All Things News

Straight from LGF by way of USA Today: “We just spoke with the true-crime author who wrote the piece and published it at Daily Kos and In Cold Blog.

“It’s not my intention to denigrate the troops,” Corey Mitchell says. “It’s to help them when they get back.”

Within a few hours of the original posting, Mitchell says he added a disclaimer: This article in no way is meant to suggest that all military members will become serial killers or mass murderers. It does point out a serious problem with what is happening in our armed forces and seeks a solution to help the brave men and women on their return back home.

But Mitchell says he then pulled the posting from both blogs after readers, liberals and conservatives alike, “ripped it to shreds.” He says no one from Daily Kos asked him to remove the posting.

“The piece was completely misinterpreted by the readers,” he says. “I don’t know if that’s because I did a bad job writing it? … My piece was pro-soldier all the way.”

We asked Mitchell if he thinks military service causes people to commit atrocities in civilian life.

“It can be a fraction of the whole painting of that person,” he says, adding: “I don’t think flat-out 100% if a person goes into the military they’re going to come out as a serial killer or mass murderer. I do think that everything in a killer’s life determines who they become.”

Mitchell says he may decide to republish the piece on his blog, but is weighing the effect of all the negative attention on his wife, who works on a military base, and their young daughter. “I have to weigh my family’s stress level versus how necessary is it to have that piece up,” he writes in a follow-up e-mail.”

Since the original article referenced here [KILLITARY: How America's Armed Forces Create Serial Killers and Mass Murderers] has been removed, you can find it in all its glory in the Google Cache.

Straight from Slashdot: “Researchers at the University of Cambridge have combined studies of global human genetic variations with skull measurements worldwide to show conclusively the validity of the single origin hypothesis. The alternative hypothesis contended that different populations independently evolved from Homo erectus to Home sapiens in different areas. The lead researcher explains, ‘The origin of anatomically modern humans has been the focus of much heated debate. Our genetic research shows the further modern humans have migrated from Africa, the more genetic diversity has been lost within a population. However, some have used skull data to argue that modern humans originated in multiple spots around the world. We have combined our genetic data with new measurements of a large sample of skulls to show definitively that modern humans originated from a single area in Sub-saharan Africa.’ The article abstract is available from Nature.”

Straight from Slashdot: “Universe Today has a fascinating article discussing the difficulty of executing EDL (entry, descent, landing) on Mars for vehicles bigger than MER, Viking and Pathfinder, and the challenges for manned craft in particular. Airbags can’t be used for obvious reasons, but the atmosphere is too thin to be used for parachutes or aerobraking by large heavy vehicles. The stronger gravity (compared to the moon) makes an Apollo-style powered descent impossible. The best current idea is a huge inflatable torus called a hypercone: ‘Imagine a huge donut with a skin across its surface that girdles the vehicle and inflates very quickly with gas rockets (like air bags) to create a conical shape. This would inflate about 10 kilometers above the ground while the vehicle is traveling at Mach 4 or 5, after peak heating. The Hypercone would act as an aerodynamic anchor to slow the vehicle to Mach 1.’”

Straight from Slashdot: “AMD hosted a small gathering in the Penthouse at the SoHo Grand Hotel in New York City yesterday to demo some products due to be released in the coming months. HotHardware attended the event and snapped some photos of the various demo stations. The shots and info regarding the AMD quad-core Phenom-powered system running John Woo’s Stranglehold (Unreal 3.0 engine) will be of interest, as will the slick notebooks, HTPCs, and hand-held devices, like the HTC Advantage 7501. It’s essentially a cross between a UMPC, Phone, PDA, and portable GPS. The device features and AMD Imageon processor, 8GB of flash memory, a 5″ touch screen, and a built in magnetic QWERTY keyboard, GPS navigator and 3MP camera.”

Straight from Slashdot: “NASA reports that a severe ongoing dust storm on the Red Planet has blocked 99 percent of the direct sunlight that powers the Opportunity rover. If these conditions persist for too long, it could finally bring an end to the marathon mission of this robot geologist, and perhaps of its partner Spirit as well. ‘Before the dust storms began blocking sunlight last month, Opportunity’s solar panels had been producing about 700 watt hours of electricity per day, enough to light a 100-watt bulb for seven hours. When dust in the air reduced the panels’ daily output to less than 400 watt hours, the rover team suspended driving and most observations, including use of the robotic arm, cameras and spectrometers to study the site where Opportunity is located … A possible outcome of this storm is that one or both rovers could be damaged permanently or even disabled. Engineers will assess the capability of each rover after the storm clears.’”

Straight from Gizmodo: “The boffins at the Georgia Institute of Technology are working on a realistic solution for high-speed wireless data transfer. The technology, dubbed multi-gigabit wireless, has reached a blazing 15Gbps at 1m.The vision is in creating Personal Area Networks (PAN), and relies upon utilizing unlicensed, 60GHz RF frequencies. The transfer speeds are only limited by distance; speed falls drastically as distance increases. (At 2m, 10Gbps and at 3m, 5Gbps).

The practical applications come to life in the form of peer-to-peer file sharing. The new standard, to be called 802.15.3C, is also cross compatible with FireWire and USB. The possibilities for such advancement, seems to be endless. Fast wire free data transfer between electronic devices would replace the necessity for close range, wired communications. (E.g. TV to DVD, Laptop to Laptop/Mobile etc, the list goes on).”

Straight from TorrentFreak: “Torrentspy and Isohunt announced that they will give content owners a “carte blanche” to remove torrents from their BitTorrent search engines last month. The perfect solution for content owners and site admins says Torrentspy – a nightmare according to The Pirate Bay.

It all started when Torrentspy owner Justin launched a .torrent removal system called “FileRights” that content owners can use to take down “infringing” torrents. From now on, the FileRights system will be used on Torrentspy and Isohunt, two BitTorrent sites that were sued last year by the MPAA.

This basically means that the content owners such as the RIAA and the MPAA get complete control over the(ir) content on all the sites that use FileRights. They decide what torrents can stay and what torrents have to be filtered out. Pirate Bay admin Brokep thinks that the removal system is a step in the wrong direction and accuses Torrentspy of trying to make money by sleeping with both sides, “if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen, don’t blow it up so nobody else can cook” he adds.”

Digg Comments

Straight from Frontline: “Mark Klein worked for more than 20 years as a technician at AT&T. Here he tells the story of how he inadvertently discovered that the whole flow of Internet traffic in several AT&T operations centers was being regularly diverted to the National Security Agency (NSA). Klein is a witness in a lawsuit filed against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which alleges AT&T illegally gave the NSA access to its networks. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on Jan. 9, 2007.”

Digg Comments

Straight from Slashdot: “There have been rumors for years about the FBI remotely installing spyware via e-mail or by exploiting an operating system vulnerability from afar — and now there’s confirmation. Last month, the FBI obtained a federal court order to remotely install spyware called CIPAV (Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier) to find out who was behind a MySpace account linked to bomb threats sent to a high school near Olympia, Wash. News.com has posted a PDF of the FBI affidavit, which makes for interesting reading, and a summary of the CIPAV results that the FBI submitted to a magistrate judge. It seems as though CIPAV was installed via e-mail, as an article back in 2004 hinted was the case. In addition to reporting the computer’s IP address, MAC address, and registry information, it also gave the FBI updates on which IP addresses the user(s) visited. But how did the FBI get the spyware activated and past anti-virus defenses? Two obvious ways are for the Feds to find and exploit their own operating system backdoors, or to compromise security vendors…”

Straight from Fox News: “CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chavez said Sunday that foreigners who publicly criticize him or his government while visiting Venezuela will be expelled from the country.

Chavez ordered officials to closely monitor statements made by international figures during their visits to Venezuela — and deport any outspoken critics.

“How long are we going to allow a person — from any country in the world — to come to our own house to say there’s a dictatorship here, that the president is a tyrant, and nobody does anything about it?” Chavez asked during his weekly television and radio program.

The Venezuelan leader’s statements came after Manuel Espino, the president of Mexico’s conservative ruling party, criticized Chavez during a recent pro-democracy forum in Caracas.

Government opponents argue Chavez — a close ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro — is becoming increasingly authoritarian and cracking down on dissent as he steers oil-rich Venezuela toward what he calls “21st-century socialism.”"