JPMorgan Employee and His Wife Found Dead in Their Home in Apparent Murder-Suicide
February 10th, 2015Via: nj.com:
A JPMorgan Chase & Co. employee and his wife were found dead in their home in an apparent murder-suicide.
It happened in Closter Friday evening, where the bodies of Michael and Iran Pars Tabacchi were discovered. Authorities say Iran was stabbed and strangled, while Michael died of a self-inflicted stab wound.
But it also happened in Jefferson Township in July, when police say Julian Knott shot his wife Alita before taking his own life with the same weapon.
There’s no evidence to suggest the two cases are related, but Julian Knott and Michael Tabacchi shared an employer: JPMorgan Chase & Co. Knott and Tabacchi are the latest in a string of suicides by company employees over the past year.
When Li Junjie, a 33-year-old JPMorgan worker, jumped off the roof of the company’s Hong Kong office in February 2014, the New York Post noted that it was the third death of a JPMorgan employee in weeks. Junjie was preceded by Gabriel Magee, a vice president with JPMorgan’s corporate and investment technology arm in London, who jumped off an office tower, and Ryan Henry Crane, a New Jersey native and executive director with the company, who was found dead in his Stamford, Conn., home.
Mystery Milky Rain Falls on Washington, Oregon
February 8th, 2015Via: USA Today:
Rainfall described as milky-colored, dusty or dirty fell across parts of Washington, Oregon and Idaho, with its origin is unclear.
The National Weather Service received reports of the dirty rain from more than 15 cities from Hermiston, Ore., to Rathdrum, Idaho, on Friday. The weather service’s Spokane office collected water samples that will be sent to a lab for testing.
The light gray dirt in the rainfall coated vehicles and windows across the region as a rainstorm that originated in the Pacific moved in.
“Dirty” rains fell at our office & across much of Spokane. We are looking into source of this phenomena. #wawxpic.twitter.com/akad4Am3M2
— NWS Spokane (@NWSSpokane) February 6, 2015
Experts said they are checking out several possible explanations including a recent volcanic eruption in Mexico and one in Russia. The weather service said the rainstorm may have passed through some dust or volcanic ash as it moved west.
Cryptogon Earnings from November 2014 to January 2015
February 8th, 2015I finally calculated earnings for Cryptogon over the last few month. For the period covering November 2014 to January 2015, total earnings came to $2249.58. Divide that by three and that’s $749.86 for each month.
Thanks very much to everyone who helped keep Cryptogon going during this time.
Life Inside a Secret Chinese Bitcoin Mine
February 8th, 2015Via: Vice:
Millions of GMO Insects Could be Set Loose in Florida Keys
February 8th, 2015Via: AP:
Millions of genetically modified mosquitoes could be released in the Florida Keys if British researchers win approval to use the bugs against two extremely painful viral diseases.
Never before have insects with modified DNA come so close to being set loose in a residential U.S. neighborhood.
“This is essentially using a mosquito as a drug to cure disease,” said Michael Doyle, executive director of the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District, which is waiting to hear if the Food and Drug Administration will allow the experiment.
Dengue and chikungunya are growing threats in the U.S., but some people are more frightened at the thought of being bitten by a genetically modified organism. More than 130,000 signed a Change.org petition against the experiment.
Research Credit: almaverdad2
Oil Caps Biggest 2-Week Gain in 17 Years
February 7th, 2015Disclosure: I’m long oil and multiple companies involved with oil exploration and production.
Via: Bloomberg:
Crude oil capped the biggest two-week rally in 17 years on speculation a falling rig count will curb U.S. production growth. Price volatility rose to the highest in almost six years.
Brent crude jumped 18 percent in the past 10 trading days, the most since March 1998. A volatility index gauging price fluctuations in West Texas Intermediate crude rose this week to to the highest since 2009.
Oil has rebounded as companies including Statoil ASA, BP Plc and Royal Dutch Shell Plc have reduced investments in response to the market’s collapse. U.S. drillers pulled more rigs off oil fields, according to data from Baker Hughes Inc. Friday. Saudi Arabia cut prices for March exports to Asia to the lowest in at least 14 years, signaling OPEC’s largest producer may continue to fight for market share.
Citigroup Predicts Battery Storage Will Hasten Demise Of Fossil Fuels, Utilities Focused on Centralized Generation
February 6th, 2015Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
Via: Clean Technica:
Investment bank Citigroup predicts that the wide deployment of battery storage technologies will hasten the demise of fossil fuels across the globe in the coming decade, including oil, coal and gas.
And it also warns that the battery phenomenon will be even more profound than the solar revolution currently sweeping the globe, and will sweep aside any traditional utilities that remain focused on centralised generation.
The Trip Treatment
February 6th, 2015Via: The New Yorker:
One of the researchers was quoted as saying that, under the influence of the hallucinogen, “individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states . . . and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.”
Research Credit: pookie
New High-Tech Farm Equipment Is a Nightmare for Farmers
February 5th, 2015Via: Wired:
Aside from using it, there’s not much you can do with modern ag equipment. When it breaks or needs maintenance, farmers are dependent on dealers and manufacturer technicians—a hard pill to swallow for farmers, who have been maintaining their own equipment since the plow.
“[DIY repair] is cheaper than calling out the technician. But that information is just not out there,” Dave explained to me.
The cost and hassle of repairing modern tractors has soured a lot of farmers on computerized systems altogether. In a September issue of Farm Journal, farm auction expert Greg Peterson noted that demand for newer tractors was falling. Tellingly, the price of and demand for older tractors (without all the digital bells and whistles) has picked up. “As for the simplicity, you’ve all heard the chatter,” Machinery Pete wrote. “There’s an increasing number of farmers placing greater value on acquiring older simpler machines that don’t require a computer to fix.”
The problem is that farmers are essentially driving around a giant black box outfitted with harvesting blades. Only manufacturers have the keys to those boxes. Different connectors are needed from brand to brand, sometimes even from model to model—just to talk to the tECU. Modifications and troubleshooting require diagnostic software that farmers can’t have. Even if a farmer managed to get the right software, calibrations to the tECU sometimes require a factory password. No password, no changes—not without the permission of the manufacturer.
John Deere, in particular, has been incredibly effective at limiting access to its diagnostic software. Which is why I wouldn’t have been able to tweak the programming on Dave’s tractor, even if I had been able to hack together the right interface. John Deere doesn’t want me to. The dealer-repair game is just too lucrative for manufacturers to cede any control back to farmers.
The World’s Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
February 5th, 2015If anything is real in this area, it’s GPG.
It’s a shame that most people can’t or won’t use it, even now that mass surveillance is mainstream knowledge.
Via: ProPublica:
The man who built the free email encryption software used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, as well as hundreds of thousands of journalists, dissidents and security-minded people around the world, is running out of money to keep his project alive.
Werner Koch wrote the software, known as Gnu Privacy Guard, in 1997, and since then has been almost single-handedly keeping it alive with patches and updates from his home in Erkrath, Germany. Now 53, he is running out of money and patience with being underfunded.
“I’m too idealistic,” he told me in an interview at a hacker convention in Germany in December. “In early 2013 I was really about to give it all up and take a straight job.” But then the Snowden news broke, and “I realized this was not the time to cancel.”
