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The federal government is planning to introduce new behavior detection techniques at airport checkpoints as soon as next month, Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole said Thursday.
TSA already has “behavior detection officers” at 161 airports nationwide looking for travelers exhibiting physiological or psychological signs that a traveler might be a terrorist. However, Pistole said TSA is preparing to move to an approach that employs more conversation with travelers—a method that has been employed with great success in Israel.
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TAKE a look around you. The walls, the chair you’re sitting in, your own body – they all seem real and solid. Yet there is a possibility that everything we see in the universe – including you and me – may be nothing more than a hologram.
It sounds preposterous, yet there is already some evidence that it may be true, and we could know for sure within a couple of years. If it does turn out to be the case, it would turn our common-sense conception of reality inside out.
The idea has a long history, stemming from an apparent paradox posed by Stephen Hawking’s work in the 1970s. He discovered that black holes slowly radiate their mass away. This Hawking radiation appears to carry no information, however, raising the question of what happens to the information that described the original star once the black hole evaporates. It is a cornerstone of physics that information cannot be destroyed.
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A molecular biologists has long believed that cancer results from chromosome disruption rather than a handful of gene mutations, which is the dominant theory today. That idea has led him to propose that cancers have actually evolved new chromosomal karyotypes that qualify them as autonomous species, akin to parasites and much different from their human hosts.
“Cancer is comparable to a bacterial level of complexity, but still autonomous, that is, it doesn’t depend on other cells for survival; it doesn’t follow orders like other cells in the body, and it can grow where, when and how it likes,” said Duesberg. “That’s what species are all about.”
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Though photo manipulation has become more common in the age of digital cameras and image editing software, it actually dates back almost as far as the invention of photography. Gathered below is an overview of some of the more notable instances of photo manipulation in history. For recent years, an exhaustive inventory of every photo manipulation would be nearly impossible, so we focus here on the instances that have been most controversial or notorious, or ones that raise the most interesting ethical questions.
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If you fashion yourself as an audiophile and just threw down a decent wad of cash on a new A/V receiver, you probably won’t like hearing that the receivers of yesteryear produce comparable sound. Why is that? Technological advancement, ironically.
Cnet’s Steve Guttenberg sheds light on this interesting development that over the years, actual sound quality became a secondary selling point since most people started buying their equipment either online or from big box retailers. People started caring more about the number of connections and wireless interfaces and wattage of systems. As a result, there was less money in R&D budgets to spend on advancements in sound.
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When you tweet–even if you tweet under a pseudonym–how much do you reveal about yourself? More than you realize, argues a new paper from researchers at the Mitre Corporation. The paper, “Discriminating Gender on Twitter,” which is being presented this week at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing in Scotland, demonstrates that machines can often figure out a person’s gender on Twitter just by reading their tweets. And such knowledge is power: the findings could be useful to advertisers and others.
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Anonymous tweeters may have just become a little less anonymous. Researchers have put together an algorithm that can predict the gender of a tweeter based solely on the 140 characters they choose to tweet. Of course, determining the gender of an Internet personality has its monetary benefits for Twitter. “Marketing is one of the major motivators here, adding that he had heard talk that Twitter was internally working on similar demographically identifying algorithms internally,” linguist Delip Rao told Fast Company’s David Zax. But it could also help identify phonies misrepresenting themselves. Like, say, older men pretending to be lesbian bloggers. Remember when the Gay Girl in Damascus revealed himself as a middle-aged man from Georgia?
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An Australian designer has been forced to apologise for referencing the Holocaust in the name of one of its garments.
The “Belsen Was a Gas” military parka designed by Australian label Evil Twin, caused a furore among shoppers on the online retail website Buy Definition this week.
Shoppers condemned the label for “committing the sin of such hateful, shallow and selfish callousness”.
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◆ Atheist group sues over cross at Sept. 11 museumThe installation of a cross-shaped steel beam at the Sept. 11 memorial at ground zero is unconstitutional, a national atheist group argued in a lawsuit filed Wednesday, asking a judge to order it removed or request that other religions and nonreligious views be equally represented at the site.
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A 36-year-old woman allegedly snatched an infant from his stroller and slammed him into the metal railing of a truck as his mother and aunt tried to fight her off, police said Wednesday.
The woman, Natasha Hubbard, later told police she wanted to eat the baby’s arm. The baby suffered only minor injuries.
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A clever crook, dressed as an armored truck guard, waltzed out of a Queens check-cashing joint last week with almost $15,000 in cash, cops said.
After stepping into Lorenzo’s Enterprises on 31st St. in Astoria about 10:15 a.m. Friday, the disguised bandit said he was there for a pickup and was given the load of cash, police said.
The employees never suspected the man, who was clad in a GARDA Armored Courier uniform, was a thief.
It wasn’t until a few hours later, when an actual guard from the same armored truck company arrived for the cash, that the workers realized they had been had, cops said.
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Responding to reports of someone breaking into cars, officers had confronted Thomas, a transient well-known to merchants and officers in downtown Fullerton.
The Orange County Register reported that Thomas, who suffered from schizophrenia, began to struggle as officers tried to search him and that Thomas sustained head and neck injuries.
Thomas’ father, a retired Orange County sheriff’s deputy, has asserted that officers used excessive force to subdue his son, who was unarmed, slight and of medium height.After seeing his son’s injuries and talking with witnesses, Thomas told the Register his son “was brutally beaten to death.”
“When I first walked into the hospital, I looked at what his mother described as my son … I didn’t recognize him,” Thomas said. “This is cold-blooded, aggravated murder.”
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A dozen police cars had been set on fire, which in turn set off their alarms, underscoring the angry shouts from a mob of five thousand understandably outraged gays. The police were running amuck in an orgy of indiscriminate sadism, swinging their clubs wildly and screaming profanity-laden homophobic epithets.I was struck with a nightstick on the outside of my right knee and I fell to the ground. Another cop came charging at me and made a threatening gesture with his billy club. When I tried to protect my head, he jabbed me viciously on the exposed right side of my chest. Oh, God, the pain! It felt like an electric cattle prod was stuck between my ribs.
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Your computer, your phone, and your other digital devices hold vast amounts of personal information about you and your family. This is sensitive data that’s worth protecting from prying eyes – including those of the government.
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protects you from unreasonable government searches and seizures, and this protection extends to your computer and portable devices. But how does this work in the real world? What should you do if the police or other law enforcement officers show up at your door and want to search your computer?
EFF has designed this guide to help you understand your rights if officers try to search the data stored on your computer or portable electronic device, or seize it for further examination somewhere else.
Because anything you say can be used against you in a criminal or civil case, before speaking to any law enforcement official, you should consult with an attorney.
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The rabidly politicized, mad-as-hell, accept-us-or-die quotient of gay Americans—at last count, somewhere between 97 to 99 percent of them—seem determined to prove that they can get just as offended as your average hillbilly breeder mountaineer, if not more so.
It’s as if they’re taking it to the streets, up into the hills, and down into the hollers to spread a simple message—“You think you can get offended, you stupid, hateful, one-toothed, inbred, Christ-worshiping rednecks? You ain’t seen an uptight bunch of whiny wah-wah emotionally retarded walking fetuses until you’ve tangled with us!”
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Scientists in South Korea have used a cloning technique to created a “glowing” dog, which they hope to use to investigate certain human diseases. The “glowing” effect in the two year old beagle named Tegon can be turned on and off with a doxycycline antibiotic.
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Fuck MTV
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According to the latest daily statement from the U.S. Treasury, the government had an operating cash balance of $73.8 billion at the end of the day yesterday.
Apple’s last earnings report (PDF here) showed that the company had $76.2 billion in cash and marketable securities at the end of June.
In other words, the world’s largest tech company has more cash than the world’s largest sovereign government.
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◆ Damaged Nuclear Fuel Rod Stuck At Japanese Plant for 17 Years
A damaged nuclear fuel rod was stuck inside a reactor at Japan’s ageing Hamaoka nuclear plant after an accident 17 years ago and is still there, the plant’s operator said Thursday.
The operator, Chubu Electric Power Co., said experts were unable to remove the spent fuel rod from the plant, located 125 miles (200 kilometers) southwest of Tokyo, Kyodo News reported.
The rod was stored inside a special container in the spent fuel pool of a decommissioned reactor. The company sought help from domestic and foreign experts on how to safely extract it, but no solution was found so far.
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Don Bailey and Mathew Solnik, Two hackers have found a way to unlock cars that use remote control and telemetry systems like BMW Assist, GM OnStar, Ford Sync, and Hyundai Blue Link. These systems communicate with the automaker’s remote servers via standard standard mobile networks like GSM and CDMA — and with a clever bit of reverse engineering, the hackers were able to pose as these servers and communicate directly with a car’s on-board computer via “war texting” — a riff on “war driving,” the act of finding open wireless networks.
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