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A police officer in Texas made international headlines after he was caught on tape pepper spraying a baby squirrel.
A student at Kimbrough Middle School recorded the officer spraying the animal as voices in the background begged for the officer to stop.

Remember this G20 cop?

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The Obama administration warned Friday that governments around the world are extending their repression to the Internet, seeking to cut off their citizens’ access to websites and other means of communication to stave off the types of revolutions that have wracked the Middle East.

Dear US, look in the mirror first.

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Last year, Sen. Joe Lieberman introduced the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act that would institute the National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications, a new federal bureaucracy that would monitor and regulate the security status of all private websites and Internet service providers. Any company connected to the United States’ information infrastructure (Internet and/or phone), which basically means all businesses, would be subject to command by the NCCC. Any website or network perceived to be a threat could be shut down without warning.

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There has been a war of language and thought going on in the copyright debate for years.  People think in language just as they speak in language, which is why content industry groups have gone to such lengths to pervert nuanced legal language into stacatto and misleading buzzwords crafted purely for public consumption.  This language war is the reason why when I Google the word “piracy”, the first page gives me the Wikipedia article for the war act of piracy and then in the news items I get a story about lawmakers wondering if search engines contribute to piracy.

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When you hear politicians lament that “we’re broke,” consider this fact: If corporations and households with $1 million income paid at the same levels they did in 1961, the Treasury would collect an additional $716 billion a year – or $7 trillion over a decade.

Our communities are facing mammoth state and federal budget cuts because Congress has, in large part, failed to sufficiently tax America’s millionaires and billionaires or prevent aggressive tax avoidance by multinational companies. The rest of us are paying to pick up the slack in budget cuts and future taxes.

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Using a Cypress Semiconductor PSoC system-on-chip motherboard, equipment maker Oscium has unveiled the iMSO-104, a device the company calls the world’s smallest and most portable oscilloscope. The hardware plugs into any iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch that can run the corresponding app (free), and it displays up to one analog and four digital signals simultaneously.

What would be possible with Thunderbolt on future iOS devices?

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In one explosive stroke Thursday, the clerk in a Republican stronghold tilted the tight Supreme Court race in favor of Justice David Prosser by recovering thousands of untallied votes for the incumbent.

Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus said Thursday that she failed to save on her computer and then report 14,315 votes in the city of Brookfield, omitting them entirely in an unofficial total she released after Tuesday’s election. With other smaller errors in Waukesha County, Prosser gained 7,582 votes over his challenger, JoAnne Kloppenburg, leaving the sitting justice significantly ahead for now amid ongoing official counting.

Although you shouldn’t mistake incompetence for malice, in some cases they are basically equivalent. A doctor who doesn’t know what they’re doing shouldn’t be doing surgery, or a police officer who can’t tell an armed maniac from an 8 year old child running away before shooting – at that point, it’s equivalent.

This lady should not be a County Clerk.

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Breathtaking views of Spacewalks with our blue planet below. Space Shuttle Discovery made its last appearance to ISS and the Astronauts had a few Spacewalks. We have put together the best, and most breathtaking images of these spacewalks and previous spacewalks throughout history.

[32 Pics]

In February 1984, Mission Specialist Bruce McCandless II went further away from the confines and safety of his ship than any previous astronaut had ever been. This space first was made possible by the Manned Manuevering Unit or MMU, a nitrogen jet propelled backpack. After a series of test maneuvers inside and above Challenger’s payload bay, McCandless went “free-flying” to a distance of 320 feet away from the Orbiter. This stunning orbital panorama view shows McCandless out there amongst the black and blue of Earth and space. Spacewalks – Blue Sky: credit: NASA

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As we got further and further away, it [the Earth] diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man.

— James B. Irwin

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With multiple players engaging in high-speed trading – buying and selling stocks at literally 90 percent the speed of light – even the tiniest fractional time advantage is a significant edge.

The research was designed to "explore the physical boundaries of liquidity" by devising a new way to buy and sell stocks, in turnaround times that were considered impossible due to light-propagation delays, Wissner-Gross told CNBC.com in a telephone interview.

"It provides a new source of liquidity – or what can be viewed as a new source of liquidity – because it allows for faster turnaround times for coordinated trading of geographically separated securities," he said.

There should be a sales tax on stock sales.

Doesn’t have to be high at all, how about x/(t)% where t is the time in seconds that the stock is held for, and x is however long you want to set the floor for trading.

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Is it because the iPhone development environment is better than the Android’s?

This.