Are we talking about Google Docs in space? Google Glass for astronauts? What hardware or software are you talking about? Do you have the fainest clue about space rating anything? It's not going down to Best Buy and getting a laptop with TurboTax, you realize, right?

Family Outraged After North Miami Beach Police Use Mug Shots as Shooting Targets

A South Florida family is outraged at North Miami Beach Police after mug shots of African American men were used at a shooting range for police training.

It was an ordinary Saturday morning last month when Sgt. Valerie Deant arrived at the shooting range in Medley, or so she thought.

Deant, who plays clarinet with the Florida Army National Guard’s 13th Army Band, and her fellow soldiers were at the shooting range for their annual weapons qualifications training.

What the soldiers discovered when they entered the range made them angry: mug shots of African American men apparently used as targets by North Miami Beach Police snipers, who had used the range before the guardsmen.

Even more startling for Deant, one of the images was her brother. It was Woody Deant’s mug shot that taken 15 years ago, after he was arrested in connection to a drag race in 2000 that left two people dead. His mug shot was among the pictures of five minorities used as targets by North Miami Beach police, all of them riddled by bullets.

“I was like 'why is my brother being used for target practice?'" Deant asked.

She immediately called her brother, Woody Deant, who was 18 years old when the picture was taken.

“The picture actually has like bullet holes,” Woody Deant said. “One in my forehead and one in my eye. I was speechless," he added.

The City of Medley owns the Medley Firearms Training Center and it leases the facilities to law enforcement agencies in the area. The shooting range staff doesn’t select the targets used by law enforcement and the military.

North Miami Beach Police Chief J. Scott Dennis admitted that his officers could have used better judgment, but denies any racial profiling.

He noted that the sniper team includes minority officers. Dennis defended the department’s use of actual photographs and says the technique is widely used and the pictures are vital for facial recognition drills. But the Deant family questions why officers were firing targets with images of real people, in this case African-Americans, especially at a time when relations between minority communities and law enforcement are so tense.

“Our policies were not violated,” Dennis said. “There is no discipline forthcoming from the individuals who were involved with this.”

NBC 6 Investigators spoke with sources at federal and state law enforcement agencies and five local police departments that have SWAT and sniper teams in an attempt to find out if this is a common practice. All law enforcement agencies said they only use commercially produced targets, not photos of human beings for target practice.

Yes, the short answer is that in the USA minorities are second class citizens. They are often are denied the rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".

Now consider what would happen if a minority gun club had targets made of white people. They would be slapped with the label "terrorist" and end up in a Federal maximum security lockup for life.

You don't think so? No matter who you are if you did the same thing with pictures of cops it would happen to you. But if you have a gun and badge and you do the equivalent, then it's just bad judgement.

Wertheimer is the Directer of Research a the NSA. He was quoted on Slashdot two days ago apologizing in the Notes of the American Mathematical Society. The issue was a possible trap door in a set of encryption standard parameters submitted by the NSA. This was noticed by some researchers at Microsoft, and when it was brought up in the standards committee NSA just ignored the criticism.

This made some member of the AMS very unhappy. Here is what angry mathematicians sound like:

“AMS Should Sever Ties with the NSA” (Letter to the Editor), by Alexander Beilinson (December 2013); “Dear NSA: Long-Term Security Depends on Freedom”, by Stefan Forcey (January 2014); “The NSA Backdoor to NIST”, by Thomas C. Hales (February 2014); “The NSA: A Betrayal of Trust”, by Keith Devlin (June/July 2014); “The Mathematical Community and the National Security Agency”, by Andrew Odlyzko (June/July 2014); “NSA and the Snowden Issues”, by Richard George (August 2014); “The Danger of Success”, by William Binney (Sep tember 2014);

If you read his statement, it is content free. As a admission of wrongdoing, it's completely worthless.

"With hindsight, NSA should have ceased supporting the dual EC_DRBG algorithm immediately after security researchers discovered the potential for a trapdoor. In truth, I can think of no better way to describe our failure to drop support for the Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm as anything other than regrettable"

This is more of an apology for getting caught then anything else.

So when Dr. Wertheimer pontificates about filtering email and national security, you should not be very impressed. His agenda assumes the end of constitutional protections for privacy. He is not an honest man doing an honest job for an honest employer.

Graphene is like affordable solar cell energy. It takes a long, long time to get started, and it seems that it's always five to ten years off, and then "suddenly" it has a major impact. Let's face it, the low hanging fruit, like transistors, has all been exploited. And even transistors had their begging in the 1930s with research at places like Bell Labs.

Introducing fundamental technology takes decades of incremental improvements and theoretical discovery. If you are looking for instant gratification perhaps you should shift your focus to web startups or multi-level marketing schemes. Things like graphene require a long attention span and lots of dedicated work. That doesn't seem to fit with your attitude.

RTFA, moron.

They are using the WhiteKnightTwo with a unmanned rocket payload for orbital launches.

Branson wrote in his blog that the company is working to build a two-stage rocket, known as LauncherOne that would air-launch launch from the companies existing WhiteKnightTwo aircraft at about 45,000 to 50,000ft.

“LauncherOne will be built using advanced composite structures, and powered by our new family of LOX/RP-1 liquid rocket engines. Each LauncherOne mission will be capable of delivering as much as 225 kilograms (500 pounds) to a low inclination Low Earth Orbit or 120 kilograms (265 pounds) to a high-altitude Sun-Synchronous Orbit, for a price of less than $10M,” Branson wrote.

So far the responses to this post indicate that Slasdot should change it's name to Slashdolt because of the shear stupidity of what's being said. The first post is by Frosty Piss, and he is living up (or more accurately down) to his name. It seems like the nerds have been displaced by drooling fools.

I'm starting to wonder if I should waste my time on the likes of you.

Treason is not the correct term. It refers to betrayal of country.

In law, treason is the crime that covers some of the more extreme acts against one's sovereign or nation. Historically, treason also covered the murder of specific social superiors, such as the murder of a husband by his wife or that of a master by his servant.

The correct term is Sedition.

In law, sedition is overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that is deemed by the legal authority to tend toward insurrection against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent (or resistance) to lawful authority. Sedition may include any commotion, though not aimed at direct and open violence against the laws. Seditious words in writing are seditious libel. A seditionist is one who engages in or promotes the interests of sedition.

Note the boldface. In this case the "established order" is the rule of law enshrined in the constitution. The NSA has subverted the constitution with warrantless mass surveillance. The Department of Homeland Security (aka Department of Homeland Pork) has ignored the constitutional right to due process with the "no fly list": there is no official way to find out if you are on it or to be removed from the list.

These actions, along with many current policies, are absolutely unconstitutional. In short, sedition. They betray the constitutional rule of law. Treason typically is the betrayal of one's country to another sovereign entity.

The American middle class prospered from the end of WWII up to the time of the Reagan presidency. In the post-Reagan era an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth is the new normal. We have an economical/political system that redistributes wealth upwards. There is no other rational explanation for the current statistics. This is the legacy of Reaganomics: the end of the American Dream.

The US, post-Soviet Russia and post-Communist China are all following the same path to rule by oligarchy. The differences in how control is concentrated are not important to the continuing concentration of power in each system. In Russia, the economic oligarchs are only allowed to slavishly support Putan, or they are jailed or exiled and their wealth stripped. In China the oligarchs are either Party members themselves or the families of Party members. The rest of the rich know that they must participate in the endemic corruption. They were only allowed to succeed because they embraced corruption from the beginning.

In the US the oligarchs have, for the most part, taken over the government and the country is run for their benefit. Examples are too numerous to mention, but I'll highlight a few.

The 2008 market crash. The reason it was so horrific in the first place was that the Bush administration effectively suspended all regulation of Wall Street and Alan Greenspan got to fulfill his Libertarian fantasy. The result, unsurprisingly, was an epic failure. Lack of effective oversight is the wet dream of every oligarch. That's why they love secret unlimited secret campaign contributions, another gift to oligarchs the from the politicians and judges they own.

The bailout from the crash was another astonishing transfer of wealth to the ultra rich. Instead of calling Wall Street to task and making those responsible pay up, the oligarchs were rewarded instead. Many of them are have far more now then they did before 2008, and everyone else is worse off. The new stock market highs are the proof of that. Meanwhile, the job recovery is still lagging, and the jobs that are being generated pay significantly lower then before the crash. This is a mass transfer of assets from the general population to the rich. Again there is no other rational explanation.

An earlier example is Medicare Part D, brought to your pocketbook by Big Pharma and Billy Tauzin,

Two months before resigning as chair of the committee which oversees the drug industry, Tauzin had played a key role in shepherding through Congress the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill. Democrats said that the bill was "a give-away to the drugmakers" because it prohibited the government from negotiating lower drug prices and bans the importation of identical, cheaper, drugs from Canada and elsewhere. The Veterans Affairs agency, which can negotiate drug prices, pays much less than Medicare. Public Citizen called Tauzin's hiring "yet another example of how public service is leading to private riches." Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook said, "a member of Congress who pushed through a major piece of legislation benefiting the drug industry gets the job leading that industry."

The bill was passed in an unusual congressional session at 3 a.m. under heavy pressure from the drug companies. Walter B. Jones (R-NC) said, "The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill." The drug lobby invested more than $10 million in campaign contributions during the last election and has been a source of lucrative employment opportunities for congressmen when they leave office, said Jones.

Tauzin received $11.6 million from PhRMA in 2010, making him the highest-paid health-law lobbyist.

I'll even make a prediction: when the FCC announces what they will call "Net Neutrality" rules, it will be the end of the internet as an open platform. It will become just as closed, structured and overpriced as the current cable industry. Just like Wall Street and Big Pharma, the cable/telco oligarchs want their non-competitive guaranteed profit margins. And since they have paid for the privilege they'll get it. You have no say in the matter.

So remember, if you like loosing your economic well being and personal liberty in a corrupt surveillance state, it all started with your hero, Ronald Reagan.

Remember, the real name of DHS is DHP: Department of Homland Pork.

Yes, fitting a random person into a full body rig will have zero impact on the false positive/false negative rates. No problem.

They tested this on 75 volunteers. This is an example of the kind of bogus "proof" that is used to justify the utility of polygraphs in the first place.

It's in the same territory as drug companies excluding tests that show problems with their drugs. I'm sure if they ran enough small groups that they could find one with better then 90% and report only that.

Why do polygraph advocates lie so much?

Binary or Hex. But not Octal.

They clearly are more concerned about the publicity aspects of the hack then anything else. Any other issues, like exposure of employee data, don't mean a damn to them.

That's why there are the DCMA takedown notices and the threats to sue. They figure that if they can keep it out of the press then it will soon be forgotten and they won't have much to worry about.

This might work for the general public, but in Hollywood it's not going to be that easy. Besides the powerful individuals that they trashed, it's now obvious that that they also engage in routine conspiracies to get what they want. That's what the Google maneuver was about. A lot of players are going to realize that Sony had done a lot of dirty deeds already, and some will see that previous problems may be the result of underhanded tactics. Not that anyone else is better, but having confirmation effectively raises the stakes.

Personally, I enjoy looking forward to some real pain in Sony land. They have a bad reputation among the Hollywood rank and file, so there will be a lot of schadenfreude in the new year. It's long overdue.

What are the alternatives? Who will fund things like deep sea diving or space launch systems? (Big game hunting is just a stupid troll.)

There are only two groups outside of individual rich people who can fund these endeavors: governments and normal investment. Governments are already in the game. India just launched their first heavy lift vehicle, for example.

Regular investment will never take that kind of risk. Perhaps in the past you could have raised money on Wall Street or the equivalent, but these days big financial institutions expect government subsidized guaranteed profit. It's so much easier to buy legislation, manipulate the system and control regulators then invest in long term innovation. Acquisitions and mergers along with zero interest prime rate funding lines their pockets without any bothersome "investing". Why bother with risky space investment, for example?

So it's fine if big egos go after these kinds of things. There are a lot worse ways that the ultra rich spend their wealth. Would you rather see Musk with Tesla and SpaceX, or Ellison with his billion dollar yacht?

By the way, you are subsidizing Ellison's yacht and purchase of the island of Lanai in Hawaii. He took out a loan against his stock in Oracle, so the interest he pays defers his income taxes. To quote another rich asshat, "taxes are for little people."

Given how abysmal PHP is as a language, it seems completely consistent that an overwhelming percentage of the deployed systems are security failures. PHP seems to breed incompetence.

RTFA

Additionally, there are no radioactive mind control CIA spiders in your basement. Seek professional help.

Apple is part of the US oligarchy. Just like European royalty in the 18th and 19th century, today's oligarchs often have more in common with each other then they do with the people of their own country. That's why nothing is likely to happen with Apple in China.

If you're going to play the oligarch card, trying to cast primary blame on the peasants/consumers avoids the real issue. There is class warfare going on, but only one side knows it's a war. Right now the peasants are clueless, so they always loose.