Aussies to Be Fined for Swearing [???]
May 31st, 2011Nat, they’re coming for you.
Via: Sydney Morning Herald:
Australians may have a love of plain speaking but new laws are set to curtail some of their more colourful language with police issuing on-the-spot fines for obnoxious swearing.
The country’s second most populous state Victoria is due to approve new legislation this week under which police will be able to slap fines of up to Aus$240 (US$257) on people using offensive words or phrases.
Eurozone Crisis Risks ‘Systemic’ Fallout
May 31st, 2011Via: AFP:
The debt crisis in Greece, Ireland and Portugal could have “significant systemic effects” in the eurozone, Italy’s central bank chief Mario Draghi, who is set to head up the European Central Bank, said on Tuesday.
“In the eurozone, the sovereign debt crisis in three countries, which together represent six percent of the area’s GDP, has the potential to exert significant systemic effects,” Draghi said at a central bank conference.
“European economic and monetary union is facing its most difficult test since it was created,” added Draghi, referring to Greece, Ireland and Portugal which have agreed bailout packages worth tens of billions of euros (dollars).
“European surveillance over national budget policies, which was weakened in the middle of the last decade on the initiative of the three biggest countries, showed itself wanting just when it was most essential,” he said.
Had the European stability pact rules been respected to the letter, the ratio of public debt to gross domestic product on the eve of the crisis would have been 10 percentage points less in the eurozone, he said.
“There are no shortcuts,” warned Draghi, calling on governments to rein in public finances.
High Radioactivity Found in Japanese Nuclear Workers
May 30th, 2011Via: AFP:
Two workers from Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear plant have been contaminated by high levels of radioactive iodine, the operator said Monday, prompting fears over their long-term health.
The workers, reportedly men in their 30s and 40s, may have already been exposed to radiation levels higher than the recently boosted official annual limit, Japanese media suggested.
Test: Javascript Bitcoin Miner
May 30th, 2011Update: Good Video Cards for GPU Mining
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Update: HAHA Never Mind
This misses doing anything worth doing by about four orders of magnitude. lol.
Thanks to everyone who tried this out, but it’s the Bitcoin equivalent trying to win the lotto.
—End Update—
A crew calling themselves bitp.it have created a distributed javascript Bitcoin mining system. Since many tens of thousands of you are apparently waiting for some other method of supporting Cryptogon, besides the ones available already, *grin* I thought that maybe you’d be up for opening this Bitcoin mining page on Cryptogon [Update: Page taken down] in your browser, and leaving it open for as long as you like. You don’t have to do anything else. The code will run inside your browser until you close the tab or window. Open as many instances of the thing as you want. If you monitor your processor utilization, you’ll see the browser using more with each instance.
On a modern computer, you probably won’t notice any difference with just one instance running. On smartphones, old computers and netbooks, you may notice a slowdown, or your fan turning on or becoming audible.
Bitcoins are so hard to mine now that I doubt that this will accomplish anything, but I just wanted to see how many hashes per second you guys could reach.
Writer Urges Internet Junkies to ‘Switch Off’ and Think
May 30th, 2011The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
Via: AFP:
Like tens of millions of others, US technology writer Nicholas Carr found the lure of the worldwide web hard to resist — until he noticed it was getting harder and harder to concentrate.
He set out his concerns in a celebrated essay headlined “Is Google making us stupid?”
And his latest book “The Shallows” explores in depth what he fears the Internet is doing to our brains.
“The seductions of technology are hard to resist,” Carr acknowledges in that book, which has sold an estimated 50,000 hardback copies in the United States alone. But he thinks it’s time to start trying.
In a speech at last week’s Seoul Digital Forum and an interview with AFP, Carr restated his concerns that IT is affecting the way people think and feel and even the physical make-up of their brains.
Every new technology in history — like the map and the clock — changed the way people think but Carr sees special dangers in the Internet.
He got his first PC back in the 1980s and was an avid net user until “a few years ago, I noticed some disturbing changes in the way my mind worked. I was losing the ability to concentrate.”
Miami Shootout
May 30th, 2011Via: Miami Herald:
Three police officers are in the hospital Monday after emptying several rounds of bullets on a driver who opened fire on South Beach.
The driver was killed; four bystanders were injured.
The police officers involved are in non-life-threatening condition, said Miami Beach Police Sgt. Alejandro Bello.
Germany Decides to Abandon Nuclear Power by 2022
May 30th, 2011Via: AP:
Germany’s governing coalition said Monday it will shut down all the country’s nuclear power plants by 2022. The decision, prompted by Japan’s nuclear disaster, will make Germany the first major industrialized nation to go nuclear-free in years.
It also completes a remarkable about-face for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right government, which only late last year had pushed through a plan to extend the life span of the country’s 17 reactors — with the last scheduled to go offline in 2036.
But Merkel now says industrialized, technologically advanced Japan’s helplessness in the face of the Fukushima disaster made her rethink the risks of the technology.
“We want the electricity of the future to be safe, reliable and economically viable,” Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters on Monday after overnight negotiations among the governing parties. “We have to follow a new path.”
While Germany already was set to abandon nuclear energy eventually, the decision — which still requires parliamentary approval — dramatically speeds up that process.
The Whistleblower
May 30th, 2011If you don’t know what this is about, see the handy Employee involvement in child sex slave traffic section on the Wikipedia page for DynCorp. And remember: “We Serve Today For a Better Tomorrow.”
Bolkovac, who worked as part of the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia in the late 1990s, provides yet another perspective on why private military contracting has encroached on U.S. foreign policy, threatening our image, national security, and the lives of those we are supposed to be protecting. A police officer turned human rights investigator, she worked at uncovering international sex trafficking and cover-ups by her bosses at DynCorp International, which led to her firing, a mad rush across the border, and a subsequent wrongful termination lawsuit in which she was victorious and became the self-described poster girl for everything wrong about security-for-hire. Most galling is the sad truth that DynCorp answered to no law, nor to the military, the U.S., or the Bosnians. The criminality, including rape and murder, committed by corporate military contractors has proliferated in the past decade, and Bolkovac’s cautionary tale ends on the sourest of notes. DynCorp won another federal contract on the heels of her lawsuit, and no one was prosecuted for crimes against the women whose lives she struggled to save. Infuriating and heartbreaking.
Dozens of Pages Disappear from Intelligence File on Canadian Socialist
May 30th, 2011Via: The Canadian Press:
Dozens of pages from a decades-old intelligence file on socialist icon Tommy Douglas have mysteriously disappeared.
The disappearance came to light during a lengthy court battle over the federal government’s refusal to fully disclose the RCMP dossier on the former Saskatchewan premier and one-time federal NDP leader.
Library and Archives Canada, which currently holds the 1,142-page dossier, initially released just over 450 heavily censored pages in response to a request by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.
But the government partially lifted the shroud of secrecy a week before a court hearing into the matter began in February, releasing almost 400 additional pages under a new, more relaxed policy governing the release of historically significant documents.
It was only then, with fuller access to the file, that Paul Champ, lawyer for The Canadian Press, realized about four dozen pages were missing.
Research Credit: cptmarginal
Robot Juggles Five Billiard Balls at Once
May 30th, 2011The audio is the chilling part.
Via: io9:
This a robotic juggler built by the Department of Control Engineering at Prague’s Czech Technical University. Researchers have taught this machine to lob and catch five billiard balls all on its own. It’ll someday do the same with our skulls.
