>Do you speak cuttlefish?

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>SALTCOATS UFO

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>Pain ray really killer ray gun, many goats dead, says ‘expert’

>

The US military’s pain ray, aka the Active Denial System, is a certified excrement magnet. In March Reg readers learned that the US Air Force wonder weapon is still being pitched as a game changer in Iraq, a prediction that’s never even been close to being tested.

ADS defenders claim the Pentagon, afraid that using it would be a public relations disaster, won’t give the non-lethal pain ray, a gun that shoots millimeter waves, the green light. It’s something the US would use to torture foreigners, preferably smaller and not as well-armed as our boys.

Ah, but maybe it’s not just a pain ray – maybe it’s a death ray, too! And it’s been hiding in plain sight under cover of a non-lethal weapons program.

This interesting allegation comes by way of a man named Dave Gaubatz, and FrontPage magazine.

Gaubatz, described as a former veteran of the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, informed FrontPage that 60 Minutes, as well as everyone else, had been fed a crock on the pain ray. It was originally designed, he said, as a straight lethal ray gun and it’s been operational for years. It was ready for use in Iraq where it could have slain the enemy and saved American lives. And 60 Minutes made a big mistake by not getting the truth of this and “putting our soldier’s lives in danger everyday.”

“Each day that goes by and another soldier dies should weigh heavily on every member of 60 Minutes,” said Gaubatz.

Well into the weird, Gaubatz explained that journalists have all been fed a story about the non-lethal weapon. This is true, but only to a point – one not yet in crazy world. Then the narrative jumps the cliff. The journalists are culpable because they’re “liberals who know less about the Ray Gun [yep, that’s in caps] than they do basic fundamentals of war.”

Keep in mind that FrontPage magazine isn’t a news organ. It’s the publication of David Horowitz, the head of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, an organisation well known for its right-wing disinformation. Its latest helping is the claim that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was raised and schooled as a Muslim and is hiding this from voters. Another scoop is that global warming is a smokescreen liberals are using to promote their agenda in which the godly’s right to be fruitful and multiply is obstructed.

Gaubatz has been in the news before with the same tenor of allegation. In 2006 the New York Times, reported that Gaubatz, then working as an investigator for a medical examiner in Dallas County, Texas, had been – by his own description – “a lone American [battling] politicians to locate WMDs” in Iraq.

Gaubatz claimed that while working as a civilian in Iraq in 2003 he went on an expedition with a colleague. They identified four suspected chemical weapons depots in sourthern Iraq. Try as Gaubatz might, he couldn’t get the US military to investigate them. The New York Times, for its part, contacted Charles Duelfer of the Iraq Survey Group. Duelfer, while not referring directly to Gaubatz, told the newspaper that “lots of good-hearted people thought they saw something” in Iraq but, in the end, no such stories had panned out. Further, the ISG had the cooperation of top-level Iraqi officials with incentives to tell the truth – WMDs had long been destroyed. –reg

>Every Italian’s tax bill published online

>

The British government might be useless at keeping our data safe, but the outgoing Italian government has gone one better – it has published the tax details of every single Italian on a website and made them available to anyone interested.

The Italian revenue deliberately published the information in an effort to increase transparency and reduce tax evasion.

But the plug was pulled on the scheme yesterday as Italian privacy and consumer groups reacted with outrage.

The Italian tax office published names, addresses, dates of birth, declared income, and tax paid. Which sounds to us like enough information to engage in a serious bit of identity theft.

The director of the tax office, Massimo Romano, told news agency ANSA the move was “in the public interest in order to allow the free circulation of information in a framework of transparency”. He also claimed the action was in line with privacy guidelines.

But the privacy watchdog was not so sure – it ordered the site closed immediately for breaking Italian privacy laws.

Beppe Grillo, an Italian comedian and politician, pointed out the information would be useful for kidnapping because ransom demands will be in line with people’s incomes, and burglars will target the correct homes because they will have accurate income information. Grillo said on his blog that tax evaders have nothing to fear from the scheme.

He said: “Paying taxes like that is too dangerous. It would be better to have a conviction for tax evasion than to be knifed or kidnapped.”

The decision was one of the last actions of the outgoing centre-left government led by Romano Prodi. He has been replaced by Silvio Berlusconi. – reg

>Yoda: Small. Fast. Telekenetic. More alone than me.

>I’m dateless and bored on another Friday night.

I should be more like Yoda. He may be the only one of his species, which is not even named, and so, he might be the loneliest creature in an artificial Universe, but he never shows a that he has any problem with this fate. He just gets on with his business.

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>Before cell phones …

In 1978, Bell Labs launched a trial of first commercial cellular network in Chicago using AMPS [1]. … The first handheld mobile phone to become commercially available to the US market was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, which received approval in 1983. Mobile phones began to proliferate through the 1980s with the introduction of “cellular” phones based on cellular networks with multiple base stations located relatively close to each other, and protocols for the automated “handover” between two cells when a phone moved from one cell to the other. At this time analog transmission was in use in all systems. Mobile phones were somewhat larger than current ones, and at first, all were designed for permanent installation in vehicles (hence the term car phone). Soon, some of these bulky units were converted for use as “transportable” phones the size of a briefcase. Motorola introduced the first truly portable, handheld phone. These systems (NMT, AMPS, TACS, RTMI, C-Netz, and Radiocom 2000) later became known as first generation (1G) mobile phones.

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Star Trek debuted in the United States on NBC on September 8, 1966.^[6] The show tells the tale of the crew of the starship Enterprise and that crew’s five-year mission “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” The original 1966-1969 television series featured William Shatner as Captain James Tiberius Kirk, Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, James Doohan as Montgomery “Scotty” Scott , Nichelle Nichols as Nyota Uhura, George Takei as Hikaru Sulu, and Walter Koenig as Pavel Chekov. In its first two seasons it was nominated for awards as Best Dramatic Series. –wiki