Eeyore's News and View

GPS system 'close to breakdown'
Network of satellites could begin to fail as early as 2010
It has become one of the staples of modern, hi-tech life: using satellite navigation tools built into your car or mobile phone to find your way from A to B. But experts have warned that the system may be close to breakdown.
US government officials are concerned that the quality of the Global Positioning System (GPS) could begin to deteriorate as early as next year, resulting in regular blackouts and failures – or even dishing out inaccurate directions to millions of people worldwide.
The warning centres on the network of GPS satellites that constantly orbit the planet and beam signals back to the ground that help pinpoint your position on the Earth's surface.
The satellites are overseen by the US Air Force, which has maintained the GPS network since the early 1990s. According to a study by the US government accountability office (GAO), mismanagement and a lack of investment means that some of the crucial GPS satellites could begin to fail as early as next year.
"It is uncertain whether the Air Force will be able to acquire new satellites in time to maintain current GPS service without interruption," said the report, presented to Congress. "If not, some military operations and some civilian users could be adversely affected."
The report says that Air Force officials have failed to execute the necessary steps to keep the system running smoothly.
Although it is currently spending nearly $2bn (£1.3bn) to bring the 20-year-old system up to date, the GAO – which is the equivalent of Britain's National Audit Office – says that delays and overspending are putting the entire system in jeopardy.
"In recent years, the Air Force has struggled to successfully build GPS satellites within cost and schedule goals," said the report. "It encountered significant technical problems … [and] struggled with a different contractor."
The first replacement GPS satellite was due to launch at the beginning of 2007, but has been delayed several times and is now scheduled to go into orbit in November this year – almost three years late.
The impact on ordinary users could be significant, with millions of satnav users potential victims of bad directions or failed services. There would also be similar side effects on the military, which uses GPS for mapping, reconnaissance and for tracking hostile targets.
Some suggest that it could also have an impact on the proliferation of so-called location applications on mobile handsets – just as applications on the iPhone and other GPS-enabled smartphones are starting to get more popular.
Tom Coates, the head of Yahoo's Fire Eagle system – which lets users share their location data from their mobile – said he was sceptical that US officials would let the system fall into total disrepair because it was important to so many people and companies.
"I'd be surprised if anyone in the US government was actually OK with letting it fail – it's too useful," he told the Guardian.
"It sounds like something that could be very serious in a whole range of areas if it were to actually happen. It probably wouldn't damage many locative services applications now, but potentially it would retard their development and mainstreaming if it were to come to pass."
The failings of GPS could also play into the hands of other countries – including opening the door to Galileo, the European-funded attempt to rival America's satellite navigation system, which is scheduled to start rolling out later next year.
Russia, India and China have developed their own satellite navigation technologies that are currently being expanded.
http://frc4u.org/phpbb/index.php?topic=1393.0;topicseen

What do we have here? Another evolutionary hoax in a long line of hoax's? Or just a deformed Lemur Monkey? Who knows but i think the last time a "find" like this was made and proclaimed it was found to be a made up "discovery" of made up put together pieces. Science does not do well in the truth department.
Fossil Discovery Is Heralded
n what could prove to be a landmark discovery, a leading paleontologist said scientists have dug up the 47 million-year-old fossil of an ancient primate whose features suggest it could be the common ancestor of all later monkeys, apes and humans.
Anthropologists have long believed that humans evolved from ancient ape-like ancestors. Some 50 million years ago, two ape-like groups walked the Earth. One is known as the tarsidae, a precursor of the tarsier, a tiny, large-eyed creature that lives in Asia. Another group is known as the adapidae, a precursor of today's lemurs in Madagascar.
Based on previously limited fossil evidence, one big debate had been whether the tarsidae or adapidae group gave rise to monkeys, apes and humans. The latest discovery bolsters the less common position that our ancient ape-like ancestor was an adapid, the believed precursor of lemurs.
[lemur] AP Photo/Karen Tam
A fossil discovery suggests humans may be descended from an animal that resembles present-day lemurs like this one.
Philip Gingerich, president-elect of the Paleontological Society in the U.S., has co-written a paper that will detail next week the latest fossil discovery in Public Library of Science, a peer-reviewed, online journal.
"This discovery brings a forgotten group into focus as a possible ancestor of higher primates," Mr. Gingerich, a professor of paleontology at the University of Michigan, said in an interview.
The discovery has little bearing on a separate paleontological debate centering on the identity of a common ancestor of chimps and humans, which could have lived about six million years ago and still hasn't been found. That gap in the evolution story is colloquially referred to as the "missing link" controversy. In reality, though, all gaps in the fossil record are technically "missing links" until filled in, and many scientists say the term is meaningless.
Nonetheless, the latest fossil find is likely to ignite further the debate between evolutionists who draw conclusions based on a limited fossil record, and creationists who don't believe that humans, monkeys and apes evolved from a common ancestor.
Scientists won't necessarily agree about the details either. "Lemur advocates will be delighted, but tarsier advocates will be underwhelmed" by the new evidence, says Tim White, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. "The debate will persist."
The skeleton will be unveiled at New York City's American Museum of Natural History next Tuesday by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and an international team involved in the discovery.
According to Prof. Gingerich, the fossilized remains are of a young female adapid. The skeleton was unearthed by collectors about two years ago and has been kept tightly under wraps since then, in an unusual feat of scientific secrecy.
Prof. Gingerich said he had twice examined the adapid skeleton, which was "a complete, spectacular fossil." The completeness of the preserved skeleton is crucial, because most previously found fossils of ancient primates were small finds, such as teeth and jawbones.
It was found in the Messel Shale Pit, a disused quarry near Frankfurt, Germany. The pit has long been a World Heritage Site and is the source of a number of well-preserved fossils from the middle Eocene epoch, some 50 million years ago.
Prof. Gingerich said several scientists, including Jorn Hurum of Norway's National History Museum, had inspected the fossil with computer tomography scanning, a sophisticated X-ray technique that can provide detailed, cross-sectional views. Dr. Hurum declined to comment.
lthough the creature looks like a lemur, there are some distinctive physical differences. Lemurs have a tooth comb (a tooth modified to help groom fur); a grooming claw; and a wet nose. Dr. Gingerich said that the adapid skeleton has neither a grooming claw nor a tooth comb. "We can't say whether it had a wet nose or not," he noted.
Since the fossilized creature found in Germany didn't have features like a tooth comb or grooming claw, it could be argued that it gave rise to monkeys, apes and humans, which don't have these features either.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124235632936122739.html

Brazil and China eye plan to axe dollar
Brazil and China will work towards using their own currencies in trade transactions rather than the US dollar, according to Brazil’s central bank and aides to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president.
The move follows recent Chinese challenges to the status of the dollar as the world’s leading international currency.
Mr Lula da Silva, who is visiting Beijing this week, and Hu Jintao, China’s president, first discussed the idea of replacing the dollar with the renminbi and the real as trade currencies when they met at the G20 summit in London last month.
An official at Brazil’s central bank stressed that talks were at an early stage. He also said that what was under discussion was not a currency swap of the kind China recently agreed with Argentina and which the US had agreed with several countries, including Brazil.
“Currency swaps are not necessarily trade related,” the official said. “The funds can be drawn down for any use. What we are talking about now is Brazil paying for Chinese goods with reals and China paying for Brazilian goods with renminbi.”
Henrique Meirelles and Zhou Xiaochuan, governors of the two countries’ central banks, were expected to meet soon to discuss the matter, the official said.
Brazil: Exports to ChinaMr Zhou recently proposed replacing the US dollar as the world’s leading currency with a new international reserve currency, possibly in the form of special drawing rights (SDRs), a unit of account used by the International Monetary Fund.
In an essay posted on the People’s Bank of China’s website, Mr Zhou said the goal would be to create a reserve currency “that is disconnected from individual nations”.
In September, Brazil and Argentina signed an agreement under which importers and exporters in the two countries may make and receive payments in pesos and reals, although they may also continue to use the US dollar if they prefer.
An aide to Mr Lula da Silva on his visit to Beijing said the political will to enact a similar deal with China was clearly present. “Something that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago is a real possibility today,” he said. “Strong currencies like the real and the renminbi are perfectly capable of being used as trade currencies, as is the case between Brazil and Argentina.”
In what was interpreted as a sign of Chinese concern about the future of the dollar, the governor of China’s central bank proposed in March that the US dollar be replaced as the world’s de-facto reserve currency.
In an essay posted on the People’s Bank of China’s website, Zhou Xiaochuan, the central bank’s governor, said the goal would be to create a reserve currency ”that is disconnected from individual nations” and modelled on the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights, or SDRs.
Economists have argued that while the SDR plan is unfeasible now, bilateral deals between Beijing and its trading partners could act as pieces in a jigsaw designed to promote wider international use of the ­renminbi.
Any move to make the renminbi more acceptable for international trade, or to help establish it as a regional reserve currency in Asia, could enhance China’s political clout around the world.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/996b1af8-43ce-11de-a9be-00144feabdc0.html

Venezuela set to build first oil rig with China: report
Venezuela is poised to begin building the first joint Venezuelan-Chinese oil drilling platform in June, according to Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez.
"The oil drilling platform is at a very advanced stage in the (western) Orinoco Belt," Ramirez told the Panorama newspaper, from the northwestern city of Maracaibo, on Monday."In June ... Venezuela will assemble the first oil rig with Venezuelan labor."
Run through a joint venture between Venezuelan Petroleum (PDVSA) with a 60 percent stake, and China National Petroleum Company (CNPC) with a 40 percent stake, the oil rig will maintain 24 active teams equipped with "the latest technology," Ramirez said.
There are currently 276 active oil rigs in Venezuela, 51 of which are owned by PDVSA and the rest are run by contractors. Seventeen others are undergoing maintenance and four are inactive due to cuts agreed with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the newspaper said.
"We hope that in a few years, we can assume control of all oil rigs in the country," Ramirez said.
The planned oil rig assembly is the second stage of a 2007 deal under which China agreed to build 13 high-tech oil-drilling platforms that can drill 8,000 feet (2,400 meters) deep.
The third stage anticipates manufacturing and maintaining oil wells in Venezuela.
In 2007, PDVSA said it was investing 3.5 billion dollars in building and maintaining oil rigs through 2012.
During his last visit to Beijing in April, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez discussed the possibility of constructing a refinery in the country, capable of processing 400,000 barrels at day.
China buys 300,000 barrels of Venezuelan crude every day, and is eager for more from the Latin American country as part of its global quest for a diverse range of energy supplies.
The majority of Venezuela's vast oil reserves -- which PDVSA estimates at 3.01 million barrels a day, but the International Energy Agency places at 2.33 million barrels a day -- are destined for markets in the United States.
Venezuela has proven oil reserves of around 99 billion barrels and is the Western hemisphere's largest oil exporter.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.65dc69205fefac56a1edd540d2b1790b.321&show_article=1

St. Louis County man is Missouri's first swine flu fatality
A 44-year-old St. Louis County man is the first person in Missouri to die after becoming ill with swine flu.
According to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, the man traveled last month to Mexico where the 2009 H1N1 flu virus first emerged. He returned on April 27 and became ill a week later.
The man went to an urgent care center on May 9 and was admitted to a hospital the same day. He died from medical complications related to the flu.
He was the eighth person in the United States to die with swine flu. Most of the more than 5,000 cases nationwide have been relatively mild, health officials have said.
The man’s family and medical personnel who treated him have received anti-viral medications.
An autopsy will be done on the man. State and county health officials and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are investigating the case.
“Our deepest condolences go out to this man’s family and his friends,” said Margaret Donnelly, director of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services. “We are working hard to determine why this case of flu became so much more severe than other cases in Missouri.”
http://www.kansascity.com/news/breaking_news/story/1205608.html

Figures on government spending and debt
May 19, 2009 - 6:51pm
Total public debt subject to limit May 18 11,226,564
Statutory debt limit 12,104,000
Total public debt outstanding May 18 11,286,593
Operating balance May 18 254,539
Interest fiscal year 2009 thru April 193,439
Interest same period 2008 243,904
Deficit fiscal year 2009 thru April 802,294
Deficit same period 2008 153,471
Receipts fiscal year 2009 thru April 1,256,066
Receipts same period 2008 1,549,720
Outlays fiscal year 2009 thru April 2,058,360
Outlays same period 2008 1,703,191
Gold assets in April 11,041