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"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned" Richard Feynman
"The penalty good people pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by people worse than themselves."
- Plato, Greek philosopher.
The source article is paywalled at Court News UK: Plot to Abuse Children for ‘Top Political People’: A paedophile told an undercover police officer that they could make millions of pounds raping children on camera for ‘top political people,’ a court heard. Gihan Muthukumarana, 28, claimed they could sell the film for £10m if they […]
Via: Channel 4: An undercover investigation by Channel 4 News reveals how Cambridge Analytica secretly campaigns in elections across the world. Bosses were filmed talking about using bribes, ex-spies, fake IDs and sex workers. Senior executives at Cambridge Analytica – the data company that credits itself with Donald Trump’s presidential victory – have been secretly […]
Update: Tempe Police Chief Says Early Probe Shows No Fault by Uber Via: San Francisco Chronicle: Pushing a bicycle laden with plastic shopping bags, a woman abruptly walked from a center median into a lane of traffic and was struck by a self-driving Uber operating in autonomous mode. “The driver said it was like a […]
I still miss Walter and the gang from Fringe. Via: ScienceAlert: Stephen Hawking submitted the final version of his last scientific paper just two weeks before he died, and it lays the theoretical groundwork for discovering a parallel universe. Hawking, who passed away on Wednesday aged 76, was co-author to a mathematical paper which seeks […]
Via: Reuters: Nervous Asian battery makers are turning to early-stage cobalt projects in Australia and Canada to lock in supplies of the critical battery ingredient ahead of expected shortages as demand for electric vehicles revs up. Mine developers say interest from Japanese and Korean firms is particularly strong as they compete with rivals from China, […]
Via: GeekWire: After security researchers were able to exploit design flaws in modern processors that lay undetected for up to 20 years, Intel said it would redesign future chips to correct those flaws, and on Thursday it provided a little more information about how that will work. Starting with the Cascade Lake version of its […]
Tesla has been doing this for years, and it’s very disturbing. Of course, the justification is that changes can be made to the car to fix things over the air, without the customer having to bring the car in for servicing. I get all of that. But many people don’t realize that the vehicles are […]
Via: CBC: The bottled water industry is estimated to be worth nearly $200 billion a year, surpassing sugary sodas as the most popular beverage in many countries. But its perceived image of cleanliness and purity is being challenged by a global investigation that found the water tested is often contaminated with tiny particles of plastic. […]
Via: Guardian: The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. A […]
Via: Foto: Ron Haeberle was a combat photographer in Vietnam when he and the Army unit he was riding with — Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment — landed near the hamlet of My Lai on the morning of March 16, 1968. Villagers weren’t alarmed; American GIs had visited the region near the central […]
Via: Reuters: China said it will begin applying its so-called social credit system to flights and trains and stop people who have committed misdeeds from taking such transport for up to a year. People who would be put on the restricted lists included those found to have committed acts like spreading false information about terrorism […]
Why was the detective concerned with debunking “conspiracy theories” related to this? Via: Columbia Journalism Review: I started getting a flood of emails from P.S. Ruckman Jr., a political science professor who taught at Northern Illinois University and Rock Valley College. In 10 emails containing 65 spreadsheets, he was sending his entire data set of […]
Your what hurts? Via: JAMA: In 2016, the US spent 17.8% of its gross domestic product on health care, and spending in the other countries ranged from 9.6% (Australia) to 12.4% (Switzerland). … Life expectancy in the US was the lowest of the 11 countries at 78.8 years (range for other countries, 80.7-83.9 years; mean […]
300 MWh. 😯 Via: Electrek: After breaking a few energy storage records with its battery system projects in Australia, Tesla looks to come back to the US to build a new world’s largest Powerpack battery system in Colorado. … In South Australia, Tesla’s 100MW/ 129MWh Powerpack project is known as “the most powerful battery system […]
Via: Jon Rappoport: I really hope you understand this. It is not a fantasy. It isn’t science fiction. It isn’t satire. It is Brave New World, but not the Huxley novel. It’s happening now. It’s a published study that appears on the website of the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the […]
Update: This Story Is Bullshit Via: LiveScience: So what really happened to Mark and Scott Kelly? It turns out that big changes in the expression of Scott Kelly’s genes occurred while he was in space, and 7 percent of those changes persisted after he returned to Earth, lead author Susan Bailey, a researcher at Colorado […]
Via: The Verge: YouTube will add information from Wikipedia to videos about popular conspiracy theories to provide alternative viewpoints on controversial subjects, its CEO said today. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said that these text boxes, which the company is calling “information cues,” would begin appearing on conspiracy-related videos within the next couple of weeks. Wojcicki, […]
They have their doomsteads here, so… Via: Radio New Zealand: A network of self-piloted, flying taxis will be trialled in New Zealand, in a partnership with the government. Airways, New Zealand’s air navigation service provider confirmed the trial and said it will develop a nationwide unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) traffic management system which will integrate […]
Via: Bloomberg: Volkswagen AG secured 20 billion euros ($25 billion) in battery supplies to underpin an aggressive push into electric cars in the coming years, ramping up pressure on Tesla Inc. as it struggles with production issues for the mainstream Model 3. The world’s largest carmaker will equip 16 factories to produce electric vehicles by […]
Update: She Ran the Site After the Abu Zubayda Incidents — Via: Quartz: As CIA director Mike Pompeo moves to become the United States’ secretary of state, deputy director Gina Haspel has been nominated to lead the agency. If confirmed by the Senate, she will become the first woman to run the CIA. Haspel’s nomination […]
Via: Guardian: There are a growing number of reports of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) searching the electronic devices of passengers on domestic flights in the US, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has sued the federal agency for records. The ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed a lawsuit against the TSA […]
Via: Organic Prepper: When you think of the most dangerous, violent cities in the world, do you picture slums in Third World countries with vicious drug cartels or arrogant warlords? Maybe the kind of violence where enemies are decapitated and whole families are murdered seem like things that happen far away in some terrifying, exotic […]
Via: BBC: China has approved the removal of term limits for its leader, in a move that effectively allows Xi Jinping to remain as president for life. The constitutional changes were passed by China’s annual sitting of the National People’s Congress on Sunday. The vote was widely regarded as a rubber-stamping exercise. Two delegates voted […]
Via: Los Angeles Times: The price of the California bullet train project jumped sharply Friday when the state rail authority announced that the cost of connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco would be $77.3 billion and could rise as high as $98.1 billion — an uptick of at least $13 billion from estimates two years […]
Via: Bloomberg: Billionaire investor Peter Thiel got a fresh victory in Washington. His data-mining startup, Palantir Technologies Inc., won a much-contested contract to provide software to the U.S. Army. Palantir will work with Raytheon Co. to replace the troubled Distributed Common Ground System now in effect. They beat out seven other proposals for a decade-long, […]
The sci-fi fan in me decided to post this one, but, no, this isn’t going to solve peak cobalt, or peak-whatever anytime soon. Via: Bloomberg: Sending a spacecraft to the far reaches of our solar system to mine asteroids might seem like an improbable ambition best left to science fiction. But it’s inching closer to […]
Via: Guardian: Two of the six collisions involving autonomous vehicles in California so far this year involved humans colliding with self-driving cars, apparently on purpose, according to incident reports collected by the California department of motor vehicles. On 10 January, a pedestrian in San Francisco’s Mission District ran across the street to confront a GM […]
Via: Reuters: President Donald Trump said on Thursday he was prepared to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for the first U.S.-North Korea summit, marking a potentially dramatic breakthrough in nuclear tensions with Pyongyang. Kim has committed to “denuclearization” and to suspending nuclear or missile tests, South Korea’s National Security Office head Chung Eui-yong […]
Via: EFF: After the prosecution of a California doctor revealed the FBI’s ties to a Best Buy Geek Squad computer repair facility in Kentucky, new documents released to EFF show that the relationship goes back years. The records also confirm that the FBI has paid Geek Squad employees as informants. EFF filed a Freedom of […]
“For non-offensive uses only.” *snort* Via: Guardian: Google’s artificial intelligence technologies are being used by the US military for one of its drone projects, causing controversy both inside and outside the company. Google’s TensorFlow AI systems are being used by the US Department of Defense’s (DoD) Project Maven, which was established in July last year […]
I think that this is the main Reddit thread: A family is being persecuted for exposing high ranking pedophiles (2018) Via: YouTube: My mom, Neringa Venckien?, a former Lithuanian judge and Parliament member, fled Lithuania with me from political persecution, and we arrived in the U.S.A. in 2013 when I was just 13-years-old. As my […]
Mmm hmm. This was treated like comedy gold on Cryptogon when it was announced. And now, not only has it not worked, but the problem is worse. Via: Reuters: A costly “ice wall” is failing to keep groundwater from seeping into the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, data from operator Tokyo Electric Power Co shows, […]
Via: USA Today: Uber has been sending self-driving trucks on delivery runs across Arizona since November, the first step in what promises to be a freight transportation revolution that could radically reshape the jobs of long-haul truckers. After testing its technology earlier in 2017, Uber began contracting with trucking companies to use its own autonomous […]
Can this possibly be right? Via: CNBC: At this rate, retirement is more of a fantasy than a reality for many people in this country. About 42 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved for when they retire, according to a study by GoBankingRates released Tuesday. The No. 1 reason most people cited for […]
Via: IEEE: Google is carrying out research on hypersonics, probably for new technologies to slash the cost of geothermal energy and tunneling. It could also be acquiring a Washington-based startup called HyperSciences that has already built prototype devices. … The technology being developed by HyperSciences should make it cheaper to reach much higher temperatures even […]
Update: Uber, Lyft Drivers Might Make More than $3.73/Hour, MIT Paper Author Says Via: USA Today: After a working paper published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claimed 74% of Uber and Lyft drivers take home less than minimum wage, the paper’s author said his analysis might be wrong. The paper suggested median profit for […]
The New York Times is promoting Khrushchyovka-style living in San Francisco for $1,400 to $2,400 a month. Via: New York Times: Shared bathrooms at the end of the hall and having no individual kitchen or living room is becoming less weird for some of the city’s workers thanks to Starcity, a new development company that […]
The Health Ranger YouTube channel is currently returning: “This account has been terminated for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.” Well, I went through being added to Google’s shit list over a decade ago. So… I have no idea why people who deal with alternative information continue to rely on Google’s platforms, given the company’s long history […]
Via: Yahoo News: The topic of overpopulation has been much discussed over the past few decades, but what if the real issue is a severe decline in population? It sounds like something straight out of a dystopian nightmare, but new research shows sperm counts are drastically dropping across the Western world. Researchers from Hebrew University-Hadassah […]
Shocker. Via: Guardian: MI5 agents are allowed to carry out criminal activity in the UK, the government has acknowledged for the first time. The prime minister was on Thursday forced to publish the text of a direction to the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office, the spying watchdog, on governing “security service participation in criminality”. It instructs […]
Via: Nature: In March 2015, Li-Huei Tsai set up a tiny disco for some of the mice in her laboratory. For an hour each day, she placed them in a box lit only by a flickering strobe. The mice — which had been engineered to produce plaques of the peptide amyloid-? in the brain, a […]
Via: Reuters: U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to slap stiff tariffs on imported steel and aluminum has rattled financial markets and stirred fears that some trading partners might retaliate by dumping U.S. Treasuries. Should China, Japan and other nations, which have recycled their trade dollars through their Treasuries holdings, suddenly decide to whittle them down, […]
Via: Yasha Levine: For years, the Tor Project — along with other U.S. government crypto tools like Signal — has been seen in almost religious terms by the privacy community as the only way to protect people from government spying online. The Electronic Frontier Foundation held up Tor as the digital equivalent of the First […]
Via: The Week: In the reviews that rolled out recently for Google’s new Clips smart camera, there were the rote things that you’d expect in all tech reviews: what was good, what was bad, and, inevitably, whether or not you should buy it. There was, however, a key idea conspicuously absent: whether or not the […]
How Can a Place with 58,000 Homeless People Continue to Function? Answer: With favelas and airmobile paramilitary forces. Most Americans couldn’t identify Brazil on a map, but the sprawling U.S. ghettos will increasingly look like Rio. Via: Los Angeles Times: Homelessness affects the lives of all Angelenos, not just those forced to live on the […]
“But he stressed it must be conducted in a manner which preserved food production and security.” Oh sure. Russian Famine of 1921–22 Great Chinese Famine Cambodian Famine Keep those in mind when you see the kids in the streets waving hammer and sickle signs. Via: Independent: South Africa‘s parliament has passed a motion to seize […]
Via: Defense News: Rapid advances in artificial intelligence and military robotics have some concerned that the development of Terminator-like killer robots will be humankind’s downfall. But that doesn’t seem to worry Eric Schmidt, the former executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, who addressed the impact of technology on democracy at the Feb. 16-18 Munich […]
Via: USA Today: President Trump said Wednesday he favors taking guns away from people who might commit violence before going through legal due process in the courts, one of many startling comments he made in a rambling White House meeting designed to hash out school safety legislation with a bipartisan group of lawmakers. “I like […]
Via: Atlas Obscura: AN ARCTIC FOX, A HEN, wild berries, a reindeer, a single candle glowing in the darkness, glaciers floating at sea, and an aurora borealis. These are some of the subjects of delicate, precise illustrations created by a man imprisoned in a Soviet gulag during the 1930s. The man’s drawings and letters, teeming […]
Via: The Verge: The program began in 2012 as a partnership between New Orleans Police and Palantir Technologies, a data-mining firm founded with seed money from the CIA’s venture capital firm. According to interviews and documents obtained by The Verge, the initiative was essentially a predictive policing program, similar to the “heat list” in Chicago […]
It’s a bit like the Christmas shit appearing in stores in October. Hmm. I wonder if They’ll fit Hillary with a powered exoskeleton suit this time? Via: CBS: President Donald Trump announced that he’s running for re-election in 2020, and Brad Parscale, who served as the Trump campaign’s 2016 digital guru, has been named campaign […]
Thinking about the security side of this sends a chill down my spine. We’ve all heard of botnets. We’re probably not more than a couple of years away from the first botnet consisting of thousands of autonomous vehicles. I have roughly zero confidence that the security around autonomous vehicles will be sufficient to prevent this […]
Via: The Verge: Norway will spend 100 million Norwegian Crowns ($12.7 million) to upgrade the doomsday seed vault it built 10 years ago. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was constructed in an abandoned Arctic coal mine to store and safeguard the world’s crops and plants from global natural or man-made disaster. If nuclear war or […]
Swipetarded parents. Swipetarded children. This should be a boon for the public school to private prison gravy train. Via: Guardian: Children are increasingly finding it hard to hold pens and pencils because of an excessive use of technology, senior paediatric doctors have warned. An overuse of touchscreen phones and tablets is preventing children’s finger muscles […]
Via: CNBC: A file that Apple updated on its website last month provides the first acknowledgment that it’s relying on Google’s public cloud for data storage for its iCloud services. The disclosure is fresh evidence that Google’s cloud has been picking up usage as it looks to catch up with Amazon and Microsoft in the […]
Via: NBC: A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employee was last seen 11 days ago, when he left work early after complaining that he felt unwell, Atlanta police said Friday. Timothy Cunningham, 35, works as a commander in the U.S. Public Health Service and has responded to the Ebola virus and the Zika virus […]
Via: Reuters: China’s ruling Communist Party on Sunday set the stage for President Xi Jinping to stay in office indefinitely, with a proposal to remove a constitutional clause limiting presidential service to just two terms in office.
Via: Reuters: When Apple Inc begins hosting Chinese users’ iCloud accounts in a new Chinese data center at the end of this month to comply with new laws there, Chinese authorities will have far easier access to text messages, email and other data stored in the cloud. That’s because of a change to how the […]
Via: Electrek: As we reported last week and discussed on the Electrek podcast yesterday, many people still have a difficult time wrapping their head around the Tesla Semi specs that the company announced last year. But now CEO Elon Musk says that he is ‘optimistic’ they can beat those specs with the production version of […]
Via: BoingBoing: Millions of new cars sold in the US and Europe are “connected,” having some mechanism for exchanging data with their manufacturers after the cars are sold; these cars stream or batch-upload location data and other telemetry to their manufacturers, who argue that they are allowed to do virtually anything they want with this […]
Via: cnet: A pair of small satellites named for an adventurous Belgian cartoon character could serve as proof of concept for an ambitious global broadband service envisioned by Elon Musk. After days of delays, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the two small satellites, newly dubbed Tintin A and B by Musk (but known more […]
Via: ProPublica: In Great Britain, midwives deliver half of all babies, including Kate Middleton’s first two children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte. In Sweden, Norway and France, midwives oversee most expectant and new mothers, enabling obstetricians to concentrate on high-risk births. In Canada and New Zealand, midwives are so highly valued that they’re brought in […]
Via: The Verge: Installation has finally begun on Jeff Bezos’ 10,000-year clock, a project that the Amazon CEO has invested $42 million in (along with a hollowed-out mountain in Texas that Bezos intends for a Blue Origin spaceport), with the goal of building a mechanical clock that will run for 10 millennia.
Via: Real Clear Politics: Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor Colton Haab appeared on FOX News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight to talk about his saga with CNN and how they “scripted” a question for him to use at Wednesday night’s town hall event hosted by the network and moderated by CNN’s Jake Tapper. Haab, a […]
I just hope there’s plenty of 4K footage of the launch centrifuge facility when it experiences catastrophic failure. Via: TechCrunch: What if instead of blasting cargo into space on a rocket, we could fling it into space using a catapult? That’s the big, possibly crazy, possibly genius idea behind SpinLaunch. It was secretly founded in […]
Via: Reuters: Facing a future in which self-driving cars may curb vehicle ownership, Nissan Motor Co is taking its first steps to becoming an operator of autonomous transportation services, hoping to break into a segment set to be dominated by Uber Technologies and other technology firms. In partnership with Japanese mobile gaming platform operator DeNA […]
Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand. — Via: Reuters: Rather than rising, GE Power’s profit fell 45 percent last year, forcing GE to slash its overall profit outlook and cut its dividend for only the second time since the Great Depression. Its shares have plunged more than 50 percent since the March […]
Via: The Hill: Following a federal indictment of Russians accused of meddling in the U.S election, a former CIA director on Friday said the U.S. “probably” meddles in other countries’ elections, as well. The Russian embassy flagged his comments. When asked whether the U.S. interferes in other countries’ elections, James Woolsey said, “Well, only for […]
No. Via: Bloomberg: Picture this: You’re driving home from work, contemplating what to make for dinner, and as you idle at a red light near your neighborhood pizzeria, an ad offering $5 off a pepperoni pie pops up on your dashboard screen. Are you annoyed that your car’s trying to sell you something, or pleasantly […]
Via: Wall Street Journal: A South Korean official who guided Seoul’s regulatory clampdown on cryptocurrencies was found dead on Sunday, according to a government spokesman. Jung Ki-joon, 52, was head of economic policy at the Office for Government Policy Coordination. He helped coordinate efforts to create new legislation aimed at suppressing cryptocurrency speculation and illicit […]
Via: New Zealand Herald: A New Zealand academic who made international waves researching China’s international influence campaigns has linked a number of recent break-ins to her work. University of Canterbury professor Anne-Marie Brady, speaking today from Christchurch to the Australian Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee in Canberra, outlined three recent events which caused her conc
Via: BBC: In the summer of 1974, a large and highly unusual ship set sail from Long Beach in California. It was heading for the middle of the Pacific where its owners boasted it would herald a revolutionary new industry beneath the waves. Equipped with a towering rig and the latest in drilling gear, the […]
Build the sprawling San Angeles favelas with autonomous construction drones! No? Via: Los Angeles Times: Los Angeles County’s homeless population is increasing faster than the supply of new housing, even with the addition of thousands of beds in the last two years and millions of dollars beginning to flow in from two ballot measures targeting […]
Via: NBC: How dirty is San Francisco? An NBC Bay Area Investigation reveals a dangerous mix of drug needles, garbage, and feces throughout downtown San Francisco. The Investigative Unit surveyed 153 blocks of the city – the more than 20-mile stretch includes popular tourist spots like Union Square and major hotel chains. The area – […]
Via: The War Zone: Last November, The War Zone posted an exclusive story detailing a bizarre incident involving an unidentified aircraft that transited the skies of the Pacific Northwest in the early evening of October 25th, 2017. What
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I've been 'around' for a few years now, pursuing the shifting goal of a sharable home-made surfers resource site focused on ease of use and variety of mostly adult ( whoa : I didn't say prurient ) content.
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