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Friday, May 29, 2015

Friday Frith Fructuary

Image result for Jesus on the phoneThe FCC's Lifeline program subsidizes phone service for very poor Americans; it gained notoriety under the label "Obamaphone," even though the program started under Reagan and was extended to cell phones under Clinton

Now the FCC is proposing that the program, which is funded by a fee on telecom providers, be extended to broadband, on the logic that high-speed internet is as necessary today as telephone service was a generation ago.

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'CROWDFUNDING A WAR AGAINST ISIS'

This Guy From Baltimore Is Raising A Christian Army To Fight ISIS… What Could Go Wrong?

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Intercepted...

Image result for emailsA trove of emails provided to The Intercept detail Russian schemes to obtain a crucial component for military thermal-imaging systems

Though emails about the thermal imaging systems date back as far as 2006, the plans to acquire them began in earnest much more recently, in 2013. 

To try to hide Russian involvement, a company called Cyclone established a new company in the Republic of Cyprus.

 They did so with the help of a company called Rayfast, which was owned by three other companies itself.

 After obfuscating the new company's ownership and military ties, they reached out to several Western companies who worked with the technology.

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 Fifteen Chinese nationals living in the U.S. have been charged with creating an elaborate scheme to take U.S. college entrance exams on behalf of students. Image result for Chinese nationals

For the past four years, the accused provided counterfeit Chinese passports to impostors, who sneaked into testing centers where they took the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), and others, while claiming to be someone else, according to a federal grand jury indictment

 Special Agent in Charge John Kelleghan for Homeland Security Investigations of Philadelphia said:

 "These students were not only cheating their way into the university, they were also cheating their way through our nation's immigration system."

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In response to a ban of food imported from the European Union, an Italian grocery in Russia hired an ad agency to create a billboard with a camera and facial recognition software, that's able to change to a different ad when it recognizes the uniform of Russian cops

Image result for billboards Gizmodo reports: "With the aid of a camera and facial recognition software, the technology was slightly tweaked to instead recognize the official symbols and logos on the uniforms worn by Russian police.

 And as they approached the billboard featuring the advertisement for Don Giulio Salumeria’s imported Italian goods, it would automatically change to an ad for a Matryoshka doll shop instead."

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From the fantasy files...With biologists getting closer and closer to reversing the aging process in human cells, the reality of greatly extended life draws closer.

 This brings up a very important conundrum: 

Image result for live foreverYou can't tell people not to reproduce and you can't kill people to preserve resources and space.

 Even at our current growth rate there's not enough for everyone. 

Not enough food, not enough space, not enough medical care. 

If — no, when — age reversal becomes a reality, who gets to live?

 And if everyone gets to live, how will we provide for them?

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Image result for chimpsWe are the animals...

The 66 chimps are currently surviving on a reduced feeding schedule paid for through emergency funds pieced together by the Humane Society and the personal donations of a handful of individual conservationists. But they only have enough money to support the chimps’ care for a few more weeks.

These Chimps Helped Us Find A Hepatitis Vaccine. Now They've Been Left To Die

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