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One should never expect justice in life.

The best one can hope for is poetry.

And yet, just once or twice, both manage to collide with a deliciousness that moves the soul.

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A St. Paul man has been charged with terroristic threats for pointing an AK-47 rifle at his daughter during an argument over the fact that she got two B’s instead of straight A’s in school.

According to the charges, 52-year-old Kirill Bartashevitch recently purchased the AK-47 due to fears that such weapons would be banned under President Obama’s push for gun control legislation.

Well, if the daughter (and the mom) had been carrying their own guns, this wouldn’t have happened, now would it?

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A group of self-proclaimed Satanists on Friday praised Florida Gov. Rick Scott for signing a bill into law last year that lets Florida school boards permit student-initiated prayer and other “inspirational messages.”

During their rally, a white sign with black lettering was stretched across the steps of Florida’s Old Capitol proclaiming “Hail Satan! Hail Rick Scott!”

A high priest wearing goat horns and four “minions” dressed in black, hooded robes were joined by a spokesman, sound technician and camera crew.

The devil, though, was in the details.

The spokesman, Lucien Greaves of Cambridge, Mass., earlier this month had been listed on the Actors Access website as the casting director in an ad seeking unpaid, nonunion actors in Tallahassee. They were wanted to perform in a “mockumentary” titled “The Satanic Temple.”

Greaves insisted it wasn’t all a hoax, although a smile creased his face as he said it.

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If you’re making a movie about WikiLeaks, this is the kind of thing you probably see coming.

Julian Assange says he has obtained a leaked copy of the script for “The Fifth Estate,” a DreamWorks film about the maverick computer expert and his famed secret-busting site. In a speech before the Oxford Union debating society earlier this week, Assange said his unauthorized sneak peek has left him convinced the film is a hit piece.

“It is a mass propaganda attack against WikiLeaks, the organization (and) the character of my staff,” he said, adding that the movie — the opening scenes of which Assange described as taking place in Tehran and Cairo — also hyped Western fears over the Islamic Republic’s disputed atomic energy program.

“It is not just an attack against us, it is an attack against Iran. It fans the flames of an attack against Iran,” he said.

A DreamWorks spokeswoman declined to comment on Assange’s claims.

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Al-Shihri, a “veteran jihadist,” traveled to Afghanistan shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks to fight coalition troops, only to be captured weeks later, according to West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. He was sent to the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he stayed for six years before being released to Saudi Arabia. There, he entered a so-called “jihadi rehab” program that attempted to turn terrorists into art students by getting them to get “negative energy out on paper,” as the program’s director told ABC News in 2009.

But just months after he supposedly entered the fingerpainting camp, al-Shihri reappeared in Yemen where he was suspected to have been behind a deadly bombing at the U.S. embassy there.

Wait, what? fingerpainting camp?

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One of the Universe’s most common particles has left physicists completely stumped. The proton, a fundamental constituent of the atomic nucleus, seems to be smaller than thought. And despite three years of careful analysis and reanalysis of numerous experiments, nobody can figure out why.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka” but “That’s funny…”

—Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) …

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A quick, well crafted Google search returns “About 86,800 results” for publically accessible HP printers.

There’s something interesting about being able to print to a random location around the world, with no idea of the consequence.

Lock down your printer

Just wait until the spammers discover this..

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The nuts and bolts of what is presented here is the idea that DLLs are loaded into memory space if there is memory available, and if there is no memory or only small amounts of memory available then the DLL will be put into the remaining memory hole. This sounds simple. And it works, we can load a DLL into a remaining memory hole. First of all the exploit writer has to code a javascript routine that does fill memory until the memory boundary is hit and a javascript exception is raised. When the memory is filled up the installed javascript exception handler will execute javascript code that frees small chunks of memory in several steps, each step the javascript code will try to load an ActiveX object. The result is that the DLL (sometimes there are several DLLs loaded for an ActiveX object) will be loaded at a predictable address. This means that now the exploit writer has a predictable address to jump to and the ‘where do i jump when I have code execution’ problem is solved. One problem the method has is that Windows will become unresponsive at the time memory is exhausted but will resume normal operation after the DLL is loaded at a fixed address and the memory is freed using the javascript code.

Reduce the deficit? Improve education? Reduce poverty? Help the sick? Fuck that shit. There are women out there having safe legal abortions! OH THE HUMANITY.

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In the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff department, here’s what the Republican Party of Texas wrote into its 2012 platform as part of the section on education:

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
Yes, you read that right. The party opposes the teaching of “higher order thinking skills” because it believes the purpose is to challenge a student’s “fixed beliefs” and undermine “parental authority.”

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A group of Arizona politicians — all Republicans, of course — have proposed a law (House Bill 2467) requiring public high school students to recite the following oath in order to graduate:

I, _______, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge these duties; So help me God.

To quote Comedy Central’s Ilya Gerner: “Nothing says ‘I take this obligation freely’ quite like a state law that withholds your diploma unless you swear an oath.”

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Researchers at the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have created a way to store data in the form of DNA – a material that lasts for tens of thousands of years. The new method, published January 23 in the journal Nature, makes it possible to store at least 100 million hours of high-definition video in about a cup of DNA.

There is a lot of digital information in the world – about three zettabytes’ worth (that’s 3000 billion billion bytes) – and the constant influx of new digital content poses a real challenge for archivists. Hard disks are expensive and require a constant supply of electricity, while even the best ‘no-power’ archiving materials such as magnetic tape degrade within a decade. This is a growing problem in the life sciences, where massive volumes of data – including DNA sequences – make up the fabric of the scientific record.

“We already know that DNA is a robust way to store information because we can extract it from bones of woolly mammoths, which date back tens of thousands of years, and make sense of it,” explains Nick Goldman of EMBL-EBI. “It’s also incredibly small, dense and does not need any power for storage, so shipping and keeping it is easy.”

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Men: have you always wanted to develop one— and only one— breast on the left side of your chest? Well, if you have an elite military training background, live in Germany or are willing to move there, you can now fulfill your dreams of single-boobery. But you have to act fast.

Dozens of soldiers it the Wachbataillon (German for man with one breast, you know how concise German words are) unit, which performs drill displays at official events, are developing breasts on their left side because of the way they drill. It turns out that repeatedly slapping your chest in the same exact spot with heavy rifles can stimulate glands to produce hormones and cause a condition called one sided gynecomastia. (I’m sure the Germans have a single word for it but I don’t know what it is.) The condition has been diagnosed in 74 % of Wachbataillon members who have gone to army medics because of their “developments.”

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Last month, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi noted the absurdity of HSBC bankers skating on serious drug money laundering charges while hundreds of thousands of Americans sit behind bars for petty drug offenses. The Secret Service’s involvement in hunting down a 26-year-old charged with downloading too many scholarly articles is just another example of our justice system’s chillingly warped priorities.

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Lori Stodghill was 31-years old, seven-months pregnant with twin boys and feeling sick when she arrived at St. Thomas More hospital in Cañon City on New Year’s Day 2006. She was vomiting and short of breath and she passed out as she was being wheeled into an examination room. Medical staff tried to resuscitate her but, as became clear only later, a main artery feeding her lungs was clogged and the clog led to a massive heart attack. Stodghill’s obstetrician, Dr. Pelham Staples, who also happened to be the obstetrician on call for emergencies that night, never answered a page. His patient died at the hospital less than an hour after she arrived and her twins died in her womb.

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But when it came to mounting a defense in the Stodghill case, Catholic Health’s lawyers effectively turned the Church directives on their head. Catholic organizations have for decades fought to change federal and state laws that fail to protect “unborn persons,” and Catholic Health’s lawyers in this case had the chance to set precedent bolstering anti-abortion legal arguments. Instead, they are arguing state law protects doctors from liability concerning unborn fetuses on grounds that those fetuses are not persons with legal rights.

So life needs protection from conception (and thus we can’t have abortion) except when it costs the church money?

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The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) should dismantle a decades-old colony of 360 chimpanzees, retiring all but 50 or so of the animals to a national sanctuary, the agency was told on 22 January in a long-awaited report.

The report, from a working group of external agency advisers, also counsels the NIH to end half of 22 biomedical and behavioural experiments, saying that they do not meet criteria established in a December 2011 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report.

“Clearly there is going to be a reduction in the use of chimpanzees in research,” says working group co-chair Kent Lloyd, associate dean for research at the School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California Davis.

The report says that the NIH should begin planning the transfer of animals due for retirement to sanctuary housing “immediately”, and that a colony of about 50 animals is sufficient for future research. The report also sets high hurdles for chimp experiments, calling for the establishment of an independent committee that would vet individual study proposals after they have passed routine NIH scientific review. For cases in which the burden on the animals is high, the benefit to humans would have to be “very high” to pass muster with the committee, says Daniel Geschwind, the other co-chair of the working group and a geneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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(Reuters) – Emelie Olsson is plagued by hallucinations and nightmares. When she wakes up, she’s often paralyzed, unable to breathe properly or call for help. During the day she can barely stay awake, and often misses school or having fun with friends. She is only 14, but at times she has wondered if her life is worth living.

Emelie is one of around 800 children in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe who developed narcolepsy, an incurable sleep disorder, after being immunized with the Pandemrix H1N1 swine flu vaccine made by British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline in 2009.

Finland, Norway, Ireland and France have seen spikes in narcolepsy cases, too, and people familiar with the results of a soon-to-be-published study in Britain have told Reuters it will show a similar pattern in children there.

Their fate, coping with an illness that all but destroys normal life, is developing into what the health official who coordinated Sweden’s vaccination campaign calls a “medical tragedy” that will demand rising scientific and medical attention.

Europe’s drugs regulator has ruled Pandemrix should no longer be used in people aged under 20. The chief medical officer at GSK’s vaccines division, Norman Begg, says his firm views the issue extremely seriously and is “absolutely committed to getting to the bottom of this”, but adds there is not yet enough data or evidence to suggest a causal link.

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Inside Reindert Dooves’s home, a 17th- century, three-story converted warehouse along the Zaan canal in suburban Amsterdam, a 21st-century Internet giant is avoiding taxes.

The bookkeeper’s home office doubles as the headquarters for a Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) offshore unit. Through this sun-filled, white- walled room, Yahoo has taken advantage of the law to quietly funnel hundreds of millions of dollars in global profits to island subsidiaries, cutting its worldwide tax bill.

The Yahoo arrangement illustrates that the Netherlands, in the heart of a continent better known for social welfare than corporate welfare, has emerged as one of the most important tax havens for multinational companies. Now, as a deficit-strapped Europe raises retirement ages and taxes on the working class, the Netherlands’ role as a $13 trillion relay station on the global tax-avoiding network is prompting a backlash.

The Dutch Parliament is scheduled to debate the fairness of its tax system today. Lawmakers from several parties, including members of the country’s governing coalition, say they want to remove a stain on the nation’s reputation.

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Across four decades since 1972, Landsat satellites have continuously acquired space-based images of the Earth’s land surface, coastal shallows, and coral reefs. The Landsat Program, a joint effort of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), was established to routinely gather land imagery from space. The result of this program is a long-term record of natural and human induced changes on the global landscape.

Each Landsat satellite images the Earth’s surface along the satellite’s ground track in a 185 kilometer-wide (115 mile-wide) swath as the satellite moves in a descending orbit (moving from north to south) over the sunlit side of the Earth. Each satellite crosses every point on the Earth at nearly the same time once every 16 or 18 days, depending on its altitude. Landsats 1, 2, and 3 orbited at an altitude of 920 kilometers (572 miles), circling the Earth every 103 minutes yielding repeat coverage every 18 days. Landsats 4, 5, and 7 were placed in orbit at 705 kilometers (438 miles) altitude, circling the Earth every 99 minutes, for a 16-day repeat cycle.

The Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) is the next-generation Landsat satellite and is expected to be launched no earlier than February 11, 2013. This mission will ensure the continued acquisition and availability of Landsat-like data well beyond the duration of the current Landsat 5 and Landsat 7
missions.

The Landsat satellites have a spectral band range from visible green to near-infared. As to why the colours can seem a little funky in the images, check out this fantastic presentation that discusses how Landsat images are made and the important distinction between photographs and images, especially when it concerns satellite imagery.

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A law is deserving of respect to the extent, and only to the extent, it is just.  A law which is not just deserves only the level of obedience one gives to any group or individual who says “do this, or I’ll hurt you.”

Long but worth reading. With a truly shocking graph.

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Many parishioners are expressing their disappointment after hearing the news that seven Catholic churches will be closing in Cape Breton…

Three other Glace Bay-area churches and three on the Northside will also close their doors by June 2014 – the latest in a long string of Catholic Church closures in recent years.

According to the Diocese of Antigonish – which just finished paying off a multi-million dollar legal settlement – a declining population and fewer people attending Mass are to blame.

“It’s really difficult. I think people have a sense that their churches were given to them by their forbearers, that they were called to use these churches and serve them and protect them,” says Father Donald MacGillivray.

The sheep are waking up, apparently…the population had entirely too much forebearance, if I’m any judge. (The most recent ex-bishop of Antigonish was arrested at Ottawa airport with a laptop full of child pornography – and a passport full of recent stamps from SE Asian trips.)

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Retired Cardinal Roger Mahony and other top Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles officials maneuvered behind the scenes to shield molester priests, provide damage control for the church and keep parishioners in the dark, according to church personnel files.

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The $240 billion net income of the world’s 100 richest billionaires would have ended poverty four times over, according to the London-based group’s report released on Saturday.

The group has called on world leaders to commit to reducing inequality to the levels it was at in 1990, and to curb income extremes on both sides of the spectrum…

… the world’s richest one percent have seen their income increase by 60 percent in the last 20 years, with the latest world financial crisis only serving to hasten, rather than hinder, the process…

“We can no longer pretend that the creation of wealth for a few will inevitably benefit the many – too often the reverse is true,”

Oxfam, bless them, are addressing the Davos audience – but saying the rich could end poverty is like saying wolves could stop sheep-stealing. And that $240 billion is income for last year…