Hello dear frnds today i am coming with a great post which is all about how you can easily install Kali Linux hacking tool in your android device without any computer or laptop . You Like Hacking and want some amazing hacking tools for your android phone.
You can also install Kali Linux Distribution in your android mobile. Now you can do your ethical hacking work anywhere you want. Installing Kali Linux in android mobile is very simple. Below we give you some instructions for installing kali Linux in android device.
Lets coming towards The Ultimate Installation Guide for Kali Linux.For Run Kali Linux On Your Android Device you need to Follow Some Simple Steps and enjoy hacker's OS of course Kali Linux.
Step1:- First of all you need to root your Android Device.
Step2:- Then we need to install UNIX Scripts into our device using the Busybox app. Download the app from the above-given link and install it in your Android Device.
Step3:- Now third step we need to Paragone NTFS tool Downlod it google play store or the app above from the given link. After downloading and installing it launch the app in your device and there tap on the mount button.
Step4:- Now fourth step Kali Linux.img.zip file extract to your sdcard .
Note:- kaliLinux.img file never copy in the your sdcard . because its reason your sdcard copy file limitation up to 4GB . you should formet your sdcard and change select NTFS then formet it and copy kali linux.img file without no any error . but your phone not support your sdcard .Its used Paragone NTFS tool.
Step5:- Now when you extract kalilinux.img file copy on your phone sdcard. then download and install the Linux Deploy App on your android device from Google Play Store. or the app from above the given link. Now After downloading and installing it launch the app in your device and there tap on the properties. then select Installation path and give the kali linux.img path on your sdcard .
Step6:- Now scroll up and click on the Reconfigure button at the top of there.
Step7:- Now tap the START button and tap OK it will mount the Linux file.
Step8:- Now you can see the result that is the installation process starts .
Note:- simply Note down the IP address in the top left corner of Linux deploy it changes periodically.
Step9:- This is last step which we are going to perform, this step is all about Configure The vnc viewer.
Download Android VNC Viewer App from Google Play Store or the vnc viewer app from above the given link.
First of all open the vnc viewer app and now enter blow setting in your vnc viewer app.
After that enter your ip address and name is kalilinux.
Now the click create button.
Step10:- Now enter kali linux password is "changeme" and click the connect button.


text:
LAUGHTER IN THE DARK
Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star herself. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s.
About Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), one of the 20th century's greatest writers in both Russian and English, was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and spent his adult life in Germany, France, the United States, and Switzerland. In addition to his literary work, he was a passionate lepidopterist and chess player. His books include Lolita, Pale Fire, The Real Light of Sebastian Knight, Laughter in the Dark, and many more.
"Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written that is, a ecstatically."—John Updike

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
battleaxe 2 years ago •updated 2 years ago
When Cheerleaders went wild!
Oh yes, the nostalgia and family friendly crowd motivators went full on party mode. Out went a focus on athletics and in came the managers and pushers of as little clothing as possible. Again it could be argued this is using women to sell stuff with sex and not pay them enough HOWEVER, hundreds were turning out en force to fight for a spot on a team. The Dallas Cowboys kicked off this trend but the following teams took it to a whole new level of kitsch! OH MY!
Other teams followed suit with such awesomely silly/sassy/cheesy names like... "The Chicago Honeybears", "Buffalo Bills Jill's" and "The Washington Bullettes" just to name a few. It would be very uncomfortable to do a lot of moves with mega wedgies and that much hair spray but that's the price of being a leggy kicker of cheer!
Honeybear /ChicagoNow..............I so would rock those then go read Coinbase for the latest Crypto News :P
The Washington Post is sorta like the New York Times in not holding back a bit of sensationalism and sass when it comes to such hard hitting Sports news as Cheerleaders gone wild! Here is an epic quote that's pretty funny imho...
The Washington Post declares, "Their disco dancing, skimpy costumes and sultry looks have become the prototype of the new cheerleader." (The Post's coverage of the NBA's Washington Bullettes: "There they are, in their high-cut red hotpants and red wedgies, Farrah Fawcett manes tossing, dancing on the Capital Centre's basketball court to the tune of the "Bullets loaded with hustle" songs, smiling as though they were queens for a day.")
Youtube/ Chicago Bears............Oh no, these are a couple of the rather defunct "Honey Bears"!
Disco and Touchdowns................A match made in heaven or hell with it's blatant show of skin and big hair? You Decide!
Thanks for being good Sports on this historical ride through Cheerleading. Greetings to new users of Scorum and stay tuned for more Curation projects, games and Pom Poms!
motivation ( Stems are mine and never stop da' grind)
Athleticscheerleadingfunhistorycommunityinspiration


Baby Coffee is a zine about babyhood and adulthood, and everything before, between, and beyond.
If you enjoy your free copies of Baby Coffee, please consider making a donation to offset printing and mailing costs. Thank you!


Great to have Ricky and Peanut from the Kaiser Chiefs down at the groundbreaking for the Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy Centre opening in Spring 2018, the only centre outside of London.
The building for the centre in Jemsond has been donated by Graham Wylie and our Foundation will pay all the running costs once up and running.
Music is transforming lives and young children of the North will soon have access to this treatment.


From ground level the grassy field looks to be covered with the kind of plastic sheeting commonly used to shelter intensively farmed fruit and vegetables. But this is no agricultural device: it is an image on the Earth. It is only when the sheet is seen from the aerial view that the image becomes startlingly clear.
Staring up from this anonymous field in the drone-killing heartland of Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa within the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan (known as 'FATA'), the gigantic image, placed there by a group of French, American and Pakistani political artists, is of a local girl.
According to Pakistan's Foundation for Fundamental Rights, the nameless child lost both her parents and her brother, Syed, as 'collateral damage' to a Hellfire missile fired by a US armed drone on August 21st, 2009.
As with developments in bombers, satellites and armed helicopters, such a view reminds us of the ever-tightening connection between the act of killing through a weapon system and the use of visual technologies to find a target.
As the time between sensing and shooting has reduced with new communications and sensing technologies, so the military obsession, in the parlance, is to 'compress the kill chain'. The dream here is to move to a world where weapons and imaging systems are so totally integrated that acts of seeing and killing effectively become one and the same.
Journalist Alissa Scheller's infographic depicting the geography of a single day's operations of U.S. lethal drone operations.
Drones linger and annihilate people from above. Sociologists who have studied viewer comments to YouTube footage from drones of the targeting and killing of 'insurgents' note a widespread tendency. In keeping with deep traditions in western culture and language, they see their top-down view as one of inherent superiority over the subjugated, less important, and racialised people — or even dehumanised non-people — far beneath the gaze.
Most of the 1600 or so comments from viewers addressed in the study inscribed their views — that is the view of the murderous weapon itself — with a sense of moral and all-seeing superiority. "I want, to see for myself that they are dead and dying", one comment read. "Just for my own satisfaction".
The drone's eye view plays well on Youtube, as well as in a whole host of militarised video games. This only adds to the ways in which drone killing operates through complex webs of electronic technology. Together, these work to blur weapons systems with entertainment systems.
For this reason perhaps, the U.S. Air Force is directly targeting the recruitment of gamers – especially those with experience of home aircraft and drone simulators — as drone pilots. The actual controls used by drone pilots to undertake the killing now sometimes directly mimic the familiar Sony Playstation controls that recruits have been using since early childhood.
In response to this, the uncanny power of #NotABugSplat derives from the way it upscales and upturns that most human of all images – the face – in a way that fundamentally upsets the logic of distant, vertical and machinic vision. It questions the surveillance and dehumanisation that the rise of routine drone-killing relies on.
More important still is the way the girl's eyes 'look back' vertically towards the distant sensors that support the drone attacks. On seeing the girl's image on the field, it's tempting, for a brief moment, to wonder whether its appearance briefly enforces a more symmetrical gaze between targeter and targeted as image of the girls eyes meet digital sensor. Did the image momentarily undermine the normal operation of drones, which, as media scholar Tim Blackman has put it, "are designed to stay in the dark and bring enemies into the light where they can be destroyed"?
It is doubtful whether such a chain of events actually occurred, however: once the image was photographed, and those images had gone viral globally, local villagers used the valuable sheeting as building materials.
The #NotABugSplat project reveals, along with many other campaigns, the myths that the military and political supporters of ongoing drone wars endlessly repeat. Drone killing, these arguments stress, involves 'precision' attacks and 'targeted killings'. They operate through all-seeing sensing and targeting systems. And they lead to negligible, and justifiable, 'collateral damage' – civilian deaths.
Certainly, the US use of killer drones is widely celebrated by large sections of the civilian population as a strategy that puts machines at risk in order to save US military personnel. Indeed, Republican congressman Brian Bilbray has even argued that the Predator drone should be seen as an American 'folk hero.' "If you could register the Predator for President," he suggests, "both parties would be trying to endorse it." Recently, parts of the US military have even urged that medals should be awarded for successful drone pilots.
NotaBugSplat, in challenging the myths and euphemisms of drone killing exposes the gaze of the killer drone from above as little more than a racist gaze used in imperial killing.
The image emphasises, above all, how the racist mechanisms through which imperial power constructs humans to be of differential value between a notional 'us' in the 'homeland' and a threatening and racialised enemy — a 'them' — have been switched through drone killing from a largely horizontal to a vertical frame (although one organised though satellites, communications systems and military technologies that are horizontally organised across continental scales).
A similar process can be seen in Israel's switch from a permanent military occupation of Gaza to a policy of dominating the area from above through drone surveillance and strikes.
Whilst it is difficult in this case to disentangle drone strikes from assaults by artillery, helicopters and warplanes, the Gazan human rights group al-Mezan calculates that drone strikes killed at least 760 Gazans between 2006 and 2012. During its 2012 'Pillar of Defence' bombardment of Gaza, 36 of the 162 Palestinians killed died through drone strikes and a further 100 were seriously injured. Of those 36 killed, two-thirds were civilians.
In analysing such violence, architectural researcher Eyal Weizman invokes Edward Said's influential critique of the tradition of western 'Orientalism' – the construction of an imaginary, primitive and exotic 'Other' in the Middle East and Asia to justify violent western colonialism and militarised control.
Since the first attack by a US drone in Yemen in 2002, drones have become the mainstay of both U.S. military air power and of covert strikes by the CIA. Between 2002 and 2010, the US inventory of drones increased forty-fold, from 167 to around 7000. They now constitute more than 40% of the U.S. military's entire fleet of aircraft.
Following their routine use in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Iraq, the US, under Obama's policy of extending drone operations, now also launches armed drone strikes in Libya, Somalia. The U.S. also runs routine drone surveillance operations in a wide range of other African and Middle Eastern countries. With extraordinarily broad and vague rules of targeting and engagement, the 'war on terror's' drone-wars have, in effect, turned large parts of the world into a free-fire zone.
However, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan overwhelmingly dominate US drone killings. The C.I.A.'s covert drone operations against the northern regions of its notional ally of Pakistan — in breach of every tenet of international law — have been especially controversial.
The Bureau for Investigative Journalism has produced robust estimates of the civilian toll of dead and injured over the various periods of the operations. They estimate that, between 2004 and 21 May 2016, out of a total killed by U.S. drone strikes of between 2499 and 4001 in Pakistan, between 424 and 966 were civilians (between 172 and 207 of which were children).
The same study calculates that, up to 18 March 2015, CIA drone strikes in Pakistan left between 1,142 and 1,720 civilians were also seriously injured; many were left permanently disabled and impoverished.
In Yemen, meanwhile, between 65 and 166 civilians died under similar strikes (out of a total number killed of between 578 and 840,up to 12 October 2016). And in Somalia, between 3 and 10 civilians died out of a total of between 241 and 418 killed by drone strikes (up to 28 September 2016).
Finally, official U.S. data admits that drones killed between 2104 and 2756 people in Afghanistan up to 9 October 2016. Many, however, strongly contest official suggestions that this total only included between 90 and 105 civilians.
On the back of the massive expansion in the use and deployment of lethal military drones, drone manufacturers have grown enormously in size, profitability and lobbying power. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems — a branch of General Dynamics that manufactures the most widely used 'Predator' and 'Reaper' drones — is a particularly powerful case. From an annual turnover of only $110m in 2001, rapid growth led this figure to burgeon to $1.8billion by 2012.
Drones, moreover, are rapidly becoming more sophisticated and capable. As they do so, weapons manufacturers label them using monikers drawn from ancient mythology, names chosen deliberately to add to the sense that they are murderous and all-seeing cyborg-like monsters loitering far above. Beyond the now-familiar 'Predator' and 'Reaper, for example, DARPA, the US military research agency, is building a drone with 92 cameras called Argus after the mythic all-seeing servant in Greek mythology with a hundred eyes.
The Sierra Nevada Corporation, meanwhile, make a system called Gorgon Stare, named after the female figure in Greek mythology with hair of live snakes who turned those who looked on her to stone. Aimed at surveilling whole cities, to build up patterns of supposedly 'normal' life against which the 'abnormal activities of 'targets' might be identified, the company claims that the system can completely surveil a four kilometre radius. The system even has its own motto: motto oculus semper vigilans ("an always watchful eye").
Understanding the impacts of living in Pakistan, Afghanistan, or elsewhere, under permanent system drone surveillance – as well as the possibility of being killed or maimed at any moment — is not easy. Few journalists or human rights groups venture to the places where drone strikes occur; even fewer manage to interview locals and relatives of victims. Instead, the perspectives, including those of sites like YouTube, remain almost entirely aerial.
The dark paradox here is that drone killings are sustained by a deeply technophiliac and militarised myth of total vertical vision and a fetish for seeing all. This, however, is combined with an almost complete absence of knowledge of, and media coverage about, those on the ground unlucky enough to get in the way of the Hellfire missiles fired down from the sky.
It is known that in Northern Pakistan the mysterious machines flying far above have entered local folklore: the term ""I will drone you" has even entered day-to-day conversation as a morbid joke.
Research efforts are also starting to reveal the impacts of drone strikes on the people and communities below. Like the artists behind #NotABugSplat, Stanford University's Living Under Drones project has recently challenged the dominant narratives surrounding drone strikes.
Stanford's 'Living Under Drones' researchers, meanwhile, have shown that civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan are reluctant to help those hit by the first strikes because rescuers themselves have often been killed by follow-on drone strikes. Injured relatives in the rubble of the first strike have been known to tell their relatives not to help rescue them because of the frequency of these so-called 'double-tap' strikes. People also avoid gathering in groups in visible places. Many children are permanently kept indoors and often no longer go to school.
Other children struggle with permanent disabilities caused by drone strikes; many amputees have to use poor quality prosthetic limbs. One example is Sadaullah Wazir, a teenager and former student from the village of Machi Khel in Mir Ali, North Waziristan. He lost both of his legs and one of his eyes in a September 2009 drone strike on his grandfather's home.
Rather than being the result of all-seeing sensors that can identify armed insurgents execute them with precision, the realities of drone warfare reveal a dangerous absence of knowledge about the people targeted far below.
Canadian anthropologist Gastón Gordillo points out that large-scale civilian deaths are an inevitable result of a U.S. policy of deploying lethal drones , especially when backed up by myths that drone operators benefit from God-like omniscience. These, he points out, stem from widespread attitudes in the military of the way drones and other digital technologies bring with them 'total information awareness', 'persistent surveillance'.
Despite their CCTV cameras, heat sensors, motion-detecting systems and other sensors, however, Gordillo stresses that the sheer mass of imagery and data often means that drone controllers are completely overloaded with too much material to process or interpret when taking decisions to fire. In 2009 alone, U.S. drones collected the equivalent of 24 years' worth of video footage; DARPA's Argus system, mentioned already, can generate 8 years' worth of continuous video from a single day's operations.
In addition, the sheer immensity of the huge and foreign geographies that drone pilots target, moreover, mean that drone pilots are almost entirely ignorant culturally of those that they target and kill. Crucially, they have absolutely no way of reliably distinguishing genuine armed insurgent from the rest of the surrounding population. Because of this, they work hard wilfully to fill completely unreliable visual clues – people holding objects or 'loitering' suspiciously — with the imagined and violent intent necessary for them to launch their missiles under standard rules of engagement.
The sheer immensity of the huge and foreign geographies that drone pilots target, moreover, mean that drone pilots are almost entirely ignorant culturally of those that they target and kill.
Transcripts of the conversations of drone pilots repeatedly show their desperation to use Orientalist cliché. This imperialist apparatus of knowledge can turn any aspects of normal, civilian life into clear evidence that they are watching 'insurgents' or 'terrorists' that can be fired on at will.
The language of drone operators effectively enrolls all adult men in the vicinity of drone strikes as 'combatants' by labelling them "military age males". Even the US military has admitted that such a terminology encourages drone strikes against civilians because it "implies that the individuals are armed forces and therefore legitimate targets." As a result, the US does not count dead adult men as 'civilians' unless there is clear posthumous intelligence proving that they are.
Constant effort is also made to assimilate other Afghans, Pakistanis or Iraqis on the screens into the set of legitimate targets. Obvious evidence that images of innocent children or civilians are filling their screens is often wilfully ignored or –worse still — interpreted as further evidence of malevolence because assumptions are made that they have been deliberately placed there by 'terrorists' or 'insurgents' to purposefully thwart drone pilots' ability to kill.
The Drone Four: Michael Haas, Brandon Bryant, Cian Westmoreland and Stephen Lewis.
In November 2015, in response to such whistle blowing, the U.S. Government seized Hass's credit cards and froze his bank account, a treatment they also meted out to several of his colleagues.
Grégoire Chamayou's analysis, of one three hour long surveillance and attack operation on a convoy of three of SUVs that killed civilians in Afghanistan in February 2010, shows a typical, if notorious, case. Throughout the operation there is a sense of the drone controllers' desperation to destroy the people and destroy the vehicles — whatever the evidence of their clearly civilian nature. The transcript is full of statements like "that truck would make a beautiful target"; "Oh, sweet target!"; "the men appear to be moving tactically"; and "They're going to do something nefarious".
The mission controller later spots an "adolescent near the rear of the SUV". "Well", the operator responds, "teenagers can fight!" … " twelve or 13 years old with a weapon is [sic.] just as dangerous!"" (Children are often called "fun-size terrorists" by drone operators).
Based on an alleged 'weapon' sighting, the decision is then made to fire Hellfire missiles from nearby armed helicopters called to the scene; the first and third vehicles in the convoy are destroyed. The Predator pilots immediately fly in to assess the carnage. Seeing a scene of dead and maimed men, women and children, the safety observer remarks "No way to tell, man". The camera operator agreed. "No way to tell from here".
U.S. military officials admitted that on this occasion the missiles killed 16 civilian men and severely injured a woman and three children. However, Afghan elders from the victims' home villages said in later interviews that the attacks had killed 23 including two boys, Daoud, 3, and Murtaza, 4. As is common in such cases, the US military compensated families of the dead with the equivalent of $4,800 for the relatives of each person killed. Each survivor was given $2,900.
In such a context, he stresses that the enormous pressure on drone pilots to interpret what they see as 'insurgent activity', combined with the fact that drone operators have no reliable way of distinguishing civilians from 'insurgents', means that the killing of large numbers of civilians is in no way an 'accident' or an 'error'.
The acts of watching the grainy video feed from the drone, and of launching a missile on humans below, creates a sense of extraordinary power amongst drone operators. One admits that he sometimes felt "like a God hurling thunderbolts from afar'. Another relates that 'you see a lot of detail … we feel it, maybe not to the same degree [as] if we were actually there, but it affects us.' 'When you let a missile go,' he continues, 'you know that's real life there's no reset button'.
There are even some reports of drone pilots struggling with post traumatic stress disorder after they have killed civilians, especially children. Unlike bomber pilots, moreover, drone operators linger long after the explosives strike and see its effects on human bodies in stark detail.
As Western military budgets shrivel, a concerted drive is being made by a complex constellation of lobby groups, arms manufacturer and industry associations to construct drones developed initially for war and vertical killing as a panacea for all manner of security and police operations in civilian airspace within domestic 'homelands'.
Many barriers confront such efforts, however. Their murderous use in Asia and the Middle East means that drones have something of an image problem. Civilian airspace regulators are also concerned about the potential for drones to cause widely fatalities through ground crashes or collisions with civilian aircraft. Civil liberties and anti-surveillance lobbyists, finally, are working hard to expose the ways in which domestic drone programmes are umbilically connected to deepening cultures of surveillance and police militarisation.
Drone manufacturers, as might be expected, are adamant that their products have been unfairly maligned, and that they can be extremely useful for a wide range of civilian applications. Included here are humanitarian and disaster response, mail delivery, crop monitoring, weather forecasting, search and rescue, and policing.
The figure of the drone has even been projected as a much-maligned victim of public misunderstanding based on the widespread myths that drone killings along the 'war on terror's' frontier and war zones are already entirely autonomous.
It is crucial to stress that the current shift towards the domestic deployment of drones is a result of the growing militarisation of security within Western nations that have occurred as a key element of the 'war on terror'. In particular, the widening adoption of the concept of 'Homeland Security'.
The concept originated with the lockdown of Israel in the 1990s; it was honed in the US after the terrorist attacks there in 2001; and it is now being diffused to Europe and elsewhere. Homeland security projects all aspects of civilian life as domains of permanent existential threat requiring militarised responses based on extending the powers of networked surveillance and targeting.
In the process, everything beyond the worlds of full weapon-on-weapon warfare becomes a 'low intensity operation' or 'Military Operations Other Than War' (or 'MOOTW' to its friends) within an all-encompassing 'battlespace.' Such shifts work to radically blur already vague distinctions between policing, intelligence and military deployment and between local, national and international policy. They also blur the legal and doctrinal separation between the domestic and foreign spheres.
Reinforced by such ideas, security operations everywhere increasingly merge into a permanent mobilisation, based on the deployment of high-tech military sensors such as drones, aimed at pre-emptively highlighting threats and 'targets' from the background civilian population or city. Crucially, such ideas are fuelled by the same fantasies of total vision against vague and existential threats lurking deep within the normal flows and circuits of civilian life.
Such shifts mean that domestic domains dominated previously by a rhetoric of policing against criminal activities amongst citizens are gradually reconstituted as paramilitarised 'wars' against lurking, existential threats.
In a powerful example, the US Department of Security now routinely project the US-Mexico border in the same language that the US military uses to describe its war zones: a limitless 'battlespace' encompassing a world where civilian life camouflages 'targets' and where drones and other high-tech surveillance systems are the key to "persistent situational awareness" achieved through "network-centric" operations. The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, are already exploring ways of arming its Predator B drones with what it calls "non-lethal weapons designed to immobilize" targets.
Fueled by xenophobic and bellicose political rhetoric, the latest US legislation on border security — the 'Secure Our Borders First Act' (introduced in January 2015) — added an additional $10 billion for further drone acquisition and deployment.
The act calls for the US Department of Homeland Security to use new technologies such as drones to 'seal' what is deemed to be an unacceptably leaky frontier. The language is highly militarised: the challenge is to work towards 100% "defence in depth" through radically improved "situational awareness". This, the argument goes, is necessary so that 9 out of 10 migrants can be intercepted within a 100 mile strip of territory just inside the US-Mexico Border.
Again, despite evidence that drones have been an extremely expensive and highly ineffective means of securing the US-Mexico border, myths of total vision and absolute panopticism permeate the politics of drone deployment. Already, the Department of Homeland Security's Predator drones capture video of the border zones that they monitor which is analysed to automatically identify changes in the terrain below.
What the New York Times' James Risen has termed the 'homeland-industrial security' complex, of course, is only too happy to amplify the militarisation of discourses about the security of civilian life, and feed the myths of total vision, in the hope that their weapon systems can reach widespread civilian deployment. This is especially so as drone markets are predicted to triple in value between 2015 and 2025, totalling $93 billion over that period. Global drone manufactures also work hard to lobby US and European Governments to get them to undermine barriers to the widespread civilian deployment of drones.
In the US, a 60-strong lobby group of immigration hardliners and conservative 'hawks' has established the Congressional Caucus on Unmanned Systems (CCUS). The purported aim of the group is to "educate members of Congress and the public on the strategic, tactical, and scientific value of unmanned systems; actively support further development and acquisition of more systems, and to more effectively engage the civilian aviation community on unmanned system use and safety." In addition, the main industry lobby group in the US, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, spent at least $22 million on lobbying in 2011 alone.
Securitised subway: Billboards for Northrop Grumman X47B strategic strike drone (left) and Global Hawk surveillance drone (right) in a Washington DC subway station.
The power of the lobbying of drone companies is especially startling to anyone who uses Washington DC's futuristic metro system. The walls of the stations are a veritable Jane's Defence Weekly plastered with huge ads for high-tech drones and other weapons. In flagrant attempts to curry favour with key decision makers in the Beltway, stations have been reconstructed as an extraordinary symbol of the militarisation of US culture and politics.
The usual myths of 'precision' and perfect vision are again the mainstay here: drone technology is projected as a flexible panacea to all security and military challenges, at home and abroad.
Other lobbying efforts in the US and Europe are working to normalise drone use within civilian police forces. In the US the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have established grants, training programs and "centers of excellence" to support the introduction of drones in policing. Early drone policing activities, to bolster the surveillance capabilities of narcotics squads and S.W.A.T. teams, have already been established in Montgomery County and Arlington, Texas and in Miami.
In Europe, meanwhile, a powerful consensus between EU policy makers and defence manufacturers are similarly bent on selling drones as panaceas for domestic security policies. Statewatch and TNI have calculated that the EU has spent fully 500 million Euros, without democratic oversight or public scrutiny, to support such a shift since the late 1990s.
Once again, drone manufacturers are pressing hard for civilian expenditure to naturalise drone use within a wide spectrum of civilian applications. A key motivation in Europe is industrial policy: to bolster the growth of European drone makers in a market totally dominated at by US and Israeli companies. Another key focus is Europe's burgeoning migration crisis, as millions of African and Middle Eastern migrants and refugees risk all making sea and land crossings to flee poverty and war.
In October 2010, Dani Stroli of Israel Aerospace Industries made a presentation to one of the EU's drone policy consortia (of which he was a member at the time). The challenge, he said, was to discover ways to "make people perceive [drone] technology as a natural part of future society"; to "create positive interest in [drones]"; and to "create a multidisciplinary promotional campaign".
The UK lobby group for the drone industries have also suggested that adverts for drones should depict their work in humanitarian emergencies. They also suggest that civilian drones should be painted in bright colours to distinguish them from their murderous cousins in war zones.
The problems with the deployment of drones within domestic space are the same that attend all radical extensions of systems of digital surveillance and tracking at a distance within contemporary cultures of policing – especially those based on re-purposed military systems.
A permanent and radical extension of vertical surveillance of entire societies through live-feed cameras, communications surveillance, infra-red monitoring and video analysis will be the inevitable result.
Drone-based dragnets that gather the electronic signatures of whole cities' populations, that are the focus of programmes that feature in the Argus and Gorgon-Stare projects, would very likely emerge as the corner stone of domestic drone policing. The use of sensors to see through walls and roofs is also very likely.
Combined with the existence of large databases of individual facial images, communications records, and so on, it is not hard to envisage automated man-hunts.
Although face-recognition is in its infancy, and is only as good as the facial images on the databases used, its capabilities are improving rapidly. Working face-recognition drones, trawling images from all manner of high-resolution social media and image and other biometric and information database, would, at a stroke, radically undermine remaining notions of public anonymity on city streets.
Again, military drone systems provide a worrying precedent. Tim Faltemier, of the Progeny Systems Corporation, talked in 2011 about a project they're developing for US army drones that uses 3D models of people's faces to try and track them biometrically from above. "If this works out, we'll have the ability to track people persistently across wide areas," he says.
"A guy can go under a bridge or inside a house. But when he comes out, we'll know it was the same guy that went in," he continued. In such 'non-cooperative' tracking of people by their biometric signatures, the upturned face of the human beneath the drone, rather than a means of challenging the eye of the drone, as in the NotaBugSplat project, becomes, instead, the very signature that allows the drone to deepen its hold.
It is very likely that new drone-based policing methods, of course, would be particularly concentrated on intensifying vertical scrutiny of those places or populations deemed, a priori, to be the source of threats, agitation, otherness and criminality.
In the U.S., as with the deployment of police helicopters after the widespread rioting in US cities in the late 60s, it seems highly likely that, within increasingly polarised cities, police drone squadrons will overwhelmingly be used to police black and non-white neighbourhoods whilst working to protect and secure downtowns and affluent white suburbs. Focusing on political movements in the vein of the Occupy protests, which aim to interrupt the logistical flows of city life, will likely be another important focus.
Just as in the deployment of lethal drones abroad, the use of police drones will rely on the internal prejudices of policing cultures in stipulating what or who is an 'enemy' in a world where such prejudices are used to simplify the radical complexity and opaqueness of the world viewed below.
Finally, once established, regular drone patrols might inevitably be the source of mission-creep, as more and better sensors and weapons become available to be added to existing, highly expensive, platforms.Indeed, in the U.S., the Bill of Rights Defense Committee has already stressed that the domestic deployment of armed drones, building on the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to arm its border drones, is a very real possibility. "Drones are easily affixed with lethal and 'less-lethal' weapons," they point out. "And assurances that they will not be armed domestically lack credibility."Already, the Committee cite an example in Houston where police have deployed a small 50lb helicopter drone capable of being armed with a 12-gauge shotgun and a grenade launcher. The local sheriff, moreover, is "open to the idea of adding non-lethal weapons like tear gas, rubber bullets or Taser-style rounds to the drone."The prospect of armed drones in domestic policing, accompanied in the US by highly racialised and militarised policing tactics, inspires particularly grave concerns. They also bring the prospect of an especially powerful Foucauldian boomerang: the use of high-tech drones piloted from a distant place to deploy violence against racialised 'Others' far below both at home and abroad.
How, then, to contest the dronesphere? A widespread and powerful range of loosely-coordinated social movements, legal and human rights movements, demonstrations and activism campaigns are working hard at many scales to challenge the progressive normalisation of drones at home and abroad.
The Not a Bug Splat project is only one particularly visual campaign amongst many. Resistance to drone-killing is manifest in continuous demonstrations by veterans and other protestors at Creech and other drone air bases; widespread demonstrations against all aspects of the drone-related military machine; forensic analysis of drone strikes to try and hold those perpetrating human rights abuses or war crimes to account; and a wide spectrum of legal, communication and journalistic critiques and challenges. The latter are focusing especially on proscribing the deployment and design of fully automated drone and robot weapons systems where the decision to kill is actually taken by computer software without any human intervention whatsover.
An anonymous group of activists have also produced a 'Drone Survival Guide' – a guide to '21st century birdwatching' as they call it, outlining types of drones, as viewed from below, as well as ways to challenge their power. "Our ancestors could spot natural predators from afar by their silhouettes", it reads. "are we equally aware of the predators in the present day?".
A paradox emerges here: more and more of electronic game culture is filled with cases of participants undertaking virtual drone strikes as entertainment. And yet mainstream media providers like Apple too often work to censor or sanitise the bloody and real effects of real drone strikes on real people.
U.S. artist Josh Begley tried to get Apple to accept his Drones+ smart phone app which would notify users each time a U.S. drone strike was reported.
Beyond Begley, a wide range of journalists, artists, activists and academics are working to render the real effects of civilian drone killings visible in an effort to bring those responsible for such killings to account. These include the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Stanford and NYU law schools 'Living under Drones' project, and the #NotaBugSplat groups, James Bridle's Dronestagram project, for example – http://www.instagram.com/dronestagram – lists satellite images of drone strike locations with their civilian casualties.
The invisibility of civilian killings by drones makes forensic analysis of the impacts of drone strikes by critical architects and lawyers especially important. Such experts are helping the United Nations Human Rights Council and other NGOs and legal teams to investigate drone killings of civilians as human rights abuses and potential as war crimes – and to prosecute their perpetrators.
In partnership with civilian drone victims, Weizman's groups are using the latest techniques of computer visualisation and satellite analysis to undertake forensic analysis of specific drone killings of civilians. In the process, they are exposing systemic evidence of acts against international humanitarian law.
Importantly, anti-drone campaigns groups and campaigns are working especially hard to problematise the ways in which unarmed and armed drones are crossing over from the colonial frontier to the domestic metropolis. In 2012, in a famous case, the New York based artists Essam Attia was arrested for pasting 100 satirical posters around the city attacking the prospect of drone-based policing there. Triggered by the decision of the New York Police Department to authorise drone use, Attia's simple aim, he said, was to "create a conversation" about the politics of drone-based policing.
Elsewhere, activists themselves are exploring the adoption of drone-base systems to extend their own powers of surveillance 'from the grassroots' against state and corporate power (what has been termed 'sous-surveillance'). This is part of a broader shift in urban activism towards recognising the need to address the volumes of city spaces rather than merely occupying the flat levels of urban streets.
With drone hobbyism growing rapidly, and basic drones with video cameras now accessible from any toy store for very low prices, prospects for democratising the drone are starting to emerge. Might drones be repositioned away from the monopolistic control of the worlds of high tech military and police power towards the routines of citizen activism, research, critique and hobbyism?
In an initial example, Occupy protestors in New York in December 2011 repurposed a simple drone bought from a toy store as an 'Occucopter.' An attempt to distribute the vertical gaze beyond the security forces or corporate media to the activist and demonstrators themselves – and their channels of communication — the Occucopter represents one example of the ways in which the democratisation of initially military technologies can be used to challenge the militarisation of civil society.
In practice, the Occucopter helped activists become aware when groups of demonstrators were being illegally incarcerated, when they were being geographically confined by 'kettling' tactics, or when journalists were illegally barred from accessing sites of demonstrations. Recorded footage from the drone was also useful in countering the efforts of the police or corporate media to brand activists and demonstrators as a mere gang of 'anarchists'. (Further successful drone use by protestors and critical researchers has occurred in Estonia, Russia and Poland and Washington D.C.).
Capturing the violence of political regimes against non-violent protestors, in particular, can be a huge boon in efforts to bolster campaigns whilst quickly undermining the legitimacy of those in power. Technology researcher Patrick Meier even wonders whether drones could be used more strategically to paint entire skies with key activist slogans or to follow key public officials during protests.
The first challenge for such campaigns, however, is to prevent the a priori criminalisation of activist drones at the outset. Just as citizen drone use is proliferating, national security states are trying to reclaim their hegemony of the skies.
As journalists, activists and researchers have extended their use of the technology to gain previously impossible footage and imagery of proscribed and securitised spaces, so civilian use of such technologies is increasingly being criminalised as a 'security threat'. In 2015, three Al Jazeera journalists were arrested on suspicion of using drones without a license in Paris; a photojournalist using a drone near Gatwick airport was also arrested and held even though he had a license.
Many states are also introducing much tighter legislation criminalising the use of hobbyist drones based on the same vague and ill-specified 'security' concerns so often used to justify homeland deployment of drones in the first place. With particular irony, scare stories are often used in such arguments about the possibility of terrorists using drones with weapons attached.
In February 2015, four weeks before a hobbyist drone controller was arrested for accidentally flying his machine whilst drunk above the White House, a wide range of US state security departments had held a 'summit' exploring the dangers posed by the possible weaponisation of hobby drones. Videos of fighters in the Syrian civil war using drones equipped with automatic weapons were shown. An exhibition was organised of hobby drones with various weapons attached. The emphasis was that the enormous expenditure fortifying government facilities against surface-level terrorist attacks might ultimately be simply traversed by those using the third, vertical, dimension.
More prosaically, police forces in Japan unveiled an anti-hobbyist drone in December 2015. This is equipped with a net to pluck drones seen as troublesome out of the Tokyo skies. Such cat and mouse, drone versus drone, conflicts will only become more intense in the airspaces above cities.
Fuelled by the language of emergency and endless war, combined powerfully with a major push by military and security complexes to normalise their deployment, fleets of unmanned drones are quickly saturating our skies. Myths of 'precision' cover their murderous trail; powerful censorship and intimidation obscures their violence; efforts to sanitise or infantilise such systems hide their domestic proliferation.
With an on-going shift towards fully automated drones at home and abroad, which identify 'targets' or 'abnormal' activities entirely autonomously using software, the challenges facing those who oppose the robot imperium are large indeed.
Such shifts, however, are not inevitable. The challenge now is for concerted efforts to connect and mobilise critiques, activism, protest and legal mobilisation so that the burgeoning world of lethal and 'less than lethal' drones can be revealed, regulated and radically circumscribed.


Use iTunes to sync your music, videos and photos to your iPad.
Listening to your favorite music while you're working can make long hours at the office seem a little less tedious. If you frequently transfer music to an iPod, USB flash drive or other portable device, the XML list that contains the library information for your iTunes collection might become corrupted. Rebuilding your iTunes library can take a considerable amount of time depending on the number of songs in your collection. If problems arise with your library file -- or if you want to move your iTunes collection to another computer -- you can use tools already built into iTunes and Windows to edit or repair the XML file and correct common problems.
Launch iTunes on your computer. ITunes displays an error message stating that it has attempted to repair the corrupted library file and renamed it. Note the location of the renamed library XML file. Click the "OK" button to close the message box. Close iTunes on your PC.
Click "Start" and then "Computer." Browse to the folder location displayed in the iTunes warning message. Click and highlight the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file. Press "Ctrl-X" to cut the file and store it in the Windows clipboard.
Minimize the Windows Explorer window, and then press "Ctrl-V" to paste the file to the Windows desktop.
Maximize the Windows Explorer window to display the iTunes folder and its file contents. Highlight the "Tunes Library.itl" file and delete it from the folder.
Launch iTunes again on your computer. Click "File" on the menu bar, then "Library." When the slide-out menu appears, click the "Import Playlist" option.
Browse to the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file on the Windows desktop. Click the filename, and then click "Open." Wait a few seconds for iTunes to import the playlist file and rebuild the library.
Click the "OK" button when prompted to do so. Reconnect portable devices with the computer to resynchronize the library files between the players and iTunes. ITunes resynchronizes the playlists on the portable devices automatically.
Open iTunes and click "File" then "Library" on the menu bar. Click "Export Library" on the pop-up menu. Note the name of the folder and filename created when you export the library file.
Connect a USB flash drive or external hard drive to a free USB port on the computer. Wait a few seconds for Windows to detect the device and configure the drive as an external storage device.
Click "Start," then "Computer" to open Windows Explorer. Alternatively, right-click the "Start" button, and then click "Open Windows Explorer" on the pop-up menu.
Browse to the folder where you keep all of your music on your PC; by default it's the Music folder within your username folder. Press "Ctrl-A" to highlight all of the music files, and then press "Ctrl-C" to copy and store them in the Windows clipboard.
Browse to the main Windows Explorer window that displays all of the drives in your computer. Double-click the drive letter for the USB flash drive or external hard drive you connected earlier.
Press "Ctrl-V" to copy all of the music files to the external storage device.
Browse to the folder in which iTunes saved the exported library file. Press "Ctrl-C" to copy the file and then "Ctrl-V" to paste it to the USB drive. Close Windows Explorer and disconnect the USB flash drive or external hard drive from the computer.
Connect the USB flash drive or external hard drive to the second computer. Wait for Windows to detect the device and assign it a drive letter in Windows Explorer.
Install iTunes (itunes.com) on the second computer if you have not already done so. Note the name of the folder the installation creates for your music collection.
Double-click the drive letter for the USB drive in Windows Explorer. Right-click the filename of the exported library file in the USB drive and click "Open with Notepad" on the pop-up menu. Notepad opens and displays the contents of the file in the text editor window.
Click "Edit" on the Notepad menu bar, then "Replace." Enter the default path used in the exported library file into the Find What field. Using the sample case, enter "C:\Program Files\iTunes\Music" into the field.
Enter the drive letter and path on the USB drive where the files are located into the "Replace with file" field -- "F:\" or "F:\music" in the sample case.
Click the "Replace All" button. Windows Notepad replaces all of the path names created by the iTunes export utility with the path on the USB drive.
Click "File" and "Save" on the Notepad menu bar, and close Notepad.
Open iTunes on the second computer. Click "File" then "Library" on the menu bar. On the pop-up menu, click "Import Playlist." Browse to the exported library file saved on the USB drive. Highlight the filename and click "Open." Wait a few seconds for iTunes to import the music and playlists from the USB drive.
A simpler way to copy your music library from one computer to another is to use an iPod or iPad. After you sync your library and playlists on the first computer with the iPad or iPod, simply install iTunes on the second computer and sync the application with the portable device. Then all of your music and playlist files transfer to the new computer.
Grundy, Jeff. "Editing the iTunes XML File." Small Business - Chron.com, http://smallbusiness.chron.com/editing-itunes-xml-file-40813.html. Accessed 21 April 2019.
What Is Auto-Filling on iTunes?


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If I Die by Rachel Vincent
July 18, 2012	Shaheen	Reviews	0
No one wants to be this teacher's pet…
The entire school's talking about the gorgeous new math teacher, Mr Beck. That is, everyone except Kaylee Cavanaugh. After all, Kaylee's no ordinary high-school junior. She's a banshee — she screams when someone dies.
But the next scream might be for Kaylee.
Yeah — it's a shock to her, too. So to distract herself, Kaylee's going to save every girl in school. Because that hot new teacher is really an incubus who feeds on the desire of unsuspecting students. The only girls immune to his lure are Kaylee and Sabine — her boyfriend's needy ex-girlfriend. Now the unlikely allies have to get rid of Mr Beck…before he discovers they aren't quite human, either.
But Kaylee's borrowed lifeline is nearing its end. And those who care about her will do anything to save her life. Anything.
By now I'm used to something freaky and supernatural going down in the very first chapter of a Soul Screamers novel, but I was surprised regardless! It's great that Rachel Vincent can keep astonishing her readers five books into the series. If I Die is a roller coaster ride unlike any I have ever read before – the protagonist knows she has less than a week to live and finds out that her Math teacher is preying on his female students. This is an emotionally charged book that – unfortunate for Kaylee – hurtles towards its conclusion and leaves readers breathless at the end.
The most interesting aspect of the novel, for me, is how Kaylee deals with her impending death. Many of the characters remark, with confusion, that she takes everything quite well. There's no screaming or raging. Kaylee wants to spend her last few days with her family and friends and ensure that the incubus preying on her fellow classmates, including her best friend Emma, is stopped. A welcome, and natural, source of support is Tod, who has a much larger role in the novel than previously (which I loved because I'm Team Tod all the way). In contrast Nash, who I believe hit rock bottom in the last book and couldn't disappoint me any further, started digging.
On a more personal note, the news of her death brings to the forefront everything Kaylee will not have the opportunity to do, and one of the things she decides to experience is sex. Rachel Vincent handles the issue very well, balancing Kaylee's helplessness and her desire to be in control of one aspect of her life with the concerns of her friends about making a decision she simply isn't ready for. I have found that Rachel Vincent has handled the issue of Kaylee's virginity throughout the series with candour and respect and, above all, realistically, and am glad to find this hasn't changed.
There are a few things I didn't like in this book. Keeping Sophie out of the loop is doing no one any favours – not only is she in constant danger, but she must be extremely confused because she knows there is something going on, but has no idea what it is. Although I find her attitude towards Kaylee repulsive I understand where the impulse comes from. Similarly Kaylee's efforts to keep her best friend Emma in the dark proves more dangerous, time and time again, than just letting her know everything up front. Finally, Kaylee's attitude towards the relationship between Nash and Sabine is both inexplicable and wrong, in my opinion. She and Sabine make a deal for Sabine to inherit Nash as a boyfriend, and possibly Emma as a friend, after Kaylee's death. These are people we are talking about, not possessions!
This book certainly delivers! Rachel Vincent has packed a lot into this fantastic book, and its conclusions had me reaching for Before I Wake, the next book in the series, immediately. If you haven't started this series, you are seriously missing out!
Date published: 1st October 2011
Publisher: HarlequinTeen Australia
ISBN 13: 9781921794896 ISBN 10: 1921794895
Categories: Young Adult
Goodreads / The Book Depository / Booktopia (AU)
My review of My Soul to Lose (Soul Screamers 0.5)
My review of My Soul to Take (Soul Screamers I)
My review of My Soul to Save (Soul Screamers II)
My review of My Soul to Keep (Soul Screamers III)
My review of Reaper (Soul Screamers 3.5)
My review of My Soul to Steal (Soul Screamers IV)
Soul Screamers Series
By Rachel Vincent
The Secret Runners of New York by Matthew Reilly
More Than We Can Tell by Brigid Kemmerer
Letters to the Lost by Brigid Kemmerer
With All My Soul by Rachel Vincent
Before I Wake by Rachel Vincent
My Soul to Steal by Rachel Vincent
My Soul to Keep by Rachel Vincent
My Soul to Save by Rachel Vincent
Blood Bound by Rachel Vincent
Blog Tour: Freeks by Amanda Hocking
Waer by Meg Caddy
Marked by Sue Tingey
Audiobook Review: Dreams of Gods and Monsters by Laini Taylor
Audiobook Review: Days of Blood and Starlight by Laini Taylor
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Marketplace & Legals
An Evening of Worship with Michael Combs
Non-Profit Guide
GDOT announces lane closures on Hwy. 9, Dawson Forest
Race for Commission Chair heats up
City, county enter IGA on proposed TSPLOST referendum
Amicalola Regional Farmers Market eyes April launch
Northside Hospital Forsyth plans expansion
Letter to the Editor: Transparency concerns with BOC
General Assembly needs to take a hard look at film tax credit scheme
Letter to the Editor: The "No Declared War" War
Letter to the Editor: Not such a Merry Christmas for some
Some advice for a great-grandson at the start of a new year
Betty Jo Arrendale
Sandra D. Brown
Chris Richardson
Melba M. Hatton
Doris Louise Grogan Garrett
Dawson County romps in pair of regional wins
Lady Tigers split key regional games
Injury plagued season haunts Tigers in Area Duals
Thrilling win starts Tigers' new year
Lady Tigers look strong in win over Cherokee Bluff
The modern-day chain letter
Andy Griffith Show Part Two of a Four Part Series
The Andy Griffith Show — Part One of A Four Part Series
The chance of snow
Ghosts of Christmas present
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Casey Cagle, Brian Kemp share their thoughts on 8 state issues
Republican candidate for governor will be picked in July 24 primary runoff
Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and Secretary of State Brian Kemp will face off in a July 24 runoff in the Republican governor primary.
DCN Regional Staff
Updated: July 20, 2018, 10:09 a.m.
The Times spoke by phone with both candidates seeking the Republican nomination for governor. These answers are in their own words. The two will be on the ballot in the primary runoff July 24.
How should the state invest its increasing tax revenue, and what is your general view on state government spending?
Brian Kemp: I want to implement a spending cap that is tied to population and inflation, so we can reduce spending, budget conservatively, while properly funding the things that we should in state government, like education, public safety, transportation, infrastructure, health care and so on.
Casey Cagle: I want to see our (state income) tax rate below 5 percent. ... I want to do that in four years. We can do a portion of that through the increased revenue spending that we currently have. I want to put zero-base budgeting in place where every agency is going to program their core competencies in a way that is focused on outcomes, and then we budget accordingly to that … It's a combination of cutting taxes and it's also a combination of funding the core competencies of education and public safety as well as transportation.
Would you cut the income tax further as governor if it meant a true reduction in state revenue, and not just the reduction of a windfall?
Kemp: Yes, that is the plan. We should offset any windfall the state is getting. … The state should absolutely offset that dollar for dollar and give that back to the people of Georgia. I believe by budgeting conservative in the future and controlling and reducing spending, we can further lower the rates than what's already been proposed, and I am going to be working on that as governor.
Cagle: My plan is to move us to under 5 percent within the four years of my first administration.
Would you commit to fully funding the QBE formula for education if you were elected and for every year that you would serve in office?
Kemp: We'd commit to fully funding QBE. It's fully funded now, thankfully. It took a very long time to do that. But I also think we need to redo the funding formula. It's very inequitable for a lot of different districts. ... The formula is very old. It needs to be brought up to today's standard, and I personally think that we need to include the state school superintendent, who is the elected leader for education in the state per the Constitution, to be involved in that process. I don't know that anyone knows that better than he does, so that would be something I look forward to working with him on.
Cagle: We fully funded QBE this year, and it was a huge priority of not just the governor's but also of mine. I believe undeniably that as governor, we have to adequately fund our K-12 education. I'm going to be committed to spending the resources necessary to improve our public education, along with getting our teacher salaries back up to the national average. Sadly enough, those have fallen. We have a teacher shortage now. Our schools are challenged to find enough teachers to teach in their schools. ... The QBE formula is certainly outdated. It needs to really be restructured, and I am committed to doing that.
What are your thoughts on Georgia's reforms to the gas tax system?
Kemp: There was a transportation bill that was passed years ago that is funding a lot of the infrastructure improvements in the future.
Cagle: Obviously we are going to have to make significant investments in our infrastructure. Georgia is expected to grow by 4 million people in less than 15 years, and so to sustain the growth that we currently have but also building upon the future, we will have to have even more revenue available to invest in our roads. Many of our communities are doing T-SPLOST (transportation sales tax). ... Typically, overwhelmingly they are voting to tax themselves in order to improve transportation.
What are your thoughts on the state's ongoing "water wars?" Would you seek funds to expand state reservoirs?
Kemp: My goal there is to put Georgians first and fight hard to protect our water resources in our state, including Lake Lanier that is so critical to the Northeast Georgia area, certainly Hall County and those surrounding where the lake is, not only there but all of Georgia when you think about our farmers. We have to have a governor who will fight for us on that, and I will certainly do that, and I will continue to fund the litigation as long as it makes sense for Georgians, and I believe we'll be victorious at the end of the day on that. As far as additional reservoirs, I'd be open to that in the future to continue to have the water resources we need, but I would look at that on a case-by-case basis when I become governor.
Cagle: The real solution, No. 1, is to win in court, and I will be a governor that will continue to put the resources there and to ensure that we do win … If we can capture more of our rainfall and use it in a responsible way, we can take care of our needs well into the future. So reservoirs have to be a solution, and I'll be committed to doing so.
Both candidates also noted that the state's water management has reduced water use. Both candidates commented on the Glades reservoir, a proposed project in North Hall.
Kemp: I know that's been in the pipeline for a long time and has run into issues, and quite honestly, I'm not sure where that stands right now and what the hurdles would be to get that done and whether it would be good to do it anyway.
Cagle: I'm very supportive, clearly, of Glades Farm Reservoir, and we just have to find the right solution that federal partners and our local partners can come to the table and agree upon.
What about "constitutional carry"? Would you sign a bill that allowed Georgians to carry a firearm concealed without a permit and application process?
Kemp: I'm certainly supportive of constitutional carry. I'm a strong supporter of the Second Amendment. I hunt, I shoot and I carry. I think we need to have a governor that will continue to get more access for the Second Amendment, and I will do that as governor. The way that is done is something that will have to come through the legislative process and will need to be reviewed and see how that looks in regards to federal legislation. I'm certainly open to doing that.
Cagle: Yes ... I think our Constitution does clearly protect individuals or gives individuals a constitutional right to carry. It's not predicated on government making that decision, it's an individual decision that people should be allowed to make.
What is your plan for Georgia's overburdened foster care system?
Kemp: I've got a detailed plan on my website that you can check out for adoption reform, so I think that's one of the things we need to start with, is streamlining that process.
Cagle supported the Supporting and Strengthening Families Act, which allows parents in crisis to give temporary guardianship to a friend, family member or other trusted adult for up to a year.
Cagle: There are a tremendous amount of not-for-profit organizations that are out there that need or desire a streamlined process that is not so bureaucratic, so this bill will allow for a much more seamless way for kids to be able to be in loving families.
Both Cagle and Kemp said they support increasing the adoption tax credit to make adoption more affordable.
Should the state take over the Atlanta airport?
Kemp: I wouldn't go that far. I think certainly there is definitely corruption at the airport that needs to be cleaned up. How you do that is a bigger question. I'm certainly open to studying that and looking into it.
Cagle appointed a study committee of state legislators in June who will look at the state's role in airport operations. He said the study committee's findings would help him make a decision.
Cagle: I do think there needs to be greater oversight. There's been a number of corruption allegations that have been brought forth, and that's why we took the action in which we did. I will wait on the study committee to do its work and have the findings and analyze it accordingly.
Why are you a better choice for the Republican nomination based on your policy positions?
Kemp: I think if you look at my conservative four-point plan, making Georgia No. 1 for small business by taking a chain saw to government regulations; reforming the way state government spends taxes and operates so we can implement a spending cap and lower state income tax rates; making sure that no matter what your ZIP code is, you have the same opportunities as anyone else in this state — access to high-speed internet, good quality health care, good quality education and economic opportunities; and good infrastructure in your local community. And I have plans to do that, especially concerning strengthening rural Georgia. Lastly, we need a governor that will put Georgians first and keep them safe. I have two detailed plans to do public safety reform, tracking and reporting criminal illegals and stopping and dismantling gangs in our state.
Cagle: (I am) a lieutenant governor who has cut taxes, a lieutenant governor who has outlawed sanctuary cities, a lieutenant governor who has passed the strongest illegal immigration bills in the country, a lieutenant governor who has created 46 college and career academies across the state of Georgia. ... (I have) been committed to educational reforms like the charter system. ... It's a record of accomplishments that absolutely have improved the lives of citizens in our state.
There is also one runoff on the Democratic ballot. Georgia voters must select either a Republican or Democratic ballot on Tuesday. Polls will be open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Check whether you're registered, the location of your polling precinct and view sample ballots.
Who's on the ballot
L.S. "Casey" Cagle
https://www.gainesvilletimes.com/news/casey-cagle-brian-kemp-share-their-thoughts-8-state-issues/
Geoff Duncan
David Shafer
David Belle Isle
Brad Raffensperger
State school superintendent
Sid Chapman
Otha E. Thornton Jr.
Gainesville Times Managing Editor Shannon Casas contributed to this report.


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Conservative commentator Ann Coulter has lost her enthusiasm for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie after the senator he appointed to temporarily fill the late Frank Lautenberg's seat voted to end debate on the immigration bill.
"@GovChristie's dead to me," Coulter said in a tweet to the Republican she once championed as the party's only hope to capture the White House in 2012.
@GovChristie's dead to me: Jeffrey S. Chiesa R NJ votes "Aye" on Amnesty bill. CRUZ 2016!
She added, "[Sen.] Jeffrey S. Chiesa R NJ votes 'Aye' on Amnesty bill."
She then sent out several tweets suggesting that a vote to allow "amnesty" for immigrants was also a vote for "abortion, gay marriage, Obamacare, and big government."
"Any politician who claims to be pro-life yet votes for amnesty is a liar," said one of her Twitter messages.
"So glad you FINALLY woke up to the fraud that is @ChrisChristie," she said in another, followed by, "if amnesty passes, country is over. THANKS CHRIS CHRISTIE."
Coulter was one of the earliest advocates of a Christie presidential candidacy and pushed hard for him to run against President Barack Obama in the last election.
"I don't care if [Chris Christie] wants to run, his country needs him, it appears," she said in February 2011.
As late as May, Coulter defended Christie against criticism that he was fraternizing with Obama, telling conservative talk show host Sean Hannity, "There seems to be a concerted movement by both liberals and conservatives to lie about Christie and make him seem more liberal than he really is."
Coulter appears to have thrown her support behind Sen. Ted Cruz as the 2016 GOP presidential nominee. "CRUZ 2016!" she said at the end of her tweet.


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https://www.starsinsider.com/celebrity/239752/the-actors-who-almost-appeared-in-harry-potter
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The actors who almost appeared in 'Harry Potter' -
Everyone knows 'Harry Potter'. Both the book and film series are huge parts of contemporary culture. The films helped restart the UK film industry, and introduced the world to the UK's finest acting talent. However, which actors didn't get a place on the 'Harry Potter' cast?
When Richard Harris passed away in 2002, it raised the question of who would take his iconic role as Dumbledore in the 'Harry Potter' series. As we all know, Michael Gambon eventually took over the part, but director Chris Columbus has recently spoken about the casting choice in an interview with The Wrap. He recalled meeting with the Peter O'Toole as he thought O'Toole would be good for the part, but the actor turned it down. "Richard was his best friend and he felt it was intrusive from an acting point of view so he decided not to do it," Columbus revealed.
Click on to find out more about the actors who almost appeared in 'Harry Potter.'
Getty Images/BrunoPress
Peter O'Toole - Legendary actor Peter O'Toole starred in films such as 'Lawrence of Arabia' and 'My Favourite Year'.
Peter O'Toole - O'Toole was considered for the role of Albus Dumbledore, after the original actor Richard Harris passed away. At the time, it was believed that producers were also concerned with O'Toole's health. The role eventually went to Michael Gambon.
© Getty Images/BrunoPress
J.K. Rowling - That's right, J.K. Rowling herself almost showed up in the film series. The writer was considered for the role of Harry's mother, Lily.
J.K. Rowling - It didn't work out in the end, and the role eventually went to Geraldine Somerville.
Tim Roth - The late Alan Rickman impressed audiences worldwide as Severus Snape. However, the role could have played by another actor entirely: Tim Roth.
Tim Roth - Roth was apparently first in line for the role, but chose to work on 'The Planet of the Apes' instead.
Kate Winslet - The 'Titanic' narrowly missed out on joining the 'Harry Potter' cast.
Kate Winslet - Winslet was considered for the role of Helena Ravenclaw, a ghost who haunts Hogwarts. According to Hollywood.com, Winslet's agent rejected the role on her behalf. Kelly Macdonald (right) and Nina Young played the role in two seperate films.
Ian McKellen - No stranger to wizarding roles, Sir Ian McKellen was another actor who was considered for the role of Albus Dumbledore.
Ian McKellen - After Richard Harris died, he was offered the role. But knowing that Harris had been critical of his previous acting work, McKellen didn't feel it would be right.
Robin Williams -
Rubeus Hagrid was a role made iconic by Robbie Coltrane. However, the late Robin Williams also had a chance at playing the character.
BrunoPress
Robin Williams - Apparently, Warner Brothers had picked Williams as first choice. However, J.K. Rowling wasn't happy with an American actor in the role.
Tilda Swinton - Swinton almost swiped up the role of Sybil Trelawney, a quirky character who fit the actress's style.
Tilda Swinton - Scheduling conflicts prevented Swinton from joining the 'Harry Potter' cast. The amazing Emma Thompson took on the role instead.
Hugh Grant - In 'Chamber of Secrets', Gilderoy Lockhart was played brilliantly by Kenneth Branagh. However, Hugh Grant was offered the role first, and even accepted it. So what went wrong?
Hugh Grant - Yet again, it was scheduling conflicts that caused Grant to miss the opportunity.
Rosamund Pike - Way before 'Gone Girl', Rosamund Pike was hoping to join 'Harry Potter' as Rita Skeeter.
Rosamund Pike - However, things didn't work out, and the role eventually went to Miranda Richardson.
Billy Connolly - The legendary comedian was considered for the quirky character, Xenophilius Lovegood.
Billy Connolly - However, he decided to work on other films such as 'The Hobbit' and 'A Series of Unfortunate Events' instead. Rhys Ifans stepped in to take the role instead.
Naomi Watts - Naomi Watts missed out on playing Narcissa Malfoy, mother of the menacing Draco Malfoy.
Naomi Watts - However, like Kate Winslet, Watts apparently had the role refused by her agent. Instead, Helen McRory played the complex character.
David Walliams - Talking with the Daily Star, David Walliams said he was "was offered a part, not a big part" in the 'Harry Potter' series.
David Walliams - He didn't reveal who he could have played, yet Walliams would have been a great addition to the magical movies.
Robson Green - Now known for his 'Extreme Fishing' series, Robson Green almost scored a role in the 'Harry Potter' series.
Robson Green - Green was apparently picked out for the role of Sirius Black by director Chris Columbus. However, Alfonso Cuaron handled the film with Black, and he picked Gary Oldman instead.
Bob Hoskins - According to Popsugar, the late Bob Hoskins was considered for the role of Horace Slughorn.
Bob Hoskins - Unfortunately for Hoskins, the role landed in the hands of Jim Broadbent.
Liam Aiken - That's right, the all-important of Harry Potter was not always for Daniel Radcliffe. Apparently, the role was offered to American actor Liam Aiken.
Liam Aiken -
However, it didn't turn out well for Aiken. J.K. Rowling didn't want the role to go to a non-British actor. Radcliffe was ultimately chosen for the lead role.
See also: From brilliant to rubbish: British accents delivered by American actors
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The actors who almost appeared in 'Harry Potter'
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Anita Wlodarczyk is likely to start her new season in May at the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Challenge Meeting in Beijing, China, where she is the defending champion.
Though the season starts with the IAAF Diamond League in Doha on May 5, Wlodarczyk would not be in action as women's hammer throw is not part of the calendar.
The Poland star topped the IAAF Hammer Throw Challenge for the third consecutive time and was short-listed for Athlete-of-the-Year award which went to Ethiopian distance runner Almaz Ayana.
The 31-year-old will conclude her training camp in Doha, where she is accompanied by her coach Kaliszewski Kysztof and physiotherapist Diorian Lomza, on December 18.


Among the most encouraging fields that are still developed in the contemporary business world healthcare market plays the leading role. This ball has actually constantly been the last one to prune the budget plan for. Medicine is creating extremely quickly, therefore develops the servicing of patients. Certified nursing help as well as phlebotomy are the most encouraging areas. If you have composed your mind to be involved in phlebotomy, you have to complete unique courses.
. It is recommended to choose across the country accredited programs as they ensure you the ideal level of certification.
The timetable has academic research study (physiology, makeup) and also sensible training (executing blood tests as well as analyses in labs). At the end of the program pupils take an exam containing a test and also functional tasks. Pupils who intend to train for a test can find tests and tests on the Internet. But typically prep work for the final examination happens throughout classes and trainings at labs.
Certified nursing aid and phlebotomy are the most promising areas. If you have made up your mind to be included in phlebotomy, you have to complete special courses.
At the end of the program trainees take an exam being composed of a quiz and also useful projects.


Should Creditsafe disclose the names of the Trade Partners under the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act?
The Trade Payment information held is not personal data (it is business data) and therefore it is not amenable to the Freedom of Information Act. This Act only places relevant duties on public bodies/ certain other bodies listed under the Act (which essentially exercise public functions). Therefore unfortunately we are unable to simply provide the names of the suppliers of payment information due to the non-disclosure agreements in place.
However we do have a discrepancy process if you would like to challenge the payment data; are you able to kindly provide us with a copy of your purchase ledger? - This way our Trade Payment Team will be able to can check the payment information contained therein against the information we hold from our trade payment partners to identify any potential discrepancies which may affect your credit rating. (In order to cross reference the data to our information we would need a full list of paid invoices in the last 12 months containing the key information such as invoice number, invoice date, due date, paid date and invoice amount). If any discrepancies were found these would be queried with the data supplier. We would then ask the supplier to allow us to disclose their details to you. If we are unable to contact a particular supplier for verification within 14 days, then these payment experiences would be removed.


FYI: There was some type of glitch with the boards today (b77 and HoF). It involved the wrong time for the boards, which then created issues when the time was reset to the correct time.
You will also notice missing posts. Jude said he may try to look into that to see if he can manually edit them back in. Otherwise, we don't know if they're gone permanently or temporarily.
We are now hoping, however, that the space-time continuum has been restored.
Well, obviously, the issue has recurred (both here and at HoF). Jude is going to submit a ticket to mXhub.
Also, Jude is having difficulties posting due to the time stamp issue, and we've realized that others may be having issues, too. If so, please don't give up hope! Also, private messaging is still working. Feel free to PM me if need be.


Elections 2014 have received worldwide praise for the peaceful transition of power in India and their smooth conduct but do you know behind their execution there was a "quietly efficient" planning that started 18 months in advance.
The sheer size of the Indian electors is mind-boggling to most outsiders--830.5 million voters, 9,00,000 polling stations, 8,000 candidates across 543 Lok Sabha constituencies in the world's largest democracy that demands involvement of men and machine of a scale unthinkable anywhere else in the world.
"This election has truly been a logistical achievement. Planning for this major event began over 18 months ago, and the Election Commission leadership was clearly focused on delivering an efficient, quiet and high quality election with minimum glitches," says a top Commission source.
The largest size of poll staff was deployed in this election--6,69,000 poll officials across 543 constituencies to be precise drawn entirely drawn from the central and state bureaucracy.
"While the election is being applauded for its efficiency, it was fully conducted by the same bureaucracy that is often criticised for slowness and delayed decision making," the source said.
Helplines were set up at the constituency level, state level and at Delhi headquarters to immediately organise raids and seize cash. This enabled seizures of cash of Rs.313 crore, 2.2 lakh litres of liquor valued at Rs.1,000 crore and 1.85 lakh kg of drugs. For the first time in the Lok Sabha polls, the Commission operated an expenditure monitoring division headed by a senior officer of income tax department.
This time, by rotating forces across multiple phases, the Commission optimised the services of over 8,00,000 paramilitary personnel. Such large number of troops had to be rotated across the length and breadth of the country nine times over the nine phases of the polls via Indian Railways. Over 570 special trains were dedicated for election duty to rotate the troops. Additionally, over 50 helicopters were deployed on poll day duty, which made over 1,500 sorties.
The Commission also made innovative polling booth security management. As against an isolated state election where it could provide 100 per cent paramilitary force deployment, in a general election the same forces are deployed across the country. This makes the force availability limited to about 20-30 per cent of sensitive polling stations besides 100 per cent deployment in the Left Wing Extremism areas.
In the initial phases of this election, the Commission started taking the preferences of political parties in deploying the limited available paramilitary forces in various polling stations. This enabled political parties to feel a sense of participation in security arrangements and went a long way in retaining faith in the security arrangements, the source said.
The greatest achievement of this election has been the highest turnout in the history of Indian elections. However, this has not been achieved overnight, says the source pointing to the fact that the last 23 Assembly elections had resulted in higher turnouts. In several cases the turnouts have made records. A voter awareness programme 'SVEEP' was introduced nationwide and major celebrities were roped in as brand ambassadors. National icons like A P J Abdul Kalam and Aamir Khan greatly helped in voter awareness.
The women voters have gone up from 55 to 65 per cent which has contributed to the overall increase of the voting percentage. In 16 states and Union Territories, women recorded higher turnout than men. Success was also achieved in the area of eliminating urban apathy. The participation of urban voters has also increased significantly by between 13 per cent and 20 per cent in different mega cities and urban centres. Also for the first time, the Commission took up a special campaign for registration of voters on election eve.
It took note of the general complaint of some voters, particularly in big cities, that though they had voted in previous elections, their names were not found in the current list when they went to the voting booth. So the Commission, when it announced the election schedule on March 5, it also announced registration for filing application on the same day if voters did not find their names. Over 82 lakh applications for enrolment were filed in one single day. The Commission also put in place a special complaint management machinery.
In the last two months, the election machinery filed over 16,000 FIRs and issued 3000 paid news notices in which 700 were confirmed. This amounts to an average of 300 FIRs and 50 paid news cases each day with more than one in some constituencies. The Commission also managed to complete diligence on each complaint and directed it to its logical conclusion. Depending upon the complexity of the case, suitable investigation by field staff had been undertaken and further action was taken. Over Rs 2,000 crore worth of inducement materials were seized by expenditure management monitoring.
This election, the source said, marked the first large scale deployment of flying squads and static surveillance teams. Over 21,000 teams were deployed amounting to 40 flying squads in each parliamentary constituency. Helplines were set up at the constituency level, state level and at Delhi headquarters to immediately organise raids and seize cash. This enabled seizures of cash of Rs 313 crore, 2.2 lakh litres of liquor valued at Rs 1,000 crore and 1.85 lakh kg of drugs. For the first time in the Lok Sabha elections, the Commission operated an expenditure monitoring division headed by a senior officer of income tax department. A record 667 expenditure observers, more than one in some constituencies, were deployed in this election to monitor expenditure of candidates.


Early in 1997 an underwater video filmed by a sport diver was given to a research associate in my laboratory (Underwater Research Lab) at Simon Fraser University. The underwater video, which was shot in a fresh water lake (Pavilion Lake in the interior of British Columbia), showed large fields of coral like growths. Intrigued by the images, we launched a small investigation to confirm their existence and bring back samples. It was clear to us that these growths were unique but we did not know at the time how unique.
We thought the growths in Pavilion Lake might be related to ancient stromatolites so we contacted Chris McKay and Sherry Cady at NASA Ames. McKay and Cady are exobiologists and their work includes studies of fossilized life forms found in ancient lake beds. It is hoped that these studies will shed light on the possibility that life existed at one time in ancient lakes on Mars. Specifically, if it can be shown that fossils similar to those found on earth exist in dry lake bed on Mars and these fossils are the result of life forms then it may be concluded that life once existed on Mars.
There is some scientific controversy with regard to the genesis of ancient lake-bed 'fossils'. If they are biogenic in origin then it is safe to conclude that there once was life where the fossils now reside. However, if the 'fossils' are not biogenic in origin (biological processes are not required) then no conclusion can be made about the presence or absence of former life.
Drs. McKay and Cady were extremely interested in the growths in Pavilion Lake because they might represent modern analogs to ancient dendritic reef structures and thereby yield some clues as to the origin of ancient stromatolites. Joint field work (URL and NASA) took place in September 1997, October 1998, and August 1999 and resulted in the cover story in NATURE (Oct. 5, 2000). The writing of the NATURE paper began with Bernard Laval, a research associate working for me, and was continued by NASA's Dr. Sherry Cady when Laval commenced his PhD. studies on an Australian International Postgraduate Scholarship. Dr. Cady is now with Portland State University where she is pulling together a team of NASA scientists (including Dr. McKay) and graduate students to study the genesis of the growths (now called microbialites) in Pavilion Lake.
Pavilion Lake is unique. What sets Pavilion Lake apart from other lakes with microbialites is that the Pavilion Lake microbialites have a resemblance to Epiphyton and Girvanella. These are Early Cambrian microbialites whose genesis is poorly understood because before the Pavilion Lake discovery there was no modern analog. As a result, there is international interest in the lake and therefore it would seem prudent that Canada have a hand in her exploration. The microbialites that grow along the walls of the lake are not the only feature of interest. There is a collection of interconnected mounds on a submerged ridge in the centre of the lake that should be investigated with regard to origin. There is an opportunity here to investigate the attributes of this unique lake and to make a contribution to establishing the possibility of life on Mars. Our previous research reveals the unique opportunities the Pavilion Lake ecosystem presents in elucidating microbialite morphogenesis and microbial calcification processes, and in improving our ability to interpret the fabrics of ancient carbonates.
We are looking for funds and support to continue research at Pavilion Lake, and encouraging visitors to this website to contact us with information that might lead to such research support.
Please note that Pavilion Lake is a protected ecosystem and permission is required to take samples or dive on the site.
More pictures of the lake floor and the directions to the site, click here.