woah.

YouTube - amazing light projection

Taxpayers should get a receipt so they know what they're paying for, a think tank called Third Way argues in a new paper.

Here's a sample from the group. It includes federal income tax and FICA, which funds Medicare and Social Security. Details are here.

Thanks For Paying Taxes. Here's A Receipt. : Planet Money : NPR

The EFF writes:

As you may or may not be aware, there is an extremely bad Internet censorship
bill that is going to be passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee this Wednesday. Senators are claiming that they haven't heard any opposition to this "COICA" bill, and it is being sponsored by 14 of the 19 committee members.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has some heavy guns - having this bill come up this way means there is a serious possibility of passage.

The EFF further writes:

The bill creates two blacklists of censored domains. The first is longer, and includes any sites where the DOJ decides that infringement is "central" to the purpose of the site. The bill gives ISPs and registrars strong legal incentives to censor the domains on that list. The Attorney General can also ask a court to put sites on a second, shorter blacklist; ISPs and registrars are required by law to censor those sites.

The bill provides that the Attorney General can get a court order forcing domain name registrars or registries to pull a particular domain. It also provides that if they don't want to go through that process, they can publish the domain name in a list. DNS registries are strongly encouraged to go ahead and pull any domain on that list if they want to avoid being held legally liable for the content on that domain.

Because DNS registries are implicated, and not just registrars, this could have significant and extremely destructive implications for US control over the DNS systems. This is really very bad.

Very, very bad Internet Censorship bill makes Senate

At this point, I didn't believe it was possible, but the Obama administration has just reached an all-new low in its abysmal civil liberties record. In response to the lawsuit filed by Anwar Awlaki's father asking a court to enjoin the President from assassinating his son, a U.S. citizen, without any due process, the administration late last night, according to The Washington Post, filed a brief asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the claims. That's not surprising: both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly insisted that their secret conduct is legal but nonetheless urge courts not to even rule on its legality. But what's most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is "state secrets": in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are "state secrets," and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.null

Obama argues his assassination program is a "state secret" - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Out of 460 challenges as reported to the Office for Intellectual Freedom
1. ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
Reasons: drugs, nudity, offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group
2. And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
Reasons: homosexuality
3. The Perks of Being A Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
Reasons: anti-family, drugs, homosexuality, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit, suicide, unsuited to age group
4. To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Reasons: offensive language, racism, unsuited to age group
5. Twilight (series) by Stephenie Meyer
Reasons: religious viewpoint, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group
6. Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group
7. My Sister’s Keeper, by Jodi Picoult
Reasons: homosexuality, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexism, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, violence
8. The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group
9. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group
10. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
Reasons: nudity, offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group

ALA | Top ten most frequently challenged books list of 2009

8BITS

YouTube - 8BITS

Cyber security experts say they have identified the world's first known cyber super weapon designed specifically to destroy a real-world target – a factory, a refinery, or just maybe a nuclear power plant.

The cyber worm, called Stuxnet, has been the object of intense study since its detection in June. As more has become known about it, alarm about its capabilities and purpose have grown. Some top cyber security experts now say Stuxnet's arrival heralds something blindingly new: a cyber weapon created to cross from the digital realm to the physical world – to destroy something. nullnullnullnullnullnullnull

Stuxnet malware is 'weapon' out to destroy ... Iran's Bushehr nuclear plant? - Yahoo! News

How to dispose of hard drives.

YouTube - HackaDay thermite-based Hard drive destruction

Tight-fitting T-shirts and hipster jeans would get even snugger if you could just spray them on.

That idea just got a little less far-fetched. A liquid mixture developed by Imperial College London and a company called Fabrican lets you spray clothes directly onto your body, using aerosol technology.

Make Clothes Out of a Can With Spray-On Fabric | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

The anatomy of your brain reflects your introspective capacity, or ability to self-judge the merits of your decisions, new research indicates.

The study found that people with stronger reflective, or introspective, ability appear to have a higher volume of gray matter, the outer layer of the brain, in the part of their brains sitting behind their eyes. This region is called the anterior prefrontal cortex.

This discovery fits with previous work that showed people with damage to this brain region had trouble assessing their own decision-making, even though their performances on a task were unimpaired.

"In terms of looking at variation across a population of healthy individuals, our study is the first to say how [introspection] might link to structure," said study researcher Stephen Fleming, a neuroscientist at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London.

There was a second anatomical connection as well. Fleming and his colleagues also found a connection between introspective ability and the integrity of the white matter that connects with the anterior prefrontal cortex. In other words, better white matter was also linked with a greater ability to think about thinking. nullnullnullnullnullnullnull

Brain's Anatomy Predicts Level of Introspection - Yahoo! News