Boston Dynamics: PETMAN
April 11th, 2013They expect us to believe that this is just a sort of moving mannequin to test military clothing.
Have a nice day.
Via: Boston Dynamics / YouTube:
The PETMAN robot was developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from the DoD CBD program. It is used to test the performance of protective clothing designed for hazardous environments.
U.S. Killer Robot Operators ‘Weren’t Always Certain Who They Were Killing’
April 11th, 2013Via: McClatchy:
Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified “other” militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan’s rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show.
The administration has said that strikes by the CIA’s missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against “specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces” involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting “imminent” violent attacks on Americans.
“It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative,” President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 6, 2012, interview with CNN. “It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.”
Copies of the top-secret U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy, however, show that drone strikes in Pakistan over a four-year period didn’t adhere to those standards.
The intelligence reports list killings of alleged Afghan insurgents whose organization wasn’t on the U.S. list of terrorist groups at the time of the 9/11 strikes; of suspected members of a Pakistani extremist group that didn’t exist at the time of 9/11; and of unidentified individuals described as “other militants” and “foreign fighters.”
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The documents also show that drone operators weren’t always certain who they were killing despite the administration’s guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA’s targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian casualties have been “exceedingly rare.”
IRS: We Can Read Emails Without Warrant
April 11th, 2013Via: The Hill:
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has claimed that agents do not need warrants to read people’s emails, text messages and other private electronic communications, according to internal agency documents.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request, released the information on Wednesday.
In a 2009 handbook, the IRS said the Fourth Amendment does not protect emails because Internet users “do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.” A 2010 presentation by the IRS Office of General Counsel reiterated the policy.
CourseSmart E-Textbooks Monitor Student Reading Habits
April 10th, 2013In technofascist America, E-books read you.
Via: New York Times:
Several Texas A&M professors know something that generations of teachers could only hope to guess: whether students are reading their textbooks.
They know when students are skipping pages, failing to highlight significant passages, not bothering to take notes — or simply not opening the book at all.
“It’s Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent,” said Tracy Hurley, the dean of the school of business.
The faculty members here are neither clairvoyant nor peering over shoulders. They, along with colleagues at eight other colleges, are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up, CourseSmart, that allows them to track their students’ progress with digital textbooks.
Major publishers in higher education have already been collecting data from millions of students who use their digital materials. But CourseSmart goes further by individually packaging for each professor information on all the students in a class — a bold effort that is already beginning to affect how teachers present material and how students respond to it, even as critics question how well it measures learning. The plan is to introduce the program broadly this fall.
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CourseSmart is owned by Pearson, McGraw-Hill and other major publishers, which see an opportunity to cement their dominance in digital textbooks by offering administrators and faculty a constant stream of data about how students are doing.
Manager of a South Pacific Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong Franchise Says That Kids Should Consider Learning Mandarin
April 10th, 2013Via: New Zealand Herald:
Prime Minister John Key wants more students to consider learning Mandarin.
And a Herald-DigiPoll survey shows a surprisingly high number of people, more than 25 per cent, would like Maori and a foreign language to be compulsory at school – although the majority prefer no compulsion.
The Prime Minister is visiting China this week.
He said the argument against teaching Mandarin was that there were not enough teachers “but I think that’s not a very strong argument”.
There were 250,000 New Zealanders of Chinese ethnicity, a great many of whom spoke Chinese and many of them would teach on a part-time basis, he said.
Any student going through school today, faced with the choice of learning Mandarin or another language, would be well served to think about learning Mandarin.
When he went to the Lantern Festival in Auckland, the Asia Foundation executive director John McKinnon had given the entire speech in Mandarin “and boy did he have the audience engaging”.
Band-Aid on Band-Aid: All 104 Nuclear Reactors Currently Operational in the U.S. Have Irreparable Safety Issues
April 10th, 2013Via: Russia Today:
All 104 nuclear reactors currently operational in the US have irreparable safety issues and should be taken out of commission and replaced, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory B. Jaczko said.
The comments, made during the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference, are “highly unusual” for a current or former member of the safety commission, according to The New York Times. Asked why he had suddenly decided to make the remarks, Jaczko implied that he had only recently arrived at these conclusions following the serious aftermath of Japan’s tsunami-stricken Fukushima Daichii nuclear facility.
“I was just thinking about the issues more, and watching as the industry and the regulators and the whole nuclear safety community continues to try to figure out how to address these very, very difficult problems,” which were made more evident by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, he said. “Continuing to put Band-Aid on Band-Aid is not going to fix the problem.”
Laser Scans Objects in 3D from Half a Mile Away
April 10th, 2013Via: Engadget:
3D scanning at a range of 0.62 miles? It just became possible, thanks to a laser camera developed by physicists at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. You can pretty much see how it works from the images above — laser beams are bounced off the target and the duration of their return journey is measured precisely enough to detect millimeter depth changes even at extreme distances.
Chinese Colonel Says Latest Bird Flu Virus Is U.S. Biological Weapon
April 10th, 2013Via: Washington Post:
Colonel Dai Xu of the People’s Liberation Army wrote online that the new strain of bird flu hitting China, known as H7N9, is an American “bio-psychological weapon” meant to destabilize China. The rant, posted to Dai’s account on the Twitter-like service Weibo, had already been shared by more than 30,000 fellow users by the time that the South China Morning Post reported it on Monday. Dai now has a quarter million followers on Weibo, which is quite a platform.
In general, Chinese Web users appear to have rejected Dai’s argument. In response to the criticism, though, he’s only dug in. “It is common knowledge that a group of people in China have been injected with mental toxin by the U.S.,” he wrote at one point. “I will not retreat even half a step.” He urged Chinese officials to ignore the virus’s apparent spread and argued that the disastrous 2003 SARS outbreak was also an American plot.
Dai’s conspiracy theory does not appear to be widely held, although fears about the United States and its supposed secret desire to topple the Chinese Communist Party are not uncommon among Chinese officials. He is a lecturer at the National Defence University, giving him a not insignificant platform for his theories and the worldview behind them.
Helmut Kohl: I Acted Like a Dictator to Bring in the Euro
April 10th, 2013Via: Telegraph:
Helmut Kohl, Germany’s former chancellor, has admitted that he acted like a “dictator” to bring in the single currency to the country, otherwise he “would have lost” had he held a referendum.
In an interview conducted for a journalist’s PhD thesis, Germany’s longest-serving postwar chancellor said that he would have lost any popular vote on the euro by an overwhelming majority.
“I knew that I could never win a referendum in Germany,” he said. “We would have lost a referendum on the introduction of the euro. That’s quite clear. I would have lost and by seven to three.”
The interview was conducted by Jens Peter Paul, a German journalist in 2002, the year when the Deutsche Mark was replaced by euro notes and coins, but has only been published now.
Comex Gold Inventories Collapse
April 10th, 2013Via: Bull Market Thinking:
A stunning piece of information was brought to my attention yesterday. Amid all the mainstream talk of the end of the gold bull market (and the end of the gold mining industry), something has been discretely happening behind the scenes.
Over the last 90 days without any announcement, stocks of gold held at Comex warehouses plunged by the largest figure ever on record during a single quarter since eligible record keeping began in 2001 (roughly the beginning of the bull market).
