America’s space program is at a crossroads. This year, the Space Shuttle fleet is expected to be retired after nearly 30 years of ferrying astronauts and equipment into space. In addition, there have been calls to have its immediate successor — the Ares I launch vehicle which would be topped with an Orion crew capsule — shelved altogether.
A 155-page report issued in November 2009 by the Augustine Panel made a number of recommendations on which direction to steer NASA in the future. The recommendations included 1) hitching rides into space using spacecraft from other nations or private contractors, 2) keeping the Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs alive, albeit in more limited roles, and 3) shifting the focus from returning to the moon and instead aiming for Mars.
The Augustine Panel also made it clear that the estimated $145 billion cost to return to the moon by 2020 would not be possible given NASA’s $18.7 billion yearly allowance for all operations.
So many empty stores, office buildings and other commercial real estate dot the country that you wonder if many of them will ever be filled again. Makes you also wonder if you’re renting an apartment it wouldn’t be cheaper to rent office space from desperate owner and live there.
A group led by Tishman Speyer Properties has decided to give up the sprawling Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town apartment complex in Manhattan to its creditors in the collapse of one of the most high-profile deals of the real-estate boom.
The decision comes after the venture between Tishman and BlackRock Inc. defaulted on the $4.4 billion debt used to help finance the deal. The venture acquired the 56-building, 11,000-unit property for $5.4 billion in 2006—the most ever paid for a single residential property in the U.S. The venture had been struggling for months to restructure the debt but capitulated facing a massive debt load and a weak New York City economy that has undercut rents and demand for high-priced apartments.
The property’s owners signaled they would be unable to reach a deal with lenders and instead decided to allow creditors to proceed with what amounts to an orderly deed-in-lieu of foreclosure, which means a borrower voluntarily gives the property back to lenders to avoid a foreclosure proceeding.
And then there’s this:
Problems in the U.S. commercial real estate market are expected to continue in the first quarter and are likely to be the cause of more bank failures in the coming year, a top banking regulator said Wednesday.
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said in a speech that regulators expect banks to report higher delinquencies and charge-off rates for commercial real estate properties in the first three months of 2010. Speaking to the Commercial Mortgage Securities Association, Bair said even income-producing properties have seen a decline in credit performance.
“Commercial real estate credit problems are affecting large and small banks alike,” Bair said.
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This Episode’s Executive Producer: Ian Munroe Listen to show by clicking ► Direct link to show. |
Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for the failed attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas in a new audio message released Sunday threatening more attacks on the United States.
The United States said there was no indication to suggest that bin Laden or any of his top lieutenants had anything to do with the attempted attack and that the claim may have been motivated by the wish of the terror network’s leaders to appear in control of al-Qaida’s offshoots.
In the minute-long recording released to al-Jazeera Arabic news channel, bin Laden addressed President Barack Obama saying the recent attempt was meant to send a message similar to that of the Sept. 11 attacks.
I normally don’t believe or like conspiracy theories, but this can and probably will be used to prop up the wars.
 
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Google made headlines when it went public with the fact that Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. The news here isn’t that Chinese hackers engage in these activities or that their attempts are technically sophisticated — we knew that already — it’s that the U.S. government inadvertently aided the hackers.
In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.
Google’s system isn’t unique. Democratic governments around the world — in Sweden, Canada and the UK, for example — are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell.
  Plump sort of spy that should be ready first. |
Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the “routine” monitoring of antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.
The arms manufacturer BAE Systems, which produces a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for war zones, is adapting the military-style planes for a consortium of government agencies led by Kent police.
Documents from the South Coast Partnership, a Home Office-backed project in which Kent police and others are developing a national drone plan with BAE, have been obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act.
Golly. You mean the British government wasn’t keeping the public informed?
Things seem to have changed a bit since I was a young’un.
They don’t give their names, but viewers can see their faces plainly and what these teens are saying is shocking parents.
“I ended up having sex with more than one person that night and then in the morning I was trying to get morning-after pills,” one of the girls said. “I was, like, 14 at the time.”
[…]After four years researching for the documentary, [Canadian filmmaker Sharlene] Azam told “Good Morning America” that oral sex is as common as kissing for teens and that casual prostitution — being paid at parties to strip, give sexual favors or have sex — is far more commonplace than once believed.
“If you talk to teens [about oral sex] they’ll tell you it’s not a big deal,” Azam said. “In fact, they don’t consider it sex. they don’t consider a lot of things sex.”
Evidence of this casual attitude may be seen in the fact that more than half of all teens 15 to 19 years old have engaged in oral sex, according to a comprehensive 2005 study by the Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Health Statistics.
In the documentary, “Oral Sex is the New Goodnight Kiss,” girls as young as 11 years old talk about having sex, going to sex parties and — in some extreme situations — crossing into prostitution by exchanging sexual favors for money, clothes or even homework and then still arriving home in time for dinner with the family.
There’s a movie coming out based on the true story of “a group of high school girls that agreed to get pregnant, take care of their babies together and, presumably, live happily ever after.”
In vaguely related news, sitting too long can be bad for you. Who could have imagined that?
Ah, remember the days when it was hand to hand combat with steel swords and axes and shields, blood spurting everywhere, making a man who survived feel like a man? Good times, good times…
When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, they had no robots as part of their force. By the end of 2005, they had 2,400. Today, they have 12,000, carrying out 33,000 missions a year. A report by the US Joint Forces Command says autonomous robots will be the norm on the battlefield within 20 years.
[…]
Every time you hear about a “drone attack” against Afghanistan or Pakistan, that’s an unmanned robot dropping bombs on human beings. Push a button and it flies away, kills, and comes home. Its robot-cousin on the battlefields below is called SWORDS: a human-sized robot that can see 360 degrees around it and fire its machine-guns at any target it “chooses”. Fox News proudly calls it “the GI of the 21st century.” And billions are being spent on the next generation of warbots, which will leave these models looking like the bulky box on which you used to play Pong.
[…]
This is “one of the most fundamental changes in the history of human warfare,” according to PW Singer, a former analyst for the Pentagon and the CIA, in his must-read book, Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Defence in the Twenty-First Century. […] The earlier technologies made it possible for humans to decide to kill in more “sophisticated” ways – but once you programme and unleash an autonomous robot, the war isn’t fought by you any more: it’s fought by the machine. The subject of warfare shifts.
[…]
While “we” will lose fewer people at first by fighting with warbots, this way of fighting may well catalyse greater attacks on us in the long run. US army staff sergeant Scott Smith boasts warbots create “an almost helpless feeling…. It’s total shock and awe.” But while terror makes some people shut up, it makes many more furious and determined to strike back.Imagine if the beaches at Dover and the skies over Westminster were filled with robots controlled from Torah Borah, or Beijing, and could shoot us at any time. Some would scuttle away – and many would be determined to kill “their” people in revenge.
And what about the day captured robots start being reprogrammed to attack the attacker?
It may just be me, but I’m a tad skeptical about this.
Amid the mass of aid agencies piling in to help Haiti quake victims is a batch of Church of Scientology “volunteer ministers”, claiming to use the power of touch to reconnect nervous systems.
Clad in yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of the controversial US-based group, smiling volunteers fan out among the injured lying under makeshift shelters in the courtyard of Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital.
A wealthy private donor provided his airplane to fly in 80 volunteers from Los Angeles, along with 50 Haitian-American-doctors, in a gesture worth 400,000 dollars, said a Parisian volunteer who gave her name as Sylvie.
“We’re trained as volunteer ministers, we use a process called ‘assist’ to follow the nervous system to reconnect the main points, to bring back communication,” she said.
“When you get a sudden shock to a part of your body the energy gets stuck, so we re-establish communication within the body by touching people through their clothes, and asking people to feel the touch.”
Apparently the “wealthy private donor [providing] his airplane” is John Travolta.
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