Valero: Suspending Gasoline Sales in California Spot Markets
October 5th, 2012Via: NASDAQ:
Valero Energy Corp. (VLO) said Thursday it temporarily stopped selling gasoline in California’s wholesale market as a string of refinery outages resulted in a regional gasoline shortage.
Analysts fear the scramble for the motor fuel will send prices in the state close to $5 a gallon and force some gas stations to close.
The lack of gasoline has pushed California’s wholesale, or spot, prices of $4.10 a gallon Thursday, a 39% increase from Aug. 6, the day an explosion shut down Chevron Corp.’s (CVX) 245,000 barrel-a-day refinery in Richmond. Those prices don’t include taxes, transportation and other fees, which typically add another 70 cents or more before the gas reaches the pump.
Valero said it will met its current contracts to supply gasoline, but won’t sell into the spot market. But spokesman Bill Day said resumption of spot sales “will depend on markets and inventories.”
Coast Guard Investigating Oil Sheen at BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster Site
October 5th, 2012Via: Times Picayune:
The U.S. Coast Guard is investigating an oily sheen spotted in the Gulf of Mexico last month near the site of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill 40 miles south of the Mississippi River, a spokesman said Wednesday. Samples of the sheen taken near the site of the failed BP Macondo oil well have been sent to the service’s Marine Safety Lab in Groton, Conn., to determine whether the oil is from the BP spill, said Lt. Commander Michael Wolfe.
The CIA and Jeff Bezos Bet on Quantum Computing
October 5th, 2012Via: MIT Technology Review:
Inside a blocky building in a Vancouver suburb, across the street from a dowdy McDonald’s, is a place chilled colder than anywhere in the known universe. Inside that is a computer processor that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the CIA’s investment arm, In-Q-Tel, believe can tap the quirks of quantum mechanics to unleash more computing power than any conventional computer chip. Bezos and In-Q-Tel are in a group of investors who are betting $30 million on this prospect.
California Cities in Fiscal Trouble ‘Conga Line’
October 4th, 2012Via: CNBC:
Vallejo started it.
Then came Stockton. Mammoth Lakes. San Bernardino. Which California city will go bankrupt next?
“There’s a lot of them lined up in the conga line,” said Marilyn Cohen, CEO of Envision Capital Management.
Up next could be the city of Atwater, where civic leaders will vote Wednesday night on declaring a fiscal emergency. They may even lay off a quarter of the town’s 90-person workforce.
Britain: National ‘Virtual ID Card’ Scheme
October 4th, 2012Via: Independent:
The Government will announce details this month of a controversial national identity scheme which will allow people to use their mobile phones and social media profiles as official identification documents for accessing public services.
People wishing to apply for services ranging from tax credits to fishing licences and passports will be asked to choose from a list of familiar online log-ins, including those they already use on social media sites, banks, and large retailers such as supermarkets, to prove their identity.
Once they have logged in correctly by computer or mobile phone, the site will send a message to the government agency authenticating that user’s identity.
The Cabinet Office is understood to have held discussions with the Post Office, high street banks, mobile phone companies and technology giants ranging from Facebook and Microsoft to Google, PayPal and BT.
We’ve Already Passed the Tipping Point for Orbital Debris
October 4th, 2012Via: IEEE:
Since the dawn of the space age, more than 20 000 objects larger than a softball have accumulated in Earth’s orbit. About 1000 of those objects are spacecraft that carry active payloads, serving many valuable missions for mankind. But the rest could best be called junk, the by-product of thousands of launches and routine spacecraft deployments, nearly 200 explosions, and several collisions. And this junk poses a serious problem.
Many years ago, early orbital debris researchers predicted that parts of Earth’s orbit could eventually become so crowded that accidental collisions would fuel a self-reinforcing boom in the hazardous debris population—even if we put a stop to future launches.
That runaway debris generation scenario, often called the Kessler syndrome, may seem far off. But in fact, the sheer density of derelict objects in orbit has already exceeded what many consider to be the mathematical point of no return.
‘The Last Pictures’
October 3rd, 2012Via: Computerworld:
The problem: You want to send images into space and you want them to last 5 billion years. The solution: A gold-plated disc.
That’s the idea behind The Last Pictures project, which is scheduled to blast off in the next few months.
The project involves attaching a silicon disc encased in gold to the outside of a communications satellite. The disc will include just 100 etched photos, which are meant to be a cultural artifact for aliens to find if mankind is no longer here when they come knocking.
The disc, designed by researchers at MIT and Carleton College, is filled with images chosen by artist Trevor Paglen and a team he put together, who are working with the nonprofit arts organization Creative Time and the media and satellite company EchoStar.
More: The Last Pictures
Historical Cell Phone Location Data: No Reasonable Expectation of Privacy, According to U.S. Government
October 3rd, 2012Via: Computerworld:
Individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy in historical cell phone location data collected and maintained by phone companies, a federal prosecutor said in oral arguments Monday before a three-judge panel from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.
The court is reviewing an appeal from the U.S government in a case pertaining to the government’s authority to collect historical cell phone location data from a phone company without obtaining a formal search warrant first.
Federal prosecutors in the case have maintained that the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 allows them to use a relatively easy-to-obtain court order, called 2703 (d), to force a cellphone company to turn over historical cell-site location information on specific subscribers.
‘So, who does gain from the drugs trade?’
October 3rd, 2012The private prison scam is a key component of this as well.
Via: Al Jazeera:
Clearly a small number of criminals make significant sums from the trade. But most people are working for little more than subsistence wages, from the peasants growing coca plants in the Andes or opium poppies in Afghanistan to the dealers on the streets of Western cities. Even those few of the latter who avoid arrest or violent death and rise to the top face the constant danger from law enforcement and from their competitors. Though the drugs trade has become a symbol of easy, if immoral, money, much of it is demanding and difficult work, where the penalties for miscalculation are severe.
So, who does gain from the drugs trade? One unambiguous winner is the Western banking sector. In recent years a series of American and British banks, including Wachovia and HSBC, have been caught providing banking services to drug dealers. Bankers don’t move money around for nothing. They receive commissions for the service. And they are only part of a much larger infrastructure of lawyers, company formation agents, accountants and tax advisers who help turn the proceeds of crime into untraceable capital.
The benefits for banks don’t stop there. Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, told the Observer newspaper that “in many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital” that the banks could access during the credit squeeze of 2008. “There were signs,” he said, “that some banks were rescued that way.”
‘Fusion Centers’ Threaten Civil Liberties While Doing Little to Counter Terrorism
October 3rd, 2012Via: Los Angeles Times:
A federal domestic security effort to help state and local law enforcement catch terrorists by setting up more than 70 information-sharing centers around the country has threatened civil liberties while doing little to combat terrorism, a two-year examination by a Senate subcommittee found.
The so-called fusion centers were created in 2003 after the Sept. 11 commission concluded that federal, state and local law enforcement agencies needed to collaborate more in counter-terrorism efforts.
Funded by federal grants, the fusion centers were intended to share national intelligence with state and local law enforcement and to analyze potential terrorist activity detected by police. Homeland Security Department officials have credited the centers for helping uncover terrorist plans, including a 2009 plot to bomb the New York subway.
But the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in a 146-page report released Tuesday that reviewed intelligence reports from fusion centers between April 1, 2009, and April 30, 2010, “could identify nothing that uncovered a terrorist threat, nor could it identify a contribution any fusion center made to disrupt an active terrorist plot.”
