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Careful — the trees might fight back!
When officials in the town of Alphen aan den Rijn in the Netherlands began noticing unexplained abnormalities on trees, they were worried that the damage did not come from natural causes.
There were concerns that cracks, discoloration, tissue deterioration and other problems stemmed from radiation fueled by area Wi-Fi networks.
The town commissioned Wagenigen University to conduct a study to determine the source. The study concluded that radiation from Wi-Fi networks may have negatively impacted the health of nearby plants.
Assange’s latest showed the duplicitous nature of American foreign affairs, not that that really surprised anyone whose read Confessions of an Economic Hitman or other unsanitized history. Now this. About time someone exposed the banks.
In a rare interview, Assange tells Forbes that the release of Pentagon and State Department documents are just the beginning. His next target: big business.
Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.
(For the full transcript of Forbes’ interview with Assange click here.)
When? Which bank? What documents? Cagey as always, Assange won’t say, so his claim is impossible to verify. But he has always followed through on his threats. Sitting for a rare interview in a London garden flat on a rainy November day, he compares what he is ready to unleash to the damning e-mails that poured out of the Enron trial: a comprehensive vivisection of corporate bad behavior. “You could call it the ecosystem of corruption,” he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. “But it’s also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest.”
Comcast has begun imposing a fee on Internet middleman Level 3 Communications, one of the companies that Netflix has hired to deliver movies and TV shows to Web customers.
Comcast, the largest U.S. cable TV company, has set up an Internet “toll booth,” charging Level 3 whenever customers request content, the Broomfield, Colorado-based company said in a statement yesterday.
Level 3 plans to complain to U.S. regulators who may enact so-called net-neutrality rules next month. The Federal Communications Commission is seeking to bar phone and cable providers from interfering with legal traffic on their networks. The rules are backed by President Barack Obama and companies led by Google, EBay and IAC/InterActiveCorp. Phone and cable companies say rules aren’t needed and may hurt investment.
“This action by Comcast threatens the open Internet and is a clear abuse of the dominant control that Comcast exerts in broadband access,” Thomas Stortz, Level 3’s chief legal officer, said in the statement. “With this action, Comcast is preventing competing content from ever being delivered to Comcast’s subscribers at all, unless Comcast’s unilaterally determined toll is paid.”
Comcast, which is seeking regulatory approval to acquire majority ownership of NBC Universal, defended the fee in a statement, saying it is based on “long established and mutually acceptable commercial arrangements” with Level 3’s peers…
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in proposing net neutrality rules last year, called for a principle of non- discrimination by Internet-service providers. The FCC will meet on Dec. 21.
“This means they cannot block or degrade lawful traffic over their networks,” Genachowski said.
If you don’t pay the toll, your traffic doesn’t go through – or Comcast will slow it down enough to make it unwatchable.
This Episode’s Executive Producers: Matthew Schauer, John Grumling
Associate Executive Producers: Sir Kelly Spongberg, Noah Kuttler
Art By: Nick the Rat
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Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
Ahson Saeed, of Corvallis reacts over burnt debris from the mosque |
Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been called in to aid the investigation into an arson fire at the Corvallis mosque where Portland bomb plot suspect Mohamed Osman Mohamud sometimes attended.
The fire at the Salman Al-Farisi Islamic Center was discovered by an on-duty police sergeant at about 2:15 a.m. today. It took firefighters 10 minutes to put it out and it damaged about 80 percent of the office it was contained to. No one was injured.
FBI spokeswoman Beth Anne Steele said it’s standard for the agency to become involved in attacks on religious groups, but that the possible connection between the fire and the arrest of Mohamud makes their involvement even more important…
The FBI is offering a reward of up to $10,000 for information that leads to the identification, arrest and conviction of the person or people responsible for the fire…
Arthur Balizan, the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI in Oregon stated: “We have made it quite clear that the FBI will not tolerate any kind of retribution or attack on the Muslim community…We are working very closely with the leadership at the mosque. We will find the person responsible for this attack and bring the full force of the federal justice system to bear…”
If you’ve followed the details of the teenage nutball who wanted to commit terrorist murders at a tree lighting ceremony, you would know that the initiatives that turned this creep up to the FBI and Homeland Security came from the Islamic community in Oregon.
OTOH, the bigot that committed the arson attack upon the Corvallis mosque will likely turn out to be someone who has trouble reading the Sunday comics.
I’ll claim ownership of one of Saturn’s rings. A nice inner one, please.
After billions of years the Sun finally has an owner — a woman from Spain’s soggy region of Galicia said Friday she had registered the star at a local notary public as being her property. Angeles Duran, 49, told the online edition of daily El Mundo she took the step in September after reading about an American man who had registered himself as the owner of the moon and most planets in our solar system.
There is an international agreement which states that no country may claim ownership of a planet or star, but it says nothing about individuals, she added.
“There was no snag, I backed my claim legally, I am not stupid, I know the law. I did it but anyone else could have done it, it simply occurred to me first.”
The document issued by the notary public declares Duran to be the “owner of the Sun, a star of spectral type G2, located in the centre of the solar system, located at an average distance from Earth of about 149,600,000 kilometers.”
Duran, who lives in the town of Salvaterra do Mino, said she now wants to slap a fee on everyone who uses the sun and give half of the proceeds to the Spanish government and 20 percent to the nation’s pension fund.
Mr. Hollywood Suntan, George Hamilton, would probably owe the value of a small nation if he had to pay for all the sunlight he’s used over the years.
Found by Brother Uncle Don
Protecting American business is the true business of America.
The Homeland Security Department’s customs enforcement division has gone on a Web site shutdown spree, closing down at least 76 domains this week, according to online reports.
While many of the web domains were sites that trafficked in counterfeit brand name goods, and some others linked to copyright-infringing file-sharing materials, at least one site was a Google-like search engine, causing alarm among web freedom advocates who worry the move steps over the line into censorship.
All the shut sites are now displaying a Homeland Security warning that copyright infringers can face up to five years in prison.
[…]
Homeland Security’s ability to shut down sites without a court order evidently comes from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a Clinton-era law that allows Web sites to be closed on the basis of a copyright complaint. Critics have long assailed the DMCA for being too broad, as complainants don’t need to prove copyright infringement before a site can be taken down.News of the shutdowns has some observers wondering whether the US really needs COICA, the anti-counterfeiting bill that passed through a Senate committee with unanimous approval last week. That bill would allow the federal government to block access to Web sites that attorneys general deem to have infringed on copyright.
In a vaguely unrelated story, a poll shows a huge percentage of Americans no longer feel the US Government operates the way the Founding Fathers intended.
UPDATE: Even though this story was played high in the NYT and elsewhere, I’d advise you read this info on a hackers site suggesting we are witnessing an elaborate hoax. — JCD
It’s that time of year again when every brick & mortar store looks like an Apple store about to release a new [insert latest anything Apple] at 3am with lines around the block. Are you one of them? Will you be doing your part to help our ailing economy by shopping till your dropping? Or are you a cyber Monday kinda person who calmly clicks their credit card into oblivion? Are you above all this craziness and don’t indulge in it all? Or has the economic ‘recovery’ passed you by and finding how to pay for food is a tad more important?
Despite the down economy and some unfavorable weather in some parts of the country, bargain shoppers in Boston and nationwide began showing up before dawn today to take advantage of Black Friday deals that included flat-screen TVs and e-book readers.
Retailers kicked off the busy holiday shopping season with expanded hours, deep discounts, and online deals to entice bargain-hungry shoppers. Turnout appeared to be strong following a weeks-long push by retailers to get shoppers to open their wallets with early deals.
There were more than 400 people in line at the Toys R Us.
[…]
“It’s like we’re here to see the President,” said Marla McRae, standing behind themed-park like metal grates with her teenager daughters, 16 and 17, this morning. “This is ridiculous.”
This Episode’s Executive Producer: Norman Mcdonough
Associate Executive Producers: Christopher Skalenda, Simon Bennet, Jonas Astrom, Phillip Smith
Art By: Jesse Anderson
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DIGITAL TRENDS
The United States Patent and Trademark Office is really losing it. The department is granting Facebook a trademark to the word ‘face.’ The social network already owns the word ‘book.’ Facebook received a Notice of Allowance from the USPTO, now all it must do is pay a fee and file a Statement of Use to obtain its trademark.
Luckily the trademark has some limits. According to TG Daily, the trademark covers use of the word for “telecommunication services, namely, providing online chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users in the field of general interest and concerning social and entertainment subject matter, none primarily featuring or relating to motoring or to cars.”
The Patent Office, like everything else in this country, has gone bonkers.
Found by Cinàedh.
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