Number Of Teens Expecting To Depend On Parents Into Adulthood Has Doubled Since 2011
March 30th, 2013Via: Consumerist:
In what could be an indicator of either a massive drop in teens’ financial prospects or the fact that teens today are getting more realistic about their financial futures, a new survey shows that the percentage of teenagers who expect to remain dependent on mom and/or dad until at least age 27 has doubled in just the last two years.
In 2011, only 12% of respondents to the Junior Achievement Teens and Personal Finance Survey said they would probably be financially dependent on a parent or guardian until the age of 27. According to the newly released 2013 survey [PDF], that rate now stands at 25%. Meanwhile, those who are completely unsure of when or if they will ever be dependent has jumped from 1% in 2011 to 11% in 2013.
U.S. Army Veteran Charged with Fighting with Al-Qaida in Syria
March 30th, 2013“I know he was doing some work for the CIA over there… I know for a fact that he was passing information on to the CIA.”
Via: Washington Post:
A U.S. Army veteran, who boasted on Facebook of his military adventures with Syrian rebels, was charged Thursday with firing rocket propelled grenades as part of an attack led by an al-Qaida group against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Eric Harroun, 30, of Phoenix, was charged in U.S. District Court in Alexandria with conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction — specifically, a rocket propelled grenade launcher — outside the U.S.
According to an FBI affidavit, Harroun, who served three years in the Army before being medically discharged, was engaged in military action in Syria, siding with rebel forces against the Syrian government, from January to March of this year.
Harroun told FBI investigators that he traveled to Turkey in November hoping to join the Free Syrian Army, a rebel group. In January, he crossed the border and made contact with the Free Syrian Army, which outfitted him two Russian rifles, according to the affidavit.
Within days, Harroun participated in an attack on a Syrian army encampment that was carried out jointly by the Free Syrian Army and the al-Nusrah Front, commonly known as “al-Qaida in Iraq” and designated a terrorist group by the U.S., according to the affidavit.
After that battle, Harroun retreated in the back of an al-Nusrah truck. Harroun told the FBI that at the al-Nusrah camp, he was initially treated like a prisoner but was later accepted by the other members and participated in several attacks with them, according to the affidavit.
Harroun said al-Nusrah fighters would ask him why the U.S. had designated them as terrorists, according to the affidavit.
Harroun used RPG launchers in the attacks and once, on his Facebook page, claimed credit for downing a Syrian helicopter. According to the affidavit, Harroun told the FBI that he shot an estimated 10 people in his various battles, though he was unsure if he had ever killed anyone.
On the Facebook page, Harroun also stated that “the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist” and that he intended to travel to the Palestinian territory because of Israeli atrocities there, according to the affidavit. The affidavit states that Harroun served in the Army from 2000 to 2003, when he received a medical discharge after he was injured in a car accident.
An Army spokesman said Harroun served at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri and Fort Riley in Kansas, and that his record listed no overseas deployments.
Canadian Researchers Claim Fuel Cell Breakthrough
March 30th, 2013Via: Vancouver Sun:
Researchers at the University of Calgary say they’ve made a breakthrough that could make renewable energy much more practical and affordable.
Their paper published in the journal Science says they’ve found a much easier and cheaper way to build an electrolyzer, which uses electricity to break up water into hydrogen and oxygen, the basic requirements of fuel cells.
Fuel cells take those gases and generate energy by recombining them. Water is the only waste product. The cells are seen as a possible source of clean, reliable power that could be built on almost any scale required.
Electrolyzers depend on rare, difficult-to-work-with and sometimes toxic metals, but the method developed by Chris Berlinguette and Simon Trudel uses metals as common as rust. It delivers results comparable to current techniques but costs about 1,000 times less.
That could make it easier to use hydrogen to store intermittent energy produced by renewable sources such as wind or solar generators — cheaper, more efficient and with fewer toxic materials than the batteries currently used.
Research Credit: DF
Egypt: Divers Caught Cutting Internet Cable
March 29th, 2013Via: Global Post:
Egypt’s naval forces caught three scuba divers officials say were trying to cut an undersea internet cable in the Mediterranean on Wednesday.
In a statement on his official Facebook page, Col. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said divers were arrested while “cutting the undersea cable” of Egypt’s main communications company, Telecom Egypt.
“The armed forces foiled an attempt and arrested three divers while they were cutting a submarine cable,” Ali wrote.
The statement, accompanied by a photo of three young men who were apparently Egyptian, said they were captured while on a speeding fishing boat just off the coast of Alexandria. It did not say who they were or why they would want to cut the cable.
Egypt’s internet had been spotty for days, following damage to an undersea cable last week. But after the arrest of three men who allegedly used diving equipment to cut yet another line off the coast of Alexandria, there is speculation that what was initially billed an accident may have been part of a wider plan to take Egypt offline.
According to Agence France-Presse and local press reports, the men have denied the accusations.
They say they were salvaging shipwrecks. Alexandria’s security director is quoted by the official state news agency as saying they severed the cable by mistake.
BionicOpter: Festo’s Giant Robotic Dragonfly
March 29th, 2013Via: Canadian Manufacturing:
Building on the work of last year’s bionic creation, the Smart Bird, Festo announced that it will literally launch its latest creation, the BionicOpter, at Hannover Messe in April. With a wingspan of 63 cm and weighing in at 175 grams, the robotic dragonfly mimics all forms of flight as its natural counterpart, including hover, glide and manoeuvring in all directions.
This is made possible, the company says, by the BionicOpter’s ability to move each of its four wings independently, as well as control each wing’s amplitude, frequency and angle of attack. Including its actuated head and body, the robot exhibits 13 degrees of freedom, which allows it to rapidly accelerate, decelerate, turn and fly backwards.
Wal-Mart May Get Customers to Deliver Packages to Online Buyers
March 29th, 2013Via: Reuters:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc is considering a radical plan to have store customers deliver packages to online buyers, a new twist on speedier delivery services that the company hopes will enable it to better compete with Amazon.com Inc.
Tapping customers to deliver goods would put the world’s largest retailer squarely in middle of a new phenomenon sometimes known as “crowd-sourcing,” or the “sharing economy.”
Obama’s Crackdown on Whistleblowers and the NSA-SAIC-Trailblazer Fraud
March 29th, 2013Via: The Nation:
In the annals of national security, the Obama administration will long be remembered for its unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. Since 2009, it has employed the World War I–era Espionage Act a record six times to prosecute government officials suspected of leaking classified information. The latest example is John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer serving a thirty-month term in federal prison for publicly identifying an intelligence operative involved in torture. It’s a pattern: the whistleblowers are punished, sometimes severely, while the perpetrators of the crimes they expose remain free.
The hypocrisy is best illustrated in the case of four whistleblowers from the National Security Agency: Thomas Drake, William Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis. Falsely accused of leaking in 2007, they have endured years of legal harassment for exposing the waste and fraud behind a multibillion-dollar contract for a system called Trailblazer, which was supposed to “revolutionize” the way the NSA produced signals intelligence (SIGINT) in the digital age. Instead, it was canceled in 2006 and remains one of the worst failures in US intelligence history. But the money spent on this privatization scheme, like so much at the NSA, remains a state secret.
…
The NSA Four are now speaking out for the first time about the corporate corruption that led to this debacle and sparked their decision to blow the whistle. In exclusive interviews with The Nation, they have described a toxic mix of bid-rigging, cronyism and fraud involving senior NSA officials and several of the nation’s largest intelligence contractors. They have also provided an inside look at how Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), the government’s fourth-largest contractor, squandered billions of dollars on a vast data-mining scheme that never produced an iota of intelligence.
Research Credit: ottilie
Navy Wants Lasers on Marines’ Trucks to Shoot Down Drones
March 29th, 2013Via: Wired:
If there was any doubt that the military has new confidence in its forthcoming laser arsenal, the Navy’s top geeks want to outfit Marines with a laser cannon to shoot small drones out of the sky.
Specifically, the Office of Naval Research thinks that Marine air-ground task forces are too vulnerable to adversaries flying cheap, small spy drones overhead, like the four-pound Raven the Marines themselves used in Iraq. Its answer: outfit Marine ground vehicles with laser guns.
Google Maps a Japanese Nuclear Ghost Town
March 29th, 2013Via: The Atlantic:
Two years after the the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, and the following tsunami and nuclear disaster, a large area around the failed Fukushima nuclear plant is still considered an exclusion zone. Namie, a small city just north of the nuclear power plant, was evacuated shortly after the quake, and its 21,000 townspeople have been unable to return since, leaving it a ghost town. At the invitation of local officials, Google recently deployed its camera-equipped vehicles to Namie to create a street view map of the deserted town so residents can see their abandoned homes, and the world can witness the remains of the disaster.
Location Data Can Uniquely Identify Cellphone Users
March 28th, 2013Via: Popular Science:
Just a few data points from a location-tracking cellphone are enough to identify most people, a new study found. It doesn’t matter if those data are “anonymized” so they aren’t linked to any identifiers such as address or phone number. Just four random points are enough to put names to 95 percent of the anonymized users in a cellphone database.
The study fits in with growing evidence that fairly publicly available data—cellphone location data is open to many location-tracking apps, for example—is not as anonymous as you might think.
The research team, including technology researchers from the U.S., Belgium and Chile, looked at 15 months’ worth of location data from 1.5 million cellphone users in a “small European country.” The data weren’t particularly detailed. They simply tagged people by their closest cellphone tower once an hour. Many apps get similar data from Apple and Android.
The team then figured out the math to identify 95 percent of the phone-users from just four randomly selected data points. Given 11 data points, they could identify all of the users.
The danger of being able to identify cellphone users so easily is that you could deduce some pretty private information just from where people go. You could see if someone attends certain religious or political meetings, visits an HIV/AIDS or reproductive clinic, or hangs out with an ex or a business rival.
