The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a report earlier this month that nearly one in 10 Americans admit to regularly using illegal drugs. There is a drug arrest every 19 seconds in the U.S. Every day there is 4,320 people that get arrested because of drugs. Because of more than 1.6 million drug arrests in 2010, police and judges have been campaigning to legalize and regulate drugs. Since the declaration of the ‘war on drugs’ 40 years ago there has been tens of millions of people making an effort to reduce drug use. The fact that there has been another 1.6 million citizens last year that have been arrested in effort to reduce drug use shows that this is not working. In this current economy arresting so many people in the failed ‘war on drugs’ is becoming too pricey. Some people agree that legalizing and taxing drugs would be the best option. This would create new revenue in addition to the money from arresting users as well as making society safer by bankrupting the cartels and groups who control the current illegal marketplace. FBI reports show that 81.9 percent of all drug arrests in 2010 were for possession only, and 45.8 percent of all drug arrests were or possession of marijuana. Today the Mexican drug cartels are currently operating in more than a thousand cities in the United States. Two years ago the Mexican drug cartels were only in 230 U.S. cities.

Benito Apolinar a 36 year old Texas man has pleaded not guilty to battery charges after assaulting his estranged wife for not “liking” a status update he posted on Facebook. He has posted an update about the anniversary of his mother’s death. While she did not acknowledge his post he confronted her angrily while dropping off his children at her home. “That’s amazing everyone ‘Likes’ my status but you, you’re my wife. You should be the first one to ‘Like’ my status,” Apolinar says before punching her in the cheek and pulling her hair. He was under the influence of alcohol at the time. He was arrested the same the same evening of the incident and is scheduled to appear in court on December 22nd.

Who will take Jobs’ even more pivotal place as the tech world’s foremost visionary? Many are saying Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is the obvious man. He has given his success with changing the way the world connects. Many others beg to differ. Jobs and Zuckerberg do have a lot in common.

Zuckerberg is a computer genius, like jobs, who dropped out of college to start his own company. Zuckerberg is already following in jobs footsteps with all the new Facebook features like the Timeline that has given people the opportunity to express themselves even more. Zuckerberg is extremely confident in his work and visions, as was jobs. So the big question, Is Mark Zuckerberg the next Steve Jobs? You decide.

Researchers from Duke University and the Ecole Polytechnic Federale de Lausanne has developed technology that has allowed monkeys to control a virtual arm and touch and feel virtual objects using only their brain activity. Now, paralyzed patients may be able to walk again! The researchers say it is the first-ever demonstration of a two-way interaction between a primate brain and a virtual body and could lead to robotic exoskeletons. By inserting electrodes in the regions of the brain the researchers were able to train two monkeys to use their brain activity to direct the virtual hands of an avatar to move and differentiate identical virtual objects based on texture.

The virtual body is controlled by the animal’s brain activity. The Virtual hand generates feedback information that is signaled to the animal’s brain. The texture of the virtual objects was shown as a pattern of minute electrical signals transmitted to the monkey’s brains, with three different electrical patters corresponding to each of the three different object textures. One monkey took nine tried to learn how to select the correct object during each try. The other monkey took four tries. The researchers performed several tests to confirm that the monkeys were actually sensing the object and not just selecting random objects. This success seen on non-human primates suggests that this task can be done on humans and accomplished more successfully. As research is shown, it should be possible to create a robotic exoskeleton that could allow severely paralyzed patients to walk while receiving tactile feedback.

Appelbaum, 28, is a computer scientist employed by the University of Washington. Applebaum has yet to be charged with any crime and his records were demanded without his knowledge. He was dubbed ‘The Most Dangerous Man in Cyberspace’ by Rolling Stone in 2010. In the making of WikiLeaks, the U.S government issued secret court orders requiring Google and Sonic.net Inc.to give information on the email accounts of WikiLeaks volunteer.

Court documents reviewed by the wall street journal have shown email address of everyone that Applebaum has corresponded with over the last two years. The Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure, while The Attorney General’s office obtained the records without a search warrant. Google and Sonic fought to inform Appelbaum of the investigation, the court ruled against them.

The government is no longer legally compelled to provide copies of search warrants. Now, the warrants are sealed and the full investigation proceeds without the suspect knowing. Because the government’s process is so secretive it’s unknown how often the methods are employed, but Google began disclosing the number of requests it receives in December 2009.In the last six months of 2010 the Internet giant received more than 4,600 requests, search warrants, and subpoenas complying with them 94 percent of the time.

Today at 3:30PM ET time the New York Stock Exchange website was down for 2 minutes. It was reported by the Chicago Tribune that a group of hackers calling themselves “Anonymous” Launched a massive DDos attack on the NYSE website and made it unavailable to the public for 2 minutes.

DDos attacks do not involve actual hacking, packets are sent to the servers by 1000′s causing the server to overload and become slow and eventually unavailable.
The NYSE official respond was “We detected no service outage on our corporate website at that time,”. And claimed that the trading was no interrupted at any time.

Read More – http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chi-anonymous-takes-down-nysecom-for-1-minute-20111010,0,1627656.story

It seems as if someone outside of Apple has gotten there hands on the upcoming iPhone 4S and Uploaded a video thanks to AppVV.com
In the video you see the Siri interface and benchmarking performance in the browser.

The official iPhone launch day is Oct14, we have no information on how this individual got his hands on an genuine iPhone 4S

Know exactly how long each Wireless Carrier stores your private information, taken from the Department of Justice, Obtained by American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina by the freedom of information act

A month ago Yahoo’s board of directors managed to kick CEO Carol Barts. What seemed like another new page for Yahoo seem more like a planned strategy to put Yahoo for sale.
Rumors are surfacing that Yahoo is getting ready for a sale, it seems as Yahoo has been in contact with Goldman Sachs and Alien & Company for due diligence and financial reporting in preparation for a sale.
And it’s already been rumored by Reuters that Microsoft has an eye for Yahoo once again.

Back in 2008 Microsoft tried a hostile takeover with 45,000,000,000$ in their pocket it seemed like a done deal at the time. Now after 3 years Yahoo is valued at 18,000,000,000$. But for a company like Microsoft gaining control over Yahoo, it’s hard to put a number behind the value.

So how can an iPad help childrens vision?
The University of Kansas experimented with children with cortical visual impairment (CVI) which is a vision disorder caused from brain damage and prevents the children’s brain from intercepting the visual information.

They tested 15 children with vision problems, each was given an iPad. “We tested 15 children and were absolutely shocked” was Muriel Saunders the lead researcher’s words.

It’s been concluded that children with CVI can contract with bright lights and high contract objects in a better manner, with the iPad’s bright LCD display the children had a way of making contract with simple applications like ‘Baby Finger’.

Childrens Vision problems is only the beginning.

Source: DailyMail