Groups Sue US Government for Mobile Phone Tracking

NY Times Article related to Government Mobile Tracking


It was a fear a long time ago, that the US Government would eventually have the means to know our exact location at all times. This has been a reality for most of us after the PATRIOT Act and some other National Security tactics, but apparently The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation believe that this is an unconstitutional act and a clear case of the government overstepping their boundaries. They are requesting the records that the government has gathered and also the number of cases where they were not obtained by standard legal procedure. I feel somewhat bothered by this, then again I am a nobody, a law abiding citizen, but at the same time if anything ever happened even by false accusation, there would be police or feds picking me up on the street within minutes. There are privacy issues with buying a mobile phone, but I do not believe that we should have our information traded around with no reason for such action. The article says that signing up for a contract with a mobile phone company should not be "synonymous with signing up to be spied on by the government." Well that is all I have for now, so you decide if you think that this is a practice that needs to be going on, and whether most of the general public even knows about it.

A New Trojan Horse that Attacks Mac Users

Well you might not have known it, but there were at least two other virus scares for Mac users in the past. They may not spread to your computer but think for a second before downloading any file that can be opened with your AppleScript program. Due to a vulnerability in Apple's Remote Desktop Agent, local users ( on a local network ) or anyone with a Secure Shell Client can execute commands via AppleScript. The Trojan is not a virus, as it does not send itself to any of your contacts, but it is released on a mass scale via LimeWire and iChat. The trojan runs undetected but allows outside users access to your username and passwords, open ports in the firewall and turn off system logging (yeah I don't really know what damage that can do). So if you want to check out a quick fix for this security flaw or just want to read the full story click on the link below.

Trojan Horse Article on The Tech Herald

Rotten Tomatoes - Why go to a Movie you know will suck?!?

RottenTomatoes.com

Now, I knew about this website LONG before I went to catch M. Night Shyamalan's new flick The Happening, and although I thought it would suck, there was a little gleam of hope somewhere deep within me. I thought, well even if the generic storyline was as terrible as usual, at least Mark Wahlberg would save it. Nope. Didn't happen. The acting was terrible, the story was terrible and to top it all off, I'm not really into the usually dependable Zoey Deschanel. I wish I had gone to rotten tomatoes as I usually do, if I don't really care if I spoil my hopes for a movie, because I would have known. The film scored a terrible 19% among T-Meter Crtitics (Which I believe are just amateur film snobs)on their "Tomatometer." Even among the "Top Critics" it only gave it a 13% rating. So I didn't enjoy it all that much. I haven't seen The Village and I think that anything Shyamalan has done since Unbreakable pretty much sucked. Take for example Lady in the Water, not really my style.
On to the meat of the story, this website is a very useful tool for new or old releases. There are many "twitter-like" posts from each critic scattered about the page and makes it easy to get a quick glimpse of what you are in for. It has quotes from "real" critics as well, if you are into that whole official kind of reviews. I personally like the people who aren't snobs about movies, but you will get them anywhere, even among friends. Rotten Tomatoes at least gives you many different views and will allow you to make the right decision to go see The Incredible Hulk, which according to my brother is awesome, instead of that piece of trash, no twist or explanation shame that is The Happening RATED R. For showtimes... click... yeah that is what should have happend.

They Have Found Ice on Mars

An Article on Finding the Ice on Mars

Well, I don't know if anyone out there is interesting in the fact that they found ice on the planet Mars, but I am and thats what this blog is about. Anyway, so a couple months or years ago they started to believe that there were chasms and eroded areas of Mars that appered to be created by flowing waters. So we assumed that there was water on Mars at some point in time. Finding ice though is a whole different ball game because that ice has trapped information that could prove useful to us in teh question of whether there was actually LIFE on Mars. So the Phoenix will cut some chunks of ice out of the ground and evaporate the chunks in the ovens. The vapors will be analyzed and if we find amino acids, then there was life. Check out some of the pictures by clicking on the link below. More to come hopefully.

Here are some more pictures

Yahoo Answers : A Recent Addiction

Recently I came upon a website while asking Google a question. I came upon yahoo answers and found that it was a very useful question search engine. So I used my 7 year old Yahoo! account to set up an Yahoo! Answers account. I have since only asked one question about health benefits for temporary employees, which to my dismay was an enthusiastic "No, Benefits are a Gift!" I thought that to be a little over the top, but it answered my question. My favorite part is the answering though. You answer and then others will give your answer the thumbs up or thumbs down and someetimes pick your answer to be the "Best Answer" that will award you more points that you may ask questions with. It is competitive and it is fast. Like someone writing "First" on a comment board it is a rush to give that first solution. finding out that you are wrong is somewhat embarassing, but that happens to the best of us. So check it out - http://answers.yahoo.com/ - and you will probably have a little bit of an addiction too.

The Hulk (Again?), Gay and Straight Gender Similarities and What's Up on the Associated Press

All Photos Courtesy of Google.com

The Hulk and The Happening

The only reason I had to put this up is because if you are like me, you may be perplexed as to how the movie industry can come out with two movies about The Incredible Hulk within 5 years of one another, one of the two would have to be a sequel right? Wrong. Apparently the industry is going through this "Overhaul" trend where we have to redo everything that wasn't perfect the first time. I am not complaining, but it does cause some confusion. The first movie "The Hulk" starring Eric Bana and Jennifer Connoly was terrible by many opinions. Get rid of all this and let Marvel produce YET ANOTHER movie and it will sell. Bottom line, Marvel is at the top of their game now and there is no sign of them stopping yet.

Gay Men are to Straight Women as ...

I found this article to be a bit risky to throw out on this board, but it may be of some interest to you as well. The article states that there are some, now note the "some" in there, SOME similarities between gay men and straight women in the the area of the brain that is responsible for emotions, mood and anxiety. It also notes that according to this study there are some similarities in this part of the brain between straight men and gay women. There is also a difference in size so that in the near future we may be able to determine the future orientation of the child. I personally think this is a bad idea, I think that we should explore these options on our own. If a child is told that he or she will be straight or gay when they grow up aren't they going to be more inclined to lead that life? Then again this may put to rest that whole debate about nature vs. nurture.

AP Gets Angry with Blogging

And what is this now? As long as I have read news sites, probably a couple years now, I was under the impression that the Associated Press stories were just copied and pasted from publication to publication. Now they are angry because bloggers are posting snippets and headlines on their blogs? Everyone needs to just get their heands in everyone else's pockets. It feels like a desperate menuver to regain control of news reporting. Many people don't rely on the classic newspaper on the train scenario and now read blogs and other electronic media to get their fill. I don't think this will affect me, but who knows? I just posted a link to their website about the Inredible Hulk movie so I figured I would post as much as I could and get my fill on other reporters' writing. Not that I am a plagiarist, but I like to reword every now and then. Haven't we all?

Honda FCX

Honda FCX Clarity Article : Hydrogen Electric Car
Introducing the new FCX Clarity, Honda's new hybrid car. The only thing that is emitted is water and it gets an equivalent of 74 mpg. I am assuming that this number is city and highway rated because of the way the car's fuel system is set up. It isn't a bad design for the looks portion of ratings, although the article mentions mixed reviews."Where are we going to refuel these things" I continued to ask myself as I read the article. The article states that there are 3 service stations in southern California near the dealerships where you can recharge your hydrogen load. This seems a bit inconvenient to me considering the high price ($600/mo. subsidized) of the lease. And the fact that you would have to live less 280 miles from one of these stations at which point you would only be able to drive to teh feuling station and back. The article mentions a few celebrities that will be recieving the cars. Over the next 3 years they plan to ship 200 cars to the United States. This is obviously a test run to see if it is a reliable source of energy for the automotive industry. We'll see how it works out.