10 Dec 2012
Eric Sprott: Silver to Outshine Gold as the Investment of this Decade!
Vote against authoritarian regimes pushing for full governmental control of the Internet in a binding global treaty!
Authoritarian regimes are pushing for governmental control over the internet in a binding global treaty. If they succeed, the internet could become less open, more costly and much slower. We've stopped threats like this before, and we can again -- but only with a massive global outcry. Sign the petition and share with everyone you know:  |
The Internet has been an amazing example of people power -- allowing us to connect, speak out and pressure leaders like never before. That's largely because it's been governed to date by users and non-profits and not governments. But now countries like Russia, China and United Arab Emirates are trying to rewrite a major telecom treaty called the ITR to bring the Internet under its control -- the web would then be shaped by government interests and not by us, the users. Tim Berners Lee, one of the "fathers of the Internet," has warned that this could increase censorship online and invade our privacy. But if we object with a massive people-powered petition, we can strengthen the hand of countries fighting this power grab.
We have stopped attacks like this before and can do it again before the treaty text is locked this week. A wave of opposition to a new ITR is already building -- sign the petition to tell governments hands off our Internet!
Too Big To Understand - azizonomics
Aziz: One thing that has undergone hyperinflation in recent years is the length of financial regulations:
The Dodd-Frank regulatory
hyperinflation crowds out those who cannot afford teams of legal
counsel, compliance officers, and expansive litigation. Dodd-Frank
creates new overheads which are no challenge for large hedge funds and
megabanks armed with Fed liquidity, but a massive challenge for startups
and smaller players with more limited resources.
The law requires Hedge Funds to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, supply reams of sensitive data on trading positions, carefully screen potential investors, and hire compliance officer after compliance officer.
So, is this expansion in volume likely to improve financial stability? No — the big banks are bigger and more interconnected than ever, which was precisely the problem before 2008, and they are still speculating and arbitraging with very fragile strategies that can incur massive losses as MF Global’s breakdown and more recently the London Whale episode proves.
Andy Haldane laid out the problem perfectly in his recent paper The Dog and the Frisbee:
Catching a frisbee is difficult. Doing so successfully requires the catcher to weigh a complex array of physical and atmospheric factors, among them wind speed and frisbee rotation. Were a physicist to write down frisbee-catching as an optimal control problem, they would need to understand and apply Newton’s Law of Gravity.
Goldman Sachs: Microsoft has gone from 97 percent share of compute market to 20 percent
According to the report, Microsoft's operating systems have gone from 97 percent of all computing devices in 2000 -- back when desktop and laptop PCs were dominant -- to 20 percent expected in 2012 -- when PCs, tablets and smartphones are all part of the computing-device picture.
Here's a chart from the report showing part of that shift. (The chart shows consumer computing devices, rather than total computing devices -- which includes both consumer and commercial. That's why Microsoft is shown is having 93 percent in 2000 in the chart, as opposed to 97 percent.)
[Update 12:58 p.m.: I asked Goldman Sachs about what happened in the 2004-2005 time frame -- as seen in the above chart -- that made Apple's vendor share jump, Microsoft's share plummet and the "other" category to go from zero to 29 percent. Goldman Sachs replied that it has to do with more mainstream adoption of non-PC consumer computing devices but declined to elaborate beyond that.]
Israel tanks, bulldozers enter Gaza in 1st post-truce incursion
Doctors ‘cure’ leukemia by using HIV to rewire immune system
RT: Doctors have successfully used a disabled version of HIV to modify a
7-year-old leukemia patient’s white blood cells to attack her cancer.
The breakthrough procedure could potentially replace bone marrow
transplant as a leukemia treatment.Emma Whitehead was selected as a patient for the experimental technique after two years of battling with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the New York Times reported. Chemotherapy failed to either cure the disease or result in a period of remission long enough for a bone marrow transplant.
The process was previously tested only on adult patients. In April, Whitehead became the first child to undergo the treatment, her medical team revealed during an annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology in Atlanta last weekend. She was also the first patient to be treated for her kind of leukemia.
Doctors from the University of Pennsylvania and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia manipulated Whitehead’s immune system to make it target cancer cells. They took a batch of her own T cells – a kind of white blood cell – and genetically engineered them to kill the B cells – another kind of white blood cell – responsible for her disease.
To do this, the doctors used a modified and disabled form of HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS, to alter the T cells’ genes, making them produce a protein called a chimeric antigen receptor on their surface. This artificial protein matches another protein encountered only on the surface of B cells. The alteration allows T cells to attach to B cells, and destroy them. The genetically engineered T cells were then injected back into Whitehead’s blood, where they could reproduce on their own.
"No more runny eggs!" in Fascist UK: First Coke, Now Bloody Center - Government Feed-tervention Escalates
Submitted by Tyler Durden: The personal freedom to indulge in 32 ounces
of sugary corn-syrup-filled fizzy drinks left New Yorkers with a nasty
libertarian taste in their mouths. Now, a few months later, as The Telegraph reports that UK
council officials are cracking down on the freedom to choose how your
burger is done, warning restaurants not to offer them rare or even
medium-rare. Of course, this is proposed to be in the best
interests of the eating public focused on "making sure customers are
eating meat that is a not a threat to their health." This policy, set to
the subject of a legal ruling shortly, leavs some to suggest it could
destroy the gourmet burger industry (by mandating lengthy cooking
times): "Not only that but you’re opening a Pandora’s box, because where do you finish? Steak tartare, runny eggs … the list is endless." Soylent Green anyone?
Via The Telegraph:
Now (fascist) council officials are cracking down on the freedom to choose how your burger is done, warning restaurants not to offer them rare or even medium-rare.
A number of celebrity chefs are affected by the move, including Gordon Ramsay, whose Maze Grill restaurant sells a burger for £12
'It may cause panic' Russian PM's secret files on aliens
Medvedev has spoken about top secret files on aliens that may have landed in Russia.
In footage recorded Saturday after a television interview, the former president joked that each Russian leader gets two folders with information about extraterrestrials that visited our planet - and stayed here.
Unseen on camera footage, he is heard telling a Ren TV journalist he could not tell "how many of them are among us, because it may cause panic." He said more details could be found in Barry Sonnenfeld's "Men in Black" films.
During his 2008-2012 presidency, Medvedev showed a sense of humor slightly more subtle than Putin's sometimes brutal jokes.
- AP Source
The Secrets Terrorists Don't Want You To Know
Little Jones lets you in a secret that terrorists will cringe if you find out.