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We are thrilled to announce that ESL is partnering with The Coalition and Xbox to kick off Gears of War esports! Having had its beginning in 2006, the third-person-shooter series gained many fans throughout the years thanks to its exciting and unique gameplay. Now it’s time to bring Gears of War back to the competitive scene and give players in North America a chance to prove their skills - and win prizes in the process. Starting in September 2015, ESL will be partnering with The Coalition for two action packed seasons of Gears of War, where players from all over North America can compete at the highest level . Gears of War preseason ESL will start off with eight preseason cups - each with a US$500 weekly prize pool - in September 2015, where players can develop their skills and get ready for the regular season. During the preseason, ESL will be working with The Coalition and the community to continue to refine the ruleset, striving for the best possible competitive experience for our players. Gears of War Pro League by ESL presented by Xbox The action will really pick up as the Gears of War Pro League by ESL kicks off with two open qualifier cups on the 4th and 11th of October 2015, each resulting in eight teams moving forward and a US$500 prize pool. The cups will be followed by a Pro League qualifier - featuring those sixteen teams and a US$1,000 prize pool - which will be broadcast live on the 18th of October 2015 on the Gears of War Twitch channel. Once the qualifiers are over, the first season of the Gears of War Pro League by ESL will officially begin. Eight teams will compete over the course of seven weeks from October to December 2015, with there being two match days, one of which will receive a live broadcast. The top four teams will then advance to the season one finals in January 2016 and battle it out for the first Gears of War Pro League championship title as well as their share of the US$50,000 prize pool. Visit the Gears of War Pro League by ESL website! Gears of War Open Series by ESL presented by Xbox If you’re looking to play Gears of War competitively but in a more relaxed setting, the Gears of War Open Series by ESL is the way to go. Upon the completion of the preseason, the Gears of War Open Series will be in full swing with a weekly US$500 prize pool and competitions running over the course of ten weeks from October to December 2015. Find out more and sign up for the Open Series here! Whether you’re a Gears of War veteran, a competitive pro or a relative newcomer, this is your chance to prove your skills and begin your esports career. We’re looking forward to seeing you and your team in either the Gears of War Pro League or the Gears of War Open Series by ESL cups - good luck! To stay up to date, be sure to follow ESL Gears of War on Facebook and Twitter. Share this article: |
Gay life in America has utterly transformed itself since World War II. In the 1950s, homosexuality was a crime. Now, openly gay people are everywhere in popular culture, gay kids are coming out as early as elementary school and we can get even get married in a half-dozen states (including, soon, Washington). One of the most crucial, but least-talked about, reasons for this change is gay literature. Starting in the 1940s, a coterie of bold writers -- Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Armistead Maupin and Tony Kushner, among many others -- played a central role in creating what we now think of as gay life. Their words gave voice to a segment of the American population that, for much of its history, was hidden away. In his new book, "Eminent Outlaws," novelist Christopher Bram uses a series of complex portraits of America's most influential gay literary lions to argue for their position in the pantheon of American culture. The book covers expansive territory, charting the tumultuous relationship between Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, whose passionate hatred for one another lasted until the latter's death (Vidal called it a "good career move"). It describes Tennessee Williams' tortured relationship with his sexuality and gradual descent into alcoholic misery, James Baldwin's struggles against racism and Edmund White's eloquent reactions to the terror of AIDS. For anybody interested in gay culture, "Eminent Outlaws" offers a crucial and fascinating overview of decades of American literary history. It also raises the question: In an era when being gay is considered mainstream, does gay writing still matter? Advertisement: Salon spoke to Bram (who is also the author of "The Father of Frankenstein," which was later turned into the film "Gods and Monsters") over the phone about Gore Vidal's importance, the death of the gay bookstore and the problem with gay men today. As you point out in the book, literature has had an outsize role in the evolution of gay culture. Why do you think that is? For the longest time, there were no gay characters or story lines in television or in the movies, so people had nowhere else to go but books for stories of gay life. After WWII there was suddenly a slew of them. It was surprising how many came so quickly. People could and wanted to write about it and the publishers would publish it. In my book I emphasize Capote's "Other Voices, Other Rooms" and Gore Vidal's "The City and the Pillar," but there were others. The mainstream houses backed away from gay material in the '50s but it was picked up by smaller presses, like Greenberg and Guild. Once it started it couldn't stop. Why do you think the gay literary explosion happened right after World War II? It was partly WWII itself. Gay boys who had grown up in the middle of nowhere entered the service, and found out they weren't alone. Alan Berube, in his book "Coming Out Under Fire," does a great job of painting this sudden awareness and huge change. Gay people also wanted to read about each other, and after WWII censorship for books loosened. Before, cities would ban any book with sexual content, and after WWII people could write about sex, even gay sex. Gore Vidal is the major thread connecting the book. Do you think he's the most important figure in gay literature of the last 50 years? Advertisement: Yes, but almost by accident. It's not a role he wanted. "The City and the Pillar" is a very gay book published early on in 1948. It sold very well but he got kicked in the teeth for writing it, and after that he played a little more coy. He adopted the strategy that there's no such thing as a homosexual, there's only a homosexual act; homosexual is an adjective and not a noun. He wrote "Myra Breckinridge" in the '60s, which is this wonderfully polymorphously perverse novel about a transsexual who rapes a straight man at one point. It's over the top and out there and was a huge bestseller. Then he started writing historical novels, which hardly dealt with homosexuality. But one of the most amazing things he wrote from a gay political point of view is the essay "Pink Triangle, Yellow Star," which was sparked by a very foolish bizarre essay by Midge Decter about gay men and their identity. He tore her essay to shreds, but he also argued that Jews and homosexuals had a lot in common, that they were both minorities that are in the same boat. In the last few years we've seen the disappearance of a lot of gay bookstores around the country. What do you think this says about the state of gay literature? That is a major change and it's an important and worrisome one. There are a couple of factors causing it. Independent bookstores have been in trouble for a while, struggling to compete first with super-chains and then Amazon and the Internet. Now the whole book business is going to transition, and even the super-chains are in trouble. Gay bookstores were always just keeping their heads above water. But I don't think it says so much about gay books in particular as it does about the book business. Edmund White once wrote that "'Will & Grace' killed gay literature." Do you think he's right -- that the rise of gay TV and movies has made gay writing less appealing? Advertisement: I think it's reduced the gay readership by 10 or 15 percent -- not a huge amount. And those were the people who didn't really enjoy reading anyway. For them, it was their only way to get gay stories. Now they don't have to. Independent film has dried up the same way indie bookstores have, so there's not as much gay film as there used to be just 4-5 years ago, but the change in TV is phenomenal. These shows matter-of-factly include gay story lines and characters and do really good jobs with them. They're not just here as comic relief, they're really fully fleshed out, well-drawn characters. These TV shows are following in the footsteps of Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City" by including gay characters in this larger world. Larry Kramer has very forcefully argued that young gay people these days don't respect their elders or their history. Do you get the sense that young gay men today are less interested in gay culture and literature than they were in the past? Not really. I don't think the current younger generation is different from mine or even Larry's. In my generation, we hated our elders. We might like Christopher Isherwood, but there was a dislike of the older generation: "They got it all wrong, we're going to get it right." I think that's a natural generational dynamic; as time goes on you learn to keep what was good from the older generations and drop what was bad. I like the generations being different. Every generation wants to carve out their own space and to some extent it's going to mean rejecting the older generation. Advertisement: But Larry Kramer isn't alone in feeling hurt by this. What do you think spurs this particular kind of anger among older gay men? You're getting older and you know you're going to die, and you're not happy about that, so you take out your anger on the generation coming behind you. I teach at NYU, so I work with people in their early 20s and I expect us to have nothing in common but I'm always surprised by the books they like, the movies they like, the things we do have in common. I also think older gay men are pissed off that young gay men seem entitled and don't seem to know what gay life was like in the '50s, '60s, '70s, and especially the '80s, during the first wave of the AIDS crisis. Advertisement: Why should they know it? When they are aware of it, I'm pleased but I don't expect them to. They're lucky they didn't grow up with the hardships Larry's generation grew up with. My generation didn't have it as harsh as Larry's did, but I had it a little harsher than yours. It's only natural. You just kind of have to accept that. In his famous essay in the Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan argued that we're witnessing the "end of gay culture," that it's splintering and dissolving as a result of mainstream acceptance. Old gay culture wasn't that solid to begin with, and [literary gay men] were always a minority within a minority. Even when gay books were the only game in town, there were plenty of gay people who didn't read. For them being gay was about sex and going to bars and dancing. There's still gay culture around and it takes different shapes and forms. Gay bars don't play the same role in gay life they once did 10-15 years ago. The Internet has changed that too. I miss the gay bookstores, but I like the difference and the variety. Do you think there's such a thing as a gay sensibility in literature? Advertisement: When Jeff Weinstein, the New York culture critic, was asked if there was a gay sensibility and if it affected culture, he said, "No, there's no such thing as a gay sensibility and yes, it does affect culture." I feel that way. The only thing holding these men together is that these were men who were sexually attracted to men who would write about it and about how that mixed with the rest of their lives. For some writers, [their gayness] was just one more ingredient in the stew, like Armistead Maupin. For some, sex and love with other men was everything, like Edmund White. But even he mixed things up. His new book is about the friendship between a gay man and a straight man (though I think his best writing is his sexual writing). Speaking of Edmund White, he has very strong feelings about writers, like Susan Sontag, who were famous but did not come out of the closet. I think if she had actually written as a lesbian about lesbian life it would have given a whole other dimension to her work and she would have been a much more interesting and exciting writer than she was. But I just think of her as a writer [not a gay writer]. The other writer he talks about is Harold Brodky. Being unable to write directly about gay life made his prose weird and baroque and really blocked him as a writer. For me, their being in the closet becomes its own punishment. A friend of mine recently told me that he thought we just don't have the kinds of great gay literary writers that we used to. I think we do, they're just not known as primarily gay writers. Do you think that's true? Advertisement: There's good stuff being done by younger writers than the old war horses. It just hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. Paul Russell just did an amazing book last year called "The Unreal life of Sergei Nabokov," following Vladimir Nabokov's gay brother from pre-revolutionary Russia to Paris in the time of Cocteau to Nazi Germany. Peter Cameron's last book, "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You," was very smart and beautifully written. Bob Smith, a comedian, did a wonderful novel called "Remembrance of Things I Forgot," about a gay man who travels through time to help his family and discovers he's been pursued by that arch-villain Dick Cheney. And then there's Rakesh Satyal, and the novel he published two years ago, "Blue Boy," about a gay 12-year-old boy in an Indian family in Cincinnati. What gay books would you recommend as must-reads to a gay kid coming of age right now. You could do far worse than Armistead's Maupin's "Tales of the City"; the entire series would be a great education in itself. Maupin imagines and records this world in San Francisco where gay people are just one more piece of the puzzle and accepted as such. And there's "Giovanni's Room" by James Baldwin. It's set in Paris in the 1950s, about a gay man who almost comes out but doesn't. It's very painful, beautifully written and it would show him what we've come away from. I'll be selfish and recommend one of mine, "Surprising Myself." It was my first novel, published in like 1987, and it's set in New York in the '70s -- the sexual golden age. |
Izvor: Tanjug/Tanja Valič Premijerka Ana Brnabić ne vidi problem u tome da se fotografije predsednika države Aleksandra Vučića postave u državne institucije, pošto smatra da treba nastaviti jačanje kulta nacionalnih simbola države. Isto mišljenje ima i ministar prosvete Mladen Šarčević. Šarčević je odgovarajući na pitanje N1 o postavljanju fotografija predsednika u državne institucije rekao da ne vidi problem i da mu je "to normalno". Dodao je da kada je on služio vojsku na zidovima u kasarnama bile su fotografije predsednika SFRJ Josipa Broza Tita. Upitan da li bi trebalo da Vučićeve fotografije budu postavljene i u školama, Šarčević je odgovorio da je u školama normalnije da budu istaknute slike prosvetnih velikana. Mediji su prethodnih dana objavili da je ministar odbrane Aleksandar Vulin izdao nalog da se u službenim prostorijama vojske i Ministarstva odbrane postave Vučićeve fotografije. Vulin je u utorak rekao da "postoje interne procedure koje se sprovode" i da će se o njima izjasniti u javnosti kada budu završene. Dodao je da bi postavljanje fotografije predsednika trebalo posmatrati kroz jačanje kulta države Srbije. |
ITU Approves New 40 Gbps Fiber Standard The ITU-T this week approved the G.989 series of standards for 40 Gbps-capable passive optical networks (NG-PON2), paving the way for fiber broadband connections that can exceed 10 Gbps. According to the organization's announcement , NG-PON2 is a successor to 1 Gbps capable G-PON (ITU-T G.984 series) and 10 Gbps-capable XG-PON1, with much faster speeds courtesy of multi-wavelength operation and ONU wavelength tunability in both transmitters and receivers. "A study of 25 Gbps per wavelength over PON has been initiated with the aim of enhancing the capacity of PON systems to beyond 100 Gbps," notes the group. News Jump Wednesday Morning Links Tuesday Morning Links Monday Morning Links TGI Friday Morning Links Thursday Morning Links Wednesday Morning Links Tuesday Morning Links Friday Morning Links Thursday Morning Links - Valentines Edition Wednesday Morning Links ---------------------- this week last week most discussed Most recommended from 21 comments battleop join:2005-09-28 00000 7 recommendations battleop Member How long... Until the first person posts about reaching their cap faster? |
Calling all Wildcats! Now that High School Musical 4 is an actual, real thing that is happening in life and not just in our impeccably choreographed dreams, it's time to find out everything we can about the newest singing-and-dancing students at East High. Producers are searching for five new leads, including a soccer player, a bad boy dancer, a jock/theater nerd (hello, Troy 2.0)—who also happens to be Sharpay and Ryan's cousin!—a cheerleader and a fallen queen bee. Here's the scoop on the new characters: Erin is a badass soccer player who strives for excellence—and the only girl on the boys' team. She starts falling for the bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks, but isn't sure whether to follow her heart. Derek, the aforementioned bad boy who falls for Erin, is tough on the surface but a soft-hearted family guy at his core. He's an excellent soccer player and incredible dancer who teaches dance classes to little girls at his family's studio. |
Taste the Best of Sonoma County In 2018, the Harvest Fair marked its 44th year of showcasing our county's grand harvest which continues to result in world-class wines, award winning beer and a plethora of culinary wealth. In 2015, with over 26,000 votes, the Harvest Fair was voted the Best Annual Festival of Sonoma County bestowed by The Press Democrat readers. Each October, thirsty travelers from across the entire US, are beckoned to Santa Rosa to participate in a complete farm to table experience, inspired by the county's hard working farmers, ranchers, vintners and producers. Harvest Awards Night We celebrated the region's top winemakers, growers, microbrewers and culinary artists. Find out which winery won this year's coveted "Sweepstakes" award. More... Grand Harvest Tasting Pavilion The epicenter of the Harvest Fair is still the Grand Tasting Pavilion, which features over one-hundred Sonoma County wineries bringing forth their best varietals for sampling. Guests were invited to savor innovative cuisine from this year's Professional Food Competition, awards winning wines, locally crafted brews, ciders and more. More... Wine Country Marketplace The Wine Country Marketplace offers visitors a unique "Go Local" shopping experience where you can sit it on a chef demonstration or polish your palette during a wine tasting seminar (free with gate admission). Not only will guests be able to take home gold medal wines from the professional competition but collectors may find special vintages that may not be readily available at the local grocer. The marketplace also boasts an array of artisan vendors with unique wares like hand-crafted jewelry, clothing, luxury soaps and locally milled olive oil. More... Thank you to our 2018 event sponsors: Visit our Sponsors Page for a full listing |
As darknets go, some people may think of I2P as one of the more technically-oriented ones. For that reason, I think it deserves more tutorials! If you’ve already read our 2013 article Full Guide: How to Access I2P Sites & Use themarketplace.i2p, then you at least have some idea how to access I2P. Therefore, I thought I2P-Bote, a messaging platform that operates over the I2P network, deserved a little attention. Synchronous Email! Does the term “asynchronous communication” ring a bell? In a nutshell, it means transmission of data with a time lag. Email and forum communications are two well-known examples. Unlike most email platforms, I2P-Bote is asynchronous, and built for privacy and anonymity. Obviously, it operates over the I2P network, and therefore it is quite a bit more secure and anonymous than a standard email provider (e.g. Gmail). Tales from the Crypto One of the major ways in which I2P-Bote is more secure than its email competitors is through its use of encryption. If you’re using a clearnet email provider, you would type in the sender’s address, which might look something like [email protected]. I2P-Bote, on the other hand, uses cryptographic keys as destinations, which are generated via a cryptographic hash function. (For example, a 504-bit WPA key might look something like this: >7%vC&Nyq4$ve?1suA=&79r-K39qa8s2WmA”40=I`5|y89F<bIduU5z!i0{;OT-.) That’s not a real one, by the way. When you send a message to someone over I2P-Bote, the message is encrypted using their public key; clear-text messages are not sent over the system. While it is possible to decrypt the messages, this at least puts that extra step in the way of an attacker. Credit: Funker Bernd 2012 I2P-Bote also cleans up the headers (which can reveal a lot of information about the sender), and encrypts any remaining information. We Are Anonymous I2P-Bote is also far more anonymous than any standard email provider. Why, you ask? I2P-based email providers operate over the I2P network, which already adds a degree of anonymity in and of itself. If you really want the full details on how it works, read their tech intro on the official site. To sum it up, I2P uses packet switching to break up communications before they’re sent, which are “reassembled” when they arrive at their destination. It’s also serverless, which reduces the surface area that attackers can target. Believe it or not, setting up I2P-Bote is actually very easy. Once you’re connected to the I2P network, type http://127.0.0.1:7657/configclients into the URL bar, and then go down to the bottom of the page. Copy and paste this link into the plugin install box: http://tjgidoycrw6s3guetge3kvrvynppqjmvqsosmtbmgqasa6vmsf6a.b32.i2p/i2pbote.xpi2p After you’ve done that, then click “Install Plugin.” As you might expect, it will take time to install, but when it’s finished, the plugin should appear on your Router Console under the name “Secure Mail.” Once the plugin is finished installing, you’ll need to create an identity (similar to how you would in Freenet). You can do this under the “Addresses” menu at left (see above screenshot). The public name that you generate here will be the name that shows up on all emails you send, unless you choose to designate the message as anonymous. As for encrypting your messages, you have four options: 256-bit Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) 521-bit ECC 2048-bit ElGamal NTRU-1087 Which one you choose is somewhat a matter of personal preference, but 521-bit ECC is considered to be one of the strongest (though it’s also sometimes overkill). It may depend on what you’re trying to encrypt! Finally, after you’ve created your identity, go into “Settings,” where you can adjust your anonymity. One of the things you can tweak, for instance, is the amount of time between when I2P-Bote searches for new e-mail. In addition, you can add relays with a large delay-range (which also adds to the anonymity factor). If you’re completely new to all of this, it may seem a little complex at first, but play around with it and you’ll get the hang of it. The more people that use I2P and I2P-Bote, the better it will become. Or I suppose you could always do the “anonymous message with the cut-out letters” thing, but that takes a lot more effort, doesn’t it? |
Workhorse Mach Series - 6 Color / 4 Station The Professional's Choice! This press was designed for the printer who makes his or her living behind a squeegee. Light enough for ease of use day in and day out, but solidly welded to provide a rigid platform for life. The Mach printers are ideal for growing and high volume shops producing sophisticated designs. The large diameter, full length center shaft combined with print station support struts maximize rigidity. The precision machined cast aluminum print heads and center wheel provide the tightest registration. With the optional cap, jacket, sign, coozie, sticker and pocket attachments, this machine is the do it all answer for any shop. Combined with the tool free X, Y, and Z micro registration, this machine is the best of all worlds. Mach printers also come in a variety sizes to fit your printing needs. Press Features Precision Machined, Cast Aluminum Print Heads and Print Wheel Large Diameter, Full Length Center Shaft with Tapered Bearings Print Station Support Struts Tool-Free Adjustments Dial-In Off Contact Micro-Adjust Screen Angle Super Responsive Micro Registration Bearing-Aided Micro Registration Bearing-Aided Micro Cinch-Down/ Anti-Droop Extra Large Diameter Registration Points Max Screen Width of 23" When Using All Heads Easy to Load, Quick Change Pallets The Professional's Choice! This press was designed for the printer who makes his or her living behind a squeegee. Light enough for ease of use day in and day out, but solidly welded to provide a rigid platform for life. The Mach printers are ideal for growing and high volume shops producing sophisticated designs. The large diameter, full length center shaft combined with print station support struts maximize rigidity. The precision machined cast aluminum print heads and center wheel provide the tightest registration. With the optional cap, jacket, sign, coozie, sticker and pocket attachments, this machine is the do it all answer for any shop. Combined with the tool free X, Y, and Z micro registration, this machine is the best of all worlds. Mach printers also come in a variety sizes to fit your printing needs. Warranty Information All Workhorse Odyssey and Mach Manual Presses have a lifetime warranty. Items not included in warranty are springs, hog rings, nylon bolts, pallets and casters. All warranties are non-transferrable. |
From 1990 to 2013, the notorious tiger poacher Kuttu Bahelia and his extended family — brothers, uncles, and their wives and children — reportedly killed hundreds of tigers and leopards in the tiger-rich Indian states of Maharashtra and Karnataka, according to law enforcement informants and media reports. “Even if half that [estimate] is correct, it is still a very significant number,” says Belinda Wright, who directs the non-profit Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI). So there was relief when, after years of eluding the police, Kuttu was arrested in 2015. He faced at least six counts of tiger poaching in forests across the central state of Maharashtra and was held without bail. On January 21, 2016, he was taken to court to stand trial in the first of those cases, for allegedly poaching a pair of tigers three years earlier. After his court appearance, while being transported back to jail, he begged to make a restroom stop — and fled into the forest, handcuffed, successfully evading his two police escorts. Authorities launched a manhunt, but Kuttu — who is descended from a long line of traditional hunters — had vanished. _________ In 2016, tiger poaching in India surged to its highest levels in 15 years. The spike was the result of a deadly confluence of factors that included killings by roving gangs like Kuttu’s; more tigers snared by locals, who are increasingly trapping deer, wild boar, and other game for food; and cutbacks in anti-poaching patrols due to federal budget cuts. There were 50 confirmed tiger poaching deaths last year, according to WPSI statistics. But that number comes with a caveat: Customs officials multiply known poaching offenses by ten to estimate the true scope of the illegal trade. Another 82 tigers perished in 2016 from causes other than poaching, bringing the confirmed death toll to 132. Many tigers were killed to meet a thriving illicit demand, largely in China, for pelts, bones, and other body parts. Poaching is the greatest threat to the ultimate survival of tigers in the wild. Some 100,000 of these majestic cats roamed across Asia at the dawn of the 20th century, around the time Rudyard Kipling published The Jungle Book — which he set in what is now India’s Kanha Tiger Reserve. Since then, tiger populations in Asia have plummeted by 96 percent, falling to fewer than 4,000 animals, split among five subspecies; a sixth, the South China tiger, is thought to exist only in captivity. Only a few hundred Siberian and Indochinese tigers remain. India’s last census estimated 2,226 Bengal tigers, and these animals represent the last, best hope for wild tigers — 60 percent of all left alive today. Some investors, banking on extinction, are collecting tiger skins and tiger wine. This dramatic decline began with elaborate big-game hunts that were a favored sport during the British Raj. Historian Mahesh Rangarajan estimates that more than 80,000 tigers were slaughtered by kings, lords, generals, and Maharajahs from 1875 to 1925. Many more then died as habitat was razed, which brought the cats into greater conflict with humans. More recently, the tiger has become a victim of consumerism. Demand for tiger parts used in traditional Chinese medicine skyrocketed during the 1980s in tandem with China’s growing middle class. For millennia, the official traditional Chinese pharmacopeia has attributed curative properties to nearly every part of the cat, from whiskers to tail. Tiger remedies have been used to treat epilepsy, liver and kidney problems, baldness, toothaches, ulcers, impotence, fevers, nightmares, and laziness. The hu gu (Mandarin for tiger bones) are the most highly prized parts because of a purported ability to treat arthritis and restore flagging libido. But the demand has now changed. A 2014 report prepared for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species found that “‘wealth’ [is] replacing ‘health’ as a primary consumer motivation” and tiger parts “are now consumed less as medicine and more as exotic luxury products.” Chief among them are tiger pelts used in high-end décor and “bone strengthening wine,” made by steeping a tiger skeleton in rice wine, experts say. These items are used as bribes or prestigious gifts to gain influence, or to flaunt wealth and power. Some investors, banking on extinction, are collecting skins and tiger wine. The demand for these products is fueled by industrial-scale breeding facilities in China that currently “farm” an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 tigers for their parts. This legitimizes the sale of these items, stimulating the market and driving poaching in the wild, says Debbie Banks, head of the Environmental Investigation Agency’s tiger campaign. Tigers are part of a larger, global illegal wildlife trade run by international cartels, a problem that has gained world prominence with the widespread slaughter of African elephants and rhinos. This trade is now ranked as the world’s fourth-largest illegal activity after guns, drugs, and human trafficking operations, valued at $15 to $20 billion a year by the United Nations Environment Program. Gangs like Kuttu’s are an integral part of this professional tiger-trafficking network. Tigers photographed with a remote camera in India’s Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve. Steve Winter/National Geographic Kuttu’s family is from the Bahelia tribe, whose name derives from the Sanskrit vyadha, or “hunter.” The clan’s heritage harkens to a time when it and other tribes served emperors and kings as expert hunters. But their status plummeted when the British Raj instituted The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, effectively branding lower castes and tribal people as criminals. Some traditional hunting families like Kuttu’s remain nomadic or live on the fringes of society. With deep ancestral knowledge, they have become the most effective poaching gangs in India, says Jose Louies, head of law enforcement in India for the International Fund for Animal Welfare -Wildlife Trust of India. He notes that “it’s a lucrative, easy job” — and Kuttu’s family is among the top offenders. Stymied last year in their search for Kuttu, the police eventually enlisted additional help to find the fugitive, including operatives from India’s Wildlife Protection Society. The first break came in June when Kuttu’s family was sighted in the state of Madya Pradesh. Police and WPSI field agents spread out, scouring nearby villages, with no luck. Additional leads poured in. The gang was constantly on the move. Finally, however, the family slipped up. An informant obtained the number for a mobile phone a Kuttu gang member was using — a surprising mistake since most professional poachers no longer communicate via cell phone. Police tracked the signal and located their camp in Uttar Pradesh, outside a town that hugged the Nepalese border. One of the six major trafficking routes to China crosses through the center of Nepal. Police placed the group under surveillance. Finally, on November 30, the police moved in as family members headed into a nearby town. Though the gang scattered, the police captured Kuttu — a short, round-faced, 35-year-old with a goatee. Everyone else, including Kuttu’s brother, Keru, who is wanted for trafficking tiger skins, ran off. If Kuttu is convicted in one case, he’ll be sentenced to three years in jail; a second will put him out of commission for seven years. His is a high-profile case that will get serious attention, but in general, Indian wildlife laws are difficult to enforce because of an overburdened judicial system that rarely makes environmental crime a priority. Only 112 people in India have ever been convicted of killing or trafficking in tigers. Louies of the International Fund for Animal Welfare estimates that the core offenders in India number only about 70 people, including poachers, middlemen, and “carriers” who transport the contraband. When professional gangs target a forested area, they spend at least a week doing their homework, studying both park guards’ patrol patterns and tiger movements. “They know tiger biology, the habitat usage, the behavior of the animals,” says Louies. “Their skill set is absolutely brilliant.” They almost exclusively use jaw traps — crude metal contraptions forged over a blacksmith’s fire that they conceal on trails where tigers walk. They’re easy to maintain, easy to hide, and deadly efficient, catching tigers by the leg. Guns are hard to conceal, make too much noise, and leave a bullet hole in the body of the pelt. Government guards hold metal jaw traps discovered in the buffer zone outside an Indian tiger reserve. Sharon Guynup Often, they manage to catch a tiger within 24 hours. “No tiger can escape from these traps,” says Nitin Desai, WPSI’s central India director. Once it’s caught, he says, “poachers spear it in the throat to silence it. Then they club it to death with sticks.” This year, Desai says, most of the seizures involving organized poachers occurred in northern India, which shares long borders with China, Nepal, and Bhutan. While India has 50 tiger reserves, some are small and have reached their capacity to accommodate tiger populations. As a result, when adolescent tigers leave their mothers, they often need to travel long distances to find their own territory. The moment they step outside of the parks, there is no protection. Louies once asked a poacher where he prefers to hunt: a protected area where there are plenty of tigers but more patrols, or a fringe area where there are fewer tigers, but a lower chance of getting caught? His response: “A tiger reserve is like a nursery for me. That is where my tigers grow, my tigers breed. Every year, a few will come out, and that’s all I need, so I wait outside. Why should I take the risk of going into the forest?” But even inside some tiger reserves, patrolling is lagging; a recent study showed that less than 30 percent of park acreage is being patrolled. And Bivash Pandav, a tiger expert at the Wildlife Institute of India, is concerned that there is little accountability for poaching events. “If poaching goes up, we cover it up, with more concern over protecting one’s reputation than understanding the cause and the impact”— or finding a solution, he says. An example of the government’s lack of transparency is their website, which lists 98 tiger deaths in 2016: two poached, 22 seized in parts, and 57 listed without cause, despite the agency’s position that all deaths will be treated as poaching unless proven otherwise. Part of the problem is money. In 2015, finance minister Arun Jaitley cut funding for tiger conservation. States must now chip in 40 percent of certain expenses for the first time since concerted efforts to protect the cat began in 1973 under Indira Gandhi’s Project Tiger. “This has resulted in budget cuts for anti-poaching, forest fire-fighting, staff salaries, and village relocation,” says Bittu Sahgal, a noted conservationist and founder of the magazine Sanctuary Asia. These cuts have left many reserves more vulnerable. Among them is northern India’s Corbett Tiger Reserve, the park with the country’s highest tiger densities. Sixteen cats were confirmed poached in that general area last year. “If a few tigers are poached from an area where there are lots of tigers, they can bounce back,” says Pandav. But tigers may then die battling over territory — or there may be fewer births for a year or two until the social order is reestablished. And poaching even a few individuals from a forest with a small number of tigers may make it very difficult for them to recover. Field studies have shown that if a population of tigers loses half of its breeding age females, that population collapses. Wright has a prescription for how to stop the killing before it happens, including an “an intelligence-led approach to wildlife crime” that more effectively identifies and tracks poachers, particularly repeat offenders. She said India also needs better surveillance along its porous borders and a beefed-up Wildlife Crime Control Bureau. |
July 10th marks EFF's 20th anniversary! To thank you for your support over these two decades, please enjoy this new animation created especially for us by celebrated cartoonist and free culture activist Nina Paley. This short cartoon highlights some of the reasons why EFF is here: EFF's defense of your digital rights is needed now more than ever. From onerous user agreements with monstrous blocks of legalese that take away your rights, to new forms of tracking and surveillance that erode your privacy as you use the Internet, to international efforts to force ISPs to monitor subscribers and become "copyright cops," the threats to our freedom and rights online continue. Support EFF and help us continue to fight for your digital rights for another 20 years! And see Nina Paley in San Francisco on July 20th for a showing of her fantastic feature length opus, "Sita Sings the Blues." A benefit for EFF and the Cartoon Art Museum, Nina will introduce the film and answer questions from members of the audience. Get your tickets now! |
Election 2016: Joyce, Fitzgibbon and Di Natale go head-to-head at Regional Leaders' Debate Updated What gets you fired up about living in regional Australia? About a third of Australians live outside the capital cities, but the issues that bother them are equally likely to trouble their city counterparts. Poor internet speeds and connections, better standards for education, access to jobs and future prosperity for young people – these are universal issues that are magnified when your options are limited by geography. Join the ABC's political editor Chris Uhlmann as he talks regional issues with Nationals' leader Barnaby Joyce, the ALP's Joel Fitzgibbon and Greens leader Richard Di Natale. They will be joined by a live audience at Goulburn in regional NSW on Wednesday from 7:30pm. You can watch the debate on ABC News 24, or listen in via ABC Regional Radio or News Radio around the country. It will also be available via iView. Add your voice to the mix via social media – find your favourite ABC Facebook site or join in via Twitter, using the hashtag #ausvotes. Topics: federal-elections, rural, regional, regional-development, goulburn-2580 First posted |
INDIANAPOLIS -- The eight Super Regional hosts were announced Tuesday by the NCAA Division I Baseball Committee. A minimum of 48 hours of Super Regional television will be provided by family of ESPN channels, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU. Consult local listings for specific games shown in each area of the country. As many as 24 national broadcast windows could appear on the three ESPN networks from June 6-9. The national seed is indicated before the team name. All times are Eastern: Bracket Schedule FRIDAY-SUNDAY UC Irvine (38-23) at Oklahoma State (48-16) • 9:30 p.m. (ESPNU), 10 p.m. (ESPNU), 9 p.m. (ESPNU) Houston (48-16) at Texas (41-19) • 4 p.m. (ESPN2), 2 p.m. (ESPN), 2 p.m. (ESPN) Kennesaw State (40-22) at Louisville (48-15) • 6:30 p.m. (ESPNU), 7 p.m. (ESPNU), 6 p.m. (ESPN2) Stanford (34-24) at Vanderbilt (44-18) • 1 p.m. (ESPN2), 3 p.m. (ESPN2), 3 p.m. (ESPN2) SATURDAY-MONDAY College of Charleston (44-17) at Texas Tech (43-19) • 1 p.m. (ESPNU), 3 p.m. (ESPNU), *1 p.m. (ESPN2) Pepperdine (42-16) at No. 7 TCU (45-15) • 4 p.m. (ESPNU), 6 p.m. (ESPNU), *7 p.m. (ESPNU) Ole Miss (44-18) at No. 6 La.-Lafayette (57-8) • 8 p.m. (ESPN2), 9 p.m. (ESPN2), *7 p.m. (ESPN2) Maryland (39-21) at No. 3 Virginia (47-13) • Noon (ESPN2), Noon (ESPN2), *4 p.m. (ESPN2) * -- Game time and ESPN network subject to change. The determination of the Men’s College World Series order of first-round games on June 14-15 will be announced June 9. The ESPN family of networks and NCAA.com will release the CWS game dates and times as soon as they are available. The 68th College World Series begins play June 14 at TD Ameritrade Park Omaha in Omaha, Nebraska. |
BiblePlaces.com has put together a nice little review of the top Bible-related archaeological discoveries of 2013. We went through their list and ranked them here in order of coolness. With any new archaeological claim, it’s best to leave it to the experts to figure out what we’re actually looking at. Some archaeologists are notorious making sensational claims to draw attention (and funding) to their work. So let’s allow time for them to do their work and treat these as possible discoveries for the moment. #1. The Tabernacle Area at Shiloh Why cool? The Tabernacle was where God met with the Israelites in the OT. It would be further confirmation of the Bible’s authenticity and accuracy. Archaeologists have been excavating for a few years at the biblical site of Shiloh. They now claim they have discovered the location of the tabernacle in Shiloh. Israel HaYom writes, Archaeologists discover[ed] holes carved into the ground in Shiloh which could have held the beams of The Tabernacle or Tent of Meeting, which, according to the Bible, housed the Ark of the Covenant. #2. David’s Palace Why cool? Some scholars debate whether King David existed at all because of the lack of evidence. D’oh! I’d say a palace is pretty solid evidence! While it is still being confirmed, Yosef Garfinkel (with a history of sensational claims) has announced the discovery of David’s royal palace along with an enormous storehouse. He said, Two royal public buildings, the likes of which have not previously been found in the Kingdom of Judah of the tenth century BCE, were uncovered this past year by researchers of the Hebrew University and the Israel Antiquities Authority at Khirbet Qeiyafa – a fortified city in Judah dating to the time of King David and identified with the biblical city of Shaarayim. #3. Elisha’s House Why cool? While some say it’s a bit of a stretch, if this really is Elisha’s house it’s one of the raddest discoveries of 2013. Because he’s like one of the sickest prophets in the OT. There is compelling evidence to believe that archaeologist Amihai Mazar (a scholar of impeccable reputation) has identified the prophet Elisha’s house (2 Kings 4:2,32; 6:32). Mazar has suggested that a room found in his excavations at Tel Rehov was inhabited by Elisha on the basis of (1) two incense altars found nearby, (2) a table and a bench discovered in the room, and (3) a fragmentary inscription reconstructed to read Elisha. #4. Discovery of Dalmanutha Mentioned in Mark Why cool? It’s kinda mentioned in the Gospel of Mark, so it needs to be a real place. In the Gospel of Mark we read: “About four thousand men were present. And having sent them away, he got into the boat with his disciples and went to the region of Dalmanutha. The Pharisees came and began to question Jesus. To test him, they asked him for a sign from heaven.” (Mark 8:9–11) Some scholars have proposed that Dalmanutha may not be a proper name but simply the Aramaic word for harbor and now suggest this area in the Plain of Gennesaret as its location. #5. Zechariah Inscription Why cool? It’s always cool to identify a person mentioned in the Bible by name. It shows the Bible is not make-believe. Archaeologists may have discovered a 7th century inscription of “Zechariah the son of Benaiah” mentioned in 2 Chronicles 20:14. The inscription was found in a layer of thousands of pottery sherds, oil lamps, and figurines near the Gihon Spring. #6. New Evidence for AD 70 Roman Siege Why cool? Jesus himself prophesied of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. Jesus prophesied of the destruction of the temple (Matt. 24:2, Mark 13:2, Luke 21:6) and of Jerusalem (Luke 19:41-44). There’s new evidence of the Roman siege of Jerusalem in AD 70. A cistern was found near Robinson’s Arch in the City of David which contained three intact cooking pots and a small ceramic oil lamp…“The complete cooking pots and ceramic oil lamp indicate that the people went down into the cistern where they secretly ate the food that was contained in the pots, without anyone seeing them,” he (Eli Shukron of the Antiquities Authority) said. “This is consistent with the account provided by Josephus.” #7. Royal Architecture Found Near Jerusalem Why cool? They say it can really help us understand the periods of Kings David and Solomon. Three dozen royal capitals from the time of the kings of Israel and Judah have already been found throughout Israel. A new ancient column was discovered which could indicate the location of a new capital. The capital was found in a cave between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Yaron Rosenthal believes that an entire building from the time of Judah’s monarchy may be waiting to be unearthed. Here’s a replica of the column that was found: #8: Enormous Jerusalem Quarry Why cool? How is a 2,000 year old key anything but cool!? An enormous quarry from the time of the Second Temple (first century CE) was discovered with “2,000 year old key, pick axes, severance wedges etc are also among the artifacts uncovered during the course of the excavation.” Here’s some of the cool stuff that was found in the quarry (see the key?): #9. Earliest Alphabetic Inscription in Jerusalem Why cool? It may have been written by the Jebusites who were part of the city population in the time of Kings David and Solomon. This 7th Century BC inscription was found in the City of David: The Hebrew University writes, The inscription, in the Canaanite language, is the only one of its kind discovered in Jerusalem and an important addition to the city’s history. Dated to the tenth century BCE, the artifact predates by two hundred and fifty years the earliest known Hebrew inscription from Jerusalem, which is from the period of King Hezekiah at the end of the eighth century BCE. #10. Largest Stele of Nebuchadnezzar Why cool? There’s tons of evidence that Nebuchadnezzar was a real person whose reign lines up with biblical narrative. But the more, the merrier! World Bulletin writes, What could be the largest discovered inscribed tablet (stele), dating to the reign of Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II between 605-562 BC, has been discovered in the Turkish city of Karkamis on the military zone along the Turkey-Syria border. Say thanks by liking/sharing: |
[The following is the first draft of an essay assignment for my Law & IT class on the threat of SaaS (Software as a Service) and cloud computing to open source licensing models like the GPL. The given title was “The only major threat to open source software license models like the GPL is the spread of ‘cloud computing’ and Software as a Service (SaaS) business models.” Please criticise, and please let me know if I’ve missed a relevant example. You can also download the report as a PDF.] Introduction Cloud computing, the latest computing paradigm, is a topic of particular importance for advocates of open source software license models such as the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License. As cloud computing continues to grow in popularity, the open source community must determine what risk, if any, the paradigm poses and how the movement should respond. As cloud computing may endanger the open source movement through a loophole found in almost all open source licenses, it is critical to estimate the possible damage this may cause and how best to close the loophole. If cloud computing truly encapsulates one of the largest changes to the computing industry for some time, then it will be critical for open source organisations to react accordingly. In this paper, I will introduce both cloud computing and open source software, including the relevant caselaw, describe the proposed and actualised reactions of the open source community, namely the FSF’s Affero GPL license, and discuss what the continued uptake of cloud computing is likely to mean for the future of open source. Cloud Computing Cloud computing is, fittingly, a nebulously defined concept, primarily focusing around location-independent computing, where servers provide software, data and computational resources to other networked computers on demand. At its heart is so-called “Utility Computing”, a paradigm that treats computational power as a generic utility to be used, much like water or electricity. Like these more commonplace utilities, all of the work is done at a centralised processing station; as electricity is managed and produced at a power plant, so too is computing power produced in a collection of computer servers called a data centre. This concept of utility computing has been around since 1966, but only recently has it become a mainstream phenomenon. Cloud computing has multiple layers, according to the level of access that is provided: Infastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service. The lowest level, Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS, provides rather direct access to these machines, allowing users to implement whichever platforms and applications they wish. The next one up is Platform as a Service, PaaS, which provides common software (such as the open source LAMP stack, which provides Linux, the Apache web server, the MySQL database software, and PHP, a web programming language) upon which applications can be written. Perhaps most common is the highest level, Software as a Service or SaaS. In this model, complete user-ready software running on the server is made available, typically through a web browser, to users. Probably the best known example of SaaS is Google’s online office application Google Docs. The Cloud Computing Manifesto details the advantages, challenges, and goals of the cloud computing movement, and serves as a good indicator of the ideal cloud computing system of the future, extolling the virtues of open standards and potentially the use of open source software. Open Source Software Many of the software components of common Cloud computing platforms are open source programs. These programs are so named because their software licenses require that their source code, the human readable ingredients of the program, are distributed with the program and all derivatives thereof. This allows wide communities of developers to work together to improve these pieces of software, in contrast with closed source software where a single owner of the software is the only contributor. While it is difficult to estimate how much of the world’s code is open source, it is widely known that open source software are well used in the software industry; the Apache web server represents upwards of 70% of the market, while the web browser Firefox holds 30% of the web browser market. 60% of web servers also run a version of the open source Linux operating system, although less than 5% of desktop computers run Linux. Each of these pieces of software is licensed with a different open source license. While there are a multitude of open source licenses available, very few are widely used. One of the most popular open source licenses is the GNU Public License or GPL, produced by the Free Software Foundation and principally written by free software advocate and Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman. The major point of the license is its “copyleft” provision, which to ensure that to ensure the source code remains open, strictly controls the distribution of derivative works. It requires that the license cannot be changed or removed, e.g. in a case where the derivative work is made closed source, or the work cannot be distributed. Using normal copyright law to enforce this behavior has made the license very powerful, so much so that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer remarked in 2001 that the license made Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.” This license is attached to an estimated 66% of all open source projects, and has allowed the open source community to develop software that in many cases rivals the functionality of closed source alternatives without fear that this software would then be used in a closed source program. Open Source Caselaw As the GPL is the license of choice for the most open source projects, it has seen the most tests in court. In all cases, in the United States, Germany and elsewhere, the GPL has found to be legally enforceable, resulting in a number of cases in which companies who have incorporated open source software into their own closed source implementations have been forced to stop distribution of their software until they release their source code and therefore become compliant with the terms of the GPL license. In Germany, “a series of court decisions… has held the General Public License (GPL) enforceable, including its prohibition on commercial exploitation of Open Source Software (OSS).” The first of these was tried in Munich Regional Court in 2004 between a German corporation that produced routers, and Linux software developer Harald Welte. The defendant used GPL protected software in routers that were later offered for sale in Germany, without releasing the source code or reproducing the GPL license. The court held that “…the distribution of the software without complying with the conditions of the GPL constitutes an infringement of copyright leading to a claim for injunctive relief.” After the case, Harald Welte founded gpl-violations.org, an organisation dedicated to “raising public awareness of the infriging use of free software” and legally pressure companies to cease violating the GPL. One of the most interesting cases came in 2008, when Welte filed against Skype for distributing a phone that used GPL code without abiding by the terms of the license. After Skype lost in a lower court in 2007 and appealed, the Munich Regional Court indicated that any further actions would be likely to lead to a Skype loss, and Skype decided to withdraw its appeal. While these and other decisions were based on contract law, rather than copyright law, in each case the defendants were forced to stop distributing their software until they complied with the GPL by releasing their source code. While these cases was initially lauded as an open source victory, open source licenses like the GPL are very complex and proving violations is difficult; this is further compounded by the fact that so few cases, particularly in the U.S., have actually been ruled on by the court. While many companies immediately decide to yield when faced with the threat of legal action, lacking many tried cases has left supporters of the GPL and other open source licenses in a suboptimal position, even though they have never lost a case. Cloud Computing and Open Source With the development of GPL version 3 in late 2005, the GPL had a very strong history behind it. The new version was intended to provide increased protections for specific issues that had been small annoyances for the Free Software Foundation, specifically “software patents,compatibility with other licenses, the definition… of source code, and dealing with Digital Restrictions Management”, i.e. hardware restrictions on software modification. The cloud computing revolution had not yet taken off. Just a year later, as the GPLv3 remained in the draft stages, two major events in what would become cloud computing took place: First, Google acquired Upstartly, a four person software house that produced the collaborative online Office suite called Writely. This acquisition soon blossomed into what is perhaps the most widely used SaaS product, Google Docs. Secondly, Amazon announced its Amazon Web Services, allowing anyone to use their computing power on demand, and really kicked off the cloud computing trend. These events worried the Free Software Foundation, as due to a legal loophole software run on the cloud was not pursuant to the GPL. As the GPL only applies when the protected code is distributed further, just using or running the code does not trigger the license; likewise, modifying a GPL protected program for private use is completely permissible. While this wasn’t of concern when the GPL version 2, the most common version of the GPL, was drafted in 2001, this loophole meant that any power the Free Software Foundation had to prevent open source code from being used in closed source applications could not be brought to bear. Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media, a company that publishes a popular series of computer user manuals and noted open source advocate, had this to say: “all of the killer apps of the Internet era… run on Linux or FreeBSD, but they’re not apps in the way that people have traditionally thought of… one of the fundamental premises of open source is that the licenses are all conditioned on the act of software distribution, and once you’re no longer distributing an application, none of the licenses mean squat.” The Open Source Response Clearly, the GPL license was in trouble – if the cloud computing paradigm became the dominant form of software, changes and improvements to open source software could be hidden away in technically private modifications and run on the cloud. The FSF’s answer came in the form of the Affero General Public License (more commonly known as the Affero GPL or AGPL) version 3. This license is nearly identical to GPL version 3, save for one additional provision, section 13: “if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.” While the Free Software Foundation did provide a method of tying the two licenses (AGPL and GPL) together, they stopped short of merely including the relevant clause into the GPLv3 proper, as its inclusion could have prevented adoption of the new version, which contained other important provisions they wanted to ensure were included. Eben Moglen, counsel to the Free Software Foundation, reportedly said that “if Google starts getting too parasitic, then we’ll re-evaluate” having Affero as a separate license. Chris diBona, Google’s manager of open source programs, was interviewed soon afterward about Google’s potentially parasitic perception: “I think it is a largely incorrect perception… Google is releasing every year, not counting Android or the really large open-source projects like GWT, a new project every two or three weeks… patching hundreds of projects a month.” Given these industry pressures, the Free Software Foundation’s final wording, found on the GPL website, is not particularly strong: “We recommend that people consider using the GNU AGPL for any software which will commonly be run over a network.” Affero’s Adoption Unfortunately for the Free Software Foundation and other open source advocates worried about cloud computing’s effect on open source, cloud computing has become the new paradigm of choice for many software organisations, with Amazon and Google leading the way; Microsoft, Oracle, HP and many others also have cloud computing branded programs, and the movement receiving mainstream media coverage. In other daunting news, uptake of the Affero General Public License has been incredibly slow, with only 706 of the 260,000 open source projects listed on project directory SourceForge having an AGPL license, and none have more than 5000 downloads a week. This is an incredibly low number for a Free Software Foundation backed license compared to the 109,000 open source projects licensed under the GPL on SourceForge. Perhaps some of the reason for this incredibly low adoption rate can be traced back to the Free Software Foundation itself – on its page “Why the Affero GPL”, it states: “One problem which the GNU Affero FPL does not address is the problem of Software as a Service (SaaS). It is impossible, as far as we know, to address this problem with a software license.” This seems to be a case of the Free Software Foundation’s idealism overcoming its practical considerations. Instead of providing a license and supporting it to the fullest, the FSF have given a license with one hand but cried out against the whole SaaS paradigm with the other. The “Why the Affero GPL” page links to a Richard Stallman article entitled “Who does that server really serve?” The article is an attack on SaaS cloud computing on moral grounds, arguing that “SaaS is equivalent to total spyware and a gaping wide back door, and gives the server operator unjust power over the user. We can’t accept that.” It goes on to recommend that users “don’t trust a server run by a company” and that peer-to-peer replacements for web applications should be developed. While Stallman’s motivations may be pure, his advice is incredibly impractical and merely serves to underscore the lack of practical guidance the FSF has issued on the topic. Open Source Cloud Computing Today While the Affero license has suffered, open source cloud computing software protected by standard licenses have continued to develop, although generally in the realms of Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service rather than Software as a Service (SaaS). Many of the biggest programs in use by cloud computing leaders like Amazon and Google have open source equivalents, such as the MapReduce equivalent Hadoop and Amazon’s EC2 equivalent OpenStack. While these open source implementations have proved popular, the lack of access to the source code of industry leaders like Amazon and Google caused by failure to adopt the AGPL has no doubt hindered the technical progression of the paradigm as a whole. One open source Software as a Service success story of note has been SugarCRM, a customer relationship management package. Like closed source equivalent Salesforce.com, SugarCRM provides a common interface for businesses to manage business processes such as sales, marketing and customer service. SugarCRM’s strategy has been to allow its users to freely modify its source code in order to achieve speedier development cycles and tap into the community aspect of open source. While it was originally released under the GPLv3 license, it has since changed to become one of the only well-known adopters of the maligned Affero GPL license. SugarCRM’s success has shown that even though open source projects have suffered from a lack of a strong, well-supported licensing option, open source solutions can still find a place in the SaaS environment. Marc Osofsky of Optoros enumerated the disadvantages of closed source SaaS, namely limited customisation, vendor lock-in and long release cycles, and the advantages of open source SaaS: “Unique experiences are the strength of open source with direct access to the code. No lock-in, customers can shift the hosting of the system at will and they control the code if they wish to modigy or migrate it, and short release cycles; open source projects are focused on creating powerful new releases…” Conclusion For open source software to weather the threat of SaaS, open source projects must embrace these strengths. Given the poor uptake of the Affero GPL license, particularly by industry giants Google and Amazon, it is more critical than ever that the few open source projects that are protected by the license flourish and continue to provide viable alternatives to closed source software. If enough succeed, the license will reach a tipping point and once that occurs the open source software movement as a whole will be in the same position as it was before the massive uptake of cloud computing paradigms in 2006. While initiatives from organisations like the Open Cloud Manifesto have been steps in the right direction, more open source advocates need to focus their attention on the cloud computing space, as it seems to be the major growth area for computing at the moment, and victory here could provide the open source movement with a solid foundation for the continued development of computing paradigms, whether that be cloud computing or not. |
Colonel Mustard said: Since Atlus has been branching the Etrian series out and they're not shy about crossovers... I think it's time for Etrian Arcadia. A first person dungeon crawling, reimagining of Skies of Arcadia. It's time. Do it. Click to expand... As much as I love and want a sequel/hd remake of Skies to happen, that doesn't sound all that intriguing. I also fail to see how they would have control over Sega's IP.They deserve it. The first major problem with both releases is we only got one version in both releases. As of now the only way to play it in english is to get P2:IS's PSP version and P2:EPs Playstation version. That combined with the fact that the first release came out when Atlus still was selling pitiful numbers in all markets on all their games meant it never got it's worthy initial exposure. The second releases were largely ignored as well due in part to perception that older graphics = bad game (I really hate this perception a lot) and due to the fact that it came out on the PSP, a system that the masses at large didn't really care for outside of P3P and Peace Walker. It's not like the P2:IS psp release was even well advertised in the first place. It's a set of games that despite a re-release is still a bit under the radar in the West. |
We're hearing from... well, let's call them "people familiar with the matter" that HTC's Thunderbolt -- a phone that's supposed to be Verizon's first with LTE -- is experiencing positively miserable battery life that's making it difficult for testers to avoid carrying a second phone around as a backup. How bad? Two to three hours from full to empty in some cases. Of course, we wouldn't be surprised if battery life was really bad with the LTE radio left on -- the EVO 4G wasn't much different at launch with WiMAX lit up -- but the word on the street is that the power situation is largely responsible for the delays we've been seeing. In fact, our source tells us the phone is currently working on its sixth retail delay at the moment. More on this situation as we get it.We've just heard from another trusted tipster that there's definitely a new firmware in the works to address battery life and signal issues (which -- you guessed it -- are interrelated). Thanks, HTC Kid! |
Review The Tintri T850 is Tintri's mid-line offering. It is a great example of the current line of Tintri products. Reviewing it has been something of a challenge, though that is the fault of your reviewer, not the storage array. Tintri focuses on intelligent storage that analyses your workloads and predicts what your workloads are going to do and ensures that there is enough performance available for all workloads. This is different from the traditional contention-based model which simply lets all workloads attempt to grab resources unfettered. In a contention-based storage model a single workload can crowd out the others, functionally starving them of resources. Tintri's approach doesn't let that happen; performance hogs are given as much performance as can be spared, but only so long as that doesn't interfere with the regular functioning of the other workloads on the array. For a reviewer, this is a bit of a nightmare. Load testing this sort of an array can be very difficult. How can you really ever be sure you are getting every last drop of performance out of the system if the system, by definition, is designed to ensure no single workload can wreck it for everyone else? This has made real world testing a must. Synthetic benchmarks are not going to tell me enough about the T850 to make any sort of rational recommendation. What I needed what to get this system into production with workloads I knew inside and out. Fortunately, Tintri has been quite accommodating. I have had the T850 in my lab and ultimately at a client site in production for several months now. My impressions are no longer surface deep. I've encountered successes and esoteric oddities, frustrations and elation. So here, warts and all, is the Tintri T850. Hardware and specifications The Tintri T850 officially supports 2000 VMs with a grand total of 6000 virtual disks. It sports 53TB of raw capacity including 5.3TB of raw flash. The usable total capacity is 30TB, which Tintri claims is 66TB effective. These figures are all terabytes, not tebibytes. The 66TB effective figure really depends on what you're feeding the array. When I was doing VDI testing I saw crazy space savings that went into the high double digits. With a real-world workload that has a file server consisting of uncompressible JPEGs consuming most of the space, I'm seeing space savings of about 1.9x. T850 showing space savings of 1.9x; click to embiggen the image The unit consists of two nodes (controllers) sharing disks via a passive backplane. In this sense it is really not that different from any number of other storage arrays you might encounter. The unit is loud. It's not the loudest piece of hardware I’ve encountered, but it's very close. At 108lbs, it's quite heavy, too. I certainly wouldn't want to put racking any of these things above waist level. The unit I was shipped came with 4x 10GbE ports per node; 2x for data and 2x for replication. Each node has 2x 1GbE ports for administration. |
An overwhelming majority of Egyptians who voted on the country's new constitution backed the draft charter, a senior Egyptian official said Thursday, despite criticism from an international monitoring group of a clampdown on free speech ahead of the election. The election official told The Associated Press that unofficial results after most of the ballots had been counted indicated that more than 90 per cent voted "yes" on the constitution. He declined to give an estimate on the final turnout and spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to journalists. Nabil Salib, the head of the Supreme Election Committee, was quoted by the state news agency MENA saying that ballots were still being counted and that final results would be announced in a few days. He initially said the results were expected Friday. Results typically are announced within 72 hours after polls close in Egypt. The vote held Tuesday and Wednesday was a milestone for Egypt's interim government, installed by the military after a July coup toppled Islamist president Mohammed Morsi, following mass protests demanding that he step down. Many considered the vote as key to restoring stability and supporting the current government in the face of continued opposition and protests from Morsi supporters. 9 killed Nine people were killed during clashes on the first day of voting. Thursday, students rallied outside the campus of the University of Cairo and fought with security forces. Police fired tear gas, pushing the students back. An Interior Ministry statement said it later deployed forces to clear clashes on campus between pro- and anti-Morsi students and one student was shot and killed. It was not immediately clear who shot the student. An intense campaign by the government and the overwhelmingly pro-military media portrayed the balloting as key to the nation's security and stability. (Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters) The draft constitution is a heavily amended version of a charter written by Morsi's Islamist allies and ratified in December 2012 with some 64 per cent of the vote but with a nationwide turnout of just over 30 per cent. Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood group and other Islamist groups boycotted this week's referendum, calling it "illegitimate." The Brotherhood, leading a coalition of Islamist groups, has vowed to keep up its protests. The country's second-largest Islamist group, the ultraconservative Salafis, largely stayed away from the polls. That left traditional Islamist strongholds across Egypt seeing only a trickle of voters during the two-day balloting. By contrast, long lines formed outside polling stations in Egypt's major urban areas and big cities, with crowds brandishing posters of the country's military chief, as men chanted in support of the army and women ululated. Such patriotic outbursts followed an intense campaign by the government and the overwhelmingly pro-military media, which portrayed the balloting as key to the nation's security and stability. In the weeks before the vote, hundreds of thousands of fliers, posters, banners and billboards urged Egyptians to vote "yes." Security forces arrested people calling for a "no" vote. 'Severe obstacles' Kol Preap, the head of a Transparency International mission that monitored the referendum, said in a report Thursday that while authorities had responded to "a deep desire by the majority of Egyptians to move toward a democratic path," the political environment around the vote created "severe obstacles to advancing democracy." Preap cited "severe limits on the freedom of expression, association, and assembly" in the campaign ahead of the vote. His group had eight observers in 15 out Egypt's 27 provinces. "The political context in the run-up to the referendum impaired conditions to hold a free and fair referendum compared with international standards," he said. Government actions such as arresting critics "undermined a level playing field for the promotion of diverse views." Local Egyptian groups that monitored the balloting said Thursday they had spotted some irregularities, such as instances of troops barring monitors from having access to the polling centres and the presence of pro-charter activists campaigning too close to the centres. The interim government is looking for a strong "yes" majority and large turnout to win undisputed legitimacy and perhaps a popular mandate for the military chief, Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, to run for president later this year. But silencing dissent has raised questions about the legitimacy of the process. El-Sissi has yet to say outright whether he plans to seek the nation's highest office, but his candidacy appears increasingly likely every day. Amr Moussa, the head of the panel that drafted the constitution, told the pan-Arab daily newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat that he believes el-Sissi is making up his mind to run in the race. "I believe that Gen. el-Sissi is likely to run" for president, he told the paper in an interview published Thursday. "We need a nationalist figure trusted by the people, one who we are sure will not take the country into an abyss." |
Xiaomi has launched a new product which would be very useful this summer and it is the Turok Steinhardt Swimming Googles. The Xiaomi TS Swimming Glasses is a useful addition to the large collection of eye glasses that Xiaomi has released this year alone, most of them in collaboration with Turok Steinhardt under the crowdfunding platform. This year alone, we have seen the 199 Yuan ($29) Turok Steinhardt Sunglasses, then the Roidmi Glasses with Anti-UV Protection . The tech giant has also launched the an Anti-Blue Light Sunglasses priced at 249 Yuan ($36)and just two weeks back, it added another pair of Turok Steinhardt anti-blue light glasses. The new TS Swimming glasses is designed to give a clear view underwater adn is designed with a adjustable headband with zipper tape design which fits all types of head sizes comfortably. The headband is easy to wear and easy to remove and increases the wearing comfort. Read More: Mijia’s Latest Crowdfunding Item Is The Turok Steinhardt Color Changing Corrective Glasses The glass has a 3D curved design and comes with a silicone gasket which fits the eyes very well, providing comfort and also prevents the entry of water into the eyes. The nose stump is also replaceable. The has a mirror and frame which seems to be molded together. The mirror finish keeps the underwater vision unchanged and provides a wide field of view. The lens also comes with a special anti-fog coating which ensures nothing impedes the wearer view underwater. The Swimming google comes with a price tag of 69 Yuan ($10) and is presently available on the Mi Home crowdfunding platform. |
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Douglas Ross is missing universal credit vote to officiate at football match in Barcelona. An SNP MP brandished a red card during Prime Minister's Questions in an attack on a Scottish Tory who is missing a crucial vote to officiate at a football match. Douglas Ross will be unable to cast his vote after the Commons debate on universal credit as he will be in Spain running the line as an assistant referee when Barcelona take on Olympiakos at the Nou Camp. SNP MP John McNally pulled the red card from his pocket at PMQs on Wednesday, asking Theresa May what message the absence would send to members of the public who were "expected to turn up to their day jobs or face sanctions". The Prime Minister responded by defending Ross, who represents Moray, saying Scottish Tory MPs are doing more for Scottish interests at Westminster "than the Scottish Nationalists have ever done". Labour are hoping to win a symbolic victory in an opposition day vote later on Wednesday, which will call for the roll-out of universal credit reforms to be paused. The expansion of universal credit, merging six benefits into one, has been plagued by a number of issues. Thousands of claimants have had to wait longer than the standard six weeks to receive payments, a period already criticised by charities as being too long. Many have been plunged into debt and arrears as they wait to receive their funds. McNally, MP for Falkirk, asked May: "Does the Prime Minister notice that I am wearing a red card in my pocket today? "She will be aware that the honourable member for Moray is not in his place. Indeed, he is in Barcelona doing his other job, today of all days. "What signal does she think this sends to hard-working members of the public who are expected to turn up to their day jobs or face sanctions?" May replied: "I think the constituents of Moray will be very pleased that they have a Conservative member of parliament who is seeing their interests in this House. "And I can say to him that the Conservatives, the Scottish Conservative members, are doing more for the interests of Scotland in this parliament than the Scottish Nationalists have ever done." Fellow Scottish Conservative MP Andrew Bowie had earlier defended his colleague, saying Ross had personally raised concerns over welfare reforms with work and pensions secretary David Gauke. Bowie said: "I think the people of Moray are quite happy for him to continuing refereeing as well as being their MP and he's doing a very good job at both." He added: "Douglas has held over 50 surgeries since becoming a member of parliament." Bowie spoke out after shadow Scotland Office minister Paul Sweeney accused Ross of having a "perverse sense of priorities". The Labour MP said: "The rollout of universal credit has blighted lives across the country, forcing many to rely on food banks and crisis grants to get by. "Yet Mr Ross doesn't even have the decency to turn up to parliament and explain why he supports putting people through such misery. Ross has been an MP since June, when he ousted the SNP's Westminster leader Angus Robertson to win the Moray seat. It is not the first time he has missed parliamentary duties for his second job as an assistant referee, a role which earns him around thousands of pounds in addition to his salary as an MP. Last year, while as an MSP before standing successfully for a Westminster seat, Ross missed a number of justice committee meetings and a vote on a motion concerning the SNP's council tax plans. Ross last officiated a European club football match in August when he ran the line at the Europa League qualifying match between NK Domzale and Marseille. Westminster's register of MPs' interests shows he was paid £1436.35 for the game. Want to receive the latest headlines straight to your inbox? Subscribe to our 'Morning Briefing' newsletter. Subscribe This field is required. That doesn't look like a valid e-mail format, please check. That e-mail's already in our system. Please try again. Please tick the box below to confirm your subscription Thanks for subscribing to our 'Morning Briefing' newsletter. Subscribed Want to receive the latest headlines straight to your inbox? Subscribe to our 'Morning Briefing' newsletter. Thanks for subscribing to our 'Morning Briefing' newsletter. Subscribe Download: The STV News app is Scotland's favourite and is available for iPhone from the App store and for Android from Google Play. Download it today and continue to enjoy STV News wherever you are. |
The revised guidelines for an R18+ rating have now been released and, as you'd expect, the language is vague and completely open to interpretation — that said, the guidelines do make extensive reference to the fact that the impact of games should be treated differently as a result of interactivity, which we find disappointing. Ultimately, we'll only be able to see the true validity of the new R18+ rating when it's implemented. It'll be interesting to see exactly how the Classification Board will apply these guidelines in the future. The basic guidelines are as follows... The Guidelines use the following hierarchy of impact: • very mild - G • mild - PG • moderate - M • strong - MA 15+ • high - R 18+ • very high - RC Later the guidelines refer to which games will now be refused classification, and still cling to the argument that interactivity affects the level of impact. Due to the interactive nature of computer games and the active repetitive involvement of the participant, as a general rule computer games may have a higher impact than similarly themed depictions of the classifiable elements in film, and therefore greater potential for harm or detriment, particularly to minors. Interactivity may increase the impact of some content: for example, impact may be higher where interactivity enables action such as inflicting realistically depicted injuries or death or post-mortem damage, attacking civilians or engaging in sexual activity. Greater degrees of interactivity (such as first-person gameplay compared to third-person gameplay) may also increase the impact of some content. Interactivity includes the use of incentives and rewards, technical features and competitive intensity. Except in material restricted to adults, nudity and sexual activity must not be related to incentives or rewards. Computer games will be Refused Classification if they contain: (i) illicit or proscribed drug use related to incentives or rewards; (ii) interactive drug use which is detailed and realistic. Later the guidelines go into more detail regarding the R18+ rating. R 18+ - RESTRICTED Impact test The impact of material classified R 18+ should not exceed high. Note: Material classified R 18+ is legally restricted to adults. Some material classified R 18+ may be offensive to sections of the adult community. Classifiable elements THEMES There are virtually no restrictions on the treatment of themes. VIOLENCE Violence is permitted. High impact violence that is, in context, frequently gratuitous, exploitative and offensive to a reasonable adult will not be permitted. Sexual violence may be implied, if non-interactive and justified by context. SEX Sexual activity may be realistically simulated. The general rule is “simulation, yes – the real thing, no”. LANGUAGE There are virtually no restrictions on language. DRUG USE Drug use is permitted. Drug use related to incentives and rewards is not permitted. NUDITY Nudity is permitted. Ron Curry, the CEO of the iGEA was pleased at the progress of R18+, but raised some concerns about the discussion of interactivity. “We are pleased to see this process moving forward and understand that great care has been taken to balance the concerns of those who have resisted an R18+ classification and adults who want to play video games designed specifically for mature audiences and readily available in other developed democracies," he said. “There will be continued debate about whether the interactivity of video games has a greater impact than other forms of media, and we will continue to refer to the lack of the evidence to support these claims," he continued. "With that being said, we welcome the commitment from all parties involved to seek a reasonable outcome to address this longstanding issue. “We now look forward to the Commonwealth, States and Territories implementing these guidelines in an expedient manner." You can look at the guidelines in their entirety here. |
In a scathing speech on Wednesday, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union charged that racism and “rich white people” are to blame for the immense financial crisis facing the Chicago Public Schools. In her remarks to an audience at the upscale City Club of Chicago, union boss Karen Lewis strongly criticized Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. She also urged the city schools to follow the strategic blueprint of the Chicago Cubs baseball team. “Members of the status quo — the people who are running the schools and advising the mayor on how to best run our district — know what good education looks like because they have secured it for their own children in well-resourced public and private institutions,” the Dartmouth graduate charged. “When will there be an honest conversation about the poverty, racism and inequality that hinders the delivery of a quality education product in our school system?” Lewis also asked in the speech. “When will we address the fact that rich, white people think they know what’s in the best interest of children of African Americans and Latinos—no matter what the parent’s income or education level.” The union leader then questioned the motives of “venture capitalists” who have expressed a desire to improve the quality of education for poor and minority students. “There is something about these folks who love the kids but hate the parents,” Lewis inveighed. “There’s something about these folks who use little black and brown children as stage props at one press conference while announcing they want to fire, layoff or lock up their parents at another press conference.” Lewis called for “an end to corporate subsidies and loopholes.” She demanded “progressive taxation” to close the $1 billion budget deficit currently facing the Second City and its public schools. (RELATED: It’s official: Chicago Public Schools will close 49 elementary schools for good) Higher income tax rates on wealthy residents would generate billions in necessary revenue, the union chief suggested. She also proposed new taxes for commuters and for financial transfers. In her closing remarks, Lewis, a self-professed Chicago White Sox fan, suggested that the Chicago Public Schools would be wise to emulate the Chicago Cubs baseball franchise. “When the Cubs lose a game they don’t call for Wrigley Field to close down. They don’t want the entire team dismantled. Despite empty seats, the stadium isn’t accused of being underutilized,” she said. Lewis, who obviously spends little time listening to Chicago’s two main sports radio stations, also suggested that “no one questions” the salaries of Chicago baseball players. Year after year — despite individual player performance, despite game losses and near wins — the fans show continue to show up. We keep cheering for our Cubbies. We know they are winners. We dream. We believe,” Lewis said. “Do the same for our children,” she implored. “Cheer them on. Invest in them. Love them. Support their parents. Support their teachers. Support their schools. Let’s work together. Let’s win, Chicago. Let’s win.” The Chicago Cubs famously have not won a World Series since 1908 (or a National League pennant since 1945). The team is currently in next-to-last place in Major League Baseball’s National League Central division — 16 games out of first place. Follow Eric on Twitter and send education-related story tips to erico@dailycaller.com. Join the conversation on The Daily Caller Read more stories from The Daily Caller Chicago teachers union chief faults 'rich white people' for city's education mess Where was the Tea Party on Election Day? [VIDEO] CBO says immigration bill aids investors, not wage earners Farm bill amendment seeks to allow hemp production Top 9: Most worthless protest signs [SLIDESHOW] |
Do women really talk like 12-year-old girls? Actress Lake Bell insists there is vocal 'pandemic' of adults talking in 'baby' voices Lake Bell: The 34-year-old actress believes that young women everywhere have caught chronic 'sexy baby vocal virus' From Valley Girls to the Kardashians, young women are often mocked for the way they talk. And Lake Bell, best known for her role in the 2009 movie, It's Complicated, believes that young women everywhere have caught chronic 'sexy baby vocal virus'. 'It's like a speech pattern that includes uptalking and fry, so it's this amalgamation of really unsavory sounds that many young women have adopted. It's a pandemic, in my opinion,' the 34-year-old told NPR . The actress, who wrote, directed and stars in the upcoming film, In A World, says she is worried that women are hurting their careers by talking like 'little girls'. 'I grew up thinking a female voice and sound should sound sophisticated and sexy, a la Lauren Bacall or Anne Bancroft or Faye Dunaway, you know. 'Not a 12-year-old little girl that is submissive to the male species. 'I can't have people around me that speak that way,' she admitted. Whether it is uptalk (pronouncing statements as if they were questions), or the incessant use of 'like' as a conversation filler, vocal trends associated with young women are often seen as markers of immaturity or stupidity. But some believe women also change their voices, often subconsciously, to sound less threatening or domineering. 'I hear women do it on the street when they are talking to a man they want to quickly placate,' wrote Huffington Post blogger Kate Fridkis. 'I heard one of my college roommates use it every night on the phone with her boyfriend. Girls and women slip into it so naturally, and then out of again, on a daily basis.' Carmen Fought, a professor of linguistics at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, told the New York Times: 'If women do something like uptalk or vocal fry, it’s immediately interpreted as insecure, emotional or even stupid. 'The truth is this: Young women take linguistic features and use them as power tools for building relationships.' Miss Bell, in In A World, plays Carol, a woman who wants be the voice behind movie trailers - and must overcome the fact that they are mostly male. 'I was always interested in the idea that the omniscient voice was always considered male,' Miss Bell told NPR. |
There will be more shooting rampages, like that which targeted Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson last weekend -- as long as it is easier to get a gun than mental health care. Our current epidemic of mass shootings is but a symptom of our nation's broken health care system. Poor access to medical care jeopardizes an individual's health. But when the mentally ill or the seriously distressed can't access care, we are all at risk. As a psychiatrist, I remember when I once did everything in my power to keep a disturbed patient stable, and society safe. I'd see the patient every day, or hospitalize the patient for months, if necessary. Needless to say, this degree of attention is impossible today, given limited resources, and the fights my staff and I regularly undertake with insurance companies to get even routine care approved. For decades, the American health care system has prioritized profits, often by excluding the sick. This travesty is now coming to roost, in the form of mass violence, such as the recent shootings in Tucson, at Virgina Tech, and in communities across the country, including my own. Medical care for our most disenfranchised citizens will never turn good profits -- yet basic health care for everyone, is necessary for the stability of society. What does it mean that for kids today, the greatest threat of mass violence comes not from enemy powers, but from fellow disenfranchised citizens? As opposed to the duck and cover bomb drills of my own childhood, schoolchildren today do drills to prepare for shootings. Across the country, uniformed officers with weapons rush onto campuses to tackle imaginary shooters, while students run for cover. In Oxford, CT, helicopters and over 150 officers helped stage an elaborate shooting drill. At Scales Elementary School in Tennessee, little kids cried and wet their pants during a drill. In Dallas, police mistook a drill for an actual attack, and rushed onto campus like an episode of Keystone Cops. What have we come to? Insurance companies have the ultimate say about how often I see a patient, what medications I prescribe, and if the patient can be hospitalized. In the past, I might have provided services free of charge, in the name of patient welfare, my own professional ethics, or for the sake of public safety. But physicians and hospitals who don't prioritize the bottom line are increasingly put out of business. Even St. Vincent Hospital in Manhattan, after 161 years of practicing good medicine but bad business, is bankrupt, gone. Meanwhile, health insurers are among the most profitable companies on Wall Street. It's a perverse distribution of the nation's precious medical dollars. My own community's worst mass shooting occurred on August 18, 2005, when five people in Albuquerque were shot and murdered by a man who suffers from schizophrenia. For the prior three days, John Hyde sought help, but was turned away each time. His family called his psychiatrist repetitively, but HIPAA privacy laws prevented communications. On the day Hyde started shooting, he sought help from his insurance company. Hyde was once kept stable for seven years by an old-fashioned psychiatrist who had personal relationships with patients, and who was available at all hours, like all doctors of another time. But when for-profit insurance companies took control of New Mexico's mental health dollars in 1998, Hyde's psychiatrist found himself paid less, while needing to spend just as much time haggling with insurance bureaucrats, as treating patients. In 1998, practicing the same devoted way he had for 22 years, Hyde's psychiatrist, Dr. Jay Feierman, closed his practice with $50,000 in debt. After Hyde lost the long-term, committed care of his personal psychiatrist, Hyde fell into a system that operates in today's typical fashion. His care was divided between a psychologist for therapy, a psychiatrist for medications, an emergency room for problems after hours (which is most hours of the week), with insurance bureaucrats ultimately at the helm of each medical decision. With Dr. Feierman, at least Hyde knew who to call, if he felt unstable. Effective treatments for serious mental illness only began with anti-psychotic medications created in the 1950's. An older, more primary function of psychiatry -- dating from the time of asylums -- has always been to keep society safe. We as a society are only as stable as the least stable individual roaming our streets. |
One of the key arguments that ended up winning over a lot of Trump-skeptic conservatives in November was the desperate need to reverse the liberal activist direction of the federal courts, which, as the "nutty 9th Circuit " repeatedly demonstrates, is increasingly resulting in the violation of the separation of powers. But would Donald Trump, who spent most of his life donating a lot more to Democrats than Republicans, actually follow through on his promises to nominate conservative judges? So far the answer is a resounding yes. Trump's most celebrated decision so far among staunch conservatives is his selection of Neil Gorsuch to replace the deceased Antonin Scalia, who was a steadfast conservative voice on the Supreme Court. But Trump has quietly done much more than that to reverse the direction of the courts. He has now appointed over 20 strong, conservative candidates for lower court positions. As Legal Insurrection's William Jacobson pointed out Wednesday, while the media frenzy over the highly anticipated James Comey testimony was approaching its crescendo, Trump announced a second slate of conservative federal judicial appointments that has inspired cheers from conservative legal minds and "dismay" from progressives. As Jacobson put it earlier in the month, "Trump has an unprecedented opportunity to nominate a substantial percentage of the federal judiciary," currently around 100 vacancies. In early May, Trump nominated a group of 10 solidly conservative judges, celebrated by the Right and decried by the Left. On Wednesday, he named another 11. "These nominations follow the successful nomination and confirmation of associate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch to the United States Supreme Court, the successful nomination and confirmation of Judge Amul R. Thapar of Kentucky to serve as a circuit judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and the nomination of numerous candidates to other judgeships," the White House said in a statement Wednesday (full statement below). Like the first group, the 11 appointees have conservatives, like law professor Jonathan Adler, thrilled. "Today, the Trump administration announced another slate of incredibly strong judicial nominees, including three nominees for federal appellate court," wrote Adler, who went on to note that many of the names (five of the nine circuit court nominees) are "current or former law professors," like him. Adler drew a comparison to the Reagan administration, which likewise believed that "appointing academics is one way to maximize its influence on the federal judiciary." One of those Reagan nominees was Antonin Scalia. Below is the full statement released by the White House on Wednesday: President Donald J. Trump today announced his fourth wave of Federal judicial nominees. These nominations follow the successful confirmation of Associate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch to the United States Supreme Court, the successful confirmation of Judge Amul R. Thapar of Kentucky to serve as a Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and the nomination of numerous candidates to other judgeships. The President today announced his nomination of these individuals to the following Federal judgeships. If confirmed, Allison H. Eid of Colorado will serve as a Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Justice Allison Eid currently serves as the 95th Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court. Justice Eid was appointed to the Colorado Supreme Court in 2006 and retained by the people of Colorado in 2008. Before assuming office, Justice Eid served as Colorado’s Solicitor General and as a tenured Associate Professor of Law at the University of Colorado School of Law, where she authored several articles on federalism and taught courses on constitutional law, legislation, and torts. Before joining the University of Colorado faculty, Justice Eid practiced commercial and appellate litigation with the Denver office of Arnold & Porter. Justice Eid has served as a member of the Advisory Committee on Federal Appellate Rules, and she is currently a member of the American Law Institute. Earlier in her career, Justice Eid clerked for Associate Justice Clarence Thomas of the United States Supreme Court and for Judge Jerry E. Smith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Justice Eid received her A.B. with distinction from Stanford University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and her J.D. with high honors from the University of Chicago Law School, where she was elected to the Order of the Coif and served as Articles Editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. If confirmed, Ralph R. Erickson of North Dakota will serve as a Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Judge Ralph Erickson currently serves on the United States District Court for the District of North Dakota. He has served on the District Court of North Dakota since 2003. Judge Erickson served as the Chief Judge of the District of North Dakota from 2009-2016. Prior to his appointment to the Federal bench, Judge Erickson was a judge on the North Dakota state district court for eight years. He currently serves as the chair of the United States Sentencing Commission’s Tribal Issues Advisory Group. Judge Erickson graduated from Jamestown College, magna cum laude, with a B.A. in History, and received his J.D. from the University of North Dakota, where he served on the North Dakota Law Review. If confirmed, Michael P. Allen of Florida will serve as a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. Michael P. Allen serves as a Professor of Law and Director of the Veterans Law Institute at Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, Florida, where he teaches courses in civil and constitutional law, as well as veterans’ benefits law. Professor Allen is a recognized expert on the law of veterans’ benefits and has testified before Congress and published widely in the field. Before joining the Stetson law faculty sixteen years ago, Professor Allen spent nine years as a civil trial attorney at the law firm Ropes & Gray in Boston, Massachusetts. Professor Allen received his B.A. in American history and political science, summa cum laude, from the University of Rochester, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and his J.D. from the Columbia University School of Law, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. If confirmed, Dabney L. Friedrich of Washington, D.C., will serve as a District Judge on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Dabney Friedrich has a lengthy career of distinguished public service. Most recently, Ms. Friedrich served as a Commissioner on the United States Sentencing Commission. Before that, Ms. Friedrich served as an associate counsel to the President during the George W. Bush Administration, as Chief Crime Counsel to Senator Orrin G. Hatch, as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, as a trial attorney at the Department of Justice, and as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of California. Before holding those positions, Ms. Friedrich clerked for Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the District of Columbia District Court. Ms. Friedrich received her B.A., magna cum laude, from Trinity University, her Diploma in Legal Studies from Oxford University, and her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she served as a senior editor on the Yale Journal on Regulation. If confirmed, Timothy J. Kelly of Washington, D.C., will serve as a District Judge on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Timothy Kelly is currently chief counsel for national security and senior crime counsel to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley. He also serves as the Republican staff director for the Senate’s Caucus on International Narcotics Control. Earlier in his career, Mr. Kelly spent a decade as a Federal prosecutor, serving first as an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Columbia and then as a trial attorney in the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division. Mr. Kelly also spent several years as a civil litigator at Arnold & Porter. Mr. Kelly clerked for Judge Ronald L. Buckwalter on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. He received his A.B., cum laude, from Duke University, and his J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center, where he was a senior associate editor of the American Criminal Law Review. If confirmed, Trevor N. McFadden of Virginia, will serve as a District Judge on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Trevor McFadden currently serves as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice. Before assuming that role, Mr. McFadden was a partner in the Compliance, Investigations & Government Enforcement Group in the Washington, D.C. office of Baker & McKenzie LLP. Earlier in his career, Mr. McFadden served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Columbia and as counsel to the United States Deputy Attorney General. Mr. McFadden also has extensive experience as a law enforcement officer, having served as both a Deputy Sheriff in the Madison County Sheriff’s Office and as a police officer with the Fairfax County Police Department. Mr. McFadden clerked for Judge Steven M. Colloton on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. He received his B.A., magna cum laude, from Wheaton College, and his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he served on the editorial board of the Virginia Law Review. If confirmed, Amanda L. Meredith of Virginia will serve as a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. Amanda L. Meredith serves as the deputy staff director and general counsel of the U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, chaired by Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia. She previously served as general counsel to the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and as benefits counsel to Ranking Member Richard Burr of North Carolina and Ranking Member Larry Craig of Idaho. Prior to her service on the Committee, Ms. Meredith served as director of the Task Force for Backlog Reduction for the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims and as a law clerk and executive attorney to Chief Judge Kenneth Kramer, United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. Ms. Meredith received her B.S. from the State University of New York at Buffalo, summa cum laude, and her J.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo, magna cum laude, where she was a member of the Buffalo Law Review. If confirmed, Stephen S. Schwartz of Virginia will serve as a Judge on the United States Court of Federal Claims. Stephen S. Schwartz is currently a partner at Schaerr Duncan LLP in Washington, D.C, where he litigates civil, constitutional, and administrative law matters in Federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court. Prior to joining Schaerr Duncan, Mr. Schwartz served as counsel at Cause of Action, a public interest law firm based in Washington, D.C. Before joining Cause of Action, he was an associate in the litigation practice of Kirkland & Ellis LLP in Washington, D.C. Mr. Schwartz joined Kirkland after serving as a law clerk to Judge Jerry E. Smith on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Mr. Schwartz received his B.A., with distinction, from Yale and his J.D., with honors, from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. If confirmed, Joseph L. Toth of Wisconsin will serve as a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. Joseph L. Toth is a veteran of the Judge Advocate General Corps of the United States Navy. In 2011, he served as a field officer in the Rule of Law Field Force Afghanistan (ROLFF-A), where he was stationed with the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division in the Zhari District of Afghanistan. In Zhari, Mr. Toth partnered with Afghan prosecutors to establish the rule of law in the district where the Taliban was formed, and he was awarded the Joint Service Commendation Medal for his service. He also served as Senior Defense Counsel in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where he defended Sailors, Marines, and Coast Guard personnel at courts-martial. Following his military service, Mr. Toth clerked for Judge Daniel A. Manion on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Judge Robert J. Conrad of the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina. Most recently, he served as an associate Federal public defender in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Mr. Toth received his B.A. from the University of Chicago and his J.D. from the Ave Maria School of Law. President Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Nominate Judicial Candidates The President today also announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to the following Federal judgeships. If confirmed, Stephanos Bibas of Pennsylvania will serve as a circuit judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Professor Bibas serves as Professor of Law and Criminology and as Director of the Supreme Court Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. One of the Nation’s leading experts in criminal law and procedure, Professor Bibas has published two books and more than sixty scholarly articles, and he has argued six cases before the United States Supreme Court. Before joining the law faculty at Penn, Professor Bibas taught at the University of Chicago Law School and the University of Iowa College of Law, after completing a research fellowship at Yale Law School. From 1998 to 2000, he served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where he prosecuted more than one hundred cases. Before that, Professor Bibas litigated at the law firm of Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. and served as a law clerk to Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the United States Supreme Court and to Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Professor Bibas received his B.A. from Columbia University, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, his B.A. and M.A. from Oxford University, and his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was on the editorial board of the Yale Law Journal. While at Oxford, he won the First Place Speaker award at the World Universities Debating Championship. If confirmed, Claria Horn Boom of Kentucky will serve as a district judge on the United States District Courts for the Eastern and Western Districts of Kentucky. Claria Horn Boom is currently a partner in the Lexington office of Frost Brown Todd LLC. Before joining Frost Brown Todd LLC, Ms. Horn Boom served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern and Western Districts of Kentucky, and before that, practiced at King & Spalding in Atlanta, Georgia. Before holding these positions, Ms. Horn Boom clerked for Judge Pierce Lively of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Ms. Horn Boom grew up in the Martin County, Kentucky courthouse , where her mother served as clerk of the court. Ms. Horn Boom earned her undergraduate degree from Transylvania University and her J.D. from the Vanderbilt University Law School. |
The Internet Archive, one of the most widely known nonprofit organizations in the internet community, has just announced that they intend to start paying a portion of their employees’ salaries in Bitcoin. The Archive describes itself as “a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies & music, as well as 267 billion archived web pages”, and is most well-known for two key projects. First, the Archive maintains the Wayback Machine, a service that allows anyone to access old versions of web pages, including potentially web pages that have since disappeared from the internet, from as far back as 1996. Second, the organization’s website features a collection of millions of works in video, music, audio and text. The Archive is also actively attempting to preserve older works of literature by converting them into a digital form, with 23 scanning centers in 5 countries uploading 1,000 new books to its collection every year, and maintains a number of smaller projects including its collection of NASA images. The Archive is not the only “open-source” digital library out there – the Gutenberg project also comes to mind, but it is one of the largest, and projects like it play an important role in keeping public domain books accessible as we rapidly transition to a digital age. Although companies like Google have also stepped in to fill the role with projects like Google Cache and Google Books, many are worried about what would happen if the only records of a large number of important cultural artifacts were left in the hands of a single large corporation, and to those concerned about such issues the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and Open Library projects provide a compelling alternative. The organization first started accepting Bitcoin for donations in December 2012. “At the end of 2011,” Brewster Kahle relates, “we did a fundraiser, we were trying to raise money at the Internet Archive by putting up a banner, and we got a lot of emails saying we should take Bitcoin. I thought, I’m going to try a test. I took our head of administration – she’s a capable woman but not technical at all – and said, if you can figure out how to take Bitcoin, we’ll take Bitcoin. She downloaded BitcoinQt, and it was slow but it worked.” The Archive has received over $5,600 in Bitcoin donations since then. Archive.org is listed by Alexa as the 233rd most popular site in the world, placing it only behind Reddit and WordPress in terms of organizations that accept Bitcoin. As far as organizations paying employees in Bitcoin go, however, the Archive is by far the largest. The only other nonprofit known to do such a thing is the P2P foundation, which announced its plans to pay employees in bitcoin in March 2012, although many Bitcoin-specific nonprofits businesses are likely already paying their employees in bitcoin without feeling the need to explicitly mention it – Bitcoin Magazine itself being one example. When asked why he is so interested in accepting and promoting Bitcoin, Kahle’s response is one that many people in the Bitcoin community can related to. “I think that at the Internet Archive,” Kahle said in a phone interview, “we see ourselves as coming from the net. As an organization we exist because of the internet, and I think of Bitcoin as a creature of the net. It’s a fantastically interesting idea, and to the extent that we’re all trying to build a new future, a better future, let’s try and round it out.” However, Kahle reminds us, the Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization, and relies heavily on donations to keep its services running. Those who support what the Internet Archive is doing and wish to see it continue to preserve and digitize even more content, as well as those who simply wish to help Bitcoin-accepting organizations grow and succeed, are encouraged to donate to its public address, which can be found here on its website (although other methods of payment are also always welcome). If the Internet Archive continues to receive enough funding to maintain this initiative, it will provide yet another boost to Bitcoin’s legitimacy, and perhaps even encourage other organizations and even businesses to follow suit. With bitcoins flowing around in a closed loop, passing from average Bitcoin users to businesses and organizations like the Internet Archive, and from there directly to their employees who then spend it at other Bitcoin businesses without being converted to and from USD along the way, it looks like Bitcoin is well on its way to becoming a true, self-sustaining currency. |
A high-ranking Russian officer, Col. Ruslan Galitsky, who was accused of commanding pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, has been killed in Aleppo, Syria. Russian President Vladimir Putin personally confirmed the colonel’s death. The Russian Ministry of Defense announced on Wednesday that Galitsky had been killed, and Putin subsequently said that Galitsky had suffered fatal wounds when a Russian military field hospital in Aleppo’s al-Furqan neighborhood was shelled on Monday. A Russian military doctor and a nurse reportedly were killed in the same attack. According to the state-owned RIA Novosti news agency, Galitsky was acting as a military adviser to the Syrian regime, which has made a rapid three-week advance—with the help of Russian air power and Iranian-sponsored Shia proxy forces—through about 75 percent of East Aleppo. The area has been a stronghold of the Syrian opposition for the last four years. Vladimir Kuzmin, head of the Saint Petersburg branch of the Officers of Russia veterans’ organization, told the independent Fontanka newspaper that Galitsky had been due to be promoted to the rank of Major-General as soon as December 12. The death of such a high-ranking Russian military commander in Syria would always garner attention, but Galitsky has a particularly interesting history. In May this year, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense publicly accused Galitsky of commanding militants in the war-torn east of that country. According to Ukrainian military intelligence, Galitsky was the deputy chief of staff at the Center of Territorial Troops in the Rostov city of Novocherkassk, around 50 kilometers from the Ukrainian border. That Galitsky, who was born in Ukraine, did indeed serve at a military unit based in Novocherkassk is not in doubt. On February 16, he was decorated for his military service by the governor of the Rostov region, Vasily Golubev. At this time, he was named as the “chief of the directorate of operations at military unit 64722 of the Southern Military District.” Unit 64722 is rather mysterious. A search of Russian military databases reveals absolutely nothing. That the unit exists is proven by several military court records of disciplinary or pay-related cases lodged by servicemen deployed there. In May this year, an anonymous user on the Voronezh Q&A website asked if the unit existed, and gave the address as 36 Atamanskaya Street in Novocherkassk. They received no reply, but the address matches that of a former military academy, officially dissolved in 2011. In December, 2014, the same address was given in replies on a Novocherkassk forum to a plea for help from a mother trying to contact her son. She she had been told he was transferred to another unit, 65246, but had been unable to find any information on the base or establish direct contact by phone. Reporting last year on a third such ghost unit based in Novocherkassk, Ukrainian investigative bloggers “InformNapalm” suggested that the Russian military was using these non-existent units as fronts for deploying troops into Ukraine. That Galitsky was decorated on February 16 this year may well be significant. The date marked the anniversary of a major Russian offensive in Ukraine to seize the city of Debaltsevo. Intriguingly, it was the very tank unit that led this offensive that Galitsky wound up commanding later in the year: the 5th Independent Tank Brigade, based in Ulan-Ude in Russia’s far-eastern Republic of Buryatia, playing a leading role in the Selenga-2016 military exercises held in August and September with the Mongolian armed forces. The 5th Independent Tank Brigade (OTB) took part in some of the fiercest fighting of the Ukraine war, engaging Ukrainian tanks to encircle Debaltsevo. Dorzhi Batomunkuyev, a tank gunner in the Brigade, suffered horrific burns after his tank was knocked out near the village of Logvinovo and described his deployment in detail to Novaya Gazeta’s Yelena Kostyuchenko. That the 5th OTB fought in Ukraine has also been demonstrated by Vice News’s Simon Ostrovsky, Bellingcat, and InformNapalm. Galitsky is not the only member of the 5th OTB to have wound up dying in Syria. On June 19 of this year, another colonel in the brigade, Vladimir Bekish, was killed by shelling in the Aleppo region. Bekish, a 42-year-old from the Belarusian town of Grodno, was reportedly the head of the intelligence company in the 5th OTB. So what are commanders from a Russian tank brigade doing dying in Aleppo, where the Russian military operation is supposedly limited to air support and humanitarian activity? According to Kathleen Weinberger, a Russia analyst at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War, “Russia is using the battlefields in both Ukraine and Syria to test and develop its hybrid war capabilities, particularly its ability to coordinate air power with a ground fight. Aleppo is an ideal test case for the Russians to practice and refine that capability in a dense urban environment.” Russia has in the past rotated units and officers involved in its undeclared dirty war in East Ukraine into Syria to help steer Assad’s recapture of lost terrain, and coordinate with Iranian reinforcements. Weinberger told The Daily Beast that Gen. Aleksandr Dvornikov, who led Russia's Syria operation, was rotated back into the Southern Military District, indicating that the Russian military may be applying lessons learned from the prosecution of the one conflict to the prosecution of the other. Galitsky, Weinberger added, was likely acting in an advisory role embedded with a Syrian armored unit and helping to coordinate the regime’s effort to seize the remainder of East Aleppo. |
Leaf Morphology: Phyllode/ Cladode: modifyed stems that act as leaves. LEAF POSITION Ensiform: leaves sharp edges, taper into a slender point (fern) PLANT HAIR Stellate: hairs come up like fingers. Looks like cluster of hair. Peltate: "petiole joins to the center" in leaves. With hair, at the end of each single hair, a flat, round, part is attached. ---------------------------- Glossary of Terms: WHORLED - more than two (2) opposite leaves. -------------------------------------- OPPOSITE - leaf nodes are on opposite sides of twig. Arranged by Compound (below left) or Simple (below right): -------------------------------------- ALTERNATE - leaf nodes alternate in pattern along branch. Arranged in Compound or Simple. -------------------------------------- DECUSSATE - Arranged on a stem in opposite pairs at right angles to those above or below, resulting in vertical rows of leaves. -------------------------------------- PALMATE - consisting of leaflets or lobes radiating from the base of the leaf. ------------------------------------ Fruits CAPSULE - a hollow dry fruit with 3+ locules (chambers) Dehiscent = splits open to release the seed. Indehiscent: remaining closed, do not split open at maturity. Capsule Types- Dehiscent: Capsule breaks to release fruit Indehiscent: This is a drupe, no hard capsule that is made to split open DRUPE - a fruit which has an outer fleshy part [exocarp/skin or mesocarp/flesh] that surrounds a shell (pit or stone) with a seed inside. A walnut is a drupe fruit. -------------------------------------- SAMARA - (“Helicopters” or “Whirligigs”)- Winged seed, indehiscent, distributed by wind. SCHIZOCARP- ("split fruit") - Dry fruit; when mature it splits up into one-seeded mericarps. The mericarp is either: -------------------------------------- OVATE (ovoid) OBOVATE (obovoid) ELLIPTICAL Root Index Adventitious- Develops from any plant part other than the roots Modifications of Adventitious roots : Tuberous Roots: ex- Sweet Potato Fasciculated Root: ex- Asparagus Nodulose Roots: ex- Tumeric Stilt Roots: ex- Maize Prop Roots: ex- Mangrove Fibrous- Root system branched and of simalar thickness, main taproot not obvious. ex: White Clover Taproot- Main root, large, down-growth ex: Carrot Aerial- Root grows above ground or water ex: Epiphytes Fleshy-Thick root, stores water or carbohydrates ex: Beets Haustorial- Root penetrates other plants, parasitic to other plants (absorbs water and nutrients from them) ex-Love Vine (Bahamas :) ) -------------------------------------- Other Terms Xerophytes: plants that are adapted to dry climates/habitats Halophytes: PLants that can tolerate high levels of soil salinity Erect Stems: Stems that stand with vertical or upright habit References: http://www.ag.auburn.edu/hort/landscape/dbpages/images/185a.jpg http://www.bioed.org/nhguideweb/PlantGuide/Glossary/illustrations/decussate.jpg http://www.dkimages.com/discover/previews/773/92111.JPG http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/sciences/botanicalsciences/ClassificationPlants/Spermatophyta/Angiosperms/ReproductiveMorphologyII/V26R088.jpg http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinlabar/2415101341/ http://www.cas.vanderbilt.edu/bioimages/g/wgydi--lffrom-below11899.jpg http://www.bio.txstate.edu/~dlemke/botany/1410lab/lab_exercises/lab7/morphology/whorled.jpg http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/fo02/vincetox.jpg http://blh23.net/trees/images/acer_negundo_leaf.jpg http://www.answers.com www.pngplants.org/PNGtrees |
Schools told to follow rules or lose money S.F. PUBLIC EDUCATION Feds hold schools to grant's reform policies 8th grade teacher, Alex Algones, with students from his social studies at Everett Middle School in San Francisco, Ca., on Tuesday August 30, 2011. Everett is one of nine schools in the school district with a massive federal grant to improve student performance. The school is among those that didn't follow the federal rules and is technically at risk of losing the second year of funding. less 8th grade teacher, Alex Algones, with students from his social studies at Everett Middle School in San Francisco, Ca., on Tuesday August 30, 2011. Everett is one of nine schools in the school district with a ... more Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close Schools told to follow rules or lose money 1 / 8 Back to Gallery SAN FRANCISCO -- San Francisco school officials have some explaining - and complying - to do. Last year, the district failed to follow the strict rules attached to a $56 million, three-year federal grant to improve student performance at 10 of its lowest-performing schools. The schools could lose the second installment - about $18 million - if they don't make adjustments. San Francisco can take some solace in the fact that none of the 41 districts in California receiving similar grants followed all the rules, including Oakland, West Contra Costa and Hayward, and also risk losing a second round of funding. The districts didn't know they would receive the grants until after the 2010-11 school year started and then didn't actually get the money flowing into the schools until December or January. In addition, some of the federal Department of Education's rules attached to the cash were open to interpretation. "There was a lot of confusion," said Chris Swenson, director of the state Department of Education School Improvement Division. "It was done rather hurriedly." Four reform methods The schools, among the 188 schools ranked academically in the bottom 5 percent statewide, were required to adopt one of four reform models. Those included closing; converting to a charter school; bringing in new leadership and staff; or replacing the principal combined with other major reforms like an overhaul of teaching methods. The schools that the district kept open to reform had to increase the school day or academic year. In San Francisco, Willie Brown Elementary was closed. Four schools adopted the model requiring the turnover of staff and the other five replaced the principal and revamped instruction. District officials, however, were dinged for failing to swap out, as required, at least half the teaching staff at three of the four schools, violating a major component of the selected reform model. Guilty, district officials said without remorse. Because the grant money came in so late, Superintendent Carlos Garcia refused to pull teachers out of classrooms midyear, said district spokeswoman Gentle Blythe. "The superintendent made a decision that he would take it up with the state and federal authorities rather than do that to school communities after the school year began," she said. The district fulfilled the requirement by the start of this academic year in August, which has satisfied federal and state authorities, Blythe said. A reform principal There was also some confusion at Everett Middle School, which was required to replace the principal with a reform-minded leader. Federal authorities questioned whether the new principal, who was replaced as allowed within a two-year window prior to the grant, fit that description. He was hired to fix the school, district officials told state and federal officials. "This was an issue of miscommunication that seemed to have stemmed simply from the principal not self-identifying as a 'reform principal,' " Blythe said. State officials conceded the point. But San Francisco, along with nearly every district in the state, failed to adequately increase learning time for students and will have to do so this year to fulfill the requirement. That could mean summer school, longer school days or even Saturday school - for all students. Each of the 41 districts will have to submit by Sept. 12 corrective action plans that show that they are in compliance before they can get the new round of funding. When money arrives As soon as the problems are corrected, they'll get the money, Swenson said. "The guidance continues to be refined," Swenson said. "They're getting another opportunity through this process." In the meantime, the nine San Francisco schools that received federal grants are moving ahead with the second year of reforms, using first-year funds officials didn't have time to spend last year. The funds will continue to be spent primarily on a few key areas: tutors, classroom coaches and teacher training; new and higher quality materials; and staff to help engage parents, district officials said. Spring test scores released this month showed some improvements in student proficiency within those schools, but also that a lot of work remains to be done. Federal School Improvement Grant reform models To receive federal School Improvement Grants, district officials must choose one of four reform options for each school: Turnaround model: Replace the principal (if on the job more than two years) and at least 50 percent of the school staff, and rework the school's instructional program. Restart model: Convert the site to a charter school or select an education management organization to operate it. School closure model: Close the site and enroll students in higher achieving schools within a reasonable distance from the closed site. Transformation model: Replace the principal (if on the job more than two years), increase instructional time and adopt other improvement strategies. |
Half of all Canadians are fit to donate blood, but only 1 in 60 Canadians gave blood last year. Our organ donation rates are also lower than many countries, including the United States. You can book an appointment to donate blood in Canada in several ways: If you live in Canada (outside of Quebec): Become an organ and tissue donor Only a fraction of Canadians are registered donors. Depending on where you live, there are different ways to register and decide what you want to donate. Select your province from the list to register and donate: Loved ones are always asked before donation happens, so it is important that they know your wishes. If you decide to become an organ and tissue donor, discuss it with your family and friends. If you have questions about how donation affects your religious or spiritual practice, speak with your spiritual leader. The need for donors in Canada In Canada, 52% of people say they or a family member have needed blood or blood products at some point in their lives. Our country also needs organ and tissue donors, but not enough Canadians have made plans to donate. The need for blood donation There is a constant demand for blood and blood products such as: platelets blood plasma red blood cells It takes many donors to help save a hospital patient. For example, it takes up to: |
Communist rebels warned President Duterte yesterday that they may be forced to end their monthslong ceasefire and resume fighting if he does not suspend the government’s counterinsurgency program and withdraw troops from rebel-influenced areas. The Communist Party of the Philippines said if Duterte fulfills the demands by January and releases remaining political detainees through an amnesty, it can guarantee the ceasefire’s extension, helping to foster peace talks brokered by Norway. New People’s Army guerrillas, however, will be forced to engage troops if the President presses the military’s deployment of troops in what the rebels claim as “guerrilla zones” in the countryside, the outlawed party said in a statement. “He will only have himself to blame if this forces the hand of the Communist Party of the Philippines to terminate its unilateral cease-fire declaration,” it said. While no fighting has erupted since both sides declared separate ceasefires in August, the Maoist guerrillas have complained that troops continued to be deployed in rebel areas to carry out surveillance and other counterinsurgency operations in what they say are violations of the government’s own truce. |
KIRT MCMASTER has the right stuff to be a successful software boss. He talks a mile a minute with a booming voice. And he projects inevitability: “We’re creating something everybody wants.” But communication skills are not the only reason why his firm may succeed where others, including Amazon and Samsung, have failed: establishing a third mobile-computing platform to compete with Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, which have market shares of 78% and 18% respectively. Most previous efforts to launch a new mobile platform were controlled by a single company or a consortium, so they were either supported by few others or were hampered by complex decision-making. What is more, new operating systems require makers of apps to rewrite their programs—a costly undertaking with an uncertain outcome. Cyanogen has avoided these pitfalls, says William Stofega of IDC, a market-research firm. It was born in 2009 as an open-source project. The platform is fully compatible with Android but is also more customisable and boasts more features, such as better privacy settings. Although installing it is tricky and often voids the device’s warranty, around 50m smartphone owners worldwide have done so. Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. Mr McMaster convinced Steve Kondik, its founder, to turn it into a business in 2012. Initially, investors were reluctant. But Cyanogen has since raised $110m, with several big Silicon Valley venture-capital firms getting involved. Although Android is open-source too, Google’s official version comes with licensing strings attached. These have kept the platform from fragmenting into incompatible versions but also serve to promote Google’s app store and mobile services, such as e-mail and maps, which allow it to sell advertisements and collect user data. (The firm’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, is a member of the board of The Economist Group, which owns this newspaper.) Cyanogen is best seen as an attempt to unbundle this package. Upstart handset-makers, such as Micromax in India and Kazam in Europe, want to stop competing mainly on price and tailor their products to specific markets, for instance by integrating local mobile services. The model is China: most of Google’s services are banned or unavailable there and manufacturers use their own Android versions, a big factor in the rapid rise of Xiaomi, a local firm. Mobile carriers, for their part, would welcome more variety in handsets and a less dominant Google; Telefónica, a global telecoms operator, participated in Cyanogen’s latest funding round. Makers of popular apps, such as Facebook and Twitter, worry that Android will give Google an unfair advantage in mobile services, where most of the industry’s profits will be made; Twitter too is an investor in Cyanogen. Poor countries could benefit as well: smartphones adapted to local tastes are likely to spread faster. Then there are the regulators, which have shown increasing interest in Android. In April the European Commission began a formal investigation. This scrutiny, says Mr McMaster, will keep Google from using hardball tactics against his firm. Micromax and a few others are already selling smartphones powered by Cyanogen; more are likely to follow. Mr McMaster has also signed deals with several app vendors, including Microsoft. It will make the mobile version of Office and related services available on the Android clone. Yet success is by no means guaranteed. It is unclear, for instance, whether Cyanogen will be able to make much money: it intends to take a cut from the revenues generated by the services it builds into its program. It may not be able to do so without Google’s mobile services, at least in rich countries, where they are already dominant, points out Geoff Blaber of CCS Insight, another market researcher. Mr McMaster seems unfazed. His goal, he says, is not to replace Google’s services, but to create a level playing-field. But he is already plotting his firm’s next move: combining all the services built into Cyanogen and the data they generate into clever new offerings, such as a field in a phone’s dialler app which tells users whether an incoming call is from a telemarketing firm, based on feedback from other users. Google would not be able to do the same, because many big service providers simply don’t trust it, he argues. “We are the Switzerland of the mobile world.” |
U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Berghdal is pictured in this undated handout photo provided by the U.S. Army and received by Reuters on May 31, 2014. (U.S. Army/Handout) Among the most tantalizing mysteries surrounding Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s departure from his U.S. military base in 2009 is this: Was he trying to find the Taliban? Or did he simply wander away and get captured? Politicians and members of the military have criticized the Obama administration’s decision to swap five jailed Taliban leaders for Bergdahl, saying the soldier may have deserted. Until now, few details have emerged about the circumstances of Bergdahl’s disappearance from his base. But The Washington Post has reached Afghan villagers who spotted Bergdahl shortly after he slipped away from his base. To them, it’s clear something was wrong with the American. And he seemed to be deliberately heading for Taliban strongholds, they say. “It was very confusing to us. Why would he leave the base?” said Jamal, an elder in the village of Yusef Khel, about a half-mile from the American military installation. (Like many Afghans, he goes by only one name). “The people thought it was a covert agenda – maybe he was sent to the village by the U.S.” Locals remember Bergdahl walking through the village in a haze. They later told Afghan investigators that they had warned the American that he was heading into a dangerous area. “They tried to tell him not to go there, that it is dangerous. But he kept going over the mountain. The villagers tried to give him water and bread, but he didn’t take it,” said Ibrahim Manikhel, the district’s intelligence chief. “We think he probably was high after smoking hashish,” Manikhel said. “Why would an American want to find the Taliban?” Residents still remember the massive search effort that followed Bergdahl’s disappearance. But the village eventually returned to normal – albeit still with grave problems from Taliban fighters – and few locals thought about the American soldier until this past week, when his face flashed across Afghan news programs. “I had forgotten about that abducted American,” said Manikhel. “I hope the U.S. can re-arrest the Talibs that they released.” |
Cathal McNaughton/Reuters Savita Halappanavar, who was denied a termination, died from septicemia in an Irish hospital 17 weeks into her pregnancy in 2012. Irish activists say a lack of legal clarity from the Catholic church about when terminations are justified contributed to her death. WASHINGTON -- Eight years ago, Dr. Lori Freedman began a study of how the medical practices of obstetrician-gynecologists are affected by abortion training they received during their residencies -- and she stumbled on an unexpected finding. Freedman’s study, “Where there’s a heartbeat,” found that OB-GYNs working in Catholic-owned hospitals were sometimes forced to delay inducing labor for women whose pregnancies threatened their health. Their hospitals’ ethics committees either insisted they wait for the fetal heartbeat to cease before terminating the pregnancy or that they transfer the patient to another facility. They did so because of how they interpreted the church’s “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services,” which ban abortion but allow operations that “have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman … when they cannot be safely postponed until the unborn child is viable.” The problem, as Freedman saw it, is that in practice, Catholic hospitals have differing interpretations of when they are allowed to terminate pregnancies. OB-GYNs told her they had to wait until it looked like their patient was going to die before ending her pregnancy. One doctor at a secular hospital reported accepting a patient transferred from a Catholic hospital who was already septic -- i.e., dangerously infected -- and hemorrhaging blood when she arrived. The number of U.S. hospitals with a Catholic affiliation has increased by 22 percent since 2001. “To me, miscarriage management and abortion were completely separate things, but when I learned about this particular set of doctrines I learned how the interpretations could vary,” Freedman told The Huffington Post. Cases like this are gaining prominence because of a multi-pronged legal and legislative campaign by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups concerned about the increasing prevalence of Catholic hospitals nationwide. A report released in May from the ACLU and MergerWatch found that one out of every six of the country’s acute care hospital beds is in a facility with ties to the Catholic church. Mergers and acquisitions in the health care industry mean the number of hospitals with a Catholic affiliation has increased by 22 percent since 2001, to 15 percent of the nation’s hospitals. Advocates took note of Freedman’s research. As early as the 1970s and as recently as this year, the ACLU had sued Catholic hospitals that refused to tie the tubes of patients giving birth at their institutions because of the church’s policy against sterilization -- but the potentially widespread nature of the miscarriage management issue surprised the group. “We all read [Freedman’s study] and said we needed to investigate the problem more thoroughly to see what we could do from a legal and advocacy perspective,” said Brigitte Amiri, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom project. Taking the issue to court A turning point for the ACLU was learning about Tamesha Means and the miscarriage she experienced in 2010 at Mercy Health Partners, a Catholic hospital in Michigan. At 18 weeks pregnant, Means arrived at the hospital after her water broke, but staff there sent her home. When she returned after feeling “severe pain,” they again sent her home, even though she was at risk of infection. Her lawsuit claims she was never informed that her fetus would not survive, though her doctors knew that ending the pregnancy was the safest option and the standard of care. The Guardian reported in February that four other women with pre-viability pregnancies who were showing signs of infection underwent dangerous miscarriages at the Michigan hospital in 2009 and 2010, without being informed they could be transferred to another institution that would have helped them. Three years later, the ACLU filed an unprecedented suit against the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which wrote the ethical and religious directives, for negligence and providing substandard care. A district court dismissed the suit last year, so they appealed to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Oral argument in that case is scheduled for June 17. Cathal McNaughton / Reuters A woman holds a poster during a vigil in November 2012 in Dublin in memory of Savita Halappanavar, who died of septicemia following a miscarriage 17 weeks into her pregnancy. In the U.S., civil rights groups are suing Catholic hospitals over similar cases in which they did not intervene when women were having dangerous miscarriages. A flurry of other lawsuits filed by the national ACLU and its state affiliates allege that various Catholic hospitals are failing to provide appropriate miscarriage management for patients experiencing pregnancy-related complications. In October, the ACLU sued Trinity Health Corporation, one of the nation’s largest Catholic health care systems. The group alleges the network has repeatedly violated the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which requires hospitals to provide stabilizing treatment to patients. A judge dismissed that case in April; the ACLU has asked the judge to reconsider his decision. Elizabeth Sepper, a health law scholar at Washington University in St. Louis, told HuffPost that while “the legal framework is not friendly to plaintiffs in this area,” she believes reproductive health care advocates could have a conversation about challenging the conscience clauses passed by states that say doctors or institutions can refuse to provide abortions and sterilizations and simultaneously be protected from lawsuits if their patient suffers harm as a result. “In many states, if a Catholic hospital were to kill a woman because they did not provide her with proper miscarriage management, they would not face liability,” Sepper noted. “It’s one thing to say, in order to protect one’s religious beliefs and convictions about when life begins, we’re going to allow you to step away from a situation, to not perform an abortion in most situations. But to say that you could actually kill someone or seriously injure them and face no consequences for that seems a step too far.” There isn't much of an incentive for staff at Catholic hospitals to challenge the scope of the church's directives, since doing so could result in being punished. A nun who was an administrator at a Catholic hospital in Arizona was excommunicated in 2010 after she approved an abortion for a patient who probably would have died if her pregnancy had continued. 'Stories beget stories' One hurdle for groups hoping to sue more Catholic hospitals is that it’s difficult to find former patients who had mismanaged miscarriages, because they may not have realized anything was amiss with the care they received. “We don’t know whether visibility of the lawsuits will improve practice because it scares people, or if the visibility of the lawsuits will help people who have had terrible care come out of the closet,” Freedman said. “Most doctors don’t want a woman to have a bad outcome, so they’ll try very hard to try some sort of workaround. But then you have the issue of the ethics of workarounds -- is it ethical that the only way to get her needs met is to fudge things? That’s not usually how we like to practice medicine.” To raise awareness about the management of miscarriages at Catholic hospitals, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in May to obtain complaints from women refused emergency treatment from hospitals with a religious affiliation. The group hopes the lawsuit will inspire the federal government to undertake its own investigation of gaps in reproductive health care at hospitals with religious ties. “We have found that stories beget stories,” Amiri said. “Our goal is to raise awareness, get folks to come forward, to contact us, to be strategic about litigation and advocacy to try to change things.” Various ACLU state affiliates are also pushing legislation that would ensure patients are given all the information they need about their health condition, rather than denied information about their pregnancy because of their hospital’s religious beliefs. The Democrat-controlled Illinois state House passed just such a law in May. “We’re seeing a lot more efforts to use the courts, the administrative process and the legislative process in tandem to create public awareness of this problem,” Sepper said. Next step: More research Freedman said she tried to get funding from a foundation eight years ago for a study comparing health care at religious and non-religious institutions. But the foundation told her they were not interested in “political activism work." “They treated me like I wanted to do some activist intervention,” she recalled. “This foundation couldn’t envision this as legitimate research.” Now, she and other researchers have formed a consortium to encourage others to research the intersection of reproductive health care and religiously affiliated hospitals, or at least include a question about the nature of the hospital in otherwise unrelated studies to measure the impact of its affiliations on the patient experience. They held their first meeting last fall. |
Back cover + paddles & open 3D file! Open file for 3D printing replacement. A number of reasons for this! I'm loving the controller very nicely thought about bit of kit. Though I have a request for Valve on the back cover the is used to hide the batteries and used for the back paddle buttons.They feel strong but If they break or is the plastic notch on the inside wares down or breaks will render the paddle button un-usable.My idea would be to have replacements made but not on the store but as an open source file we can use to either 3D print our own or use a 3D printing service to replace our own back covers if we ever need to get a new one this way it take the demand off Valve to have to produce/package & sell them via Steam or retail stores.I hope others feel the same though I have trust in the product I just feel it might be a good idea to have a file out there where people can create their own backup's in case of anything breaking during a rage event :P1. Simple to make your own (If you're lucky enough to own a 3D printer) or use a 3D printing service.2. It off loads any pressure on Valve to have to waste time money and resources having to produce their own to sell replacements.3. User customization if someone wanted to create a paddle button with grip or by changing the texture.Any other ideas you guys might want to add please do add to my thread with your posts. |
In Boston, some residents banded together to protest dedicating taxpayer dollars to Olympic infrastructure. No Boston Olympics “We should never be planning our cities around three-week events, or planning our cities around visitors.” On January 8, 2015, many of Boston’s wealthiest residents celebrated the announcement that the United States Olympic Committee had chosen Boston over Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco as the U.S.'s candidate to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. President Obama sent his congratulations to the city, the Massachusetts governor labeled the decision “great news,” and Boston’s mayor Marty Walsh said it was “an exceptional honor” to be chosen as the host city. By that summer, though, Walsh announced that he would not sign the Olympic Host City Contract. “I cannot commit to putting the taxpayers at risk,” Walsh said. The USOC, along with the Boston's city government, withdrew Boston's bid. That night, a motley group of Boston residents gathered in a local pub to celebrate the David-and-Goliath-esque defeat. Sine 1972, when Denver backed out as host city for the 1976 Games, citing economic and environmental concerns, the public examples of “white elephants”—shiny new stadiums left unused after the Games—have led many people around the world to question the premise that hosting the Olympics is good for cities. The collapse of Boston's bid, though, was one of the most visible examples of Olympic-hosting opposition in the Games' history. What started as a small group of young professionals concerned about their city swelled until polls showed that the majority of Boston residents opposed the bid. Through grassroots efforts, the group had chipped away at the vague promises of Olympic host-city-backers, exposing those promises—especially the assurance that taxpayers would be off the hook for cost overruns—as unreliable and statistically improbable. To find out how a grassroots campaign managed to shut down the Olympic juggernaut, we spoke with Christopher Dempsey, one of the founders of the No Boston Olympics movement, and a co-author of the new book No Boston Olympics: How and Why Smart Cities Are Passing on the Torch. We asked Dempsey, also the director of the nonprofit coalition Transportation for Massachusetts, what happened during the Boston opposition movement, what's up next for potential Olympic host cities, and why he believes that hosting the games under their current arrangement shouldn't be a part of any smart city's plan. How did the No Boston Olympics movement begin? No Boston Olympics was formed in a living room in Boston in the fall of 2013. It was a group of young professionals in their early 30s, with backgrounds in business, government, and political campaigns. We saw that Boston 2024 was being supported by some powerful, influential, and wealthy people in the region, and we had genuine concern about what a bid could mean for the future of our city. So we thought there could be a grassroots group [to oppose to bid] and we could be those people. How did your co-author, the economist Andrew Zimbalist, get involved in No Boston Olympics? We realized early on that the academic community could be an important ally for us because of its independence—and, frankly, because of the serious amount of work that has been done in the academic community of weighing the pros and cons of an Olympic bid. Zimbalist, who is a professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, is one of the world's leading economists on the Olympics. He attended and spoke at our very first public meeting. Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter. The best way to follow issues you care about. Subscribe Loading... In a sentence, what was your group's goal? Our goal was to make sure that an Olympic bid didn't become a threat to our city and our region's bright future. Give us a brief recap of the course of Boston Olympic bid's until the city and the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) decided to end the bid in July 2015. The issue of the Olympic bid was a little under the radar at first, for much of 2013 and 2014. But then in January of 2015, the USOC chose Boston over bids from San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. It was at that point that regular citizens started to realize that this bid was real and that it would have important implications for them and their families, neighborhoods, and the future of their city. And that's when people started to engage on the pros and cons. The Boston Public Radio station WBUR realized that while elected leaders were saying the public supported the bid, no one knew for sure. So they hired a group to measure public opinion. There was no single moment when we knew we had tipped the balance—it was a process that grew over time. The polling, though, was clear: The more citizens learned about the bid, the less they liked it. In January 2015, the polls showed 55 percent of the public supported the Olympic bid and 35 percent opposed it. By March, we had helped flip those numbers. It was only this polling that helped people see the public had turned on the bid. What do you think did the most to convince Bostonians that the Olympics were a bad idea? I think the most important talking point we had was around the taxpayer guarantee. The International Olympic Committee requires host cities to sign a contract saying taxpayers will be responsible for cost overruns. And the boosters behind Boston 2024 made all sorts of promises about how the public would be protected. But they weren't able to produce anything substantive that showed that, and they were still asking for the blank check. So it was hard for the public to trust the boosters and ensure there wouldn't be costs to pay in the case of overruns, as there have been in all of the recent Olympics. [Editors’ note: According to a study from University of Oxford, no Olympics since 1960 have come in under budget; they average a cost overrun of 156 percent.] What was the most rewarding part about being involved in this movement? We had a broad coalition of people who came to us for any number of reasons. Some people were concerned about the taxpayer guarantee, others didn't want disruption to their life for the three weeks, others were concerned about militarization of police and restriction on rights that occurs when hosting mega-events. At our victory party, there were people in socialist alternative t-shirts sharing a beer with people in t-shirts with the Don't Tread On Me flag representing the Tea Party right. We had been able to form an incredibly broad coalition, and that’s something I think doesn't happen enough. One of the great takeaways here is that we are lucky to live in a democracy where we can have a robust Olympics debate. No Boston Olympics was outspent 1,500-to-1 by the boosters; we spent less than $10,000. But we had the facts on our side and a press willing to tell both sides of the story. I think we are lucky that's the case. The day after the bid was pulled, I received a phone call from the primary backer of the bid [businessman John Fish] and his words to me were, "Democracy worked." That was a pretty profound and gracious thing for him to say. What was it like to watch the Rio Olympics right after you all had defeated the bid? It wasn't any surprise to us that while the Rio Olympics might have looked great on TV for American viewers, it left the city of Rio with significant debt and a number of venues that it has no use for and no resources to maintain. This is the Olympic story in cities around the world. What we often heard here is that Rio is different: Brazil is a developing country, and Boston would be able to manage the Games much better. But even if you look at a developed and efficient country like Japan [where the 2020 Summer Olympics will be held], they have already seen multiple billions of dollars of cost overruns, and they are still three years away from hosting those games. “We should never be planning our cities around three-week events, or planning our cities around visitors.” What about the argument that the Olympics can bring much-needed infrastructure development to cities? For example: the Stockholm Olympic Stadium, which is over 100 years old and is still used to host sporting events. There is a misconception that the IOC cares that the transit system works well when they are choosing the city to award the games to. In 1996, they awarded the games to Atlanta over Toronto and Melbourne, both of which have far superior transit systems than Atlanta. Boston 2024 never had a plan for investing new or additional resources in transportation. All that they produced in their two-plus years of existence was a wish list of projects they would like to see happen. But if they happened, they would come at the expense of other projects already in the planning process, because they weren't advocating for new resources or revenue to grow the pie. I've lived in Boston my whole life and never owned a car, so there is no bigger supporter of investment in transit that I am, but this bid was never going to do that. I think it is important to remember we should never be planning our cities around three-week events, or planning our cities around visitors. We should be planning our cities in a way that will work for decades, and will benefit the residents of the city. Have other cities opposed the 2024 bid since Boston? In October, Zimbalist and I were in Hamburg, Germany to speak to groups [about opposing an Olympic bid]. By November, they had turned down the bid, and they looked to Boston as an example. Only months later, a newly elected mayor in Rome decided her city had more important priorities than the Olympics. Months later, a group of organizers similar to ours came together in Budapest and collected more than 250,000 signatures to put a question of the 2024 Olympics on the ballot. The Olympic organizers there saw the writing on the wall and pulled that bid. We have seen a number of cities around the world look to Boston as a model and example of why smart cities are better off passing. What's going on right now with the 2024 Olympics? Both Paris and Los Angeles are still in the auction and bidding phase, where they are making more and more elaborate promises to the IOC about the games they can deliver. We'll see that play out in the second week of July, when each of those cities will send delegations to IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland to make their pitch. And later in September, the IOC will convene in Lima to vote—by secret ballot, as it typically does—as to which city will be the winner of the 2024 auction. Are people in Los Angeles opposing the Olympics? I think many people in Southern California have very fond memories of the 1984 Olympics, which we would agree were pretty successful compared to modern Olympics. But what they don't remember as well is that L.A. was one of only two bidders; the other bidder was Tehran, Iran, which dropped out because of the Iranian revolution. When you show up to an auction and you're the only bidder, you're going to get a good deal. So back then, L.A. rejected the taxpayer guarantee—they’re the only city in modern Olympics history to successfully reject the guarantee. That dramatically changed the incentives and dynamics of the Games, because the taxpayers were no longer on the hook to cover cost overruns. As a result, the Games were much better managed in a way to benefit L.A. residents rather than the IOC. Unfortunately, as long as there are multiple bidders [for 2024], the IOC will conduct the auction in a way that benefits the IOC. In L.A., a group has recently formed to oppose the bid and to ask tough questions of the bidders. We have communicated with them and wish them luck on raising these questions and calling out elected officials, who seem more focused on winning the bid than needs and goals of citizens. If I were an L.A. resident, even if I was in favor of the Games, I would be demanding that Mayor [Eric] Garcetti not sign the taxpayer guarantee. L.A. should be asking for the same deal that it got in 1984. But Garcetti seems like he will be signing that contract this summer, and that should be unacceptable to L.A. voters who care about where their tax dollars go and want to be sure they are spent on the right things. Given the pushback, what is the future of the Olympics? I'd like to think that the IOC has deemed that their model doesn't work and that they would institute substantive reforms, but I have little optimism that will occur. It is made up of roughly 100 individuals, many of whom are royalty, like the princess of Liechtenstein and the prince of Malaysia. They are incredibly wealthy and used to getting their way. I think as long as one or two cities are deciding to bid, they will be able to still extract significant concessions out of these host cities. I think we will see the Games being awarded more and more to undemocratic countries, like Beijing [China] or Sochi [Russia]. That’s sad, because the Olympics are supposed to be about athletic achievement and bringing the world together. Instead, the IOC turned them into construction competitions. |
This accident was thought to have been caused by an improper load of smokelss powder. Its not known what that load was. The shooter sustained minor injury. Forearm Above photos courtesy of Vern Jakubowski The below rifle is a caliber 12,7x44R 1867 Swedish military rifle built by Husqvarna that was crudely sporterized. It was in poor condition to begin with. The photos are courtesy of the Swedish state criminal forensic laboratory. The shooter was killed when the breechblock split in two and half lodged in his skull behind his right eye. The breechblock was split in two through the pivot pin hole. This collection of ammunition was found at the scene. At this time its not known exactly what caused the rifle to come apart but the preliminary examination suggested that the shooter introduced a .500 Express cartridge into the chamber. This isn't known for sure yet. Return to index © 2007 D.L.van den Brink ~Dutchman~ No photos or text may be copied or used without written permission |
How would you like it if I told you there was a way to eat pretty much anything and everything you wanted to eat and still maintain your health? Or better yet, what if I told you that you could eat pretty much anything and everything you wanted and even improve your health? Would you be interested? I figured as much. There is a way to reduce blood sugar, improve insulin sensitivity, reduce blood pressure, increase HDL levels, get rid of diabetes, live a lot longer, and still be able to lose a little weight. All without giving up the foods you love. And without having to eat those foods in tiny amounts. Sounds like a late-night infomercial gimmick, but it isn’t. Before I get to the real nitty gritty of how such a thing can be done, let’s look at a method that has been proven in countless research institutions to bring about all the above-mentioned good things. It’s called caloric restriction. When researchers restrict the caloric intake of a group of lab animals to about 30 to 40 percent of that of their ad libitum (all they want to eat) fed counterparts, they find that the calorically restricted animals live 30 percent or so longer, don’t develop cancers, diabetes, heart disease, or obesity. These calorically restricted (CR) animals have low blood sugar levels, low insulin levels, good insulin sensitivity, low blood pressure and are, in general, much healthier than the ad lib fed animals. Most of the work in caloric restriction has been done on rodents, but there is a long term study on Rhesus monkeys (17 years at this point) that appears to confirm the rodent data on longevity and health with CR in primates. There are no human longevity studies, but there are a number of human studies on CR and health that show that human subjects under CR conditions reduce blood sugar, improve insulin sensitivity, reduce blood pressure, etc., so it stands to reason that if humans reduced their caloric intake by 30-40 percent for their entire lives, they would also live longer. Caloric restriction is a terrific way to lose weight and get healthy; problem is, it’s not much fun. When rats live out their little ratty lives calorically restricted in their cages they seem to show signs of depression and irritability. Primates do for sure. If primates don’t get enough cholesterol, they can actually become violent. But, if you’re willing to put up with a little irritability, hostility and depression, it might be worth cutting your calories by 30 percent for the rest of your long, healthy miserable life. Doesn’t sound so cheery? You’re not ready to sign up yet? Well, there is a better way. A number of different research teams have studied a method by which rodents can get all the health and longevity benefits of caloric restriction without calorically restricting. And the method has been studied in humans and seems to achieve the same health benefits and, if an old Spanish study can be believed, maybe even an increase in lifespan. What is this magic method? Intermittent fasting. In regular fasting one goes entirely without food, which is caloric restriction carried to the extreme. Going entirely without food in the short term leads to improvement in health, but also leads to an extremely short life unless the fast is aborted. Intermittent fasting (IF) is just as its name implies: a period of fasting alternated with a period of eating. But isn’t that what we do anyway? We eat breakfast, then fast until lunch. Then, after lunch, we fast until supper. Then we fast all night. Uh, not exactly. In research settings animals that are intermittently fasted are fed every other day, so they eat whatever they want for a day, then they are denied food for a day. Interestingly, on feeding days most of the animals eat a almost double the amount that their ad lib fed mates do. Thus the IF animals eat about the same number of calories overall that the ad lib fed animals eat, but, and this is a huge ‘but,’ the IF animals enjoy all the health advantages that the CR animals do, and, in fact, are even healthier than the CR animals. Like caloric restriction, intermittent fasting reduces oxidative stress, makes the animals more resistant to acute stress in general, reduces blood pressure, reduces blood sugar, improves insulin sensitivity, reduces the incidence of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, and improves cognitive ability. But IF does even more. Animals that are intermittently fasted greatly increase the amount of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) relative to CR animals. CR animals don’t produce much more BDNF than do ad libitum fed animals. What’s BDNF? (The Wikipedia definition is actually pretty good) BDNF, as its name implies, is a substance that increases the growth of new nerve cells in the brain, but it does much more than that. BDNF is neuroprotective against stress and toxic insults to the brain and is somehow–no one yet knows how, exactly–involved in the insulin sensitivity/glucose regulating mechanism. Infusing BDNF into animals increases their insulin sensitivity and makes them lose weight. Humans with greater levels of BDNF have lower levels of depression. BDNF given to depressed humans reduces their depression. And Increased levels of BDNF improves cognitive ability. In short, you want as much BDNF as you can get., and with IF you can get a lot. But, who wants to go all day every other day without food? Well, you don’t have to. MD and I, using ourselves (selflessly, I might add) as subjects have worked it out. Most rodents feed throughout the day and night, so restricting them for 24 hours does just that: it restricts them for 24 hours. In humans, however, the situation is different. We humans, for the most part, eat only during our waking hours. So if we fast for a day, we end up fasting for about 34 hours and eating for 14, which isn’t the same as 24 on, 24 off. Let me show you what I mean. Let’s say you pick a day to start. You eat all day, then go to bed, wake up in the morning and fast all day, then go to bed. You wake up the next morning and eat all day, then go to bed and start again. So, assuming you eat until 10 PM on your eat day, once you quit eating you don’t eat again until 8 AM 34 hours later. If you eat from 8 AM that day until 10 PM, you’ve eaten for 14 hours. so, you’re on (eating) for 14 hours and off (fasting) for 34. MD and I spent a couple of weeks doing it that way, and I’m here to tell you, it’s no fun. At least not on the fast days. The eating days were a different story; they were great, but we would spend the entire day dreading the fast day coming up. We fooled around with a number of different eat-fast-eat regimens and came up with something that works pretty well. We set up our cutoff time as 6 PM. On the day we started, we ate until 6 PM, then fasted until 6 PM the next day. On the next day we ate supper right after 6 PM and ate breakfast and lunch (and a few snacks) the next day until 6 PM when we started fasting again. The advantage of this regimen is that we were able to eat every day. One day we would get supper–the next day we would get breakfast and lunch. On no days would we go entirely without food. This schedule worked the best for us. On the times during the day that we ate, we didn’t stick with our normal low-carb fare; we ate pretty much whatever we wanted, including a fare amount of higher carb stuff. We stuck with the regimen for a few weeks just to see if we could tolerated it, which we did just fine. We ultimately drifted back to our normal low-carb diet, however, just because it seemed to work better with our schedules. We could have been happy on the intermittent fasting regimen for the long term. I would think that the optimal way to go would be to follow an intermittent fast using low-carb foods during the eating periods. One would get the best of all worlds healthwise this way. Over the period that we followed the various IF regimens we lost a little weight because, unlike the rodents, we couldn’t eat twice as much during the eating days as we would have eaten were we not fasting. We didn’t check any lab work to see if any values had changed. We weren’t doing a hard core study; we were simply evaluating IF as a practical means for humans to use to improve their health. In thinking about the process I came to the conclusion that IF was probably the way Paleolithic man ate. We modern humans have become acculturated to the three square meals per day regimen. Animals in the wild, particularly carnivorous animals, don’t eat thrice per day; they eat when they make a kill. I would imagine that Paleolithic man did the same. If I had to make an intelligent guess, I would say that Paleolithic man probably ate once per day or maybe even twice every three days. In data gathered from humans still living in non-Westernized cultures in the last century, it appears that they would gorge after a kill and sleep and lay around doing not much of anything for the next day or so. When these folks got hungry, they went out and hunted and started the cycle again. If you buy into the idea that the Paleolithic diet is the optimal diet for us today because it is the diet we were molded by the forces of natural selection to perform best on, then you should probably also buy into the idea that a meal timing schedule more like that of Paleolithic mean would provide benefit as well. One of the things MD and I took away from our IF experience is the idea that we don’t have to eat three meals per day. We now often skip lunch and don’t seem any the worse for it. Sometimes we get up and get going with all our projects and don’t eat breakfast. We try to skip a meal here and there because figure it’s probably good for us. When you get used to it, you don’t really even think about it. And it’s good for you. Don’t take my word for it–look at the medical literature. There have been a few human studies on IF, and all have shown a marked improvement in virtually every parameter tested. None of the subjects in any of these studies has done the full 24 on-24 off that MD and I did. Most fasted until 5 or 6 PM on the fast days, then ate, then ate regularly on the eat days. Even with this wimpy IF schedule the subjects did better. One of the recent papers published on the less rigid IF schedules caught my eye because one of the authors was Don Laub, who used to be the chairman of the plastic surgery department at Stanford. When I was in medical school I thought I wanted to be a plastic surgeon so I went to Stanford during a part of my senior year and worked with Dr. Laub as my mentor. In this study, published in the journal Medical Hypothesis in March of this year, Dr. Laub along with two other physicians (neither of whom I know) underwent their version of and intermittent fast. The three of them have since May 2003 been on a version of the IF in which they consume about 20-50 percent of their estimated daily energy requirements on the fast day and eat whatever they want on the non-fast days. Since starting their regimen they have observed health benefits starting in as little as two weeks, in insulin resistance, asthma, seasonal allergies, infectious diseases of viral, bacterial and fungal origin (viral URI, recurrent bacterial tonsillitis, chronic sinusitis, periodontal disease), autoimmune disorder (rheumatoid arthritis), osteoarthritis, symptoms due to CNS inflammatory lesions (Tourette’s, Meniere’s) cardiac arrhythmias (PVCs, atrial fibrillation), menopause related hot flashes. In their paper these researchers discuss a 1957 paper from the Spanish medical literature. …the subjects were eating, on alternate days, either 900 calories or 2300 calories, averaging 1600, and that body weight was maintained. Thus they consumed either 56% or 144% of daily caloric requirement. The subjects were in a residence for old people, and all were in perfect health and over 65. Over three years, there were 6 deaths among 60 study subjects and 13 deaths among 60 ad lib-fed controls, non-significant difference. Study subjects were in hospital 123 days, controls 219, highly significant difference. We believe widespread use of this pattern of eating could impact influenza epidemics and other communicable diseases by improving resistance to infection. In addition to the health effects, this pattern of eating has proven to be a good method of weight control, and we are continuing to study the process in conjunction with the NIH. There is much more to the IF story that I will continue in another post. I would do it in this one, but I (actually my web guy) upgraded my blogging software and somehow the little buttons that let me link to other sites are AWOL. I can’t italicize or set off quotes or do any of the things I normally do in the course of posting. I’m hoping that I will get this straightened out soon. When I do, I’ll go into the subject in a little more detail and show a chart that demonstrates the difference between CR and IF. (Note: the problem is solved; all links are working.) In the meantime, if any of the readers of this blog would like to undertake an intermittent fast, I would love to hear the results of the experience. Please send a comment. |
SAN DIEGO -- San Diego police are seeking three vehicles involved in a hit-and-run crash that left a 48-year-old pedestrian dead in Linda Vista Sunday night. The victim was attempting to dash across Linda Vista Road near Mesa College Drive outside a crosswalk when she was struck in the southbound lanes by a dark sedan around 10:30 p.m. Sunday, San Diego police Officer Dino Delimitros said. The driver did not stop and continued south. Moments later, the woman was run over by a full-sized pickup truck with a camper shell, then by a red sedan. Delimitros said neither or those vehicle's drivers stopped either. The victim died at the scene, according to the officer. Her name was not immediately released. Police said the suspect drivers could face potential manslaughter and hit-and-run charges. |
“He certainly doesn’t want to lay out his game plan for our enemies,” Ms. Sanders declared. Sometimes, though, Mr. Trump’s statements leave his own staff in the dark, forcing them to impute a meaning to his words that might not actually exist. Privately, a few aides said they did not believe the president was preparing the country for war with either North Korea or Iran. But they also noted Ms. Sanders has had a more successful debut as press secretary than her predecessor, Sean Spicer, in part because she has not attempted to clean up Mr. Trump’s statements – something that would rankle the president. The president’s penchant for provocative statements is well established. In March, Mr. Trump tweeted, “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” The Justice Department later said there was no evidence that Mr. Obama tapped his apartment during the 2016 campaign. Pressed by reporters at the time, Mr. Spicer tried to walk back the claim, saying “the president used the word wiretaps in quotes to mean, broadly, surveillance and other activities.” Mr. Trump also shows an obvious delight in keeping people guessing. At the United Nations last month, he announced he had made up his mind about how to handle the Iran nuclear deal, but was not going to tell the public. When he met Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, perhaps America’s closest ally, she asked him what he had decided. He refused to tell her, either. “I didn’t know he was going to say today he’s made a decision,” a bemused Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said at the time. “I knew he had, but I didn’t know he was going to say he had.” Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state, is credited with coining the principle of constructive ambiguity in diplomacy: the use of deliberately fuzzy language to overcome sensitive issues in negotiations between countries. Mr. Trump may have tried a variation of that on Thursday evening, except that he was applying it to military deterrence. |
Chivas is now officially out of the playoff hunt after a 2-1 loss to Morelia. Five storylines from round 13 of matches in the 2017 Apertura: 1. Champion Chivas out of playoff race Chivas coach Matias Almeyda threw in the towel on making the playoffs following his team's 2-1 loss to Morelia on Saturday in Estadio Chivas. As championship defenses go, Chivas' this season has been especially poor. The club is down in 16th position with just one victory from 12 Liga MX matches in the Apertura. It wasn't Saturday's game that condemned Chivas, however. The absentees for preseason, injuries to Alan Pulido and Jair Pereira, drop in form of key players -- Orbelin Pineda, Edwin Hernandez, Jesus "Chapo" Sanchez -- and lack of new signings have all hampered the team. On Saturday, the issue was lack of precision in front of goal. Almeyda's side had multiple chances to win the match. In total, Chivas had 57 percent possessions and 24 shots (nine on goal) over the 90 minutes. The intensity returned to Chivas' play, but defensive lapses remained and while Morelia was second best, the team from Michoacan was consistently able to open up Chivas. Rodolfo Pizarro's petulant swipe at Diego Valdes in the 81st minute, for which he was sent off, didn't help Chivas and won't aid his national team chances. Pizarro will now miss Wednesday's Clasico Nacional against America and Chivas haven't won in any of their last seven games without the 23-year-old. At the postgame news conference, six players joined Almeyda, at least showing that there is a sense of unity despite the difficult title defense. 2. Salcido the hero and then the villain for Chivas Carlos Salcido netted both the equalizing goal for Chivas and an own goal deep into injury time to condemn Guadalajara to its fifth defeat of the Apertura. It was a cruel 32-minute period for the 37-year-old. With Chivas now out of the playoff race, he'll again be considering the prospect of retirement at the end of the season. Almeyda will likely try to convince the player to stay, given his experience, influence and versatility, but Salcido was already persuaded once last summer. If Salcido does decide to retire, Almeyda's assertion last season that Salcido should have a statue built outside Estadio Chivas seems appropriate. Salcido will go down as one of Mexico's best players ever, a natural talent who rose above a poverty-stricken childhood and embarked on an amazing career. Saturday's own-goal won't alter that. 3. America prepares for Chivas clasico with victory in Clasico Joven Club America defeated Cruz Azul 3-1 on Saturday in the last Clasico Joven in Estadio Azul, which is set to be demolished at the end of the season. Miguel Herrera's team found the gaps and made easy work of Cruz Azul's defense, with Oribe Peralta, Silvio Romero and Darwin Quintero combining well. La Maquina dominated possession (66 percent), but won't win too many games against top opposition if it remains so porous at the back while spawning opportunities in the final third. Like Paco Jemez, Herrera's default setting is to attack, but the former Mexico manager has added more dimensions to his outlook in recent years. It showed on Saturday, with America happy to soak up Cruz Azul pressure while keeping its shape and remaining dangerous on the counter. Las Aguilas host faltering Chivas on Wednesday and are one of the favorites to replace them as Liga MX champion. 4. Jonathan Gonzalez a bright spot for U.S. Soccer It's not been a great week for U.S. Soccer -- if you've been hiding under a rock, the Stars & Stripes failed to make the World Cup for the first time since 1986. But U.S. fans who have followed Jonathan Gonzalez's development of will be excited about how the Monterrey central midfielder is establishing himself in Liga MX. Saturday's match -- in which Monterrey overcame Pachuca 2-0 -- was a particular highlight. Only 18-years old, Gonzalez was named man-of-the-match. His intense harrying and tackling in front of the defense meshed with simple, intelligent passes to start Monterrey's attacks. Gonzalez is the type of player you don't usually notice, but while Monterrey's front four of Rogelio Funes Mori, Aviles Hurtado, Dorlan Pabon and Carlos Sanchez are stealing the headlines, it is perhaps the young Californian who is the story of the campaign. Gonzalez is starting and making an impact in Mexico's best team. Even with all that is going on north of the border with the coaching situation after Bruce Arenas' exit, somebody should be taking note of the dual national's progress and perhaps considering a call for the November friendly or friendlies. Let's not forget U.S. youth international Gonzalez is still be eligible for Mexico, who would surely be keen on having him. For Pachuca, it was a case of being second best. Diego Alonso fielding Keisuke Honda up front didn't work and a playoff spot is looking like an increasingly distant prospect. 5. Leon continues rise It's five wins from five games now for Leon since Gustavo Diaz took over as head coach, with Saturday's 1-0 victory over Tigres another impressive performance. Mexican winger Elias Hernandez scored the winner in the 83rd minute, but Leon's defensive displays also appear to be improving, with Tigres having only one shot on target over the 90 minutes. The club from the state of Guanajuanto is now up to third in the Liga MX table and is an example of how changing a manager midway through the season after a poor start can work under certain circumstances. Tom Marshall covers Liga MX and the Mexican national team for ESPN FC. Twitter: @MexicoWorldCup. |
The identity of a suspect who killed six people in Kalamazoo on Saturday night is reportedly a 45-year-old Uber driver named Jason Dalton. According to local WDIV News, Dalton was taking Uber fares in between opening fire on bystanders at a car dealership, a Cracker Barrel, and other locations. The shootings happened over five hours in western Michigan, from approximately 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. The gunman shot randomly at people, many of them in parking lots. “We have multiple people dead,” Undersheriff Paul Matyas of Kalamazoo County said, according to The New York Times. “In summary, what it looks like is we have somebody just driving around, finding people and shooting them dead in their tracks.” An eerie Facebook post about Dalton was reportedly posted by a woman who claims that Dalton was “driving VERY erratically” and that her fiancee wasn’t able to leave his car while taking the Uber. BREAKING: We've talked to woman who posted about bad Uber driver before shooting. Doesn't want to comment right now. pic.twitter.com/XLyF9cPCrW — Luke Stier (@LukeStier) February 21, 2016 The death count was updated on Sunday, after authorities reportedly counted one teenage girl among the dead, before realizing she was still alive but seriously wounded. Officials have not yet identified a motive for the shootings, and Dalton remains in police custody. Correction: A previous version of this post included reports stating that an 8-year-old child was among the victims. Officers now say that early reports were mistaken. This post has been updated to reflect that. [Image via Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Office] |
– Mahatma Gandhi Judged from a planetary or Kyoto perspective, or from an individual or public health perspective, or an economic perspective, or … or … our present arrangements for transport in cities are seriously damaged. They are the product of another age, another system of city, another way of organizing daily life. As things stand today in city after city around the world, they threaten health in the city and on the planet. They are dangerous. They are costly. They are disruptive. They are thoroughly dysfunctional. And they are howlingly unfair. All this is a huge problem of — but we prefer to think of it instead as “problematique,” a word we see more often in French and which is used to describe the broader context or fabric of the problem. Or in this case the interlinked nexus of problems, shortcomings and inefficiencies that together constitute our patently unsustainable transportation arrangements in cities in general, and in your city in particular. Let’s have a look at this in steps: 1. Simple really. The system’s broke “Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effects of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building. The simple needs of automobiles are more easily understood and satisfied than the complex needs of cities, and a growing number of planners and designers have come to believe that if they can only solve the problems of traffic, they will thereby have solved the major problems of cities. Cities have much more intricate economic and social concerns than automobile traffic. How can you know what to try with traffic until you know how the city itself works, and what else it needs to do with its streets? You can’t.” – Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities Well, when it comes to our present arrangements for transport in cities, that which we are calling the “old mobility,” the answer to this is a quite long one. Just to hit the high spots . . . The present (car-based) system is dangerous, injurious and menaces our health as one of the most debilitating public health menaces of our era. It provides poor value for money – for individual car owners as well as others. And for the taxpayer in terms of bang per public buck. It is socially unjust and discriminatory to the poor, racial minorities, women, children, the unemployed, and people with physical disadvantages. To all those who cannot or should not be driving a car (a very large number, in fact). And to those who choose not to drive a car. It consumes and wastes resources on an intolerable scale. It pollutes to the extent that it is endangering the planet’s ecosystem It puts the national economy, the international economy and your and my economy at risk by total systemic dependence on a cartel of oil suppliers. (And pours money into the coffers of non-democratic societies and cliques.) Despite the fact that it costs an arm and a leg, both toindividual citizens and tothe community as a whole, the system is steadily degrading in environmental, performance and economic terms year after year. It implicitly accepts assurances advanced by the principal industrial and energy suppliers, as well as many transportation specialists, specialist administrators, etc., that technological progress will take care of the problems in the long run. And that we not therefore need concern ourselves with the problems today. Worse yet — and this is the final nail in the coffin — there are as things stand today no grounds for hopefulness. . . unless there is a major underlying paradigm change (which is not in sight). Moreover, when we take the measures that are being discussed in most places under the cover of would-be solutions, we can see that in most all cases they are indeed either not going to offer the needed relief in the critical target period (which we define somewhat arbitrarily as the 24/36 months directly ahead) and . . . worse yet, in almost all cases are actually going to contribute to increasing the scale of the problem, in the longer run, that they are purportedly targeting (i.e., by creating more new infrastructure, bringing more vehicles on the road, etc. etc.). Furthermore, and with only few exceptions, when measured in terms of spending and measures with teeth, it all but ignores anything that might actually provide an alternative to present arrangements: whether in terms of demand management, non-motorized transport, new services and innovative private providers, and transport substitution though better planning, clustering of activities, or new technologies. Is that true for every city on the planet? Fortunately no, but it does do a pretty good job at characterizing the majority in the advanced economies and even more catastrophically in cities in the developing world. And is it true for your city? Well, we have to leave that to you to judge. So, we can see that we have a system (of sorts) and we for sure have a problem. What next? A solution? Not quite. Let’s take a look first at the nature of the problem as it stands today here in cities across the globe. Note: Just to be sure that this is more than a personal and idiosyncratic summary of problems and eventual solutions, we have placed this before several authoritative international fora of transportation and environment specialists from more than fifty countries around the world. And while there was, as you might well guess, abundant criticism and qualifications – many of which have been incorporated into this draft – the bottom line was that this analysis is generally on track. Back to top 2. Why “Dysfunctional Transportation” is a major public health threat There can be little doubt that the best way of gauging the seriousness of the mounting problems of our present dysfunctional transportation arrangements – and hence the need for fast and effective remedies and adjustments — is not so much from the usual purely transportation lens, or public works, nor even that of “environment” or land use – though all these are, of course, critical components of the challenges we need to resolve. Rather, we should above all be prepared to look at this from a public health perspective. It is only from this vantage that we can begin to appreciate the full range and degrees of severity of the problems that we are, in fact, resolutely refusing to face. And it helps us to remember that what all this is in the final analysis about people – and not about vehicles, or roads. or throughput, or, or. . . It’s about people and quality of life. ANd of course heatlh. Public health Impacts: Public health broadly defined – as it must be – is heavily impacted by the dysfunctional parts of our transportation arrangements in every city in the world. Here are a rough dozen broad areas in which these impacts are being felt, and which therefore should make it clear why this is a challenge that needs to be addressed immediately as a very high priority for the city and its region. Let us start here with those that are most commonly associated with the ‘public health’ rubric, and then go on to list briefly yet others which in fact belong here as well. Traffic Deaths and Injuries: We need to achieve major reductions in traffic deaths and injuries, most of which occur in or because of cars. We can do this if we chose to (and if you need a real world example check out the results of the French example of the past two years which have been sensational and entirely a function of political will and commitment from many levels of society). Air pollution: Clean air must be a priority for the health of our citizens and their children – more than 50% of air pollution comes directly from cars. (Let’s cite the example of what is normally mentioned as a “good example,” Toronto. Closer to 75% of air pollution there comes from traffic, and where at present the number of respiratory deaths due to road air pollution has been charted at 1800 for 2003 alone. Look at the stats for your city. They have to be comparable if not worse.) Other forms of toxicity and pollution Pollution from the transport sector takes other forms as well which also threaten public health significantly. Among them leakage of fuels and oils in normal operations or road traffic accidents, threats to underground water quality, various residues from vehicles, and others. Traffic noise is a significant and increasingly targeted public health problem too. And while we are at it, there are also such intrusions as odors and light pollution, each of which eat away at the health of those who are directly affected. Destruction of urban form and quality of life: Roads and traffic are the lifeblood of a city — but too much of both threatens the city’s livability in many ways. Life Styles: We increasingly need to promote healthier, more active life styles. And in the process cut back on obesity for children and adults Time Pollution: This is the first thing we all see and feel. As a result of our dysfunctional transportation arrangements, we are all spending far too much time stuck in traffic. This is taking away from the time we should be spending with our families, with our own personal development, on our neighbors, doing important work. The stress that is related to this significant timedeprivation does little to improve our health or that of our families. Personal economics: We are spending significantly more on our transportation habit as individuals than we need to. All of us, car owners and others, can get around better, faster and more safely — and for less money than most of us currently are putting out. And this too is a public health problem. Total system costs, including subsidies, hidden and visible: Indeed, if we add up the annual cost to society of these — let us call them “transport dysfunctonalities” — we have a very, very large number indeed in most of our cities, which at the very least should get our fullest attention. Overall, we need to find ways to get more bang per buck for the huge amount of money we spend on transport (so that we can free it for more important uses such as education, health, culture and more). Medical resources: Our dysfunctional transport arrangements are putting unnecessary pressure on our hospitals and public health programs — crowding them with patients and problems who really should not be there, and taking scarce resources that are much needed for other uses). Passive citizenry: The present transportation paradigm defines the citizens of a city as passive agents, whose choices are largely made by “experts” and others who shape the system. But 21st century democracy requires an active civil society. For this to happen in the realm of mobility, a new paradigm of governance and action is required. Climate modification. .. and finally back to Kyoto: Everybody needs to do their bit to cut back on global warming. Rather than decreasing emissions by grams each year to get us back to 1990 levels — itself a proposal so timid as to warrant deep soul searching — our cities, all of them, are steadily doing worse every year when you look at the bottom line (e.g., CO2 emissions resulting from increased traffic volumes). Moreover, there is no end in sight. If we cannot somehow come up with something that is consequential and that will get these basic trends back in line, it will just continue to get worse year after year and the planet, your city and your country and more will all passively go to hell in a handbasket. Does this bring us to the end of this list? Far from it, but working with this as a opening step –which you will be able to take it much further for your own purposes Back to top 3. What do you do when everyone else is sitting on their hands? To figure out where we have to go, let’s first make a quick detour to list some of the things that are being consistently touted here and there as solution elements, but which are not… at least if you consider, as we think you must, that these are very high priority problems that quite simply cannot wait. You don’t start to plan and build another yet another highway You don’t even give priority to a new metro. Never mind anything like PRT, monorails or other such wondrous solutions to someone else’s problems (maybe). You let someone else devote time and money to building long-term scenarios (remembering what Lord Keynes said about the long term). You don’t wait for fuel cells or new automotive technologies to dig you out of these pits in the decade or more ahead. Nor do you wait for all those industrial groups that are making rather good money out of present arrangements to step forward with anything that is going to change the basic transportation problematique (which is after all their problematique, thank you very much!). You might pray for World Government to solve your problems (but don’t hold your breath). What this means is truly simple: and that is if you want the problem to be solved, you the concerned citizen have to roll up your sleeves, get together with your neighbors, have a close look at what is really going on unencumbered by all you are being told you cannot do to solve the problem, open up the debate, get public attention, mobilize real on-street expertise, and go to work yourself. Remember this. No one else is going to do it for you. |
The method, use and direction characteristic of Anglican divinity first came into clear light in the writings of Hooker. His theology claimed to do both far less and far more than the theologies of Calvin, of Luther and of Trent. It did less in that it eschewed any attempt to offer a complete scheme of Biblical doctrine, or an experiential assurance of justification or an infallibilist system of dogma. It did more in that it appealed to a larger field of authority and dealt with the whole man rather than with certain parts of him. For it appealed to Scripture, tradition and reason: "the Spirit everywhere in the scripture...laboureth to confirm The discussion in Theology upon the nature of Anglican theology is timely. For there is such a thing as Anglican theology and it is sorely needed at the present day. But because it is neither a system nor a confession (the idea of an Anglican "confessionalism" suggests something that never has been and never can be) but a method, a use and a direction, it cannot be defined or even perceived as a "thing in 'itself," and it may elude the eyes of those who ask "What is it?" and "Where is it?" It has been proved, and will be proved again, by its fruits and its works. |
Dear George Clooney, I recently read about the letter PETA Founder and President Ingrid Newkirk sent you asking for permission to use the perspiration from your gym towel to flavor a line of tofu she planned to dub “CloFu.” You know the one. In her letter, Ms. Newkirk explained to you the science behind unique odor profiles and the gas chromatography used to confirm the stability of a stimulant matrix (your sweat, Mr. Clooney). She basically wanted to use your sweat to attract tofu virgins and, hopefully, convince them to make bean curd part of their diets. This scent science isn’t new, but, as far as I know, using it to flavor food is. Please do not take offense, Mr. Clooney, but I would probably vomit if I got a whiff of CloFu. I’m sure you smell delightful (though, after a trip to the gym…maybe not so much), but the idea of smelling sweat-scented food is revolting. The idea of eating it? Even more so. So, thank you – thank you – Mr. Clooney, for denying PETA the rights to market your bodily fluids and odors and use them to attract people to eat a certain kind of food. I just hope Newkirk doesn’t get mad at you, diagnosis you with a mental illness, and try to get Alan Rosenberg to kick you out of the Screen Actors Guild. |
Hello and welcome to the 200th instalment of the SWD . Military events/news are listed below by the governorates: Raqqa: The SDF and ISIS clashed early on the morning as the terrorist organisation forces launched a counter-attack towards the SDF forces stationed in Al-Moroor neighbourhood. The counterattack was successfully repelled by SDF. Islamic State sources claimed 18 SDF soldiers were killed in Al-Haramiyyah neighbourhood, and another 10 YPG soldiers were killed in the neighbourhood of Al Moroor. The French Republic conducted 11 airstrikes in Syria, most of them targeted ISIS forces in Raqqa city. Aleppo: Several Syrian Arab Army soldiers allegedly defected to FSA Euphrates Shield forces, according to pro-opposition sources. Although, no visual proves were uploaded. On the ES forces side, 20 of its soldiers surrendered to SDF in Shahba region today. Government forces shelled the area of Al-Zahraa neighbourhood, and Lirmon and Kafr Hamra area located to the northwestern side of Aleppo city. SAA forces targeted the towns of Tal Bajir and Kafr Karif in south Aleppo, too. Russian troops movement has been detected today around the Mare area in north Aleppo governorate. Hama: The Islamic State launched a night counter-attack on SAA positions inside Uqayribat city in central Syria. The night attack included the use of women and children for suicide bomb attacks against the SAA “ISIS Hunters” unit. Apparently, the counter attack managed to capture some points previously captured by government forces. Later on today, ISIS has used one or two SVBIEDS on the outskirts of Uqayribat which targeted a convoy. The attack claimed more than 10 SAA soldiers, several tanks and armoured vehicles destroyed, according to ISIS sources.On the one hand, the Islamic State claims to have killed 7 Russian soldiers in Uqayribat frontline and to have recaptured the city. On the other hand, pro-government sources claim that the Russian Ministry of Defence confirms Uqayribat is still under SAA control and that SAA forces are clearing the last pockets of ISIS resistance. Earlier this morning, SAA targeted Soha, Hamada Amar, Abu Hanaya, Abu Hubaylat and Umm Mil in Salamiyah countryside. Later on today, ISIS has used one or two SVBIEDS on the outskirts of Uqayribat which targeted a convoy. The attack claimed more than 10 SAA soldiers, several tanks and armoured vehicles destroyed, according to ISIS sources. The situation in Uqayribat area and surrounding areas is unknown as both pro-government and pro-ISIS sources are reporting contradictory reports and information. On the one hand, the Islamic State claims to have killed 7 Russian soldiers in Uqayribat frontline and to have recaptured the city. On the other hand, pro-government sources claim that the Russian Ministry of Defence confirms Uqayribat is still under SAA control and that SAA forces are clearing the last pockets of ISIS resistance. As there are no clear reports on whom is controlling Uqayribat, the information should be considered highly inaccurate. Damascus: Government forces shelled with artillery the areas of Zemlka, Jobar and Ayn Tarma. Nine were injured in Zemlka, while a ground assault took place in Jobar and Ayn Tarma after shelling stopped. The results of the offensive are unknown, most likely failed or repelled. Government forces and allies recaptured the border posts 169 and 170 on the Jordanian border after clashing with opposition forces. The situation there remains unclear, too. Deir ez-Zor: The Tiger Forces, an SAA elite unit, continued its advance towards the city of Deir ez-Zor, which is 26,6km away from the current front lines. SAA forces are close enough to the city so government artillery can be heard from Deir ez-Zor city. Less than 30 km (some reports reduce the distance to 25km, although these are not confirmed) separate the four-year long besieged city and government forces on the ground. The Syrian Arab Army took control of the strategic mountain of Al-Bahri and some of the points located east of the mountain. Government forces also captured Rujm al-Hajjanah village and Jabal Safiya, west Deir ez-Zor governorate. SAA forces are advancing on two different fronts, the Tiger Forces are advancing towards Shilah from its positions in Jabal Bishri, while the regular SAA forces advance towards Kabbajb. Some Russian Special Operations Forces have been spotted participating in different battles on the Homs-Deir ez-Zor governorate border. The Islamic State militants have two options if the Syrian Arab Army reaches Deir ez-Zor city before taking the area west of the Euphrates river. The first option, to keep their positions and end up encircled between the river and SAA in a new pocket between Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor governorates; Secondly, to retreat south of Deir ez-Zor and by doing so, give the area to SAA forces. The second option would be the best outcome for both sides as it would avoid battle. Although, it would be very risky for ISIS as the area east of Bishri mountain is a plain desert. Thus, a convoy retreating in that area is the perfect target for Russian and Coalition air forces. With regards to the evacuated ISIS militants from west Qalamun, at least 100 militants have reached Deir ez-Zor, while another considerable part of the convoy, apparently 200 people, has been stuck in the SAA-ISIS front lines close to Deir ez-Zor. According to pro-Hezbollah media, US jets stopped the convoy by threatening to destroy it. Although, a last-minute US-led coalition communication said the coalition will not target the convoy carrying ISIS family members as it contains unarmed civilians. Some sources reported that unknown persons tore down a recruitment poster and burned down an ISIS media office inside ISIS-held Deir ez-Zor city. CJTF-OIR : On the 1st of September 2017, CJTF-OIR has conducted 22 strikes in Syria. CJTF-OIR ‘s main focus in Syria is Raqqa region where they did 17 strikes supporting SDF‘s operations against IS destroying 16 fighting positions, three logistics nodes, two command and control nodes, and a VBIED. Another area where five strikes occurred is Deir ez-Zor destroying 11 oil stills, four vehicles, an ISIS-held building, a bulldozer, a fuel tank, and an artillery system. The full report on CJTF-OIR strikes conducted in both Syria & Iraq can be found here. Other: Intellectual credited properly used may vary from an edition to edition. Feel free to voice your opinion in the comments section below, constructive criticism is welcomed. For those of you interested, you can follow me on my personal, controversial twitter @alextorrell where I constantly tweet about different issues and conflicts Advertisements |
The Beatles played their last stadium gig in August, 1966 at Candlestick Park, then stopped touring altogether. At least publicly, they claimed that their new songs, coming off of intricately-produced albums like Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, were just too hard to perform live. Enter The Fab Faux, the greatest of all Beatles cover bands. Featuring Will Lee (bassist for the Late Show with David Letterman), Jimmy Vivino (bandleader for Conan), Rich Pagano, Frank Agnello, and Jack Petruzzelli, The Fab Faux is all about one thing-- performing live the most accurate reproduction of The Beatles' repertoire. That includes songs that The Beatles never played live, and particularly songs off of the intricate later albums. Above, you can watch them in action, playing the extended medley (16 minutes) that graces the second side of Abbey Road. Before you watch it, here are a couple things you need to know: This Fab Faux recording of most of side two of 'Abbey Road' is a live, in-the-studio performance for a two-camera video shoot.... In the end, there were only three minor guitar fixes and each section was recorded in no more than three takes (most were two). There are NO added overdubs within this performance. The audio is pure - and mixed by Joe Chinnici. The video was originally recorded for The Howard Stern Show. If you want to get a feel for how well The Fab Faux nailed it, watch their version played alongside the original below: Related Content Audio: The Beatles Play Their Final Concert at Candlestick Park, 1966 Take a Virtual Tour of Abbey Road Studios, Courtesy of the New Google Site “Inside Abbey Road” A Short Film on the Famous Crosswalk From the Beatles’ Abbey Road Album Cover Hear the Isolated Vocal Tracks for The Beatles’ Climactic 16-Minute Medley on Abbey Road |
Federal prosecutors moved forward with a terrorism case against a purported Klansman who had been soliciting money from Jewish businessmen to build a bizarre — but technologically feasible — X-ray cannon intended to secretly kill Muslims. Eric J. Feight, 55 pleaded guilty Wednesday to domestic terrorism-related charges in a federal courtroom in Albany, N.Y., and faces up to 15 years in prison. His alleged co-conspirator, Glendon Scott Crawford, 49, pleaded not guilty to the charges Wednesday after being indicted on three federal felony counts. The indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Albany, New York last week charged Crawford with attempting to produce and use a radiological dispersal device, conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, and distributing information relating to weapons of mass destruction, The Times-Union of Albany reported that Feight and his lawyers may seek a plea agreement in exchange for testimony against Crawford. Investigators began looking at Crawford in April 2012, after the self-described Klansman approached a Schenectady synagogue, looking for financial support to build the radiation device. “Crawford planned to create a mobile, remotely operated, radiation-emitting device capable of killing people silently from a distance with lethal doses of ionizing radiation,” according to the indictment. “Crawford’s intended targets were Muslims, Muslim-related organizations and persons Crawford believed were contributing to the demise of the United States.” Crawford struck out in New York, then went to North Carolina looking for backing. The FBI had been tracking him at this point, notes the Southern Poverty Law Center. Crawford “described to the [undercover FBI agents] his radiation emitting device, his remote initiation device, mobilizing the radiation device and discussed operation security concerns,” a criminal complaint filed last June said. “Crawford again solicited money to finance his scheme (primarily to fund the purchase or acquisition of an industrial strength x-ray system).” |
Call it The Great Unbundling. Cord cutters are busy getting rid of—or never even signing up for—expensive cable bundles, in favor of cheaper or more appealing alternatives like Netflix. This in turn has forced broadcasters and cable companies to rethink what a bundle means, and many are trying to find smaller, more targeted ways of getting viewers to watch and also pay. A new subscription service called Seeso from NBCUniversal is an attempt to do just that. The channel, which costs $3.99 per month, has been tested in a limited number of markets since last month, but officially premiered on Thursday. But will it work? The new service is aimed at comedy fans of all ages, and carries a mix of archived shows such as Kids In The Hall and Monty Python, along with original content. The originals range from a musical series about a man who lives with a puppet to a show co-hosted by founders of the Upright Citizens Brigade, including SNL star Amy Poehler. A New York Times review found the mix somewhat underwhelming. For example, it found a show that makes fun of people who get drunk and try to explain complicated concepts derivative, since there are already multiple programs that do something similar. “The service has lots of goodies but only a limited amount of original content to start with, and from the samples available during beta, none of that is exactly mandatory viewing.” The artistic merits of the service aside, there’s a very serious method behind NBCUniversal’s madness. Namely, an attempt to find smaller micro-markets within the broad TV-watching universe who might be willing to pay smaller amounts for customized content. Sort of like a miniature version of Netflix (NFLX), but more focused, and 100% controlled by the Comcast-owned network. In fact, NBCUniversal is apparently planning to launch as many as nine more micro-targeted services similar to Seeso, according to Evan Shapiro, the executive VP of digital services for the network. See how Amazon is getting into movies Although Shapiro won’t say what these other services will be focused on, it seems likely that they will take a similar approach to different markets—sports being the most obvious one. In effect, the network is trying to carve up its broadcasting universe into a number of smaller narrow-casted services, each with its own paying audience. As the NBCUniversal executive put it in an interview with Decider: “We feel like we’re providing the curated, niche experience that cable provided in the 1980s with the huge advantage of having watched the last 30 years take place.” There are a number of obvious problems with this strategy, of course. One is that every new offering like Seeso has to compete for attention in an increasingly fragmented and chaotic environment for television and video content. The new service and its seven siblings, assuming they are ever launched, don’t just have to compete with Netflix—which plans to spend more than $5 billion this year alone on introducing new comedy and other TV shows. They have to compete with Hulu and HBO and Amazon Prime Video and YouTube Red (GOOG), and new streaming offerings coming from other cable co’s and broadcasters, such as CBS All Access. Subscribe to Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter. Is anyone going to subscribe to all of these channels? Of course not. Are enough of them going to subscribe to Seeso or any of NBCUniversal’s nine other offerings to make the costs worthwhile? That’s the multibillion-dollar question. At least NBCUniversal is owned by Comcast, which can make up for some of the shortfall in broadcasting revenue with higher cable fees for the broadband that everyone is using to watch Netflix and HBO and YouTube. As Tim Goodman of The Hollywood Reporter pointed out in a recent column about the Television Critics Association conference, there is an ocean of television out there that may not be so lucky. “As the first day of TCA starts — with four days of cable — it’s hard not to look at channels like UP, Ovation and the Outdoor Channel, which kicked things off Tuesday, and think: ‘How are you still in business?'” So maybe The Great Unbundling isn’t the best term for what’s happening to traditional cable television. Maybe The Great Winnowing would be better, or even The Game of Thrones. All we know is that there’s more disruption coming, and quickly. |
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