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Politics

Submission + - The GOP's War on Reality Has Finally Jumped the Shark 2

Submitted by derekmead
derekmead writes: It can be ridiculously frustrating when our Congress doesn’t understand something important, like the Internet, but the less cynical amongst us could argue that it’s impossible to be an expert on everything, even though congresspeople are often expected to be. I’m imagining a short film called “The Innocence of Congress,” about aides trolling Wikipedia while Chuck Grassley talks to the MS Word paperclip.

But there’s something far worse than ignorance or naiveté, feigned or not. It’s the type of vitriolic misinformation coming out of Republican Representative Paul Broun, who’s broken hateful new ground in the GOP’s war on facts.

Broun, a physician who sits on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, pulled no punches with videotaped remarks, in which he said that there’s a lot of good evidence that the Earth is only 9,000 years old, and that evolution and the big bang theory are “lies straight from the pit of hell.” He qualified those statements, made September 27 at a sportman’s banquet at a church in Georgia, by saying that he’s a “scientist.”
United States

Submission + - Reverse Robocall Turns Tables On Politicians (itworld.com) 2

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: "One of the great banes of election season is that any politician can shell out a few pennies per voter and phone-spam thousands of people who'd rather not hear a recorded pitch. But turnabout's fair play, and now a service called reverse robocall will deliver your recorded message to elected officials as often as you'd like for a nominal fee. If you got someone who you'd like to call repeatedly, check them out."
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook Flaw Means Anyone Can See Private Photos (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: A surprising security hole in Facebook allows almost anyone to see pictures marked as private, an online forum revealed late Monday. Even pictures supposedly kept hidden from uninvited eyes by Facebook's privacy controls aren't safe, reported one user of a popular bodybuilding forum in a post entitled "I teach you how to view private Facebook photos." Facebook appears to have acted quickly to eliminate the end-run around privacy controls, after word of the exploit spread across the Internet. It wasn't long before one online miscreant uploaded private pictures of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg himself — evidence that the hack worked, he said.

Submission + - New all-sky map shows the magnetic fields of the M (mpa-garching.mpg.de)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With a unique new all-sky map, scientists at MPA have made significant progress toward measuring the magnetic field structure of the Milky Way in unprecedented detail. Specifically, the map is of a quantity known as Faraday depth, which among other things, depends strongly on the magnetic fields along a particular line of sight. To produce the map, data were combined from more than 41,000 individual measurements using a novel image reconstruction technique. The work was a collaboration between scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), who are specialists in the new discipline of information field theory, and a large international team of radio astronomers. The new map not only reveals the structure of the galactic magnetic field on large scales, but also small-scale features that provide information about turbulence in the galactic gas.

Submission + - US officially becomes a police state (huffingtonpost.com) 1

Submitted by quadrox
quadrox writes: The national defense authorization act recently passed by the senate contains a provision to let the military detain terrorism suspects on U.S. soil and hold them indefinitely without trial. An attempt to restrict this provision to non US citizens failed.

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