Leaked Report Suggests Long-Known Flood Threat To Nuclear Plants
October 22nd, 2012Via: Huffington Post:
An un-redacted version of a recently released Nuclear Regulatory Commission report highlights the threat that flooding poses to nuclear power plants located near large dams — and suggests that the NRC has misled the public for years about the severity of the threat, according to engineers and nuclear safety advocates.
“The redacted information shows that the NRC is lying to the American public about the safety of U.S. reactors,” said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and safety advocate with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
A redacted version of the report was posted to the NRC website on March 6. An un-redacted version was recently obtained by the environmental group Greenpeace and shared with The Huffington Post.
Among other things, evidence in the report indicates that the NRC has known for a decade or longer that failure of a dam upriver from the Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina would cause floodwaters to overwhelm the plant’s three reactors and their cooling equipment — not unlike what befell Japan’s Fukushima Dai-chi facility after an earthquake and tsunami struck last year. Three reactors at Fukushima experienced a full meltdown, which contaminated surrounding farmland and exiled hundreds of thousands of residents.
According to the NRC’s own calculations, which were also withheld in the version of the report released in March, the odds of the dam near the Oconee plant failing at some point over the next 22 years are far higher than were the odds of an earthquake-induced tsunami causing a meltdown at the Fukushima plant.
Italy: Court Rules Mobile Phones Can Cause Brain Tumors
October 20th, 2012Via: Telegraph:
Innocente Marcolini, 60, an Italian businessman, fell ill after using a handset at work for up to six hours every day for 12 years.
Now Italy’s Supreme Court in Rome has blamed his phone saying there is a “causal link” between his illness and phone use, the Sun has reported.
Mr Marcolini said: “This is significant for very many people. I wanted this problem to become public because many people still do not know the risks.
“I was on the phone, usually the mobile, for at least five or six hours every day at work.
“I wanted it recognised that there was a link between my illness and the use of mobile and cordless phones.
“Parents need to know their children are at risk of this illness.”
British scientists have claimed there is insufficient evidence to prove any link to mobiles.
But the respected oncologist and professor of environmental mutagenesis Angelo Gino Levis gave evidence for Mr Marcolini — along with neurosurgeon Dr Giuseppe Grasso.
They said electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobile and cordless phones can damage cells, making tumours more likely.
Prof Levis told The Sun: “The court decision is extremely important. It finally officially recognises the link.
“It’ll open not a road but a motorway to legal actions by victims. We’re considering a class action.”
U.S. Meningitis Toll Up to 21 as Outbreak Widens
October 20th, 2012Via: AFP:
The death toll in the United States from an unprecedented outbreak of fungal meningitis linked to a contaminated drug has climbed to 21 people, health officials said Friday.
The number of infections tied to the tainted steroid rose to 271 in 16 states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on its website.
Officials have said at least 14,000 people in 23 states could be at risk and that it could be weeks or even months before authorities have a final tally of the infections, due to the disease’s long incubation period.
Survey: 40 Percent Of Americans Have $500 Or Less In Savings
October 20th, 2012Via: CBS:
A survey of about 1,100 Americans finds that more than 4-in-10 respondents admit they don’t have more than $500 in readily accessible savings.
Supreme Court Terminates Warrantless Electronic Spying Case
October 20th, 2012Via: Wired:
The Supreme Court closed a 6-year-old chapter Tuesday in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s bid to hold the nation’s telecoms liable for allegedly providing the National Security Agency with backdoors to eavesdrop, without warrants, on Americans’ electronic communications in violation of federal law.
The justices, without comment, declined to review a lower court’s December decision (.pdf) dismissing the EFF’s lawsuit challenging the NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping program. At the center of the dispute was 2008 congressional legislation retroactively immunizing the telcos from being sued for cooperating with the government in a program President George W. Bush adopted shortly after the September 2001 terror attacks.
Research Credit: alvinroasting
Lebanon’s Top Intelligence Official Assassinated
October 20th, 2012Via: CNN:
Al-Hassan and at least two others died in a massive explosion Friday in the typically peaceful and cosmopolitan Ashrafiyeh district of East Beirut that he called home.
Does the Romney Family Now Own Your E-Vote?
October 20th, 2012Via: Global Research:
Will you cast your vote this fall on a faulty electronic machine that’s partly owned by the Romney Family? Will that machine decide whether Romney will then inherit the White House?
Through a closely held equity fund called Solamere, Mitt Romney and his wife, son and brother are major investors in an investment firm called H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. in turn holds a majority share and three out of five board members in Hart Intercivic, a company that owns the notoriously faulty electronic voting machines that will count the ballots in swing state Ohio November 7. Hart machines will also be used elsewhere in the United States.
In other words, a candidate for the presidency of the United States, and his brother, wife and son, have a straight-line financial interest in the voting machines that could decide this fall’s election. These machines cannot be monitored by the public. But they will help decide who “owns” the White House.
Research Credit: luky
Crimes by ATF and DEA Informants Not Tracked by Feds
October 20th, 2012*yawn*
Via: USA Today:
The nation’s top drug and gun enforcement agencies do not track how often they give their informants permission to break the law on the government’s behalf.
U.S. Justice Department rules put strict limits on when and how agents at the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can authorize their informants — often drawn from the ranks of the criminals they are investigating — to commit a crime. But both the ATF and DEA acknowledged, in response to open-records requests and in written statements, that they do not track how often such permission is given.
Research Credit: HongPong
Which Brand of Fascism This Time?
October 20th, 2012Via: Global Research:
Every four years, the deck chairs of the political Titanic that is the American empire get rearranged in the choreographed spectacle of another presidential “election”. The 2012 charade is particularly disgusting; the lies more blatant and shrill, as the world continues to burn.
‘You’re not going to hear about the Windows 8 upgrade cycle. This is the end of Windows.’
October 20th, 2012I run IT for a small business here in the Far North of New Zealand as a favor to family members.
While it’s a small business, it’s one of the largest employers in the region. The employees are decentralized and I thought about establishing the right kinds of network connections and remote access systems, servers, backup power supplies, etc. and then I thought, “Is this even necessary anymore?”
No, it isn’t. Not for this business, or countless others like it.
I set them up on Google Apps. No servers.
That’s right. No servers.
This business runs on residential (that is, crap) grade DSL connections, mobile broadband, free Wi-Fi in town and “smart” phones. If the main facility was turned into a smoking cinder, or washed into the sea, or whatever, all that would be necessary to resume operations would be commodity devices and an Internet connection. The data that they rely on is in the cloud by default (with local cache for when the intertubes are broken).
As they got down to making-do with this stuff (despite Google Apps being not-so-great in a lot of ways), I thought to myself, “IT workers are even more doomed than before.” I’d burned out on this sort of work back in 2002, so it was over for me on a personal level way back then. I went back that last time around 2004 after I met Becky so that we could buy our place. But now… If organizations are able to shitcan their server rooms… HA! Fill it to the rim with Grim!
I know, Mr. IT, you snicker, but it’s going to go like this: The IT jobs are increasingly going to fall into two broad categories, 1) near minimum wage level hardware set-up and swap-out monkeys on the client side and 2) people who can build and maintain warehouse-scale megasystems, colloquially known as, “the cloud.”
If you think that the cloud is a passing fad, you’re wrong. It’s like voice over IP. Remember how crappy VoIP was in the early days? Having to “Reboot the phones,” etc? No matter how many problems people have with VoIP, it’s too cheap not to use. Cloud computing makes the savings companies realized from VoIP seem like pocket change. Cloud computing allows companies to eliminate rooms full of expensive, power hungry hardware, the support systems, and more importantly, the jobs of the people who built and maintained all of that stuff. And since IT is THE most hated division in organizations, even better.
Anyway, I need to go feed our chickens…
Via: Eweek:
“The big catalyst of the next shift in the enterprise is Windows 8,” Benioff said. “People are asking do I go to Windows 8 or not,” he added, calling the situation a “gambit.” However, “This was not the case with Windows 7. You heard about the Windows 7 upgrade cycle; you’re not going to hear about the Windows 8 upgrade cycle. This is the end of Windows.”
During his keynote, Benioff described various eras of computing, from the mainframe era in the 1960s to mini-computing in the ‘70s, to client server in the ‘80s, cloud computing in the ‘90s, mobile computing in the 2000s and social computing in the 2010s.
Benioff said you can go to any AT&T store and find any number of devices you can use in BYOD environments, such as iPhones, iPads, and Android phones and tablets, among other things. “You didn’t have this kind of choice 48 months ago,” he said.
Meanwhile, also helping to spur the shift in the enterprise is a changing of the guard, Benioff said.
“The next generation of leaders has come up and the last generation is going out,” Benioff said. “A lot of the people who made that Oracle or Microsoft [purchase] decision are no longer there. The new people in there are modern, up-to-date, and they have a new brand preference. How they view technology is different.”
Moreover, fast wireless technology such as LTE is changing the game, too, Benioff said. The next generation of LTE technology is going to eliminate the need for LANs and WANs, he said.
“With this networking, everything is moving to the cloud,” Benioff said. “We are on a train and we’re not getting off it.”
