A number of lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation have confirmed what people have been saying since the get-go, which is that the FBI's telecommunications data mining program went far beyond what it was supposed to (login/password required, bugmenot.com will hook you up). It's well known and documented that the US government's been leaning on telecommunication companies all across the country (and a few rolled over and bared their throats without even being ordered) to provide them with lists of names and numbers of their customers so that who called whom …
Last calendar week something unusual happened in the US court system: The sections of the USA PATRIOT Act that made it far easier to get National Security Letters were declared unconstitutional (specifically, they violate the First Amendment rights of US citizens) by federal Judge Victor Marrero. National Security Letters, or NSLs, are official documents written up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation which can be used to demand sensitive information, such as personnel dossiers, telephone or Internet usage information, and financial history information without having to go on the record by requesting a search warrant from the court system. These …
Earlier today I was gifted with a unique experience that I never in my wildest dreams thought I'd ever do, much less squee like a rabid fangirl over - I got a tour of the hangar and they let me sit in the cockpit of an F-18 in the facility's air fleet. With the permission of my PoC and the hangar chief, I was allowed to bring my camera in and be photographed while sitting in the (very tiny) cockpit of a fully operational F-18 jet. First off, I had to remove everything that might possibly fall out of my pockets …
I apologize for the slightly dodgy quality of these photographs taken during my trip through the Mojave Desert. I was using my PDA/cellphone/handlink/external memory device as a camera while riding in a car doing 70 miles per hour, so there's bound to be a little image blurring.
Anyway, I hope that some of these photographs show why I love the desert so much. The landscapes are simply beautiful, moreso when you actually get to go walking around in the environment and not just watching it pass by. There's something about the dichotomy between the hard, dry earth …
It's me, the Doctor, checking in after an entire weekend on the road. At this moment I've found lodgings in a quaint little hotel about forty miles into the high desert of California, which is about a two hour drive from LAX when you factor in traffic. As my cow-orker T- says, "I love LA. There are ten-lane highways and everyone's still doing fifteen miles per hour." I'm running on about four hours of sleep right now, so I'm going to try to hit the high points before I fall over unconscious.
Biomedical researchers at the Harvard Medical School have made an interesting discovery while working with rats that had, for all intents and purposes, developed Alzheimer's disease - genetically modified rat cells that produce a protein that breaks up amyloid-beta plaques in the brain can reverse the progression of the disease. At least in part (thus disclaimed because this isn't really my field of expertise), Alzheimer's disease is caused by masses of a protein called amyloid-beta that interfere with the normal operation of neurons in the brain, causing the functionality of neural networks to degrade. There is, however, a protein called neprilysin …
Without the callbacks from the captive audience because those on stage might decide to shoot you.
A couple of days ago Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing flew into Los Angeles International Airport and was caught up with a large number of her fellow passengers in what could best be described as a game of anti-terrorism freeze tag run by the Department of Homeland Security. It went down a little something like this: Jardin and other travelers walking through a hallway after leaving the plane (probably the covered gantry that leads from the boarding platform into the airport terminal (the so-called …
