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Pinback

Pinback's Journal
Pinback's Journal
July 22, 2014

Vote today! July 22

Get a sample ballot here:
http://www.mvp.sos.ga.gov/

Polls open til 7:00. Only 10 percent turnout expected in my area -- if it's the same where you live, your vote will REALLY count!!

July 8, 2014

"...some of that data may belong to American citizens."

We were assured, by Clapper and the NSA's defenders, that only metadata was being collected on American citizens (for example, "Sally Smith sent an email from IP Address 123.45.678.9 at 11:53:08 p.m. on June 12, 2014, to edjones@acme.cz&quot . We now know that is not true. We now know that the NSA would save the content of the email, and any attachments -- for example the lingerie photo Sally thought only Ed would see. And we know that this "private" communication and attachment(s) could be, and was, accessed by a low-level contractor.

"You can't know which emails to collect until you know which emails to collect." The NSA says that the precedent set by Smith v. Maryland gives them the right to collect all Americans' emails (and, presumably, to record all phone calls). To quote Randy Barnett of Georgetown U.:

The paradigm of what the Fourth Amendment prohibited as “unreasonable” in its first sentence was the use of general warrants, which is why its second sentence requires that warrants must be particular. And, as USD law professor Donald Dripps has shown, the seizure of papers for later search for evidence of criminal conduct was the epitome of an unreasonable search and seizure that was closely akin to general warrants. - Washington Post, April 28, 2014

So, which emails to collect? When it comes to Americans' emails: Legally, constitutionally, the ones you have a warrant to collect. Not all the emails you might potentially need some day in the course of an unforeseen investigation.

And if my granddaughter's bathtub photo is among the data collected and stored, it's cold comfort to reflect that the NSA's data banks (purportedly) include only a fraction of a percent of all communications.
July 3, 2014

How about some bar-b-q music for the 4th?



"Chili Mac" from Omaha Bar-B-Q by Preston Love, with special guest Shuggie Otis -- for your funky cookout!
July 3, 2014

The $200 open source wearable that enables fully paralyzed people to draw and communicate

How the "Brainwriter" is overshadowing Google Glass and Oculus Rift at London event
- By Lyndsey Gilpin, TechRepublic, 7/3/2014



Not Impossible Labs just revealed the Brainwriter, designed to read and write brain waves for fully paralyzed people so they can draw and communicate, and it's now on display in London.

At a new tech exhibition in London on Thursday, sitting between Google Glass and Oculus Rift, is a wearable you've probably never heard of. But it's the one that could have more of a revolutionary, world-changing impact than any of us realize.

It's called the Brainwriter -- and it's an open source, do-it-yourself device that pairs with ocular recognition technology to enable the fully paralyzed to draw and communicate. It is on exhibit at the Barbican's "Digital Revolution" in London as the headliner in the "Wearable Technologies" section.

"Not Impossible is a very small rag-tag group of incredibly passionate people, so it's an honor being at this exhibition, being next to behemoth companies like these," said Mick Ebeling, the founder of Not Impossible, a startup based in Venice, California. The Not Impossible Foundation raises money to fund the crowdsourced projects of the lab, which is run by a small team under Ebeling's lead.

More: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-brainwriter-the-200-open-source-wearable-for-the-paralyzed-that-can-read-and-write-thoughts/


This sounds very cool! This could be great for disabled people around the world.

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Hometown: GA
Home country: USA
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 12,154
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