[Quote]:

Many individuals who took a single dose of psilocybin — the active ingredient in what the drug culture calls “magic mushrooms” — showed alterations in personality characteristics, largely for the better, that persisted for more than a year, a prospective scientific study showed.

Participants who reported “mystical experiences” during the hallucinogen sessions tended to show increases in the personality dimension known as openness, according to Katherine A. MacLean, PhD, and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University.

They found no adverse effects from the drug exposure.

Openness is generally considered a positive characteristic and includes such traits as aesthetic appreciation and sensitivity, imagination, intellectual engagement, and awareness of feelings in themselves and others, the researchers indicated in an online report in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

Action Points

• Explain that many individuals who took a single dose of psilocybin showed alterations in personality characteristics, largely for the better, that persisted for more than a year.
• Note that participants who reported “mystical experiences” during the hallucinogen sessions tended to show increases in the personality dimension known as openness (aesthetic appreciation and sensitivity, imagination, intellectual engagement, and awareness of feelings in themselves and others).

The findings were consistent with previous studies and anecdotal reports from psilocybin users, who have said the drug changed their interactions with the world long after the acute effects wore off, MacLean and colleagues said.

“Although there is still much to learn about the mechanisms by which hallucinogens might produce positive changes, the increases in openness observed in the present study indicate novel avenues of future research into the biological and psychological mechanisms of psilocybin treatment,” they wrote.

So what Cooper is saying is that CNN can be judged by any of the comments/perspectives of any of its guests? CNN is a racist, sexist, murder and terrorism-glorifying hellhole?

Even Animal couldn’t stop this guy:

[Quote]:

There are many forms of protest, many ways to express an objection to particular events, situations, policies, and even people. Protests can also take many forms – from individual statements to mass demonstrations – both peaceful and violent. In the last 30 days, there have been numerous protests across the globe in many countries. The following post is a collection of only some of those protests, but the images convey a gamut of emotions as citizens stand up for their political, economic, religious and lifestyle rights. — Paula Nelson (51 photos total)

3
Police subdue a Bolivian from the Isiboro Secure indigenous territory after he and dozens of other protesters blocked an airport runway on Sept. 26. The demonstrators had been on a 370-mile protest march from Trinidad in the northern lowlands to the government seat in La Paz in an attempt to draw attention to the government’s plan to build a highway through their territory. President Evo Morales ordered police to stop the march. As police were herding the protesters onto a plane at Rurrenbaque airport to return them home, a large group broke away and blocked the runway with burning wood and tires. (David Mercado/Reuters) #

[Quote]:

n what appears to be a crucial false-positive, Microsoft’s security tools are removing Chrome from Windows machines, marking it as a variant of the notorious Zeus (Zbot) malware family.

*grabs popcorn*

[Quote]:

There’s the old saying that we, as skeptics and people constantly bombarded by digital manipulation, take to heart: If something it too good to be true, then it probably is. This picture is just too good. It immediately led to a thread on Reddit and on various blogs, where people questioned the authenticity and claimed that it is fake. There were a variety of arguments posed by other people:

• The RPG would knock over a guy on crutches.
• The shadows are missing.
• He’s not firing at anything. (What’s he trying to do, kill trees?)
• The back-blast from an RPG is bigger than that.
• The RPG flame has a blurry edge and was pasted.

The key word in the adage is “probably”. Probably is not the same as absolutely. I rarely rely strictly on my eyes to evaluate images. Instead, I use a suite of algorithms and methods. In this case, the critics at Reddit are wrong. This picture passes every test I have thrown at it as if it is real. It is not a splice, edit, or digital manipulation. There is a little color correction and sharpening, but it is well within the reasonable amount allowed by Reuters.

[Quote]:

You may have heard about the Cellebrite cell phone extraction device (UFED) in the news lately. It gives law enforcement officials the ability to access all the information on your cell phone within a few short minutes. When it became known that Michigan State Police had been using the tool to access cell phones during traffic stops, it raised concern with the ACLU. Now, everyone is wondering if cops will be using devices like this elsewhere. Will this new law enforcement tool be abused, or will it be used responsibly in the pursuit of justice?

Call us paranoid, but we obtained a law-enforcement-grade software extraction tool for the iPhone to see exactly what data is up for grabs. You’d be surprised to see just how much data today’s smartphones can store — and police can access.

The weird thing is, it can also insert data. See: http://www.cellebrite.com/images/stories/ufed%202/UFED_PA_user_guide.pdf Staring under “Create a new call”

What court would ever accept anything by this software as evidence?

I guess I’ll have to start carrying around a second phone so I can hand over innocent data…

[Quote]:

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) should apply copyright protection to the functions of computer programs, a software company has told it, according to media reports.

SAS Institute Inc claims that World Programming Ltd infringed its copyrights by developing a rival software program it designed using information published in manuals for SAS software. It wants the ECJ to apply copyright protections to the functions of computer programs.

"[Exempting computer program functions from copyright protection would] deprive the copyright owner of a significant part of the value of the protection given to computer programs," SAS’s lawyer said, according to a report by news agency Bloomberg.

"There is no warrant for excluding that type of intellectual creativity," he said.

Hell yes there is – are you really sure there’s room for only one program allowed to print “Hello World” to the screen for the next 75 years?

[Quote]:

According to Daily Kos, The New York Transit Workers Union (TWU) voted to support the Wall Street Protestors at their meeting last night.A member of TWU Local 100 told a reporter that they would join the protest Friday at 4PM.

Here’s more about them from their website:

The TWU has four main divisions: Railroad; Gaming; Airline; Transit; and Utility, University and Service. The Union has 114 autonomous locals representing over 200,000 members and retirees in 22 states around the country.

Occupy Wall Street has been picking up some decent support from unions in the past few days. Yesterday we reported that the Teamsters Union declared their support for protestors, and we also found out that the United Pilots Union had members at the protest demonstrating in uniform.

Today we learned the Industrial Workers of the World put a message of support on their website as well.

UPDATE: Verizon union workers have joined the protestors in NYC.

[Quote]:

A 16-year-old girl has been placed on a nationwide airport watch list to stop her being sent to Lebanon against her will for an arranged marriage.

In what a magistrate has called an ”act of great bravery”, the girl sought a court order to stop her parents taking her out of Australia to marry a man she has met only once.

The girl, who cannot be named, approached the Legal Aid Commission in Sydney after her parents organised the wedding despite her saying she did not want to marry the man.

In the Federal Magistrates Court yesterday, magistrate Joe Harman granted an ex parte application and placed the girl on the PACE Alert system at all points of departure from Australia to prevent her parents spiriting her out of the country.

[Quote]:

Oracle seems a little confused about the sequence of events and origins of the data it has received, something that would suggests it needs better management of and insight into the unstructured data on its internal systems. We would be delighted to help."

Ouch.

Refers to this and this

[Quote]:

SIR – Given the turmoil that Yahoo! is currently experiencing, and its uncertain future, I suggest the company be rebranded as Yahoo? (“Portal exit”, September 10th). After all, relevance is a key characteristic in its business.

[Quote]:

So, I am gravely serious when I write this – if I catch someone not replacing the milk, or at least, in the case where the downstairs store has close already, not sending an email to the office so the first person that arrives (usually Christa or me) can pick one up upon arrival – then I am going to fire you. Im not joking. You will be fired for not replacing the milk, and have fun explaining that one to your next employer. This is not a empty threat so PLEASE don’t test me.

SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!!!

[Quote]:

RIM has started to slash prices for its little-loved BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in the US amid channel talk on this side of the pond that the fondleslabs are shifting more slowly than expected and inventory levels are out of control.

The troubled Canadian firm is taking a lead from HP which saw demand for its TouchPad go through the roof after it hacked prices ahead of canning the product family. RIM is trying to tempt customers with a $100 coupon and $100 rebate.

The latest price-hacking measures have yet to reach Europe, although telco launch partner for the PlayBook Carphone Warehouse confirmed it is now giving PlayBooks away for free when bought as part of a mobile contract with its BlackBerry device.

[..]

“It’s a dog with fleas,” claimed one reseller. “Demand is very poor”.

I’ve played around with one – it’s actually not that bad, but the problem is all the other tablets available..

Quote

The United States is looking at building fences along the border with Canada to help keep out terrorists and other criminals.

…

Ironically, the moves come as Canada and the U.S. try to finalize a perimeter security arrangement that would focus on continental defences while easing border congestion. It would be aimed at speeding passage of goods and people across the Canada-U.S. border, which has become something of a bottleneck since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The line formerly known as the Longest Undefended Border in the World  is crossed, at Buffalo, by the Peace Bridge. Should this be renamed the Bridge of Uneasy Vigilance?

Mexico-US border fence

Original:

Original:

[Quote]:

Kainat Soomro is a 17-year-old Pakistani girl who has become a local celebrity of sorts in her battle for justice in the Pakistani courts, a daring move for a woman of any age in this country, let alone a teenager.

She is fighting to get justice for a gang rape that she insists happened four years ago in Mehar, a small town in Pakistan.

[..]

According to the Kainat family’s account, the tribal elders declared her kari, (which literally means black female), for losing her virginity outside marriage.

In Pakistan, women and men who have illicit relationships or women who lose their virginity before marriage are at risk of paying with their lives.

“These are matters of honor and the leaders call a jirga and they declare that the woman or the couple should be killed,” said Abdul Hai, a veteran field officer for the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan. These acts of violence are most commonly labeled as “honor killings.”

[..]

Kainat said that despite the pressures her family refused to kill her.

[Quote]:

Somebody must be making money out of the music-streaming service Spotify, mustn’t they? This isn’t the early 1990s, after all. You can no longer have a business model that says: we’re going to be a tech-sounding company, right, and venture capitalists are going to give us millions, right, all of which we are going to spend on cargo pants, haircuts and those weird trainers with ninja toes. And then, as long as we get to the stock market flotation before anybody notices that we haven’t worked out a way of getting paid for whatever our gadget does, we’re laughing.

Those were the good old days. But Spotify isn’t like that. Spotify shows every sign of actually being a proper business. Advertisers pay Spotify to play their adverts on the free service; subscribers pay Spotify a tenner or so a month to use it advert-free; Spotify pays record companies to stream their music; and the record companies pay their artists royalties.

All happy? Well, no. The British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors has complained that Spotify’s payments to songwriters are "tiny", and that the way they are calculated is distressingly opaque. The most eyecatching detail to emerge recently is the claim that, in a five-month period shortly after the service launched, Spotify users enjoyed more than 1m plays of Lady Gaga’s song Poker Face – which earned Her Gaganess the sum of $167.

[Quote]:

The latest issue of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s Inspire magazine is finally here, with a special edition for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. This issue has gotten some traction in the media for its feature story, “Iran and the Conspiracy Theories”

You can view excerpts at Public Intelligence, download the entire magazine as a PDF, or simply read the Iran article after the jump.

Please note that this magazine contains images of 9/11 and other conflicts that may be triggers for some people.
Iran and the Conspiracy Theories:

There have been plenty of conspiracy theories surrounding the events of 9/11. These conspiracy theorists believe that the U.S. government manufactured the attacks while others believe that it was the Israeli Mossad who was behind them. They site claims such as the Pentagon was not hit by a plane but by a rocket, and that the World Trade center building number seven was brought down by a controlled demolition. The prescribers to these theories have been some scattered individuals here and there who do not posses the research capabilities and capacities that are only available to governments. However, there has been one exception: the government of Iran.

The Iranian government has professed on the tongue of its president Ahmadinejad that it does not believe that al Qaeda was behind 9/11 but rather, the U.S. government. So we may ask the question: why would Iran ascribe to such a ridiculous belief that stands in the face of all logic and evidence?

Since the start of the Iranian revolution, Iran wanted to project an image of antiAmericanism. This would serve as a rallying call for the millions of Muslims around the world who despise America for its aggression against them. Iran played this card very well and garnered a lot of support among the Muslims as being the country that is willing to stand up to America.

If Iran was genuine in its animosity towards the U.S., it would be pleased to see another entity striking a blow at the Great Satan but that’s not the case. For Iran, anti-Americanism is merely a game of politics. It is anti-America when it suits it and it is a collaborator with the U.S. when it suits it, as we have seen in the shameful assistance Iran gave to the U.S. in its invasion of Afghanistan and in the Shi`a of Iraq, backed by Iran, bringing the American forces into the country and welcoming them with open arms.

Therefore with 9/11, the Iranians saw a great operation that had brought damage to the U.S. like nothing they had ever dreamed of causing during their two decades in power. For them, al Qaeda was a competitor for the hearts and minds of the disenfranchised Muslims around the world. Al Qaeda, an organization under fire, with no state, succeeded in what Iran couldn’t. Therefore it was necessary for the Iranians to discredit 9/11 and what better way to do so? Conspiracy theories.

Iran and the Shi`a in general do not want to give al Qaeda credit for the greatest and biggest operation ever committed against America because this would expose their lip-service jihad against the Great Satan

Note: None of these links go to Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda affiliated groups.

[..]

…and yes, The Onion did this already.

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

– Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.