Recovery: Alcatel-Lucent to Cut 10,000 Jobs
October 8th, 2013Via: Dice:
Alcatel-Lucent is planning to cut 10,000 workers by 2015 as the telecom equipment maker continues to restructure.
Alcatel-Lucent logoBack in June, Alcatel-Lucent announced its Shift Plan, which aims to save 1 billion Euros in fixed costs as it retools its operations. However, at the time, it didn’t give an estimate of how many jobs would be cut. Today, the other shoe dropped.
Of the 10,000 jobs that will be cut, 2,100 will come from North America, the company says. At the end of 2012, Alcatel-Lucent employed 72,344 workers worldwide, of which 16,507 were based in North America.
The layoffs, which amount to nearly 14 percent of the company’s worldwide workforce, will largely be in sales, support and administrative areas. IT positions tied to legacy technologies, like 2G and 3G wireless technology, are also expected to feel the pain.
Social Security Warns Benefits Could Get Cut
October 8th, 2013Via: Wall Street Journal:
The Social Security Administration has begun warning the public it cannot guarantee full benefit payments if the debt ceiling isn’t increased.
When asked by the public, the agency is notifying beneficiaries that “Unlike a federal shutdown which has no impact on the payment of Social Security benefits, failure to raise the debt ceiling puts Social Security benefits at risk,” according to a person familiar with the agency directive.
The warning was assembled after the agency consulted with the Treasury Department, which would play a lead role in determining how the government handles payments if the borrowing limit isn’t raised soon.
Related: On the Possibility of Social Security Payments Not Going Out
America’s Police Are Looking More and More Like the Military
October 8th, 2013Via: Guardian:
America’s streets are looking more and more like a war zone. Last week, in a small county in upstate New York with a population of roughly 120,000 people, county legislators approved the receipt of a 20-ton Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle, donated by the US Defense Department to the county sheriff.
Between the Armored Personnel Carriers locking down main streets in major American cities – mimicking our MRAPs in Afghanistan – or Special Weapons and Tactics (Swat) and Special Forces units canvassing our country, if we’re not careful, this militarization of our domestic policing will make-over America, and fast.
Aerospace Company Develops Drone That Can Fly Continuously For 5 Years
October 8th, 2013Via: CBS:
An aerospace company has presented its design “atmospheric satellites” that fly at 65,000 feet and provide drone-like services such as live-mapping and monitoring narcotics trafficking.
Titan Aerospace recently offered the Solara series of such drones: which can fly continuously for nearly five years, charging its own battery high above commercial aircraft through the use of solar power. The larger Solara will be 60 meters wide and have the ability to carry about 250 pounds.
Cruising speed for the Solara is about 65 mph, and the unmanned craft will have an operating range of over 2.8 million miles.
The Solara series are designed to be a fraction of the cost of a satellite, but operate many similar tasks, such as surveillance, crop-monitoring, weather and disaster oversight, or any other monitoring that low-altitude satellites track.
…
Titan Aerospace is based out of New Mexico, and a report from Breaking Defense finds that defense and intelligence customers such as the CIA, NRO and NGA are the most obvious interested buyers. The company has reportedly held preliminary talks with intelligence agencies about the use of the Solara aircraft.
The Solara aircraft can also provide 4G cell phone service for massive areas for reasons such as disasters.
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October 8th, 2013I’d like to thank Conspiracyflix.com for leasing the big banner space on Cryptogon for a month.
Nuclear Fusion Milestone Passed at U.S. Lab
October 7th, 2013Via: BBC:
Researchers at a US lab have passed a crucial milestone on the way to their ultimate goal of achieving self-sustaining nuclear fusion.
Harnessing fusion – the process that powers the Sun – could provide an unlimited and cheap source of energy.
But to be viable, fusion power plants would have to produce more energy than they consume, which has proven elusive.
Now, a breakthrough by scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) could boost hopes of scaling up fusion.
NIF, based at Livermore in California, uses 192 beams from the world’s most powerful laser to heat and compress a small pellet of hydrogen fuel to the point where nuclear fusion reactions take place.
The BBC understands that during an experiment in late September, the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel – the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world.
This is a step short of the lab’s stated goal of “ignition”, where nuclear fusion generates as much energy as the lasers supply. This is because known “inefficiencies” in different parts of the system mean not all the energy supplied through the laser is delivered to the fuel.
But the latest achievement has been described as the single most meaningful step for fusion in recent years, and demonstrates NIF is well on its way towards the coveted target of ignition and self-sustaining fusion.
Chinese Jitters Over Absurd $1.3 Trillion Gamble in U.S. Debt
October 7th, 2013Via: Independent:
China, the biggest foreign creditor of the United States, has waded into the American budget crisis, warning Congress that it must resolve the political impasse over the debt ceiling without further delay.
The Chinese Vice Foreign Minister, Zhu Guangyao, told America’s deadlocked politicians on Monday that “the clock is ticking” and called on them to approve an extension of the national borrowing limit before the federal government is projected to run out of cash on 17 October.
“We ask that the United States earnestly takes steps to resolve in a timely way the political issues around the debt ceiling and prevent a US debt default to ensure the safety of Chinese investments in the United States,” Mr Zhu told reporters in Beijing. “This is the United States’ responsibility,” he added.
The American government entered its seventh day of shutdown on Monday, following the failure of Congress to approve the national budget a week ago. And there was little sign of progress on the still more crucial issue of the fast-approaching “debt ceiling” deadline. Yet rather than indicating a willingness to negotiate, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, stated on Sunday that it was “time for us to stand and fight” over the budget. He added that a default was “the path we’re on”.
Self-Assembling Robots: MIT M-Blocks
October 7th, 2013Via: MIT News:
Small cubes with no exterior moving parts can propel themselves forward, jump on top of each other, and snap together to form arbitrary shapes.
40 Percent of Humanity Online
October 7th, 2013Via: AFP:
Around 2.7 billion people — 40 percent of the world’s population — will be connected to the Internet by the end of 2013, the United Nations said Monday.
Another 250 million people came online in 2012, but 4.4 billion people remain unconnected, said the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
Ninety percent of those not online live in developing countries.
The ITU also said there would be 6.8 billion mobile-cellular subscriptions -? almost as many as there are people on the planet — by the end of the year.
South Korea leads the world in information and communication technology (ICT) development for the third consecutive year, followed closely by Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Finland and Norway, the ITU said in its annual report.
Long Island School Bans ‘Footballs, Baseballs, Lacrosse Balls, or Anything that Might Hurt Someone’
October 7th, 2013Via: CBS:
Worries about injuries at a Long Island school have led to a surprising ban.
As CBS 2’s Jennifer McLogan reported Monday, officials at Weber Middle School in Port Washington are worried that students are getting hurt during recess. Thus, they have instituted a ban on footballs, baseballs, lacrosse balls, or anything that might hurt someone on school grounds.
Tossing a football during recess has long seemed to be a rite of passage for kids in the school community.
“I think we need the soccer balls, the footballs and everything, so we can have some fun,” one student said.
But the students will have no such option anymore. They were just informed that during recess, football is out and Nerf ball is in. Hard soccer balls have been banned, along with baseballs and lacrosse balls, rough games of tag, or cartwheels unless supervised by a coach.
