Wally Wallington has demonstrated that he can lift a Stonehenge-sized pillar weighing 22,000 lbs and moved a barn over 300 ft. What makes this so special is that he does it using only himself, gravity, and his incredible ingenuity.

Moving large blocks using primitive materials

From the cryptography@metzdowd.com list:

A fascinating IEEE Spectrum article on the incident in which lawful
intercept facilities were hacked to permit the secret tapping of
the mobile phones of a large number of Greek government officials,
including the Prime Minister:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/5280

Hat tip: Steve Bellovin.

Perry
--
Perry E. Metzger perry@piermont.com

How the Greek cellphone network was tapped

Texas resident Rhonda Crain claims that Sony BMG Music Entertainment and others in the Recording Industry Association of America lawsuit illegally employed unlicensed investigators and were aware that they were disregarding the laws of her state. She filed an amended counterclaim Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Beaumont Division.

PI-license requirement for computer investigations used to counter-sue RIAA

I want to talk about embracing honesty as the truest form of reality we have available to us.

Deception is a necessity in today's society. People need the comfort of secrecy. There are things that cannot be known by all, because all is unknowable and therefore untrustworthy except by faith. Our experiences with the many, as shared one to another, tell us this faith can be misplaced and abused, often. How can it extend to all?

If a thing exists as a behavior, among we the living who mimic instinctively, it will persist. This facet of our nature cannot be undone, but may be overcome at an individual level by conscious decision.

In order to decide one must be conscious. To express knowledge of a thing falls short of the thing, and it is the crux of miscommunication. It is all too common that this fact goes unknown, so that people interpret what is flawed as genuine, and act on it, giving rise to suffering in various forms, which is further misunderstood. The countless ripples hereof are seldom harmonic, but allow for the beauty which is the counter-wave that establishes a new balance, and in this case is the alleviation of suffering. But I digress.

Seldom is one person in possession of one constant frame of mind at all times. The mind arises from the body which resides in a world that exists in time, whose one constancy is the change of all things. Matter forever reinvents itself according to the whims of energy as described by the way things are. The possibility of self-determining entities to act in unforeseen ways is a constant. Previously non-existent behaviors emerge as the result of the synthesis between an entity's aggregate of past experience and the eventual encounter of new and strange. So it's no surprise that people misunderstand one another. Or that they choose to conceal that which is precious from this they distrust.

A thing that pleases is incorporated into the world of self, thereby falling under the domain of self-preservation. Threat is opposed. So how we define our world of self determines our capacity for honesty.

Realize, then, that in the house secure lies nothingness.

Here threaten the limitations of language, so bear with: 'Thing' implies a static state, always there when you need it, just the way you left it. Ours is a world in time. 'Thing' implies an entity discrete, but consider:

The various and sundry thing was once stardust.

Every, that became Any, was once All, born of None.

You are, then, a vessel, and whatsoever fills it is change.

Non-sequitur at times, yet beautifully crafted. Thanks, brother.

Up washed a pearl

The Defense Department is warning its American contractor employees about a new espionage threat seemingly straight from Hollywood: It discovered Canadian coins with tiny radio frequency transmitters hidden inside.

In a U.S. government report, it said the mysterious coins were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

Defense workers warned about spy coins

I decided to create my list of Best Astronomy Pictures of 2006. I went through hundreds of images (maybe thousands), checking NASA, APOD, the ESA, BAUT, and a few dozen amateur and professional sites featuring pictures as well.

Bad Astronomy Blog - The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006

I shall not here defend the views held by the scientific establishment. I am among those who have done that elsewhere, in many books. My purpose in this article is only to convey the full magnitude of the error into which, if Burgess and McIntosh are right, the scientific establishment has fallen.

First, the age of the Earth. McIntosh thinks, on biblical authority alone, that it is less than 10,000 years.

Comment is free: Big mistake | Richard Dawkins

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called "premium content", typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

Peter Gutmann: A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

NASA, seeking to give the public easy access to its massive trove of images and data about Earth and outer space, has entered into a formal agreement with Google to post material from the agency's many missions on the Internet. As the technology improves and the collaboration grows, officials said, viewers could one day be treated to live video from the moon, Mars and elsewhere.
...
Megan Smith, the company's director of new business development, said many Google employees first got excited about computer technology through NASA, so it is especially meaningful for them to be working with the agency.

NASA Launches Google Collaboration - washingtonpost.com

NASA photographs have revealed bright new deposits seen in two gullies on Mars that suggest water carried sediment through them sometime during the past seven years.

NASA Images Suggest Water Still Flows in Brief Spurts on Mars