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Saturday, March 16, 2013

NRA?s LaPierre: Critics are crazy, not me

Wayne LaPierre (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.?Wayne LaPierre's critics have called him a lot of things in the past few months: A lunatic, crazy, a gun nut. But from his perspective as the executive director of the National Rifle Association, he's the only sane guy in the room.

As an outspoken gun-rights lobbyist, LaPierre has faced heavy scrutiny for his defense of firearm ownership in the aftermath of a recent string of mass shootings. Through the NRA, LaPierre has vehemently opposed new proposals in Congress to build a more robust system of background checks on gun sales and curtail ownership of some firearms.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, the day after a Senate panel considering new gun legislation approved an assault weapons ban, LaPierre argued that despite his opponents' criticism, they're the ones out of step with reality, not him.

"It's time for us to take a sane look at the insanity that's consumed all too much of the media and the political class in this town. They wag a finger condemning the NRA. They call us crazy," LaPierre told the group of conservative activists, before reciting one-by-one the list of the NRA's gun safety, training and education programs. "Each year we teach millions of law-abiding people how to use, store and defend themselves with firearms. We've been training America's military and law enforcement officers since NRA's founding in 1871. And they call us crazy?"

He added, "I'm still standing, unapologetic and unflinching. They can call me crazy or anything else they want."

LaPierre went on to list some of the ideas that have been proposed in defense of imposing gun restrictions. Use scissors to defend against an office gunman, he said the Department of Homeland Security advises, an idea LaPierre called "shear madness." (Get it?) Also, he noted, the vice president says women should fire a shotgun in the air to spook would-be attackers. "Have they lost their minds?" LaPierre asked. And, he said, congressional Democrats have proposed requiring universal background checks, even for private sales. LaPierre, right on cue: "Are they insane?"

He added, "It's as if insanity itself has been sequestered in Washington. They call me crazy, and yet the people doing the finger-pointing are saying things that are absolutely bizarre."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/nra-wayne-lapierre-critics-crazy-not-us-171507216--politics.html

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What 1988 Los Angeles Thought 2013 Would Look Like

Everybody always imagines the future looking way cooler than it actually does. The Los Angeles Times just re-proved the point by republishing a 1988 issue in which it made a slew of guesses about 2013. Some of them were right, but unfortunately cars still don't look that cool. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/B5-czU5xV3w/what-1988-los-angeles-thought-itd-look-like-in-2013

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'Killer dolphins' escape? Not so fast.

'Killer dolphins' escape: A story of highly-trained killer dolphins escaping from a Ukrainian military facility has turned out to be a hoax. But there is such a thing as a military dolphin.

By Mai Ng?c Ch?u,?Contributor / March 13, 2013

Sergeant Andrew Garrett watches as K-Dog, a bottle nose dolphin attached to Commander Task Unit 55.4.3 leaps out of the water while training near the USS Gunston Hall in the Persian Gulf in 2003.

Brien Aho/US Navy/AP/File

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Three "killer dolphins" trained by the Ukrainian navy to kill combat swimmers, possibly armed with guns or knives attached to their heads, have escaped and are now roaming the Black Sea in search of a mate.

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At least that's what a?Ukrainian?and Russian news outlets are claiming, and it's almost certainly not true.?

The state-owned RIA Novosti repeated stories Thursday from Ukrainian media outlets that said that, following a training exercise in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, only?two of five military-trained dolphins returned to their handler. From there, the story was picked up by many English-language news outlets.

But?Ukraine's Defense Ministry has denied the reports, and has refused to confirm that its navy even has a dolphin program.

The Atlantic, which originally accepted the report as more or less factual, followed up with the news that the story is a hoax, apparently started by a museum director.?

But is it plausible? Does the Ukrainian military train dolphins for warfare??

Apparently, it does, just like the US Navy does. Beginning in 1973, the Soviet Navy in?Sebastopol?trained dolphins to detect military equipment such as mines on the seabed, to attack divers, and even to carry explosives on their heads to plant on enemy ships.

After the USSR broke up and the Black Sea Fleet divided into Ukrainian and Russian fleets, the Ukrainian Navy took over the dolphin training section, which then were used for civilian goals such as working with disabled children. In 2000, the BBC reported that many of the trained dolphins, along with several sea lions, walruses, and a beluga whale, were sold to the Iranian government.?

Dolphins are believed to be the world's second smartest animals, at least by human standards, with a large capacity for social cognition. ?US Navy officials said dolphins have exceptional sonar and deep diving capabilities that outperform anything human divers or the latest technology developments can provide. The US Navy has relied on specially trained dolphins and sea lions to find sea mines, that, if not found, could sink ships, destroy landing crafts and kill or injure people, according to the American Forces Press Service.

US military dolphins programs date back to in the early 1960s, when the military first started to study the aqua-dynamics of the mammals to help them design ships and submarines. The Navy quickly realized the animals could be used for more complex assistance tasks.

In addition to dolphins, the US Navy has also trained whales, grey seals, and sea lions for military purposes. Such marine mammals are so important that there is an entire program dedicated to studying, training, and deploying them, called the Navy Marine Mammal Program (NMMP).

The dolphins, according to NMMP officials, usually receive two or three years of specialty training before working on underwater security projects. Recently, NMMP, which is based in?San Diego, Cal.,?used its militarized dolphins to train Montenegrin Navy divers to locate and clear underwater mines and explosives dating back to World War I.

Last year, the Navy announced that it would be laying off some of its mine-seeking dolphins, replacing them with robots.?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/E08-C3dtaII/Killer-dolphins-escape-Not-so-fast

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Friday, March 15, 2013

Honda recalls 250,000 vehicles for braking ... - Automotive News

March 14, 2013 - 8:14 am ET
UPDATED: 3/14/13 12:20 pm ET

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Americans are Upbeat Toward Housing | Las Vegas Real Estate

Mar 15, 2013, Posted by: Summer Bowen

Survey Check Marks for Vegas Housing American consumers continue to express strong positive attitudes towards housing according to Fannie Mae?s February 2013 National Housing Survey results. ?The survey found Americans who believe home prices will increase in the next year have hit their highest levels since the survey began in June 2010. ?However, confidence in personal finances, household income and the health of the overall economy fell or remained flat according to the survey.

?Despite fiscal headwinds and political uncertainty, consumer sentiment toward housing is robust and continues to gather strength,? said Doug Duncan, senior vice president and chief economist at Fannie Mae. ?We expect home prices to firm further amid a durable housing recovery, gradually reducing the population of underwater borrowers and helping to boost the share of consumers who say that now is a good time to sell.?

Here are some highlights from the survey:

Fifty percent of those surveyed say home prices will go up in the next 12 months, holding steady from January at the highest level since the survey?s inception
The share of respondents who said that if they were moving, they would buy rather than rent, increased by 2 percentage points to 67 percent.
Nearly half of those surveyed ? 45 percent ? think mortgage rates will go up. That was an increase of 4 percentage points to the highest level since August 2011. Only 7 percent of those surveyed thought mortgage rates would go down.
25 percent of respondents think it?s a good time to sell a house, the highest level since the survey?s inception in June 2010.
At 38 percent, the share of respondents who say the economy is on the right track has held steady over the past three months.

Source: http://www.marshallstearns.com/economy/americans-are-upbeat-towards-housing/

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Scientists confirm Higgs boson discovery

The particle detected last July by CERN's Large Hadron Collider is indeed the elusive Higgs boson, say researchers. The discovery completes the Standard Model of particle physics and could help predict the ultimate fate of the universe.

By Jeanna Bryner,?LiveScience Managing Editor / March 14, 2013

The mass of the Higgs boson particle, possibly uncovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, may mean doom for our universe. Here, proton-proton collisions at the LHC showing events consistent with the Higgs.

CERN/CMS/Taylor, L; McCauley, T

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A newfound particle discovered at the world's largest atom smasher last year is, indeed, the Higgs boson, the particle thought to give other matter its mass, scientists reported today (March 14) at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference in Italy.

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Physicists announced on July 4, 2012, that, with more than 99 percent certainty, they had found a new elementary particle weighing about 126 times the mass of the proton that was likely the long-sought?Higgs boson. The Higgs is sometimes referred to as the "God particle," to the?chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name.

But the two experiments, CMS and ATLAS, hadn't collected enough data to say the particle was, for sure, the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by?the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics.

Now, after collecting two and a half times more data inside the?Large Hadron Collider?(LHC) ? where protons zip at near light-speed around the 17-mile-long (27 kilometer) underground ring beneath Switzerland and France ? physicists say the particle is the Higgs. [In Photos: Searching for the Higgs Boson]

"The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela in a statement.

Dave Charlton, ATLAS spokesperson agreed, the new results "point to the new particle having the spin-parity of a Higgs boson as in the Standard Model," referring to a quantum property of elementary particles.

To confirm the particle as the Higgs boson, physicists needed to collect tons of data that would reveal its quantum properties as well as how it interacted with other particles. For instance, a Higgs particle should have no spin and its parity, or the measure of how its mirror image behaves, should be positive, both of which were supported by data from the ATLAS and CMS experiments.

Even so, the scientists are not sure whether this Higgs boson is the one predicted by the Standard Model or perhaps the lightest of several bosons predicted to exist by other theories.

Seeing how this particle decays into other particles could let physicists know whether this Higgs is the "plain vanilla" Standard Model Higgs. Detecting a Higgs boson is rare, with just one observed for every 1 trillion proton-proton collisions. As such, the LHC physicists say they need much more data to understand all of the ways in which the Higgs decays.

From what is known about the particle now, physicists have said the?Higgs boson may spell the universe's doom?in the very far future. That's because the mass of the Higgs boson is a critical part of a calculation that portends the?future of space and time. Its mass of 126 times the mass of the proton is just about what would be needed to create a fundamentally unstable universe that would lead to a cataclysm billions of years from now.

"This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there'll be a catastrophe," Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said last month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out," added Lykken, a collaborator on the CMS experiment.

Follow LiveScience on Twitter?@livescience,?Facebook?or?Google+. Original article on?LiveScience.com.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/qI_xPdZ1dEY/Scientists-confirm-Higgs-boson-discovery

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Samsung prototype wireless game pad hands-on! (update: video)

We just wrapped up the unveiling of the Samsung Galaxy S 4 and, while the hardware of the phone itself held few surprises, this accessory did. Samsung doesn't have a formal name for it just yet, but this concept device is expected to launch sometime this summer. It's basically a first-party Bluetooth controller with a full complement of face buttons, dual analog sticks, a D-pad and even shoulder buttons on the back. It's powered by dual AAA batteries and connects wirelessly, the phone held in place by an expanding clamp up top that looks plenty big enough to support a Note II (we tried, it fit fine) and maybe even something like the Note 8.0!

Again, no pricing or details at this point, but it certainly felt nicer than your average Bluetooth controller. And, hopefully, that it's made by Samsung means we'll see widespread support.

Gallery: Samsung prototype wireless game pad hands-on