Archive for October, 2013
Not Round Up Ready: El Salvador Votes to Ban Glyphostate
October 23rd, 2013Via: GM Watch: El Salvador has voted to ban glyphosate, the pesticide that most GM crops are designed to be grown with, along with 52 other chemicals.
Nuclear Officers Napped With Blast Door Left Open
October 23rd, 2013Via: AP: Air Force officers entrusted with the launch keys to long-range nuclear missiles have been caught twice this year leaving open a blast door that is intended to help prevent a terrorist or other intruder from entering their underground command post, Air Force officials said. The blast doors are never to be left open […]
Saudi Arabia Set for Diplomatic Shift Away from U.S.
October 23rd, 2013Via: Guardian: Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief has said the kingdom will make a “major shift” in dealings with the US in protest at perceived American inaction over the Syria war and its overtures to Iran, a source close to Saudi policy said on Tuesday. The source said that Prince Bandar bin Sultan had told European […]
Meet CGI Federal, the Company Behind the Botched Launch of HealthCare.gov
October 23rd, 2013Via: Washington Post: Over the past few weeks, if you’ve been paying attention at all to the unfolding disaster of people trying and failing to sign up for Obamacare online, one name keeps coming up: CGI Federal, the IT contractor that has orchestrated most of the Healthcare.gov Web site. By most accounts, it’s been a […]
The Sixth Stage of Collapse
October 23rd, 2013Dmitry We’re-Fucked-No-Matter-What Orlov outlines how the light at the end of the civilization tunnel is the train. Via: Club Orlov: A solution for avoiding the sixth stage must be found, but I don’t know what that solution would look like. I do find it unsafe to blithely assume that collapse will simply take care of […]
U.S. Dollar Tanks
October 22nd, 2013Via: Reuters: The dollar slid to a two-year low against the euro and a measure of global equity markets rose for a fifth session in a row on Tuesday after weak U.S. jobs data reinforced expectations the Federal Reserve will keep its easy-money policy intact into 2014.
The Rise of Geoengineering
October 22nd, 2013Via: Independent: Geoengineering technologies are the stuff of Hollywood disaster movies. Researchers have suggested sending a giant glass sunshade into space to reflect light; the eruption of artificial volcanoes, or spraying of sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere; dissolving mountains and putting remains in the sea; and, least dramatically, perhaps, filing the ocean with iron filings […]
Fructose: The Poison Index
October 21st, 2013Via: Guardian: The battle over the compound fructose now reaches new levels of obfuscation. The food industry is a strong – and loud, and rich – proponent, hard to ignore. The European Food and Safety Agency has just weighed in, in favour of the substitution of sucrose (table sugar: a disaccharide composed of the monosaccharides […]
How to Lose $172,222 a Second for 45 Minutes
October 21st, 2013Via: python sweetness: This is probably the most painful bug report I’ve ever read, describing in glorious technicolor the steps leading to Knight Capital’s $465m trading loss due to a software bug that struck late last year, effectively bankrupting the company. The tale has all the hallmarks of technical debt in a huge, unmaintained, bitrotten […]
NSA Intercepts Millions of Telephone Calls… In France
October 21st, 2013Via: AFP: France and Mexico have angrily demanded prompt explanations from the United States following “shocking” new spying allegations leaked by former US security contractor Edward Snowden. The reports published in French daily Le Monde and German weekly Der Spiegel reveal that the US National Security Agency secretly monitored tens of millions of phone calls […]
