to the agency for analysis. Thus, these new centers in Utah, Texas, and possibly elsewhere will likely become the centralized repositories for the data intercepted by the NSA in America's version of the "big brother database" rejected by the British.

A group of rich Germans has launched a petition calling for the government to make wealthy people pay higher taxes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8321967.stm

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Junior Field Reporter 09/10/26(Mon)07:13 No.2544   File: 1256566410431.jpg -(92657 B, 640x480) Thumbnail displayed, click image for full size. >>2523 Superman vs. Goku. Who would win? Alv, from Kiddy Grade. As soon as they came into contact with her, she can suck out their power (via her G-Class 'Absorb' ability), and even take on their appearance(s). And as for their attempts in attacking her? She could repel any & all attacks with her 'Reflect' power. Not even Kenshiro, Guts, Dio Brando, or The Flash could beat her.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/26/least_productive_day/

Today is apparently the "least productive" day of the year, as glum workers battle that sinking feeling provoked by the clocks going back.

That's according to a poll by the the Canary Island tourism board, Promotur, which found that no less than 52 per cent of 2,000 workers polled reckoned they'd struggle to get their act together.

Fourteen per cent, meanwhile, said things were so bad last year that they'd had to talk to their boss about their lack of motivation, and eight per cent "even admitted to phoning in sick because they were so depressed at the thought of going to work amid the shorter, darker days", as the Telegraph puts it.

The upshot is a 50 per cent drop in productivity this week, presumably before employees come to terms with the depressing reality of travelling home in wintery darkness.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/26/geocities_closes/

Yahoo! is demolishing GeoCities today, a decade after acquiring the ticky-tacky build-your-own-website service for $3.57bn in stock.

In April, the company announced plans to raze the service and stopped accepting new users. "We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways," the company said.

This summer, Yahoo! announced October 26 as demolition day, and at least two organizations have been scrambling to preserve as many GeoCities sites as possible. Yahoo! is deleting all pages from its servers without archiving them, leaving the likes of the Internet Archive and an archive team calling itself, er, the Archive Team to save all those blinking logos from the dustbin of history.

http://news.antiwar.com/2009/10/25/iaea-inspectors-tour-irans-qom-facility/

Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) toured Iran’s still under construction uranium enrichment facility in Qom today, just over a month after Iran revealed the site’s existance to the international community.

Western officials have criticized Iran for keeping the site, built under a mountain near a major city, secret for so long, but Iran insists that it was under no obligation to do so as the facility still hasn’t had any nuclear material introduced to it.

The site is much smaller than its existing Natanz facility. Iranian officials say that the location is being built to allow for some continuity in the event Israel or the US attacks its above ground sites.

Western officials have condemned the site as a “undeniable” violation of the NPT, and despite Iran having allowed the IAEA such quick access to the location officials maintain that they have “suspicions” about the nature of the facility.

"The internet is on the cusp of the "biggest change" to its working "since it was invented 40 years ago", the net regulator Icann has said.

The body said it that it was finalising plans to introduce web addresses using non-Latin characters.

The proposal - initially approved in 2008 - would allow domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts.

The body said if the final plans were approved on 30 October, it would accept the first applications by 16 November.

The first Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) could be up and running by "mid 2010" said the president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann)."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8326241.stm

"Denny Hamlin leads Jimmie Johnson through turn four during the running of the NASCAR TUMS Fast Relief 500 at the Martinsville Speedway in Martinsville, Virginia, Oct. 25, 2009."

http://www.upi.com/News_Photos/Photos_of_the_Day/October-25-2009/2413/11/

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Junior Field Reporter 09/10/26(Mon)09:07 No.2550   File: 1256573262374.jpg -(33836 B, 416x300) Thumbnail displayed, click image for full size. ASSCAR? YAWN Round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round & round an oval track. Keeps the ADHD & inbred redneck hee-haws entertained, I guess. Like WWE. Meanwhile... UK WON F1

"Helicopter crashes killed 14 Americans on Monday in the deadliest day for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan in more than four years."

"In the first crash, a helicopter went down in the west of the country after leaving the scene of a firefight with insurgents, killing 10 Americans — seven troops and three civilians working for the government. Eleven American troops, one U.S. civilian and 14 Afghans were also injured.

In a separate incident, two U.S. Marine helicopters — one UH-1 and an AH-1 Cobra — collided in flight before sunrise over the southern province of Helmand, killing four American troops and wounding two more"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_afghanistan