Once you attain a certain stature in life, there are two things that no longer make sense—cheap liquor and expensive gas stations.

So there’s obvious appeal to the idea that you could turn cheap liquor into cheap gas in the time it takes you to down an ice-cold martini (made with the good stuff). Say hello to your new personal gas pump, the EFuel100 MicroFueler.

Rather than waiting in line on a smoggy street corner for the privilege of being gouged mercilessly, roll right up to the EFuel100 residing in your driveway (or garage, or basically anywhere with a power outlet and a water hookup) to fill any gas-burning auto with your homemade batch of ethanol. Just pour in the mix of sugar feedstock and yeast—or the residual gin from your Bootlegger’s Ball ‘05 gathering—and after a few days, fill ‘er up. The MicroFueler makes 35 gallons a week, each gallon costs you about $1, and your car will actually enjoy a little more power (which is why IndyCar racers use ethanol).

Sure, you can brag about the purported environmental benefits of your newfound gasoline independence, but there’s also a certain satisfaction in using that gas money you saved somewhere else.

Like the bar.

EFuel100 MicroFueler, $9,995, now available for pre-order online

Traditional Media’s Attention

“What if they disclosed a torture memo and nobody cared? This week, an 81-page memo, authored by John C. Yoo, who was a deputy in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice at the time of its creation, was declassified and made public. The memo, which, among other things, was used as the rationale for authorizing the torture of government detainees, has long been held to be a savage reimagining of the structure of the Executive Branch and its authority, hostile to the traditional checks and balances that circumscribe the President’s authority. And that’s stating the matter diplomatically. A less kind observer might conclude that the memo was a legal abomination which tortures the accepted body of Constitutional law along the way to glibly authorizing a Grand Guignol of authoritarian power that our nation’s founders would find abhorrent. With these high stakes as the prologue, you’d have to imagine that the disclosure of the memo would be of pre-eminent importance to the media.”

For solid pushback, WaPo customers needed to seek out Dan Froomkin, who devoted the bulk of his White House Watch column to the matter, and provided plenty of legal analysis from critics. And Froomkin absolutely got it right:

Yoo’s memo is a historic document. It is the ultimate expression of Cheney’s belief that anything the president or his designates do — no matter how illegal, barbaric or un-American — is justifiable in the name of national self-defense.It is also an example of how enabling zealots to disregard the rule of law and the customary boundaries of human conduct leads to madness.

Outside of Froomkin, the best pushback from WaPo came from a participant in Dana Milbank’s chat:

The (sadly) funny part of the Yoo memo is that it purports to uncover an exception to anti-torture treaties if you are torturing the prisoner in order to extract information about pending attacks. That is actually the exact reason for these agreements. It is like arguing that speed limits do not apply if you are in a hurry.

“Warning! These photos censored by China are extremely graphic. Some came directly from the morgue. Please use parental guidance if showing these to kids.”

“MAHALLA EL-KOBRA, Egypt (AP) — Thousands of demonstrators angry about rising prices and stagnant salaries torched buildings, looted shops and hurled bricks at police who responded with tear gas Sunday in a northern industrial town as Egyptians staged a nationwide strike.

About 150 people were arrested and 80 were wounded in the gritty Nile Delta town of Mahalla el-Kobra, where riots broke out among residents and disgruntled workers at the largest textile factory in Egypt.

Protesters stormed city hall, burned tires in the streets, smashed chairs through shop windows and ran off with computers. At least two schools were set ablaze and facades of banks were vandalized, police said.

Nearly 100 others were arrested elsewhere across Egypt, officials said, as thousands skipped work and school and hundreds protested over the rising cost of food and deteriorating working conditions.

A call for a nationwide strike Sunday was the first major attempt by opposition groups to turn the past year’s labor unrest into a wider political protest against the government of President Hosni Mubarak.

The strike and riots in the north came two days before key elections for local councils, causing jitters in the government, which last week lifted import duties on some food items in an effort to soften economic discontent.

The U.S.-backed government strongly warned citizens against participating in the strikes and demonstrations. Strikes and protests are illegal in Egypt, and protesters are often detained by Egyptian security forces.

Nearly 40 percent Egypt’s 76 million people live below or near the poverty line of $2 a day. The prices of staples such as cooking oil and rice have nearly doubled in recent months, amid widespread shortages of government-subsidized bread.

Many Egyptians in Cairo responded to the calls for nationwide action by skipping work or school. Many shops were closed in the capital, and traffic was significantly lighter than usual in the normally car-clogged streets.

In an effort to thwart mass protests downtown, the government sent hordes of riot police to many of Cairo’s main squares to intimidate people from showing up.

But there were some smaller protests. Hundreds of students gathered at two universities, chanting anti-government slogans, and activists outside Egypt’s Bar Association waved banners demanding economic reform.

“The strike is legitimate against poverty and starvation,” chanted the protesters, who were surrounded by riot police. Protesters on a roof later showered security forces with glass bottles and bits of wood.

In Mahalla, workers at the Misr Spinning and Weaving Factory initially planned to stage a sit-in Sunday at the mill, which employs 25,000 people. But the sit-in was canceled after hundreds of security forces showed up at the facility and labor leaders said the government promised to pass a law raising the minimum wage.

Disgruntled workers and younger activists not happy with the decision instead held a protest that turned violent in the main town square later Sunday.

An Egyptian security official said the 2,000 protesters damaged property and hurled bricks, forcing police to disperse them with tear gas. About 50 were wounded in the riots, he said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to media.

“A lot of young kids and women took part, and actually a few of the women were quite militant and urging people to get into the middle of it,” said Joel Beinin, an expert on labor movements at American University in Cairo.

Associated Press writer Maggie Michael contributed to this report from Cairo.”

So how did these young people reach that goal? Four out of five amassed their fortunes on the internet, and one enterprising young man earned his money the old fashioned way.

Cameron Johnson, Ashley Qualls, Catherine Cook, Adam Hildreth and Fraser Doherty all built million-dollar businesses before reaching age 20.”

“17-year-old Ashley Qualls launched Whateverlife.com as a personal portfolio of pictures and graphics in 2004, at age 14. She then began offering free MySpace layouts and tutorials for teens who want to learn to do their own graphics designs.

Last year, the media marketing company Valueclick contacted Ashley about advertising on her site. With 7 million individual viewers and over 60 million page views per month, Ashley has taken in over $1 million in advertising revenue.

In less than two years since launching Whateverlife, Ashley has dropped out of school, bought a house and helped launch artists such as Lily Allen.

In March of 2006, Qualls received an offer for Whateverlife of $1.5 million dollars, plus the car of her choice, which she turned down.”

“In 2002, at the age of 14, Fraser Doherty began making jams from his grandmother’s recipes and selling them door-to-door in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Tweaking the recipes and coming up with a name for his product, Doherty quit school at age 16 to work on Superjam full time.

Quickly outgrowing the kitchen in his parents’ home, Fraser began renting a factory a few days a month. In 2007, Waitrose, a high end supermarket in the U.K., approached him about selling Superjam in their stores.

Borrowing $9000 from a bank, he began producing three flavors, Blueberry & Blackcurrant, Rhubarb & Ginger, and Cranberry & Raspberry. Tesco followed, adding Superjam to 300 stores across the U.K. Doherty is on track to make $1-$2 million in 2008.”

Related Article:  Superfast Internet Replacement Grid

“The internet could grind to a halt within two years under the pressure of booming demand for online video, experts have warned.

Soaring visitor numbers to video websites such as YouTube and the BBC’s iPlayer are putting the copper wires, which underpin parts of the internet, under severe strain.

Experts warn that unless billions of pounds is spent on upgrading the web’s infrastructure, it could slow down or even collapse. An internet meltdown would have a disastrous impact on the economy.

Larry Irving, co-chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance, an American industry group lobbying for universal improvements in the web’s network, said: “Our streets in cities like London or New York were designed for a certain amount of traffic.

“There are times of the day when you can get around and times when there is congestion.

“London does not shut down, it carries on, but everything slows down. The internet is something like that.”

Sections of the internet are supported by copper wires that were only intended to carry voice calls. Irving said the surge in transfers of video-related data means the risk of these wires becoming overloaded is real.

He warned that internet traffic in America was increasing at more than 50 per cent a year, while capacity was growing at only about 40 per cent. Britain is suffering a similar shortfall.

In Britain, demand for video websites has spiralled in the past 12 months. Online monitors Hitwise recorded a 178 per cent increase in visitors to video websites. Last year it was said that YouTube consumed as much capacity as the entire internet took up in 2000.

Bill Thompson, visiting lecturer at City University, London, said: “I think we’re in trouble. If you’ve got kids on YouTube and parents on iPlayer and other things going on, it all starts to go very slow.”

Consumers sharing video content, as well as downloading it, add to the drain.

Internet providers are being urged to spend billions of pounds to replace the copper wires which provide the final web link to homes with high-speed fibre optics.

Telecoms giant BT has a £10?billion upgrade plan which it will launch at the end of the month, but there are fears it will not cope with demand.

Anthony Walker, chief executive of Britain’s Broadband Stakeholder Group, said: “There are big investment challenges ahead. Replacing copper with fibre optic, taking it closer to the consumer, we’re talking about billions of pounds over almost a decade.”

This is already fantastically tantalizing…

“Scientists in Switzerland have developed a lightning-fast replacement to the internet that would allow feature films and music catalogues to be downloaded within seconds. The invention could signal the end of the dreaded ‘frozen screen’, when computers seize up after being asked to process too much information.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the internet, the grid could also provide the power needed to send sophisticated images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call. David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technology could change society. He said: “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine.”

The power of the grid will be unlocked this summer with the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a new particle accelerator designed to investigate how the universe began.The grid will be turned on at the same time to store the information it generates, after scientists at Cern, based near Geneva, realised the internet would not have the capacity to capture such huge volumes of data.

The grid has been built with fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data, unlike the internet. There are 55,000 grid servers already installed, a figure which is expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.

Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. “The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.” Britain has 8,000 servers on the grid system, meaning access could be available to universities as early as this autumn.”

“The State Department has announced it is extending the private military firm Blackwater’s contract in Baghdad for another year. The news comes despite an ongoing FBI investigation into the September 16th shooting in Baghdad where Blackwater guards were accused of killing seventeen Iraqi civilians. An earlier investigation by the Pentagon found that all seventeen Iraqis were killed as a result of unprovoked and unjustified fire by Blackwater operatives. We speak with journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of the bestselling book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s most Powerful Mercenary Army. Scahill recently confronted the vice president of Blackwater about the September 16th shootings.”