Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
2009
“The city of Miami and several commercial partners plan to rollout a “smart grid” citywide electrical infrastructure by the year 2011. This rollout was
announced on the heels of news that foreign agents have infiltrated our existing electrical infrastructure and that recent penetration tests have uncovered numerous vulnerabilities in the proposed technologies. Simultaneously, the National Institute for Standards in Technology (“NIST”) has recently released a roadmap for producing smart grid standards. In this whitepaper, I will discuss the flaws with the current guidelines and map them to the criticisms of similar regulatory mandates, including the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (“PCI DSS”), that rely heavily on organizations policing themselves…
As of the writing of this white paper, NIST has released a draft framework for review that includes some of the proposed standards. While there are several security standards listed in the framework, NIST appears to be making the same mistakes of previous regulatory mandate governing bodies. For example, the PCI DSS standards have been criticized for not requiring a high-level of security in environments that process cardholder data. Specifically, one of the major criticisms is the “self policing” aspect of these standards. The credit card companies (American Express, Discover
Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide, and Visa Inc.) are responsible for ensuring that relevant companies are compliant with the standards. If a company is deemed non-compliant, then the credit card companies issue what they consider to be the appropriate punishment…”
source: blackhat.com
“Genetically modified foods are not safe. The only reason they’re in our food supply is because government bureaucrats with ties to industry suppressed or manipulated scientific research and deprived consumers of the information they need to make informed choices about whether or not to eat genetically modified foods.
Now, the Obama Administration is putting two notorious biotech bullies in charge of food safety! Former Monsanto lobbyist Michael Taylor has been appointed as a senior adviser to the Food and Drug Administration Commissioner on food safety. And, rBGH-using dairy farmer and Pennsylvania Agriculture Secretary Dennis Wolff is rumored to be President Obama’s choice for Under-Secretary of Agriculture for Food Safety. Wolfe spearheaded anti-consumer legislation in Pennsylvania that would have taken away the rights of consumers to know whether their milk and dairy products were contaminated with Monsanto’s (now Eli Lilly’s) genetically engineered Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH)…”
“Scientists at an observatory outside Hangzhou joined residents and tourists across China and India in observing the longest total solar eclipse in a century and probably the most-viewed ever…
‘All our equipment seems to have worked, so now we still have an hour or so of partial eclipse to image, and then we will download photos and start looking at them. The oscillation experiment has a lot of data through two filters, and we will assess later whether comparison of the two channels allow us to account for the cloud cover,’…
Pasachoff and his colleagues are capturing data over many eclipses to understand better why the Sun’s corona, the outer halo of million-degree gas, shines hotter than the Sun itself. Most of the corona is visible from Earth only for the fleeting time that the moon totally blocks the Sun’s direct rays…”
via sciencedaily.com
“Even Albert Einstein might have been impressed. His theory of general relativity, which describes how the gravity of a massive object, such as a star, can curve space and time, has been successfully used to predict such astronomical observations as the bending of starlight by the sun, small shifts in the orbit of the planet Mercury and the phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Now, however, it may soon be possible to study the effects of general relativity in bench-top laboratory experiments.
Xiang Zhang, a faculty scientist with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and professor at the University of California Berkeley, lead a study in which it was determined that the interactions of light and matter with spacetime, as predicted by general relativity, can be studied using the new breed of artificial optical materials that feature extraordinary abilities to bend light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation…”
via sciencedaily.com
“…If ‘Obamacare’ passes, most working people, the disadvantaged, and those singled out as less important will experience large rollbacks in quality, readily accessible coverage. For them, future health problems will be more hazardous than ever because a callous nation doesn’t care. On July 17 as expected, two of three key House committees passed HR 3200. Largely along party lines, Ways and Means voted 23 – 18. Education and Labor approved 26 – 22 with a Kucinich amendment that may not survive a floor vote or make it to the Senate. It leaves HR 3200 intact but lets states create single-payer plans. Eight are now considering them – California, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Missouri, and Washington with perhaps more to follow. On June 11 in Pennsylvania, HealthCare4ALLPA organized over 400 people for a state capital rally, and its Executive Director Chuck Pennachio predicts pending legislation passage later in the year because bipartisan support backs it. So do most Pennsylvanians, and Governor Ed Rendell said he’ll sign what comes to his desk…
Reversing its earlier opposition, the influential American Medical Association (AMA) endorsed the House bill after a new payments provision was added to halt scheduled 2010 cuts to doctors under Medicare.
AMA’s president, Dr. James Rohack, said:
‘We pledge to work with the House committees and leadership to build support for passage of health reform legislation to expand access to high quality affordable health care for all Americans.’ The AMA calls it ‘an important step, but one of many steps in the process,’ including income-increasing measures for their members and ‘individual responsibility for health insurance, including premium assistance for those who need it.’
Opposing Obamacare are advocates for universal single-payer coverage like Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP). On July 16, it said the House health reform bill is a “proven failure” and called for an amendment to overturn it and implement a Medicare-for-all system…”
via globalresearch.ca
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