Lavabit Case Unsealed: FBI Demands Companies Secretly Turn Over Crypto Keys -

Lavabit Case Unsealed: FBI Demands Companies Secretly Turn Over Crypto Keys - 



"Lavabit won a victory in court and were able to get the secret court order [which led to the site's closure] unsealed. The ACLU's Chris Soghoian called it the nuclear option: The court order revealed the FBI demanded Lavabit turn over their root SSL certificate, something that would allow them to monitor the traffic of every user of the service. Lavabit offered an alternative method to tap into the single user in question but the FBI wasn't interested. Lavabit could either comply or shut down. As such, no U.S. company that relies on SSL encryption can be trusted with sensitive data. Everything from Google to Facebook to Skype to your bank account is only encrypted by SSL keys, and if the FBI can force Lavabit to hand over their SSL key or face shutdown, they can do it to anyone."

Read more - 

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/10/03/1324222/lavabit-case-unsealed-fbi-demands-companies-secretly-turn-over-crypto-keys

Montana dog that ate 5 $100 bills gets bailed out by US Treasury Department -

Montana dog that ate 5 $100 bills gets bailed out by US Treasury Department - 



A Montana man who painstakingly gathered and reassembled parts of five $100 bills eaten by his golden retriever has been reimbursed by the U.S. Treasury for the “mutt-ilated” currency.

Wayne Klinkel of Helena received a $500 check on Monday, the Independent Record reported.

“It was great to get the check after all the crap I went through,” Klinkel, a graphic artist at the newspaper, joked.

His 12-year-old dog, Sundance, downed all but half of one of the bills in December. Sundance, a rescue from a Wyoming animal shelter, snacked on the cash left in the family vehicle while Klinkel and his wife ate at a restaurant, but left a $1 bill untouched. They were on a road trip to visit their daughter in Colorado.

Klinkel carefully picked through the dog’s droppings over the next few days to recover parts of the bills and his daughter recovered more when the snow melted in the spring.

Klinkel cleaned and carefully reassembled the bills, put them in plastic bags and sent them to the U.S. Treasury in April with an explanation.

He got a receipt for the bills 10 days later, and didn’t hear from the Treasury until he received the check.

“I gave Sundance a pat, showed it to him and told him not to eat it,” said Klinkel.

He said there wasn’t any correspondence with the check, but the memo section in the bottom left read: “MUT.CURR REFUND.”

Read more - 

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/10/03/montana-dog-that-ate-5-100-bills-get-bailed-out-by-government/?intcmp=latestnews

Mercedes-Benz Sells Most Cars Ever In September -

Mercedes-Benz Sells Most Cars Ever In September - 



The electric car dream may be ending, one flaming Lithium Ion battery pack a time (no matter how Borgified the cult following of the carmaker may be), but when it comes to combustible engines, some have never had it better. Such as Mercedes.

According to Reuters "Daimler's luxury brand Mercedes-Benz sold the most cars in one month in its history in September, German paper Bild reported on Thursday. The carmaker sold over 142,000 cars last month, a rise of 15.9 percent, driven by demand in China and the United States, the paper said in an advance copy of an article to be published on Thursday."

The world's fascination with Mercedes may also explain why a Benz is also the car that recently sold for a record $30 million price at a car auction.

A Mercedes-Benz car that Juan Manuel Fangio drove to two Grand Prix victories sold today for 19.6 million pounds ($29.7 million), a record for a car at auction.

The 180 MPH Mercedes was being sold by the Emir of Qatar, who acquired it from the German industrialist Friedhelm Loh about eight years ago, according to dealers with knowledge of the car. A spokesman in the Emir’s office said he would not comment on personal matters.

The silver Mercedes W196 didn’t carry a formal valuation at Bonhams’s 20th-anniversary “Festival of Speed” sale. The London-based auction house only said the price was likely to be higher than the record $16.4 million paid for a 1957 prototype Ferrari Testa Rossa at Gooding & Co. in California in August 2011.

“You’re in a club of one with this car,” Dave Kinney, publisher of the U.S.-based Hagerty Price Guide, said about the Mercedes before the auction. “You can’t race it with your fellow Ferrari GTO owners. It is a very significant piece of Grand Prix history. While its future use-potential is slight, it exudes the history of perhaps the greatest era in racing.”

The straight-eight, 2½-liter Mercedes is a variant of the streamlined aluminum-bodied “Stromlinienwagen” in which Fangio won the 1954 French Grand Prix.
So who again says the wealth effect does not trickle down... If mostly to the Mercedes-Benz and the 0.01%-ers bottom line that is.

Read more - 

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-03/mercedes-benz-sells-most-cars-ever-september

About 40 Percent Of All Food In The United States Is Thrown In The Garbage -

About 40 Percent Of All Food In The United States Is Thrown In The Garbage - 



Could that headline actually be true?  Do Americans waste about 40 percent of all the food that we produce?  That sounds like an absolutely crazy number, but it is actually quite accurate according to a study conducted by the Natural Resources Defense Council.  What the NRDC discovered is that approximately 40 percent of our total food supply is either thrown into dumpsters by grocery stores, is discarded by restaurants, never gets harvested on our farms, or is thrown into the garbage by consumers in their homes.  Even though 47 million Americans are on food stamps and millions of children go to bed hungry in this country every single night, we continue to waste approximately 263 million pounds of food every single day of the year.  One day people will look back and regard us as probably the most wasteful society in the history of the planet.

So where does all of that food go?

Well, according to a recent Seattle Times article, “food waste” takes up more space in our landfills than anything else does…

Last year, the NRDC found that Americans throw out as much as 40 percent of the country’s food supply each year, adding up to $165 billion in losses.

Food waste makes up the largest portion of solid trash in landfills, according to researchers.

Some $900 million of expired food is dumped from the supply chain annually, much of it a result of confusion. Misinterpreted date labels cause the average American household of four to lose as much as $455 a year on squandered food, according to researchers.

The expired food that gets wasted is one of my personal pet peeves.

I don’t do this a lot, but today I am going to share a personal story with you.

Earlier today I was out running errands and I decided that I wanted to pick up some mini-cupcakes from Safeway that I just love.  I do try to eat a healthy diet, but I do also like a treat from time to time.  So I got over to Safeway, and I noticed that the only mini-cupcakes that they had out were ones with chocolate frosting, but I wanted ones with vanilla frosting.

So I went up to the bakery counter and there was nobody there, but behind the counter I saw a stack of several containers of vanilla cupcakes.  I waited until the bakery lady got back and I asked her if I could have them.

I was astounded when she very firmly told me that I could not buy them.

She said that it was against regulations.

I implored her to sell them to me.  I explained that I had come over to Safeway just to buy them and I didn’t care if they were a little old.

Again she very firmly told me that I could not buy them.

I could not understand this.  I knew that the cupcakes were just going to be thrown out, so I asked to speak to her manager.

After a few moments her manager came over and I was once again told very firmly that under no circumstances would I be able to buy the cupcakes.

So needless to say, I left the store with a sad look on my face and without any cupcakes.

Now of course I probably didn’t need the cupcakes anyway.  They are not healthy for me.  But big chains such as Safeway throw away massive amounts of very good food as well.  The level of the waste that goes on is absolutely astounding.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans that are dealing with hunger and malnutrition grows with each passing day.  I want to share with you an excerpt from a recent article authored by Jason Ford entitled “I Work On The Breadline“…

I work as a cashier at a nationally known discount store. I sell clothing, cleaning products, house wares and food. The people I sell to are people of all colors, races, ages and sex, but most of them have one thing in common; EBT cards. I would say about half of every transaction I do is paid for with an EBT card. Sometimes people will use three different methods of payment. They will use whatever is left on their EBT card, then use whatever is left on their debit card, and then scrape their purse to find the remaining balance, and sometimes they still don’t have enough.

Another common trait of the people I serve besides the poverty is the poor health. The food I sell is not healthy, by any stretch. I sell potato chips, candy bars, bread, canned food, ice cream, soda, packaged meat, cigarettes and alcohol. I noticed quickly that a common ingredient of most of the foods is sugar and grains. Sugar and grains are easy to grow and produce cheaply and are used as fillers in processed food to cut cost and mask the taste of other questionable ingredients. Grains work in conjunction with sugars to inflame the body and compromise the immune system. Grains and sugars also have no nutritional value besides calories, so on top of inflaming the body; they do not provide the sustenance the body needs to survive. As the functions of the body require these nutrients the diet lacks, the body sucks these minerals from the bones, teeth and brain. Bone loss, and tooth decay and decreased brain function are the unfortunate symptoms of malnutrition. The poorest of the customers I serve are also the sickest. I have witnessed toothless mouths in the young and old. Mental retardation is also a common trait among many of them. I have even witnessed one unfortunate woman whose skin was a pale green color. These people are dying a slow starvation and they don’t even know it.

Doesn’t that just break your heart?

People are living like that, and yet America discards 263 million pounds of food every single day.

Something is fundamentally wrong with the way our system works.

So what is society going to do as the number of hungry people continues to grow in this country and around the world?

Well, according to ABC News, some scientists plan to feed them with flour made out of bugs…

A team of MBA students were the recipients of the 2013 Hult Prize earlier this week, providing them with $1 million in seed money to produce an insect-based, protein-rich flour for feeding malnourished populations in other countries. The product is called Power Flour.

“It’s a huge deal because we had a very ambitious but highly executable five-year plan in place,” said team captain Mohammed Ashour, whose team hails from McGill University in Montreal. “So winning this prize is a great step in that direction.”

Ashour, along with teammates Shobhita Soor, Jesse Pearlstein, Zev Thompson and Gabe Mott, will be immediately working with an advisory board to recruit farmers and workers in Mexico, where a population of roughly 4 million live in slum conditions with widespread malnutrition.

“We will be starting with grasshoppers,” Ashour said.

Are you ready for a “protein-rich flour” made out of grasshoppers?

I know that I am not.

And in Japan, scientists have actually been working on a way to create meat out of poop.  You can read more about that right here.

Perhaps if we just quit wasting so much food we would be able to feed everybody without resorting to such craziness.

These days, an increasing number of Americans are fighting back against the colossal waste that they see all around them.  Some have even chosen to take advantage of the waste by regularly going “dumpster diving”.  The following is how I described “dumpster diving” in one of my previous articles…

Have you ever thought about getting your food out of a trash can?  Don’t laugh.  Dumpster diving has become a hot new trend in America.  In fact, dumpster divers even have a trendy new name.  They call themselves “freegans”, and as the economy crumbles their numbers are multiplying.  Many freegans consider dumpster diving to be a great way to save money on groceries.  Others do it because they want to live more simply.  Freegans that are concerned about the environment view dumpster diving as a great way to “recycle” and other politically-minded freegans consider dumpster diving to be a form of political protest.  But whatever you want to call it, the reality is that thousands upon thousands of Americans will break out their boots, rubber gloves and flashlights and will be jumping into dumpsters looking for food once again tonight.

Who knows – perhaps some enterprising young dumpster diver will end up fishing the vanilla cupcakes that I wanted out of Safeway’s dumpsters this evening.

It is amazing what some of these dumpster divers are able to recover from “the trash”.  In North Carolina, one man even takes his son dumpster diving with him…

A programmer by day, Todd takes to the streets of North Carolina by night, digging through Dumpsters at drug stores and grocery stores all around his rural neighborhood.

“You would be simply amazed at what businesses throw out,” he said. “I’ve only had to buy two loaves of bread all year. … Last week I had a trunk full of cereal, cookies, chips and ramen noodles.”

Todd slinks in and out of smelly places with low-light flashlights to evade rent-a-cops who will shoo him away.  Most nights, his 14-year-old son comes along.

Unfortunately, dumpster diving is not as easy as it used to be.

As dumpster diving has soared in popularity, some grocery stores have responded by putting locks on their dumpsters.

And in some areas of the country, police have even started regularly arresting dumpster divers.

But in the end, dumpster diving was not going to be a permanent solution anyway.

A permanent solution would be to quit wasting so much food.

I applaud the grocery store chains that choose to donate their expired food to homeless shelters and food banks.

We need to see a lot more of that going on.

And in our own homes we need to find ways to give more food away and waste less of it.

All of this needless wasting of food does not have to happen.  Let’s work together to find some solutions.

Read more -

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/about-40-percent-of-all-food-in-the-united-states-is-thrown-in-the-garbage

STUDY: Knocking wood, throwing salt over shoulder 'can reverse bad luck'... -

STUDY: Knocking wood, throwing salt over shoulder 'can reverse bad luck'... - 



SUPERSTITIOUS people may have been right all along as knocking on wood really could protect you against bad luck, scientists claim.

Those who perform long-held rituals such as throwing salt over their shoulder are less likely to worry about ill-fortune, according to researchers from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Superstitions reverse perceived bad fortune by making participants believe ill-fortune was less likely to happen.

Professor Jane Risen, of Chicago University, said knocking on wood seems to create the sense bad luck is being pushed away.

The study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology said: "General said knocking on wood is the most common superstition in Western culture used to reverse bad fortune or undo a "jinx."

Other cultures maintain similar practices - like spitting or throwing salt - after someone has tempted fate. 

Even people who aren't particularly superstitious often participate in these practices.

People believe that negative outcomes are especially likely after a jinx. 

If someone says “no one I know will ever get into a car accident” it often feels a crash is likely to occur.

But people's elevated concerns after tempting fate can be eliminated if they engage in a ritual to undo that bad luck.

Read more - 

http://www.express.co.uk/news/science-technology/433862/Knocking-on-wood-and-throwing-salt-over-your-shoulder-can-reverse-bad-luck-says-study

VW’s augmented-reality app moves amateur mechanics out from under the shade tree -

VW’s augmented-reality app moves amateur mechanics out from under the shade tree - 



Ever wondered how automotive technicians are able work on every single car from a brand – or several brands, for that matter? The answer involves lots of training and online step-by-step instruction repair manuals.

That is, until now.

Let me introduce you to what I believe is the future for not only dealership-based automotive repair but also at-home, do-it-yourself repair. The system is called MARTA (Mobile Augmented Reality Technical Assistance) and it is going to revolutionize the repair industry.

Developed by Volkswagen, MARTA uses the built-in camera on tablet device to display service information for a vehicle in real time. Specifically, the system was developed for the Volkswagen XL1.

When MART is activated, it projects an image on the tablet screen over the live image of the vehicle, as you can see in the video below. Going step by step, MARTA shows the technician the steps and tools required to complete the job.

In the video, we see that MARTA shows a torque wrench is needed to loosen a part of the front clip on the VW XL1.

I come from an automotive repair background. Not having to turn around and dig through an antiquated computer program for repair steps every couple minutes, forced to decipher poorly rendered black and white images, would have been a godsend during my mechanic days.

Sadly, for now, the MARTA only works for the Volkswagen XL1.

I am sure, however, that in a matter of a few years, this technology will expand across the new car field. It can then trickle down to the aftermarket, which will be ideal for tech-savvy shade tree mechanics like me.



Read more - 

http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2013/10/02/vws-augmented-reality-app-moves-amateur-mechanics-out-from-under-shade-tree/?intcmp=HPBucket&intcmp=features

Chinese boy 'gives birth' to twin brother after doctors find fetus growing in his stomach -

Chinese boy 'gives birth' to twin brother after doctors find fetus growing in his stomach - 



A 2-year-old Chinese boy had surgery to "give birth" to his twin brother, after stunned doctors discovered his parasitic twin brother's fetus inside his stomach.

Xiao Feng, from Huaxi, China was taken to hospital after his stomach became so enlarged he was having difficulty breathing. X-Rays and MRI scans revealed Feng was carrying the undeveloped fetus of his twin inside his swollen stomach.

Shocked doctors diagnosed Feng as "pregnant" and rushed him into emergency surgery, where he was forced to "give birth" as doctors removed the twin fetus, reported the Inquisitr.

The fetus was nearly 8 inches wide and had developed a spine, fingers and toes. It had grown so much that it was taking up almost two-thirds of the boy’s stomach, doctors said.

Read more - 

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/10/01/chinese-boy-gives-birth-to-twin-brother-after-doctors-find-fetus-growing-in-his/?intcmp=obnetwork

Beaver butts emit goo used in vanilla flavored foods - "natural flavoring" -

Beaver butts emit goo used in vanilla flavored foods - "natural flavoring" - 



Next time you pick up a vanilla candy, think twice. A chemical compound used in vanilla flavored foods and scents comes from the butt of a beaver.

Castoreum comes from a beaver's castor sacs, located between the pelvis and base of the tail. Due to its proximity to the anal glands, the slimy brown substance is often mixed with gland secretions and urine.

"I lift up the animal's tail," Joanne Crawford, a wildlife ecologist at Southern Illinois University told National Geographic. "I’m like, 'Get down there, and stick your nose near its bum.'"

"People think I'm nuts," she added. "I tell them, 'Oh, but it's beavers; it smells really good.'"

Beavers use the brown slime, often compared to a thinner version of molasses, to mark their territory. The musky, vanilla scent is attributed to a beaver's diet of bark and leaves.

Manufacture have been using castoreum as an additive in foods and perfumes for at least 80 years, according to a 2007 study in the International Journal of Toxicology.

But getting a beaver to emit castoreum is not easy. Foodies are willing to "milk" the animals in order to get their hands on the gooey substance.

"You can milk the anal glands so you can extract the fluid," Crawford said. "You can squirt [castoreum] out. It's pretty gross."

Only 292-pounds per year is collected because the milking method is unpleasant for all parties involved.

And the worst part? The FDA-approved castoreum is not required to be listed as an ingredient on food items. Manufacturers may list "natural flavoring" instead.

Perhaps a bit too natural for us.

Read more - 

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/10/02/beaver-butts-emit-goo-used-in-vanilla-flavored-foods/

Exercise may be ‘as effective’ as drugs for treating common diseases - such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes -

Exercise may be ‘as effective’ as drugs for treating common diseases - such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes - 



Routine exercise has long been touted as a preventative lifestyle choice that can help lower an individual’s risk for developing health conditions such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

But now, new research has shown that exercise may be equally as effective as certain prescription medications at treating these chronic – and sometimes deadly – diseases.

In a study published in the British Medical Journal, researchers from the London School of Economics, Harvard Medical School and Stanford University School of Medicine were interested in comparing the benefits of both exercise and drugs from past clinical trials, to see how they measured up in terms of extending a person’s mortality.

“What we have is a body of research that looks at benefits of exercise alone and then a separate body of research that looks at benefits of drugs on their own,” lead researcher Huseyin Naci, a researcher at the London School of Economics and a pharmaceutical policy research fellow at the Harvard Medical School, told FoxNews.com. “There’s never been a study that compares these two together, so that’s the rationale for this research.”

Naci and his team looked at four areas of health where evidence has shown that exercise can have lifesaving benefits: secondary prevention of heart disease, stroke rehabilitation, treatment of heart failure and prevention of diabetes.

Researchers then compiled a list of the different classes of drugs people commonly take to manage these conditions, and ultimately came up with 305 randomized clinical trials to analyze.  The study involved 339,274 people, 15,000 of whom received physical intervention for their health conditions while the rest were included in drug trials.

Overall, the researchers saw no significant difference between exercise and drug intervention for the secondary prevention of heart disease and the prevention of diabetes.  And in the case of stroke patients, exercise was found to be more effective than drug treatment at extending a person’s mortality.  However, diuretic drugs were found to be more effective than exercise and other drugs for the helping patients with heart failure.

Given their findings, Naci argued that the study’s results should not dissuade heart disease and diabetes patients from changing their current treatments.

“One thing that is very much not a takeaway is that patients should stop taking their medications without consulting with their doctors,” Naci said.  “However, doctors do need to have really candid conversations with patients about the lifesaving benefits of exercise.”

Naci also said that combination therapies utilizing both diet and exercise may not be the answer either.  A recent study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that statins, commonly prescribed cholesterol lowering medications, may actually block some of the health benefits seen from exercise.

Read more - 

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/10/02/exercise-may-be-as-effective-as-drugs-for-treating-common-diseases/?intcmp=features

Wave of jellyfish shut down nuclear power plant... -

Wave of jellyfish shut down nuclear power plant... - 



The Swedish operators of one of the world’s largest nuclear reactors say they are preparing to restart the facility after it had to be shut down because of a wave of jellyfish.
A wave of jellyfish was huge enough to force one of the world’s largest nuclear reactors to shut down – a phenomenon that marine biologists say could become more common.
Operators of the Oskarshamn nuclear plant in southeastern Sweden had to scramble reactor number three on Sunday after tonnes of jellyfish clogged the pipes that bring in cool water to the plant’s turbines.
By Tuesday, the pipes had been cleaned of the jellyfish and engineers were preparing to restart the reactor, which at 1400 megawatts of output is the largest boiling-water reactor in the world, said Anders Osterberg, a spokesman for OKG, the plant operator.
All three Oskharshamn reactors are boiling-water types, the same technology at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant that suffered a catastrophic failure in 2011 after a tsunami breached the facility’s walls and flooded its equipment.
Jellyfish are not a new problem for nuclear power plants. Last year the California-based Diablo Canyon facility had to shut its reactor two after gobs of sea salp – a gelatinous, jellyfish-like organism – clogged intake pipes. In 2005, the first unit at Oskarshamn was temporarily turned off due to a sudden jellyfish influx.
Nuclear power plants need a constant flow of water to cool their reactor and turbine systems, which is why many such plants are built near large bodies of water.
Marine biologists, meanwhile, say they would not be surprised if more jellyfish shutdowns occur in the future.
“It’s true that there seems to be more and more of these extreme cases of blooming jellyfish,” said Lene Moller, a researcher at the Swedish Institute for the Marine Environment. “But it’s very difficult to say if there are more jellyfish, because there is no historical data.”
The species that caused the Oskarshamn shutdown is known as the common moon jellyfish.
“It’s one of the species that can bloom in extreme areas that . are overfished or have bad conditions,” said Moller.
“The moon jelly likes these types of waters. They don’t care if there are algae blooms, they don’t care if the oxygen concentration is low. The fish leave . and (the moon jelly) can really take over the ecosystem.”
Moller said the biggest problem right now is that there’s no monitoring of jellyfish in the Baltic Sea.

Read more - 

http://nypost.com/2013/10/01/wave-of-jellyfish-shut-down-nuclear-power-plant/