Archive for August, 2010
Independent Scientists Face Restrictions When Trying to Conduct Research in Areas Affected by BP Incident
August 12th, 2010This is absolutely ridiculous. Via: The Scientist: I want to collect data to answer scientific questions absent a corporate or governmental agenda. I won’t collect data specifically to support the government’s lawsuit against BP nor will I collect data only to be used in BP’s defense. Whereas I think damage assessment is important, it’s my […]
Federal Workers Earning Double Their Private Counterparts
August 12th, 2010Via: USA Today: At a time when workers’ pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees’ average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn, a USA TODAY analysis finds. Federal workers have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years in a row. The compensation […]
More Foreclosures, More Bank Failures, Big Trouble for the FDIC
August 11th, 2010Via: Yahoo Finance: The U.S. housing market continues to send mix signals. More homes continue to enter foreclosure but the number of homeowners carrying so-called “under water mortgages,” declined in the second quarter, Zillow.com reported Monday. 21.5% of homeowners owed more on their mortgage than their home was worth in the second quarter, that’s down […]
Cryptogon Reader Sends $20
August 11th, 2010MW sent $20. Thank you.
‘John Doe’ Who Fought FBI Spying Partially Freed From Gag Order After 6 Years
August 11th, 2010Via: Wired: The owner of an internet service provider who mounted a high-profile court challenge to a secret FBI records demand has finally been partially released from a 6-year-old gag order that forced him to keep his role in the case a secret from even his closest friends and family. He can now identify himself […]
Cars Hacked Through Wireless Tire Sensors
August 11th, 2010Via: Ars: The tire pressure monitors built into modern cars have been shown to be insecure by researchers from Rutgers University and the University of South Carolina. The wireless sensors, compulsory in new automobiles in the US since 2008, can be used to track vehicles or feed bad data to the electronic control units (ECU), […]
NASA: Future Strategic Issues: Detonate Seabed Methane to “Produce Tactical/Strategic Level Tidal Waves Against Littoral Regions”
August 11th, 2010Here’s a 1999 New Zealand Herald article about the development of a tsunami bomb in the 1940s: Top-secret wartime experiments were conducted off the coast of Auckland to perfect a tidal wave bomb, declassified files reveal. An Auckland University professor seconded to the Army set off a series of underwater explosions triggering mini-tidal waves at […]
DARPA Driving Development of Exascale Computers
August 11th, 2010Via: BBC: Computers that can perform a quintillion calculations per second are being planned by the US military. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has awarded the first grants to firms it wants to build so-called exascale computers. These will be far more powerful than current top supercomputers which manage just over one petaflop […]
Baby Boomers of Mass Destruction
August 11th, 2010Via: Bloomberg: Based on the CBO’s data, I calculate a fiscal gap of $202 trillion, which is more than 15 times the official debt. This gargantuan discrepancy between our “official” debt and our actual net indebtedness isn’t surprising. It reflects what economists call the labeling problem. Congress has been very careful over the years to […]
Berkeley: Sensor Package Models Building Interiors
August 11th, 2010Shrink it down so that it fits on the remote controlled cyborg beetle. Uhh, yeah. Via: ABC: Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a laser backpack that scans its surroundings and creates an instant 3D model. It can make video games more realistic and buildings more energy efficient. They are driving to discover a model […]
