Mr. Barack Hussein Obama is the President of the United States. He currently lives in the White House, and enjoys all the privileges of the presidency, including 24/7 security protection (including that of the protection from food poisoning).

Mr. Edward Snowden currently lives in an undisclosed location somewhere in Russia. He currently is under 24/7 threat from the United States of America for allegation of "treason".

One is currently the "President" and the other is currently labeled as a "fugitive".

For the past several months, revelations from the so-called "fugitive" has deeply troubled that "President", so much so that, few hours ago, that "President" had to come out to admit that the United States of America has spied on millions of people for no reason whatsoever.

It took MONTHS for that so-called "President" to admit his own wrongdoing, but even when that "President" has confessed to his own sin, Mr. Snowden, the "fugitive", is still under constant threat.

This is year 2014. The 14th years into the 21st century, and yet, our society still treats people with integrity, such as Mr. Edward Snowden, as a "fugitive". Meanwhile a man with no integrity whatsoever still gets to live inside the White House.

Is this the United States of America the founding fathers had envisioned ?

Or has the United States of America turned into the very DICTATORIAL MONSTER the founding fathers was fighting against ?

http://cdn.rall.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/12-13-13.jpg

Now, we see the fruit that was borne by that tree.

"Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

"I thought I'd never understand ObamaCare until I read these eleven words from a Washington Post columnist"

http://www.correntewire.com/i_thought_id_never_understand_obamacare_until_i_read_these_eleven_words_from_a_washington_post

WHY IS SHE SO ANTI-SEMITIC!

Doesn't she KNOW that her actions are SUBVERTING the only DEMOCRACY in the Middle East (TM)?

In 2009 I Told You!

It was TOO DUMB! And? The frickin' conul staff helping our boy get ON THE PLANE... WITHOUT a boarding pass.

About six months ago my main PC died and I needed a new one. Not having a lot of cash, and not really having a lot of free time to spend on the computer, I decided to get an Acer C7 Chromebook to hold me over.

Refurbished units are available on Acer's official refurb store, over on E-Bay. I paid $149 at the time. Now the base 2 Gb unit with a 320 Gb HD is available for $139.

These are Intel Celeron-based systems with 2 SO-DIMM RAM sockets and a mini-PCIe slot that holds the a/b/g/n/Bluetooth adapter. With only one RAM socket populated, it was easy to pop in a 4 Gb module for a total of 6 Gb of RAM. Adding more RAM allows the system to operate better with multiple tabs open. Other than that, you won't notice much of a difference.

Now that I've been using this as my primary machine for the last 6 months I can render an informed opinion.

I'm amazed at how much of what I do now is thru a web browser. After adding an SSH app, there is very little I couldn't do with the Chromebook. Still, there are some critical limitations that have driven me to get a "real" computer.

One of the big ones is the lack of network file system support. There is no way to access SMB/CIFS or NFS shares on the Chromebook. It also doesn't have FTP support, though there is a commercial app available for FTP. It is only $1.99, but needs to phone home to make sure you've paid, so requires connectivity to function.

If you can live with accessing files only through Google Drive, everything is fine. But, if you have -- like me -- a few terabytes of data on local shares, you're stuck. No, uploading every movie, television show, educational video and audio file I've every ripped to Google Drive is not an option.

Speaking of uploading music, that is another limitation. If you use Google Music, you can play everything fine, but will need a "real" computer to upload any files.

Printing, too. There is no direct printing support. The system only supports "Google Cloud Print", which means you either buy a new printer that supports GCP or leave a PC running with the printer driver configured, and logged in to Chrome (browser). You also have to be comfortable with everything you print going up to Google and back down. Meh.

It is impressive what can be accomplished through the Chrome browser, an SSH app and an FTP app. There are numerous web IDEs such as Shift Edit that are actually very good for development of HTML, CSS, Javascript and other script-based languages.

Of course, Chrome doesn't do Java. There are still some things on the web that require Java.

The lack of network file system support is a show stopper for me. I'm also taking some online classes including a couple in Java development, which means I can't use the Chromebook.

Not that I'm getting rid of it. I have given it to my wife. My young son also has one.

For $139 plus $20 or so for extra RAM it makes a wonderful backup system. Or one to grab and take with if you aren't going to be doing heavy development.

A chill ran up my spine after I read http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/12/19/2113235/proposed-california-law-would-mandate-smartphone-kill-switch

Right now, as it is, NSA can listen to your telephone communication, can read your sms/email, can know where you are, who you regularly communicate with, can profile your behavior (when you will do what at where), but they still can't shut you off (unless they send in a "cleaner").

With the Kill Switch, they can do that.

Yes, the law as it is, is for people who report to the police that their smartphones were stolen, so that the authority can issue a "kill order" to brick that lost smartphone.

And we also know what NSA is all about - no law on the land can touch them - and with the availability of the "Kill Switch", NSA can effectively KILL THE PHONES of those who they do not like, cutting them off the communication grid, and leaving them out in the cold.

I can foresee the consequential abuses that will accompany this new "Kill Switch" law. It'll only make NSA (and all the other BIG BROTHERS) that much stronger.

"American Senators tell us that Brazil should not worry, because this is not "surveillance," it's "data collection." They say it is done to keep you safe. They're wrong. There is a huge difference between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement -- where individuals are targeted based on a reasonable, individualized suspicion -- and these programs of dragnet mass surveillance that put entire populations under an all-seeing eye and save copies forever. These programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power."
http://pastebin.com/2ybz27UE

Hussein Barack Obama, when he was a Senator, spoke eloquently about the issue of GENOCIDE.

Senator Hussein Barack Obama spoke about the GENOCIDE in Sudan, and also the GENOCIDE of the Armenian people by the Turks.

That was, of course, before Senator Obama became President Obama.

Once Obama moved into the White House, he stopped talking about GENOCIDE altogether. This page:

will show you the complete 180-degree change of direction Obama has taken on the Genocide in Sudan.

These pages

will guide you to the shameful decision by the Obama White House in refusing to display an 88-year-old rug, despite having promised so earlier, for a Smithsonian Institute project.

I, as an American Citizen, is very shameful to have Obama as my president. Although I never cast my vote for him, millions of my fellow Americans were stupid enough to elect this two-faced liar into the White house, not once, but twice.

If issues such as GENOCIDE can become a total non-issue, what kind of message the United States of America is going to give to the world, that America is a non-principled, rogue country ?

It's so f*cking crazy, that you'll think I'm the one gone bonkers, for saying it...

They are batshit billionaires, convinced that enough capital and technology can have them produce physical immortality. They want to upload their beautiful minds into replaceable robots, forever.

That's the ultimate aim behind those difficult to fathom investments and acquisitions.

But the human mind? It's an effect not an artifact. It cannot be preserved independent of its "emitter". The superficial characteristics of the effect can be recorded and even simulated. No matter HOW good the recording, there's no VHS player that will ever BE Grandma.

But these are fools - who in a world of madness, are heralded as visionary.

Ok, I need to expand a bit on my excessively long post on education some time back.

The first thing I am going to clarify is streaming. This is not merely distinction by speed, which is the normal (and therefore wrong) approach. You have to distinguish by the nature of the flows. In practice, this means distinguishing by creativity (since creative people learn differently than uncreative people).

It is also not sufficient to divide by fast/medium/slow. The idea is that differences in mind create turbulence (a very useful thing to have in contexts other than the classroom). For speed, this is easy - normal +/- 0.25 standard deviations for the central band (ie: everyone essentially average), plus two additional bands on either side, making five in total.

Classes should hold around 10 students, so you have lots of different classes for average, fewer for the band's either side, and perhaps only one for the outer bands. This solves a lot of timetabling issues, as classes in the same band are going to be interchangeable as far as subject matter is concerned. (This means you can weave in and out of the creative streams as needed.)

Creativity can be ranked, but not quantified. I'd simply create three pools of students, with the most creative in one pool and the least in a second. It's about the best you can do. The size of the pools? Well, you can't obtain zero gradient, and variations in thinking style can be very useful in the classroom. 50% in the middle group, 25% in each of the outliers.

So you've 15 different streams in total. Assume creativity and speed are normally distributed and that the outermost speed streams contain one class of 10 each. Start with speed for simplicity I'll forgo the calculations and guess that the upper/lower middle bands would then have nine classes of 10 each and that the central band will hold 180 classes of 10.

That means you've 2000 students, of whom the assumption is 1000 are averagely creative, 500 are exceptional and 500 are, well, not really. Ok, because creativity and speed are independent variables, we have to have more classes in the outermost band - in fact, we'd need four of them, which means we have to go to 8000 students.

These students get placed in one of 808 possible classes per subject per year. Yes, 808 distinct classes. Assuming 6 teaching hours per day x 5 days, making 30 available hours, which means you can have no fewer than 27 simultaneous classes per year. That's 513 classrooms in total, fully occupied in every timeslot, and we're looking at just one subject. Assuming 8 subjects per year on average, that goes up to 4104. Rooms need maintenance and you also need spares in case of problems. So, triple it, giving 12312 rooms required. We're now looking at serious real estate, but there are larger schools than that today. This isn't impossible.

The 8000 students is per year, as noted earlier. And since years won't align, you're going to need to go from first year of pre/playschool to final year of an undergraduate degree. That's a whole lotta years. 19 of them, including industrial placement. 152,000 students in total. About a quarter of the total student population in the Greater Manchester area.

The design would be a nightmare with a layout from hell to minimize conflict due to intellectual peers not always being age peers, and neither necessarily being perceptual peers, and yet the layout also has to minimize the distance walked. Due to the lack of wormholes and non-simply-connected topologies, this isn't trivial. A person at one extreme corner of the two dimensional spectrum in one subject might be at the other extreme corner in another. From each class, there will be 15 vectors to the next one.

But you can't minimize per journey. Because there will be multiple interchangeable classes, each of which will produce 15 further vectors, you have to minimize per day, per student. Certain changes impact other vectors, certain vector values will be impossible, and so on. Multivariable systems with permutation constraints. That is hellish optimization, but it is possible.

It might actually be necessary to make the university a full research/teaching university of the sort found a lot in England. There is no possible way such a school could finance itself off fees, but research/development, publishing and other long-term income might help. Ideally, the productivity would pay for the school. The bigger multinationals post profits in excess of 2 billion a year, which is how much this school would cost.

Pumping all the profits into a school in the hope that the 10 uber creative geniuses you produce each year, every year, can produce enough new products and enough new patents to guarantee the system can be sustained... It would be a huge gamble, it would probably fail, but what a wild ride it would be!

Walmart to Install Surface-to-Air Missiles on Store Rooftops to Shoot Down Amazon Drones

Based on the following reports, all in Mandarin:

One dated 2009:

http://www.chinamil.com.cn/jfjbmap/content/2011-01/07/content_47810.htm

In which it outlined the need to build a network consist of three (3) deep space tracking stations, to prepare China's up and coming space missions, including Chang-e 5, and beyond. Two (2) of the stations have been built, they are inside China. The third one will be build in Argentina, at the cost of $80 Million, and will be completed by 2016. This page, from a state-owned construction company in China, Second Engineering Company Limited of CCC Fourth Highway Engineering Company Limited, gave the location of the 3rd Chinese deep space tracking station:

http://www.ccfourth.com/004/level3.jsp?id=381

This page, dated 25th October 2013, stated that the building of the 3rd Chinese deep space tracking station has begun. The deep space tracking station will be build on a high plateau in between 800 meter to 900 meter above the sea level.

Back in 2003, the city of Los Angeles demanded that manufacturers, suppliers and contractors stopped using the terms "master" and "slave" on computer equipment, saying such terms were unacceptable and offensive.

http://edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/master.term.reut/

From 2003 to 2013, many more such absurdities came into being, from Obama's wish to revamp NASA into an organization to please the Muslims

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7875584/Barack-Obama-Nasa-must-try-to-make-Muslims-feel-good.html

to Obamacare website fiasco originated from the a no-bid $93 Million contract to Mitchelle Obama's ex classmate.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2477403/Michelle-Os-Princeton-classmate-exec-company-built-Obamacare-website.html

When I signed on to become an American I never imagine that my new country would become the buttjoke of the world, but unfortunately, it is.

Sigh !!