Editor's Note: The following has been signed by the 16 scientists listed at the end of the article:

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about "global warming." Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"

In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggest s that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

...Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of "incontrovertible&qu ot; evidence.

Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.

Yeah.  Settled Science.

The Wall Street Journal

Add them to this:  31,487 American scientists have signed this petition, including 9,029 with PhDs.

Need a quick three billion dollars, Uncle Sam? How about looking in your own pockets?

Deficit cutters struggling to make ends meet in Washington are eyeballing an unusual pot of potential revenue: back taxes owed to the government by federal employees themselves.

According to an IRS study last year, those employees and federal retirees owed a staggering $3.3 billion dollars in delinquent tax payments to the government.

The federal agency with the largest back-tax bill? The US Postal Service, where hundreds of thousands of employees owed a total of more than $283 million, said the report.

Also high on the list is the Department of Veterans Affairs, where employees had more than $156 million in back taxes.

The biggest group, though, is retired military personnel. That group owed more than $1.5 billion dollars.

And even the White House folks are behind in their taxes. Employees in the executive office of the president, which includes nearly 2,000 employees, owed more than $831,000 to Uncle Sam, the IRS found.

The large agency with the highest delinquency rate per employee was the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission, where more than 11 percent of employees owed back taxes, followed by the Government Printing Office, where nearly seven percent were in arrears.

But collecting on all that money isn't easy—federal employees are entitled to the same rights as everybody else. The federal government can't simply dock their paychecks for the delinquent money.

Federal employees “are entitled to the same process under the tax law as you are,” said IRS spokesman Anthony Burke. “They don’t have different rights than everyone else.” Burke said that each taxpayer likely will receive three or four notices about the back taxes before the IRS can take more serious action.

And the IRS spokesman said much of this money could well be paid back in time as the delinquencies work their way through the system.

CNBC

How embarrassing this must be for President Obama, whose major speech theme so far this campaign season has been that every single American, no matter how rich, should pay their "fair share" of taxes.

Because how unfair -- indeed, un-American -- it is for an office worker like, say, Warren Buffet's secretary to dutifully pay her taxes, while some well-to-do people with better educations and higher incomes end up paying a much smaller tax rate.

Or, worse, skipping their taxes altogether.

A new report just out from the Internal Revenue Service reveals that 36 of President Obama's executive office staff owe the country $833,970 in back taxes. These people working for Mr. Fair Share apparently haven't paid any share, let alone their fair share.

Previous reports have shown how well-paid Obama's White House staff is, with 457 aides pulling down more than $37 million last year. That's up seven workers and nearly $4 million from the Bush administration's last year.

Nearly one-third of Obama's aides make more than $100,000 with 21 being paid the top White House salary of $172,200, each. 

The IRS' 2010 delinquent tax revelations come as part of a required annual agency report on federal employees' tax compliance. Turns out, an awful lot of folks being paid by taxpayers are not paying their own income taxes.

The report finds that thousands of federal employees owe the country more than $3.4 billion in back taxes. That's up 3% in the past year.

IBD

Six House Democrats, led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), want to set up a "Reasonable Profits Board" to control gas profits. 

The Democrats, worried about higher gas prices, want to set up a board that would apply a "windfall profit tax" as high as 100 percent on the sale of oil and gas, according to their legislation. The bill provides no specific guidance for how the board would determine what constitutes a reasonable profit. 

The Gas Price Spike Act, H.R. 3784, would apply a windfall tax on the sale of oil and gas that ranges from 50 percent to 100 percent on all surplus earnings exceeding "a reasonable profit." It would set up a Reasonable Profits Board made up of three presidential nominees that will serve three-year terms. Unlike other bills setting up advisory boards, the Reasonable Profits Board would not be made up of any nominees from Congress.

According to the bill, a windfall tax of 50 percent would be applied when the sale of oil or gas leads to a profit of between 100 percent and 102 percent of a reasonable profit. The windfall tax would jump to 75 percent when the profit is between 102 and 105 percent of a reasonable profit, and above that, the windfall tax would be 100 percent. The bill also specifies that the oil-and-gas companies, as the seller, would have to pay this tax.

Dennis, just STFU.  You've proven time and time again you're a complete idiot.

The Hill

General-purpose computers are astounding. They're so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they're for, how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. This brings us back to something you might be sick of reading about: copyright.

But bear with me, because this is about something more important. The shape of the copyright wars clues us into an upcoming fight over the destiny of the general-purpose computer itself.

In the beginning, we had packaged software and we had sneakernet. We had floppy disks in ziplock bags, in cardboard boxes, hung on pegs in shops, and sold like candy bars and magazines. They were eminently susceptible to duplication, were duplicated quickly, and widely, and this was to the great chagrin of people who made and sold software.

Enter Digital Rights Management in its most primitive forms: let's call it DRM 0.96. They introduced physical indicia which the software checked for—deliberate damage, dongles, hidden sectors—and challenge-response protocols that required possession of large, unwieldy manuals that were difficult to copy.

These failed for two reasons. First, they were commercially unpopular, because they reduced the usefulness of the software to the legitimate purchasers. Honest buyers resented the non-functionality of their backups, they hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles, and they chafed at the inconvenience of having to lug around large manuals when they wanted to run their software. Second, these didn't stop pirates, who found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication. People who took the software without paying for it were untouched.

Typically, the way this happened is a programmer, with possession of technology and expertise of equivalent sophistication to the software vendor itself, would reverse-engineer the software and circulate cracked versions. While this sounds highly specialized, it really wasn't. Figuring out what recalcitrant programs were doing and routing around media defects were core skills for computer programmers, especially in the era of fragile floppy disks and the rough-and-ready early days of software development. Anti-copying strategies only became more fraught as networks spread; once we had bulletin boards, online services, USENET newsgroups and mailing lists, the expertise of people who figured out how to defeat these authentication systems could be packaged up in software as little crack files. As network capacity increased, the cracked disk images or executables themselves could be spread on their own.

This gave us DRM 1.0. By 1996, it became clear to everyone in the halls of power that there was something important about to happen. We were about to have an information economy, whatever the Hell that was. They assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information. Information technology improves efficiency, so imagine the markets that an information economy would have! You could buy a book for a day, you could sell the right to watch the movie for a Euro, and then you could rent out the pause button for a penny per second. You could sell movies for one price in one country, at another price in another, and so on. The fantasies of those days were like a boring science fiction adaptation of the Old Testament Book of Numbers, a tedious enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information—and what might be charged for each.

Unfortunately for them, none of this would be possible unless they could control how people use their computers and the files we transfer to them. After all, it was easy to talk about selling someone a tune to download to their MP3 player, but not so easy to talk about the the right to move music from the player to another device. But how the Hell could you stop that once you'd given them the file? In order to do so, you needed to figure out how to stop computers from running certain programs and inspecting certain files and processes. For example, you could encrypt the file, and then require the user to run a program that only unlocked the file under certain circumstances.

But, as they say on the Internet, now you have two problems.

An excellent article.  Go read the rest at BoingBoing.

PhoneFactor offers three easy method of out-of-band authentication – a phone call, text message, and an app for smart phones and tablets – to secure account logins and transactions. By leveraging the user’s existing device, PhoneFactor provides unmatched convenience for users and a cost-effective, secure platform for enterprises, government agencies, healthcare organizations, and financial institutions.

Step 1: Enter your username and password. Instantly… Step 2:
Phone Call PhoneFactor calls you. Just answer and press # (or enter a PIN).	Test Message PhoneFactor sends you a text message with a passcode. Simply reply to the text message with the passcode.	Phone App PhoneFactor pushes a notification to the PhoneFactor app on your smartphone or tablet. Simply tap “Authenticate&rdquo ; in the app.

That’s It!

This simple process provides two-step authentication through two separate channels (your computer and your telephone):

• Something you know – your password.
• Something you have – your telephone.

For a third factor of authentication, PhoneFactor prompts you to speak a short passphrase during the authentication call to add:

• Something you are – your voiceprint.

A hacker would have to know your password and have your telephone to login as you. By requiring you to also verify your secret PIN or voiceprint, PhoneFactor can further ensure that you have possession of your telephone at the time of the authentication.

The entire authentication process is completely out-of-band, which protects against malware installed on your computer and man-in-the-middle attacks. These types of attacks defeat in-band authentication methods like security tokens, which require that a one-time passcode be entered into the login screen.

In addition to securing user logins, PhoneFactor can prevent fraudulent funds transfers and payments by verifying transactions through a similar out-of-band process. PhoneFactor simply provides details about the transaction during the phone call, text message, or phone app notification.

 Awesome product, and much cheaper to deploy than RSA's Secure Key.  Check them out.  (No, I'm not getting any kickbacks...)

PhoneFactor

The money shot...

That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the “Sputnik” investments President Obama made with taxpayer dollars. Four other solar companies that received stimulus money also went bankrupt this year. There is also Brightsource,a failing solar energy company connected to Obama donor Robert Kennedy Jr, who received more than a billion dollars in taxpayer guaranteed loans. In late September, President Obama’s Department of Energy extended more green energy loans to companies like Exelon and General Electric whose leadership and employees were also big donors to his campaign.Most recently, President Obama has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the company Solazyme to fuel a Navy ship with algae based biofuels. Solazyme’s strategic adviser&nb sp;is non other than T.J.Glauthier who was part of President Obama’s transition team and who worked on the energy part of the 2009 stimulus bill. Solazyme is receiving $16 a gallon for this fuel-- 4 times the average price for such a fuel.  Pretty good payback from a friend, huh?

President Obama’s promised to invest in more than just clean energy, though, and that he did investing in both information technology and medicine. Take for example the companies Lightsquared and Siga Technologies.  Lightsquared, which received hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for a broadband project and has ties to both the infamous George Soros and Phillip Falcone (another Obama donor) is another company which has been part of President Obama’s “Sputnik Year”. President Obama indeed also invested in “information technology” as he promised in his State of the Union address, but such an investment did not help ” strengthen our security”. In fact, testing showed that Lightsquared internet signals interfered with military GPS signals. In essence, President Obama is willing to compromise the military’s technological abilities in order to fill the wallets of his cronies.  President Obama also has extended a hundreds of millions of dollars no bid contract to Siga technologies  a company who manufacture small pox treatments. This company had ties to former SEIU leader and Obama friend, Andy Stern, and to mainly Democratic donor Ronald Perleman.

President Obama indeed chose to invest in those areas that he sees will pave the way for what he sees as America’s Sputnik moment, but he has done so at the expense of the American taxpayer and at the cost of our financial future. There’s nothing like repaying your campaign donors and cronies with taxpayer money to truly “win the future”. Yet again, Governor Palin was right. It was just another “WTF” moment turned into a “WTF” year for our President.

A Time for Choosing

Sen. Susan Collins on Wednesday blasted the Defense Department for classifying the Fort Hood massacre as workplace violence and suggested political correctness is being placed above the security of the nation's Armed Forces at home.

During a joint session of the Senate and House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, the Maine Republican referenced a letter from the Defense Department depicting the Fort Hood shootings as workplace violence. She criticized the Obama administration for failing to identify the threat as radical Islam.

 Thirteen people were killed and dozens more wounded at Fort Hood in 2009, and the number of alleged plots targeting the military has grown significantly since then. Lawmakers said there have been 33 plots against the U.S. military since Sept. 11, 2001, and 70 percent of those threats have been since mid-2009.  Major Nidal Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist, who is being held for the attacks, allegedly was inspired by radical U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in late September. The two men exchanged as many as 20 emails, according to U.S. officials, and Awlaki declared Hasan a hero.

Words fail me.  "Workplace violence."

FNC

The Rise and Demise of the Zuccotti Park Commune 

November 23, 2011, by El Marco

I recently traveled from Colorado to New York the weekend before the demise of the revolutionary social experiment in lower Manhattan known as Occupy Wall Street’s “Camp Anonymous.” I went intending to capture for posterity photographic images of the people and infrastructure that comprised that hopeful utopian “model community for a new world.”

A pamphlet entitled Mutual Responsibility OWS I picked up at one of the information desks stated:

The global reality is not the currency or market fluctuations, but rather a direct result of the new global, integral, and social restructuring taking place. Until now, we developed ourselves on a personal level. Now humanity is approaching a new phase, and the old world must make way for the new world. We are dealing with the natural law of development. Everything that we considered true up until yesterday no longer works …

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller 

Utopian futurist Buckminster Fuller, in the mid 1960s, popularized a “new model structure” for the way we would all live in the future. The geodesic dome hasn’t exactly transformed the global human condition as promised. Today, the Occupy Wall Street revolutionary utopians are offering a “new model social structure for the entire global community“. The OWS big thinkers created an entire revolutionary community in Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street. It thrived and grew for two months until the liberal billionaire mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, ordered police and sanitation workers to relegate it to the trash-heap of history.

This is the first in a series of photoessays which will bring you into that model utopian community created by the anarchists and Marxists of the OWS revolutionary movement. These people are convinced, each in his or her own way, that this new movement will bring down the entire global free enterprise system, and replace it with their kinder, better, wiser, revolutionary … uh, you know … revolutionary thing.

See the bufoonery at El Maro's Blog

It was just last week that an #Occupy LA protester was arrested for masturbating on the steps of City Hall. Now the squatters are getting their own private office building.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has decided to award the lawlessness, lewd acts, shoplifting and drug use of the Occupy LA squatters. He just offered the hooligans 10,000 square feet of downtown office space and farmland for $1-a-year.

Gateway Pundit

By Rivka Solomon Gonzales-Aoki

(AP) – Ryan Sulzman walks alone through the woods behind his parents’ home in Binghamton, New York. It’s one of the few things that gives his troubled soul peace these days. “I like hearing the birds sing…and the crickets” he confides. “It takes my mind off the horrors I witnessed. These are…these are things I still find it hard to talk about.”

Like many young people who volunteered to join the nationwide Occupy movement, Ryan has been having a hard time being back in “the world.” “When we were ‘in country,’ we became used to a certain routine. The free meals served in the camp soup kitchen, the free wi-fi, the rhythmic sounds of the drum circles, and the crackheads who’d let you buy food with their EBT cards in exchange for cash for drugs. I’d give them, like, $10 and they’d let me buy $40 in food. It was a sweet deal.”

But it wasn’t long before Ryan, and so many young people of his generation who had volunteered to do their duty, saw the ugly side of human nature. “The day they cleared out our camp, this one cop…he…he yelled at me. ‘Move! Move! Move!’ He had a bullhorn…the sounds still haunt my nightmares. And then…” Ryan’s voice trails off, as tears well up in his eyes, “then he grabbed my Tumi duffle bag and literally, like, pushed it into my arms. I totally could have been knocked over it I wasn’t wearing my Urban Outfitters boots.”

Still, Ryan considers himself lucky. “I had a friend, Eddie…’Lucky Eddie’ the guys in the camp used to call him, because he’d always get lucky with the drunk girls who’d passed out. The day the camp was disbanded, he got…pushed by a cop. I saw him at the triage we set up in the Starbucks across the street. There was a vacancy in his eyes. ‘Lucky Eddie’ was gone – he was an empty shell of a man.”

Ryan, who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and is currently receiving disability, says that all he wanted when he returned home were a few words of thanks from the people he left behind. “I didn’t ask for a parade; none of us did,” Ryan says, as he attempts to restrain the anger building inside him. “But when I came home, when I walked through the door, and there were my parents who hadn’t seen me for two months, and they gave each other a look, like, ‘oh crap, he’s back.’ They hadn’t even known if I’d been alive or dead the past two months…except, of course, for the text messages I’d send, and the Skype videos. Oh, and they both subscribe to my Youtube channel. And, of course, there were the money transfers I had them make so I could upgrade my iPhone. But other than that, I could have been dead for all they knew.”

Ryan isn’t alone in his restrained bitterness. Across the nation, returning OWS vets are finding readjustment difficult – owing in large part to what they see as an indifference on the part of their loved ones to their ordeal. One such disillusioned OWS vet, a 25-year-old who would only give his name as Nick when the we interviewed him in front of the Krazy Kures medicinal pot clinic in Culver City, related his difficult tale. “My mom erased every single program I had Tivo’d. EVERY SINGLE PROGRAM. Sure, I can catch up with “Dexter” on Video on Demand, but those episodes of “Conan” are GONE. I’ll NEVER be able to see them again.”

Snicker.

Republican Party Animals

One of the secret weapons the corrupt mainstream media uses in their never-ending quest to Palace Guard for the left is context. For example, when it came to the Tea Party, the MSM was notorious for amplifying a single incident (that was usually a lie) and using it to attempt to smear and define an entire movement. This is what you do when you want to quickly take out a political enemy.

The MSM’s contextual game changes, however, when their desire is to strengthen a movement and give it credibility and room to grow. By dutifully reporting individual incidents but not reporting on the growing scope and size of Occupy Wall Street lawlessness, the MSM is willfully covering up the violence, vandalism, and anti-Semitism that truly does define this movement.

Moreover, by intentionally keeping the pieces of this story scattered, the MSM is allowed to have their cake and eat it too. No one can accuse them of not reporting these incidents, but by choosing not to bring the pieces together, the MSM ensures the least amount of public relations damage is done to the Occupiers.

What I’ve collected below is far from comprehensive but still shows over 75 incidents of sexual assault, violence, vandalism, anti-Semitism, extortion, perversion, and lawlessness.

The MSM could easily tell the story of how this violence-prone movement is becoming an increasing threat to our society. After all, my research below is the result of nothing more than Twitter and Google. Among others, The New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, and the LA Times have willfully chosen not to use the resources at their disposal to give the public an honest look at this growing menace. In their partisan minds, truth doesn’t trump agenda.

A few notes on the list below. Whenever possible, I traced the incident back to the original news source. I was as careful as possible when it came to duplicate postings, though I would guess there are a few in here. There are also less than five examples that don’t involve what I would qualify as outright lawlessness but do help to expose the Occupiers for who and what they really are. Finally, and this is the most important way in which the list is imperfect, I most certainly wasn’t able to document everything. A perfect list would be much more alarming than the one I slapped together in just a few hours.

What is true is that on October 18, pollster Doug Schoen (a Democrat!) discovered that a full 31% of Occupiers were willing to commit violence in pursuit of their agenda, whatever that is. As a response to this startling and frightening admission, the MSM either outright ignored or dismissed it. What you’ll see below proves that at least when it comes to their willingness to break the law, the Occupiers are keeping their word.

The list is in no particular order. Like the Occupiers themselves, it’s unruly, disorganized, messy and not focused solely on the nation’s media centers. The movement is spreading across America and bringing with it their outrageous and appalling behavior.

Read the list at Big Government.

Women with attractive eyes may be forced to cover them up under Saudi Arabia's latest repressive measure, it was revealed today.

The ultra-conservative Islamic state has said it has the right to stop women revealing 'tempting' eyes in public.

A spokesperson for Saudi Arabia's Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, Sheikh Motlab al Nabet, said a proposal to enshrine the measure in law has been tabled.

Women in Saudi Arabia already have to wear a long black cloak, called an abaya, cover their hair and, in some regions, conceal their faces while in public.

If they do not, they face punishments including fines and public floggings.

They are also banned from driving by religious edict and cannot travel without authorisation from their male guardians.

Yeah.  Love me that Sharia.

Mail Online

How Does SOPA Work, and Why Should I Care?

The idea behind SOPA sounds reasonable. It came about in order to try to snuff out piracy online, as the entertainment industry is obviously not excited about the many people downloading their product without their permission. The issue is, however, that it doesn't really matter whether you're in support of piracy, against it, or just don't care. SOPA makes it possible for companies to block the domain names of web sites that are simple capable of, or seem to encourage copyright infringement.

This means that if Lifehacker happened to have an article or two that could be interpreted as piracy-friendly, our domain could be blocked so it's unaccessible by visiting lifehacker.com. What the bill can't do is block numeric IP addresses, so you could still access Lifehacker, or any other site that could be censored, if you knew that address. This is important because it means this bill can't do much to stop downloaders of pirated content. If a domain name is blocked, everything will still work via the numeric IP address. Basically, the bill will be no good at stopping piracy—what it was apparently designed to do—but excellent at censoring any web site capable of providing its users with the means of promoting pirated content or allowing the process. This includes sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, and many more. If it's possible to post pirated content on the site, or information that could further online piracy, a claim can be brought against it.

In the event of SOPA-based censorship, any site can submit an appeal so long as they do so within five days. This isn't a lot of time to handle a legal matter, and if you've ever dealt with a copyright infringement takedown notice you know how ineffective an appeal can be. When a threat of legal action is posed, a company is generally going to prefer to err on the side of caution and remove infringing content indefinitely. It's far cheaper to run the risk of removing perfectly legal content than to battle the issue in court. If your web host censors your site because of a SOPA-based claim, you can expect the same sorts of problems.

If you want to learn more about how SOPA works, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) posted a great overview. You can also view the exact contents of SOPA.

We need to stop this garbage folks...

lifehacker

Tissue with wound-like conditions allows tumors to grow and spread. In mouse lung cancer cells, treatment with silibinin, a major component of milk thistle, removed the molecular billboards that signal these wound-like conditions and so stopped the spread of these lung cancers, according to a recent study published in the journal Molecular Carcinogenesis.

Though the natural extract has been used for more than 2,000 years, mostly to treat disorders of the liver and gallbladder, this is one of the first carefully controlled and reported studies to find benefit.

Here is how it works:

Basically, in a cell there can be a chain of signals, one leading to the next, to the next, and eventually to an end product. And so if you would like to eliminate an end product, you may look to break a link in the signaling chain that leads to it. The end products COX2 and iNOS are enzymes involved with the inflammatory response to perceived wounds – both can aid tumor growth. Far upstream in the signaling chain that leads to these unwanted enzymes are STAT1 and STAT3. These transcription factors allow the blueprint of DNA to bind with proteins that continue the signal cascade, eventually leading to the production of harmful COX2 and iNOS.

Stop STAT1 and STAT3 and you break the chain that leads to COX2 and iNOS – and the growth of lung tumors along with them.

Interesting stuff.

Colorado Cancer Blogs

OWS proposed demands.

Artificial intelligence researcher, John McCarthy, has died. He was 84.

The American scientist invented the computer language LISP.

It went on to become the programming language of choice for the AI community, and is still used today.

Professor McCarthy is also credited with coining the term "Artificial Intelligence" in 1955 when he detailed plans for the first Dartmouth conference. The brainstorming sessions helped focus early AI research.

Prof McCarthy's proposal for the event put forward the idea that "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it".

The conference, which took place in the summer of 1956, brought together experts in language, sensory input, learning machines and other fields to discuss the potential of information technology.

Other AI experts describe it as a critical moment.

"John McCarthy was foundational in the creation of the discipline Artificial Intelligence," said Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield.

"His contribution in naming the subject and organising the Dartmouth conference still resonates today."

Rest in peace, Professor.

BBC News

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., drew heavy criticism from fellow Democrats and his Republican colleagues for demanding President Barack Obama suspend the U.S. Constitution and declare a national jobs emergency.

Jackson told The Daily Caller last week that the president should use "extra-constitutiona l" authority to resolve the employment crisis by creating jobs outside of the normal legislative process. His comments drew immediate criticism from his primary opponent as well as other members of the House of Representatives.

Former congresswoman Debbie Halvorson, Jackson's Democratic opponent in next year's primary election, said he has failed to introduce a jobs bill during his 16 years in the House.

They're not even trying to hide it anymore.

Y!

Just wow.

 Video at Live Leak.

What’s really keeping a thousand or so young protesters in Lower Manhattan? Apparently, a ready supply of vegan pizza, hot quiches, and organic carrots. According to the New York Times, protesters have universally praised the free food available at the encampment. One protester explained:

‘I’ve been here for 12 days, and I’ve put on 5 pounds,’ he said, sitting on the ground in front of a handmade sign that said ‘Class War Ahead.’ ‘I’m eating better than I do at home.’

All he had to do was amble toward a ramshackle cluster of tables and boxes in the middle of the park and, without paying a cent, grab a slice of pizza or a warm slab of homemade vegan casserole. Last Thursday he had encountered ‘a bunch of Katz’s Deli sandwiches,’ he said. ‘That was good.’

Others said:

‘Someone gave us Spam,’ said Elliot Hartmann-Russell, 18, a volunteer who held up a can of the meat and stared at it while sorting through the donations. ‘I’m not going to eat it, but…’

Tom Hintze, 24, was volunteering in Zuccotti Park last week. ‘Just now there was a big UPS delivery,’ he said. ‘We don’t know where it comes from. It just appears, and we eat it.’

The kitchen’s philosophy isn’t quite the farm-to-table approach Mr. Hintze internalized while on the wait staff at the expensive and high-toned Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Westchester County, N.Y. Still, he was picking up a similar community-based ethos.

Parasites.

NRO