Tesla Batteries Already Deployed in 11 California Wal-Mart Stores
April 23rd, 2015Via: Bloomberg:
As part of a pilot program with sister company SolarCity, Tesla has installed batteries at about 300 California homes equipped with solar panels. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which has a relationship with SolarCity, has Tesla batteries installed at 11 California stores; Cargill Inc. plans a one-megawatt system for its animal-processing plant in Fresno.
And Now… “How Tor Is Building a New Dark Net with Help from the U.S. Military”
April 22nd, 2015You betcha.
Via: TheDailyDot:
To stay ahead in the security race, Tor is building the next-generation Dark Net in part with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. military agency charged with inventing the cutting edge of new technology.
The funding, which began in 2014, comes as part of DARPA’s Memex project, a “groundbreaking” search engine designed to best commercial titans like Google at searching the Deep Web and other oft-ignored terrain for the U.S. intelligence, law enforcement, and military. To build Memex, DARPA is partnered with universities like Carnegie Mellon, NASA, private research firms, and several Tor Project developers.
DARPA is funding multiple projects focused on improving Tor’s hidden services across “1-3 years,” Tor’s director of communications Kate Krauss told the Daily Dot via email. Tor declined to give more specifics on the grant, like its monetary value and terms, and DARPA didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Jeb Bush Praises Obama’s Expansion of NSA Surveillance
April 22nd, 2015Via: FirstLook:
One of the most glaring myths propagated by Washington — especially the two parties’ media loyalists — is that bipartisanship is basically impossible, that the two parties agree on so little, that they are constantly at each other’s throats over everything. As is so often the case for Washington partisan propaganda, the reality is exactly the opposite: from trade deals to Wall Street bailouts to a massive National Security and Penal State, the two parties are in full agreement on the bulk of the most significant D.C. policies (which is why the leading candidates of the two parties (from America’s two ruling royal families) will have the same funding base). But because policies that command the agreement of the two parties’ establishments are largely ignored by the D.C. press in favor of the issues where they have some disagreements, the illusion is created that they agree on nothing.
To illustrate how true this all is, consider the comments today of leading GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush. He appeared on Michael Medved’s conservative talk radio program, and was asked by the host what his favorite part of the Obama administration has been. His answer? As McClatchy’s Lesley Clark noted on Twitter, Bush hailed “Obama’s enhancement of NSA.”
Brain-Damaged UK Victims of Swine Flu Vaccine to Get £60 Million Compensation
April 22nd, 2015Via: IB Times:
Patients who suffered brain damage as a result of taking a swine flu vaccine are to receive multi-million-pound payouts from the UK government.
The government is expected to receive a bill of approximately £60 million, with each of the 60 victims expected to receive about £1 million each.
Peter Todd, a lawyer who represented many of the claimants, told the Sunday Times: “There has never been a case like this before. The victims of this vaccine have an incurable and lifelong condition and will require extensive medication.”
Following the swine flu outbreak of 2009, about 60 million people, most of them children, received the vaccine.
It was subsequently revealed that the vaccine, Pandemrix, can cause narcolepsy and cataplexy in about one in 16,000 people, and many more are expected to come forward with the symptoms.
Across Europe, more than 800 children are so far known to have been made ill by the vaccine.
FBI Admits Flaws in Hair Analysis Over Decades
April 20th, 2015Via: Washington Post:
The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.
The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.
Walmart Raises Suspicions After Closing 5 Stores In Same Day For “Plumbing” Problems
April 20th, 2015Via: Consumerist:
There are thousands of Walmarts in the U.S., so the fact that five of them were temporarily shut down all on the same day, all for the same reason, and all for the same estimated amount of time, may be statistically insignificant. But some workers and city officials are raising questions about what’s actually behind these six-month shutterings.
The five stores — two in Texas, one in California, one in Oklahoma, and another in Florida — were all closed on Monday without advance notice to shoppers or the thousands of affected employees. At each of the stores, the reason given for the closures — which are estimated to last upwards of six months — was problems with plumbing.
The Machines Are Coming
April 19th, 2015Via: New York Times:
THE machine hums along, quietly scanning the slides, generating Pap smear diagnostics, just the way a college-educated, well-compensated lab technician might.
A robot with emotion-detection software interviews visitors to the United States at the border. In field tests, this eerily named “embodied avatar kiosk” does much better than humans in catching those with invalid documentation. Emotional-processing software has gotten so good that ad companies are looking into “mood-targeted” advertising, and the government of Dubai wants to use it to scan all its closed-circuit TV feeds.
Yes, the machines are getting smarter, and they’re coming for more and more jobs.
Not just low-wage jobs, either.
Feds Say Cannabis Is Not Medicine While Holding The Patent on Cannabis as Medicine
April 19th, 2015U.S. Patent 6630507: Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants
Via: Ben Swann:
Iris Scanner Identifies a Person 40 Feet Away
April 18th, 2015Via: Discovery:
The CMU team recently posted a video successfully testing the system in a typical traffic stop scenario. Using the long-range iris scanner, the system was able to identify the driver of a vehicle by capturing an image of the eye via the side-view mirror.
What Microsoft Was for PCs, This Company Hopes to Be for Drones
April 16th, 2015Via: MIT Technology Review:
Microsoft’s Windows operating system had a vital role in turning the personal computer into a ubiquitous technology. Jonathan Downey hopes his company Airware will play a similar part in the development of commercial drones.
The startup today launched a control system for drone makers to bundle with their small aircraft. It is intended to speed up the development of drone hardware and services that rely on drones, since it would free manufacturers or their customers from having to develop their own autopilots or flight planning software. Other companies will be able to build additional software to run on top of Airware’s system, adding features such as data collection options for a particular industry.
