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Kind of goes along with with this (not even close to safe for work!!) video.
Video found by Gasparrini.
Courtesy Supertouch
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Ice Cream! Bring the kids?
The Lickety Split ice cream truck on Staten Island was dishing out more than single-dips – it was selling oxycodone pills to junkies for $20 a pop.
That’s what prosecutors said Thursday as they announced the indictment of 31 members of a “diabolic” black-market pill-pushing ring that racked up $1 million sales in a year.
“My kids bought ice cream every day last summer. It’s horrible, scary, that they were moving drugs. This is a close-knit community. We never suspected.” Grownup addicts sat in their cars waiting for local kids to finish getting their treats, then lined up for their painkillers – a generic version of the powerful and highly addictive OxyContin narcotic pain reliever.
Ringleaders Louis Scala, 29, and Joseph Zaffuto, 39, got hundreds of blank prescriptions from co-defendant Nancy Wilkins, 40, the office manager for an unsuspecting Manhattan orthopedic surgeon, officials said. They forged them and recruited friends, relatives and neighbors to be “runners” who went to mom-and-pop pharmacies to fill the prescriptions.
Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan said the 42,755 pills the ring sold are just a fraction of the black market. “We are equating this now to the epidemic that we saw when crack cocaine was first introduced in New York City,” he warned.
You’d think they had a smart racket. Nah — the ring was uncovered when a runner was arrested for holding up pharmacies.
Any reason to run her yap is OK with Annie. So, I agree with Bill. I will now have to commit Harakiri.
Rustock, purveyor of more e-mail spam than any other network in the world, was felled last week by Microsoft and federal law enforcement agents.
A lawsuit by Microsoft that was unsealed at the company’s request late today triggered several coordinated raids last Wednesday that took down Rustock, a botnet that infected millions of computers with malicious code in order to turn them into a massive spam-sending network.
“This botnet is estimated to have approximately a million infected computers operating under its control and has been known to be capable of sending billions of spam mails every day,” Richard Boscovich, senior attorney in the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, wrote in a blog post today.
The Wall Street Journal first reported that it was Microsoft’s digital crimes unit, working in concert with U.S. marshals, that raided seven hosting facilities across the country and seized the command-and-control machines that ran the network…
Shutting down Rustock could put a huge dent in spam worldwide. Tech security giant Symantec estimated last year that Rustock was responsible for 39 percent of the world’s spam.
Nuthin’ wrong with an occasional dose of anti-parasite medicine.
CHICAGO (CBS) — Trace amounts of radiation from Japan have been detected in Chicago. As WBBM Newsradio 780′s Mike Krauser reports, travelers coming in from Japan on Wednesday triggered radiation detectors at O’Hare as they passed through customs. Only very small amounts of radiation were detected. In one instance, radiation was detected in a plane’s air filtration system. Radiation was also found in luggage and on passengers on flights from Japan.
Mayor Richard M. Daley and other city officials wouldn’t provide any additional details, saying federal authorities were handling the situation.
“Of course the protection of the person coming off the plane is important in regards to any radiation and especially within their families,” Daley said at an unrelated event.
The mayor said the city has no local policy when it comes to detecting radiation at the airports.
“That would be up to the federal government. Every city can’t have a policy. One says yes, one says no, you can’t do that. You have to have a federal policy dealing with anyone entering the country in regards to the situations like that,” Daley said. “And they handle it very professionally and it will be up to Homeland Security. We’ve been working with them. They have the primary responsibility.”
Chicago Aviation Department Commissioner Rosemarie Andolino confirmed that at least two planes tested positive for elevated radiation levels.
What a mess..
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Executive Producers: Patrick Brennan, Sir Adam Kolbe, Chris McGraw Art By: Jesse Anderson Sign up for No Agenda Show Talking Points signup here. No Agenda Survey Results Listen to show by clicking ► Direct link to show. Sign up for No Agenda Talking Points Newsletter signup here. |
guardian.co.uk
The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.
A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an “online persona management service” that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.
The project has been likened by web experts to China’s attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.
The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as “sock puppets” – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.
Business as usual.
 “No – you can’t have a white one!” |
U.S. paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division recently took part in a field exercise at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in which they experimented with a tool not normally used by the armed forces – a smartphone. And no, they weren’t playing Farmville. Instead, they were using custom phones running custom apps, to coordinate the swarming of a mock village and the capture of a high-value target. Judging by how the exercise went, smartphones could soon be showing up on battlefields everywhere.
The phones were ruggedized Android-based prototypes developed specifically for the project. They were plugged into the soldiers’ tactical radios, combining the capabilities of both technologies. Running on the phones were two apps – Joint Battle Command-Platform, or JBC-P Handheld, and Tactical Ground Reporting, or TIGR Mobile.
JBC-P displays a map of the battlefield, using GPS to indicate the locations of friendly forces, enemies, and landscape hazards in real time. TIGR allows soldiers to send photos back and forth, and swap historical information relevant to the operation…
Given that troops presumably wouldn’t want to be thwarted by coverage limitations, the phones communicated using the WIN-T secure terrestrial network provided by the soldiers’ HMS Manpack and Rifleman radios. The network allowed troops to share information with one another in the field, and with the battalion tactical operations center. WIN-T also links up to a secure satellite connection, to keep the higher-ups at headquarters in the loop.
We can all be confident that no one else in the world can match our tech know-how – and hack into battlefield cellphones and use the information against our troops.
Uh, right?
It would be interesting to see how many of these people are religious, too.
Perhaps inspired by TV favourites such as Doctor Who and Ashes to Ashes, nearly a third of Britons (30%) believe that time travel is actually possible. The results were revealed in a survey, launched at the start of National Science and Engineering Week (11-20 March) by Birmingham Science City, which aimed to see just how blurred the lines between science and fiction really are.
Other findings included:
1. Over a fifth of adults incorrectly believe light sabres exist.
2. Nearly a quarter (24%) of people are wrong in their belief that humans can be teleported.
3. Nearly 50% of adults wrongly believe that memory-erasing technology exists.
4. More than 40% of people incorrectly believe that hover boards exist.
5. Nearly one fifth (18%) of adults have the incorrect view that they can see gravity.
Ah, England
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Buford T. Justice: What we’re dealing with here is a complete lack of respect for the law.
The Drug Enforcement Administration seized Georgia’s entire supply of sodium thiopental, which defense attorneys claim came from a fly-by-night British supplier operating from the back of a driving school in a gritty London neighborhood.
DEA agents have not said exactly why they seized the drug, except that there were questions about how it was imported into the U.S.
The seizure in Georgia effectively delays any executions until the federal probe is complete, which could take months. That’s little comfort to friends of Emmanuel Hammond, a 45-year-old who was executed in January even after his attorneys argued that the state could have illegally obtained the drug.
“There’s something terribly wrong when officials charged with enforcing criminal laws break them,” said Brian Mendelsohn, an attorney for Hammond, who was put to death for the 1988 slaying of an Atlanta preschool teacher.
Georgia’s stockpile of sodium thiopental — believed to be around 20 grams, enough for at least four executions — has been under scrutiny since corrections officials released documents in court that showed the state bought the drug from Dream Pharma, a company in London that has the same address as the Elgone Driving Academy.
Texas on Wednesday announced it is switching to another, stronger sedative that is often used to euthanize animals.
If you’ve listened to John and Adam on No Agenda, for a long time they’ve talked about how only a small fraction of the money donated to Haiti has actually gone to help the people. This guy says we need to be more careful about how and to whom we donate to help others around the world.
Individuals are doing it, banks are doing it — faced with the horrific news and pictures from Japan, everybody wants to do something, and the obvious thing to do is to donate money to some relief fund or other.
Please don’t.
We went through this after the Haiti earthquake, and all of the arguments which applied there apply to Japan as well. Earmarking funds is a really good way of hobbling relief organizations and ensuring that they have to leave large piles of money unspent in one place while facing urgent needs in other places. And as Matthew Bishop and Michael Green said last year, we are all better at responding to human suffering caused by dramatic, telegenic emergencies than to the much greater loss of life from ongoing hunger, disease and conflict. That often results in a mess of uncoordinated NGOs parachuting in to emergency areas with lots of good intentions, where a strategic official sector response would be much more effective. Meanwhile, the smaller and less visible emergencies where NGOs can do the most good are left unfunded.
In the specific case of Japan, there’s all the more reason not to donate money. Japan is a wealthy country which is responding to the disaster, among other things, by printing hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of new money. Money is not the bottleneck here: if money is needed, Japan can raise it. On top of that, it’s still extremely unclear how or where organizations like globalgiving intend on spending the money that they’re currently raising for Japan — so far we’re just told that the money “will help survivors and victims get necessary services,” which is basically code for “we have no idea what we’re going to do with the money, but we’ll probably think of something.”
Click pic to vastly embiggen (2mbyte)
A Japanese home adrift in the Pacific Ocean, photographed by U.S. Navy Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Dylan McCord.
Found on reddit
Has anyone had contact with someone in Japan with a story to tell that hasn’t been on the news?
Here is the latest conversation I had with money manager Andrew Horowitz…. new insights for anyone who invests in anything. This week we look closely at Japan and the outcome from the quake.
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Click pics for more weirdness
I think it’s really because of global warming.
Google Earth explorers who view these satellite images sometimes come across astonishing, otherworldly sights. Artist and programmer Clement Valla, for example, has collected dozens of images of warped bridges spotted from California to the Catskills. Geekosystem explains that the pictures “[consist] of bridges zoomed in upon in Google Earth just so, revealing surreal, bendy, glitch-infused landscapes.”
Valla’s unusual collection puts an alien twist on familiar sights. “I travel through Google Earth looking for strange mappings of the 2 dimensional onto the 3 dimensional that provide fabulous and unintentional distortions. These images are like funhouse mirrors – strange illusions and reflections of the real,” Valla said in a statement.
Valla himself acknowledged the impermanence of these surreal finds. “[A]s Google Earth improves its 3d models, its terrain, and its satellite imagery, these strange, surrealist depictions will probably be replaced with better representations,” the artist said.
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