Lifeboat Foundation

Allen McDuffee — Wired
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sGqQek3pqQ#t=106
With UAVs crowding navigable airspace and plans underway to put giant mega-satellites into orbit, it was just a matter of time before a drone-satellite hybrid was developed to fit between the two spaces. StratoBus, a new project out of France, is conceptualized to do just that. Designed to be about the length of a football field and 25 yards in diameter, the blimp-shaped vehicle’s shell will be made of carbon fiber.

Without a launcher, StratoBus floats to the lower stratosphere at an altitude of about 13 miles where developers say it will be in a perfect position to carry out a range of functions, including surveillance, border security monitoring, communications reinforcement and facilitating navigation — all from a stationary position with the help of two self-adjusting electric motors. The StratoBus will be able to endure missions of up to a year with a total lifetime of five years.

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Damon Tabor — Popular Science


On September 16, 2008, Carl Pike, the deputy head of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Operations Division, watched live video feeds from a command center outside Washington, D.C., as federal agents fanned out across dozens of U.S. cities. In Dallas, a team in SWAT gear tossed a flash-bang grenade into a suburban home and, once inside, discovered six pounds of cocaine behind a stove, and a stockpile of guns. At a used-car dealer’s house in Carmel, Indiana, agents pulled bricks of cocaine from a secret compartment in his Audi sedan, while state troopers dragged a stove-size safe onto the lawn and went at it with a sledgehammer.

In the coming weeks, the net widened to include caches of assault rifles, a Mexico-bound 18-wheeler with drug money hidden in fresh produce, and a crooked Texas sheriff who helped traffic narcotics through his county. In Mexico City, a financier was arrested for laundering drug money through a minor-league soccer team named the Raccoons (and an avocado farm). After one especially large bust, when it came time for a “dope on the table” photo, there was in fact no table big enough to support the thousands of tightly bundled kilos of confiscated cocaine. They had to be stacked in the back parking lot of a police station.

The raids and arrests were the final stage of a DEA-led investigation called Project Reckoning—18 months, 64 cities, 200 agencies—intended to cripple Mexico’s Gulf Cartel. Over the past two decades, the organization had built a drug empire that spanned across Mexico and into the U.S. It had become pervasive, hyper-violent, brazen. Cartel operatives had smuggled billions of dollars’ worth of narcotics into the U.S. They had assassinated Mexican politicians and corrupted entire police departments. One of the organization’s leaders had famously brandished a gold-plated .45 at two agents from the DEA and FBI traveling through northeastern Mexico. The cartel had even formed its own paramilitary unit, a band of former Mexican police and special-forces soldiers called the Zetas, to seize territory and dispatch rivals. The notorious syndicate became known as La Compañia, or The Company.

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By Harry J. Bentham

Originally published at h+ Magazine

Who is more “luddite”: the individual or the state?

Continue reading “Who’s More Luddite?” »

Michael Salla — Honolulu Exopolitics Examiner

Among the leaked Snowden National Security Agency (NSA) documents, the first to explicitly involve the UFO issue has just been released and is currently generating much media scrutiny. The 50 page document is a powerpoint presentation titled “The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations,” and was authored by the British equivalent of the NSA, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The document was the subject to an in-depth story released this week by Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first worked with Edward Snowden to release to the world official NSA surveillance of the general public, and foreign government officials. The leaked document details how the NSA is working with its “Five Eyes” partners in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to train its operatives in online covert operations. Greenwald’s article exposes how the NSA and its Five Eyes intelligence partners encourage a range of psychological warfare tools to discredit any targets discussing sensitive national security information. In the “Art of Deception” document three of the 50 slides show images of UFOs – one of which dates from 1950. The leaked document reveals a clear connection between online covert operations by the GCHQ and its intelligence partners on the UFO issue. It is smoking gun evidence that the international intelligence community is training its covert operatives to deceive the public on a range of sensitive national security issues including UFOs.

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FEBRUARY 14/2014 LIST OF UPDATES. By Mr. Andres Agostini at The Future of Scientific Management, Today! At http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

Reinventing Social Media: Deep Learning, Predictive Marketing, And Image Recognition Will Change Everything
http://www.businessinsider.com/social-medias-big-data-future…_inn_feb14

EU Rules Mean That ‘Children Can’t Get Life-Saving Cancer Drugs’
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/11/eu-rules-children-c…mg00000067

Virgin Atlantic Is Using Google Glass for Faster Check-Ins
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/02/11/google_gl…s_for.html

Here’s What California’s Historic Drought Will Do To The Economy
http://www.businessinsider.com/california-drought-economy-20…z2t3NVIAyL

Continue reading “The Future of Scientific Management, Today!” »

FEBRUARY 08/2014 LIST OF UPDATES. By Mr. Andres Agostini at The Future of Scientific Management, Today! At http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

MITRE-Harvard nanocomputer may point the way to future computer miniaturization
http://www.kurzweilai.net/mitre-harvard-nanocomputer-may-poi…turization

New form of graphene allows electrons to behave like photons
http://www.kurzweilai.net/new-form-of-graphene-allows-electr…ke-photons

The first flexible, transparent, and conductive material
http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-first-flexible-transparent-and-conductive-material

Adidas Says Under Armour Infringed Its Wearable-Tech Patents
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-05/adid…ch-patents

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FEBRUARY 07/2014 LIST OF UPDATES. By Mr. Andres Agostini at The Future of Scientific Management, Today! At http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

The Ryno Microcycle is a Sci-Fi Inspired Single Wheeler
http://www.engineering.com/DesignerEdge/DesignerEdgeArticles…eeler.aspx

Rigged rules mean economic growth increasingly “winner takes all” for rich elites all over world
http://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressrelease/2014-01&#…ich-elites

Economist Debates: Democracy economist.com
http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/196

Behavioral Economics Gives The Advertising Industry A Nudge In The Right Direction
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnowrid/2014/02/05/behavioural…direction/

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FEBRUARY 06/2014 UPDATES [LIST]. By Mr. Andres Agostini at The Future of Scientific Management, Today! At http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

Faraway Planets May Be Far Better for Life http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/superhabitable-planets/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+sciam/space+%28Topic:+Space%29

Six Trends That Will Shape Consumer Behavior This Year http://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2014/02/04/six-trend…this-year/

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FEBRUARY 05/2014 UPDATES [LIST]. By Mr. Andres Agostini at www.Future-Observatory.blogspot.com

Do autistic brains create more information at rest or do they have weaker connectivity — or both?
http://www.kurzweilai.net/do-autistic-brains-create-more-inf…ty-or-both

‘Electronic tongue’ identifies brands of beer with 81.9% accuracy
http://www.kurzweilai.net/electronic-tongue-identifies-brand…9-accuracy

Bodily maps of emotions
http://www.kurzweilai.net/bodily-maps-of-emotions

Antibiotic ‘smart bomb’ can target specific strains of bacteria
http://www.kurzweilai.net/antibiotic-smart-bomb-can-target-s…f-bacteria

Continue reading “The Future Observatory” »