X-37 Variant Might Carry Astronauts
October 12th, 2011Via: Wired:
The Air Force’s mysterious X-37B “space plane” is only on its second, eight-month-plus orbital mission, ostensibly conducting science experiments. But manufacturer Boeing has already drawn up plans for a major upgrade to the nimble, 29-foot-long robot — one that could more than double the vehicle’s size and make room for up to six astronauts.
AOL Launches New Unmanned ‘Lights Out’ Data Center
October 12th, 2011They role all the hardware issues into batch jobs that get dealt with by contractors.
I wonder how many years it will be before they build Ikea warehouse style data centers, where robots will actually pull and replace the defective server units? You could have a data center the size of a couple of football fields alert a pimply faced teenager or prison labor pool, when a stack of dead servers reaches a specified height.
A low wage meatsack would replace the dead server component or components and the repaired server would then be placed in an outgoing queue. A robot would return the server the rackspace when necessary. Scripts would handle the rest.
Wow, the prospects for IT work in the future look great!
Via: Data Center Knowledge:
AOL has begun operations at a new data center that will be completely unmanned, with all monitoring and management being handled remotely. The new “lights out” facility is part of a broader updating of AOL’s infrastructure that leverages virtualization and modular design to rapidly deploy and manage server capacity.
…
“Failures and issues on-site go into a planned maintenance mode,” said Manos. “We simply move the instances (or create new ones) to other data center facilities and the failed equipment is addressed in a scheduled way using outsourced or vendor partners. This is hugely cost beneficial for us as we can now build SLAs around the service without having to worry about the cost of staffing for ‘something to go wrong’.”
Related: Some Ikea Warehouses Run 24 Hours Per Day, In the Dark, with the Work Being Done by Robots
Solution to Real Estate Mess: Burn Down Homes
October 12th, 2011AIG Will Offer Reputation Insurance
October 12th, 2011Hilarious.
Via: New York Times:
Insurance providers are constantly coming up with new products to sell to policyholders. But the American International Group has hit upon one of the more unusual new services we’ve heard of in some time: reputation insurance.
Chartis, A.I.G.’s property and casualty insurance arm, said Tuesday that it would begin selling something called ReputationGuard. Created by Chartis’s executive liability team, it would give policyholders access to “a select panel” of experts at the public relations firms Burson-Marsteller and Porter Novelli to protect against negative publicity.
A.I.G. knows a little bit about crisis communications, of course. After its initial $65 billion bailout by the government, the insurer became a target of widespread scorn, its very name a shorthand for the excesses that led to the financial crisis.
Research Credit: ms
Financial Giants Put New York City Cops On Their Payroll
October 12th, 2011Via: CounterPunch:
If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of dollars in bailouts from taxpayers. One of the ingenious methods that has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in New York City in 1998. It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye.
The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.
New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.
The taxpayer has paid for the training of the rent-a-cop, his uniform and gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits stemming from the police personnel following illegal instructions from its corporate master. Lawsuits have already sprung up from the program.
Research Credit: noncompliant
U.S. Claims to Have Disrupted Iranian Terror Plot
October 12th, 2011Oh, well, if Tom Kean is on board, there should be no doubts at all about the veracity of these claims. *chortle*
Via: CNN:
The FBI and the DEA have disrupted a plot involving Iran to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States and commit other attacks, according to the U.S. Justice Department. Two men – one arrested, the other at large – have been charged in connection with the plot, which the Justice Department says was directed by elements of the Iranian government.
The Justice Department says one of the men – Manssor Arbabsiar, a naturalized U.S. citizen holding an Iranian passport – arranged to hire for the assassination someone in Mexico who he thought was an associate of a drug trafficking cartel. The person in Mexico actually was a DEA confidential source who was posing as a cartel associate, the Justice Department says.
Follow below for the latest developments and read the Justice Department complaint (PDF).
[Updated at 7:41 p.m. ET] Tom Kean, former chairman of the 9/11 Commission said the alleged plot “surprises me.” Speaking to CNN’s Erin Burnett, Kean said the plot is “pretty close to an act of war. You don’t go in somebody’s capital to blow somebody up.”
Research Credit: RD
Afghan Opium Production Rises by 61% Compared with 2010
October 11th, 2011Via: BBC:
Opium production in Afghanistan rose by 61% this year compared with 2010, according to a UN report.
The increase has been attributed to rising opium prices that have driven farmers to expand cultivation of the illicit opium poppy by 7% in 2011.
Last year opium production halved largely due to a plant infection which drastically reduced yields.
Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s opium – 5,800 tonnes this year – the main ingredient of heroin.
Canada: Mass Graves Discovered at Closed Mohawk Institute Residential School
October 11th, 2011Via: Examiner:
Mass graves of Mohawk children have been uncovered by ground-penetrating radar at the Mohawk Institute, a residential school for Mohawk operated by the Church of England and the Vatican before its closure in 1970.
According to Rev. Kevin Annett, Secretary of the International Tribunal for Crimes of Church and States (www.itccs.org), the Mohawk Institute was “set up by the Anglican Church of England in 1832 to imprison and destroy generations of Mohawk children. This very first Indian [First Nations] residential school in Canada lasted until 1970, and, like in most residential schools, more than half of the children imprisoned there never returned. Many of them are buried all around the school.”
Preliminary scanning by ground penetrating radar adjacent to the now closed main building Mohawk Institute has revealed that “between 15-20 feet of soil” was brought in and put over the mass graves just before the Mohawk Institute closed in 1970 in order to camouflage the mass graves of Mohawk Children and avoid prosecution for genocide and crimes against humanity under the Geneva Conventions, the International Criminal Court, and cooperating national courts.
More: International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State
Research Credit: Sierra
VeriSign Demands Website Takedown Powers, No Court Order Necessary
October 11th, 2011Via: Register:
VeriSign, which manages the database of all .com internet addresses, wants powers to shut down “non-legitimate” domain names when asked to by law enforcement.
The company said today it wants to be able to enforce the “denial, cancellation or transfer of any registration” in any of a laundry list of scenarios where a domain is deemed to be “abusive”.
VeriSign should be able to shut down a .com or .net domain, and therefore its associated website and email, “to comply with any applicable court orders, laws, government rules or requirements, requests of law enforcement or other governmental or quasi-governmental agency, or any dispute resolution process”, according to a document it filed today with domain name industry overseer ICANN.
The company has already helped law enforcement agencies in the US, such as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, seize domains that were allegedly being used to sell counterfeit goods or facilitate online piracy, when the agency first obtained a court order.
That seizure process has come under fire because, in at least one fringe case, a seized .com domain’s website had already been ruled legal by a court in its native Spain.
Senior ICE agents are on record saying that they believe all .com addresses fall under US jurisdiction.
But the new powers would be international and, according to VeriSign’s filing, could enable it to shut down a domain also when it receives “requests from law enforcement”, without a court order.
With Ongoing Nuclear Disaster Hurting Tourism, Japan Will Offer 10,000 Foreigners Free Airfares to Visit the Country
October 11th, 2011Via: Telegraph:
The Japan Tourism Agency plans to ask would-be travellers to submit online applications for the free flights, detailing which areas of the country they would like to visit, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said.
The agency will select the successful entrants and ask them to write a report about their trip which will be published on the internet.
Tourism authorities hope that positive reports from travellers about their experiences in Japan will help ease international worries about visiting the country, the newspaper said.
The programme, which will require travellers to cover other costs such as accommodation, is expected to start from next April, subject to government budgetary approval.
The number of foreign tourists to Japan fell more than 50 per cent year-on-year during the three months after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that triggered meltdowns and explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
