MyFox Kansas City KANSAS CITY, MO. — The Kansas City Missouri mayor is looking for creative ideas on ways to recruit more minority cops. So, Mayor Mark Funkhouser said lowering the standards to be a cop may be the solution.

Mayor Funkhouser said why not let people with a criminal record be a police officer?Barely 11 percent of Kansas City’s police officers are African American. The police chief and the mayor say that’s not enough. At a town hall meeting Wednesday, Mayor Funkhouser suggested lowering standards to recruit more minority police. The Mayor said this is just an idea… a way to provoke debate to come up with creative ideas to hire more minority cops. But is it realistic? Ken Christopher is a criminal justice professor with Park University. He said, “The more you can attract candidates you can reliably trust the better off you are.”

Christopher said there are other ways to recruit minorities without compromising standards. “To say you’re willing to take on people who’ve committed felony violations is pretty much outside the mainstream about what police hiring practices are about,” said Christopher.

This is already done with the military, so hey, why not? What could possibly go wrong?

The personal details of 600,000 people who had expressed an interest in joining the armed forces have gone missing after a laptop belonging to a Royal Navy officer was stolen, the Ministry of Defence said last night.

In another breach of government security, police are investigating the theft of the laptop, which was stolen from a vehicle in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham this month and contained, among other information, passport, and national insurance numbers and bank details.

According to defence officials, the MoD has known about the theft since it occurred on January 9. Des Browne, the defence secretary, is expected to appear before MPs next week to explain the theft and why he has not revealed what happened until now.

Uh, no mention in the article about encrypted anything.

Staff call this the Tabletop Synchrotron

Most people think Einstein said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but that’s not really the case… Einstein predicted that particles and information can’t travel faster than the speed of light — but phenomenon like radio waves? That’s a different story, said John Singleton, a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow.

Singleton has created a gadget that abuses radio waves so severely that they finally give in and travel faster than light.

The polarization synchrotron combines the waves with a rapidly spinning magnetic field, and the result could explain why pulsars — which are super-dense spinning stars that are a subclass of neutron stars — emit such powerful signals, a phenomenon that has baffled many scientists, Singleton said…

And beyond explaining what has been a bit of a mystery to the astronomical community, Singleton’s discovery could have wide-ranging technological impacts in areas such as medicine and communications, he said.

“Because nobody’s really thought about things that travel faster than light before, this is a wide-open technological field,” Singleton said.

And like Singleton says – Einstein wouldn’t have been upset by this at all.

Thousands of obsolete dams and thousands of miles of abandoned roads in America’s aging and crumbling infrastructure could still be valuable – to the environment, according to a policy forum paper in this week’s Science…

With the baby boomer generation also came a vast increase of infrastructure – roads, bridges and dams. With this infrastructure came substantial environmental changes: dams and levees cut off fish migration; roads fragmented forests and facilitated the spread of invasive plant species; oil and gas platforms discharged waste and released atmospheric pollution.

Many of these structures are now badly in need of repair, at a price tag of more than $1.6 trillion. But a substantial number are abandoned or are no longer used for their original purpose, and government policies on decommissioning, if they exist, are often vague.

“Removing aging infrastructure can be a significant opportunity for ecosystem restoration, and can also remove a safety liability, as well as reduce long-term economic costs of constant repairs,” said Martin Doyle.

Among the country’s inventory of infrastructure listed in the paper are: 3,500 dams that have been rated unsafe; more than 15,000 miles of levees, many with unknown structural integrity; 1,300 offshore oil and gas platforms sitting idle; and a maintenance backlog of over 42,000 miles for U.S. Forest Service roads.

Sensible recycling of infrastructure. Wonder what the odds are of getting it implemented?

Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

“Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside,” said Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering. “This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it’s extremely promising…”

“People may find all sorts of applications for it that we have not thought about. Our goal is to demonstrate the basic technology and make sure it works and that it’s safe,” said Parviz, who heads a multi-disciplinary UW group that is developing electronics for contact lenses.

Who will these be developed for, first? Gamers or the military?

It must feel like an Alienware Curve wrapped around your head.

Eric “the Cyberlawyer” Menhart

EFF – January 18, 2008: Eric Menhart may call himself a cyberlawyer, but we think he has a lot to learn about cyberlaw — and common sense.

Menhart is the author of a blog about cyberlaw issues called, logically if not innovatively, “Cyberlawg.” (As he says in the top right corner, “Cyberlawg = Cyberlaw + blog.”) And he is “principal attorney” in a firm called “CyberLaw P.C.” OK, OK, we get it, he practices technology law. Based on this, he’s applied for a trademark on the use of the term “cyberlaw” in connection with the practice of, um, cyberlaw. That’s like a soda company claiming a trademark in the use of the word soda in connection with the sale of soda. Or an apple farmer claiming a trademark in the use of the term apple in connection with the sale of apples. Or … well, you get the picture.

What is worse, he’s threatening other lawyers with legal action based on this silly “mark.” Menhart has demanded that attorney Michael Grossman change the title of his blog about technology law, “CyberBlawg.” Presumably Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, with its Cyberlaw Clinic, as well as the Berkman’s Center for Internet and Society, and Elliot Zimmerman’s blog, CyberLaw.info, are in Menhart’s sights as well.

Unintended consequences.

Can terrorists use the Net to avoid wiretaps?

Can members of Al Qaeda use voice over Internet technology (VoIP) to avoid wiretaps?

Recent comments by Michael McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, seem to suggest that terrorists could create significant roadblocks for the National Security Agency by simply routing their traffic through the U.S.
[…]
If McConnell is to be believed, Al Qaeda merely needs to switch to using U.S.-based voice over IP services, and it can immediately crush the NSA under a pile of FISA paperwork. No matter where the NSA actually tried to intercept the Internet-routed phone call, a FISA warrant would be required. For $24.99 a month per terrorist, Al Qaeda could launch a gigantic legal denial of service against the folks at Fort Meade. Furthermore, now that the iPhone has been hacked to support VoIP software, the VoIP-subscribing terrorists could communicate in style.

They do a difficult and dangerous job, and Howards was wrong to touch Cheney, but the agents aren’t above the law.

Secret Service: Detailed Look at ’06 Turmoil

The arrest of a man named Steven Howards in June 2006 after he approached Vice President Dick Cheney at a Colorado ski resort and denounced the war in Iraq might have seemed, at the time, no more than a blip on the vice president’s schedule.

But now the blip has become a blowup, with Secret Service agents — under oath in court depositions — accusing one another of unethical and perhaps even illegal conduct in the handling of Mr. Howards’s arrest and the official accounting of it.

The revelations arise from a lawsuit Mr. Howards filed against five Secret Service agents, accusing them of civil rights and free-speech violations. They offer a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the Secret Service, which usually wears the standoffish, plainclothes cool of its mission like a cloak of invisibility.

Changing an agent’s report would have been a federal crime.

“Did you believe that Agent Reichle was telling you in essence, ‘I want you to commit the crime of making false statements in an officially filed Secret Service document?’ ” asked a lawyer for Mr. Howards, David A. Lane.
[…]

“Yes, sir.”

That’s right. Usually it’s the dumb crook of the day; but, this one behaved a bit differently.       A Berlin burglar’s break-in took an unexpected turn when he stumbled upon a corpse and felt compelled to call the police.

“He called to say he’d just broken into a flat and found a dead body,” said a spokeswoman for Berlin police Thursday. “He gave the address of the place and then hung up.”

Officers discovered the 64-year-old resident of the flat dead in his bedroom. The man had passed away about two weeks ago, and authorities are not treating the death as suspicious.

Local media reported he didn’t take anything – just left the scene.

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Smoking 101: Canadian smokers and non-smokers in grades five through eight are being offered $5,000 to quit smoking or stay smoke-free throughout their high school years.

The group Rewarding Everyone Who Acts Responsibly and Doesn’t Smoke, or R.E.W.A.R.D.S., is unveiling its Canada-wide program in conjunction with National Non-Smoking Week, which begins Sunday. In order to be eligible, students must sign a contract pledging to remain smoke-free at least until graduation.

They must also enlist four sponsors who agree to donate a small amount of cash each month to the R.E.W.A.R.D.S. foundation which, in turn, hands the money to the student when they complete Grade 12. R.E.W.A.R.D.S. program president Samy Bishay says the goal is to sign up 100,000 young people over the next few months.

Bishay hopes the foundation inspires teachers, program co-ordinators and principals to support students in their goal to graduate smoke-free.

$5000 bucks Canadian can buy a lot of booze. You guys are funny.