Russia Developing ‘Terrorist-Killer Robots’ -

Russia Developing ‘Terrorist-Killer Robots’ - 



Russian experts are developing robots designed to minimize casualties in terrorist attacks and neutralize terrorists, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said on Friday.
Robots could also help evacuate injured servicemen and civilians from the scene of a terrorist attack, said Rogozin, who oversees the defense industry.
Other antiterror equipment Russia is developing includes systems that can see terrorists through obstacles and effectively engage them in a standoff mode at a long distance without injuring their hostages, he said.
Rogozin did not say when the equipment might be deployed by Russia’s security and intelligence services.
Human Rights Watch has criticized fully autonomous weapons, known as "killer robots," which would be able to select and engage targets without human intervention and called for the preemptive prohibition on such weapons.
“Fully autonomous weapons do not exist yet, but they are being developed by several countries and precursors to fully autonomous weapons have already been deployed by high-tech militaries,” HRW said in a statement on its website. “Some experts predict that fully autonomous weapons could be operational in 20 to 30 years.”
“These weapons would be incapable of meeting international humanitarian law standards, including the rules of distinction, proportionality, and military necessity. The weapons would not be constrained by the capacity for compassion, which can provide a key check on the killing of civilians,” the human rights watchdog said. “Fully autonomous weapons also raise serious questions of accountability because it is unclear who should be held responsible for any unlawful actions they commit.”

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http://www.en.rian.ru/military_news/20130517/181208708.html

Robots deployed as home aides for elderly dwindle... -

Robots deployed as home aides for elderly dwindle... - 


In the opening scene of the movie “Robot & Frank,” which takes place in the near future, Frank, an elderly man who lives alone, is arguing with his son about going to a medical center for Alzheimer’s treatment when the son interrupts him. “I brought you something,” he says to Frank. Then the son pulls a large, white humanoid robot from the trunk of his car.

Frank watches in disbelief. “You have got to be kidding me,” he says as a robot helper, called the VGC-60L, stands in front of him. “I’m not this pathetic!”

But as Frank soon learns, he doesn’t have much of a choice. His new robot helper is there to cook, clean, garden and keep him company. His son, mired in family and work life, is too busy to care for his ailing father.

Just like Frank, as the baby boomer generation grows old and if the number of elderly care workers fails to grow with it, many people might end up being cared for by robots. According to the Health and Human Services Department, there will be 72.1 million Americans over the age of 65 by 2030, which is nearly double the number today. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the country will need 70 percent more home aide jobs by 2020, long before that bubble of retirees. But filling those jobs is proving to be difficult because the salaries are low. In many states, in-home aides make an average of $20,820 annually.

“There are two trends that are going in opposite directions. One is the increasing number of elderly people, and the other is the decline in the number of people to take care of them,” said Jim Osborn, a roboticist and executive director of the Robotics Institute’s Quality of Life Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. “Part of the view we’ve already espoused is that robots will start to fill in those gaps.”

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed Cody, a robotic nurse the university says is “gentle enough to bathe elderly patients.” There is also HERB, which is short for Home Exploring Robot Butler. Made by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, it is designed to fetch household objects like cups and can even clean a kitchen. Hector, a robot that is being developed by the University of Reading in England, can remind patients to take their medicine, keep track of their eyeglasses and assist in the event of a fall.

The technology is nearly there. But some researchers worry that we are not asking a fundamental question: Should we entrust the care of people in their 70s and older to artificial assistants rather than doing it ourselves?

Sherry Turkle, a professor of science, technology and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the book “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other,” did a series of studies with Paro, a therapeutic robot that looks like a baby harp seal and is meant to have a calming effect on patients with dementia, Alzheimer’s and in health care facilities. The professor said she was troubled when she saw a 76-year-old woman share stories about her life with the robot.

“I felt like this isn’t amazing; this is sad. We have been reduced to spectators of a conversation that has no meaning,” she said. “Giving old people robots to talk to is a dystopian view that is being classified as utopian.” Professor Turkle said robots did not have a capacity to listen or understand something personal, and tricking patients to think they can is unethical.

That’s the catch. Leaving the questions of ethics aside for a moment, building robots is not simply about creating smart machines; it is about making something that is not human still appear, somehow, trustworthy.

A recent Georgia Tech study found that older people were intrigued by the idea of robotic assistants in the home, but a robot’s appearance played a large role in what they will trust the machines to do. Older people want robots that look human for tasks that involve intelligence, like recommending which medicine they need to take. But they want a more sterile-looking machine for manual labor tasks, like cleaning and cooking, so they do not feel guilty bossing it about.

Wendy A. Rogers, a professor at Georgia Tech and director of the university’s Human Factors and Aging Laboratory, said concerns about older people developing relationships with their in-home helper robots were no different than the bond we develop with other inanimate objects.

Dr. Rogers has been experimenting with a large robot called the PR2, made by Willow Garage, a robotics company in Palo Alto, Calif., which can fetch and administer medicine, a seemingly simple act that demands a great deal of trust between man and machine.

“We are social beings, and we do develop social types of relationships with lots of things,” she said. “Think about the GPS in your car, you talk to it and it talks to you.” Dr. Rogers noted that people developed connections with their Roomba, the vacuum robot, by giving the machines names and buying costumes for them. “This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just what we do,” she said.

In fact, Mr. Osborn’s laboratory at Carnegie Mellon has designed a robot to work with therapists and people with autism. The machine can develop a personality and blinks and giggles as people interact with it. “Those we tested it with love it and hugged it,” he said. “You begin to think of it as something that is more than a machine with a computer.”

In the movie “Robot & Frank,” technologists have raced ahead of society’s collective conscience with their robot caregivers. But the movie still leaves its audience with a question: Will it one day be morally acceptable to unload your parents’ care to a machine?

As the actor Frank Langella, who plays Frank in the movie, told NPR last year: “Every one of us is going to go through aging and all sorts of processes, many people suffering from dementia,” he said. “And if you put a machine in there to help, the notion of making it about love and buddy-ness and warmth is kind of scary in a way, because that’s what you should be doing with other human beings.”

Read more -

Mercedes S-Class wows with 3D cameras and night vision -

Mercedes S-Class wows with 3D cameras and night vision - 



There was a time when luxury cars were defined by their sheer size and mass, their power, performance and, of course, exclusive details like leather seats and wood trim.

Those factors distinguish the 2014 Mercedes-Benz S-Class, but there’s more to the redefined German flagship that fit the changing nature of the auto industry. From its LED lamps to the 3D cameras, radar and night vision systems that allow the new sedan to virtually drive itself, the new S-Class is a technical tour de force that will likely have competitors racing to catch up.

The long-awaited remake of the classic full-size luxury sedan was staged at an Airbus factory in Hamburg, Germany – no surprise because parent Mercedes-Benz also holds a stake in the French airline manufacturer. But the venue was clearly chosen to underscore the technical sophistication of the new S-Class.

Mercedes officials noted that it will be the first automobile to dispense with conventional light bulbs, opting instead for more advanced LED technology for everything from the head to taillights, and all those small indicators, reading lamps and mood lights in-between. All told, there are 300 LEDs in the interior alone, 56 in each headlamp and another 25 in each taillight. Oh, and you can choose from seven different colors for the interior lighting, with five dimmer levels and four distinct lighting zones.

The mammoth, 104-page press release covering all the details of the new car is overwhelming. The section on sensors runs longer than most new car announcements.

There’s the latest version of the Mercedes Distronic technology, using both cameras and radar to monitor the vehicle’s surroundings. It allows the new S-Class to keep pace with traffic, come to a complete stop in a tie-up and then start rolling again. It triggers the brakes if a collision seems likely and even turns on the flashers when one does occur.

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Measles surges in UK years after vaccine scare -

Measles surges in UK years after vaccine scare - 



More than a decade ago, British parents refused to give measles shots to at least a million children because of a vaccine scare that raised the specter of autism. Now, health officials are scrambling to catch up and stop a growing epidemic of the contagious disease.
This year, the U.K. has had more than 1,200 cases of measles, after a record number of nearly 2,000 cases last year. The country once recorded only several dozen cases every year. It now ranks second in Europe, behind only Romania.
Last month, emergency vaccination clinics were held every weekend in Wales, the epicenter of the outbreak. Immunization drives have also started elsewhere in the country, with officials aiming to reach 1 million children aged 10 to 16.
"This is the legacy of the Wakefield scare," said Dr. David Elliman, spokesman for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, referring to a paper published in 1998 by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues.
That work suggested a link between autism and the combined childhood vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, called the MMR. Several large scientific studies failed to find any connection, the theory was rejected by at least a dozen major U.K. medical groups and the paper was eventually retracted by the journal that published it.
Still, MMR immunization rates plummeted across the U.K. as fearful parents abandoned the vaccine — from rates over 90 percent to 54 percent.
Nearly 15 years later, the rumors about MMR are still having an impact. Now there's "this group of older children who have never been immunized who are a large pool of infections," Elliman said.
The majority of those getting sick in the U.K. — including a significant number of older children and teens — had never been vaccinated. Almost 20 of the more than 100 seriously ill children have been hospitalized and 15 have suffered complications including pneumonia and meningitis. One adult with measles has died, though it's unclear if it was the disease that killed him.
The first measles vaccines were introduced in the 1960s, which dramatically cut cases of the rash-causing illness. Since 2001, measles deaths have dropped by about 70 percent worldwide; Cambodia recently marked more than a year without a single case.
Globally, though, measles is still one of the leading causes of death in children under 5 and kills more than 150,000 people every year, mostly in developing countries. Measles is highly contagious and is spread by coughing, sneezing and close personal contact with infected people; symptoms include a fever, cough, and a rash on the face.
Across the U.K., about 90 percent of children under 5 are vaccinated against measles and have received the necessary two doses of the vaccine. But among children now aged 10 to 16, the vaccination rate is slightly below 50 percent in some regions.
To stop measles outbreaks, more than 95 percent of children need to be fully immunized. In some parts of the U.K., the rate is still below 80 percent.
Unlike in the United States, where most states require children to be vaccinated against measles before starting school, no such regulations exist in Britain. Parents are advised to have their children immunized, but Britain's Department of Health said it had no plans to consider introducing mandatory vaccination.
Last year, there were 55 reported cases of measles in the United States, where the measles vaccination rate is above 90 percent. So far this year, there have been 22 cases, including three that were traced to Britain. In previous years, the U.K. has sometimes exported more cases of measles to the U.S. than some countries in Africa.
Portia Ncube, a health worker at an East London clinic, said the struggle to convince parents to get the MMR shot is being helped by the measles epidemic in Wales.
"They see what's happening in Wales, so some of them are now sensible enough to come in and get their children vaccinated," she said.
Clinic patient Ellen Christensen, mother of an infant son, acknowledged she had previously had some "irrational qualms" about the MMR vaccine.
"But after reading more about it, I know now that immunization is not only good for your own child, it's good for everyone," she said.

Read more - 

http://news.yahoo.com/measles-surges-uk-years-vaccine-scare-100011003.html

NYC lawmakers furious over 'Ghetto Tour' by Bronx bus company -

NYC lawmakers furious over 'Ghetto Tour' by Bronx bus company - 



Tourists are crowding onto a Bronx bus tour that promises “a ride through a real New York City ‘GHETTO’ ” — and local politicians are furious.
Three times a week, Real Bronx Tours takes riders — mainly white Europeans and Australians — on a trip that includes stops at food-pantry lines and a “pickpocket” park.
Last week, on the first stop of the $45 tour, guide Lynn Battaglia, from Pittsburgh, pointed out a housing project. She then mocked the Grand Concourse, modeled after a Parisian boulevard.
“Do you feel like we’re on the Champs-Elysées?” she teased a couple from Paris.
As the bus idled across from historic St. Ann’s Episcopalian Church, Battaglia launched into a description of the crime, poverty and violence that plagued the South Bronx during the 1970s recession.
As she spoke, a line of two dozen poor people — including one man visibly agitated by the onlookers — waited for handouts from the church pantry.


Read more: -

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/bronx/ghetto_gawking_ffMgfDAaCD76GXNYDrth7L

Bright explosion on moon visible from Earth, NASA says -

Bright explosion on moon visible from Earth, NASA says - 



A meteoroid struck the surface of the moon recently, causing an explosion that was visible on Earth without the aid of a telescope, NASA reported Friday. But don't be alarmed if you didn't see it; it only lasted about a second.
"It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before," said Bill Cooke, of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office.
NASA astronomers have been monitoring the moon for the past eight years, looking for explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the lunar surface. It's part of a program to find new fields of space debris that could hit Earth. NASA says it sees hundreds of detectable lunar meteoroid impacts a year.
Meteor lights up East Coast and social media
None however can match the size of the explosion they say they saw March 17. NASA says the meteoroid was about 40 kilograms and less than a meter wide, and it hit the moon's surface at 56,000 mph. It glowed like a 4th magnitude star, NASA says, thanks to an explosion equivalent to 5 tons of TNT.
"It jumped right out at me, it was so bright," said Ron Suggs of the Marshall Space Flight Center.
Cooke says Earth was pelted by meteoroids at about the same time, but they hit the moon because it has no atmosphere to protect it.
Opinion: Meteor shows why it's crucial to keep an eye on the sky
"We'll be keeping an eye out for signs of a repeat performance next year when the Earth-moon system passes through the same region of space," Cooke said.
If you're wondering how there can be an explosion on the moon, without oxygen, NASA has the answer for you. It says the flash of light comes not from any type of combustion -- as we typically think of explosions -- but rather by the glowing molten rock at the impact site.

Read more - 

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/18/tech/moon-explosion/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Markets are on a crazy, sugar-fuelled journey - 'When the music stops, things will get complicated”. -

Markets are on a crazy, sugar-fuelled journey - 'When the music stops, things will get complicated”. - 



The then chief executive of the US banking giant Citigroup was admitting that growing concerns about sub-prime loans could ultimately shatter what we now know was “irrational exuberance” on global financial markets.
“As long as the music is playing, though, you’ve got to get up and dance,” Prince continued. “And we’re still dancing.”
There’s a “we’re still dancing” mood on global markets today, just as there was six years ago in the run-up to what turned out to be the disastrous market meltdown of September 2008.
Rather than the securitisation of recklessly extended commercial credit providing the music, the beat now comes from “quantitative easing”, courtesy of the world’s leading central banks.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 15pc since last September, after the Federal Reserve launched QE3, its third round of money-printing. The eurozone’s Stoxx 50 has soared also, gaining 30pc since July, when European Central Bank (ECB) president Mario Draghi vowed to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro.
The Nikkei 225 has rocketed 44pc since late December, after the election of a new government committed to forcing the Bank of Japan to crank up its QE antics. The UK’s FTSE 100, too, has gained 20pc in six months, riding a wave of Bank of England largesse — and, crucially, the prospect of more to come.
The Western world is yet to stage a meaningful recovery from the sub-prime debacle. The fundamentals remain awful. The eurozone economy, we learnt last week, contracted 0.9pc during the first quarter and has now been shrinking since late 2011 — Europe’s longest post-war recession. The UK is still enduring its slowest recovery since records began. Yet Western stock indices have been setting repeated all-time highs.
As financial markets dance, though, lost in the QE trance music, massive questions now loom. The ECB has expanded its balance sheet 150pc during the five years since the sub-prime collapse. The Fed has overseen a 220pc ballooning of base money.
“Extraordinary measures” on this scale may be unprecedented but both look moderate compared to the Bank of England, which has implemented balance sheet growth of 370pc since the credit crunch began in earnest — the vast majority of it, in a bizarre form of circular financing, being used to buy government bonds.
How will these vast balances be unwound? What will happen to sovereign bond prices once governments stop self-buying? That will truly determine, rather than any “forward guidance”, just how long our central banks can keep interest rates “ultra-low”. And what will the reaction of currently spaced-out Western equity markets be once the sugar rush fades, reality hits and the money-printing ends? What happens when the QE music stops?
Some of us have posed such uncomfortable questions for years now — and been derided for our trouble. In recent weeks, the now vast scale of QE, and its broader collateral damage, have forced such issues into mainstream discourse. Flickering signs of returning Western growth have also brought official recognition that such measures may soon be hard to justify and that, to paraphrase Chuck Prince, things could indeed “get complicated”, when the lights come up and the QE party is over.
Last week, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) acknowledged that, having strayed into “uncharted waters”, central banks will find the QE exit “difficult to control”. The world’s leading economic watchdog recognised, in an official paper, that long-term interest rates could spike as investors demand higher yields to fund cash-strapped governments, with commercial credit risks also rising as higher rates make it harder for borrowers to service loans.
Presenting his final quarterly Inflation Report before his July retirement, the Bank of England Governor, Sir Mervyn King, also warned that post-QE complications mean that rates “may rise faster than current market expectations” of no increase until late 2016. The IMF also nodded to “diminishing returns” in continuing with QE. That states the case rather mildly. QE and the related slashing of interest rates to deeply negative real-terms levels has not only hammered pensioners and other savers but stored up a world of future inflationary pain.
With many large Western banks still moribund, and massive undeclared losses on their balance sheets, QE hasn’t resulted in more growth-generating working capital being extended to credit-worthy firms and households. It’s gone instead into asset markets, bidding up not only shares but also oil and basic foodstuffs on global exchanges.
That’s pleased the City and Wall Street but done serious real world damage. Expensive energy has made Western recovery much tougher, while soaring food costs have led to a wave of unrest across the developing world, arguably sparking the Arab Spring.
And, while we’re at it, QE has also deeply annoyed the governments of powerful Western creditors like China and Brazil. By inflating their currencies, our money-printing has harmed their exports. It’s also debased the dollar, pound and euro, so lowered the real value of what we owe.
That’s a principal reason why the World Trade Organisation is in turmoil, with the increasingly strident emerging powers in open revolt and the world economy suffering the first failure of a multilateral trade negotiation since the 1930s. So, yes, you could say that QE now has “diminishing returns”.
Given the massive regulatory mistakes that had already been made, no one is arguing that central banks shouldn’t have provided extra liquidity in the dark days of early 2009. Had they not, the Western financial system would have collapsed, causing economic and social chaos.
Yet that extra liquidity should have been strictly limited, heavily conditional and used as a buffer, allowing us to flush out the rotten banks, implement root-and-branch reforms and move on.
Instead, QE has become an open-ended life-support mechanism for living-dead “zombie banks”, a mask to cover up financial wrongdoing. It’s also become a comfort blanket for politicians, allowing most of them to delay the really tough fiscal decisions.
Money printing on the scale we’ve seen has gone way, way beyond a necessary palliative and been transformed from legitimate temporary emergency measure into lifestyle choice — the economic equivalent of crack cocaine.
File the IMF’s calibrated hair-splitting nonsense in the historical dustbin and read instead a brave and important speech given last week by Jaime Caruana of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), an umbrella group for the world’s central banks.
“Monetary policy can buy time to implement the necessary balance sheet repair and structural reforms,” thundered Caruana. “But it cannot substitute for them.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. “After five years of buying time, one has to ask if that time has been — or will be — used wisely.”
Asking aloud if “ever more monetary action” is “really justified”, Caruana observed rightly that ongoing QE “gives borrowers, financial institutions and policymakers an incentive to keep kicking the can down the road”.
Tackling the myth that governments and firms really have been tightening their belts, the BIS boss reported that since the end of 2007, the total public and private debts of the world’s leading economies have risen by more than $30,000bn.
Challenging Western politicians to finally shake out the banks, and impose supply-side reforms, Caruana concluded by asking: “What monetary policy can substitute for balance sheet repair by banks and borrowers … or remove impediments to a worker moving from an overbuilt sector to a more promising one?”
The speech was an onslaught of common sense, a tour de force. So sensible was it, in fact, that it’s destined to be ignored.

Read more - 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/liamhalligan/10066060/Markets-are-on-a-crazy-sugar-fuelled-journey.html

'Crazy ants' a threat in southern U.S. -

'Crazy ants' a threat in southern U.S. - 



Researchers at the University of Texas are warning that the invasive species from South America has the potential to change the ecological balance in the southeastern United States, largely because the ants can wipe out colonies of what's been widely considered the insect villain of the region, the fire ant.
The crazy ants, officially called "Tawny crazy ants," are omnivores that can take over an area by both killing what's there and starving out what they don't kill, said Ed LeBrun, a research associate with the Texas invasive species research program at the Brackenridge Field Laboratory in the College of Natural Sciences.
"Perhaps the biggest deal is the displacement of the fire ant, which is the 300-pound gorilla in Texas ecosystems these days," LeBrun said in a press release. "The whole system has changed around fire ants. Things that can't tolerate fire ants are gone. Many that can have flourished. New things have come in. Now we are going to go through and whack the fire ants and put something in its place that has a very different biology. There are going to be a lot of changes that come from that."
Beyond the troubles they cause for the environment, the crazy ants can be a big headache for people because their populations are so dense, LeBrun said.
The crazy ants nest in walls, crawl spaces, house plants or empty containers in the yard, researchers said.
"They don't sting like fire ants do, but aside from that they are much bigger pests," he said. "There are videos on YouTube of people sweeping out dustpans full of these ants from their bathroom. You have to call pest control operators every three or four months just to keep the infestation under control. It's very expensive."
The crazy ants are going so crazy, in fact, that some people want their fire ants back, LeBrun said.
"Fire ants are in many ways very polite. They live in your yard. They form mounds and stay there, and they only interact with you if you step on their mound," he said.

Scientists are unsure how far the ants, which are native to Argentina and Brazil, may spread in the U.S. Since being first seen in Houston in 2002, they've been found mostly in wetter environments with mild winters in parts of Texas, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi.
And while they can quickly overwhelm a small area, the reproductive members of the species don't fly, so to move over large distances, they have to hitchhike -- in your stuff.
"If people living in or visiting invaded areas are careful and check for the crazy ants when moving or going on longer trips, they could have a huge impact on the spread," LeBrun said.

Read more - 

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/17/us/crazy-ants/index.html?hpt=hp_t5

Cell phone users ‘have no legitimate expectation of privacy’ – Judge -

Cell phone users ‘have no legitimate expectation of privacy’ – Judge 



A federal judge recently ruled that if someone has their cell phone turned on, their location data does not deserve protection under the Fourth Amendment, meaning law enforcement can track individuals without a search warrant.
New York magistrate judge Gary Brown decided in favor of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents who were seeking his approval over a warrant on a doctor who they suspected was being paid for issuing thousands of prescriptions. The warrant would have compelled the physician’s phone company to provide real-time tracking data from his cell.
Brown, certainly to the delight of police, issued a 30-page brief outlining his opinion that, by carrying a cell phone, someone is essentially waiving their Fourth Amendment right to due process.
“Given the ubiquity and celebrity of geolocation technologies, an individual has no legitimate expectation of privacy in the prospective of a cellular telephone where that individual has failed to protect his privacy by taking the simple expedient of powering it off,” Brown wrote.
“As to control by the user, all of the known tracking technologies may be defeated by merely turning off the phone. Indeed – excluding apathy or inattention – the only reason that users leave cell phones turned on is so that the device can be located to receive calls. Conversely, individuals who do not want to be disturbed by unwanted telephone calls at a particular time or place simply turn their phones off, knowing that they cannot be located.”
He goes on to suggest that because there are smartphone applications available that allow users to locate people in their area with similar interests, cell phone customers should not expect their inherent right to privacy to be observed.
“Given the notoriety surrounding the disclosure of geolocation data to retailers purveying soap powder and blue jeans to mall shoppers, the police searching for David Pogue’s iPhone and, most alarmingly, the creators and users of the Girls Around You app, cell phone users cannot realistically entertain the notion that such information would (or should) be withheld from federal law enforcement agents searching for a fugitive.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has long been a voice for the American people against governmental overreach and technological surveillance. Chris Soghoian, a principal technologist and senior policy analyst at the ACLU, wrote that Brown’s opinion was “ridiculous.”
“There is a big difference between location information you knowingly share with a select group of friends (or, in fact, the world) and information collected about you without your knowledge or consent,” he wrote.
Exactly how common this practice is throughout the law enforcement community is unclear but it has widely been reported that a Michigan police force tried to gain information about every single cell phone within the proximity of a labor protest.
Congressional leaders are currently considering two laws that would address how freely police are able to bug citizens. During an April hearing on Capitol Hill one detective told Senators that warrantless geolocation tracking is “essential to obtain in the early stages of investigations when probable cause has not yet been established.”
That attitude, and the wide potential for abuse this kind of law creates, has the ACLU alarmed.
“Someone might be happy to share their location with a few friends by ‘checking in’ using Foursquare while at a music festival, but not want law enforcement to access that same information,” Soghoian continued. “And, they would still reasonably expect that their location a week later at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting or abortion clinic should remain private. Sharing location data isn’t and shouldn’t be all or nothing.”

Read more - 

http://rt.com/usa/no-cell-privacy-expectation-399/

Dark, massive asteroid to fly by Earth on May 31 -

Dark, massive asteroid to fly by Earth on May 31 - 


It's 1.7 miles long. Its surface is covered in a sticky black substance similar to the gunk at the bottom of a barbecue. If it impacted Earth it would probably result in global extinction. Good thing it is just making a flyby.

Asteroid 1998 QE2 will make its closest pass to Earth on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. PDT.

Scientists are not sure where this unusually large space rock, which was discovered 15 years ago, originated from. But the mysterious sooty substance on its surface could indicate it may be the result of a comet that flew too close to the sun, said Amy Mainzer, who tracks near-Earth objects at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. It might also have leaked out of the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, she said.

We will know more after the asteroid zips closer to Earth and scientists using the Deep Space Network antenna in Goldstone, Calif., and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico can get a better look at it. Astronomers at both observatories plan to track it closely from May 30 to June 9, according to a JPL release.

At its closest approach the asteroid will still be 3.6 million miles from our planet (about 15 times the distance between the Earth and the moon), but it will be close enough for these powerful radar antennas to see features as small as 12 feet across.

"With radar we can transform an object from a point of light into a small world with its own characteristics," Lance Benner, JPL's principal investigator for Goldstone radar observations, said in a statement. 

There is no chance that asteroid 1998 QE2 could collide with Earth this go-around, and its next close approach won't be until 2119.

Still, Mainzer said the size of the asteroid, and its potential for mass destruction, should remind us that there are some scary things flying around in space.

"This is a really big asteroid, similar in size to the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and it's getting very close to us," she said. "Fortunately we've been tracking its orbit very carefully so we know with great certainty it won't hit us.

"We don't need to panic, but we do need to pay attention," she said. 

Read more - 

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-asteroid-1998-qe2-20130516,0,548201.story