[Quote]:

The Obama administration cut taxes for middle-class Americans, expects to make a profit on the hundreds of billions of dollars spent to rescue Wall Street banks and has overseen an economy that has grown for the past five quarters.

Most voters don’t believe it.

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The latest statistics from Web metrics company Net Applications pegged IE6′s usage share at 15.6%, which means it’s the world’s third-most-used browser edition. Many of the holdouts are enterprises locked into IE6 because the commercial software or home-grown applications they use work only in that browser.

Organizations running IE6 have told Gartner that 40% of their custom-built browser-dependent applications won’t run on IE8, the version packaged with Windows 7. Thus many companies face a tough decision: Either spend time and money to upgrade those applications so that they work in newer browsers, or stick with Windows XP.

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See that little bright spot on the plume on the left, just above the Sun’s edge? That spot is the same size as the Earth. The image to the right should make that fairly clear; I made the Earth pretty close to the right size for comparison. Our planet is about 13,000 km (8000 miles) in diameter, so that one minor prominence is roughly 50,000 km high. That’s 30,000 miles. And it’s positively dwarfed by the Sun itself. A million Earths could fit inside the Sun.

In case you woke up today feeling important.

[Quote]:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A senior Pentagon official broke Department of Defense rules and lied to military officials when he set up a network of private contractors to spy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the New York Times reported Friday.

The Times cited an internal investigation stating that the official, Michael Furlong, set up an unauthorized spy network starting in late 2009 and “deliberately misled” top generals about it.

Pentagon rules forbid using contractors as spies.

Captcha is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. The process usually involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade. Most often they’re images, with words in them obscured by lines and distortion to prevent OCR software from reading it.

You’d think this was something marketing couldn’t possibly ruin, right?

 

 

 
Wrong.

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This is going to be terrible. In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.

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WASHINGTON — Nearly 18 billion dollars earmarked for reconstruction in Afghanistan remain unaccounted for, snagged in a “labyrinth” of contract bureaucracy, a sweeping US government audit has shown.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) said 17.7 billion dollars was obligated over three years to nearly 7,000 contractors, but the Pentagon, State Department and US Agency for International Development were unable to say how much money has been spent.

The audit addresses fiscal years 2007 through 2009, but the problems go back to 2002 when the United States began funding Afghan reconstruction, because “much of the data available from the agencies prior to 2007 was too poor to be analyzed,” the report said.

Not shown: the air support.

[Quote]:

he United States spent $80 billion on spy activities in 2010, the first time the government has officially announced the total tab for intelligence spending.

The amount included $53.1 billion on non-military intelligence programs, a 6 percent boost from the previous year, according to a statement released Thursday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The military spent an additional $27 billion on its intelligence apparatus, said Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan.

No further details were released.

Okay, about these details:

It’s approximately the same size as the Department of Veterans Affairs, or the Department of Transportation. It’s about 5 times the budget of NASA.

It is 8 times the size of the entire GDP of Afghanistan, or roughly equivalent to the entire military budget of China, and $30 billion more than the entire military budget of Russia.

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This is the “world’s first true Android”, called the Actroid-F. She’s (I’m sorry, it’s) designed to be used in hospitals and other locations involving natural human-to-human communication, and can move its eyes, open and close its mouth, tilt its head, nod, smile, replicate breathing, and bow; and is 1.4 meters tall when seated. She made an appearance at a two-day laboratory fair at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), where a teleoperating station equipped with a camera was showcased, enable the android to replicate the head and facial movements of the operator, as well as following manually-inputted commands.

Those subtle facial movements are going to be useful, they’ll include

Disdain for your meat-based processor.

Puzzlement that you are still alive.

A small frown to indicate that you should more quickly bleed out.

A slight, polite smile from one T-600 to an earlier model as it crushes a human skull underfoot.

[Quote]:

The story of industries paying lobbyists to influence legislation that benefits their business is nothing new—but what about when that industry is a privately-owned and operated prison system?

NPR reports that Arizona Senate Bill 1070 (PDF), the immigration bill that requires anyone who can’t produce papers proving they are in the country legally to be arrested, was drafted with the help and influence of Arizona’s private prison companies.

“According to Corrections Corporation of America reports reviewed by NPR, executives believe immigrant detention is their next big market. Last year, they wrote that they expect to bring in “a significant portion of our revenues” from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that detains illegal immigrants.”

Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law – NPR