lifestream of designer Dr P Fenderson
About a month ago, we reported that Nevada (with a healthy dose of lobbying by Google) was considering legislation that would effectively legalize self-driving cars in that state. Today, Assembly Bill No. 511 passed, granting the Department of Transportation the authorization to draft a set of regulations and rules governing autonomous cars. Pop goes the champagne in Mountain View.via PopSci
Internal U.S. government reviews have determined that a mass leak of diplomatic cables caused only limited damage to U.S. interests abroad, despite the Obama administration's public statements to the contrary.
A congressional official briefed on the reviews said the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers.
"I think they just want to present the toughest front they can muster," the official said.
SEE? I TOLD YOU
- Forced them to walk through a backscatter X-ray scanner that shows their naughty bits to someone in another room.
- Subjected them to invasive and humiliating patdowns.
- Placed them on a no fly list for unknown reasons.
- Kicked them off an airplane for looking suspicious.
- Prevented them from flying because of their religion or ethnicity.
- Roped them into terrorist plots using paid informants and then arrested them for being terrorists.
- Tortured them using sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, sexual humiliation, and extreme temperatures.
Just an excerpt. Click through for more atrocities.
Never forget the day you began to lose your freedom.
Mike Huckabee, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, says the effort to allow gays and lesbians to marry is comparable to legalizing incest, polygamy and drug use.
Huckabee also told college journalists last week that gay couples should not be permitted to adopt. "Children are not puppies," he said.
WASHINGTON – After seven frustrating years probing the deadly 2001 anthrax mailings, the FBI closed the case Friday, concluding a mentally unhinged government researcher acted alone in the attacks that killed five people and unnerved Americans nationwide.
Many details of the case have been known, but newly released FBI documents paint a fuller portrait of Dr. Bruce Ivins as a troubled scientist whose career was teetering toward failure at the time the letters were sent. As the U.S. responded to the mailings, his work was given new importance by the government and he was even honored for his efforts on anthrax.
I call shenanigans.
California lawmakers finally passed Assembly Bill 390, the Marijuana Control, Regulation, and Education Act by a 4-3 vote. Assemblyman Tom Ammiano from San Francisco introduced the bill, and will be pushing for it to be on this year's upcoming public ballot. This is the first time in US history that a bill that seeks to legalize cannabis has passed any legislative body.
"This is a significant vote because it legitimizes the quest for debate, legitimizes the quest for discussion," Ammiano said. "This is far from over. Not only did we get it out of (the) public safety (committee), but members are now willing to say, yes, this is worthy of discussion."
Advocates hailed the narrow passage of the bill — it was approved by the Assembly Public Safety Committee on a 4-3 vote — as a major breakthrough that will lead to a national legalization movement
The bill would place a $50 fee on each ounce of marijuana sold to pay for drug education and treatment. Board of Equalization Chairwoman Betty Yee, who has endorsed the bill, said legalization would raise $1.4 billion in state revenues.
It seems that the Chinese government has been attacking the digital accounts of numerous human-rights leaders, and other political dissidents, through Google and many other online services. After the internet search giant found out about the attacks, they posted a public response outlining the attacks and the possibility of shutting down services in China.
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.
Hopefully this will have an enormous impact on the Western view of Chinese politics and human-rights in the upcoming year. Google has the visibility, and the weight, to push people's eyes in a certain direction.
via BoingBoing
After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.” They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.
Czar Hadji Van Donut. Dreamer, designer, cyborg, or something.
