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A farm by the side of the A1 offers a nursery, business centre and a community broadband service. Ben Barnett reports.
For many of the region’s remote rural areas, the long-heralded roll out of high speed broadband is not a revolution that’s happening on their doorsteps and it’s an issue that’s getting in the way of a thriving rural economy.
Without efficient connection to the global digital highway in this modern age businesses are being handicapped and so farming couple Stephanie, 36, and Mark Pybus, 37, have taken matters into their own hands at Crabtree Hall Farm.
Diversification is something they have embraced in a big way. As well as arable crops grown over 450 acres, a business centre and now a nursery all operate from their farms on either side of the A1 near Northallerton – the other being Broad Close Farm.
With the nursery proving a big hit with former London-based freelance textile designer Stephanie at the helm, Mark is hoping for similar success with a community broadband service to nearby, isolated local villages by way of 4G wireless technology.
“We have a wireless network system so we can send a signal out to the local community, to outlying farms and small villages that otherwise are relying on receiving broadband over traditional copper lines that are increasingly becoming too slow to provide internet based services,” says Mark.
“If you get a dish on the side of your house you can receive our signal. We cover most of the villages between the edge of the Dales and the edge of the Moors.
“With the services over the internet now, people feel they are being left behind, especially over the last few years, and it’s fundamental to business – from cattle registration to Single Farm Payment applications. They are all moving online, or that’s the way the Government wants it.
“We put our bandwidth on wireless and recharge on a monthly basis for the service. We have around 20 customers at the moment but it is starting to pick up and I have it in a few villages now. There is a lot of interest in it.”
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Like a macabre marine mystery, the carcasses — many badly deteriorated and tossing about in the surf — first turned up along the coast of New Jersey in June. Soon, droves of them washed up in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia and most recently Florida, their winter home.
So far this year, nearly 1,000 bottlenose dolphins — eight times the historical average — have washed up dead along the Eastern Seaboard from New York to Florida, a vast majority of them victims of morbillivirus. Many more are expected to die from the disease in the coming months.
The high death toll from the resurgence of the virus, which killed 700 dolphins in an outbreak 25 years ago, has alarmed marine scientists, who say it remains unclear why the dolphins have succumbed to the disease. The deaths, along with a spate of other unrelated dolphin die-offs along Florida’s east and west coasts, raise new questions about the health of the ocean in this part of the country and what role environmental factors may be playing, scientists said.
“Marine mammals are very good sentinels for ocean and human health, and they really act like the proverbial canaries in a coal mine,” said Dr. Greg Bossart, a veterinary pathologist and senior vice president in charge of animal health at the Georgia Aquarium. “They give us an idea of what’s occurring in the environment.”
Because bottlenose dolphins are top predators, have long life spans and live near shore, Dr. Bossart said, “whatever happens coastally impacts them and potentially us.”
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America's newest, most expensive coal-fired power plant is hailed as one of the cleanest on the planet, thanks to government-backed technology that removes carbon dioxide and keeps it out of the atmosphere.
But once the carbon is stripped away, it will be used to do something that is not so green at all.
It will extract oil.
When President Barack Obama first endorsed this "carbon-capture" technology, the idea was that it would fight global warming by sparing the atmosphere from more greenhouse gases. It makes coal plants cleaner by burying deep underground the carbon dioxide that typically is pumped out of smokestacks.
But that green vision proved too expensive and complicated. So the administration accepted a trade-off.
To help the environment, the government allows power companies to sell the carbon dioxide to oil companies, which pump it into old oil fields to force more crude to the surface. A side benefit is that the carbon gets permanently stuck underground.
The program shows the ingenuity of the oil industry, which is using government green-energy money to subsidize oil production. But it also showcases the environmental trade-offs Obama is willing to make, but rarely talks about, in his fight against global warming.
Companies have been injecting carbon dioxide into old oil fields for decades. But the tactic hasn't been seen as a pollution-control strategy until recently.
Obama has spent more than $1 billion on carbon-capture projects tied to oil fields and has pledged billions more for clean coal. Recently, the administration said it wanted to require all new coal-fired power plants to capture carbon dioxide. Four power plants in the U.S. and Canada planning to do so intend to sell their carbon waste for oil recovery.
Just last week, former Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced he was joining the board of a company developing carbon capture technology.
The unlikely marriage of coal burners and oil producers hits a political sweet spot.
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Yes, North Carolina is home to Apple’s two recently finished massive (40 MW total) solar panel farms. But the state also has emerged on its own as a major market for solar. According to the latest report from the Solar Energy Industry Association and GTM Research, North Carolina was the third most active solar state in the U.S., trailing only California and Arizona, in the third quarter of 2013.
The state has been expected to have an 80 percent growth in solar farms over 2013. North Carolina had 69 solar system installations in the third quarter, up from 56 in the second quarter.
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Conservative groups may have spent up to $1bn a year on the effort to deny science and oppose action on climate change, according to the first extensive study into the anatomy of the anti-climate effort.
The anti-climate effort has been largely underwritten by conservative billionaires, often working through secretive funding networks. They have displaced corporations as the prime supporters of 91 think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations which have worked to block action on climate change. Such financial support has hardened conservative opposition to climate policy, ultimately dooming any chances of action from Congress to cut greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet, the study found.
“I call it the climate-change counter movement,” said the author of the study, Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle. “It is not just a couple of rogue individuals doing this. This is a large-scale political effort.”
Brulle's study, published on Friday in the journal Climatic Change, offers the most definitive exposure to date of the political and financial forces blocking American action on climate change. Still, there are big gaps.
It was not always possible to separate funds designated strictly for climate-change work from overall budgets, Brulle said. “Since the majority of the organizations are multiple focus organizations, not all of this income was devoted to climate change activities.”
Some of the think tanks on Brulle's list – such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) – said they had no institutional position on climate change and did not control the output of their scholars. In addition, Brulle acknowledged that he was unable to uncover the full extent of funding sources to the effort to oppose action on climate change. About three-quarters of the funds were routed through trusts or other mechanisms that assure anonymity to donors – a trend Brulle described as disturbing and a threat to democracy.
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AT&T and international service providers China Telecom and Deutsche Telekom's aggressive IPTV buildouts and subscriber acquisition strategies are helping them take away share from cable operators, says Infonetics in its new Pay TV Services and Subscribers report.
"Telco IPTV operators AT&T, China Telecom, and Deutsche Telekom continue to enjoy strong growth in new subscribers and ARPU, showing that competitive providers with differentiated services can successfully steal share away from incumbent cable operators," said Jeff Heynen, principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV at Infonetics Research.
Global IPTV has continued to rise due to an ongoing increase in new subscribers and ARPU, particularly in North America and Western Europe. The research firm forecast that the overall global pay-TV market will see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 5 percent to reach $270 billion.
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The growth in mobile broadband usage is so rapid that it cannot be accommodated by new technologies alone -- access to new sources of spectrum is also essential.
It is therefore unsurprising that unused spectrum in certain areas -- so-called white space -- is generating excitement in the industry.
However, this new approach raises key technical and commercial challenges and even risks harming existing mobile services.
Research from Ericsson AB shows that global mobile data traffic grew 80% between the second quarter of 2012 and the third quarter of 2013, which means that the average mobile operator will need about 1600-1800MHz of spectrum by 2020, compared with the 300-500MHz they have today.
Needless to say, this is a substantial amount of new spectrum and represents a critical challenge for the telecom industry. In this light, the promise of unused bands undoubtedly holds appeal. Regulators are inevitably eyeing up all opportunities and white space is seen by many as a prime new resource to mine.
White space is used to define the parts of spectrum that are not used at a particular time and geographic location. Traditionally, the focus has been on TV white space, which consists of unused spectrum in the television broadcasting bands (for example, 470–790MHz in Europe and 470–698MHz in the US).
These bands contain portions of unused spectrum because of the necessary geographical separation between television stations using the same frequency channel and due to unused spectrum by regional television stations.
In principle, these white spaces can be used to provide vital new capacity for broadband services. However, there are a number of issues that could limit the size of the market, the quality and cost of services, as well as potentially negatively impact existing licensed mobile broadband services.
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In looking at the way that the internet is performing across the world in 2013, it’s very clear that many countries are hitting their stride and growing in terms of their adoption of broadband. However, that growth comes at a cost: the progression of the internet is signaling the beginning of the end of United States’ place in the top tiers of performance, according to Akamai’s latest State of the Internet report for the second quarter of 2013.
Overall, the number of unique IPv4 addresses has swollen to over 752 million — approximately 18 million more than the first quarter to create a 2 percent increase overall quarter-over-quarter. While it sounds like a small number in the grand scheme of things, Akamai noted that the number of unique IPv4 addresses is slowly dwindling. As major gains continue in developing nations like Tanzania and Mozambique, the IPv4 address pool is quickly becoming exhausted. While the size of the web is getting bigger, internet connections are also becoming faster. The global average connection speed saw a 5.2 percent increase quarter-over-quarter to 3.3 Mbps.
Even more important is the number of countries that have a connection speed of less than 1 Mpbs, which has dwindled to just 11 from 18 in the fourth quarter of 2012. Overall, this indicates that developing companies are increasing their average internet connection speeds, and already-developed nations are improving their infrastructure. The Global average peak connection speed increased just 0.1 percent to 18.9 Mbps, but more countries than ever are passing the 10 Mbps connection speed mark.
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Radio Disney, "home of the hottest kids' music," is teaming up with Ohio's oil and gas industry to teach school kids that pipelines are awesome.
"Rocking In Ohio" is an interactive, game show-like presentation entirely funded by the Ohio Oil and Gas Association and presented jointly with Radio Disney. This "special partnership," as they call it, "highlights the importance of Ohio’s oil and gas industry, and why science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) are crucial in developing energy resources in Ohio," according to the association.
Hosted by a master of ceremonies and three staffers from Cleveland's Radio Disney affiliate WWMK, the hour-long event challenges kids, families and dads to head-to-head games that explain the science behind resource extraction and tout the benefits of products made from fossil fuels. Children run, dance and answer questions, and are given prizes from Disney movies and the Radio Disney brand.
Radio Disney broadcasts online and in more than 35 markets and positions itself as "the unrivaled broadcast radio network for kids and families." Nielsen ranks Cleveland as the nation's 31st-largest radio market.
Disney representatives did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.
The traveling show is part of an industry-funded outreach program called the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program (OOGEEP), which partners industry representatives with science teachers in the state. "Rocking In Ohio" was performed at the Ohio State Fair in August, and since then the show has made at least 26 stops at county fairs, science centers and schools.
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As we near the end of 2013, NPR is taking a look at the numbers that tell the story of this year. They're numbers that, if you really understand them, give insight into the world we live in.
On a breezy December morning, a work crew is scouring the surf line on Grand Isle, La., scooping up tiny tar balls and collecting them in a basket.
Foreman LeRoy Irving keeps track of what the 14-person team has collected in a half-day. "If I had to guess, maybe 10 pounds," he says.
These patrol and maintenance teams are out four days a week, combing Grand Isle and nearby beaches on this stretch of south Louisiana. It continues to be a trouble spot for oiling, nearly four years after the BP oil spill.
This year, crews have collected 4.6 million pounds of oily material from the Gulf Coast shoreline. Coastal residents are asking how long they'll be living with the effects of BP's 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
"A lot of people don't realize that the Deepwater Horizon response is still going on," says Coast Guard Petty Officer 1st Class Michael Anderson with the Gulf Coast Incident Management Team. "It's been a marathon, not a sprint."
The active cleanup is now down to 55 miles here in south Louisiana — out of more than 4,300 in the immediate aftermath of the spill. Tar balls still wash ashore on beaches in Alabama and Mississippi, but now only get cleaned up when a report is called in to the National Response Center.
Anderson says the active cleanup is now focused on harder-to-find oil. Tropical storms have buried it under layers of sand and sediment, both on beaches and in marshes.
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When you think of governments ready to fall in Europe, you probably think of Greece or Spain. Instead it is Italy that is warning of a violent insurrection.
"Events in Italy are turning serious. President Giorgio Napolitano has warned of “widespread social tension and unrest” in 2014 as the Long Slump drags on. Those living on the margins are being drawn into “indiscriminate and violent protest, a sterile lurch towards total opposition”
The protest movement in Italy is literally called the Pitchfork Movement (Movimento dei forconi). Their demands are no less than the overthrow of the government.
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For years now, we've been arguing about the dangers of the TPP agreement, how it's nothing more than the USTR teaming up with giant legacy companies to create a secretive massive corporatist, crony capitalist attack on the public, on innovation and on the economy. As the agreement moves closer to completion, it appears that others are noticing the same thing. Incredibly, while the NY Times has columnists endorsing the agreement, Bloomberg News, a publication that sometimes seems so beholden to promoting blind corporate power over all else that it recently censored itself to avoid losing business deals, now has a columnist flat out calling the TPP an ugly secretive "corporatist power grab" that pretty much all countries should avoid.
U.S. lawmakers and civil-liberties groups have complained for some time about the opacity surrounding the treaty’s terms. Mild grousing turned into outrage last month after WikiLeaks did what Barack Obama’s White House refuses to: share portions of the document with the public. The draft of the intellectual-property rights chapter by Julian Assange’s outfit validated the worst fears -- that TPP is a corporatist power grab. Rather than heed the outcry, the U.S. doubled down on secrecy, refusing to disclose more details.
From there, columnist William Pesek explained that most of the more advanced economies in Asia know that it's a bad idea to be involved in the TPP, and that's why they're staying away:
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The suburbs of Southern California go on and on and on some more, a sea of cookie-cutter houses so vast it’s crossed the border into Mexico. This collision of cultures fascinates photographer Anthony Marchetti, whose series Occidente Nuevo and Little Boxes document the banality of suburban sprawl that’s migrated south from San Diego into the regions around Tijuana.
Marchetti has long been intrigued by suburban landscapes, inspired by the work of Robert Adams and the bleak but striking photos of the famous New Topographics exhibition. Opting for a bulkier and more time-consuming large format camera to produce his stark shots, Marchetti says he aims for the spot between photojournalistic documentation and artful representation, a place he calls “the documentary aesthetic.”
His approach provides the viewer a chance to sit with the reflection of San Diego in Tijuana. The cheap designs, building materials, and houses that form the subject matter of the two series were essentially discarded by their former owners in California. Marchetti’s documentation of this transfer portrays a second-hand, dreary aesthetic that also feels somehow new.
“I think it’s really interesting how people are able to reuse that stuff, although I’m not sure all the building materials are necessarily good for people to be using,” Marchetti says. “I was also interested in what travels what way. Discarded refuse travels from the United States down to Tijuana, and what comes the other way is less goods or objects, but more people.”
The phenomenon of Cali homes appearing south of the border was borne of convenience and economic sense. Before the economy tanked, construction was happening so fast that land had to be cleared quickly. To the U.S. owners of these rambler-style tract houses, built in the ’50s and ’60s to accommodate a booming population, they went from representing the American dream to simply taking up space. “The developers just wanted those older houses off the property and were willing sometimes to just give them away, or to sell them for a very nominal fee if they had to,” says Marchetti. “You could probably buy a house and get it down to a spot in Mexico, if you had the plot of land, for under $10,000.”
Marchetti first heard about this material migration during an an exhibition in his home state of Minnesota. He caught a lecture by an architectural professor from San Diego who explained how the ubiquitous stuff of suburbia — windows, garage doors, the houses themselves — were being shipped south to the outskirts of Tijuana.
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“Free broadband for every student home in Nottingham.” These are the words of Callum Hives, the fresh faced businessman and medical student. “Naturally we’re hoping to move past Nottingham pretty quickly, but it’s a great place to start. It’s disruptive, but that’s the idea. We know it’s going to upset a lot of people.”
Callum Hives is a hugely successful part-time CEO of a company that currently turns over around £100,000 a year and looks set to grow significantly. He is also a third year medical student at the University of Nottingham.Starting at the tender age of 15, Callum set up a small, boutique IT support network in his native rural home of Lincolnshire.
Undercutting the existing corporate IT services available in central Lincoln, Callum, along with like-minded school friends, capitalised on the gap in the market by offering affordable one-off services to small businesses. Within a few years, the business had its own office, a solid customer base and several employees.
Callum is setting up a revolutionary new service provider geared to completely usurp the current dominance of Virgin and BT in Nottingham.
Becoming a limited company in 2012, CalCom Enterprises (the main business, imaginatively named after its creator) is now making its first foray into the world of telecoms.Along with a partner, Callum is setting up Snap Broadband, a revolutionary new service provider geared to completely usurp the current dominance of Virgin and BT in Nottingham. Although not technically completely free, after a one off installation payment residents in a house will have free access to their unlimited 10meg internet for as long as they want.
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The videos of swaying skyscrapers in Tokyo during the powerful earthquake in 2011 that hit off the coast of Japan are absolutely terrifying. Thanks to strict building codes and the location of the earthquake's epicenter, the skyscrapers were spared.
But if Tokyo were to take a direct hit from a high-magnitude earthquake, the scene could be much worse.
There are many older skyscrapers that don't have earthquake-resistant technology that's required to be built into new skyscrapers.
That's where the innovation comes in. Real estate developer Mitsui Fudosan and Kajima Corp., a construction and engineering company, are teaming up to install six 300-ton steel pendulums, known as "tuned mass dampers," on the roof of the Shinjuku Mitsui building, a 55-story skyscraper built in 1974, instead of tearing it down and building a new tower. The idea is that the massive pendulums will counteract the massive seismic waves during an earthquake and keep the building upright.
As Next City reports, the technology is being used in new buildings but isn't common as a retrofit to older buildings. But it could be extremely effective at dampening the blow of a powerful earthquake with an epicenter near Tokyo, according to Next City:
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First Wind, an independent U.S.-based renewable energy company, and the Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Co. today announced an agreement that will bring clean energy from First Wind's planned Hancock Wind project near Ellsworth, Maine, to 17 Massachusetts municipal utilities.
Under a 25-year, fixed-price contract, First Wind will sell nearly 75 percent of the power and capacity generated at the 51 megawatt (MW) wind farm to MMWEC. Consistent with its nonprofit, Joint Action Agency model, MMWEC will resell the power and capacity at cost to 17 of its member municipal utilities, which are based in the communities of Boylston, Chicopee, Groton, Holden, Holyoke, Ipswich, Mansfield, Marblehead, Paxton, Peabody, Russell, Shrewsbury, Sterling, Templeton, Wakefield, West Boylston and Westfield, according to a news release.
Burlington Electric Department in Vermont is purchasing the remaining energy from the Hancock Wind project.
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In 2002, it was reported that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had told a friend an amusing tale about our man George W. Bush. It seems that the two of them and French President Jacques Chirac had gotten into an economics discussion, after which George supposedly confided to Tony that he was decidedly unimpressed with Jacques' views: "The problem with the French," Bush scoffed, "is that they don't have a word for 'entrepreneur.'"
W's head has always been a no-fly-zone for factual reality. However, what would boggle his mind even more than the fact that we Americans filched that word from the French, is the reality that government is not quite the entrepreneur-devouring ogre (Mon dieu! George, another French word!) that Bush's cartoonish dogma paints it to be. Actually, government-at-its-best can be an entrepreneur's buddy. One surprising place to see this buddyship at work is in one of the most mundane of government offices: Procurement (i.e., the Department of Buying Stuff).
Where does your mayor, school board, governor, or any other "public shopper" go to purchase fixtures, food, furniture, ferns, and whatnot? Where I live, various agencies have Buy Austin, Buy Texas, Buy American, Buy Green, Buy Sweatshop-Free, and other targeted policies that apply our tax dollars to our values. This sensible idea has swept across the country, most likely including where you live, and these agency purchases add up to a big financial boost for start-ups, independents, women-owned, and other homegrown enterprises. Rather than buying everything from Walmart or China (excuse the redundancy there)--thus shipping truckloads and boatloads of cash out of our communities--plow that public money back into the home turf for grassroots economic growth and the flowering of local jobs.
Imagine the uproar if President Obama and Congress tried to pass a bill to outlaw such "preferential procurement" policies, summarily cancelling our democratic right to decide where to make public purchases. I'd get pretty PO'd, wouldn't you? And what if they also proposed that foreign corporations in Brunei, New Zealand, Vietnam, and other nations must be given the right to make the sale on any and all products purchased with our tax dollars? That'd set my hair on fire!
The American people would never stand for this brazen affront to our sovereignty, so I can assure you that Obama and Congress will definitely NOT be proposing any such thing. Not directly, that is.
Instead, their hope is to tiptoe it around us. The nullification of our people's right to direct expenditures of our own tax dollars is but one of the horror stories being quietly packed into a political-and-economic bombshell benignly labeled TPP --the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
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Senior Israeli officials have called on the US to stop spying on Israel, after revelations that the National Security Agency had intercepted emails from the offices of the country's former leaders.
It is the first time Israeli officials have expressed anger since details of US spying on Israel began to trickle out in documents leaked by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The scandal has spurred renewed calls for the release of Jonathan Pollard, a former US intelligence analyst who has been imprisoned in the US for nearly three decades for spying for Israel.
"This thing is not legitimate," the Israeli intelligence minister, Yuval Steinitz, told Israel Radio. He called for both countries to enter an agreement regarding espionage.
"It's quite embarrassing between countries who are allies," the tourism minister, Uzi Landau, said. "It's this moment more than any other moment that Jonathan Pollard [should] be released."
Documents leaked by Snowden – and published last week in the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times – revealed that British agents from GCHQ worked with the NSA from 2008-11 to target email addresses belonging to the offices of then Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and the defence minister, Ehud Barak.
Amir Dan, spokesman for Olmert, played down the revelations. He said the email address targeted was meant for queries from the public and was not used for sensitive communications. "There is no chance there was a security or intelligence breach caused from this email address," he said.
Barak could not immediately be reached for comment.
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The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India has strongly urged the government to implement uniform spectrum usage charge (SUC) before the upcoming auctions in the interest of all stakeholders such as consumers, economy, government and the industry. This is in light of the failure of the last two spectrum auctions on account of high reserve prices and an escalated SUC regime.
"None of the spectrum reforms being introduced by the government like spectrum sharing, spectrum trading, revised mergers and acquisitions (M&A) guidelines will take off until there is a uniform SUC regime as the operators will be discouraged to purchase spectrum if the SUC continues at the current escalated regime," said ASSOCHAM at a press conference jointly addressed by T.V. Ramachandran, chair, National Telecom Council of ASSOCHAM and resident director, Regulatory Affairs at Vodafone India along with D.S. Rawat, secretary general.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has emphasized on the principle of uniformity in respect of spectrum usage charges, but has left the decision on the exact rate to the government, it added. "If the government believes that three per cent SUC will result in a loss, it can set the uniform SUC at a rate that will give the government revenue neutrality."
A 167.50MHz of spectrum in 1,800MHz band that remained unsold in the November 2012 auctions caused a loss to the government exchequer to the tune of Rs 1,744 crore per year (annual installment with repayment term for 20 years at 10 percent interest) as per today's reserve prices.
"This loss due to non-implementation of the uniform SUC is almost seven times than the Rs 250 crore annual loss estimated by the government on implementing the uniform SUC," highlighted ASSOCHAM. "A uniform SUC apart from bringing additional revenues to the government will also result in the most efficient and optimal utilization of spectrum."
The ASSOCHAM also pointed out that the government has not considered the issue of arbitrage that has been brought out by TRAI.
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The shortage of physicians in rural and remote areas in tandem with the continuous development of telecommunication are providing the opportunity for telemedicine to increase its services to millions of patients, according to a new report from Research and Markets.
This widespread deployment of services will continue at a rapid pace for the foreseeable future; the increase in telemedicine applications are increasing due to the high prevalence of chronic diseases, consistent need for improved quality services and rising elderly population across countries which demand telemedicine to deliver improved products with higher patient satisfaction.
As a result, the global telemedicine market, which stood at $14.2 billion in 2012, is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.5 percent during 2012-2018, according to the report, “Global Telemedicine Market Outlook to 2018.”
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Britain’s largest internet provider, BT, is offering its customers the option to block sex education, “gay and lesbian lifestyle” websites, and non-adult content about sexual health, as UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s sweeping plans for a filtered internet come into effect.
In an article about state interference with the internet, GigaOm’s Jeff John Roberts made the editorial decision to mention the UK and North Korea, together, in the same headline. While there is a certain level of caustic hyperbole in doing so, advocates for web freedom have been highlighting the slippery slope Cameron’s government has been careening down for years. Now, one paragraph, hidden away on the customer care page for Britain’s biggest internet provider, brings questions of censorship and the potential harm it can do sharply into focus.
British Telecom’s customer care page, titled “Blocking categories on Parental control”, details a list of topics customers can choose to filter. Tucked away at the bottom, after the expected violence, hate, pornography, and drugs options, is “Sex Education”.
It reads: “Sex Education will block sites where the main purpose is to provide information on subjects such as respect for a partner, abortion, gay and lesbian lifestyle, contraceptives, sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy.”
While sex education pages will not be blocked by default, the mere existence of it as an option sends a deeply worrying message to BT’s customers.
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This year saw the completion of the city of Munich's switch to Linux, a move that began about ten years ago. "One of the biggest lessons learned was that you can't do such a project without continued political backing," said Peter Hofmann, the leader of the LiMux project, summing up the experience.
The Munich city authority migrated around 14,800 of the 15,000 or so PCs on its network to LiMux, its own Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, exceeding its initial goal of migrating 12,000 desktops.
Munich decided to migrate its IT systems when Microsoft said it planned to discontinue support for the operating system the city then relied on, Windows NT 4.0. The city was forced to choose between moving to a newer version of Windows, or finding an alternative platform, as new software and new versions of existing software would not be available on Windows NT. The city council decided to go with Linux to become more independent from software vendors.
Continued political backing was key to the success of the migration, said Hofmann.
"We had it from the start and it never failed. We had to treat our politicians as stakeholders and keep them informed," he said.
By doing this, the politicians never lost interest and always knew what the people involved in the project were doing, he said. "I saw a lot of other open source projects going down the sink," because they didn't have that backing, or lost it, he said.
It took the city about 10 years from the first decision to switch through to completion of the LiMux project, which was originally scheduled for completion in 2009. However, there were several delays along the way.
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This is just outrageous. The fossil fuel industry has zero regard for the American people. I hope the parish wins and wins big.
The Louisiana parish of Plaquemines is taking on a group of oil and gas giants including BP and Chevron for allegedly dumping toxic waste — some of it radioactive — from their drilling operations into its coastal waters, according to a lawsuit removed to federal court on Thursday.
Plaquemines Parish is claiming the companies violated the Louisiana State and Local Coastal Resources Management Act of 1978 by discharging oil field waste directly into the water “without limitation.”
Worse, the companies allegedly failed to clear, revegetate, detoxify or restore any of the areas they polluted, as required by state law. The oil and gas companies’ pollution, along with their alleged failure to adequately maintain their oilfields, has caused significant coastal erosion and contaminated groundwater, the lawsuit said."
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It's because they allow companies to pollute at will.
It wasn't so much labor costs that soured Business on America.
It was America's growing unwillingness to continue allowing Business to privatize all of the profits and socialize all of the costs of doing business.
Environmental safeguards force industry to internalize that aspect of their operations.
This is what China's lax to nonexistent environmental regulations look like on the ground.
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On Thursday China began trading in Guangdong’s carbon permit market, which is expected to be the world’s second-largest market after the European Union in terms of carbon dioxide emissions covered. It is far larger than either the Australian or Californian emissions trading schemes.
The Chinese government has approved seven pilot carbon trading exchanges in total, with Shenzhen being the first to launch in June followed by Beijing and Shanghai. However, Guangdong, which is home to over 100 million people and has an economy larger than Indonesia, far outweighs the other pilot projects launched to date. These pilot projects are working toward a national trading system that could be introduced within the next few years, the government has said.
Aside from being the largest carbon market to operate in China yet, Guangdong is also the first to use auctions to distribute emissions permits, rather than offering them all initially for free.
The Guangzhou-based China Emissions Exchange oversaw the first day of trading, in which, “price level matched expectations, following a government auction of 3 million permits sold at 60 yuan, the official price floor for auctions, on Dec. 16,” according to Reuters.
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