What sort of bargains are you looking for this Black Friday?
Does the WalMart worker protests affect whether you’ll shop there or not?
Do any of you outside the country have anything comparable now or at other times of the year?
A dead pigeon discovered recently in a chimney in Surrey may be able to provide new answers to the secrets of World War II. The pigeon had a secret coded message attached to it, which has stumped code-breakers at GCHQ. Can you help crack the code? The pigeon message is as follows:
AOAKN HVPKD FNFJW YIDDC
RQXSR DJHFP GOVFN MIAPX
PABUZ WYYNP CMPNW HJRZH
NLXKG MEMKK ONOIB AKEEQ
WAOTA RBQRH DJOFM TPZEH
LKXGH RGGHT JRZCQ FNKTQ
KLDTS FQIRW AOAKN 27 1525/6
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Protecting privacy by eliminating it. Orwell would have been proud.
A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans’ e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law, CNET has learned.
[…]
✭ Grants warrantless access to Americans’ electronic correspondence to over 22 federal agencies. Only a subpoena is required, not a search warrant signed by a judge based on probable cause.
✭ Permits state and local law enforcement to warrantlessly access Americans’ correspondence stored on systems not offered “to the public,” including university networks.
✭ Authorizes any law enforcement agency to access accounts without a warrant — or subsequent court review — if they claim “emergency” situations exist.
✭ Says providers “shall notify” law enforcement in advance of any plans to tell their customers that they’ve been the target of a warrant, order, or subpoena.
✭ Delays notification of customers whose accounts have been accessed from 3 days to “10 business days.” This notification can be postponed by up to 360 days.
On the afternoon of June 2, the authorities say, a former music teacher named Christian Paetsch walked into a Wells Fargo bank waving a gun and ordered everyone to lie down.
About 15 minutes later, a phalanx of police cars descended upon an intersection a few miles away, blockading dozens of shocked motorists — including Mr. Paetsch, whom the authorities had tracked with a GPS device buried in the $26,000 he was accused of stealing.
But with only the faintest physical description and unsure which vehicle the device was in, the police trained their weapons on all 20 cars at the intersection and ordered people to show their hands. For nearly two hours, the police ordered every driver and passenger to step out of their cars, even handcuffing some of them, before discovering the missing money and two loaded firearms in Mr. Paetsch’s S.U.V.
The case, now winding its way through the federal court system, is being watched by Fourth Amendment lawyers and law enforcement experts. While advanced technology now gives the police the power to shadow a suspect moments after a crime is committed, there are still legal questions over how wide a net the authorities can cast while in pursuit.
At issue is not Mr. Paetsch’s involvement in the robbery. Rather, his lawyer, Matthew Belcher, a federal public defender, has argued that evidence seized from Mr. Paetsch’s vehicle should be thrown out on the grounds that the roadblock was unconstitutional.
The crook’s lawyer offers a lawyerly interpretation of how he’s trying to get his client off. He says the coppers just had a hunch. Wrong. They had a signal from an RFID tag planted in the stolen money.
The local coppers certainly did a crappy job of handling the public – but, they did what they’re instructed to do when the call is for “armed and dangerous”. The FBI didn’t show with their RFID detector for an hour and the Aurora PD doesn’t own one.
The question still comes down to [1] OK to use any and all tech to catch crooks – or [2] do we violate the privacy of suspects by responding to that tech?
Throughout the campaign, President Obama lamented the so-called skills gap and referenced a study claiming that nearly 80 percent of manufacturers have jobs they can’t fill. Mitt Romney made similar claims.
[…]
At GenMet, the starting pay is $10 an hour. Those with an associate degree can make $15, which can rise to $18 an hour after several years of good performance. From what I understand, a new shift manager at a nearby McDonald’s can earn around $14 an hour.The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. “It’s hard not to break out laughing,” says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in wages,” he says. “It’s basic economics.” After all, according to supply and demand, a shortage of workers with valuable skills should push wages up. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has fallen and so have their wages.
[…]
Manufacturers, who face increasing competition from low-wage countries, feel they can’t afford to pay higher wages. Potential workers choose more promising career paths.
When an unskilled job pays more than a skilled job that required time and money to get skilled, we are just shooting ourselves in the employment foot. I WILL have fries with that.
Click the blue dots on the map to place yourself, then each picture is actually a panorama, so click the arrows at the bottom to rotate around.
Found by plane buff, Brother Uncle Don
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On one side (the one the Obama supports wholeheartedly) are the Israelis who say they are just protecting themselves from terrorists wanting to destroy them.
Israel bombed dozens of targets in Gaza on Monday and said that while it was prepared to step up its offensive by sending in troops, it preferred a diplomatic solution that would end Palestinian rocket fire from the enclave. Mediator Egypt said a deal for a truce to end the fighting could be close. The leader of Hamas said it was up to Israel to end the new conflict it had started. Israel says its strikes are to halt Palestinian missile attacks.
On the other are the Palestinians who see Israel as oppressing them.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip erdogan described Israel on Monday as a “terrorist state” in carrying out its bombardment of Gaza, underlining hostility for Ankara’s former ally since relations between them collapsed in 2010.
His comments came after nearly a week of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel and Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip. An Israeli missile killed at least 11 Palestinian civilians including four children in Gaza on Sunday.
Given how the Israelis treat the Palestinians, one has to wonder who has the better case.
“They are now not allowing desalination plants in and water purification plants in and without water you cannot live and the UN report stated that by 2016 that the water in Gaza will be undrinkable and by 2020 the aquifer will be beyond repair,” said Derek Graham a pro-Palestine Irish activist in a Wednesday interview with Press TV.
The Israeli regime denies about 1.7 million people in Gaza their basic rights, such as freedom of movement, jobs that pay proper wages, and adequate healthcare and education.
From last night’s SNL. And yeah, there’s an ad at the beginning.
Over the past decade the business of renting out private soldiers has grown from a specialised niche into a global trade, worth as much as $100 billion, according to the United Nations. When the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was torched in September, locals hired by Blue Mountain, a British firm, were on guard. When a few weeks later African Union forces kicked the Shabab, a terrorist group, out of Kismayo, Somalia, South African private soldiers gave them training and support. In Iraq and Afghanistan more than 20,000 private guards are employed by the American government.
The industry’s growth has been paid for by Western governments, keen to limit the political cost of military boots on the ground.
So what’s the next front?
More than 90% of the firm’s business to date has come from governments, but it thinks that in the future half of its customers could be corporate. Among the early adopters are energy firms and a hotel chain. By the end of the year Academi expects to have opened a new “several thousand acre” training site, probably in east Africa, to help meet the changing demand.
Add in for-profit prisons (we need more laws for people to break to create more prisoners!) and then war and police states are THE growth and employment area for the future! Until, as the article points out, China’s mercs take it all over for a lower price.
This was from a Snopes item from 2007. I wonder how many companies have complied with this since then? Also, how many people in industry filed medical claims for hernias from laughing so hard at this?
The County of Los Angeles has requested that equipment vendors avoid using the industry term “Master/Slave” in product descriptions and labeling.
Social changes of our era have been accompanied by linguistic changes: as discrimination based upon race, gender, or physical condition has become less socially acceptable, we began to frown upon the use of pejorative terms associated with race, moved towards more gender-neutral usages of language (e.g., ‘chairperson’ instead of ‘chairman’), and replaced terms for describing the disabled with less stigmatizing ones (e.g., ‘mentally handicapped’ rather than ‘retarded’). Along with these linguistic changes have come tales of the “political correctness run amok” variety – cases where certain usages were deemed unacceptable merely because they bore a resemblance to terms now considered inappropriate, even though the usages had little or nothing in common with the now-inappropriate terms in a linguistic sense.
[…]
One such recent example included the manufacturer’s labeling of equipment where the words “Master/Slave” appeared to identify the primary and secondary sources. Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label.
Found by Brother Uncle Don
Looks to me like Senator John McCain should be investigated rather that Susan Rice over the Benghazi attack in Libya. McCain poses as a war hero but there seems to be more indicators he sold out. Right now he’s acting like a total crybaby and I don’t think he’s got over the 2008 election. He used to be on the slightly sane side but he’s totally crazy these days. He’s the guy who brought us Sarah Palin and voted for Condi Rice when she brought false testimony about nukes in Iraq that got millions killed.
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For Kindle and with free ePub version. Only $9.49 Great reading.
Here is what Gary Shapiro CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) said: Dvorak's writing sings with insight and clarity. Whether or not you agree with John's views, he will get you thinking and is never boring. These essays are worth the read!
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