AdamSmith

Indeed $38/head seems like a bargain to deal with a few troublesome folk. I agree. Mars is a great target for what we're doing there right now: robotic investigation. As messed up in several respects as our space program is today, a maybe under-appreciated aspect of it is the great success of the many, many unmanned missions underway even now -- not only the new Mars rover, but also the Opportunity rover, still operating almost ten years into its mission, the Voyager probe now in the process of leaving the sphere of solar influence and beginning to give first readings of the interstellar medium, all the other near- and deep-space probes finding new things. The cost/benefit of unmanned exploration far exceeds that of manned spaceflight. Where I think manned missions would make sense would be to establish permanent bases on the moon, for scientific research such as giant radiotelescopes on the far side, shielded from Earth's electronic racket, etc., and also for industrial purposes beginning with extraction of lunar mineral resources. This was originally part of the Apollo plan -- a phase 2 after the initial trips, to be called the Apollo Applications Program. A casualty of the early '70s political and economic climate, alas.

Think I'll wait til the Martian escort population builds up a bit... More than 100,000 want to go to Mars and not return, project says By Jennifer Juarez, CNNMexico.com updated 5:15 PM EDT, Fri August 9, 2013 | Filed under: Innovations Mars applicants apply here (CNN) -- More than 100,000 people are eager to make themselves at home on another planet. They've applied for a one-way trip to Mars, hoping to be chosen to spend the rest of their lives on uncharted territory, according to an organization planning the manned missions. The Mars One project wants to colonize the red planet, beginning in 2022. There are financial and practical questions about this venture that haven't been clarified. Will there be enough money? Will people really be able to survive on Mars? But these haven't stopped some 30,000 Americans from signing up. You can see some of the candidates on the project's website, but they're not the only ones who have applied, said Bas Lansdorp, Mars One CEO and co-founder. "There is also a very large number of people who are still working on their profile, so either they have decided not to pay the application fee, or they are still making their video or they're still filling out the questionnaire or their resume. So the people that you can see online are only the ones that have finished and who have set their profiles as public," Lansdorp said. The entrepreneur did not specify how many have paid the fees, completed their profiles and configured them as private. The application process Anyone 18 or older may apply, but the fee depends on a user's nationality. For Americans, it's $38; if you're in Mexico, however, it's a mere $15. The company said it sets the price based on the gross domestic product per capita of each nation. "We wanted it to be high enough for people to have to really think about it and low enough for anyone to be able to afford it," Lansdorp said. For the first crew, the Mars One mission will cost $6 billion, Lansdorp said. The idea is for it to be funded by sponsors and media that will pay for broadcasting rights of shows and movies documenting everything from the astronauts' training on Earth to their deployment and colonization of Mars. Out of the applicants, Mars One said it will select a multicontinental group of 40 astronauts this year. Four of them -- two men and two women -- are set to leave for Mars in September 2022, landing in April 2023. Another multicontinental group of four will be deployed two years later, according to the Mars One plan. None of them will return to Earth. An illustration shows the proposed Mars One settlement. A manned mission to Mars is planned in nearly a decade. The astronauts will undergo a required eight-year training in a secluded location. According to the project site, they will learn how to repair habitat structures, grow vegetables in confined spaces and address "both routine and serious medical issues such as dental upkeep, muscle tears and bone fractures." "What we want to do is tell the story to the world," Lansdorp said, "when humans go to Mars, when they settle on Mars and build a new Earth, a new planet. This is one of the most exciting things that ever happened, and we want to share the story with the entire world." How will Mars be colonized? Each lander that Mars One sends will be able to carry about 5,511 pounds of "useful load" to Mars, he said. After eight missions, more than 44,000 pounds of supplies and people are expected to have arrived. The capsules themselves, whose weight is not included in that number, will become part of the habitat. Food and solar panels will go in the capsules. Earth won't be sending much water or oxygen though -- those will be manufactured on Mars, Lansdorp said. Astronauts will filter Martian water from the Martian soil. "We will evaporate it and condense it back into its liquid state," he said. "From the water we can make hydrogen and oxygen, and we will use the oxygen for a breathing atmosphere inside the habitat. This will be prepared by the rovers autonomously before the humans arrive." It sounds like terraforming, a process in which the conditions of a planet are modified to make it habitable, but Lansdorp said it isn't. "We will create an atmosphere that looks like the atmosphere on Earth, so you could say that we are terraforming the habitat. But to terraform the entire planet, that's a project that will take hundreds and hundreds of years," he added. A dangerous mission In spite of the risks of space travel, the Mars One founder said he is convinced of the viability of the project. However, some space travel experts have said the risks are far too high to carry out these manned missions to Mars, a distance that humans have never traveled. Radiation is a big concern. NASA does not allow their astronauts to expose themselves to radiation levels that could increase their risk of developing cancer by more than 3%. To maintain the radiation exposure standards that NASA requires, the maximum time an astronaut can spend in space "is anywhere from about 300 days to about 360 days for the solar minimum activity. For solar maximum, in ranges anywhere from about 275 days to 500 days," said Eddie Semones, NASA spaceflight radiation officer. A round-trip journey to Mars could expose astronauts to the maximum amount of radiation allowed in a career under current NASA standards, according to a recent study by scientists at the space agency. Mars One is planning a one-way journey, which doesn't negate the problem, and being on Mars could expose astronauts to even more radiation, depending on how long they stay and what the shielding conditions are like. Radiation damages cells' DNA, which can lead to cell death or permanent changes that may result in cancer. However, "there's no convincing human evidence for excess abnormalities in offspring of radiation-exposed adults," Semones said. While orbiting the Earth, astronauts get exposed to greater concentrations of cosmic background radiation than here on Earth in addition to charged particles trapped in the upper atmosphere and from the sun, said Robert J. Reynolds, epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center. As a spacecraft moves into deep space, the people on board would be exposed to even more cosmic radiation and solar particles, which is "fairly dangerous," Reynolds said. Interestingly, according to Reynolds, astronauts' risk of dying of cancer is lower than that of the general public because they tend to be in shape, eat well, don't smoke and receive careful monitoring from doctors. Of course, none of them have been to Mars. Semones emphasized that NASA does not study the health effects of Mars colonization and that it's focusing on shorter recognition missions of the surface of Mars. "We're not looking at colonization of Mars or anything. We're not focusing our research on those kinds of questions." Can it be done? Mars One isn't the only group hoping to make history by sending people to the red planet. The Inspiration Mars Foundation wants to launch two people -- a man and a woman -- on a 501-day, round-trip journey to Mars and back in 2018 without ever touching down. At this time there is no technology that can protect astronauts from an excess of space radiation. "The maximum number of days to stay with our standards is on the order of 500 days. So any mission that would exceed 500 days would not be doable," Semones said. Reynolds agreed: "At this point it's completely infeasible to try to send someone to Mars unless we can get there faster or we develop better shielding for a spacecraft." NASA is working on engines intended to cut the travel time to Mars by the 2030s, but those systems won't be ready for many years, Chris Moore, NASA's deputy director of advanced exploration systems, told CNN this year. In the meantime, Moore said engineers could try to limit travelers' exposures by designing a spacecraft in such a way that it provides more protection. But Mars One founder Lansdorp insisted his group will get people landing on Mars by 2023. "The risks of space travel in general are already very high, so radiation is really not our biggest concern," he said. If that all sounds good, you can still sign up. But remember: You can never go home again. http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/09/tech/innovation/mars-one-applications/index.html?hpt=hp_c4

This is contrary to some of the above heartfelt and seriously reasoned-out advice: I think you should continue following your heart and instinct as far as they lead you. If there is pain at the end, so what? Three of my best friends came to me through such a mess. One of them I met because he was an escort.

Compelling. http://m.politico.com/iphone/story/0813/95420.html

"There have been murder and larceny in every generation, but that hasn't made murder meritorious or larceny legal." Sen. Sam Ervin

Weiner is nuts. Nothing new, just one more example. Weiner mocks British reporter Posted by CNN's Ashley Killough (CNN) – Stopping on the campaign trail for a sidewalk interview, a clearly agitated Anthony Weiner mocked a British reporter Thursday and laughed as she asked him questions. "It's hard to take you seriously," he said after being asked whether he was pursuing his New York City mayoral bid out of "ambition" or "hunger for the job." He then appears to repeat her question in a British accent. Lucy Watson @lucywatsonitv My full run-in with #weiner http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZx5I3Z-K-0&feature=youtu.be … 1:52 AM - 9 Aug 2013 Standing with his hands on his hips, Weiner jokingly sneered as the ITV reporter, Lucy Watson, asked how he plans to carry out his political campaign following his admission last month that he continued to send lewd messages following his 2011 congressional resignation. Asked if anything could stop him, Weiner replied: "I just have a feeling I've like stepped into a Monty Python bit." The former congressman has vowed to stay in the race, with a little more than a month to go before the September 10 Democratic primary. "I don't know, would anything stop me? Now is a rock going to fall on my head?" he continued. "No, nothing is going to stop me. I'm going to win this election." In the roughly two-minute interview, Weiner struggled to hold eye contact and grew distracted with passers-by on the street. "Anything else I can do for ITV? You want me to do the weather or something?" he asked. As the reporter complied, he then turned to the camera to deliver his fake forecast for England. "It's going to be raining, cloudy and gray. So do what you can guys. Try to keep your head up. Keep a stiff–what is it? A stiff upper lip," he said. He thanked his campaign volunteers and said he had to leave to go home and feed the baby. A new poll released Thursday indicated Weiner remains behind three of his opponents in the Democratic contest. He also made headlines earlier in the week for referring to a Republican candidate as "grandpa" during a confrontation shortly before an AARP forum. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/09/weiner-mocks-british-reporter/?iref=allsearch

Lavabit's closure marks the death of secure cloud computing in the USOnce Edward Snowden's use of the email service was public, it was perhaps a given that Lavabit would be targeted by the US Alex Hern theguardian.com, Saturday 10 August 2013 05.00 EDT On Thursday afternoon, Ladar Levison, the owner and operator of Lavabit, an email service that prides itself on privacy and security, abruptly closed his website, posting a short message to his former users. "I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit," he wrote. "After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot." Levison might be gagged by the law, but it's not hard to guess at least part of the reason why his site is having legal troubles. In early July, journalists and human rights activists received an email from edsnowden@lavabit.com, inviting them to a press conference in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport. Given the NSA leaker's understandable desire for security, it is not surprising that Edward Snowden would use a service designed for keeping messages out of prying hands. But knowing the American government's desire to go to extraordinary lengths (such as grounding the Bolivian president's plane) necessary to recapture him, it was perhaps a given that Lavabit would be a target once Snowden's use of the service was public. Assuming the former infrastructure analyst's justified paranoia was put to good use, even a fully co-operative Lavabit wouldn't be able to provide the US government with much help. One of the site's biggest selling points against more popular email services such as Gmail is its full support for public-key encryption. This is a form of encryption which uses two numerical "keys" to encode a message. One, the public key, is given out freely. Anyone wanting to send a message to Snowden would know his public key, encrypt the message with it, and send the now-garbled text. Snowden would then use his private key to decrypt it. This practice is also known as "asymmetric encryption", because of the most important factor in it: the public key cannot be used to decrypt the messages it has encrypted. Only the private key can do that. And, while the technological details are far too complex to get in to here (it's basically magic maths, involving extremely large prime numbers), based on everything we know about the intelligence services, even they can't break that sort of encryption. If they don't have the key, they don't have the data. Unfortunately, as we know from the Verizon leaks that started this whole thing off, you can find out a huge amount about people without ever looking at their actual data. The metadata they leave behind – data about their data – is just as valuable. In Lavabit's case, that almost certainly includes who Snowden has been emailing, and when. Depending on how much data the site stores, and how careful Snowden was when accessing it (he may have taken measures such as accessing the site through anonymisers like Tor, which would limit the damage), they could have details such as when he checked his inbox, what IP address he was checking from, and which browser he was using. Levison promises he will fight "for the constitution" in the courts, but the odds are stacked against him. Bigger companies with better legal resources than Lavabit have been forced to submit to the national security apparatus. Eventually any metadata the site does hold is likely to end up in the hands of the government. It's not hard to sense the desperation in Levison's voice when he writes that "without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States", but it's also admirable honesty. From a security point of view, cloud computing in the US is dead on its feet. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/10/lavabit-closure-cloud-computing-edward-snowden

NSA loophole allows warrantless search for US citizens' emails and phone callsExclusive: Spy agency has secret backdoor permission to search databases for individual Americans' communications James Ball and Spencer Ackerman The Guardian, Friday 9 August 2013 12.08 EDT Detail of Section 702 of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which gives the NSA authority to target without warrant the communications of foreign targets. The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden. The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans' communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing "warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans". The authority, approved in 2011, appears to contrast with repeated assurances from Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials to both Congress and the American public that the privacy of US citizens is protected from the NSA's dragnet surveillance programs. The intelligence data is being gathered under Section 702 of the of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which gives the NSA authority to target without warrant the communications of foreign targets, who must be non-US citizens and outside the US at the point of collection. The communications of Americans in direct contact with foreign targets can also be collected without a warrant, and the intelligence agencies acknowledge that purely domestic communications can also be inadvertently swept into its databases. That process is known as "incidental collection" in surveillance parlance. But this is the first evidence that the NSA has permission to search those databases for specific US individuals' communications. A secret glossary document provided to operatives in the NSA's Special Source Operations division – which runs the Prism program and large-scale cable intercepts through corporate partnerships with technology companies – details an update to the "minimization" procedures that govern how the agency must handle the communications of US persons. That group is defined as both American citizens and foreigners located in the US. "While the FAA 702 minimization procedures approved on 3 October 2011 now allow for use of certain United States person names and identifiers as query terms when reviewing collected FAA 702 data," the glossary states, "analysts may NOT/NOT [not repeat not] implement any USP [uS persons] queries until an effective oversight process has been developed by NSA and agreed to by DOJ/ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence]." The term "identifiers" is NSA jargon for information relating to an individual, such as telephone number, email address, IP address and username as well as their name. The document – which is undated, though metadata suggests this version was last updated in June 2012 – does not say whether the oversight process it mentions has been established or whether any searches against US person names have taken place. Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, has obliquely warned for months that the NSA's retention of Americans' communications incidentally collected and its ability to search through it has been far more extensive than intelligence officials have stated publicly. Speaking this week, Wyden told the Guardian it amounts to a "backdoor search" through Americans' communications data. "Section 702 was intended to give the government new authorities to collect the communications of individuals believed to be foreigners outside the US, but the intelligence community has been unable to tell Congress how many Americans have had their communications swept up in that collection," he said. "Once Americans' communications are collected, a gap in the law that I call the 'back-door searches loophole' allows the government to potentially go through these communications and conduct warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans." Wyden, along with his intelligence committee colleague Mark Udall, have attempted repeatedly to warn publicly about the ability of the intelligence community to look at the communications of US citizens, but are limited by their obligation not to reveal highly classified information. But in a letter they recently wrote to the NSA director, General Keith Alexander, the two senators warned that a fact sheet released by the NSA in the wake of the initial Prism revelations to reassure the American public about domestic surveillance was misleading. In the letter, they warned that Americans' communications might be inadvertently collected and stored under Section 702, despite rules stating only data on foreigners should be collected and retained. "[W]e note that this same fact sheet states that under Section 702, 'Any inadvertently acquired communication of or concerning a US person must be promptly destroyed if it is neither relevant to the authorised purpose nor evidence of a crime,'" they said. "We believe that this statement is somewhat misleading, in that it implied the NSA has the ability to determine how many American communications it has collected under Section 702, or that the law does not allow the NSA to deliberately search for the records of particular Americans." The foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court issues approvals annually authorizing such operations, with specific rules on who can be targeted and what measures must be taken to minimize any details "inadvertently" collected on US persons. Secret minimization procedures dating from 2009, published in June by the Guardian, revealed that the NSA could make use of any "inadvertently acquired" information on US persons under a defined range of circumstances, including if they held usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity. At that stage, however, the rules did not appear to allow for searches of collected data relating to specific US persons. Assurances from Obama and senior administration officials to the American public about the privacy of their communications have relied on the strict definition of what constitutes "targeting" while making no mention of the permission to search for US data within material that has already been collected. The day after the Guardian revealed details of the NSA's Prism program, President Obama said: "Now, with respect to the internet and emails, this doesn't apply to US citizens and it doesn't apply to people living in the United States." Speaking at a House hearing on 18 June this year, deputy attorney general James Cole told legislators "[T]here's a great deal of minimization procedures that are involved here, particularly concerning any of the acquisition of information that deals or comes from US persons. "As I said, only targeting people outside the United States who are not US persons. But if we do acquire any information that relates to a US person, under limited criteria only can we keep it." Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, said in June 2012 that she believed the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department were sufficiently mindful of Americans' privacy. "The intelligence community is strictly prohibited from using Section 702 to target a US person, which must at all times be carried out pursuant to an individualized court order based upon probable cause," Feinstein stated in a report provided to the Senate record. While there are several congressional proposals to constrain the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone records, there has to date been much less legislative appetite to abridge its powers under Section 702 – as lawmakers are satisfied it doesn't sufficiently violate Americans' privacy. "702 is focused outside the United States at non-citizens," said Adam Schiff, a member of the House intelligence committee. "The evidence of the effectiveness of 702 is much more substantial than 215 [the bulk phone records collection]. So I think there are fewer fourth amendment concerns and more evidence of the saliency of the program." Wyden and Udall – both of whom say foreign surveillance conducted under Section 702 has legitimate value for US national security – have tried and failed to restrict the NSA's ability to collect and store Americans' communications that it accidentally acquires. Wyden told the Guardian that he raised concerns about the loophole with President Obama during an August 1 meeting with legislators about the NSA's surveillance powers. "I believe that Congress should reform Section 702 to provide better protections for Americans' privacy, and that this could be done without losing the value that this collection provides," he said. The Guardian put the latest revelations to the NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence but no response had been received by the time of publication. More: NSA surveillance: the long fight to close backdoor into US communications http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/09/nsa-loophole-warrantless-searches-email-calls

That is an air mask designed specifically for pets. If you love doggies, donate to your local fire dept. designated for them to buy these devices.

Jahwol. But of what?

You need to transport your cute little ass back into the U.S. of A. as soon as possible. The enemy is waging psychogical warfare against you!

hito is asexual. (That is not a merely theoretical or hypothetical statement!)I forgot what i was going to say next.

One needs to be a bit versatile, that's all! Living in NYC I would drag somebody home without any idea what they were into, as I like everything. I was not even very particular about the gender in those cases where it was not immediately obvious.