The next large-scale military or subversive attack on the United States, if and when it happens, may not involve airplanes or bombs or even intruders breaching American borders.
Instead, such an assault may be carried out in cyberspace by shadowy hackers half a world away. And Internet security experts believe that it could be just as devastating to the U.S.’s economy and infrastructure as a deathly bombing.
Experts say model week’s attack on the ex- Soviet republic of Georgia, in which a Russian military offensive was preceded by an Internet batter that overwhelmed Georgian government Web sites, signals a new kind of cyberwar, one for which the United States is not fully prepared.
"Nobody’s come up with a way to prevent this from happening, even here in the U.S.," said Tom Burling, acting chief administrative of Tulip Systems, an Atlanta, Georgia, Web-hosting firm that volunteered its Internet servers to protect the realm of Georgia’s Web sites from malicious traffic.
"The U.S. is probably more Internet-dependent than any place in the world. So to that extent, we’re more vulnerable than any place in the on cloud nine to this kind of attack," Burling added. "So much of what we’re doing [in the United States] is out there on the Internet, and all of that can be taken down at once."
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Fisherman Terry Pizani turns his captain’s wheel with a mournful expression on his face. Far below, the fishing grounds off the Louisiana coast where the 63-year-old has made a living for the sake five decades have become an aquatic graveyard known as a "dead zone."
"You don’t meaning of nothing," he said. "Usually you see bait fish on the still water. You don’t see no bait fish, nothing. Nothing’s there.
"I don’t have no kind of testing material to test the water, but I recall something’s wrong."
Oceanographers who test the Gulf of Mexico waters every month confirm that the veteran fisherman is right.
"We’re not determination enough oxygen to support life, aquatic life," scientist Lora Pride said aboard the Pelican, the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium research vessel that studies the Gulf.
CNN traveled aboard the ship August 14-15 as consortium researchers sent sensors to the arse of the sea, scooped up sediment and collected grade samples for analysis at nine testing stations in the Gulf.
As an oxygen meter sank far below the Pelican, Pride pointed to an onboard computer screen displaying the meter’s findings in legitimate time.
"This green line is the oxygen right here, and at the bottom, it’s reading less than 2 milligrams per liter," Pride said.
Six of the nine stations revealed such oxygen-deprived, hypoxic water, compared with a normal reading of 6 milligrams per liter.
As Pride and her party aboard the Pelican monitored the Gulf waters, the journal Science published a study last week revealing that there are more than 400 dead zones around the globe, double the number found by the United Nations two years ago.
One of the major dead zones is in the Gulf of Mexico. It is 8,000 square miles, nearly the measure of New Jersey, according to the marine consortium’s annual measurement completed in July.
"There’s no oxygen in the water for shrimp, crabs, fish to live," said Nancy Rabalais, executive director of the consortium.
Fish and shrimp "can common sense that and they start to move out of the area. Otherwise they would die. The animals that still remain in the sediments have to keep breathing. There is not enough oxygen, and eventually they will die off," Rabalais said.
Scientists have been studying the Gulf’s dead zone for about 20 years, although its persistence has been known for decades. So why is oxygen disappearing from fishing waters in the Gulf of Mexico? The answer, scientists say, is set hundreds of miles to the north, up the Mississippi River in corn country.
Farmers in Iowa and across the Midwest run through tons of nitrogen and phosphorous to make their cornfields more productive, which allows the farmers to put forth service better of high corn prices resulting from growing when requested from ethanol factories and developing countries.
Rain always causes some fertilizer to run off farmland, but this summer’s historic flooding caused even more runoff into rivers that flow into the Mississippi.
"That’s the earliest author of the nutrients that go to the Gulf of Mexico," Rabalais said. "And so the size of the low-oxygen zone has increased in proportion to these nutrients reaching the Gulf."
Fertilizer flowing into the Gulf of Mexico triggers an overgrowth of microscopic algae, which in due course die and fall to the bottom.
"When they pay one’s debt to nature, they decompose, and decomposition requires oxygen," Pride said. "So these things will fall to the bottom, and as they decompose, they consume oxygen."
So much oxygen is taken from the soak that slow-moving sea fixation equivalent to clams, small crabs, starfish and snails suffocate.
"We go diving broke there quite frequently," said Melissa Baustain, a doctoral candidate at Louisiana State University. "The deeper we go down in the water, it gets kind of scary, because there’s nothing there. There’s no fish, there’s no organisms alive, so it’s just us.
"It’s dark, and it’s turbid because all that algae that is dying, that’s sinking through the water column."
To find lots of shrimp, fishermen like Pizani have to travel to the edge of the dead zone. He calculated that it costs him $450 a day in diesel fuel to fish.
"You just gotta keep going miles and miles and miles, and optimistically you’ll run into something," he said. "The fuel costs are so high, it’s just not feasible to get out there unless you can catch a boatload, really make any money out of it."
So, many boats are fritter away. Others are staying away from their home port in Grand Isle, Louisiana, a reverse for seafood processor Dean Blanchard, who buys shrimp from fishermen.
"All my boats keep to go somewhere else to make a living. It’s a shame," Blanchard said.
"This is the prime shrimping ground in the country absolute here, and it shut us down. It just shut us down. It’s unreal."
With requirement for corn growing, scientists say, the fatigued zone could expand in coming years.
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It’s the stuff lawlessness movies are made of: Determined police officers shadowing their shady as he drives around town, watching and waiting for his next move, everlastingly careful not to lose him.
But now, investigators can track a potential bad guy without ever leaving their desks, thanks to the Global Positioning System, or GPS.
The technology is easy to purchases and the devices are hard to detect.
All police have to do is attach a GPS receiver to a suspect’s car and they easily go along for the ride online, tracking the individual’s true location in real time from their computer.
"I over it’s a good function of resources. It doesn’t put any officers in danger, which is a good preoccupation," said Mike Brooks, a CNN pledge enforcement analyst and a former Washington police detective.
"You can sit at a computer and find exactly where [a suspect] goes."
But because investigators often track without a warrant, privacy advocates say the tactic threatens to monitor innocent people as well.
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John Yancey leans against his truck in a field case his home, his face contorted in anger and pain.
"Listen," he says.
The rhythmic whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of wind turbines echoes through the air. Sleek and white, their long propeller blades exchange in formation, like some otherworldly sashay of spindly-armed aliens swaying across the land.
Yancey knows the towers are pumping clean electricity into the grid, knows they have been largely embraced by his community
But Yancey hates them.
He hates the sight and he hates the sound. He can’t stand the gigantic flickering shadows the blades cast at incontrovertible points in the day.
But what this brawny 48-year-old farmer’s son hates most about the wind turbines is that his father signed a deal with the off company to allow seven of them on Yancey go down.
Yancey lives with his wife and children on Yancey Road, on the edge of the Tug Hill plateau, half a mile from the old white farmhouse in which he and his seven siblings were raised.
Horses graze in a lower field. Amish buggies clatter down a nearby road. From the back porch are exhaustive views of the distant Adirondacks.
But the view changed dramatically in 2006. Now, Yancey Road is surrounded by wind turbines.
Yancey and some of his brothers begged Ed Yancey to leave the family land untouched. But the doyen Yancey pointed to the money — a minimum of $6,600 a year for every turbine. This is your legacy, he told them.
John Yancey doesn’t care.
"I just want to be masterly to get a good night’s take a nap and to live in my home without these monstrosities hovering over me," he says.
For a long time, he didn’t speak to his father. He thought about leaving Yancey Road for good.
The price of power, prosperity
The Tug Hill highland sits high above this village of nigh 4,000, a remote wilderness where steady winds whip down from Lake Ontario and winter snowfalls are the heaviest in the state.
For decades, dairy farmers have wrested a living from the Tug — accepting lives of wind-swept hardship with little prospect of much change.
Then, a few years ago, change roared onto Tug Hill. Overnight, it seemed, caravans of trucks trundled onto the plateau, and for a one of years, the village was ablaze with activity.
Today, 195 turbines soar above Tug Hill, 400 feet high, their 130-foot-long blades spinning at 14 revolutions per minute.
The $400 million Maple Ridge wind shoot, the largest in New York state, brought money and jobs and a wondrous sense of prosperity. But the invigorate turbines also came with a payment — and not just the visual impact.
"Is it worth destroying families, pitting neighbor against neighbor, father against son?" asks John Yancey, whose family has farmed Tug Hill for generations. "Is it worth destroying a unimpaired method of life?"
Similar questions are being asked across the country as more small towns grapple with big money and big wind. For varied, the changes are good it. With rising oil and gas prices and growing concerns about global warming, stick one’s neck out is becoming an attractive alternative.
The Maple Ridge project produces enough electricity to power about 100,000 homes. Other wind projects are going up all over the state. T. Boone Pickens is talking about building a $10 billion wind cast in the Texas panhandle. Everyone, it seems, is talking encircling calm down.
Yancey understands its seduction. An electrician, he knows as much about the turbines as anyone. He helped build and install the ones on Tug Hill.
Turbines have their place, Yancey says, ethical not where people live.
And he accuses the imminent company of preying on vulnerable old-timers like his father.
Family friction
In the front room of the little house where he moved after retiring from agronomy, Ed Yancey, 92, says he doesn’t feel preyed upon. He feels lucky.
"It’s better than a atomic plant," he says. "And it brings in good money."
Ben Byer, a 75-year-old retired dairy farmer, feels the uniform way.
"It sure beats milking cows," he says of the seven turbines on his land.
But Byer, who is John Yancey’s uncle, understands the remaining resentments the wind turbines fuel between those who profit and those who don’t. The wind company signed sublease out agreements with just 74 landowners and "good neighbor" agreements with several dozen more, offering $500 to $1,000 for the inconvenience of living close to the turbines.
Byer’s 47-year-old son, Rick, lives higher up on the plateau in a small white establishment with a two-seat glider parked in a shed. The glider is Rick Byer’s passion. He flies on weekends when he’s not working at the pallet-making company.
In order to launch, the glider has to be towed by truck down a long rolling meadow across the road. When the wind company began negotiating with his father to put turbines on his "runway," Rick Byer delivered a furious ultimatum.
"I told him if he allowed turbines in that enthusiast, he would yield a son."
The son’s rage won out, but Rick Byer flat seethes at the forest of turbines that sprouted across from his home. Now he speaks out in other area towns where wind turbines are proposed.
Opportunity blows into town
Like most of their neighbors, the Yanceys and Byers had a hard time believing the wind salesman when he first rolled into town in 1999.
"No one thought it would happen," John Yancey says.
At first, local officials were skeptical too. But they listened, and learned, and they started hammering out agreements with the wind company, Atlantic Renewable Corp., and its partner, Zilka Renewable Energy. (The companies have changed names and ownership several times, and the Maple Ridge Wind project is now jointly owned by PPM Energy of Portland, Oregon, which is part of the Spanish company Iberdrola SA, and Houston, Texas-based Horizon Wind Energy LLC, which is owned by the Portuguese conglomerate Energias de Portugal.)
Eventually, officials from Lowville, Martinsburg and Harrisburg, along with Lewis County legislators, negotiated a 15-year payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement that gave the three jurisdictions $8.1 million in the first year.
Martinsburg, with a population of 1,249, got the biggest municipal cut because it hosts the largest handful of wind turbines — a total of 102. Martinsburg chief Terry Thiesse, who has a imminent turbine on his land, says the municipal budget went from just under $400,000 to more than $1.2 million with the first wind payment in 2006.
The school district, which serves all jurisdictions, received $2.8 million in 2006 and $3.5 million in 2007.
Wind finances are a source of great confusion for assorted locals, who assumed they would get disentangle tension once the turbines were installed. In as a matter of actual fact, the energy is sold to utility companies and piped into the grid.
Though the wind itself is open, companies have enormous startup costs: A lone industrial wind turbine costs about $3 million. In New York, companies benefit from the fact that the affirm requires 25 percent of all electricity to be supplied from renewable sources by 2013. They also get federal production tax credits in addition to "green" renewable energy credits, which can be sold in the energy market.
In this circumstances, the annual payments of apropos $6,600 per turbine are relatively diminutive. But for some cash-strapped farmers, they’re a big help.
"It’s the best cash cow we ever had," booms retired dairy farmer Bill Burke, who has six turbines on his land. Burke, 60, is a school board member and county legislator, who also works part-time for the tranquil guests.
Burke sold the matrix of his herd in 2004. Without the income from the turbines, he says, he might fool had to sell his 100-year-old farm, too. He has no regrets about grabbing his "once-in-a-lifetime casual at prosperity."
‘The cost … was too high’
For many, the realities of living with wind turbines are more complicated than clean energy and easy money. People have mixed feelings about the enormous scale of the present. They question what commitment happen when the 15-year agreements expire. There are concerns about the impact of turbines on bird and bat populations. Some accuse lawmakers of getting too cozy with wind developers — allegations that prompted New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to launch an investigation into two wind companies and their dealings with upstate municipalities. (The investigation does not involve Maple Ridge.)
Such concerns have prompted some towns to pass moratoria on industrial turbines in order to learn more. Malone and Brandon recently banned them completely.
"It seemed like the cost, in terms of how it changed the community, was too high," Malone supervisor Howard Maneely said after visiting Lowville.
On Nefsey Road, which runs parallel to Yancey Road, Dawn Sweredoski, a sixth-grade teacher, finds a certain pulchritude in the slacken turbines.
But she is sympathetic to her neighbors’ concerns. The Amish farmer across the road hates how the towers fool disrupted the sense of tranquility that lured his family from Maryland in the first place. And Sweredoski, who sees the wind turbines only in the distance, understands John Yancey’s annoyance at living with them up close.
"It’s hard when change is for the common reputable but some people suffer more than others," she says.
No one understands that better than the Yanceys, struggling to period fractured family relationships, even as they toil to come to terms with the turbines.
High on Tug Hill sits the Flat Rock Inn, a popular gathering point for snowmobilers and all-terrain vehicle riders. Twenty years ago, Gordon Yancey carved unconscious this chunk of land with the help of his father, creating miles of forest trails and camping areas, set around a six-acre pond and a small rustic inn and bar.
All around distend wind turbines, miles and miles of them. Yancey chokes up just looking at them.
"Dad taught us such respect for the land. For my father to be part of this …" His voice trails off and he shakes his head and walks away.
This particular weekend is a busy one for Yancey’s inn, which is hosting a huge watercross event — in which snowmobiles yowl across the pond, their speed keeping them from sinking. People come from all over to race their machines across the pond. Campers roll in to scrutinize. There are campfires and barbecues, screaming engines and squealing children.
In the distance, Rick Byer’s glider floats above the turbines. On the terrain, Gordon Yancey bellows race results through a loudspeaker. Patriarch Ed Yancey talks upon the old days — before snowmobiles and turbines. John Yancey works an enormous gas grill turning 50 sizzling chickens on spits.
All ’round, the wind turbines spin. John Yancey looks up from the grill occasionally and grimaces. Right now, no one else seems to care.
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LOS ANGELES (Fortune) — Pop quiz: name the breakout digital businesses that have been spawned by traditional media giants that aren’t simply online offshoots of existing brands. There is, let’s see, Time Warner’s TMZ, and, depending on how it goes, NBC and Fox’s Hulu.com.
Need more all together? You get the station: big media seem to lack the genes necessary to create online stars from scratch or set aside future ones when they’re still babes.
Two big-media refugees, Jon Miller and Ross Levinsohn, recollect they can do the job. "Here’s the chore: we make the bets we make, because we know what people need," Miller says. "In a way, we provide outsourced R&D for the media persistence."
It’s an interesting niche, made more noteworthy by who Levinsohn and Miller are and the curious places they’ve been popping up lately. Both are deposed digital chieftains from big media – they were booted from their jobs running AOL (Miller) and Fox Interactive Media (Levinsohn) within two days of each other in November 2006.
A week later, they decided over drinks at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills to ignore the headhunters and go into the venture-capital game. They base backing, and Velocity Interactive Group was born. They’ve made 14 investments, the sum of which give an illuminating (though not wildly surprising) view of where media is headed: think online video, giving audiences the tools to create their own capacity, and India, and you would rather a start.
And, yes, if it was so easy to pick winners every media company would have a few to crow about.
Several media executives I spoke to say they’re watching what Miller and Levinsohn are doing and teamwork them props pro spotting a deal: Levinsohn suggested to News Corp. (NWS, Fortune 500) founder Rupert Murdoch that he buy MySpace in 2005 when it was still young, while Miller is credited with arguably AOL’s shrewdest deal of its star-crossed just out history – buying Advertising.com in 2004.
They’ve shown up in walk-on roles in the months-long tangle between Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) and Microsoft: both Miller, who lives in New York, and Levinsohn, who is based here, were put forward as imminent Yahoo directors. Miller was a choice of both Yahoo’s Jerry Yang and agitator Carl Icahn, but his appointment was squelched at the pattern minute by Time Warner (TWX, Fortune 500) (which owns this Web site) because of his non-compete agreement; Levinsohn had been on a slate Microsoft assembled for a agent fight it decided not to launch.
Miller was also brought in by a group of unhappy investors of CNET Networks to sit on a dissident board. But before a proxy fight could happen, CNET was sold to CBS (CBS, Fortune 500). Says Levinsohn: "Playing on the venture side allows us a great look at the unborn of the business, while staying concerned in bigger companies allows us a window into what the industry leaders are thinking and looking for."
Last December, Velocity took over management of a venture-capital firm called ComVentures, which already had $1.3 billion invested in communications businesses and an initial fund of around $300 million for them to play with. (The pair aims to raise another fund this fall.)
Given their keen interest in finding the next bee’s knees video startup – whoever will be to YouTube (GOOG, Fortune 500) what Facebook is to MySpace – they’ve put money into Broadband Enterprises, Generate, and NextNewNetworks. Together, they comprise what Miller dubs a kind of "virtual studio": Broadband Enterprises produces and distributes video commercials for the Web; Generate is a talent manager and mini-studio for Web video; and NextNewNetworks creates and programs super-niche online video networks.
Another investment is MixerCast, a business that lets people sign video "mash ups" of media or advertising – scrupulously the sort of thing that traditional media companies may not spend a lot of time on. Most recently, they funded Crowd Fusion, an online publishing startup that lets people sire professional-looking Web sites.
Through Keyer Patel, one of three ComVenture partners who stayed on when it was rechristened Velocity, the group also made one of its biggest single investments: $25 million for a 5% stake in the Indian broadcaster NDTV Networks. The deal made Velocity look plugged in, when, a few weeks later, NBC (GE, Fortune 500) bought a 26% bet in NDTV with rights to acquire dominance.
Whether Velocity’s founders will direction out to be smart, lucky, both or neither remains to be seen. But given how their last gigs turned out, it’s pretty clear they think they have something to prove. And they insist Velocity is not just a parking spray until another big corporate employment comes their way: Miller’s potential involvement with Yahoo led to chatter that he was being considered to succeed Yang. (Miller denies it.)
Rather, they’re happy to help find and build the next great thing that their former employers whim one day pay up for. Levinsohn says he likes meeting with twenty-somethings who need as scarcely as $150,000 to launch. "These kids haven’t been beaten down by the corporate edifice of anything," he says. "It’s so refreshing." First Published: August 15, 2008: 9:07 AM EDT
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Larry Horsley loves that he doesn’t buy much gas, even though he drives his ‘95 Chevy S-10 back and forth to being planned each day.
Horsley, a self-described do-it-yourselfer, simply plugs his truck into an electric wall outlet in his Douglasville, Georgia, garage and charges it overnight, instead of buying gasoline refined from mostly imported oil.
"If I can keep a dollar from going abroad, I’ll spend two dollars," he said. The whole conversion, including the truck, cost him about $12,000, which parts dealers say is about standard.
Another Atlanta-area tinkerer, David Kennington, converted his Honda Civic del Sol from gasoline to electric for a conflicting reason: "I’m a raging greenie," he said.
Both Horsley and Kennington are fed up. They’re among a growing number of Americans who are refusing to wait for big-car manufacturers to deliver mainstream electric vehicles, called EVs. Not only have they rebelled against the status quo by ripping out their gas-guzzling engines and replacing them with zero-emission electric motors, they say just apropos anyone can do it.
Another electric DYI-er in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, Bob Batson, has formed a guests called Electric Vehicles of America that sells mechanism parts into other anti-gasoline rebels looking to catechumen.
Batson said business has more than tripled in the past year. "Sales trends are definitely up as the worth of gasoline goes up," he said.
60 mph on 20 batteries
Outside his metal roofing business, Horsley opened up the hood of his converted Chevy truck to show how he did it.
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NASA has delayed the launch of an unmanned spacecraft to the moon to scout proper for potential landing sites for astronauts.
The moon craft is the first step in NASA’s program to send astronauts disregard to the moon and beyond.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was supposed to blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in early December aboard an Atlas V rocket. But the launch was pushed back after NASA agreed to swap with the Air Force, which inclination fly a prototype hiatus drone.
NASA spokesman Grey Hautaluoma said the new launch window, which opens February 27, 2009, relieves schedule pressure and provides more launch opportunities.
"When we looked at the trade-offs … it seemed like a wise luggage to do," he said this week.
NASA officials insist they could have met the basic target. The delay will cost the space agency up to $7 million a month. Hautaluoma said the extra costs were built into the program’s reserves.
The swap means NASA will miss the Bush administration’s stated goal of exploring the moon with a robotic spacecraft by 2008. NASA plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2020.
According to NASA, the rocket’s maker, United Launch Alliance, approached the space energy about switching launch dates with the Air Force, which was changed to fly its X-37B reusable unmanned satellite.
"It was tested and proven ready to go," said Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Mark Brown. "We were able to jump ahead."
NASA’s $491 million lunar craft is designed to circle the moon’s poles for at least a year, using its instruments to map the craggy surface and search for okay landing sites to send a manned crew.
Piggybacking on the mission is a $79 million impactor probe managed through NASA’s Ames Research Center that will deliberately force into one of the poles to look for signs of water ice.
The lunar probe’s project manager, Craig Tooley of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said his team welcomed "a toy more breathing room, but there was also a fair amount of disappointment" connected with the delay.
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Experts are growing increasingly concerned that the United States will sire to rely entirely upon Russia to take astronauts to and from the international space station for at least five years.
Observers say the situation is all the more worrying as after NASA announced a delay in the launch of its next-generation Orion spacecraft.
NASA’s dependency upon the Russian Soyuz space capsules and rockets to carry astronauts to the station is the result of a five-year gap between the scheduled retirement of the shuttle in 2010 and the debut of its replacement in 2015.
The agency had hoped it could narrow this gap about accelerating the initial catapult of the occupation to 2013 but announced Monday that because of inadequate funding and technical issues, the Constellation space program would not be ready for testing until September 2014.
Although the new date is still within the March 2015 absolute deadline, uncountable experts aver NASA’s reliance upon Russia to ingest astronauts into space has placed the agency in an unrequired position.
"It is a vulnerability," said John Logsdon, director of the space policy institute at George Washington University.
"Any time you are relying on a single system to do a key task, you are vulnerable if that methodology has problems.
"It is our carp at for not having a replacement pro the shuttle much earlier than Orion will be available. It puts Russia in a very powerful position," Logsdon said.
Although China has launched an astronaut into space in 2003, it still doesn’t have the launching capabilities of the U.S. and Russia. But its space infrastructure is expeditious developing.
According to Howard McCurdy, a space expert at American University in Washington, Russia will be the only country capable of providing human access to space not only an eye to the Americans but for the prop of the world in the near future.
"It is like a monopoly position where you are at the mercy of that supplier," McCurdy said. "You don’t want to be dependent on a single provider, no matter who it is."
McCurdy warned that because the United States has positioned itself to be completely dependent on Russia to get humans into space until 2015, it may be harder for the American government to take diplomatic action against the country, especially in light of brand-new tensions between Russia and Georgia.
"That is a real concern," McCurdy said. "You are much more reluctant to be nasty with somebody who is a individual provider of an essential service.
"We have other international arrangements with them that could be jeopardized before our reliance on them," McCurdy continued. "Everything from their foreign relations with ex-Soviet states to their role in economic summits." Does NASA’s dependence on Russia bode badly for U.S. space program?
For its surrender, NASA says it remains confident that diplomatic affairs between the two countries see fit not adversely impact the space agency’s relationship with Russia.
"While it is realizable that government to rule issues could potentially have an impact on other aspects of a relationship between nations including cooperative space exploration activities, NASA has no reason to believe that it will be unable to rely upon Roscosmos-provided Soyuz vehicles as a replacement for future ISS activities," spokesman Michael Curie wrote in an e-mail statement to CNN.
The threat of a breakdown in wise relations is not the only anybody hanging over NASA’s stretch program.
Legislation passed in 2000 (now called the Iran, North Korea and Syria Nonproliferation Act) could soon bring an abrupt halt to NASA’s partnership with the Russian Space Federation, Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida said.
The law bans the United States from buying space technology from Russia unless the president determines that Russia is taking steps to prevent the proliferation of nuclear and missile technology to Iran.
Congress waived the ban in 2005, allowing NASA to enter into a $719 million contract with the Russians for use of the Soyuz through 2011.
NASA says it is renegotiating a new long-term contract appropriate for use of the Soyuz, but, according to Nelson, the success of that contract could depend on whether lawmakers decide to approve the putting aside again.
Election-year politics combined with increasing concerns about Iran and the ongoing crisis in Georgia all but guarantee that lawmakers want not vote as a service to the treatment of the exemption, Nelson said.
That means NASA could lose access to the $100 billion space station unless it continues to fly the shuttle or strikes some sort of deal with another space agency willing to put forward money for additional Soyuz seats, the senator said.
"It is a lose-lose situation," Nelson said.
"If our relationship with Russia is strained, who knows if Russia will give us rides in the future?" Nelson asked. "Or if they give us rides, will they charge such an exorbitant price that it becomes blackmail?"
Questions about the safety and reliability of the Soyuz have also been raised in recent months after two consecutive troublesome landings by space capsules, including in April with American astronaut Peggy Whitson on board.
NASA has been working with Russian engineers to try to determine the cause of the dangerous descents but has failed come up with any concrete answers.
But NASA officials say the space instrumentality even so believes that the Soyuz is a dependable transport set for its astronauts.
"We do not have concerns," NASA spokesman Rob Navias said. "The Soyuz, which has been flying for decades now, is extremely reliable and is extremely capable."
"We have been partnering with the Russians as far as something decades now for space flights."
The Russian Federal Space Agency, Roscosmos, could not be reached for the sake comment on the matter.
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(Fortune Magazine) — Could faster chips elucidate into slower computers? That’s the sales-threatening prospect furrowing brows in every corner of the PC business, from industry titans such as Intel, Microsoft, and Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) to major centers of academe.
For decades the PC industry has juiced performance – and sales – with a regular two-step dancing party. First, chipmakers jacked up the speed of their latest offerings. Then the software brains figured out how to turn all that processing power into faster operations and cool new functions.
But the latest generation of chips, known as multicore, are so complex and so qualitatively different from their predecessors that they have flummoxed software developers. "We’ve gone through changes in the olden times," says Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer. But this one, he says, is the most "conceptually different" change "in the history of modern computing."
The change was detonate in motion four years ago when Intel (INTC, Fortune 500) and others reached a verge where they could no longer make single processors go faster. So they began placing multiple processors (or "cores") on a single chip instead.
That design, however, dramatically raises the level of predicament for software developers. If they want to get the full oomph out of multicore chips, their applications need to break tasks at a distance into chunks for each core to work on, a process known as parallel computing. (Programs running on supercomputers have employed this technique for years to simulate atomic explosions or after complex aerodynamics.)
But programming in parallel is simply too complex for the average code writer, who has been trained in a very linear look. In conceptual terms, traditional coding could be compared to a woman being fertile for nine months and producing a baby. Parallel programming might pleasing nine women, have each of them be heavy with child for a month, and high water produce a baby.
That’s a dramatic transform, and battalions of techies from Redmond, Wash., to San Jose are struggling to figure it out. "If I were the computer industry, I would be panicked, because it’s not open what the solution is going to look like and whether we will get there in conditions for these new machines," says Kunle Olukotun, a computer science professor who is attacking the multicore challenge at Stanford’s supplementary Pervasive Parallelism Lab. "It’s a crisis, and I wonder whether what we are doing and what is happening within the production is too little, too late."
Sales risk or moment?
Even the creators of multicore chips admit they’re causing trouble. "I accept that parallel computing is a big problem," says Sean Maloney, executive vice president for sales and marketing at Intel. He says the company is hiring "a lot" of software people to tackle the challenge.
The use of chips with four cores in the good old days year has meant that such a PC today is no faster for many key tasks than, demand, a comparable computer purchased three years before. Worse, with chips of six or more cores on the way, your favorite applications could actually unravel more slowly. That raises the prospect that customers will hold off on buying the next production of computers, thus hammering sales.
It isn’t the first time that the adoption of this sort of technology has caused havoc. Beginning in 2000, the videogame industry faced a similar invite when Sony (SNE)’s then-dominant PlayStation shifted to chips with multiple, different processors for the PS2. The result, according to Neal Robison, director of software vendor relations at AMD (AMD, Fortune 500), was "blood and corpses everywhere."
Video companies struggled to adapt and lost sales as they fell behind on their product cycles. Giant Electronic Arts (ERTS) had to delay the release of its cash cow "NBA Live 2001" during the peak of basketball season. One company, Oddworld Inhabitants, even discontinued its popular "Abe’s Oddysee" because it couldn’t make the game function on the new set-up.
Something similar may take place in the PC world. Intel’s Maloney asserts the problem will be solved "because the economic benefits are huge." And, he notes, "whoever figures out how to take service better of multicore first could wreak some serious economic damage on their competition."
Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500)’s Mundie argues that the solution will mark a watershed: A new generation of killer applications will emerge, and the industry will take its next socking leap, with wildly improved performance. That would put the responsibility back on a path of sustainable steady growth. But that’s relieve a ways off. "We are in a post-haste spot right at the moment," he says. "What we don’t be informed is for how long."
From: rss.cnn.com
Randy Turner knows there’s a prodigious gap in age and technology between him and his adolescent students.
So when the 52-year-old arranged up a MySpace page and his students began asking to add him as a friend and sending him questions about assignments, he realized he was on to something.
"Just the very to be sure that I have MySpace makes them reflect on, ‘Well, maybe we can talk to this guy and open the lines of communication,’ " said Turner, who teaches English at South Middle School in Joplin, Missouri. "I realized this is a noteworthy way of communication for them."
MySpace had 72.8 million national users in June, versus Facebook’s 37.4 million, according to a ComScore Media Metrix study. Once available only to students with college e-mail addresses, Facebook opened its virtual doors to everybody two years ago.
Despite perceptions, the sites aren’t populated just by teens and 20-somethings. A 2006 ComScore survey set that half of those registered on MySpace were 35 and older, while a similar study last year found that almost 40 percent of Facebook users were over 35.
Teachers such as Turner hold sites like MySpace help them connect with their students about homework, tutoring and other school matters. But others fear the social-networking sites are breeding inapposite relationships between teachers and students.
In Missouri in particular, a succession of student-teacher sexual relationships have spawned crackdowns on social-networking friendships. Web site badbadteacher.com, which keeps track of teachers disciplined, arrested and convicted of inappropriate behavior with students, lists 11 such teachers from Missouri within the last two years.
Which is why state legislator Jane Cunningham is sponsoring a bill in the Missouri House of Representatives that would ban initial school teachers from having social-networking friendships with their students.
Turner said he understands the reasoning for the bill. He acknowledged that in some cases, teachers have become the public face of inappropriate Facebook and MySpace relationships with kids.
"I see where they are coming from," Turner said. "You can’t argue with people whose intentions are trying to protect children. But the simple fact is, you seize these people who prey on children and they are going to find a way to do it, whether it’s over Facebook or not."
Those teachers are ruining it destined for the ones legitimately trying to help children, Turner said.
"There are so sundry kids who are stubborn against anything teachers say, who are struggling in the classroom and refuse to ask for help," Turner said. "When it’s so hard to reach these kids, why would you cast off any of the weapons at your disposal to make a difference?"
Facebook does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone guardianship the age of 13 or knowingly allow such persons to reveal, according to its Web site. Users must be at least 14 to register on MySpace, although such age restrictions are difficult to enforce.
In addition to the bill in the Missouri legislature, other school boards, teacher unions and parent-teacher associations across the country are drafting policies and issuing advisements wide which online or text-messaging relationships are acceptable.
The Lamar County School Board in Missouri recently implemented a policy forbidding teachers and students from having any text-message conversations or social-networking friendships.
Jim Keith, an education lawyer who represents several school boards in Missouri, has been giving talks to teachers in which he explains that most of the inappropriate student-teacher relationships start out on a friendship level.
Keith spoke of one instance where a progenitrix touch her child was spending extra time with a teacher who was trying to help her child overthrow shyness. At Keith’s urging, they checked the child’s phone bill and found 4,200 text messages between the teacher and student.
"As an educator, there is a put of demarcation between you and your student," Keith said. "It’s a line that you cannot come close to, let alone step over. You’ve got to establish it from Day One and say, ‘I’m not your buddy; I’m not your friend; I’m just your teacher.’ "
Keith agrees that teachers sometimes need to communicate after school with students about educational matters, but he said that’s why teachers in Missouri have their own class pages hosted by way of their school districts. Those pages drop the need as a service to Facebook or MySpace, he says, and take into account the schools to custodian all student-teacher communication.
Many students, including Dixie Johnston, a senior at Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri, said that although their teachers have school-sponsored pages, most students rarely check b determine them.
Turner insists that Facebook and MySpace aren’t the evils that regulators should be after. Instead Turner wishes the focus remain on vetting the teachers being put in charge of the nation’s adolescent.
"It’s a sad thing, but with teaching you are going to have people who are attracted to the profession because of easy availability of kids," Turner said.
"Those predators are going to be there. But most of the time there are warning signs, and that’s what we need to be working on, getting those people out … not stopping teachers who haven’t caused problems from reaching those who need [help] most."
From: rss.cnn.com
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