text:
Renishaw launches a 'rocket' at MACH 2008
Riding a controlled explosion astride a snarling 1,500 horsepower engine
See and believe
Visitors to Renishaw's stand at MACH 2008 (hall 5, stand 5140) will be able to see Team Salakazi's amazing KTM Super Twin nitromethane fuelled dragster which takes just 6.7 seconds to cover a 1/4 mile race track, achieving speeds of around 200 miles per hour. Aided by Renishaw's rotary magnetic encoders that monitor crankshaft position and clutch speed, this 360kg 'rocket' generates 1,500 hp from just a 1995 cc engine.
Riding a controlled explosion
Not many people would even consider sitting astride a snarling 1,500 horsepower engine travelling at over 300 km per hour. But Jaska Salakazi from Finland has made a very successful career of it, becoming the first person in the world to break the magical seven-second barrier over a quarter of a mile on a Super Twin Top Fuel bike. So what gives him the confidence to take the bike to its limits, whatever the conditions?
Since 2000, the speed-obsessed six-man team at Salakazi Racing has continually designed, built and refined its KTM Super twin powered Dragster. A recent modification is the addition of two RM22 compact high-speed rotary magnetic encoders, produced by Renishaw's partner company RLS d.o.o. in Slovenia. These measure clutch speed and monitor the position of the engine's crankshaft, helping to take the bike to unsurpassed speeds. Within a split second the 1995 cc engine screams to 7,500 rpm.
Clutch slippage, traction and road conditions can all be precisely determined by comparing values from the encoders, providing the team's technicians with the vital data to pre-program the bike and make final adjustments to the first stage counterweights before the race begins. Where milliseconds are crucial, the encoders enable the team to optimise clutch engagement and maximise speed and acceleration on the spot.
Magnetic encoders are critical to success
The team's technology guru, Petri Mäkinen, is quick to recognise the importance of the Renishaw encoders. "We need to read the clutch speed even before the rear tyre has completed its first full rotation. The data they provide us with beforehand is critically important – we couldn't obtain it or preset the clutch any other way. They've been such a success that during the next two years we'll also use the encoders to control the ignition advance and adjust the cams".
Visitors to the Renishaw stand will also be able to see new probing systems, calibration and encoder products that will speed up manufacturing processes and minimise the cost of poor quality for a wide range of machining and measurement applications.
News updates
Register for regular news updates from Renishaw
- Salakazi Racing [gen] [5.2MB]
- 磁気式ロータリーエンコーダ [gen] [598kB]
All images and text - copyright Renishaw


text:
Beware bold promises from a multibillion-dollar industry that can't prevent your IT systems from being routinely hacked
Consider me a career-long computer security curmudgeon. When a vendor guarantees its latest and greatest will defend the world against all computer maliciousness, I yawn. Been there; it didn't pan out.
All computer security vendors want us to think that signing on the dotted line and sending them a check will mean our worries are over. Rarely do they deliver. And although a little marketing hype never really hurts -- we're all used to taking it with a grain of salt -- some vendors can be caught outright lying, expecting us to buy what amounts to security snake oil.
[ Verse yourself in the 7 sneak attacks used by today's most devious hackers, 14 dirty IT security consultant tricks, 9 popular IT security practices that don't work, and 10 crazy security tricks that do. | Find out how to greatly reduce the threat of malicious attacks with InfoWorld's Insider Threat Deep Dive PDF special report. | Learn how to protect your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and the Security Central newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]
If you're a hardened IT security pro, you've probably had these tactics run by you over and over. It's never only one vendor touting unbelievable claims but many. It's like a pathology of the computer security industry, this all-too-frequent underhanded quackery used in the hopes of duping an IT organization into buying dubious claims or overhyped wares.
Following are seven computer security claims or technologies that, when mentioned in the sales pitch, should get your snake-oil radar up and primed for false promises.
Security snake oil No. 1: Unbreakable softwareBelieve it or not, vendors and developers alike have claimed their software is without vulnerability. In fact, "Unbreakable" was the name of one famous vendor's public relations campaign. The formula for this snake oil is simple: The vendor claims that its competitors are weak and don't know how to make invulnerable code the way it does. Buy the vendor's software and live in a world forever without exploits.
The last vendor to claim this had its software exploited so badly, so quickly that it should serve as notice to every computer security organization never to make such a claim again. Amazingly, even as exploit after exploit was discovered in the vendor's software (the vendor is best known for database software), the "Unbreakable" ad campaign continued for another year. We security professionals wondered how many CEOs might have fallen for the PR pitch, not realizing that the vendor's support queues were full of calls demanding quick patches. To this day, dozens of exploits are found every year in that vendor's software.
Of course, this vendor isn't alone with its illusions of invulnerability. Browser vendors used to kick Microsoft for making an overly vulnerable browser in Internet Explorer. But then they would release their invulnerable browsers, only to learn they had more uncovered public vulnerabilities than the browser they claimed was overly vulnerable. You don't hear browser vendors bragging about making perfectly secure browsers anymore.
And then there's the infamous University of Illinois at Chicago professor who consistently lambasts software vendors for making software full of security holes. He chides and belittles them and says they should be subject to legal prosecution for making imperfect software. He even made his own software programs and challenged people to find even one security bug, backing this challenge with a reward. Not surprisingly, people found bugs. Initially he tried to claim that the first found vulnerability wasn't an exploitable bug "within the parameters of the guarantee." Most people disagreed. Then someone found a second bug, in another of his programs, and he paid the reward. Turns out making invulnerable software is pretty difficult.
I don't mean to negate that professor's contributions to computer security. He's one of the best computer security experts in the world -- truly a hero to the cause. But you won't hear him claim anymore that perfect software can be made.
Remember these high-profile lessons in humility the next time you hear a vendor claim that its software is invulnerable.
Security snake oil No. 2: 1,000,000-bit cryptoEvery year a vendor or coder no one has heard of claims to have made unbreakable crypto. And, with few exceptions, they fail miserably. Although it's a claim similar to unbreakable software, technical discussion will illuminate a very different flavor of snake oil at work here.
Good crypto is hard to make; even the best in the world don't have the guts (or sanity) to claim theirs can't be broken. In fact, you'll be lucky to get them to concede that their encryption is anything but "nontrivial" to compromise. I trust the encryption expert who doesn't trust himself. Anything else means trusting a snake-oil salesman trying to sell you flawed crypto.
Case in point: A few years ago a vendor came on the scene claiming he had unbreakable crypto. What made his encryption so incredible was that he used a huge key and distributed part (or parts) of the secret key in the cloud. Because the key was never in one place, it would be impossible to compromise. And the encryption algorithm and routine was secure because it was a secret, too.
Most knowledgeable security pros recognize that a good cipher should always have a known encryption algorithm that stands up to public review. Not this vendor.
But the best (and most hilarious) part was the vendor's claim that his superior cipher was backed by a million-bit key. Never mind that strong encryption today is backed by key sizes of 256-bit (symmetric) or 2,048-bit (asymmetric). This company was promising an encryption key that was orders of magnitude bigger.
Cryptologists chuckled at this for two reasons. First, when you have a good encryption routine, the involved key size can be small because no one can brute-force all the possible permutations of even relatively small encryption keys -- think, more than the "number of atoms in the known universe" type of stuff. Instead, to break ciphers today, cryptologists find flaws in the cipher's mathematics, which allow them to rule out very large parts of the populations of possible keys. In a nutshell, found cryptographic weaknesses allow attackers to develop shortcuts to faster guessing of the valid possible keys.
All things being equal, a proven cipher with a smaller key size is considered more secure. A prime example is ECC (elliptic curve cryptography) versus RSA. Today, an RSA-protected key must be 2,048 bits or larger to be considered relatively secure. With ECC, 384 bits is considered sufficient. RSA (the original algorithm) is probably nearing the end of its usefulness, and ECC is just starting to become a primary player.
So saying you have a million-bit key is akin to saying your invented cipher is so sucky it takes a million bits of obscurity (versus 384 bits) to keep the protected data secure. Five thousand bits would be overkill from any good cipher, because no one is known to be able to come close to breaking even 3,000-bit keys from a really good cipher. When you make a million-bit key, you're absolutely saying you don't trust your cipher to be good at smaller key sizes. This paradox is perhaps only understood by cipher enthusiasts, but, believe me, you'd slay the audience at any crypto convention by repeating this story.
Second, if you were required to use a million-bit key, that means you would somehow have to communicate that huge mother from sender to receiver, making that communication at least a megabyte. Suppose you encrypted an email containing a single character. The resulting encrypted blob would be 1MB. That's pretty wasteful.
A "secret" million-bit cipher being split among the cloud was enough to do that crypto in. No one took it seriously, and at least one impressive encryption expert, Bruce Schneier, publicly mocked it.
The worst part was that the vendor claimed to have proof that it sold $5 million of its crypto to the military. I hope the vendor was lying; otherwise, the military purchaser has a lot of explaining to do.
Security snake oil No. 3: 100 percent accurate antivirus softwareAlso akin to the claim of unbreakable software is the claim from multiple vendors that their anti-malware detection is 100 percent accurate. And they almost all say this detection rate has been "verified independently in test after test."
Ever wonder why these buy-once-and-never-worry-again solutions don't take over the world? It's because they're a lie. No anti-malware software is, or can be, 100 percent accurate. Antivirus software wasn't 100 percent accurate when we only had a few viruses to contend with, and today's world has tens of millions of mutating malware programs. In fact, today's malware is pretty good at changing its form. Many malicious programs use "mutation engines" coupled with the very same good encryption mentioned above. Good encryption introduces realistic randomness, and malware uses the same properties to hide itself. Plus, most malware creators run their latest creations against every available anti-malware program before they begin to propagate, and then they self-update every day. It's a neverending battle, and the bad guys are winning.
Some vendors, using general behavior-detection techniques known as heuristics and change-detecting emulation environments, have valiantly tried to up their accuracy. What they've discovered is that as you enter the upper ranges of detection, you run into the problem of false positives. As it turns out, programs that detect malware at extremely accurate rates are bad at not detecting legitimate programs as malicious. Show me a 100 percent accurate anti-malware program, and I'll show you a program that flags nearly everything as malicious.
Even worse, as accuracy increases, performance decreases. Some antivirus programs make their host systems so slow that they're unusable. I know users who would rather knowingly compute with active malware than run antivirus software. With tens of millions of malware programs that must be checked against hundreds of thousands of files contained on a typical computer, doing a perfectly accurate comparison would simply take too long. Anti-malware vendors are acutely aware of these sad paradoxes, and, in the end, they all make the decision to be less accurate.
Counterintuitively, being less accurate actually helps security vendors sell more of their products. I don't mean that lowered accuracy allows malware to propagate, thereby ensuring security vendors can sell more software. It's that the trade-offs of extremely accurate anti-malware detection are unacceptable to those shopping for security software.
And if you do find yourself buying the claim of 100 percent accuracy, just don't ask your vendor to put it in writing or ask for a refund when something slips by. They won't back the claim.
Security snake oil No. 4: Network intrusion detectionIDSes (intrusion detection systems) have been around even longer than antivirus software. My first experience was with Ross Greenberg's Flu-Shot program back in the mid-1980s. Although often described, even by the author, as an early antivirus program, it was more of a behavioral-detection/prevention program. Early versions didn't have "signatures" with which to detect early malware; it was quickly defeated by malware.
During the past two decades, more sophisticated IDSes were invented and released. Popular ones are in use in nearly every company in America. Commercial, professional versions can easily cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for only a few sensors. I know many companies that won't put up a network without first deploying an NIDS (network-based IDS).
Unfortunately, IDSes have worse accuracy and performance issues than antivirus programs. Most NIDSes work by intercepting network packets. The average computer gets hundreds of packets per second, if not more. An NIDS has to perform a comparison of known signatures against all those network packets, and if they did so, even somewhat accurately, it would slow down network traffic so much that the computer's network communications, and involved applications, would become unbearably sluggish.
So what NIDSes do is compare network traffic against a few dozen or hundred signatures. I've never seen an NIDS with even two hundred signatures activated -- paltry in comparison to the tens of millions of malware and thousands of network attack signatures they should be checking to be truly accurate. Instead, we've become accustomed to the fact that NIDSes can't be configured to be meaningfully accurate, so we "fine-tune" them to be somewhat accurate against things antivirus software is less accurate at detecting.
Security snake oil No. 5: FirewallsI spend part of my professional career telling people to make sure they use firewalls. If you don't have one, I'll probably write up an audit finding. But the truth is that firewalls (traditional or advanced) rarely protect us against anything.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
MONDAY, May 26, 2008 (HealthDay News) -- What would you do if you suddenly became dizzy and had trouble seeing? Watch and wait? Call 911?
Most Americans don't act on warning signs of stroke, including sudden dizziness or loss of balance or coordination and loss of vision in one or both eyes. Yet experts say early treatment could avoid devastating consequences, including death and disability.
A study presented at a recent American Stroke Association meeting found more than half of people experiencing stroke symptoms don't seek treatment.
"What it really tells us is that whether or not it was stroke, they should have gotten it checked out, because it could have been a stroke," said study lead author Virginia J. Howard, an epidemiologist at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. "And when in doubt," she added, "they should talk to their doctor or seek some guidance -- even if they just talk to their doctor over the telephone."
Howard's research team examined data from a large, ongoing study involving white and black U.S. adults aged 45 and older. By the end of the study, some 30,000 people will have been interviewed and had blood work, an electrocardiogram and a medical evaluation. It's all part of a sweeping effort to understand why blacks and people who live in the southeastern part of the United States -- a region known as the "Stroke Belt" -- suffer higher-than-average rates of death from stroke than whites and people in other regions of the country.
Stroke is the nation's third leading killer, claiming the lives of more than 150,000 Americans each year. About 700,000 people have a new or recurrent stroke each year, the American Stroke Association reports.
Eighty percent of strokes are caused by a clot that obstructs blood flow to the brain -- a so-called ischemic stroke. Another type, hemorrhagic stroke, can occur when a vessel ruptures and bleeds into the surrounding brain.
Some people experience a "mini-stroke," called a transient ischemic attack, when blood flow to the brain is temporarily blocked, and these individuals are at greater risk of having a future stroke.
To explain the link between stroke symptoms and behavior, Howard's team asked study participants if they had experienced any stroke symptoms and, if so, whether they'd sought medical care.
Of those who reported symptoms but had no confirmed diagnosis of stroke or mini-stroke, more than half -- 51.4 percent -- did not seek medical care.
It isn't known how many of them actually experienced a stroke. Still, their failure to seek care is very worrisome, one stroke expert said, because tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), a clot-busting drug given to people who've had ischemic stroke, is most effective when administered within three hours of the onset of stroke symptoms.
"It has been estimated -- and figures from our center support this -- that if everyone with a stroke called 911 at the onset of symptoms and were taken to a hospital prepared to treat them, 50 percent of stroke patients would receive IV tPA, rather than the present national average of around 2 percent," noted Dr. James C. Grotta, professor and chairman of the Department of Neurology at the University of Texas Medical School and director of the stroke program at Memorial Hermann Hospital, in Houston.
There are many reasons why possible stroke victims don't seek medical attention.
Often people simply don't recognize the symptoms, explained Dr. Dawn Kleindorfer, an assistant professor of neurology and stroke researcher at the University of Cincinnati. "It's not that they're afraid, they just don't recognize it as an emergency," she said.
The American Stroke Association teaches the public to watch for these warnings signs:
- Sudden numbness or weakness of the face, arm or leg, especially on one side of the body.
- Sudden confusion, trouble speaking or understanding.
- Sudden trouble seeing in one or both eyes.
- Sudden trouble walking, dizziness, loss of balance or coordination.
- Sudden, severe headache with no known cause.
But in a study in the journal Stroke, Kleindorfer and her colleagues examined whether a simple acronym, FAST -- meaning "face, arms, speech, time" -- might be better at capturing stroke patients than the typical list of symptoms. Within the populations studied, more than 88 percent of patients had symptoms included in FAST. It missed some stroke patients, especially those with bleeding in the brain, because the acronym doesn't include headache. Still, she thinks it may be a better way to educate the public.
"It may miss a few, but it's easier to remember, and maybe that is more important and we need to study that," Kleindorfer said.
Getting that message to the public is, of course, another challenge.
Kleindorfer has been exploring different venues for education, even local beauty shops. Her research team taught stroke symptoms to hairdressers in African-American-run salons in Cincinnati and Atlanta who, in turn, talked to their clients about stroke. Before-and-after measurements showed a significant increase in the women's knowledge of stroke.
"I think it's working with the community, instead of at the community, and getting more ownership of the problem within communities, especially high-risk communities, that's going to be the way to go," she said.
More information
To learn more about the signs of stroke, visit the Stroke Awareness Foundation.


text:
• CVSS Severity Rating • Fix Information • Vulnerable Software Versions • SCAP Mappings • CPE Information
|A vulnerability in the web-based management interface of Cisco Energy Management Suite Software could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to conduct a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attack and perform arbitrary actions on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to insufficient CSRF protections for the web-based management interface of an affected device. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by persuading an authenticated user of the interface to follow a crafted link. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to perform arbitrary actions on a targeted device via a web browser and with the privileges of the user.
|Note: References are provided for the convenience of the reader to help distinguish between vulnerabilities. The list is not intended to be complete.
|Assigning CNA
|Cisco Systems, Inc.
|Date Record Created
|Disclaimer: The record creation date may reflect when the CVE ID was allocated or reserved, and does not necessarily indicate when this vulnerability was discovered, shared with the affected vendor, publicly disclosed, or updated in CVE.
|Phase (Legacy)
|Assigned (20180817)
|Votes (Legacy)
|Comments (Legacy)
|Proposed (Legacy)
|This is an record on the CVE List, which provides common identifiers for publicly known cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
You can also search by reference using the CVE Reference Maps.
|For More Information: CVE Request Web Form (select "Other" from dropdown)


text:
Betty Wheeler was killed last Saturday when a driver in an unknown vehicle struck her as she walked near Route 340 in Waynesboro, Virginia. Police say the driver fled the scene but left this part behind.
Can you identify this piece of what looks like a front air dam/spoiler? If so, you might help catch a killer.
UPDATE: We are in contact with the Waynesboro Police Department and they are aware of the post. Specifically, we've let them know about the similarity to an F-150 grille. Keep up the good work everyone!
Here's what police had to say:
This silver piece is a part that came off the suspect vehicle that fatally struck Mrs. Betty Wheeler on the evening of 4-7-12 in the northbound lane of Rosser Ave. (Rt. 340) near P. Buckley Moss Museum . Waynesboro Police is asking anyone who knows or sees a vehicle missing a piece that matches the one pictured to contact the Waynesboro Police Department at 540-942-6675 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-332-2017.
If you've got guesses please post them in the comments. If you're in the area and know the vehicle it's from please e-mail us here or contact police at the numbers above.
(Hat tip to Ivan and Steve!)


text:
The California Homebuyer's Downpayment Assistance Program is a deferred payment junior loan that can be used in conjunction with other CalHFA housing programs.
This post is aligned with a network of sites interested with the intersection of small business, the philanthropic sector and government in creating healthy and sustainable communities.
For more information on small business grant and home ownership programs visit TopGovernmentGrants.com.


text:
Hampstead Property Management
Let us manage your Hampstead Residential and Commercial property
At Advantage Gold Realty, we understand that choosing a company to represent your real estate management ventures is a monumental decision that includes not only how well the business protects your investment, portfolio or association, but the type of relationships you have with the individuals caring for your specific needs.
We know that you expect not only expertise in the real estate management industry, but also the highest quality customer service provided by an experienced, caring team that knows Midway Park and its surrounding areas better than anyone in the business.
Advantage Gold Realty is that Company.
In fact, our innovative business model, combined with our friendly, knowledgeable staff, allows Advantage Gold Realty to meet ALL your real estate management needs.
Advantage Gold Realty is Hampstead Premiere Real Estate Management Company. Our company provides you with the highest quality management service at an affordable rate. As a testament to our quality service, we continue to grow every year through referrals from our satisfied clients and customers.
At Advantage Gold Realty our goal is to provide the information you need when you need it to make informed real estate investing decisions. Our comprehensive property management services means we handle the day to day tasks of managing the property so that you don't have to. Because we treat each of our client's properties as if they were our own, every detail is accounted for.
Advantage Gold Realty Management Services:
- Apartment Property Management
- Home Property Management
- Townhome Property Management
- Rental Property Management
- HOA Property Management
or commercial ventures in Camp Lejeune, Midway Park, Richlands, Sneads Ferry, or Topsail area, you can count on us to save you time, money, and any worry associated with your valuable investment.
Inquire About Our Services
Our Management Services Include the Following:+
- Advertising
- Rental Agreement Execution and Enforcement
- Rent and Security Deposit Collection
- Maintenance Coordination
- Financial Record Keeping and Bill Paying
- Move Out Property Reviews
- Monthly Owner Statements
- Tenant Screening
- Maintain ongoing relations with property owners and tenants
- Eviction and Collections
- Maintaining records of the property to include all rents collected, and all repair receipts
- After Hours Emergency Line
Let Us Handle Your: +
- Tenant Background Checks
- Rent Collection
- Rental Rate Negotiation
- Legal Documentation
- Property Inspections
- Maintenance & Repair Services
- And more!
We Specialize in the following properties: +
- Single Family Homes
- Custom Luxury Homes
- New Home Communities
- Golf Course Properties
- Townhome Communities
- Condominiums
- Investment Properties
There are many reasons for our success in the Hampstead, NC area, but the most important one is our TEAM!
Years of experience, continuous training, and dedication to customer service guarantee reliable, affordable Residential and Rental Property Management Services for Hampstead, NC and beyond. Our Property Management Company is committed to helping you realize your investment goals, enhance your rental value and the future market value of your property, develop productive relationships with you and your tenants, and give prompt, courteous attention to everyone's needs.
Our commitment to excellence provides the best Rental and Residential Property Management to our customers and clients in a professional, courteous manner.
Call 910.353.2001or click here to contact us via email to learn more about what the Property Management Company can do for you.
Hampstead Area Information
Hampstead is an unincorporated community in Pender County, North Carolina, United States. It is located between Wilmington and Jacksonville on U.S. Route 17. Hampstead is part of the Wilmington Metropolitan Statistical Area. Source: Wikipedia


text:
Academy Award-winning screenwriter William Goldman ("Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Marathon Man") says there is a key rule that you must always remember to understand the way things work in Hollywood: "Nobody knows anything."
When it comes to pro football, the same phrase applies to the complex, tortured exercise of deciding who can and can't play quarterback. There's something of an art to it, but all attempts at science have failed.
In the late 1960s at the dawn of the Super Bowl era, teams succeeded only about 50 percent of the time in identifying quarterbacks taken in the first 10 selections of the draft, where each pick carries All-Pro expectations. Overall, in the entire first round -- where you at least want a long-time quality starter -- their collective record on QBs was identical: about 50 percent. Sometimes teams were right (like when the Pittsburgh Steelers took Terry Bradshaw with the first pick in the 1970 draft) and sometimes they were flat wrong (like when the Chargers took Marty Domres with the ninth pick in the 1969 draft). Sometimes teams made selections that, in retrospect, seem implausible. In 1967, with the third pick in the draft, the San Francisco 49ers chose Heisman Trophy winner Steve Spurrier from Florida. One pick later, the Miami Dolphins took future Hall of Famer Bob Griese.
Today, with the benefit of decades more experience, a keener understanding of the qualities needed to be successful and millions of dollars spent in scouting and evaluating talent with precision ... teams still are hitting about 50 percent in trying to identify future All-Pro quarterbacks in the first 10 picks, and the same 50 percent with first-rounders in general.
There are two ineluctable truths that one can never forget about the position:
1. Quarterback is the single most difficult position to master in the world of team sports. No other position -- not baseball pitcher or soccer goalkeeper or basketball point guard -- requires such a mixture of athletic skills, raw brainpower, functional intelligence and that ineffable something that Hemingway once described as "grace under pressure."
2. It is the single hardest position to evaluate and project in all of professional sports. NFL teams, armed with three or four years of major college game films, hundreds of pages of scouting reports, dozens of hours of workouts in Indianapolis, pro days and individual team workouts, as well as multiple one-on-one personal interviews, still will miss routinely.
Since 1998, 17 quarterbacks have been selected first, second or third overall in the draft. Certainly there are some special names on this list -- Peyton Manning, Eli Manning, Donovan McNabb. As of late, there are some promising picks, as well -- Matt Ryan, Matthew Stafford, Cam Newton. But also on that list of 17 are Ryan Leaf, Tim Couch, Akili Smith, David Carr, Joey Harrington and JaMarcus Russell. What do all these players have in common? The coaches who were there when the players were drafted are no longer employed by those teams.
The franchise quarterback is the Holy Grail of the football business. The search for one can make or break careers. Draft the right quarterback, and everything else you do instantly looks smarter. Pick the wrong one, and you might as well put your house on the market and start updating your résumé. The quest to land the quarterback with the Right Stuff -- along with the fear of missing a chance to draft that quarterback -- gets into the heads of football people. It has humbled men much smarter men than me. Sooner or later, it can force many people in the game to veer from their principles, abandon strategy and skepticism and ... reach.
Consider that from 1999 to 2011, there were 39 quarterbacks drafted in the first round of the draft, but only 16 drafted in the second round. Think about that: By all rights, the distribution from one round to the next should be roughly equal. Even if teams tend to overrate or overvalue quarterbacks, they should overrate them and overvalue them all the way down the line. But that's not what happens. Teams worry nearly as much about passing on a franchise quarterback as they do about drafting a player who turns out to be a bust.
Casserly: Two-round mock draft
Charley Casserly projects the first two rounds of the 2012 NFL Draft, with no quarterbacks coming off the board in Round 2. **More ...**
At other positions, there is a rough pecking order based largely on a tangible set of skills that a prospect shows: This wideout has both the speed and the hands to be a first-rounder, while that receiver isn't fast enough to justify a first-round pick. But with quarterbacks, it's different. Too many of the elements are intangible to begin with, or difficult to reliably project from one level to the next. That, combined with the pressure every GM is under to find a franchise quarterback, means that players who have the basic skill set (size, fundamentals and a strong arm) tend to go in the first round, even when there are red flags (ranging from questions about accuracy, makeup, composure or leadership skills) that might compel a team to wait until later in the draft.
In 2008, the Miami Dolphins bypassed QB Matt Ryan, instead taking tackle Jake Long with the first pick of the draft. Long is an outstanding tackle, but four years later, during which time the team has had four different starters at quarterback, the Dolphins are desperately in need of a franchise quarterback. In 2005, the Minnesota Vikings bypassed Aaron Rodgers twice and took wide receiver Troy Williamson and defensive end Erasmus James. Neither Williamson nor James is in the league. And look at the carryover for Minnesota and Miami: The Vikings reached at the quarterback position in last year's draft, taking Christian Ponder at No. 12, while the Dolphins are thinking about doing the same thing in this year's draft, by potentially taking Ryan Tannehill at No. 8.
Need is a terrible negotiator and an even worse evaluator. But the panic to draft someone who might turn out to be great is immense. Which is why, in addition to worrying about whether Tannehill would be a reach at No. 8, the Dolphins are also worrying about if he'll even be around then. Some other, equally desperate team -- Seattle, for instance -- may trade up to take him first.
This is why GMs don't sleep well in April.
Much of the material above has been adapted from the book, "More Than A Game: The Glorious Present and Uncertain Future of the NFL," written by Brian Billick and Michael MacCambridge. Follow Brian Billick on Twitter @coachbillick


text:
The PHP Curl Documentation for CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS makes this note:
This can either be passed as a urlencoded string like 'para1=val1¶2=val2&…' or as an array with the field name as key and field data as value. If value is an array, the Content-Type header will be set to multipart/form-data.
I've always discounted the importance of that, and in most cases it doesn't generally matter. The destination server and application likely know how to deal with both multipart/form-data and application/x-www-form-urlencoded equally well. However, the data is passed in a much different way using these two different mechanisms.
application/x-www-form-urlencoded is what I generally think of when doing POST requests. It is the default when you submit most forms on the web. It works by appending a blank line and then your urlencoded data to the end of the POST request. It also sets the Content-Length header to the length of your data. A request submitted with application/x-www-form-urlencoded looks like this (somewhat simplified):
POST /some-form.php HTTP/1.1 Host: www.brandonchecketts.com Content-Length: 23 Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded name=value&name2=value2
multipart/form-data is much more complicated, but more flexible. Its flexibility is required when uploading files. It works in a manner similar to MIME types. The HTTP Request looks like this (simpified):
POST / HTTP/1.1 Host: www.brandonchecketts.com Content-Length: 244 Expect: 100-continue Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=----------------------------26bea3301273
And then subsequent packets are sent containing the actual data. In my simple case with two name/value pairs, it looks like this:
HTTP/1.1 100 Continue ------------------------------26bea3301273 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="name" value ------------------------------26bea3301273 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="name2" value2 ------------------------------26bea3301273--
CURL usage
So, when sending POST requests in PHP/cURL, it is important to urlencode it as a string first.
This will generate the multipart/form-data version
$data = array('name' => 'value', 'name2' => 'value2'); curl_setopt($curl_object, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data)
And this simple change will ensure that it uses the application/x-www-form-urlencoded version:
$data = array('name' => 'value', 'name2' => 'value2'); $encoded = ''; foreach($data as $name => $value){ $encoded .= urlencode($name).'='.urlencode($value).'&'; } // chop off the last ampersand $encoded = substr($encoded, 0, strlen($encoded)-1); curl_setopt($curl_object, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $encoded)


text:
Product Features
- Best solution for independent and simultaneous cooling and heating all year round
- Top class efficiency due to full Inverter technology
- Daikin single screw compressor with integrated inverter and Variable Volume Ratio technology
- High efficiency inverter fans with optimized geometry ensure the best ratio between airflow and power input
- Wide operating envelope for cooling and heating with extra capacity in boosted operation and rapid restart functionality
Inverter compressors continuously adjust compressor speed to actual demand. Fewer power-consuming starts and stops result in decreased energy consumption (up to 30%) and more stable temperatures.
Screw compressor
Single screw compressors have rotors with male and female gears and are designed for high capacities and performances
Download language
Download language
Download language
Download language


text:
The 2014 NC 4-H Congress will be held on June 21-24, 2014 in Raleigh. Congress is for 4-H youth 13 - 18 years old. We will stay in a hotel (with an outdoor pool) in Raleigh for the event. You will get to attend workshops, tour parts of NCSU campus, participate in a state-wide community service opportunity, see state presentations, dance, etc. Some of the day by day highlights include:
There will be 2 tracks of the event - leadership and citizenship tracks.
Cost will be $250 per person which includes lodging, meals and transportation. You shouldn't have any additional out of pocket expenses (unless you want extra milkshakes or snacks at the convenience store). You may use scholarship dollars to pay. Email Mrs. Kathy at firstname.lastname@example.com to check your balance.
You must RSVP by May 2 with your track preference (Leadership or Citizenship) and your t-shirt size. Last year Citizenship filled up so RSVP soon! Payment is required to reserve your space (4-H scholarship dollars are accepted). You must be an active Forsyth County 4-H member to attend! Email firstname.lastname@example.com for more information.


text:
Warning, but ever hear the 911 call when the monkey tore that poor lady apart? Ugh. Don't say we didn't warn you. ~And speaking of NPR this morning, how about that great story of the 3 billion insects above your head floating about in the breeze? Spiders, beetles, flies, you name it. They reach altitudes of 15,000 feet. check the video.
I don't think at this point it needs to be written since the last update to Fecal Face was a long time ago, but...
I, John Trippe, have put this baby Fecal Face to bed. I'm now focusing my efforts on running ECommerce at DLX which I'm very excited about... I guess you can't take skateboarding out of a skateboarder.
It was a great 15 years, and most of that effort can still be found within the site. Click around. There's a lot of content to explore.
Hit me up if you have any ECommerce related questions. - trippe.io


text:
"Of all the English Reformers, Bishop Hugh Latimer was the most popular in his time and probably has the greatest place in the affections of posterity. Although a passionate preacher and a zealot for reform, in a day when religious executions were all too common, he completed his three-score years and ten, before sealing his testimony with his blood"
(Harold S. Darby, Hugh Latimer (London: Epworth Press, 1953), p. 7.)
850G Hugh Latimer 1485-1555
The fyrste Sermon of Mayster Hughe Latimer, whiche he preached before the kynges Maiest. wythin his graces palayce at Westminster M. D. XLIX. the viii. of Marche. (,',) Cu gratia et Privilegio ad imprimendum solum.
[bound with]
The seconde Sermon of Maister Hughe Latimer, whych he preached before the Kynges maiestie, iv in his graces Palayce at Westminister y. xv. day of Marche. M. ccccc.xlix. Cum gratia et Privilegio ad Imprimendum solum.
[London: by Jhon Day, dwellynge at Aldergate, and Wylliam Seres, dwellyng in Peter Colledge, 1549] $14,200
Octavo 137 x 88 mm A-D8, A-Y8, Aa-Ee8 (Lacking Ee7 and 8, undoubtedly blank.) First editions, each of the two works is one of three or four undated variants, attributed to the year 1549. This copy is bound in nineteenth century calfskin, the hinges starting to crack but holding strong.
The Encyclopedia Britannica calls Hugh Latimer's sermons, "classics of their kind. Vivid, racy, terse in expression; profound in religious feeling, sagacious in their advice on human conduct. To the historical student they are of great value as a mirror of the social and political life of the period."
"All things which are written, are written for our erudition and knowledge. All things that are written in God's book, in the Bible book, in the book of the Holy Scripture, are written to be our doctrine." (from Hugh Latimer's Sermon of the Plow)
"This was the first of Latimer's famous Lenten sermons on the duty of restoring stolen goods which resulted in the receipt of considerable sums of 'conscience money.'" (Phorzimer Catalogue)"The seven sermons which he preached before the king in the following Lent are a curious combination of moral fervor and political partisanship, eloquently denouncing a host of current abuses, and paying the warmest tribute to the government of Somerset." (DNB)
STC 15270.7; STC 15274.7; Pforzheimer #581 and 582; McKerrow & Ferguson 64.
Article reprinted from Cross†Way Issues Winter 1994, Spring 1995, Spring 1996, Summer 1996 & Autumn 1996 (Nos. 55, 56 60, 61 & 62)
(C)opyright Church Society; material may be used for non-profit purposes provided that the source is acknowledged and the text is not altered.
HUGH LATIMER – APOSTOLIC PREACHER. By David Streater.:
"With the accession of Edward VI at the beginning of 1547, the danger to Latimer's life receded and he was released from the Tower of London under a general pardon. He returned to preaching and as Darby says in his book, Hugh Latimer (1953):-
Latimer's fame is most secure as a preacher. It was in that way that he served best in the days of Henry VIII: it was almost the only way that he served during the short reign of his son. The six years gave him his fullness of opportunity to follow his natural bent.
It was during these years that the First Prayer Book of 1549 and the Second, more Protestant, Prayer Book of 1552 were drawn up with the Forty Two Articles and the First Book of Homilies. With such a programme of reform, it was clear that Latimer would be the natural choice to return to
the See of Worcester. He was invited to do so but he declined the appointment on the ground of age and infirmity. This was accepted, and as preaching was his high calling, he preached extensively before the young king. Most of our knowledge of his sermons dates from this period of his ministry. He became a champion, not only of the spoken word, but of the Word preached directly to the present congregation. It was a word relevant to the condition of the nation as a whole.
His earlier convocation sermon which had attacked the lethargy and worldliness of the clergy had won Latimer the respect of the nation. His refusal of high office and the wealth which went with it gained their hearts. It would be true to say that no other English preacher has ever been held in such high esteem, including the Wesleys and George Whitefield, as well as Charles Spurgeon. It would also be true to say that no other preacher has ever accomplished as much good in the life of the nation. The records of the State Paper Office and British Museum bear out this testimony. But Latimer was now ageing and after Lent 1550, he resigned as the King's preacher and he returned to his home country, his beloved Midland Counties, continuing to preach from Lincolnshire to Warwickshire."
Hugh Latimer preaching to King Edward VI of England, a woodcut in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, better known as Foxe's English Martyrs. By the time this book was published in 1563, Edward VI was revered as a pious patron of the English Reformation, a new Josiah who loved nothing better than to hear sermons, during which he often took notes. He is depicted here listening from a gallery to a sermon by Bishop Hugh Latimer, who, along with Thomas Cranmer and Nicholas Ridley, was a key figure in the development of Protestantism in Edward's reign and, like them, a martyr under Edward's Catholic successor Queen Mary I. Historian Diarmaid MacCulloch stresses the accuracy of this image of Edward, though fellow historian Jennifer Loach cautions against too ready an acceptance of the portrayal of Edward by Reformation propagandists such as Foxe, who called Edward a "godly imp". The pulpit in the Privy Garden at the Palace of Whitehall had been built by Henry VIII in an enclosure which continued to be used for animal-baiting and wrestling. The king's pulpit became the most fashionable preaching place in London, provoking Latimer to complain: "Surely it is an ill misorder that folk shall be walking up and down in the sermon-time, as I have seen in the place this Lent: and there shall be such huzzing and buzzing in the preacher's ear that it maketh him oftentimes to forget his matter". (References: Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, pp. 21–25, 107; Jennifer Loach, Edward VI, New Haven (CT): Yale University Press, 1999, pp. 180–81.) & Chris Skidmore, Edward VI: The Lost King of England, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, ISBN 9780297846499.


text:
There are -worlds- of difference when we try to make rules for satellite operations.
For example, using the BBS on ISS. It is extremely inefficient to attempt to logon to this BBS over Europe and the USA since it blocks other users from the more efficient digipeater mode designed for those high density areas.
However, a station in Hawaii, surrounded by 16 million square miles of ocean has virtually unlimited access. Similarly, some stations in South Africa, Australia/New Zealand, South America and others may be able to make practical use of it, with out interfereing with anyone.
The GLOBAL map of HAM radio activity is extremely diverse, with probably 95% of the HAM Radio population all sharing only 5% of the footprints of our satelites. Trying to make "rules" without accounting for this 400-to-1 diversity severly limits the utility of our satellites.
I propose that AMSAT endorse a global AMSAT map of "Operational Areas". There are 4 categories:
OA/0 - Isolated. Hawaii, Arctic, Antarctic, South Africa etc OA/A - Area, Regional. (Australia, NZ, Japan? Etc) OA/B - Border (10% footprint overlap into OA/C areas OA/C - Congested. USA, Europe
Then if we ever need to make any flat statements about operations, then it can very clearly be designated as to what operating recommendations apply where.
Further, such a map would help educate the satellite user about orbital geometry and network planning. It would also encourage better use of our satellites over remote areas where we can actually contribute very well to communications applications.
Any discussion about "operational receommendations" is a waste of time without also identify the area where it applies. This map should be published in ALL amateur radio publications that mention Amateur Satellites. It should be come as common as the callsign maps...
Anyone want to take a crack at drawing the map?
This same map can also overlay the "INTERFERENCE" areas which shows the footprint areas of HIGH QRM from pirates. These shaded areas would also help educate not only our users, but our regulatory bodies as well.
Bob, WB4APR


text:
Light sold separately! Includes 0.5x Barlow lens and WH10x20mm eyepieces, 30mm, one pair
3.5X-90X Simul-Focal Trinocular Stereo Zoom Microscope
- Simul-focal trinocular stereo microscope simultaneously views clear images through trinocular port and eyepieces
- 3.5X-90X super widefield stereo zoom magnification power
- 2-1/2″ super widefield view and 8″ working distance
- 3D boom stand allows you to point microscope head in any direction desired
The AmScope SM-4TPZ professional trinocular stereo zoom microscope has a pair of 10x super-widefield high-eyepoint eyepieces, a 0.7x-4.5x zoom objective, two Barlow lenses, and a double-arm boom stand. The microscope has an overall magnification range of 3.5x-90x. The trinocular viewing head offers simultaneous viewing through the eyepieces and trinocular port, and has an interpupillary range of 55 to 75mm, a 45-degree inclination to reduce eye and neck strain, and 360-degree rotation to enable sharing. The vertical trinocular port can be used as a C-Mount or 23mm photo port (camera sold separately). The WH10x20mm super-widefield high-eyepoint eyepieces combine with the 0.7x-4.5x zoom objective to provide continuous zoom magnification and a longer working distance for inspecting large-scale specimens that require handling or repair. The microscope comes with 0.5x and 2.0x Barlow lenses that can be added to the objective to increase the magnification range. A Barlow lens with a magnification of less than 1.0 reduces magnification and increases the working distance, while a Barlow lens with a magnification greater than 1.0 increases the magnification and reduces the working distance. High-eyepoint eyepieces ease viewing for users who wear glasses, and dioptric adjustment accommodates individual eye-strength differences. A stereo microscope, sometimes called an inspection or dissection microscope, has low magnification and a long working distance that enables users to manipulate the object being inspected.
Ambient lighting illuminates the specimen, eliminating the need for power or batteries. The microscope has a double-arm boom stand that enables users to position the microscope head on all three axes (X, Y, and Z). Bilateral focus eases use for left- and right-handed users. The stand has 20″ double arms, and a 30″ overall length. The pillar is 17″ and the focus rack has a 3″ diameter. The solid cast-steel base is 2 x 8-1/4 x 10-1/4 inches (H x W x D, where H is height, the vertical distance from the lowest to highest point; W is width, the horizontal distance from left to right; D is depth, the horizontal distance from front to back).
|Magnification range
|Zoom objective power
|Eyepieces (DIN, 30mm)
|WH10x20mm high-eyepoint
|Trinocular port
|C-Mount or 23mm
|Field of view
|Optical working distance
|Up to 8″
|Microscope stand
|Double-arm boom stand
|Head movement
|X-, Y-, and Z-axes
|Illumination type
|Light source
Microscopes are instruments used to enhance the resolution of an object or image. Types include compound, stereo, or digital. Compound microscopes use a compound optical system with an objective lens and an eyepiece. Stereo microscopes show object depth in a three-dimensional image. Digital microscopes are used to display an image on a monitor, rather than looking through a lens. Microscopes can have monocular (one), binocular (two), or trinocular (three) eyepieces, with varying magnification abilities. Magnification ability refers to the size of an image. Resolution, also known as resolvant power, refers to the clarity of the image. The interaction between field of view (FOV), numerical aperture (NA), and working distance (WD) determines resolution. Microscopes can control magnification through a fixed focus, or through a range of adjustments. They can also utilize LED, fluorescent, and mirror light sources to help control viewing capabilities. Microscopes are widely used in education, lab research, biology, metallurgy, engineering, chemistry, manufacturing, and in the medical, forensic science, and veterinary industries.
United Scope manufactures microscopy equipment and accessories under the brand name AmScope. The company, founded in 1996, is headquartered in Irvine, CA.


text:
Cellular Shades
The crisp, elegant style and remarkable versatility of cellular window shades has made them the most on-trend window coverings. Also known as honeycomb shades, you can expect soft, sturdy and offer excellent insulation. Choose from single and double honeycomb construction with a variety of honeycomb sizes. When raised, cellular blinds are neat and compact to allow a clear outdoor view. You can choose from our selection of sheer, light-filtering or room-darkening fabrics in a large variety of colors. Honeycomb shades can also be purchased cordless to make them ideal for a child's room.
You can browse cordless cellular window shades by
8 Items
per page
8 Items
per page


text:
Clearwater, FL (SportsNetwork.com) - The Philadelphia Phillies officially announced on Sunday the signing of veteran right-hander A.J. Burnett to a one- year, $16 million contract.
The deal included a mutual/player option for 2015, performance and award bonuses and a limited no-trade clause.
Burnett made 30 starts for Pittsburgh last season, going 10-11 with a 3.30 earned run average and helping the Pirates clinch their first playoff berth since 1992. He led the National League in strikeouts per nine innings pitched with 9.85.
"To be able to add a pitcher of A.J.'s caliber at this time of year says a lot about our ownership group's commitment to winning," said Phillies general manager Ruben Amaro, Jr. "A.J. will complement Cole (Hamels) and Cliff (Lee) in our rotation and adds another experienced arm to our team."
Burnett has posted at least 10 wins in nine straight years and owns a career record of 147-132 with a 3.99 ERA over 15 seasons for the Florida Marlins, Toronto Blue Jays, New York Yankees and Pirates.
The 37-year-old was a member of the Yankees club that beat the Phillies in the 2009 World Series.


text:
« The Size of Countries'┐ĮPosner'┐Įs Comment | Main | Response on Small is Beautiful-BECKER »
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.
14 February 2005
United States Court of Appeals
Judicial Council of the Second Circuit
Thurgood Marshall US Courthouse
40 Foley Square
New York, New York 10007
RE: Resubmission of Complaint of Misconduct
Judicial Council of the Second Circuit
Case: Hall v. The New York Presbyterian Hospital, et al
Dear Clerk:
As a practicing physician, born and trained in the United States of America, and board certified by the American Board of Family Medicine, I am held accountable for my professional actions. As a representative of my chosen profession, I am not only responsible to the patients I treat, but I am expected to adhere to an ideal, one that is called the Hippocratic Oath to ensure my patients receive the best care I possibly can deliver. It is understood that the same ethical and expert standards that apply to the medical profession also apply to the legal profession as well. Therefore, it is only natural that the following complaint be viewed only from the perspective of governance of the federal judiciary and management of federal law.
It is my firm belief that the Honorable Judge George Daniels, civil servant of the United States, agent of the United States federal judiciary, and lifetime member of the United States Southern District Court has violated his professional duties and must be held accountable to the American public. It is the belief of many that he has acted inappropriately and incompetently while presiding over Hall v. The New York Presbyterian Hospital, et al as he has treated these claims with extreme carelessness and negligence amounting to '┐Įjudicial malpractice'┐Į.
It is inconceivable that a federal judge can ignore the official overtures of representing counsel. This has occurred in my case. It is morally unjust to require the filing of a lawsuit to force a ruling by a judge. This has occurred in my case. As well, one cannot comprehend how the federal court system can allow a member the federal judiciary to professionally lapse and allow an American citizen to be placed in an unacceptable and indeterminate state. This has occurred in my case. Moreover, it is unconscionable that this agent of the American government has not been held accountable for his actions. Honorable Judge George Daniels'┐Į behavior is not only unacceptable, but also reprehensible. It must be documented that my civil rights as an American citizen were carelessly abandoned not only by my previous employer, but also by the very federal legal system designed to fairly resolve such disputes. Clearly, my constitutional entitlement to a fair judicial examination was abandoned. This District Court and Honorable Judge George Daniels'┐Į actions have cast a great shadow on the American legal system and triggered a great number of personal, psychological and financial traumas. The Judicial Council of the Second Circuit must address these issues.
Please allow me to indulge the Judicial Council of the Second Circuit for a moment and provide some background for my complaint.
During the summer of 1997, while serving as chief ophthalmic resident and a graduate medical education member at The New York Presbyterian Hospital ('┐ĮHospital'┐Į), Petitioner witnessed several acts of racial prejudice and medical misconduct committed by senior medical staff against black Americans.
Within days, after verbally informing Petitioner'┐Įs chief-of-service, Dr. D. Jackson Coleman, MD, and program director, Kip Dolphin, MD, that an outer-borough black child did not receive timely and compassionate treatment from hospital surgeons for a traumatic penetrating eye injury, Petitioner was presented a fait accompli and asked to resign or face termination. Petitioner had previous been warned that previous comments regarding racial discrimination and medical negligence were not acceptable, and there was displeasure within the hospital staff regarding a written memo, in which Petitioner detailed why black patients did not receive adequate medical care at the hands of white hospital medical staff.
1) On October 17, 1997, unwilling to resign, Petitioner was summarily terminated from Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education ('┐ĮACGME'┐Į) approved ophthalmology residency position.
2) During April 1998 Petitioner brought forward a breach of contract complaint with the New York State Supreme Court based on a contractual obligation the Hospital had failed to obey by disregarding important employment bylaws while terminating Petitioner'┐Įs employment and disregarding a contractual obligation to provide adequate staffing and medical training based on ACGME approved guidelines.
3) On June 21, 1999, Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam of the New York State Supreme Court dismissed the claims based a failure to go before the New York State Public Health Council ('┐ĮPHC'┐Į). A state review board comprised of twelve (12) lay and professional New York State residents enacted by New York Public Health Law 2801-b. (NY Sup. Ct. docket no. 6020395/98)
4) After discussions with numerous attorneys, Petitioner was advised that as a member of the Hospital'┐Įs '┐Įgraduate medical education'┐Į, or effectively a '┐Įmedical student'┐Į, Petitioner would receive no resolution, as the PHC was purely designed to hear disputes between '┐Įcredentialed hospital staff members'┐Į and hospital administration. Furthermore, the PHC was unable to offer any administrative remedy.
4) On October 14, 1999 Petitioner submitted an Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act claim ("EMTALA"), regarding two points, a) maintenance of physician-on-call lists and information on physicians who refuse or fail to appear to provide timely stabilizing treatment and b) protection for "whistle-blowers" who report a violation of the regulations, as well as a 42 U.S.C. '┐Į 1981 claim.
5) After initial arguments, a full disclosure revealed that District Court Judge Jed Rakoff had a conflict of interest with the case, as this was officially entered as part of the court record. At the time, the judge was affiliated with Cornell University; Petitioner'┐Įs attorney, Ambrose Wotorson, requested that he recuse himself and appoint a new judge, the judge refused.
6) On February 24, 2000, the District Court dismissed, without prejudice, the EMTALA claim for failure to proceed before the PHC. A copy of the opinion is attached as Exhibit A.
7) a) In July 2000, Petitioner provided a written complaint to the PHC and the Hospital provided a response. A copy of the complaint is attached as Exhibit B.
b) Additionally, in July 2000, Petitioner also communicated the same claim to the New York office of the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission ('┐ĮEEOC'┐Į) and the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of for Civil Rights. A copy of the letters is attached as Exhibit C.
8) On September 22, 2000, Petitioner was provided a full crediting and affirmation of civil rights violations claims by the PHC. A copy of the opinion is attached as Exhibit D.
9) On October 16, 2000, Petitioner attorney filed a suit against defendants alleging violations of 42 U. S. C. '┐Į 1981 and various state and local laws. Abruptly, the District Court Judge Jed Rakoff inexplicably recused himself from the case and appointed District Court Judge George Daniels.
10) Between November and December 2000, the Hospital provided false and malicious information regarding medical qualifications and skills to a prospective employer, in total contradiction to the findings of the PHC.
11) On December 13, 2000, the Hospital filed a 12(b)(6) Motion seeking to dismiss the complaint for failure to plead a prima facie case of discrimination and retaliation.
12) On April 6, 2001 Petitioner submitted a formal request to amend the complaint after receipt of a right-to-sue letter from EEOC. In January 2001 the EEOC provided Petitioner with a right-to-sue letter under Title VII civil rights law. A copy of the letter is attached as Exhibit E.
13) On July 4, 2001 Petitioner submitted a formal complaint of misconduct to the Judicial Council of the Second Circuit regarding the aberrant actions of Judge Jed Rakoff. (Docket no. 01-8568)
14) On November 18, 2003, a writ of mandamus was served by Petitioner'┐Įs attorney to the Second Circuit Appeals Court causing the District Court, by judgment dated December 5, 2003, to dismiss Petitioner'┐Įs claim under 42 U. S. C. '┐Į 1981 for failure to state a claim.
15) On July 13, 2004, Petitioner'┐Įs attorney filed a timely notice of appeal contesting the validity of the district court'┐Įs findings. A copy of the appeal is attached as Exhibit F.
16) On November 23, 2004, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit entered an order affirming the district court decision. A copy of the opinion is attached as Exhibit G.
17) On December 13, 2004, Petitioner submitted a formal complaint of misconduct to the Judicial Council of the Second Circuit regarding the actions of Judge George Daniels. Please refer to the New York Times article '┐ĮJudges Decisions Draw Notice, For Being Conspicuously Late'┐Į, Dec 6, 2004. A copy of the article is attached as Exhibit H.
It is crystal clear, after mandates from New York State Supreme Court and the United States Southern District Court to seek review by the New York State Public Health Council; my complaints were thoroughly investigated in July 2000. Consequently, my allegations were fully credited and during September 2000 the council established that the New York Presbyterian Hospital and Drs. Dolphin and Coleman on two points:
(1) "Committed an improper practice by terminating Dr. Hall's clinical privileges" and (2) "the council determined the Hospital's actions was not based on principles of patient care, patient welfare, practitioner character or competence, and/or the objectives of the institution." (PHC letter dated September 22, 2000)
After receiving this patent victory against the Hospital, the case was reintroduced into the federal court system, again under the auspices of Judge Jed Rakoff. Abruptly, Judge Rakoff then recused himself without explanation after my attorney again raised the issue of a conflict of interest between his senior position with Cornell School of Law and my previous employer, Cornell Medical University, who was named a defendant in my case. Judge Rakoff unprecedented and aberrant behavior was raised with complaint of misconduct on July 4, 2001 with the Judicial Council of the Second Circuit (Docket No. 01-8568).
Shortly thereafter, Judge George Daniels was appointed to my case. After satisfying Judge Jed Rakoff'┐Įs request to seek review before the New York State Public Health Council, and receiving a Title VII right-to-sue letter from the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission, my case was placed in a state of limbo. After almost three years of inaction and stating at oral argument that he would resolve a 12(b)(6) Motion '┐Įquickly'┐Į the case continue to face total inaction. In fact, my attorney was hamstrung by the Judge Daniels and forced to write '┐Įpleas'┐Į for discussion with Judge George Daniels and place phone calls that were causally dismissed, ignored and never returned. To our dismay, the District Court eventually required a writ of mandamus to finally issue any statement at all. It is important to note after the writ was filed, within a period of two weeks, Judge Daniels threw out my long-standing claims after years of delay, inaction and abandonment. The case was never allowed to proceed to discovery.
It is obvious that my civil rights claims contained within, Hall v. The New York Presbyterian Hospital, et al., (Southern District Court Index No. 00 CIV. 7858), were treated by the District Court with an absence of ordinary care.
I base this information on several facts and have enclosed documents to support my allegations.
1) Approximately one year ago, the Southern District Court (Honorable Judge George Daniels) granted defendants' motion to dismiss the case against The New York Presbyterian Hospital and Drs. Coleman and Dolphin. In an order dated December 5, 2003, the District Court held that my pleadings were legally deficient, "nowhere in his complaint'┐Įdoes Dr. Hall claim that he'┐Įspecifically complained of disparate treatment provided to blacks as compared to white, or that the issue of race was ever discussed in connection with is patient'┐Įs care or his complaints about their treatment.'┐Į Moreover, the District Court held that the complaint made '┐Įno factual allegations that the white senior physicians were actually made aware that the patient in question was black, that senior physicians who failed to assist Dr. Hall were aware that the patient in question was black, that a departure from the standard of care occurred because the patient was black.'┐Į This issue is critical as we had submitted and affidavit attesting to this fact, yet Judge Daniels disallowed this evidence form becoming part of the legal record.
It is my claim that the District Court failed to appreciate a significant lower court ruling, primarily the New York State Public Health Council crediting my complaint against the New York Presbyterian Hospital in September 2000. It is my belief that this vital information was improperly disregarded by the District Court thwarting my claims. The substance of the complaint, in which I brought against the New York Presbyterian Hospital-Cornell Medical University, regarded the hospital terminating my professional privileges under the 2801-b provision of New York State Public Health Law. It is the New York State Public Health Council'┐Įs opinion the hospital, ophthalmology department chairman and program director acted improperly. Specifically stated in my complaint I referenced an African-American immigrant who was not treated timely or compassionately by white staff members after a severe penetrating eye injury, '┐Įit is my belief that the hospital internationally disregarded the patient (sic) civil rights and federal rights for treatment in a level one trauma center due to his ethnicity and immigration status.'┐Į Additionally, I went on to describe that an African-American child with a severe penetrating eye injury was not seen or examined at all, by any member of registered hospital attending staff after five separate white surgeons were notified personally by me while on call as chief resident. All white surgeons asked pointed questions about the child'┐Įs ethnicity and when identified as black were adverse to attend to his emergent medical care, '┐Įthe incident that transpired in August involving a African-American child transferred explicitly to the hospital from another (local) hospital was entirely racially motivated and reflects an arrogance and superiority I have never witnessed before.'┐Į (See the New York State Public Health Council complaint)
Moreover, stated bolding in my the New York State Public Health Council complaint and made exhibit one of my federal complaint, I proclaim '┐Įthe hospital parties were also well aware of several complaints'┐Į.in writing and verbally'┐Įto hospital superiors'┐Įcomplaints were based on several episodes of medical negligence and racial discrimination.'┐Į (See the New York State Public Health Council complaint). Contrary to the defendant'┐Įs claims, I immediately made Drs. Coleman and Dolphin aware of my concerns of disparate medical care against black patients by white hospital staff. This is unequivocally supported by the New York State Public Health Council investigation and extensive review of all the evidence. As well, the crediting of the allegations as fact completely contradict the District Court'┐Įs affirming the defendants'┐Į outlandish assertions that the claims are '┐Įafter-the-fact'┐Į and are based on '┐Įa second bite at the apple'┐Į legal theory.
2) Additionally, the District Court denied my motion to amend my complaint by implying it held no new relevant information. In the alternative, I argued that the District Court should have granted me this relevant affidavit, amending my complaint, so that I could have pleased the court with specified details that the court requested, including the substance of the New York State Public Health Council ruling, [which incidentally was already cited in the pending federal complaint] and demanded highly germane by the previous District Court Judge Jed Rakoff in accordance to New York State Health Law. (Southern District Court Index No.99 CIV. 10554)
In that regard, it is unclear from the District Court'┐Įs dismissal what additional information would please the court, as it would seem that the court has on one hand demanded [per District Court Judge Jed Rakoff] the New York State Public Health Council judgement, deemed vital to pursue federal action, and on the other, ignored the New York State Public Health Council findings altogether. Based on my first federal ruling, (Southern District Court Index No. 99 CIV. 10554), a nexus was formed and clearly stated my federal claims are not separate and distinct from the New York State Public Health Council'┐Įs expert judgement and the affirmation of these allegations, as they are intertwined, provide undeniable, definitive and incorruptible support to my sentinel allegations against the defendants.
Once again, incredulously, at oral argument counsel represented that I had furnished all links to disparate care and the mistreatment of black patient by defendants through my detailed and fully accepted New York State Public Health Council review finalized in September 2000. I had met the legal threshold of both 42 U.S.C. '┐Į 1981 and Title VII, 42 U.S.C. '┐Į 2000e by advocating for a racial minority and then later being discriminated against by my employer for doing so through termination and defamation. Emphatically, this is based on the verbal and written statements attesting to the surgical and medical mistreatment and racial discrimination by the defendants as it related to black patients I was caring for as a federal funded proxy of the defendants.
Clearly, I witnessed and purported black patients with critical eye injuries did indeed suffer and receive disparate care by agents of The New York Presbyterian Hospital. I vociferously expressed these concerns through an internal memo providing them to my immediate superiors and was later fired for doing so. As my claims were presented before the court, they have been boxed neatly by the New York State Public Health Council and avoid any notion of presumption or confusion.
To reiterate, as I have read my claims presented by my attorney, it is ludicrous to determine that I have failed to allege '┐Įthat he was fired by the hospital because he was advocating the 1981 rights of member of a racial minority,'┐Į as per Honorable Judge George Daniels. Plainly stated, the District Court argued this point was never alleged or supported in my federal claim. This is absolutely wrong, as it formed the basis of my New York Hospital Public Health Council complaint and this action was entered into my federal complaint in October 2000 as well as a Title VII right-to-sue letter from the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission a letter provided to the court on April 6, 2001. What exactly does a right to sue letter imply if the District Court can ignore it and is not held accountable to the federal agency that provided it? Again, it is impossible to understand why this claim was not acknowledged or understood, as it was highlighted and on the first page of my federal complaint.
3) District Court Judge George Daniels, as a lifetime member of the federal judiciary and representative of the United States of America legal system, was issued a Writ of Mandamus regarding a unreasonable time delay regarding a 12(b)(6) Motion sought by the defendants. The writ was issued because of a perceived lack of professionalism and ethics, as he was contacted by my attorney via phone and writing multiple times without response over a period of years and failing to render a decision over two and half years. Realizing that the case was in a state of limbo, on June 2, 2003 we wrote the Chief Judge of the Southern District of New York requesting that the case be transferred to another District Court Judge in light of the District Court'┐Įs failure to render a decision on a 12(b)(6) Motion for almost three years. This letter was never answered. Only after being issued a Writ of Mandamus on November 18, 2003, the District Court ruled on December 5th, 2003, fifteen days after receiving the summons. It appears that after a period of many years, the Honorable Judge George Daniels was exceptionally willing to work toward resolving the case and dismissing it without delay. The space of time required for him to make this profoundly swift decision raises the question of his motives and raises the question that he breached his professional and ethical judicial duties.
Furthermore, I allege the District Court acted unjustly and prejudicially by the sweeping dismissal of claims, 42 U.S.C. '┐Į 1981 and Title VII, 42 U.S.C. '┐Į 2000e, [provided by a right-to-sue letter from the New York office of the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission in January 2001] after the said court was again forced by legal threat to make a decision based on a higher court'┐Įs writ of mandamus submitted by my attorney Ambrose Wotorson. Soon after, the District Court ruled with unceremonious alacrity to discharge the claims while boldly demonstrating, through a short opinion, it had no reasonable comprehension of the case and supporting documents. The District Court failed to address serious claims with any modicum of logically bearing and has made irrational statements that indicate it clearly had no understanding of the claims and set out to nullify said claims and thereby actively obstructed my case and hindering due process.
The District Court affirmed the dismissal of all defendants and found with prejudice against Dr. Hall.
4) Recently, the Southern District Federal Court of Manhattan, New York, and its proxy, the Honorable Judge George Daniels has recently come under scrutiny in the press. It is obvious that the United States Southern District Court'┐Įs integrity is currently in peril and based on a front page article from The New York Times, dated December 6, 2004, the District Court'┐Įs Judge George Daniels has had a series of lapses in jurisprudence. Unparalleled in the history of the United States Southern District, this chaotic situation creates numerous fears, invokes unprecedented suspicions and opprobrium. Most concerning, Judge Daniels'┐Į behavior gives the appearance and impression that the validity of his rulings are potentially flawed. According to The New York Times, the District Court'┐Įs Chief Judge, Michael B. Mukasey, Judge George Daniels'┐Į behavior is not isolated and is was recognized as improper and ongoing, '┐ĮJudge Michael B. Mukasey, chief judge of the Federal District Court, who has received repeated complaints about the delays, said that he thought Judge Daniels had been tackling his backlog, and that the year-old statistics did not offer the clearest picture. '┐ĮJudge Daniels and I have spoken about this," he said, '┐Į"As an institutional matter," Judge Mukasey added, "obviously inordinate delay is always a concern."
There are serious questions raised by these statements. Are we to assume that any clearer picture exists? What does '┐Įinstitutional matter'┐Į legally define; does it apply only to the bench or also the public? Who exactly is in charge? Why is behavior condoned and this allowed to happen? Can a judge be above the law?
In conclusion, I respectfully ask the Judicial Council of the Second Circuit to initiate and complete a professional review of the Honorable Judge George B. Daniels'┐Į court procedures and a full and unfettered evaluation of his ruling regarding Hall v. The New York Presbyterian Hospital, et al. As you may be aware, I have recently submitted a formal complaint of misconduct against the Honorable Judge George B. Daniels to the Clerk of Court of the Second Circuit Appeals Court, but was required to formally resubmit the matter.
These statements are true under penalty of perjury.
Yours faithfully,
Michael James Hall, MD, MSc
What the heck is the above comment about?
Anyway, I just wanted to point out that being ignored in trade deals also probably has disadvantages. For one nations are going to be less concerned about giving you favored trading status or entering into other agreements to lower trade barriers. Moreover, should a large country be engaging in unfair trade practices your threat to respond with your own tariffs or duty is likely to be ignored.
Still, I do agree with your broader point that it is now easier to be a small country by entering into economic pacts.
I think innovations in international government change the playing field for this issue in interesting ways, as Becker and logicnazi note. For example, the monetary unions of West Africa and Central Africa allow small states to endure while preventing the inefficiency that comes from a small, corrupt government printing lots of money to keep itself afloat. The currency union has a regional monetary bank.
The EU is a very similar arrangement, where there is a regional central bank and regional currency, which greatly facilitates monetary discipline and has done an excellent job of lowering barriers to trade among member states. The American union has done the same, and that was one of the key reasons for the original federal Union'┐Įpreventing trade wars and other economic barriers between the states. Until the 1930s and after the adoption of the 16th and 17th Amendments, which inadvertently swelled federal power over states, the American union did that. The new law that puts class action lawsuits in the hands of federal courts also tends to use federal power to enforce economic discipline and liberalization in the judicial management of the cases, while not touching the substance of the laws themselves, which are the province of state law.
Lastly, I would offer the WTO as another increasingly effective form of quasi-governmental innovation that preserves decentralization while using centralized control to enforce economic and regulatory discipline on member states.
OT, but in alluding to the Federalist Papers it brought a prominent contemporary issue to mind.
Would the Becker-Posner blog consider addressing what the Federalist Papers have to say regarding the intended power of the courts in relation to the other two branches of govt. It's been a while since I've read the FP, but I recall emphases which would suggest the courts are, among the three branches, intended to be the least powerful. I.e., indications or suggestions proscribing activist initiatives.
Actually, some of the federalist papers explicitly anticipate judicial review of state and federal laws. You have to remember that most of the founding fathers believed in natural law and the corollary that unjust laws are not laws themselves. The founding fathers (generalizing here) had no problem whatsoever with judges throwing out bad laws, for they believed that unconstitutional laws weren't really laws at all.
A lot of the due process incoherence that we have to deal with is much more to blame on the "natural law" concept of 18th century jurisdprudence as it is on 20th century judicial activism.
With all due respect, I believe that Professor Becker might be a little ethnocentric in his assertion that small countries can "free ride" off of the military protection offered by United States, NATO, etc.
Small, first-world countries (Singapore, for example) might be offered such protections and could theoretically live in a world where military might is obsolete. However, many small undeveloped countries, say in Africa or even Palestine, live with permeable borders and constant military strife.
These countries, who are struggling to get their economies off the ground, might be more akin to the America that existed when Hamilton was writing (pre - American banks, pre - stock markets). It would be nice to think that the world has moved past that and that small is indeed universally beautiful, however, I don't think that's yet the case.
Why Small has Become Beautiful-BECKER
Generally agree with the idea that small wannabe states sometimes become more serious and responsible when they get out on their own. Prof. Becker used the example of the Slovaks. Congratulations to them, but there's no guarantee that all new states will do the same. Would Quebec tighten up its act if it got independence? Unlikely, since about 80% of the French-speaking population regards capitalist enterprises as pirate ships. Ethnic groups may achieve independence and nonetheless continue to blame others for whatever misfortunes befall them.
Regarding that ridiculous piece of amateur legal brief spam that opens the comments on this thread ... the spammer's name is linked to a book promotion website called "The American Gentleman" where the same guy is shilling for a book he wrote promoting chivalry and a return to manners and civility. Hey brainiac ... if you really want to be a gentleman, refrain from dumping spam into unrelated blogversations.
I believe the founders would have been more comfortable in terms of traditional English legal culture with juries throwing out bad laws - like seditious libel in the Zenger case - by refusing to enforce them. But some kind of review power in the judiciary seems to have been anticipated.
To be clear, judicial review and judicial activism are not synonymous, they're two different animals.
How'd this go back to judicial review? Anyway, judicial review was discussed in the federalist papers. It was generally thought to be permissable because the judiciary was the "least dangerous branch" insofar as it had no enforcement mechanism. An absurd, or baseless decision could be ignored, it was thought. Indeed many presidents did just that--Jackson and Lincoln come to mind. But we are in a new era, where because of "the rule of law" and governmental stability, even the most baseless and unpopular decisions, such as Roe v. Wade, are obeyed and enforced. Decision after questionable decision, however, is testing this deference to the judiciary and the current balance of power. Will the Court press its luck one too many times?
The question Becker and Posner raise in their most recent entry is interesting. I think it is true that one traditional impediment to the small state is being eroding--barriers to trade. However, I think the other benefits of a country such as the United States have been overlooked. The EU attempts to produce the freedom of capital, labor, and goods and services that the US has had since its inception. But how much of this freedom is dependent on homogeneity of the population? Language, culture, and understanding of one's neighbor is all necessary to facilitate a united market in its fullest sense. In short, while trade barriers are significant, I don't see an economic zone like the EU, where cultures and language are still quite different throughout the continent, achieving anything close to the freedom of movement of labor and capital that the United States possesses. Eliminating legal barriers isn't the same as eliminating all barriers. Should they also move to adopt a more homogenous culture to facilitate this economic growth? Doesn't the lack of a homogenous culture impede the fludiity of the resource market (and to a much lesser degree, the product market)?
Hi -
Great piece, but with a flaw on the analysis of German unification (not reunification, quite a bit was left with the Poles and others!).
The major reason that the East Germans built their wall was to keep their citizens in. If after the collapse - the East German government wasn't overthrown, it collapsed - East Germany had remained sovereign and independent, it would have seen a massive drain towards the west with little or no chance to stop it.
East Germany wasn't just a disaster economically, but also socially and poltically, and in many ways remains so today. Hence the idea that you could simply ask the East Germans to remain home and they'd continue to work in their factories is absurd: there was virtually no industry worth the name left in Eastern Germany after all those decades of incompetence and neglect. Indeed the only real survivor of East German industrialization has been the watch industry, which was rejuvenated by west Germans.
Hence the example of German unification is flawed: the moment the border became porous, the drain started and continues today.
While the 1:1 exchange rate was a fiscal catastrophe, it was a political necessity and is widely acknowledged in the ex-GDR that it was the only economically positive thing about unification at all...
And the depopulation of East Germany continues to this day, but that is an effect of demographics and legal risks to investing in eastern Germany (largely having to do with environmental pollution cleanup costs that any new investor has to carry...)
A major other reason for Germany's persistent economic malaise is extensive labor regulations and the social welfare state, which greatly inhibit the release of human capital. Contrasting German and Soviet transitions is interesting, because Germany kept a lot of that stuff, whereas the former USSR went cold turkey on socialism. Both transitions have been sharply criticized! Bottom line is that the transition ain't gonna be easy.
I do think that the German story is hardly finished, and the same with Russia. Assessing those changes still is a little mid-stream. Germany won't emerge from its stagnation, though, until it liberalizes the labor market, something which has been slowly gaining in currency for several years. (yes that's a pun...!) Until that happens, the question of the wisdom of economic reunification remains an unfinished matter, because labor regulations probably greatly slow the process of equilibrium between East and West.
"An absurd, or baseless decision could be ignored"
Off-topic, I know, but wanted to point out that this is still true. Courts have remarkably limited powers. Look in the area of institutional injunctions and consent decrees which are often uniformly ignored. Or look how hard it was for any real civil rights enforcement to get accomplished during the period in-between the Brown v. Board decision, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
It's a touchy issue, but the Roe decision was not-crazy enough such that it wasn't just ignored. It easily could have been. Times haven't changed that much.
As for the splintering of the current geo-politcal/economic blocks that the world has experienced in the last twenty years; this can be attributed to the basic inconsistencies and contradictions inherent in the decisions reached at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences during and at the end of World War 2. These decisions were based on the accomplished facts of conquest and occupation. Ignoring basic fundamental desires of politico-economic organization based on homogeneous structures. Whether it has an ethnic, racial, religious, or political bent.
In terms of the advantages or disadvantages, homogeneoity or heterogeneoity, smallness or largeness of modern nation states and it's economic orginazation; it may be appropriate to develop a new method of analysis. This analytical method ought to be based on some of the ideas and concepts already developed in the physical sciences. Some of these concepts are; mass and energy, momentum, inertia, entropy and the like. By developing a new methodology based on such principles, a clearer picture of the current politico-economic phenomenon would be gained.
As for the application of such principles, I'll leave it up to all of you to figure it out.
Hope this helps.
To be sure, international trade has grown significantly in the last 50 years. But I wonder how much of this is due to a proliferation of nations, and not a creation of trade between nations? That is, trade between the UK and India used to not be international trade. With India's independence, it becomes international trade with no change in the goods or parties involved. The opposite would happen if Europe were integrated - trade between France and Germany that is now international trade would become intranational trade. Worldwide international trade would plummet, even without a change in trading structure. My guess, based on the fact that in the U.S., int'l trade has roughly tripled as a share of GDP, and the general observation that most of the countries splintering off to form new entities are relatively poor and therefore engage in only a small percentage of the world's international trade, is that the effect that I describe is minimal, but it is worth considering when assessing the magnitude of the increase in international trade.
┘ģž▒┘āž▓ ž¬žŁ┘ģ┘Ŗ┘ä
ž©┘垬 ž¦┘äž▓┘ä┘ü┘Ŗ
ž┤ž¦ž¬ ž│ž╣┘łž»┘Ŗ
Thank you, you always get to all new and used it
Hi all. If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?
I am from Tuvalu and now study English, please tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "Yellow pages online for security adt security services incorpor."
Thanks :-D. Raisa.
The comments to this entry are closed.


text:
Obama: Marriage benefits should cross state lines
President Barack Obama says the Supreme Court's rulings on gay marriage were a victory not just for gays and lesbians, but for American democracy.
He says as president, he believes federal benefits should be granted to couples married in a state that recognizes gay marriage even if they move to a state that doesn't.
Obama says he asked his lawyers to start evaluating how to update federal statutes to grant gay couples federal benefits even before the high court ruled.
Obama spoke in Dakar, Senegal, at a joint news conference with Senegal's President Macky Sall. Obama said different customs and religious beliefs must be respected in different countries, but states and laws should treat everyone equally.
Sall says Senegal is not ready to decriminalize homosexuality.


text:
[SIZE=7]Lawsuit: Teacher lowered student's grade because he stopped having sex with her[/SIZE]
Updated: 6:17 AM CDT Sep 25, 2018
Associated Press
SOURCE: Al Cannon Detention Center
A South Carolina math teacher is accused of lowering a student's grade because he stopped having sex with her.
The young man and his mother are suing the Charleston County School District for negligence.
The Post and Courier reports that 27-year-old Jennifer Olajire-Aro allegedly "encouraged and coerced" her student, then 17, into having sex with her multiple times. The civil lawsuit filed last week says the teacher would remind him that she controlled his grade if he tried to fend off her advances.
The lawsuit says the student told his mother after the teacher lowered his grade from a 98 to 89 when he refused her in December. She was arrested that month. Her criminal case is pending.
A school district spokesman said the district hadn't seen the lawsuit yet.


text:
Finding a VA Lender
Start Your VA Home Loan
Get a personalized assessment from a Home Loan Specialist
VA Experience Matters
Buying a home isn't something most people do with any great regularity. You might only purchase one or two houses in your life. Others will do this dozens of times.
Whether it's your first or your twenty-first home purchase, working with someone who really understands VA loans is critical. This is a specialized loan product. It's not something most loan officers and real estate agents work with every day.
Be wary of lenders or real estate agents who try to steer you away from exploring the VA loan program. This is often due to a lack of familiarity with VA loans. The VA process isn't more complicated or difficult than any other loan. It's just different, and knowing how to navigate those differences can make or break a deal for buyers.
Whether you choose Veterans United or another lender, it's important to ask the following key questions before obtaining a VA home loan:
Do You Have VA Loan Expertise?
Lenders familiar with the VA program and the unique needs of military borrowers can expertly guide you through the process. Loan officers who don't do a lot of VA loans may not have a great grasp on the program's requirements and restrictions, along with its exceptions and exemptions.
Lenders that know VA loans inside and out can help make sure you get the most from your home loan benefits. Your loan officer should be able to clearly and concisely explain how VA loan entitlement works, walk you through the VA appraisal process and break down how this loan program compares to other options.
What Military-Related Documents Will I Need to Provide?
Lenders and loan officers should be able to walk you through the types of documents you'll need to furnish, whether it's a member 4 copy of your DD-214, a statement of service for active military or VA disability paperwork. The last thing homebuyers need is a delay because of easily avoidable paperwork problems.
Will I Need to Obtain my Own Certificate of Eligibility?
Some VA lenders will often be able to obtain your COE for you in minutes using the VA's online portal. You're certainly welcome to try and obtain the COE on your own. But having a lender take care of it for you can save time and potential delays. You also don't need this document in hand to start the process.
Can You Recommend a Real Estate Agent Who Knows VA Loans?
We'll talk more about the importance of VA-savvy real estate agents in the next course. Working with agents who truly understand VA loans can make a big difference for veterans and military buyers. Ask lenders if they can connect you to a veteran-friendly agent in your market. Real estate agents who know VA loans can save you time and money. Veterans United has an national realty network of more than 5,000 veteran-friendly agents.
Will I Have a Dedicated Loan Team?
Many lenders shuffle their borrowers through a process that looks something like a conveyor belt. Consumers are passed from person to person as they move through the loan approval process. You might talk to a different person every time you call. Borrowers can find themselves explaining the same information over and over to new people, and that can waste time and add a lot of needless stress to the homebuying process. Having a dedicated loan team means that you work with the same set of VA loan experts from start to finish.
The key takeaway is this: Protect your investment and your financial security by choosing a lender that can help you get the most from your hard-earned benefits.