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Timeo Danaos et dona ferentis
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Multiple analysts warned of vulnerabilities, but instead of being heeded they were severely punishedAfter a lengthy DDOS attack, some determined hacking, and repeated attempts to penetrate its hardened security layer, the host was finally rooted by a cunningly designed piece of social and mechanical engineering. When the malware released its payload, not only was the system completely wiped, but the culture that created it as well.
Supernovae blasts shape climate, life on Earth, reckons boffin
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A new paper by cosmic ray researcher Henrik Svensmark suggests that the abundance of diversity of biological life on Earth is closely correlated to our planet’s proximity to supernovae.
Svensmark, a professor of physics at the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish Space Research Institute, revealed his work in a paper published by the Royal Astronomical Society.
The prof reconstructed the relative rate at which stars within 850 parsecs of our solar system went supernova over the past 510 million years, and compared it to geophysical and paleobiological records.
He concluded, poetically, that: “…remarkable connections to the long-term histories of life and the carbon cycle have shown up unbidden. Biodiversity, CO2 and the carbon-13 (δ13C) isotope (a proxy for photosynthesis) all appear so highly sensitive to supernovae in our galactic neighbourhood that the biosphere seems to contain a reflection of the sky.”
Ok, that’s close enough you pervert
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Should We Kill The Dollar Bill?
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In its most recent report, the GAO recommends switching to coins, which could make $4.4 billion for the government over 30 years. But the report says the government benefit does not come from the fact that coins are more cost effective. Instead the benefit comes from something called "seigniorage."
Seigniorage is the profit the government makes from having money out in the economy. More money out there means more profit for the government.
Over time, coins earn more seigniorage for the government, but only because we don’t like using them.
"Lots of people when they take coins out of their pocket or purse at the end of the day put them in what we call a coin jar," says the GAO’s Lorelei St. James, who oversaw the agency’s most recent study.
As a result, the GAO estimates that if the government were to eliminate $1 bills and switch to coins, it would have to replace every two bills with three coins, because one of the coins would sit idle.
So more coins means more profit for the government. But where does that profit come from? It comes from us — the public.
I decided not to include the bit where they talk about the fact that the senators proposing the switch to coins are from states where… coins or their raw materials are produced. Surprise!
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Poll: One-Fourth Of Americans Less Likely To Vote Because Of Super PACs
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A new poll by the Brennan Center of Justice found that one in four Americans is less likely to vote in 2012 because of fears that candidates are catering to interests of super PAC donors.
“Unlimited spending by supposedly independent super PACs is creating widespread perceptions of corruption and undermining public confidence that elected officials serve in the public interest,” Adam Skaggs, senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy program, said in a statement. “The perception that super PACs are corrupting government is making Americans disillusioned, and an alarming number say they are less likely to vote this year.”
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Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham Drum Out Takes
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Everyone has their take on how the Bonham half-time shuffle should be played. This is from the man himself. John Bonham’s drum track on Led Zeppelin’s Fool in the Rain
Mormon Flow Chart for Your Soul
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Seems like there’s a lot of confusion lately over what Mormons actually believe. If you are a befuddled believer or heathen, here’s a handy chart to help you out.
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Federal judge complicity
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One of the most amazing statistics of the last decade: not a single War on Terror victim — not one, whether foreign or American — has been permitted to proceed in an American court in an effort to obtain compensation for illegal treatment by the U.S. Government; instead, American courts have unanimously dismissed those cases at the outset, without reaching their substance. Even when everyone knows and admits that the U.S. Government abducted a totally innocent person and shipped him off to Syria to be tortured, as is true for Arar, American federal judges shut the courthouse door in his face, accepting the claims of the Bush and Obama DOJs that to allow the victim to obtain justice for what was done to him would be to risk the disclosure of vital “state secrets.” They accepted this Kafkaesque secrecy claim even after the Government of Canada published to the world a comprehensive report detailing what happened to Arar.
Kindle prototype
Quantum decision affects results of measurements taken earlier in time
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Delayed-choice entanglement swapping consists of the following steps. (I use the same names for the fictional experimenters as in the paper for convenience, but note that they represent acts of measurement, not literal people.)
- Two independent sources (labeled I and II) produce pairs photons such that their polarization states are entangled. One photon from I goes to Alice, while one photon from II is sent to Bob. The second photon from each source goes to Victor. (I’m not sure why the third party is named “Victor”.)
- Alice and Bob independently perform polarization measurements; no communication passes between them during the experiment—they set the orientation of their polarization filters without knowing what the other is doing.
- At some time after Alice and Bob perform their measurements, Victor makes a choice (the “delayed choice” in the name). He either allows his two photons from I and II to travel on without doing anything, or he combines them so that their polarization states are entangled. A final measurement determines the polarization state of those two photons.
The results of all four measurements are then compared. If Victor did not entangle his two photons, the photons received by Alice and Bob are uncorrelated with each other: the outcome of their measurements are consistent with random chance. (This is the “entanglement swapping” portion of the name.) If Victor entangled the photons, then Alice and Bob’s photons have correlated polarizations—even though they were not part of the same system and never interacted.
Wal-Mart shaken by bribery probe, shares plunge
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc lost $10 billion of its market value on Monday on concerns that a bribery investigation in Mexico could be very costly and hinder its plans to grow.
Reflect on that for a second. Shares didn’t go down because the company committed a crime, or because of unethical behavior, or the way the company behaved when the crime was discovered. No. Shared dropped because it could hinder its plans to grow.
And nobody blinks an eye on that. Society is fucked up.
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Prototype Quadrotor with Machine Gun!
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Seniors get the TSA runaround, lose $300
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Nobody, he says, is giving him a straight answer. “The police said they went and reviewed the videotapes but they were too blurry,” Petti says. Petti’s son Bill, who is helping his father, doubts that. “You can bet if my father were a terrorist, those videos would not be too blurry.”
But I’m sure they feel much safer, right?
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I told ‘em that Helen would be the end of us…no-one ever listens to me. Oimoi!