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The Bolivarian revolution's core brutishness, brutality, immorality and total absence of compassion were displayed to the world from Miraflores on 10 January.
Vice President Nicolas Maduro, flanked by National Assembly President Diosdado Cabello, the entire Bolivarian cabinet backed by some thousands of "chavistas" chanting "We are Chavez" staged a bizarre ceremony to inaugurate/extend/perpetuate the 14-year government of President Hugo Chavez for another six years, until 10 January 2019.
A small group of current and former "international leaders" including (as @LIVEFROMMIND tweeted) "1 pederast, 1 adulterous priest, 2 dictators, 3 coupsters, 4 thieves, 1bought (tarifado),1 coca grower (cocalero), and 1 Absent president" were also in Caracas to show the radical Latin American left's unshakable support for President Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution, which personally has paid off so handsomely for them.
The "Absent president" – Chavez – was in Havana's Cimeq oncology center, hooked up 24/7 to machines to keep the cancer-ravaged leader breathing, fed and evacuated.
But Chavez was officially present in spirit – "We are Chavez," the crowd chanted, while the visiting adulterous priest, Paraguay's deposed president Fernando Lugo, declared that "Chavez now belongs to the Americas."
Maduro, Cabello and gang set Venezuela's temporary new course in two moves on 8-9 January, clearly orchestrated by a Cuban regime that infects Venezuela's government as completely as the cancer that is killing Chavez.
First, the PSUV-controlled National Assembly voted on 8 January granted Chavez a "temporary absence" while he recovers from the cancer surgery he had on 11 December. This move extends the current (previous) government that was supposed to end on 10 January for 90 days, and can be extended to 180 days.
Second, Supreme Court chief justice Luisa Estella Morales announced on 9 January that Chavez's presidency continues unbroken from the 2007-2012 period that ended constitutionally on 10 January 2013, through the 2013-2018 period. In effect, the court ruled that Chavez is an elected president, not re-elected, and the 10 January oath of office mandated by the constitution is irrelevant.
These Bolivarian regime actions perpetuate the government indefinitely. Chavez officially has all the time he might need to recover sufficiently to return to power in Caracas.
Alternately, Chavez also may recover sufficiently to take the new oath of office in Havana before the Venezuelan Supreme Court, which would set up shop in Cimeq, perhaps with Cuba's government enacting a new law, decree, resolution or whatever establishing that Chavez's bed in the ICU is sovereign Venezuelan territory – so that formalities can be observed.
Clearly, President Chavez will be kept alive as long as possible with machines, on 24/7 life support, pumped full of narcotics, antibiotics and intravenous fluids until his final heartbeat. How long can this go on? How many weeks or even months? Where is the line between life and death? Would the Bolivarian regime and Cubans keep the body alive on machines even if he is brain dead?
What extraordinary cruelty – keeping a dying man alive with machines and giving the cancer spreading like wildfire through his body more time to chew up his internal organs, climaxing eventually with massive organ failure and systemic infection.
The death of Chavez will be a game-changer for the Bolivarian/Cuban regime. When Chavez is irrevocably dead, the constitution finally will apply – theoretically, at least, given the assembly's and supreme court's penchant for doing whatever is politically expedient for the regime's determination to remain in power.
But when Chavez finally dies, officially, will the Bolivarian/Cuban regime announce that he is dead? Or will the lies continue, with a dead president still officially imparting orders to Maduro and gang? Eventually the truth would come out.
Chavez dead would trigger new moves in this power struggle between chavistas, chavistas and more chavistas – with the Cubans trying to pull everyone's strings. New presidential elections would have to be called, since it can be assumed reasonably that Chavez won't survive the first four full years of the 2013-2018 period. The constitution states that if a president is incapacitated any time in the first four years of a six-year period, new elections must be held.
Maduro likely would be the PSUV's candidate. Chavez officially anointed Maduro as his successor in the presidency on 8 December. Cabello and others might be tempted to undermine Maduro, but the vice president likely would continue in the presidency with the blessing of the assembly and high court, able to tap the state's resources to fund his election as Bolivarian Venezuela's new president. Maduro also hopes to capitalize on the Chavez sympathy vote.
But Maduro and the Bolivarian/Cuban regime also confront an explosive problem. The economy is tanking despite last year's official 5.5% GDP growth, practically all of it due to two consecutive years of massive public spending that left the government with a fiscal deficit equivalent to about 17% of GDP, 20% inflation, and huge consolidated internal/external debts in excess of $200bn by some estimates. Pdvsa also is broken, perhaps beyond repair in its present form, and the private sector has been decimated.
Maduro, Cabello and the rest of the Bolivarian thugs in the current Cabinet are not competent managers by any stretch of the imagination. The can steal and destroy, borrow and spend, but they cannot create productive growth.
The government needs $5 billion per month to finance its deficit, Devil's Excrement reports, confirming Bank of America's recent assessment that the Bolivarian regime confronts a $65 billion financing shortfall in 2013 if it doesn't enact reforms including a substantial currency devaluation, local energy price hikes and such.
The longer these reforms are postponed, the greater the overall macroeconomic impact on the populace. But the reforms will hurt as much as doing nothing. The regime's options, basically, are to undergo painful economic surgery quickly or postpone the surgery so that the economy grows even sicker than it is now. Today it appears that the Bolivarian/Cuban regime has opted for postponing critically needed economic measures.
This year's projected financial shortfall of $65 billion is equivalent to over two-thirds of the more than $92 billion of oil export revenues that Pdvsa generated in 2012, according to Central Bank's preliminary year-end report. Last year imports also totaled about $55 billion, the highest one-year total in memory.
Venezuela imports more and more of everything, and exports less oil. But Venezuelan exports of human talent and capital have boomed during the Chavez era.
Delay could prove politically lethal for Maduro and gang. How will Maduro explain the economy's crisis this year? Chavez died and the economy also went to hell. Who will he blame besides the gringos and the vast right wing international conspiracy to destabilize Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution, steal its oil and enslave its people?
But a dim light glimmers in the past 72-96 hours. Henrique Capriles Radonski put it succinctly. Maduro and gang hold the reins of power; now let them confront/manage the economy's plunge. The Bolivarian/Cuban regime controls the presidency, national assembly, supreme court, attorney general, solicitor general, and the armed forces.
Capriles Radonski's defeat in last October's presidential election may have been the best outcome for his political future, and for the country's truly democratic forces – notice, we didn't say "parties," because most/all of the organized political parties don't represent anyone except their own very narrow interests.
"I think this is exactly what Chavez wanted," Devil's Excrement remarked yesterday as we exchanged New Year's greetings.
Crowd chant: "We are Chavez!"
Après moi, le deluge… digo yo.


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Arizona to Feds: No "Enhanced" Drivers License
Last week, the governor of Arizona signed H.B. 2426, which bars the state from implementing the "enhanced" drivers license (EDL) program.
If the federal REAL ID revival bill (PASS ID) becomes law, it will give congressional approval to EDLs, which up to now have been simply a creation of the federal security and state driver licensing bureaucracies.
As governor of Arizona, the current Secretary of Homeland Security signed a memorandum of understanding with the DHS to implement EDLs, and she backs PASS ID even though she signed an anti‐REAL ID bill as governor. As I said before, Secretary Napolitano seems to be taking the national ID tar baby in a loving embrace.

subset: commoncrawl


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De Young Repositioning Companies
By trade a certified public accountant, the managing director of Grand Rapids business-to-business marketing firm Francis Marketing was first introduced to the company as part of an embezzlement investigation.
In late 1994, De Young was working as a public accountant in the Grand Rapids office of accounting firm Plante & Moran, specializing in private placement offerings, business evaluation and troubled-company consulting. He had not worked with the firm's client J.A. Francis & Associates, as it was then known, before the embezzlement investigation. But during a lengthy period spent auditing and correcting the company's financial records, he became intimately familiar with the family-owned firm.
The following summer, he was engaged to Heather Francis, the managing director and daughter of the founder. They were married on Dec. 23.
"Everybody thought we were nuts," De Young said. "We were getting married right before Christmas, and it turned out to be the ideal time."
When De Young left the accounting field two years later to join the Francis family business, he found his accounting skills translated surprisingly well to the marketing world.
"The nature of our work here, the nature of our clients, is about making smart business decisions and being good business counselors," he said. "As an accountant, I had a much more inquisitive stance than just trying to complete an audit. I needed to understand how the company worked. … So the transition was in many respects seamless for me."
Almost exclusively a B2B marketer, with a particular emphasis toward repositioning brands, Francis Marketing prides itself on understanding how businesses work. Clients are typically seeking means to increase their differentiation in the marketplace, and that often requires more than a basic marketing campaign.
"Other marketing firms are more about marketing; they're communication driven," De Young said. "We do that, too, but that's not what we're trying to create. Our goal is not to sell them a creative project. Creative is important — it moves people to take action — but this is more of a strategic effort. How do we position the firm to succeed in the marketplace?"
There are no impulse buys in the B2B market, De Young noted. Engineering products and services, construction, industrial products and services, professional services and other companies that cater exclusively to other businesses face a great deal of scrutiny from their customers. For a single customer, the decision to purchase can be influenced by a host of stakeholders — the end user, technical implications, financial concerns, management — with months, sometimes years, of research and debate.
"There are multiple people you need to influence over time," De Young said. "You need to be able to show that there are few credible substitutes."
Francis Marketing generally works with companies that see too many credible alternatives in the market, where the segment has become too competitive and price conscious, making growth, and sometimes survival, difficult. More often than not, the repositioning process is less a matter of refining the company's message than retooling its business model, perhaps adding a new product or seeking new markets.
A recent Francis success story is construction firm CSM Group. Based in Galesburg, with operations throughout West Michigan, CSM Group was a successful, reliable general contractor with a long history and a solid reputation, one of literally dozens of such companies in the region. When the market as a whole grew, so did CSM Group; when it contracted, CSM Group did, too.
After researching the company and its market, Francis Marketing suggested that CSM Group no longer identify itself as a general contractor. Most of its work was construction management, a professional service, with very little actual construction.
"They were afraid to narrow themselves, but that was what they needed to do," said De Young. "This was a position that only serves the business owner, and that's not true of general contracting."
In the first year after implementing the change, CSM Group saw annual growth six times that of its West Michigan peers. In the two years since, it has averaged an annual growth in volume of 50 percent.
"It was a natural fit," said Doug Phillips, director of business development for CSM Group. "We did really know what we were looking for, but they were able to capture our company's culture and turn it into a program that worked."
De Young emphasized that changes of this sort are not surface deep. Every employee in the company plays a role in the company's position in the market, even if that employee's general role stays the same.
"The staff members themselves have the most impact on the brand," he said. "If you align all these people, they are essentially all salespeople out on the street."
With so many companies in Michigan realizing substantial changes in their historical markets, De Young figures there will be a growing need for companies to reposition themselves.
"Companies are going to have to change, adjust and augment the things they've been doing for many years," he said.
After graduating from Calvin College in 1989, the West Michigan native accepted a post at the Plante & Moran office in Ann Arbor. He returned in 1991, working in management positions at local food and medical companies. Just prior to joining the local Plante & Moran staff, he served as administrator for a 30-doctor mental health practice.
In 2000, De Young and his wife purchased the company her father founded in 1986, renaming it Francis Marketing. It is still located on two floors of 124 E. Fulton St. in Grand Rapids, perhaps the only local office building with a manual elevator.
The company recently launched Francis SEO, a subsidiary focused on B2B search-engine optimization.


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Indian Jewels Found Buried in Alps
A stash of jewels suspected to have been onboard when an Air India plane crashed high in the French Alps at least 47 years ago has been discovered buried in snow by a mountaineer scaling Mont Blanc.
The gems, reported to be worth $332,000, were found in a metal box by an unnamed French climber on Europe's highest peak earlier this month.
The climber handed the emeralds, rubies and sapphires to the French police, according to the Agence-France Presse news agency.
Some of the jewels were found in pouches marked "Made in India," the AFP quoted Sylvain Merly, the local police chief, as saying.
It is suspected that the box was onboard one of two Indian planes that crashed in the mountains, one in 1950 the other in 1966.
Homi Bhabha, then chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, died in the 1966 crash, in which reports say 117 people perished.
French authorities trying to trace the owners or heirs to the gems have contacted Indian officials about the find, according to the AFP report. A spokesperson from India's Foreign Ministry was not immediately available for comment.
If the treasures were indeed onboard one of the ill-fated flights it is too early to say which one.
This is not the first discovery of items suspected to have been carried on the flights, but it is possibly the most valuable.
In recent times, several documents thought to have been among the wreckage of the aircraft have been recovered from the mountains.
In August 2012, a bag containing letters from India's Ministry of External Affairs was found in the French Alps near the spot where a New York-bound Air India flight crashed on Jan. 24, 1966. Arnaud Christmann, the mountain rescue worker who found the bag was reported by The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. as saying the find might spark a gold-rush to the crash site.
In 2010, students from the University of Dundee in the U.K. found a mailbag in the mountainous region containing 75 letters and birthday cards, some postmarked "Bombay 1950." The items were reported to be remnants of the 1950 crash.
In September 2008, Daniel Roche, a mountain climber, found a copy of the Hindustan Times Weekly newspaper dated Jan. 23, 1966.
Like India Real Time on Facebook here and follow us on Twitter @WSJIndia.


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Students Finally Receive Prizes for Pulling an All-Nighter
POSTED ON: February 18, 2014
Though prizes are rarely awarded for students who pull all-nighters, an exception was made over the weekend of February 8th. The Cooper Union hosted its first-ever hackathon, an intercollegiate, interdisciplinary event that opened up the labs at the Albert Nerken School of Engineering to the creative whims of 100 students for 24 hours. Organized by create@cooper, "hackCooper" awarded prizes to the three best "hacks," collaborative projects that solved a problem or were just interesting but that were developed and built entirely during a 24-hour period. The top prize went to a device shaped like a turtle.
"HackCooper went really well," Sharang Phadke, an electrical engineering senior and co-founder of create@cooper, says. "In the end there were 27 projects that were really high quality. The sponsors were all impressed by the hacks and by the students." Though the term "hack" is commonly associated with computer subterfuge, hackathons focus on intensive, short-term collaborative creation often among students, but increasingly professional organizations have sponsored them as well. This was the first for The Cooper Union, which gave the event its own flavor.
"What's particularly cool about hackCooper was that the top prizes were awarded to hardware hacks," Andrew Rehayem, the event coordinator for create@cooper and an electrical engineering sophomore, says. "The vast majority of hackathons, like the ones at Columbia, NYU or Duke, all focus on software. It's a funny dynamic at Cooper. Because we are so small, everybody has access to the laser cutter, for example, whereas at a bigger university, if there is only one laser cutter, it has to be shared with thousands. Consequently Cooper students get pretty good at prototyping stuff and making things pretty quickly."
Starting at noon on Saturday, students from The Cooper Union schools and others in the area formed teams, brainstormed, built and coded projects without any advance work. Sponsors included Yahoo!, McGraw Hill Education, LinkedIn and others. Many sent "mentors" who, along with Cooper Union faculty, mingled with the students giving advice. Some presented short talks, such as one on cryptocurrency and another on taking your hack to the next level. Work went through the night, fueled by free food and free materials. But all work had to stop at noon the next day, whereupon each project team gave a two-minute demo to a panel of judges and the rest of the participants.
Third prize went to "hippocampus," a web-based scrapbook for sharing images, music and more. Second prize went to "High Frequency Stealing," a game like Simon, pitting two players against each other to see who can be the first to press buttons in the same order as matching LEDs flash. To make it more interesting, each player logs into a virtual currency account and loses or gains real money depending on their skills.
The top prize, with its $999 award, went to "TurtleBot," created by Alex Dworzanczyk, Hannah Talisse, David Tan and Henry Wang, a team of Cooper Union mechanical engineering students. About the size of a Roomba, the robotic home vacuum cleaner, and built with a similar purpose, TurtleBot is designed with two arms and a bright green shell that covers a spinning brush underneath. It is meant to climb the mesh of 41 Cooper Square and clean it, although this could not be tested. In spite of this, the judges were impressed. "At hackathons the idea isn't that what you make has to work 100% or be scalable or marketable," Sharang Phadke says. "The goal it to just 'hack' something together as quickly as possible. The Turtlebot crew CADed everything, cut out all the gear boxes and wrote all the code themselves in 24 hours. That was impressive."
"People will always tell you to 'just go' to a hackathon--that you don't have to know how to program--and you never believe them," Andrew Rehayem says. "You expect that in order to make anything cool, you have to have lots of experience. But when you are there, you see people winging it, just working on whatever is off the top of their heads, and a lot of times actually coming up with something interesting. So you internalize that it isn't that hard to make something."
Create@cooper hopes to make hackCooper an annual event. "I'm pretty sure we'll have a hackCooper every year," Sharang Phadke says. "There was a lot support for it. Everyone who participated had a lot of fun and learned a lot. The sponsors are eager to do more at Cooper."


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DSL Internet Oregon
DSL Internet Service in OR
DSL is an easy and reasonably-priced way to get high speed internet service. DSL is a proven technology that has been utilized for many years as a way to bring internet to people. Today's DSL internet boasts even better performance and more reasonable cost than in the past.
How DSL Internet Service Works
"DSL" is short for "digital subscriber line." Like dial-up internet service, DSL utilizes phone lines in order to transmit data. However, unlike dial-up, DSL provides fast internet service. Plus, it does not tie up the telephone line when the internet is in use.
DSL internet service requires minimal equipment. In order to use DSL, your computer needs to be connected to a modem, and the modem needs to be connected to a telephone jack. This enables the transmission of digital data over the telephone lines, which is then sent to a Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplier (DSLAM) that routes requests between computers and the internet.
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There are two different types of DSL. Asynchronous DSL (ADSL) and Synchronous DSL (SDSL). The former, ADSL, gives you a download speed that is faster than the upload speed. The latter, SDSL, offers download and upload speeds that are the same - or "in sync."
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Verizon DSL is widely available throughout the U.S. and is one of the largest service providers in the nation. It provides customers with high speed internet, 4 GB of web space for a personal website, always available live technical support, a free wireless router and a 30-day money back guarantee. In addition to internet service, customers can also obtain fiber optic television through Verizon.
AT&T has long been known as one of the nation's major providers of long distance telephone service. With AT&T DSL, customers get the service that they have come to expect from the company that has become a major provider of not only telephone services but digital TV and internet as well.
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DSL Internet Providers in Various Cities in Oregon
Albany, OR
Aloha, OR
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Kingsley Field, OR
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Onkyo HT-R558
Audio Video Receiver (2012-16)
Tuning range: FM, MW
Power output: 100 watts per channel into 6Ω (stereo)
Surround output: 100W (front), 100W (center), 100W (rear)
Frequency response: 5Hz to 100kHz
Total harmonic distortion: 1%
Damping factor: 60
Input sensitivity: 200mV (line)
Signal to noise ratio: 100dB (line)
Output: 200mV (line)
Speaker load impedance: 6Ω to 16Ω
Digital inputs: coaxial, optical, USB
Video Connections: HDMI, component, composite
Dimensions: 435 x 150 x 318mm
Weight: 7.6kg
Accessories: RC-799M remote control
Year: 2012
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I've read numerous introductions to finite fields, but I feel like my intuition about them is fairly lacking. Considering that finite fields are the the most "inert" objects in algebraic geometry, I think I could use a serious surge of perspective.
What I would like to read now is a comprehensive overview that tells me "everything I need to know" about how finite fields and their algebraic closures work, algebraically. I don't mind working out the proofs on my own if they are terse or absent; I'm just looking for quality and quantity of results. Hopefully some intense reading will help steep out some of my insecurities about characteristic p.
Can anyone recommend a single source for such an overview?


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The irony of this just dawned on me. What if Brad Paisley was the one who changed your world? I mean, his wife probably credits him with changing hers. But it's possible that his music — especially his most meaningful songs — could have impacted a lot of lives. I know his "He Didn't Have to Be" kind of changed mine.
Anyway, now that Paisley is well on his way to making a feature film based on his song "I Can't Change the World," he's asking fans and social media followers to tell him who changed their lives and whose world they'd like to change. (If you look up the hashtag #ChangedYourWorld on Twitter, you'll see how many people responded with stories and pictures.)
Earlier this week, Paisley tweeted , "We began filming last week on location in Haiti on the film project to accompany the latest song." He posted a photo of himself on location in what appeared to be a Martin Scorsese moment as he assessed his surroundings.
Paisley described that part of the shoot in a recent radio interview.
"One of the major plotlines of this movie involves an orphan in Haiti and her situation and the woman that wants to adopt her, and that's a major cause for me," Paisley said. "I really have started to feel very strongly about our responsibility as the United States of America … closest to the poorest nation in the world, which is Haiti."
In fact Paisley and his wife Kimberly Williams-Paisley have been volunteers for Live Beyond, a Nashville nonprofit mission that provides medical care, clean water, and developmental activities in Haiti. And $1 from every ticket sold to his Beat This Summer tour benefits Live Beyond.


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Security products professionals need help promoting their services in this market but do not wish to hire a PR agency for increased media exposure. To help overcome this, Understanding Marketing [on March 17] launched the PR Toolkit, an affordable new e-Book that helps smaller firms generate their own public relations tactics to increase their client base.
Authored by John Sternal, a seasoned PR professional of nearly 20 years, the new PR Toolkit provides insight to help small businesses leverage the power of media awareness to promote their companies and generate bigger profits. Understanding Marketing offers DIY marketing and PR information for small businesses and the PR Toolkit serves as an agency-in-a-box for any company looking to insource and get publicity on a shoestring budget.
GE Security in Pittsfield is cutting its workforce, likely by more than one-third.
About 430 people work at the plant.
Just before the end of the first shift Wednesday, company officials called workers together to tell them the news: due to a drop in sales, they have to cut jobs.
They asked first for a voluntary reduction, offering severance packages with benefits.
Company spokesperson Michelle May tells TV-5 the number of jobs that will be cut depends on how many people take the voluntary package.
But, she says it's likely more than 100 people will permanently lose their jobs.
Some workers at the plant were already on month-long furloughs.
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We need to do some serious bootstrap-pulling, and quick.
VSI Viscount Selected for Obama Hookerbucks Program.
VSI Viscount is pleased to announce the company has been selected by the US Government as the official co-sponsor of the launch of the Obama Hookerbucks program. Attendees to the upcoming ISC WEST Security Conference will receive complementary Hookerbucks at the VSI booth.
As part of the US Government's $3 Trillion budget, the $30 Billion Obama Hookerbucks program is expected to be the key to stimulating the Las Vegas economy. Stephen Pineau, CEO of Viscount, commented, "The public is being screwed by the whole mess anyways so at least this way attendees will have something to show for it."
Gaming revenues decreased 17% for the fourth quarter. The Company's total table games volume (including baccarat) decreased 17% in the quarter, with the overall table games hold percentage near the midpoint of the Company's normal 18% to 22% range in the 2008 period, lower than the 2007 period when the hold percentage was near the top end of the range. Slots revenues decreased 12% company-wide. Rooms revenue decreased 21% as market conditions impacted rates and occupancy leading to a 21% decrease in Las Vegas Strip REVPAR(1). Average room rates decreased 15% at the Company's Las Vegas Strip resorts and occupancy decreased from 93% to 85%.
Clovis, CA (March 17, 2009) – Pelco is pleased to announce that Mr. Clifford S. Holtz has joined the executive management team of Pelco as its new Senior Vice President, Americas Sales, reporting to Mr. Dean A. Meyer, Pelco President and CEO. Holtz comes to Pelco from Nortel Networks Corporation in Denver, Colorado, where he was President of Enterprise Sales, North American.
"The addition of Cliff our management team brings invaluable sales management experience to Pelco. Cliff has a long and successful record of working with leading technology products and independent sales channels that are similar to ours. We look forward to working closely with Cliff to do an even better job of taking Pelco products and services to market,†says Meyer.
Prior to joining Pelco, Holtz was President of Enterprise Sales, North America, at Nortel and was responsible for all sales and marketing activity to this customer base. Leading technology-oriented enterprise business units for over 23 years, Prior to that, he served as Executive Vice President, Business Markets Group at Qwest Communications, where he led a $5 billion unit and managed an organization of over 5,000 employees.
Earlier in his career, Holtz was at Gateway Corporation, where he led the $5 billion Consumer Division as Senior Vice President, where he managed all aspects of retail sales channels, advertising and product development. While at AT&T Corporation, he was President, Metro Markets, a $4.5 billion business unit.
Our goal is to show off at ISC West and give people a taste of how their security applications will be facilitated in the future. (Actually, the future is now, as the data infrastructure that makes our solution so robust has already been built and is currently in use.) In addition to showing what we are doing, John Deere (the heavy equipment manufacturer) will be sharing space in our booth to show their latest proof-of-concept product, the R-Gator. It is a semi-autonomous vehicle designed for patrolling areas that might be dangerous or inefficient for people to patrol. This includes huge installations like wind farms and power plants, or even border patrol areas. It carries on-board cameras that can be connected to our data center via wireless broadband cellular or other connections to the Internet. This is a really cool application.
According to travel website Orbitz, Las Vegas is slashing room rates to stay afloat amid the economic morass. The average day rate for three-star hotels in Vegas is $48, down 54 percent from 2008's $104. The average rate for four-star hotels is $87, down 43 percent from last year's $152. Week nights are even cheaper, says the Las Vegas Sun–you can hit the rack at the Stratosphere for just $25.99 Monday night. That's even better than the dingy no-tell motels that line the Black Horse Pike outside Atlantic City.
"With nearly 11 million Americans taking trips on public transportation to save time and money every day, there is no greater moment for Congress and the federal government to reaffirm its commitment to safeguarding our nation's public transportation infrastructure and protecting the Americans who ride these systems,†SIA Director of Government Relations Don Erickson said. "This can be accomplished by fully funding the Transit Security Grant Program at $900 million in FY2010 and ensuring that these critical resources are sent directly to transit authorities without a match requirement."
Transportation Security Administration Assistant Administrator John Sammon told the panel that the program "makes transit systems more secure by expanding the deployment of surveillance, monitoring and detection technologies to improve intrusion and anomaly detection, strengthen access control measures and otherwise add layers to harden facility security."
NORTH CANTON, Ohio, March 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Diebold, Incorporated (NYSE: DBD) today announced leadership changes as part of an organizational realignment within its security division.
Bradley J. Stephenson, vice president, physical security solutions, has been promoted to vice president of Diebold's security division with a focus on increasing the value of Diebold's security solutions to customers and accelerating market growth in the Americas. He is now responsible for the company's enterprise security and fire services operations, government solutions group, monitoring services, security research and development, product management and security marketing and business development functions. Dennis M. Moriarty, senior vice president, global security division, is leaving the company to pursue other opportunities.
"This change is designed to drive efficiencies through defined business processes, targeted geographic focus and organizational optimization," said Thomas W. Swidarski, Diebold president and chief executive officer. "We have an enormous amount of confidence in Brad Stephenson's ability to deliver results in his new responsibilities," Swidarski continued. "His wealth of experience in running various businesses within Diebold across a number of different industries will prove to be valuable in this broadened leadership role."
Swidarski added, "During the time Dennis Moriarty led our security division, he expanded our security offerings and raised the visibility of the company in the industry and with influential decision makers in emerging markets. We thank Dennis for his contributions to our company and wish him well in his future endeavors."
Stephenson has been with Diebold for more than 35 years, serving in a variety of senior management and technical positions including general manager of card systems, fire services and Nexus Software. Stephenson led the company's electronic security division from 1996 to 1999, developing security products to meet the needs of financial services and retail clients. Prior to moving to the security division's corporate headquarters in 1995, Stephenson had more than 20 years of experience in various customer-facing roles.
Moriarty was appointed vice president of Diebold's global security division in 2005. He joined Diebold in 1996 as Eastern Division vice president, where he led the sales, service and systems organizations. He also served as vice president of Customer Business Solutions within Diebold North America. Prior to joining Diebold, Moriarty served in senior leadership positions at Pitney Bowes Corporation in Stamford, Conn. A native of Stamford, N.Y., Moriarty holds a bachelor's degree in English from Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y.
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The next four lessons are going to be going in the 'for kids' section. I have received so many requests for these animals and figures and since it has been asked of me more than once, I will fill a need today. I'm going to begin with showing you guys "how to draw a dwarf for kids", step by step. This is a really popular fantasy figure from lore, and as you know dwarves is almost always written into stories that features unicorns, wizards, and trolls. I know that many of you have a hard time when it comes to drawing fantasy creatures and beings. That is why I made sure to create a lesson that was not only easy enough for everyone to try, but also cute enough to tackle. I think you will find that drawing a dwarf for kids is going to be a fun experience. I suggest that everyone try out this submission even if you already know how to draw a dwarf. That's about it guys, I have to get moving if I want to get the rest of my lessons up before days end. Peace out and enjoy your drawing day!
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