The Miss Florida Scholarship Pageant: photo by Deanna Meredith Sierra Minott, Miss Florida 2008 Recent pictures here Sierra 's blog here

Miss Florida Family Pictures (Click to enlarge) Former Miss Florida Contestant, Danielle Marino married Ben Marciano on August 4, 2007.

MissFloridaUSA.com is YOUR site! If there's anything you would like to see here, we will do our best to get it. We are determined to make MissFloridaUSA.com your "One-Stop ...

The Miss Florida competition is the pageant that selects the representative for the state of Florida in the Miss America pageant. Famous Miss Florida titleholders include actress ...

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The Miss Florida USA competition is the pageant that selects the representative for the state Florida in the Miss USA pageant. Whilst Florida has been successful in terms of ...

MISS FLORIDA USA WEBSITE. The Miss Florida Teen USA Pageant is independently produced by Tel-Air Interests, Inc. 2040 Sherman Street Hollywood, FL 33020

The Florida State Championship of Teenage Pageant - Miss Florida Teen USA 2007 took place October 13 - 15 in the host city of Hollywood and Bailey Concert Hall.

Directions and instruction for preliminary pageants, listing and photographs of qualifiers, prizes and news.

Hello friends! What a wonderful weekend I had at Shands Hospital in Gainesville. On Friday I participated in the last day of the Children's Miracle Network Radiothon and was able ...

LAS VEGAS - In ball gowns, blue jeans and bikinis, 52 young women took to the stage to compete for the Miss America 2009 title Saturday, capping a mini-reality series on pageant ...

pageant prep work and a week of preliminary competition. The winner will be crowned by reigning Miss America Kirsten Haglund of Michigan and take home a $50,000 scholarship before ...

LAS VEGAS -- Miss Indiana Katie Stam was crowned Miss America 2009 in Las Vegas on Saturday night, fighting off a throat infection, laryngitis and 51 other contestants to win the ...

LAS VEGAS -- In ball gowns, blue jeans and bikinis, 52 young women were set to compete for the Miss America 2009 title, capping a mini-reality series on pageant prep work and a ...

LAS VEGAS -- In ball gowns, blue jeans and bikinis, 52 young women were set to compete for the Miss America 2009 title, capping a mini-reality series on pageant prep work and a ...

In ball gowns, blue jeans and bikinis, 52 young women took to the stage to compete for the Miss America 2009 title Saturday, capping a mini-reality series on pageant prep work and ...

Angie McDermott, a University of Minnesota Duluth graduate from Austin, Minn., competed as Miss Minnesota in the Miss America Pageant on Saturday night in Las Vegas. Angie ...

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Devan Downey scored 22 points and South Carolina defeated Mississippi 82-71 on Saturday night. The Gamecocks (14-4, 3-2 Southeastern Conference), who defeated No ...

The top-ranked high school football players of the past seven years are now familiar names, for the most part. Former Oklahoma running back Adrian Peterson, now with the Minnesota ...

TAMPA, Fla. - Villanova coach Jay Wright didn't offer any excuses. His 20th-ranked Wildcats struggled offensively in Saturday's 70-61 victory over South Florida, with the pesky ...

Pandemic Studios, having enjoyed some success with their release of Star Wars: Battlefront II, sought to bring their style of action game to the Lord of the Rings universe as well. Since both Star Wars and LotR are widely regarded as classics in their respective genres, and both have a rich, deep fan base, the task would appear to be similar in scope. Many were expecting Lord of the Rings: Conquest to be, if nothing else, a playground for Tolkien fans to revel in the environments so vividly brought to life by the movies. Unfortunately, between the short, simplistic campaign and the shallow, uninspired combat, LotR: Conquest merely relies on its name for success, failing to bring the innovation or cleverness that the franchise deserves. Read on for the rest of my thoughts.

dfn_deux writes "In a follow up to a 2005 story where Florida judge Doug Henderson ruled that breathalyzer evidence in more than 100 drunk driving cases would be inadmissible as evidence at trial, the Second District Court of Appeal and Circuit Court has ruled on Tuesday to uphold the 2005 ruling requiring the manufacturer of the Intoxilyzer 5000, Kentucky-based CMI Inc, to release source code for their breathalyzer equipment to be examined by witnesses for the defense of those standing trial with breathalyzer test result being used as evidence against them. '"The defendant's right to a fair trial outweighed the manufacturer's claim of a trade secret," Henderson said Tuesday. In response to the ruling defense attorney, Mark Lipinski, who represents seven defendants challenging the source codes, said the state likely will be forced to reduce charges — or drop the cases entirely.' ... What this really means is that outside corporations cannot sell equipment to the state of Florida and expect to hide the workings of their machine by saying they are trade secret. It means the state has to give full disclosure concerning important and critical aspects of the case."

Adam Korbitz writes "NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission is set to launch late on the evening of March 6th. A few days ago, the space telescope arrived in Florida for final launch preparations. According to the NASA/JPL Planet Quest website: 'Kepler will hunt for planets using a specialized one-meter diameter telescope called a photometer to measure the small changes in brightness caused by the transits. Over a four-year period, Kepler will continuously view an amount of sky about equal to the size of a human hand held at arm's length or about equal in area to two "scoops" of the sky made with the Big Dipper constellation.' A map of the area Kepler will search is shown superimposed on a picture of the constellation Cygnus, The Swan. NASA has posted a countdown clock for Kepler, as well as animations of the spacecraft mission and the science objectives."

Lorin Ricker writes "Back in the dark ages of windows-based GUIs, corresponding to my own wandering VMS evangelical days, I became enamored of a series of books jauntily entitled Xxx Annoyances (from O'Reilly & Assocs.), where "Xxx" could be anything from "Windows 95", "Word", "Excel" or nearly piece of software which Microsoft produced. These were, if not the first, certainly among the most successful of the "tips & tricks" books that have become popular and useful to scads of hobbyists, ordinary users, hackers and, yes, even professionals in various IT pursuits. I was attracted, even a bit addicted, to these if only because they offered to try to make some useful sense out of the bewildering design choices, deficiencies and bugs that I'd find rampant in Windows and its application repertory. Then I found Keir Thomas, who has been writing about Linux for more than a decade. His new "tips" book entitled, Ubuntu Kung Fu — Tips & Tools for Exploring Using, and Tuning Linux, and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf, is wonderful. Having only recently wandered into the light of Linux, open source software, and Ubuntu in particular, this book comes as a welcome infusion to my addiction." Read below for the rest of Lorin's review.

An anonymous readerwrites "On Friday the wonderfully customer centric AirTran decided to remove a family of 9 US born Muslims after a comment between two family members regarding how close to the Jet engine they had been seated. The wonderful part is that after the FBI cleared the family 2 hours later, AirTran refused to fly the family, and refused to rebook them on their way from Washington to Orlando, Florida. The family purchased additional tickets on US Airways later that day, after AirTran requested that the irate father be escorted from their booking podiums by security. This whole story highlights the pathetic customer service we are getting from the Airlines these days — they actually treat us like criminals first and ask questions later. Just don't get me started on Delta." It's nice to see that stupidity still knows no bounds.

dstates writes "The State of Maryland has filed a $8.5M claim against Premier Election Systems (previously known as Diebold), joining Ohio in seeking damages from the company. The claim alleges that election officials were forced to spend millions of dollars to address multiple security flaws in the machines. Previously, Diebold paid millions to settle a California lawsuit over security issues in their machines. The dispute comes as Maryland and Virginia prepare to scrap the touch screen electronic voting systems they bought after the 2000 presidential election. California, Florida, New Mexico, and Iowa have already switched to optical scanners, and voters in Pennsylvania are suing to prevent the use of paperless electronic voting systems in their state. Meanwhile, Artifex Software is suing Diebold for violations of the GPL covering the Ghostscript software technology used in the proprietary voting machines."

Whiteox writes about an Australian researcher named Renata Pronk, who has discovered that octopuses prefer HDTV. She recruited 32 gloomy octopuses from the waters of Chowder Bay. Previously, researchers have reported little success when showing video to octopuses. Miss Pronk's insight was that the octopus eye is so refined that it might see standard PAL video, at 25 fps, as a series of stills. She tried HDTV (50 fps) and her subjects reacted to the videos of a crab, another octopus, or a swinging bottle on the end of a string. A further discovery is that octopuses show no trait of individual personalities, even though they exhibit a high level of intelligence. It would certainly be possible to quibble about the definition of "personality" employed, and whether Miss Pronk had successfully measured it.

eldavojohn writes "UMass Dartmouth Physics Professor Gaurav Khanna and UMass Dartmouth Principal Investigator Chris Poulin have created a step-by-step guide designed to show you how to build your own supercomputer for about $4,000. They are also hoping that by publishing this guide they will bring about a new kind of software development targeting this architecture & grid (I know a few failed NLP projects of my own that could use some new hardware). If this catches on for research institutions it may increase Sony's sales, but they might not be seeing the corresponding sale of games spike (where they make the most profit)."

darthcamaro writes "Canadians were among the last people in the world to get the season 4 finale of Doctor Who which already aired in the UK and Australia. The Canadian public broadcaster — CBC — decided to cut out nearly 20 minutes from the episode, leaving fans wondering what was going on. Doctor Who isn't the easiest show to follow at the best of times — but Canadians are now up in arms (or at least hockey sticks) over their taxpayer-funded broadcaster's lack of respect for SciFi hosers."

Gamasutra has an article analyzing random events in games, and how they can add or subtract to a player's experience. It looks at the different ways luck plays a part in games; from landing a critical strike instead of a miss to the scatter of a shotgun blast to waiting for that blasted straight piece in Tetris. "Game developers are sometimes faced with similarly challenging decisions when contemplating whether to include some kind of deliberate randomness. For example, in the video game Unreal Tournament, when a player shoots at a target with the 'enforcer' weapon, the projectile does not necessarily hit the point that is aimed at; a random deviation is added that scatters shots. This introduces a degree of realism from an observer's perspective and no doubt gives beginners a fair chance against more experienced players, but it can also potentially frustrate skilled players."