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Comment Re:there DR plan needs day to day manual work? (Score 3, Insightful) 82

A few years ago the NYSE vanished for a few hours and a "processor" malfunction was blamed.
Last week air travel stopped and a "corrupt file" was blamed
US gas pipeline (Colonial Pipeline) was crippled in 2021 and the mysterious perps were described as "dispersed" a few weeks later.
When global; sociopaths are at work flaming wars in Europe and Asia I'm not quick to blame code and hardware quirks .

The West is already fighting World War 3 with Russia, former White House Russia advisor Fiona Hill says
https://www.businessinsider.co...

Comment Re:How Tragic (Score -1) 422

The danger and "sensitive" nature of a fertilzer plant reminded me of this:

  "CNN) -- A previously secret document found at Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan sets out a detailed al Qaeda strategy for attacking targets in Europe and the United States.

The document -- a letter written to bin Laden in March 2010 by a senior operational figure in the terror group -- reveals that tunnels, bridges, dams, undersea pipelines and internet cables were among the targets.

CNN has obtained details of the document from sources briefed on its contents. The 17-page letter is in Arabic.

Al-Mauretani proposed that al Qaeda recruits take jobs with companies transporting gasoline and and other sensitive companies in the West, and await the right moment to strike.

He said targets should include tunnels, airports and even "Love Parades" -- gay and lesbian events held every summer in Germany. "

AQ and Iran have been promising attacks for months now for various reasons (Syria being a main one for Iran).

New al Qaeda document sheds light on Europe, U.S. attack plans

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/20/world/new-qaeda-document

Comment Study Finds CRA 'Clearly' Lead To Risky Lending (Score 1, Informative) 251

A recent study by the preestigous National Bureau of Economic Research found the Community Reinvestment Act was the initial cause for banks to lose their bearings. They were intimidated intimidated into making bad loans on one hand and relaxed into doing so by gov promises to back up losses. The private/public partnership removed barriers to sound financial practice.

"NBER: "There is a clear pattern of increased defaults for loans made by these banks in quarters around the (CRA) exam. Moreover, the effects are larger for loans made within CRA tracts," or predominantly low-income and minority areas.

To satisfy CRA examiners, "flexible" lending by large banks rose an average 5% and those loans defaulted about 15% more often, the 43-page study found.

The strongest link between CRA lending and defaults took place in the runup to the crisis — 2004 to 2006 — when banks rapidly sold CRA mortgages for securitization by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Wall Street.

CRA regulations are at the core of Fannie's and Freddie's so-called affordable housing mission. In the early 1990s, a Democrat Congress gave HUD the authority to set and enforce (through fines) CRA-grade loan quotas at Fannie and Freddie.

It passed a law requiring the government-backed agencies to "assist insured depository institutions to meet their obligations under the (CRA)." The goal was to help banks meet lending quotas by buying their CRA loans.

But they had to loosen underwriting standards to do it. And that's what they did...

"We want your CRA loans because they help us meet our housing goals," Fannie Vice Chair Jamie Gorelick beseeched lenders gathered at a banking conference in 2000, just after HUD hiked the mortgage giant's affordable housing quotas to 50% and pressed it to buy more CRA-eligible loans to help meet those new targets. "We will buy them from your portfolios or package them into securities."

Its pretty funny to see Federal Housing Finance Agency suing banks like Chase (who was actually one of the banks least caught up in the sub-prime fiasco)

New Study Finds CRA 'Clearly' Did Lead To Risky Lending"
  http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/122012-637924-faults-community-reinvestment-act-cra-mortgage-defaults.htm#ixzz2KKE5CMwm

Comment NASA Gets Busted All The Time (Score 3, Informative) 554

NASA, GISS and James Hansen have been busted before (by amateurs) for being wrong several times :

Deja Vu All Over Again: Blogger Again Finds Error in NASA Climate Data

NASA'S Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) is one of the world's primary sources for climate data. GISS issues regular updates on world temperatures based on their analysis of temperature readings from thousands of monitoring stations over the globe.

GISS’ most recent data release originally reported last October as being extraordinarily warm-- a full 0.78C above normal. This would have made it the warmest October on record; a huge increase over the previous month's data.

Those results set off alarm bells with Steve McIntyre and his gang of Baker Street irregulars at Climateaudit.org. They noted that NASA's data didn't agree at all with the satellite temperature record, which showed October to be very mild, continuing the same trend of slight cooling that has persisted since 1998. So they dug a little deeper.

An alert reader on McIntyre's blog revealed that there was a very large problem. Looking at the actual readings from individual stations in Russia showed a curious anomaly. The locations had all been assigned the exact temperatures from a month earlier-- the much warmer month of September. Russia cools very rapidly in the fall months, so recycling the data from the earlier month had led to a massive temperature increase.

A few locations in Ireland were also found to be using September data..

Steve McIntyre informed GISS (run by Hansen) of the error by email. According to McIntyre, there was no response, but within "about an hour", GISS pulled down the erroneous data, citing a "mishap" and pointing the finger of blame upstream to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)."

http://www.dailytech.com/Article.aspx?newsid=13410&red=y#366381

NOAA has been singled out for calling 2010 the warmest year using faulty data

NOAA’s Jan-Jun 2010 Warmest Ever: Missing Data, False Impressions

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/17/noaas-jan-jun-2010-warmest-ever-missing-data-false-impressions/

Comment iRape (Score 1) 485

"The moment came Wednesday when Apple, the maker of iPods, iPhones and iPads, shot past Microsoft, the computer software giant, to become the world’s most valuable technology company."

Now the politicians, regulators etc will be looking for their pound (or two) of flesh.
Being #2 isn't so bad really.

The Almighty Buck

Apple Passes $300B Market Cap, 2nd In the World 485

An anonymous reader writes "In May, Apple surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization to become the second largest company (by that measure) in the world. Today, with its shares riding high, Apple passed $300 billion in market cap, entering a club of two along with the still-gigantic ExxonMobile. And investors' targets could bring Apple beyond where Exxon is now (though Exxon continues to soar as well). Perhaps Wall Street is catching on that, despite the discontinuation of their underused Xserve, Apple is in fact becoming one of the key tech providers to enterprise, a position that even a year ago seemed laughable. If you consider the iPad to be a PC (which enterprise increasingly is), then suddenly you realize that Apple is expected to climb to 12% market share in 2011. Plus, of course, they have those little things called iPods, and iTunes..."

Comment Too many diseases for military environment (Score -1, Troll) 828

Homosexuals represent one of the greatest disease vectors in society and that alone is reason to keep them out of military. Emergency medical staff have to wear protective clothing because of AIDS. It makes no sense to inflict people with a known 44x(CDC) AIDs rate on soldiers who can't protect themselves from blood in battle. Homosexuals also account (CDC) for 10% of hepatitis A and 20% of hepatitis B. New syphilis cases are homosexuals 64% of the time (CDC). Anal infection with human papilloma virus (HPV) is "at near universal levels in gay men". Homosexual populations in cities are undergoing a huge epidemic of a new MRSA strain - a strain a research doctor in San Francisco said would be lethal to the general population if combined with VRE infections also taking place. The homosexual groups went after that doctor to silence her.

Homosexuality was never proven not to be a disorder. It was dropped as one under political pressure. Indeed GID (Gender Identity Disorder) still exists but will be dropped because of political pressure as well. Of course they will want the military to be forced to accommodate them as well. The behavior of homosexuality is not the same as race etc and deserves no special rights and protections. Like the hoax of global warming, the "homosexual behavior as civil rights issue" is more heat then light. Liberals push the agenda just like they support for terrorists over CIA, illegals over citizens, speech rights for pornographers but not the religious (unless they are terrorists etc). The Democrats pulled the rug from under US troops in 2005 and the left generally resent the military. Homosexualizing it is more important to them than making is safe and effective for members.

On a final note, a congressional report showed most soldiers who were discharged from military under DADT where homosexuals who reported themselves as a way to get out of the military. The idea that there are legions of soldiers waiting to die for the country but being witched hunted out is false. Indeed its a testament to how unintelligent America has become that Dems repeal DADT juts as story broke about an emotionally disturbed (he attacked an officer in Iraq etc) homosexual wiki-leaker betrayed the country because of his displeasure with military. Average people think the DADT thing is over now and they fail to appreciate the PC carnival that is about to fire up and how it will harm the military (and Americans love their military). Repeal of DADT will backfire in a major way. Homosexuals really should have left well enough alone.

"Flesh-eating bug spreads among gays"

"Once this reaches the general population, it will be truly unstoppable," Binh Diep, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the study, told the Telegraph. "That's why we're trying to spread the message of prevention."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/flesh-eating-bug-spreads-among-gays/story-e6frg6to-1111115341040

Comment Re:Reason is games... (Score 1) 422

"take too long to make today because hardware power has increased asset production time exponentially. So it's obvious why console generations are no longer 5 years, its pretty much approaching 3+ years between a game and its sequel."

Unless its Half Life 3 then the wait is at least three presidents

Comment Re: Don't Ask Don't Tell Should Have Kicked In (Score 1) 833

"Homophobia" is just a stick for angry people like yourself to try an suppress dissent. The president of the American Psychological Association at the time when homosexuality was dropped as a disorder ("pending further research") was Nicholas Cummings. Cummings has said his profession was characterized by:

"intellectual arrogance and zealotry" and homophobia as intimidation is one of the the most pervasive techniques used to silence anyone who would disagree with the gay activist agenda..sadly, I have seen militant gay men and lesbians-- who I am certain do not represent all homosexuals, and who themselves have been the object of derision and oppression-- once gaining freedom and power, then becoming oppressors themselves."

Gender Identity Disorder of course still remains a recognized disorder (for the time being) and Manning really wasn't military service material.

The "gay suicide" epidemic is also mostly a media creation. Youth suicides are down drastically from the 80's and 90's with only a mild uptick in early 2000's. There are less than 5k suicides of people under 25 - and none of them fill out questionnaires about their sexuality before dying so the "gay suicide epidemic" is not substantiated (and a video that recently went viral showed a 14 yr old boy at a school board meeting lamenting
the "gay holocaust" of 6 million gay suicide deaths a year - preposterous of course). Some have tried to use (as evidence) half-way house and drug rehab surveys that suggested homosexuals in the surveys had more suicidal ideation but that was a small sample of an extreme population.

As for the "gay linguists" - they were discharged before even finishing training and were not even translators yet.

As a Congressional Research Service report made clear, homosexuals discharged from the military have decreased in numbers and most of the homosexuals discharged (almost 100% "honorably") "out" themselves most of the time because they want to get out of the military.

DADT - The Law And Military Policy On Same Sex Behavior"
  http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/150775.pdf

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