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The executives at Chevrolet can rest easy for now. Since the Roberts was constructed in an age before Henry Ford’s mass production, the 115-year-old electric car is one of a kind.

But don’t let the car’s 115 years let you think it isn’t tough: It’s present-day owner, who prefers not to be named, told The Daily Caller it still runs like a charm, and has even completed the roughly 60-mile London to Brighton Vintage Car Race.

If you didn’t know there are electric cars as old as the Roberts, you aren’t alone. Prior to today’s battle of electric v. gas, there was another battle: Electric v. gas v. steam. This contest was fought in the market place, and history shows gas gave electric and steam an even more thorough whooping than Coca-Cola gave Moxie.

But while the Roberts electric car clearly lacked GPS, power steering and, yes, air bags, the distance it could achieve on a charge, when compared with its modern equivalent, provides a telling example of the slow pace of the electric car.

You don’t have to read George Orwell to conjure up such an ominous surveillance state. You just have to skim through filings at the U.S. Patent Office.

It’s hard to imagine Americans would tolerate such a direct, Big-Brotherish intrusion. But they might not notice if the all-seeing cameras were tucked inside another kind of government tracking technology that millions of Americans have already invited into their cars.

Kapsch TrafficCom AG, an Austrian company that just signed a 10-year contract to provide in-car transponders such as the E-Z Pass to 22 electronic highway toll collection systems around the U.S., recently filed a patent on technology to add multi-function mini-cameras to their toll gadgets. Today, transponders are in about 22 million cars around the U.S. Adding inward and outward facing cameras to the gadgets would create surveillance capabilities far beyond anything government agencies have tried until now.

The stated reason for an inward-pointing camera is to verify the number of occupants in the car for enforcement of HOV and HOT lanes. The outward-pointing camera could be used for the same purpose, helping authorities enforce minimum occupant rules against drivers who aren’t carrying transponders.

As much as it was the complete opposite of his previous views, he couldn’t dismiss or avoid the case—it was none other than his own experience, and he had to face it and search for an explanation.

Having contracted acute bacterial meningitis, which damages the neocortex—the part of the brain that is thought to involve complex cognitive functions like conscious thought—Alexander went into a coma and spent six days on a ventilator. The chance of survival was very slim, and less so was the possibility of recovering fully.

The normal glucose levels in a human’s cerebrospinal fluid are between 60 and 80 mg/dl (milligram per one-tenth of a liter), and the meningitis infection is considered severe when the level drops to 20 mg/dl. But the glucose level of Alexander’s cerebrospinal fluid was at 1 mg/dl, making it impossible for his brain to function.

However, during the time when he was in coma, Alexander encountered vivid experiences involving multiple senses, such as vision, hearing, and smell. He said that he couldn’t describe how amazing it was.

“What happened deep in coma was absolutely stunning,” Alexander said during an interview.

“The whole situation seems to be much more real than our earthly life, and the sensory modalities were very strange because they were, you know, when I was remembering all this and trying to write it down, a lot of the kind of auditory and visual things that we would normally think of as things that we see or hear, were all kind of blended together.”

For example, he “saw” a beautiful melody appearing as colors in front of him, and he remembered gold and silver arcs of lights as transparent arcs of energy that he perceived as sounds.

“To compare it with sitting here and talking on the phone or working on my computer, it was much, much more real, very rich, and as if I were truly being alive for the first time,” Alexander said. “It was really amazing.”

“My brain right now—I think it recovered pretty well—could not do anything close to what my brain was doing deep in coma,” Alexander said in this year’s International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) conference.

“How does a dying brain end up getting far, far more powerful and able to handle these tremendous loads of information instantaneously and put it altogether?”

“For me the problem was how to explain the hyper-reality. How do I explain such a rich experience, such an interactive experience, one with so much very vivid, and auditory and visual components when the parts of my human brain that normally handle all that were infected with meningitis and were not working. And especially how was it that the mind would experience consciousness, and handling very complex tasks?” Alexander said during the interview.

…

“The standard neuroscientific explanation […] absolutely does not address the real powerful elements of the experience,” he said.

“My conclusion is that the experience was very real and had to happen outside of my brain, and it had to happen outside of this physical universe. […] There is an element of our consciousness that is not dependent on the brain and that is what was set free, for me, and went on that journey.”

…

“The main role in my view for quantum mechanics is that it provides the ‘smoking gun,’ that shows us there’s something special about consciousness in making reality,” he said.

“It suggests that we’re missing a big point about our consciousness and exactly how it interacts with reality. […] I don’t think that by chasing quantum mechanical phenomena to a certain degree that we will come up with the answer about mind and consciousness, although I think it will be very helpful at elucidating the mind-brain interface.”

The technology, brought to Australia by a UK-based company, has prompted a call for privacy or telephone intercept regulators to investigate.

One unnamed Queensland shopping centre is next month due to become the first in the nation to fit receivers that detect unique mobile phone radio frequency codes to pinpoint location within two metres.

The company behind the Footpath system says it is also in discussions with other major Australian sites.

Path Intelligence national sales manager Kerry Baddeley stressed that no mobile phone user names or numbers could be accessed.

According to Cubrilovic, he waited for a year to hear from Facebook on this privacy issue that he discovered, emailing them and reaching multiple dead-ends.

Two days later, on September 27th, Cubrilovic noted, “In summary, Facebook has made changes to the logout process and they have explained each part of the process and the cookies that the site uses in detail … They want to retain the ability to track browsers after logout for safety and spam purposes, and they want to be able to log page requests for performance reasons etc.”

EFF, however, is unequivocal in stating, “Facebook can track web browsing history without cookies.”

“Facebook is able to collect data about your browser – including your IP address and a range of facts about your browser – without ever installing a cookie. They can use this data to build a record of every time you load a page with embedded Facebook content,” added the EFF.

This ability to track users outside of Facebook is particularly troubling.

EFF states, “It’s clear that Facebook does extensive cross-domain tracking, with two types of cookies and even without. With this data, Facebook could create a detailed portrait of how you use the Internet: what sites you visit, how frequently you load them, what time of day you like to access them. This could point to more than your shopping habits – it could provide a candid window into health concerns, political interests, reading habits, sexual preferences, religious affiliations, and much more.”

That Facebook keeps this data on file for 90 days (before it’s discarded or made anonymous) is a legitimate privacy concern and it could certainly be useful in the event U.S. intelligence services desires to build a profile of a particular user’s web browsing.

His death has been under investigation by the Lake County Coroner’s Office and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) for the past 20 months.

Airborne radiation of up to 3.35 microsieverts per hour was recorded Thursday along a sidewalk in a residential area in Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward in an inspection commissioned by the ward, and a citizens’ group detected up to 5.82 microsieverts close to the ground at a children’s theme park in Funabashi, Chiba Prefecture, local officials said.

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In Setagaya, radiation of up to 3.35 microsieverts per hour was recorded Thursday at a height of 1 meter along the sidewalk in the Tsurumaki district, ward officials said.

The ward officials took samples of tree leaves over a home’s board fence in the area concerned to investigate what type of radioactive material is involved.