SAN FRANCISCO — For Google last week, the decision was clear. An anti-Islamic video that provoked violence worldwide was not hate speech under its rules because it did not specifically incite violence against Muslims, even if it mocked their faith.

The White House was not so sure, and it asked Google to reconsider the determination, a request the company rebuffed.

Although the administration’s request was unusual, for Google, it represented the kind of delicate balancing act that Internet companies confront every day.

These companies, which include communications media like Facebook and Twitter, write their own edicts about what kind of expression is allowed, things as diverse as pointed political criticism, nudity and notions as murky as hate speech. And their employees work around the clock to check when users run afoul of their rules.

Google is not the only Internet company to grapple in recent days with questions involving the anti-Islamic video, which appeared on YouTube, which Google owns. Facebook on Friday confirmed that it had blocked links to the video in Pakistan, where it violates the country’s blasphemy law. A spokeswoman said Facebook had also removed a post that contained a threat to a United States ambassador, after receiving a report from the State Department; Facebook has declined to say in which country the ambassador worked.

“Because these speech platforms are so important, the decisions they take become jurisprudence,” said Andrew McLaughlin, who has worked for both Google and the White House. Most vexing among those decisions are ones that involve whether a form of expression is hate speech. Hate speech has no universally accepted definition, legal experts say. And countries, including democratic ones, have widely divergent legal approaches to regulating speech they consider to be offensive or inflammatory.

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USDA: Plants Database “The home page for the United States Department of Agriculture PLANTS Database. The PLANTS Database provides standardized information about the vascular plants, mosses, liverworts, hornworts, and lichens of the U.S. and its territories.”

The names of 77 ancient Egyptian dogs have been recorded. The names refer to color and character, such as Blackie, Ebony, Good Herdsman, Reliable, and Brave One. – Provided by RandomHistory.com

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Peace Be Upon You

Internet videos will insult your religion. Ignore them.

Dear Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and Jews,

You’re living in the age of the Internet. Your religion will be mocked, and the mockery will find its way to you. Get over it.

If you don’t, what’s happening this week will happen again and again. A couple of idiots with a video camera and an Internet connection will trigger riots across the globe. They’ll bait you into killing one another.

Stop it. Stop following their script.

Today, fury, violence, and bloodshed are consuming the Muslim world. Why? Because a bank fraud artist in California offered people $75 a day to come to his house and act out scenes that ostensibly had nothing to do with Islam. Then he replaced the audio, putting words in the actors’ mouths, and stitched together the scenes to make an absurdly bad movie ridiculing the Prophet Mohammed. He put out flyers to promote the movie. Nobody—literally nobody—came to watch it.

He posted a 14-minute video excerpt of the movie on YouTube, but hardly anyone noticed. Then, a week ago, an anti-Muslim activist in Virginia reposted the video with an Arabic translation and sent the link to activists and journalists in Egypt. An Egyptian TV show aired part of the video. An Egyptian politician denounced it. Clerics sounded the alarm. Through Facebook and Twitter, protesters were mobilized to descend on the U.S. embassy in Cairo. The uprising spread. The U.S. ambassador to Libya has been killed, and violence has engulfed other countries.

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Intel unveils Rosepoint—CPU and WiFi on same chip.

<NewsDaily: Russian mammoth remains give glimmer of hope for cloning.

Getting (drugs) under your skin: Using ultrasound waves, researchers boost skin’s permeability to drugs.

Looking at you: Face genes identified; Five genes have been found to determine human facial shapes.

Flu antibody’s ‘one-handed grab’ may boost effort toward universal vaccine, new therapies.

Plant Zone Map Made Obsolete By Rising Temperature – Science News – redOrbit.

Bats Get Help From A Manmade Cave – Science News – redOrbit.

Planes, Trains and Past Participles | Marcia Malory.

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Wild Snakes Capable of Virgin Birth

Researchers in the US studying two snake species found two female snakes that each reproduced without a male. The phenomenon, which is not uncommon in invertebrates, is called facultative parthenogenesis, and occurs when an egg develops without fertilization by a sperm. Although it has been reported in snake, shark, lizard and bird species, it previously had been observed only in captive vertebrates. In the recent study, scientists captured pregnant cottonmouths and copperheads, two types of North American pit vipers, and one snake in each group produced offspring that had only the mother’s genetic material.

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André RenéRoussimoff (Andre the Giant) has been unofficially crowned “The Greatest Drunk on Earth”^[66] for once consuming 119 12-US-fluid-ounce (350 ml) beers (over 41 litres) in 6 hours.^[67]On an episode of WWE’s Legends of Wrestling, Mike Graham said André once drank 156 16-US-fluid-ounce (470 ml) beers in one sitting, which was confirmed byDusty Rhodes. Such feats can be attributed to his large size, which meant it took higher amounts of alcohol to inebriate him. In her autobiography, The Fabulous Moolah Lillian Ellison writes that André drank 127 beers in a Reading, Pennsylvania hotel bar and later passed out in the lobby. The staff could not move him and had to leave him there until he awakened.^[68]

From HERE.

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“The Master”: A forbidding portrait of L. Ron Hubbard’s America