WikiLeaks' Assange Continues Extradition Fight: Ready to Ask Supreme Court to Grant Him a Hearing For Possible Non-Extradition Appeal Case In UK

""LONDON (AP) – A British court Monday gave WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange permission to continue his legal battle to avoid extradition to Sweden over sex crimes allegations.

The decision means Assange does not face immediate deportation. British judges said Assange could apply to the Supreme Court to hear one specific point of his legal case — but there is no guarantee that the higher court will accept his request.

In his judgment, Judge John Thomas said Assange had only a small prospect of convincing the Supreme Court of his arguments.

The "chances of success may be extraordinarily slim" for Assange's appeal, Thomas said.

Assange's lawyers had argued that every European arrest warrant issued by police or prosecutors was flawed, because neither should be considered a judicial authority.

The High Court judges did not indicate whether they agreed with the argument, but said Assange's legal team should have the chance to ask the Supreme Court to grant them a hearing. Assange said he was pleased by the ruling.

"The High Court has decided that an issue that arises from my own case is of general public importance and may be of assistance in other cases and should be heard at the Supreme Court," he said outside the courthouse.

"I think this is the right decision and I am thankful, the long struggle for justice for me and for others continues."

Assange now has 14 days to submit a written request to the Supreme Court, Assange's lawyer Gareth Peirce said."" 

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2011-12-05/julian-assange-sxtradition-fight/51653254/1

Gem-Sized Diamonds Open Quantum Computing Entanglement Doors Blurring the Divide Between Classical Physics And Spooky Action From a Distance With Solid Real World Tangible Objects in First Room Temperature Environment

"""It's hard to understand, almost, that you can have this quantum thing that's a millimetre thick that you can hold in your hand," said Ben Sussman, a quantum physicist at the National Research Council of Canada and an adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa, who co-authored the study published online Thursday in Science.

Sussman, who largely designed and set up the experiments, said the demonstration is important in part because scientists and engineers around the world have been working hard to exploit quantum phenomena such as entanglement for use in new technologies such as quantum computing. In the future, quantum computers are expected to be able to store exponentially more information and process information exponentially faster than conventional computers.

The challenge is that many approaches to building quantum computing-technologies being tested now require unusual materials and conditions, such as very cold temperatures. What sets the new study apart is it took place at room temperature in a solid-state material.""

""Those conditions are "sort of the holy grails" for building practical quantum devices that are compact, robust and don't need special environmental controls, Sussman said.

"I think it does open a door," said Ian Walmsley, a professor of experimental physics at the University of Oxford who co-authored the paper and runs the lab where the experiments took place.

However, he and Sussman both acknowledge that the system still has issues to overcome before it can lead to commercial applications.

Walmsley said although entanglement has mostly been seen in very, very small things, it was previously known to be theoretically possible in regular-sized objects.

"We don't think there is a fundamental surprise here," he said.

However, entanglement of large-scale objects was difficult to demonstrate experimentally, and any larger systems that showed entanglement in the past were unusual, such as superconducting circuits cooled to very low temperatures.""

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/12/01/science-diamond-quantum-entanglement.html

Exclusive Inside Look At Facebook's Data Centers in Oregon: 'With the Internet, Place No Longer Matters'. 800 Million Users Live Part Time Here, Housed in Network Servers & Data Stream Cities, Sprawling With Activity at All Hours of the Social Day. The Secret Facebook Layer Has Been Found.

""PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Data centers arrived in Oregon five years ago, cloaked in mystery. There's no hiding them now. From Umatilla to Prineville to Hillsboro, server farms are sprouting across the state. They are the physical manifestations of the cloud that hosts your free Gmail, movie streams and Facebook ..."" 

• - Prineville has become Facebook's template as it shifts its data from leased facilities to company-owned centers deployed around the globe.
• - Facebook imagined a variety of potential hazards, from central Oregon wildfires to volcanoes in the Cascades.

http://www.thedailyglobe.com/article/1874485/2906-data-centers-in-oregon-with-internet-place-no-longer-matters-11-22-2011-1-24-pm


""Facebook built its data center in Prineville because it’s on the high desert. Patchett calls it “the Tibet of North America.” The town sits on a plateau about 2,800 feet above sea level, in the “rain shadow” of the Cascade Mountains, so the air is both cool and dry. Rather than use power-hungry water chillers to cool its servers, Patchett and company can pull the outside air into the facility and condition it as needed. If the air is too cold for the servers, they can heat it up — using hot air that has already come off the servers themselves — and if the outside air is too hot, they can cool it down with evaporated water.

In the summer, Prineville temperatures may reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but then they drop back down to the 40s in the evenings. Eric Klann, Prineville’s city engineer, whose family goes back six generations in central Oregon, says Facebook treats its data center much like the locals treat their homes. “Us country hicks have been doing this a long time,” says Klann, with tongue in cheek. “You open up your windows at night and shut them during the day.”

The added twist is that Facebook can also cool the air during those hot summer days.""

""All this is done in the data center’s penthouse — a space the size of an aircraft carrier, split into seven separate rooms. One room filters the air. Another mixes in hot air pumped up from the server room below. A third cools the air with atomized water. And so on. With the spinning fans and the neverending rush of air, the penthouse is vaguely reminiscent of the room with the “fizzy lifting drinks” in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, where Charlie Bucket and Grandpa Joe float to the ceiling of Wonka’s funhouse. It’s an analogy Patchett is only too happy to encourage.

You might say that Facebook has applied the Willy Wonka ethos to data center design, rethinking even the smallest aspects of traditional facilities and building new gear from scratch where necessary. “It’s the small things that really matter,” Patchett says. The facility uses found water to run its toilets. An Ethernet-based lighting system automatically turns lights on and off as employees enter and leave areas of the data center. And the company has gone so far as to design its own servers.""



http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/12/facebook-data-center/all/1

Senate Wants the Military to Lock You Up Without Trial: The Senate Soundly Defeated a Measure to Strip Out all the Detention Provisions, So Despite the Sixth Amendment’s Guarantee of a Right to Trial, the Senate Bill Would Let the Government Lock Up Any Citizen it Swears is a Terrorist.

""Without Burden of Proving its Case to an Independent Judge""

""Here’s the best thing that can be said about the new detention powers the Senate has tucked into next year’s defense bill: They don’t force the military to detain American citizens indefinitely without a trial. They just let the military do that. And even though the leaders of the military and the spy community have said they want no such power, the Senate is poised to pass its bill as early as tonight.

There are still changes swirling around the Senate, but this looks like the basic shape of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Someone the government says is “a member of, or part of, al-Qaida or an associated force” can be held in military custody “without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.” Those hostilities are currently scheduled to end the Wednesday after never. The move would shut down criminal trials for terror suspects.""

""But far more dramatically, the detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn’t limited to foreigners. It’s confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.”

An amendment that would limit military detentions to people captured overseas failed on Thursday afternoon. The Senate soundly defeated a measure to strip out all the detention provisions on Tuesday.

So despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to trial, the Senate bill would let the government lock up any citizen it swears is a terrorist, without the burden of proving its case to an independent judge, and for the lifespan of an amorphous war that conceivably will never end. And because the Senate is using the bill that authorizes funding for the military as its vehicle for this dramatic constitutional claim, it’s pretty likely to pass.

It would be one thing if the military was clamoring for the authority to become the nation’s jailer. But to the contrary: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta opposes the maneuver. So does CIA Director David Petraeus, who usually commands deference from senators in both parties. Pretty much every security official has lined up against the Senate detention provisions, from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to FBI Director Robert Mueller, who worry that they’ll get in the way of FBI investigations of domestic terrorists. President Obama has promised to veto the bill.""

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/senate-military-detention/

Ultra-Red Galaxy Discovered: Strange New "Species" Observed - These Galaxies Might Be a 'Missing Link' in Galactic Evolution, Thanks to the Infrared Array Camera

""Cambridge, MA - In the distant reaches of the universe, almost 13 billion light-years from Earth, a strange species of galaxy lay hidden. Cloaked in dust and dimmed by the intervening distance, even the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't spy it. It took the revealing power of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to uncover not one, but four remarkably red galaxies. And while astronomers can describe the members of this new "species," they can't explain what makes them so ruddy.

"We've had to go to extremes to get the models to match our observations," said Jiasheng Huang of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Huang is lead author on the paper announcing the find, which was published online by the Astrophysical Journal.""

""Spitzer succeeded where Hubble failed because Spitzer is sensitive to infrared light - light so red that it lies beyond the visible part of the spectrum. The newfound galaxies are more than 60 times brighter in the infrared than they are at the reddest colors Hubble can detect.

Galaxies can be very red for several reasons. They might be very dusty. They might contain many old, red stars. Or they might be very distant, in which case the expansion of the universe stretches their light to longer wavelengths and hence redder colors (a process known as redshifting). All three reasons seem to apply to the newfound galaxies.

All four galaxies are grouped near each other and appear to be physically associated, rather than being a chance line-up. Due to their great distance, we see them as they were only a billion years after the Big Bang - an era when the first galaxies formed.""

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2011/pr201133.html

Anonymous Threatens Robin Hood Attacks Against Banks: Hacktivist Group Says it Will Steal Credit Card Data From Commercial Banks and Use the Information to Donate to Charities and Protest Groups

""Just in time for the holidays, the hacktivist collective Anonymous has announced that it has teamed up with like-minded group TeaMp0isoN to donate to charity. The catch: they're using stolen credit data from big banks to make their donations, in a campaign they're calling Operation Robin Hood (#OpRobinHood). 

"In regards to the recent demonstrations and protests across the globe, we are going to turn the tables on the banks," according to a YouTube video uploaded on Saturday, which formally announced #OpRobinHood.

"Operation Robin Hood is going to return the money to those who have been cheated by our system and most importantly to those hurt by our banks," it said. "Operation Robin Hood will take credit cards and donate to the 99% as well as various charities around the globe. The banks will be forced to reimburse the people there (sic) money back." 

The video also claimed that the group had already used credit card data stolen from Bank of America, Chase, and CitiBank. "We have donated thousands to many protests around the world. We have donated thousands to the homeless and other charities. Our government has fallen short in many ways," it said. The video also urged people to move their money out of commercial banks and into credit unions.""

http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/attacks/232200481