In short: Humane Officer Barry Accorti was called to a home on a report of some feral kittens. His solution: shoot them on the spot, right in front of some kids.
And according to the local police chief, this was a perfectly cromulent approach to the issue.
(Feel free to check my math!)
Recent news events have brought publicity to the NSA’s “Utah Data Center” currently being built to store vast amounts of digital data. How much data? According to sources, the storage capacity is on the scale of a yottabyte. And how much is that? A yottabyte is 10^24 bytes. Also known as one trillion terabytes. And what does that mean in physical terms? According to Wiki:
To store a yottabyte on terabyte sized hard drives would require a million city block size data-centers, as big as the states of Delaware and Rhode Island.[1] If 64 GB microSDXC cards (the most compact data storage medium available to public as of early 2013) were used instead, the total volume would be approximately 2500000 cubic meters, or the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
That’s a lot. But what if you tried to print it out? Well, the first question is “how many pages equal how much data?” According to THIS site, one megabyte gets you about 60 pages of email/word processing; 250 pages of text; 20 pages of presentations, PDFs, images. Let’s just settle on 60 pages/megabyte, or thirty sheets of paper (printed double-sided) per megabyte. There are 10^18 megabytes per yottabyte, so one yottabyte would score you 3X10^19 sheets of paper. What’s that in other measurements? If the sheets were standard 8.5X11 and were put end-to-end, that’d be 5,208,333,333,333,333 miles. Since one astronomical unit (AKA AU, the distance from the Earth to the Sun) is 92,955,807 miles, this strip of paper would stretch from the earth to the sun 56,030,209 times. A bit much. OK, rather than taping the sheets end to end, simply stack ’em up. I just measured a 500-sheet ream of paper; it came out right close to 2 inches thick. So, each sheet would average 2/500 inches thick = 0.004 inches. Multiply that by 3X10^19 sheets and you get a thickness of 1,893,939,393,939 miles. Much more manageable… this would only stretch to the Sun 20,374 times. Put a bit closer to home, this stack of paper would stretch from the Earth to the Moon (238,900 miles) 7,927,749 times.
Put another way: weight. One ream of cheap copy paper weighs about 5 pounds… 5/500 = 0.01 pounds per sheet. Multiply by 3X10^19 sheets and the total weight of the stack 9not counting ink) would be about 3X10^17 pounds, or 136,363,636,363,636,363 kg. This is a pitiful 2.28×10^-8 times the mass of Earth. However, a closer match was the Chicxulub asteroid that hit the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago. It was *about* 1.6×10^15 kilograms, or 3.5×10^15 pounds. So the Utah Data Center, once full, could theoretically have enough data that, if printed out, would mass on the order of 100 times the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
Your tax dollars at work!
The EPA report is available as a PDF file HERE.
Neato.
Why does the EPA have boxes of passports just lying around? Because frak you, that’s why.
That is, apparently, the going rate for lobbying President Obama. Now you can start budgeting!
And never mind this:
[youtube xzvHpWCMAnU]
Things are tough all over. But it takes a socialized economy to make things so bad that the police raid warehouses for toilet paper.
First: according to the Department of Justice… First Amendment? Never heard of it.
Bill Killian, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee … Killian and Moore will provide input on how civil rights can be violated by those who post inflammatory documents targeted at Muslims on social media.
“This is an educational effort with civil rights laws as they play into freedom of religion and exercising freedom of religion,” Killian told The News Monday. “This is also to inform the public what federal laws are in effect and what the consequences are.”
“Inflammatory” ain’t illegal in the US. Making it so specifically for one religious group *is* anti-American.
But then…
This will go over well.
Then here is a list of words you can use on social media that will grab the attention of Homeland Security. Maybe you can find a new friend!
Drill! Crash! Cops! Facility! Recall! Cloud! Wave! AMTRAK! Smart! Mexico! Ice! Hail! Snow!
Yesterday a friend of mine mentioned that she had gone into a store that was playing the song “Those Were The Days” by Mary Hopkin, and that the song had become lodged in her head. Because this is what one does, I looked up the song on Wikipedia. Of all the factoids the article has, by far the most bizarre was this:
On Christmas 1975, the President of Equatorial Guinea, Francisco Macías Nguema, had 150 alleged coup plotters executed in the national stadium while a band played Those Were the Days.
Errrr…….
The Wiki article on Nguema has a little more info:
During Christmas of 1975 he ordered about 150 of his opponents killed. Soldiers dressed up in Santa Claus costumes executed them by shooting at the football stadium in Malabo, while amplifiers were playing Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days”.
Errrr…..
Africa seems to be the place to be if you are a weirdo-bizarre nut with delusions of divinity. In the US, the best you can do is sic the IRS on your political opponents.
[youtube gVdOQvx379Y]
Regardless of your views on Obamas policies and ideology, one thing that can’t really be denied is that he was pretty much wholly unprepared to become President. A little while in the Senate following a basically contest-free election, following a little while in the Illinois senate, characterized by voting “present” a lot, followed by no time spent in positions of business or military leadership. And now that his incompetence is coming to the fore with multiple scandals, questions are starting to be raised about whether the stress is finally getting to him.
Take, for example, this CNBC article:
Where we read:
Yet Mr. Obama also expresses exasperation. In private, he has talked longingly of ”going Bulworth,” a reference to a little-remembered 1998 Warren Beatty movie about a senator who risked it all to say what he really thought. … ”Probably every president says that from time to time,” said David Axelrod, another longtime adviser who has heard Mr. Obama’s movie-inspired aspiration.
Why is this of interest? Well, here’s part of the plot description of Bullworth from Wikipedia:
Tired of politics and his life in general and planning to commit suicide, Bulworth negotiates a $10 million life insurance policy with his daughter as its beneficiary in exchange for a favorable vote from the insurance industry. Knowing that a suicide will negate his daughter’s inheritance, he contracts to have himself assassinated within two days’ time. … Bulworth happily accepts a new campaign for the presidency right before he is shot in front of a crowd of reporters and supporters by an insurance representative fearful of Bulworth’s push for single-payer health care.
A President fantasizing about emulating a suicidal movie character who supports the same policies as the real-world politician sounds juuuuust a little bit disturbing.
Well, the US FedGuv has finally waded into the debate on 3D printed guns. Wielding the sort of bludgeon that authoritarians like Bloomberg and Schumer can only dream of, the US Department of Defense Trade Controls has shut down Defense Distributed via the dubious power of ITAR. ITAR – International Traffic in Arms Regulations – is supposed to prevent US citizens and corporations from sending overseas technologies and designs for advanced weapons and the like that might aid enemies of the US. But as it’s being used here, it is being used to prevent the likes of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Whatever from being able to build unreliable, expensive zip guns.
Much as it pains me to link to Infowars, they seem to have the details.
Here’s one of many things to consider: if the exact same files had been created by, say, a Canadian, and were hosted on a Canadian website, the US FedGuv would have neither the power nor the interest to shut them down. Why would they? Printed guns are, and will be for some time, substantially crappy devices compared to properly manufactured firearms. However, as printing technology evolves, and as design capabilities and experience progress, printed guns will become substantially better, potentially eventually becoming competitive or even superior in some ways. So what the government is doing, in effect, is turning over the future of not only weapons development but advanced manufacturing systems and basic entrepreneurship itself to foreign powers.