"I believe we are building the forces of good to beat the forces of evil. ... We are taking a major step in giving the American people their first light saber," Obering told dignitaries and employees gathered for the ceremony.

I know that no one's going to destry this guys house with popcorn, but maybe someone should.

I wonder if he knows Jim Channon...

FOXNews.com - U.S. Air Force Debuts Laser-Weapon Aircraft - Science News | Current Articles

With their wide eyes and innocent hearts, you might think it's easy to tell when a child is lying. Oh no it isn't. Not according to Leif Stromwall and colleagues, who found adults were useless at detecting when children were lying.

Thirty children aged between 11 and 13 were told they were going to be interviewed about one event that had really happened to them, and about another that they'd never experienced (an earlier questionnaire identified which life experiences the children had actually had). The children's task was to talk about both events as if they had experienced them both.

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: Adults are unable to tell when children are lying

"Talking" CCTV cameras that tell off people dropping litter or committing anti-social behaviour are to be extended to 20 areas across England.

They are already used in Middlesbrough where people seen misbehaving can be told to stop via a loudspeaker, controlled by control centre staff.

About �500,000 will be spent adding speaker facilities to existing cameras.

Shadow home affairs minister James Brokenshire said the government should be "very careful" over the cameras.

BBC NEWS | UK | England | 'Talking' CCTV scolds offenders

YUBA CITY, Calif. - Authorities put all 36 schools in 12 Northern California school districts under lockdown Thursday as police searched for a man who claimed he was planning an armed attack that would “make Virginia Tech look mild.”

36 California schools under lockdown - Crime & Punishment - MSNBC.com

k wrote:

Sometime after he killed two people in a Virginia university dormitory but before he slaughtered 30 more in a classroom building, Cho Seung-Hui mailed NBC News a large package including photographs and videos Monday morning, boasting, “When the time came, I did it. I had to.”

The package included an 1,800-word manifesto-like statement diatribe in which Cho expresses rage, resentment and a desire to get even.

The material does not include any images of the shootings Monday, but it does contain vague references. And it mentions “martyrs like Eric and Dylan” — apparently a reference to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold...

The material is deeply angry, crying out against unspecified wrongs done to him in a diatribe laced with profanity.

“I didn’t have to do this. I could have left. I could have fled. But no, I will no longer run. It’s not for me. For my children, for my brothers and sisters that you f---, I did it for them,” Cho says on one of the videos.

Whow...

[Wow indeed. Fucking raving lunatic jackass. -k]

Really annoying that they don't make the whole manifesto available. It seems that he wasn't very good at stringing together coherent thoughts, viewing them out of context is pretty irritating. It's also somewhat ironic that there's a sound off page for his diatribe (which no ones allowed to read). I could understand if maybe this was with held to catch a criminal, but the asshole is dead. If they're as overblown as the retarded scripts i'm going to be even more annoyed.

RE: Gunman in massacre contacted NBC News

In the futuristic cartoon series "The Jetsons," a robotic maid named Rosie whizzed around the Jetsons' home doing household chores--cleaning, cooking dinner and washing dishes.

Such a vision of robotic housekeeping is likely decades away from becoming reality. But at MIT, researchers are working on a very early version of such intelligent, robotic helpers--a humanoid called Domo who grasp objects and place them on shelves or counters.

A robot like Domo could help elderly or wheelchair-bound people with simple household tasks like putting away dishes. Other potential applications include agriculture, space travel and assisting workers on an assembly line, says Aaron Edsinger, an MIT postdoctoral associate who has been working on Domo for the last three years.

Edsinger describes Domo as the "next generation" of earlier robots built at MIT--Kismet, which was designed to interact with humans, and Cog, which could learn to manipulate unknown objects. Domo incorporates elements of both of those robots.

Assistive robot adapts to people, new places - MIT News Office

Decius wrote:

I've known one woman to have one of these. She was very anti-choice. The baby that she so wanted was found at just under 7 months to have severe hydrocephalus and spinal bifida. She was told there was no question the child would be profoundly mentally retarded and would need life long institutional care. After a few weeks of prayer, her and her husband decided to have the procedure.

I think this is exactly the sort of realistic and difficult scenario that comes up with optional late term abortions and often isn't frankly discussed. People talk about rape, incest, and the health of the mother. There is another scenario: The baby may be broken, severely. Is it murder to abort such a pregnancy? This is going to become a vital question very soon now, and I think that searching for theological explanations is as useful here as it is in explaining the age of the planet. This is a deep moral, philosophical problem that absolutely requires an analysis of the alternatives on their impact and merit. I don't really know if anyone deeply addresses this, and I think popping out with a strict interpretation of some scriptural verse is a cop out that avoids taking this issue head-on and does not properly prepare people to handle this situation.

If you invited someone over to your house for a drink... and they refused to leave, sat on your sofa for months and months, ate a significant portion of your food, attempted to make you moody all day long, made you nauseous, forced you to see the doctor, made you pay their doctor bills, at what point do you get to legally shoot them? Granted... an adult should be able to survive outside of your house so you should be able to kick the asshole out... but it doesn't work this way with a fetus. Even if you put an ad in the paper... no one wants an unborn fetus, only living babies. Therefore a fetus that can't survive on it's own has no rights to live. You're status before you're hatched isn't good enough to warrant protection. You go from being a parasite, to having rights. Maybe, if science advances, Women may be able to have a Postponement wherein the fetus is removed and frozen until such date as they wish to carry the thing to term. I think these would be popular. Think of the ebay possibilities as unused fetuses from deceased celebrities become hot properties.

RE: Late Term Abortion Ban Upheld by Supreme Court

An Essex firm is making stab-proof hoodies lined with Kevlar, the material used in body armour for British troops.

Romford-based Bladerunner, which makes protective clothes for police forces and security guards, is selling the tops for �65

Get yours here. Maybe they can make them with the memestreams or industrial memetics logo on them.

Ananova - Stab-proof hoodies on sale

These pool of blood pillows would be fun for Halloween sleep overs - Thanks numlok! Link.

MAKE: Blog: Blood puddle pillows

Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being. Those people who have different political views from me ought to be ashamed of themselves for thinking of cheap partisan point-scoring at a time like this. In any case, what this tragedy really shows us is that, so far from putting into practice political views other than my own, it is precisely my political agenda which ought to be advanced.

Why the Shootings Mean That We Must Support My Politics