For Google, space may really be its final frontier. Shortly after the company arranged for exclusive access to a new imaging satellite comes word that it’s backing a venture to use satellites to provide broadband to a poorly served swathe of equatorial Africa. The project hopes to piggyback on the growing cellphone infrastructure in this corner of the developing world in order to provide service in areas that aren’t really touched by fiber. The new venture is a startup called O3b networks, named for the ‘other 3 billion’ that aren’t currently getting Internet service. Although the first deployments will be in Africa, the company hopes to eventually deploy its access model across other poorly served areas of the globe. That model takes into account a couple of realities that are sometimes ignored in plans to connect the developing world. Equatorial Africa is vast, politically fragmented, and unstable. No private entity is likely to put up the money necessary to provide and maintain comprehensive access to fiber in the region, and assistance from other governments has primarily focused on wiring up academic centers that tend to be in the already-developed regions of the continent. The solution, in O3b’s […]
The Endangered Species Act is our primary legal tool for environmental protection. We have until September 15-about a week-to save the Endangered Species Act. Not just some species, but the Act itself! Bush administration officials are proposing redefinitions of terms that would allow conservative appointees in federal agencies to virtually the destroy the Act. Their goal is to allow proposed projects to proceed even if such projects would kill off endangered species or place them or their habitats in jeopardy. If the changes are not effectively challenged by September 15, they will go into effect, and, Goodbye Species! Act now: Go to the end of this article for instructions. We need the public to flood the agencies involved with comments opposing the redefinitions and rule changes. When the Cat’s Away While our attention has been turned elsewhere, the Endangered Species Act, our major environmental protection legislation, is being gutted-now. Not by Congress. Not by the courts. Not even by Bush’s executive orders. It is being destroyed by redefinition, by a series of linguistic tricks. Causation, within an ecological system, is almost always systemic in nature. That is, there are disparate contributing […]
The burning of fossil fuels — notably coal, oil and gas — has accounted for about 80 percent of the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide since the pre-industrial era. Now, NASA researchers have identified feasible emission scenarios that could keep carbon dioxide below levels that some scientists have called dangerous for climate. When and how global oil production will peak has been debated, making it difficult to anticipate emissions from the burning of fuel and to precisely estimate its impact on climate. To better understand how emissions might change in the future, Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York considered a wide range of fossil fuel consumption scenarios. The research, published Aug. 5 in the American Geophysical Union’s Global Biogeochemical Cycles, shows that the rise in carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels can be kept below harmful levels as long as emissions from coal are phased out globally within the next few decades. ‘This is the first paper in the scientific literature that explicitly melds the two vital issues of global peak oil production and human-induced climate change,’ Kharecha said. ‘We’re illustrating the types of action needed to get to […]
Sarah Palin’s churches are actively involved in a resurgent movement that was declared heretical by the Assemblies of God in 1949. This is the same ‘Spiritual Warfare’ movement that was featured in the award winning movie, ‘Jesus Camp,’ which showed young children being trained to do battle for the Lord. At least three of four of Palin’s churches are involved with major organizations and leaders of this movement, which is referred to as The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit or the New Apostolic Reformation. The movement is training a young ‘Joel’s Army’ to take dominion over the United States and the world. Along with her entire family, Sarah Palin was re-baptized at twelve at the Wasilla Assembly of God in Wasilla, Alaska and she attended the church from the time she was ten until 2002: over two and 1/2 decades. Sarah Palin’s extensive pattern of association with the Wasilla Assembly of God has continued nearly up to the day she was picked by Senator John McCain as a vice-presidential running mate. Palin’s dedication to the Wasilla church is indicated by a Saturday, September 7, 2008, McClatchy news service story detailing possibly improper use […]
The US on Tuesday began to face the financial consequences of the bail-out of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac after Congress’s budget watchdog said the housing giants’ operations should sit on the government’s books and the cost of insuring against a US default crept higher. With the stock market tumbling, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said the government takeover of Fannie and Freddie meant the companies should no longer be regarded as outside the public sector. Peter Orszag, CBO director, said: ‘It is the CBO view that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be directly incorporated into the federal budget.’ The Bush administration appeared to be caught by surprise. A spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget told the Financial Times: ‘We are working through this issue with Treasury and other stakeholders.’ The White House could take a different view on Fannie and Freddie and exclude them from its budgets. But this would be difficult because the CBO is regarded as the leading independent authority on US finances and its assessments guide spending decisions by Congress. The two mortgage companies have between them $5,400bn in liabilities, equal to the entire publicly traded debt of […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
