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Tuesday, January 31, 2012

"Julian Assange's investors are in the process of purchasing a boat to move WikiLeaks servers offshore in an attempt to evade prosecution from U.S. law enforcement, FoxNews.com has learned. Multiple sources within the hacker community with knowledge of day-to-day WikiLeaks activities say Assange's financial backers have been working behind the scenes on the logistics of moving the servers to international waters. One possible location: the Principality of Sealand, a rusty, World War II-era, former anti-aircraft platform off the coast of England in the North Sea. Based on a 1968 British court ruling that the facility is outside the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom, Sealand's owner has declared the facility a sovereign state, or 'micro-nation.'"

HOWEVER...
a long tradition of operating pirate radios has been to do it from a vessel on international waters.
Such a ship has no physical contraband to seize and they are merely violating local broadcasting regulations. Possessing "stolen" diplomatic messages ups the controversy to espionage, the later being something that might give a naval vessel in international waters the authority to board and search.

If you are beyond territorial waters and flying no flag to avoid legal responsibilities you must accept the risk that you also have far less legal protection.
To add to your doubt, the wikipedia article for Sealand makes it sounds like a couple guys with a boat and some small arms could over take it ... so, uh, you're moving your servers to a defenseless island? Where no other nation recognizes you? Where no one will come to your aid if someone decides to just blow you out of the water? And you're planning on hosting what? Oh, sensitive information about the United States government that they consider to be a threat to national security? Yeah, good luck with that. The US will take out anybody in Pakistan (or a number of other countries) in the middle of the night if they want to, I highly doubt they'd be worried about slapping some thermite to some servers out in the middle of the ocean and calling it a day -- which government would they worry about upsetting if they did so?

Fixed skateboard trucks, no matter how loose, just can't flex enough to match the carving ability and dynamic movement of a surfboard. The SurfSkate's specially-designed front truck, however, lets you carve tarmac like swells in the Pacific.

If you are from Newport or Laguna you will recognize the locations of these vid shots.

The SurfSkate features a 360-degree rotating front truck that's significantly more narrow than the fixed rear. The free-rotating truck reportedly allows a greater degree of movement and allows you to pump for speed. The SurfSkate comes in two varieties: the 42-inch Premiere, which retails for $259 and the 36-inch Stunner, which goes for $239. Both are constructed from seven-ply Canadian maple and available through SurfSkates online store. I'm not sold on it really matching the ride of a surfboard—though it looks close—but it certainly beats replacing the front wheels with office chair casters. [SurfSkates via Gizmag]

The SurfSkate features a 3
"An accident report is finally out for the Air Force E-8C Joint Surveillance Targeting and Attack Radar System that had started refueling with a KC-135 on on March 13, 2009 when the crew heard a 'loud bang throughout the midsection of the aircraft.' Vapor and fuel started pouring out of the JSTARS from 'at least two holes in the left wing just inboard of the number two engine.' The pilot immediately brought the jet back to its base in Qatar where mechanics found the number two main fuel tank had been ruptured, 'causing extensive damage to the wing of the aircraft.' How extensive? 25 million dollars worth of extensive. What caused this potentially fatal and incredibly expensive accident to one of the United States' biggest spy planes? According to the USAF accident report, a contractor accidentally left a plug in one of the fuel tank's relief vents (PDF) during routine maintenance. 'The PDM subcontractor employed ineffective tool control measures,' reads the report. Tool control measures? 'You know, the absolutely basic practice of accounting for the exact location of every tool that is used to work on an airplane once that work is finished.' Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz just told Congress, 'there is a JSTARS platform that was damaged beyond economical repair that we will not repair.' So, if this is the one Schwartz is talking about, then one mechanic's mistake has damaged a $244 million aircraft beyond repair."

Monday, January 30, 2012

"In a classic case of 'we say destroy, you say party hard,' the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Securitydetained a pair of British twenty-somethings for 12 hours and then sent them packing back to the land of the cheeky retort. At issue is a Tweet sent by Leigh Van Bryan about plans to 'destroy America,' starting with LA...

"With so many threats to a free and open Internet, sooner or later, people will need to arm themselves for the fight, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'If the baboons succeed in constraining speech and information flow on the broader Internet, the new Internet will emerge quickly. For an analogy, consider the iPhone and the efforts of a few smart hackers who have allowed anyone to jailbreak an iPhone with only a small downloaded app and a few minutes,' Venezia writes. 'All that scenario would require would be a way to wrap up existing technologies into a nice, easily-installed package available through any number of methods. Picture the harrowing future of rampant Internet take-downs and censorship, and then picture a single installer that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that installs tor, tools to leverage alternative DNS servers, anonymizing proxies, and even private VPN services. A few clicks of the mouse, and suddenly that machine would be able to access sites "banned" through general means.'" 
Last week, 3 million of us beat back America's attack on our Internet! -- but there is an even bigger threat out there, and our global movement for freedom online is perfectly poised to kill it for good.

ACTA -- a global treaty -- could allow corporations to censor the Internet. Negotiated in secret by a small number of rich countries and corporate powers, it would set up a shadowy new anti-counterfeiting body to allow private interests to police everything that we do online and impose massive penalties -- even prison sentences -- against people they say have harmed their business.

Europe is deciding right now whether to sign ACTA -- and without them, this global attack on Internet freedom will collapse. We know they have opposed ACTA before, but some members of Parliament are wavering -- let's give them the push they need to reject the treaty. Sign the petition -- we'll do a spectacular delivery in Brussels when we reach 500,000 signatures:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/stop_acta/?vl

It's outrageous -- governments of four-fifths of the world’s people were excluded from the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations and unelected bureaucrats have worked closely with corporate lobbyists to craft new rules and a dangerously powerful enforcement regime. ACTA would initially cover the US, EU and 9 other countries, then be rolled out across the world. But if we can get the EU to say no now, the treaty will lose momentum and could stall for good.

The oppressively strict regulations could mean people everywhere are punished for simple acts such as sharing a newspaper article or uploading a video of a party where copyrighted music is played. Sold as a trade agreement to protect copyrights, ACTA could also ban lifesaving generic drugs and threaten local farmers' access to the seeds they need. And, amazingly, the ACTA committee will have carte blanche to change its own rules and sanctions with no democratic scrutiny.

Big corporate interests are pushing hard for this, but the EU Parliament stands in the way. Let's send a loud call to Parliamentarians to face down the lobbies and stand firm for Internet freedom. Sign now and send to everyone you know:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/stop_acta/?vl

Last week, we saw the strength of our collective power when millions of us joined forces to stop the US from passing an Internet censorship law that would have struck at the heart of the Internet. We also showed the world how powerful our voices can be. Let's raise them again to tackle this new threat.

With hope and determination, 

Dalia, Alice, Pascal, Emma, Ricken, Maria Paz and the rest of the Avaaz team 

More information: 

If You Thought SOPA Was Bad, Just Wait Until You Meet ACTA
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/01/23/if-you-thought-sopa-was-bad-just-wait-until-you-meet-acta/ 

ACTA vs. SOPA: Five Reasons ACTA is Scarier Threat to Internet Freedom
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/286925/20120124/acta-sopa-reasons-scarier-threat-internet-freedom.htm?cid=2 

What's Wrong With ACTA
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number10.1/whats-wrong-with-ACTA 

The secret treaty: Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and Its Impact on Access to Medicines
http://www.msfaccess.org/content/secret-treaty-anti-counterfeiting-trade-agreement-acta-and-its-impact-access-medicines 

A new global treaty could allow corporations to police everything that we do on the Internet. Last week 3 million of us successfully pushed back the US censorship bills -- if we act now, we can get the EU Parliament to bury this new threat to all of us:  



Click here to sign the petition


Flying People in New York City (A+5*)Purchase:http://www.rcsuperhero.com/buyitnow.html Sound Track:Tom Quick "Unstoppable"http://www.audionetwork.com/production-music/unstoppable_45675.aspx



Girl can say any word backwards within seconds! 


TIL that Saddam Hussein's bunker was designed by the grandson of the woman who designed Hitler's bunker.

TIL Pablo Escobar's abandoned pet hippos kept breeding and are now terrorizing Colombian villages 


Who Are These People?
Anonymous reveals the arcane legal trick behind ACTA [cross post from r/ACTA]

TIL in 1974 a WWII survivor was found in the jungles of the Indonesian island of Morotai. He was naked, but had made himself a bamboo hut and still had 18 rounds of ammunition, his canteen, helmet and his rifle.

Homeowner wins back her house after fighting Bank of America foreclosure

U.S. Defense Department can't account for $2 Billion in Iraq, audit finds

A river over a river

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Whoa
"The sunspot cluster that erupted in a solar flare and coronal mass ejection last Monday burst into life again on Friday, blasting out an X2 class solar flare, twice as energetic as the last one. This one was on the Sun's limb and was pointed away from us, so we're in no danger; all we got was a very minor radiation storm that's on the lowest ranking of such things. But it did put on quite a light show, which you can see in a video created with images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory."
"According to an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, there's 'no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy'. From the article: 'The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2. The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle.'"

"71% of recently polled Americans feel that censorship is a far worse threat to society than piracy." - The start of a moral battle between pirates and copyright lobbyists

Tennis player yells "GOD!" in anger of a missed shot. Thunder commences.

European Parliament Official In Charge Of ACTA Quits, And Denounces The 'Masquerade' Behind ACTA 


The future of music! The middle man of the music studios is being cut out. They don't like it...TO BAD!!!! Buy these guys music now, even if it is not your taste in music, to support independence and freedom.
http://copacet.bandcamp.com/album/fountainbleau

Copyright Industry Calls For Search Engine Censorship: At a behind-closed-doors meeting with a UK govt dept, Hollywood and major music labels want Google, Bing and Yahoo to de-list popular filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, and give higher ranking to authorized sites

Loads slow but well worth the wait

A pioneer of the six screen set~up

Monk and a tiger

On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives adopted House Resolution 535 by a unanimous vote of 193-0.  The Resolution (full text) provides in part:
That the House of Representatives declare 2012 as the "Year of the Bible" in Pennsylvania in recognition of both the formative influence of the Bible on our Commonwealth and nation and our national need to study and apply the teachings of the holy scriptures.
The Resolution begins with a number of "Whereas" clauses, such as one declaring that "the Bible, the word of God, has made a unique contribution in shaping the United States as a distinctive and blessed nation and people." The resolution was introduced as "noncontroversial" under House Rule 35









And another just because...

Shopping Basket nutjob's work

Anonymous targets Europe's SOPA: Critics say ACTA is even worse than SOPA as it allows for closed door negotiations and can't be repealed. The European Parliament is due to vote on it in June

Throwing Liquid Nitrogen Into A Swimming Pool.

A cancer-causing cadmium discharge from a mining company has polluted a long stretch of two rivers in southern China, and officials warned some 3.7 million people of Liuzhou in the Guangxi region to avoid drinking water from the river, state media reported on Friday.

My all-time favorite .gif.... BEEEEES!!!!!

In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad - “Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who until April worked in management at Foxconn Technology

Matt Taibbi: Good Foreclosure Deal Could Open the Door to Ending Up With Half of Wall Street in Jail | AlterNet, Sarah Seltzer | January 28, 2012 


Spyder man takes a fraction of the time that rope climbers take...


Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

Revenge of the Electric Car Hi Def Vid

LA Police Department Conducts Joint Exercises with the Military.
http://youtu.be/6Dys3xE2Bnk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Klqv9t1zVww&feature=fvwrel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgMx2F41XD0&feature=related

Must Watch Before It Gets Taken down!
The World According to Monsanto (Full Length Movie)

I have worked with ladders for 45 years! This is incredible!!!
Ladder Racing

Atmospheric geoengineering could make climate worse 


Snakes
Senator Wyden: "Like ACTA, these TPP negotiations are being held in secret. Unlike ACTA, the terms of the TPP extend to just about every facet of our economy and society" 


EYE TEST

Friday, January 27, 2012







 Alex & Me': The Parrot Who Said 'I Love You'

 TIL that Alex the parrot's (A subject of a 37-year experiment) last words to his caretaker were "You be good. I love you."

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gR6KVYJ73AU

Character is no longer an important issue with Christians?

"Reflect Christian Principals"

Why I (a Christian pastor) am endorsing this man

 Just a reminder that Saturday January 28 is international Data Privacy Day in the U.S., Canada, and many European countries. Various events are being held around the globe: the head of the FTC opened a weekend forum on the topic by calling out Facebook and Google, the Ontario Privacy Commissioner is holding a symposium on 'Surveillance by Design', and of course Google recently announced they'll be tracking you more thoroughly in the future."

 "One independent rap group found it impossible to post their song on YouTube. When they tried to put up their video, they were informed that the copyright belonged to Universal Music, even though the rap group wasn't signed to any label. Another group working with Universal had used the music in a video of their own, which then accidentally leaked online. YouTube's filtering software then blocked the original. The Hollywood Reporter shares what happened and concludes by saying, 'For an industry that's pursuing copyright reform, the portrayal of a copyright regime that works against young artists can't be a good thing.'"

 "The reverberations from the SOPA fight continue to be felt in the U.S. and elsewhere, but it is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that has captured increasing attention this week. Several months after the majority of ACTA participants signed the agreement, most European Union countries formally signed the agreement yesterday (notable exclusions include Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia). Michael Geist has a full rundown on what is at stake and what you can do, wherever you live."

 "The FBI is in the early stages of developing an application that would monitor sites such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as various news feeds, in order to find information on emerging threats and new events happening at the moment. The tool would give specialists the ability to pull the data into a dashboard that also would include classified information coming in at the same time. One of the key capabilities of the new application, for which the FBI has sent out a solicitation, would be to 'provide an automated search and scrape capability for social networking sites and open source news sites for breaking events, crisis and threats that meet the search parameters/keywords defined by FBI/SIOC.'"

 ACTA - the latest threat to internet freedom

 "Ireland's Sopa" to pass without parliamentary vote.

 A law proposing to drug test welfare recipients has been withdrawn after an amendment was passed that required legislators to be tested also.

  The future according to the year 1956


This doesn't happen often

 Harvard Prof: MegaUpload Shutdown is an Attempt to Kill Technology

 Russian Plasma TV
Ephesians 1: 17-23...


"That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him: The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of His calling, and what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, And what is the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe, accordng to the working of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: And hath put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, Which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all." ...


This is our second look at a portion of scripture that we looked at a few says ago, and I want to hit it from a different angle in this particular study. One of the things that I love about God's Word is that it is so rich, and one look at a number of books, chapters and verses in His Word is often just not sufficient to give us enough of what was originally intended for the reader, and so we'll take another look here at the end of the first chapter of Ephesians. In the first study, I stressed the importance, even the absolute necessity of realizing as believers that everything that we receive, we must receive from God- be it wisdom, understanding, anointing for a particular ministry, even rebuke and discipline.


 If we are not in tune with what He is doing in and through us, and if we are not coopperating with Him, we will be open to all sorts of spiritual obsession and confusion, which will render us less effective in truly bringing the risen Christ to others....


Now I want to discuss what the apostle Paul was explaining to the Ephesians (and in effect, us), concern ing who Christ is to the church, and just who and Who's we are. Paul stated in verses 15 and 16 that he in fact prays for them, that they would understand these things, because he knew that if they came to an understanding of them, they would not be victims of any false teachings, or any demonic diversions that might pull them away from the genuine gospel message, and that they would become mature saints of God, able to present the living, risen Savior- in the full power of the Holy Spirit- to those around them. They in turn would pray and teach others likewise, so that the lost would not only come to a saving knowledge of Chrst, but also become spiritually equipped to present Christ in His reality to those around THEM-and so on, and so on...


Paul prayed that God would grant the Ephesians wisdom and knowledge- the wisdom and knowledge that can only come from God Himself, for only God has the true perspective of the state of the lost world, and of His own remedy for it's salvation. He wants them to understand that the Father raised His Son from the dead, and that Christ is head over all. ALL.  "That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2:10 & 11)"...


 He also wants them to understand just who THEY are. Even today, so few of us in the Church seem to really know who we are, because we're usually taught a bunch of do's and don't's by our clergy, rather than why we are a holy people. It is God Himself who has MADE us holy by the precious blood of Christ, and we absolutely must see ourselves as He has declared we are. He could not make it more plain- We are His Holy Church because we are IN CHRIST, and HE put us there! Christian, never again see yourself outside of Christ- You are in Chri st, and that is God's doing. Knowing that fact alone will set many believers free from the defeated lifestyle in which they have- maybe for years- ignorantly resided. No more! You are a child of God, and we, the body of Christ, are to carry His fulness to this lost world "...


The church ,which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all- Eph. 1:23". That is our commission......Lord Jesus, May Your fulness be made manifest in us, be shown to the world in us, Your Body, and that we would present YOU, not a mutated imitation of You, but You in Your reality, in Your beauty, in Your power, in Your love, to a world that so desperately needs you. We recognize, Lord, that this can only be done as you empower us, and as we yield our members up to You. Grant this, Lord- In Your most Holy name we pray...


Amen.
Jim Ewing