Euthanasia Coaster
July 1st, 2011Via: Science Gallery:
Euthanasia Coaster is a hypothetical euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely—with elegance and euphoria—take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster’s track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness and eventually death.
Research Credit: EB
Case Against Strauss-Kahn Collapsing
July 1st, 2011Update: Accuser Worded as a Hooker
Via: New York Post:
Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s accuser wasn’t just a girl working at a hotel — she was a working girl.
The Sofitel housekeeper who claims the former IMF boss sexually assaulted her in his room was doing double duty as a prostitute, collecting cash on the side from male guests, The Post has learned.
—End Update—
Via: New York Times:
The sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is on the verge of collapse as investigators have uncovered major holes in the credibility of the housekeeper who charged that he attacked her in his Manhattan hotel suite in May, according to two well-placed law enforcement officials.
Although forensic tests found unambiguous evidence of a sexual encounter between Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a French politician, and the woman, prosecutors now do not believe much of what the accuser has told them about the circumstances or about herself.
Since her initial allegation on May 14, the accuser has repeatedly lied, one of the law enforcement officials said.
Senior prosecutors met with lawyers for Mr. Strauss-Kahn on Thursday and provided details about their findings, and the parties are discussing whether to dismiss the felony charges. Among the discoveries, one of the officials said, are issues involving the asylum application of the 32-year-old housekeeper, who is Guinean, and possible links to people involved in criminal activities, including drug dealing and money laundering.
Hopey/Changey: Obama Awards Defense Chief Gates Medal of Freedom
July 1st, 2011Via: Reuters:
President Barack Obama awarded retiring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a farewell ceremony on Thursday morning.
“A humble American patriot; a man of common sense and decency; quite simply, one of our nation’s finest public servants,” Obama said of Gates.
Obama spoke at a departure ceremony outside the Pentagon. Leon Panetta has been named Gates’ successor as Defense Secretary.
Gates was originally appointed by President George W. Bush in 2006 and retained by Obama, making him the only defense secretary in history to be asked to remain in office by a newly elected president, according to the Department of Defense.
Flashback: The ‘Most Severely Wounded’ American Soldier
IBM: Phase Change Memory
June 30th, 2011Via: PC World:
Solid-state flash memory is widely used as a storage medium in tons of consumer devices, from cell phones to laptops like the MacBook Air. While it has big advantages over hard drives in terms of speed and a lack of moving parts, it has a limited lifespan. Now IBM researchers say they’ve crafted a way of encoding data that works better than flash—and has a greatly increased lifespan.
The discovery is called phase-change memory (PCM), and where flash memory can typically be overwritten only 3,000 to 10,000 times, PCM can endure in the order of 10 million write-erase cycles. On top of that, its read-write performance is said to be up to 100 times that of today’s flash storage.
…
It’s going to be a while before the technology is commercialized—IBM estimates about five years.
DOJ Criminal Investigation Into Deaths That Resulted from CIA Torture
June 30th, 2011Via: MSNBC / AP:
Attorney General Eric Holder said Thursday he has authorized a full criminal investigation into the deaths of two terror detainees who died overseas while the CIA was involved in interrogating them.
During the Bush administration, Attorney General Michael Mukasey asked a federal prosecutor in Connecticut to look into the destruction of videotapes of CIA interrogations. In 2009, Holder asked the prosecutor to broaden his inquiry to look into allegations that CIA personnel had mistreated detainees.
Holder said Thursday that the prosecutor, John Durham of Connecticut, looked into the interrogation of a total of 101 detainees who were in U.S. custody overseas after the 9/11 attacks. Durham recommended conducting a full criminal investigation into the deaths of two of them, and Holder has now concurred.
Judge: Google Can Be Sued for Wiretapping in Street View Debacle
June 30th, 2011Via: Wired:
A federal judge has found that Google can be held liable for damages for secretly intercepting data on open Wi-Fi routers. The ruling is a serious legal setback for the search giant over activity it has engaged in across the United States for years.
That decision, the first of its kind, was handed down late Wednesday by a Silicon Valley federal judge presiding over nearly a dozen combined lawsuits seeking damages from Google for eavesdropping on open Wi-Fi networks from its Street View mapping cars. The vehicles, which rolled through neighborhoods across the country, were equipped with Wi-Fi–sniffing hardware to record the names and MAC addresses of routers to improve Google location-specific services. But the cars also secretly gathered snippets of Americans’ data.
Facebook: 10th Most Hated Company in America
June 30th, 2011
Dvorak is right: Facebook is a sort of AOL.
Via: Business Insider:
#10 Facebook
A common complaint includes user’s privacy and personal information protection. Social networkers worry about privacy and sometimes complain when Facebook introduces new features, like the news feed. Or when Facebook shuts down apps without warning users beforehand, like they did recently to tens of thousands of apps.
U.S. War Number Six: Somalia
June 30th, 2011Via: Guardian:
The US has conducted its first drone strike on Islamist militants in Somalia, marking the expansion of the pilotless war campaign to a sixth country.
The missile strike on a vehicle in the southern town of Kismayo, reported last week as a helicopter assault, wounded two senior militants with al-Shabab and several foreign fighters according to the Washington Post.
Armed Predator and Reaper drones already operate in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and Libya, where they are controlled by the US military or the CIA.
The CIA-run programmes are controversial. Although they provide the Obama administration with a low-risk weapon against Islamist militants, they stir intense anti-American hostility among the local population.
U.S. Monthly Combat Deaths in Iraq at 3-Year High
June 30th, 2011Via: New York Times:
Fifteen American soldiers have been killed in June, 14 of them in hostile incidents. According to icasualties.org, an online database, this was the highest number of combat fatalities since June 2008, when 23 soldiers and Marines were killed.
The Obama Administration’s Whistleblower Problem
June 30th, 2011Via: The Atlantic:
Somewhere in the federal bureaucracy, there is a middle-aged woman sitting in a cubicle wearing business casual clothing, eating a turkey sandwich from a brown paper bag, and trying to decide whether the government misconduct she’s privy to should be exposed. Perhaps her agency is infringing on the constitutional rights of American citizens, or violating statutory law, or merely wasting millions of taxpayer dollars. Or it could be that the particular failure threatens national security, or public health, or the robustness of the international or national economy.
Our dutiful bureaucrat doesn’t have to ponder the matter for long. She knows what she ought to do: inhale, put cool steel to pursed lips, and blow the whistle. Inside the bathroom stall at work, in her Hyundai sedan during the evening commute, and worst of all in bed at night, she weighs her duty to the American public against the consequences that will befall her husband, kids, and shelter-adopted mutt if her superiors fire her for making them look bad. Somewhere in the federal bureaucracy, this woman or someone like her hasn’t decided what she’ll do — and she is less likely to come forward now than she was when the Obama Administration took office because, for reasons big and small, fair and possibly unfair, it has acquired a reputation for retaliating against whistleblowers.
The most recent example is practically breaking news. In A Fox News interview, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent claimed Tuesday that he was fired for helping to expose the now infamous “Fast and Furious” operation. That was the code name given when ATF agents permitted criminals to illegally smuggle guns into Mexico in hopes of tracing them to big time drug traffickers. As the Houston Chronicle reports: “The weapons purchased in gun stores in and around Phoenix, as many as 2,500, got away from ATF surveillance and eventually reached the cartels in Mexico.”
