These veterans of America’s space program are among the 49 retired NASA employees who recently asked the agency to halt what they consider its unscientific advocacy of climate alarmism.

In a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden Jr., these rocket scientists, space explorers, and other men and women of reason requested that “NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites.” They added: “We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.”

“The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements,” the March 28 letter continued.

 “We feel that NASA’s advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate,” the document concluded. “At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA’s current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself.”

The letter’s signatories share at least 1,168 years of combined service to NASA. They include Gerald C. Griffin and Christopher C. Kraft, both of whom ran the JSC; former Space Shuttle Program director Leroy Day; Skylab astronauts Ed Gibson and Joseph Kerwin; and Apollo astronauts Phillip K. Chapman, Walter Cunningham, Charles Duke, Richard Gordon (also a Gemini veteran), Harrison Schmitt, and Al Worden.

Among these brave men, Duke and Schmitt walked on the moon, and Gordon and Worden flew there without landing.

These serious names should retire the notion that skeptics of so-called “global warming” are either mindless mouth-breathers or corporate shills who challenge “settled” climate science so that Big Business may molest Mother Earth.

Until this year’s AWOL winter in America (and a simultaneous deep freeze in much of Europe), satellites have observed global temperatures remaining below peak levels measured in 2000. Even if the last eleven years of cooling disguise a deeper warming, skeptics like these NASA alumni point to natural — rather than man-made — causes for such phenomena.

“I think the climate has been changing for billions of years,” Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, told London’s Daily Telegraph. “If it’s warming now, it may cool off later. I’m not in favor of just taking short-term, isolated situations and depleting our resources to keep our climate just the way it is today. I’m not necessarily of the school that we [humans] are causing it all. I think the world is causing it.”

Of course, Surrogate will along directly to call them Flat-Earthers and Moon Landing Deniers...

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/299649/astro nauts-cool-it-warming-der oy-murdock#" title="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/299649/astro nauts-cool-it-warming-der oy-murdock#" target="_blank"http://www.nationalreview.com...

It could cost U.S. employers between $2 billion and $4 billion to comply with an obscure Americans with Disabilities Act regulation meant to protect workers who are gun-shy in public restrooms.

According to an informal discussion letter the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued in August 2011, “paruresis” — more commonly known as “shy bladder syndrome” — qualifies as a disability under the amended Americans with Disabilities Act.

The International Paruresis Association defines the odd affliction as the “inability to urinate with others present.” The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the gold-standard of psychiatrists, categ orizes it as a social phobia that affects roughly seven percent of the population — approximately 17 million Americans.

The Association alleges that thousands of people who are afflicted by paruresis have been unfairly fired because of their inability to urinate in a public restroom during random drug screening tests.

And while the EEOC suggests that providing alternative drug-testing methods is one way to accommodate these sufferers, the next frontier could be the claim that they are entitled to pee in privacy during the normal course of daily work.

If every employer large enough to be subject to the ADA were to hedge against future lawsuits by adding segregated restrooms for timid tinklers, the cost would exceed the gross domestic product of many small nations.

*Facepalm*

http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/10/americans- with-disabilities-act-cov ers-bashful-bladder-syndr ome-could-cost-employers- billions/" title="http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/10/americans- with-disabilities-act-cov ers-bashful-bladder-syndr ome-could-cost-employers- billions/" target="_blank"http://dailycaller.com/2012/0...

It could cost U.S. employers between $2 billion and $4 billion to comply with an obscure Americans with Disabilities Act regulation meant to protect workers who are gun-shy in public restrooms.

According to an informal discussion letter the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued in August 2011, “paruresis” — more commonly known as “shy bladder syndrome” — qualifies as a disability under the amended Americans with Disabilities Act.

The International Paruresis Association defines the odd affliction as the “inability to urinate with others present.” The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the gold-standard of psychiatrists, categ orizes it as a social phobia that affects roughly seven percent of the population — approximately 17 million Americans.

The Association alleges that thousands of people who are afflicted by paruresis have been unfairly fired because of their inability to urinate in a public restroom during random drug screening tests.

And while the EEOC suggests that providing alternative drug-testing methods is one way to accommodate these sufferers, the next frontier could be the claim that they are entitled to pee in privacy during the normal course of daily work.

If every employer large enough to be subject to the ADA were to hedge against future lawsuits by adding segregated restrooms for timid tinklers, the cost would exceed the gross domestic product of many small nations.

*Facepalm*

http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/10/americans- with-disabilities-act-cov ers-bashful-bladder-syndr ome-could-cost-employers- billions/" title="http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/10/americans- with-disabilities-act-cov ers-bashful-bladder-syndr ome-could-cost-employers- billions/" target="_blank"http://dailycaller.com/2012/0...

Analysis Cyber-crooks may be able to keep malicious domains operating for longer - even after they are revoked - by manipulating the web's Domain Name System (DNS).

A weakness in the cache update logic of many widely used DNS servers creates the potential to establish so-called ghost domains, according to a recent joint study by a team of researchers from universities in China and the US. These DNS servers are critical to the running of the internet: they convert human-readable domains into numeric addresses that networking kit can understand in order to route, say, page requests to the right websites.

Attackers often use domain names for various malicious purposes such as phishing, botnet command and control, and malware propagation. An obvious strategy for preventing these activities is deleting the malicious domain from the upper level DNS servers.

In this paper, we show that this is insufficient. We demonstrate a vulnerability affecting the large majority of popular DNS implementations which allows a malicious domain name to stay resolvable long after it has been removed from the upper level servers.

Our experiments with 19,045 open DNS servers show that even one week after a domain name has been revoked and its TTL expired, more than 70 per cent of the servers will still resolve it.

The researchers found that DNS server implementations by BIND, Microsoft, Google and OpenDNS are all potentially vulnerable. There's evidence that the vulnerability has been exploited, and the prevalence of the flaw make the possibility of attack far from theoretical.

"This vulnerability can potentially allow a botnet to continuously use malicious domains which have been identified and removed from the domain registry," the Sino-American team warns.

Whoops.

The Register

The Obama Doctrine can be summed up as the assertion that for the United States to have influence and standing on the global stage, it must first abandon its interests and its allies.

The doctrine is rarely described as bluntly as that by its proponents who employ euphemisms like multilateral policies and honest broker to mean much the same thing, denouncing the previous administration and all the preceding administrations going back to old Tom Jefferson for alienating the world by pursuing American interests and cutting deals with non-progressive allies.

The easiest way to spot the problem with this approach is to try and distinguish it from the UN. That's hard to do because except during the occasional pro-forma trade dispute there is no distinction. It's the same policy of multilateral human rights interventions, global mediation and stability, and promoting the welfare of the angrier parts of the Third World. And if America's agenda is identical to that of the United Nations, than for all intents and purposes there is no American foreign policy.

This leaves the United States as less than a nation, a version of the United Nations with its own military and a great deal of wealth. It has no interests except reaching out to befriend its enemies and it has no allies except those enemies willing to pretend to be its allies, at which point they will become enemies. But the United Nations was designed to be a forum in which nations pursue their own interests, it is not supposed to have interests or allies. The United States is a nation and it is meant to have both. If the United States cannot articulate interests apart from the UN agenda then it no longer functions as a nation on the world stage.

The Obama Doctrine dispensed with America's traditional allies and pursued relations with its enemies without improving America's standing or influence in the world, though it did garner its overseer a preemptive Nobel Prize. Even the Libyan War was more of a European project than an American one.

The truth that dare not speak its name in the ink stained pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post is that the Obama Administration has been standing by the sidelines of world events with a very limited influence on what happens anywhere. The United States will not decide what happens in Syria. France, Germany, Qatar and England will decide what they want to do and will allow Obama to sign on if he wants to. Exactly the way it happened in Libya.

The United States still has mass, but it no longer has momentum. It does things like abandon Mubarak or bomb Gaddafi because other countries think they are a good idea. It responds belatedly to events from the outside world and then does its best to take credit for them.

Part of that is inexperience. The White House is headed up by a junior Senator who was a State Senator five years before he ran for the highest office in the land.  The Secretary of State is a former First Lady who spent eight years in the Senate before doing the same thing and then oddly enough landed as head of the country's foreign office. But it's not all of it.

The real problem is that the United States no longer has national interests. Its leaders act like they are the Secretary General of the UN, rather than the President of the United States. They jostle for standing on the world stage and play international philosophers preaching higher principles to the world, instead of looking out for their own country. Rather than representing the United States, they speak for some global ethical consensus on human rights and democracy.

The problem did not begin with Obama. LBJ may have been the last president who was satisfied with being a national leader, rather than an international leader, but it significantly worsened with Obama because he lacks even the vestigial allegiances that Biden or Kerry retain on some level. If they think like Americans at some gut level, Obama doesn't and he has no reason to. He is the figurehead of an ideology that champions an end to American interests.

The Obama Doctrine has not actually repaired America's foreign relations or made the world a better place. What it has done is taken American interests off the table.

Sultan Knish

“The cold snap in Europe, which began in late January, has killed hundreds and brought deep snow where it hasn’t been seen in decades,” says this article in the Seattle Times.

This should be front page news. Instead, the article doesn’t appear until page eight. And the title, “At least 3 killed in avalanche in Kosovo,” belies the seriousness of the situation. (The print version carries a different headline: “Cold snap, snow lock down Europe.”)

How about a headline that tells it like it is?

140,000 trapped by snow – Death toll rises past 550.

That headline would give readers a glimpse of what’s really happening in Europe, where snow drifts reaching above the rooftops have kept tens of thousands of villagers prisoners in their own homes.

Now, I’ll admit that once you get past the ho-hum headline and down to the third paragraph, the Seattle Times article gets to the harsh truth.

You learn that in Montenegro, “the heaviest snow in 63 years sealed off hundreds of villages, shut down roads and railways and closed the main airport.” And you learn that “It was the biggest snowfall in the capital since 1949.”

You also learn that “boat traffic on the frozen Danube river — one of Europe’s key waterways — has been unable to move for the longest time in recent memory.” (Italics added.)

The rest of the article is quite informative, and I appreciate that.

But it’s that “cold snap” thing that bugs me.

Did all of the world’s journalists go to “cold snap” school?

If temperatures go up by a hundredth of a degree they scream “global warming.” But if, heaven forbid, it’s record cold and record snow? “Well, let’s just call it a cold snap.”

Been telling you guys this for years:  AGW is a HOAX!!!

Ice Age Now

COSTELLO: I want to talk about the unemployment rate in America .
ABBOTT: Good Subject. Terrible times. It's 9%.

COSTELLO: That many people are out of work?
ABBOTT: No, that's 16%.

COSTELLO: You just said 9%.
ABBOTT: 9% Unemployed.

COSTELLO: Right 9% out of work.
ABBOTT: No, that's 16%.

COSTELLO: Okay, so it's 16% unemployed.
ABBOTT: No, that's 9%...

COSTELLO: Wait a minute. Is it 9% or 16%?
ABBOTT: 9% are unemployed. 16% are out of work.

COSTELLO: IF you are out of work you are unemployed.
ABBOTT: No, you can't count the "Out of Work" as the unemployed. You have to look for work to be unemployed.

COSTELLO: BUT THEY ARE OUT OF WORK!
ABBOTT: No, you miss my point.

COSTELLO: What point?
ABBOTT: Someone who doesn't look for work, can't be counted with those who look for work. It wouldn't be fair.

COSTELLO: To whom?
ABBOTT: The unemployed.

COSTELLO: But they are ALL out of work.
ABBOTT: No, the unemployed are actively looking for work. Those who are out of work stopped looking. They gave up. And, if you give up, you are no longer in the ranks of the unemployed.

COSTELLO: So if you're off the unemployment roles, that would count as less unemployment?
ABBOTT: Unemployment would go down. Absolutely!

COSTELLO: The unemployment just goes down because you don't look for work?
ABBOTT: Absolutely it goes down. That's how you get to 9%. Otherwise it would be 16%. You don't want to read about 16% unemployment do ya?

COSTELLO: That would be frightening.
ABBOTT: Absolutely.

COSTELLO: Wait, I got a question for you. That means they're two ways to bring down the unemployment number?
ABBOTT: Two ways is correct.

COSTELLO: Unemployment can go down if someone gets a job?
ABBOTT: Correct.
OSTELLO: And unemployment can also go down if you stop looking for a job?
ABBOTT: Bingo.

COSTELLO: So there are two ways to bring unemployment down, and the easier of the two is to just stop looking for work.
ABBOTT: Now you're thinking like an economist.

COSTELLO: I don't even know what the **** I just said!

Editor's Note: The following has been signed by the 16 scientists listed at the end of the article:

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about "global warming." Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"

In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggest s that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

...Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of "incontrovertible&qu ot; evidence.

Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.

Yeah.  Settled Science.

The Wall Street Journal

Add them to this:  31,487 American scientists have signed this petition, including 9,029 with PhDs.

Need a quick three billion dollars, Uncle Sam? How about looking in your own pockets?

Deficit cutters struggling to make ends meet in Washington are eyeballing an unusual pot of potential revenue: back taxes owed to the government by federal employees themselves.

According to an IRS study last year, those employees and federal retirees owed a staggering $3.3 billion dollars in delinquent tax payments to the government.

The federal agency with the largest back-tax bill? The US Postal Service, where hundreds of thousands of employees owed a total of more than $283 million, said the report.

Also high on the list is the Department of Veterans Affairs, where employees had more than $156 million in back taxes.

The biggest group, though, is retired military personnel. That group owed more than $1.5 billion dollars.

And even the White House folks are behind in their taxes. Employees in the executive office of the president, which includes nearly 2,000 employees, owed more than $831,000 to Uncle Sam, the IRS found.

The large agency with the highest delinquency rate per employee was the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission, where more than 11 percent of employees owed back taxes, followed by the Government Printing Office, where nearly seven percent were in arrears.

But collecting on all that money isn't easy—federal employees are entitled to the same rights as everybody else. The federal government can't simply dock their paychecks for the delinquent money.

Federal employees “are entitled to the same process under the tax law as you are,” said IRS spokesman Anthony Burke. “They don’t have different rights than everyone else.” Burke said that each taxpayer likely will receive three or four notices about the back taxes before the IRS can take more serious action.

And the IRS spokesman said much of this money could well be paid back in time as the delinquencies work their way through the system.

CNBC

How embarrassing this must be for President Obama, whose major speech theme so far this campaign season has been that every single American, no matter how rich, should pay their "fair share" of taxes.

Because how unfair -- indeed, un-American -- it is for an office worker like, say, Warren Buffet's secretary to dutifully pay her taxes, while some well-to-do people with better educations and higher incomes end up paying a much smaller tax rate.

Or, worse, skipping their taxes altogether.

A new report just out from the Internal Revenue Service reveals that 36 of President Obama's executive office staff owe the country $833,970 in back taxes. These people working for Mr. Fair Share apparently haven't paid any share, let alone their fair share.

Previous reports have shown how well-paid Obama's White House staff is, with 457 aides pulling down more than $37 million last year. That's up seven workers and nearly $4 million from the Bush administration's last year.

Nearly one-third of Obama's aides make more than $100,000 with 21 being paid the top White House salary of $172,200, each. 

The IRS' 2010 delinquent tax revelations come as part of a required annual agency report on federal employees' tax compliance. Turns out, an awful lot of folks being paid by taxpayers are not paying their own income taxes.

The report finds that thousands of federal employees owe the country more than $3.4 billion in back taxes. That's up 3% in the past year.

IBD

Six House Democrats, led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), want to set up a "Reasonable Profits Board" to control gas profits. 

The Democrats, worried about higher gas prices, want to set up a board that would apply a "windfall profit tax" as high as 100 percent on the sale of oil and gas, according to their legislation. The bill provides no specific guidance for how the board would determine what constitutes a reasonable profit. 

The Gas Price Spike Act, H.R. 3784, would apply a windfall tax on the sale of oil and gas that ranges from 50 percent to 100 percent on all surplus earnings exceeding "a reasonable profit." It would set up a Reasonable Profits Board made up of three presidential nominees that will serve three-year terms. Unlike other bills setting up advisory boards, the Reasonable Profits Board would not be made up of any nominees from Congress.

According to the bill, a windfall tax of 50 percent would be applied when the sale of oil or gas leads to a profit of between 100 percent and 102 percent of a reasonable profit. The windfall tax would jump to 75 percent when the profit is between 102 and 105 percent of a reasonable profit, and above that, the windfall tax would be 100 percent. The bill also specifies that the oil-and-gas companies, as the seller, would have to pay this tax.

Dennis, just STFU.  You've proven time and time again you're a complete idiot.

The Hill

General-purpose computers are astounding. They're so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they're for, how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. This brings us back to something you might be sick of reading about: copyright.

But bear with me, because this is about something more important. The shape of the copyright wars clues us into an upcoming fight over the destiny of the general-purpose computer itself.

In the beginning, we had packaged software and we had sneakernet. We had floppy disks in ziplock bags, in cardboard boxes, hung on pegs in shops, and sold like candy bars and magazines. They were eminently susceptible to duplication, were duplicated quickly, and widely, and this was to the great chagrin of people who made and sold software.

Enter Digital Rights Management in its most primitive forms: let's call it DRM 0.96. They introduced physical indicia which the software checked for—deliberate damage, dongles, hidden sectors—and challenge-response protocols that required possession of large, unwieldy manuals that were difficult to copy.

These failed for two reasons. First, they were commercially unpopular, because they reduced the usefulness of the software to the legitimate purchasers. Honest buyers resented the non-functionality of their backups, they hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles, and they chafed at the inconvenience of having to lug around large manuals when they wanted to run their software. Second, these didn't stop pirates, who found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication. People who took the software without paying for it were untouched.

Typically, the way this happened is a programmer, with possession of technology and expertise of equivalent sophistication to the software vendor itself, would reverse-engineer the software and circulate cracked versions. While this sounds highly specialized, it really wasn't. Figuring out what recalcitrant programs were doing and routing around media defects were core skills for computer programmers, especially in the era of fragile floppy disks and the rough-and-ready early days of software development. Anti-copying strategies only became more fraught as networks spread; once we had bulletin boards, online services, USENET newsgroups and mailing lists, the expertise of people who figured out how to defeat these authentication systems could be packaged up in software as little crack files. As network capacity increased, the cracked disk images or executables themselves could be spread on their own.

This gave us DRM 1.0. By 1996, it became clear to everyone in the halls of power that there was something important about to happen. We were about to have an information economy, whatever the Hell that was. They assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information. Information technology improves efficiency, so imagine the markets that an information economy would have! You could buy a book for a day, you could sell the right to watch the movie for a Euro, and then you could rent out the pause button for a penny per second. You could sell movies for one price in one country, at another price in another, and so on. The fantasies of those days were like a boring science fiction adaptation of the Old Testament Book of Numbers, a tedious enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information—and what might be charged for each.

Unfortunately for them, none of this would be possible unless they could control how people use their computers and the files we transfer to them. After all, it was easy to talk about selling someone a tune to download to their MP3 player, but not so easy to talk about the the right to move music from the player to another device. But how the Hell could you stop that once you'd given them the file? In order to do so, you needed to figure out how to stop computers from running certain programs and inspecting certain files and processes. For example, you could encrypt the file, and then require the user to run a program that only unlocked the file under certain circumstances.

But, as they say on the Internet, now you have two problems.

An excellent article.  Go read the rest at BoingBoing.

PhoneFactor offers three easy method of out-of-band authentication – a phone call, text message, and an app for smart phones and tablets – to secure account logins and transactions. By leveraging the user’s existing device, PhoneFactor provides unmatched convenience for users and a cost-effective, secure platform for enterprises, government agencies, healthcare organizations, and financial institutions.

Step 1: Enter your username and password. Instantly… Step 2:
Phone Call PhoneFactor calls you. Just answer and press # (or enter a PIN).	Test Message PhoneFactor sends you a text message with a passcode. Simply reply to the text message with the passcode.	Phone App PhoneFactor pushes a notification to the PhoneFactor app on your smartphone or tablet. Simply tap “Authenticate&rdquo ; in the app.

That’s It!

This simple process provides two-step authentication through two separate channels (your computer and your telephone):

• Something you know – your password.
• Something you have – your telephone.

For a third factor of authentication, PhoneFactor prompts you to speak a short passphrase during the authentication call to add:

• Something you are – your voiceprint.

A hacker would have to know your password and have your telephone to login as you. By requiring you to also verify your secret PIN or voiceprint, PhoneFactor can further ensure that you have possession of your telephone at the time of the authentication.

The entire authentication process is completely out-of-band, which protects against malware installed on your computer and man-in-the-middle attacks. These types of attacks defeat in-band authentication methods like security tokens, which require that a one-time passcode be entered into the login screen.

In addition to securing user logins, PhoneFactor can prevent fraudulent funds transfers and payments by verifying transactions through a similar out-of-band process. PhoneFactor simply provides details about the transaction during the phone call, text message, or phone app notification.

 Awesome product, and much cheaper to deploy than RSA's Secure Key.  Check them out.  (No, I'm not getting any kickbacks...)

PhoneFactor

The money shot...

That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the “Sputnik” investments President Obama made with taxpayer dollars. Four other solar companies that received stimulus money also went bankrupt this year. There is also Brightsource,a failing solar energy company connected to Obama donor Robert Kennedy Jr, who received more than a billion dollars in taxpayer guaranteed loans. In late September, President Obama’s Department of Energy extended more green energy loans to companies like Exelon and General Electric whose leadership and employees were also big donors to his campaign.Most recently, President Obama has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the company Solazyme to fuel a Navy ship with algae based biofuels. Solazyme’s strategic adviser&nb sp;is non other than T.J.Glauthier who was part of President Obama’s transition team and who worked on the energy part of the 2009 stimulus bill. Solazyme is receiving $16 a gallon for this fuel-- 4 times the average price for such a fuel.  Pretty good payback from a friend, huh?

President Obama’s promised to invest in more than just clean energy, though, and that he did investing in both information technology and medicine. Take for example the companies Lightsquared and Siga Technologies.  Lightsquared, which received hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for a broadband project and has ties to both the infamous George Soros and Phillip Falcone (another Obama donor) is another company which has been part of President Obama’s “Sputnik Year”. President Obama indeed also invested in “information technology” as he promised in his State of the Union address, but such an investment did not help ” strengthen our security”. In fact, testing showed that Lightsquared internet signals interfered with military GPS signals. In essence, President Obama is willing to compromise the military’s technological abilities in order to fill the wallets of his cronies.  President Obama also has extended a hundreds of millions of dollars no bid contract to Siga technologies  a company who manufacture small pox treatments. This company had ties to former SEIU leader and Obama friend, Andy Stern, and to mainly Democratic donor Ronald Perleman.

President Obama indeed chose to invest in those areas that he sees will pave the way for what he sees as America’s Sputnik moment, but he has done so at the expense of the American taxpayer and at the cost of our financial future. There’s nothing like repaying your campaign donors and cronies with taxpayer money to truly “win the future”. Yet again, Governor Palin was right. It was just another “WTF” moment turned into a “WTF” year for our President.

A Time for Choosing

Sen. Susan Collins on Wednesday blasted the Defense Department for classifying the Fort Hood massacre as workplace violence and suggested political correctness is being placed above the security of the nation's Armed Forces at home.

During a joint session of the Senate and House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, the Maine Republican referenced a letter from the Defense Department depicting the Fort Hood shootings as workplace violence. She criticized the Obama administration for failing to identify the threat as radical Islam.

 Thirteen people were killed and dozens more wounded at Fort Hood in 2009, and the number of alleged plots targeting the military has grown significantly since then. Lawmakers said there have been 33 plots against the U.S. military since Sept. 11, 2001, and 70 percent of those threats have been since mid-2009.  Major Nidal Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist, who is being held for the attacks, allegedly was inspired by radical U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in late September. The two men exchanged as many as 20 emails, according to U.S. officials, and Awlaki declared Hasan a hero.

Words fail me.  "Workplace violence."

FNC

The Rise and Demise of the Zuccotti Park Commune 

November 23, 2011, by El Marco

I recently traveled from Colorado to New York the weekend before the demise of the revolutionary social experiment in lower Manhattan known as Occupy Wall Street’s “Camp Anonymous.” I went intending to capture for posterity photographic images of the people and infrastructure that comprised that hopeful utopian “model community for a new world.”

A pamphlet entitled Mutual Responsibility OWS I picked up at one of the information desks stated:

The global reality is not the currency or market fluctuations, but rather a direct result of the new global, integral, and social restructuring taking place. Until now, we developed ourselves on a personal level. Now humanity is approaching a new phase, and the old world must make way for the new world. We are dealing with the natural law of development. Everything that we considered true up until yesterday no longer works …

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller 

Utopian futurist Buckminster Fuller, in the mid 1960s, popularized a “new model structure” for the way we would all live in the future. The geodesic dome hasn’t exactly transformed the global human condition as promised. Today, the Occupy Wall Street revolutionary utopians are offering a “new model social structure for the entire global community“. The OWS big thinkers created an entire revolutionary community in Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street. It thrived and grew for two months until the liberal billionaire mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, ordered police and sanitation workers to relegate it to the trash-heap of history.

This is the first in a series of photoessays which will bring you into that model utopian community created by the anarchists and Marxists of the OWS revolutionary movement. These people are convinced, each in his or her own way, that this new movement will bring down the entire global free enterprise system, and replace it with their kinder, better, wiser, revolutionary … uh, you know … revolutionary thing.

See the bufoonery at El Maro's Blog

It was just last week that an #Occupy LA protester was arrested for masturbating on the steps of City Hall. Now the squatters are getting their own private office building.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has decided to award the lawlessness, lewd acts, shoplifting and drug use of the Occupy LA squatters. He just offered the hooligans 10,000 square feet of downtown office space and farmland for $1-a-year.

Gateway Pundit

By Rivka Solomon Gonzales-Aoki

(AP) – Ryan Sulzman walks alone through the woods behind his parents’ home in Binghamton, New York. It’s one of the few things that gives his troubled soul peace these days. “I like hearing the birds sing…and the crickets” he confides. “It takes my mind off the horrors I witnessed. These are…these are things I still find it hard to talk about.”

Like many young people who volunteered to join the nationwide Occupy movement, Ryan has been having a hard time being back in “the world.” “When we were ‘in country,’ we became used to a certain routine. The free meals served in the camp soup kitchen, the free wi-fi, the rhythmic sounds of the drum circles, and the crackheads who’d let you buy food with their EBT cards in exchange for cash for drugs. I’d give them, like, $10 and they’d let me buy $40 in food. It was a sweet deal.”

But it wasn’t long before Ryan, and so many young people of his generation who had volunteered to do their duty, saw the ugly side of human nature. “The day they cleared out our camp, this one cop…he…he yelled at me. ‘Move! Move! Move!’ He had a bullhorn…the sounds still haunt my nightmares. And then…” Ryan’s voice trails off, as tears well up in his eyes, “then he grabbed my Tumi duffle bag and literally, like, pushed it into my arms. I totally could have been knocked over it I wasn’t wearing my Urban Outfitters boots.”

Still, Ryan considers himself lucky. “I had a friend, Eddie…’Lucky Eddie’ the guys in the camp used to call him, because he’d always get lucky with the drunk girls who’d passed out. The day the camp was disbanded, he got…pushed by a cop. I saw him at the triage we set up in the Starbucks across the street. There was a vacancy in his eyes. ‘Lucky Eddie’ was gone – he was an empty shell of a man.”

Ryan, who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and is currently receiving disability, says that all he wanted when he returned home were a few words of thanks from the people he left behind. “I didn’t ask for a parade; none of us did,” Ryan says, as he attempts to restrain the anger building inside him. “But when I came home, when I walked through the door, and there were my parents who hadn’t seen me for two months, and they gave each other a look, like, ‘oh crap, he’s back.’ They hadn’t even known if I’d been alive or dead the past two months…except, of course, for the text messages I’d send, and the Skype videos. Oh, and they both subscribe to my Youtube channel. And, of course, there were the money transfers I had them make so I could upgrade my iPhone. But other than that, I could have been dead for all they knew.”

Ryan isn’t alone in his restrained bitterness. Across the nation, returning OWS vets are finding readjustment difficult – owing in large part to what they see as an indifference on the part of their loved ones to their ordeal. One such disillusioned OWS vet, a 25-year-old who would only give his name as Nick when the we interviewed him in front of the Krazy Kures medicinal pot clinic in Culver City, related his difficult tale. “My mom erased every single program I had Tivo’d. EVERY SINGLE PROGRAM. Sure, I can catch up with “Dexter” on Video on Demand, but those episodes of “Conan” are GONE. I’ll NEVER be able to see them again.”

Snicker.

Republican Party Animals

One of the secret weapons the corrupt mainstream media uses in their never-ending quest to Palace Guard for the left is context. For example, when it came to the Tea Party, the MSM was notorious for amplifying a single incident (that was usually a lie) and using it to attempt to smear and define an entire movement. This is what you do when you want to quickly take out a political enemy.

The MSM’s contextual game changes, however, when their desire is to strengthen a movement and give it credibility and room to grow. By dutifully reporting individual incidents but not reporting on the growing scope and size of Occupy Wall Street lawlessness, the MSM is willfully covering up the violence, vandalism, and anti-Semitism that truly does define this movement.

Moreover, by intentionally keeping the pieces of this story scattered, the MSM is allowed to have their cake and eat it too. No one can accuse them of not reporting these incidents, but by choosing not to bring the pieces together, the MSM ensures the least amount of public relations damage is done to the Occupiers.

What I’ve collected below is far from comprehensive but still shows over 75 incidents of sexual assault, violence, vandalism, anti-Semitism, extortion, perversion, and lawlessness.

The MSM could easily tell the story of how this violence-prone movement is becoming an increasing threat to our society. After all, my research below is the result of nothing more than Twitter and Google. Among others, The New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, and the LA Times have willfully chosen not to use the resources at their disposal to give the public an honest look at this growing menace. In their partisan minds, truth doesn’t trump agenda.

A few notes on the list below. Whenever possible, I traced the incident back to the original news source. I was as careful as possible when it came to duplicate postings, though I would guess there are a few in here. There are also less than five examples that don’t involve what I would qualify as outright lawlessness but do help to expose the Occupiers for who and what they really are. Finally, and this is the most important way in which the list is imperfect, I most certainly wasn’t able to document everything. A perfect list would be much more alarming than the one I slapped together in just a few hours.

What is true is that on October 18, pollster Doug Schoen (a Democrat!) discovered that a full 31% of Occupiers were willing to commit violence in pursuit of their agenda, whatever that is. As a response to this startling and frightening admission, the MSM either outright ignored or dismissed it. What you’ll see below proves that at least when it comes to their willingness to break the law, the Occupiers are keeping their word.

The list is in no particular order. Like the Occupiers themselves, it’s unruly, disorganized, messy and not focused solely on the nation’s media centers. The movement is spreading across America and bringing with it their outrageous and appalling behavior.

Read the list at Big Government.