John McCain's Presidential campaign has discovered the remix-unfriendly aspects of American copyright law, after several of the candidate's campaign videos were pulled from YouTube. McCain has now discovered the rights holder friendly nature of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which forces remixers to fight an uphill battle to prove that their work is a 'fair use.' However, instead of calling for an overhaul of the much hated law, McCain is calling for VIP treatment for the remixes made by political campaigns.

McCain seeks special 'fair use' copyright rules for VIPs

McCain bristles when it is suggested that he might lack youthful vigor. Early in the primaries, he faced a blunt question from a New Hampshire teenager. Was he worried he would get Alzheimer's disease or die in office? "I'm very active," McCain shot back. "People will judge by the vigor and enthusiasm associated with our campaign. I've out-campaigned my opponents, every race I've ever been in." He ended with a joke. "Thanks for the question, you little jerk!"

Age, health questions continue for McCain

To constitute depraved indifference, the defendant's conduct must be 'so wanton, so deficient in a moral sense of concern, so lacking in regard for the life or lives of others, and so blameworthy as to warrant the same criminal liability as that which the law imposes upon a person who intentionally causes a crime. Depraved indifference focuses on the risk created by the defendant’s conduct, not the injuries actually resulting.

So lets get some forensic accounting going on and charge the people who are not just screwing the American economy, the world really, and take the assets of those people and charge them with depraved indifference....

My father says there is/was no crime committed, but I see the complete opposite! Moral crimes show motive, and the proof (of greed & etc) is all around us....

Depraved Indifference: The crime behind 'American' greed...

The FBI and law enforcement officials in Monroe, Washington are searching for a man who robbed a bank and made a getaway down a nearby creek on an inner-tube. Seriously. Investigators believe the thief may have employed the help of decoys recruited on Craigslist.

The suspect is described as a white male about 25 years old and between 5 7 and 5 10. He was wearing a blue shirt and and a dust mask, which appears to have been essential to the heist. An ad placed on Craigslist searching for road workers is now at the center of the investigation. The ad asked more men to show up at a site near the bank just before the robbery took place. The respondents were asked to wear safety vests, goggles, blue shirts, and face masks, just like the suspect was wearing.

No one ever showed up to meet these hired road workers, leading to the theory that the ad was posted by the thief to create a distraction for responders. The inner-tube used as the getaway vehicle was found along the banks of Wood creek near the Skykomish River.

Anyone who may have information that could aide investigators are asked to contact Monroe police at 360 863-4600. From: Seattle Times null

Bank Robber Gets Away With the Help of Craigslist

The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), a three person panel that controls royalty rates for music sales, is set to make a judgment today that could potentially raise royalty rates on digital music by 66-percent. Currently, the rate rests at 9 cents per track, but the National Music Publishers' Association wants the rate raised to 15 cents.

Apple Threatens to Close iTunes Over Increased Royalty Rates

Google has taken a public stand against Proposition 8, an anti-gay marriage measure on the November ballot in California.

Co-founder Sergey Brin, who made the announcement in a blog Friday afternoon, acknowledged that it is unusual for his company to take stands on issues outside the tech realm. The company "especially" avoids taking stands on social issues, he said, because of the diversity of its workforce.

However, Brin said, "it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8."

"We should not eliminate anyone's fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love," he said.

Brin did not mention whether Google will do anything else to oppose the measure, other than taking a stand.

The official site opposing the proposition includes a long list of backers. No companies are listed there. However, on Thursday, Levi Strauss & Co. and PG&E became co-chairs of the No On Prop 8 Equality Business Council. And in July, PG&E donated $250,000 to the campaign.

Google opposes anti-gay marriage measure....

Do you wish your computer was faster? Engineers and physicists from Germany have demonstrated the quickest prototype yet of an advanced form of RAM tipped by hardware manufacturers to be the future of computing. The device is so fast it brushes against a fundamental speed-limit for the process.

Magnetoresistive random access memory MRAM is a faster and more energy efficient version of the RAM used in computers today, and hardware companies think it will in a few years dominate the market. Its speed and low power will in particular boost mobile computing.

Whereas conventional RAM stores a digital 1 or 0 as the level of charge in the capacitor, MRAM stores it by changing the north-south direction of a tiny magnet s magnetic field. Each variable magnet is positioned next to one with a fixed field. Reading a stored value involves running a current through the pair to discover the direction of the variable magnet s field.
Spin flips

The MRAM that IBM and most other manufacturers are betting on uses the spins of electrons to flip the magnetic fields, called spin-torque MRAM.

Now researchers in Germany have built a spin-torque system that is dramatically faster than any other. Santiago Serrano-Guisan and Hans Schumacher of the Physical-Technical Federal Laboratory of Germany worked with University of Bielefeld and Singulus Nano-Deposition Technologies researchers to build it from tiny pillars 165 nanometres tall.

The tOP ENd of each pillar acts as a variable magnet that stores data, whereas the bottom ends are fixed magnets. A current passing through a pillar from bottom to top has the spin of its electrons lined up by the permanent-magnet region.

When those electrons reach the pillars other end, they flip the variable magnet region s field to match. The field can be flipped back by reversing the current.

Usually when the field is flipped it takes some time to settle into its new orientation. The north-south axis draws a few circles in the air before settling into place.

Spin flip trick points to fastest RAM yet....

Like the Large Hadron Collider? Feel like you’ve been reading the same LHC articles or watching the same videos over and over again? Then check out the latest addition to the YouTube pantheon of LHC videos, the Large Hadron Rap.

The rap is the brainchild of Kate McAlpine, a.k.a. alpinekat, a freelance science writer and one of the editors of the ATLAS e-News. Having just produced her first physics rap, McAlpine was already planning an LHC rap when she arrived at CERN in October for a six-month stint in U.S. LHC communications.

“I’d just finished a rap about a neurochip, and my head was filled with information about the LHC and its goals,” said McAlpine. “I had access to experimental halls as well as stock footage. To not rap would have been a wasted opportunity.”

The dancing and rapping segments were filmed on LOCATION at CERN and in the LHC’s underground areas. While actors, musicians and even a dance troupe had visited the LHC, this was the first time it had starred in a rap video.

“The response was dubious when we were trying to get permission to film and intrigued once people found out what we were up to,” she said.

McAlpine’s newest venture has been attracting much more attention than she expected – she’s been interviewed by the BBC, and in the video’s first dozen hours on YouTube it attracted more than 1,300 views.

“You know what the status was eight hours after uploading N3UROCH!P her first rap ? 14 people had seen it,” she added.

While alpinekat hasn’t yet signed with a record label, she’s already planning her next physics rap.

Rapping the LHC

Initially, Fermilab management questioned the wisdom of diverting Zimmerman from a full day of work at the laboratory, where his projects require a mix of physics, computer programming, and mechanical engineering skills. Now management views his show as educational outreach, a vital part of running a government-funded physics laboratory in a heavily-populated area in tight economic times. The two-hour show connects everyday citizens with a complex scientific field where jargon often stands in the way of easy understanding.
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“I feel it is the responsibility of people who work in science to do things like this because that is the only way people know what we do,” Zimmerman says. “Cryogenics provides an easy entry point. About anybody can understand hot and cold. And there are lots of things you can do—not quite limitless, but close.”

Zimmerman consistently adds new components to his show, but staple crowd-pleasers include mixing soap with nitrogen to create geysers of bubbles, using compressed gas to shoot confetti or rubber balls, shattering roses, and using a frozen banana to pound frozen rubber tubing through wood. Sometimes he “accidentally” breaks off the fingers of his safety glove as it emerges from a tank of nitrogen.

“I have had girls in the front row scream their heads off, like I just maimed myself,” he says with a slight smile.

Gasps and giggles aside, the show teaches the basics of gases, liquids, and solids and the cryogenics used to run particle accelerators at Fermilab. Zimmerman brings the complicated, mammoth machines down to Earth by comparing them to everyday objects such as the television, which is a type of particle accelerator.

Day in the Life: Mr. Freeze

Physicists of the DZero experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have discovered a new particle made of three quarks, the Omega-sub-b (Ωb). The particle contains two strange quarks and a bottom quark (s-s-b). It is an exotic relative of the much more common proton and weighs about six times the proton mass.

The discovery of the doubly strange particle brings scientists a step closer to understanding exactly how quarks form matter and to completing the "periodic table of baryons." Baryons (derived from the Greek word "barys," meaning "heavy") are particles that contain three quarks, the basic building blocks of matter. The proton comprises two up quarks and a down quark (u-u-d).

Combing through almost 100 trillion collision events produced by the Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab, the DZero collaboration found 18 incidents in which the particles emerging from a proton-antiproton collision revealed the distinctive signature of the Omega-sub-b. Once produced, the Omega-sub-b travels about a millimeter before it disintegrates into lighter particles. Its decay, mediated by the weak force, occurs in about a trillionth of a second.

DZero Omega-sub-b