The particular ideas that were mostly at issue were the patent for Square's payment card reader-seems that glass art business owner Jim McKelvey's name was left off, after he allegedly pointed out the payment flaw that was the essence of Square's raison d'etre-and other mobile payment approaches. The argument is that McKelvey came up with the idea and that he discussed it with Jack Dorsey-now the CEO of Square and, in his spare time, Twitter-and Morley. These arguments are classic Silicon Valley. Whose implementation idea is it? The person who noticed the problem and had a vague idea how to make it work, the more technical person who figured out a precise way to make it work, the specialist (in this case, payments expertise) who amended all of the above to work best with the rules and infrastructure of existing reality or the business person who figured out the way to let it generate revenue and profits? It's usually something close to a true collaboration-which makes splitting up the money later more challenging. Also, these interactions are rarely transcribed, beyond some e-mails and texts. If key meetings happened in person, egos and greed-fueled memories dominate. Hello, judge and jury.
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
Square Finally Settles Its Ren Holding Lawsuit
Monday, June 13, 2016
Achieve a YEAR'S Worth of Success in Just 90 Days
Want to achieve a year's worth of success in just 90 days? Here's how…
But he also rocks a damn bold promise too.
Not too many coaches would have the chutzpah to stand before an audience of savvy (and skeptical) entrepreneurs and proclaim to have a framework that allows them to achieve a year's worth of EPIC wins in just 90 days.
And it doesn't matter how well researched, proven and battle-tested his methods are.
(as you'll see in Video 3, Todd goes to EXTREME lengths to prove the efficacy of his systems).
Nor the fact that he's spent two decades working in the trenches with Olympians, pro athletes and Fortune 100 CEO'S in the world's most grueling competitive environments.
Regardless of ALL that…
Todd has shown a crazy amount of courage to make his claims, knowing that they could easily trip up the BS detectors of a VERY smart audience.
But that's the promise Todd has made us.
To help ambitious entrepreneurs like you and I reach levels of unparalleled performance while outgunning our competitors with the advanced achievement systems that allow us to rack up game changing win after game changing win.
And while the first two videos in his 90 Day Jumpstart Series gave us a strong peek into that possibility…
Video #3 (which Todd JUST released)… pulls back the curtain on the ENTIRE 90 Day Year System.
What Todd reveals is a robust, yet elegant 8-Phase Model that breeds 100% confidence that the results he promises are not only “possible”…
… but downright PROBABLE when armed with the right system.
He also aims his rockets at a bunch of widely popular “mindset” myths that his research proves do wayyyy more harm than good.
(If you've ever bought into the nonsense that you need to “go big”… or start with a meaningful “why” then you'll want to watch this right now)
Anyway, you know the drill.
Don't want to spoil any surprises for you.
Go load up VIDEO #3, and come face to face with the advanced achievement system that will drive your success in 2016 and beyond.
Friday, June 10, 2016
Sewage Sludge On Crops A Public Health Disaster
Contamination Spreading Brain Disease In Humans, Wildlife and Livestock
In 1972, world leaders realized that dumping millions of tons of sewage sludge into the oceans killed entire underwater ecosystems. Some nations stopped the dumping immediately, while others did not.
The U.S., for example, finally passed the Ocean Dumping Ban Act of 1988. It required dumping all municipal sewage sludge and industrial waste on land. That meant dumping it into landfills or dumping it openly on land, including farms, ranches, national forests, city parks, golf courses, playgrounds, sport fields and beyond. The Act went into effect in 1992 and it sparked a public health disaster. The practice is spreading pathogens to people, livestock, wildlife and beyond every day. It's also fueling mosquitoes with the Zika virus and others that cause brain disease.
Landfills designed to handle this toxic soup are extremely expensive. So, the dumpsters hired a public relations firm to convince unsuspecting citizens that neurotoxins and carcinogens are fertilizer. The PR firm started calling this toxic waste biosolids. It's even sold in bags at your local home and garden store as soil for your garden and potting plants. It's death dirt.
Since then, millions of tons of sewage sludge have been given to farmers as fertilizer and dumped into food and water supplies around the world every year. Those farmers and ranchers who don't believe that “fertilizer” bullshit are being paid to dump sewage sludge on their land and shut up. Sick livestock are sold or buried as quickly as possible. Those that make it to market are consumed by people and pets, while permanently contaminating everything that they touch.
The landowners are held harmless if the sewage sludge causes damage to people or property downwind, downstream or on the dinner table. Landowners are literally making a killing with government assistance.
Unfortunately, the practice of dumping extreme quantities of sewage sludge on land has created an even bigger public health problem. It's killing people, wildlife, livestock and sea mammals downstream.
Prions are infectious proteins responsible for a group of diseases known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). The operative word is transmissible. TSEs have been given a wide range of confusing names to keep innocent citizens from connecting the dots of this global disaster, including:
- bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) in cattle;
- scrapie in sheep;
- Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans; and
- chronic wasting disease in deer, elk, moose and reindeer.
- badgers, mink, cats, elephants, dolphins and many other mammalian species have died from TSE. The concept of a species barrier is a myth. A deadly prion is a deadly prion. They don't discriminate.
According to Nobel Laureate Stanley Prusiner, Alzheimer's disease, ALS and Huntington's disease also are on the TSE spectrum. All are fatal, neurodegenerative brain diseases.
Infectious prions are in the bodily fluids of its victims, including blood, urine, mucus, saliva and feces. As such, these victims send prions to the municipal sewage treatment plant where they remain untouched. Wastewater effluent and sewage sludge applied to land recycles prions into the environment. Once dumped on open land, prions remain infectious. Irrigation, precipitation and wind carry the prions into groundwater, streams, lakes, oceans and airways, including homes, offices and beyond.
Reckless wastewater treatment policies and practices are now fueling a global epidemic of neurodegenerative disease among people, wildlife and livestock. In fact, Europe just reported its first case of chronic wasting disease in a reindeer in Norway. There will be many more.
The risk assessments for the land application of sewage sludge (LASS) are based on fraud and outdated information. The risk assessments were developed back in the 1970s and 1980s–before we knew about prions and other killers in modern sewage streams, including many forms of infectious medical waste. These fraudulent risk assessments make the entire practice illegal. Common sense makes them immoral and a crime against humanity.
Because of these reckless practices, it's time to reform many laws, practices and policies. For example, it's vital to demand testing for mad cow disease in beef cattle and hope like hell that dairy producers aren't spreading the disease in milk, cheese and meat. There is no reliable test for live animals, yet, which means that animal health is paramount for public health. There also is no testing of crops grown in sewage sludge, despite the science that has proven that crops for humans and livestock absorb the toxins and pathogens that they are grown in–including deadly prions.
Ironically, the United States passed homeland defense laws to protect our food and water supplies from potential terrorists. Many other nations followed suit. When the U.S. government enacted the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002, it classified prions as select agents that pose an extreme risk to food, water and much more. With reckless policy, the U.S. transferred responsibility for the management of select agents in the U.S. to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC–a private corporation that seems to act as the Coverup Division). These questionable defenders of public health quietly took prions off the list about 10 years later because the regulation criminalized entire industries and several reckless practices. They obviously chose to defend someone's bottom line instead of public health.
Unfortunately, prions linger in the environment, homes, hospitals, nursing homes, dental offices and beyond infinitely. They migrate, mutate, multiply and kill with unparalleled efficiency. Prions defy all attempts at sterilization and inactivation.
Prions shed from humans are the most deadly. They demand more respect than radiation. They're being ignored by regulators and industry alike. As such, food and water sources are being contaminated with the deadliest forms of prions. Municipal water systems can't stop them from reaching water taps in millions of homes. Filtration doesn't phase them.
As stated earlier, the risk assessments for biosolids, sewage sludge and reclaimed wastewater were questionable when they were developed and they are total failures now. Plus, these risk assessments do not account for the possibility of sewage sludge dumped on land going airborne via windstorms and tornadoes. These events now leave a trail of sickness and death in their wake. Airborne sewage is a killer. It dumps the toxins, pathogens and superbugs everywhere.
Unfortunately, the U.S. exported these ridiculous ideas to other nations who proceeded to contaminate their food and water supplies with sewage. If hospitals can't stop prions, neither can the brain surgeons at wastewater treatment plants.
The legislation banning ocean dumping was very explicit about the need to stop dumping potentially infectious medical waste into the oceans. Ironically, the current policy that promotes LASS ignores the risk of infectious medical waste and many other threats. It also ignores radionuclides, endocrine disruptors, birth control pills, antibiotics, flame-retardants and other toxins and superbugs. This toxic waste belongs in a lined landfill not our watersheds and food supplies. It's time for immediate reforms.
The same sewage-borne toxins and pathogens are still contaminating our oceans. Now, they're dumped in further upstream. Entire watersheds are now being infected-including the oceans. The body count among people, livestock and wildlife has been stacking up ever since ocean dumping began phasing out.
Biosolids and other forms of sewage mismanagement are now fueling a global epidemic of neurological disease, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, autism,mad cow disease, chronic wasting disease, microcephaly and more. Industry and governments are scrambling to blame the global epidemic on anything but contaminated soil, water, food and air. They are playing dumb in the face of fraud and scientific suppression. Negligence is too kind of a word for these sociopaths.
Sewage sludge and reclaimed wastewater also contaminate our food with listeria, e-coli, salmonella and other killers. In fact, scientists are forced to come up with deceptive new names for the growing list of sewage-related ailments, including Zika virus, West Nile virus, epizoic hemorrhagic fever, equine herpes, valley fever and others. Industrial disease.
As mentioned earlier, crops contaminated by sewage sludge can uptake prions and deliver them throughout the plant. Plants then deliver the deadly prions to mammals that consume the plant. In fact, infected plants are spreading prion diseases to several species, including humans. When hamsters consumed infected wheat grass, the animals were infected with prion disease. Researchers also found deadly prions in plants exposed to infected urine and feces.
“These findings demonstrate that plants can efficiently bind infectious prions and act as carriers of infectivity, suggesting a possible role of environmental prion contamination in the horizontal transmission of the disease,” said Claudio Soto, the lead investigator from the University of Texas at Houston.
Killer prions are impossible to stop. Prions are contributing to the death of millions of people now. Victims produce and spread prions daily because they're in the bodily fluids of all victims. Millions of people with brain disease are contaminating their homes and communities, while exposing caregivers and family members to the contagion. The sewage from these victims is contaminating the local wastewater treatment plant and everything that enters or leaves these facilities, including reclaimed wastewater and sewage sludge. Once dumped on open land, these contagions remain infectious as they migrate, mutate and multiply forever.
Prions demand containment and isolation, not distribution and consumption through air, food and water. These toxins demand lined landfills not reckless dumping on our dinner tables. Since prions migrate, mutate and multiply, dilution is not a solution. Prions are a public health nightmare, not to mention the carnage taking place among other mammals.
The world has never done an effective job of managing its sewage. It's an industry that drives by looking in the rear view mirror. It only swerves when the dead-end road is littered with body bags. After enough people get sick and die, new alternatives emerge. Today is no different.
We now have nearly eight billion people competing for food, water, open spaces and places to dump their sewage. As prion disease spreads and as industrial-scale agriculture becomes more intensive, sewage is becoming deadlier by the day. The stakes have never been higher.
The bodies are stacking up. The contamination grows stronger and spreads further every day. It's time to stop dumping sewage sludge on land because of the prion risk and many others that are not accounted for in the antiquated and fraudulent risk assessments. It's time for citizens to defend our land, water and air. Homelands around the world are under assault and ISIS has nothing to do with it. The terrorists are home-grown traitors. It's treason.
Today, the land application of sewage sludge is killing mammals and more around the world. Pathogens in sludge are causing brain disease, cancer and death. Let's take a meaningful stand for food safety. Just say no to sewage sludge in our watersheds and food supplies. Demand the use of lined landfills and possibly pyrolysis.
Take a free preview of our new eBook to learn everything that you need to know about the epidemic and the mismanagement. The rest of the book explains how to defend yourself with aversion and targeted nutrition. Eating organic foods is one way to minimize your exposure to sewage-borne toxins and pathogens.
Please join our global coalition of Homeland Defenders. Join our campaign for truth and reform. Please write to Gary Chandler for more information gary@crossbow1.com
Food Safety News via http://crossbowcommunications.com/land-application-of-sewage-sludge-spreading-brain-disease/
Cities Offer Best Practices In Water Management
Droughts, Floods, Growth Testing Municipal Water Management
The threat of a water crisis is looming for hundreds of millions of the world's inhabitants, as climate change, water management challenges and demographic shifts are disrupting water's ecosystem. As a result, many of the globes cities are currently scrambling to shore up resilience, improve efficiency and guarantee the quality of their water. When it comes to ramping up water sustainability, cities globally can learn from Rotterdam, Copenhagen and Amsterdam.
The social and economic implications of water to cities is key, providing, among others, an infrastructure to support residents and businesses, as well as providing an impetus toward improving the standard of living of inhabitants. In line with the rise of megacities, and the ever growing urbanization trend, in particular in upcoming markets, addressing the management of water in and around cities in a sustainable manner is becoming an ever more pressing matter for city policy makers. This means efficiently providing safe, reliable, and easily accessible water to residents and businesses, as well as trustworthy access to sanitation and protecting waterways from pollution.
Sustainable Water Index
To better understand how 50 of the world's top cities are performing in terms of water sustainability, Arcadis recently partnered with the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) to gauge the management of city waterscapes across a range of factors. The researchers looked at three factors – the resiliency of the water system, the efficiency of water use and the quality of water use – with each of the dimensions broken down into a range of sub-indices.
The authors found that, among the cities taken into scrutiny, Rotterdam is the most sustainable city in the ranking. The city scores number one in the resilience category, offering strong performances in almost all major sub-indices. The Dutch city has taken a pro-active approach to water stewardship, including a resilience civil servant as well as a comprehensive set of packages aimed at improving and maintaining the cities' relationship with its local water bodies. Danish capital Copenhagen takes the number two spot, on the back of a strong performance in water efficiency sub-indices and resilience, while Amsterdam, the capital city of the Netherlands, takes the number three spot. Berlin and Brussels complete the top five, with strong performances in resilience (2nd) and quality (4th) respectively.
The first Asia-Pacific city on the list is Sydney, with a strong performance in efficiency (4th) although its quality score (25th) is somewhat below par – while Melbourne, the number 11 on the list, has its quality placement at number 17. The first US city to make the list is Washington, which boasts good quality water (12th), while Los Angeles takes the number 2 efficiency spot and number 27 overall.
Eight of the top ten spots are held by European cities, reflecting the continent's strong geographic and demographic advantages surrounding water (temperate climate, low population densities), as well as a long history of dealing with water problems; many of these cities have mature water systems that have been built up over a long period of time, many times in response to challenges they have faced with water. Two outliers are included in the list however, with London 21st and Italian capital Rome 28th, suggesting that there is room for improvement.
The remainder of the list contains two Indian cities, New Delhi and Mumbai – the cities constantly score in the bottom percentile of the three indices. African cities too are relatively lowly ranked on the index, including Nairobi, which manages a number 10 place in resilience at number 46 overall, and Johannesburg at number 45. The Latin American cities of Rio de Janeiro, Santiago and Buenos Aires hold the number 44, 35 and 34 spots respectively.
According to the researchers, Latin American cities perform poorly largely due to water quality, requiring improved wastewater treatment and sanitation. The African cities listed are held back by inefficiency and poorer water quality.
John Batten, Global Director of Water and Cities at Arcadis, says: “The World Economic Forum named water crises as one of the top three highest global risks to economies, environments and people, in terms of impact in 2016 [after climate change and the use of weapons of mass destruction]. Water demand issues and climate change risks are happening right here and right now. The cities that best understand this and act first will be the ones that not only help save the planet from an impending water crisis, but will also be the first to attract investment and improve their competitive position.”
Sustainable City News via http://www.consultancy.uk/news/12068/the-top-50-most-sustainable-cities-for-water-management
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Feds Peer Into Payments Regulatory Crystal Ball-And Get Headaches
Indeed, there's even talk of adopting a European-like saferoom approach, where startups have a limited window to explore and innovate without worrying about regulators cracking down. It's a saferoom in the sense that no idea is too risky to not be explored, even for a limited period of time. In other words, regulators are toying with the idea of whether it's sometimes best to not regulate at all.
NRF Mounts An Impressive Takedown Of PCI
The trigger for the FTC letter appears to be concerns that the FTC might incorporate PCI compliance with recommendations it is preparing-a move that would solidify and increase PCI's leverage and power. This is one of these arguments that is best articulated in the abstract. At the legal abstract hypothetical level, NRF makes an impressive-sounding case that PCI is indeed a powerplay by the cardbrands.
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
5 Questions Every Executive Should Be Asking Themselves – Big Data Video
It is the duty of executives to asses the overall health of their companies. This is no easy task. Assessments can become quite complex and overwhelming. Start out simple: Ask yourself these 4 questions to determine what area you should be looking at. Having trouble answering these questions or unsure of your answers?