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Wright State researchers developing skeletal scans to recognize terrorists
[Quote]:
The Wright State Research Institute is developing a ground-breaking system that would scan the skeletal structures of people at airports, sports stadiums, theme parks and other public places that could be vulnerable to terrorist attacks, child abductions or other crimes. The images would then quickly be matched with potential suspects using a database of previously scanned skeletons.
I wonder – how many countries have a database of terrorist skeletons just waiting to be used?
John McCain
[The Onion]:
"President Obama deserves zero praise for this borderline accomplishment," Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) told reporters. "After all, if it weren’t for President Bush ordering the initial invasion of Iraq and making it his central foreign policy initiative, we wouldn’t be here right now awkwardly celebrating the muddled outcome of whatever the hell it is we’ve been doing over there for the past seven years."
[Twitter from the real McCain]:
Last American combat troops leave Iraq. I think President George W. Bush deserves some credit for victory.
Radio, RIAA: mandatory FM radio in cell phones is the future
[Quote]:
Music labels and radio broadcasters can’t agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics.
The Consumer Electronics Association, whose members build the devices that would be affected by such a directive, is incandescent with rage. "The backroom scheme of the [National Association of Broadcasters] and RIAA to have Congress mandate broadcast radios in portable devices, including mobile phones, is the height of absurdity," thundered CEA president Gary Shapiro. Such a move is "not in our national interest."
"Rather than adapt to the digital marketplace, NAB and RIAA act like buggy-whip industries that refuse to innovate and seek to impose penalties on those that do."
SWAT team searches home for drugs, comes up empty
[Quote]:
Police in SWAT gear busted through a door and searched a Cedar Rapids home for drugs Thursday morning, but came up empty.At least 12 officers surprised the tenants at 1135 33rdSt. NE when they arrived around 7 a.m. with a narcotics search warrant. Sgt. Cristy Hamblin, a police spokeswoman, later confirmed that nothing was seized from the house.
No one was taken to jail, but the tenants of the house, Justin Davis, 28, and his girlfriend, Erica Lewis, 26, were charged with disorderly house and signed a promise to appear in court, police said. No one was injured during the raid.
Disorderly house, eh? That’s 20 to life right there! Also, by having locks on the doors, the house was resisting entry.
Chaplains Treating PTSD
[Quote]:
Perhaps the most alarmingly repugnant stories are those coming in from our recent war veterans regarding the widespread practice of "battlefield Christian proselytizing." When, on active duty, our service members sought urgently needed mental health counseling while on the battlefield and with the gun smoke practically still in their faces, they were instead sent to evangelizing chaplains, who are apparently being used with increasing frequency to provide mental health care due to the acute shortage of mental health professionals. Chaplains are not certified, professional mental health experts.
According to the reports of these veterans, the chaplains they were sent to for evaluation and treatment had the unmitigated temerity to urge, as a medicinal cure, a conversion to evangelical Christianity, and sometimes even went as far as disgustingly lacing their "counseling" with the soldiers’ need to stay on the battlefield to" kill Muslims for Christ." Even in the best cases, while the chaplains’ words of proselytizing may have provided a temporary placebo, allowing these soldiers to return temporarily to combat for the remainder of their deployment, within months of returning home from war, their "temporary religious faith" wore off as their profound mental health symptoms, quite predictably, returned in all their fury. And, again, the shortage of available mental healthcare professionals and lack of treatment exacerbated the service members’ psychological trauma.
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Music Festival Producer Pre-Sues Bootleggers
[Quote]:
Ah, pre-crime. THREsq has a worrisome story of a couple of recent lawsuits by concert producers pre-suing potential bootleggers claiming trademark infringement. Yes, they’re claiming trademark infringement for something that hasn’t happened yet, and simply listing out hundreds of John Doe and Jane Does who can later be filled in. As a part of this, they’re getting law enforcement involved by using the lawsuit to ask the court to order US Marshalls, local and state police and even off-duty officers to go ahead and seize and impound the bootlegged material.It’s really quite something to read the lawsuit which refers to possible events happening in the future.
The article notes that it seems unlikely that any defendants will show up in court to defend themselves or to protest the lawsuit, since they haven’t done anything yet. So, basically, the lawsuit is allowed because there’s no one to contest it, because who’s going to contest such a lawsuit?
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Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Six Blades
You think The Onion is ridiculous?
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Shorewood Police arrest teen suspected of stealing chicken nuggets
[Quote]:
Sharing or trading food during school lunchtime is not unheard of, but sharing landed one teenager in police handcuffs.
Ava Hernandez got a disturbing voicemail message from the Assistant Principal of Shorewood High School in March. Her 15-year-old brother Adam has been taken into police custody. She says, "It was because his friend had shared a lunch with him and he was accused of stealing was really, I don’t know, it was just over the top."
[..]
Ava Hernandez says, “They were like, ‘Well do you know that friend receives federally free lunch?’, and I said, ‘I do now.’, and they said, ‘Well, it’s illegal to share a free lunch so either way Adam was breaking the law’.”
Why bother stealing a nugget when you can download the whole chicken at http://thechickenbay.org/?
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Cow Clicker
[Quote]:
Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It’s partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today’s social games, and partly an earnest example of that genre.You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom “premium” cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called “mooney”), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends’ cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.
[Quote]:
Many games involve compulsion, and studies that compare the partial reinforcement techniques of slot machines and psychological manipulations to videogames stretch back to the mid-1980s. In recent years, massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) frequently have been accused of doing little more than compelling players to keep playing; amounting to “brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money” to use Juul’s words from the NYU event announcement. And certainly one could make a convincing case that many other sorts of games build compulsion into their design.But, as Jesse Fuchs pointed out during the seminar, most games (even MMOs) aren’t just brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money. And in the case of social games, it often seems that they exist solely for that purpose. This is a logic that dovetails well with Zynga CEO Mark Pincus’s infamous declaration, “I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away.”
I am so tempted to make an iPhone version of this…
Microsoft: do users really want copy and paste on mobiles?
[Quote]:
Microsoft has told TechRadar that it’s not sure whether users want copy and paste or ‘true’ multi-tasking on Windows Phone 7.
Greg Sullivan, senior product manager for Microsoft, told us that the user experience has been prioritised over certain other elements of the platform:
"I’m not so sure users necessarily expect [copy and paste and multie-tasking] on Windows Phones – what they want is a user experience that does what they want it to do.
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Spirit Airlines CEO Defends Luggage Fees; Tells Congress Bags Are ‘Not Essential’ For Vacations
[Quote]:
The head of the nation’s most fee-happy airline told Congress today that bringing luggage on vacation was “not essential” to travel and his airline was actually helping the poor fly by charging up to $45 to place a carry-on bag in the overhead bin.
I wonder… has he ever changed his shorts?
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Nederland – Uruguay
Just read that a Dutch hospital in Heerlen has invited all their cardiac out-patients to come watch the match in a room in the Hospital, close to medical care…
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‘The internet’s completely over’, declares petulant Prince
[Quote]:
Purple rock geezer Prince has declared that the internetosphere has had its day, as he prepares to release his latest album exclusively on CD through UK newspaper the Daily Mirror.
In a punctuation-light interview ahead of the unleashing of 20TEN in physical form, the Jehovah’s Witness declared: "The internets completely over. I dont see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They wont pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they cant get it."
“Prince is completely over”, declares petulant Internet…
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The Future of the USA
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First Amendment suspended in the Gulf of Mexico as spill cover-up goes Orwellian
[Quote]:
As CNN is now reporting, the U.S. government has issued a new rule that would make it a felony crime for any journalist, reporter, blogger or photographer to approach any oil cleanup operation, equipment or vessel in the Gulf of Mexico. Anyone caught is subject to arrest, a $40,000 fine and prosecution for a federal felony crime.
Vuvuzela-Konzert
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4 Pinoys lose US jobs for speaking in Tagalog
[Quote]:
Four Filipina ex-staffers of a Baltimore City hospital haven’t gotten over the shock of being summarily fired from their jobs, allegedly because they spoke Pilipino during their lunch break.
SWIFT
I just had a bizarre conversation with my bank.
I had an incoming international transfer of a small amount of money, and it showed up on my statement as coming from an intermediate account by my own bank. I called them to ask from which foreign bank the money was transferred to me, and they were unable to tell me. Note: I didn’t ask from which account at the foreign bank, which might have been my next question, I just asked for the name of the bank and the country it was in.
No answer.
This effectively means that the USA Government has more information on my own bank account than I do.
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Judge favored by BP has financial ties to oil industry
[Quote]:
The judge that BP wants to hear an estimated 200 lawsuits over the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster gets tens of thousands of dollars a year in oil royalties and is paid travel expenses to industry conferences, financial disclosure forms show.
[..]
Oil giant ConocoPhillips paid him between $50,000 and $100,000 in 2008, the last year in which records are publicly available. In a note attached to the 2008 form, Hughes said he expected the amounts to be relatively similar for 2009. He gets smaller amounts from smaller producers such as Sun Oil, Everest Oil and Wagner Oil, which pay for the right to drill oil and gas from lands he owns.
Surely there’s no conflict of interest here, right?
Congressman apologizes to BP
[Quote]:
On June 17, BP CEO Tony Hayward appeared on Capitol Hill to testify for the first time regarding the oil spill disaster. Unbelievably, the ranking committee member, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), apologized to the BP CEO, calling it a tragedy that a private corporation was being forced to pay back Gulf Coast victims.
CGI animated/Live Action in 3D with blue people?
No, not that one.
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Louis Armstrong death metal version of “What a Wonderful World”
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Limbaugh’s solution to childhood hunger: Kids should ‘dumpster dive’
[Quote]:
Rush Limbaugh believes he knows why 16 million American schoolchildren will go hungry this summer, and it has nothing to do with soaring job losses or endemic poverty — the problem is kids can’t find their refrigerator or the local neighborhood McDonald’s.
And, of course, the first will be: “Try your house.” It’s a thing called the refrigerator. You probably already know about it. Try looking there. There are also things in what’s called the kitchen of your house called cupboards. And in those cupboards, most likely you’re going to find Ding-Dongs, Twinkies, Lays ridgy potato chips, all kinds of dips and maybe a can of corn that you don’t want, but it will be there. If that doesn’t work, try a Happy Meal at McDonald’s….
There’s another place if none of these options work to find food; there’s always the neighborhood dumpster. Now, you might find competition with homeless people there, but there are videos that have been produced to show you how to healthfully dine and how to dumpster dive and survive until school kicks back up in August.
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GOOOOAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!
[Quote]:
Admin checklist for when reddit is getting mysteriously slow
□ Bad hardware □ Bugs □ Michael Jackson dies □ jedberg takes a nap ☑ Goals and other events in the World Cup <---In conclusion, we’re noticing a 25-35% bandwidth surge everytime something interesting happens in the World Cup. We’re adding capacity and fixing some some newly discovered bottlenecks.
Teabagger unmasks Obama-BP connection!!!
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On this ground, zero tolerance
[Quote]:
As a hot, humid wind blew off New York Harbor, Mitzner joined some 500 others to stir up a rhetorical whirlwind of protest against a proposal to build a mosque and Islamic cultural center near the site of America’s bloodiest terror attack.
Unfortunately, this is what Ground Zero has now become — a scene of protests.
[..]
The mosque and Islamic center would not actually exist at Ground Zero. Plans call for it to be built two blocks north, on Park Place, at the site of a former Burlington Coat Factory. Perhaps ironically, the center would be located around the corner from a Roman Catholic church which displays the Ground Zero “cross” of steel beams that were left standing after the trade center fell.
But for many, having a mosque even a short walk from Ground Zero is too close.
[..]
At one point, a portion of the crowd menacingly surrounded two Egyptian men who were speaking Arabic and were thought to be Muslims.
“Go home,” several shouted from the crowd.
“Get out,” others shouted.
In fact, the two men – Joseph Nassralla and Karam El Masry — were not Muslims at all. They turned out to be Egyptian Coptic Christians who work for a California-based Christian satellite TV station called “The Way.” Both said they had come to protest the mosque.
“I’m a Christian,” Nassralla shouted to the crowd, his eyes bulging and beads of sweat rolling down his face.
But it was no use. The protesters had become so angry at what they thought were Muslims that New York City police officers had to rush in and pull Nassralla and El Masry to safety.
“I flew nine hours in an airplane to come here,” a frustrated Nassralla said afterward.
But don’t you dare calling these people bigots!
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AT&T warns customer that emailing the CEO will result in a cease and desist letter
[Quote]:
Sure, Steve Jobs might be a one-man email PR machine, but his pal Randall Stephenson at AT&T doesn’t appear to be quite as gregarious — as reader Giorgio Galante found out today, sending AT&T’s CEO two emails in two weeks results in a phone call from AT&T’s Executive Response Team and a warning that further emails will result in a cease and desist letter. What did Giorgio’s emails say? The first was a request to bump up his iPhone eligibility date and a request for a tethering option, and today’s outlined his displeasure with AT&T’s new data rates and ultimate decision to switch to Sprint and the EVO 4G. That prompted “Brent” to call Giorgio back and thank him for the feedback, but also politely warn him that further emails would be met with legal action. Ouch. As you’d expect, AT&T just lost itself a customer.
Calgary boy to return after 2 years in U.S.
[Quote]:
A United States judge has ruled a 12-year-old Calgary boy can return to Canada after being shuffled through a series of foster homes in Oregon for nearly two years.
Lisa Kirkman says her son Noah Kirkman, who was 10 years old at the time, was picked up by Oregon police for not wearing his bike helmet while on a summer vacation with his stepfather in 2008.
U.S. officials didn’t recognize Noah’s stepfather as a legal guardian, so the boy was sent to a foster home.
If you don’t understand the “his stepfather wasn’t a legal guardian, so they decided he would be better off with a total stranger” logic, keep reading – the boy was basically a hostage in an attempt to get his mother to travel to the US:
Kirkman believes the case was delayed because U.S. justice officials were hung up on the fact she has edited marijuana-related magazines and has a criminal record for growing medical marijuana for her husband.
‘hottest cougar in the Republican Party’
[Quote:]
“When I came to Afghanistan, I expected to find many strange and unusual sights,” the paper’s reporter penned. “A gunnery sergeant with a tattoo of Sarah Palin on his buttocks wasn’t one of them.”
10 Things You Need (But Don’t Want) To Know About the BP Oil Spill
[Quote:]
Transocean Ltd., the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig leased by BP, has been flying under the radar in the mainstream blame game. The world’s largest offshore drilling contractor, the company is conveniently headquartered in corporate-friendly Switzerland, and it’s no stranger to oil disasters. In 1979, an oil well it was drilling in the very same Gulf of Mexico ignited, sending the drill platform into the sea and causing one of the largest oil spills by the time it was capped… nine months later.
This experience undoubtedly influenced Transocean’s decision to insure the Deepwater Horizon rig for about twice what it was worth. In a conference call to analysts earlier this month, Transocean reported making a $270 million profit from insurance payouts after the disaster. It’s not hard to bet on failure when you know it’s somewhat assured.
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That seems a ridiculous mandate on so many levels. Why would I, as a consumer, want to buy it and why would a manufacturer want to make it?
Take a look at any mp3 player that has a built-in FM receiver. The receiver and related software do nothing but add to the size of the physical device. It just seems … like this article belongs on the pages of The Onion.
Ok, I have to admit that when I buy a mobile phone, a built-in FM radio is high on the list. I like to listen to radio. But mandate it? What for? This is ridiculous.