FL Attorney Says Growing Veg Not A Fundamental Right

By Brandon Turbeville

A new local controversy is brewing in South Florida surrounding yet another instance of local governments imposing fines on residents and persecuting them over maintaining gardens on their property.

After living in Miami Shores for 17 years, and growing vegetables in their front yard for the same amount of time, Tom Carroll and Hermine Ricketts were forced to dig up the garden in front of their home in 2014 when they were threatened by town officials with $50 a day fines if they did not. The threat of fines came only a few months after the Miami Shores Village Council passed a new zoning plan meaning that low-level bureaucrats wasted no time in fanning out amongst residential areas to uproot violators.

The couple is now suing on grounds that the ban on front yard gardens violates the Florida Constitution by imposing improper limits on private property rights as well as violating the equal protection clause. The couple is being represented by lawyers with Institute for Justice, a Libertarian non-profit organization that focuses on free speech and property rights among other issues.

See: City Forces Family To Destroy Their Vegetable Garden

Attorney Ari Bargil told circuit judge Monica Gordo, “were not saying you can do anything you want on your property, we are simply saying you can grow vegetables on your property and that is protected by the constitution.”

continue http://www.naturalblaze.com/2016/06/fl-attorney-says-growing-vegetables-not-a-fundamental-right.html

Elite Tourists Trashing The Environment

Concerns have been raised about the participation of a UK science vessel in an Arctic tourist voyage.

Funded by the UK government, the RRS Ernest Shackleton normally carries out support work for the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

But this summer the ice breaker has been chartered to accompany a luxury liner’s voyage in the Arctic.

Critics say it is inappropriate for a vessel dedicated to science to support tourism in such a fragile area.

Global warming has seen a rapid rise in the number of ships travelling through Arctic waters in recent years.

The Northwest Passage – a shortcut from Asia to Europe through the Canadian Arctic – first became fully clear of ice in the summer in 2007.

There is a significant tension between the science and environmental mission of the Shackleton and its participation in an exercise in tourism

Prof Michael Byers, University of British Columbia

Since then only a handful of ships have travelled the route – 17 in 2015, according to the US Coast Guard.

This summer the Crystal Serenity aims to become the biggest passenger ship yet to attempt to sail through the famous route.

Starting in Alaska, the 32-day voyage will see the 1,700 passengers and crew travel 1,500km across the top of Canada, ultimately ending in New York.

Berths on the 14-deck luxury liner are not cheap, starting at around $20,000 per person and running up to $120,000 for a deluxe stateroom.

While the route is accessible to ships, it is not ice-free and the company behind the voyage has chartered an ice breaker, RRS Ernest Shackleton, from the British Antarctic Survey.

continue http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36541583

Why do we outrage over almost everything today?

Around 15 years back, there was so much optimism about Internet spreading its legs across every nation. The magical idea that we could share and bring in information from all around the globe was fascinating enough. To add to that glory, it also gave us an hope that people would become more tolerant, acceptive and appreciative of each other once they know about different cultures and ideas.

15 years down the lane, We are grateful to the Internet for many services and glory it has given us. The world is more connected than it was a decade back. We know more about different cultures today and we can literally boast of seeing new places without even setting foot outside our homes. However, not everything happened for “good” as we anticipated.

What went wrong?

It seems that the more we try to connect disparate people and thoughts, the more they are bound to clash. Instead of accepting cultures and ideas, people seem to repel it with extreme hatred. Hardening of divisions between different demographics of people, or even in the same demographic is pretty common these days. No one likes to accept or even listen to thoughts different from theirs.

continue http://skithub.com/why-do-we-outrage-over-almost-everything-today/

Cover-Up of Fukushima Proves Conspiracy Theorists Right

(ANTIMEDIA) United States — According to a new report, the Japanese government worked in concert with TEPCO to purposely cover up the meltdown at Fukushima in 2011.

“I would say it was a coverup,” Tokyo Electric Power Company President Naomi Hirose announced during a press conference. “It’s extremely regrettable.”

Masataka Shimizu, president of TEPCO at the time of the earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear disaster, told employees not to go public with the term “meltdown” — allegedly in capitulation to pressure from the Prime Minister’s Office.

For two months, TEPCO officials euphemized the meltdown in public statements as “core damage,” even as they had full knowledge of the true extent of the catastrophe. Though a few company officials initially used the term “meltdown,” it abruptly vanished from public discussions just three days after the disaster struck.

According to the report, Shimizu rushed a note to Vice President Sakae Muto as he held a press conference that warned him against using the word meltdown.

“Considering this fact, it is presumable that the Prime Minister’s Office requested Shimizu to be careful about admitting to a meltdown in public,” the report states, as Japan Times noted.

Though the three lawyers who authored the report did not find direct evidence, they surmised it was “highly likely” governmental pressure was behind the amelioration of information about the scope of the disaster.

continue http://countercurrentnews.com/2016/06/new-report-exposing-cover-fukushima-proves-conspiracy-theorists-right/

After Winning The Internet, Google Wants To Become Your Doctor

Short Bytes: Over the course of its 17 years of operation, Google has become synonymous with the term web search. Now, going one step ahead, Dr. Google is rolling out a new feature called “Symptoms Search” that will give you self-treatment options and tell you about the situations when one needs to pay a visit to the doctor.

With an increased dependence on the internet, we have developed a habit of searching the web to get an answer to even the slightest doubts. Similarly, we perform a Google search when we encounter some unknown medical issue before paying a visit to our doctor.

To make itself more helpful, Google is rolling out a new feature called “Symptom Search”. This will show you better search results in your iOS and Android Google apps.

continue http://fossbytes.com/doctor-google-shows-disease-symptoms-search/

Britain chose liberty over NWO beauracracy

I FIND IT SLIGHTLY IRONIC THAT BRITAIN FACED SIMILAR CIRCUMSTANCES AS THE U.S. FACED DURING COLONIAL TIMES.  LIKE BRITAIN THE COLONIES CHOSE LIBERTY AND SEPARATED FROM ATyranical IMPOSED GOVERNANCE.

THE  Freedom  FROM Tyranny IS ONE THAT MUST BE CONSTANTLY WATCHED OVER AND NURTURED FOR IT CAN BE FLEETING AND ENDANGERED BY THE VERY LEADERS WHO CLAIM TO PROTECT IT. BRITAIN  NOW HAS A DIFFICULT BUT FRUITFUL JOURNEY AHEAD IS THE NATION CHOOSES TO BE ON GUARD FOR THERE COLLECTIVE FREEDOMS AS A NATION.

A VALUBLE LESSON CAN BE LEARNED BY THE U.S. THE POWER OF NO IS STRONG AND MUST BE USED AS A NATION OF FREEDOM LOVING PEOPLE TO STAND AGAINST THE NATION CRUSHING OF ONE WORLD DOMINANCE OF  SCHEMES LIKE THE U.N THE EU. AND OTHER TRADE PACTS Sovereignty KILLERS LIKE NAFTA GATT THE IMF AND AN ASSORTMENT OF NGO’S AND PHILANTHROPIC TECHNOLOGY GRIDS BEING USED TO ENSNARE US.

CHOOSELiberty ,Sovereignty,AND FINANCIAL FREEDOM

BINGHAM BOATWRIGHT

China wants to share its new space station with the world

Everyone’s welcome

Erik Simonsen/Getty

By Jacob Aron

China is launching a rival to the International Space Station (ISS) – and it wants to share its new toy.

The China Manned Space Agency and the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) have announced a partnership that will let UN member states conduct experiments on and even send astronauts to the Chinese space station, due to start operating in the 2020s.

The UN and China say they are keen to get more nations involved in space activities. “This is an exciting opportunity to further build the space capacity of developing countries and increase understanding of the benefits space can bring to humankind,” said UNOOSA director Simonetta Di Pippo.

continue https://www.newscientist.com/article/2094636-china-wants-to-share-its-new-space-station-with-the-world/

New Hard Drives for Old Computers

After a certain age, computers start to show signs that they might need to be replaced or upgraded. After even more time, it starts getting hard to find parts to replace the failing components. And, as the sands slip through the hourglass, the standards used to design and build the computer start going obsolete. That’s the situation that [Drygol] found himself in when he was asked to build a SD-card hard drive for an Atari.

The 8-bit Atari in question was a fixture of home computing in the 80s. In fact, if you weren’t on the Commodore train, it’s likely that your computer of choice was an Atari. For the nostalgic among us, a new hard drive for these pieces of history is a great way to relive some of the past. Working off of information from the SIO2SD Wiki page, [Drygol] used the toner transfer method to build a PCB, 3D printed a case, and got to work on his decades-old computer.

continue http://hackaday.com/2016/06/21/new-hard-drives-for-old-computers/

IMF Warns that US Needs to ‘Urgently’ Tackle Poverty

 The nation’s middle class is at “its smallest size in the last 30 years,” the IMF says. (Photo: Gilbert Mercier/flickr/cc)

Invest in the nation’s infrastructure, raise the minimum wage, expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, improve paid family leave, and raise the ceiling for social security contributions.

These suggestions, long-advocated for by progressive organizations, are now being encouraged by none other than the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which warned Wednesday of an “urgent need to tackle poverty” in the United States.

While praising the “overall good shape” of the nation’s economy, the IMF said in its assessment that “the U.S. faces potentially significant longer-term challenges to strong and sustained growth. Concerted policy actions are warranted, sooner rather than later.”

continue http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/06/22/imf-warns-us-needs-urgently-tackle-poverty

The Pentagon’s Real $trategy: Keeping the Money Flowing

These days, lamenting the apparently aimless character of Washington’s military operations in the Greater Middle East has become conventional wisdom among administration critics of every sort. Senator John McCain thunders that “this president has no strategy to successfully reverse the tide of slaughter and mayhem” in that region. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies bemoans the “lack of a viable and public strategy.” Andrew Bacevich suggests that “there is no strategy. None. Zilch.”

After 15 years of grinding war with no obvious end in sight, U.S. military operations certainly deserve such obloquy. But the pundit outrage may be misplaced. Focusing on Washington rather than on distant war zones, it becomes clear that the military establishment does indeed have a strategy, a highly successful one, which is to protect and enhance its own prosperity.

Given this focus, creating and maintaining an effective fighting force becomes a secondary consideration, reflecting a relative disinterest — remarkable to outsiders — in the actual business of war, as opposed to the business of raking in dollars for the Pentagon and its industrial and political partners. A key element of the strategy involves seeding the military budget with “development” projects that require little initial outlay but which, down the line, grow irreversibly into massive, immensely profitable production contracts for our weapons-making cartels.

If this seems like a startling proposition, consider, for instance, the Air Force’s determined and unyielding efforts to jettison the A-10 Thunderbolt, widely viewed as the most effective means for supporting troops on the ground, while ardently championing the sluggish, vastly overpriced F-35Joint Strike Fighter that, among myriad other deficiencies, cannot fly within 25 miles of a thunderstorm. No less telling is the Navy’s ongoing affection for budget-busting programs such as aircraft carriers, while maintaining its traditional disdain for the unglamorous and money-poor mission of minesweeping, though the mere threat of enemy mines in the 1991 Gulf War(as in the Korean War decades earlier) stymied plans for major amphibious operations. Examples abound across all the services.  

Meanwhile, ongoing and dramatic programs to invest vast sums in meaningless, useless, or superfluous weapons systems are the norm. There is no more striking example of this than current plans to rebuild the entire American arsenal of nuclear weapons in the coming decades, Obama’s staggering bequest to the budgets of his successors.

continue http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-pentagons-real-trategy-keeping-the-money-flowing/5531422

Eye-tracking System Uses Ordinary Cellphone Camera

For the past 40 years, eye-tracking technology—which can determine where in a visual scene people are directing their gaze—has been widely used in psychological experiments and marketing research, but it’s required pricey hardware that has kept it from finding consumer applications.

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the University of Georgia hope to change that, with software that can turn any smartphone into an eye-tracking device. They describe their new system in a paper they’re presenting on June 28 at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference.

In addition to making existing applications of eye-tracking technology more accessible, the system could enable new computer interfaces or help detect signs of incipient neurological disease or mental illness.

“The field is kind of stuck in this chicken-and-egg loop,” said Aditya Khosla, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and co-first author on the paper. “Since few people have the external devices, there’s no big incentive to develop applications for them. Since there are no applications, there’s no incentive for people to buy the devices. We thought we should break this circle and try to make an eye tracker that works on a single mobile device, using just your front-facing camera.”

Khosla and his colleagues—co-first author Kyle Krafka of the University of Georgia, MIT professors of electrical engineering and computer science Wojciech Matusik and Antonio Torralba, and three others—built their eye tracker using machine learning, a technique in which computers learn to perform tasks by looking for patterns in large sets of training examples.

Strength in numbers

Khosla and his colleagues’ advantage over previous research was the amount of data they had to work with. Currently, Khosla says, their training set includes examples of gaze patterns from 1,500 mobile-device users. Previously, the largest data sets used to train experimental eye-tracking systems had topped out at about 50 users.

To assemble data sets, “most other groups tend to call people into the lab,” Khosla added. “It’s really hard to scale that up. Calling 50 people in itself is already a fairly tedious process. But we realized we could do this through crowdsourcing.”

In the paper, the researchers report an initial round of experiments, using training data drawn from 800 mobile-device users. On that basis, they were able to get the system’s margin of error down to 1.5 centimeters, a twofold improvement over previous experimental systems.

continue http://www.rdmag.com/news/2016/06/eye-tracking-system-uses-ordinary-cellphone-camera

comedian shuts down a sexist heckler who, ironically, brought his daughters to the show.

The Pentagon Is Developing Disappearing Drones

The U.S. Department of Defense just got a lot closer to creating flying battlefield drones that vanish on command.

This month, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) awarded $5.2 million to two companies to develop disappearing delivery drones. Unfortunately for those excited about the possibility of invisible drones, these devices won’t ever re-materialize after they vanish—they will just self-destruct into oblivion, leaving no trace of military operations.

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) has been working on disappearing material since at least 2013, with the inception of the Vanishing Programmable Resources (VAPR) program aimed at developing electronic system that could physically disappear when triggered. A statement released at the time explaining the project said VAPR systems would mean the military wouldn’t have to worry about leaving devices or information that could lead to the “compromise of intellectual property and technological advantage.”

continue http://www.vocativ.com/330465/darpa-disappearing-drones/

One Creepy Word Captures the NSA’s Culture of Secrecy

 

Around 2000, the NSA became very interested in what was passing through the globe’s many cables. (Photo: JEAN-SEBASTIEN EVRARD/AFP/Getty Images)

A bill reforming the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is on its way to the president right now. It makes clearer the presumption of disclosure and centralizes requests for information from the feds. The Obama White House has arguably the worst record of finding records following FOIA requests of any administration, according to the AP. One advantage to keeping records locked up is that it helps to remove any sense that lower echelon public servants close to a given issue have doubts about political leaders’ chosen course of action.

Here’s a case in point: Muckraking news site The Intercept has been gradually releasing National Security Agency (NSA) documents secured by Edward Snowden onto the internet. In May, it published all of the agency’s internal newsletters from 2003, and the Observer offered a close read of a series therein that illuminated how the agency views other parts of the U.S. government.

One word in one document has been bugging us ever since: “corporate.”

An NSA writer used the word in a newsletter story about its Legislative Affairs and Intelligence Security Issues office. That office watches budgets, answers questions from elected officials and vets all communication between NSA staff and Congress. As the newsletter article put it, if a staffer needs to communicate with a legislator, the office “will assist you in analyzing the request, providing background and context to the responsible action office, and reviewing the responses to ensure that they meet the five Cs (candid, complete, correct, consistent and corporate) for dealing with Congress.”

continue http://observer.com/2016/06/nsa-speak-james-risen-michael-hayden-edward-snowden/

Apple “opens up” the iOS 10 kernel – accident or design?

Apple, it seems, just can’t win when it comes to openness.

Or lack of it.

You’ll find many articles right now that suggest that Apple somehow “forgot” to apply its usual obfuscations to the iOS kernel when it released its recent iOS 10 Beta.

This has led to the thorny question, “Why?

Proprietary software products, even if they contain open source components, as both Apple’s and Google’s operating systems do, are often built from source code in a way that deliberately makes them much harder to reverse engineer.

Malware often does much the same thing, of course, all the way from a simple scrambling of tell-tale text such as URLs and pop-up messages, to heavy-duty rewriting of scripts so that they are as good as illegible and incomprehensible to human analysts.

continue https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/06/22/apple-opens-up-the-ios-10-kernel-accident-or-design/

KFC Meal Boxes In India Now Come With A Built In USB Charger

YouTube

KFC Watt-A-Box

The KFC Watt-A-Box promotion gives you what you really want in your food: batteries.

Ever wished that your food came with a portable charging station for your smartphone?

No? We didn’t either.

But someone had to have just that thought, because a partnership between an India-based tech manufacturer and the country’s KFC marketing team has delivered just that to customers in Delhi and Mumbai.

Reports are overwhelmingly negative about the charging capabilities of the device (which comes with the 5-in-1 meal box and really rounds out your dining experience), with something like a 17 percent battery boost, that takes half an hour, before the device dies completely.

continue http://www.popsci.com/kfc-meal-box-comes-with-built-in-usb-charger