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On Sunday May 19th, storm chasers captured a low precipitation (LP) supercell near Newcastle, Wyoming. A supercell is a thunderstorm that is associated with a mesocyclone, which is a deep, persistently rotating updraft. Supercell thunderstorms can persist for many hours and are responsible for nearly all of the significant tornadoes produced in the U.S.

The US cloud industry faces up to €25.8 billion in lost revenues following revelations about US-led snooping on EU citizens. “The surveillance revelations will cost the US cloud computing industry USD 22 to 35 billion in lost revenues over the next three year,” said EU justice commissioner Viviane Reding on Sunday (19 January) at the Digital Life Design Conference in Munich. …

The crew of the USS Dewey have honored the dying wish of a Pearl Harbor survivor by allowing him on board the latest version of the destroyer he served on in the Second World War. Electrician’s Mate Second Bud Cloud was due to begin hospice care, when his friend Jennie Haskamp reached out to the Dewey's crew and asked if he could see the ship in San Diego. But when they arrived at the dock, the sailors carried the 90-year-old veteran on board and attentively listened as he shared his memories from the war.

The NSA's activities are a massive blow for US computer businesses "It's an ill bird," runs the adage, "that fouls its own nest." Cue the US National Security Agency (NSA), which, we now know, has been busily doing this for quite a while. As the Edward Snowden revelations tumbled out, the scale of the fouling slowly began to dawn on us. Outside of the United States, for example, people suddenly began to have doubts about the wisdom of entrusting their confidential data to cloud services operated by American companies on American soil. As Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president responsible...

U.S. technology companies warn they could lose between $21.5 billion to $35 billion in global cloud computing contracts over the next three years due to negative fallout from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) spying programs on Internet users, including emails. A new report from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, estimates that U.S. cloud computing companies could lose 10% to 20% of the cloud computing market to European or Asian companies due to U.S. spying. That means major players including Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT) could be hurt.... Some tech companies...

Microsoft Windows 10 might become a cloud based operating system (OS) according to a leaked road-map. The road-map shows that Microsoft will no longer release service packs but instead will release major updates every year which also increases the version number of the OS. The next major improvement should be Windows 9, this should bring back the Aero interface in a new form. This should also be a version in which Microsoft will merge its ARM CPU based Windows RT platform with Windows Phone. This version of Windows could also be the last version of Windows as we know it....

Summary: Revelations of the U.S. government's spying programs could have a massive impact on the U.S. cloud industry, which stands to lose vast sums over the next three years as a result — compounded by other countries bankrolling efforts to combat U.S. market leadership. The U.S.' dominance in the cloud space may soon be challenged by rival countries, particularly those in the European Union, as the global surveillance scandal threatens to wipe up to $35 billion off the U.S. cloud slate. A new report by non-profit group the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation claims that Europeans are attempting to nudge...

UPDATE: Why Govt. Source leaked PRISMAdditional information is being reported that confirms what most of us have always suspected. NSA is collecting all our email data, tracking our movements, our photographs, our documents, etc. Also factor in the fact that a court recently ruled that Obama is free to collect our DNA without being found guilty of any crime. National Security Agency (NSA) building designed for massive data collection in Utah:WaPo reports the following:The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection...

Adobe . . . has made a bold move to abandon their customers . . . and force them into a subscription sales model which some of us might remember from the 1950s door-to-door book and encyclopedia sales women who sold my mom a set. Only now . . . Adobe abandoned all their customers. From now on . . . you don't get rent to own. You only get to rent . . . What do you think?

Explanation: Globular star cluster 47 Tucanae is a jewel of the southern sky. Also known as NGC 104, it roams the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy along with around 200 other globular star clusters. The second brightest globular cluster (after Omega Centauri) as seen from planet Earth, it lies about 13,000 light-years away and can be spotted naked-eye near the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) in the constellation of the Toucan. Of course, the SMC is some 210,000 light-years distant, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way and not physically close to 47 Tuc. Stars on the outskirts of the...

Curious why there are those with an online business, who believe that handing over their entire back office infrastructure to one company, aka "going cloud" may not be the wisest of ideas. Just ask all those websites that use Amazon's cloud service today, who suddenly went dark when the Amazon cloud crashed. From the NYT: Amazon’s data centers in Northern Virginia crashed Monday afternoon, taking with it a number of popular Web sites, from Someecards, the quirky e-card company, to mobile applications like Flipboard and Foursquare. Amazon reported having problems with the data centers in Northern Virginia. Those problems appear...

While many scientists have some dire warnings against us trying to geoengineer our way out of the climate crisis, others don’t necessarily see it that way and are working on new methods to solve the problem. Researchers at the University of Washington’s College of the Environment Institute are studying the idea of cloud brightening, utilizing ships to shoot salt water high into the atmosphere over the oceans in order to create long-lasting cloud cover. The additional clouds reflect more sunlight back into space, resulting in a cooling effect on the planet. In order to encourage discussion amongst other climate scientists,...

What would you do if your entire digital life started evaporating before your eyes and there was virtually nothing you could do about it? This is the nightmare scenario that greeted US technology journalist Mat Honan, who had all of the contents of his iPhone, iPad and Macbook Air wiped, and lost control of his Gmail and Twitter accounts, all in the span of just over 15 minutes.

Would it be possible to privately cloud seed in order to make it rain? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding

The China Daily is reporting that a giant mushroom cloud resembling an atomic explosion is being seen all over the capital city of Beijing on Sunday. The video of the cloud has already appeared all over YouTube (see below). There are multiple videos of the haze that have been filmed from skyscrapers and from the ground, some going back as far as June 14th. The Chinese government, in reacting to the red and green haze, is warning residents that they should stay inside according to the French Press on the scene. Due to the sheer size of the Chinese population,...

This is pretty wild... A phenomenon known as a 'roll cloud' -a very rare form of Arcus cloud- was seen in eastern Texas early this morning... it's formed when a cool outflow of air from a substantial thunderstorm jets-out ahead of the system in a rotating rope that can run 50 miles long... More at Reaganite Republican ____________________________________ KTLV-TV   Wikipedia  h/t Doug Welch

The cloud could suffer the same kind of collapses that plague the financial system, according to an analysis of the unrecognised risks of cloud computing. The cloud is essentially a metaphor for a network of computers in which computational tasks and resources can be shared. The big idea here is that users simply rent the computing power, the storage or an application for as long as they need it without having to invest in the infrastructure behind it. That makes computing cheaper, easier and more efficient. There are well known problems of course. The most obvious relates to guaranteeing the security of data...

Ever find yourself not trusting something or someone from the first moment - but not knowing why? For instance the first moment you saw a politician, instantly not trusting them but you just couldn't place why? *cough* John Edwards *cough*. Well that's what I thought the first time I heard about "cloud computing".

President Obama travels to North Carolina on Wednesday dogged by poor economic news, threats of resistance on the Hill, sagging poll numbers and Democratic losses in a pair of special House elections. If September, and more specifically the president’s jobs speech, was intended to be the start of a new phase of Obama’s presidency, there is precious little indication as of yet that anything at all has changed. -- FOR THE RECORD: Obama tour: An earlier version of this online article misstated the White House's assertions regarding any intended connection between President Obama's tour promoting his jobs package and his...

Although the CLOUD experiment carried out in CERN didn't quite drive a stake through the heart of the global-warming ideology, it came close to. Through simulating the atmosphere being bombarded by cosmic rays, the experiment produced microscopic droplets of water vapour. It established that higher levels of cosmic rays do indeed lead to more droplets in the sky, a claim denied by all global-warming models. As of yet, the droplets produced in the CERN lab aren't large enough to form clouds. So far, a solid causation has not supplemented an already-established correlation. In response to CLOUD, some global-warming supporters are...