Last week's employment situation report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics was stronger than anticipated with non-farm private payroll showing increased employment of 268,000 last month, surpassing March's strong showing of 231,000. This growth is the most robust in five years, and marks the seventh straight month of employment increases. Nonetheless, jobless rate climbed and government jobs fell by 24,000. 
 

The Conference Board shows concern around the leading indicators for employment, this month's Employment Trend Index dropped. Monster, Dice and many search firms are reporting positive growth and continued signs of improvement of the labor market.

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Data breach is costly and perilous whether your data is in-house or up in the cloud. Paypal, Visa and Mastercard were all attacked by hacktivists reportedly. Then there was the Amazon interruption last month which was likened to the computing equivalent of an airplane crash, by Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer of Rackspace a specialist in data center services. Sony's PlayStation Network and Qriocity online services have been down since April 20th and will be down until at least May 31th. Ouch!
 

As the cloud becomes larger, what kind of rain storm might be possible? What pots of gold are at the end of the rainbow?

John Whitney

For some time now, the intermittent nature of both solar and wind renewable energy generation systems has been a thorn in the side of the clean energy industry.  Coal, natural gas, and nuclear advocates have trumpeted the fact that generation capacity factors for their power plants range from 85% to 90% while solar and wind numbers are in the 20% to 35% range.  Over and over we get hammered with the question:  What happens when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing?

Well, as renewable energy supporters have been correctly responding, the simple two-part reply is:  Wind turbines continue to generate electricity at night and peak electricity demand kicks in during the day when the sun is shining.  Furthermore, because renewables are a relatively small portion of their power generation fleets, utilities have been able to effectively incorporate their intermittent generation into the mix.  Even as renewable generation contributions continue to increase it can be argued that a smarter grid, with fine-grained response capability, will be able to effectively absorb and integrate intermittent power sources.

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