text:
How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan
Jeff Yang muses on how Apple managed to beat the tech titans of Japan by playing their game, only better
The better part of a month has gone by, and most pundits have already weighed in on this year's CES -- the global gadget extravaganza that makes Las Vegas the gravitational center of the geek universe every January. The consensus? Meh.
That's because the cacophony and crowds and celebrity sightings -- is there a rapper who doesn't have an audio accessory line at this point? -- couldn't disguise the fact that Apple, the new king of the tech hill, had once again refused to participate in a gathering dominated by old-guard standouts like Sony, whose gargantuan 25,000 square foot pavilion is always the show's largest, and which traditionally pulls out the razzle-dazzle stops in its presser (last year: country pixie Taylor Swift; this year, the stars of "The Green Hornet" -- and their car).
And that meant all the noise and clamor and glitz and glamor would almost certainly be made moot by whatever game-changing innovations Apple chose to unleash at its next invitation-only private unveiling a few months later.
Not that the lack of an official presence prevented Apple's fingerprints from being found nearly everywhere at CES. iPhone and iPad accessories were the only things more ubiquitous than celebrity-branded headsets, and most of the show's plethora of new services and devices desperately touted their compatibility with iOS apps and hardware. (Those that didn't, from smart TVs to smartphones, were instantly benchmarked against existing or fantasized Apple products -- and more often than not, found wanting.)
In short, despite CES's parade of CEO keynotes and bold-faced name guests, the man who did the most to shape the show was the one who wasn't there at all.
And given Steve Jobs's recent announcement that he's once again facing health problems, it's valid to wonder if his absence is something the technology world -- and Apple's millions of global fans and customers -- may soon have to get used to beyond CES as well.
Ma, not meh
Jobs' refusal to attend CES was hardly an accident: Apple has never made a showing at the event in its three decades of existence, and as long as Jobs is its CEO, it probably never will.
CES is the home of the mainstream, the chorus, the echo chamber; by not attending, Apple maintains its identity as the maverick, the soloist, the think-different visionary -- even though its massive success has now made it the world's eighth-largest consumer technology company by revenue.
That ability to express by omission holds a central place in Jobs's management philosophy. As he told Fortune magazine in 2008, he's as proud of the things Apple hasn't done as the things it has done. "The great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products," he said. "We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas." (Jobs sometimes says this even more bluntly: Nike CEO Mark Parker likes to recount the advice Jobs gave him shortly after Parker's promotion to the top spot: "You make some of the best products in the world -- but you also make a lot of crap. Get rid of the crappy stuff.")
Other companies fail to do things because they've overlooked potential openings or are cutting corners to save money; under Jobs, however, every spurned opportunity is a conscious, measured statement. It's why the pundits who give Apple products poor reviews for not including industry-standard components -- for instance, the iMac's lack of a floppy drive -- just aren't getting it: Apple products are as defined by what they're missing as much as by what they contain.
To understand why, one has to remember that Jobs spent much of the 1970s at the Los Altos Zen Center (alongside then-and-current Gov. Jerry Brown) and later studied extensively under the late Zen roshi Kobun Chino Otogawa -- whom he designated as the official "spiritual advisor" for NeXT, the company he founded after being ejected as Apple's CEO in 1986, and who served as officiant when he wed his wife Laurene in 1991.
Jobs's immersion in Zen and passion for design almost certainly exposed him to the concept of ma, a central pillar of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Like many idioms relating to the intimate aspects of how a culture sees the world, it's nearly impossible to accurately explain -- it's variously translated as "void," "space" or "interval" -- but it essentially describes how emptiness interacts with form, and how absence shapes substance. If someone were to ask you what makes a ring a meaningful object -- the circle of metal it consists of, or the emptiness that that metal encompasses? -- and you were to respond "both," you've gotten as close to ma as the clumsy instrument of English allows.
While Jobs has never invoked the term in public -- one of the aspects of his genius is the ability to keep even his most esoteric assertions in the realm of the instantly accessible -- ma is at the core of the Jobsian way. And Jobs' single-minded adherence to this idiosyncratically Japanese principle is, ironically, what has allowed Apple to compete with and beat Japan's technology titans -- most notably the company that for the past four decades dominated the world of consumer electronics: Sony.
Learning the rules
Alan Deutschman, Reynolds professor of business journalism at University of Nevada-Reno and author of "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs" -- the definitive unauthorized biography of the Apple CEO -- notes that from his early twenties on, Jobs had a fascination with Sony that bordered on obsession.
"It was very nearly fetishistic, in fact -- he even had a collection of Sony letterhead and marketing materials," laughs Deutschman. "Sony was a company that Jobs instinctively admired and saw as model from the very beginning. So it's been an interesting transformation over time, to see Apple supplant Sony as the center of the consumer technology universe."
Deutschman sees Jobs as having some uncanny similarities to Sony's founder -- not Akio Morita, who was Sony's CEO and public face, but his elder partner Masaru Ibuka, the proprietor of the original radio repair shop that evolved into the electronics giant and, during its rise to market dominance, the company's chairman and the architect of its philosophical foundation.
"Ibuka was really the heart and soul of the company," says Deutschman, who wrote about Sony's elder statesman in his most recent book, "Walk the Walk." "He was the one responsible for Sony's sense of purpose. This was a company that was launched in a Tokyo that had been leveled by firebombing in World War II, that had experienced the kind of destruction associated with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and whose residents were facing homelessness, hunger and desperation. And yet Ibuka laid out a mission statement for Sony that was aimed at changing the world."
That statement was simple and to the point: "Sony will be the company that is most known for transforming the global image of Japanese goods as being of poor quality." It defined Sony by what it would not do -- make bad products -- making it something of an omission statement, if you will.
By way of example, Deutschman tells the story of how Sony entered the color TV marketplace, noting that in the Sixties, when color TV was going from 3% to 25% of the market, Sony was one of the few electronics companies that didn't sell a color model. "People were telling Ibuka, 'You have to come in to this market, everyone will take your market share,'" says Deutschman. "And Ibuka refused, saying, 'No, we will only do great products. We will only do high quality goods. We will only do breakthrough technology.'"
As a result, the company found itself in a precarious financial situation, losing out to its primary rivals -- until it came upon the aperture-grille technology that Sony unveiled in 1966 as the core of the Trinitron TV. A full 25% brighter than its rivals, Trinitron became the best-selling color TV for the next quarter century.
"At the time, Sony was committed to not releasing a crappy product just because the market was there; they waited until they had a truly revolutionary innovation, combined it with great design and then profited from it for long, long time," says Deutschman. "For decades, Sony was a perfect place for engineers to fully use their creativity, because it was focused on bringing real meaning and benefit to society by making great products. Sadly, in the last couple of decades, Sony has lost its way."
Changing the game
What Sony misplaced, arguably, was its sense of ma -- its understanding of what it shouldn't do, even if it could.
Buoyed by blockbuster successes like the Trinitron and the Walkman, Sony was led to believe it could launch any product and create a new market category around it. As a result, points out USC Annenberg professor and director of new media Andrew Lih, Sony became "too complex, with too diverse a set of offerings, without sending a clear signal to the customer what the ideal vision should be for its products."
Lih points out that recent mass-market consumer technology successes have generally had a simple concept, a clear purpose and a thoughtfully limited set of features and options, giving as examples the Flip camera, the Kindle, the iPod and the iPhone.
"Consumer electronics are so complex today that they can't simply be a checklist of features," says Lih. "The brands that curate their products well, with thoughtfulness and consideration for the customer, end up the winners. And Sony has hardly done that."
The apex of Sony's why-not-what-the-hell attitude toward product introductions was reached in September 2007, when -- six months after Apple announced the original iPhone -- it introduced the $399 Rolly, an egg-shaped MP3 device that would spin around and flap its winglets to the rhythm of the music it played. The Rolly was a disaster, as anyone would likely have guessed given its price point and exceptional lameness -- but it failed to teach Sony a lesson.
No better example of this exists than the company's go-for-broke focus on 3-D television. Last year's CES saw the industry unleash a flood of 3-D TVs, only to encounter ho-hum reactions from consumers and, subsequently, mediocre sales -- research giant NPD estimates that just 2 percent of all televisions sold in North America were 3-D capable. Rather than consider whether introducing a nonessential technology with minimal available content was a bad idea, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer was quoted by USA Today as saying, "No -- you have to launch [it]. It's there. Competitive pressures -- you read in the papers, so-and-so is the first to release 3-D TV. You don't want to be the last."
At this year's CES, with the help of "Green Hornet" stars Seth Rogan and Jay Chou, Sony triumphantly showcased a pair of prototype devices intended to serve as the company's innovation centerpieces. The first was a glasses-free portable 3-D video player suitable for use in the car. The second was a Geordi LaForge-esque "personal 3-D viewing visor" that wags promptly dubbed the "Headman."
Meanwhile, as Douglas Krone, CEO of Dynamism and Gizmine -- sister companies that sell otherwise-unavailable Japanese gadgets to American early adopters -- notes, the home of Sony has become the land of Apple.
"I was at a party last night in central Tokyo that happened to have a bunch of twentysomething guests," he says. "Every time I saw something glowing, it was an iPhone. It was a chilling display of dominance -- five years ago, you would have seen 99.9 percent Japanese handsets and 0.1 percent Nokias and MotoRAZRs. Softbank's flagship stores look almost comical now, with rows and rows of iPhones broken only by the occasional row of iPads, in a space that used to have a wide array of handsets."
The unexpected popularity of the iPhone and iPad in a country hitherto dominated by phones with a far greater array of features and capabilities has taken many pundits by surprise. A 2009 Wired.com Gadget Lab article, "Why Japanese Hate the iPhone," even predicted that the iPhone would be a profound flop, with Japanese consumers seeing the device as outmoded technology offering insufficient support for video and multimedia messaging and a complete lack of standard (for Japan, anyway) features like a built-in TV tuner. It has instead become a game-changing hit -- selling over 5 million units and owning, as of the last quarter of 2010, over 72 percent of the country's rapidly expanding smartphone market.
Apple's successful conquest of Sony's home turf could be seen as the final evidence that the Cupertino company is what Deutschman calls Sony's "spiritual successor." "Under Jobs, Apple has the kind of passion for design and innovation that Sony did in its heyday," he says. "Everything they do is the 'greatest thing we've ever done,' which will 'once again change the world.' And recently, most of the time they've been right."
There have been questions as to whether Apple can continue its stunning run of success in Jobs' absence -- pointing to how the company foundered after its founder was ousted in 1986. The difference between then and now is that Jobs has spent much of the past seven years (yes, it's been that long since Jobs first announced he'd undergone surgery for pancreatic cancer) laying the groundwork for the company's transition -- not merely in terms of succession, which most analysts have focused on, but in its fundamental business model.
The most critical announcements that Apple has made, and has yet to make, relate not to new products, but fundamental extensions of the infrastructure that Jobs has quietly embedded into and around his iconic devices: Seamless cross-device integration; ridiculously simple platforms for downloading, sharing and streaming content; a one-click payment system that currently holds more than 100 million active accounts, each with linked credit card information.
The rumors are rife about Apple's soon-to-come move to the cloud -- which would make its media and application framework both ubiquitous and device-agnostic -- and an even-sooner-to-come addition of wave-to-pay technology to its mobile devices -- which would allow Apple's iTunes accounts to be used to purchase real-world goods as well as digital ones.
If so, Jobs's last act as CEO might well be not just to change the world, but to build a new one, with Apple's technology at its core. That is, if the rumors prove true.
"Who knows?" says Deutschman. "Whatever happens, for the next two or three years, Apple is in terrific shape. It has incredible momentum. And you know -- no one's made money betting against Steve Jobs in a very long time."


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subset: commoncrawl


text:
This post started as a comment at Punt This! on Warsong Gulch 101, but I thought I'd write it up properly and add some badly composed images… you know, my hallmark.
This is my standard flag carrying strategy in WSG.
It's the one that proves 2 things.
- Mages (make that any clothy) can flag carry
- Horde Graveyard is a good way to come.
I have probably returned 8-9 out of 10 flags this way. You are usually in your flag room before the Horde knows you took the flag, so with the Horde flag in your base, the only other thing required is the return of your flag.
I often find that after running this once in a BG (assuming the EFC is taken down fast for a quick cap), that all opposition evaporates. I guess when there is a flag cap within the first few minutes, and they didn't see the flag carrier, they just figure they wont see them again and it is already game over.
This is also a good strategy for grabbing their flag just before they cap your flag. They tend to mill about in disbelief that they couldn't cap, and then split their forces in several directions trying to catch you.
This is a guide written about me, a Mage, A Gnome Mage, and my flag running strategy from my perspective. That said, my non-Mage buddies do the same thing if I am ever too slow, or choose to cover them instead.. Warlocks, Disc Priests, Resto Shaman they all do fine.
This strategy is augmented if you have done a little preparation before entering WSG and before the gates open. Note you can't use the pots in RBGs, but you can chew on them in normals.
- Source some Swiftness Potions – Requires level 15 (You will use 6 per battle if you do the 3 caps… I keep 40 on me all the time, last thing you want is to run out when you need a burst of speed)
- Source some Elixir of Camouflage Requires level 50 (This is optional, but I'd rather not have Hunters and Druids tracking my approach to the EFR)
- Buy 1-2 healer friends, an annoying DPS never hurts either (These are optional… who needs friends when you are about to fly like the wind)
- Re-roll Mage (Also optional, but well and truly advised by me)
- Mage food (If you are a Mage… you are a Mage aren't you… otherwise get some)
- Lock Rocks/Candy (You may be on your own at times, this may save your bacon… mmmm bacon)
- Proudly announce you will be flag carrying.
- Tell Healers to stay mounted and wait for you out the front (as is about to be described).
- Tell everyone you are coming via graveyard, that you are fast, but you need the EFC down ASAP.
- Pop your Elixir of Camouflage
- With 15 seconds before the gates open, Slow Fall everyone (just common courtesy as a Mage)
The Downstroke
You will use this flag running path each time, from the moment that the gate opens until the game ends. It assumes that you are starting in the flag room, or on your way to the EFR. Even if your GY is being camped, just slip over the edge, mount up and ride. It's the fastest way, mounted the whole time. If you are somewhere else, then work it out.
Face up to the gate just before the timer expires, start auto-run and as soon as the gate moves, BLINK!
At this point you can mount and thanks to Slow Fall, launch yourself off the cliff. Left or right of the hut is irrelevant unless there are Horde in one of those locations. If there aren't, but there is a friendly pally at your side, stick with them until they deviate from the path.
You can if you so desire jump a couple of stumps.. I usually do, but the main reason to do so is to avoid melee that are close by. If you don't know of any, just ride like the wind to the right of the wagon and hut.
Meanwhile, hopefully at least one healer and one support player is with you… if not, whatever, they wont see you coming… or going…
The rest of your team can do what they want. I prefer if they harry midfield, waiting for the EFC to come to it's death.
As a general rule Horde exit their base over their graveyard (1), a couple will come out the tunnel (2) and maybe 1 o two will come down/to their ramp (3) to slow you down. Their EFC will most likely try the ramp on the initial push, Allies are too close to the ramp… after that they are opportunists.
As a flag runner, they are none of your concern, hopefully on the initial push no one dismounts, they just rush the EFR. If someone has to stop, let it be the support… that's what they are there for. If you as the flag runner get pulled down, then your support player, or healer just got a new role – Flag Carrier. You just don't stop, keep the momentum going.
Things take a different path once your get to the top of the ramp outside the Horde base. Heals and Support don't enter the flag room, they wait mounted out the front.
You then run through level 2, practicing a little caution as you are about to enter the room. Now is the time to put on your shields. If you can see Horde name tags, pop invisibility (you can't use it when carrying the flag, so whatever, it's about cooldowns after that).
From now on be prepared to pop your Trinket and/or Escape Artist You're a Gnome right?), you are about to blink to leave the room, so reserve that for that purpose.
Drop down into the room, grab the flag, double check you have grabbed the flag, make sure you are just out of the flag alcove (uneven floor screws your blink), line up the doors to the ramp and…
Another few steps and you are reunited with your support crew. 9 out of 10 times it will be a clean exit… it's not expected, not the 1st time, not the 2nd time, maybe the 3rd time, but you will still get away with it the 4th+ time.
If you have improved Blink, you will now be enjoying 3 seconds of 70% speed boost, which will get you out past the wagon on your right.
Speaking of right, this is where you make a sharp right, while drinking your Swiftness Potion. You support crew will now either block those trying to leave the building, or follow you on their mounts – so you wont out pace them.
Run deep across that right side of the "ramp" and as you go, throw slow falls over your shoulder to your support team, of course remembering yourself now too. You can also refresh your shields now.
Once you get to the end of their "ramp", drop down between the logs and the machinery. Generally any Horde that have just rezzed and have the foresight to look around before charging into Mid, will get caught by the logs, hut or wagons, so worry less about them.
Your Blink cooldown will be up by the time you get to the end of those logs – Blink
(OK, just taking a moment out.. the Blinks and their cooldowns can be managed to get you across the field fast, but they are also a-get-out-of-snares-free-card, so just before it comes of cooldown have a look about… is there a Mage about to Nova you, and DK about to pull you, a friendly Priest about to pull you – if so, wait – you will get the same result – distance – but you will also remove the snare.)
By now the horde should have picked up your flag.
They normally come Tunnel ((1) or Ramp (2) – at which point they seem to go more mid field leaving you alone normally). They might come Graveyard.. I see that in about 1 out of 50 games.
Work out who the EFC is and set them as your focus target.. their health levels just became more important than yours.
Run… don't tell me you stopped… run!
Your next blink will come up just as you get in range of the big tree, line it up, BLINK!
Your objective on this path is to limit visual (if not casting) line of sight. So blinking between objects, or behind objects is the idea. The wagons, the trees, the hut and the fence all provide visual if not spell issues for the Horde.
Your Support team meanwhile… Your Healer should be in front of you, especially if they are a priest. Your other support nearby. Best if they aren't "on top of you" as a Horde scanning the edges is more likely to see your support team than you the FC, so if you have a little distance between you, it makes it harder for them to pin-point you.
Attacks either come at the end of the logs, or as you are preparing to blink to the tree, they need to be aware of that to keep the Horde out of range of you. You need to be aware for the same reason. If your healer is a Priest, then they need to be ahead of you, because they may need to pull your out while your Blink is on cooldown.
Remember, as the flag running crew, your job isn't to stop and fight… keep your eye on your flag room, CC & slow the Horde chasers.
Your Blockers and Chasers have (hopefully) now engaged the EFC and are doing their best to peel off him, slow him and of course kill him to return the flag.
The main difficulty you might have now is as you head behind the hut. The difficulty is usually less from chasers and more from a head on collision with the EFC's party. Usually however, your Blockers and Chasers are moving to intercept the EFC, whereas the Horde have no idea where you are.
Behind the hut, your Blink will come off cooldown. You have a choice… no chasers, blink immediately. A few chasers, Blink is now snare removal.
Hopefully your Priest will be riding up the ramp at this point (you did make friends with a Priest right?) to cover you in case of emergency… if not, meh whatever.
You are now heading up the right side of the ramp fence. Smart Horde will head up the ramp, less so will follow you to the right.
About 90% of the way along the fence is a small break, duck through it and you are now on the ramp. If you haven't used your blink yet, line it up and go.
Now you are on top of the ramp, your blink is on cooldown, but the Swiftness Potion isn't – run, run, run.
By the time you get to the 2nd level entrance, your blink is off cooldown. Choices again, blink now or later… now is usually good.
Assuming that the EFC has gone down, run in 2nd level, drop down and cap. if you are concerned, throw down a ring of frost as you come in. Don't slow fall, it slows you down, you don't want them having the extra second to pick up the flag.
If the EFC hasn't yet gone down, but is close (you know this because you are watching his health on your focus target) drop down into the flag alcove so it is an auto cap.
If the EFC still has plenty of health, then you have 3 options. Stay 2nd level, in the corner of the wall out of sight from above, below and behind, or drop down to the flag alcove or little room. I tend to stay on 2nd level, as that gives me the other two options if required.
Preferably you have (at least) one healer and a support with you, but one or none is fine. It's not about you at this point, it's about him. Strong Horde O will probably rip you to shreds, what you really wanted was for the EFC to be dead before, or as your entered the FR. Still, maintain line of sight with your healer (no running you big chicken!) and look after them and you will survive most initial assaults.
OK so you capped, well maybe you died, but let's assume initially you capped.
If your Blink is available, then blink and start again from GO!, otherwise just get out of your flag room… your job is to carry, not to tarry!
If you have rezzed at the graveyard, then keep working it… it will work… just don't stop the circuit.
3 Minute, One Man Turtle
If the scores are tied (and you capped last) and there are only a few minutes left on the clock, AND the EFC has your flag, then it may not be wise to risk the gauntlet.. may not be, depends on the battle.
If it isn't then you might want to turtle, and if possible do it solo, so the others have a chance to stop the EFC (and if you have the time, you can continue on your journey)
You start it like any other flag run, but you don't drop off the edge of the "ramp".
For the Horde to get to you, they will either have to go to their ramp and across, or up the tunnel, through the flag room and out.
Either way, you have plenty of time to see them coming… but meanwhile the clock is ticking while they navigate the circuit, knowing you can still escape.
If as I say, the EFC is taken down and the path appears clear (or the heat is too great up top), drop down and continue for a flag cap.
So that's it, the strategy that turned us into a WSG machine.
Some bits need a little practice: getting through the fence, timing your blinks etc. but otherwise, it's a simple circuit.
Gnomer and Out!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.


text:
Connecting Through Your Company
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Employee Giving: Invite the Food Bank to your Employee Giving event. We provide educational materials to support increasing your company's employee giving to the Food Bank
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For more information, contact Corporate Partnerships at email@example.com or 404.892.FEED (3333) x1271.


text:
Hi all, I am new in this forum and this is my first post: I am a Java beginner and I hope to have some help from you.
I my main class (SplitJFrame) I have a GUI with a text area: in another class (FileImport) I have a method to read a txt file, put it in an array and print the array.
public void importToArray(){ int rows = 0; bin = new String[numberOfLines()][6]; try { FileReader fr = new FileReader(fileToImport); BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(fr); String line = null; while((line = br.readLine())!= null){ StringTokenizer stk = new StringTokenizer(line, ","); while(stk.hasMoreTokens()){ for (int cls = 0;cls<6; cls++){ bin[rows][cls]= stk.nextToken(); } rows++; }//end inner while loop }//end outer while loop br.close(); }//end try catch(Exception e){ System.out.println(e); } }
Plus another simple method that return the array
I would like to display in text area first 3 and last 3 rows of txt file stored in array named bin.
How can I do this?


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Truman Rejoins Kili & Rachel
Truman returns to the bird room to rejoin the other parrots. A recap of the parrot health situation and a video of Truman's reunion with Kili for the first time in over a year.
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text:
How Right Wing Libertarians, John Birthers And Comspiracy Freaks Are Trying To Hijack The Occupy Movement
The Occupy movement's evolving agenda is in danger of being sullied by association with neo-Nazi David Duke and antigovernment crusader Ron Paul.
"End the Fed" signs, and other Ron Paul-inspired sloganeering have been a staple of Occupy encampments from the birth of the movement. To an extent, that reflects the Occupiers' diversity of ideas. But Paul, who wrote a book called End the Fed in 2009, has a spotty reputation among champions of social justice, which was made worse this week with the release of another round of racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic comments excerpted from a newsletter he published throughout the 1980s.
At many Occupy encampments, "End the Fed" signs are everywhere, and Paul supporters are becoming more and more vocal — using the language of the Occupy movement in service of their extremist anti-government agenda.
For the most part cooler (and more progressive) heads prevail, but to a certain extent in the movement, anger at Wall Street and its bankers is morphing into anger at the Federal Reserve and international "banksters" — a term long popular among libertarians, John Birchers and the armed right-wing Patriot Movement.
The Occupy movement's evolving agenda is in danger of being sullied by association with Paul, whose position includes at its core a conspiracy theory involving the Federal Reserve — a decades-old right-wing bugaboo. On the web, a crucial battleground in the era of the online revolution, the Occupy Movement's central critique of the obscene power of corporations is in danger of being slapped way off course. Ron Paul supporters dominated the conversation in the public forum on OccupyWallSt.org, the movement's unofficial Web site, throughout the fall. A December post on the forum complained about the Paul-partisan spammers, and warned against forging an alliance with "Wall Street's religious fanatics, the libertarians, espousing their predatory free-market religion."
A few weeks ago, the forum's anonymous moderator finally banned Paul's supporters from propagandizing:
"We do not support an election campaign for 2012. At all. We have removed election material for Obama, Paul, Warren, Paul, Cain, Paul, Perry, Paul, the green party, Paul, Nader, Paul, and did I mention Paul?"
At the same time, the forum mod announced a ban of "conspiracy theories, including any attempt to spam material by David Icke, Lyndon LaRouche, David Duke or Alex Jones."
But elsewhere on the web, the Occupy message is being shanghaied by radical libertarians, Tea Partiers and worse.
On Martin Luther King Day, as the Occupy the Dream marchers were on the move in 13 cities, I Googled "Occupy Federal Reserve," and the first result was a link to Infowars, a Web site run by Alex Jones, a Texas-based wingnut radio host. Jones, a longtime Ron Paul supporter, believes that the government staged both the World Trade Center attacks and the Oklahoma City bombings; that the Gates Foundation is a eugenics operation; and that the government has been taken over by agents of the New World Order who are planning to release a cancer-causing monkey virus.
Since the Occupy protests began, Jones, whom Rolling Stone has labeled "the most paranoid man in America," has added a wrinkle to his shtick, ranting and blogging relentlessly on behalf of OWS and the 99 percent, while threading attacks on the 1 percent into his vitriolic rants. He also began to call (loudly) for the Occupy protesters to turn their attention to the Fed. Apparently it has become his chief mission to embrace — and be embraced by — the Occupy movement. His gambit may be working.
While Occupy the Fed appears to be largely a creation of Jones and other right-leaning libertarians, it is having some success weaving itself into the fabric of the movement. The Facebook page "Occupy Federal Reserve" contains status updates from thousands of Friends apparently affiliated with the mainstream Occupy movement. It also contains hundreds of updates posted by radical libertarians and wack-job conspiracy freaks. Days after launching, @OccupyFederalReserve posted a link to the 2007 documentary Zeitgeist, which claims to prove that 9/11 was orchestrated as a pretext for the creation of a police state, that the Fed and the IRS are criminal enterprises and, by the way, that Jesus Christ did not exist.
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24 Mei 2011
HMNZS Endeavour (photo : NZ Navy)
The new ship to replace the navy's ageing tanker, Endeavour, could have some serious weaponry to fight off pirates. The 23-year-old Endeavour will be replaced with a new ship in 2018 at a cost of about $250 million.
Navy planners looking at the best ship to order said the new ship would at the least have .50-calibre machine guns and other measures to ward off pirates.
Endeavour was built on a commercial tanker design in Korea and modified for the navy as a fleet replenishment ship, which could refuel other ships at sea, carry stores and operate a helicopter.
However, it had no weapons on board other than 5.56mm Steyr assault rifles and pistols. The navy said it was looking at following global trends to give the new ship the ability to fight off pirates.
Commander Tony Hayes, the navy officer in charge of the acquisition programme, said as well as .50-calibre machine guns, they were also looking at a deck layout which would allow a mounting for a rapid-fire Phalanx Gatling gun similar to those fitted to the Anzac frigates, Te Kaha and Te Mana.
The 20mm, radar guided, close-in weapons system is used to ward off missile attacks, strike aircraft and fast inshore attack boats and could fire up to 4500 rounds a minute.
''We would consider in the design placement for such a thing. If you look at what the other major navies are doing, they are considering self defence weapons on these types of ships.''
Cdr Hayes said as more navies opted for more multi-role ships, including ships like HMNZS Canterbury and the Endeavour replacement, they did not have as many warships.
''These multi-role vessels are having to do more jobs and independently.''
''We would want appropriate anti-piracy measures.
Anti-piracy measures could include high pressure water systems, barbed wire and ''all sorts of attachments you will see on a lot of the major oil tankers.
''It is to physically to stop people climbing or putting grappling irons on the sides of ships.''
Endeavour will become non-compliant with International Maritime Organisation requirements in 2013 and be reclassified, with its cargo volume reduced.
Two years ago the navy spent about $2m closing off some of the tanks to effectively give it a double hull, reducing the capacity by 25 percent to about 5500 tonnes of fuel. From 2013 it would be limited to 5000 tonnes of fuel.
The replacement ship was likely to be more versatile than Endeavour but it would retain its main function as a fleet tanker.
''If budget permits and the base design permits we would like to see it with additional craneage, the ability to take a lot more containers and maybe support amphibious operations too.''
The ship would also be able to land the air force's new NH 90 helicopters and the navy's Seasprite helicopters and carry limited numbers of troops.


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Las Vegas has put together another stellar lineup for New Year's Eve, leaving you with the question of not what are you going to do, but sadly what do you have to miss out on? You can find Foster the People, Travis Barker and some of the best DJ's and that is just scratching the surface as every Las Vegas venue has pulled out the stops to make sure you have a memorable New Year's Eve to kick off 2013.
The Palms has put together and entire weekend of entertainment and to make life easy for you they have created the "All Weekend Party Monster Pass" that will get you into the best parties all weekend long with just one ticket. This will give you VIP express complimentary entry to all events between Friday, December 28th and Monday, December 31st inside Rain, Moon and ghostbar.
Kelly Rowland at Rain Nightclub, December 29 – Kelly Rowland is back with "Ice," a Lil Wayne-assisted single that will surely heat up the charts. The R&B superstar just released the new video this week and will kick off New Year's Eve weekend at Palms with a special concert in Rain Nightclub. Rowland will be performing her popular hits and fan favorites from her three solo albums including the sexy chart-topper, "Motivation." Kelly's fourth solo album titled 'Year Of the Woman'(which features ICE) is scheduled to be released next year. She also will be preforming her new songs from this album.
Questlove and DJ Jazzy Jeff perform together at Moon Nightclub, December 29 – Grammy Award-winners Questlove of The Roots and DJ Jazzy Jeff bring their energetic, body-thumping beats to Moon Nightclub for a unique collaborative performance. The set will feature Questlove's sonically inventive skills on the drums paired with DJ Jazzy Jeff's signature flawless DJ talents, for a back-and-forth never seen before.
Iggy Azalea at Moon Nightclub, December 30 – Australian underground hip-hop sensation, Iggy Azalea, brings her energetic hits 'Pu$$y' and 'Murda Business (featuring T.I.), to Moon Nightclub for a special concert. And after signing with Wilhelmina Models this summer, she's now taking over the fashion industry with her hipster-street chic and unapologetic philosophy. After a stint with Levi Jeans' 'Go Forth' campaign, Iggy has landed the perfect campaign for her glamourpuss street style -- she's the face of House of Holland's new sunglasses range.
Travis Barker withYelawolf at Rain Nightclub, December 31 – Drummer and producer icon Travis arker teams up with rapper Yelawolf to bring their new collaborative project to Rain Nightclub on New Year's Eve. The duo will perform their new extended play tracklist "Psycho White," which dropped on November 13 featuring the new song "Push Em" where Barker provides the unmatched percussion and Yelawolf lays down his spitfire flow.
The Palms will get the New Year's Eve entertainment goingearly as Pitbull will be performing at The Pearl Concert Theater on December 28th and 29th.
Haze Nightclub at ARIA Resort & Casino will celebrate New Year's Eve with a full line-up of star-studded entertainment during the first ever Haze Music Festival. Up and coming rock band FUN will be headlining the New Year's Eve festivities and you can catch world renowned DJ Laidback Luke on the 29th and R&B sensation John Legend on the 30th. You can purchase individual tickets or you can purchase the all-access package to make
sure you get into Haze all three nights.
Foster the People will be ringing in the New Year at Bank Nightclub at Bellagio by performing their hit "Pumped up Kicks." Ludacris will get the weekend going by performing at Bank on the 29th.
If you are trying to avoid the big nightclubs and want something a little more intimate the Gold Lounge inside of ARIA is the perfect spot for you. With your ticket into the Gold Lounge you will be treated to a three hour open bar including a champagne toast at midnight. DJ ShadowReD will be spinning all-night long for your entertainment.
The Cosmopolitan has lined up the Killers on December 28th and 29th and the Red Hot Chili Peppers on New Year's Eve at The Chelsea.
New Year's Eve in Las Vegas is an experience unlike any other, from fireworks, to endless parties and every type of music you could think of. This is sure to be one memorable night, but make sure you plan out your night to avoid long lines and keep in mind transportation is going to be hard to find and make sure you are all well rested for a long and memorable night.


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When Facebook goes public this year, it will raise at least $5 billion, making it the biggest Internet IPO the world has ever seen. The day it debuts on the stock exchange, Facebook will be worth more than General Motors, the New York Times Company, and Sprint Nextel combined. The next morning, Mark Zuckerberg's smiling face will appear on the front page of newspapers around the world.
But don't be surprised if that smile looks like the forced grin of someone dragged to the altar. Truth be told, Zuckerberg is going public not because he wants to but because SEC rules have forced his hand. Once a company takes on more than 500 shareholders—a number that Facebook easily surpasses if you include all the investors and employees who have bought or received shares over the years—it must register its stock. That means shareholders can trade it in the OTC (over the counter) markets, out of the company's control and without its consent or cooperation. No high-profile business wants its shares to be traded in that opaque purgatory of low valuations.
And so, like a hapless groom, Zuckerberg is about to become just one part of an institution much bigger than himself—a publicly listed limited-liability joint-stock company. The visionary who turned down a billion-dollar offer to cash out at the age of 22, the imperial CEO with complete control over the company he built from scratch, will now run a company owned by hordes of shareholders from all over the world.
Zuckerberg clearly does not relish this prospect, and he has taken great pains to preserve his iron grip on Facebook. When the company goes public, Zuckerberg will still control 56.9 percent of the votes, will be free to single-handedly appoint directors, and will even be able to name his successor. Technically, Facebook may be going public, but Zuckerberg will continue to run it like his own privately held concern.
There's another option: Skip the VC cash. That may sound like suicide, but a recent study showed that most fast-growing US companies take no venture funding at all.
Thanks to those safeguards, Facebook will probably weather its IPO just fine. But when the world's most successful young tech entrepreneur does everything in his power to minimize the impact of public ownership, it makes one thing clear: The IPO model is broken.
Going public might be good for a company's investors and employees, but it is usually bad for the company itself. It forces CEOs to focus on short-term stock fluctuations at the expense of long-term growth. It wrests control from the founders and gives it to thousands of faceless shareholders.
For hugely successful mega-businesses—Apple, Facebook, Google—going public has its benefits. Public companies enjoy cachet, tax advantages, and access to more and better financing options. But for many young companies, the drive to go public results in a death spiral of unsustainable growth.
It doesn't have to be this way. There are better options for financing technology companies. But first we have to kill the tech industry's senseless addiction to the IPO.
For roughly 65 years—say, from 1933 to 1998—the initial public offering was the engine of American capitalism. Entrepreneurs sold shares to investors and used the proceeds to build their young companies or invest in the future. After their IPOs, for instance, Apple and Microsoft had the necessary funds to develop the Macintosh and Windows. The stock market has been the most efficient and effective method of allocating capital that the world has ever seen.
That was a useful function, but it's one that IPOs no longer serve. Going public is more difficult than it used to be—Sarbanes-Oxley regulations have made filing much more difficult, and today's investors tend to shy away from Internet companies that don't have a proven track record of steady profitability. That has created a catch-22: By the time a company can go public, it no longer needs the cash. Take Google. It had already been profitable for three years before raising $1.2 billion in its 2004 public offering. And Google never spent the money it raised that year. Instead, it put the cash straight into the bank, where the funds have been sitting ever since. Today, Google's cash pile has grown to more than $44 billion.
Of course, tech industry startups don't have to wait for an IPO to raise capital. Hordes of venture capital firms and angel investors are clamoring to offer them money. (And there are more all the time; VCs invested $18.2 billion in 2011, up 32 percent from 2010.) And many entrepreneurs don't need as much capital anyway—cloud technology has made it vastly cheaper to start a web company. That's one reason why startups haven't been in any rush to go public. In 1985 most VC-backed companies were less than four years old at the time of their IPOs. By 2009 most of them were more than 10 years old.
If the primary goal of the IPO is no longer to provide funds for promising young companies, what purpose does it serve? For the most part, it has become a reward for the founders, employees, and early investors—a jackpot for those who placed their bets correctly. That's not as bad as it sounds. Without the promise of going public, companies couldn't use stock options to attract talented employees—a crucial tool for startups, which usually can't offer competitive salaries. And it's the possibility of a future IPO that makes a company attractive to venture capitalists and angel investors in the first place.
On the surface, there's nothing wrong with this arrangement. It simply allows young companies to raise cash while deferring their IPO until they're more established. But it has created a series of perverse incentives, in which investors' interests conflict with—and usually trump—those of the companies they fund.
When the web was new, all you needed to launch a public company like Netscape was an idea, a couple hundred employees, and a multimillion-dollar loss in the previous year. After the dotcom bubble burst, the bar to going public got much higher. When Google held its IPO in 2004, it had already been profitable for three years. And when Facebook hits the public market, it will be truly huge—with a profit of $1 billion in 2011. So if you want to go public today, here's the secret: Build a company that's so big you don't need the money.—Joanna Pearlstein
|Year of IPO
|Dollars raised
|$207 million
|$1.5 billion
|$5 billion*
|Number of employees at time of IPO filing
|Revenue in fiscal year before IPO
|$8 million
|$1.8 billion
|$3.7 billion
|Profit (loss) in year before IPO
|($16.5 million)
|$128.9 million
|$1 billion
|Quote from prospectus
|"There can be no assurance that the market for the Company's products and services will develop … or that individual PC users will use the Internet for commerce and communication."
|"Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short-term gains."
|"Simply put: we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services."
VCs and angels may talk about changing the world, but their business model rests on a more prosaic calculation: Buy low, sell high. They invest in companies they think will become more valuable, so they can sell their stake for a sizable profit. From the time that VCs invest in a company, they have five years—10 at the most—to sell their entire position, hopefully for many times more than their original investment. After that, it doesn't matter to them whether the company survives a year or a century.
To put it another way, the VC model is based on creating wealth for investors, not on building successful businesses. You buy into a company early on and sell out a few years later; if you pick well, you can make lots of money. But your profits don't accrue to the company itself, which could implode after your exit for all you care. Silicon Valley is full of venture capitalists who have become dynastically wealthy off the backs of companies that no longer exist.
Of course, once VCs make their investments, they don't just sit back and hope for the best; they push the companies to grow as fast as possible. That may work for the likes of Apple, Facebook, and Google—all-or-nothing bets on legitimately world-changing technologies. But it creates problems for more modest startups, which might have the potential to grow into perfectly sustainable medium-size firms.
Because venture capitalists require such massive returns, they invariably force the companies they invest in to take outsize risks. Look, for instance, at Groupon. In the first quarter of 2010, it made a profit of $8 million on revenue of $44 million. That's a healthy profit margin for a young company, and it's easy to see how it could have grown steadily from that point onward.
But in the first quarter of 2011, Groupon's revenue skyrocketed to $645 million—an increase of 1,357 percent in one year. Meanwhile, the once-profitable company was suddenly faced with a loss of $146 million. In one quarter. The reason for the reversal? Groupon, with the full support of its VC backers, juiced revenue by spending gobs of money on marketing, sacrificing profits for growth. That's an enormous bet: If the company grows fast enough, everyone gets extremely wealthy—but if it stumbles, it can quickly wither.
In this case, the gamble paid off. When Groupon went public in November 2011, just three years after it first launched, it was valued at almost $13 billion, making billionaires of founders Eric Lefkofsky, Brad Keywell, and CEO Andrew Mason. But now the company must keep up its torrid pace of growth or risk alienating its many investors. Indeed, Groupon's very first quarterly earnings report sparked hand-wringing news stories about the company's performance.
And for every Groupon success story, there are scores of VC-backed companies that never go public. Sometimes the flameouts are truly spectacular: The phone service Amp'd Mobile, for example, was so eager to grow that it signed up customers regardless of their ability to pay. When too many of them turned out to be deadbeats, the company went bankrupt in 2007, taking $360 million in venture capital down with it. Amp'd didn't need to fail. It might well have achieved sustainable and modest profitability had it not expanded at such a breakneck pace.
Or take Zappos. CEO Tony Hsieh had hoped to maintain control of his company, but his investors, led by Sequoia Capital's Mike Moritz, had other ideas. In 2009, worried about Zappos' cash flow, they started pressuring Hsieh. "If the economy didn't improve," Hsieh recalled in Inc. magazine, "the board would fire me and hire a new CEO who was concerned only with maximizing profits." As a result, Hsieh decided to sell Zappos to Amazon, which he thought would be a better steward than the investor-packed board of directors. Hsieh may have kept the board from seizing control of his company, but he had to give up his independence to do so.
Once a company goes public, the demand for constant growth only increases. Conventional public companies enter into a devil's bargain: "Give us capital now and we'll attempt to grow in perpetuity," says Silicon Valley-based IPO consultant Lise Buyer. "The problem comes when companies try to do heroic things to meet expectations every quarter, even when that's an unnatural act."
It's like British cyclist Tom Simpson, who took a combination of cognac and amphetamines before a brutally hot stage of the 1967 Tour de France. It enabled him to push past his limits—until he collapsed and died on the slopes of Mount Ventoux. Sometimes it's best to conserve energy, to play the long game, and not to risk everything for the sake of a short-term win. But once you're public, the markets start pushing you to hit those numbers every quarter. And the results can be fatal. Look, for example, at Hewlett-Packard—arguably the most venerable and respected company in Silicon Valley, stifled by cost-cutting managers and board members who were always trying to do what was right for the share price rather than what was right for the company and its legacy. Today HP is struggling to define itself.
Of course, plenty of venture-backed companies fail before they have a chance to go public. VCs tend to shrug that off as a cost of doing business; their model depends on funding a whole lot of losers in order to discover a few big winners. And if they can't take their portfolio companies public, they'll simply sell them. Indeed, selling out to an established player has become a popular alternative exit strategy for young companies. (Last year 429 VC-backed companies were acquired, while 52 went public.)
The problem is that, despite every assurance, acquired companies almost always give up their identity and mission when they get folded into a larger behemoth. It's a story you hear again and again: Flickr was a flagship of the Web 2.0 era until Yahoo bought it and turned it into a photo-sharing afterthought; TechCrunch dominated the tech blogosphere until AOL's meddling alienated founder Michael Arrington and many of his top staffers.
Something has to change. It's time to stop forcing young companies into a broken process. We need to find a way to invest in new businesses without jeopardizing their future.
So, what do you do if you're a young company that doesn't want to go public or get acquired? First you have to find another way of offering equity. After all, without the ability to give away shares, startups would have a much harder time competing for top-notch talent. And as it grows, a company can use that stock on all manner of tactical or strategic priorities. When Apple, say, wants to hire a couple of great engineers, it can throw lots of stock options and restricted stock units at them instead of just paying enormous salaries. It's the Silicon Valley way, and it helps Apple save cash—not that it really needs to, given the rate at which its $98 billion trove of cash and marketable securities is growing.
Look at it this way: When Apple went public in 1980, it had 54.2 million shares outstanding. It has since split three times, so those original 54.2 million shares have now become 434 million shares. But in fact, Apple currently has 929 million shares outstanding. Many of the extra 495 million shares—worth well over $200 billion, at current valuations—were issued over the years to pay for companies or people. And Apple isn't even particularly acquisitive.
All that equity has no value if there isn't some way to convert it into cash eventually. If there's no IPO, how can any shareholders, be they employees or investors, hope to sell their shares?
In fact, there are some clear—and increasingly popular—alternatives. One is to enter the private markets. These are online platforms, like SecondMarket and SharesPost, that let companies trade their stock without inviting public scrutiny. In recent years, these markets have become a crucial step on the way to an IPO. Since 2008, more than $1 billion of stock has changed hands on SecondMarket, the largest of the private markets.
Here's how SecondMarket works: Companies set periodic auction dates, at which point buyers and sellers can post the prices at which they're willing to transact. The company usually retains a right of first refusal, giving it the option to buy back its stock at whatever the winning bid price might be. Unlike public markets, private markets let companies control who buys their stock and who gets access to confidential financial information. From a company's point of view, the great advantage of these markets is that they give outsiders less power and influence.
For investors, buying shares through the private markets is very different from trading public stocks. You can't just sell your shares whenever you want but must wait for an arranged auction—by which point their value may have plummeted.
In other words, these are risky bets, and they are treated as such. To buy shares on these private exchanges, you need to be a rich, accredited investor; they're not accessible to most of us. And it's certainly true that many people are going to lose substantial sums of money in these markets. But that's the whole point of early-stage equity-market investing: It offers massive returns and also very big risks. (Still, it's worth noting that SecondMarket is a broker-dealer and so is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission.)
Private markets are important for other reasons too. In the 1980s, when companies normally went public at four or five years of age, it was reasonable to ask employees to wait until the IPO before they tried to sell stock. Today, when it can easily take a decade to go public, companies are more willing to let their early employees trade shares on secondary markets.
But if private markets currently serve as a way station on the road to an IPO, in theory they could end up replacing the IPO altogether. That would be a boon for most companies. Because these markets restrict the number of times a company's stock can be traded, they avoid the problem of overtrading. In public markets, high-frequency algorithms can trade in and out of a stock hundreds or thousands of times a day, making tiny profits and losses on each transaction. They neither know nor care what the company does; they just trade the flows. At the same time, billions of dollars flow in and out of passive instruments like index funds, which buy and sell a set group of stocks. The result is that we've recently seen record highs in market correlation—stock prices driven by broad market movements rather than by any unique qualities of the companies themselves. The private markets remove those factors, meaning that share prices rise and fall based on a company's unique prospects, not just on global trends over which it has no control.
And there's another option for startups that don't want to go public: Forgo VC and angel investments entirely and fund the company with the profits from your business. That organic-growth option may sound quaint, but it can still be quite successful. Indeed, VC funding is by no means necessary to fund a fast-growing company. In 2009 Paul Kedrosky, a Kauffman Foundation senior fellow and venture capitalist, looked at the Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing companies in the US for every year between 1997 and 2007—a period that includes the VC boom of 1999-2000. He found about 900 companies in all, of which only 16 percent had VC backing. "Such companies almost certainly could have venture investors, if they wanted them," Kedrosky wrote in a paper for Kauffman. In other words, the overwhelming majority of the fastest-growing companies decided that they didn't need VCs.
If the tech industry is to move away from the IPO model, it will have to change some deeply ingrained attitudes. Because most startups hand out equity, any company not offering that perk risks dooming itself to irrelevance, unable to hire the talent it needs to survive. And if a founder says he'll never go public, demand for his company's shares will diminish and its valuation on private markets will be lower; outside investors will always favor companies that are heading toward an IPO. Until a groundswell of CEOs commit to not going public, they'll face overwhelming pressure to do so.
But it's about to get easier for tech CEOs to ignore the IPO's siren song. Legislation wending its way through Congress would change SEC rules, meaning no tech company would find itself forced to go public in the way that Facebook has. The bills, which have been supported quite vocally by a number of CEOs at pre-IPO companies in Silicon Valley, as well as VCs who want more control over the timing of their companies' IPOs, would not count employees toward a company's 500-investor limit. The legislation would also raise that limit to 1,000 shareholders.
It will take a while for tech companies to fully explore the options available to them. Entrepreneurs can be surprisingly conservative about such things. But venture capitalists in the Valley are already resigned to the fact that most of their portfolio companies will never go public. And the more alternatives there are, the better the chance that some of those companies might find some other way to survive or even thrive. Businesses that have choices tend to be worth more money. Venture capitalists even have a term to describe it—option value. It could just be the next big thing.
Felix Salmon (firstname.lastname@example.com) is a blogger for Reuters; he wrote about high-frequency trading in issue 19.01.Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.


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GRENOBLE, France, Dec. 30 (UPI) -- Former Formula One champion Michael Schumacher suffered cerebral lesions and brain contusions following a nearly fatal skiing accident, French doctors said.
Schumacher remained in critical condition Monday at a French hospital following Sunday's serious fall on a ski slope. Doctors said they could not offer a prognosis yet.
A statement released by the University Center Hospital of Grenoble, France, indicated the greatest driver in F1 history was in a coma when he arrived and required immediate brain surgery, CNN reported.
The 44-year-old German, who retired from the circuit for a second time in 2012, fell while skiing at the Meribel resort and hit his head on a rock, resort director Christophe Gernignon-Lecomte told the U.S. broadcaster.
He said it remained unclear what caused the accident, but added it was not linked to an avalanche.
Schumacher was wearing a helmet and was not alone during the accident, but no one else was involved, Schumacher's representative, Sabine Kehm, said in a statement released to the official F1 website. Doctors said the helmet likely saved Schumacher's life, Radio France Internationale reported.
He was airlifted off the slope by helicopter after being checked by ski patrol members, but was described as being conscious at the time.
Schumacher won the Formula One championship seven times in his storied racing career.


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Before I remake this thread, I just wanted to put forth some guidelines about posts:
- Stay on topic
- It's not a race to find the most breaking news. Posting something from a few months ago is fine.
- Mainstream and Alternative science articles are welcome.
- Do not spam the thread with the same topic everyday. Especially if people aren't that interested.
- Posting small excerpts occasionally is fine - just don't abuse it.
- Post just the HEADLINE + LINK. Copying and pasting the entire article isn't necessary and clutters the thread (however it's ok every now and then)
- If you strongly oppose something, make a thread to debate/rant.


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Sunday, November 18, 2012
Paper Pieced Kaleidoscope Tutorial
28 comments:
- ♥Duff said...
What's this "really pleased" business? Your pillow is super-swoll-fabulous!!
- November 18, 2012 at 8:50 PM
- Katie B said...
Perfect! Thanks for the tutorial!
- November 18, 2012 at 9:14 PM
- Token Asian Friend said...
Thanks! I've always wondered how to make that block on my own :)
- November 18, 2012 at 9:41 PM
- Debbie said...
This is really lovely!
- November 18, 2012 at 10:30 PM
- Cille said...
Thank you so much for taking the time to do this tutorial. It's great and definately a must do :)
- November 18, 2012 at 11:41 PM
- bruinbr said...
Beautiful pillow! What a lucky partner and thanks for the tutorial!!
- November 19, 2012 at 10:44 AM
- sukie said...
Great tutorial!
- November 19, 2012 at 2:45 PM
- happy zombie said...
Gorgeous, gorgeous, GORGEOUS! And I love your tute, I'm sooo going to have to try it.
- November 20, 2012 at 2:22 PM
- Tennjenny said...
I love love love this pillow and thank you for posting a tutorial.
- November 25, 2012 at 9:52 AM
- Sarah said...
Love this tutorial Brooke! Totally using it.
- November 27, 2012 at 7:26 PM
- Steph Zerbe said...
Oh My Goodness, this is stunning and your photo tutorial makes it actually look doable for a beginner like me. THANK YOU! I have to try this!
- December 4, 2012 at 5:59 PM
- Nancy@owensolivia said...
- December 18, 2012 at 10:42 AM
- Beatrice said...
Hello, I've come from Craft Gossip. Thank you for the tutorial.
- December 28, 2012 at 5:35 AM
- Holly said...
This is so pretty, thank you. I might try it, but maybe create a template and print out a bunch rather than hand-draw each one.
- December 28, 2012 at 6:22 AM
- Shannon said...
Love, love, LOVE this pillow! It is so freaking cute!
- January 27, 2013 at 11:22 AM
- ~Kelie~ said...
Wow! This is gorgeous!
- January 27, 2013 at 11:27 AM
- Connie Kresin Campbell said...
Beautiful pillow and thanks for showing how you made your PP template!
- January 28, 2013 at 8:44 PM
- Unknown said...
hello how are you
gusro me much this cushion
grace for the tutorial
you have good week
- February 14, 2013 at 3:20 AM
- Unknown said...
hello how are you
gusro me much this cushion
grace for the tutorial
you have good week
- February 14, 2013 at 3:20 AM
- Lori said...
Thank you so much for this tutorial! I just used it today for a swap project!
- March 12, 2013 at 4:18 PM
- Crystelle Boutique said...
Oh my! I am so glad you shared this pattern with us! I am so amazed by how fabulous this kaleidoscope design is.... Pinning! For sure!
hugs x
Crystelle Boutique
- March 19, 2013 at 3:11 PM
- Karee said...
thank you for this tutorial! going to tackle one of these in April! love the crispness.
- March 23, 2013 at 12:46 PM
- Patricia Lessell said...
Thank you so much for this tutorial it really is wonderful and I never ever thought of making my own paper pattern.
- April 5, 2013 at 11:27 AM
- Di~ said...
ThanksBrooke! I love this! Hope to do it soon!
- May 10, 2013 at 4:24 PM
- Di~ said...
I pinned it! I hope that is ok with you...
- May 10, 2013 at 4:25 PM
- MissesStitches said...
What do I have to do to draw a larger block?
- June 15, 2013 at 11:27 AM
- Claudia/Ompompali said...
Just found your tute and it's exactly what I need. Thank you so much for sharing - now I know how to do it!
- April 30, 2014 at 9:30 PM
- Leslie said...
I know you shared this a looooong time ago, but do you know what fabrics you chose? I love what you used together. I'm just getting into quilting and pieced my first one (just a SUPER simple jelly roll) last month. I'm taking a class in a few weeks to make a lantern quilt (paper piecing). I've been looking online at what colors/prints draw me that I think would translate well. Plus, I need to think about smaller prints that will show for the small pieced pieces. I love what you used here and looked in your tute and in the comments but didn't see any mention. Thanks for any help!
- April 14, 2015 at 4:51 AM


text:
PORTSMOUTH — More than two dozen law enforcement officials gathered in Portsmouth Thursday to thank U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte for her efforts to strengthen New Hampshire's Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force.
The event took place on the heels of the recent signing of the Child Protection Act of 2012, a piece of federal legislation aimed at curbing child exploitation online.
Members of New Hampshire's ICAC team gathered at Portsmouth City Hall with Mayor Eric Spear and representatives from the state attorney general's office to offer their thanks to Ayotte for her advocacy on behalf of the ICAC program.
A previous law appropriated $60 million per year for ICAC task forces, but the funding was set to expire at the end of fiscal 2013. The Child Protection Act reauthorizes funding at the same level for another four years.
"When the exploitation of children occurs online and child pornography is distributed, that child is re-exploited every single time that occurs," Ayotte said, "and there's obviously a huge connection between those who are exploited and the crimes that are committed against them and other crimes, so this is a very important effort."
Written by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., the act is geared at helping police target child predators.
It increases the maximum penalties from 10 years to 20 years for child pornography offenses that involve prepubescent children or children under the age of 12. It also permits federal judges to issue protective orders in cases where child victims or witnesses are being harassed or intimidated.
Another provision gives the U.S. Marshals limited subpoena authority to locate and apprehend fugitive sex offenders.
As the bill was negotiated in Congress, Ayotte worked to "strengthen training and technical assistance" available to law enforcement, according to information provided by her staff.
One outcome of that effort was a provision in the bill that doubles the amount of money available for relevant ICAC training, according to Ayotte.
Implementing the new act carries a total estimated price tag of $121 million between now and fiscal 2018, according to an analysis prepared by the Congressional Budget Office.
New Hampshire's ICAC team was assembled in 1998. The group is headquartered at the Portsmouth Police Department, and it investigates cases across the state. Members are stationed at dozens of participating police departments, including in Rochester, Manchester and Concord, and at the attorney general's office.
The ICAC team coordinates with federal agencies to investigate crimes ranging from possession and manufacturing of child pornography to child prostitution.
Portsmouth Police Chief Stephen DuBois called the ICAC program one of the most important facets of the police department. The ICAC team has provided training to about 1,500 police officers, 150 prosecutors, and at countless other community outreach programs.
Since 2007, the team has investigated more than 500 cases, resulting in 115 arrests.
One such case involved an individual posting sexually explicit photos of children manufactured at his house. An investigator in Washington, D.C., became aware of the photographs, and the ICAC team worked with officials in the attorney general's office and the Hinsdale police. ICAC coordinated the efforts, ultimately leading to the child victims being removed from the home.
DuBois also detailed a second case in which a detailed investigation by the ICAC team turned up evidence of shocking abuse. The case originated in Milton, and was investigated by a Rochester police investigator.
In that case, school bus driver John Wright, 46, pleaded guilty to federal charges of exploiting minors following his arrest last September. The victims used the Provider Bus Services, and had Wright as their Seacoast bus driver. He operated out of Dover and Kittery, Maine.
Authorities issued a search warrant for Wright's home and found thousands of graphic assault images on his computers and peripheral devices, including several videos of Wright assaulting the victims.
Officials concluded Wright used hidden cameras in pens and sunglasses to record students aboard his bus, while he was sexually assaulting them, and even to record other students who were simply riding along.
"Had it not been for the efforts of Sen. Ayotte's commitment to protecting children and partnering with us on training, incidents such as these ... would have remained secret," DuBois said.
Rockingham County Attorney Jim Reams highlighted changes made by the Child Protection Act that will remove barriers to training across the country. He described a changing mindset in New Hampshire courts and among lawmakers regarding the need for tougher sentencing in child sex crime cases.
Ayotte served as New Hampshire attorney general from 2004 to 2009 before being elected to the Senate. During that time, she helped to push for the successful passage of the Online Child Safety Act, according to information provided by her office.
"With the challenges and the great things that we can find on the Internet, and the educational opportunities, we've found that there are many challenges that have come with law enforcement, and our laws were not up to date to deal with those challenges," Ayotte said.
Enacted in 2008, the act increased penalties for people convicted of using the Internet to facilitate a crime against a child. During her tenure, Ayotte also traveled around the state to educate teens and parents about safety online.
"Her work in Washington is absolutely consistent with what she did here when she was our attorney general," Reams said.
Brad Russ, retired Portsmouth police chief, and current director of the New Hampshire ICAC Task Force's Training and Technical Assistance program, held up a printed map, which was marked with pins to represent locations where someone committed a felony offense in the preceding 10 hours by trading child pornography online.
Research shows about 50 percent of those perpetrators are also molesting children, Russ said, and the fact is most of those victims will never come forward to police, he said.
"Local departments often don't have the resources or the expertise to be able to investigate those crimes on their own," Ayotte said, "and that's where the ICAC Task Force, and the collaboration between the task force and local departments makes sure that online predators don't get away."


text:
The F# Depth Colorizer for VS2012 makes it easy to see the nesting-depth of your F# code and ensure that control constructs are properly indented. Compare:
The left screenshot shows how code appears by default. Are the 'try' and 'with' keyword aligned? It can be hard to tell at-a-glance. The right screenshot has the F# Depth Colorizer installed; small changes in background color at each level of nesting/indent highlight various code blocks and make it easy to see where the indents are.
This extension to Visual Studio 2012 parses F# code as you type and interactively updates the background colorization to match the actual parsed structure of the code. It understands the full F# 3.0 language syntax.
This extension is a free VSIX on the Visual Studio Gallery, so it is easy to download and try out. Once installed, it will appear on the Visual Studio 2012 'Tools\Extensions and Updates…' menu:
where you can easily remove it if you decide it's not for you.
Are you using the new 'dark' theme colors in VS2012? Not a problem, the extension can detect dark default colors, and switches to a more appropriate color set for highlighting in the dark theme:
Like the extension, but don't like the default colors? You can change them. UI is not my strong point, so unfortunately the colors are only configurable via the registry (rather than some pretty color-editor GUI). Here is the registry entry for the default light-theme colors:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\Text Editor\FSharpDepthColorizer\Light]
and dark-theme colors:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\Text Editor\FSharpDepthColorizer\Dark]
(You can save these registry examples to a file "foo.reg", run the "foo.reg" file to install those keys, and then use the "regedit" tool to inspect/change the values. Be careful when modifying your registry!)
The DepthN values are strings of six numbers, representing two sets of RGB values, e.g.
DepthN = R1, G1, B1, R2, G2, B2
where N is the depth of the nesting of the source code structure, the RGB1 values are the color of the left edge of the highlight (intention is to provide more visual contrast at the edge), and the RGB2 values are the main color for highlighting that nesting depth.
Note that this is a new extension specifically designed for VS2012 (currently at the RC 'Release Candidate' stage); if you are using VS2010, then you'll need to use the older version of this tool instead, linked here.


text:
BrickStore is OpenSource software, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 . There are the following download and deployment options:
- The source code is freely
available for anyone (see Development ,
CompileFromSource for an instruction how to compile). A version
built this way does not have any restrictions.
- Readily compiled binary
packages for an easy installation can be downloaded for
Windows, Mac OS X and Linux*. These versions support three
modes of operation:
- Private use: You do not need all the BrickLink
Seller features (no reminders and no registration required).
- Demo mode: You want to use the unrestricted demo
version (a reminder will popup every 20 minutes).
Commercial use: You want to use the full version
(no reminders, but you need a valid registration key).
This personal BrickStore registration key can be purchased in my BrickLink Shop for $20 :
- You get a personal registration key, which unlocks all features of your BrickStore installation.
- All updates for the 1.1.x series will be free of charge.
- If you have problems with the program or if you have a feature request, just contact me via e-mail .
* Currently there are only Linux packages for Debian "Etch" und Ubuntu "Dapper" / "Feisty". If you are running a different distribution feel free to contact me .
- Private use: You do not need all the BrickLink Seller features (no reminders and no registration required).
BrickStore is a BrickLink offline tool, very similar to BrikTrak . It is multi-platform (Windows, Mac OS X and Unix), multilingual (currently english, german, french and dutch), fast and stable.
Some things you can do with BrickStore without the slow and clumsy web interface (I'm not saying BrickLink's interface is particular bad - every web interface is slow and clumsy in my opinion):
- Browse and search the BrickLink catalog.
- Easily create XML files for Mass-Upload and Mass-Update either by parting out sets or by adding individual parts (or both).
- Download and view any order by order number.
- Download and view your whole store inventory. An easy way to use this for repricing, is to use the BrickLink Mass-Upload functionality.
- Easily create and upload Wanted-Lists (this is not 100% complete yet - see below ).
- Price your items based on the latest price guide information.
- Create XML data for the BrickLink inventory upload.
- If you load files which contain items with obsolete item ids you can fix them using the BrickLink catalog change-log (this could be automated with some support from BrickLink).
- Calculate differences between two documents: you can easily check, if it is possible to build a set given your current inventory.
What is planned for the next version(s)?
Implementing support for Undo / Redo.Implemented in 1.1.2
- Better support for Wanted-List export (ignore color, ignore condition, etc.)
- More (better) printing templates. I need some feedback from users on this though. 1.1.2 uses JavaScript based templates
For more information take a look at some screenshots on the right side and/or read on...
- BrickStore works on every Windows 32-bit and 64-bit operating system (95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista), Mac OS X (PowerPC: 10.2 "Jaguar" and up, Intel: 10.4 "Tiger" and up) and Linux/Unix (tested on all current Linux distributions - in principle it does run on any Unix-like platform with X-Window-System).
- CPU speed is not that important, but you should have at least 256MB RAM (128MB are sufficient for normal use, but you will most likely get some disk activity due to swapping when you want to e.g. view all parts in the catalog with pictures).
- A desktop resolution of 1024x768 or above helps a lot.
- An internet connection - the faster, the better (of course it also works with a 56K dial-up).
BrickStore is © 2004-2006 Robert
Griebl, licensed under the GNU
General Public License (GPL) version 2 .
All data from www.bricklink.com is owned by BrickLinkTM, which is a trademark of Dan Jezek.
Peeron Inventories from www.peeron.com are owned by Dan Boger and Jennifer Finch.
LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO group of companies, which does not sponsor, authorize or endorse this software.
All other trademarks recognised.
If you have some questions, problems, ideas, feature requests, etc. concerning BrickStore just drop me a line at BrickStore Support <brickstore--AT--softforge.de> .


text:
[Elections 2008]
In his Huffington Post article, "Clinton and RFK Deserve Better", my good friend, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Pooh-poohs Hillary Clinton's mention of Robert Kennedy's assassination in the context of this election, and all the while the DNC slumbers.
What is he suggesting , that she's sleep deprived again? I think that's getting kinda old, and I also think that it's way past time for the DNC to come out of hibernation.
On May 11th while appearing on Meet The Press Hillary's campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe, made the same kind of statement to Tim Russert. He said that in order for Hillary to win the nomination "something big" would have to happen. Then Russett asked, "An act of God, or something catastrophic?", and he said, "Yes, something big would have to happen–absolutely."
Hillary's behavior has betrayed her to be nothing less than America's version of a Third World demagogue–a woman who is so desperate and hungry for power that the thought of seeing it slip through her fingers has caused her to slip into her own private realm of reality. Personally, I'm seriously concerned that she might have left the ranch and gone camping on us. So at this point it behooves us to take her every utterance dead seriously.
Yet, nervous over the growing fracture in the Democratic Party, the DNC is vigorously reminding Democratic voters of the importance of backing the Democratic nominee in order to win the November election. The problem with their position, however, is the DNC is placing all of the responsibility for Democratic success on the voters, while skirting its own responsibility to act in an appropriate and decisive manner. They don't seem to recognize that party loyalty goes both ways.
In light of what the nation has gone through in the past seven years, political parties can no longer expect the voters to just fall in and march in lockstep to the party line. That's what's gotten us to where we are today–involved in a senseless war, without jobs, losing our homes, and with the very pillars of our society under attack.
The Democratic Party is sure to argue that it is for precisely these reasons that we must stick together, however. But that is only true if you're prepared to accept the proposition that everything that's gone wrong in the past seven years is solely the fault of the Republicans, and that is clearly not the case.
While it is true that our current condition is primarily due to Republican greed, shortsightedness, an ineptitude, it is also true that we find ourselves in this condition as a result of the total impotence of the Democratic Party. Democratic politicians have been absolutely gutless for the past seven years. Instead of fighting for the soul of this nation and the ideals they profess to believe in, Democrats have been basing their actions on the direction of the wind; and instead of standing up for what was in the best interest of the nation, they were cowering in the basement on Capitol Hill, desperately trying to protect their own political careers.
But now that the Republican Party has all but self-destructed, the Democrats have chosen this moment to come strutting out to tell us all they want to do to protect our interest. Where were they before the Republican Party all but dropped dead of gluttony? If the Republican Party is indeed in the throes of death, it's only resulting from Democrats allowing them to gorge themselves to death. And even now, the Democrats don't have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to two egomaniacal Republicrats, as the wreak havoc within the Democrats' own ranks.
The DNC should have told Hillary Clinton initially that changing the rules regarding Florida and Michigan in the middle of the game purely for her accommodation was out of the question. They should have been unequivocally emphatic that the decision was made in the beginning of the primaries, and everyone agreed, including Hillary, that the delegates from those states would not be counted due their violation of DNC rules. Case closed.
Had the DNC been immediately decisive when the Clintons initially sent up their trial balloon, they would have recognized that they were stepping over the line of fairness. But when the DNC was indecisive, and showed a sign of weakness in carrying out its responsibility, the Clintons smelled blood, and now their trial balloon has become a demand.
So catering to the Clintons and dragging its feet in this matter is only going to complicate things further. The Clintons have no intentions of allowing the Democratic Party to remain unified. Before the Clintons decided upon their course of action, they not only took into account the affect it would have on Obama supporters, but also how it would affect all fair minded voters across this land.
They then decided upon a gamble. They knew that due to Obama's popularity, Hillary would never become president unless he was brought down. So they decided they were going to do whatever they had to do to tear Sen. Obama down, then even if Hillary didn't get the nomination this year, Obama would still be so damaged that he would lose the election, in which case, she would run in 20012.
They've already accepted the fact that their course of action would deeply divide the party, but, ironically, they're depending on Sen. Obama's good character to help rally support for Hillary if, and when, she's allowed to run. They're also gambling that Democrats are so desperate to get the Republicans out of office, that they'd hold their nose and vote for Hillary in spite of her behavior when the time comes. They realized it's a big gamble, but they calculated that a slim chance was better than no chance at all.
Of course, there are those who will say that not even the Clintons could be that Machiavellian in their calculations, but look at the facts–this is a woman who agreed not to count the votes of Michigan and Florida, then even while ahead, managed to leave her name on the ballot in Michigan as an insurance policy.
And we mustn't forget that one of Hillary's earliest influences was radical organizer Saul Alinsky. In fact, she did her colleges thesis on him–a document that the Clintons have managed to be kept securely under lock and key at Wellesley College. But now, Hillary's current tactics are right out of Alinsky's 1971 book, "Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals."
Among Alinsky's rules is to always "personalize " the issue. He taught that "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have." He also says that "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." That rule comes to mind in Hillary's declaration that "all Obama has is a speech." Another one of Alinsky's rules is,
"The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself." Thus, Hillary's threat to divide the party. Alinsky goes on to advise that you "Maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition", and "push a negative hard and deep." And finally he instructs that you "pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it"–thus, Hillary's comment, "Hard working, White voters." Hillary has held to Alinsky so snugly that it's almost as if he's her campaign manager, post mortem. But I think even Alinsky would frown upon this campaign.
So the DNC might as well make its stand now–and the earlier the better. Because there is nothing they can do to head off a crisis within the party short of handing the nomination to Hillary. It is part of Hillary's game plan to polarize the party, because she knew from the very beginning that if all else failed, her end game would involve a scorched Earth, and a Hail Mary.
For more of Black Star News contributor Wattree's writings please see wattree.blogspot.com
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I think you have "Filtered HTML" turned on here. If you switch to "Full HTML," it will probably...
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text:
Hello. I was making a Java application,when,suddenly,Eclipse didn't accept my System.out.println();
I then made a simple 'Hello World!' application to demonstrate.
public class main { System.out.println("Hello planet!"); }
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
EDIT: I found out why it isnt working now. I forgot to make the 'main' method.


text:
expansion IKEA store
The front of the store is oriented to the N128 (Antwerpseweg) and is closely located to highway A76. A railway runs along the rear of the building. The IKEA store is part of a furniture mall.
expansion IKEA store
|IKEA Beheer BV, Amsterdam
|Gert Jan Knevel
|project team:
|Rob Dekker, Sander Weeda, Bas van Berkum, Samir Halim, Antoinne Nioche
|Ingenieursbureau Boorsma BV, Drachten
|Halmos BV Adviseurs, Den Haag (M&E); Ingenieursbureau Boorsma, Drachten (structure); Civil Support, Goirle (infra); Safe Building, Best (fire safety)
|In de Cramer 142, Heerlen
|plot size:
|35.400 m²
|floor area:
|24.300 m²
|293.000 m³
|start design:
|December 2005
|start construction:
|October 2007
|September 2009
The front of the store is oriented to the N128 (Antwerpseweg) and is closely located to highway A76. A railway runs along the rear of the building. The IKEA store is part of a furniture mall.
A horizontal character of the building is provided by the large size of the main volume. An elevator block of the car park is placed as an autonomous volume in front of the store. This building component is a vertical interruption in the horizontality. From an urban perspective, a physical and visual east-west connection is located in front of the store. This is a pedestrian route connecting with the furniture mall.
The assignment concerns the extension of the existing IKEA store in Heerlen. Besides the extension of the store, the program includes an addition of a parking garage.
The extension from 20.000 m² to 38.000 m² has taken place on two sides of the existing store and is executed in three phases. By extending the store, the complete layout is transformed. The required number of parking is increased by enlarging the retail area. A solution is found in a double layered parking garage on top of the warehouse. During the construction period the store remained open.
The entrance area is placed to the back for the connection, which makes the restaurant on the first floor cantilever. The facade of the restaurant is mainly executed in glass, which provides a panoramic view to the forecourt and the direct surroundings.