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Earth (on the left) and the moon (on the right) were seen by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on Aug. 26, 2011, when the spacecraft was about 6 million miles (9.66 million kilometers) away. The photo was taken by the spacecraft’s onboard camera, JunoCam.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

– Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

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Solution: Repair relations with your Asian suppliers by pushing those components through the factories. And then give it a positive spin by telling your customers that you are doing it just for them.

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James Gosling, the notable programmer who founded Java at Sun Microsystems, has joined Google, a company locked in a lawsuit over how the technology is used in Android.

Gosling announced his new Google employment today on his blog. "I don’t know what I’ll be working on. I expect it’ll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon," he said.

When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems last year, Gosling decided not to join.

Oracle’s ways evidently didn’t agree with Gosling. He called Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison "Larry, Prince of Darkness." And, he said, "During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle, where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer’s eyes sparkle."

"When you’re young, you look at television and think – There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought."

– Steve Jobs

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The Murdoch media empire has cost humanity perhaps one or two decades of time in the battle against climate change. Each lost decade greatly increases the eventual economic costs, the devastation to our ecosystems, and the suffering of future generations….

There are two hard problems in computer science: cache validation, variable substitution, and off-by-one errors.

According to the State Department’s recent report, fifteen American private citizens died in terrorist attacks in 2010: thirteen in Afghanistan and one each in Iraq and Uganda.

More people die of peanut allergy each year.

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For the eleventh time in four years, a human foot washed ashore near Vancouver – baffling investigators who are at a loss to explain the grisly trend.

The investigation must be running in circles.

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RCMP spokeswoman Const. Annie Linteau said Friday that matching the feet is only one part of the investigation.

"It’s certainly a good step in our investigation," she said.

Hey, wait, making puns is my job!

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Here is an important question: What single organization is responsible for more terror plots in the USA than any other?

Possible answers: Al Qaida. That would no doubt be the popular answer but it would be wrong. The KKK. Way past their prime, so that is not it. The Jewish Defense League. Good guess, but still not it. So what is the correct answer?

It is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, AKA the FBI. Don’t believe me? Well, just read Trevor Aaronson’s expose entitled “The Informants” published in the September/October 2011 issue of Mother Jones.

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It would appear that a Florida bank has been the victim of a $13 million ATM heist, but just how did the cyber-robbers pull it off?

Although the security breach which led to the ATM fraud itself seems to have taken place in March, and was disclosed in the first quarter earnings statement for Fidelity National Information Services Inc (FIS) back in May, details of exactly what happened are only just starting to leak from the FBI probe that followed.

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While high-profile medium James Van Praagh has yet to take the bait, a self-proclaimed Toronto psychic says she’s considering taking up a $1-million challenge to prove her abilities.

"I would say yes, I would take [the] challenge because I have enough faith in my own abilities if I was available," Toronto-based psychic Nikki told CBC News.

"I am the real thing so I don’t have to worry about this stuff."

[..]

Randi, who gained fame for taking on televangelist Peter Popoff and Israeli spoonbender Uri Geller, said since the challenge was established, hundreds of psychics all over the world have taken up the offer.

“Most of them have been convinced that they’d pass the test and win the million, yet every time we’ve tested them under scientific conditions, their ‘powers’ seem to have disappeared. Hey, that’s a good trick,” he said.

I guess they thought that it would be easy enough: just a quick jaunt across a river. Accomplish their mission, and then have a nice story to tell their family when they got back home. Unfortunately you can only see the surface of a murky torrent of flood water, so they misjudged how deep they would be getting themselves in. By the time it was obvious that it was a bad idea, they were too late to turn around, so they might as well commit to the catastrophe in the vague hopes of getting some positive outcome. In the end everyone ended up bailing, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment, and the opportunity cost that it would take to fix their mess, plus the time and money wasted when they could’ve been doing something useful somewhere else.

In other words they’re just playing by the Defense Department’s handbook for the past 10 years or so.

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It will cost $15 to ask Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) a question in person during the August congressional recess.

The House Budget Committee chairman isn’t holding any face-to-face open-to-the-public town hall meetings during the recess, but like several of his colleagues he will speak only for residents willing to open their wallets.

They should show up at the face-to-face meetings with copies of their past tax returns, stamped “Paid in full.”

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The Irish justice minister has said that forthcoming child protection measures, including mandatory reporting will "apply regardless of any internal rules of any religious grouping".

Alan Shatter was responding to comments made by Cardinal Sean Brady who defended the seal of confession.

Cardinal Brady stressed it was a "sacred and treasured" rite.

[..]

A priest could be convicted of a criminal offence if they were told of a sexual abuse case and failed to report it to the civil authorities.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Mr Shatter said: “It is the failure in the past to make such reports that has led sexual predators into believing that they have impunity and facilitated paedophiles preying on children and destroying their lives.”

Anyone who fails to declare information about the abuse of a child could face a prison term of five years.

The Irish Children’s Minister Frances Fitzgerald said that priests who are given admissions of child abuse during the sacrament of confession will not be exempt from new rules on mandatory reporting.

During his homily to worshippers at Knock shrine in County Mayo, on Sunday, the archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland said: “Freedom to participate in worship and to enjoy the long-established rites of the church is so fundamental that any intrusion upon it is a challenge to the very basis of a free society” he said.

How much more do we need to do before these bishops understand that no, it is NOT alright to protect pederasts?

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“I forward this file to you for review. Please open and view it.”

Take a look.

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Ever since Google launched its new Google+ social network, we and others have pointed out that the search giant clearly has more in mind than just providing a nice place for people to share photos of their pets. For one thing, Google needs to tap into the “social signals” that people provide through networks such as Facebook so it can improve its search results. There’s a larger motive, too: As Chairman and former Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt admitted during an interview in Edinburgh over the weekend, Google is taking a hard line on the real-name issue because it sees Google+ as an “identity service” or platform on which it can build other products.

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Sen. Roberto Arango, an anti-gay Republican who represents the capital of San Juan for the island’s governing party, presented his letter of resignation after the photos on Grindr were leaked to the press.

Can you guess why without clicking the link?

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The LA Times, and most people who denounce these spending "inefficiencies," have the causation backwards: fighting Terrorism isn’t the goal that security spending is supposed to fulfill; the security spending (and power vested by surveillance) is the goal itself, and Terrorism is the pretext for it. For that reason, whether the spending efficiently addresses a Terrorism threat is totally irrelevant.

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Security researchers have discovered a counterfeit web certificate for Google.com circulating on the internet that gives attackers the encryption keys needed to impersonate Gmail and virtually every other digitally signed Google property.

The forged certificate was issued on July 10 to digitally sign Google pages protected by SSL, or secure sockets layer. It was issued by DigiNotar, a certificate authority located in the Netherlands. The forged certificate is valid for *.google.com, giving its unknown holders the means to mount transparent attacks on a wide range of Google users who access pages on networks controlled by the counterfeiters.

[..]

Google and Mozilla have responded to the forgery by preparing updates to Chrome, Firefox and other software programs that take the highly unusual step of blocking all certificates issued by DigiNotar while the forgery is being investigated.

This one apparently was used by the Iranian government. Diginotar is used by the Dutch government for a lot of their (legit) certificates, it’ll be interesting to see which parts of the government are hit by these emergency patches.

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Hurricane Irene wound up by most estimates as one of the top ten most destructive and deadly hurricanes to hit the United States since 1980. While ultimately not as powerful as many had predicted, the storm still killed at least 27 people along its path from the Caribbean to the eastern seaboard. Transportation was shut down all along the east coast, stranding residents and tourists in shelters, airports, and train stations. More than 5.8 million customers lost electricity, thousands of flights were cancelled, flooding washed out roads and destroyed homes, and evacuation orders were issued for hundreds of thousands. Gathered here are pictures from the Hurricane’s path. — Lane Turner (44 photos total)

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Hotel workers put outdoor furniture in a pool to keep it from blowing away in preparation for Hurricane Irene on August 26, 2011 in Ocean City, Md. Ocean City Mayor Rick Meehan has ordered a mandatory evacuation for thousands of residents and visitors. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images) #

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