New reports have emerged today about the NSA’s practices of inserting tiny circuit boards and USB cards surreptitiously into computers that then send out radio-frequency signals that can be picked up by listeners even if the computer is not hooked up to the internet. [Read more…]
US District Court judge Terence C. Kern ruled yesterday that Oklahoma’s constitutional amendment passed in 2004 limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Judge Kern relied heavily on this year’s US Supreme Court ruling in the DOMA case United States v. Windsor to strike down the Oklahoma law. [Read more…]
The Greece v Galloway case dealing with whether what kind of prayer, or any kind of prayer at all, is allowable at official government functions, such as at the beginning of the sessions of legislatures and other governmental bodies, brings to the fore the thorny problem of how to interpret the Establishment Clause of the US constitution in this particular context. I have been asked to be on a panel at the Law School of my university later this month that will deal with this case (and at which one of the plaintiffs challenging the practice will also appear) and so I decided that it might be helpful to write up the issues that the Supreme Court will be grappling with before it issues its opinion later this spring. [Read more…]
The company Virgin Galactic is working to be a space tourism company and has already people signed up to go into space. A few days ago it reached a milestone of sorts when it sent its plane on a 10-minute ride to an altitude to 21km. As a comparison, the International Space Station is at an orbital height of about 420km and the Hubble Space Telescope is at 559km, so it has a long way to go. [Read more…]
Heather Linebaugh is someone who operated killer drones in Afghanistan and she writes about what it was like.
Whenever I read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator and Reaper program – aka drones – I wish I could ask them a few questions. I’d start with: “How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?” And: “How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?” Or even more pointedly: “How many soldiers have you seen die on the side of a road in Afghanistan because our ever-so-accurate UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] were unable to detect an IED [improvised explosive device] that awaited their convoy?” [Read more…]
By every tangible measure, Pope Francis is no different from his predecessors. He opposes abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage, adoptions by gay couples, and has not called off the inquiry into the social activism of American nuns. And yet simply by saying a few things about gays and atheists that were not outright hateful and that many other Christians had long ago said, and by expressing some gentle criticisms of the current scandalous state of wealth inequality, he has driven the right and the Republican party in in this country into a tizzy. It just shows how much they have assumed that successive popes were Tea Party members in all but name. [Read more…]
When people create videos using their cell phones, they usually do it in portrait mode. Not being someone who whips out a camera and records things, I am not sure why the portrait mode is the one that people prefer. Is it something to do with the ease of holding the phone? But whatever the reason, the net result is curiously dissatisfying to watch, apart from the black bands that appear on each side when you play it back on YouTube or a video player. [Read more…]
While the US and British governments undoubtedly have the resources to obtain the best computers and cryptographers that money can buy, they cannot (at far as I know) break really good encryption systems. This is why they have achieved much of their success the old-fashioned way and resorted to cheating, such as getting computer and chip makers and communication companies to collaborate with them to install back doors. News reports based on leaked documents by (who else?) Edward Snowden show that the NSA may have bribed RSA, one of the most important companies in the security industry, to get them to provide a loophole that the NSA could exploit. [Read more…]
I have not seen anything like this or even heard about it but it appears that weather conditions can be such that a thick carpet of ice can inexorably march from lakes onto land. It looks like a creeping monster, pushing aside even buildings in its path. It is called an ‘ice shove’ and scientists are familiar with the phenomenon and say it happens on occasion in places like Alaska. [Read more…]
A lot of attention has been focused on the Republican race to be the party’s nominee for the 2016 presidential election. Less attention has been paid to the events on the Democratic side because of what seems to be a media consensus that that nomination is Hillary Clinton’s for the taking and until such time as she announces that she is not interested in running, there is no point talking about it. [Read more…]