Keeping Money Overseas

So you want to see how Obama’s policies are keeping our economy from truly recovering?

For those who aren’t clear as to what a repatriation holiday is, it’s an event where US companies are given the opportunity to bring money earned overseas back to the US at a tax rate of 5-6% instead of the current top rate for businesses of 35%. The theory being that companies could invest the money domestically, by hiring more people, investing in research and development or acquiring companies. Without the tax holiday, US corporations can only use the money to invest outside the US.

A big part of what made Cisco the company it is today was its ability to grow through acquisition. Over the past few years Cisco has struggled to grow, and many experts believe that a wave of acquisitions could be the thing Cisco needs to kick start itself again. What might Cisco acquire? The market is really wide open depending on what adjacencies Cisco wants to move into. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them buy any one or more of the following: Acme Packet, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Riverbed, Silver Peak, Citrix, F5, EMC, Network Appliance, A10. Some are more likely than others, but an argument can be made for each one of these. However, without the repatriation holiday, none of these will happen.

Although Cisco is currently flush with cash, most of the US-earned cash has been used to buy back stock and other activities to give the stock price a boost (which has its own benefit to the company and the economy). The only significant acquisition Cisco has made over the past couple of years was Tandberg, which was headquartered overseas, meaning Cisco could use its foreign cash to make the acquisition.

In fact, I specifically asked Chambers about Cisco’s investment strategy in the face of not getting the tax relief on repatriation; he made it very clear that the company would need to over-weight its investments overseas because so much of the cash of the company is now outside the US. As an example, he pointed to the fact that Cisco has been beefing up its CRS-3 team by hiring people in Ottawa Microsoft is currently building a facility in Vancouver, BC as well. Microsoft also bought Skype, which is headquartered in Luxembourg. Coincidence? It’s clear in my mind that Cisco and other companies will dig their heels in and hope that Congress grants the holiday.

High-Density Reactive Materials

Great.

This new approach from the US Office of Naval Research replaces the inert casing with High-Density Reactive Materials (HDRM) that combine and explode only when the projectile hits the target.

According to navy researchers, recent tests have shown that the HDRMs are durable and significantly enhance the explosive effect. They increase the chances of what the military scientists term a “catastrophic kill”.

Clifford Bedford, a researcher involved in the development of the new material, explained its advantages over existing weapons.

“In the case of a steel missile you explosively launch it, it goes through the target and all the kinetic energy is dissipated into the target,” he said.

“With the reactive material missile, you have the same explosive launch - however, it disintegrates within the target and liberates chemical energy, and this chemical and kinetic energy combined gives you the enhanced effect.”

Ooma

We’ve been considering replacing our landline with Ooma. Do any of you have Ooma? What’s your experience?

WWW Turns 20

Cheers!

On August 6, 1991, the first website was launched on the Internet, forever changing the way we browse. (And thankfully, web design has improved just a bit in the past two decades.)

We here at NewsFeed think it’s important to respect our roots. And today happens to be a milestone in our history.

It’s like we’re celebrating the 20th birthday of our great-great-great-… -great-grandfather: the modern website. You see, we (and all of our newsy brethren to say the least) essentially wouldn’t exist had it not been for the work of Tim Berners-Lee. Then a contractor at CERN, the European nuclear research organization, Berners-Lee had access to the largest Internet node on the continent.

Hacker Drone

Wow.

Built by Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins, the Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform (otherwise known as the WASP) is a flying drone that has a 6-foot wingspan, a 6-foot length and weighs in at 14 pounds. The small form factor of the unmanned aerial vehicle allows it to drop under radar and is often mistaken for a large bird. It was built from an Army target drone and converted to run on electric batteries rather than gasoline. It can also be loaded with GPS information and fly a predetermined course without need for an operator. Taking off and landing have to be done manually with the help of a mounted HD camera. However, the most interesting aspect of the drone is that it can crack Wi-Fi networks and GSM networks as well as collect the data from them.

It can accomplish this feat with a Linux computer on-board that’s no bigger than a deck of cards. The computer accesses 32GB of storage to house all that stolen data. It uses a variety of networking hacking tools including the BackTrack toolset as well as a 340 million word dictionary to guess passwords. In order to access cell phone data, the WASP impersonates AT&T and T-Mobile cell phone towers and fools phones into connecting to one of the eleven antenna on-board. The drone can then record conversations to the storage card and avoids dropping the call due to the 4G T-mobile card routing communications through VOIP.

Amazingly, this was accomplished with breaking a single FCC regulation. The drone relies on the frequency band used for Ham radios to operate.

Hybrid Freak

Wow. Priorities?

Ted Bohn, 49, who designs hybrid vehicles for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, wanted his 3-year-old daughter, Madeleine, to be part of history, so he took his pregnant wife’s 2010 Prius to the parade while she was at home having contractions. This elicited boos when announced to the crowd that assembled in the dealership before the parade.

Shuttle Program Over

RIP.

Double sonic booms shattered the predawn silence around the space center, the last time residents will hear the distinctive sound of a shuttle coming home.

Full Disclosure

This is an idea that’s been long overdue.

Lost in the controversy over the state budget was a proposal to make the state disclose vast amounts of new information about how it spends taxpayers’ money.

The state will have to release data on a website for every expense of more than $100, under the provision passed as part of the 2011-‘13 budget. Citizens, private companies and the media will be able to search the information, which will include which agency made a purchase, how much it spent, and who received the money.

Rep. Robin Vos (R-Rochester), the chairman of the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee and an author of the provision, said it was similar in spirit to federal legislation that President Barack Obama had put forward while he was still a U.S. senator.

“This is a bipartisan idea. Every Republican and Democrat alike wants to make sure the public has that information so they can decide for themselves whether that spending is worthwhile or not,” Vos said.

MMSD To Install Better Condom Traps

Great!

Installing new, smaller screens to remove debris, trash, plastic containers and condoms from wastewater flowing into the Jones Island sewage treatment plant, as well as other upgrades at the 25-year-old preliminary treatment facility, will cost $14.9 million, under a proposed contract.

On Monday, the operations committee of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District’s commission recommended hiring J.F. Ahern Co. of Fond du Lac to install the upgrades. J.F. Ahern was the low bidder.

Five debris screens with ¾-inch openings will be replaced with eight new screens with ¼-inch openings, as part of the work. The smaller mesh will trap more debris and floatable trash in the wastewater, MMSD officials said.

American Manned Space Travel Comes to an End

I’ll steal Brian Dunbar’s comments on the final Space Shuttle launch.

A gorgeous spectacle on launch.  Poetry in air gliding home.

Too complex, too expensive, not very good at any one thing.

But she was a by-God spaceship: such a sight to see.

Perhaps Rare-Earth Elements Aren’t So Rare

This is really good news.

China’s monopoly over rare-earth metals could be challenged by the discovery of massive deposits of these hi-tech minerals in mud on the Pacific (KSE: 002790.KS - news) floor, a study on Sunday suggests.

China accounts for 97 percent of the world’s production of 17 rare-earth elements, which are essential for electric cars, flat-screen TVs (Taiwan OTC: 8264.TWO - news) , iPods, superconducting magnets, lasers, missiles, night-vision goggles, wind turbines and many other advanced products.

These elements carry exotic names such as neodymium, promethium and yttrium but in spite of their “rare-earth” tag are in fact abundant in the planet’s crust.

The problem, though, is that land deposits of them are thin and scattered around, so sites which are commercially exploitable or not subject to tough environment restrictions are few.

As a result, the 17 elements have sometimes been dubbed “21st-century gold” for their rarity and value.

Production of them is almost entirely centred on China, which also has a third of the world’s reserves. Another third is held together by former Soviet republics, the United States and Australia.

But a new study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, points to an extraordinary concentration of rare-earth elements in thick mud at great depths on the Pacific floor.

Burn More Coal to Combat Global Warming

Huh.

The lull in global warming from 1998 to 2008 was mainly caused by a sharp rise in China’s coal use, a study suggests.

The absence of a temperature rise over that decade is often used by “climate sceptics” as grounds for denying the existence of man-made global warming.

But the new study, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that smog from the extra coal acted to mask greenhouse warming.

China’s coal use doubled 2002-2007, according to US government figures.

Although burning the coal produced more warming carbon dioxide, it also put more tiny sulphate aerosol particles into the atmosphere which cool the planet by reflecting solar energy back into space.

So burning more coal fights global warming? Good to know.

Eating Poo

No thanks.

Somehow this feels like a Vonnegut plotline: population boom equals food shortage. Solution? Synthesize food from human waste matter. Absurd yes, but Japanese scientists have actually discovered a way to create edible steaks from human feces.

Mitsuyuki Ikeda, a researcher from the Okayama Laboratory, has developed steaks based on proteins from human excrement. Tokyo Sewage approached the scientist because of an overabundance of sewage mud. They asked him to explore the possible uses of the sewage and Ikeda found that the mud contained a great deal of protein because of all the bacteria.

Senate Site Hacked

Yikes.

US officials said they have ordered a security review after hackers managed to break into the Senate website at the weekend.

An official said the incident had been “inconvenient”, but had not compromised the security of the staff.

The confirmation came after Lulz Security, a loosely aligned group of hackers, said it had carried out the attack for fun and posted files online.

Nation Behind IMF Attack

Wow.

Bloomberg News reported the IMF’s computer system was attacked by hackers “believed to be connected to a foreign government, resulting in the loss of e-mails and other documents.”

The attack occurred before the May 14 arrest of former IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn on sexual assault charges, Bloomberg said. It did not identify a suspect government. Cybersecurity experts say it is very difficult to trace a sophisticated cyber break-in to its ultimate source.