Stripe, a startup backed by the same band of self-styled Libertarian revolutionaries who founded and then cashed out of PayPal, is set to do to every transaction on the planet what one-click payments did to Apple's App store and Amazon.com. If the company succeeds, the psychological abstraction of money at the core of the one-click impulse buy could make buying things easier than ever -- maybe even too easy -- and the backers of Stripe very, very rich.
A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists used an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama, previously undisclosed records show.
For decades people were allowed to take a private copy of a public broadcast. You could record the radio program with a cassette recorder or make a copy of your favorite movie by using a video recorder. All these techniques have been opposed heavily in its early years by the big media companies who didn't want the public to have such technology. They did describe such technology as criminal and as a threat to their business e.g. the 1980s campaign Home Taping Is Killing Music.
Several years later history is about to repeat: Google has teamed up with the RIAA to make the same claims against all sorts of online recording tools for their 21th century broadcasting service: YouTube ("Broadcast yourself"). Google is taking action against nearly every service that enables its users to create a private copy of a public YouTube broadcast while the RIAA is threatening news media like CNet for promoting such a software.
I hereby ask Google to break their silence and participate in an open and fair discussion with the intention to find a solution that suits the needs of the users.
Just want to say for this and other reasons, I'm happy to be an ex-Wells Fargo customer. They're not the only bank that steered minority borrowers who qualified for regular loans to subprime mortgages, but I don't think $175 million begins to pay for the harm they've caused. It's more like a slap on the hand. After all, their lending practices helped perpetuate the lingering myth that minorities crashed the economy - when it was really their own damned greed:
WASHINGTON — Wells Fargo Bank will pay at least $175 million to settle accusations that it discriminated against African-American and Hispanic borrowers in violation of fair-lending laws, the Justice Department announced Thursday.
Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest residential home mortgage originator, allegedly engaged in apattern or practice of discrimination against qualified African-American and Hispanic borrowers from 2004 through 2009.
At a news conference, Deputy Attorney General James Cole said the bank’s discriminatory lending practices resulted in more than 34,000 African-American and Hispanic borrowers in 36 states and the District of Columbia paying higher rates for loans solely because of the color of their skin.
Cole said that with the settlement, the second largest of its kind in history, the government will ensure that borrowers hit hard by the housing crisis will have an opportunity to access homeownership.
The bank will pay $125 million in compensation for borrowers who were steered into subprime mortgages or who paid higher fees and rates than white borrowers because of their race or national origin rather than because of differences in credit-worthiness.
Wells Fargo also will pay $50 million in direct down payment assistance to borrowers in areas of the country where the Justice Department identified large number of discrimination victims. Those areas are Washington, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Oakland and San Francisco, New York City, Cleveland, Riverside, Calif., and Baltimore.
The Internet has won the fight. SOPA and ACTA are both dead after having been eviscerated by the combined powers of the world coming together to fight for what they believe in – basic digital human rights. We can now rest easy knowing that the war has come to an end. Politicians would never think to bring them back, even under the guise of innocuous trade agreements and IP bills, right? Right?
Unfortunately, the war is not won and it’s looking like the war will never end. SOPA and ACTA are both back in new forms that are even harder to kill than before. I can understand SOPA being back as it’s been dead for a while, but are they really trying to push through ACTA right after it was defeated in the European Parliament? The answer is an astounding yes and the tactics that politicians are employing to regulate the Internet are pretty terrifying.
Alleged WikiLeaks whistle-blower PFC Bradley Manning is back in court soon for his next pre-trial motion hearing. We encourage everyone to attend! The next scheduled court dates are:
"If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels" -Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh
World population is, by all intents and purposes, completely out of control.
Plans are underway now, implemented by the New World Order Elite, to depopulate the planet's 6-7 billion people to a manageable level of between 500 million and 2 billion.
The discovery of over 500 dead penguins has scientists puzzled in the Brazilian state of Rio do Sul. Preliminary examination of the bodies showed they bore no injuries or oil stains and were well-fed.
The 512 penguins were found between the towns of Tramandai and Cidreira by residents of the area, who then notified the environmental patrol.
Investigators from the Brazilian Center of Martine Studies (Ceclimar) have taken a sample of 30 of the birds to try and ascertain the cause of death. The results of their study will be available in a month’s time.
The world may soon see the first examples of synthetic life, artificial organisms constructed in a laboratory. These will be unique organisms, not close copies of existing cells, said their creator Dr Craig Venter.
The controversial geneticist last night delivered a keynote address at Trinity College Dublin, part of the programme taking place in Dublin during the EuroScience Open Forum. Aptly, the title of his talks was “What is Life?”
FUTURE PRIMATE 