68023211
submission
schwit1 writes:
If you’ve already bought tickets for Super Bowl XLIX or are looking forward to watching it with your friends and family, you may be surprised to learn that there is a chance it might not be played. Congress first needs to make a decision on renewing a piece of legislation that you possibly never have heard of: TRIA—the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act.
TRIA was signed into law in 2002 in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, establishing a risk-sharing partnership between the federal government and the insurance industry that made terrorism insurance widely available to U.S. businesses—among them, organizers of sporting events. Without federal support, most insurers had been unwilling to offer coverage. TRIA was renewed in 2005 and in 2007. It is set to expire on Dec. 31 unless Congress renews it. With two weeks until the deadline, the clock is ticking.
68023139
submission
schwit1 writes:
Scientific data shows Greenland's continental shelf is connected to a ridge beneath the Arctic Ocean, giving Danes a claim to the North Pole and any potential energy resources beneath it, Denmark's foreign minister said.
Foreign Minister Martin Lidegaard said Denmark will deliver a claim on Monday to a United Nations panel in New York that will eventually decide control of the area, which Russia and Canada are also coveting.
68021783
submission
schwit1 writes:
People who own all-electric cars where coal generates the power may think they are helping the environment. But a new study finds their vehicles actually make the air dirtier, worsening global warming.
"It's kind of hard to beat gasoline" for public and environmental health, said study co-author Julian Marshall, an engineering professor at the University of Minnesota. "A lot of the technologies that we think of as being clean ... are not better than gasoline."
Hybrids and diesel engines are cleaner than gas, causing fewer air pollution deaths and spewing less heat-trapping gas. Ethanol isn't so green, either.
67948395
submission
HughPickens.com writes:
Nathaniel Popper writes at the NYT that the Citizens Bank of Weir, Kansas, or CBW, has been taken apart and rebuilt, from its fiber optic cables up, so it can offer services not available at even the nation’s largest bank. The creation of the new bank, and the maintenance of the old one, are the work of Suresh Ramamurthi and his wife, Suchitra Padmanabhan who were born in India and ended up buying the bank in Kansas in 2009 after living in Silicon Valley and passing through jobs at Google and Lehman Brothers. Their goal was to find solutions to logjams that continue to vex consumers all over the country, such as the obstacles that slow money moving from one bank to another and across international borders. The new services that CBW is providing, like instant payments to any bank in the United States, direct remittance transfers abroad and specialized debit cards that can be set for particular purchases, such as those at specific stores, or at specific times might seem as if they should be painless upgrades in an age of high-frequency trading and interplanetary space missions. But the slowness of current methods of moving money is a widely acknowledged problem in the financial industry.
In the United States the primary option that consumers have to transfer money is still the ACH payment. Requests for ACH transfers are collected by banks and submitted in batches, once a day, and the banks receiving the transfers also process the payments once a day, leading to long waits. ACH technology was created in the 1970s and has not changed significantly since. The clunky system, which takes at least a day to deliver money, has become so deeply embedded in the banking industry that it has been hard to replace. CBW went to work on the problem by using the debit card networks that power ATM cash dispensers. Ramamurthi’s team engineered a system so that a business could collect a customer’s debit card number and use it to make an instant payment directly into the customer’s account — or into the account of a customer of almost any other bank in the country. The key to CBW's system is real-time, payment transaction risk-scoring — software that can judge the risk involved in any transaction in real time by looking at 20 to 40 factors, including a customers’ transaction history and I.P., address where the transaction originated. It was this system that Elizabeth McQuerry, the former Fed official, praised as the “biggest idea” at a recent bank conference. "Today's banks offer the equivalent of 300-year-old paper ledgers converted to an electronic form — a digital skin on an antiquated transaction process," says Suresh Ramamurthi. "We'll now be one of the first banks in the world to offer customers a reliable, compliant, safe and secure way to instantly send and receive money internationally."
67941033
submission
schwit1 writes:
The uncertainty of science: 2014 caps the quietest three year period for tornadoes on record, and scientists really don’t understand why.Harold Brooks, a meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., said there’s no consistent reason for the three-year lull — the calmest stretch since a similar quiet period in the late 1980s — because weather patterns have varied significantly from year to year. While 2012 tornado activity was likely suppressed by the warm, dry conditions in the spring, 2013 was on the cool side for much of the prime storm season before cranking up briefly in late May, especially in Oklahoma, SPC meteorologist Greg Carbin said. Then, activity quickly quieted for the summer of 2013.
67902647
submission
schwit1 writes:
A French lawmaker lashed out at Airbus for daring to consider SpaceX as a possible launch option for a European communications satellite.The senator, Alain Gournac, who is a veteran member of the French Parliamentary Space Group, said he had written French Economy and Industry Minister Emmanuel Macron to protest Airbus’ negotiations with Hawthorne, California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. for a late 2016 launch instead of contracting for a launch on a European Ariane 5 rocket. “The negotiations are all the more unacceptable given that, at the insistence of France, Europe has decided to adopt a policy of ‘European preference’ for its government launches,” Gournac said. “This is called playing against your team, and it smacks of a provocation. It’s an incredible situation that might lead customers to think we no longer have faith in Ariane 5 — and tomorrow, Ariane 6.”
67858689
submission
schwit1 writes:
Attorney General Eric Holder has decided against forcing a reporter for the New York Times to reveal the identity of a confidential source, according to a senior Justice Department official. The reporter, James Risen, has been battling for years to stop prosecutors from forcing him to name his source for a book that revealed a CIA effort to sabotage Iran's nuclear weapons program.
The government wanted Risen's testimony in the trial of a former CIA official, Jeffrey Sterling, accused of leaking classified information.
67840839
submission
schwit1 writes:
It's small. It's bright yellow, and it's capable of cracking Wi-Fi passwords, eavesdropping on your cell phone calls and reading your text messages. It's a spy drone and it just landed in Washington, D.C.
Long-time friends and former Air Force buddies, Mike Tassey and Rich Perkins, describe their state-of-the-art cyber drone as hard to take down, hard to see and virtually hard to detect.
They built it in a garage, using off the shelf electronics to prove a drone can be used to launch cyber-attacks.
67830555
submission
ErnieKey writes:
Earlier this month, surgeons at Zhejiang University in China, performed a surgery to remove 2 damaged vertebrae from a 21-year-old patient. In their place they inserted a 3d printed titanium implant which was shaped to the exact size needed for the patient's body. The surgery which took doctors much less time and provided significantly less risk was completely successful and the patient is expected to make a full recovery. This is said to be the first ever surgery involving 3d printing vertebrae in order to replace a patient's thoracic vertebrae.
67827135
submission
schwit1 writes:
Airbus plunged deeper into crisis yesterday as customers reacted with fury to its suggestion that it may stop producing the fabled A380 super-jumbo in 2018 because of poor sales. The prospect of the European plane-maker, which employs thousands of workers in the UK, mothballing the giant passenger airliner sent shockwaves through the aviation industry yesterday and triggered a major fall in the company’s share price.
Sales of the A380 have been sluggish because of a limit to the number of routes where a 500-seater is needed. No airline has ordered A380s at all this year, while in July, the Japanese carrier Skymark Airlines cancelled the six it had ordered.
Chief financial officer Harald Wilhelm started the speculation frenzy when reports emerged that he had told investors Airbus might have to discontinue the plane unless it can invest in improvements to make it more attractive to customers. Although analysts and rivals have suggested it for some time, it was the first time the manufacturer had talked publicly about the humiliating possibility.
He said the A380 manufacturing programme would break even next year but not into 2018 without new engine types. That decision on the engine has to be made soon, because it would normally take about four years – and $2bn – to develop.
67824329
submission
MobyDisk writes:
Yesterday, a woman was arrested for recording the police from her car while stopped in traffic. Ars Technica writes, "Stopped in traffic, she began filming the nearby arrest of a man...Police erased the 135-second recording from the woman's phone, but it was recovered from her cloud account according to the Circuit Court for Baltimore City lawsuit, which seeks $7 million."
Baltimore police lost a similar case against Anthony Graber in 2010 and another against Christopher Sharp in 2014. The is happening so often in Baltimore that in 2012, the US Department of Justice sent a letter to the police reminding them that they cannot stop recordings, and most certainly cannot delete them.
Local awareness of this issue is high since the the Mayor and the City Council support requiring police body cameras. The city council just passed a bill requiring them, but the mayor is delaying implementation until a task force determines how best to go about it. The country is also focused on police behavior in light of the recent cases in Ferguson and New York, the latter of which involved a citizen recording.
So the mayor, city council, police department policies, courts, and federal government are all telling police officers to stop doing this. Yet it continues to happen, and in a rather violent matter. What can people do to curb this problem?
67820993
submission
Freshly Exhumed writes:
Ford's in-car infotainment system known as Sync will soon evolve to add a capacitive touch screen, better integration with smartphone apps and, eventually, support for Android Auto and Apple CarPlay in version 3, thanks to a switch of OSes. After years of teaming with Microsoft, the automobile giant has switched to Blackberry's QNX, a real time operating system renowned for stability.
67781479
submission
darthcamaro writes:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 is now out as a public beta and it has a long list of new features including improved Ceph storage support and windows Common Internet File System (CIFS) integration. Security is a big item in the new release with a number of new capabilities including support for FreeOTP for two-factor authentication, a new Certificate Authority managements system and an guide for the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP)
67777673
submission
schwit1 writes:
The legislation was passed yesterday 325-100 via a voice vote, a green light for what Congressman Justin Amash describes as “one of the most egregious sections of law I’ve encountered during my time as a representative”.
The bill allows the private communications of Americans to be scooped up without a court order and then transferred to law enforcement for criminal investigations.
The legislation effectively codifies and legalizes mass warrantless NSA surveillance on the American people, with barely a whimper of debate.
67766865
submission
schwit1 writes:
NATO allies sent patrol planes to help Britain scour the waters off its western Scottish coast after a submarine's periscope was spotted, in a search reminiscent of the Cold War, media reported.
