Archive for December, 2011
This 28-Year-Old Wants to Kill Credit Card Use
Alyson Shontell reports in Business Insider:
There’s a tiny 12-person startup churning out of Des Moines, Iowa. Dwolla was founded by 28-year-old Ben Milne; it’s an innovative online payment system that sidesteps credit cards completely.
Milne has no finance background, yet his little operation is moving between $30 and $50 million per month; it’s on track to move more than $350 million in the next year. Unlike PayPal, Dwolla doesn’t take a percentage of the transaction. It only asks for $0.25 whether it’s moving $1 or $1,000.
We interviewed Milne about how he is building a credit card killer and Square rival from the middle of the nation where VCs and press are scarce.
Address To The Industrial Nation
YOU will be pleased to know … actually … let’s start at the beginning. All systems are a product of their histories. Events over time shape the state of OS and application software both for good and bad; while users make forward progress on productive work, bugs and malicious software may destabilize and corrupt their efforts. External events to a historical version of a virtual monitor ma-chine. Replay is intentionally non-deterministic, and may be parametrized as to modify the stream of events that are delivered. In the second, analysis stage, the engine pro-state as mutable through time has been the subject of many tools to assist with semantic comparisons between the resulting alternate states.
Now, a lot of people like to talk about “industrial musicK” like they know what they’re talking about. They only talk of machine drums, sequencers set on 16th-note patterns, barre cords, tedious vocal distortion and sound bites sampled…
Was Blagojevich Arrested On Corruption Charges After Going Up Against Bank of America?
Site’ editor’s note: Former Illinois Governor Rob Blagojevich was sentenced to 14 years this week after being convicted of a wide range of corruption charges, including the allegation that he tried to sell the Senate seat vacated by President Obama.
You won’t see the talking head presttitutes discussing the fact that former Governor Rob Blagojevich was arrested exactly one day after he announced he was “…asking all Illinois government agencies to suspend business with Bank of America” …
Here’s Rod Blagojevich uncensored on We Are Change Chicago:
Coming to a Theater Near You: The Greatest Water Crisis in the History of Civilization
William deBuys writes at TomDispatch:
Consider it a taste of the future: the fire, smoke, drought, dust, and heat that have made life unpleasant, if not dangerous, from Louisiana to Los Angeles. New records tell the tale: biggest wildfire ever recorded in Arizona (538,049 acres), biggest fire ever in New Mexico (156,600 acres), all-time worst fire year in Texas history (3,697,000 acres).
The fires were a function of drought. As of summer’s end, 2011 was the driest year in 117 years of record keeping for New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana, and the second driest for Oklahoma. Those fires also resulted from record heat. It was the hottest summer ever recorded for New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, as well as the hottest August ever for those states, plus Arizona and Colorado.
Virtually every city in the region experienced unprecedented temperatures, with Phoenix, as usual, leading the march toward un-livability. This past summer, the so-called Valley of the…
Apocalypse Tao: Austerity Hits the Export Economies
Agence France-Presse, via MSN News, calls our attention to the typically under-stated way in which the 2nd trumpeter plays his solo*:
Large-scale strikes have hit China in recent weeks, as workers resentful about low salaries or lay-offs face off with employers juggling high costs and exports hit by lower demand from the debt-burdened West.
Politburo member Zhou Yongkang said authorities needed to improve their system of “social management”, including increasing “community-level” manpower.
“In the face of the negative impact of the market economy, we have not formed a complete system of social management,” Zhou said in a Friday speech to officials reported by the state Xinhua news agency at the weekend.
“It is urgent that we build a social management system with Chinese characteristics to match our socialist market economy.” China’s economy grew by 9.1 percent in the third quarter, down from 9.5 percent in the previous quarter. Manufacturing — a key engine of growth —…
Rick Perry: A ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Fan? (Video)
We’ve all seen Rick Perry’s anti-gay campaign ad. Well, here’s the follow up:
Facebook, Google, And YouTube In 1997 Format
Miss that classic feeling of using the internet back when it was fresh? Now you can feel it once again — via Once Upon by Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied:
Three important contemporary web sites, recreated with technology and spirit of late 1997, according to our memories.
Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.03 and a screen resolution of 1024×768 pixels, running under Windows 95. We recommend using a Virtual Machine or appropriate hardware, connected to a CRT monitor. If such an environment unachievable, it should be possible to experience the piece with any browser that still supports HTML Frames. The transfer speed of our server is limited to 8 kB/s («dial-up» speed).
The First Major Electoral Victory For The Occupy Wall Street Movement?
…In South Korea, not the United States. The newly elected mayor of Seoul is Park Won Soon, a longtime activist and human rights lawyer who ran on an explicit “Occupy Wall Street platform” of challenging social inequality. Could this happen here as well? Via New Left Project:
Park Won Soon, the newly elected mayor of Seoul, is “perhaps the first politician to win with an Occupy Wall Street platform”.
Park Won Soon ran on a platform of social justice. The previous mayor of Seoul had resigned over the issue of school lunches, Park pushed for the universal provision of lunches to all Seoul school children. He also promised to direct social services to helping the poor and disadvantaged. Korea has become increasingly divided in terms of rich and poor, and Seoul has some of the richest and some of the poorest people in the country. Park pledged to be the mayor of…
A Cloaked UFO Next To Mercury?
Many who want to believe are claiming that this footage taken by NASA’s STEREO spacecraft shows a “cloaked” UFO appearing, and then disappearing, near the planet Mercury. Extraterrestrials on vacation?
Execution Case Against Mumia Abu-Jamal Dropped
Reports the Associated Press via the Washington Post:
Prosecutors on Wednesday abandoned their 30-year push to execute convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther whose claim that he was the victim of a racist legal system made him an international cause celebre.Abu-Jamal, 58, will instead spend the rest of his life in prison.
Flanked by police Officer Daniel Faulkner’s widow, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams announced his decision two days short of the 30th anniversary of the white patrolman’s killing.
He said that continuing to seek the death penalty could lead to “an unknowable number of years” of appeals, and that some witnesses have died or are unavailable after nearly three decades.
“There’s never been any doubt in my mind that Mumia Abu-Jamal shot and killed Officer Faulkner. I believe that the appropriate sentence was handed down by a jury of his peers in 1982,” said Williams, the city’s first black district attorney.…
Going To A Public Farm School
Are schoolyard farms the best way to counteract the increasingly industrial food provided by school lunches? Via Denver’s ABC affiliate:
DENVER — Just eight months ago, a one-acre plot at the Denver Green School was an unused athletic field, but now that land has come to life with food-bearing vegetation.
“We have harvested over 3,000 pounds of produce from this ground. Lots of salad greens and root vegetables, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers,” said Megan Caley, the programs and outreach coordinator for Sprout City Farms.
Each week during harvest season, the farm produces 150 pounds of fresh, organic fruits and vegetables that end up in the school’s cafeteria.
“Kids are eating healthier,” said Frank Coyne, lead partner at the Denver Green School. “They are excited to eat the tomatoes on the salad bar, they are excited to eat the cucumbers.”
Rats Display Human-Like Empathy
Rats are better than many people. The Telegraph writes:
Rats actually display human-like empathy and will unselfishly go to the aid of a distressed fellow rodent, research has shown.
The results of an experiment in which rats opened a door to free trapped cage-mates astonished scientists. No reward was needed and not even the lure of chocolate distracted the rescuing rats.
”This is the first evidence of helping behaviour triggered by empathy in rats,” said US study leader Professor Jean Decety. ”There are a lot of ideas in the literature showing that empathy is not unique to humans, and it has been well demonstrated in apes, but in rodents it was not very clear.”
Psychology graduate student Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, who helped devise the experiment, pointed out that the rats were not trained in any way. ”These rats are learning because they are motivated by something internal,” she said. ”We’re not showing them how to…
Who Stole The Moon?
Olivine basalt collected by Apollo 15. Photo: Wknight94 (CC)
Dan Vergano writes in USA Today:
NASA hauled back loads of rocks and dust from the moon, but apparently hasn’t kept good track of those samples on Earth. The space agency has lost or misplaced more than 500 pieces of the lunar rocks and other space samples, NASA’s inspector general reported Thursday, making the case for better inventory controls.
Astronauts on the Apollo moon landings from 1969 to 1972 returned 842 pounds of lunar rock and soil to Earth. The space agency now loans samples, along with meteorite and comet dust, to about 377 researchers worldwide.
The space agency now lists 517 moon rock samples as missing or stolen. However, the inspector general audit suggests much more is missing, based on inquiries to a sample of 59 scholars loaned moon rocks, comet dust or meteorites. The audit found 19% could not locate all of their…
Income Disparity Threatens to “Unravel Social Contract”
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
The gulf between the rich and the poor continues to grow exponentially and stands to “unravel the social contract in many countries,” according to a report released Monday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 17 out of 22 countries the OECD measured, income inequality has risen steadily for more than three decades and now sits at the highest levels in recent history. The study found the average income of the richest 10% of a population is nine times that of the poorest 10%. The income gap in “traditionally egalitarian countries” like Demark and Sweden rose from 5 to 1 in the 80’s to 6 to 1 today, and in America, the income gap is a staggering 14 to 1.
Inequality in wages and salaries is the largest contributing factor to the rise in income disparity. Other factors include an increase in part time work…
Has the “God Particle” (the Higgs Boson) Been Discovered?
Davide Castelvecchi reports in Scientific American:
Rumors are flying about a December 13 update on the search for the long-sought Higgs boson at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider.
The physics buzz reached a frenzy in the past few days over the announcement that the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva is planning to release what is widely expected to be tantalizing — although not conclusive — evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, the elementary particle hypothesized to be the origin of the mass of all matter.
Many physicists have already swung into action, swapping rumors about the contents of the announcement and proposing grand ideas about what those rumors would mean, if true. “It’s impossible to be excited enough,” says Gordon Kane, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Global Carbon Emissions Reach Record 10 Billion Tons
Via ScienceDaily:
Global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have increased by 49 per cent in the last two decades, according to the latest figures by an international team, including researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of East Anglia.Published December 4 in the journal Nature Climate Change, the new analysis by the Global Carbon Project shows fossil fuel emissions increased by 5.9 per cent in 2010 and by 49 per cent since 1990 — the reference year for the Kyoto protocol.
On average, fossil fuel emissions have risen by 3.1 per cent each year between 2000 and 2010 — three times the rate of increase during the 1990s. They are projected to continue to increase by 3.1 per cent in 2011.
Total emissions — which combine fossil fuel combustion, cement production, deforestation and other land use emissions — reached 10 billion tonnes of carbon* in 2010 for the…
Who Is Winning The War on Wall Street? Making It Personal Is One Way To Seize The Initiative
Wall Street has become a battleground, defended by a battalion of New York Cops, and under surveillance around the clock. There’s a war under way after months of protests and assaults by the non-violent warriors of Occupy Wall Street.
So, who’s winning?
On the surface, despite major layoffs and economic setbacks, you would have to say that the epicenter of our financial markets is alive, if not well. The exchanges and banks remain open for business, even if their costs for security are up, and their long-term optimism is way down.
Attempts by occupiers and activists to “shut it down” have so far failed, but they have slowed it down and forced its defenders on the defensive. A sharp critique of out of control capitalism that was barely heard in the media before the movement began. It is now everywhere. The Movement has changed the national conversation.
The gluttons of greed are, at least…
Cosmic Cycles of Violence: John Lennon and Dimebag Darrell Gunned Down on December 8
Courtesy of Brandt Hardin
From RockStarMartyr.net:
Pantera’s furious music was propelled by guitarist Darrell Abbott’s maniacal claws ripping across a Washburn fretboard. The music was aggression distilled, warfare on vinyl, the hellish harmonics of testosterone-pumped teenagers smashing beer bottles and crucifixes, the pentatonic expression of sociopathic sexual impulse turned loose on loose pussy, power chords and possession, amplifiers and alcohol, whammy bars and whimsical youth. Pantera was pissed. And yet, no one remembers the jolly Dimebag Darrell being particularly pissed in day-to-day life. Not nearly as pissed as John Lennon was, anyway.
Behind the lead Beatle’s circular granny glasses and tireless promotion of peace burned a fury unmatched by most metal enthusiasts. Lennon was pissed at his parents, pissed at his bandmates, pissed at his stay-at-home wife, pissed at Her Majesty the Queen, pissed at America’s war machine, pissed at the world for not giving peace a chance. Lennon was fucking hostile. But…
