Europe's highest court rejected the 'safe harbor' agreement used by American tech companies

"The European Court of Justice has just ruled that the transatlantic Safe Harbour agreement, which lets American companies use a single standard for consumer privacy and data storage in both the US and Europe, is invalid.
...
Companies such as Facebook and Twitter may now face scrutiny from individual European countries' data regulators — and could be forced to host European user data in Europe, rather than hosting it in the US and transferring it over."

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They're finally here... our very own Rainbow Doritos!

Best video so far of the two massive explosions in Tianjin

From wiki:

On 12 August 2015, at least two explosions within 30 seconds of each other occurred at a container storage station at the Port of Tianjin in the Binhai New Area of Tianjin, China.[4][5] The cause of the explosions was not immediately known, but initial reports pointed to an industrial accident.[5] Chinese state media said that at least the initial blast was from unknown hazardous materials in shipping containers at a plant warehouse owned by Ruihai Logistics,[6] a firm specializing in handling hazardous materials.

 [...]

 Several reports stated that at least 71 people were severely injured, and more than 50 killed.

Als een nacht met duizend sterren - Joeri Boom

Het boek waar ik het gisteravond over had. Ik heb het nog niet uitgelezen maar ben nu op ongeveer 2/3e en heb tot op heden elke keer moeite gehad om het boek weg te leggen.

In Als een nacht met duizend sterren toont bekroond journalist Joeri Boom hoe ingewikkeld het is om de krankzinnige werkelijkheid van een oorlog te vatten. Zeker als daar militairen uit eigen land bij betrokken zijn, en voorlichters over je schouder meekijken. Tijdens de Nederlandse missie in de Afghaanse provincie Uruzgan (2006 – 2010) ging Boom mee op levensgevaarlijke patrouilles en zocht hij vergeefs naar resultaten van opbouwprojecten. Hij raakte in de ban van het soldatenleven en worstelde met (zelf)censuur en de eenzijdigheid van embedded-verslaggeving. Pas toen het hem lukte los van Defensie in Uruzgan te werken, merkte hij hoe onvolledig zijn beeld van de missie was geweest. Met pakkende en schokkende voorbeelden laat Joeri Boom zien wat er allemaal verborgen ligt achter het zinnetje: 'Dit artikel is gecontroleerd door Defensie, er is niets in gewijzigd.'

Over de schrijver: Joeri Boom

Battle for Lybia: video made by a Lybian soldier

In depth reporting on the Shake Weight

Challenge: identify this helicopter

Hide and seek champion

edit:

Tsunami footage taken from helicopter

Don't know if you've seen this, it's new to me.

Couldn't find a better source for this footage so here's the link.

Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: whose line is it anyway?

The US actor and the Libyan leader have produced some choice lines recently.

Can you distinguish between them? Take the quiz here.

My score was 8 out of 10 correct.

Epic News day

I've been glued to various live streams covering the riots in Egypt all day. The whole day the front lines between the anti-Mubarak protesters and the pro-Mubarak supporters have moved up and down the main street. The thugs supporting Mubarak seem to have started the violence, at one point charging into the crowds with horses and camels, later they started throwing molotov cokctails, they also drove a bus into the crowds. At night the anti-Mubarak protesters fought back hard moving up, shielded with steel barriers, in a phalanx formation.
But much more was going on today. The NASA Kepler time announced the biggest find of exoplanets yet:

"We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone - a region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Some candidates could even have moons with liquid water," said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and the Kepler Mission’s science principal investigator. "Five of the planetary candidates are both near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their parent stars."
Planet candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets. "We have found over twelve hundred candidate planets - that’s more than all the people have found so far in history," said Borucki. "Now, these are candidates, but most of them, I’m convinced, will be confirmed as planets in the coming months and years."
Among the stars with planetary candidates, 170 show evidence of multiple planetary candidates, including one, Kepler-11, that scientists have been able to confirm that has no fewer than six planets.

Also a colossal winter storm in America covering two thirds of the country. It consists of snowstorms, blizzards, ice storms, and thundersnow.
More extreme weather as Cyclone Yasi becomes one of the biggest cyclones to ever hit Australia.

Finally the volcano Shinmoedake has been erupting in Japan, resulting in a massive explosion and pretty night lightning.

More pictures of the volcano and lightning.
Hard to keep up with, but a good excuse not to be working on my thesis.

Egyptian Riot Compilation

These are some powerful images, much respect for these people protesting while facing such a repressive regime.

Also read this post about a journalist and many others being apprehended, brutally beaten up and tortured.

The Anti-Social Network

Iraq war logs: Frago 242 – a licence to torture

One of the revelations of the huge WikiLeaks document release.

First drop test of Vigrin Galactic's VSS Enterprise

"Vrijheid en verantwoordelijkheid" - deel 1: Drugs

• Coffeeshops worden besloten clubs die alleen voor meerderjarige inwoners van Nederland toegankelijk zijn op vertoon van een clubpas.
• Er komt een afstand van tenminste 350 meter tussen scholen en coffeeshops.
• De minister verscherpt het landelijk beleid en ziet erop toe dat gemeenten het afstandscriterium en de overige relevante delen van het landelijk beleid in hun vergunningen handhaven.
• Het kabinet komt met voorstellen zwaardere straffen te stellen op de (voorbereiding van) in- en uitvoer, teelt en (georganiseerde) handel van drugs en tot aanpassing van het onderscheid tussen harddrugs en softdrugs.

Kepler Spacecraft Finds 750 Exoplanet Candidates

Already a bit old news (June 15th), but somehow I missed it. Pretty exciting stuff.

The Kepler spacecraft has found over 750 candidates for extrasolar planets, and that is just from data collected in the first 43 days of the spacecraft's observations. "This is the biggest release of candidate planets that has ever happened," said William Borucki, Kepler's lead scientist. "The number of candidate planets is actually greater than all the planets that have been discovered in the last 15 years."

This is an astounding amount of potential exoplanets from data taken during such a short period of time, however Borucki added that they expect only about 50% of these candidates to actually turn out to be planets, as some may be eclipsing binary stars or other artifacts in the data. But still, even half would be the biggest group discovery of exoplanets ever.

And the exciting part is that 706 targets from this first data set have viable exoplanet candidates with sizes from as small as Earth to around the size of Jupiter. The team says the majority have radii less than half that of Jupiter.

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Change we can believe in?

Jack, drop die beat!

Somt het wel aardig op...