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WASHINGTON—The 2012 Farm Bill is "an opportunity to address our nation's broken and outdated agricultural policies" said leaders of four national Catholic organizations, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) in a March 6 letter to the leaders of the U.S. Senate's Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry.
"We ask that you support a Farm Bill that provides for poor and hungry people both at home and abroad, offers effective support for those who grow our food, ensures fairness to family farmers and ranchers, and promotes stewardship of the land," wrote Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockton, California; Bishop Richard Pates of Des Moines, Iowa; Father Larry Snyder, president of Catholic Charities USA (CCUSA), Carolyn Woo, president of Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and James F. Ennis, executive director of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference.
"We also urge that this Farm Bill target limited resources, such as subsidies and direct payments, to those farmers and ranchers who truly need assistance to be competitive and successful," they wrote.
Bishops Blaire and Pates chair the USCCB Committee of Domestic Justice and Human Development and the Committee on International Justice and Peace, respectively.
The full letter is available online: www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/agriculture/upload/Joint-Letter-to-Senate-on-Farm-Bill-2012-03-06.pdf
Keywords: 2012 Farm Bill, U.S. Senate, Senator Debbie Stabenow, Senator Pat Roberts, Bishop Stephen Blaire, Bishop Richard Pates, Father Larry Snyder, Catholic Charities USA, CCUSA, Carolyn Woo, Catholic Relief Services, CRS, James F. Ennis, National Catholic Rural Life Conference
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As the temperature starts to rise, and the snow slowly starts to melt, some New York City sidewalks remain covered by their white blankets - and that's a problem a councilman is working to fix.
City Councilman Justin Brannan hopes to do it by introducing what he calls "Shovels of Shame." He wants fines for failure to shovel to rise. In the meantime, he's started posting pictures of snowfall scofflaws on social media with the Shovels of Shame tag. He's hoping if extra fines won't convince the businesses to shovel, maybe public pressure will.
"When the average small business owner gets out there and shovels, when the average homeowner gets out there and shovels, you would think that some of these big corporate chains can get out there and shovel just like everybody else," Brannan said. "If you're not going to do it, then we're going to put you on blast. That's what Shovels of Shame is all about."
Right now the city requires responsible parties to shovel their sidewalk between 4 and 14 hours after the snow stops falling. If you don't, fines range between $100 and $350. Brannan wants to increase the fines for chain retailers. The new penalties would range from $1,000 to $5,000 and would apply to businesses with 10 or more locations.
Pedestrians cautiously shuffling over the un-shoveled snow Tuesday say they're on board.
"Whoever this belongs to at this present moment should pay to get this done, properly," Dyker Heights Adam Cuniglio said. "10-degrees below zero, now you gotta walk over snow which you've got ice patches and it's very dangerous."
Adrienne Escobar ventured out of her house for the first time since the snowfall Tuesday. She's still shell shocked from slipping and breaking her foot during a previous storm
"This is ridiculous," she said about sidewalk conditions. "I don't get it, I mean it's such a liability for them and for the people that can actually fall."
Brannan's bill would need city council approval, so the businesses likely won't have to fork over the additional cold, hard cash until next winter.

subset: commoncrawl


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Odilo, a technology company whose proprietary solution enables entities with large groups of users to access digital content – e-books, audio and video on demand – has obtained 1.3M € to continue to finance its international expansion and strengthen its line of Content as a Service (CaaS) business model.
The funding round was led by Inveready Technology Investment Group and complemented by the public funding entity ENISA. With this transaction Inveready now joins ACTIVE Venture Partners which led the first financing round in 2014.
Odilo has developed a platform for digital content management that allows entities with large groups of users to offer their user base access to digital content on demand through a pay-per-consumption model.
The company is a leader in the Spanish speaking market -3rd language in number of speakers – being the technological platform provider of the national e-book library of Spain (eBiblio) and Chile, as well as the Cervantes Institute, allowing these to offer their catalog of eBooks through a loan mode so its users can download it on their devices for free without having to go to the physical library.
Following the successful implementation in Spain, the company has undertaken an internationalization process that has awarded them public contracts in Europe, Latin America and North America. In the United States, in particular, they were awarded the contract to deliver digital content to the whole State of Michigan.
Since last October, Odilo has become the first company outside the United States to sign a global distribution agreements with the five largest publishing groups in the world.
The funding obtained from Inveready and ENISA will allow the company to continue on its successful market expansion opening new markets, having signed new trade agreements in Asia and Europe in order to reinforce its digital education area where Odilo's solution has generated a lot of interest, such as from primary schools in the United States.
Rodrigo Rodriguez, CEO of the company, says: "The new funds will allow us to continue our internationalization strategy. Some time ago we decided to go for a Content as a Service model, allowing all kinds of communities to deliver content to their users paying only for what they consume. This business model is especially adapted to libraries, government agencies and schools, and is also recently perceived as an added value for private groups such as the hotel or transport industry. The great adoption, both nationally and internationally, validates our vision. The vision is to value culture and bring it to the largest possible number of people through new forms of consumption and with attractive distribution models which is possible with our technology."
Ricard Söderberg, Founding Partner at ACTIVE Venture Partners, says: "We are adding a valuable investor to Odilo and we are happy to work together with Inveready going forward. Odilo has a fantastic product range for public libraries and schools that can certainly become a game changer for this industry with its innovative business model. "


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Java 7 Awesome Aspect-Automatic Resource Management
In my previous article," Java 7 Awesome Features" I had missed one of the greatest aspect of Java 7.That is nothing but "Automatic Resource Management". This article deals with the same.
Managing Resource is one of the keen thing in development. Because if we don't manage the resource effectively it will cause lot of issues like PermGen Space Error, TooManyConnections Error etc.
For avoid those problems Java 7 introduce the great aspect "Automatic Resource Management". By this feature java can automatically manage the resources effectively. So java frees the developer from lots of overhead. Lets have a prolix look on this.
try(Resource 1;Resource 2;Resource 3….) { //block of statements } catch(Exception e) { //block of statements }
Here is simple code snippet which shows you the typical try-catch-finally block. In the code we create the jdbc connection for access the data from database.
Connection connection = null; Statement statement = null; try { connection = DriverManager.getConnection("databaseurl","username(opt)","password(opt)"); statement = connection.createStatemnet(); boolean executionStatus= statement.execute("query"); } catch(Exception e) { //Block of code for handle the exception e.printStacktrace(); } finally { try { statement.close(); connection.close(); } catch(Exception e) { //block of statements for handle exceptions. } }
In the above snippet, suppose we forget to close the statement and connection, what happened? May be after some operations (which also open the connection) "Too Many connection error" will occurred.
But java 7 keeps us in safe zone from those kinds of errors by mange the resource automatically. In java 7 we can write the above snippet like this,
Connection connection = null; Statement statement = null; try(connection = DriverManager.getConnection("databaseurl","username(opt)","password(opt)"); statement = connection.createStatemnet()) { boolean executionStatus= statement.execute("query"); } catch(Exception e) { //block of statements for handles the exceptions }
In the above snippet, there are no overheads like close the connections and statements properly. Java 7 can manage those things automatically for us.
Java 7 mange the resources which are sub interfaces and implementing classes of AutoCloseable.So we can pass the resources which are extends or implements the interface AutoCloseable.
That's all folks, I think this article makes you bit more knowledgeable about java 7 awesome aspect "Automatic resource Management", If you feel the same, please leave your footprints(comments) here. Joyous coding day…..
Java 7 awesome Features
Whenever, I am crawl through the web i notice the word java 7.Then,I really found out java 7 is today's hot topic. So i googled it for know something about java 7.At that time i found out some thing interested and useful features in java 7.Thats push me here to share something to you all folks.Lets get into the topic.
The project name of java 7 development is Project Coin.I have listed some of the features below.
Null-safe Method invocation:
This is the greatest feature which is going to added in Java 7.NullPoniterException is one of the most common exception encountered in Java programming.
When I searched "NullPointerException" in Google, it gave about 5,570,000 results! This proves how pervasive the exception is and how much effort a developer has to put in writing java code free from null pointer exception.
Suppose if java has a feature to keep us in safe zone from null pointer exception, how is it? It happens.
Suppose we have a method to fetch postal code of a person's address:
public String getPostcode(Person person) { if (person != null) { Address address = person.getAddress(); if (address != null) { return address.getPostcode(); }} return null; }
Now check the above syntax. We have done lots of if (null! = object) checks to avoid NullPointerException.
public String getPostcode(Person person) { return person?.getAddress()?.getPostcode(); }
Null-ignore invocation is concerned with dealing with possible null values in calling one or especially a chain of methods. Check the syntax?. while calling method on an object. This is Null-safe operator in Java 7. Thus, you can avoid lots of if (null!= object) checks in Java 7.
Strings in Switch Statements:
Whenever i am working with switch-case i felt, if the case allowed the string as a case variable we feel so comfort on that. Because the switch case allows only the primitive data types as variable such as integer, char etc.
Whenever i working with the methods that returns status of the operations like succesful, failed like that. At that time i need to convert that in to constants. Then only i can move on switch statements.
But java 7 offers the Strings as case variables in Switch Statements, So we are free from the conversion process.
Multi-Exception Catch:
Another awesome update is Multi-Exception Catch, that means a single catch can handle multiple exceptions. The syntax is
try { block of statments } catch(Exception1|Exception2|Exception3...) { block of statements. }
It save lot of spaces in the code.
Bracket Notation for Collections:
This feature refers to the ability to reference a particular item in a Collection with square brackets similar to how Arrays are accessed. Collection is one of the key concepts in java.
But when i was a student, I feel so discomfort with collections because of its strutcture.Thats some thing different from basic things in java.
But now its also be like a simple things like array etc. For ex, a Collection class we might consider something similar to arrays.
Instead of:
Collection<String> c = new ArrayList(); c.add("one"); c.add("two"); c.add("three"); Use: Collection<String> c = new ArrayList {"one", "two", "three" };
Thats all folks.If any important updates are missing don't hesitate to add that as comments.
Java code to Wrap and Rotate image in PDF File
Now-a-days if we wanna develop an application, that application must have the capability to prefer the Reports. All the reports are favour to PDF format. If we develop a report for a particular concern the client needs to place their logo in the report. For that we need to insert the image in PDF file. This article deals the same.
The itex.jar makes it most simple and elegant.
JDK 1.5 and Above
Jar : itext.jar(Download here)
To make a program over this, firstly we need to import some packages. Remember to make this program the first and foremost thing to remember is to place the iText.jar in WEB-INF/lib of your web application.
Without this .jar the application will not run.
Steps involved in Insert image in PDF File:
Create Document :
This class describes a PDF file's page size, margins, and other important attributes. It works as a container for a document's chapters, sections, images, paragraphs, and other content.
Create PdfWriter:
This class is used to create the pdf file.
By using the method getInstace we can create pdf file from the given output stream.
Open pdf File:
Now open the document by using open() method in document class.
Get the Image content:
By using the method getInstace() of image class we can get the image content.
The method has the image filename as argument.
Add contents to Pdf File:
By using add method in document class we can add paragraph and image in the pdf file.
Resize the image:
By using the scaleAbsolute() method we can resize the image. We can pass the width and height as the argument to resize the image.
Rotate image:
By using setRotationDegrees() method of image class we can set the degree which we want to rotate the image.
After rotate the image we add the image into the pdf file by using add method of document class.
package com.bsj.itext; import java.io.*; import com.lowagie.text.*; import com.lowagie.text.pdf.*; /** * * @author Muneeswaran */ public class WrapImageinPdf { public static void main(String arg[]) throws Exception { //Create Document Document document = new Document(PageSize.A4.rotate()); //Create PdfWriter: PdfWriter.getInstance(document, new FileOutputStream("imagePdf.pdf")); Font font = new Font(Font.TIMES_ROMAN, 18, Font.BOLD); //Open pdf File: document.open(); Paragraph paragraph = new Paragraph("Original:", font); Paragraph par = new Paragraph("After rotate:", font); //Get the Image content: Image image = Image.getInstance("2.jpg"); //Add contents to Pdf File: document.add(paragraph); document.add(image); document.add(par); //Resize the image: image.scaleAbsolute(500.0f, 500.0f); image.setBorder(1); //Rotate image: image.setRotationDegrees(45.0f); document.add(image); document.close(); } }
I hopes this helps.Go ahead to prefer report and inserting logo in pdf.Before that,if you feel it useful,leave your foot prints here[Comments].
Execute Javascript from Java
After a small gap,I am back to here for share something to you all.A week before i have stuck with execute javascript from java.I google it for this.Finally i found my way to achieve this.
Java provides the way to execute JavaScript also.The solution is come along with ScriptEngineManager.This article deals the same.
The ScriptEngineManager comes along with the package javax.script.
This is a relatively small, simple API. A ScriptEngineManager object can discover script engines through the jar file service discovery mechanism. It can also instantiate ScriptEngine objects that interpret scripts written in a specific scripting language. The simplest way to use the scripting API is as follows:
- Create a ScriptEngineManager object.
- Get a ScriptEngine object from the manager.
- Evaluate script using the ScriptEngine's eval methods.
Now we look at the sample code.
import javax.script.*; public class ExecuteScript { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { // create a script engine manager ScriptEngineManager factory = new ScriptEngineManager(); // create a JavaScript engine ScriptEngine engine = factory.getEngineByName("JavaScript"); // evaluate JavaScript code from String engine.eval("print('Welocme to java world')"); } }
Executing a Script from .js File:
In this example, we can execute JavaScript which is from .js file.This can be achieved by the eval method of ScriptEngine Class.
The eval method have the FileReader object as argument.
we can create the ScriptEngineManager and get the ScriptEngine from the above code(line 4-7).
Then we add the eval method which is used to execute script from .js file.
// evaluate JavaScript code from given file engine.eval(new java.io.FileReader("welcome.js"));
Let us assume that we have the file named "welcome.js" with the following text:
println("Welcome to java world");
If we will run the code,this yields the output as
Welcome to java world.
I hopes this helps.Then Go ahead to execute your JavaScript by using your java code.Before that,if you feel it useful,leave your foot prints here[Comments].