Canada’s new $100 and $50 bills can’t stand the heat - Quick! Spend them before they melt -

Canada’s new $100 and $50 bills can’t stand the heat - Quick! Spend them before they melt - 




Turns out Canada’s new $100 and $50 bills can’t stand the heat after all.


Under certain conditions they will curl up like bacon in a frying pan.


“The Bank of Canada cannot rule out that polymer notes may be damaged under certain extraordinary conditions,” Julie Girard, a currency spokesperson for the Bank of Canada, told the Star Thursday.


According to various reports, the so-called indestructible polymer bills will shrink under intense heat, be it the inside of a car or placed next to a heat source.


The new $100 bills, which were introduced in November, underwent scientific tests to make sure they withstood various conditions, the Bank of Canada says. The polymer $50 was introduced earlier this year.


According to anecdotal reports from Brittney Halldorson, a teller at the Interior Savings Credit Union in Kelowna, B.C., she’s heard of cases where several of the bills have melted together inside a hot car.


The Star confirmed another report of a Halifax man who laid his wallet on a toaster oven after toasting a bagel and noticed later that three $100 bills had taken on the shape of a “Coke bottle.”


“So you can’t rip them, you can’t tear them, you can’t wreck them by washing them but apparently you can heat them and melt them,” said a banking industry source who asked not to be identified.


And then there was the Cambridge Times (a sister paper of the Star) story in January about a man who at Christmas left eight $100 bill he had received as a bonus in a tin box near a heater only to discover a day later that they had shrivelled up.


Read more -
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1225532--plastic-bills-quick-spend-them-before-they-melt

Facebook is watching users’ chats for criminal activity and notifying police if any suspicious behavior is detected -

Facebook is watching users’ chats for criminal activity and notifying police if any suspicious behavior is detected - 




Facebook and other social platforms are watching users’ chats for criminal activity and notifying police if any suspicious behavior is detected, according to a report.


The screening process begins with scanning software that monitors chats for words or phrases that signal something might be amiss, such as an exchange of personal information or vulgar language.


The software pays more attention to chats between users who don’t already have a well-established connection on the site and whose profile data indicate something may be wrong, such as a wide age gap. The scanning program is also “smart” — it’s taught to keep an eye out for certain phrases found in the previously obtained chat records from criminals including sexual predators.


If the scanning software flags a suspicious chat exchange, it notifies Facebook security employees, who can then determine if police should be notified.


Keeping most of the scanned chats out of the eyes of Facebook employees may help Facebook deflect criticism from privacy advocates, but whether the scanned chats are deleted or stored permanently is yet unknown.


The new details about Facebook’s monitoring system came from an interview which the company’s Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan gave to Reuters. At least one alleged child predator has been brought to trial directly as a result of Facebook’s chat scanning, according to Reuters’ report.


When asked for a comment, Facebook only repeated the remarks given by Sullivan to Reuters: “We’ve never wanted to set up an environment where we have employees looking at private communications, so it’s really important that we use technology that has a very low false-positive rate.”


Read more - 
http://mashable.com/2012/07/12/facebook-scanning-chats/

Nudist Resort Sees Boom In Business As Temperatures Soar... -

Nudist Resort Sees Boom In Business As Temperatures Soar... - 




Temperatures rising means business is booming at a place where folks are letting it all hang out.


“I tell you Dave, if you have friends who live in a nudist colony, tonight wouldn’t be a bad night to visit,” I said.


It was that my comment to Dave Bender during Wednesday night’s broadcast that sparked an email from a nice lady.


Kitty told CBS13 the naked truth.


“It’s a nudist resort, not a colony, silly. And business, thanks to the area’s heat wave, has never been better,” wrote Kittyy.


CBS13 ventured out to Wilton to Laguna Del Sol on, yes, Rawhide Lane to see how these sun-drenched skinny dippers are soaking in the summer sizzler.


“Obviously everybody wants to wear as little as possible when it’s hot. It’s too hot to mow the lawn, and you see people going where there’s water. And this is just a great place to go,” said Suzanne Schell, a visitor.


Suzanne Schell and her hubby, Wayne, have been urging people to come out of their shell for years, but fighting through the stigma of being a nudist hasn’t been easy.


We asked Wayne what is the biggest misconception about nudists. He replied, “I think they think it’s a sexually oriented recreation, and it’s not.”




The Schells call this 250-acre resort family friendly; and even though they’re nude, dude, no shenanigans are allowed. It’s just good clean fun.


“It’s a recreation like any other campground or resort. We have archery here; pickle ball is really popular right now; water volleyball,” said Wayne.


Archery might be kind of dangerous.


Their sense of humor was easy to find. Where would they hide it?


Lisa Flannery isn’t hiding anything. She’s one of 80 full-time residents of Laguna Del Sol and wouldn’t have it any other way.


“It’s absolutely heaven, everyday. When you come in here to come home, all your stress is left at the gate,” said Flannery.


Others say being here fuels their “fountain of youth.” From hopping on a bike to enjoying the scenery to soaking in the pool, it got us thinking, “who was really the fool on this 100-plus degree day?”


Read more - 
http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2012/07/12/nudist-wilton-resort-sees-boost-in-business-as-temperatures-rise/

World’s most powerful laser fires most powerful laser blast ever - 500 trillion watts of power -

World’s most powerful laser fires most powerful laser blast ever - 500 trillion watts of power - 




And you thought you saw fireworks on the 4th of July!
The largest laser system in the world was turned on for a fraction of a second July 5, and it unleashed the most powerful laser blast in history -- besting a record set mere months earlier.
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) -- a laser test facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. -- turned on its 192 laser beams for a scant instant the day after the nation celebrated its birth, unleashing a record-setting 1.85-megajoule blast into a target chamber that delivered more than 500 trillion watts of power.
Five hundred terawatts is 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, the facility said.
Scientists celebrated the historic test, which created conditions in the laboratory that had previously only existed deep within the heart of a star.
'Scientists are taking important steps toward ... the quest for clean fusion energy.'
- NIF director Edward Moses
“For scientists across the nation and the world who, like ourselves, are actively pursuing fundamental science under extreme conditions ... this is a remarkable and exciting achievement,” said Dr. Richard Petrasso, senior research scientist and division head of high energy density physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The test bested a record set March 15, when NIF unleashed a record-setting 1.8-megajoule blast into a target chamber.
In the historic test, NIF's 192 lasers fired within a few trillionths of a second of each other onto a 2-millimeter-diameter target. Beyond its sheer power, the beam-to-beam uniformity was within 1 percent, making NIF not only the highest energy laser of its kind but the most precise and reproducible.
“NIF is becoming everything scientists planned when it was conceived over two decades ago,” NIF director Edward Moses said.
“Scientists are taking important steps toward achieving ignition and providing experimental access to user communities for national security, basic science and the quest for clean fusion energy.”
In fission, atoms are split and the massive energy released is captured. NIF aims for fusion, the ongoing energy process in the sun and other stars where hydrogen and helium nuclei are continually fusing and releasing enormous amounts of energy. In the ignition facility, beams of light converge on pellets of hydrogen isotopes to create a similar, though controlled, micro-explosion.
As the beams move through a series of amplifiers, their energy increases exponentially. From beginning to end, the beams' total energy grows from one-billionth of a joule to a potential high of four million joules, NIF said -- a factor of more than a quadrillion. 
And it all happens in about five millionths of a second.
Because the laser is on for the merest fraction of a second, it costs little to operate -- between $5 and $20 per blast, spokeswoman Lynda Seaver told FoxNews.com in March, when an earlier test set the stage for the July 5 blast. 
NIF’s managers hope by the end of the year to reach a break-even point, where the energy released is equal to if not greater than the energy that went into the blast.




Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/07/12/worlds-most-powerful-laser-fires-most-powerful-laser-blast-ever/?intcmp=features

27 Things That Every American Should Know About The National Debt -

27 Things That Every American Should Know About The National Debt - 




The U.S. government has stolen $15,876,457,645,132.66 from future generations of Americans, and we continue to add well over a hundred million dollars to that total every single day day.  The 15 trillion dollar binge that we have been on over the past 30 years has fueled the greatest standard of living the world has ever seen, but this wonderful prosperity that we have been enjoying has been a lie.  It isn’t real. 


We have been living way above our means for so long that we do not have any idea of what “normal” actually is anymore.  But every debt addict hits “the wall” eventually, and the same thing is going to happen to us as a nation.  At some point the weight of our national debt is going to cause our financial system to implode, and every American will feel the pain of that collapse.  Under our current system, there is no mathematical way that this debt can ever be paid back.  The road that we are on will either lead to default or to hyperinflation.  We have piled up the biggest debt in the history of the world, and if there are future generations of Americans they will look back and curse us for what we did to them.  We like to think of ourselves as much wiser than previous generations of Americans, but the truth is that we have been so foolish that it is hard to put it into words.


Whenever I do an article about the national debt, Democrats leave comments blaming the Republicans and Republicans leave comments blaming the Democrats.


Well you know what?


Both parties are to blame.  Both of them get a failing grade.


If the Republicans really wanted to stop the federal government from running up all this debt they could have done it.


If the Democrats really wanted to stop the federal government from running up all this debt they could have done it.


So let’s not pretend that one of the political parties is “the hero” in this little drama.


The damage has been done, and both parties will go down in history as being grossly negligent on fiscal issues during this period of American history.


Sadly, neither party is showing any signs of changing their ways.


Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney is promising to eliminate the federal budget deficit in 2013.  They both talk about how the budget will be balanced “someday”, but as we have seen so many times in the past, “someday” never comes.


I didn’t mean to get all political in this article, but the truth is that the national debt threatens to destroy everything that previous generations have built, and our politicians continue to give us nothing but excuses.


The following are 27 things that every American should know about the national debt….


#1 It took more than 200 years for the U.S. national debt to reach 1 trillion dollars.  In 1986, the U.S. national debt reached 2 trillion dollars.  In 1992, the U.S. national debt reached 4 trillion dollars.  In 2005, the U.S. national debt doubled again and reached 8 trillion dollars.  Now the U.S. national debt is about to cross the 16 trillion dollar mark.  How long can this kind of exponential growth go on?


#2 If the average interest rate on U.S. government debt rises to just 7 percent, the U.S. government will find itself spending more than a trillion dollars per year just on interest on the national debt.


#3 If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.


#4 Since Barack Obama entered the White House, the U.S. national debt has increased by an average of more than $64,000 per taxpayer.


#5 Barack Obama will become the first president to run deficits of more than a trillion dollars during each of his first four years in office.


#6 If you were alive when Jesus Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.


#7 The U.S. national debt has increased by more than 1.6 trillion dollars since the Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives.  So far, this Congress has added more to the national debt than the first 97 Congresses combined.


#8 During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has accumulated more new debt than it did from the time that George Washington became president to the time that Bill Clinton became president.


#9 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.


#10 As Bill Whittle has shown, you could take every single penny that every American earns above $250,000 and it would only fund about 38 percent of the federal budget.


#11 Today, the government debt to GDP ratio in the United States is well over 100 percent.


#12 A recently revised IMF policy paper entitled “An Analysis of U.S. Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: Who Will Pay and How?” projects that U.S. government debt will rise to about 400 percent of GDP by the year 2050.


#13 The United States already has more government debt per capita than Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or Spain does.


#14 At this point, the United States government is responsible for more than a third of all the government debt in the entire world.


#15 The amount of U.S. government debt held by foreigners is about 5 times larger than it was just a decade ago.


#16 The U.S. national debt is now more than 22 times larger than it was when Jimmy Carter became president.


#17 It is being projected that the U.S. national debt will surpass 23 trillion dollars in 2015.


#18 Mandatory federal spending surpassed total federal revenue for the first time ever in fiscal 2011.  That was not supposed to happen until 50 years from now.


#19 Between 2007 and 2010, U.S. GDP grew by only 4.26%, but the U.S. national debt soared by 61% during that same time period.


#20 The U.S. government has total assets of 2.7 trillion dollars and has total liabilities of 17.5 trillion dollars.  The liabilities do not even count 4.7 trillion dollars of intragovernmental debt that is currently outstanding.


#21 U.S. households are now actually receiving more money directly from the U.S. government than they are paying to the government in taxes.


#22 The U.S. government is wasting your money on some of the stupidest things imaginable.  For example, in 2011 the National Institutes of Health spent $592,527 on a study that sought to figure out once and for all why chimpanzees throw poop.


#23 If the federal government used GAAP accounting standards like publicly traded corporations do, the real federal budget deficit for last year would have been 5 trillion dollars instead of 1.3 trillion dollars.


#24 The Federal Reserve purchased approximately 61 percent of all government debt issued by the U.S. Treasury Department during 2011.


#25 At this point, the U.S. national debt is more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was first created.


#26 If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 480,000 years to completely pay off the national debt.


#27 The official government debt figure does not even account for massive unfunded liabilities that the U.S. government will be hit with in the years ahead.  According to Professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, the U.S. government is facing a future “fiscal gap” of more than 200 trillion dollars.


As the U.S. economy continues to crumble, even more Americans are going to become financially dependent on the federal government.


For example, spending on food stamps has doubled since 2008.  Millions of Americans have lost their jobs and have needed some assistance from the government.  Since Obama became president the number of Americans on food stamps has gone from 32 million to 46 million.


But the Obama administration believes that a lot more Americans should be enrolled in the food stamp program.  The Obama administration is now spending millions of dollars on ads that urge even more people to sign up for food stamps.  In fact, their efforts to get even more Americans to sign up for food stamps have become very creative….


The government has been targeting Spanish speakers with radio “novelas” promoting food stamp usage as part of a stated mission to increase participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps.


Each novela, comprising a 10-part series called “PARQUE ALEGRIA,” or “HOPE PARK,” presents a semi-dramatic scenario involving characters convincing others to get on food stamps, or explaining how much healthier it is to be on food stamps.


I’m all for helping those that cannot feed themselves, but do we really need to run ads urging more people to become dependent on the government?


Of course Obamacare is going to cause our debt to balloon in size as well.  It is being projected that Obamacare will add more than 2.6 trillion dollars to the U.S. national debt over the first decade alone.


So where are we going to get all this money?


We can’t keep spending money that we do not have.  We have got to prioritize.  Every single category of government spending needs to be cut.


But instead we feel like we can keep ripping off future generations of Americans and that we will always be able to get away with it.


What we have done to our children and our grandchildren is beyond criminal.


The truth is that we should have listened to the warnings of our founding fathers about government debt.  For example, Thomas Jefferson once said that if he could add just one more amendment to the U.S. Constitution it would be a complete ban on all borrowing by the federal government….


I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.


Where would we be today if we had taken the advice of Thomas Jefferson?


That is something to think about.


Read more - 
http://www.blacklistednews.com/27_Things_That_Every_American_Should_Know_About_The_National_Debt/20496/0/38/38/Y/M.html