First Alien Contact May be Robots
The first life we find might be a form of artificial intelligence - and it could indicate that humans, too, will one day be more machine than man. Dr Susah Schneider, an Associate Professor...
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December 2014 Breaking News Cyborgs Transhumanism Artificial Intelligence DARPA Demons dangers
December 2014 Breaking News Cyborgs Transhumanism Artificial Intelligence DARPA Superhuman demons dangers Demons Fallen Angels December 2014 Breaking News World #39;s First Robot Pilot ...
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Yann Lecun, Facebook // Data Driven #32 // Dec 2014
Professor Yann LeCun, Director of AI Research at Facebook, sat down for a fireside chat at December 2014 #39;s edition of Data Driven NYC to discuss deep learning and the future of artificial intellige...
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Update 16: Assault on Starcrown Aerospace
Get Interstellar Marines on Steam: http://www.IMonSTEAM.com Update 16: Assault On Starcrown Aerospace! 2014 has been an incredible year for Interstellar Mari...
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Interstellar Marines : Assault on Starcrown Aerospace [Update #16]
Another co-op map is here ! A little smaller in scale compared to Neurogen, but still has an interesting theme. Music in-game musics from Interstellar Mari...
By: Luftangreifer
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Interstellar Marines : Assault on Starcrown Aerospace [Update #16] - Video
Bachelors of Science, Aerospace Engineering
My oldest son graduated from Texas A M university today. Oh how the years have flown.
By: Texas Silhouette
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TEC, aerospace and defence quality specialist, has announced 20 new training courses for 2015.
Past delegates have come from many primes and their supply chains including: GE Aviation, UTC Aerospace Systems, Darchem, Meggitt, Lufthansa, B/E Aerospace, Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems, Babcock, and AugustaWestland.
Mick Ball, from PS Marsden, on the QMS Lead Auditor training: The team made the whole process of booking easy and there was plenty of advice given leading up to the course. It was enjoyable while being very intense and brain blowing at times. An awful lot of information into, what seemed like, a very short time frame.
Dr David Scrimshire, director of TEC, said: We are pleased that our courses are helping the staff of many aerospace companies improve their processes and systems and that we recently put through our 600th delegate. 2015 promises to be a fantastic year for the industry provided employees have the right skills and knowledge. We aim to play our part in increasing those skills and knowledge.
The courses include:
Practical Corrective Action for Managers
This unique course is currently being offered as an on-site event for up to 10 people. By the end of the 1-day interactive course and workshop management team members will be able to:
Aerospace APQP & PPAP (AS9145)
By the end of this 2-day interactive course and workshop participants will be able to implement and operate an effective New Product Introduction process incorporating Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP) and Production Product Approval Process (PPAP) for the Aviation, Space and Defence sectors in line with AS9145.
The course includes Project Management to conform to the fundamental requirements of AS/EN91XX:2009 and contractual requirements now being imposed by the global Primes. Mandatory requirements included in AS/EN9102:2004 and AS/EN9103:2012 are also addressed.
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What is going on? How do we explain this recent wave of secularization that is washing over so much of America?
The answer to these questions is actually much less theological or philosophical than one might think. It is simply not the case that inrecent years tens of millions of Americans have suddenly started doubting the cosmological or ontological arguments for the existenceof God, or that hundreds of thousands of other Americans have miraculously embraced the atheistic naturalism of Denis Diderot. Sure, thismay be happening here and there, in this or that dorm room or on this or that Tumblr page. The best-sellers written by Richard Dawkins,Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harrisas well as the irreverent impiety and flagrant mockery of religion by the likes of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, House, South Park, and Family Guyhave had some impact on American culture. As we have seen, a steady, incremental uptick of philosophical atheism and agnosticism is discernible in America in recent years. But the larger reality is that for the many millions of Americans who have joined the ranks of the nonreligious, the causes are most likely to be political and sociological in nature.
For starters, we can begin with the presence of the religious right, and the backlash it has engendered. Beginning in the 1980s, with therise of such groups as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, the closeness of conservative Republicanism with evangelical Christianity has been increasingly tight and publicly overt. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, more and more politicians on the right embracedthe conservative Christian agenda, and more and more outspoken conservative Christians allied themselves with the Republican Party.Examples abound, from Michele Bachmann to Ann Coulter, from Mike Huckabee to Pat Robertson, and from Rick Santorum to JamesDobson. With an emphasis on seeking to make abortion illegal, fighting against gay rights (particularly gay marriage), supporting prayerin schools, advocating abstinence only sex education, opposing stem cell research, curtailing welfare spending, supporting Israel, opposinggun control, and celebrating the war on terrorism, conservative Christians have found a warm welcome within the Republican Party, whichhas been clear about its openness to the conservative Christian agenda. This was most pronounced during the eight years that George W. Bush was in the White House.
What all of this this has done is alienate a lot of left-leaning or politically moderate Americans from Christianity. Sociologists MichaelHout and Claude Fischer have published compelling research indicating that much of the growth of nones in America is largely attributableto a reaction against this increased, overt mixing of Christianity and conservative politics. The rise of irreligion has been partiallyrelated to the fact that lots of people who had weak or limited attachments to religion and were either moderate or liberal politically foundthemselves at odds with the conservative political agenda of the Christian right and thus reacted by severing their already somewhat weakattachment to religion. Or as sociologist Mark Chaves puts it, After 1990 more people thought that saying you were religious was tantamountto saying you were a conservative Republican. So people who are not Republicans now are more likely to say that they have no religion.
A second factor that helps account for the recent rise of secularity in America is the devastation of, and reaction against, the CatholicChurchs pedophile priest scandal. For decades the higher-ups in the Catholic Church were reassigning known sexual predators toremote parishes rather than having them arrested and prosecuted. Those men in authority thus engaged in willful cover-ups, brash lawbreaking,and the aggressive slandering of accusersand all with utter impunity. The extent of this criminality is hard to exaggerate: over six thousand priests have now been credibly implicated in some form of sex abuse, five hundred have been jailed, and more victimshave been made known than one can imagine. After the extent of the crimesthe rapes and molestations as well as the cover-upsbecamewidely publicized, many Americans, and many Catholics specifically, were disgusted. Not only were the actual sexual crimes themselvesmorally abhorrent, but the degree to which those in positions of power sought to cover up these crimes and allow them to continue was trulyshocking. The result has been clear: a lot of Catholics have become ex-Catholics. For example, consider the situation in New England.Between 2000 and 2010, the Catholic Church lost 28 percent of its members in New Hampshire and 33 percent of its members in Maine,and closed nearly seventy parishesa quarter of the total numberthroughout the Boston area. In 1990, 54 percent of Massachusetts residents identified as Catholic, but it was down to 39 percent in 2008. And according to an American Values survey from 2012, althoughnearly one-third of Americans report being raised Catholic, only 22 percent currently identify as sucha precipitous nationwide declineindeed.
Of course, the negative reaction against the religious right and the Catholic pedophile scandal both have to do explicitly with religion. Buta very important third possible factor that may also account for the recent rise of secularity has nothing to do with religion. It is something utterly sociological: the dramatic increase of women in the paid labor force. British historian Callum Brown was the first to recognize this interesting correlation: when more and more women work outside the home, their religious involvementas well as that of their families tends to diminish. Brown rightly argues that it has been women who have historically kept their children and husbands interested and involved in religion. Then, starting in the 1960s, when more and more British women starting earning an income through work outside thehome, their interest inor time and energy forreligious involvement waned. And as women grew less religious, their husbands and childrenfollowed suit. Weve seen a similar pattern in many other European nations,especially in Scandinavia: Denmark and Sweden have the lowest levels of church attendance in the world, and simultaneously,Danish and Swedish women have among the highest rates of outside-the-home employment of any women in the world. And the data shows asimilar trajectory here in America. Back in the 1960s, only 11 percent of American households relied on a mother as their biggest or sole source of income. Today, more than 40 percent of American families are in such a situation. Thus it may very well be that as a significantly higher percentage of American moms earn a living in the paid labor force, their enthusiasm for and engagement with religion is being sapped, and thats playing a role in the broader secularization of our country.
Additional Factors
In addition to the above factorsthe reaction against the overt mingling of religion and conservative/right-wing politics, the reactionagainst the Catholic priest pedophile scandal, and the increase of women in the paid labor forceI would add two more possibilities concerning what might also be at least partial contributors to the recent rise of irreligion in America: the greater acceptance of homosexuality in American culture and the ubiquity of the Internet.
Since the days of Stonewall and Harvey Milk, more and more Americans have come to accept homosexuality as a normal, legitimate formof love and pairing. For many, acceptance of homosexuals simply boils down to a matter of fairness, civil rights, and equality before the law. The overall stigmatization of homosexuality has weakened significantly in recent decades. We see that those Americans who continue tomalign homosexuality as sinful or immoral, and who continue to fight against gay rights, do so exclusively from a religious vantage point. And it is turning some people off religion. In my previous book, Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion, which was based on in-depth interviews with Americans who were once religious but are no longer, I found that many of those who have walked away from their religion in recent years have done so as a direct consequence of and reaction against their respective religious traditions continued condemnation and stigmatization of gays and lesbians. The fact that Americans today between the ages of eighteen and thirty are the generation most accepting of homosexuality in the nations history, and are simultaneously those least interested in being religiousand the fact that the states that have legalized gay marriage tend to be among the most secularmight be coincidental, but I highly doubt it.
Next, the Internet has had a secularizing effect on society in recent decades. This happens on various levels. First, religious people canlook up their own religion on the Web and suddenly, even unwittingly, be exposed to an array of critiques or blatant attacks on their tradition that they otherwise would never have come across. Debunking on the Internet abounds, and whether one is a Mormon, a Scientologist, a Catholic, a Jehovahs Witnesswhateverthe Web exposes the adherents of every and any religious tradition to skeptical views that canpotentially undermine personal certainty, rattling an otherwise insulated, confident conviction in ones religion.
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Were putting an end to religion: Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher and the exploding new American secularism
Aging & Longevity
Study points to ibuprofen as possible new anti-aging medicine
Buck Institute study shows popular over-the counter drug extends lifespan in yeast, worms and flies
Dec. 20, 2014 - Ibuprofen, a common over-the-counter drug used to relieve pain and sold under the brand names of Advil, Motrin and others, could hold the keys to a longer healthier life, according to a study showing that regular doses of ibuprofen extended the lifespan of yeast, worms and fruit flies.
The study was led by researchers at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in a collaboration with Texas A & M's Agrilife program and published in PLoS Genetics on December 18.
"There is a lot to be excited about," said Brian Kennedy, PhD, CEO of the Buck Institute, who said treatments, given at doses comparable to those used in humans, extended lifespan an average of 15 percent in the model organisms. "Not only did all the species live longer, but the treated flies and worms appeared more healthy," he said.
"The research shows that ibuprofen impacts a process not yet implicated in aging, giving us a new way to study and understand the aging process."
But most importantly, Kennedy said the study opens the door for a new exploration of so-called "anti-aging medicines." "Ibuprofen is a relatively safe drug, found in most people's medicine cabinets," he said. "There is every reason to believe there are other existing treatments that can impact healthspan and we need to be studying them."
Michael Polymenis, PhD, an AgriLife Research biochemist in Texas A & M's Agrilife program started the work in baker's yeast and then moved it into worms and flies.
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Study points to ibuprofen as possible new anti-aging medicine
Former NATO Chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen on the Threat of ISIS
Anders Fogh Rasmussen served as Secretary General of NATO from 2009 to 2014. In this Big Think interview, Rasmussen explains how NATO evaluates terrorist thr...
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Former NATO Chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen on the Threat of ISIS - Video
E #39; nato ICARO
Uno sportello unico per i neo genitori. Ne parlano l #39; Assessore alle Politiche Temporali Laura Canale e Roberto Daffonchio Dirigente Regione Lombardia.
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Wrist Watch Talk 16- Viewer Emails, Rubber Vs Nato, Are Luxury Prices Justified? +TGV #39;s Collection
WWT Part 16 -This Week Viewer Emails, Rubber Vs Nato Straps, Are Luxury Watch Prices Justified? The TGV Watch Collection. Make sure you subscribe and If yo...
By: The Urban Gentry
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Tutoril nato jak dt obrzek na vodn stranu videa
By: Matj Hauschild
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BRUSSELS, Dec. 19 (UPI) -- With conflict curbing Libya's oil potential, NATO officials said they've reviewed the situation, but have not discussed any military role in the country.
Last weekend, the oil ports of Es Sider and Ras Lanuf were shuttered because of armed clashes in the region. Combined, the two ports can handle 560,000 barrels of oil per day, about half of the country's total export capacity.
Libyan stability since the end of civil war in 2011 has faltered amid clashes between armed groups fighting for more control over the oil-rich country. Pre-conflict oil production was higher than 1 million barrels per day, though output has slumped recently to as low as 330,000 bpd because of clashes in and around key oil fields.
Leaders from the North Atlantic Council, NATO's highest decision-making body, met last week in Jordan with African leaders to assess the national security situation in Libya, which has sparked concerns among countries sharing a border with the North African nation.
A NATO official told UPI on background Friday that, despite enduring security post-civil war security challenges, the alliance is not discussing any military action in Libya.
NATO in 2011 carried out a U.N. mandate to protect the Libyan people from attacks by forces loyal to late leader Moammar Gadhafi. That mission ended in October 2011, the official said.
The International Energy Agency at the height of the civil war called on member states, including the United States, to release oil from their strategic reserves to offset crude oil shortages from war-torn Libya.
With the United States producing more than 9 million bpd on average, markets have since adjusted to the low output from Libya.
On the security front, the U.N. Support Mission in Libya said Thursday parties to the conflict were taking steps "in the right direction" through dialogue.
2014 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI's prior written consent.
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New job: Set to be NATO's new chief, Former Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg. Photo: AFP
Brussels:Former Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg will lead NATO starting October 1, the alliance announced on Friday.
The appointment of Stoltenberg, 55, comes as the United States reaffirms its commitment to the Western military alliance as a way of containing an increasingly assertive Russia led by President Vladimir Putin.
Putin's decision to order troops to seize Crimea this month and his blunt rejection of criticism from Europe and the US seem likely to reinvigorate NATO and give the alliance a central role as a counterweight to Moscow.
Stoltenberg, whose appointment by NATO member countries was widely expected, will succeed Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a Dane who will have served more than five years in the post when he steps down.
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Among the challenges Stoltenberg faces is figuring out how the alliance should define collective security if Putin tries to expand Russia's influence across other parts of Ukraine and into other former Soviet bloc countries that are not members of NATO.
Stoltenberg was prime minister of Norway from 2000-2001 and again from 2005-2013. He is also the leader of the Labour Party in Norway and serves as a UN special envoy on climate change.
In an apparent reference to Stoltenberg's suitability for the post - particularly since Russia's annexation of Crimea - the alliance said in a posting on its website that he had "frequently called for NATO to focus on security challenges close to allied territory" while serving as the Norwegian prime minister.
Another challenge Stoltenberg faces is disgruntlement among Americans who feel that European members of NATO do not allocate enough spending to the alliance and leave Americans paying disproportionately for European defence.
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AP gov NSA Advertisement
By: Akshar Patel
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DEF CON 22 - NSA Playset - PCIe
DEF CON 22 Hacking Conference Presentation By Joe FitzPatrick Miles Crabill NSA Playset - PCIe.
By: SecurityRelated
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MVI 4483 NSA Hacked Sony!
Obama is doing what he always does, distract, divert to deceive!
By: Gabor Zolna
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A federal judge on Friday questioned the strength of a key lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the governments Internet surveillance program known as upstream data collection.
Judge Jeffrey White heard oral arguments by attorneys from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the suit, and the government, during a hearing in a federal district court in Oakland, California. The EFF says its suit is the first challenge in public court to the governments upstream data program, which copies online data from the main cables connecting Internet networks around the world.
The EFF first filed its suit in 2008 after an AT&T technician provided evidence that the company routed copies of its Internet traffic records to the NSA.
The National Security Agency program is unconstitutional because it collects communications, including content such as email, of people without ties to issues of national security, EFF attorney Richard Wiebe told the judge. Thats an overly broad dragnet that violates the Constitutions Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure, he said.
U.S. Justice Department attorney James Gilligan did not deny the government taps the Internets backbone to gather data. But the government uses filtering mechanisms to automatically destroy certain communications records within milliseconds, he said.
Judge White could declare the upstream collection program unconstitutional, a ruling the government would probably appeal. But on Friday, he questioned whether there was enough evidence on either side to say whether the program is constitutional.
The judges ruling might take months, judging from the number and complexity of questions he asked Friday.
What evidence is there that its all international communications [gathered], not just communications with suspected terrorists or hot spots? he asked EFF attorney Wiebe.
Wiebe cited a top-secret 2009 report by the NSA inspector general detailing the governments email and Internet data collection, published by The Guardian. Other documents, including AT&Ts first surveillance transparency report, published earlier this year, provide evidence of the programs reach, he said.
But the government has never confirmed nor denied the 2009 secret report, Gilligan said, and AT&Ts report only pertains to legal court orders received under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
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Senators question need to rein in NSA surveillance Share This The U.S. Congress would endanger the nation's security by passing even watered-down legislation to limit the National Security Agency's bulk collection of domestic phone records, several U.S. senators said Thursday.
The U.S. Congress would endanger the nation's security by passing even watered-down legislation to limit the National Security Agency's bulk collection of domestic phone records, several U.S. senators said Thursday.
Several members of the Senate Intelligence Committee voiced opposition to the USA Freedom Act, a bill aimed at reining in NSA bulk collection of telephone and other records, even though many civil liberties groups and technology companies have questioned whether the bill would work as its sponsors originally envisioned.
With the USA Freedom Act, Congress is "compromising to please a skeptical and frequently misinformed public" that's mistakenly worried about NSA surveillance, Senator Dan Coats, an Indiana Republican, said during a hearing on the House bill, taking place one year after the first leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were published.
The USA Freedom Act would ban what the NSA and the U.S. Department of Justice consider "bulk" collection of phone and business records, said James Cole, deputy attorney general at the DOJ. But Cole parsed the definition of "bulk" collection.
Quoting a House Intelligence Committee report on the USA Freedom Act, Cole said, "Bulk collection means indiscriminate acquisition. It does not mean the acquisition of a large number of communication records." Therefore, the House bill would allow the NSA collection of large numbers of records, if that collection were approved by the U.S. surveillance court.
An amended definition of what records the bill allows the NSA to collect gives the agency wide latitude, said Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat. The version of the USA Freedom Act that passed the House "is not the true reform I've demanded, and many other Americans have demanded, for years," he said.
The House bill is "vague enough to still allow the collection of mass information," Udall said. "The NSA has shown time and time again it will seize on any wiggle room in the law, and there's plenty of that in this bill."
The NSA phone records program helps protect national security, several senators argued, even though critics have found that many of the examples of investigations given to justify the program have only a limited connection to it.
Nevertheless, the Senate should "step back" and reconsider whether to pass the USA Freedom Act, said Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican.
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