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The House just passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), including a provision to authorize worldwide war, which has no expiration date and will allow this president — and any future president — to go to war anywhere in the world, at any time, without further congressional authorization. The new authorization wouldn’t even require the president to show any threat to the national security of the United States. The American military could become the world’s cop, and could be sent into harm’s way almost anywhere and everywhere around the globe.

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Uploading your music to the cloud isn’t as simple as you might think. As more data is stored online, the cloud takes more and more energy to maintain, forcing companies to get into the business of getting power as cheaply as possible.

1. The Cloud of Smog.

The companies of the cloud–the so-called “information factories” of Google, Facebook,Amazon, and Apple, among others–have collectively achieved a scale of which old-school factories could only dream. The cloud is, however, quite dirty. It takes a lot of carbon to run all the servers that power it. And since more carbon means more money, these companies are doing everything possible to make their operations as efficient as possible.

Just as Henry Ford met economies of scale with a level of vertical integration never seen before or since–amassing railroads, mines, and even rubber plantations to supply his factories–the cloud companies are coping with their billowing carbon footprints with their own version of integration. They’re making advancements in data center design, hardware, and even remaking the electrical grid itself.

Storing 1.2 zettabytes of information (that’s more than a trillion gigabytes) requires the construction increasingly massive data centers whose voracious appetite for power consumes 3 percent of U.S. electricity, while personal devices comprise 15 percent of home electricity use–a figure projected to triple by 2030, equivalent to the demand of the American and Japanese home markets combined.

Much of this electricity comes from coal, the cheapest and dirtiest source available. For example, Apple’s eagerly-awaited cloud music service will most likely be housed at its new data center in Maiden, North Carolina, which is expected to draw on an astounding 100 megawatts supplied by Duke Energy, which generates 61 percent of its output from coal.

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An extensive study released Wednesday in the journal Business and Politics found that the investments of members of the House of Representatives outperformed those of the average investor by 55 basis points per month, or 6 percent annually, suggesting that lawmakers are taking advantage of inside information to fatten their stock portfolios.

“We find strong evidence that members of the House have some type of non-public information which they use for personal gain,” according to four academics who authored the study, “Abnormal Returns From the Common Stock Investments of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives.”

To the frustration of open-government advocates, lawmakers and their staff members largely have immunity from laws barring trading on insider knowledge that have sent many a private corporate chieftain to prison.

(…)Despite the GOP’s reputation as the party of the rich, House Republicans fared worse than their Democratic colleagues when it comes to investing, according to the study. The Democratic subsample of lawmakers beat the market by 73 basis points per month, or 9 percent annually, versus 18 basis points per month, or 2 percent annually, for the Republican sample.

This makes for a headline that’s easy to get indignant about, but before drawing any conclusions, I’d want to know what the range of investment performance is–averages aren’t all that useful to see what’s going on here. Maybe most perform about average but a few people made a bundle.

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William Phuoc and a few other storm chasers were shooting a thunderstorm in the Australian grasslands when a huge bolt of lightning struck the ground about 200 meters away. Luckily, they captured the strike on video and Phuoc’s Canon EOS-1D Mark IV (using a 14mm lens and lightning trigger) was able to capture an amazing photograph of the strike.

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Seventeen lost pyramids are among the buildings identified in a new satellite survey of Egypt.

More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements were also revealed by looking at infra-red images which show up underground buildings.

Initial excavations have already confirmed some of the findings, including two suspected pyramids.

The work has been pioneered at the University of Alabama at Birmingham by US Egyptologist Dr Sarah Parcak.

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Solar power: works great when the sun is out. It works less great when the sun isn’t out, which happens every night, as you may have noticed. To fulfill any dreams of living in a world powered by the sun, there needs to be some sort of solution for storing energy gathered during the day for nighttime. And that solution might be molten salt.

Molten salt, for those scratching their heads, is simply a good conductor of heat. A new power plant will use nearly 20,000 heliostats–basically very focused mirrors–aimed at a focal point in a tower, which will heat up salt to a steamy 1,050 degrees Fahrenheit. Pump that salt near some water and you get enough steam to run a turbine. Hold that salt at that high temperature and then put it near water later and you get power when the sun isn’t out.

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American Express is no longer allowing transactions to be processed at medical marijuana dispensaries nationwide, according to published reports.

A spokesperson told the LA Weekly that the company made the decision to not allow its credit cards to be accepted for medical marijuana because it is their “policy to adhere to the federal law in such matters.”

The American Independent reported that Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) plans to introduce legislation to clarify that banks can maintain normal business relationships with legal medical marijuana dispensaries, possibly as soon as this week.

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Here we go again. A California religious radio impresario who predicted — wrongly — that the end of the world would begin on May 21 revised his prophecy on Monday, saying now that the end is due in October.

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What he decided, apparently, was that May 21 had been “an invisible judgment day,” of the spiritual variety, rather than his original vision of earthquakes and other disasters leading to five months of hell on earth, culminating in a spectacular doomsday on Oct. 21 — something he had repeatedly guaranteed. On Monday, however, Mr. Camping seemed satisfied with his new interpretation, which apparently spared humankind its months of torture for a single day of destruction.

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But Mr. Camping said his company — which is a nonprofit — would also not return donations given by his followers in advance of the May 21 prediction. “We’re not at the end,” he said, “Why would we return it?”

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Andrew Goldstein has been a Bank of America customer for more than four decades. He’s grown up with the bank, trusted it, relied on it to be there for him through thick and thin.

So it was with more than a little shock that Goldstein, 60, learned the other day that a BofA employee apparently leaked confidential information about his and hundreds of other customers’ accounts to scammers, resulting in more than $10 million in losses.

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He immediately went to his local BofA branch and tried to straighten things out.

“While I was at the bank,” he told me, “the scammers called again and did another telephone transfer — while I was sitting there! We actually saw the amount in my account go down on the computer screen.”

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What’s good for the police apparently isn’t good for the people – or so the law enforcement community would have us believe when it comes to surveillance.

That’s a concise summary of a new trend noted by National Public Radio last week – the trend whereby law enforcement officials have been trying to prevent civilians from using cell phone cameras in public places as a means of deterring police brutality.

Oddly, the effort – which employs both forcible arrests of videographers and legal proceedings against them – comes at a time when the American Civil Liberties Union reports that “an increasing number of American cities and towns are investing millions of taxpayer dollars in surveillance camera systems.”

Then again, maybe it’s not odd that the two trends are happening simultaneously. Perhaps as more police officers use cameras to monitor every move we make, they are discovering the true power of video to independently document events. And as they see that power, they don’t want it turned against them.

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Apparently this is what some police officers see when they look at a camera, which explains the horror stories of photographers being harassed by law enforcement for having cameras and making pictures.

Here’s a closer look at this Canon 16M:

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Rape is often called the ultimate violation of self. A crime of absolute contempt for personal integrity, leaving the women caught in its wreckage to labor under the trauma for years. What reprehensible event could possibly have the same consequences as the spiritual dead zone rape victims are left in?

Well, getting a flat tire, according to Kansas state Rep. Pete DeGraaf.

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A little more than a week after iOS developers were threatened with legal action by a company that holds various patents, Apple’s legal department has struck back.

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The crux of Apple’s letter, from senior vice president and general counsel Bruce Sewell, is right in its opening paragraph, which reads in part: “Apple is undisputedly licensed to these patents and the Apple App Makers are protected by that license. There is no basis for Lodsys’ infringement allegations against Apple’s App Makers. In addition to stating that Apple would share the letter with developers—which it has—the company also says that it “is fully prepared to defend Apple’s license rights.”

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Members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement have filed a lawsuit against Cisco Systems Inc. accusing it of supplying the Chinese government with computer-networking equipment used to spy on and persecute dissidents.

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We can’t make this up people.  According to Google, who gets to make the rules since it’s their service, rooted devices are not supported by the Android Markets new movie rental service“due to requirements related to copyright protection”.  You’ll even see a specific error message when you attempt to try — “Failed to fetch license for [movie title] (error 49)”.

So now people who root their phones, whether to get rid of the crap “open” that’s forced down their throats, or to have a current version of Android, are punished and lumped in with folks who steal movies.  Nice move, Google.  That makes me want to buy more of your products and use more of your services, so I can be treated like a criminal just because I’m smart enough to get rid of CityID, or want a safe version of Android on my phone.  And of course, I’d much rather steal movies streamed with a poor bitrate at a low resolution to my phone than use Google to search out any of the thousands of places where I could steal them using my computer. Facepalm.

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Many Americans know that the United States is not a democracy but a “corporatocracy,” in which we are ruled by a partnership of giant corporations, the extremely wealthy elite and corporate-collaborator government officials. However, the truth of such tyranny is not enough to set most of us free to take action. Too many of us have become pacified by corporatocracy-created institutions and culture.

Some activists insist that this political passivity problem is caused by Americans’ ignorance due to corporate media propaganda, and others claim that political passivity is caused by the inability to organize due to a lack of money. However, polls show that on the important issues of our day – from senseless wars, to Wall Street bailouts, to corporate tax-dodging, to health insurance rip-offs – the majority of Americans are not ignorant to the reality that they are being screwed. And American history is replete with organizational examples – from the Underground Railroad, to the Great Populist Revolt, to the Flint sit-down strike, to large wildcat strikes a generation ago – of successful rebels who had little money but lots of guts and solidarity.

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A woman slit her daughters’ throats before slitting her own early Friday evening, claiming that "the Tribulation" was going to occur and she wanted to prevent them from suffering through it, officials said.

Lyn Benedetto, 47, reportedly told her daughters to lie on a bed and proceeded to take a knife to their throats.

The suspect then took the knife to her own throat before driving the victims to an unoccupied friend’s house to die.

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The victims were treated at Antelope Valley Hospital for moderate though non life-threatening injuries and released to custody of Department of Children’s Services.

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The Dutch Catholic Church and the Salesian order are investigating revelations that a Salesian priest served on the board of a group that promotes pedophilia with the full knowledge of his boss.

The order’s top official in the Netherlands, Delegate Herman Spronck, confirmed in a statement that the priest – identified by RTL Nieuws as 73-year-old "Father Van B." – served on the board of "Martijn," a group that campaigns to end the Dutch ban on adult-child sex.

The group is widely reviled but not outlawed.

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Last night was probably a busy one for Bart Centre of New Hampshire. He is the founder of Eternal Earthbound Pets, a service that places pets who are not lifted into the sky during today’s rapture into the loving homes of non-believers. Should things go the way that some of his clients think they will, later today forty-four of Centre’s associates around the country will visit the newly vacated homes of 259 clients to collect the soulless dogs, cats, birds, fish and gerbils that will be left behind when their owners ascend to heaven, which apparently has a No Pets policy. (Like Centre, all the potential caretakers are atheists.)

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Of all the wasteful, misguided uses of technology, this has to be one of he strangest; some Texas schools are going to spend $2 million to install cameras in cafeterias to find out why children are getting fat.

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We here at The Feed have seen some great videos come out of ChatRoulette. Some time back we showed you a love song and marriage proposal, and now we have a video of amazing magic tricks being performed. Check it out.

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Bill Clinton doesn’t like all the misinformation and rumors floating on the Internet. And he thinks the United Nations or the U.S. government should create an agency to do something about it.

“It would be a legitimate thing to do,” Clinton said in an interview airing Friday on CNBC.

The agency, Clinton said, would “have to be totally transparent about where the money came from” and would have to be “independent” because “if it’s a government agency in a traditional sense, it would have no credibility whatever, particularly with a lot of the people who are most active on the internet.”

CIA: Create Internet Agency.

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But, in reality, LinkedIn was scammed by its bankers.

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As Eric Tilenius, the general manager of Zynga, wrote on Facebook: “A huge opening-day pop is not a sign of a successful I.P.O., but rather a massively mispriced one. Bankers are rewarding their friends and themselves instead of doing their fiduciary duty to their clients.”

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The European Union and China appear to have agreed to share their preferred approaches to censorship, producing a model that is a perfect mix between current EU and Chinese policies.

On 20 April 2011, at an event in the European Parliament entitled “Creative Industries: Innovation for Growth”, the French European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Michel Barnier, announced plans to make focus on Internet providers to enforce intellectual property. He explained that he did not want to “criminalise” consumers and therefore would put the pressure on online intermediaries (who will then police and punish the consumers instead).

Eight days later, on 28 April, the Beijing Copyright Bureau decided to follow exactly the same model. In its “Guiding Framework for the Protection of Copyright for Network Dissemination,” it proposes a range of obligations on Internet intermediaries such as:

-180-day data retention for the name and IP address of users, if the intermediary provides file-sharing or hosting services. This is fractionally more liberal than the most liberal approach permitted by the European Commission, which requires data retention for a minimum of six months;

- deterring and restraining (sic) those who upload unlicensed material, including terminating the offending users’ service (as appears in the preparatory works of the ACTA agreement, supported by the EU) and also reporting these infringing acts to copyright law enforcement authorities;

- employing “effective technical measures to prevent users uploading or linking to copyrighted works” (as supported by the EU in its input to the European Court of Justice in the Scarlet/Sabam case (C-70/10).

While the developments in relation to copyright show China’s willingness to learn from the EU’s planned repressive measures, the traffic is not entirely one-way, as shown by the recent revelations on the Hungarian Presidency’s “virtual Schengen” proposal.

In 2008, the French EU Presidency developed plans for a “Cybercrime Platform” to be run by Europol, as a means of collecting reports of illicit/unwanted content from across Europe, acting as an “information hub” with the reasonably obvious intention of a harmonised approach to blocking web content.

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What makes a sport? Competition. Athleticism. Sometimes a form of ball. This crazy scene has two out of three, so it qualifies. Introducing Botaoshi, the Japanese sport of “pole pull-down.” Can the blue team pull down the white team’s pole? See for yourself.

Go Blue! Aw, they were so close. It looks like a pretty intense game. The goal, if you hadn’t guessed, is to pull down the opponent’s pole within two or three minutes. No word on how the white team did when it was their turn to assault the pole, but we’ll keep you posted.

A frenzied mob charging into the opposition, beating and clawing at their opponents with the ultimate goal of destruction of property.