Hasta La Gadget!

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – More than 50 State Department diplomats have signed an internal memo sharply critical of U.S. policy in Syria, calling for military strikes against President Bashar al-Assad’s government to stop its persistent violations of a cease-fire in the country’s civil war.

The “dissent channel cable” was signed by 51 mid- to high-level State Department officers involved with advising on Syria policy. It was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

The cable calls for “targeted military strikes” against the Syrian government in light of the near-collapse of the cease-fire brokered earlier this year, the Journal reported, citing copies of the cable it had seen.

Military strikes against the Assad government would represent a major change in the Obama administration’s longstanding policy of not taking sides in the Syrian civil war.

One U.S. official, who did not sign the cable but has read it, told Reuters the White House remained opposed to deeper American military involvement in the Syrian conflict.

The official said the cable was unlikely to alter that, or shift Obama’s focus from the battle against the persistent and spreading threat posed by the Islamic State militant group.

A second source who has read the cable said it reflected the views of U.S. officials who have worked on Syria, some of them for years, and who believe the Obama administration’s policy is ineffective.

“In a nutshell, the group would like to see a military option put forward to put some pressure … on the regime,” said the second source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The cable discussed the possibility of air strikes but made no mention of adding U.S. ground troops to Syria. The United States is believed to have roughly 300 U.S. special operations forces in Syria carrying out a counter-terrorism mission against Islamic State militants but not targeting the Assad government.

Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan told a congressional hearing on Thursday that Assad was in a stronger position than he was a year ago, bolstered by Russian air strikes against moderate opposition.

Brennan also said Islamic State’s “terrorism capacity and global reach” have not been reduced.

The names on the memo are almost all mid-level officials – many of them career diplomats – who have been involved in the administration’s Syria policy over the past five years, at home or abroad, the New York Times said.

While dissent cables are not unusual, the number of signatures on this document is extremely large, if not unprecedented, according to the Times.

“We are aware of a dissent channel cable written by a group of State Department employees regarding the situation in Syria,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said in an email. “We are reviewing the cable now, which came up very recently, and I am not going to comment on the contents.”

Kirby said the “Dissent Channel” was an official forum that allows State Department employees to express alternative views.

(Reporting by John Walcott and Arshad Mohammed; Writing by Eric Beech; Editing by Paul Tait)

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You might see a cute, driverless bus roaming the streets of Washington DC starting today. It’s called Olli, and it’s an autonomous electric minibus designed by Local Motors, which you might remember as the company that’s planning to sell 3D-printed c…

If you’re hoping to find future games from Microsoft be available for purchase on Steam, it seems that is a possibility that Microsoft isn’t opposed to. Speaking during Giant Bomb’s E3 stream (via ArsTechnica), Xbox boss Phil Spencer said that is something that they are looking at for the future of releases.

According to Spencer, “I look at Steam today, it’s on an incredible growth trajectory. It’s a massive force in gaming; a positive force. I think it will be bigger a year from now than it is today. And five years later it will still be bigger again.” He also adds, “I don’t think Valve’s hurt by not having [Microsoft’s] first-party games in their store right now. They’re doing incredibly well.”

Spencer also says that while Steam releases are a possibility, it won’t be applicable to every Microsoft title. “There’s going to be areas where we cooperate and there’s going to be areas where we compete. The end result is better for gamers. We will ship games on Steam again.” Unfortunately Spencer did not state which titles we might be able to expect in the future.

As it stands, Steam is one of the most popular platforms when it comes to purchasing games. This is thanks to various features offered on the platform, like discounts, social aspects where users can chat with each other, as well as a marketplace where gamers can resell items.

Microsoft Looking To Ship Games On Steam Again , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Last week it was rumored that iMessage for Android could be in the works. Apple has a reputation for being closed off to platforms that aren’t their own, and while they have been open to the idea of other companies like Microsoft and Google develop for their devices, they haven’t exactly returned the favor, save for Apple Music.

That being said, WWDC kicked off earlier this week and we have to say that we were a little surprised to learn that iMessage would not be making its way onto Android, so the question is, why not? According to reporter Walt Mossberg, it seems that one of the reasons is because Apple believes that having an exclusive feature like iMessage would drive sales of their products.

“When I asked a senior Apple executive why iMessage wasn’t being expanded to other platforms, he gave two answers. First, he said, Apple considers its own user base of 1 billion active devices to provide a large enough data set for any possible AI learning the company is working on. And, second, having a superior messaging platform that only worked on Apple devices would help sales of those devices — the company’s classic (and successful) rationale for years.”

This is similar to the line of thinking that BlackBerry had back in the day when BBM was exclusive to BlackBerry devices, although BBM has since expanded to other platforms. We’re also not sure if having iMessage is compelling enough to purchase an Apple product, but what do you guys think? Does that explanation make sense?

Apple Explains Why iMessage Isn’t Available For Android , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Elephants are equipped to survive pretty much every challenge except us.

But because human beings slaughter close to a hundred elephants every day to sell their tusks for the ivory, it’s possible the elephant might not survive at all.

Every part of the message isn’t that bleak in Nat Geo Wild’s Mind of a Giant, an intriguingly scientific elephant documentary that airs Sunday at 9 p.m. ET. But Caitlin O’Connell, one of the experts interviewed on the show, warns that it could be.

“The ivory trade is in no way sustainable,” says O’Connell, a consulting faculty member at Stanford who has studied elephants in the wild for 25 years. “If we’re serious about protecting elephants, I believe ivory should not be sold at all.”

O’Connell notes that as long ago as 1989, Kenya staged a public ivory burn, torching 12 million tons of illegally harvested tusks and rhinoceros horns.

The Kenyan government hoped to show it was serious about stopping poachers and protecting its elephant population, which had become a major tourist attraction.

“I was hopeful after that burn,” says O’Connell. “But you look around today and we’re back at the [poaching] levels of 25 years ago.

“There are more awareness programs now to educate people on how special and intelligent these animals are. But they’re still being killed.”

Mind of a Giant shows footage of Satao (above), an elephant for years said to be the largest in Africa. The producers note that his tusks, because of their size, could bring up to $250,000 in the illegal ivory market.

In 2014, Satao was killed by poachers.

Mind of a Giant, while it addresses the poaching issue, primarily focuses on elephants themselves, concluding that by any measure, elephants are remarkably intelligent.

Herds of elephants have figured out where they are protected, and where they are threatened by poachers. These herds will queue up in the protected zone at twilight and when it gets dark, hurry across the unprotected area to reach another safe zone.

Elephants recognize their image in mirrors (above). Elephants can figure out how to retrieve food from a setup that requires two elephants to pull on separate ropes simultaneously. In one study, one elephant figures out that she doesn’t have to pull at all, simply stand on the rope while the other elephant does the pulling.

“Elephants can assimilate and assess data,” O’Connell notes, enabling them to solve problems in ways we might assume are unique to humans.

On an equally interesting plane, the elephants in Mind of a Giant gather around and mourn fallen family members. On a lighter note, O’Connell says they have a sense of humor.

“I’ve worked with an elephant at the Oakland Zoo,” she says, “who would straighten his trunk and jab it into you, like a playful punch to the shoulder. It startled me the first time – and after he did it, he rocked back and forth from side to side, like he was enjoying that he’d ‘gotten’ me.”

Some of O’Connell’s longer-term studies have shown that elephants are highly sensitive to vibrations in the ground, which enables them to set up a relay system of warnings when there’s danger ahead.

“They have extremely well-developed auditory and olfactory senses,” she says. “We’ve found elephants can identify specific humans they know could harm them, by the color of their clothes or their smell.

“If you measured elephants against humans by the acuity of their senses, elephants would come out ahead. The only reason we think of ourselves as superior is that humans value vision so highly. In many of the other senses, we’d be far behind.”

An obvious question here, then, is that if elephants understand people are often a threat, why don’t elephants simply avoid us?

“Often in places where they can, they do,” O’Connell says. “They’ll wait until dark to travel in many populated areas. The problem is that humans are spreading out so much that there are fewer and fewer areas where it’s possible not to come in contact with us. So elephants, like other wildlife, have to adapt.”

The consequences of this interaction can get complicated.

“When I was working in Namibia,” she says, “the government instituted a ban on shooting elephants. But that created a problem for farmers. If you’re a poor farmer trying to grow corn in Namibia, you need some way to protect your crop from elephants or you will have nothing.”

Still, it’s the elephants that usually get the shorter end of the interaction stick, and even beyond the disturbing numeric toll, that creates a whole chain of further problems. .

When poachers kill the older elephants, which have the larger and more valuable tusks, it leaves a herd with a younger population. That creates the same kind of crisis chat would arise with a human family consisting mostly of teenagers.

“Studies have shown that younger male elephants behave very differently when there aren’t bulls in the herd,” says O’Connell. “In some ways they don’t know how to behave. Since elephants live in family groups, that’s a big problem.”

Like Mind of a Giant, O’Connell says she’d like to be optimistic that people and elephants can eventually work it out.

She just hopes we recognize the value and importance of elephants – and other wild animals – before our greed and indifference kills them off.

“I was more optimistic a few years ago,” she admits. “Now it sometimes feel like we’ve fallen back into the dark ages.”

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