California Traffic Ticket Fines, effective 01/06/2010

Violation	Fine
VC 12814.6: Failure to obey license provisions.	214
VC 14600(A): Failure to notify DMV of address change within 10 days. Note: The fine may be reduced with valid proof of correction.	214
VC 16028(A): Failure to provide evidence of financial responsibility (insurance) Note: This fine may be reduced with proof of insuranceon or after the violation date.	796
VC 21453(A): Failure to stop at a red signal.	436
VC 22349 & VC 22350: Unsafe Speed, 1 to 15 miles over the limit.	214
VC 22349 & VC 22350: Unsafe Speed, 16 to 25 miles over the limit.	328
VC 22450: Failure to stop at a stop sign.	214
VC 22454(A): Passing a school bus with flashing red signals.	616
VC 23123(A): Drive using wireless phone not hands free, First offense	148
VC 23123(A): Drive using wireless phone not hands free, For each subsequent offense.	256
VC 23123.5(A): Drive while wireless device to send, read or write text.	148
VC 23124(B): Minor drive using wireless phone.	148
VC 22500(I): Parking in a bus loading area.	976
VC 22507.8(A through C): Violation of disabled parking provisions, first offense.	976
VC 22507.8(A through C): Violation of disabled parking provisions, second offense.	1876
VC 26708(A): Unlawful material on vehicle windows.	178
VC 27150(A and B): Adequate muffler required	178
VC 27315(D and E): Mandatory use of seat belts.	148
VC 27360(A and B): Mandatory use of child passenger restraints. Note: This fine may be reduced by completing a court authorized child seat diversion program.	436
VC 27400: Headsets/Earplugs over both ears.	178
VC 27803 (A through C): Motorcycle safety helmet requirements.	178
VC 34506.3: Commercial Driver - Log book violation.	616
VC 4000(A): No evidence of current registration. Note: The fine may be reduced with valid proof of correction.	256
VC 4159: Notify DMV of change of address within 10 days. Note: The fine may be reduced with valid proof of correction.	178
VC 5200: Display of license plates. Note: The fine may be reduced with valid proof of correction.	178
VC 9400 (A through C): Commercial weight fees due. Note: The fine may be reduced with valid proof of correction.	178

MagicJack's next act: disappearing cell phone fees

By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer

Fri Jan 8, 2010 2:29PM EST

LAS VEGAS -

The company behind the magicJack, the cheap Internet phone gadget that's been heavily promoted on TV, has made a new version of the device that allows free calls from cell phones in the home, in a fashion that's sure to draw protest from cellular carriers.

The new magicJack uses, without permission, radio frequencies for which cellular carriers have paid billions of dollars for exclusive licenses.

YMax Corp., which is based in Palm Beach, Fla., said this week at the International Consumers Electronics Show that it plans to start selling the device in about four months for $40, the same price as the original magicJack. As before, it will provide free calls to the U.S. and Canada for one year.

The device is, in essence, a very small cellular tower for the home.

The size of a deck of cards, it plugs into a PC, which needs a broadband Internet connection. The device then detects when a compatible cell phone comes within 8 feet, and places a call to it. The user enters a short code on the phone. The phone is then linked to the magicJack, and as long as it's within range (YMax said it will cover a 3,000-square-foot home) magicJack routes the call itself, over the Internet, rather than going through the carrier's cellular tower. No minutes are subtracted from the user's account with the carrier. Any extra fees for international calls are subtracted from the user's account with magicJack, not the carrier.

According to YMax CEO Dan Borislow, the device will connect to any phone that uses the GSM standard, which in the U.S. includes phones from AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile USA. At a demonstration at CES, a visitor's phone with a T-Mobile account successfully placed and received calls through the magicJack. Most phones from Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. won't connect to the device.

Borislow said the device is legal because wireless spectrum licenses don't extend into the home.

AT&T, T-Mobile and the Federal Communications Commission had no immediate comment on whether they believe the device is legal, but said they were looking into the issue. CTIA — The Wireless Association, a trade group, said it was declining comment for now. None of them had heard of YMax's plans.

Borislow said YMax has sold 5 million magicJacks for landline phones in the last two years, and that roughly 3 million are in active use. That would give YMax a bigger customer base than Internet phone pioneer Vonage Holdings Corp., which has been selling service for $25 per month for the better part of a decade. Privately held YMax had revenue of $110 million last year, it says.

U.S. carriers have been selling and experimenting with devices that act similarly to the wireless magicJack. They're called "femtocells." Like the magicJack, they use the carrier's licensed spectrum to connect to a phone, then route the calls over a home broadband connection. They improve coverage inside the home and offload capacity from the carrier's towers.

But femtocells are complex products, because they're designed to mesh with the carrier's external network. They cost the carriers more than $200, though some sell them cheaper, recouping the cost through added service fees. YMax's magicJack is a much smaller, simpler design.

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/us_tec_gadget_show_magicjack

Amazon explorers uncover signs of a real El Dorado

Satellite technology detects giant mounds over 155 miles, pointing to sophisticated pre-Columbian culture

Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent

guardian.co.uk

Tuesday 5 January 2010 19.08 GMT

It is the legend that drew legions of explorers and adventurers to their deaths: an ancient empire of citadels and treasure hidden deep in the Amazon jungle.

Spanish conquistadores ventured into the rainforest seeking fortune, followed over the centuries by others convinced they would find a lost civilisation to rival the Aztecs and Incas.

Some seekers called it El Dorado, others the City of Z. But the jungle swallowed them and nothing was found, prompting the rest of the world to call it a myth. The Amazon was too inhospitable, said 20th century scholars, to permit large human settlements.

Now, however, the doomed dreamers have been proved right: there was a great civilisation. New satellite imagery and fly-overs have revealed more than 200 huge geometric earthworks carved in the upper Amazon basin near Brazil's border with Bolivia.

Spanning 155 miles, the circles, squares and other geometric shapes form a network of avenues, ditches and enclosures built long before Christopher Columbus set foot in the new world. Some date to as early as 200 AD, others to 1283.

Scientists who have mapped the earthworks believe there may be another 2,000 structures beneath the jungle canopy, vestiges of vanished societies.

The structures, many of which have been revealed by the clearance of forest for agriculture, point to a "sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society", says the journal Antiquity, which has published the research.

The article adds: "This hitherto unknown people constructed earthworks of precise geometric plan connected by straight orthogonal roads. The 'geoglyph culture' stretches over a region more than 250km across, and exploits both the floodplains and the uplands … we have so far seen no more than a tenth of it."

The structures were created by a network of trenches about 36ft (nearly 11 metres) wide and several feet deep, lined by banks up to 3ft high. Some were ringed by low mounds containing ceramics, charcoal and stone tools. It is thought they were used for fortifications, homes and ceremonies, and could have maintained a population of 60,000 – more people than in many medieval European cities.

The discoveries have demolished ideas that soils in the upper Amazon were too poor to support extensive agriculture, says Denise Schaan, a co-author of the study and anthropologist at the Federal University of Pará, in Belém, Brazil. She told National Geographic: "We found this picture is wrong. And there is a lot more to discover in these places, it's never-ending. Every week we find new structures."

Many of the mounds were symmetrical and slanted to the north, prompting theories that they had astronomical significance.

Researchers were especially surprised that earthworks in floodplains and uplands were of a similar style, suggesting they were all built by the same culture.

"In Amazonian archaeology you always have this idea that you find different peoples in different ecosystems," said Schaan. "So it was odd to have a culture that would take advantage of different ecosystems and expand over such a large region." The first geometric shapes were spotted in 1999 but it is only now, as satellite imagery and felling reveal sites, that the scale of the settlements is becoming clear. Some anthropologists say the feat, requiring sophisticated engineering, canals and roads, rivals Egypt's pyramids.

The findings follow separate discoveries further south, in the Xingu region, of interconnected villages known as "garden cities". Dating between 800 and 1600, they included houses, moats and palisades.

"These revelations are exploding our perceptions of what the Americas really looked liked before the arrival of Christopher Columbus," said David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z, a book about an attempt in the 1920s to find signs of Amazonian civilizations. "The discoveries are challenging long-held assumptions about the Amazon as a Hobbesian place where only small primitive tribes could ever have existed, and about the limits the environment placed on the rise of early civilisations."

They are also vindicating, said Grann, Percy Fawcett, the explorer who partly inspired Conan Doyle's book The Lost World. Fawcett led an expedition to find the City of Z but the party vanished, bequeathing a mystery.

Many scientists saw the jungle as too harsh to sustain anything but small nomadic tribes. Now it seems the conquistadores who spoke of "cities that glistened in white" were telling the truth. They, however, probably also introduced the diseases that wiped out the native people, leaving the jungle to claim – and hide – all trace of their civilisation.

• This article was amended on Wednesday 6 January 2010. Percy Fawcett is said to have partly inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's book The Lost World, but not his disappearance, as we originally seemed to suggest - that occurred after it was published. This has been corrected.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/05/amazon-dorado-satellite-discovery

Mưu sự tại nhân...

謀 事 在 人

成 事 在 天

Mưu sự tại nhân

Thành sự tại thiên

Man plans, but God determines success.

History (from Tam Quốc Chí):

Tư Mã Ý đánh nhau với Khổng Minh, thua liền mấy trận, nên giữ chặt trại, nhất quyết không ra đánh nữa.

Khổng Minh thấy Tư Mã Ý không ra, liền mật sai Mã Đại lập một trại ở trong hang Hồ Lô, trong trại đào hố sâu, chất đầy cỏ khô và đồ dẫn hoả, trong ngoài đặt địa lôi. Lại sai Nguỵ Diên dẫn 500 quân, không cần đánh thắng, cốt nhử quân Nguỵ vào hang.

Tư Mã Ý tiến vào đến trong hang, bỗng đâu tiếng reo nổi lên, lửa đâu ở trên núi ném xuống, đốt chặn ngang cửa hang trước, rồi tên lửa bắn ra, địa lôi phục bật nổ lên, củi khô ở trong các lều cỏ cháy đùng đùng, chỗ nào cũng nổ đôm đốp, ngọn lửa bốc lên ngùn ngụt. Tư Mã Ý hồn bay phách lạc, chân tay luống cuống, nhảy xuống ngựa, ôm lấy hai con, khóc ầm lên rằng:

- Ba cha con ta chết cả ở chỗ này mất rồi!

Bỗng dưng trời nổi cơn giông to, mây đen kéo ngất trời, một tiếng sét nổ dữ dội, rồi đổ mưa xuống như trút nước. Lửa đang cháy tắt sạch, địa lôi phục câm tịt, những đồ dẫn hỏa cũng vô dụng.

Khổng Minh ở trên núi thấy Ngụy Diên dử được Tư Mã Ý vào hang. Một lát thấy ngọn lửa bốc lên, Khổng Minh trong bụng đã mừng, chắc phen này Tư Mã Ý phải chết. Không ngờ trời trút cơn mưa xuống, lửa tắt sạch cả. Tư Mã Ý chạy thoát được ra ngoài.

Khổng Minh than rằng:

Mưu sự tại nhân, thành sự tại Thiên.

Nhân nguyện như thử như thử.

Thiên lý vị nhiên vị nhiên.

(Mưu việc ở người, nên việc ở Trời.  Ý người như thế như thế.  Lẽ Trời chưa vậy chưa vậy.)