Forget Anonymous: Evidence Suggests GOP Hacked, Stole 2004 Election

Three generations from now, when our great-grandchildren are sitting barefoot in their shanties and wondering how in the hell America turned from the high-point of civilization to a third-world banana republic, they will shake their fists and mutter one name: George Effin’ Bush.

Ironically, it won’t be for any of the things that liberals have been harping on the Bush Administration, either during or after his term in office. Sure, misguided tax cuts that destroyed the surplus, and lax regulations that doomed the economy, and two amazingly awful wars in deserts half a world away are all terrible, empire-sapping events. But they pale in comparison to what it appears the Republican Party did to get President Bush re-elected in 2004.

“A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio’s 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush,” according to Bob Fitrakis, columnist at http://www.freepress.org and co-counsel in the litigation and investigation.

If you recall, Ohio was the battleground state that provided George Bush with the electoral votes needed to win re-election. Had Senator John Kerry won Ohio’s electoral votes, he would have been elected instead.

Evidence from the filing suggests that Republican operatives — including the private computer firms hired to manage the electronic voting data — were compromised.

Fitrakis isn’t the only attorney involved in pursuing the truth in this matter. Cliff Arnebeck, the lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. He asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to “input data” and thus alter the results of Ohio’s 2004 election. His response sent a chill up my spine.

“Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not,” Spoonamore said. In case that seems a bit too technical and “big deal” for you, consider what he was saying. SmarTech, a private company, had the ability in the 2004 election to add or subtract votes without anyone knowing they did so.

The filing today shows how, detailing the computer network system’s design structure, including a map of how the data moved from one unit to the next. Right smack in the middle of that structure? Inexplicably, it was SmarTech.

Spoonamore (keep in mind, he is the IT expert here) concluded from the architectural maps of the Ohio 2004 election reporting system that, “SmarTech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle.”

A “man in the middle” is not just an accidental happenstance of computing. It is a deliberate computer hacking setup, one where the hacker sits, literally, in the middle of the communication stream, intercepting and (when desired, as in this case) altering the data. It’s how hackers swipe your credit card number or other banking information. This is bad. …

via Forget Anonymous: Evidence Suggests GOP Hacked, Stole 2004 Election | Benzinga.com.

 

A Revenge Plot So Intricate, the Prosecutors Were Pawns

Seemona Sumasar spent seven months in jail, accused of robberies that Queens prosecutors say were invented by an ex-boyfriend she had accused of rape, Jerry Ramrattan.

Soon after Seemona Sumasar started dating Jerry Ramrattan, she had an inkling that something might be wrong.

He said he was a police detective, but never seemed to go to work. He seemed obsessed with “C.S.I.,” “Law & Order” and other television police dramas.

About a year after he moved into her house in Queens, their relationship soured. One day, he cornered her, taped her mouth and raped her, she said. Mr. Ramrattan was arrested.

But he soon took his revenge, the authorities said. Drawing on his knowledge of police procedure, gleaned from his time as an informer for law enforcement, he accomplished what prosecutors in New York called one of the most elaborate framing plots that they had ever seen.

… The key to his scheme, prosecutors said, was to spread fake clues over time, fooling police into believing that all the evidence pointed to Ms. Sumasar.

They said he coached the supposed victims, driving them past Ms. Sumasar’s house so that they could describe her Jeep Grand Cherokee and showing them her photo so they could pick her out of a police lineup.

The setup began in September 2009, prosecutors said. An illegal immigrant from Trinidad told the police that he had been handcuffed and robbed of $700 by an Indian woman who was disguised as a police officer and had a gun, according to court documents.

Prosecutors said Mr. Ramrattan had persuaded the immigrant to lie, telling him that he could receive a special visa for victims of violent crimes.

Six months later, another man said he had been robbed in Nassau County by two police impersonators and described the main aggressor as an Indian woman about Ms. Sumasar’s height. The man said he had managed to take down the first three letters of the Jeep Grand Cherokee’s New York license plate — AJD.

All the while, Ms. Sumasar had a strong alibi, including cell phone records showing that calls were made from her phone at a casino in Connecticut on the day of the robbery.

But Sheryl Anania, executive assistant district attorney in Nassau County, said Ms. Sumasar’s business was foundering, so she appeared to have a motive.

The final fake crime was conjured in May 2010, officials said, when an acquaintance of Mr. Ramrattan said she had been held up by a couple posing as police officers. She said they were driving a Grand Cherokee, but she gave a full Florida license plate number.

She said she heard the pair call each other by name — “Seem” and “Elvis.” Elvis was the nickname of another former boyfriend of Ms. Sumasar, who owned the Jeep.

When the police looked into the Florida plate number, they found that the day after the purported March robbery, the title and the plate for the Cherokee had been transferred from Elvis to Ms. Sumasar’s sister in Florida.

Ms. Sumasar, who holds a Florida driver’s license, had driven the car to Florida to register it. To the police, she seemed to be covering her tracks.

With all the evidence pointing to Ms. Sumasar, the police arrested her. Bail was set at $1 million.

Prosecutors said the scheme unraveled in December 2010 — just weeks before Ms. Sumasar was to go on trial — when an informer told the police that Mr. Ramrattan had staged the plot. The informer gave detectives a number for a cellphone owned by Mr. Ramrattan.

When they checked phone records, they discovered multiple calls to the false witnesses, who confessed to the police. They were charged with perjury. …

via A Revenge Plot So Intricate, the Prosecutors Were Pawns – NYTimes.com.

McDonald’s Happy Meal to Get Healthier

STEPHANIE STROM-  Bowing to pressure from health advocates and parents, McDonald’s is putting the Happy Meal on a diet.

The company announced Tuesday that it would more than halve the amount of French fries and add fruit to its popular children’s meal in an effort to reduce the overall calorie count by 20 percent.

But McDonald’s appeasement only went so far. A toy will still come with each Happy Meal despite criticism that the trinkets, often with tie-ins to movies like “Toy Story,” foster a powerful connection between children and the often calorie-laden meals.

While Happy Meals account for less than 10 percent of all McDonald’s sales, the signature box and its contents — first introduced in 1979 — have become a favorite target in recent years. Lawmakers and consumers have rallied around breaking that childhood link between toys and fast food, with the efforts increasing as Michelle Obama and national public health officials point to the estimated 17 percent rate of obesity among the nation’s youths. …

via McDonald’s Happy Meal to Get Healthier – NYTimes.com.

Biologist says cancers might actually be newly-evolved species inside your body

We think of cancer as a disease, a form of runaway cell growth within an organism. But we might not have realized what cancers really are: separate, brand new parasitic species that evolve from and prey upon their human hosts.

That’s the theory put forward by UC Berkeley biologist Peter Duesberg, who argues that the very act of carcinogenesis – the formation of cancer – is itself a form of speciation, in which distinct new species evolve. …

“Cancer is comparable to a bacterial level of complexity, but still autonomous, that is, it doesn’t depend on other cells for survival; it doesn’t follow orders like other cells in the body, and it can grow where, when and how it likes. That’s what species are all about.”

… One intriguing possibility is that these cancerous species may be configured for cellular flexibility and immortality, but they’re also still very fragile, and their fundamentally damaged chromosomes means they exist right on the very brink of viability. If that’s the case, then all we need to do is figure out a way to force cancer to keep evolving, shredding its chromosomes still further until it’s no longer able to survive.

via Biologist says cancers might actually be newly-evolved species inside your body. | landesbioscience

Hotspot found on Moon’s far side

Scientists have found evidence of volcanoes on the far side of the Moon.

The new discovery, reported in the journal Nature Geoscience is a rare example of volcanism on the lunar surface not associated with asteroid, meteor or comet impact events.

Until now the best known examples of volcanism were on the Moon’s near side in a region known as the Procellarum KREEP terrane.

A team of scientists, led by Dr Bradley Jolliff from Washington University in St Louis, used images and other data gathered by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to assess the composition of an unusual region on the far side of the moon called the Compton-Belkovich thorium anomaly.

They focused on an area containing numerous domes, some more than six kilometres high.

The domes featured steeply sloping sides which Jolliff and colleagues interpret as, “volcanic in origin and formed from viscous lava”.

“We also observe circular depressions, which we suggest result from caldera collapse or volcanic vents,” the researchers write.

The LRO data indicates the rocks are rich in thorium, silica and alkali-feldspar minerals, making them different from the black basalts that make up the lunar mare on the near side. …

via Hotspot found on Moon’s far side › News in Science (ABC Science).

Scientists: No time travel possible… except forward

Hong Kong physicists say they have proved that a single photon obeys Einstein’s theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light — demonstrating that outside science fiction, time travel is impossible.

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology research team led by Du Shengwang said they had proved that a single photon, or unit of light, “obeys the traffic law of the universe.”

“Einstein claimed that the speed of light was the traffic law of the universe or in simple language, nothing can travel faster than light,” the university said on its website.

“Professor Du’s study demonstrates that a single photon, the fundamental quanta of light, also obeys the traffic law of the universe just like classical EM (electromagnetic) waves.”

The possibility of time travel was raised 10 years ago when scientists discovered superluminal — or faster-than-light — propagation of optical pulses in some specific medium, the team said.

It was later found to be a visual effect, but researchers thought it might still be possible for a single photon to exceed light speed.

Du, however, believed Einstein was right and determined to end the debate by measuring the ultimate speed of a single photon, which had not been done before.

“The study, which showed that single photons also obey the speed limit c, confirms Einstein’s causality; that is, an effect cannot occur before its cause,” the university said.

“By showing that single photons cannot travel faster than the speed of light, our results bring a closure to the debate on the true speed of information carried by a single photon,” said Du, assistant professor of physics.

“Our findings will also likely have potential applications by giving scientists a better picture on the transmission of quantum information.”

The team’s study was published in the U.S. peer-reviewed scientific journal Physical Review Letters.

via Time Travel Impossible, Say Scientists : Discovery News.

Taking a trip? Try staying in private homes instead of hotels

This is an interesting idea:  A site called AirBnB allows you to rent a room in a private home instead of in a hotel on a nightly basis.

Would you do it?  Have you done it?

—

AirBnB:AirBnB is a service that connects budget travelers with locals who have space to rent. This site is kind of like couchsurfing but it isn’t free (although the accommodation is often nicer). Sometimes the locals have an extra room and sometimes they rent our the entire apartment.  The site has a lot of nice photographs of the rentals and you pay for your stay through AirBnb (so you don’t have to worry about getting ripped off). As with most sites like these, you’re going to have more selection in larger cities and you might not find anything in smaller towns.

Crashpadder: The same idea as AirBnB.

iStopOver: Similar to AirBnB and Crashpadder

More benefits:

Budget Friendly – on average 83% cheaper than the equivalent hotel. People Friendly – each Pad comes with a free, friendly, local expert. Environmentally Friendly – the carbon footprint of the average stay is 80% smaller than a hotel stay.

Update: AirBnB is not turning out, for me, to be as great as it seemed.

There are lots of ads, but only 1 in 5 was actually available. And with the one, I lost $45 due to a 5 day no-refund cancellation policy. The host, an Asian lady, seemed nice and had good reviews, but then right before you go, you find out that the host is not going to be there, but instead, OMAR will be in the room next door to you and he knows to expect you…. OMAR, who you don’t get to see a picture of … and who is probably the real host. The place had good reviews, but I got a creepy vibe and cancelled 4 days and 23 hours before my visit. With the 5 day cancellation policy, however, I get no money back.

Getting ripped off sucks. Better to just stay with friends and family or a non-smoking Motel 6 room.

AirBnB, according to the LA Times, also had some problems with guests vandalizing homes, but that seems very rare and they do now offer an insurance policy.

Race to Moon by Private Companies

Now that the last space shuttle has landed back on Earth, a new generation of space entrepreneurs would like to whip up excitement about the prospect of returning to the Moon.

Spurred by a $30 million purse put up by Google, 29 teams have signed up for a competition to become the first private venture to land on the Moon. Most of them are unlikely to overcome the financial and technical challenges to meet the contest deadline of December 2015, but several teams think they have a good shot to win — and to take an early lead in a race to take commercial advantage of our celestial neighbor.

At the very least, a flotilla of unmanned spacecraft could be headed Moonward within the next few years, with goals that range from lofty to goofy.

One Silicon Valley venture, Moon Express, is positioning itself as a future FedEx for Moon deliveries: if you have something to send there, the company would like to take it. Moon Express was having a party on Thursday night to show off the flight capabilities of its lunar lander, based on technology it licensed from NASA, and “to begin the next era of the private commercial race to the Moon,” as the invitation put it.

“In the near future, the Moon Express lunar lander will be mining the Moon for precious resources that we need here on Earth,” the invitation promised. “Years from now, we will all remember we were there.”

Naveen Jain, an Internet billionaire and a founder of Moon Express, says the company will spend $70 million to $100 million to try to win the Google Lunar X Prize, but could recoup its investment on its first flight. He envisions selling exclusive broadcast rights for video from the Moon, as well as sponsorships, à la Nascar, for companies to put their logos on the lander.

Or, perhaps, a tie-in to reality television.

via Race to Moon by Private Companies – NYTimes.com.

The Mystery of the Pioneer Anomaly Solved at Last

Finally, the case is solved, and the villain is dead.

As the two spacecraft retreated into the distance, the data they beamed back showed that they were slowing down a little more than they should have been. Long vaunted as evidence that something was amiss in physics — perhaps that Einstein’s theory of gravity was wrong — the anomaly spawned entire academic conferences and thousands of papers.

But, as explained in our coverage of an earlier stage of Turyshev et al.’s work, some scientists believed that the anomaly had a much more mundane explanation. Namely, the scientists suspected that heat was being emitted by the spacecraft’s generators anisotropically — more in one direction than the other. If this were the case, the heat would exert an unbalanced recoil force on the spacecraft, causing them to change speed. Indeed, in April, a group of researchers in Portugal came up with just such a model for how the Pioneers’ heaters could have created a recoil force.

But many have argued that the data itself ruled out this explanation for the Pioneer Anomaly. As the plutonium-238 that served as the Pioneers’ onboard heat source radioactively decayed, it would have emitted less heat over time. Thus, if heat were the source of the Pioneer Anomaly, the anomaly should have lessened with time as well. But the data seemed to suggest that the Pioneer Anomaly was constant — an undying force — and thus much more fundamental.

But for their new analysis [PDF], Turyshev et. al. compiled a lot more data than had ever been analyzed before, spanning a much longer period of the Pioneers’ flight times. They studied 23 years of data from Pioneer 10 instead of just 11, and 11 years of data from Pioneer 11 instead of 3. As explained in their new paper, the more complete data sets reveal that the spacecraft’s anomalous acceleration did indeed seem to decrease with time. In short, the undying force had been dying after all, just like the decaying plutonium. In that case, it was most likely just a consequence of wonky heaters — mystery solved. …

via The Mystery of the Pioneer Anomaly Solved at Last | Popular Science.

Cern scientists suspect glimpse of Higgs boson

Scientists may have caught their first glimpse of the elusive Higgs boson, which is thought to give mass to the basic building blocks of nature.

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, the European particle physics lab near Geneva, announced the findings at a conference on Friday.

The world’s most powerful atom smasher hunts for signs of new physics by slamming subatomic particles together at nearly the speed of light in an 18-mile round tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border.

Speaking at the meeting, teams working on two of the collider’s huge detectors, Atlas and CMS, independently reported unusual bumps in their data that could be the first hints of the particle.

Physicists stressed that it was too early to know whether the signals were due to the missing particle.

Bumps that look like new discoveries can be caused by statistical fluctuations in data, flaws in computer models and other glitches, they said.

“We cannot say anything today, but clearly it’s intriguing,” Fabiola Gianotti, spokeswoman for the 3,000-strong Atlas team, said. She said the picture would become clearer as the groups gathered more data and combined results in the next few months. …

via Cern scientists suspect glimpse of Higgs boson | Science | The Guardian.