Francis Lauer, an inventor from Paris, dreamed of combining an airplane and a monorail to achieve what he called "guided flight." Although we dismissed the projects aeronautic capabilities and questioned its cost, we admitted that the project could be a good scientific experiment if Lauer found the proper funding
The 7 Creepiest Things About the TSAs "Porno Scanners"
clipped by:quickstar clippers remarks: The invasive scanners can see your tampons, give you cancer and make your grandmother cry -- and theyre not cheap. Why do we keep using them?
The recent, furious backlash against the TSAs degrading body scanners has drawn attention to the myriad ways the so-called "porno scanners" can violate ones privacy, civil rights and basic sense of dignity.
With National Opt-Out Day approaching the day before Thanksgiving, one of the busiest travel days of the year, here are several of the absolute creepiest things about scanners that everyone should keep in mind when flying at the holidays, or any other time of the year.
1. The scanner operators can see everything, including your pads and tampons.
2. Naked passenger images are easily saved -- and spread on the Internet.
3. They could give you cancer.
4. If you refuse to go through one, you could be publicly groped.
5. You could wind up with a hefty fine for refusing to be scanned.
clipped by:mountainpalm clippers remarks: Further, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) sent a letter to the White House Office of Science and Technology in April warning of potential health risks -- including skin cancer -- from the scanners, which distribute a dose of radiation to the skin and underlying tissue There are about 350 full-body scanners being used in close to 70 U.S. airports, and that number is expected to increase to 1,000 scanners by the end of 2011.
Dubbed "naked" scanners because they give a graphic image of your body, including genitalia and other personal effects like sanitary napkins, the devices are raising privacy and health concerns among frequent travelers and pilots groups alike.
The alternative is also causing outrage. Those who opt out of being scanned must now submit to a far more intrusive form of pat-down, and a large number of horror stories have already surfaced, where people of all ages have been humiliated, or worse, during these enhanced pat-downs.
What the TSA is NOT Telling You about Full Body Scans...
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a leading privacy group, has asked a federal appeals court to suspend the U.S. governments program of introducing full-body imaging machines at airports.
According to the group, the imaging machines constitute a suspicionless search of all airport travelers in an extremely invasive way -- so invasive that it violates the reasonable standard contained in the Fourth Amendment.
"The constitutional challenge aside, EPIC also charges that the Department of Homeland Security, in rolling out the devices, violated a host of bureaucratic policies requiring public review, including the Administrative Procedures Act. Whats more, the group claims the machines, among other things, violate the federal Video Voyeurism Prevent Act, which protects against capturing improper images that violate ones privacy."
clipped by:amgumen clippers remarks: 9. Mount Thor (Canada): Earths greatest vertical drop.a 4,100 foot pure vertical drop. Mt. Thor is Canadas most famous peak, and its made of pure granite.
10.Dead Sea (Jordan): Earths lowest elevation at 1,385 ft (422 mt) below sea level.
Lut Desert (Iran): hottest place on Earth at 159 °F (71 °C)
Mt. Chimborazo (Ecuador): highest point above Earhts center at 20,703 feet (6,310 m) above sea level
Tristan de Cunha (UK): most remote inhabited archipelago on Earth at 2,000 miles from the nearest continent
Angels Falls (Venezuela): Earths highest waterfall with 3230 feet (984 m) in height
Oymyakon (Russia): coldest inhabited place on Earth at ?96.2 °F (?71.2 °C)
The population is 800 people. Oymyakon is known as one of the candidates for the Northern Pole of Cold, because on January 26, 1926, a temperature of ?71.2 °C (?96.2 °F) was recorded there
The lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth was -129 °F in 1983, at the Russian Base Vostok in Antarctica. (Link | Photo)
The Dry Valleys (Antarctica): driest place on Earth
Marianas Trench (Indonesia and Japan): lowest point on Earth at 35,840 feet (10,924 m) below sea level
Lloro (Colombia): wettest place on Earth
Lloro, Colombia, gets an average of 40 feet of rain a year
Chard belongs to the same family as beets and spinach and shares a similar taste profile with a flavor that is bitter, pungent, and slightly salty.
Choose chard that is held in a chilled display as this will help to ensure that it has a crunchier texture and sweeter taste. Look for leaves that are vivid green in color and that do not display any browning or yellowing. The leaves should not be wilted nor should they have tiny holes. The stalks should look crisp and be unblemished.
we recommend boiling to free up acids and allowing them to leach into the boiling water; this brings out a sweeter taste from the chard
Toss penne pasta with olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, and cooked Swiss chard.
Add zest to omelets and frittatas by adding some boiled Swiss chard.
Use chard in place of or in addition to spinach when preparing vegetarian lasagna.
Elite police units in borrowed navy tanks rumbled through a heavily fortified slum Thursday in an effort to apprehend drug gang leaders they blame for five days of widespread violence, even as scores of armed youth fled to a neighboring shantytown.
Did you know that our brain function is entirely different when we think about our own honesty versus when we think about another?s honesty? That?s if the ?we? is American. For Chinese people their brains look identical when considering either.
These sorts of studies fall into so-called cultural neuroscience; the study how our environment shapes our brain function.
Scientists found that when American subjects viewed a silhouette in a dominant posture (standing up, arms crossed) their brain?s reward circuitry sparked. Not so for Japanese subjects. For the Japanese their reward circuitry fired when they saw a submissive silhouette (head down, arms at sides.) This physiological response matches a well-known behavioral difference: Americans favor and encourage dominant behavior. Japanese culture reinforces submissive culture.
clipped by:tabsey clippers remarks: American request to cancel his passport. Gotta be found guilty of something, don cha? Machiavelli could make it back into political literature, before this is finished. (How did M. get on with the Pope? Middle Ages history was a scrape through subject for me.) Again, the messenger must be stopped, not the criminal behaviour.
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) ? Police were investigating whether any Australian law was broken by the latest leaking of confidential documents by online whistle-blower WikiLeaks, the attorney-general said Monday.
Robert McClelland said he was not aware of a request from the United States to cancel WikiLeaks founder Julian Assanges Australian passport. A range of options were under consideration by Australian government agencies in response to the latest disclosure of classified U.S. material, he said.
McClelland told reporters there are "potentially a number of criminal laws" that could have been breached.
Defense Minister Stephen Smith said later that a cross-government committee was studying the documents to ascertain what damage could be done by their release.
Smith said the U.S. ambassador had told the Australian government and relevant ministers about the leaks ahead of their release.
clipped by:darkeforce clippers remarks: Canadian force in Afghanistan have been handing over child prisoners to an Afghani agency where harsh treatment and torture are well documented. Its been going on at least for the past 4 years. Additionally, other children that werent turned over to theAfghani NDS have reportedly been kept in custody "for a significant amount of time" (the redacted document that states this has how many children, and how long theyve been in custody blacked out).
Why have we allowed politicians and military leaders to take away our countries humanity and decency?
Canadas handling of Afghan child detainees queried
The Canadian Forces have for years arrested children suspected of working with the Taliban and handed them over to an Afghan security unit accused of torture, CBC News has learned.
A document obtained by the CBCs investigative unit shows that Canadian soldiers captured children as well in the fight against the Taliban, and that many of them were transferred to the custody of Afghanistans National Directorate of Security, or NDS.
The note also shows that an undisclosed number of juvenile detainees were being kept in a Canadian transfer facility at Kandahar Air Field for "a significant period."
"The use of harsh interrogation techniques [on children] and forced confession of guilt by the Afghan National Police and the National Directorate of Security was documented," according to the UN report. The report is silent on which countries detained those children.
Israeli Government Documents Show Deliberate Policy to Restrict Food to Gaza
clipped by:tabsey clippers remarks: I think the fact that there is a "world opinion" has saved the Palestinians from being cleared out of their country.
Documents, whose existence were denied by the Israeli government for over a year, have been released after a legal battle led by Israeli human rights group, Gisha. The documents reveal a deliberate policy by the Israeli government in which the dietary needs for the population of Gaza are chillingly calculated, and the amounts of food let in by the Israeli government measured to remain just enough to keep the population alive at a near-starvation level. This documents the statement made by a number of Israeli officials that they are "putting the people of Gaza on a diet".
In 2007, when Israel began its full siege on Gaza, Dov Weisglass, adviser to then Prime-Minister Ehud Olmert, stated clearly, ?The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.? The documents now released contain equations used by the Israeli government to calculate the exact amounts of food, fuel and other necessities needed to do exactly that.
CORVALLIS, Ore. ? Someone set fire to an Islamic center on Sunday, two days after a man who worshipped there was accused of trying to blow up a van full of explosives during Portlands Christmas tree lighting ceremony. Other Muslims fear it could be the first volley of misplaced retribution.
"The fact is that violent extremists come from all religions and no religion at all. For one person to blame a group, if thats what happened here, is uniquely anti-American and will be pursued with the full force of the Justice Department," he said.
clipped by:tabsey clippers remarks: Lots of debating, for some, on this issue. Parents who want it for 2 year olds will get it. If you can tie a kid to religion, what is wrong with sport?
A genetic company has played down concerns that its sport test could discriminate against children and budding young athletes.
Although genes alone cannot determine whether an individual will excel at a particular sport, they have the potential to determine whether someone is better suited to endurance or power-specific activities
The sport gene test allows DNA swabs from inside a persons mouth to be anonymously sent to the firms laboratory and analysed
The test will soon be made available in gyms and sports stores around the country, but there are fears over-zealous parents will use the test to screen their children for sporting suitability
The chief scientific officer of MyGene, Graeme Smith, acknowledges some people will want to gather information about future athletes as early as possible
But he says the test will not be made available to people under the age of 18
"We dont feel 100 per cent comfortable with the potential for a child to be discriminated against based on their genotype
In Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama, Democratic state legislators have become Republican
Democratic state representatives and senators managed to survive through the South?s GOP evolution ? the Reagan years, the Republican landslide of 1994 and George W. Bush?s two terms. Yet scores of them retired or went down in defeat earlier this month. And at least 10 more across three states have changed parties since the elections, with rumors swirling through state capitols of more to come before legislative sessions commence in January.
Blind patients suffering from a type of eye disease that strikes in childhood will become the second group of people in the world to receive stem cells derived from spare IVF embryos left over from fertility treatment.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given the go-ahead for
patients with Stargardts macular degeneration, where the light-sensitive retina cells at the back of eye are destroyed
Embryonic stem cells, which are derived from IVF embryos just a few days old, have the ability to develop into any of the dozens of specialised cells of the body. Researchers believe they could revolutionise medicine because of their ability to repair damaged tissues and organs in situ without the need for whole-organ transplants
.
However, "pro-life" groups such as the Roman Catholic Church are bitterly opposed to the practice which they say involves the deliberate destruction of potential human beings ? even if they are only 3-day old embryos.
FOUR medals including a Distinguished Flying Medal, awarded to a fearless Wigan airman tragically killed in the Second World War are set to fetch up to £3,000 at auction.
Warrant Officer William Aspey was awarded the DFM in May 1944, just 12 weeks before he was killed on August 7, 1944.
He died when the Lancaster Bomber in which he was the rear gunner was shot down by an enemy fighter while returning from a raid over Bochum, Germany, aged just 22.
The plane came down - killing the entire crew of seven - near Bolbec in northern France. WO Aspey is buried with his crew at the Bolbec Communal Cemetery.
He was born at Wigan in 1921 and educated at St Patrick?s and St Mary?s RC schools before he went on to Wigan Mining and Technical College.
In May 1941, he joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. In April 1943, he became an Air Gunner with 149 Squadron (Stirlings) at Lakenheath, Suffolk and flew in 27 bombing raids with the squadron.
Over millions of years dogs have developed bigger brains than cats because highly social species of mammals need more brain power than solitary animals
For the first time researchers have attempted to chart the evolutionary history of the brain across different groups of mammals over 60 million years. They have discovered that there are huge variations in how the brains of different groups of mammals have evolved over that time. They also suggest that there is a link between the sociality of mammals and the size of their brains relative to body size
The research team analysed available data on the brain size and body size of more than 500 species of living and fossilised mammals. It found that the brains of monkeys grew the most over time, followed by horses, dolphins, camels and dogs
The study shows that groups of mammals with relatively bigger brains tend to live in stable social groups
The brains of more solitary mammals, such as cats, deer and rhino, grew much more slowly
Whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks has released 250,000 diplomatic cables detailing the candid conversations between Washington and embassies around the world.
The documents also show Saudi donors remain chief financiers of militant groups like Al Qaeda.
Afghanistans vice-president Ahmed Zia Massoud was carrying $US52 million in cash that a cable from the American embassy in Kabul said he "was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the moneys origin or destination" when he visited the United Arab Emirates last year.
Slovenia was told to take a prisoner from Guantanamo Bay if it wanted to meet with US president Barack Obama.
In another case, accepting more prisoners was described as "a low-cost way for Belgium to attain prominence in Europe".
Stand with our North Korean allies? You betcha! As Sarah Palin?s latest gaffe hit the blogosphere, it reminded us all that foreign policy is not her, um, strong suit. But this faux pas may not be her fault: you can?t see the Koreas from Alaska, and gosh darn it,...
clipped by:debbyski clippers remarks: "But Barack Obama is our president instead, so the body-scanner debate played out rather differently. True, some conservatives invoked 9/11 to defend the T.S.A., and some liberals denounced the measures as an affront to American liberties. Such ideological consistency, though, was the exception; mostly, the Bush-era script was read in reverse. It was the populist right that raged against body scans, and the Republican Party that moved briskly to exploit the furor. It was a Democratic administration that labored to justify the intrusive procedures, and the liberal commentariat that leaped to their defense."
To that last paragraph I say "BULL" regarding progressive opinions--I am against body scanners and I think most progressives are. Furthermore, I think most of the right could give a rats behind about them except for the fact its implimented under a President they cant stand.
Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been president when the Transportation Security Administration decided to let Thanksgiving travelers choose between exposing their nether regions to a body scanner or enduring a private security massage. Democrats would have been outraged at yet another Bush-era assault on civil liberties. Liberal pundits would have outdone one another comparing the T.S.A. to this or that police state. (?In an outrage worthy of Enver Hoxha?s Albania ...?) And Republicans would have leaped to the Bush administration?s defense, while accusing liberals of going soft on terrorism.
While three new amphibian species were just discovered in the Colombian rainforest, another discovery is now gaining attention from all over the world. This time, a new, critically endangered species of Western Ground Parrot has been found in Fitzgerald River National Park in Western Australia.
It is a great achievement that this ground parrot was recognized as one of the worlds rarest birds. A team of Australian researchers, led by Australian Wildlifes Conservancys Dr. Stephen Murphy, used DNA from museum specimens up to 160 years old and by comparison, this newfound bird was recognized as a new rare species, Pezoporus flaviventris.
Endemic to Western Australia, it is an endangered species.
Above - Birthday cake celebrating 100 years of Great Entertainment at the London Palladium.
The London Palladium opened on Boxing Day, the 26th of December 1910, and so in December 2010 the Theatre is celebrating its 100th anniversary.
Several events have been held at the Theatre to mark this event, one of which was on the 12th of November in the Cinderella Bar of the Palladium when many people involved with the Theatre over the years gathered to toast the Palladiums anniversary and catch up with faces from the past.
Right - The London Palladiums Cinderella Bar shortly before guests arrived to celebrate the Theatres 100th Birthday on the 12th of November 2010.
Arsonist Sets Fire To Oregon Mosque Frequented By Mohamed Osman Mohamud
clipped by:ratilfar clippers remarks: Wanly said Mohamud was religious but didnt come to the mosque consistently.
The fire on Sunday was contained to one room, burning 80 percent of the centers office, Wanly said. The worship areas were untouched.
Wanly has been advised by friends to take his family out of their home, and to "another persons house due to the possibility of hate crimes," he said. "Im going to look into it, especially because my face has been on the news a lot."
Wanly said the local populace has always been accepting of Muslims.
CORVALLIS, Ore. ? Arson caused a fire on Sunday at an Islamic center that was the occasional place of worship for a Somali-born teen who two days ago was arrested on charges of plotting a terror attack in Portland, authorities said.
The fire at the Salman Al-Farisi Islamic Center was set early Sunday morning, said Carla Pusateri, a fire prevention officer for the Corvallis Fire Department.
She said "quite a bit of evidence" was left at the scene, which led her to believe the fire was intentionally set. No injuries have been reported.
The Islamic center was frequented by Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a 19-year-old held on charges of plotting to carry out a terror attack at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland on Friday.
Yosof Wanly, imam at the Salman Alfarisi Islamic Center, said Mohamud was a normal student who went to athletic events, drank the occasional beer and was into rap music and culture.
Stand with our North Korean allies? You betcha! As Sarah Palin?s latest gaffe hit the blogosphere, it reminded us all that foreign policy is not her, um, strong suit. But this faux pas may not be her fault: you can?t see the Koreas from Alaska, and gosh darn it,...
5 Mining Projects That Could Devastate the Entire Planet
Burning coal and oil for more than 100 years has resulted in human-made climate change. We cannot allow another 100 years of the same.
I?m not talking about fossil-digging projects that tell us something about our ecological past or our cultural past. I?m talking about digging for coal and oil. I remember reading somewhere that ?the largest profits are made by making and selling products that go up in the air.? Throughout the twentieth century digging for coal and oil, and then burning it to send carbon into the air was enough to ensure astronomical profits for a handful of fossil-fuel corporations.
?What goes up must come down.? For a hundred years, burning all that coal and oil gave us -- the humans -- great comforts, but the carbon we sent up in the air also resulted in the tremendous pain of climate change -- the rapid melting of sea ice and icebergs that is destroying Arctic
McConnell & Boehner, Repeal health care? Give up your own first!
clipped by:thinkingblue clippers remarks: Please sign this petition. I did with this comment:
It is amazing how the conservatives manipulate their words and try to make us all believe their only interests is for the Common Good and America. When we all know in reality the truth is that they could care less about America and WE THE PEOPLE. Their interests are purely corporate, in other words whats good for the corporations is good for them. So the likelihood of such conservatives like McConnell, Boehner, et al who vow to make health care strictly a corporate commodity, voluntarily giving up their own government sponsored health care? Yeah right, WHEN HELL FREEZES OVER AND PIGS FLY! Their hypocrisy is so thick its a wonder that anything else can fit into their small unthinking brains. thinkingblue
Subject: Repeal health care? Give up your own first!
Dear Friend,
For 2 years, GOP leaders in Congress fought tooth and nail to oppose health care reform. They did their best to keep tens of millions without coverage, decrying any effort to help citizens as "socialist," "fascist" or some other equally baffling "ist." And incredibly, they are now talking about repealing it.
Well, four brave members of Congress are calling GOP leaders on their hypocrisy, demanding they practice what they preach, and calling on them to give up their government-sponsored health care. And we couldnt agree more:
Write Congressman Boehner and Senator McConnell today. Tell them if they want to repeal health care, they need to practice what they preach, and give up their own government-sponsored health care first.
Please sign this petition. I did with this comment:
t is amazing how the conservatives manipulate their words and try to make us all believe their only interests is for the Common Good and America.
Still having Scrabulous withdrawal pains? In need of a little sun? Perhaps you should do what Jane and Keith Crane did: build an 8-foot Scrabble board in your backyard. Ken Love/Akron Beacon Journal
But for the love of god, you absolutely MUST NOT open her box. It?s full of singing maps and talking backpacks and terrible Spanglish singalong songs that no sober person in the world should ever be subjected to! ? Matty Malaprop
Bobcat and Fawn Find Friendship After Fire (Credit Lisa Mathiasen/ Animal Rescue Team)
A wildfire in Santa Barbara, California last month helped forge some unlikely bonds. Rescued from the Jesusita Fire, a 3-week old bobcat kitten and 3 day old fawn became fast friends. The animal rescue in California brought predator and prey together. But these babies simply took comfort in each other?s company, snuggling under a desk at a dispatch office for hours.
The bobcat and fawn would not normally be placed together, due to regulations, but the rescuers had no choice. They snagged the bobcat kitten first, finding it dehydrated and near death. Later, they brought in the fawn and discovered they didn?t have a crate large enough for it. No matter ? the kitten ran right over to the fawn, and the two became fast friends.
Bobcat and Fawn - fast friends! (Credit Lisa Mathiasen/ Animal Rescue Team)
Canadian-born Nielsen started out as a serious actor but in 1980, his role as a hapless doctor in the disaster spoof film Airplane! made him a comic star.
In all, he appeared in more than 100 films and had a star on Hollywoods Walk of Fame.
He died in hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he was being treated for pneumonia, his agent John S Kelly said.
"With his friends and his wife by his side, he just fell asleep and passed away," his nephew Doug Nielsen told the AFP news agency.
The wind outside the trailer grew louder and louder, like the sound of fighter jets closing in. Next thing, the locked front and back doors of the mobile home were blown off their hinges
? but nothing could prepare Matt Suter for what was about to happen. Seconds later, the tornado ripped the home apart and lifted the 19-year old high school senior into its jaws
Suter was carried nearly a quarter of a mile by the twister?s raging 150 mph winds. He was hurled over a barbed wire fence 200 yards from his grandmother?s shattered trailer and finally dropped in the soft grass of an open field. Incredibly, his injuries were limited
Before Suter, the longest anyone had travelled in such an incident occurred in 1955 in South Dakota when a 9-year old girl and her pony were borne 1000 feet before being gently dropped down almost unscathed
You only have to buy a frame (if you are not able to make one yourself) and you get a wonderful and very cheap gift that anyone will love. You just have to choose from the sites I post here, where the prints are available for personal use.
This site has lot?s of illustrations in PDF format from very different artists that you can print out on some cardstock and frame or even just thumbtack to the wall. source
Beautiful animal prints. There are three patterns of each of the three animals you can choose: elephant, crocodile and giraffe. source
Teachers at Heathrow Elementary School have been ordered to banish images of Santa Claus from classrooms ? along with traditional Christmas colors like red and green.
?You can?t use red and green,? one outraged parent told WESH. ?It?s ridiculous.?
The parent, who serves as a volunteer room mother, said she was recently given a list of guidelines that listed the holiday restrictions.
She said the basic theme of the letter was, ?We don?t want to offend anyone who doesn?t believe in Santa Claus or the Christian beliefs.?
The Seminole County School Board has a policy that demands employees must be neutral on religious issues. Schools are not allowed to observe or promote holidays as religious events.
The school district says they celebrate the season with a winter theme.
A Dáil member having a smoke break outside Leinster House
[DUBLIN] TWENTY-SEVEN Irish TDs (members of parliament) have lost their High Court challenge to a controversial new Health & Safety regulation which requires politicians to wear dung catchers suspended from their ears. Mr Justice Liam No Shit Sherlock ruled that the incoming regulations were essential in order to manage the increasing amounts of bullshit emanating from Irish politicians.
A gene therapy technique which aims to ease memory problems linked to Alzheimers Disease has been successfully tested in mice.
US scientists used it to increase levels of a chemical which helps brain cells signal to each other.
This signalling is hindered in Alzheimers Disease
Alzheimers disease and other forms of dementia are set to increase
boosting the brain chemical, a neurotransmitter called EphB2, could help reduce or even prevent some of the worst effects of the condition
the chemical plays an important role in memory, and is depleted in Alzheimers patients
"We think that blocking amyloid proteins from binding to EphB2, and enhancing EphB2 levels or functions with drugs might be of benefit in Alzheimers Disease."
However UK researchers said that the find, while interesting, did not offer a swift answer to Alzheimers patients.
"This research adds a piece to the Alzheimers puzzle and provides new leads for researchers.
Mystery Surrounds Cyber Missile That Crippled Irans Nuclear...Ambitions
clipped by:jatfla clippers remarks: AMAZING!!! No one had to seek airspace permission from anyone, launch a military attack on Iran, endure one life lost in this operation. Who do we know who is brilliant enough to produce such a computer "worm"? :~) And thats one secret that better never find its way to Wikileaks.
Mystery Surrounds Cyber Missile That Crippled Irans Nuclear Weapons Ambitions
, the job is handled by a suave and very sophisticated secret computer worm, a jumble of code called Stuxnet, which in the last year has not only crippled Irans nuclear program but has caused a major rethinking of computer security around the globe.
computer security companies and the nuclear industry have been trying to analyze the worm since it was discovered in June by a Belarus-based company that was doing business in Iran
Stuxnet is an incredibly advanced, undetectable computer worm that took years to construct and was designed to jump from computer to computer until it found the specific, protected control system that it aimed to destroy: Iran?s nuclear enrichment program.
And finally, after the job was done, the worm would have to destroy itself without leaving a trace.
That is what we are learning happened at Irans nuclear facilities
clipped by:ratilfar clippers remarks: Its first worth noting that there is no evidence that Assange has "blood on his hands." In a review of a previous round of leaks on Afghanistan, the Pentagon found no evidence that anyone had been endangered.
But more important: Palin is advocating that Assange be pursued like an al-Qaida operative. In the current context, its not unreasonable to interpret that to mean he should be assassinated.
This is rather like Palins recent stance against the 16th Amendment and the federal income tax: If shes going to be a serious political figure, she should be required to publicly explain and defend her positions. A serious media interview would be the perfect forum, one were not likely to get any time soon.
Potential GOP presidential contender Sarah Palin wins the prize for most feverish reaction to the WikiLeaks release with this new Facebook post:
[T]he latest round of publications of leaked classified U.S. documents through the shady organization called Wikileaks raises serious questions about the Obama administration?s incompetent handling of this whole fiasco.
First and foremost, what steps were taken to stop Wikileaks director Julian Assange from distributing this highly sensitive classified material especially after he had already published material not once but twice in the previous months? Assange is not a "journalist," any more than the "editor" of al Qaeda?s new English-language magazine Inspire is a "journalist." He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?
The business secretary, Vince Cable, is to introduce export restrictions on the painkilling drug sodium thiopental after it emerged that it has been used in executions in the US.
any British manufacturer seeking to export the drug will need a licence from the departments Export Control Organisation, involving a long series of questions at both sides of the export process about what the product might be used for
Cable said in a statement. "This move underlines this governments and my own personal moral opposition to the death penalty in all circumstances
The policy change is the result of revelations last month that British-manufactured sodium thiopental was being used as a painkiller in some US states prior to lethal injections
Lawyers argued that failing to ban exports was irrational and unlawful as state executions violate human rights.
All politicians should be congratulated when they admit a mistake
* You are like a wave in the ocean, like a gust of wind, like a lightning bolt ? each one unique, yet at the same time, part of a pattern of forces. But none of us have any special privilege in the universe.
* Your mind is the product of intricate, interlinked chemical process. It is complex, but it is also fragile, requiring a delicate balance of minute quantities of ions and molecules to function properly.
* You are impermanent. The wave will crash on the shore, the wind will dissipate, the lightning will flash and fade?and they will never return. One day, we all will die, and we each will simply cease to exist.
Thats the core of the matter, the piece Pell has right. The rest he has completely wrong.
We are not afraid. It takes courage to confront and accept reality. The person who has the perspective to appreciate his true place in the world, who can reconcile themself to their mortality and work forthrightly for the truth, is not the frightened
Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, has spoken.
"A minority of people, usually people without religion, are frightened by the future," he says. "Its almost as though theyve ? nothing but fear to distract themselves from the fact that without God the universe has no objective purpose or meaning. Nothing beyond the constructs they confect to cover the abyss."
Mr Pell has a few wrong ideas there, but there is a grain of truth to his statement. We dont believe the universe has been granted a grand purpose by some kind of deity, something central to the Abrahamic religions, at least, and we do offend Christians by our denial of a key tenet of their faith.
And thats just fine. We not only deny it, were proud of our understanding of reality. Its not just atheists that reject his god-granted purpose, but the nature of the universe that repudiates him. So lets be clear: here is an atheists understanding of oour place in the cosmos.
clipped by:ratilfar clippers remarks: So when German authorities began the process of pursuing the CIA agents responsible, John Koenig, deputy chief of the U.S. mission to Germany, intervened. Ultimately, the case did not go forward. Heres the key section from the cable (emphasis ours):
The DCM pointed out that our intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German Government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the U.S.
...
The DCM pointed out that the USG would likewise have a difficult time in managing domestic political implications if international arrest warrants are issued.
German citizen Khaled el-Masri, who was kidnapped by the CIA in 2003.
Here is an item to add to Salons list of significant WikiLeaks revelations: A top U.S. diplomat strongly warned German counterparts against issuing arrest warrants for CIA agents who were involved in the kidnapping of a German citizen, who was brought to Afghanistan and tortured before officials concluded that they had the wrong man.
Thats according to a February 2007 cable in the WikiLeaks trove. Germany ultimately opted not to pursue the case against the CIA agents.
At issue was the 2003 kidnapping in Macedonia of a German citizen of Lebanese descent, Khaled el-Masri. El-Masri was taken to a secret prison in Afghanistan, where he says he was questioned and tortured before being released several months later in a remote area of Albania. U.S. officials later conceded that el-Masri was mistakenly taken because his name was very similar to that of another man who was suspected of terrorist ties.
?Americans who affirm the idea of ?American exceptionalism,? a belief that God has given the U.S. a special role in human history, have a distinctly more militaristic approach to foreign policy than those who do not affirm this idea. Those who believe in American exceptionalism are more likely to favor military strength over diplomacy as the best way to ensure peace, and they are also more likely to say torture can be justified than those who do not believe God has given the U.S. a special role.?
Jones is referring to the disturbing finding in the same study that a majority of white Americans who say God has a special role for the U.S. also believe that peace is best found through the use of military strength rather than diplomacy and that torture can be justified in at least some cases.
Additionally, an especially regretful 73 percent of those who identify with the Tea Party chose military over diplomacy.
One of the most interesting items in the trove of diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks confirms that the Obama Administration has secretly launched missile attacks on suspected terrorists in Yemen, strikes that have reportedly killed dozens of civilians. The government of Yemen takes responsibility for the attacks.
The January 2010 cable describes a meeting between Gen. David Petraeus and President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, in which they discuss U.S. airstrikes.
Saleh lamented the use of cruise missiles that are "not very accurate" and welcomed the use of aircraft-deployed precision-guided bombs instead. "Well continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours," Saleh said, prompting Deputy Prime Minister Alimi to joke that he had just "lied" by telling Parliament that the bombs in Arhab, Abyan, and Shebwa were American-made but deployed by the ROYG.
clipped by:ratilfar clippers remarks: Shahriari was "in charge of one of the great projects" at Irans Atomic Energy Agency, nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi told the state news agency IRNA.
He was also a member of the so-called SESAME project on nuclear cooperation in the Middle East and conservative website Rajanews said he headed a "project that sought to achieve the technology to design nuclear reactor core."
The other scientist, Abbasi Davani, was targeted by UN Security Council sanctions under Resolution 1747 adopted in March 2007. He was identified as a senior defence ministry and armed forces logistics scientist.
Tehran police chief Hossein Sajedi-nia said the assailants had managed to escape and that "nobody had yet claimed responsibility" for the attacks.
In January, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, another Iranian nuclear scientist involved with the SESAME project, was killed in a bomb attack which Tehran blamed on "mercenaries" in the pay of Israel and the United States.
TEHRAN (AFP) - ? A defiant Iran admitted Monday that its atomic programme may have come under cyber-attack as one of its top nuclear scientists was killed by a bomb attached to his car in the capital and another was wounded by a similar device.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blamed the attacks against the two senior scientists in Irans controversial nuclear programme on Israel and Western powers led by the United States which accuse Iran of seeking to make atomic weapons.
Majid Shahriari was killed and his colleague Fereydoon Abbasi Davani was injured when men on motorcycles attached bombs to their cars in different parts of the capital as they made their way to work, police said.
Three others including the mens wives and a driver were also injured.
Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar blamed the Israeli spy agency Mossad and the CIA.
Israels foreign ministry declined to comment on the reports.
A 105-year-old Fort Myers woman might be old, but shes not dead.
Try telling that to the federal government.
Gladys Malarkey is alive again after she became bureaucratically deceased recently due to a Social Security Administration workers snafu, WBBH reported Tuesday.
"On paper, they had killed her," said daughter Beverly Ridge.
It turns out an investigator went to the address of a woman with the same last name as Malarkey, and when neighbors told the investigator that the Malarkey who lived there died, Gladys Social Security checks stopped rolling in.
When Malarkeys bank account started going into the red, Ridge stepped in to resurrect her.
"I have a birth certificate, all of this paperwork, I will bring everything," Ridge says she told the SSA.
"We have to do a resurrection," the SSA representative said, Ridge reports.
Malarkey was brought back to life and celebrated her 105th birthday Tuesday. She said shes seen a lot in her time and isnt ready for the party to end.
18 Former ACORN Workers Have Been Convicted or Admitted Guilt in Election Fraud
The scandal-plagued ACORN may no longer exist, but its tarnished legacy lives on in court, as the activist group and its former employees face criminal punishment.
So far this year, at least 18 former workers have admitted guilt or been convicted on varying charges of election fraud. The punishment has ranged from probation to several months of prison time.
ACORN, once a powerful advocate for low-income and minority voters, shuttered its operations amid plummeting revenues in March, six months after conservative activists posing as a pimp and prostitute caught on video some of the groups employees offering them tax advice.
Former workers across the country already are being punished for their criminal activities.
President Barack Obama has got his lips hurt during a session of a Basket Ball game, and now he needed stitches to stop his bleeding. The White House spokesperson stated that the President received at least 12 stitches on his lips, which was bleeding ever since he got it hurt during the game. Sources also state that his situation is not serious, as he walked out of the court without any assistance.
It was during the basket ball game, a game which loves playing regularly, he was inadvertently hit by someone?s elbow, and at that very moment his lips got hurt and started bleeding. It is said that he received 12 stitches by the doctor who was present on the ground floor of the White House.
He was just spending some time with his family members, and nothing much too intense. He is a great fan of outdoor sports
(CNN) -- Armed with just a video-enabled cell phone and a YouTube account, California resident John Tyner sparked a nationwide controversy over new TSA backscatter imaging machines and pat-down procedures during the busy holiday air travel season.
Note that Tyner apparently did not inform the TSA officials that he was recording the encounter, which may also be why he didnt point the phone at them. Recording police or security officers can be a legal gray area.
Three of these states have taken this recording restriction a step further. According to McElroy, Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts have specifically made it "illegal to record an on-duty police officer even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists."
Its unclear whether this law also applies to other security officers such as TSA, transit police, or campus security.
A Thanksgiving Message to All 57 States from Sarah Palin
clipped by:Steve Savage clippers remarks: If you can?t remember hearing about them, that?s because for the most part the media didn?t consider them newsworthy.
Obviously, I would have been even more impressed if the media showed some consistency on this issue. Unfortunately, it seems they couldn?t resist the temptation to turn a simple one word slip-of-the-tongue of mine into a major political headline.
African great apes play that ever-popular kids game as a way to learn how to keep a competitive edge.
Gorillas and other African great apes have been videotaped playing tag.
The game hones communication skills and helps test the limits of others, researchers believe.
Young dogs, coyotes and wolves also play tag, other research suggests.
Young gorillas and other African great apes play a lot of tag, suggesting that this common childhood pastime has deep primate roots, according to a new study.
Tag is based on hit-and-run behavior, and the study, published in the latest Royal Society Biology Letters, presents the first evidence that non-human species try to maintain their competitive advantage when responding to an unfair situation.
clipped by:jerry23w clippers remarks: 120ft (36.6m) long, Qeswachaka Bridge is built out of special grass called Qoya. It has to be rebuilt every year. It is in Canas province in Cuzco in Peru.
the media are infatuated with the idea that excessive partisanship is a symmetrical problem. If only the Republicans and the Democrats would meet each other halfway, the nations ills would be solved
There are two problems with this formulation, one tactical and the other substantive. The tactical problem is that the Republicans and Democrats arent playing the same game. So if the Democrats meet the Republicans half way, the Republicans only demand that they do it again
The tactical asymmetry connects to the substantive problem -- the fact that the solution to what ails the economy is somewhere to the left of most Democrats, not midway between, say, President Obama and Mitch McConnell. The economy will be fixed only with more public investment, more progressive taxation, and more regulation, but partisan compromise dictates less of each.
Our President, unfortunately, has played right into this trap
clipped by:jatfla clippers remarks: I admit Ive never heard of this man before but I think Ive found a truth-speaker. This is an amazingly blunt denouncement of the European Union Utopia.
clipped by:merrie clippers remarks: Just this past week, the federal government took decisive action to shut down more than 70 Web sites that were disseminating pirated music and movies. Hollywood is safe, but WikiLeaks is free to disseminate classified documents without consequence.
It seems more than passingly strange that this administration has taken stronger action against copyright infringement than in protecting the secrets of the US and its allies. The Dept. of Justice didn?t use the US Cyber Command to take down the infringing sites, of course, and the Obama administration has publicly requested intervention by Sweden to essentially do the same thing to Assange that the DoJ did to the allegedly infringing websites, to no avail. There is a certain amount of consistency between the two for the White House, even if the contexts are wildly disparate.
The US is not bound to act only through civil courts for its own defense outside of the borders of the US, whether those courts are ours or another ...
The failure to act shows a weakness in Obama that increases the risk for the US, Thiessen argues in today?s Washington Post:
The Obama administration has the ability to bring Assange to justice and to put WikiLeaks out of business. The new U.S. Cyber Command could shut down WilkiLeaks? servers and prevent them from releasing more classified information on President Obama?s orders. But, as The Post reported this month, the Obama administration has been paralyzed by infighting over how, and when, it might use these new offensive capabilities in cyberspace. One objection: ?The State Department is concerned about diplomatic backlash? from any offensive actions in cyberspace, The Post reported. Well, now the State Department can deal with the ?diplomatic backlash? that comes from standing by helplessly, while WikiLeaks releases hundreds of thousands of its most sensitive diplomatic cables.
Contrast this, Thiessen argues, to the way Obama protected Hollywood last week:
clipped by:merrie clippers remarks: And even the most secular and westernized Muslim will sooner or later feel an imperative to escape from the complications of modern life, into the pure simplicity of Islam. The media charges that such escapees misunderstand Islam, but in actuality they understand it quite well. It is a reversion to the barbaric, an Islamic narrative that sweeps aside the complexities of civilization and personal choice for something more elemental.
Goggling when university grads, doctors and other high end professionals suddenly embrace their "Inner Mohammed" and go on killing sprees is foolish. Modernity for the Muslim is a sham inflicted by colonialism and globalism on his own country and multiculturalism when hes abroad in the West. It is not the natural product of his own advancements, and no matter how often hes told that his people invented everything from telescopes to planes, its always a poor fit.
Civilization is not something the Muslim invented, but something that was forced
Last years Christmas terrorist hailed from Nigeria. This years mad Muslim bomber comes from Somalia.
If gift wrapping and church going are Christmas traditions, carrying out massacres during other peoples holiday celebrations is a Muslim tradition. In Israel, holidays are a time for extra special caution. The Passover massacre in which dozens of senior citizens attending a holiday meal were murdered, the Yom Kippur War in which Muslim armies invaded Israel on the holiest day of its year or the Purim bombing outside a Tel Aviv mall using a nail bomb, are just some of the obvious examples of Muslim religious tolerance at work.
For the Muslim, life is complicated, but Islam is simple
Unlike Christians and Jews, the Islamic holy texts are not a complicated structure that takes place across a swath of history-- but an enormously simple one dominated by a relatively brief period and a single categorical imperative, to expand, dominate and rule.
Small Business Article Roundup for Week Ending November 26, 2010
clipped by:mirbiz clippers remarks: Want to read some of the best small business articles from the past week? Check out my small business article round up for the week ending November 26th.
Small Business Article Roundup for Week Ending November 26, 2010
by Mir Rooshanak on November 29, 2010
There are tons of small business blogs and news sites out there, but you don?t have tons of free time. Here are some of my favorite small business articles from the past week.
Be sure to check back next Monday for a new Small Business Article Roundup.
Got your own favorite small business article from the past week? Please share it in the comment section below.
Follow me on for additional tips and up to the minute updates.
?Thankfulness takes the sting out of adversity. That is why I have instructed you to give thanks for everything. There is an element of mystery in this transaction: You give Me thanks (regardless of your feelings), and I give you Joy (regardless of your circumstances).?
Dem. Whip Hoyer Says Pay Freeze Should Include Military
clipped by:n2sooners clippers remarks: He says it would add an element of fairness, but in all fairness, it would only be fair if your average military member made twice as much as your average civilian performing the same job just like the average non-military government employee does.
Former House Majority Leader, and newly-elected minority whip, Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said today that President Obama?s just-announced pay freeze for 2 million civilian government employees should also be extended to military personnel.
?While I appreciate that the president reduced the length of his proposed pay freeze from three to two years,? Hoyer said in a statement according to The Hill, ?it would have produced significantly more savings had that sacrifice been shared between federal civilian and military personnel ? with a strong exception for the members of our military and civilian employees risking their lives on our behalf in Afghanistan, Iraq, and anywhere else they are serving in harm?s way.?
According to Hoyer in the statement, including the military would have increased savings and added ?an element of fairness.?
Sure, the reckless way that people ran banks is the major cause of our woes. But the property speculators who took the banks money during the good times, and are now unwilling to pay it back, are a huge contributing factor. And that rogues gallery contains a certain Jim Corr.
Contrary to what you might think from his anti-capitalist ranting, Jim was not averse to riding the property boom himself. And one of his investments, a plot of land in Kilkenny that he and a partner bought with a ?1.3m loan back in 2004, is currently the subject of litigation by ACC, who is still attempting to get its loan repaid, six years on.
A solicitors firm has attempted numerous times to serve Jim a summons, but have complained that hes been deliberately avoiding them, so theyve had to seek special dispensation to post it to him.
Perhaps this idea of a bank wanting to get its money back is another of Jims capitalist-led conspiracies?
The latest initiative from the climate change chameleon is to frame global warming as detrimental to the health of U.S. citizens. On September 28, a joint letter from 120 of America?s health organizations was delivered to President Obama, supporting efforts by the Environmental Regulatory Agency to regulate greenhouse gases. The letter claims that man-made global warming is now a U.S. public health issue especially for ?older adults.? Yet senior citizens continue to retire to Florida, Texas, and Arizona rather than North Dakota and Minnesota. Don?t they know that warmer temperatures are a serious health risk?
Chinese leaders are said to have grown increasingly frustrated with their North Korean allies
Senior Chinese officials reportedly told a South Korean minister the Korean peninsula should be reunified under Seouls control, according to leaked classified US diplomatic cables.
They are said to have told an ex-South Korean minister China placed little value on the North as a buffer state.
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei meanwhile allegedly said Pyongyang was behaving like a "spoiled child".
The US says the Wikileaks disclosures are an attack on the world community.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that every country had to be able to have honest, private dialogue with other countries about issues of common concern.
But she said she was confident that partnerships the current US administration had worked hard to build, would withstand this challenge.
North Korea claims "thousands" of nuclear centrifuges
Yongbyon houses a peaceful nuclear programme, says North Korea
North Korea says it has thousands of centrifuges operating at a previously undetected uranium enrichment facility it revealed earlier this month.
The North Koreans say the plant is for civil nuclear power. Its not clear whether the centrifuges could be used to produce material for weapons.
A US scientist has seen the facility, but could not confirm it was working.
The claim comes as tensions remain high, after the North shelled a South Korean island a week ago.
Earlier in November, US scientist Siegfried Hecker visited Yongbyon and said the equipment he was shown was "stunning".
The North Koreans assured him the centrifuges were working, producing low enriched uranium which would be used as fuel in an experimental light water nuclear reactor they were building.
They say they want to use it to produce electricity.
Color. What other factor in art is so simultaneously fascinating and frustrating for artists?
Numerous books have been written on the subject; some are less than worthwhile, some are good, some are excellent, and a few have become so relied on that over time they have become standards.
Each takes a certain approach to the subject, emphasizing color choices, color mixing, experimentation, analysis, etc., but of the many books on color that I?ve encountered
there always seemed to be key parts of the puzzle that hadn?t been addressed yet ? a certain kind of book on color that was missing
In Color and Light, which has just been released, we get the printed version of having an experienced painter leaning over our shoulder, giving us his best advice and taking us beyond the basics into the subtleties of the practical application of color in the process of creating paintings.
You look at the governing structure of the New York [Federal Reserve], it was run by the very banks that got the money. This is a Ponzi scheme, an inside job. It is outrageous, it is time for Congress to say enough of this. And to give them more power now is crazy.
Extremely important clip. Please share it anywhere and everywhere across the net. Our only hope to stop the heist will come from greater awareness. Thank you.
An outstanding discussion, primer and visual lesson on toxic assets, failed banks, the Federal Reserve, HR 1207, auditing the Fed, and the cost to taxpayers.
Dylan puts on his Banker hat and swaps a (literal) bag of trash, on-air, for $13.9 Trillion worth of Monopoly money from a guy wearing a "Fed" hat.
"The Federal Reserve just extended $14 Trillion of our money, our childrens money, Americas future...and now they dont want to talk about whats in the bag. And they did it because the banks created a garbage bag full of bad debts." (4:45)
Okay, let?s get right to the point ? this thing is expensive. Like $500 expensive. So, let?s glory in expensive contraptions. The rubber band gatling gun is one bad, er, toy.
It?s pretty explanatory. Here are the features:
Mounted flashlight. (batteries included)
100 rounds capacity, ?shoot as fast as you crank? gatling gun. (2 lbs of rubber bands included)
Gun self-supports with the barrels aligned with the users arm to aid in accuracy
Ships with operators manual, and features a pictorial loading instructions quick-guide.
Governor Elect Brian Sandovals transition team announced that he has appointed Clark County School District School Board President Terri Janison to run his Las Vegas office.
This is a good move for Janison because she is unpopular with the party and has proven herself so incompetent in running the district and the school board meetings that she now could not be elected dog catcher.
clipped by:MrGhaz clippers remarks: In fact, the average daily cholesterol intake of British males is about 390 mg daily and those women enough 290 mg-enough to raise blood cholesterol levels by about 5 percent.
Despite several decades in the spotlight of medical and media concern, cholesterol remains one of the most contentious aspects of the factors that influence our health. Medical experts disagree about its relationship to heart disease, and the public is uncertain as to what cholesterol actually is. People often tend to confuse the two types of cholesterol-dietary cholesterol and blood or `plasma? cholesterol. The first is contained in food, the other is essential for the body?s metabolism.
Each day the liver manufactures up to 1g of blood cholesterol, the fat-like waxy material that is a component of all cells. Blood cholesterol is also involved in the creation of some hormones, and helps to make vitamin D and bile acids, which aid digestion.
The major risks of heart disease sterol are rooted in genetic make-up, though diet and obesity are also important factors. Which there is nothing that can be done about heredity; you can change your diet.
Decreasing snowfall was once claimed as an indication of man-made climate change. After years of declining snowfall in England, Dr. David Viner, senior scientist at the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia, predicted that winter snowfall would become ?a very rare and exciting event.? Others predicted that snow cover in the United Kingdom would disappear by 2020. But last winter, at the same time that much of the eastern U.S. received record snowfalls, the U.K. was entirely blanketed by snow, as shown in the following NASA satellite photograph ? a rare occurrence.
The heavy snow in England was very embarrassing for the U.K. Meteorological Office, which had predicted a mild winter.
So what have the alarmists done? Attend almost any lecture today by an advocate of man-made global warming and you?ll find that ?heavy snowfall? is now included on the list of impacts from climate change. Now both heavy snow and lack of snow are evidence of man-made warming.
Saudi King Urged Strike on Iran, Cut Off Snakes Head
clipped by:AndrwDerAlex clippers remarks: A copy of the cable dated April 20, 2008, was published in the New York Times website Sunday after being released by the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. The classified communication between the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh and Washington showed the Saudis feared Shiite Irans rising influence in the region, particularly in neighboring Iraq.
Saudi King Urged Strike on Iran, Cut Off Snakes Head
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia repeatedly exhorted the United States to "cut off the head of the snake" by launching military strikes to destroy Irans nuclear program, according to leaked U.S. diplomatic cables.
A copy of the cable dated April 20, 2008, was published in the New York Times website Sunday after being released by the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. The classified communication between the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh and Washington showed the Saudis feared Shiite Irans rising influence in the region, particularly in neighboring Iraq.
The United States has repeatedly said that the military option is on the table, but at the same time U.S. military chiefs have made clear they view it as a last resort, fearing it could ignite wider conflict in the Middle East.
Tens of thousands of people have marched through Dublin in protest at the governments austerity programme.
The march has been organised as a response to the states austerity plan
Protest leaders said it was the first of many demonstrations over plans to raise taxes and cut public spending.
The austerity programme is designed to cut the Irish Republics massive government deficit, exacerbated by the rescue of the countrys banks.
The march came as officials met to hammer out the final details of a financial bail-out for the country.
The EU and the IMF are set to lend the country more than 85bn euros ($113bn; £72bn), with the terms of the deal expected to be announced on Sunday ahead of the markets re-opening on Monday.
Exactly two things have made airplane travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers they need to fight back. Everything else has been a waste of money. Add screening of checked bags and airport workers and we?re done. Take all the rest of the money and spend it on investigation and intelligence.
Geometry, not God, as an Explanation for the Universe
Given how fundamental numbers and mathematics are to physics and our universe, it wouldnt be surprising if the "explanation for everything" were found in a branch of mathematics. There is certainly much more value to be found in mathematics than in theology ? at least, there is if your goal is to better understand reality and our universe. Garrett Lisis idea may prove to be wrong, but even so it is already and will remain far superior to anything produced by theologians and apologists who try to explain the universe. The mere fact that it is objectively testable makes it so.
Transforming vacant urban lots into farms and community gardens could provide Detroit residents with a majority of their fruits and vegetables. As city officials ponder proposals for urban farms, a new study indicates that a combination of urban farms, community gardens, storage facilities and hoop houses -- greenhouses used to extend the growing season -- could supply local residents with more than 75 percent of their vegetables and more than 40 percent of their fruits.
Israel has a completely different security system. The Israeli regulator (Israel Security Agency) analyzes the threats and vulnerabilities. It then provides guidance to the airports and border crossings on how best to utilize technologies. Therefore Israel is not scanning for liquids, and neither does it have to use body scanners or screen personnel and crew.
The current security system in which everyone is a suspect is bound to be ineffective and burdensome. No system can perform efficiently when one is looking for a needle in a haystack by checking each straw individually.
clipped by:mountainpalm clippers remarks: How does a state devolve into such ridiculous and dire straits? Well read the following excerpt from the ?Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices?: But instead of cutting programs or saving money, the city is spending millions of dollars because Title Case is slightly more readable and therefore, presumably, some fractional bit ?safer.? I posted this Oct. 5, 2010. Re-posting as they are making it nationwide.....at phenominal unsustainable costs. States cannot AFFORD this excess. And 3M......makes all the reflective material needed for this massive government undertaking. SPEAK up....Say NO.....People in this country are HUNGRY.....street signs are low on my priority list. GREED, CORRUPTION....and 3M in the middle.
Opening a new front in the War on Error, New York City will soon spend an estimated 27 million dollars to get the city?s thousands of streetsigns to STOP YELLING AT YOU! In the name of readability the city will be moving from CAPS LOCK to Title Case on all streetsigns. There are over a quarter of a million signs to be replaced at a cost of $110 each.
According to the Federal Highway Administration, mixed-case signs are more readable; according to the city?s Transportation Commissioner, they?re also kinder and gentler. From the New York Post report:
The new diminutive signs, which will also feature new reflective sheeting, may also reflect a kinder, gentler New York, she said.
?On the Internet, writing in all caps means you are shouting,? she said. ?Our new signs can quiet down, as well.?
A newly found bumpy-skinned, terrestrial amphibian lived 70 million years before dinosaurs in what is now Pennsylvania.
A skull found at a FedEx site near Pittsburgh International Airport belonged to a meat-eating amphibian.
The carnivorous amphibian lived 70 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged.
Although the amphibian became extinct, it belonged to a superfamily that may have given rise to modern amphibians.
An interesting "rock" initially tossed aside at a FedEx site near Pittsburgh International Airport turns out to be the skull of a meat-eating, early terrestrial amphibian that lived 70 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged, according to a paper released today in Annals of Carnegie Museum.
Striegel originally threw it aside, thinking it wasnt important, but then he and class lecturer Charles Jones noticed pointy teeth and tusks, so the skull was brought to experts at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
Prosecutors in Farmington, NM have said that after three men finished their shifts working at a local McDonald?s this past April, they ?shaped a coat hanger into a swastika, placed it on a heated stove and branded the symbol on the arm of the mentally disabled Navajo man.?
Fossils of a new dinosaur have frozen the animal during its final moments.
A new sauropodomorph dinosaur has been discovered at Utahs red rocks.
The dinosaur was buried, possibly while it was still alive, by a collapsing sand dune.
The buried remains represent Utahs oldest most complete dinosaur.
During the Early Jurassic Period, a sand dune collapsed at Utahs red rocks with such force that it might have buried alive a plant-eating dinosaur, entombing and preserving the dinosaur upside-down for 185 million years, according to a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE.
Ruess body has never been found, but the fossils of the new dinosaur froze the animals final moments. A CT scan reveals the dinosaur was missing a single toe and a lower leg bone, suggesting that it either died and was shortly thereafter engulfed by a collapsing sand dune, or was buried alive.
clipped by:tabsey clippers remarks: This should enable a few to see that whistleblowing is good. The news may not be the crap we get fed by the media, all nice and socially acceptable because most families eat dinner during it, but it is the real news.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has claimed a fresh "mega leak" will target a major US bank early next year.
Speaking to Forbes magazine, Mr Assange said he was ready to unleash tens of thousands of documents that could "take down a bank or two".
Comparing the documents to the emails that exposed Enrons dealings amid its collapse, the controversial Australian said an existing "big US bank" was the subject of a pending data dump.
Asked about any future leaks, he said: "Yes. We have one related to a bank coming up, thats a mega leak.
"Its not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but its either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it."
As international investigations are fired up following the latest leak, Mr Assange has been offered residency in Ecuador with "no questions asked".
Earlier this month an international arrest warrant was issued against him on suspicion of rape and sexual molestation of two women in Sweden.
Wanted posters and matchboxes distributed in Pakistan were met with shops selling pro-Osama souvenir versions
A Pakistani man in Peshawar looks at posters for sale depicting Osama bin Laden as a hero. Photograph: Tariq Mahmood/AFP
Osama bin Laden has been a bugbear for American officials in Pakistan since long before the 9/11 attacks. In 1999 the Islamabad embassy noted that Bin Laden posters were hitting the streets for just 30 cents ? "a bit more than the cost of a sidewalk haircut".
The posters, officials wrote despairingly, were proving more popular than the US governments "wanted" posters, which risked proving counter-productive. New wanted posters and matchboxes "may increase [Bin Laden]s stature as a kind of folk hero", they said.
Even the Taliban, "in sharp contrast with their ordinary execrable public relations performance", was doing better than the US, the message continued. "We face a formidable foe among those churning out pro-Osama propaganda."
clipped by:caseycain clippers remarks: The president of the UK Royal Society, Lord Rees, has said that it is "essential" for governments to prepare for the worst effects of climate change.
clipped by:hotdoge3 clippers remarks: However, despite saying his behaviour "seriously calls into question his fitness to be a teacher" the council did not cancel his registration.
He said the flag indicated the teacher had "transgressed some boundaries" but the council obviously "saw merit in giving this person at least one more chance".
A male teacher who told a female student she had "nice tits" and "a nice bum" has escaped deregistration by the Teachers Council.
He has instead had his practising certificate suspended until he addresses his "lack of understanding of proper boundaries".
But, once that happens, there is nothing to stop him from returning to the classroom if a school chooses to employ him.
The Teachers Council complaints assessment committee found the year 11 teacher, who has not been identified, behaved in an "unprofessional manner amounting to serious misconduct with a number of his students".
He used inappropriate and repeated sexualised comments such as telling one student she had "nice tits", "a nice bum", her older sister was "hot" and inquiring whether she was a virgin.
Responding to the allegations the teacher, who has since resigned, admitted making some of the comments but had justifications for many of them.
clipped by:tabsey clippers remarks: Other scientists, however, point out that mice lacking telomerase are a poor stand-in for the normal aging process. Moreover, ramping up telomerase in humans could potentially encourage the growth of tumors. (Dont think my aging processes had much to do with my aging. More the outside influences introduced to it.)
Dramatic rejuvenation of prematurely aged mice hints at potential therapy.
Premature aging can be reversed by reactivating an enzyme that protects the tips of chromosomes, a study in mice suggests.
Mice engineered to lack the enzyme, called telomerase, become prematurely decrepit. But they bounced back to health when the enzyme was replaced. The finding, published online November 28 in Nature, hints that some disorders characterized by early aging could be treated by boosting telomerase activity. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)
It also offers the possibility that normal human aging could be slowed by reawakening the enzyme in cells where it has stopped working, says Ronald DePinho, a cancer geneticist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who led the new study. "This has implications for thinking about telomerase as a serious anti-aging intervention."
Australian scientists fear the planet is on the brink of another mass extinction as ocean dead zones continue to grow in size and number.
More than 400 ocean dead zones - areas so low in oxygen that sea life cannot survive - have been reported by oceanographers around the world between 2000 and 2008.
That is compared with 300 in the 1990s and 120 in the 1980s.
there is growing evidence that declining oxygen levels in the ocean have played a major role in at least four of the planets five mass extinctions
"Until recently the best hypothesis for them was a meteor strike
"But with the four other mass extinction events, one of the best explanations now is that these periods were preceded by an increase of volcanic activity, and that volcanic activity caused a change in ocean circulation
"The consequence of that is that you had increased amounts of rotten egg gas, hydrogen sulfide, going up into the atmosphere, and that is thought to be what may have caused some of these other extinction events
Extra Vitamin D and Calcium Aren?t Needed, Report Says
clipped by:tabsey clippers remarks: Like most supplements, the people who most need them, cant afford them. The people who can afford to eat well can afford to waste money on supplements. I can afford fish oil and zinc ( for infections)
The very high levels of vitamin D that are often recommended by doctors and testing laboratories ? and can be achieved only by taking supplements ? are unnecessary and could be harmful, an expert committee says. It also concludes that calcium supplements are not needed.
The group said most people have adequate amounts of vitamin D in their blood supplied by their diets and natural sources like sunshine, the committee says in a report that is to be released on Tuesday.
?For most people, taking extra calcium and vitamin D supplements is not indicated,? said Dr. Clifford J. Rosen, a member of the panel and an osteoporosis expert at the Maine Medical Center Research Institute.
Dr. J. Christopher Gallagher, director of the bone metabolism unit at the Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, Neb., agreed, adding, ?The onus is on the people who propose extra calcium and vitamin D to show it is safe before they push it on people.?
clipped by:tabsey clippers remarks: What a joke. And they expect us to believe that they wont misuse their proposed net filter. A person may send copies of the stories in foreign media to the politicians, who will probably be denied access also. Must be helpful.
Editors around Australia are not likely to respond favourably to potential requests from the Federal Government that they not publish potentially damaging information revealed by WikiLeaks.
As the whistleblower group continues to drip feed thousands of US diplomatic cables, Attorney-General Robert McClelland says the Governments focus is on minimising the fallout of their release.
While Australia has been mentioned in some despatches, the main revelations have included details of the poor reputation Irans president holds among his peers and evidence that Chinas commitment to North Korea is wavering badly.
"From my point of view, there is potentially some documentation that relates to national security-sensitive information that could prejudice the national security interests of Australia," Mr McClelland said.
He says media organisations could be asked to refrain from publishing some of the WikiLeaks material.
A woman claims shes now the legal owner of the sun after registering the star at a local notary public as being her property.
Whats more, 49-year-old Angeles Duran from Spain says she now wants to start charging everyone on the Earth for using it.
While an international agreement states no country may claim ownership of a planet or star, Duran says there is nothing stopping an individual.
As such she says shes now the rightful owner of the sun and wants to charge anyone who uses it, in a bid to raise money for the Spanish government, research, ending world hunger? and herself.
A Wave of Democratic State Lawmakers Defecting to GOP
(Newser) ? Democratic losses didn?t stop on Election Day: Since Nov. 2, at least 13 state lawmakers have switched over to the Republican party, the AP reports. Many of the defections took place in the South, where dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party is high. In some states, like Alabama and Louisiana, the party switches gave control of the House to Republicans. Georgia Rep. Alan Powell, who switched to the GOP this month, said that the GOP sweep of his state brought ?an effective end, at least for the foreseeable future, to the two-party system in state government.?
Some lawmakers say that the Democratic party is becoming too liberal; others just wanted a chance to stay in the game?which meant turning to the Republicans.
clipped by:merrie clippers remarks: It was childishly easy, according to the published chatlog of a conversation Manning had with a fellow-hacker. ?I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like ?Lady Gaga? ? erase the music ? then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing ? [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga?s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.? He said that he ?had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months?.
More than 3 million US government personnel and soldiers, many extremely junior, are cleared to have potential access to this material, even though the cables contain the identities of foreign informants, often sensitive contacts in dictatorial regimes. Some are marked ?protect? or ?strictly protect?.
How the hell does a 22-year old private have access to this stuff?
Lady Gaga? Is this a joke?
In case you are thinking that Private Manning was some kind of brilliant cyber-sleauth who figured out how to get special access to the cables:
Three million people have access to classified information that can ?spark a global diplomatic crisis?? Really? Again, is this some kind of joke? Do they give out access for simply eating your vegetables?
This is indicative of why I?ve never bought any of those wild conspiracies of super-secret actions by the government. Most of those theories would necessitate super-duper and elaborate planning and coordination and ninja-like execution. Our government just isn?t anywhere near that competent. Less like ninjas, it is really more like the Apple Dumpling Gang.
So, let?s put aside the gossipy stuff and ask the really important question: Who put these idiots in charge of anything?
The UK Guardian explains it was actually pretty easy:
New TSA Procedures are Unconstitutional and Ineffective
clipped by:merrie clippers remarks: Citizens have a constitutional right to be free from unreasonable search; contrary to the claims of some, they do not forfeit that or any other right by buying airline tickets. Random X-rays or the alternative manual searches are unreasonable in the most basic sense of the word, as there is no reason to suspect random individuals of terrorism.
Federal workers make twice as much as workers in the private sector. While the rest of the nation suffered through Obama?s first year in office, government workers increased their salaries by over $30,000 in 2009.
Today Barack Obama froze the pay for overpaid federal employees today. Of course, the state-run media won?t tell you they make twice as much as the private sector. The AP reported:
President Barack Obama will announce a two-year pay freeze for federal employees Monday, a move White House officials say is the first of many difficult decisions that must be made to reduce the nation?s mounting deficit.
For the record? The Number of Federal Workers Earning Over $150,000 Has Doubled Under Obama.
clipped by:CrazyRedHead clippers remarks: "One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor ?with both memory-storage and information-processing elements ? than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth."
The cortex of the human brain holds more than 100 trillion neural connections, or synapses, packed into a layer of tissue just 2 to 4 millimeters thick. Visualizing these densely packed units individually has proved extremely challenging.
Synapses in the brain are crowded in so close together that they cannot be reliably resolved by even the best of traditional light microscopes
The ability to study synapses en masse could help scientists understand Alzheimers disease, autism and other neurological and developmental disorders. Many of these have been shown to be linked to dysfunction or degeneration of the synapses.
collaborators first sliced thin pieces of brain tissue and then stained the slices with groups of three different antibodies. Each antibody was designed to bind to a specific type of protein found in different types of synapses and to glow a certain color, with 17 different antibodies in all.
The research was published this week in the journal Neuron.
DUSHANBE, Tajikistan ? If you search for ?unibrow,? Google will return about 200,000 results, the bulk of them devoted to tips on removing what in the West has become synonymous with unattractiveness.
There?s even a medical term, synophrys, meaning an overgrowth and fusion of the eyebrows.
And then there is Tajikistan, a small central Asian nation that could adopt many monikers ? Country of Beautiful Mountains, Realm of Terrifying Roads, and, best of all, Land of the Unibrow.
Sometimes the unibrows are natural ? black and bushy and ever elegant.
But those who missed out on the unibrow gene use an herbal remedy to fake it.
Asking Tajik women why they like the unibrow is a bit like asking Western women why they like to paint their nails or pluck their eyebrows into oblivion.
"I just think its beautiful," was, without exception, the answer I got after asking more than a dozen Tajik women about their unibrows.
DIETARY PROTEIN SPEEDS UP WEIGHT LOSS WITH BLOOD SUGAR CONTROL
clipped by:ramirofrost clippers remarks: Speed up your weight loss by consuming enough quality protein that contains a key amino acid. Add this to your healthy eating plans. If you are like many weight loss seekers you do not eat enough protein in your healthy eating plans or healthy diet plans and especially not enough protein that contains the key BCAA leucine.
Hail, oh hail, ye happy spirits, Death no more shall make you fear, Grief nor sorrow, pain nor anguish, Shall no more distress you dere.
Although the Underground Railroad had already become famous ? and, for many Americans, infamous ? only a tiny percentage of slaves managed to escape to the North: estimates have put the number at just a thousand or so each year out of a total enslaved population of some four million. Still, these fugitives were a major bone of contention for disgruntled Southerners. An adult field hand could cost as much as $2,000, the equivalent of a substantial house. To Southerners, then, anyone who helped a man or woman escape bondage was simply a thief. But more infuriating than the monetary loss it occasioned, the Underground Railroad was an affront to the slaveholders? pride ? and a rebuke to those who insisted that black men and women were comfortable and contented in bondage.
clipped by:quickstar clippers remarks: For those who have traveled in China, or who have the pleasure of living here... To be fair, many many beggars in China truly are crippled and who rely on the generosity of kind passers-by, but theres also a fair number of fakers too.
Ever suspect that the beggars on the street are completely faking it? So did this blogger, Yuan Shengtai. Yuan was walking around the Zhongguancun neighborhood in Beijing one afternoon when he spotted a "paralyzed" beggar lying on the floor and what follows is this entertaining photo narrative. When Yuan began photographing the supposed cripple, the beggar got upset, stood up to scold him, and stalked off. Yuan walked away too but came back a few minutes later to see if the beggar had returned and true enough, the same beggar was sprawled at the same spot asking for money. While its not really news that some beggars are con men, its interesting to finally see photographic evidence of the deceit.
clipped by:Johanna_G clippers remarks: Das globalisierungskritische Netzwerk Attac unterstützt weiterhin den Aufruf des Aktionsbündnis gegen Stuttgart 21 unter dem Motto "Stuttgart ist überall!" zu einer Großdemonstration am 11. Dezember in Stuttgart. Proteste gegen S21 seien auch nach dem heute verkündeten Schlichtungsspruch notwendig. "Die Argumente der Befürworter von S21 konnten im Gegensatz zu den Gegnern nicht überzeugen", sagte Detlev von Larcher vom bundesweiten Attac-Koordinierungskreis. "Das Verfahren hat deutlich gemacht: Stuttgart 21 ist kein Kommunikationsfehler, sondern ein Großprojekt an den Menschen vorbei ? zu Gunsten der Immobilienbranche und eines Bahnkonzerns, der auf Prestigeprojekte statt kluge Mobilitätskonzepte setzt."
Die Globalisierungskritiker unterstützen die Forderung des Aktionsbündnisses, dass es eine Politik der "Alternativlosigkeit" und "Unumkehrbarkeit" über die Köpfe der Bürgerinnen und Bürger hinweg nicht mehr geben darf.
Seit Mitte des Jahres finden in Stuttgart und Umgebung regelmäßig "Schwabenstreiche" (Versammlung mit ein- bis mehrminütigem gemeinsamen Protestlärmen; siehe Wikipedia) statt, bevorzugt Montags und Mittwochs. Inzwischen werden in zahlreichen Städten in Deutschland Solidaritäts-Schwabenstreiche organisiert. Attac ruft dazu auf, sich überall vor Ort an den Protesten gegen Bauwahn und Demokratiedefizit zu beteiligen!
clipped by:foxyarse clippers remarks: Moore, who lives in Spring Hill, Florida , still says Republicans are still playing politics when they pin the ?socialist? label on the president and his party. GOP bigwigs know Obama?s not a socialist, according to Moore .
They also know that to many Americans ?socialist? conjures visions of the Cold War and Moscow ?s minions grimly goose-stepping through Red Square , accompanied by rumbling tanks and massive mobile missiles.
?They are injecting fear and ignorance into an uninformed electorate,? Moore said.
He?s a democratic socialist, far from a Marxist-Leninist. Democratic socialists believe in change through the ballot box, not the bullet. They oppose the anti-democratic excesses inherent in both Stalinist-style totalitarian communism and unfettered, greed-is-good capitalism.
Anyway, ?socialist? might be a smear word stateside, but it?s not an epithet in other industrial democracies. Like Moore , millions of people in those countries ? including our NATO allies ? proudl
2008 Socialist presidential hopeful says Obama?s a capitalist .
Republicans, especially Tea Party types, still claim President Obama has a ?socialist agenda.? Democrats keep on denying it.
Journalists dutifully report the dissing and the disavowals, claiming that?s giving the public both sides of the story.
Seldom do scribes ask Real McCoy Socialists like Brian Moore if the President is one of them.
Moore says no way. ?Obama?s actions and policies are capitalist to the core.?
Moore is the 67-year-old Floridian who topped the Socialist Party USA presidential ticket in the 2008. In this the most capitalist of Western industrial democracies, Moore managed just 6,528 votes nationwide.
Brian Moore
A few journalists sought Moore ?s opinion when Republicans started trashing Obama?s ?socialist? politics on the campaign trail two years ago. Moore even went on The Colbert Report to say that he, not Obama, was the genuine Socialist candidate.
Google has announced the release of Google Earth 6 - now with fully-integrated Street View allowing amazed netizens to "journey from outer space right to your doorstep in one seamless flight".
It is sort-of seamless, too, with Street Views pegman "docked right alongside the navigation controls", and available for dragging over those highways and byways nailed by Googles all-seeing eye.
Also up in Version 6 are 3D trees, viewable the 3D buildings layer. Google has apparently already planted 80 million virtual examples, working with various organisations to "model our planet?s threatened forests" - presumably so our kids will know what the real thing looked like after theyve all been axed and concreted over.
Russians targeting Wikileaks to stop new data dump
clipped by:jatfla clippers remarks: Hmmmm....the Russian Govt doesnt give a twit about political correctness. Its enemies have a way of being poisoned or just plain disappearing.
Russians targeting Wikileaks to stop new data dump
the White House has done little except announce a preliminary probe into potential criminal charges against Assange and his team at Wikileaks
the whistle-blowing website is about to come up against an adversary that will stop at nothing to shut it down: The Russian government.
the National Security Agency, the U.S. government?s eavesdropping agency, has already picked up tell-tale electronic evidence that WikiLeaks is under close surveillance by the Russian FSB, that country?s domestic spy network, out of fear in Moscow that WikiLeaks is prepared to release damaging personal information about Kremlin leaders.
if WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, follow through on threats to post highly embarrassing information about the Russian government and what is assumed to be massive corruption among its leaders, ?the Russians will be ruthless in stopping WikiLeaks.?
Font and color choices in a website say certain things about the owner of the site. Though colors and symbols may have different meanings in other cultures, this only reaffirms the notion that design choices do affect the perception of the user, which in turn affects the message attempting to be conveyed.
Here is an infographic that delves into the meanings of fonts and colors in the context of web design.
Dona Collins is a part-time teacher and a part-time blogger. She is also an avid designer. She spends her free time creating infographics, videos, and music (with FL Studio). If you would like to know more about Dona or her team, check out CreditLoan or follow them on Twitter.
Racial profiling has hit the Ivy League. Again. A party for black Harvard and Yale alums at a Boston club was shut down last weekend because the club owner was afraid that a long line of black people outside could "attract the attention of local gangbangers."
Today we?re on the verge of a factory in every home thanks to the RepRap, an open hardware 3D printer that is designed to replicate itself. You can make a RepRap for yourself, then use it to make one for your neighbor.
The design files and software needed to build and operate the RepRap are free. You can make one for about $500 in parts. And with each new version of the machine, an increasing percentage of the parts can be produced by the RepRap itself.
We just thought wed share a brief gallery of some of the coolest looking animals around. After this is over, you can tell stock photography that you like their hooters. And you wont get smacked.
Humans cant walk in straight lines. If theres no fixed point of reference, we just walk in circles and inevitably get lost. Nobody knows why, but researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics have confirmed it in several experiments.
If you walk, drive or sail blindfolded, in the middle of the fog or at night, with no stars in sight, you will not be able to keep a straight line. No matter how hard you try, you will end going in circles because, for some mysterious reason, humans have a tendency to lean to one side more than the other. Some people speculate that this is because one side of the brain is the dominating one. Others point out that the reason may be purely mechanical, because one of our legs is always sightly shorter than the other. But, according to the results of the study, these are not the causes for this unique behavior. At least, theres not one single explanation and it may be a combination of many.
Shared by Minnesota and Wisconsin, the St. Louis River Estuary is an exceptionally significant natural area due to its diversity of habitats and connection to Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes. And the estuarys centerpiece is Clough Island.
At 358 acres, Clough Island is the largest island within the estuary and one that has long been targeted for both conservation and development.
Thanks to The Nature Conservancy and its partners, Clough Islands future is now clear. It will be conserved for clean water, fish and wildlife habitat and outdoor recreation.
Preserving Clough Island and other key natural areas in the Lake Superior Basin helps keep our water clean. In Minnesota, Duluth, Beaver Bay, Grand Portage, Silver Bay and Two Harbors all draw their drinking water directly from Lake Superior. Cloquet, Minnesota. also relies upon Lake Superior as its backup water supply. And the city of Superior in Wisconsin gets its drinking water directly from Lake Superior.
Psychologists tell us that your kids personality, his or her future prospects and whether he or she is a jerk or a productive citizen will be set in stone before he or she becomes a teenager, usually by the age of seven. Did you know that, and by the way did you take the, are you qualified to be a parent test before your kids insemination?
Joseph N. Kolton is a seasoned entrepreneur, author, humorist, closet philosopher and the founder of myPhotoLottery.com and PhotoBrainiac.com, http://www.myphotolottery.com
clipped by:tabsey clippers remarks: Cant know how successful the bailout was, as cant know what would have happened if the bailout hadnt. At least most of the money came back. And there are $25b to make up lots of stories about Obama paying for his sex change from it. Our govt didnt get any back. We spent the $25b our govt shelled out. So it cost each country the same.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Troubled Asset Relief Program, which risked up to $700 billion of government funds to bail out troubled banks and automakers, will cost taxpayers a mere $25 billion, according to an estimate released on Monday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
CBOs latest assessment of the widely reviled program is lower even than the Obama administrations own estimate of less than $50 billion, which was criticized as too rosy after it was issued at the end of September.
"Clearly, it was not apparent when the TARP was created two years ago that the cost would turn out to be this low," CBO said in its report.
With bailed-out firms returning to health, the government will spend less than previously thought on assistance to insurer AIG and automakers like General Motors, CBO said.
Additional stock repurchases by formerly troubled Wall Street firms and lower-than-expected participation in mortgage programs has also lowered the cost, CBO said.
The new collapse involved a 25-foot-long garden wall which surrounds one of Pompeii?s best-known houses, the so-called House of the Moralist.
The 2,000-year-old building lies along Via dell?Abbondanza, some 65 feet from the ruins of the frescoed House of Gladiators, which crumbled into a pile of rubble earlier this month.
Luckly, no major damage seems to have occurred to the House of the Moralist.
Consisting of two connecting properties which belonged to wine-merchants Titus Arrius Polites and Marcus Epidius Hymenaeus, the building owes its name to three rules of etiquette inscribed on the walls of the triclinium, or dining-room. They read:
?We are living in a continuous state of emergency. Pompeii is a frail town; all walls without a covering are at risk if this heavy rains continues,? Jeannette Papadopoulos, Pompeiis recently appointed superintendent, told Naples?s daily Il Mattino.
officials warned that almost three-quarters of Pompeii was in danger of collapse.
A Van Gogh sells for one hundred and thirty-nine million, a Picasso sells for one hundred and six million, a Titian (who?) sells for seventy million, what pray tell is going on here? The one thing an outsider (us that are un-cultured in art, possibly even uncouth) know is that the common link between these very famous artists is that they are all kinda weird, most died broke; some were purported geniuses, but died broke non-the-less--many suffered horribly for their art, and now strangers with deep pockets pay fortunes for their work.
Joseph N. Kolton is a seasoned entrepreneur, author, humorist, closet philosopher and the founder of myPhotoLottery.com, http://www.myphotolottery.com
Babies Can Grow Up to Be Something You May Not have Expected
Someone once suggested that prospective parents should take a test before having a baby. If we look at some aspects of parenthood, society and kids today we may agree. Babies are not that easy to get rid of, like say a bad pet--you could be stuck with them for life, and maybe in the hereafter. So consider carefully.
Joseph N. Kolton is a seasoned entrepreneur, author, humorist, closet philosopher and the founder of myPhotoLottery.com and PhotoBrainiac.com, http://www.myphotolottery.com
Babies Can Grow Up to Be Something You May Not have Expected
Someone once suggested that prospective parents should take a test before having a baby. If we look at some aspects of parenthood, society and kids today we may agree. Babies are not that easy to get rid of, like say a bad pet--you could be stuck with them for life, and maybe in the hereafter. So consider carefully.
Peeked inside your medicine cabinet lately? Chances are ? even if you eat locally, compost food scraps, and clean with nothing but vinegar and baking soda ? its contents are a medicinal flashback to your childhood.
?When it comes to our medicine cabinets, it?s habitual to reach for over-the-counter drugs,? says Madelon Hope, M.Ed., LMHC, a clinical herbalist and director of the Boston School of Herbal Studies. ?These medications are the ones our mothers gave us, and those memories condition our responses today.?
If this sounds like you, it?s time for a bathroom-cabinet makeover. While there are times you may still want to use conventional meds, such as ibuprofen and antibiotic ointment, natural remedies can be just as fast and effective as over-the-counter fixes ? sometimes more so.
Best of all, they often have far fewer (if any) pesky or potentially harmful side effects.
(NewsCore) - A playful snowball fight turned into a violent brawl involving more than 500 people in the eastern city of Leipzig, police said Tuesday, with fireworks, bottles and stones thrown into the mix.
A group of 40 people gathered late Monday to toss snowballs at each other but the game quickly degenerated into a massive free-for-all that required police intervention, authorities said in a statement.
"The black-clad mob threw not only snow but also firecrackers, bottles and rocks," the statement said.
More than 500 people joined the fracas, snarling traffic and sparking a major police operation.
"Officers became the main target of the hooligans but a completely uninvolved car driver also fell victim, with the mob smashing his windscreen with a beer bottle and injuring his arm."
Two officers were wounded in the fray and a police car was damaged before the group could be broken up.
Thanksgiving comes once a year for most of us, but the holidays spirit ? embrace generosity, give thanks ? is the very foundation of each of these restaurants, where all can sit down and eat, even if their wallets are empty.
The three nonprofit restaurants ? two opened this year
depend on the generosity of diners who are willing to pay a little more to cover the bowls of stew and plates of eggs of fellow patrons who can pay only a little or nothing.
"We have found $100 bills in the donation box," said Cathy Matthews, 45, one of the founders of Cafe 180, which opened at the end of July. "One person came in with a box of pennies. Its not the amount that matters."
The average diner at Cafe 180 pays $8 to $9.
"Weve had people come in from all over the map," said Antonacci. "They will come in for a cup of coffee and leave $20. We have families who come in and say they havent gone out to a meal in months and they dont know where their next meal is coming from."
Saudi King takes up the entire VIP wing at New York hospital - NYPOST.com
clipped by:stevenFNjones clippers remarks: Is this the same horrible medical system that people have been complaining about? Why didnt he choose to go to Canada, Great Britain, or Cuba for surgery?
Saudi Arabias King Abdullah is causing his own diplomatic drama at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where the 86 year-old monarch has commandeered an entire wing as he
We just received the news that Ranbaxy is ready to launch the sale of the Aricept genric in the United States.
Ranbaxy Pharmaceuticals Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Ranbaxy Laboratories Limited (RLL), announced that RLL has received final approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to manufacture and market Donepezil Hydrochloride Tablets 5 mg and 10 mg with 180-day market exclusivity in the U.S. healthcare system.
clipped by:merrie clippers remarks: The Pentagon today is increasing planning for smaller-scale conflicts in which the need for global, conventional warhead launchers will be particularly acute. But New Start, with its myopic focus on Russian arms levels, will severely limit our small-war capabilities. Since launchers can be used for either conventional or nuclear purposes, limiting their number to 700 forces war-planners to consider that any launcher used for conventional purposes is in effect one less launcher in the nuclear arsenal. Both conventional and nuclear capabilities are needed, and yet New Start forces a damaging trade-off.
Moreover, on the other end of the threat spectrum, China is systematically expanding its nuclear-warhead and delivery capabilities, totally unconstrained by treaty limits.
Senators need to probe far more deeply than they have into New Starts impact for our conventional force capabilities.
Russias global position is nowhere near that of the U.S., and its current launcher capabilities are far inferior. Nominally equal limitations can have dramatically unequal consequences in the real world.
Mr. Obama hopes to avoid debating limits on conventional-weapons delivery capabilities. In this he is aided by decades of eye-glazing arms-control language that intimidates the uninitiated, and by the White House spin that the Pentagon fully supports his treaty.
Fundamentally, they are political, diplomatic and legal in nature. The Pentagon is being told to structure its forces according to the treatys limits, including a ceiling of 700 launchers. This sort of compulsion has happened before, as was the case with both Start I and Start II. Forced to live within limits, and knowing that thinking outside the treatys four corners isnt career-enhancing, the military will do what it must. It has no other choice.
One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.
Neil Gaiman
retells the parable of the forgotten map by Borges in reference to "storytelling" in "American Gods".
We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory?
Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.
Gregory Bateson
"Form, Substance and Difference," from "Steps to an Ecology of Mind"
clipped by:HansWobbe clippers remarks: It seems to me that we have not come very far from the days when shrink-wrapped software included an EULA, under the wrapping that said "unwrapping this... is evidence of acceptance of the terms".
Of course, you couldnt read that without accepting. A lawyer of my acquaintance actually opined that this quite a "clever "gotcha".
Perhaps its needless to say, but its unlikely I will ever establish a "trusted" client-lawyer privileged relationship with this individual.
?Microsoft, stop being evil. Apple, stop being evil. Google, stop being evil. And you upstarts like RockMelt, don?t follow in those evil footsteps. It?s not worth it. It?s really simple. ASK first!?
? Asa Dotzler, director of community development at Mozilla, maker of the Firefox Web browser, blogs/rants about ?sneaky? plugins or extensions that programs such as Apple?s iTunes, Microsoft?s Office, and Google?s Chrome add on to Firefox. Dotzler says companies should ask for explicit user permission before installing additional software on computers. InformationWeek points out that some users already give that permission when they sign off on end-user license agreements such as Chrome?s, for example, which tells users to expect to receive ?new software modules.? Raise your hand if you read your EULAs.
A decade ago, mobile phone usage in Afghanistan was almost nonexistent; now there are 13 million subscriptions for a total of 29 million citizens, and the annual growth rate of subscription is estimated at 53 percent
major telecommunications companies in Afghanistan identifies the same five challenges to future expansion: poverty, high illiteracy rates, corruption, an untrained workforce, and lack of security
Despite these challenges, Afghanistan has proved an exceptional case study in the use of mobile phones for social change in support of peacebuildin
- Mobile money transfer (MMT) applications have proved to be powerful mechanisms for helping to reduce corruption, foster security sector reform, and promote economic development
Other applications
use mobile phones for land dispute resolution, election monitoring, and gender empowerment and education.
?How much longer is the media going to milk this beyond tired story?? ?These guys are frauds.? ?Your idiocy is disturbing.? ?We?re just trying to make the world a better place one brainwashed, ignorant idiot at a time.? These are the trollish comments, all from anonymous sources, that you could have found after reading a CNN article on the rescue of the Chilean miners.
That mythical ring gave its owner the power of invisibility, and Plato observed that even a habitually just man who possessed such a ring would become a thief, knowing that he couldn?t be caught. Morality, Plato argues, comes from full disclosure; without accountability for our actions we would all behave unjustly.
In slowly lifting the veil of anonymity, perhaps we can see the troll not as the frightening monster of lore, but as what we all really are: human.
Prepare yourself for this one - maybe with a Stoli martini or two.
Back in the days of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Red Army had an official choir composed of male soldiers and musicians. It still exists. The Red Army Choir performs throughout Russia to this day.
Now consider the Finnish rock band called The Leningrad Cowboys. A little while ago, they held a concert in Russia, in which - to the screaming applause of Russkie teen-agers - they got the Red Army Choir to join them on stage for a performance of "Sweet Home Alabama." In English. You couldnt make this up.
Were talking seriously off the wall here. Better have that Stoli ready when you watch it:
Scientists have turned back the clock in mice they engineered to age faster than normal, an advance they suggest is the first time aging in mice has been reversed.
Researchers at Harvard-affiliated medical centers genetically manipulated mice to age faster, and then used gene therapy to lengthen telomeres -- compounds found at the ends of strands of DNA -- which reversed age-related problems such as decreased brain function and infertility.
"We at best expected it to be a slowing of the process or perhaps an arresting of the process. We did not anticipate that it would be so dramatic a reversal in all of the problems that the animal was experiencing," said Dr. Ronald DiPinho, professor of medicine and genetics at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, and co-author of the paper published Sunday in the journal Nature. "We were so struck by the findings that we rushed to get the study published."
Worlds Most Beautiful and Spectacular Buildings: The Rise of Europe - Gothic Cathedrals
clipped by:MrGhaz clippers remarks: Everyone in a city helped to build the cathedral, which was large enough to hold all the citizens. One the way to the city, pilgrims also stopped at the quarry to help carry stone to the building site.
Wealthy European cities of the twelfth century built great cathedrals as residences for God and a place where citizens could gather in God?s presence. High glass walls covered with stained-glass picture surrounded worshippers in these buildings. Their builders thought of God as the light that showed them the way through life, just as the light of the sun revealed the holy teachings pictured in the colorful windows. Stonemasons built tall frames with thin stone supports to hold the glass walls. Stone ceilings of lightweight arched vaults often rose more than 37m (120 ft) above the ground. Flying buttresses and other parts of a cathedral, which at first look like decoration, are actually part of the framework that supports it. Carved images of people, animals and plants decorate the frame. These new cathedrals pioneered a new architectural style called Gothic.
Phelim McAleer is a journalist. In his capacity as a journalist, he is a skeptic.
But in climate circles, they have another word, a pejorative term, for skeptics: deniers. The church of global warming has no tolerance for heresy, and even less for probing questions or investigations.
And so it is that the journalist Phelim McAleer was denied press credentials for the UN Climate Change Conference
the global warming crowd can ill-afford doubt being cast or questions being raised. And why?
Take, for example, this recommendation from Professor Kevin Anderson
halt economic growth in the rich world over the next twenty years
politicians should consider a rationing system similar to the one introduced during the last ?time of crisis? in the 1930s and 40s
?I would bring back the Fairness Doctrine so you couldn?t have a spectacle of a Fox Flooze, which just makes stuff up and is a propaganda outlet. You would actually have to have some sanctioned human beings talking to the other side. And MSNBC would have to do the same. They would have to have some conservatives on there too. I think that?s much better for the country.?
Why does he want the government to control media?
?Americans don?t know what?s going on and therefore the media can have their way with them intellectually.?
?I believe we need to re-regulate the media," says Howard Dean. Such illiberals argue that the paucity of liberal successes in todays radio competition?and the success of Fox News?somehow represent "market failure."
Market failure is defined as consumers not buying what liberals are selling.
Easily manipulated and bewildered - that?s what Howard Dean and his liberal cohorts think of the American people.
The New York Times has taken an admirable stand on the potentially-criminal release of diplomatic cables by the online "whistleblowers" at WikiLeaks. Said one Times reporter: "The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they wont be posted here."
Oh, wait. That wasnt in reference to the WikiLeaks documents. That was the Timess former environmental blogger Andy Revkin discussing the so-called ClimateGate emails. The Times has, in fact, posted a number of American diplomatic documents obtained illegally by WikiLeaks, and containing massive amounts of sensitive diplomatic communications.
In fact, the ClimateGate emails seem to be the only high-profile leak to which Revkins ethical stand applied.
And so we get another glimpse of the amazing depths of the Gray Ladys hypocrisy.
clipped by:hotdoge3 clippers remarks: Ten air hostesses with troubled Mexicana airlines, which filed for bankruptcy in August and suspended operations, launched a sultry aviation-themed calendar Thursday in a bid to call attention to their own plight and that of their airline - one of the worlds oldest. The calendar has sparked a media frenzy in Mexico, and the first run of 1000 was sold out even before Thursdays launch. A second edition of 3000 calendars - which retail for 149 pesos, or about US$12, apiece - is in the works. The calendars release came on the heels of Mexicanas announcement that a restructuring proposal might allow it to resume some flights by mid-December. Under the plan, just 30 percent of the companys personnel would be rehired.
The 2011 calendar features glossy shots of the flight attendants, clad only in bikinis and aviation shades or abbreviated uniforms, draped over propellers and striking racy poses in the cockpit.
It was the brainchild of 10-year Mexicana veteran Coral Perez.
"It occurred to me because we all needed money, and I thought that with so many pretty girls (among Mexicanas staff) there were bound to be some whod be interested," she said.
"The goal was to try to help ourselves because we lost everything overnight," said one of the women, 26-year-old Maribel Zavala.
Mission accomplished.
The calendar has sparked a media frenzy in Mexico, and the first run of 1000 was sold out even before Thursdays launch. A second edition of 3000 calendars - which retail for 149 pesos, or about US$12, apiece - is in the works.
Founded in 1921, shortly after Dutch carrier KLM and Australias
Lut Desert (Iran): hottest place on Earth at 159 °F (71 °C)
Mt. Chimborazo (Ecuador): highest point above Earhts center at 20,703 feet (6,310 m) above sea level
Tristan de Cunha (UK): most remote inhabited archipelago on Earth at 2,000 miles from the nearest continent
Angels Falls (Venezuela): Earths highest waterfall with 3230 feet (984 m) in height 
Oymyakon (Russia): coldest inhabited place on Earth at ?96.2 °F (?71.2 °C)
The Dry Valleys (Antarctica): driest place on Earth
Marianas Trench (Indonesia and Japan): lowest point on Earth at 35,840 feet (10,924 m) below sea level
Lloro (Colombia): wettest place on Earth
The London Palladium opened on Boxing Day, the 26th of December 
Out of all the 
Opening a new front in the War on Error, New York City will soon spend an estimated 27 million dollars to get the city?s thousands of 
To be fair, many many beggars in China truly are crippled and who rely on the generosity of kind passers-by, but theres also a fair number of fakers too. 
Dona Collins is a part-time teacher and a part-time blogger. She is also an avid designer. She spends her free time creating infographics, videos, and music (with FL Studio). If you would like to know more about Dona or her team, check out CreditLoan or follow them on Twitter.
Humans cant walk in straight lines. If theres no fixed point of reference, we just walk in circles and inevitably get lost. Nobody knows why, but researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics have confirmed it in several experiments.
, and co-author of the paper published Sunday in the journal Nature. "We were so struck by the findings that we rushed to get the study published." 
