"With this discovery, we now understand the purpose of all of Stuxnet’s code."
Symantec claims to have deciphered the Stuxnet worm's payload in sufficient detail to figure out precisely what type of process control systems it actually attacks. The analysis seems to strongly support the theory that Stuxent was targeted at Iran's uranium enrichment program. See the Computerworld article here, the H Security brief here, and Eric Chien's original blog post here.
So who's on the [deeply buried] Obamacare waiver list? Well, this one's almost guaranteed to make you either laugh or cry: Aetna. What does it say when one of the largest medical insurers in the United States has to have a waiver from a law that sets a mandatory minimum standard for the medical coverage it's allowed to provide to employees?
The list also includes MacDonalds, Dish Network, and the United Federation of Teachers Welfare Fund in New York, among more than a hundred others and counting.
What does it say about an administration when they grant dozens upon dozens of exemptions from a law that they spent months upon months selling to the American people as the ultimate solution to our health care problems?
A very good question, indeed.
The truth is that the U.S. health care system was deeply broken before Obamacare, and after the new health care law the U.S. health care system is still deeply broken.
Before Obamacare, the U.S. health care system was all about making as much money as possible for health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry. After Obamacare, the U.S. health care system is still about making as much money as possible for health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry, only now we all have to deal with more suffocating layers of government bureaucracy and much higher health insurance premiums.
I really can't add much to that.
The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has found evidence of "the youngest black hole known to exist in our cosmic neighborhood". This is being fairly widely reported across the 'net and elsewhere.
Unfortunately, it's being badly reported. The typical report says that this black hole is 30 years old. But it's not. It's fifty million light-years away in the galaxy M100, and we are "seeing" it by X-rays it emitted fifty million years ago.
There is a convention that when describing astronomical objects, "age" means "the age it was when it emitted the light we're seeing it by". But the general press not only is seldom aware of this convention; it seldom understands the difference.
I propose the explicit use of a new term: observational age. We would say that an astronomical object — in this case, the black hole — has an observational age of 30 years, specifically stating that we are observing it as it was when it was 30 years old. It's actual age, of course, is about fifty million years; but we won't observe it that way for another fifty million years, unless we invent a faster-than-light stardrive at some point along the way. Any astronomical body within our solar system has an observational age equal to all practical purposes to its actual age, since the observational lag to it is so many orders of magnitude smaller than even our error bracket for its actual age. When you have a planet five billion years old give or take half a billion years, who's going to waste time quibbling about a couple of minutes to a few hours?