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0.048051 | <urn:uuid:c01eeffa-7a0a-4457-8801-e8b5608d0d68> | en | 0.867902 | Cheat Codes Club
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0.029483 | <urn:uuid:51042011-9af8-4472-9e2e-7936c1405b05> | en | 0.962089 | LOS ANGELES -- I've been looking around for a while for a way to wire up my home for sound, without all the wires. I hadn't been satisfied with the options, partly because of the high prices. Then I met Sonos' Play:1.
The little brother to the wireless speaker company's Play:3 and Play:5 speakers packs a big sound in a small package. And thanks to its littler price tag and a new promotion that lasts through the end of the year, you can now hook up a room in stereo sound for just under $400.
Sonos is ranked third behind Bose and Jawbone in the U.S. wireless speaker market, which represents about 8 percent of the $8.4 billion annual market for audio equipment including headphones, according to research firm NPD Group. But Sonos offers a sound system that other manufacturers such as Samsung and Bose are only starting to imitate.
Sonos streams music over the Internet, or from your computer, using your home's Wi-Fi network. After plugging in its Bridge adapter to your router, you can then plug in as many speakers as you want to power outlets throughout your home, and they are all linked wirelessly. Pairing two speakers in one room creates a stereo effect and you can listen to different things in different rooms. Each speaker is both a Wi-Fi receiver and transmitter, creating a mesh network that allows even owners of large homes to place speakers into every nook and cranny far from the central hub. All of this is controllable from an app on your mobile phone, tablet or computer.
The Play:1, which launches Monday, has heft like a big pickle jar and weighs 4.08 pounds. That's about a pound and a half lighter than the Play:3, which is more bread-loaf size; and 5 pounds lighter than the Play:5, which is about as big as a bread box. The Play:1's compact body fits snugly on top of a counter or bookshelf and gives off a very large and well-defined sound with plenty of bass and crisp-sounding high notes.
NPD analyst Ben Arnold says the price cut is smart because it brings Sonos' entry-level product closer to the price of fast-selling Bluetooth-enabled portable wireless speakers, such as No. 2 maker Jawbone's Mini Jambox, which retails for $180. Other wireless speakers that connect to mobile devices using Bluetooth like the HDMX Jam sell for as little as $32.
"The premium end of the market is still growing but people are just buying these speakers up like crazy. Why not tap into this very active part of the market and pull more people in?" he said.
I found that it was super easy to install two Play:1 devices and the Bridge. I didn't need the manual. After downloading the free app, I was walked through the process, pushing a button on each device as I was prompted, and letting the software figure it out. Each speaker has only two buttons -- one for play/pause and a volume toggle -- so it's hard to screw up.
I played music from Pandora and Rdio, both streaming music services that interact well with the Sonos app. Even at half the possible volume, I reached what I consider louder-than-party-level in a roughly 700-square-foot space.
I'd say the company resoundingly succeeded with a speaker that far outpunches its size. | http://www.contracostatimes.com/business/ci_24305446/review-sonos-play-1-packs-big-sound-small | dclm-gs1-052260001 |
0.021384 | <urn:uuid:565b75f6-4604-4435-b393-c095437165e9> | en | 0.801816 |
Other format: [Raw text]
Updated Cygwin Package: postgresql-7.4.1-2
New News:
=== ====
I have updated the version of PostgreSQL to 7.4.1-2. The tarballs should
be available on a Cygwin mirror near you shortly.
The following is the only notable change since the previous release:
Revert configure with --includedir=/usr/include/postgresql change
since its need was obviated by the following 7.4.1 change:
Install ECPG include files for Informix compatibility into
separate directory.
I guess I should read the release notes next time... :,)
If you are upgrading from 7.4, then please heed the following:
This version, as with most minor versions, does not require a
dump/reload to put into place. That said, there are some changes to
the information schema that require a DROP/reload of that *specific*
schema ... please read the HISTORY file for instruction on how to do
Old News:
=== ====
PostgreSQL is an open-source, Object-Relational DBMS. If interested,
see the PostgreSQL web site for more details:
Please read the README file:
since it covers requirements, installation, known issues, etc.
the web page. This downloads setup.exe to your
system. Then, run setup and answer all of the questions.
Note that we have recently stopped downloads from
(aka due to bandwidth limitations. This means that you will
need to find a mirror which has this update.
In the US,
is a reliable high bandwidth connection.
In Germany,
is usually pretty good.
In the UK,
is usually up-to-date within 48 hours.
If one of the above doesn't have the latest version of this package
then you can either wait for the site to be updated or find another
The setup.exe program will figure out what needs to be updated on your
system and will install newer packages automatically.
mailing list at: . I would appreciate if you would
use this mailing list rather than emailing me directly. This includes
ideas and comments about the setup utility or Cygwin in general.
is the appropriate place.
PGP/GPG Key: or key servers
Fingerprint: 7A73 1405 7F2B E669 C19D 8784 1AFD E4CC ECF4 8EF6
| http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-announce/2004-01/msg00004.html | dclm-gs1-052280001 |
0.149885 | <urn:uuid:b9d2aef9-03e3-4785-9588-07516701ce54> | en | 0.95283 | Print 101 comment(s) - last by FaceMaster.. on Feb 9 at 3:41 PM
Scientists have cloned a Pyrenean ibex, an extinct genetically distinct subspecies of the Spanish ibex, shown here. The ibex, known for its curved horns went extinct in 2000. Scientists resurrected it with a skin sample, though it was born with a lung defect and soon died. (Source: Jose Luis GOMEZ de FRANCISCO/
New cloning work could clear the way for resurrection of many recently extinct beasts
In the realm of commercial cloning, trickled-down technology from this cutting edge field of research has allowed firms to offer pet cloning services. And in the realm of research, tremendous advances continue as scientists are hatching plans to resurrect extinct beasts. Scientists have almost finished mapping the Woolly Mammoth genome, and have already injected DNA from an extinct species into a mouse.
Now arguably the greatest landmark event for the field of cloning has occurred. Scientists have for the first time cloned an extinct animal, the Pyrenean ibex, a form of wild mountain goat. The really spectacular thing about this cloning effort is that it was done using only DNA from skin samples.
Technically classed as a genetically distinct subspecies of the Spanish ibex, the Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo as it is called by the locals, used to roam the mountainous hillside of northern Spain. Known for its distinct horns, the animal was a popular target for hunters, and by the 19th century only 100 were left. The species was not declared protected until 1973, at which time there were around 30 animals. In 2000, the last known member of this critically endangered species was found dead on a hillside. Researchers at the time decided to wisely preserve skin samples in liquid nitrogen.
The well-preserved skin samples proved a fruitful source for DNA. Replicating this DNA using common genomic techniques, the researchers injected it into goat eggs, replacing the goat DNA.
While a great success, the effort also showcased the difficult road ahead for producing viable clones. While born alive, the newborn ibex kid had defects in its lungs, similar to those found in many cloned sheep, and they proved fatal. However, as some sheep clones have lived relatively normal lifespans, the success raises the hope of a more permanent resurrection.
Dr Jose Folch, from the Centre of Food Technology and Research of Aragon helped lead the research. He states, "The delivered kid was genetically identical to the bucardo. In species such as bucardo, cloning is the only possibility to avoid its complete disappearance."
Professor Robert Miller, director the Medical Research Council's Reproductive Sciences Unit at Edinburgh University who heads a northern white rhino cloning effort funded by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland cheered the news. He states, "I think this is an exciting advance as it does show the potential of being able to regenerate extinct species. Clearly there is some way to go before it can be used effectively, but the advances in this field are such that we will see more and more solutions to the problems faced."
The race is now on to make sure that critically endangered species' tissues are preserved for future cloning efforts. Britain's Zoological Society of London and America's Natural History Museum have teamed up in a project called Frozen Ark. They are in the process of storing samples from thousands of species.
While cloning a dinosaur is highly improbable due to DNA's chemical tendency to rapidly break apart to the point where it cannot be sequenced, this new breakthrough paves the way for cloning of both endangered species, and extinct species with fully sequenced genomes, such as Neanderthals or, likely soon, the Woolly Mammoth. However, this new work also highlights the extreme challenge ahead in trying to establish a sustainable population of a cloned animal, or even clones that live to reach adulthood.
Comments Threshold
By otispunkmeyer on 2/2/2009 9:49:22 AM , Rating: 4
its like environmentalists trying to save some dying out species today. theres usually a good reason its dying just wasnt meant to be. (though i do agree somewhat with those trying to stop poaching of animals)
i read an example about some australian swamp toad and animalists wanting to save it. truth is this thing was just super inane, wasnt particularly clever and seemed to have little compulsion to mate. basically, mother nature had doomed it to extinction...natural selection, survival of the fittest and all that. its natural end was to stop existing.
but in trying to save it, they spent a lot money basically working against nature. stupid. what a waste.
i swear some environmentalists take things so far that they are actually altering/damaging the thing theyre trying to save in the process.
By masher2 (blog) on 2/2/2009 10:30:19 AM , Rating: 5
Also left out is the fact that this particular creature is just a subspecies of Spanish ibex in general. In recent years, environmentalist-minded biologists have been playing the "species game" where they define trivial variations in a population as entirely separate species, so they can justify their protection under the Endangered Species Act.
There are a few hundred different breeds of dogs. All can fertilely interbreed, just as all the various Ibex species can (actually Ibex can also interbreed with goats and turs as well). Should every breed of dog be considered a separate species, entitled to legal protection?
By masher2 (blog) on 2/2/2009 1:29:50 PM , Rating: 5
a lot of dog breeds, if not most of them, are so inbred that they do not make a separate species
Why not? Genetically, a poodle varies much more from a Labrador than a Pyrenean Ibex does from a Spanish Ibex.
The old test of viability of offspring may not have been a perfect standard, but at least it was a standard. Now, we have nothing. No rules.
How much variation should be required to define a new species? Every plant and animal is genetically distinct. With these new policies taken to their logical conclusion, every time an animal dies, one can say a "species" has gone extinct.
One of the most blatant cases of species gerrymandering was the famous spotted owls debacle. In this case, even the fiction of genetic variation wasn't used. The "species" was defined by which side of a highway the owls were found on. Live on this side, and you're a California Spotted Owl, thriving and in no need of protection. Fly across the highway, and the bird instantly becomes a "Northern" Spotted Owl, in need of special protection-- protection which resulted in massive restrictions to the lumber industry.
By ayat101 on 2/2/2009 10:40:02 PM , Rating: 2
Nonsense... read up the test for new species: viability and stability, plus some breeding isolation. Inbreeding with other species is not a counterargument. That was your argument and it was wrong. Simple.
Don't know how you worked out that these two goats are less related than poodle et al... care to provide a reference?
It's a bit pointless discussing science with you, because repeatedly you make obvious mistakes (i.e. you do not know the basic accepted principles of the area you are talking about... and then when these accepted principles disagree with your OPINION you blame enviromentalists or greenpeace).
PLUS... your peanut gallery and cult of Masher on these boards downrates the posts that disagree with you. It is ridiculous that when I post the accepted scientific view I get downrated... and you get uprated for opposing science. It is downright cultist behaviour.
By masher2 (blog) on 2/2/2009 11:26:06 PM , Rating: 2
read up the test for new species: viability and stability...
This "species" was obviously neither viable nor stable. So much for that argument.
plus some breeding isolation
Any purebred breed of dog has more breeding isolation than most of the multitudinous subspecies of mountain goats.
When it takes a trained biologist and a physical exam to tell the difference between two "species", there isn't much of a difference. In fact, the only functional difference between all four of the subspecies of Capra pyrenaica is which part of the Iberian Peninsula they lived in.
It's a bit pointless discussing science with you
But you're not discussing science. You're simply tossing insults.
If you want to debate, why not try an actual fact, logical counterargument, or reasonable facsimile thereof? For starters, why not dispute my assertion that there is no reasonable criteria for differentiating between the 'Northern' Spotted Owl and the 'California' Spotted Owl? They're essentially the same bird, defined only by which side of a road they happen to be on at the time.
By lucasb on 2/3/2009 2:04:01 PM , Rating: 2
It's a bit pointless discussing science with you
Couldn't agree more. Arguing about science with Masher is useless. He's full of free market rhetoric and other (deeply) flawed ideological biases. There are only three choices: he knows next to nothing about real science, he suffers some sort of delusional disorder or he's a shill for some interest group.
You can clearly see this on his posts, blog entries and articles on climate change:
- According to him, consensus building has no place within science, yet he's eager to mention the "growth" in the number of skeptical scientists. To discover the truth you don't need a popularity contest but you would be a fool to ignore the findings and arguments from a vast number of educated, informed people coming from different backgrounds.
- Masher doesn't waste time trying to link (explicitly or implicitly) climate change to some sort of conspiracy theory (environmental fanaticism, liberal conspiracy, interest groups which may be benefited with a switch to a green economy). He has the opinion that Wikipedia put an army of "environuts" to patrol the articles on environmentalism and global warming against modification.
At the same time, every time someone shows a possible link between researchers quoted by him with a right-wing think tank, Big Oil or another organization known to attack mainstream science when their business models come under public light as being harmful to the common good (e.g., second-hand smoke) he quickly dismisses these findings as ad hominem attacks.
- There are countless examples of Masher cherry-picking whole papers or parts of them, distorting facts and presenting anecdotal evidence as unquestionable proof.
- He's quick to change his talking points when the research doesn't agree with his rethoric or when someone articulates a well-argued critique to his "articles". If warming is indeed happening, it shouldn't be a problem, since (according to his diatribe) a warmer globe is good for us (more rainfall and whatnot). If ice levels are rising, that's enough to discredit mountains of research. He ignores that a warmer climate may cause more snowfall thus leading to temporary recoveries on ice levels. He ignores that as water from melting ice enters the oceans, the concentration of salt on sea water becomes lower thus elevating the freezing point of the sea causing temporary surges on sea ice. And so on.
DT's readership is mostly right-wing leaning (the social phenomenon of cyber libertarians), so it's reasonable to expect a lot of cheerleaders when Masher performs some of his stunts.
| http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=14123&commentid=401801&threshhold=1&red=2950 | dclm-gs1-052340001 |
0.043867 | <urn:uuid:e69ba9f2-39b2-4d89-aee0-606fd318708b> | en | 0.95064 | Print 101 comment(s) - last by johnsmith9875.. on Sep 4 at 1:31 PM
America's aging nuclear is headed to the retirement home
Two weeks ago Entergy Corp. (ETR) won a bitter fight with the State of Vermont to keep the East Coast state's only nuclear power plant open. The reactor sits near Brattleboro, Vermont on the southern tip of the state near Massachusetts. The reactor was a Mark 1 boiling water reactor (BWR) design, similar to the reactors that melted down at Fukushima after being struck by an earthquake and tsunami flooding.
I. Giving up the Ghost
The single reactor Yankee Power Station, first commissioned in 1972, had already secured a 20 year extension --good through 2032 -- from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), but had been battling Vermont state regulators since 2010 who wanted to close the aging plant.
In its fight to keep the reactor open, Entergy first won a decision from the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont's U.S. District Judge J. Garvan Murtha who ordered [PDF] the state to allow the plant to continue to operate. The state appealed that decision. But in early August, the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New York ruled [PDF] that the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 [PDF] and the Federal [Water] Power Act of 1920 [PDF] (TITLE 16 U.S.C. Chapter 12 ) overode a pair of state laws that the state claimed gave it the power to regulate nuclear safety. The decision effectively banned the state from shutting down the reactor which the NRC approved of.
But in an ironic twist Entergy decided to shut down the reactor anyway, acknowledging the financial barriers facing the plant's continued operation.
Yankee Nuclear Plant
Entergy scored a pyrrhic win in its battle to keep the Yankee Nuclear Power Station open.
[Image Source: AP]
Entergy in a press release said that it expected the plant to about "break even" this year fiscally, but could lose as much as $50M USD per year on average over the next several years. By shuttering the plant, Entergy plans to save $150M to $200M USD in total costs by 2017. However, it has already taken a charge of $181M USD on the shuttering plan, and expects an addition $55M to $60M USD in costs relating to employee pension and severance.
Most of the plant's 630 employees -- plus an undisclosed number of contractors -- will be terminated, although a skeleton crew will be kept on during the plant's decommissioning -- a process which could last for decades if Entergy has its way.
Bill Mohl, president of Entergy Wholesale Commodities, comments, "Simply put, this decision was based on economics."
II. Nuclear Power is Struggling Financially
While nuclear fuel is relatively inexpensive, plant maintenance is not trivial; for example since Entergy acquired the Yankee plant in 2002, it has spent $400M USD -- or roughly $40M USD -- on upkeep. When you pile on the cost of lengthy legal battles with "green" minded activist parties on the local and state level, nuclear isn't quite so cheap.
To make matters worse, nuclear has had to compete fossil fuels, which are booming amid the explosion of natural gas and oil extraction from hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"). The surplus of fossil fuels has driven down prices, which Entergy notes in its press release on the closure.
Fracking regions
Fracking proejcts have greatly cut U.S. fossil fuel costs.
[Image Source: U.S. Energy Information Agency]
To add insult to injury, nuclear -- which receives a stick from the government (on a state level at least) via legal fees -- has to compete with alternative energy like wind and solar that are lavished with tax credits and other incentives on a state and federal level. As Entergy puts it:
Wholesale market design flaws that continue to result in artificially low energy and capacity prices in the region, and do not provide adequate compensation to merchant nuclear plants for the fuel diversity benefits they provide.
Professor Henry Lee, director of the environment and natural resources program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government warns, "Nuclear power is in big trouble economically."
III. Vermont is Happy to See Nuclear Jobs Leave
And not everyone is sad about that. Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin (D) commented:
Entergy's announcement today confirms what we have known for some time. Operating and maintaining this aging nuclear facility is too expensive in today’s world. Vermont utilities no longer have contracts with Vermont Yankee, and our regional grid is not reliant upon it for stability. Vermont has made clear its desire to move toward more sustainable, renewable sources of electricity, and many of our surrounding states are doing likewise.
Vermont Yankee was built with an expectation that it would operate for a limited period of years. While it is no secret that Vermont and Entergy have disagreed on how long that should be, it is now clear that Vermont Yankee is a part of the energy past, and will not be a part of our energy future.
The state says it will work to provide resources to the displaced workers.
Vermont protesters
Protesters picket Yankee power plant back in 1986. [Image Source: AP]
The cost of decommissioning the Yankee plant is estimated $566M USD; fortunately Entergy during the plant's profitable years established a trust which today is worth $582M USD and growing.
A growing controversy exists regarding the aging reactor's decommissioning cycle. Entergy is asking the NRC to allow it to put the reactor in "safe-storage" -- an up to 60-year period to allow the reactor to cool down before completing the decommissioning. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) disagrees with the plan and says he will challenge it, stating, "Entergy must go through a decommissioning process as soon as possible."
In addition to potential dangers of uncooled nuclear waste, decommissioning the plant too soon could impact Entergy financially by giving its trust less time to mature.
IV. Over Half the Nation's Nuclear is Nearing End of Life
America's aging nuclear industry has been facing a firestorm of criticism ever since the March 2011 meltdown in Fukushima. Despite the fact that the Fukushima failure was due to negligence -- the operator defied its engineers' advice to waterproof backup generators to save on costs -- the incident has had a powerful impact in shifting American public opinion against nuclear power.
That shift has helped the government escape criticism for giving solar and wind power handouts that it won't give nuclear power. It has also driven some states to try to kick out aging nuclear plants -- including Vermont.
Of the 104 reactors in 65 commercial plants in 31 states in the U.S., twenty-three -- or roughly a fourth -- are 40 years old or older. Another forty-two reactors are 30 years old or older. These older reactors tend to not only be the least efficient -- causing them to struggle more to compete with cheap fossil fuel power and artificially cheap alternative energy -- they also require more in maintenance.
Nuclear Reactor
Over half of U.S. reactors are over 30 years old. [Image Source: Corbis]
Currently the nation gets about 20 percent of its power from nuclear energy. But that could dip to 10 percent or less within a decade if the older plants are decommissioned and there's little new growth.
So far this year five reactors have been scheduled for decommissioned. Three of them -- San Onofre 2 and 3 near San Diego and Crystal River 3 in Florida -- had underwent botched maintenance efforts and would have required expensive repairs. And the Yankee plant had mounting legal costs.
V. Handful of New Projects Can't Keep Pace With Shutdowns
But one of the reactors -- the Kewaunee Power Generating Station in Kewaunee, Wisconsin shut down "purely for economic reasons" due to the falling price of natural gas. Owner Dominion Resources, Inc. (D) had kept the reactor -- a more efficient 556 MW pressurized water reactor (PWR) design -- well maintained and had little in the way of current legal issues.
Nuclear analyst Peter A. Bradford, a former member of the NRC and a former head of the New York State Public Service Commissiontold The New York Times:
That’s the one that’s probably most ominous. It’s as much a function of the cost of the alternatives as it is the reactor itself. Kewaunee not only didn’t have a major screw-up in repair work, it didn’t even seem to be confronting a major capital investment.
With the five closures, the nation's number of reactors is expected to dip to 99 by next year -- the lowest level in decades.
Some new modern reactor designs are incoming.
Reactor design
The AP1000, to be used in Georgia and South Carolina Plants [Image Source: Westinghouse]
The Tennessee Valley Authority is constructing a new reactor in its state, two reactors [PDF] are being built in Georgia (as an addition to the two-reactor Vogtle, Georgia plant), and two more are being constructed in South Carolina at the Virgil Plant, which currently has only one active reactor.
Nine other license applications are under review, according to an NRC page. However, the recent industry tribulations are apparent from that page; eight other license requests were abandoned (marked "suspended") for various reasons -- in many cases costs. Licenses typically take five years or more to obtain.
Chinese plant construction
China is already building a number of AP1000s, even as the U.S. nuclear industry wanes.
[Image Source: Westinghouse]
The rate of construction clearly isn't keeping up with closures. And that has some wondering whether nuclear power in the U.S. is destined for a slow ride off into the twilight, killed by cheap fossil fuels, alternative energy protectionism, and zealous "environmentalist" litigation.
Source: Entergy
Comments Threshold
RE: Where Does Vermont Get its Energy?
By DaveLessnau on 8/28/2013 9:50:09 PM , Rating: 2
Actually, I guess I really have to ask that question: from where does Vermont think they're going to get their electricity? Honestly. That nuclear plant produced fully 75% of their electricity. They have no coal-fired (oh, the horror). They have very few natural gas fired plants. I doubt they'll increase their hydroelectric plants lest they harm a little fishy. I'd guess solar is just not an option way up there. Apparently, according to that site I referenced, wind power might be an option because of their hilly terrain. But, I can't imagine how they'll recoup 75% of their total electricity use through that. I guess they (or most of them) won't freeze to death in the winter since it seems 60% of them use fuel oil to heat their houses. But, what they'll use to light their houses and businesses and run their economy, I don't know.
The amount they've been paying for their electricity is 43% of the US average. They're in for a rude awakening when those prices spike in the near future.
RE: Where Does Vermont Get its Energy?
By spaced_ on 8/28/2013 10:46:11 PM , Rating: 2
Surprisingly, electricity can be transported quite quickly, over long distances through wires.
States don't have electricity borders afaik so can physically traverse more than one state.
If Vermont is paying 43% of national average for electricity and 75% of their electricity is from that plant, I can see why it's shutting down. Simple economics.
RE: Where Does Vermont Get its Energy?
By DaveLessnau on 8/28/2013 11:20:41 PM , Rating: 2
I assume someone, somewhere, has to pick up the slack. Does it have to be fairly local? IOW, are the neighboring states the ones who will have to pick up the load or can the imported electricity come from all the states? If it's the neighboring states, do they have the excess capacity to carry 75% of Vermont's electricity demands?
By jwcalla on 8/29/2013 12:13:55 AM , Rating: 2
I think you're misreading that 75% number. That's the amount generated by the plant in the state of VT. But VT is actually an electricity exporter, so they're not consuming all of that. Vermont Yankee is right on the border of both NH and MA.
By spaced_ on 8/29/2013 12:23:09 AM , Rating: 1
Yeah someone has to pick up the slack, but how much of it is there? I don't know. How dense is the population in vermont? (i.e. how many air-conditioners, hot-water systems, stoves, ovens and kettles do they need?)
If you take a look at the link you posted:
There's a map that shows where the generators are located, in neighbouring and other states.
There is transmission loss distributing electricity. It varies on a number of factors including distance, so it's one of many factors when buying electricity from a generator.
But transmission loss isn't significant. 6.5% or so in the US on average.
Given the Vermont nuke plant was exporting about 60% of electricity provided to their own state and the Vermontians were only paying 43% of national average, I'm not surprised the plant closed really. Market too competitive, operating costs too high on aging plant. Can't imagine legal issues affected the economics much.
As this dude said:
By jwcalla on 8/29/2013 1:16:47 AM , Rating: 2
According to a report on Fairewinds, the Vermont Yankee plant wasn't selling any electricity to VT utilities. However, VT utilities were purchasing some nuclear-generated electricity from out-of-state nuclear plants.
This plant simply couldn't compete in the energy market. This seems to be a growing trend in the nuclear industry with the advent of cheap natural gas from the recent shale gas drilling.
By Nagorak on 8/29/2013 7:35:49 AM , Rating: 2
The article indicated that Vermont utilities don't buy their power from the plant. Even though 75% of the power generated in Vermont, and probably the power actually used by its citizens, is nuclear, they apparently weren't paying to use that power.
| http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=33258&commentid=886863&threshhold=1&red=5956 | dclm-gs1-052460001 |
0.018836 | <urn:uuid:0c31d5f1-f3d5-474c-bca8-b2ca3aa465a3> | en | 0.964859 | Sports DaySports Day Stars Stars Photos
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10 things you may not know about Stars coach Lindy Ruff
Ruff’s Sabres lost the Stanley Cup to the Stars in 1999. The clinching goal was Brett Hull’s controversial ‘Was he in the crease or not?’ marker that ended Game 6 in triple overtime. Ruff was critical of the goal being allowed. “Somebody should have called from upstairs and said ‘This is not a goal,’ ” Ruff said at the time. “All I wanted was a review. I wanted (NHL commissioner Gary) Bettman to answer the question of why this wasn’t reviewed. He turned his back on me. It was almost as if he knew the goal was tainted. You can’t explain the feeling.” Two days later, he led 20,000 Buffalonians in a “No goal” chant.
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Carson Daly has insisted that The Voice is different from other reality singing competitions like American Idol and The X Factor USA.
In an interview with Parade, the Voice host revealed his thoughts on the show's success as well as what convinced him to join the project alongside coaches Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green, Adam Levine and Blake Shelton.
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The Voice US judges. Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green, Blake Shelton and Adam Levine
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"I had never really watched any of those competition shows but I noticed in the past ten years they've gotten better. Amazing Race is pretty well done and I like the way they do So You Think You Can Dance," Daly recalled.
"So when they came to me [about The Voice], they said, 'We're not trying to make fun of people's singing and we're getting four people who are Grammy winners as coaches'. I just liked the idea and it finally felt that it could be a reality competition that could be good, clean family TV."
> 'The Voice' Carson Daly on possible 'X Factor' clash: 'We're ready to go'
He continued: "Three things point to the show's success, from my perspective. One is the blind auditions. When people saw big, red chairs with their backs to these people singing, it made people realize it was something different and separated it from the other shows.
"The second thing is having these judges be the four biggest names in music. They are the right people to be making comments and remarks. The third thing is the level of talent we came out of the box with. We start with really good singers and our journey is finding someone who is great."
Daly added that the coaches have a good rapport despite competing with one another, saying: "There is a healthy amount of trash talking. It usually ends with a hug or a high-five. They're always questioning each other's moves or song selections. Or how jealous they are of each other's team members."
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0.050256 | <urn:uuid:eab9142a-2e19-4778-81af-9c84fe7917ab> | en | 0.981422 | President Barack Obama took the official oath for his second term on Sunday at the White House in a small, private ceremony that set a more subdued tone compared to the historic start of his presidency four years ago.
Gathered with his family in the Blue Room on the White House's ceremonial main floor, Obama put his hand on a Bible and recited the 35-word oath that was read to him by U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts.
Obama hugged his wife Michelle and said, "Thank you," after she congratulated him at the swearing-in.
Obama, who became the first African-American U.S. president four years ago, will be sworn in publicly for his second term on Monday in a much bigger ceremony before an audience of as many as 800,000 people outside the U.S. Capitol.
Sunday's ceremony was needed because the U.S. Constitution mandates that the president take office on January 20. Planners opted to go with a private ceremony on the actual date and then hold the symbolic inaugural activities the next day.
Obama will have been sworn in four times, two for each term, putting him equal to Franklin Roosevelt, who served four terms. A second swearing-in was needed in 2009 when Roberts flubbed the first one.
Obama, who won a second term on November 7 by defeating Republican Mitt Romney, opens round two facing many of the same problems that dogged his first term: persistently high unemployment, crushing debt and a deep partisan divide over how to solve the issues.
This has taken some of the euphoria out of Obama's second inauguration, but he got a boost at a rousing service at Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Washington where he and his wife Michelle, who is sporting a new hair style featuring bangs, clapped and swayed to gospel music. "Forward, forward," shouted Pastor Ronald Braxton to his congregation, echoing an Obama election campaign slogan.
Early Sunday morning, Vice President Joe Biden was sworn in by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, making her the first Hispanic judge to administer an oath of office for one of the nation's two highest offices.
Obama and Biden then joined forces to lay a wreath of flowers at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery in a solemn remembrance of those killed in the line of duty. | http://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/u-s-president-barack-obama-sworn-in-for-second-term-in-white-house-1.495143?trailingPath=2.169%2C2.216%2C2.219%2C | dclm-gs1-052810001 |
0.085942 | <urn:uuid:2535fa92-d750-4786-9c01-f510b3fe7092> | en | 0.962805 | IMDb > Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) > Reviews & Ratings - IMDb
Tagebuch einer Verlorenen
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Diary of a Lost Girl More at IMDbPro »Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (original title)
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4 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
Diary of a Lost Girl
Author: Michael_Elliott from Louisville, KY
2 March 2008
Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)
*** (out of 4)
Fairly raw German silent from director G.W. Pabst. A young woman (Louise Brooks) is raped and is eventually thrown out of her house when she has a baby. From here on the girl goes to a reform school, becomes a whore but will she find redemption? I was somewhat letdown by the film since I felt it did have a few flaws. I thought the men characters were really one sided and the second half of the film drags somewhat but there are certainly more positives than negatives. Brooks is terrific in the lead role and does a great job at showing off the virginal younger girl and the eventual sluttish, if mature, older woman. There's a scene where she's working and her father notices her. Within the same scene we see Brooks "slut" slide melt away into that virginal girl we saw at the end of the film in some of the best acting I've seen. The mood and atmosphere is very strong at the start of the film and the morality ending actually works quite nicely.
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1 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Brooks, Pabst, typified classic
Author: wedgwood from nz
27 September 2002
Definately one of Pabsts more enjoyable films. But why did he have such a weakness for creating severely feeble men? It's taken just a bit irritatingly too far for my taste, although not nearly so bad in Tagebuch as in Pandora's Buchse.
Thymaine was a thoroughly likable character surrounded by a world of imbeciles. Maybe it was the silent aspect that debilitated this, but I thought it was sadly lacking in the relationship development department. I have noticed this in other Pabst films though. Very relieving end -9/10.
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3 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
Throws itself terribly out of control...
Author: Polaris_DiB from United States
30 November 2005
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
A young, upperclass woman named Thymian is excised from her family when a combination of incidents including her father's affair with the housekeeper, the death of the governess, and her rape by her father's business partner resulting in impregnation causes the family as a whole to send her away (for various reasons, some of which are unknown) to a reformatory. The draconian actions of the reformatory cause her to run away with a young Count, but unfortunately he is penniless and they have nowhere to go, so she gets stuck in a brothel of sorts where she lives until circumstances bring her back to her family and eventually lead her to a new life and new identity, from which she learns compassion for the other "lost girls" of the world.
Technically, that's what it's about.
At least, that's what happens. The problem with this film is that Thymian is the only character with any motivation, and it's a slight and unfocused one at that. For the first half of the film, indeed, one at least can be forgiving to the film because the characters inherent (and physical) beauty at least provides some sort of motion to the storyline. Unfortunately, since the characters have no motivation, and since the director seems entirely unwilling to let anything tragic have its due in the world, the movie skips past what could possibly be a beautiful and tragic ending and continues for another hour or so on tangents without importance or design.
At first this discursiveness seems rather stunning and unexpected, but a quick look back over a few points of the first half of the film start revealing that indeed, it seems Pabst really didn't have a clear understanding of overaching tones, themes, motifs. He has a storyline and names for characters, but no personalities or plot. For instance, the name of this movie: DIARY of a Lost Girl. The beginning is quite clear and obvious the importance of the diary to the character of Thymian, but not only does it not sustain its direct duty to bring her some form of closure, revelation, or salvation, it also simply disappears after a certain point and is never heard of again.
Furthermore, the movie strives to close up all threads with an opportunistic idea that everything can work out, but it closes up threads that needn't be included or are even merely incidental in the story arch. I repeat: the characters lack motivation. Since the characters lack motivation, what are they supposed to do to win, or lose, or react to events? They have nowhere to go or expand, and thus the ending keeps getting further and further away.
Most distressing about watching this film is it's complete lack of understanding about tone. It goes to extremes that seem at first to show the incredible level of conformity, decadence, ignorance, or whatever, but eventually go to far and fail to make an organized statement. Little nods to lesbianism are included for no real reason whatsoever. And what about Thymian's tendency to pass out before being taken advantage of? If it's meant to show her lack of control over the situation, it's a very maudlin and over-indulgent attempt.
In fact, why does Thymian want to hide the identity of the father of her baby when she was quite clearly raped? Some rape victims tend to victimize themselves by claiming that they deserved it, but there's no hint, nod, or involvement of that dysfunction. Why does the mistress of the reformatory derive such pleasure at the exercise of the girls? There's no clear evidence to support that she's sadistic, lesbian, or any has any form of motivation besides the fact that showing her wild grinning face seems a good way to get a reaction from the audience. Why is the housekeeper turned stepmother so stern, and furthermore, why can't she seem to make any face other than her one stern one? Sometimes this film goes to lengths, also, to go further into depth about things that don't deserve such treatment. Most of the ending seems to be an attempt by the filmmakers to take control of the theme (which they don't have) by reintroducing arbitrary characters and involving them in entirely new plot lines that don't have any coherent or enthused meaning on the overall storyarch. Basically, as soon as the Count's son inexplicably kills himself, the movie becomes saturated with false pretensions towards positivity, endurance, and "love" without taking the time to admit that the entire movie has already ended.
From there, the whole thing begins to fall entirely out of control and gets worse and worse until roughly about the beach scene and beyond, which if by that point you're still paying attention and caring about where the characters are going, you're just going to be lead to one of the most antithetical climaxes in film history. Yes, the Count actually said that line, and yes, that's all you're left with.
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0 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Das tagebuch einer Verlorenen.
Author: Andrew Roughton ( from Oxford, England.
28 February 2001
1929 saw the release of Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, which traced the traumatic tale of a beautiful young girl named Thymaine, played by the enchanting Louise Brooks. She experienced a cruel life when her innocence was torn away and her naivete exposed by the brutality of the demanding world. Throughout the film the dominance and hypocrisy of the male culture was highlighted, but prior to the conclusion Thymaine was able to shame the people that had once shamed her, which provided the film with themes of anti-authoritarianism and hope. The cinematography was arguably more evolved than in other films directed by Pabst, and the acting was second to none. The camerawork consisted of mainly mid-shots and medium close-ups, which placed emphasis on the characters and recorded their interaction with each other. Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen was unquestionably one of the more sensual films of the Expressionist period, which was largely thanks to Louise Brooks, and despite being heavily influenced by Expressionism, it displayed realism unfamiliar to other films encompassing the movement.
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5 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
Author: Claude Cat from United States
3 August 2004
This slow-paced film is beautifully shot, and enhanced by the luminous presence of Louise Brooks (as Thymian), who makes a perfect cinematic illustration of innocence under attack. But the direction is so heavyhanded that much of the message is dulled.
The chemist who preys upon Thymian is shown to be an evil lout from his first closeup, so it's hard to understand why she would ever talk to him. The reformatory directors are sadistic caricatures, and Thymian's father and stepmother are exaggerated hypocrites.
The father's acting doesn't help, as it consists mainly of standing in symbolic poses. (Irritatingly, Thymian never blames her father for his awful actions, only her stepmother.) These choices make it hard to take much of the story seriously, although probably many of the events related are based on truth.
Thymian herself can be frustrating to watch. Unluckily, and a bit absurdly, she tends to faint whenever she's confronted with a sexual situation. I assume this was the director's way of making sure viewers didn't blame her for her "fall," but perhaps there's a more interesting Freudian explanation. Twenties-fashion fans will enjoy the scenes in the surprisingly benign whorehouse. But unless you're a Louise Brooks fan or a cinematography student, I can't recommend this melodramatic film.
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0 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
overrated but not to be dismissed
Author: mukava991 from United States
9 April 2007
Twice in DIARY OF A LOST GIRL naive young Thymian (Louise Brooks) is raped after passing out - that is, stone cold unconscious for a lonnnngggg time - while being held in the arms of a man (first while conversing and second on the dance floor after drinking one glass of beer). This is too much! Was it perhaps considered normal in those days for sweet young things to faint dead away while in men's arms? I doubt it - even in D.W. Griffith films. Brooks, a stunner if there ever there was one, looks as if she could chew up these men and spit them out, which she sort of does by the finale. Fritz Rasp, as the first rapist, plays a character similar to his White Russian agent in Pabst's THE LOVE OF JEANNE NEY (1927) - a man so repellent that no decent person would want to spend one minute in his presence. German cabaret artist Valeska Gert is memorable as the sadistic headmistress of the kind of reform school we would expect to encounter in "Our Gang" comedies, Oliver Twist dramatizations or Max Fleischer cartoons (the children are forced to lift spoonfuls of gruel to their mouths in time to a beating drum). The camera devours Gert's bald, brutish husband (Andrews Engelmann) at length as he curls his lips into a sickly smile, to make absolutely sure we see what an evil reptile he is. For a film about a "diary," one wishes that the screen time devoted to the heroine's actually writing in it were one tenth as long as villains' closeups.
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0 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Mood, mood, mood
Author: bapartin from Broomfield, CO
26 April 2005
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
I had never seen a Louise Brooks or Valeska Gert film before. I thought this one was very good. The plot is basic but the atmosphere is what makes this movie--very slow, deliberate, lots of long close-ups, and a pairing of repression and hysteria, all in 1929. The print I saw was mostly a French one; perhaps no complete print now exists? I saw this film as part of a special series, which included a talk afterward. The speaker said that the ending was imposed by the censors--Pabst wanted one in which Thymiane returns to the brothel and takes it over. My favorite scene was the one in the reformatory, in which Valeska Gert bangs the gong.
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1 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
Glad that I found this diary
Author: WMOLSTAD from Minnesota
20 April 2003
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
Wow. I just saw this tonight. The Kino DVD version. Very
excellent. I'm not incredibly bothered by some of the jumpiness
that happened during a scene where Thymian's family gathers. It
sort of adds to the feel. And the jumping is very little compared to
other silents. That scene is really the only one with a constant
problem of it. Now the way that the visual elements were linked together - the
diary and the recurring characters and what they symbolized - that
was very nicely done. This one is a classic of the silent era for me,
right up there with The Passion of Jeanne D'Arc and Pandora's
Box. The movie seemed to have way more of a point then
Pandora's box. It is surprising to me that this film stops halfway through the
screenplay? Is that true? To me the movie is so well concluded,
(SLIGHT SPOILER).............. unlike the oneiric conclusion of Pandora's Box. And there are
some scary looking characters in this movie. The "Madame", the
gruesome looking nun and obedience guy at the reform school,
and by far, the pharmacy clerk - they were all creepy. Well cast. This movie is SO shiny! Louise Brooks looks heavenly. So much
of the hypocrisy in life is showcased with meaning. The irony in
many scenes towards the end as the main character recovers and
grows stronger confronts the conflicts of the first two acts
wonderfully. SEEK THIS FILM OUT! PLEASE! It is lovely.
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2 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
Intelligent and moving
Author: RoboSlater from Los Angeles
27 May 2003
I saw a pristine print of this film at the Silent Movie theatre located on Fairfax Avenue in West Hollywood, California about a year ago. It was accompanied by a live organist there who is almost old enough to have played during the silent era.
One of the best films I've seen. The acting is superb and I understand the allure of the star. A year later I'm still haunted by her looks and charisma. Powerhouse performances all-around. Mature subject matter.
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4 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
Louise Brooks is Mesmerizing
Author: Lawrence Cooper ( from Manhattan
18 May 2003
I have never seen an actress radiate as much screen presence as Louise Brooks does in "Diary of a Lost Girl". The brilliance she brings to this role makes this one of the greatest and most poignant silent films...right up there with City Lights and The Scarlet Letter.
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0.907348 | <urn:uuid:db58d683-06d3-456c-bba1-c4b32e4f6c06> | en | 0.769003 | FishbowlNY TVNewser TVSpy LostRemote AgencySpy PRNewser GalleyCat SocialTimes
How Do You Spend Your Weekends?
The Hill’s Jonathan Kaplan, Hotline’s Amy Walters and Rep. Jim Moran chat up Miss Virginia at this weekend’s Clarendon bike race. Because they can.
Mediabistro Course
Freelancing 101
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0.025059 | <urn:uuid:d8b3c3fd-cc5e-44e8-b7f2-1028284b9dca> | en | 0.977581 | Ward Room
Covering Chicago's nine political influencers
Blagojevich Not Impressed by "Grateful and Appreciative"
On November 4, 2008, the night Barack Obama was elected president, Rod Blagojevich had one thing on his mind: what’s in this for me?
Blagojevich was already insanely jealous that a goo-goo state senator from Hyde Park had leaped over him to the presidency. So he decided to try to leverage his power to appoint Obama’s successor to set himself up as a national player, too.
Rep. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s soon-to-be chief of staff, told Blagojevich fundraiser John Wyma to tell Blagojevich chief of staff John Harris that the White House would be “thankful and appreciative” if the governor would appoint Valerie Jarrett. (Like mob bosses, politicians use a lot of “buffers” to make deals.)
Those three words drove Blagojevich nuts.
“Grateful and appreciative, huh?” Blagojevich sneered to Harris. “I got a 501 (c) 4. Can he get Warren Buffett and some of his friends to help us with that? In the middle of the night delivering pizza, how about that side job? I need a place to land. What about the reality of that?”
The tape of that conversation was played from a pair of speakers atop six-foot chrome pillars, while the man who spoke the words sat nearby, in a tailored blue pinstripe suit.
Blagojevich wanted to become head of an issue advocacy group that worked to bring health insurance to children. It would be his way of “playing a role in the national game.” He wanted Obama’s wealthy friends to endow it with $10 or $15 million.
The governor was also interested in becoming head of the labor organization Change to Win, although he seemed disappointed to hear that he would only earn $125,000 to fight for the working man. Democratic strategist Fred Yang said that it was the best job to keep Blagojevich financially secure and politically viable at the same time.
“There are a lot of things that preclude you from being a high-level elected official,” he told Blagojevich, who’d been dreaming of a cabinet job. “Working with Rezko does make it hard for any big Illinois politician.”
Blagojevich threw out scads of names for the Senate seat: everyone from State Sen. Rickey Hendon to Deputy Governor Louanner Peters to an idealized “African-American Tammy Duckworth.” He was never interested in appointing Jesse Jackson Jr. Junior had promised to endorse Blagojevich for governor in 2002, then welshed when Roland Burris entered the race.
“He’s a bad guy,” Blagojevich told Yang. “He’s really not the guy I thought he was.”
Still, Blagojevich wanted to plant a rumor in Michael Sneed’s Sun-Times column that he was considering Jackson.
“The governor understood that Jesse Jr. was not a preferred choice of the Obama administration, and they might be inclined to help the governor in other things if they thought he was considering Jesse Jackson Jr.,” Harris testified. | http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/Hope-and-97091864.html | dclm-gs1-053160001 |
0.026707 | <urn:uuid:55f97f16-6042-4b3e-a88e-8c13c6bbb214> | en | 0.938866 | Rain, rain go away, or otherwise get a bimini
Australian floods
. ..
You know it’s been a wet summer when your Golden Retriever, a renowned water breed, starts to rot. That was the prognosis, at least, from the groomer who gave our girl the canine equivalent of short back and sides.
Only the tail was spared as we were advised that the smell emanating from Roxy’s coat was due to persistent moisture. For a moment there I’d feared she’d rolled in a compost of week-old prawns, backed-up sewage and a dead possum.
It stinks, too, if you’re trying to sell boats in what’s already a gloomy market, though the dealer out Wagga way might’ve flogged a few more tinnies than usual as muddy floodwaters gathered around his sandbags.
In some European countries, wet weather is the norm not the exception, so they just batten the hatches and get on with it. We’re sooks really when you consider that 99% of the Australian coastline allows blissful year-round boating.
The problem, I guess, is that we’ve grown so accustomed to sunshine that our boats are designed to suit. Big cockpits with scant regard for helm protection, and large companionways that let in equal parts air and precipitation.
With the new breed of enclosed flybridges it should never rain on your parade.
Mark Rothfield
I agree there’s nothing worse than being wet, but it shouldn’t rule out boating altogether. Buy a bimini for the runabout and it can be quite cosy. Get new clears for the flybridge and dust off the cards, Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit. Park the kids in front of an iPod if need be.
Get a fold-out marquee for the beach. The fish are already wet, so they don’t mind.
And remember, a bad day’s boating is infinitely better than a good day at home. | http://www.news.powerboat-world.com/Rain__rain_go_away__or_otherwise_get_a_bimini/94926 | dclm-gs1-053190001 |
0.1613 | <urn:uuid:f5b1e1b4-2fad-43da-9e89-5ed17d86e712> | en | 0.971077 | Original rabble rouser now face of crumbling establishment
By Rory Carroll
They surround his bus, chanting his name, and when he emerges they scream and surge forward, desperate to embrace him. Many clutch notes - handwritten pleas for a job, a house, an operation - and if they manage to slip them into his hands or pockets they near explode with joy.
The trouble for Hugo Chavez is that he is no longer that candidate.
Fourteen years later, however, as he seeks a third term, it his youthful challenger, Henrique Capriles, 40, who electrifies the crowds.
Either way, it will be another chapter in the great drama that is the life of Chavez.
How a boy from a humble family, the second son of schoolteacher parents, rose to become not just president but a global figure simultaneously adored and reviled is a remarkable tale.
Chavez, a talented baseball player, dreamed not of politics but pitching for the major leagues. Instead, he fell in love with soldiering. "A uniform, a gun, an area, close-order formation, marches, morning runs, studies in military science - I was like a fish in water," he recalled.
As Chavez moved up the ranks, he studied the writings of Simon Bolivar, the 19th-century liberator who ousted the Spanish, as well as philosophers such as Nietzsche and Plekhanov. Inspired by revolutionary military leaders in Panama and Peru, and leftwing Venezuelan intellectuals, an idea began to form: revolt.
Over a decade, he gathered fellow officers into a conspiracy to replace what they saw as a venal, sham democracy with a progressive, real democracy. The February 1992 coup was a military fiasco, letting the unpopular Government survive, but Chavez turned his televised surrender address into a political triumph. Eloquent and dashing in his red beret, he introduced himself to a startled nation - "listen to comandante Chavez" - and said his objectives had not been met "por ahora", for now. He deserved 30 years in jail, went the joke: one for the coup, 29 for failing.
Pardoned and released after two years, he was adopted as a figurehead by a coalition of grassroots movements and leftwing parties and stormed to victory in the 1998 election, cheered not only by the poor but a middle class fed up with ossified political parties. With a barrel of oil just US$8, the petro-state was near broke.
Within a few short years, Chavez became one of the world's most recognisable and polarising figures. Vehement rhetoric - he railed against the wealthy as "squealing pigs" and "vampires" who looted oil wealth - endeared him to the poor and alienated the middle class and traditional elites. They called him a monkey and worse. In April 2002, the elites briefly ousted him in a Bush Administration-backed coup, tried again with an oil strike, then a recall referendum.
After winning a second term in 2006, Chavez won a referendum abolishing term limits and talked of ruling until 2021, then 2030. That looks fanciful now. He remains revered in the barrios. But even supporters are fed up with horrific crime rates, inflation, shortages and crumbling infrastructure. Bridges collapse, refineries blow up, blackouts shroud cities.
Drained and bloated by cancer treatment, he sometimes has trouble walking. His public appearances are few and often melancholic. The other obstacle is Capriles. Unlike previous inept opposition leaders, the state governor is a disciplined, energetic campaigner.
Whether the president wins or not - and given his electoral track record you would be foolish or brave to bet against him - his fame will live on.
Hugo Chavez
Age: 58
Who: Venezuelan President who is seeking re-election.
Background: From a poor family in the Venezuelan grasslands known as los llanos. He had a military career and was a former lieutenant colonel. Chavez has been treated for cancer over the past two years and has had three operations in Cuba.
Career: He led a 1992 coup that failed but it boosted his profile and he won a 1998 presidential election. Chavez survived a short-lived coup in 2002.
Politics: Chavez is supported by the poor and has expanded health and education programmes. Despite difficult relations with the United States, it remains Venezuela's major oil export market. Chavez has nationalised areas of the economy. He is a populist and is known for long speeches - his record is 9.5 hours.
- Observer
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Re^5: Reading every file in a directory
by Athanasius (Monsignor)
on Sep 29, 2012 at 04:27 UTC ( #996332=note: print w/ replies, xml ) Need Help??
in reply to Re^4: Reading every file in a directory
in thread Reading every file in a directory
Hello spookyjack123, and welcome to the Monastery!
I think the following (untested) code will do what you want:
#! perl use strict; use warnings; my $current_time = time; my $old_time = $current_time - (60 * 60 * 24 * 5); printf "Current time is %d, old time is %d\n", $current_time, $old_tim +e; my $directory = '/home/gac3/plugins/Essentials/userdata'; my @to_delete; for my $YMLfile (<"$directory/*.yml">) { open(my $fh, '<', $YMLfile) or die "Cannot open file '$YMLfile' fo +r reading: $!"; while (<$fh>) { if (/ ^ \s* login: \s+ ( \d+ ) $ /x) { push @to_delete, $YMLfile if int($1 / 1_000) < $old_time; last; } } close $fh or die "Cannot close file '$YMLfile': +$!"; } unlink @to_delete;
Note that the timestamps in your sample data are 3 digits longer than the output of Perl’s time function. I have simply truncated the timestamp; you may need to adjust this part of the script.
Hope that helps,
Update: Fixed the call to unlink. Thanks to Kenosis for the heads-up!
Athanasius <°(((><contra mundum
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0.067102 | <urn:uuid:f8c924c5-4056-4370-84ee-810abef89138> | en | 0.891783 | Latest Lightning Stories
2012-03-13 09:04:47
Using an experimental apparatus reminiscent of a classic Frankenstein movie, French researchers have coaxed laboratory-generated lightning into striking the same place, not just twice, but over and over.
Next-Gen Weather Satellites To Improve Tornado Warnings
2012-03-01 04:39:16
When you read the following paragraph, consider the following: Tornado season hasn't even started yet.
RHESSI Mission Celebrates Ten Years And Forty Thousand X-Ray Flares
2012-02-11 04:00:56
Ten years since its launch, RHESSI has observed more than 40,000 X-ray flares, helped craft and refine a model of how solar eruptions form, and fueled additional serendipitous science papers on such things as the shape of the sun and thunder-storm-produced gamma ray flashes.
Image 1 - Lightning-Made Waves Leaking Into Space From Earth's Atmosphere
2011-11-29 10:08:34
NASA said on Monday that scientists have discovered lightning-made waves in Earth's atmosphere that leaked into space.
Lightning Sprites Are Out-of-This-World
2011-11-21 13:43:36
TAU researchers predict "sprites" in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus.
Researchers Create Extra-long Electrical Arcs Using Less Energy
2011-11-09 09:10:28
Researchers at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand, have developed a new, lower-voltage method of generating extra-long, lightning-like electrical arcs.
Latest Lightning Reference Libraries
Weather Reference Library
2012-05-10 10:05:27
When we think of thunderstorms we have to remember the deadliest part of those storms and that is the lightning that occurs with them. Lightning is found in many forms. The first type of lightning is known as cloud to cloud meaning that the electric charge travels from one cloud to the other. The second type of lightning is the Cloud to Air meaning the lighting moves from the cloud and enters the clear air of the sky. A third type of lightning is the cloud to ground. This is the most...
2010-10-21 17:15:50
A lightning rod is a metal conductor mounted on the top of a building and connected through a wire to the ground to protect the building from lightning. The rod should conduct the electricity from a lightning strike down through the wire instead of passing through the building. The rod is just a single component in the lightning protections system along with rooftop conductors and multiple conductive paths. Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod in 1749. The taller the building the...
2009-07-21 16:27:18
Heat Lightning is actually faint flashes of lightning reflecting outward from distant thunderstorms. These flashes usually do not produce thunder as the storm is sometimes too far away to be heard. The term heat lightning got its name because it often occurs on hot summer nights and does not produce audible thunder. One reason heat lightning can be seen so far away is due to the reflection of the light bouncing off water particles in moist, humid air and as light is scattered throughout the...
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Word of the Day | http://www.redorbit.com/topics/lightning/?page=11 | dclm-gs1-053510001 |
0.019697 | <urn:uuid:3ca0bfd5-a9dd-4d34-8a53-936c00e76243> | en | 0.981707 | Conviction of ex-US House leader DeLay's tossed
PAUL J. WEBER, Associated Press
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas appeals court tossed the criminal conviction of former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on Thursday, saying there was insufficient evidence for a jury in 2010 to have found him guilty of illegally funneling money to Republican candidates.
The Texas 3rd Court of Appeals said prosecutors failed to prove that the money being laundered was illegally obtained, which the court said was required for a money laundering conviction. Prosecutors alleged that DeLay illegally channel $190,000 in corporate donations though his political action committee and into Texas legislative races, where corporate money is barred.
"The fundamental problem with the State's case was its failure to prove proceeds of criminal activity," the court wrote in a 2-1 decision.
Justices on the appeals court suggested that even jurors appeared confused during deliberations, based on questions they asked about whether the charge required that the money be illegally obtained in the first place.
DeLay was meeting with religious conservatives in Washington when he learned of the court's ruling.
"We were all basically on our knees praying and my lawyer calls and says, 'You're a free man,'" the former Texas congressman said. "It's a really happy day for me and I just thank the Lord for carrying me through all of this."
State prosecutors said they would appeal to Texas' highest criminal court.
"We are concerned and disappointed that two judges substituted their assessment of the facts for that of 12 jurors who personally heard the testimony of over 40 witnesses over the course of several weeks and found that the evidence was sufficient and proved DeLay's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt," the Travis County District Attorney's office said in a statement.
DeLay was found guilty by a jury in Austin of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Prosecutors said the money he funneled to local candidates helped Republicans take control of the Texas House, enabling them to push through a DeLay-engineered congressional redistricting plan that sent more Republicans to Congress in 2004, strengthening his political power.
Delay, whose heavy-handed style while holding the No. 2 job in the U.S. House earned him the nickname "the Hammer," was sentenced to three years in prison. His sentence had been on hold during the appeals process.
Prosecutors alleged that DeLay accepted $190,000 in corporate donations to his Texas-based political action committee, then sent that money to an arm of the Washington-based Republican National Committee. The RNC then sent the same amount of money to seven Texas House candidates in 2002. Under state law, corporate money cannot be given directly to political campaigns.
Prosecutors said Delay conspired with two associates to pull off the scheme during a three-week trial. After 19 hours of deliberations, jurors agreed.
But in a 22-page opinion, the appeals court said prosecutors "failed in its burden to prove that the funds that were delivered to the seven candidates were ever tainted." The court called the evidence "legally insufficient" to support a money laundering charge.
The lone dissent was Chief Justice Woodie Jones, the only Democrat on the six-member appeals court.
Writing for the majority opinion, Justice Melissa Goodwin wrote that the deficiency of the state's case was made clear by the confusion revealed by jurors during deliberations.
Before convicting DeLay, the jury asked whether a crime could be considered money laundering if the money wasn't illegally obtained in the first place. Goodwin said the answer is no, but rather than jurors being told that, the trial judge simply referred them back to the wording of the charges.
"The jury's questions to the trial judge ... point to the lack of evidence showing that the funds involved in the transaction were the proceeds of criminal activity," Goodwin wrote.
DeLay did not shy from the spotlight during his legal fight. He was a contestant on ABC's hit television show "Dancing with the Stars" in 2009, and he runs a consulting firm in suburban Houston.
On Thursday, Delay said the case and conviction hadn't been a burden.
"I'm not saying it was easy to go through," DeLay said. "On the other hand, if you read the ruling (it says) this is an outrageous criminalization of politics ... in the ruling they say I should have never even been charged, much less indicted."
DeLay's attorney, Brian Wice, said he was confident DeLay would win again if prosecutors pursue an appeal. | http://www.reporternews.com/news/conviction-ex-us-house-leader-delays-tossed | dclm-gs1-053530001 |
0.023251 | <urn:uuid:cef25290-e204-40f1-be47-fdc73d0cd533> | en | 0.965595 | What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?- page 5 | Innovation | Smithsonian
Jaron Lanier was one of the creators of our current digital reality and now he wants to subvert the web before it engulfs us all. (Robert Holmgren)
What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?
Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe
(Continued from page 4)
Well, that is a difference. And he couldn’t have done it without the anonymous screen name. Or he wouldn’t have.
And here’s where Lanier says something remarkable and ominous about the potential dangers of anonymity.
“This is the thing that continues to scare me. You see in history the capacity of people to congeal—like social lasers of cruelty. That capacity is constant.”
“Social lasers of cruelty?” I repeat.
“I just made that up,” Lanier says. “Where everybody coheres into this cruelty beam....Look what we’re setting up here in the world today. We have economic fear combined with everybody joined together on these instant twitchy social networks which are designed to create mass action. What does it sound like to you? It sounds to me like the prequel to potential social catastrophe. I’d rather take the risk of being wrong than not be talking about that.”
Here he sounds less like a Le Carré mole than the American intellectual pessimist who surfaced back in the ’30s and criticized the Communist Party he left behind: someone like Whittaker Chambers.
But something he mentioned next really astonished me: “I’m sensitive to it because it murdered most of my parents’ families in two different occasions and this idea that we’re getting unified by people in these digital networks—”
“Murdered most of my parents’ families.” You heard that right. Lanier’s mother survived an Austrian concentration camp but many of her family died during the war—and many of his father’s family were slaughtered in prewar Russian pogroms, which led the survivors to flee to the United States.
It explains, I think, why his father, a delightfully eccentric student of human nature, brought up his son in the New Mexico desert—far from civilization and its lynch mob potential. We read of online bullying leading to teen suicides in the United States and, in China, there are reports of well-organized online virtual lynch mobs forming...digital Maoism.
He gives me one detail about what happened to his father’s family in Russia. “One of [my father’s] aunts was unable to speak because she had survived the pogrom by remaining absolutely mute while her sister was killed by sword in front of her [while she hid] under a bed. She was never able to speak again.”
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0.141518 | <urn:uuid:cb003d29-8903-4db9-9a61-9c34dfcfbc34> | en | 0.970536 | India drug business stumbles
India is a source for a goodly amount of the world's generic drugs - there are some large and serious companies there, with a lot of expertise. And in recent years, they've just been getting larger and more serious all the time, which makes a couple of recent news items very disturbing reading.
First off, Ranbaxy Laboratories has been notified by the FDA that all of their drug applications are all now on hold, because they've found evidence that the company has submitted falsified data. Most of the problems seem to have been with stability tests, where a company takes production batches of their drugs and ages them at room temperature (and in heated chambers) to make sure that they don't break down in any unusual way on storage. Ranbaxy seems to have cut some corners: for one thing, many samples were found to have been stored in refrigerators after their testing period, some of them for extended periods. None of this was disclosed to the FDA, and closer inspection showed many more inconsistencies in the submitted data. Ranbaxy was warned about this in 2006, but followup checks showed things like employee sign-offs from people who weren't there, different test results for what were supposed to be the same samples, and the like. The FDA's letter can be read here (as a PDF), and they're clearly unhappy.
Adding to the bad publicity, another one of the big Indian companies (Dr. Reddy's) has been involved in a very unusual dispute in a well-respected chemical journal. They'd published a new procedure to make an off-patent antidepressant, but the scientists at Lundbeck, the Danish company that developed the original drug, cried foul. The Indian paper included procedures, they said, that they'd already proved were impossible, and they quoted extensive data to back up their claims. The journal took the unusual step of publishing the Lundbeck challenge, a response from the Dr. Reddy's team, and a counter-response from the Lundbeck group. Most chemists who've read the papers agree that Lundbeck won their case handily, and that the Dr. Reddy's team did not come out looking very good at all.
So it wasn't a good week for the Indian chemical industry, not at all - and it wouldn't be a good one for any country that's trying to build its reputation for reliability and quality. How much this is going to hurt India's rise in the pharma world isn't clear yet. But it sure isn't going to help.
Presented by
Derek Lowe
Derek Lowe is a drug discovery chemist with 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, which is still very much his day job. He's worked on projects targeted at Alzheimer's, cancer, diabetes, infectious diseases, and other areas, but like most discovery scientists in the business, he has yet to produce a marketed drug. Explaining how and why this happens is what led to the launch of his blog, "In the Pipeline", in 2002, and the explaining continues. . .
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0.024187 | <urn:uuid:39cf5990-0d8f-4258-907f-26b9ba0d538d> | en | 0.992426 | Ilavarasan’s father suspects that his son was murdered
The father of the Dharmapuri youth E. Ilavarasan, whose body was found near a railway track at Dharmapuri on July 4, has sought a probe by a Madras High Court-constituted Special Investigation Team (SIT) into the death.
He suspected that his son was murdered.
In a writ petition filed in the High Court, T. Elango of Natham Colony, Dharmapuri district, said he belonged to the Scheduled Caste and was working as a records clerk in the Dharmapuri District Government Hospital.
His son Ilavarasan, who had been pursuing a computer science course, and Divya of Sellankottai (a caste Hindu), were in love with each other for the past three years. They got married at Tirupati in October last year.
Following this, the girl’s father, Nagarajan, died under mysterious circumstances. This led to a mob fury on November 7.
On July 4, the Ilavarasan’s body was found near the railway track at Dharmapuri. The petitioner said that in his complaint to police he had raised strong doubts that his son had been killed and sought proper investigation. On July 7, a senior police official told presspersons that the death was one of suicide.
Mr. Elango said his son had no suicidal tendency. People living near the railway track had said that some three youths indulged in a quarrel with another youth. After sometime, they heard an alarm. When people came to see what had happened, two persons ran away and a body was found near the track. Had Ilavarasan been hit by a train, his body would have been thrown several feet away. The head injury would have been caused only if some one had attacked him with an iron rod.
Hence, a fair investigation into the death was necessary. The petitioner prayed the court for a direction to transfer the case from the railway police to a court-constituted SIT which should include a team of forensic experts.
More In: Tamil Nadu | National | http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/sit-probe-sought-into-death/article4970951.ece | dclm-gs1-053820001 |
0.043543 | <urn:uuid:a04cea59-8ff3-4ca3-84ed-784c64800646> | en | 0.967587 | Nation Topics - Books and the Arts
Topic Page
Nation Topics - Books and the Arts
Arts and Entertainment Books and Ideas
News and Features
Farai Chideya, Christopher Hitchens, Barney Frank, Susan Brownmiller, Alexander Cockburn, Katha Pollitt, Slavoj Zizek and Arthur Danto on their favorite screen stars.
Cinematic activism is enjoying a comeback.
Hitler's filmmaker is Foster's fixation.
Why The Sopranos is therapeutic TV.
The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning.
--Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge
Michel Foucault would have been fascinated by late-twentieth-century presidential campaigns.
--Lynne Cheney, Telling the Truth
Since the late 1980s, when they discovered with horror certain French-derived theories of social science and literary analysis that long before then had taken root among left-leaning academics in the United States--essentially replacing Marxist dialectics as weapons of intellectual struggle, in reaction against the failure of radical politics in the 1960s--American conservative intellectuals have held these particular theories under siege. In such books as Tenured Radicals (1990) by New Criterion managing editor Roger Kimball, Illiberal Education (1991) by ex-Reagan White House domestic policy adviser (and former Dartmouth Review editor) Dinesh D'Souza and Telling the Truth (1995) by ex-National Endowment for the Humanities chairwoman and future Vice Presidential spouse Lynne Cheney, and in innumerable interviews, stump speeches and talk-radio tirades, representatives of the American conservative movement have denounced the exponents of these theories for attempting to lure students away from traditional cherished academic ideals like objectivity and truth toward a cynical, despairing view of history, politics, literature and law.
So we can assume that participants in this decade-long conservative jeremiad did not foresee that at the end of that decade their colleagues in the Republican Party would wage a campaign to win a close presidential election in ways that would seem to confirm, in virtually every respect, the validity of the theories they had been railing against--and moreover, that as part of that campaign, their allies would espouse and promote to the public the very essence of these same reviled theories. However, if we look closely at the theories in question and at the facts of Republican behavior in Florida, we will see that this is exactly what happened.
The theories in question are those derived from the works of French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Their conservative critics tend to conflate the ideas of the two men, and then to muddle things further by presenting both as synonymous with postmodernism; in fact, though they worked in distinct fields and did not even like each other (Foucault once called Derrida "the kind of philosopher who gives bullshit a bad name"), their theories do have analogous aspects that make it not difficult to confuse them.
Foucault was a philosopher of history who posited, basically, the impossibility of achieving an objective and neutral interpretation of a historical event or phenomenon. Derrida is a philosopher of literature, founder of the notorious school of deconstruction, who suggested the impossibility of achieving a stable and coherent interpretation of a literary text, or any text. In both cases, the (putative) fact of the indeterminacy of the interpretive act leads to the conclusion (or has the assumption) that whatever interpretation comes to be accepted--the official interpretation--must have been imposed by the exercise of political power (though in deconstructionism this latter point has been elaborated and emphasized much more by Derrida's American disciple Stanley Fish than by Derrida himself). It is this shared assumption that any official interpretation, whether of human behavior or the written word, has been arrived at through a process of power competition and not through the application of objective, neutral and independent analysis (because there is no such thing) that has so agitated conservative intellectuals.
In her book Telling the Truth, the wife of the man who was to become Vice President of the United States following Republican Party political and legal maneuvers in Florida uses a book that Foucault edited called I, Pierre Rivière as the starting point for a critical examination of the philosopher's ideas. Pierre Rivière was a Norman peasant boy who in 1835 brutally murdered his mother, a sister and one of his brothers with a pruning hook. Foucault and a group of his students at the Collège de France compiled a collection of documents relating to the case. What the documents revealed to Foucault was not an overarching thesis that illuminated the cause and meaning of Rivière's shocking act--not, in other words, the unifying concept or constellation of concepts that academic analysts typically grope for in their research and thinking--but, on the contrary, a welter of conflicting and irreconcilable interpretations put forth by competing, equally self-interested parties, including doctors, lawyers, judges, Rivière's remaining family members and fellow villagers, and Rivière (who wrote a memoir) himself.
In other words, as Cheney puts it, the documents were important to Foucault "not for what they tell of the murders, but for what they show about the struggle to control the interpretation of the event." Or, as she quotes Foucault as saying, the documents form "a strange contest, a confrontation, a power relation, a battle among discourses and through discourses." The reason he decided to publish the documents, Foucault said, was "to rediscover the interaction of those discourses as weapons of attack and defense in the relations of power and knowledge."
"Thus," Cheney concludes, "I, Pierre Rivière is a case study showing how different groups construct different realities, different 'regimes of truth,' in order to legitimize and protect their interests."
The Foucauldian mode of analysis does not meet with any approbation or sympathy from the Vice President's wife. In fact, she goes on to say that Foucault's ideas "were nothing less than an assault on Western Civilization. In rejecting an independent reality, an externally verifiable truth, and even reason itself, he was rejecting the foundational principles of the West." Therefore it seems a pretty good joke on her that it turns out to be the perfect mode for analyzing how Republican Party strategy in Florida was developed and implemented.
In fact, I might suggest that if Michel Foucault had not confected them already, his concepts of "discourses" and "a battle among discourses" ultimately to be decided by power would have to be invented before this signal event of American political history could be properly understood.
When former Secretary of State James Baker arrived in Florida on November 10, 2000, three days after the election, dispatched there by Lynne Cheney's husband to take charge of the Bush campaign's effort to secure the state's Electoral College slate and thereby the Oval Office, George W. Bush's initial lead of 1,784 had already been reduced by an automatic machine recount to 327, and the Gore campaign had requested manual recounts in four Democratic-leaning counties: Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia. It appeared self-evident, from the tales both of the Palm Beach butterfly ballot and of the difficulties encountered by minority voters in getting to the polls and attempting to cast their ballots, that by the intention of Florida voters who had gone to the polls, if not by the actual counted results, Gore had won the state (which, of course, is why the media had awarded it to him early on election night in the first place), and it seemed a lot more likely than not that manual recounts in counties favoring Gore, or even a full statewide manual recount, would alter the actual results in Gore's favor, despite the fact that the absentee ballots, which usually favor Republican candidates, were yet to be counted. On top of all that, Gore was leading in the national popular vote, and it came as news to many Americans that a presidential candidate could win the popular vote and lose the election. (Prior to Election Day, Bush campaign strategists, believing it likely that George Bush would win the popular vote but lose in the Electoral College, had developed a strategy to try to discredit the Electoral College, and thus perhaps gain support from Democratic electors.)
Clearly, what Secretary Baker had to do in order to insure Bush's election to the presidency was to stop the requested manual recounts, or any manual recounts, from taking place. Since Florida election law explicitly permits manual recounts, and there is a long history of them being conducted in the state for elections to offices at various levels (though not previously the presidency), including one race of Republican Senator Connie Mack, and given the situation just described above, what Baker encountered first of all in Florida was a severe public relations problem. In advance of Republican lawyers making a legal case in various courts against the manual recount process, Baker had to make a case to the American public as to why a perfectly legitimate process that had been employed many times before in Florida and elsewhere across the United States to decide close electoral contests, should not be used to resolve the closest Electoral College contest in 114 years. He needed to participate in what in Foucault's word is a discourse, by presenting an alternative to and challenging the Gore campaign and Democratic Party stance that the Florida vote was so close and so rife with proven and potential irregularities that only careful manual recounting could decide it fairly, as well as what we might call the underlying and perhaps more threatening Democratic contention that Gore had actually won the election and required only the additional step of targeted manual recounting to prove it.
The discourse (in the looser sense of a narrative) widely presented by Secretary Baker at his first press conference, on November 10, had several parts. He immediately tried to convey the sense that George W. Bush had already effectively won the election. "The American people voted on November 7. Governor George W. Bush won thirty-one states with a total of 271 electoral votes. The vote here in Florida was very close, but when it was counted, Governor Bush was the winner. Now, three days later, the vote in Florida has been recounted. Governor Bush is still the winner," he began. Wielding that assumption as his predicate, he attacked the Gore campaign for attempting to "unduly prolong the country's national presidential election," introducing the phrases "endless challenges" and "unending legal wrangling" when the election dispute was all of three days old. Then he attacked the process of recounting itself, particularly manual recounting, saying that "the more often ballots are recounted, especially by hand, the more likely it is that human errors, like lost ballots and other risks, will be introduced. This frustrates the very reason why we have moved from hand counting to machine counting." He stressed the importance of getting "some finality" to the election and accused the Gore campaign of "efforts to keep recounting, over and over, until it happens to like the result." Finally, he argued that a continued struggle over the presidential election would jeopardize America's standing in the world. By November 14, he was tying it as well to the stability of American financial markets.
Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Baker's equivalent in the Gore camp and someone no doubt unfamiliar with the writings of Foucault (and therefore not having the term discourse at his disposal), referred to Baker's argument about America's standing in the world as a "self-serving myth," and Baker did not raise this canard again. Neither did he again raise the matter of endangering US financial markets.
The next day, November 11, at a press conference announcing that the Bush campaign had filed suit in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida to block the manual recounts requested by the Gore campaign, thus becoming the first of the two campaigns to initiate "legal wrangling" (a number of private lawsuits related to the election had already been filed but none yet by the Gore campaign itself, something Baker took pains to submerge), Baker dramatically escalated his attack on manual recounting. For a number of reasons, it is worth quoting the central paragraph of his formal statement in full:
The manual vote count sought by the Gore campaign would not be more accurate than an automated count. Indeed, it would be less fair and less accurate. Human error, individual subjectivity and decisions to "determine the voter's intent" would replace precision machinery in tabulating millions of small marks and fragile hole punches. There would be countless opportunities for the ballots to be subject to a whole host of risks. The potential for mischief would exist to a far greater degree than in the automated count and recount that these very ballots have already been subjected to. It is precisely...for these reasons that our democracy over the years has moved increasingly from hand counting of votes to machine counting. Machines are neither Republicans nor Democrats--and therefore can be neither consciously nor unconsciously biased. [Emphasis added.]
Clearly, Baker and the Bush camp had decided to place a demonization of hand counting at the core of their electoral discourse. That this was a purely calculated discourse, and one in no way sincerely embraced, is child's play to demonstrate.
Manual recounting is the method used by the United Nations for settling disputed elections around the globe, and it is also countenanced by the United States when our representatives get involved in observing the resolution of electoral conflicts in other nations. A majority of American states either mandate or permit manual recounting when the differential between the machine vote totals for opposing candidates is within a certain margin. Candidate Bush, while governor, had signed just such a bill in Texas that established the same "intent of the voter" standard set by Florida. Until this particular situation in Florida arose, requiring this particular discourse, no Republican politician I am aware of had ever risen to denounce manual recounting (on the contrary, any number of Republican politicians had taken successful advantage of manual recount provisions), nor have I found any literature on the subject that appeared in the conservative journals. Moreover, the Bush camp gladly accepted the results of manual recounts in Florida when those went in their favor, as the results did in Seminole County, and they had considered plans to contest machine results in Iowa, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Oregon if things did not go their way in Florida. Manufacturers of the punch-card voting machinery used in Florida were also on record as saying that hand counting was a more accurate method of gauging votes than using their machines.
Conservative writers like Cheney, D'Souza and Kimball, who have attacked Foucault, Derrida and their allies, have done so in the first place because of these thinkers' extreme skepticism about the possibility of objectivity in human affairs. Cheney complains in Telling the Truth about "how discredited ideas like truth and objectivity have become," and accuses her ideological adversaries of aiming at "discrediting the objectivity and rationality at the heart of the scientific enterprise." (Ironically, she goes on soon after that to take Al Gore to task for criticizing, in Earth in the Balance, the cold-blooded scientism of British philosopher Francis Bacon.) D'Souza, referring to the predominantly deconstructionist English department that had been assembled by Stanley Fish at Duke University, wrote that "the radical skepticism cultivated at Duke and elsewhere is based on the rejection of the possibility of human beings rising above their circumstances" (he recounts that Fish, in an interview D'Souza conducted with him, denounced Cheney for "the error of objectivism").
The Republican campaign to demonize the hand counting of votes in Florida was nothing less than an all-out assault on this cherished ideal of the conservative movement, however, an assault as withering and uncompromising as any ever waged by Foucault or the deconstructionist movement. For what was Baker saying, in essence? That it is impossible for human beings to hand count votes accurately and honestly, citing as reasons the inevitability of "human error" (machine error is obviously to be preferred), the danger posed by "individual subjectivity," the "potential for mischief" (read, deliberate cheating by Democratic canvassing boards) and even the possibility of people being not only consciously but "unconsciously biased"; at the same time he exalted the superiority of "precise" machines over humans--even machines as grievously and laughably flawed as those that produced the "dimpled," "pregnant" and "hanging" chads.
Machines--even the worst, most malfunctioning of them--are capable of being objective, but people are not, in other words. People are incapable of "rising above their circumstances." Did Foucault ever put the case better himself? Has Stanley Fish? Has anyone?
It is safe to say that James Baker probably did not realize that he was challenging, and perhaps fatally undermining, core conservative doctrine when he advanced these arguments in his no-holds-barred effort to secure Florida's electoral votes for George W. Bush. And, for the conservative intellectual cause, there was worse to come. Soon Baker and his allies would take a further broad step down this road. They would begin impugning the fundamental American ideal of objective, neutral and fair-minded jurisprudence.
The Republican Florida discourse can be summarized even more simply and more baldly than it has been above. It was, or became: Manual recounting is untrustworthy and subject to manipulation; therefore, in attempting to force hand counting, the Democrats are trying to steal the election. (The Democratic Florida discourse was the obverse of this: Careful manual recounting is more reliable than machine counting; therefore, in attempting to stop manual recounting, the Republicans are trying to steal the election.) Such was Jim Baker and the Bush camp's basic pitch to the American public, and it became more and more explicit and fervid (or perfervid) as time went on.
Let us recall that in Foucauldian theory it is power, the possession and wielding thereof, that determines what discourse prevails in any given contest, or confrontation, or battle of discourses--and not the relative merit or cleverness of the argument. Conservative thinkers detest this part of the theory with equal or greater vehemence, because it is customarily deployed against institutions and systems they revere and are closely allied with--for instance, corporations and corporate capitalism. Cheney, struggling to explicate Foucault, complains about "the idea that reality is nothing more than a social construct, a tool that allows dominant groups to exercise power."
So, following Foucault, it would not be enough for James Baker simply to promulgate the argument that the Gore camp was trying to steal an election that neutral, precise voting machines had already indicated they had lost. To prevail, under Foucauldian theory, the GOP discourse--competing as it was with one that on the evidence and on experience was more plausible--would have to be imposed by an exertion of institutional power. And in fact an examination of the tactics used in the Republican War for Florida reveals that Republicans used, or were prepared to use, every conceivable lever of power--administrative, legislative, judicial (and not excluding extra-institutional mob rule)--in order to prevail; and that they prevailed because every single one of the controlling levers of power, from the Florida Governor's and Secretary of State's offices to the US Congress, from the Florida legislature to the US Supreme Court, was controlled by them, and was used ruthlessly.
Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, co-chair of the Bush campaign in Florida, was the point person in the Republican effort to delay and forestall completely, they hoped, any manual recounting. There are, remember, conflicting statutes regarding the deadline for manual recounting, one of which stipulates that any manual recounts not finished and submitted to the Secretary of State's office by the statutory deadline for certification, November 14, "shall be ignored," and another (chronologically more recent) indicating that they "may be ignored." And there is also an obvious conflict between this statutory deadline and the provision allowing requests for manual recounts to be made up to seventy-two hours after Election Day, since the amount of time then remaining before the deadline (three to four days, including a weekend) would not be sufficient for many Florida counties to complete such recounts. In interpreting an ambiguous and contradictory corpus of election law, Harris chose in each instance to follow a course redounding to the benefit of George W. Bush and the disadvantage of Al Gore. She refused to extend the deadline to allow time for the manual recounts requested by the Gore campaign, refused requests by Broward and Palm Beach counties to have their manual recount results included in the statewide certification after the deadline, issued a ruling questioning the legality of such recounts that temporarily delayed them from proceeding, and refused to grant an extra two hours to Palm Beach County to meet the extended deadline of November 26 mandated by the Florida Supreme Court, or to include any of the recount results the Palm Beach canvassing board had achieved so far.
After the Florida Supreme Court ruled on November 21 that hand counts must be included in the Secretary of State's certification, and extended the deadline, the Republican War for Florida shifted "to the ground," that is, to the places where actual hand counting was being done, or contemplated, by the canvassing boards. Republican tactics were summarized thus by the Los Angeles Times:
The Republicans were on the defensive, so their style was more confrontational: Challenge every disputed ballot and, if necessary, challenge the boards themselves. Build a record of inconsistent standards for court. If that leads to delays, so much the better. [Emphasis added.]
The New Republic described a Republican "ground operation" that involved, besides "now-infamous faux grassroots protests," visits to recount centers by "GOP luminaries," and that emphasized the blatant hypocrisy of the operation: It recounted Michigan Governor John Engler falling asleep during his service as an observer, and then going outside to "blast" the process, and New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman getting along "swimmingly" with the canvassing board, even complimenting them on how well they were running things, then leveling "the obligatory attacks into the microphones."
The New Republic noted a crucial difference between the Gore and Bush camps: The Gore campaign chose anonymous lawyers specializing in arcane voting law to act as their observers, whereas the Bush campaign let loose a "rotating cast of big name pols." This was because the Bush campaign was less interested in trying to insure the fairness of the recounting process than in undermining it by propagandizing their discourse about its alleged inherent unfairness.
It could be said that the Gore effort in Florida foundered in a number of ways and places, two of which were certainly Palm Beach County and Miami-Dade County. In Palm Beach County, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, "Republicans crushed the Democrats." There was more than one reason that the Palm Beach canvassing board missed the new November 26 certification deadline (when Katherine Harris certified Bush as having won by 537 votes), but here is how the Los Angeles Times summarized what happened: "Endless delays, false starts and court challenges by Republicans meant the full recount didn't begin until Friday, November 17."
In Miami-Dade, the county with the largest voting population in the state of Florida (and the largest black vote), Republicans succeeded in preventing manual recounting from taking place at all. (The Miami Herald recently reported that by its own assessment of the undercounted votes in the county, Gore would have netted another forty-nine.) Members of the Miami-Dade canvassing board, and particularly its chairman, David Leahy, had been ambivalent about doing a recount from the start. The board first decided against doing one, then reversed course. The recount started on November 20; but the very next day, the Florida Supreme Court issued a ruling setting the new certification deadline at November 26. Believing that the board did not now have the time to conduct a full recount, Leahy persuaded the other board members that they should count only the 10,750 "undervotes" (ballots cast on which the punch-card tally machines had not detected any vote for President). The board then moved upstairs to a smaller room, where there were machines that could separate out the undervotes from the rest.
There, members of the board confronted what Time called a "mob scene" and "GOP melee." A group of several dozen or more Republican protesters, most of them apparently from out of state, many of them paid Capitol Hill staffers recruited by House majority whip Tom DeLay for the Florida effort (this being one of the Republicans' faux grassroots protests), directed from a Republican electronic command center in a Winnebago outside the building and by leaders on the scene with bullhorns, engaged in "screaming...pounding on doors and...alleged physical assault on Democrats," according to Time. When Miami-Dade Democratic chairman Joe Geller emerged from the room carrying a sample ballot, he was pushed and shoved by many protesters screaming, "I'm gonna take you down!" Simultaneously, longtime GOP operative Roger Stone was overseeing phone banks urging Republicans to storm downtown Miami, and Radio Mambi, a right-wing Cuban-American radio station, was inciting the Miami community into the streets. Outside the room where the canvassing board was meeting, members of the rampaging crowd were threatening that as many as 1,000 reinforcements, including a large contingent of angry Cubans, were on the way to join them. As Time put it, "just two hours after a near riot outside the counting room, the Miami-Dade canvassing board voted to shut down the count."
Leahy later denied that the board had been intimidated into inaction by the rioters, but his claim that their bullying and threats of violence had no effect at all on the board's reversal of its previous decision hardly seems credible. In any case, saturation propaganda and near-mob rule were only two of the weapons that Republican strategists had rolled out onto the field of battle in their War for Florida. (I won't even get into the report of a mysterious state police roadblock that intimidated some on their way to the polls on Election Day.) They also had under way a lawsuit seeking to have a federal court invalidate the manual recounts on the grounds that they violated Article II, Section I of the US Constitution, which gives to the state legislatures the power to regulate presidential elections; this lawsuit and others, including arguments which would end up being decided by a 5-4 majority of the US Supreme Court, were being handled by Theodore Olson, a party lawyer who had been active in efforts to discredit President Clinton while he was in office; Olson is a past president of the Federalist Society, a conservative Republican legal organization that normally seeks to severely limit the intrusion of federal power into state matters. And just in case the Republican cause lost in both the Florida and the federal courts, the Republican-controlled legislature in Florida was prepared to intervene and certify its own competing slate of electors. In fact, on December 12, just before the US Supreme Court issued its decision and made the action moot, the Florida House of Representatives did just that. A few days before, Baker, in an interview, had refused to stipulate that the Bush camp would heed a US Supreme Court ruling that went against them rather than turn to the legislature; and on other occasions Baker had appeared to invite its intervention. Beyond that, if the matter went to Congress for final arbitration, the Republicans were more than prepared to flex their majority muscle there. Tom DeLay had circulated a memo on Capitol Hill that a Republican Congressional aide characterized as saying: "Congress can prevent Al Gore from becoming President no matter what."
A final Foucauldian note. Foucauldian theory holds that the way of the rich and powerful will prevail, the less powerful or powerless will lose out (which is partly why the theory has been embraced by the left as a successor or adjunct to Marxism, and is so abhorred by the right). Punch-card voting machines are far less effective in recording votes correctly than optical scan machines. A dimpled or pregnant chad is created when insufficient force is used on the punch tool or when plastic T-strips used in balloting are too worn or rigid to allow chads to pass through; if the ballot is improperly aligned, and only one side of the chad is punched loose, that results in a hanging chad. These problems don't exist with optically scanned ballots, and as an obvious result, only about three out of every 1,000 optically scanned ballots in the Florida election recorded no presidential vote, compared to some fifteen out of 1,000 punch-card ballots, The New York Times reported.
Optical-scan voting machines tend to be more prevalent in the wealthier, and Republican-leaning, precincts and counties of Florida, the Los Angeles Times observed, and punch-card machines more prevalent in the less wealthy and more Democratic areas, simply because the wealthier counties can better afford the more expensive optical machines (the punch-card machines are not only less effective to begin with, but many of them are also old and worn out). Looked at one way, the manual recounting efforts were an attempt to correct a discriminatory imbalance in access to electoral power between rich and poor (and black and white) in Florida; and Republican forces were determined, in every possible way, to thwart this attempt.
American conservative thinkers, as discussed, have also directed considerable intellectual ire at the deconstructionist movement. In dissecting Paul de Man, the Belgian émigré who founded American deconstructionism at Yale in the 1970s, Roger Kimball pejoratively ascribes to him "the thought that language is always so compromised by metaphor and ulterior motives that a text never means what it appears to mean." D'Souza, confronting Derrida and de Man, says that they labored "to discover ingenious, and sometimes bizarre, contradictions which render the work 'radically incoherent.'" Lumping deconstructionists together with "postmodernists, structuralists, poststructuralists, reader-response theorists," D'Souza says that "they are embarked on a shared enterprise: exposing what they say is the facade of objectivity and critical detachment in such fields as law, history, and literature."
Lynne Cheney finds the apparent migration of deconstructionist methods of textual analysis and thinking to the field of law extraordinarily disturbing. In Telling the Truth, she traces the origins (to her own satisfaction, anyway) of critical legal studies, feminist legal theory and critical race theory--academic movements that hold that the law is not in any way neutral but is crafted to favor the interests of a dominant (white, male) elite--to deconstructionism. She claims, for instance, that "one of the primary purposes of CLS [critical legal studies] is to destroy any illusions that might exist about stability and objectivity in the law by deconstructing its arguments," and goes on to assert: "The heirs of CLS, such as those in the critical race theory movement, take a giant step further. As feminists have done, critical race theorists not only attack the notion that the law is disinterested, they advocate using the law to promote their own interests." [Emphasis added.] In other words, Cheney sees the notion that legal texts have no stable, permanent, inherent meaning (a deconstructionist notion) and will therefore be interpreted according to the practical interests of those doing the interpreting, and not other criteria (a leftist political notion), as dangerously subversive of our legal system.
If the objectivity and disinterestedness of the law, however, are bedrock conservative doctrine, then James Baker, and his associates and conservative columnist sympathizers like William Safire, once again challenged and compromised that doctrine in the Florida presidential election imbroglio. The idea that law is (on the whole) neutral, objective and disinterested necessarily implies that the judges who interpret it are (on the whole) neutral, objective and disinterested; there is no conceivable syllogism whose conclusion is that our legal system is (more or less) objective and fair that can have as a premise that our judges are not and are not capable of being so. Yet this was the blatant premise of Republican commentary as an assortment of legal cases relating to the election wound their way through the Florida court system. Just as Republican operatives and commentators trashed the integrity of the county canvassing boards simply because they were under Democratic control, they also used the fact of their being Democratic appointees to attempt to discredit--often in advance--the decisions of various Florida judges, from the circuit level up to the state's Supreme Court. The clear implication was that Democratic judges would necessarily, either reflexively or by calculation, rule in favor of the Democratic candidate. They could not be trusted to be disinterested and objective.
In addition to being a monumental betrayal of the conservative movement's stated intellectual principles, this line of argument creates another problem for its Republican promoters: It tends to discredit in advance the decisions of Republican as well as Democratic judges. For if Democratic judges cannot be trusted to be evenhanded and judicious, what logic can be called forth to argue that Republican judges can be? They are also human. They are also partisan. They also owe something to the people who selected them. The theory unavoidably predicts that judges appointed by Republicans will rule, in a biased and partisan manner, against Democratic candidates and causes when occasions to do so arise.
It is doubly ironic, therefore--and doubly troublesome, one would think, for the integrity of the conservative cause--that this is exactly what happened when the case called Bush v. Gore reached the highest court in the land. On Friday, December 8, the Florida Supreme Court, in a split 4-3 decision overruling a decision by lower court judge N. Sanders Sauls, ordered an immediate manual recount of all presidential undervotes throughout the state. The next day, a 5-4 majority of the US Supreme Court (all the members of this majority conservative appointees of either Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan or George Bush) ordered the manual recount halted. This action was widely perceived at the time, by people on both sides of the battle, as a body blow to Al Gore's remaining chances of garnering Florida's electoral votes. It would inevitably push the recounting process, were it to resume, up against the December 12 "safe harbor" date (the time by which electors needed to be chosen in order to remain immune to Congressional challenge) and possibly even make it impossible to finish by December 18, the date on which the Electoral College was to cast its vote. Regarding this majority decision, issued by five judges who have pontificated widely in their writings and speeches about the virtues of "judicial restraint," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent: "To stop the counting of legal votes, the majority today departs from...venerable rules of judicial restraint that have guided the Court throughout its history."
The Court did not, as we know, allow the recounting process to resume. The following Tuesday, December 12, the same 5-4 majority ruled that manual recounting under circumstances then prevailing in Florida would be unconstitutional. In an unsigned per curiam opinion (the judges said to be the primary authors of this opinion, Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor, clearly did not want their names on it), the majority (whose members in the past have been indifferent to, if not outright scornful of, equal protection claims)--relied principally on an equal protection argument, that it would be unfair to count ballots in different counties according to different standards (e.g., to count only hanging chads in one, but also dimpled chads in another). The argument speciously ignored the fact that the Florida ballots, prior to any recount, were already counted differently, and that the very purpose of recounting was to correct for this discrepancy. It also skirted the fact that ballots are counted differently all across the United States, and that a logically consistent application of the Court's principle would invalidate the entire presidential election.
Justices David Souter and Stephen Breyer had tried, in oral argument and behind the scenes, to work out a compromise position whereby the Justices would send the case back to the Florida Supreme Court and ask it to set a uniform standard for the manual recounts. But according to the per curiam majority, it was too late for this, because there would then not be enough time to meet the "safe harbor" deadline of December 12. This argument ignored the fact that it is the very essence of a "safe harbor" clause that it allows but does not require a certain self-protective action; the Electoral Count Act of 1887 stipulates that states that send electors by then chosen according to rules in place Election Day cannot have those electors rejected by Congress, but it does not mandate that the states behave that way. The argument also glided past the fact that there is nothing in Florida election law explicitly requiring that the state abide by that date, either; the majority opinion in this regard relied entirely on a virtual aside in the first Florida Supreme Court decision, to the effect that it thought the legislature intended the state to meet the deadline; the majority could not cite any actual, germane Florida statutory law--because there isn't any.
Thus did a Republican Party strategy to delay the manual recounting of votes in Florida as long as possible finally achieve its goal by furnishing the rationale for a conservative Republican Supreme Court majority to stop the recount process there for good. Thus did a Supreme Court majority that had been pursuing an aggressive states' rights jurisprudence prior to this decision intervene in a matter of state law in a heavy-handed and unprecedented way; in a category of dispute, furthermore, whose ultimate resolution the US Constitution unambiguously gives to Congress; and in a situation, finally, that even a modicum of "judicial restraint" would have called for it to avoid. Thus did a group of conservative Republican judges--unelected judges, to use a well-worn Republican refrain--choose the Republican candidate for President over the Democratic one, rather than the voters of Florida or the American people. Thus was James Baker's discourse--his "regime of truth"--finally imposed.
A further irony here is that the behavior of the Democratic judges who were involved in the Florida presidential election struggle overwhelmingly refuted Republican predictions of reflexive ideological bias. County Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis, a Democrat, twice ruled in favor of Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the first time upholding her enforcement of the certification deadline of November 14, the second time upholding her decision to declare a winner without including any hand recounts. Circuit Judge Nikki Clark, who handled the lawsuit involving the question of whether to throw out some 15,000 absentee ballots in Seminole County because of technical violations of the law by Republican canvassing board officials and operatives, had been particularly impugned by Republican commentators. She was black, she was a former legal aid attorney, she was not only a registered Democrat but had been an aide to the state's former Democratic Governor Lawton Chiles, and she had recently been passed over for a promotion by Governor Jeb Bush. But in the event she ruled decisively against throwing the ballots out, as did her fellow Democratic judge who handled a similar case concerning absentee ballots in Martin County. The November 16 decision of the Florida Supreme Court, all Democrats except one independent, to allow manual recounts in Palm Beach County (and tacitly allow the effort already under way in Broward County to continue), was unanimous; but the December 8 decision ordering manual recounts of all the undervotes in the state was a 4-3 split, and the court unanimously upheld virtually all the lower court decisions that went against Democratic interests, with the single exception of the finding by Circuit Court Judge Sauls rejecting the Gore campaign's contest. (Sauls, advertised as a Democrat, is actually a Republican appointee who switched registration from Democratic to Republican, and has run as a "nonpartisan" candidate for re-election in Democratic Leon County.)
"What must underlie petitioners' entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed," Justice Stevens wrote in his dissent in Bush v. Gore. "Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land." [Emphasis added.] According to a January 22 article in USA Today detailing the lingering bitterness between the two opposing factions within the Supreme Court over the Bush v. Gore decision, at an election night party on November 7, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor became "visibly upset" when network anchors first awarded the state of Florida to Al Gore. The story went that her husband was heard explaining the couple wanted to retire and that his wife preferred that a GOP President appoint her successor. The paper said that people close to the Justices had confirmed the essence of the story (which was also reported in the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek). Justice O'Connor, it would seem, experienced difficulty rising above her circumstances.
I am not an adherent or admirer of the theories of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Stanley Fish or their associated movements. On the contrary. I received my education before these theories came into vogue, at a time when it was still commonly if not universally assumed on campus that the purpose of academic study was to acquire useful and verifiable knowledge in a variety of fields, not excluding literature and politics (my two fields of study). I personally believe that literary texts, while they can (and will, if they are any good) have subtleties and profundities and even contradictions that will stubbornly resist one-dimensional analysis, do have meaning--and that the better the writer, the clearer that meaning is. I believe that while the world and human nature are infinitely complex, there is, within limits, such a thing as objective truth. Since first hearing of the ideas of deconstruction and Foucault, I have counted myself among their skeptics and detractors.
So I did not undertake to write this essay to demonstrate, as it might seem, that the Republican War for Florida in all its aspects--in its ideology, in its concrete actions and, perhaps above all, in its success--lends credibility to these theories, though it has been most interesting to discover the extent to which it does. No, I am far less interested in the remarkable symmetry between what happened in Florida and the theories of Foucault and Derrida about how history and the social construction of reality work, than I am in the stunning asymmetry between Republican Party statements and actions there and the professed ideological principles of American conservatism.
In Florida, to win the presidency, the Republican Party betrayed what its intellectual spokespeople allege are among conservatism's highest ideals. To discredit the manual recounting process that they feared would result in the election of Al Gore, Republican representatives like Jim Baker propagated, in effect, the doctrine that human beings are incapable of being fair and objective in their interpretations of reality. To discredit judicial decisions that went (or simply might go) against their interests, they propagated, in effect, the doctrine that law does not have even a dimension of neutrality or disinterestedness but is from beginning to end an exercise of raw political power in disguise. Both of these are doctrines that their intellectual spokespeople like Lynne Cheney claim to oppose and despise--doctrines that according to her, are nothing less than "an assault on Western Civilization." And, to compound the moral dilemma they were creating for themselves and their movement, these representatives proceeded to conduct themselves in ways that lent support to the validity of these same cynical, anticonservative doctrines. A party that for a long time has professed adherence to principles of states' rights and judicial restraint played federal judicial intervention as its trump card to insure the election of its candidate. Will it ever be possible, in our generation anyway, to take its intellectual pronouncements seriously again?
As a proximate result of its relentless War for Florida, America's conservative party has taken control of the presidency and all the powers attendant on that office. We shall see what comes of that. But as another, perhaps longer-lasting result of that implacable war, the intellectual and moral pretensions of contemporary American conservatism lie in tatters, like so many discarded chads on the floor of a county canvassing board meeting room.
If a critic's clout can be measured by the ability to make an artist's name, the most important art critic in America today is clearly Rudolph Giuliani. Just over a year ago he excoriated the Brooklyn Museum of Art for including in its "Sensation" show Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary--the elephant-dung-decorated painting of an African BVM, which the mayor found "anti-Catholic," blasphemous and disgusting--and turned Ofili himself into a sensation overnight: One collector, I heard, complained that the media attention had driven Ofili's prices so high he couldn't afford him anymore. If I were Jake & Dinos Chapman, represented by a perverse sculpture of deformed and weirdly sexualized children, I would have been seriously peeved, and if I had been Richard Patterson, whose Blue Minotaur, a profound meditation on postmodernity and the heroic tradition, got no attention at all, I would have wept.
You'd think the mayor would have learned to stay his theocritical thunderbolts, but once again he has gone after the Brooklyn Museum for including an "anti-Catholic" work--Renee Cox's Yo Mama's Last Supper--in the new show of contemporary black photographers, "Committed to the Image." He's even suggested that what New York needs is a "decency commission," which got big laughs all around, since the mayor, a married man, is openly carrying on with his mistress, upon whom he has bestowed police protection worth some $200,000 annually at taxpayers' expense. As the whole world now knows, Yo Mama is a five-panel picture in which Cox appears naked, as Jesus, surrounded by male disciples--ten black, one white--at the Last Supper. As an artwork it's negligible, glossily produced but awkwardly composed and, to my eye, rather silly. Cox is thin and beautiful; the men, in robes and caftans, are handsome and buff--apparently the first Christians spent a lot of time in the gym and at the hair salon, getting elaborate dreadlocked coiffures. Unlike the figures in Leonardo's Last Supper, which are highly individualized and dramatically connected, the figures here are generic and stiff. My eye kept going to the limited food on offer: bowls of wax-looking fruit (did they have bananas in Old Jerusalem?), rolls, pita bread. Was the Last Supper a diet Seder?
If you want to see visually haunting work at "Committed to the Image," there's Gordon Parks, Albert Chong, Imari, Nathaniel Burkins and many others. LeRoy W. Henderson's black ballet student, dressed in white and standing in front of a damaged classical frieze, interrogates the Western tradition much more deeply than Yo Mama does. Mfon's self-portraits of her mastectomized torso, a meditation on beauty, heroism and tragedy expressed through the female body, lay bare the high-fashion hokiness of Cox's costume drama. For fan and foe alike, the interest of Yo Mama appears to be political. Cox describes her art in ideological terms ("my images demand enlightenment through an equitable realignment of our race and gender politics"), and she has been quite pungent in defending it. As with The Holy Virgin Mary, the mayor hasn't actually seen it, nor had the numerous people who sent me frothing e-mails after I defended government support for the arts on The O'Reilly Factor.
Even the New York Observer's famously conservative art critic, Hilton Kramer, who usually delights in withering descriptions of pictures he hates, apparently felt that depicting Christ as a naked black woman was so obviously, outrageously anti-Catholic he need say no more about the photo before embarking on his usual rampage. It would be interesting to know where the offense lies: Is it that Cox as Christ is naked, black or female? All three? Two out of three? If one thinks of Catholics, the people, there's nothing bigoted about any of this. (Like Ofili, Cox is Catholic--as are most perpetrators of "anti-Catholic" works.) There is no ethnic stereotyping of the sort on view, for instance, on St. Patrick's Day, when the proverbial drunkenness of the Irish is the butt of endless rude humor, especially from the Irish themselves. While we're on the subject of ethnic stereotyping, it's worth noting that in a great deal of Christian art, Jesus and the disciples are portrayed as Northern Europeans, while Judas is given the hooked nose and scraggly features of a cartoon Jew.
But if what is meant by anti-Catholic is anti-Catholic Church, why can't an artist protest its doctrines and policies? The Church is not a monastery in a wilderness, it's a powerful earthly institution that uses all the tools of modern politics to make social policy conform to its theology--and not just for Catholics, for everyone. It has to expect to take its knocks in the public arena. A church that has a 2,000-year tradition of disdain for women's bodies--documented most recently by Garry Wills (a Catholic) in his splendid polemic Papal Sin--and that still bars women from the priesthood because Jesus was a man can't really be surprised if a twenty-first-century woman wonders what would be different if Jesus had been female, and flaunts that female body. And a church with a long history of racism--no worse than other mainstream American religions but certainly no better--can't expect the topic to be banned from discussion forever.
At the Brooklyn Museum, Yo Mama's Last Supper is in a separate room with its own security guard. On Sunday afternoon, it attracted blacks, whites, Asians, parents with small children, older women in groups, dating couples, students taking notes--le tout Brooklyn, which is turning out in large numbers for the show. I asked one black woman, who described herself as a Christian, what the picture meant to her. "It shows Life as a woman," she said. "It's beautiful." Her friend, who said he was a Muslim, liked the picture too.
If only I could get the Mayor to review my book!
* * *
Show George W. Bush you support RU-486. Make a donation in W.'s name to the Concord Feminist Health Center (38 South Main Street, Concord, NH 03301) and help it buy the ultrasound machine this method requires. The center will send the President a card to let him know you were thinking of him when you wrote your check.
The recording
industry has been celebrating the supposed defeat of Napster. The
Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has affirmed the grant of a
preliminary injunction that may well have the effect of closing the
service down completely and ending the commercial existence of
Napster's parent (that is, unless the record companies agree to an
implausible deal Napster has proposed). But despite appearances, what
has happened, far from being a victory, is the beginning of the
industry's end. Even for those who have no particular stake in the
sharing of music on the web, there's value in understanding why the
"victory"over Napster is actually a profound and irreversible
calamity for the record companies. What is now happening to music
will soon be happening to many other forms of "content" in the
information society. The Napster case has much to teach us about the
collapse of publishers generally, and about the liberative
possibilities of the decay of the cultural oligopolies that dominated
the second half of the twentieth century.
The shuttering of
Napster will not achieve the music industry's goals because the
technology of music-sharing no longer requires the centralized
registry of music offered for sharing among the network's listeners
that Napster provided. Freely available software called OpenNap
allows any computer in the world to perform the task of facilitating
sharing; it is already widely used. Napster itself--as it kept
pointing out to increasingly unsympathetic courts--maintained no
inventory of music: It simply allowed listeners to find out what
other listeners were offering to share. Almost all the various
sharing programs in existence can switch from official Napster to
other sharing facilitators with a single click. And when they move,
the music moves with them. Now, in the publicity barrage surrounding
the decision, 60 million Napster users will find out about OpenNap,
which cannot be sued or prohibited because, as free software, no one
controls its distribution and any lawsuits would have to be brought
against all its users worldwide. Suddenly, instead of a problem posed
by one commercial entity that can be closed down or acquired, the
industry will be facing the same technical threat, with no one to sue
but its own customers. No business can survive by suing or harassing
its own market.
The music industry (by which we mean the
five companies that supply about 90 percent of the world's popular
music) is dying not because of Napster but because of an underlying
economic truth. In the world of digital products that can be copied
and moved at no cost, traditional distribution structures, which
depend on the ownership of the content or of the right to distribute,
are fatally inefficient. As John Guare's famous play has drummed into
all our minds, everyone in society is divided from everyone else by
six degrees of separation. The most efficient distribution system in
the world is to let everyone give music to whoever they know would
like it. When music has passed through six hands under the current
distribution system, it hasn't even reached the store. When it has
passed through six hands in a system that doesn't require the
distributor to buy the right to pass it along, it has already reached
several million listeners.
This increase in efficiency
means that composers, songwriters and performers have everything to
gain from making use of the system of unowned or anarchistic
distribution, provided that each listener at the end of the chain
still knows how to pay the artist and feels under some obligation to
do so, or will buy something else--a concert ticket, a T-shirt, a
poster--as a result of having received the music for free. Hundreds
of potential "business models" remain to be explored once the
proprietary distributor has disappeared, no one of which will be
perfect for all artistic producers but all of which will be the
subject of experiment in decades to come, once the dinosaurs are
No doubt there will be some immediate pain that will
be felt by artists rather than the shareholders of music
conglomerates. The greatest of celebrity musicians will do fine under
any system, while those who are currently waiting on tables or
driving a cab to support themselves have nothing to lose. For the
signed recording artists just barely making it, on the other hand,
the changes are of legitimate concern. But musicians as a whole stand
to gain far more than they lose. Their wholesale defection from the
existing distribution system is about to begin, leaving the music
industry--like manuscript illuminators, piano-roll manufacturers and
letterpress printers--a quaint and diminutive relic of a passé
The industry's giants won't disappear overnight,
or perhaps at all. But because their role as owner-distributors makes
no economic sense, they will have to become suppliers of services in
the production and promotion of music. Advertising agencies,
production services consultants, packagers--they will be anything but
owners of the music they market to the world.
What is most
important about this phenomenon is that it applies to everything that
can be distributed as a stream of digital bits by the simple human
mechanism of passing it along. The result will be more music, poetry,
photography and journalism available to a far wider audience. Artists
will see a whole new world of readers, listeners and viewers; though
each audience member will be paying less, the artist won't have to
take the small end of a split determined by the distribution
oligarchs who have cheated and swindled them ever since Edison. For
those who worry about the cultural, economic and political power of
the global media companies, the dreamed-of revolution is at hand. The
industry may right now be making a joyful noise unto the Lord, but it
is we, not they, who are about to enter the promised land.
Imagine Madison Square Garden brimming over with 18,000 laughing and ebullient women of every size, shape, age and color, along with their male friends, ditto. Imagine that in that immense space, usually packed with hooting sports fans, these women are watching Oprah, Queen Latifah, Claire Danes, Swoosie Kurtz, Kathleen Chalfant, Julie Kavner (voice of Marge Simpson), Rosie Perez, Donna Hanover (soon-to-be-ex-wife of New York's bigamous mayor) and sixty-odd other A-list divas put on a gala production of The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler's theater piece about women and their mimis, totos, split knishes, Gladys Siegelmans, pussycats, poonanis and twats. Imagine that this extravaganza is part of a huge $2 million fundraising effort for V-Day, the antiviolence project that grew out of the show and that gives money to groups fighting violence against women around the world. That was what happened on February 10, with more donations and more performances to come as the play is produced by students at some 250 colleges around the country, from Adelphi on Long Island--where it was completely sold out and where, sources assure me, the v-word retains every bit of its shock value--to Yale.
And they keep saying feminism is dead.
The Vagina Monologues, in fact, was singled out in Time's 1998 cover story "Is Feminism Dead?" as proof that the movement had degenerated into self-indulgent sex chat. (This was a new departure for the press, which usually dismisses the movement as humorless, frumpish and puritanical.) In her Village Voice report on the gala, Sharon Lerner, a terrific feminist journalist, is unhappy that the actresses featured at the Garden event prefer the v-word to the f-word. ("Violence against women is a feminist issue?" participant Isabella Rossellini asks her. "I don't think it is." This from the creator of a new perfume called "Manifesto"!) Women's rights aren't what one associates with postfeminist icons like Glenn Close, whose most indelible screen role was as the bunny-boiling man-stalker in Fatal Attraction, or Calista Flockhart, television's dithery microskirted lawyerette Ally McBeal. Still, aren't we glad that Jane Fonda, who performed the childbirth monologue, has given up exercise mania and husband-worship and is donating $1 million to V-Day? Better late than never, I say.
At the risk of sounding rather giddy myself--I'm writing this on Valentine's Day--I'd argue that the implied contradiction between serious business (daycare, abortion, equal pay) and sex is way overdrawn. Sexual self-expression--that's self-indulgent sex chat to all you old Bolsheviks out there--was a crucial theme of the modern women's movement from the start. Naturally so: How can you see yourself as an active subject, the heroine of your own life, if you think you're an inferior being housed in a shameful, smelly body that might give pleasure to others, but not to you? The personal is political, remember that?
The Vagina Monologues may not be great literature--on the page it's a bit thin, and the different voices tend to run together into EveEnslerspeak about seashells and flowers and other lovely bits of nature. But as a performance piece it's fantastic: a cabaret floor show by turns hilarious, brassy, lyrical, poignant, charming, romantic, tragic, vulgar, sentimental, raunchy and exhilarating. In "The Flood," an old woman says she thinks of her "down there" as a cellar full of dead animals, and tells of the story of her one passionate kiss and her dream of Burt Reynolds swimming in her embarrassing "flood" of sexual wetness. A prim, wryly clever woman in "The Vagina Workshop" learns how to give herself orgasms at one of Betty Dodson's famous masturbation classes. At the Garden, Ensler led the cast in a chorus of orgasmic moans, and Close got the braver members of the audience to chant "Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!" at the climax of a poetic monologue meant to redeem and reclaim the dirtiest of all dirty words.
How anyone could find The Vagina Monologues antimale or pornographic is beyond me--it's a veritable ode to warm, quirky, affectionate, friendly, passionate sex. The only enemies are misogyny, sexual shame and sexual violence, and violence is construed fairly literally: A poor black child is raped by her father's drunken friend; a Bosnian girl is sexually tortured by Serbian paramilitaries. None of your ambiguous was-it-rape? scenarios here. Oprah performed a new monologue, "Under the Burqa," about the horrors of life for Afghan women under Taliban rule, followed by Zoya--a young representative of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)--who gave a heartbreaking, defiant speech. Three African women spoke against female genital mutilation and described ongoing efforts to replace cutting with new coming-of-age rituals, "circumcision by words."
I hadn't particularly wanted to see The Vagina Monologues. I assumed that it would be earnest and didactic--or maybe silly, or exploitative, or crude, a sort of Oh! Calcutta! for women. But I was elated by it. Besides being a wonderful night at the theater, it reminded me that after all the feminist debates (and splits), and all the books and the Theory and the theories, in the real world there are still such people as women, who share a common biology and much else besides. And the power of feminism, whether or not it goes by that name, still resides in its capacity to transform women's consciousness at the deepest possible level: That's why Betty Friedan called her collection of letters from women not It Got Me a Raise (or a daycare center, or an abortion) but It Changed My Life. Sisterhood-is-powerful feminism may feel out of date to the professoriat, but there's a lot of new music still to be played on those old bones.
Besides, if feminists don't talk about sex in a fun, accessible, inspiring, nonpuritanical way, who will?
* * *
Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics and Culture, a collection of columns originally published in this space, is just out from Modern Library as a paperback original. It has a very pretty cover and a never-before-published introductory essay, and contains most of the columns I still agree with, and one or two about which I have my doubts.
December 5, 2014
December 3, 2014
December 2, 2014
November 21, 2014
November 17, 2014
November 14, 2014
November 12, 2014
Need some reading suggestions? See below for recommended reads from our brilliant group of fall interns:
November 12, 2014
The best way to support the troops is to make every effort to keep them out of harm's way.
November 10, 2014
“Socialism is inseparable from democracy,” The Nation wrote in its 1989 editorial.
November 10, 2014 | http://www.thenation.com/node/153/books-and-the-arts?page=366%2C8 | dclm-gs1-053840001 |
0.028414 | <urn:uuid:cbc7d604-78a2-4ca7-90ce-7a4f8a866dcd> | en | 0.924805 | Arts and Culture
The Temples of Cambodia: Discover Ancient Angkor
Filed Under: Asia, Cambodia, Landmark
Angkor is a region in Cambodia that served as the seat of the Khmer Empire, the largest empire of Southeast Asia that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries. This ancient and revered Cambodian province is home to astonishing and enduring architectural evidence of the Khmer Empire's Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist beliefs; the temples of Angkor are awe-inspiring reminders of what was the largest preindustrial urban center in the world, larger than modern day New York.
Angkor Wat
While there are over 100 stone temples scattered throughout the Angkor region, the 5 listed here are the definite must-sees. Unquestionably topping this list is the temple at Angkor Wat, built by Suryavaram II to honor the Hindu god Vishnu. The enormous temple consists of 5 concentric rectangular walls and moats, symbolizing a cosmic chain of mountains and ocean. Angkor Wat is the best-preserved temple in Angkor; it appears on the country's national flag and is the prime attraction for tourists.
The construction of Angkor Wat lasted at least 37 years. The main tower of the central temple represents the mountain Meru, the center of the Hindu and Buddhist universe. When touring Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples and religious monuments, it's also possible to visit nearby Siem Reap, a small colonial town just north of Southeast Asia's largest lake, Tonle Sap. If you'd like to stay a day or 2 to bask in the Angkor's spiritual sanctity, Siem Reap has many hotels offering reasonable prices.
Banteay Srei
Banteay Srei, or the Temple of Women, has been called a jewel of Khmer art. Its great reliefs depict many mythological Hindu events including the duel between the monkey princes, Bali and Sugreeva; Narasimha's slaying of the demon Hiranyakasipu; and the burning of Khandava Forest.
Banteay Srei is unique among Angkor's noble temples because it was built by a wealthy courtier and scholar who served as an advisor to the Cambodian king, and not the monarch himself. Banteay Srei was dedicated to the Hindu god, Siva in 967; the temple is therefore considerably older than the other Angkor sites.
The grounds, buildings and layout at Banteay Srei are small, contrasting with the monumental scale of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. While the buildings may be compact, they don't feel crowded, and the structural layout enhances the narrative relief carvings covering Banteay Srei's red sandstone walls and passageways.
Preah Khan
Preah Khan is another of King Jayavarman's creations and an inscription on the temple suggests he built it on the site where he defeated invaders from Champa, a region that is now Southern Vietnam. The successive rectangular galleries surrounding the Buddhist sanctuary have largely been left untouched.
This large complex not only functioned as a monastic house of worship, it was also a university including elements of Buddhist, Vaishnava and Shaiva worship. When visiting this hallowed ground, make sure to explore the Prasat Preah Stung, a central tower with 4 ornate Bayon-like carvings. Once inside, meander through the galleries and 2 libraries.
This is another Angkor site you can explore while staying in Siem Reap. The Preah Khan hotel takes its name from the site and offers guests modern luxuries near this enduring cultural landmark.
Ta Prohm
The Khmer monarch completed the construction of this royal monastery in the 12th century and dedicated the grounds both to his mother and the goddess of wisdom, Prajnaparamita. The central stone pillar, called a foundational stele, chronicles the dedication and urges successors to protect the revered site.
The location of the temple, set amidst the lush Cambodian jungle, makes it extremely popular for tourists. Ta Prohm was home to more than 12,500 people, and the temple served as a place of worship for thousands of souls in surrounding villages. Now this peaceful town stands as a reminder of Cambodia's early spirituality and religious beliefs.
Another of Angkor's sacred temple sites is Bayon is a walled capital city known especially for its jungle of face towers. These towers bear massive stone carvings depicting the face of the king and a message of spiritual worship. This is a place where the teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism exist in a unique spiritual balance, most visibly evident in the massive stone faces carved into Bayon's many towers.
To explore these sacred Cambodian sites, it's possible to book a temple tour. History and spirituality combine in this ancient land where mythology and religion share the same stone face, and cultural customs wait to be discovered at every turn.
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0.097533 | <urn:uuid:97e767e7-1fc9-4d52-9ae2-af4ee1037db0> | en | 0.966052 | The Blog
Horse Sense
The debate in Washington state about bestiality is actually a fight over human exceptionalism.
12:00 AM, Aug 31, 2005 • By WESLEY J. SMITH
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A WASHINGTON MAN died recently from internal injuries he sustained while having sex with a horse. After his body was dropped off at a hospital, police discovered that out-of-towners had rented a rural farm and then made local animals available for use in bestiality. Yes, video taping was involved.
This disgusting story should have had a quick ending with the arrests of the operators of the human/animal sex farm and their swift punishment. However, police discovered that there is no law against bestiality in Washington. So, even though a man is dead from a very intimate injury, even though police confiscated hundreds of graphic videotapes of people having sex with animals, apparently nothing is to be done about it.
Enter Republican state Senator Pam Roach, who announced plans to introduce legislation in the next legislative session to make it a felony in Washington to commit bestiality. "I found out that Washington is one of the few states in the country that doesn't outlaw this activity," she told me. "This has made Washington a Mecca for bestiality. People know it isn't against the law and so they come from other states to have sex with animals."
Roach told me she is receiving cooperation from the Democratic leaders of the legislature, but to her surprise, the proposed bill has stirred some controversy. The most prominent voice so far against outlawing bestiality is the Seattle Post Intelligencer's liberal columnist, Robert L. Jamieson Jr. In a July 23 column, Jamieson ridiculed Roach's proposal, writing that practices such as masturbation, oral sex, and gay sex were once considered wrong, too, and so why worry now about human/animal copulation if the animal isn't injured? "Human sex with animals remains a towering taboo, booty and the beast. But as Princeton University philosopher Peter Singer, the father of the animal rights movement, has put it, 'Sex with animals does not always involve cruelty.'"
In a follow-up column, Jamieson accused Roach of engaging in "knee-jerk lawmaking and moral hysteria" in order to pander politically to "animal-loving voters, of which there are many." Responding to Roach's condemnation of the bestiality videotapes found at the sex farm as "pornography with animals," Jamieson countered, "Isn't pornography of the human variety legal so long as children aren't involved?" As to Roach's argument that having sex with animals is wrong because they can't consent to sex, Jamieson noted that animals also don't consent to "being ground into all-beef patties," and accused Roach of "taking animal love to extremes," for seeking to outlaw bestiality.
BOTH JAMIESON AND ROACH (and a very mild Post Intelligencer editorial supporting Roach) miss the true nub of what makes this repugnant issue so important. Bestiality is so very wrong not only because using animals sexually is abusive, but because such behavior is profoundly degrading and utterly subversive to the crucial understanding that human beings are unique, special, and of the highest moral worth in the known universe--a concept known as "human exceptionalism."
And this brings us back to Peter Singer, the world's most famous bioethicist and philosopher, who clearly does understand that the crucial moral issue of our time is whether human life has intrinsic value simply--merely--because it is human. Indeed, Singer is an avowed enemy of human exceptionalism.
Thus, it is no surprise that when he was asked in 2000 to review a book extolling bestiality for an online pornography magazine, he leaped at the chance to bestow his approval. In "Heavy Petting" Singer, in often vulgar language, asserted that since both humans and animals copulate and both have the same sex organs, the continuing "taboo" against bestiality merely reflects "our desire to differentiate ourselves, erotically and in every other way, from animals."
In support of his thesis that this distinction is irrational, Singer writes of attending a conference and speaking to a woman who had been sexually assaulted by an orangutan while visiting an animal rehabilitation center. When she called out for help, the operator of the facility, a woman named Birute Galdikas, told the distraught woman not to worry because orangutans are not well endowed. (The animal lost interest before completing the assault.)
This lack of concern deeply impressed Singer. "Galdikas understands very well that we are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes. This does not make sex across the species barrier normal, or natural, whatever those much-misused words may mean, but it does imply that it ceases to be an offense to our status and dignity as human beings." In other words, bestiality is fine, for those who are attracted to that sort of thing, because it merely constitutes two animals rubbing body parts. | http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/985pgwjh.asp | dclm-gs1-053970001 |
0.256311 | <urn:uuid:315e4c78-4b15-4a04-99f7-710cca9e0c3f> | en | 0.937996 | Alt namesBéninsource: Getty Vocabulary Program
Dahomeysource: Family History Library Catalog
French West Africasource: Family History Library Catalog
Republic of Beninsource: Wikipedia
Coordinates9.5°N 2.25°E
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
source: Family History Library Catalog
the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia
Benin (formerly Dahomey), officially the Republic of Benin, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Togo to the west, by Nigeria to the east and by Burkina Faso and Niger to the north. A majority of the population live on its small southern coastline on the Bight of Benin, part of the Gulf of Guinea in the northernmost tropical portion of the Atlantic Ocean. The capital of Benin is Porto-Novo, but the seat of government is in Cotonou, the country's largest city and economic capital. Benin covers an area of approximately 115,000 square kilometers (42,000 sq mi), with a population of approximately 9.98 million. Benin is a tropical, sub-Saharan nation, highly dependent on agriculture, with substantial employment and income arising from subsistence farming.
The official language of Benin is French. However, indigenous languages such as Fon and Yoruba are commonly spoken. The largest religious group in Benin is Roman Catholicism, followed closely by Islam, Vodun and Protestantism. Benin is a member of the United Nations, the African Union, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, South Atlantic Peace and Cooperation Zone, La Francophonie, the Community of Sahel-Saharan States, the African Petroleum Producers Association and the Niger Basin Authority.
From the 17th to the 19th century, the main political entities in the area were the Kingdom of Dahomey along with the city-state of Porto-Novo and a large area with many different tribes to the north. This region was referred to as the Slave Coast from as early as the 17th century due to the large number of slaves shipped to the New World during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. After slavery was abolished, France took over the country and renamed it French Dahomey. In 1960, Dahomey gained full independence from France, and had a tumultuous period with many different democratic governments, many military coups and military governments.
A Marxist-Leninist state called the People's Republic of Benin existed between 1972 and 1990. In 1991, it was replaced by the current multi-party Republic of Benin.
How places in Benin are organized
All places in Benin
Further information on historical place organization in Benin
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This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Benin. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. | http://www.werelate.org/wiki/Place:Benin | dclm-gs1-053990001 |
0.139769 | <urn:uuid:a1cc2330-3c40-4d72-89ab-9de7ebb50624> | en | 0.930976 | Quest:You Scream, I Scream... (Horde)
102,281pages on
this wiki
Revision as of 15:02, May 2, 2011 by Raylan13 (Talk | contribs)
Children's Week icon
Horde 32 You Scream, I Scream...
StartOrcish Orphan
EndOrcish Orphan
Requires Level 10
CategoryChildren's Week
Experience850 XP
or 20Silver25Copper at Level 90
Reputation+250 Horde
Prerequisites Edit
Must complete:
Objectives Edit
Purchase ice cream at Cone of Cold and then share it with your orphan.
• Take your orphan out for ice cream.
Provided item:
Description Edit
There's a brand new ice cream shop[38, 87] in Orgrimmar, and it's not just any old ice cream either. This ice cream is made by a crazy goblin mage! You don't think it's going to disappear if I don't finish it in fifteen minutes, do you?
I bet it tastes really good. Let's go try it!
I heard some of the other kids talking about it, and they were saying the store is called the Cone of Cold and it's in the southern part of the Goblin Slums.
Orcish Orphan says: Wow, I never knew mages could make ice cream. That was good!
Orcish Orphan says: When I grow up, I want to put strange things together too!
Orcish Orphan says: What about... putting soap on an axe? Then it would have a handle and everything!
Orcish Orphan says: And when the soap's gone, you'd have a new axe!
Quest Chain Edit
1. Official horde mini-icon [10-80] Children's Week
2. Official horde mini-icon [10-80] A Warden of the Horde
Patch changesEdit
Cataclysm-Logo-Small Patch 4.1.0 (26-Apr-2011): Added.
External linksEdit
Around Wikia's network
Random Wiki | http://www.wowwiki.com/Quest:You_Scream,_I_Scream..._(Horde)?oldid=2494766 | dclm-gs1-054010001 |
0.025746 | <urn:uuid:0ac2b354-897f-49dd-824d-559ec20db807> | en | 0.915314 | update firmware, unbootable
1. eop
eop New Member
hi. yesterday i rooted my hero to be able to run link2sd. that worked without problems. after that i went to menu-setting-about phone and firmware upgrade. after it upgraded i cant start my phone, it stops at "hero". i've trid home+back+onbutton. i've removed sd card and sim card. if i start hboot it says S=on. can i get security off without having to start the phone?
2. Slug
Slug Check six! Moderator
See this thread. Note the correct name required for the update file as confirmed by Xyro.... HEROIMG.ZIP.
You can only get S-OFF on the Hero by flashing an engineering bootloader, and it's not something that's recommended due to the risk of a "bricking" if the flash goes wrong.
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getting a boost from china chinese buyers are grabbing holmes a california and nevada by foreclosed homes but some are luxury residences. chinese buyers accounted for 74 billion the sheer the second largest foreign buyer of loathsome the country. the mexico plan from the peanut butter recall has been shut down. the breeding ground from seven outbreak the fda noted there was a history of violations that led to the decision and" end quote. vacation index brings good news. prices are up 1.1%. there of 20% from one year-ago. las vegas is up but they're still below the 2000 levels. he would be fired with any other line of business. why is two 1/2 minstar still on the show why he called it fills? dennis: the winners and losers and how you can profit. >> we have some names moving on the nasdaq. [ male announcer ] you are a business pro. governor of getting it done. you know h to dance... with a deadline. and you...rent from national. because only national lets you choose any c in the aisle... and go. you can even take a full-size or above, and still pay the mid-size price. this is awesome. [ mal
testifying. let's talk with republican congressman joe peck of nevada, a member of the house intelligence committee. representative peck, thank you. what did general petraeus tell your committee this morning? >> well, he went over the points that he brought out in the hearing when he came before us september 14th. and talked to us about how that intelligence had evolved over time and where they are today with the understanding of what happened in benghazi and really the only thing that significantly changed was the fact we now know there was no spontaneous protest taking place outside of the embassy facility, the compound prior to the attack on the embassy. and we also have a better understanding of what groups might have been involved in perpetrating that deadly attack. >> do we know for sure that there was no spontaneous or are you just gath thaerg frering th looking at the video or from the testimony? >> no, we have been told that the intelligence community has now assessed that there was no spontaneous attack outside of the embassy prior to the attack on the facility. >> does this cha
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English 47
that we can get this done is because the reality is it is not rocket science -- we can get it done. mr. chairman, whether it is our current chairman, john larson, or our future chairman -- whoever gets to lead this caucus knows we have got an enthusiastic group of committed representatives of this country ready to get the job done. >> questions? >> congressman, if republicans are willing to step up and raise revenue, will house democrats provide votes to cut benefits to programs like medicare and medicaid? >> let me say that clearly, as gene sperling was sent today, the president is willing to look at what they're going to put forward in terms of revenues, but that has not been forthcoming, shall we say. with the president has been very clear is in terms of the impact on beneficiaries and beneficiaries are the people who are the recipients of medicaid, medicare, and social security -- we believe at most would agree that social security is not responsible for the deficit and should not be on at the table for discussion. with regard to the so-called entitlements -- i come from hartford,
graduate with skills that we need. people around the world with accredited degrees in science and math. get a green card and come to the u.s. of a. >> don't get too excited. the stem jobs act would give visas to 55,000 immigrant who have advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering or math, stem. the problem with the bill, only 27 democrats supported, is that it would eliminate 55,000 visas from the diversity visa program. the diversity visa program is a lottery system to provide immigrants from areas with low immigration rates with the clans it come to america. democratic congresswoman of california represents silicon valley. they are the prime beneficiary, arguably, of more high skilled immigration. she is not a fan of this bill. she said this give and take approach of immigration is like a grover norquist style pledge. signing with anti-immigrant groups to never create a green card immigrant without taking one away from someone else. it isn't likely to pass in the senate since charles schumer and chris coons added a stem bill without the visa program. the obama administration sai
national intelligence community. in 2011, the defense science board provided the secretary of defense guidance for a government-wide approach to preparing for the effects of climate change, concluding that -- and i quote -- "climate change will only grow in concern for the united states and its security interests." the 2010 quadrennial defense review by the department of defense noted khroeufp as one of the things -- climate change as one of the things that -- quote -- "will play important roles in the future security environment." and the white house's 2010 national security strategy stated -- quote -- "climate change threatens the security of regions and the health and safety of the american people." going back to 2008, there thomas fingar, then deputy chair for analysis said -- and i quote -- "global climate change will have wide-ranging implications for u.s. national security interests for the next couple of years." in a report requested by the c.i.a., the national research council wrote this year that -- quote -- "while climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may act as
can still invest in things like education, and training and science and research research. i know some of this may sound familiar to you because we talked a lot about this during campaign. this shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. this was a major debate in the presidential campaign and in congressional campaigns all across the country, and a clear majority of americans, not just democrats, but also a lot of republicans and a lot of independents agreed we should have a balanced approach to deficit reduction that doesn't hurt the economy and doesn't hurt middle class families. and i'd glass to see if you've been reading the papers lately that more and more republicans in congress seem to be agreeing with this idea that we should have a balanced approach. so, if both parties agree we should not raise taxes on middle class families, let's begin our work with where we agree. the senate has already passed a bill that keeps income taxes from going up on middle class families. democrats in the house are ready to vote for that same bill today. if we can get a few house republicans to agree as w
degree who we want to keep here in science, technology, engineering, and math. in many cases, if they're not allowed to stay, they will have to return to other countries and the jobs will follow them, costing our country jobs. choose between them and allowing people here from countries other than mexico, india, and china. some of whom are high skilled, some of whom are low skilled, divorce group across the board and looking back at many of our own forebears, certainly mine mitigating circumstance family came to this country in the late 19th century and early 20th century, 1890's, 1905. they didn't have master's degrees they zrntpampede's they didn't have college degrees. and that's the case for many of our forebears. and here today their great grandson sits as a member of congress. and had a program then existed whereby they could arrive nellliss island and be here, i wouldn't be here today my father has a ph.d. but that's a legacy of his hardworking immigrant grandparents who came to this country without a college degree. and in many cases without something that's the equivalent of e
christianson who taught political science at san jose state for 40 years and has literally written textbooks on local government. he said california might actually get away with the land grab. >> historically, it has always been recognized that the states are superior in authority to local government. so this i think would be the state's argument on the retro activity issue. we're the boss. we can do this. >> reporter: unless the property under review fits one of three criteria. the land was transferred before january 1, 2011. was contractually committed to a third party before the law was signed. or programs more pertinently, qualifies as having a clear government purpose. what exactly is a clear government purpose? according to hd palmer of the department of finance, it is defined by state law in broad terms as, quote, assets such as roads, school buildings, parks, police, fire stations, libraries, and local agency administrative buildings. omitted in that list. no mention of convention centers or theme parks. >> you cannot justify this. some thing are right and some are wrong and this is
provide green cards pr those skilled in science and technology and math. foreign internationals who have earned degrees from an american university can stay here and use their skills to improve the american workforce. sounds like a great idea, right? sure, but it does so at the expense of other immigrants. and as "the new york times" points out, it eliminates another visa category entirely. the visas set aside for people from countries with low immigration rates to the united states. so the 55,000 stem visas would come at the expense of 55,000 diversity visas. that's a zero sum gain. the elimination of diversity visas would primary affect immigrants from african countries. but despite the discriminatory nature of the bill, republicans insist it's going to create jobs and they are calling out the democrats opposition to the legislation. >> once again, the house is taking the lead on legislation that is going to help create jo jobs. >> we believe as this was the first step forward in terms of trying to address the need for modernization in our visa laws. >> the democrats had two years to d
performance of 15-year-olds in reading and math and science every three years, the united states students ranked working been reading 25th in math and 17th in science. the lack of preparedness poses stress on five national security funds. our economic growth and competitiveness and physical safety and intellectual property and u.s. global awareness and cohesion, please join me in welcoming the panelists to discuss this disturbing an important report. [applause] >> thank you. >> you can sit next to me. [applause] e-mail welcome to this evening in the broadcast of morning joe. the energy in this room is a real testament of two things. one is how this issue of education reform has been a combination of talent that we see in this room and how it has coalesced around this issue of new technologies. that there really is a sense that the moment has arrived and the other is jeb bush. [applause] >> i'm a great believer that two things matter. one is ideas and the other is people. that is the real driver of change. it is the driver of history. this includes the coming together of a person with real
is for science and research. the u.s. condemns the launch saying it is the same technology that would be used to launch a ballistic missile. >>> alan simpson is cutting loose gangnam style. >> stop tweeting your breakfast. >> yes, the republican from wyoming wants to convince people to get involved with lowering the national debt. he asks young americans to use social media to sign a petition. i think that's going to be a successful marketing campaign. >> he's moving like gangnam style. >> soon you'll be doing it. >> a billion people will have seen that youtube video. >>> two prominent members of congress are standing by to join us live. they're getting ready to debate how to break the stalemate in the fiscal cliff negotiations. whether republicans should declare victory on taxes and move on. or are we all going over the fiscal cliff? let's see if we can work out a deal right here in the situation room. but it fits in your pocket. now tell the world daniel... of pepto-bismol to-go. at chevy's year-end event, we have 11 vehicles that offer an epa-estimated 30 mpg highway or better. yeah? hey.
for consumers of pork. justified fears or junk science. bill: we'll see you then. a red kettle controversy, what is the problem with the salvation army? are you receiving a payout from a legal settlement or annuity over 10 or even 20 years? call imperial structured settlements. the experts at imperial can convert your long-term payout into a lump sum of cash today. campbell's has 24 new soups that will make it drop over, and over again. ♪ from jammin' jerk chicken, to creamy gouda bisque. see what's new from campbell's. it's amazing what soup can do. martha: this is a crazy story, a shooting over a cellphone video in southern california. oakland police say this a couple recorded a car driving erratic lee and the driver noticed that he was being filmed, on the cellphone an pulled up alongside and pointed a gun and demanded the video back. the couple drove away, but the suspects fold and one of the gunmen then gotten to the victim's car and fought with the husband who managed to kick the guy out but not before the gunman fired a shot. nobody was hit thank goodness but boy this is -- there is a l
and science you will eventually lose the innovation raise. you are not going to be able to educate people to the jobs that are available, those jobs will go elsewhere. our global growth and competitiveness and that in some ways is the most obvious link. we are not preparing people for the work place, the workplace of the twenty-first century, we are not going to longer be the world's most competitive and innovative economy. more surprising for me was brought to us by the former chief, former secretary of the army who talked about the problems of the education system and the relationships of the armed forces, the inability of fully 70% of americans actually qualify for service in the armed forces ought to be a red flag for anyone. there are other reasons for-obesity, a fair amount of it is people can't pass the basic skills tests. just imagine that. a country developed country, the most powerful country in the world, to get into the military. the analog for that is secretary of state, realizing how few people start to learn foreign languagess in a timely fashion, how many people can actual
stanford in computer sciences. i started asking him what he studied behind computer issues that i was shocked he could graduate from this amazing university where condi teaches and he had when economics course or history course. we basically said we're going to start producing at the castle curricular material. but produce simulations and modules afford that high schools and colleges can use to close this gap between what it is kids know and what it is a need to know in order to be ready for this world to like it or not is going to fundamentally affect. >> do come from an educational background in foreign policy and security background. what is your sense to fix the problem? >> maybe i will start and then pass it to someone. i come from a national security background, cc is a product of the educational system, if you will, gives me a perspective on what it is we need to achieve in that period of time. obviously a fan produced at the very, very best. i would so you two things. number one, if you have low expectations of even the best in its comment they will live down to them. [app
it is superstition but it is not like there is a science to winning the lottery. >> you don't get a better chance by doing quick pick. >> bill: let's hear the numbers here. i want to check here. okay. >> the number five. next up is number 23. here is a picture of ricky la grange from louisiana. he won $1 million. after that, we've got the number 22. round it out tonight with the number 29. all right now for tonight's winning powerball number and for that over half a billion jackpot, it is the number 6. cyprian. >> bill: i had a 22 somewhere and a 29 somewhere. if i could put them together. cyprian got the powerball number. >> bill: he got some dough. >> a couple of bucks. >> if you just hit the powerball, it is $2 i think. >> bill: so there were winners in arizona and missouri. red states. this is not fair. it is a conspiracy. >> that's not change we can believe in. >> bill: did you get anything at all? >> no. i'm going to double check later. i just go to the counter and scan them. >> bill: i'll never play po
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English 35
boswell is live from midland city, alabama with the latest. >> reporter: maureen, good evening to you. investigators have listed items, including a heater and blankets and also toys provided to the boy in the bunker. those were new items. they also had a message for the alleged kidnapper. >> i want to thank him for taking care of our child. that's, that's very important. >> reporter: investigators say alleged alabama gunman and kidnapper jimmy jimmy lee dykes is allowing food, warmth, toys and medicine to a 5-year- old boy he's been holding in a bunker tuesday since. as of now, the suspect is showing no signs of giving in. a day after the schoolbus was towed away as evidence, more stories are being told about the bus driver, charles poland, jr. >> surely this man died an american hero. >> the laughter and the love he had for kids, somebody would lay their life down. that's a hero. >> reporter: officials maintain the 5-year-old child has not been hurt. >> this whole nation actually is coming together and sending their support for this young boy. >> please, continue to be patient with
today to flood the streets of baltimore. >> through the charm city. it was a chance for the team to thank fans and for fans to thank the team for bringing home the championship. >> news4's chris gordon joins us now lye from baltimore with more on the charm offensive. >> reporter: it is said that baltimore is a blue-collar town with a chip on its shoulder. but today was filled with respect for the ravens and the city that they serve and love and the fans here and it all began this super bowl victory celebration. it began at city hall with the team's arrival and the super bowl trophy showing it to their fans, sharing it for the first time. and then the parade. there was a marching band, the cheerleaders, ravens, on floats, and in military vehicles. waving to the crowds that line the streets right to the center of the city and as they made their way to mnt bank stadium. back home, to their home turf, for their final appearance of the season, and it really paid off. we asked some of the fans given the events of the day, what would they tell a friend? what was the best thing? >> it wa
start fresh. new city. new job. new bank. there's a lot to figure out. so, i switched to suntrust. they moved everything for me. direct deposit, even my online bill pay... and suddenly, everything else just fell into place. switching to suntrust has never been easier. now, our dedicated team will do all the work for y you. suntrust. how can we help you shine today? [ male announcer ] verizon fios is the fastest internet in america. just ask pc mag. [ man ] "cable can't touch fios upload speeds." "it's hahard to imagine anyone ever beating fios." "there's no doubt fios is the fastest in the country." [ male announcer ] after 110,000 speed tests nothing came close to fios. and with fios you get unlimited internet use. period. because according to pc mag... [ man ] "if it's available, you should get it." [ male announcer ] last chance to get the fios triple play for ane price online of just $89.99 a month guaranteed for 2 years. call the verizon center for customers with disalities and get $300 back with a 2-year agreement. at 80
and kidnapping a 5-year-old boy. marie hall has the latest from midland city, alabama. >> reporter: ribbons and signs hang outside midland city elementary school where teachers and staffers returned today for the first time since a bus driver was killed and a kindergartner was abducted last tuesday. it's still not clear when classes will resume. police say 65-year-old jimmy dykes is holding a 5-year-old boy named ethan in an underground bunker. hostage negotiators have been talking to dykes and delivering food, medication and toys to the boy through a ventilation pipe. on sunday they delivered cheese- it crackers and a hot wheels car the boy requested. investigators have not said if dykes has asked for anything during negotiations. ethan turned 6 years old on wednesday. he has a disorder similar to autism. a friend of the boy's family tells cbs news the child is scared. >> i know he's cried. i know he wants his momma. he's never really been away from her. >> reporter: school bus driver charles poland was remembered as a hero at his funeral yesterday. police say dy kes shot and killed poland
are trying to figure out who killed this new york city mom. tonight, why d.n.a. could provide the clue that cracks the case. plus, from a record-setting return to a fake field goal attempt, that was one crazy super bowl. and when the power went out, the conspiracy theories lit up. but now we know what really made the superdome go dark. tome. when they tell you that you need your oil changed you got to bring it in. if your tires need to be rotated, you have to get that done as well. jackie, tell me why somebody should bring they're car here to the ford dealership for service instead of any one of those other places out there. they are going to take care of my car because this is where it came from. price is right no problem, they make you feel like you're a family. get a synthetic blend oil change, tire rotation and much more, $29.95 after $10.00 rebate. if you take care of your car your car will take care of you. we replaced people with a machine.r, what? customers didn't like it. so why do banks do it? hello? hello?! if your bank doesn't let you talk to a real person 24/7, you need an
and their chance to becoming productive americans and especially the very, very young. the teenagers and the inner-city dwellers. it is a loping-term disability that they are creating here. we must grow a heck of a lot faster to bring this problem back under control. it's just not happening. known of the data really indicate rapid resurgence in economic growth. that's when we need. >> you talk about growth. we know that the gdp for the last quarter was not good, it's in negative territory. what exactly, when we seesay gdp, what does that mean, why should they be concerned? >> on the gdp numbers, that's total gross product of the united states. when it declines, it means our country is shrinking, even though our population is expanding, which means that the income per capita of our citizens is declining. when you compare this period to when reagan was president in 1983 and 1984, our growth rates were in the range of 7 1/2% on average the first four quarters of '83 and it extended through bill clinton. we are going to lose a lot. you know, these people are a precious natural resource. you can't get back
that goes into the super bowls, all the rehearsal, not just in new orleans but any city, the question a lot of people were asking last night and this morning is, how could that have happened? do we have any more information about what happened last night? entergy. they're still calling it an abnormality which we were able to figure out ourselves. willie the shame of it is, this had been such a spectacular comeback week for new orleans. it's a great american city. this was a celebration of the city, and everything went so great until there were about 13:22 left in the second half of the super bowl. >> and then we got a good game after that. so i don't think anybody will blame the city for that one. mike, surviving in the dark in new orleans last night, thanks so much. coming up, much more -- >> we'll have a touch football game. >> sounds good. more on the super bowl, the commercials, half-time show coming up a little bit later. for now here is savannah. >> thank you. now to the tense hostage drama in alabama, entering its seventh day. this morning, police say they are still communicating wit
's the guy who gets his salsa from new york city. new york city? [ alarm chirps ] [ male announcer ] 'round here, there's only one word for salsa: pace. made the right way for that big bold kick. grab the southwest by the bottle. i took something for my sinuses, but i still have this cough. [ male announcer ] a lot of sinus products don't treat cough. they don't? [ male announcer ] nope, but alka seltzer plus severe sinus does it treats your worst sinus symptoms, plus that annoying cough. [ breathes deeply ] ♪ oh, what a relief it is! [ angry gibberish ] >>> we're going to turn now to our instant index here on a sunday night. from the super bowl to the supercute. animal planet's puppy bowl. this is the ninth time they've done this. starring adorable rescue and shelter puppies. they actually stage a super bowl of their own. half time show feature not the puppies but some kittens. believe it or not, 111 million people tuned in to the super bowl last year, 9 million actually tuned in to the puppy bowl. we were impressed by that. >>> to the other competitors tonight. it just might involve you
bunker for nearly a week. mark strassmann is in midland city alabama w new details on the raid that ended with the death of the kidnaper. good morning. >> reporter: good morning. on ethan's birthday fbi bomb technicians will be back inside the bunker for looking for and removing improvised explosives. the body will stay at least until this bomb threat is over. >> we're here to celebrate answered prayer. >> reporter: they called it a praise vigil people in ethan's community gathering last night to give thanks the little boy was safely back with his mother. fbi photos show the exterior of the underground bunker. bomb technicians have removed two improvised explosives, one inside the bunker the other inside this pvc pipe that jimmy lee dykes used to talk to negotiators. the standoff ended monday when dykes climbed the eight-foot ladder to get supplies. as he reached up he was off balance and vulnerable. when dykes opened the door rescue team members dropped two stun grenades their loud noises and flashes disoriented. within seconds has members entered the bu
latin-american drug gangs have invaded every city of significant size in the united states. phoenix is one of the kidnapping capitals of the world. states on the u.s./mexico border may be the first places to suffer from cartel violence. by no means are they the last. all of the latin-american drug gangs to fight on through on your way to work, he says guns would help that. >> bill: this is why you need an ar-15 in every house in columbus ohio. >> after hurricane sandy we saw the hellish world that the gun prohibitions see. looters ran wild. there was no food, water or electricity. if you wanted to walk several miles to get supplies, you better get back before dark or you might not get home at all. it is the most paranoid thing i have ever read. it is crazy! >> bill: he is certifiably insane. >> we'll tweet out a link. >> bill: i can't believe the nra doesn't recognize that. every time they put him out in front, they lose ground. >> he's not helping. >> bill: alex, that gets back to the issue of ticking through some of the things -- the main ideas in the president's state of the unio
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Najdi sheep in Unaizah, Saudi Arabia
The Najdi or Nejdi is a breed of domestic sheep native to the Najd region of the Arabian Peninsula. Though it is primarily raised in Saudi Arabia, Nadji sheep are also present in Kuwait, Jordan, Oman and Iraq.[1]
The Najdi has a distinctive appearance that has even been celebrated in Saudi "sheep beauty pageants" not unlike livestock shows and sales in the West.[2] They are a very tall breed, averaging 76–86 centimeters (30–34 inches) in height at the withers.[1] They have long, Roman nosed faces with drooping ears. Ewes are polled and rams may be either polled or have scurs. They are generally black with white faces and white on the legs and tail. Top Najdi ewes can sell for 20,000–30,000 Saudi riyals (US$5,300–8,000), while rams which can sire many more offspring can fetch hundreds of thousands.[2]
Najdi are highly adapted to life in desert conditions, though it is less drought tolerant than some breeds, such as the Awassi.[3] [4] Though its meat may be consumed locally, it is especially valued for its milk and long, straight wool.[4]
1. ^ a b "Breed Data Sheet". FAO Domestic Animal Diversity system (DAD-IS).
2. ^ a b "Breeders hold first pageant for Saudi-bred sheep". MSNBC (Associated Press). Oct . 31, 2008. Check date values in: |date= (help)
3. ^ Alamer, Mohammed; Adel Al-Hozab (2004). "Effect of water deprivation and season on feed intake, body weight and thermoregulation in Awassi and Najdi sheep breeds in Saudi Arabia". Journal of arid environments 59: 71–84.
4. ^ a b Lancaster, William; Fidelity Lancaster (1999). People, land and water in the Arab Middle East. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-90-5702-322-4.
External links[edit] | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Najdi_(sheep) | dclm-gs1-054320001 |
0.09248 | <urn:uuid:67db5c4f-33eb-4177-8c42-59b7e708b0f0> | en | 0.937863 | What Happens To The Marvel Cinematic Universe When Joss Whedon Leaves?
Marvel's new Thor is so worthy, she actually rewrites Mjolnir's oath
Over the years, Thor's power has been wielded by many - a Frog, a Space-horse-thing, Superman - but soon, the mantle will pass to a woman. In a preview of her first issue, it turns out that this mysterious new woman is so badass, her lifting of Thor's mighty hammer causes the weapon to literally rewrite its own creed. » 9/08/14 2:19pm 9/08/14 2:19pm
10 Times When Comics And Movies Sexualized Male Superheroes
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The Marvel movies rightly get praise for their action and their witty writing, but Gen Kim has made a video that focuses on the universe's more subtle moments. Without dialogue, and set to José González's "Stay Alive," the emotion the actors convey with their faces and body language are thrown into stark relief. » 8/27/14 9:00pm 8/27/14 9:00pm
The REAL Reason Why Superhero Romances Are Always Doomed
Everybody knows that superheroes can't have successful love lives. If a costumed hero does get married to his or her long-term love interest, then the multiverse winds up breaking (or Satan intervenes) to thwart it. Is this because happy relationships are boring? Or is there a more insidious reason? » 8/13/14 4:29pm 8/13/14 4:29pm
What's The Greatest "F*@% Yeah" Moment Of All Time?
We root for heroes who are underdogs, who suffer unimaginable setbacks and misery. But sometimes, we root the hardest for heroes who bounce back and do something incredibly awesome. Philosopher/sage Dave Campbell calls this the "F*@% Yeah" moment. But what's the greatest fist-pumping scene of all time? » 7/31/14 2:35pm 7/31/14 2:35pm | http://io9.com/tag/thor | dclm-gs1-054520001 |
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Crittenton wants to put gun incident behind him
Feb 26, 2010, 1:39 PM EST
crittenton.jpgJavaris Crittenton hasn’t been doing a lot of public appearances lately, and when he does he apologizes a lot.
Which is exactly what happened when his former college coach Paul Hewitt got him on his radio show on 790 The Zone in Atlanta and asked him what he wanted to say to the public about the gun incident that led to him and Gilbert Arenas being suspended for the season.
“Just that I am sorry for the incident to all of my fans and all of my family too, all the kids that look up to me. It wasn’t good. At this point, just moving forward and having positive thoughts and just working really hard getting ready for next season.”
“Yeah that is it. I just want to put this behind me. It was definitely a mistake. A mistake that shouldn’t have happened, but you know everything happens for a reason and really opened my eyes and I just want to move forward. Positive thoughts and positive people around me and doing the right thing.”
Crittenton has learned the hard lesson for players, that the NBA is not about basketball and only basketball.
I had to learn the hard way that this is a business. It really opened my eyes, the first time I was traded. I really was like, wow, this is a business. This is for real. It’s not just about basketball. Sometimes those things can be good and sometimes those things can be bad when you know that it is a business because in a way I fell to this sometimes. It is a business and everything is business-minded, it almost makes you lose your love for the game sometimes.”
Crittenton has game – he is very quick with pretty good handles. He can get to the rim and finish. The problem is hitting any kind of jumper, and he turns the ball over too much (both bad things for a guard in the NBA). He’s one of those guys where you see the potential but wonder if he can ever live up to it. He’s running out of chances to prove he can. But he will get another chance. Somewhere.
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5. J. Smith (5500) | http://probasketballtalk.nbcsports.com/2010/02/26/crittenton-wants-to-put-gun-incident-behind-him/ | dclm-gs1-054830001 |
0.815029 | <urn:uuid:2939fdc4-4e51-41ad-9da4-7e440d8899c1> | en | 0.820613 | Skip to content
Stoudemire MVP
1. MVP Amar’e Stoudemire? Mike D’Antoni thinks it could happen
Oct 22, 2010, 11:38 AM EST
Amar’e Stoudemire is going to have a huge year. He is the go-to option on the Knicks. They have some guys who are solid NBA role players on the roster, but there is no real number two option in the way that the Lakers, Celtics, Heat or even Thunder have one. Because of that Stoudemire…
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Who will land Josh Smith?
Top 10 NBA Player Searches
1. K. Durant (8462)
2. K. Martin (6492)
3. K. Bryant (6276)
4. K. Leonard (6245)
5. C. Bosh (6103)
1. D. Williams (5961)
2. T. Jones (5872)
3. D. Rose (5792)
4. T. Parker (5691)
5. J. Smith (5500) | http://probasketballtalk.nbcsports.com/tag/stoudemire-mvp/ | dclm-gs1-054840001 |
0.274118 | <urn:uuid:f768d795-d8d5-4dbf-84f2-8d8a8ee95a51> | en | 0.911373 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
I am looking for a list of ways of enabling peer discovery in mobile networks, preferably without centralising control. Obviously the different techniques have trade-offs, usually related to the scale/scope of the network.
My initial list includes:
• Bluetooth - good for very limited range
• Message Broadcast - good for LANs and private networks
• Central server - good for internet scale networks
Are there any other methods?
share|improve this question
I would think that to effectively query a social network of potentially millions of users... you would rather do that on a central server, and just sent back a short list (< 30) of applicable users (based on whatever criteria you are using... e.g. geolocation, shared interests, availability, etc.) - doing this (computation) on the mobile device seems very ineffective. – scunliffe Jun 10 '10 at 12:56
1 Answer 1
If you want to communicate directly between two specific mobile devices, the initiating device can act as a temporary server (e.g., ServerSocketConnection) and SMS the IP address/port to the phone number of the other mobile device. The receiving device can automatically wake up upon receipt of the SMS through PushRegistry techniques, extract the IP address/port combo in the SMS message and connect to the server socket connection.
share|improve this answer
Thanks Dan, just one question, how does the connection work through the mobile operator's NAT? So when my device is connected over 3G/Edge, I can see the publicly addressable IP of the network im connected to, but the actual IP of my device is a private IP (10.x.x.x) sitting behind the operators firewall.. – MalcomTucker Jun 25 '10 at 7:55
Good question. As far as I know, there are well-known standards to help with this part of the issue. One is called STUN and another is called NAT-PMP (upon which Apple's Bonjour is based). Both are based on an existence of some sort of server (inside or outside the NAT) which can be queried for (or create) the public IP address. When I implemented this several years ago, I did it within a single mobile operator (Cingular) where the two mobile phones were sitting behind the same NAT. – Dan Jun 25 '10 at 13:43
Your Answer
| http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3014342/methods-of-peer-discovery-in-mobile-peer-to-peer-networks | dclm-gs1-054930001 |
0.185053 | <urn:uuid:3a22ae79-e68d-4d2b-b30b-95bf47a9153d> | en | 0.922678 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
In my Linux setup, Emacs has the Edit->Copy menu item mapped to -- what key is that? And where does it get that keyname definition from? Is that internal to emacs? Or does it get that further upstream?
Specifically, I am running Gnome under Ubuntu Lucid (10.04LTS) - but I believe this is a far more generic question.
Is it, perhaps, that it is mapped to non-existant keys on a standard keyboard? (I recall earlier Sun keyboards having such keys.)
share|improve this question
1 Answer 1
up vote 1 down vote accepted
Yes, it's a standard X11 keysym for which there are no equivalents on a 105-key PC keyboard. Sun and various other workstation keyboards had such keys, and you can find them on some multimedia PC keyboards.
share|improve this answer
How do I remap/bind Emacs' "<copy>" to some other shortcut, like W-c for example? – SabreWolfy Apr 4 '12 at 9:10
You could do it inside of Emacs by finding out the function it's running (in the Emacs I have in front of me, it's ns-copy-including-secondary) and binding that to a key, or you can bind the X11 Copy keysym to a physical key using xmodmap. (Note that xmodmap cannot bind a keysym to a specific modifier+keysym sequence, though, with the exception of Mode_switch and Shift modifiers — with some caveats, in particular that the Shift modifier tends to mean "extend the selection" and few X11 programs are smart enough to figure out that you put Copy itself on a Shift modifier.) – geekosaur Apr 4 '12 at 23:13
I misunderstood. When I enter M-x clipboard-yank Emacs tells me I can just use <paste> and likewise when I enter clipboard-kill-ring-save it says I can just use <copy>. I can't remap those keys because I don't have those keys. I can remap the functions they run to other keys. – SabreWolfy Apr 5 '12 at 12:29
Ok, so you're looking for xmodmap. But, as I said, you need physical keys to bind it to; keysyms map to physical keys, not to logical keys with modifiers. So on a standard 105-key keyboard you would need to rebind keys like Menu, or on an exended keyboard you can use xev to find out the keycodes used by the added keys and then rebind those. – geekosaur Apr 5 '12 at 19:54
Your Answer
| http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6230188/in-emacs-with-x-edit-copy-is-mapped-to-copy-what-key-is-that-on-a-linux | dclm-gs1-054950001 |
0.15208 | <urn:uuid:4cad3d17-70e5-47b1-895a-462abb3d2803> | en | 0.958443 | Belfast Telegraph
Friday 26 December 2014
UK 'shouldn't front climate fight'
George Osborne: Britain shouldn't lead climate change efforts.
George Osborne: Britain shouldn't lead climate change efforts.
George Osborne has said he does not want Britain to be ahead of the rest of the world in fighting climate change.
It also comes after Ed Miliband pledged that Labour would freeze energy bills if it won the next election.
Friends of the Earth's executive director Andy Atkins said: "With the world's top scientists clearer than ever that human activity is causing climate disruption, George Osborne is showing a shameless lack of leadership.
"The Chancellor's policies are not only contributing to climate change, they're also undermining our economic future by keeping the nation hooked on increasingly expensive fossil fuels.
"The tragedy is that while our top academics and leading-edge companies develop innovations in areas like battery technology and environmental design, George Osborne constantly talks them down with his unambitious words and support for fracking.
"The UK led the world on industrialisation - if our children are to enjoy a safe, clean and prosperous future we should be at the forefront of the drive to decarbonise the world's economies."
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0.018206 | <urn:uuid:22bee562-a2fa-4e9b-91e7-41dfc5b0c494> | en | 0.980526 | Happiest place on earth...
...although you can't tell by these photos. We celebrated Bronson's birthday with a trip to Disneyland, and contrary to these photos Bronson had a blast. He seemed to have the most fun waiting in line and skipping from ride to ride. I was pleasantly surprised at how patient he was. I was also surprised that he managed to keep his wits about him from sun up to sun down (literally, 6:30 a.m.-10 p.m.) with only a 30 minute nap. The kid was so high on happy he wouldn't couldn't sleep, and with not one single meltdown we were happy to let him take it all in. (We wanted our money's worth, I forgot how expensive that place is.)
We thought for sure he would knockout out on the way back to the hotel, but no such luck. In his own little language he seemed to review the day and all that happened. What a wonderful experience for all of us.
1. This is so precious! He looks like he;s having a blast! So cute!!!!!!!!
Happy Monday to you and your little one!
2. He is just so freaking adorable!
3. toooooooo cute!!! so glad you did the Disney thing... it is soooooo expensive but such a treat ever so often! I love the photo of him with his ears. That will be a precious moment your entire life! oxo
4. oh wow Bianca, what a cutie, he is going to be a very handsome man! Happy belated birthday and congrats xo
5. He's so adorable, Bianca. And I have to admit, when I was his age, Disney characters scared me a bit. Anyone in costumes did, actually. They were just all so much bigger than me! | http://www.binkandboo.net/2011/01/happiest-place-on-earth.html | dclm-gs1-055220001 |
0.025551 | <urn:uuid:7c5cabe4-502c-40ca-b5e9-68c6b27526ce> | en | 0.947662 | Blindsight and Rage
JoRoss joross at
Mon Jul 26 00:14:13 EST 1999
Hi. I've got a couple questions, and I'm hoping you can help. But I know
nothing about neuro-anything, and I'm afraid this is going to be like asking
for directions in a foreign language--when you get the answer, you don't
understand it.
Anyway, I'm a writer, looking for just a bit of truth with which to temper my
lies ... er, fiction. I don't even know if both these questions fall under the
neuroscience rubric, but here goes:
1 - Blindsight. I read a paragraph about this, and it looks like an interesting
hook for a story I'm working on. But I don't know: what causes it (stroke,
brain lesion--if there is such a thing--head trauma, etc.), if it can occur in
the complete visual field (I read about it on one side only), and how people
who have it deal with it. If I understand blindsight (probably not), it seems
that your subconscious (or unconscious) can see, but you cannot consciously
"see" what you're seeing--you are, effectively, blind. True, false? I don't
know if a low-level, speculative discussion is appropriate on this newsgroup
(please e-mail if not), but I'd love to know more.
2 - an entirely unrelated question. I'm looking for a causable (I guess through
some sort of poison or drug, but I'd love to hear other possibilities)
neurological event that would lead victims (as this would be the villain's evil
plan) to, basically, go berserk. Paranoia, rage--the worse it is, the better. I
know (well, I think I know), that this can happen with drugs--PCP, say--but I'm
looking for a longer term, and, hopefully, more violent, thing. Any ideas?
And if anyone's willing to have their, ahem, brain picked privately, please let
me know.
All the best, and thanks in advance,
More information about the Neur-sci mailing list | http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/neur-sci/1999-July/039713.html | dclm-gs1-055230001 |
0.020159 | <urn:uuid:364ee5f1-014b-49bf-8395-c84be2dd0c92> | en | 0.958476 | Cool Korea
Swing by the high-fashion enclave of Chongdamdong on any Saturday night, and you'll see the affluent twentysomethings of Seoul chattering away on their pastel-colored mobile phones. Chic Korean women float by, bedecked in Chanel, Hermes, and Gucci. Later on, the dance clubs throw open their doors, making the very sidewalks reverberate into the early hours. Everywhere, you see billboards and posters proclaiming the coming World Cup, which South Korea is hosting with Japan. The planet's biggest sporting event is an excellent excuse to throw a nationwide party. The question is whether the Koreans will notice. Their party has already started.
To foreigners who know the ravages that the Asian crisis inflicted on Seoul, it's hard to believe this is the same capital that sprouted tent cities and soup kitchens in 1998. Or the town that, for decades, maintained a rigid culture of conformity, drudgery, and xenophobia. Koreans are rubbing their eyes, too. When 47-year-old Eric B. Kim returned to Seoul in 1999 to head marketing for Samsung Electronics after 32 years in the U.S., he felt a bit like Alice after falling through the rabbit hole. "The old hierarchy was gone," he says. He thought his two children would find Korean culture stifling. Instead, they think Korea is almost as much fun as--brace yourself--Southern California and the U.S. East Coast, where they grew up. "Koreans," says Kim, "are thriving on change."
The changes have been pretty much nonstop since the economic trauma of 1998, when gross domestic product contracted 6.7%. Today, Korea is back with a vengeance. Its economy grew 5.7% in the first quarter. Its phones, cars, and movies are hot around the world. Its citizens are riding a high verging on cockiness.
Dare we say it? Korea is cool. This country of 48 million has become a model for developing nations everywhere. Nowhere is this more true than in its home region, where Japan is a waning force and much of Southeast Asia continues to struggle with sick banking systems and dwindling foreign investment. The commentators may be right that the future belongs to China--and that Korea itself still needs to keep reforming. But Korea has already made the transition from authoritarianism to democracy and from a low-end, exporting economy sealed off from the world to one that is plugged-in, dynamic, and increasingly high-tech. It will be some time before China gets there.
Many other Asian nations, looking on enviously, see in Korea what they can only dream of: a budget surplus, $107 billion in foreign-currency reserves, a rising credit rating, and a jobless rate of 3.1%. The Korean stock market is among the best-performing in the world. Some $52 billion worth of foreign direct investment has poured into the country during the past four years, vs. $24.6 billion over the past three decades. Compare that to the situation just before the crisis, when the KOSPI index was crashing, exports and dollar reserves were collapsing, and foreign investors fleeing, and you'll get a sense of how much has changed.
How did crisis-afflicted Korea transform itself? Will it keep its prosperous new model alive? Answers to those questions provide a clue to how a country can really change, and whether Asia needs to follow the Korean way to a new level of economic flexibility and vitality.
The answer to that first question is complex. First, President Kim Dae Jung and his advisers managed to cut the connection between Korea's banks and the chaebol, the conglomerates that once ruled Korea. Second, the Koreans created an economy that did not depend exclusively on exports to survive. They fashioned a full-fledged domestic economy, a rare thing in Asia. Third, the trauma of crisis and change unleashed a wave of innovation in business and culture that is still in effect.
Much of this wouldn't have happened without the administration of President Kim--although these days, his own electorate doesn't give him much credit. The longtime political reformer, who endured assassination attempts, jail terms, and years of exile, had been waiting half his life for the opportunity to lead his nation in a new direction. When he finally made it to the presidency in 1998, Kim and his lieutenants realized that the crisis, although painful, offered an historic opportunity to overhaul Korea's economic model. Says the President: "You have to endure until the structural changes are complete. In this age of globalization, you have to accept that only profitable and competitive companies survive."
Kim & Co. ordered the overextended, state-backed conglomerates known as chaebol to go on a crash corporate diet, slash their debt, swap noncore businesses, and sell off others. "The chaebol served as a convenient whipping boy that could be blamed for the crisis," says Chung Hoon Mok, a former director of the World Bank, which, along with the International Monetary Fund, helped Korea with a $30 billion bailout package. Using the IMF's demands for reform as political cover, the government pressured chaebol chieftains to cut their empires down to size. At the same time, the administration threw open the economy to foreign competition and investment. Now, says Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Jeon Yun Churl, "even hostile mergers are allowed."
Today, Korea's business landscape stands radically transformed. Of the 30 biggest chaebol, 16 have been shut down or radically downsized. The survivors--companies such as Samsung Group and LG--barely resemble their former selves. Of the 2,100 financial institutions cluttering the banking industry in 1998, just 1,600 are now standing. Of 24 major city banks, only half remain. Imagine such ruthless restructuring in Japan.
With many of the chaebol gone, the newly vital banks had billions in capital freed up for new loans. Korean consumers and small businesses, starved of money for decades, finally had the liquidity they so desperately needed. With banks free to lend to whomever they want, small and midsize startups have proliferated; since 1998, 11,396 have popped up. Says Yang Ki Gon, president and CEO of Bellwave Co., a small mobile-phone maker: "New startups like us give dynamism to the economy."
At the same time, banks are lending to consumers through credit cards and mortgages, setting in motion a spending boom that is giving the economy a healthier balance between exports and domestic-led growth. This new economy has already shown its strength: Last year, when the rest of Asia was flat on its back after the U.S. economy swooned, the Koreans chugged on, producing a respectable 3% gain in GDP during a hard year.
The change in the way Koreans deploy capital seems to fit perfectly with a shift in the way Koreans think about themselves. It's as if a whole new Korean value system has emerged. The crisis unleashed pent-up entrepreneurial energy. The most promising trends--the rapidly expanding information-technology sector, a more fluid labor market, a better balance between export-led and home-driven economic growth--are being fueled from below by consumers instead of being orchestrated by bureaucrats.
Indeed, the whole notion of success in Korean society has come in for serious revision. Making a quick fortune in business and finance is no longer viewed as suspect or even criminal. Nor do Koreans covet entry-level jobs at the biggest corporate names in Korea--the Samsungs, the LGs, the Hyundais. In such companies, "people think and behave in a uniform manner. I hate it," says Jo Seong Hun, 31, a manager at the merger-and-acquisition firm SYM & Associates. Today, many young Koreans want to work at companies such as MP3 maker Digitalway, or NCSoft, whose online medieval-fantasy game Lineage has a cult following among global gamers.
The desire to create has spilled over into popular culture, which is becoming increasingly accessible to overseas audiences. Sixteen-year-old teen pop diva BoA's first album, Don't Start Now, has dominated the charts in Japan this year. The male dance duo Clon rules in Taiwan. And H.O.T., a boy band that blends hip-hop, R&B, and dance music, is big in China.
In film, producer Shim Jae Myung made a splash two years ago with his smash hit Joint Security Area, a North-South military drama that drew 6 million viewers at home and did well in Japan. Korea's domestic film industry has doubled its annual box-office revenues, to more than $380 million, since 1997, and now boasts a 51% share of the market. "I used to think Korean films were a waste of time," says Lee Jee Min, 24, who works at SEI Asset Korea, a fund manager. "But they are pretty good these days." Walt Disney Co.'s Miramax Films (DIS) unit recently paid $1.1 million for the rights to remake a Korean film called My Wife Is A Gangster. "We hope the boom in the movie industry will spread to other content businesses," says Park Byoung Woo, deputy director at the Culture & Tourism Ministry's Film & Video Division, which provides seed money for new films.
Korean celebrities are being wooed by Asian companies looking for spokespeople. TCL, a Guangdong-based mobile-phone maker, for example, has been featuring the hot Korean actress Kim Hee Seon on billboards in major Chinese cities. TCL signed the 26-year-old heartthrob to a two-year modeling contract worth $1.2 million, plus production expenses.
It's not just Korean culture that is winning newfound respect. In the U.S. and other markets, Samsung consumer electronics and Hyundai nameplates are no longer a fallback for those who can't afford a Sony (SNE) or Toyota (TM). A decade ago, Samsung barely registered as a global brand. Now, it's going head to head with Sony Corp. and Nokia Corp. for leadership in high-end, Internet-surfing mobile phones, digital televisions, MP3 players, liquid-crystal displays, and the like.
While Korean companies were content to pump out uninspired knockoffs before, they are now producing cutting-edge products. At Samsung, Chairman Lee Kun Hee launched a design revolution, in part by bringing in former IBM design wunderkind Tom Hardy to get designers thinking outside the box. Key Samsung designers also worked with the U.S. firm Sapient to clear out the cobwebs. "In the past, technology was the driver of new products," says An Yong Il, who runs Samsung's product research. "But now, design has taken over."
Global investors like what they see. Samsung's $48 billion market capitalization is bigger than such Japanese national champions as Hitachi, Fujitsu, and Toshiba. "We have achieved No. 1 status in a lot of flagship categories" including Internet-linked and voice-activated phones, LCDs, and high-end flash memory chips, says Kim, Samsung's marketing chief. He thinks that by 2005, the Samsung and Sony brands will be interchangeable in the minds of consumers.
Witness how the Koreans came out of nowhere to grab a market-leading 55% of the rapidly expanding global market for MP3 players, which let users play music downloaded from the Net or tunes copied from CDs. Digitalway, launched in 1998 by a group of former Samsung engineers, has managed to snag a 30% share of the U.S., Japanese, and Asian markets. Digitalway Chief Executive Woo Jung Ku thinks the Koreans have a big edge over China in the digital age because of their growing comfort with product and software design. Besides, Koreans' love of the Next Big Thing means rapid product turnover, consistent profits, and pumped-up innovation.
Finally, Korean consumers are infomaniacs, and they love to interact with Korean companies online. Digitalway receives about 100 e-mails a day from consumers with praise, complaints, and suggestions for new features for its array of lightweight and snazzy MP3 players. "We have a big and wide following of consumers on the Internet," says Woo, adding that the networking effects of a wired society are changing the game in consumer electronics.
Even pockets of old industrial Korea are being revived, thanks to foreign capital and managerial talent. Back in 1998, the Swedish industrial giant Volvo bought the money-losing construction-equipment arm of the Samsung Group in a $572 million deal. The Swedes fired 22% of the workforce, refinanced the debt, narrowed a lineup of 13 products down to one--excavators--and focused on profits, not market share.
Volvo also moved its entire global excavator operation out of pricey Sweden to lower-wage Korea. Last year, Volvo Construction Equipment Korea posted a $42.3 million profit on $415 million in sales. Some 70% of its revenues come from exports, vs. 30% under Samsung. Kim Hee Jang, a manager who survived the job cuts, says he is working harder than ever but finds the work environment far less formal and hierarchical. "I think I would feel as if I were suffocating if I went back to the old chaebol style," he says.
If such stories can be replicated on a major scale, Kim's strategic vision of turning Korea into a North Asian global hub and export platform for foreign multinationals could get interesting. One big edge is Korea's proximity to the fast-growing Chinese market. Another is the billions that the government and private sector have poured into wiring the nation with broadband fiber optics. The country's 25 million Internet surfers and 30 million mobile-phone users make it a unique market to try out new content services and wireless technologies. And Korea's manufacturing capacity and chip expertise add up to the "perfect environment" for Korea to emerge as an information-technology research and development center, says Ko Hyun Jin, Microsoft Korea's general manager. Already, Nokia (NOK), Sun Microsystems (SUNW), and Oracle (ORCL) have major operations in South Korea.
Can Korea bury the past? Vestiges of the old Korea remain. Labor unions are still restive, and some chaebol operations are walking-dead companies--virtually worthless but still draining bank funds, especially government-guaranteed loans. There are thousands of small and midsize manufacturers that still aren't competitive by global standards. And the current influence-buying scandals involving two of Kim's three sons are a stark reminder of Seoul's gold-plated political corruption. Kim, who is in the final year of a five-year term, hasn't been implicated and has apologized. But he is feeling the heat. His approval rating is hovering around 20%, down from 80% four years ago.
If Koreans elect a new president who is indifferent to the need for more reform, there's a risk that this Korean miracle could yet stall. Still, veterans of many an Asian crisis think Korea has turned a corner. "Once you let the genie out of the bottle," says IMF resident representative Paul F. Gruenwald, "it's hard to put back in." The credit belongs to the Koreans themselves. After a huge social shock, they sucked it up, got back to work, embraced new technologies with relish, and started enjoying life again. First the pain, then the gain. By Brian Bremner and Moon Ihlwan in Seoul
The Good Business Issue
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0.024305 | <urn:uuid:b1c8f0d4-a450-4170-a8fe-c96fae64a777> | en | 0.977656 |
Frankston people divided on MP Geoff Shaw
John Elder, Farrah Tomazin
Frankston MP Geoff Shaw has provoked outrage in Parliament, but some of his constituents are less inclined to judge.
Geoff Shaw may not be a team player in a political sense, but he's well regarded by the footy team he plays for, the Frankston Districts Tigersharks.
Two young women are walking down Wells Street, Frankston: happy faces, nicely turned out and unfailingly polite. Excuse me, proud youth of this battling town, what do you think of Geoff Shaw?
''He's a c---,'' says Jenny, 23. She's an apprentice carpenter.
Why is that? ''In the last election I was handing out vote cards for the Greens. He shook my hand and as he walked away, he wiped off the hippie germs on his pants.''
Jenny's friend Chrissy Ashurst, 23, a student youth worker says ''He's absolutely pathetic … what's he done for Frankston? I see so many shops closed down and empty.''
Jenny and Chrissy are also unhappy that their local member has honesty issues, tried to bully Denis Napthine to appoint a favoured judge or magistrate (nobody knows for sure) has a history of pushing people around (taxi drivers), and in recent months has focused his coercive talents on the running of the state of Victoria.
''So there's that, too,'' says Chrissy.
Marching past is a man in his 70s, wraparound sunglasses, razor burn and thin lips. His opinion of Shaw?
''He's great!'' says Ian, 70.
Why is that? ''He's got balls. He stands up for what he believes in. The rest are a pack of wimps.''
There are two things to learn here about Frankston: it's a profane and divided town, at least when it comes to Mr Shaw, who this week faces expulsion or more likely suspension from Parliament for bad behaviour outed more than two years ago.
Last week, as his beatific face, New Testament beard and all, stared from the front pages, day after day, the man himself virtually shrank away, no longer the brawling gladiator who caused all this constitution-rocking trouble. The big question though isn't Where is Geoff Shaw? but How in the sweet Lord's name did he get elected in the first place?
The short answer, according to the true believers: he took the job with two mighty hands and made Frankston relevant, where previous representatives ''did virtually nothing''.
A local Liberal Party identity who claims to have her finger on the pulse believes Shaw is the best local member ''Frankston has ever had'', a sentiment echoed by half the locals interviewed for this story. This Liberal woman was running hot with outrage on Shaw's behalf until we checked the spelling of her name. ''I can't put my name to this. I want to. I really do. Someone needs to stand up for Geoff. But I have a number of business deals hanging in the balance at the moment. I can't associate with this sort of thing.''
Shaw's spiritual home, the Peninsula City Church, likewise denied him. ''No comment.''
Similarly distancing themselves are the party members who say Shaw joined the Liberals only months before preselections opened, with the sole purpose of running as a candidate.
Shaw's ascension came down to a mixture of circumstance and blustering righteousness: former Frankston mayor Rochelle McArthur was the early favourite to win the preselection ballot, but pulled out after her husband became seriously ill.
What made Shaw an attractive replacement was his evangelical Christianity. It won him the backing of influential people in the party's hard right, including controversial upper house MP Bernie Finn, then party vice-president Sandra Mercer Moore, and south-east powerbroker Inga Peulich.
Indeed, the day of the Frankston preselection, Finn was spotted outside the convention venue talking to delegates as they entered - odd for a politician who represents the western suburbs.
Finn says he helped Shaw campaign before the 2010 poll, but insists he had little to do with his preselection. He was at the Liberal convention, he says, simply because a staffer, who happened to be a preselection delegate, needed a lift, not because he was actively lobbying on Shaw's behalf.
''I'd heard he was inclined to be on the conservative side, and that's always welcome,'' says Finn. ''But I have no influence in Frankston.''
There's no doubt, however, that Shaw found a parliamentary ally in Finn, who has similar views on topics such as abortion and gay rights, and also has a tendency to attract headlines. In fact, during the last sitting week of parliament, as Labor and the government traded blows over Shaw's misconduct, the independent MP abandoned his post to sit alone in the public gallery of the upper house, to watch Finn deliver a colourful speech blasting the ABC, calling for federal Immigration Minister Scott Morrison to be awarded a knighthood, and insisting that ''the climate change industry is a scam''.
Perhaps, he felt lonely for some like-minded company. Whatever the circumstances of Shaw's preselection, one thing is certain: he's always had the loner quality of the class oddball. He wasn't the only Christian conservative in the class of 2010 - an election many Liberals didn't think they would win - but he was certainly the most overt. In his inaugural speech to Parliament, the new backbencher created his own version of the ''welcome to country'', telling the chamber: ''In taking my place in the Legislative Assembly it is appropriate for me to acknowledge the original owner of the land on which we stand - God, the Creator, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Bible.''
His biblical piety was on display again when he erected a roadside sign in 2012, pleading for his estranged wife to reunite with him. The sign declared: ''Please Forgive Me, Sally; I Love You'' and cited a biblical reference, Psalm 42: ''As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you.''
Since then the controversies have come thicker than a plague of locusts: comparing homosexuality to dangerous driving and murder; allegedly abusing a mother who had called his office seeking help for her disabled child; intervening in a bizarre road rage dispute; scuffling with protesting taxi drivers on the steps of Parliament.
The tipping point, however, was the misuse of parliamentary entitlements, which came to light when former employees blew the whistle, revealing Shaw had authorised them to use his taxpayer-funded car and fuel card to make statewide deliveries for his hardware business.
It was a light-the-fuse moment for the relatively new Baillieu government. With the benefit of hindsight Liberal MPs now admit they should have established the facts, condemned Shaw's actions, and required him to pay back whatever money was owed.
Instead, Baillieu continued to defend his MP as ''a good local member'' while key advisers from his private office shielded him from the media glare. For Shaw, it wasn't enough. Aggrieved at having the matter referred to the Ombudsman - and encouraged by the anti-Baillieu forces to fuel leadership tensions - Shaw defected from government to sit on the crossbench, precipitating Baillieu's demise.
Still, the path of appeasement continued. When Shaw deliberately walked into a taxi-driver protest and ended up in a scuffle on the steps of Parliament last year, he demanded an immediate inquiry by the privileges committee. He got one.
When Shaw grew sick of Speaker Ken Smith, the man who referred Shaw's actions to the Ombudsman, it was Smith who fell on his sword. And when Shaw began agitating to wind back Victoria's abortion laws, describing them as ''some of the worst in the world'', Napthine initially left the door open, telling The Sunday Age he would assess any bill on its merit.
If the government had a healthy majority, things would no doubt have been different. But Napthine's survival for the past 15 months has rested on an unwritten pact with a ''rogue'' MP who has had a taste of power and wants more. It wasn't until last Tuesday, when Shaw threatened to bring down the government after Napthine refused to guarantee he would not be sanctioned for the misuse of his car, that the Premier decided he'd had enough. ''I will not be held to ransom by some rogue MP from Frankston,'' he declared.
Former state MP Gary Rowe, who was once Napthine's parliamentary secretary and one of the preselection candidates who ran against Shaw four years ago, was not surprised. ''Napthine tolerates fools to a point, and Shaw has obviously gone too far,'' he said.
Others are more sympathetic, pointing to the break-up of his marriage early in his parliamentary career as a turning point. One Liberal MP told The Sunday Age he believed Shaw had clearly ''cracked under the pressure''. ''The only thing that surprises me is that it's taken so long.''
If Shaw at least appears disloyal to the party that nurtured him, it's worth noting he was never a lifelong devotee of the Liberal Party, and clearly not a team player, not as far as politics goes.
On the footy field it's a different matter. Shaw plays for the Frankston Districts Tigersharks, in the over-35s reserves - in recent weeks he's been on the bench with a groin injury. His coach, Shane Dawes, who went to school with Shaw but didn't become friendly with him until recent years, describes a player who has an awkward kicking style but is good on the mark, takes plenty of ribbing from teammates in good humour, isn't given to grand-standing or throwing his weight around and will talk about his political woes when asked.
''I remember him winning a best and fairest award 20 years ago when he was playing at Langwarrin. He's one of the boys.''
Dawes feel Shaw has been given a rough time in the media, especially during the marriage break-up when he was wearing his pain like a red flag. ''He didn't do himself any favours talking about it on the radio … but it might have been kinder to leave him alone.''
President of the Tigersharks Phil Jones describes Shaw as a man with a heart. ''My wife died four years ago and he was constantly on the phone and sending emails, seeing how I was coping. He's pretty decent.''
It's also accepted that Shaw is passionate about Frankston, where he has lived since the age of seven. He did the rounds as a paper boy, attended St John Primary School, John Paul College, and completing a bachelor of business and accounting at Chisholm Institute. Before politics, he was a bouncer at Frankston's 21st Century nightclub and started an accounting company with his now-estranged wife in the early '90s.
But even then, controversy engulfed him. In 1992, he was found guilty of unlawful assault from his stint as a bouncer, leaving a man with broken ribs and cuts.
Despite the bad news and biffo factor, business people in downtown Frankston largely remain Shaw enthusiasts, less interested in his transgressions than the fact that ''he pops in and says hello'' and ''works hard''. In September, Fairfax Media visited the likes of Bob Sacco who runs Mamma Giovanna Pizza to gauge the love for Shaw.
''I feel the same way as I did six months ago,'' said Mr Sacco. ''If he done something wrong they should charge him. But they dropped the charges, so what's the problem? I tell you. He's a football between Labor and Liberal. It's not fair. I tell you something else. He runs in the next election I think he'll get re-elected.''
Three years into his parliamentary career, Shaw is now branded with all the cliches associated with politicians on the nose: ''embattled'', ''rogue'', ''controversial'', ''besieged''. Come this week, there may be another: ''banished''.
On Tuesday, Labor leader Daniel Andrews will attempt to find Shaw in contempt of Parliament for misusing his taxpayer-funded car for commercial gain, and will seek to expel the independent MP.
It's an extraordinary move - the last time a politician was permanently cast from Spring Street was 1901 - but Andrews insists ''enough is enough''.
However, some MPs from both sides of politics fear banishing Shaw would set an unhealthy precedent, and may not hold up to a legal challenge. He's not the first politician to breach entitlement rules and probably won't be the last. As one senior source admitted: ''We can't just get rid of someone because they're a tool.''
Boiled down, the privileges committee was split along party lines: Coalition MPs found he misused his car and should repay $6838 in costs, but could not prove he ''wilfully'' contravened the MPs code of conduct. Therefore, unlike the four Labor MPs on the committee, they ruled he was not in contempt of Parliament.
Labor's expulsion plans depend largely on whether former Liberal speaker Ken Smith agrees to cross the floor, knowing it could risk a byelection in Frankston, a seat held by the slender margin of 2.1 per cent.
If the ALP was to win such a byelection, it would give both sides 44 seats in the chamber, making Parliament unworkable, and potentially paving the way for an early election. But when things get this personal and ugly, as in any bad marriage, reason goes out the window.
The chequered history of the controversial member for Frankston
November 2010 - Accountant Geoff Shaw wins the seat of Frankston from Labor MP Alistair Harkness, who had served two terms, with a 6.8 per cent swing, helping the Coalition form government with a small majority.
April 2011 - Police called after Shaw refused to leave his wife Sally's home. The pair had recently separated.
May 2011 - Shaw tells a young gay man in an email that his right to love whoever he pleased is as invalid as the right of a molester wanting to abuse children. Victoria's Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commissioner call his comments ''potentially dangerous''.
June 2011 - Shaw admits he had been charged over a serious assault while working as a bouncer at Frankston nightclub 21st Century. He received a fine and a good behaviour bond over the 1992 attack, but escaped conviction.
August 2011 - When police pull over a 21-year-old driver in his electorate, Shaw intervenes. Police reported the member for Frankston (a karate enthusiast) had a word to the driver about his swearing and a scuffle broke out between the two, who had to be pulled apart by an officer.
May 2012 - Shaw makes his personal life public, repeatedly putting up a hand-made sign on Golf Links Road in his electorate declaring his love for ex-wife Sally and pleading for her to forgive him and take him back.
■ Baillieu government launches an investigation into reports Shaw used his taxpayer-funded car to run his hardware business.
October 2012 - Labor MPs claim Shaw called Opposition Leader Daniel Andrews a ''wanker'' and made an obscene gesture in Parliament.
December 2012 - Police launch an investigation into the MP after the Victorian Ombudsman finds he used his parliamentary car to run his business.
March 2013 - Shaw quits the parliamentary Liberal Party, claiming many Victorians share his lack of confidence in the leadership of the government. Premier Ted Baillieu resigns later that day.
October 2013 - Shaw is involved in an altercation with taxi drivers protesting on the steps of Parliament.
December 2013 - Prosecutors withdraw all charges against Shaw regarding the misuse of his parliamentary car and petrol card, saying there was not a reasonable prospect of criminal conviction.
February 2014 - Parliamentary speaker Ken Smith steps down after Shaw sides with the opposition in declaring the long-term MP has lost the confidence of the house.
June 2014 - Shaw tells a radio station he will back a vote of no confidence against the Coalition should the opposition bring one, effectively threatening to bring down the government.
Lara Nicholson
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Ex-democrat threatens his former Senate colleague
"Don't take us for granted."
I. MPAA Threatens SOPA opposers
Obama flag
U.S. President Barack Obama [Image Source: SFGate]
Chris Dodd
MPAA's corpulent CEO Chris Dodd
Bribe under table
Comments Threshold
I don't think they realize...
By borismkv on 1/22/2012 2:40:33 PM , Rating: 5
That piracy doesn't actually cause them to lose much revenue. Generally speaking, the people who pirate aren't really likely to purchase what they pirate if there was no way to do so. So without piracy, those 21 million copies of avatar would have resulted in *maybe* 1 million copies sold. And that's probably a high estimate.
RE: I don't think they realize...
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I have to admit. I pirated Avatar.
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I believe this is the best Avatar summary ever:
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By lagomorpha on 1/22/2012 3:41:40 PM , Rating: 5
I don't think that's their goal. What they would like to do is to implement a system where piracy doesn't exist as an alternative and they can lock content to individual purchasers and devices so that used copies are not available either. Once that occurs they can then jack prices of movies back up to $50 each and require you to purchase a separate copy for each device you wish to watch it on so they can sell each person several copies of the same movie like back in the VHS/laserdisc/DVD transition days.
RE: I don't think they realize...
By joex444 on 1/22/2012 4:19:40 PM , Rating: 5
This is precisely what they want.
And in all honesty, who can think back 20 years ago. Even 15 should do. Before DVDs were around, what was the state of affairs?
How did people see movies pre-DVD?
1. You watch it in theaters. People still do this, it becomes difficult to see what you want choosing this option.
2. You rent it. Blockbuster was huge, and there were competitors. Not Netflix, that was years away, but other competing brick and mortar stores. Because people drove around to go get things. I remember that some would actually rent DVD players, right before they collapsed.
Then DVD comes along and people are suddenly buying movies. This wasn't a "thing" that people did before. The VHS copies were prohibitively expensive, $50 is about right. And it's a VHS. This is why rental stores existed. Though a rental copy would cost much more for the store to buy ($300-ish, maybe more?).
Now they're able to collect sales on tickets, and then people buy it later. And we also have some brick and mortar stores that rent copies which purchase a copy, as well as Netflix which purchases the DVD and blurays (presumably at a higher price due to the special license).
In the perfect MPAA world, this is what would happen:
1. Movie ticket prices would go up
2. Piracy would be impossible
3. If piracy were possible, you would go to federal prison for even trying or pay something like $150,000 per incident
4. There are no physical discs, because those can be lent to friends, enemies, etc.
5. You would pay each time you view a movie in your house
6. What you can view would have heavy DRM on it
7. (Super-ideal world and only half joking: A camera would count the number of viewers and charge you extra for each head)
8. Viewing would probably cost most of a movie ticket. View it twice and it costs more than the Bluray.
The only advantage to a discless system is the environmental benefit of not printing discs, making cases and shipping this crap around the globe.
RE: I don't think they realize...
By MrTeal on 1/22/12, Rating: -1
RE: I don't think they realize...
RE: I don't think they realize...
By YashBudini on 1/22/2012 8:19:00 PM , Rating: 2
I don't know where you bought VHS movies, but you were getting ripped off if you were paying $50 15-20 years ago
I recall retail sales that high, it was probably more than 20 years ago.
RE: I don't think they realize...
By Solandri on 1/22/2012 11:09:00 PM , Rating: 5
When I was a kid, my parents bought one of the first VCRs (a Sony Betamax) around 1976. My aunt bought them a copy of Gone with the Wind as a gift. It was $99, which according to an inflation calculator is $378 in 2010 dollars.
The MPAA has a very poor track record at predicting what's best for them. They were convinced videotapes were going to be the death knell for them. "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." They went so far as to sue Sony (who was on the side of taping back then) and took the case all the way to the Supreme Court before losing (the famous Betamax case). In the 1990s, revenue from tape and DVD sales exceeded theater receipts for the first time. (DVD revenue has since dropped below theater revenue in 2010, shifting to video on demand and streaming services.)
Basically, every time new technology comes out, they throw a hissy fit lamenting how the technology is going to kill their industry. And in the end the technology ends up expanding and strengthening their industry. The industry is run by unimaginative people who know only how to keep the ship pointed straight, and are convinced if there's land ahead the solution is to somehow cut a path through the land instead of turn the ship. My advice would be to just ignore what they say they want, for their own good.
RE: I don't think they realize...
By ekv on 1/23/2012 1:15:01 AM , Rating: 2
The industry is run by unimaginative people
Chris Dodd visited a certain real estate companies corporate office several times. After these visits his campaign coffers were, shall we say, bolstered. Mr. Dodd can be extraordinarily imaginative ... when it comes to bribes. Of course, he's from Connecticut. Those from Chicago are rather the gun-in-your-face unimaginative types.
By YashBudini on 1/24/2012 1:15:42 PM , Rating: 2
This is what the "land of opportunity" phrase has digressed to.
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15-20 years ago DVD wasn't even around...
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15 years, yes.
20 years, no.
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By jimbojimbo on 1/23/2012 11:26:28 AM , Rating: 2
The other thing was 15 years ago a movie hit the theaters then sat there for a few months and then had showings at the $1 theaters for another month or so. It wouldn't come out on VHS for at least a year often longer. Because of this if you wanted to watch a movie you saw it in the theater. Also the viewing experience was better because nobody had cell phones.
Now. A movie hits the theaters and you know that it'll be out on Bluray within 3-4 months easily. Why bother going to a theater and have to listen to some a-hole's cell phone ringing non stop over and over? Why not wait and watch it on BluRay in surround sound at the comfort of home with no annoyances? This is why nobody goes to theaters any more except on dates or as a last resort if there's nothing else to do.
RE: I don't think they realize...
By JediJeb on 1/23/2012 2:46:09 PM , Rating: 2
In 1978 I saw Star Wars for the first time and I clearly remember that on the marquis it said "Now in its 44th week" and we still had to sit on the front row because it was packed full.
I also remember that my friend received a copy of The Empire Strikes Back for his graduation present and at the time it cost $100 new. That is just over the 20 years mentioned above, but the price of hit movies back then stayed high for a long time. I also remember when you had to pay $100 or more deposit to a video rental store before you could become a member and rent videos.
RE: I don't think they realize...
By Hardin on 1/23/2012 12:54:42 PM , Rating: 2
No I know vhs tapes were not that expensive 15-20 years ago and I don't know why people who are saying so are getting downvoted. We have so many vhs tapes from those days. We still might have more vhs movies then dvd movies. Usually we only ever went to Blockbuster to rent video games.
RE: I don't think they realize...
By rcc on 1/23/2012 1:24:27 PM , Rating: 2
Because in these discussions you are only allowed to agree with the rants. Any dissenting comments are down rated.
RE: I don't think they realize...
By nafhan on 1/22/2012 5:26:58 PM , Rating: 2
They absolutely realize it. These people in the MPAA and Congress may be corrupt and greedy, but they generally aren't stupid. The 21 million number is simply lying via statistics.
RE: I don't think they realize...
By Jeremy87 on 1/22/2012 9:02:13 PM , Rating: 2
It's even possible that without piracy it would've sold less. Or maybe not with Avatar, but many relatively unknown movies get more known because someone pirates it and talks about it, recommends it to their friends, who then buy it.
RE: I don't think they realize...
Are they real? WTF are these the dark ages?
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Dodd Petition
By leadpoop on 1/22/2012 5:00:05 PM , Rating: 5
Here is a petition at the white house web site to have Dodd investigated.
RE: Dodd Petition
By Reclaimer77 on 1/22/2012 7:58:24 PM , Rating: 3
I love that "Faux" News got him to publicly state, in such vivid detail, what essentially amounts to bribing a Government official. Not just any official, but the President himself! Sure it goes on all the time, but most people aren't stupid enough to lay it out on national TV.
RE: Dodd Petition
By FITCamaro on 1/23/2012 7:28:21 AM , Rating: 2
Jee is that the same Fox News that the Obama administration tried to bar from press conferences and essentially shut down?
And Democrats and liberals can say whatever they want since the media is 90% on their side. Doesn't matter if its an admission of guilt, blatantly untrue, or racist.
RE: Dodd Petition
By Hollif50 on 1/23/2012 7:55:00 AM , Rating: 2
President Obama is the president. Myself, I sure wouldn't want to invite those A**holes from Fox News to my press conference either. I watch 4-5 different news channels and follow 8-9 different print news organizations. They all pretty much report the same things; except Fox News. They appear to be in some alternate far-right universe. Fair and balanced my A**...
RE: Dodd Petition
By Ringold on 1/23/2012 9:09:44 AM , Rating: 2
I was listening to an interview with a lifelong Democrat and, I think, Jimmy Carter's campaign manager. Interesting interview in that he represents the old-school wing of the party that thinks Obama's been captured by extreme environmentalist groups to the detriment of the average Joe worker that once was the parties focus. But his other comment I liked was that back in his day a Democrat had to campaign on an even footing, whereas today the media is a full-blooded extension of the party. With the exception of Fox News and other, smaller outfits, like the WSJ.
On the one hand, it's good that people admit the state of affairs. On the other, it takes away any hope of innocence, as now there's no denying that our media now is just as biased as some third world countries we read about.
RE: Dodd Petition
By ClownPuncher on 1/23/2012 2:52:45 PM , Rating: 2
Obama is a politician with loose party ties and not much consistency. None of the media outlets are fair and balanced anymore, because sensationalism and spin is what sells. The good news is that it seems the public is waking up a bit and realizing this, as evidenced by petitions against these obviously ridiculous bills.
RE: Dodd Petition
By jimbojimbo on 1/23/2012 11:31:37 AM , Rating: 2
So you think they should be allowed to invite only those people that report on them favorably? Isn't that pretty much censorship of the media?
RE: Dodd Petition
Because they're all Liberal lol. Did you have a point?
RE: Dodd Petition
By FITCamaro on 1/23/2012 1:16:04 PM , Rating: 3
Yes because CNN, ABC, NBC, and MSNBC are just so unbiased in the opposite direction.
Please. Look at something like John Edwards cheating on his wife in the 2008 election. It wasn't even reported on by the rest of the media until Fox was playing recorded audio of Edwards threatening the woman he impregnated over the phone. There have also been numerous stories in the news over just the past few months that I have been unable to find any mention of on news sites other than Fox.
Is Fox biased? Yes. But so are all the other stations, just in the opposite direction. They're the only ones though that haven't called me an ignorant, inbred racist for believing in limited government.
RE: Dodd Petition
By Reclaimer77 on 1/23/2012 1:30:45 PM , Rating: 2
Exactly. Or even better, when it comes time for news networks to announce which candidate they support, look what party they endorse EVERY SINGLE time.
And that's NOT going to effect how they report the news? Please, come on.
RE: Dodd Petition
By michael67 on 1/23/2012 5:33:34 PM , Rating: 2
Thank god i don't live in the US when it come to my news.
There is something to say for good independent public television, I lived in 3 country's (Holland, German & Norway) in Europe and all have there own public television, and they all give more or less unbiased news just like the BBC.
Also our politicians, get funded by the state and are not depended on "gifts" from the public sector, they get some but they go strait in to the party account.
What i don't get is why lobbyist are demanded to be on the record all the time when they are lobbying, and make it a criminal offense if they don't record there conversation and make it public.
I think it has to benefits:
1. it properly keep politicians and lobbyist more on there tows.
2. lobbyist lie all the time or at least exaggerate there stories, so people can check and correct there lie's *kuch* mistakes.
Because from here it looks like the political system is way more broke then ours.
Not Surprised at all
Say it ain't so!
RE: Not Surprised at all
I can't believe this guy isn't in prison.
RE: Not Surprised at all
Campaign contribution...
By superPC on 1/22/2012 8:38:10 PM , Rating: 4
Is the real problem here. any kind of donation to a politician or a political party should be done with a blind system. where the politician or the political party can't know who contribute to them. that way they can really be themselves and let their ideology really shine through.
RE: Campaign contribution...
By protosv on 1/23/2012 10:02:42 AM , Rating: 2
Or, better yet still, let's just ban campaign contributions alltogether and just vote based on which candidate's ideology is most appealing. It's how things used to work many many years ago....
RE: Campaign contribution...
By Dr of crap on 1/23/2012 10:18:01 AM , Rating: 2
Yea, I'm for that, but IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
Do you really think our "great elected officals", with they're golden parachute retirement money and healthcare coverage and all the other perks, would vote to end campaign contributions?
That would mean no more ads on TV, or radio - darn
No more billboards - darn
A reduction in yard signs - HOORAYYYYY
How could they fly all over and shake hands and kiss babies, and do the bus across America campaigns???
Nope I couldn't stand it if the politicans didn't spend ALL that money to get elected!
The problem
Not to mention the disproportionate punishment.
we are watching too....
By ncage on 1/22/2012 5:25:32 PM , Rating: 3
Don't worry Mr. Dodd the voters are watching too. No matter how much money you send them they still won't get reelected if people don't vote for them. We know why the MPAA hired you and it isn't going to work.
RE: we are watching too....
By Dr of crap on 1/23/2012 10:11:33 AM , Rating: 2
You are seriously messed up IF you think votes are not bought and sold as well.
THEY can have anyone be the top pick in each party, and get the votes THEY want to get THEIR guy into office.
And if you think I'm not playing with a full deck, think about it for awhile.
It can and I'm sure it DOES happen. Money talks, folks!
MPAA is just mad...
By jonmcc33 on 1/23/2012 8:27:09 AM , Rating: 4
He's just mad that hard drive manufacturers are stealing all of their profits. If it weren't for pirated movies then who would need a 2TB hard drive?
By sprockkets on 1/22/2012 3:21:02 PM , Rating: 3
Doesn't this guy know what the retirement package is for presidents?
Threats From Hollywood.
By Hollif50 on 1/23/2012 7:39:08 AM , Rating: 2
"You tell that to that camera guy, you tell that to that makeup artist, you tell that to that truck driver out there who made, makes a living because they work in this industry." Hollywood wants to get all the revenues that it can possibly extract. Just like before the 80s video cassette tape legal decision that gave people the right to copy a tape as a backup and brought prices down from $30-$40 to maybe $10-$15. I have little sympathy for them and haven't had; especially when they can go after ordinary citizens and demand $ thousands in settlement and also sue others in court and demand $ millions. As for the little guy comment: Show me what you're paying these people and then it could strike a sympathetic cord in me. Or you could lower your prices and come up with a more accommodating business model...
By Arsynic on 1/23/2012 11:10:17 AM , Rating: 2
Chris Dodd is a crook who got sweetheart mortgage deals from Countrywide Financial while a Senator. When career politicians get booted out and become internal lobbyists for corporations, shit like SOPA and PIPA happens.
This is why our founders feared Democracy. It's glorified mob rule. As soon as people were smart enough to figure out that they could use government to take something from a certain group of people and give it to themselves the country would start its steep decline.
We're already decades into that steep decline.
Worried about the little guy?
By drlumen on 1/23/2012 12:14:11 PM , Rating: 2
No need to worry about that Mr. Dodd, that's why those people are unionized and the unions have their own lobbyists.
Those people do not see any percentage or additional perks from increased sales at the box office or from DVD/Blu-Ray sales. This is just him trying to personalize the situation for the 'little guy'. When, in essence, those people would be getting hosed by the studios if it weren't for the unions. While they be making a decent wage there are not many (if any) teamsters with yachts or multimillion dollar homes.
Say or think what you will about the unions but this is the very reason the various entertainment unions exist. The unions have to go pry their wage pittance from the studios on behalf of their members for their work as well. Otherwise all those people would be getting raped by the big media studios on a daily basis.
The best rebuttal I've seen
By lagomorpha on 1/23/2012 3:34:58 PM , Rating: 2
I guess thats means...
By masamasa on 1/23/2012 5:30:58 PM , Rating: 2
I guess thats means they won't have the cash to fund those lame campaign commercials where they constantly trash one another.
We can forget Sopa and pipa
By Adam M on 1/23/2012 6:41:32 PM , Rating: 2
These bills obviously were not needed to take down Megaupload. I am sure other sites are not far behind. Instead of lining the pockets of our statesmen, the MPAA and other industry industry groups could have spent that money offering new and novel ways to access content. For well over a decade, they have remained well behind the technological curve and they get mad when they aren't making money on something as small as a single MP3. I can't remember the last time a movie was released that I just HAD to see. I will gladly wait for a movie to show up on my movie channels or for it to be available to rent by mail. It saves me the $30 I would have spent on a theater ticket only to be dissapointed both in the movie and the price I paid to see it.
The larger issue is the "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" political system that exists today. Corporations with unlimited funds should have no ability to buy and sell their way into legislation. Republican or Democrat, they all have someones hand in their pocket. The very notion that coronations are people is what has compromised our government down to its very core. The only way for a real person to take real action is to stop buying things. In the end your money used for goods and services only goes to pay off the politicians you elect to screw you. Vote with your money, and every 4 years start with fresh representatives because the longer any one person holds office, the higher the likelihood that some one has paid for their votes in the House or Senate.
By cyberjack101 on 1/22/2012 3:34:40 PM , Rating: 1
<former Democrat Senator from Massachusetts>
Chris Dodd formerly represented Connecticut.
The penalty for piracy will continue to increase
By Beenthere on 1/22/12, Rating: -1
By abhaxus on 1/22/2012 7:30:13 PM , Rating: 3
I accidentally voted you up, but in a way you are right. We should pay. I pay for IP when it is the most convenient method for me to acquire high quality media. Unfortunately, due to the DRM involved in most things coming out of Hollywood (or gaming studios) makes it less likely that I can watch or play something at reasonable quality for a fair price, with a reasonable expectation of being able to play it continuously forever. It's a sad state of affairs when you pay extra for a blu-ray to include an "ultraviolet" digital copy that only works when connected to the internet on certain mobile devices and at a ridiculously poor quality. So I would rather download a 1080p or 720p mkv internal rip that plays perfectly on my GS2, PC, PS3, and tablet. I also own over 100 blurays and 200 DVDs.
Gaming wise the situation is even worse. I have had to download a crack to play games I have legally purchased enough that it is now a force of habit that I download a DVD check disabler and crack for every game I buy (or I just purchase through steam).
If I could pay $5-10 and download a movie with no DRM, in a format that everything understands, at a slightly lower quality than blu-ray, I would buy more movies. And the industry would make more money. But they are terrified of giving users that kind of control.
By YashBudini on 1/22/2012 8:29:21 PM , Rating: 2
It's more than that, you have a right to make a personal backup copy to safeguard your investment. That has been your right, and it's being eliminated.
with a reasonable expectation of being able to play it continuously forever
Given how easily the plastic scratches I never had such an expectation. But I have owned vinyl with hundreds of plays that sounded like new.
But this is strangely a parallel I see elsewhere in life. There are several intersections in this area completely abused by a handful of cars that do not stop first. Rather than punish just them through enforcement the town puts up a sign that says "No turn on red," which punishes everyone, except the cars who were not stopping on red and the only ones there, because alone they still don't stop.
Oh and in Reclaimer fashion, I almost're an idiot!
By bigboxes on 1/22/2012 10:42:29 PM , Rating: 1
I'm off to Newegg to order another hard drive to fill up with all sorts of goodies before beenthere's draconian laws take effect. Keep up the ganda beenthere!
By tecknurd on 1/24/2012 2:37:27 AM , Rating: 2
Everyone knows priacy is a crime so trying to rationalize it is futile. SOPA will be rewritten and passed to reduce the infringement for copyright holders - as it should be. There is no God given right to someone else' artistic works. if you want it, you must pay for it like any other good or service.
Yes piracy is a very big problem. Yes, SOPA and PIPA will be rewritten and try pass these bills in February. The ongoing fight against SOPA and PIPA will not be stop from people. The people stated that SOPA and PIPA is not the answer to the problem of piracy because these bills goes against the constitution and the bill of rights. People do understand that piracy is wrong, but what is happening right now is watching a movie, listening to music, and installing applications is not easy anymore even though people bought the product. The people that bought a movie, music, or application sometimes have to resort to piracy in order for them to use their bought product easier. A pirate movie does not bring the problems of DRM and HDCP that affects the quality of the movie if the pieces in the path from player to TV is not up to specifications. Watching a movie requires the watchers to have their Internet be up, but in some areas people do not have the Internet to benefit the high quality definition of a Blu-Ray movies. Shame on MPAA to pushing these complications in order to watch a movie that people have legally bought. Shame on RIAA to enforce to put DRM on music CD. Shame on software companies to bury protection programs on installation discs.
The amount of software and movies that I have bought in a decade is only a handful. This is because I have to build up the patients to install or watch movies that have protections. There are problems with installing software. The disc either does get read or it stops half way through installation. Sometimes the drive does not read the disc correctly, so the program does not get run. DVD and Blu-Ray discs may include some bad sectors that may create a slight pause or a skip while watching the movie. This is just not right.
I feel companies have taken the responsibility that people once had when they bought the software, movie, and music. In the place of responsibility, companies are stating every person that buys the product as criminals.
| http://www.dailytech.com/mpaa+chief+threatens+obama+congress+for+sopa+rejection/article23842.htm | dclm-gs1-055390001 |
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User avatar #158 - MaxFabian ONLINE (04/28/2012) [-]
It's funny because the U.S. border is the left side and the Mexico border is on the right.
User avatar #282 to #158 - defender (04/28/2012) [-]
how is that funny
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0.053593 | <urn:uuid:f06d32d0-c2a6-4a48-8b53-a972703276e4> | en | 0.954888 | Huffpost Religion
The Blog
Noah Efron Headshot
The Meeting of Science and Religion in Real Life
Posted: Updated:
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." --Hamlet, Act 1, Scene V
Many see the meeting of science and religion as a meeting of ideas. Biologists propose evolution and believers counter with creation. Physicists say "Big Bang" and pastors say "God's handiwork." Science is theories, religion is theology; sometimes the ideas put forth by each mesh, and sometimes they grind.
This sort of scheme is the basis of a lot of what is written about science and religion, by both those who see the two as warring, and those who see the two as compatible. Sam Harris adopted it in his essay here in the Huffington Post, "Science Must Destroy Religion":
Religious faith -- faith that there is a God who cares what name he is called, that one of our books is infallible, that Jesus is coming back to earth to judge the living and the dead, that Muslim martyrs go straight to Paradise, etc. -- is on the wrong side of an escalating war of ideas.
So, too, Christopher Hitchens who wrote that:
Richard Dawkins also maintains that the issue is ideas. "Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth," he writes, and these foolish truths are what gum up the real truths of science.
Once you see science and religion principally as bodies of ideas, the obvious thing to ask about them is whether or not these ideas fit together. Thus, even the brilliant philosopher of science, Alan Plantinga, writing on "Religion and Science" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy concludes that "perhaps the most salient question is whether the relation between religion and science is characterized by conflict or by concord." Is there or isn't there "an escalating war of ideas" between the two?
But the thing is, though both are rich with ideas of all sorts, neither science nor religion is mostly about ideas. These grand and impossible abstractions -- science and religion -- are about more than theories and theology. Each also describes exquisitely complex practices, prescriptions and proscriptions of behaviors and attitudes, communal institutions, structures of authority, canonical texts, rules for deciding what is to be believed and what rejected, sanctioned forms of communication, rituals, traditions, calendars and seasons, and more.
Science is often taken to be a bunch of rarefied, bespectacled, ethereal, elegant E=mc2 codifications. In fact, it is much broader, including scientific practices and scientific technologies (through which most of us experience science most immediately) as well as science funding and science teaching and medicine and psychiatry and a hundred other paths by which science and scientists wend their ways into our lives.
Religion is often taken to be a compendium of religious dogma championed by beshrouded men in odd hats and vestments and collars who tsk tsk about the decline of traditional values. In fact, it is much more than that, including patterns of language and liturgy, stories we tell our kids, foods we make, how we mark birth and marriage and death, how we understand sickness, what songs we sing when and why, and a hundred other paths by which religion wends its way into the lives of those who embrace or reject it.
All this being the case, the meeting between science and religion is rarely a meeting about ideas at all. Conflicts about evolution and intelligent design dominate headlines, but they are rarely, if ever, the most important story to tell about the relationship between science and religion. In fact, even when a conflict about science and religion seems to be about ideas, usually it is at the same time also about something else altogether. Obviously, these meetings are often about politics. Equally often, they are about identity, autonomy, authority and manners. They can be about economics. They can be about knowledge and what counts as reliable knowledge. Who is an expert and who is a charlatan.
Sometimes, though they seem to be about abstract ideas, meetings of science and religion are really about how best to bring up your kids and how to be a mate. Or about whether and when and how to have sex or use drugs. Or about what counts as health and what counts as illness. Or about whom one should turn to for advice when facing a problem. Or about how to entertain yourself and how to spend your money.
A few days ago, Pope Benedict XVI issued a statement about social networks like Facebook, called "Truth, Proclamation and Authenticity of Life in the Digital Age." The Pope's tone is one of reflection and careful measure, and he finds online things to admire and things to avoid. He sees in the Internet "a new appreciation of communication itself, which is seen first of all as dialogue, exchange, solidarity and the creation of positive relations." At the same time, he finds in posting and Tweeting and poking a "tendency to communicate only some parts of one's interior world" and a "risk of constructing a false image of oneself, which can become a form of self-indulgence." Life online shakes up life as we knew it, raising important questions:
What makes this document moving is the fact that in it Pope Benedict tries to make sense of how the vast changes quickly wrought by scientific technologies affect the lives of our kids and our own lives, how they might bring people together or keep them apart, how they add to our loneliness or subtract from it, how they allow us to find meaning and love, or prevent us for this. What makes it moving is the Pope's certainty that "the truth of Christ" and "the task of witnessing to the Gospel" are affected by the Internet (and other technologies served up by science), alongside his wavering and worried uncertainty about just how they are affected. The Pope knows that social networks answer a "desire for relationship, meaning and communion" that are the soul of what it means to be human, and he knows that at the same time they provide new ways for people to bully and berate one another, another human tendency.
Even more than tired polemics about Darwin, this is where science and religion meet in ways that matter, behind the locked bedroom door of a teen at a screen, waiting, forlorn, to be friended. Meetings of this sort reflect no "great war of ideas." They are something more delicate than that, far from headlines, taking place at a scale more human than seminar room polemics, with stakes that are, in the end, higher.
Over the next months, I will present in a series of essays examples of these other sorts of meetings of science, technology and religion: on Wall Street and Main Street, in bedrooms and boardrooms and examination rooms, in bistros and bodegas, in short, in all the places where, as a matter of course, we live our lives.
Around the Web
Faithful Facebook: Pope Benedict Blesses Social Networking - TIME ...
Pope Welcomes and Warns Facebook
Pope Benedict and Social Networking - The American Catholic
Pope Warns Against "Obsessive" Facebook Use | http://www.huffingtonpost.com/noah-efron/what-science-religion-are_b_814295.html | dclm-gs1-055640001 |
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Casper (SNES)
Casper SNES Title screen.
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You are Kat Harvey, the daughter of a paranormal expert. You've just met a friendly ghost named Casper, and you're getting to like him. But a pair of government agents are hot on both your tails! And if they catch you, who knows what they'll do to ghosts like him? You can't dwell on this much longer - you've got to protect him, and quick!
Based on the movie of the same name, "Casper" has you as Kat collecting items (especially coins and gems) while trying to protect your namesake ghostly friend from the wrath of government agents. Kat can use baseballs to stun the agents for a while, but she better use them wisely or she'll get caught ending the game. Luckily Kat can save the game at any time by activating a series of mechanical contraptions. Saving the game keeps track of the coins and gems Kat has collected, and that total determines how much of the game you have completed. Kat can also call on Casper to see through walls and locked doors and see what lies ahead, but he can only do this for a brief time before control returns to Kat.
Casper SNES Should avoid these bitches.
Casper SNES They love art.
Casper SNES Viewing the map.
Casper SNES Title screen.
Alternate Titles
• "キャスパー" -- Japanese spelling
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0.03791 | <urn:uuid:f9dfbe8f-793e-4902-9be6-586afe12a073> | en | 0.956346 | 'Dirty Bomb' Sting Finds a Hole in Security
Undercover investigators obtained a license to buy enough radioactive material to build a "dirty bomb," amid little scrutiny from federal regulators, according to a government report obtained Wednesday. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued the license to a fake company in just 28 days, with only a cursory review, the Government Accountability Office says.
And I'm Melissa Block.
Today, congressional investigators reported the results of an unusual sting operation. Working undercover, they set up a fake company and obtained a license for purchasing radioactive materials, the kind that could be used by terrorists in the dirty bomb.
NPR's David Kestenbaum reports.
DAVID KESTENBAUM: You can buy smoke detectors from the supermarket that have small radioactive sources inside them. But to buy more powerful sources, you need a license from U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Some members of Congress wanted to see how hard that would be, so they asked investigators with the Government Accountability Office to go undercover.
Mr. GREGORY KUTZ (Managing Director, Forensic Audits and Special Investigations, U.S. Government Accountability Office): Let me walk you through what we did and what we found.
KESTENBAUM: This is Gregory Kutz with the GAO. He testified before a Senate Subcommittee on Homeland Security today. He said the GAO set up a fake construction company that existed only on paper - no building, no Web site and it had no problem getting a radioactive materials license.
Mr. KUTZ: Twenty-eight days after making our application, we received our NRC license.
KESTENBAUM: The license did limit the amount of radioactive material that could be purchased. But fixing that part was easy. They scanned the license into a computer and made some changes.
Mr. KUTZ: We altered our genuine NRC license to allow for the purchase of unlimited quantities of radioactive materials. We then faxed this altered license to two suppliers who committed to shipping us numerous machines containing radioactive materials.
KESTENBAUM: The machines were moisture density gauges - construction companies use them to test roads and pavement. Investigators asked to buy 20 of these from one company. And the company offered instead to sell them 40.
Mr. KUTZ: What they cared about the most from us was doing a credit check and whether we could actually pay for what we wanted to buy. I mean, they assumed that since we have this license that it was genuine and they didn't have any means to determine that it wasn't.
KESTENBAUM: In the end, Kutz says, they could have purchased a category three level amount of radioactive material. He later told NPR he thought it would have been enough to make a dirty bomb that could contaminate several city blocks, prompting evacuations and probably panic.
The committee also heard from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Unidentified Man: Commissioner McGaffigan, I'm going to ask you to rise and take an oath, please.
KESTENBAUM: Edward McGaffigan is one of five commissioners at the NRC.
Commissioner EDWARD McGAFFIGAN (Nuclear Regulatory Commission): If you did find a flaw in our system and we - as soon we understood it, dealt with it.
KESTENBAUM: The NRC said that in the future, it will actually go to visit companies applying for this kind of license to make sure the businesses actually exist. To stop someone from forging a paper license, the NRC is considering setting up an online database. But McGaffigan stressed that the radioactive sources in the sting operation were not the big ones, the kinds used in some hospitals or food radiators.
Commissioner McGAFFIGAN: For high-risk sources, this thing would not work. You would be caught instantly. And you would have been caught instantly a long time ago. We give those people very, very tight scrutiny.
KESTENBAUM: McGaffigan said that what really concerned him was that in this sting operation, the companies selling the moisture density gauges didn't notice something was fishy.
Commissioner McGAFFIGAN: Instead of getting excited about, oh, my God, somebody is buying a quarter million dollars, it must be the biggest firm that somehow just landed on the Earth, they might have asked the question or two. They might have called back to us. We want to know about transactions. Please call us.
KESTENBAUM: The order did raise a red flag with one company. NPR spoke with George Marshall at Troxler Labs. Marshall said Troxler is the largest supplier of these devices. He said his company refused to fill the order. He said his company did not notify the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He said it was not required to.
The GAO also described a second sting operation that was not successful. It approached the state of Maryland for a radioactive materials license, the state issues its own. But a Maryland official called to say a sight visit would be required. The investigator's fake company didn't have a building so the sting operation ended there.
David Kestenbaum, NPR News.
| http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11926676 | dclm-gs1-055800001 |
0.043887 | <urn:uuid:2d182803-8d60-4c60-9816-ee690f64b763> | en | 0.899543 | Apres Robinson, le Deluge
Deepest and sincerest condolences to my dear faithful Anglican friends. May the prayers of C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers sustain you in this hour of arrogance and betrayal. You’re in my prayers and in the prayers of all Catholics grateful for the gifts that the Anglican communion has given the world.
So sad. Like watching your mother drink herself to death.
Did they have to pee on the grave by passing a resolution urging fetal stem cell research? | http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2003/08/26700.html | dclm-gs1-055850001 |
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go ahead... be a heretic
Comment on
GRT requires that you stringify (serialize) the values of the list you want to sort. That's not always possible. Eg. if it's a list of objects ...
And even if it's just a list of references to some data structures, by serialization and deserialization you end up with copies of the data structures. Which may matter a lot if you keep other references (in)to the structures.
In reply to Re^3: RFC:A brief tutorial on Perl's native sorting facilities. by Jenda
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Assessment for Ogani in Nigeria
Publisher Minorities at Risk Project
Publication Date 31 December 2003
Cite as Minorities at Risk Project, Assessment for Ogani in Nigeria, 31 December 2003, available at: [accessed 26 December 2014]
Nigeria Facts
Area: 923,768 sq. km.
Capital: Abuja
Total Population: 110,530,000 (source: unknown, 1998, est.)
Risk Assessment | Analytic Summary | References
Risk Assessment
The Ogoni have some of the risk factors associated with rebellion: a history of protest, group concentration and government repression. Nonetheless, they do not have a history of rebellion. Given that the group is very small and that the current government has taken some, labeling limited steps to address their concerns, it is unlikely that militant activity will occur in the near future. The group does however have a long history of protest against the Nigerian government and oil companies. Factors encouraging protest include a history of protest, government repression and economic grievances.
Analytic Summary
The Ogoni of Nigeria are a small ethnic group, comprising less than 1% of the total population of the country. They belong to the Ibibio, or Semi-Bantu, linguistic group, which comprises only 6% of Nigeria's population . The Ogoni have their own beliefs and religion. They are also identifiable as a group due to the physical characteristics. As a result of their small size, a history of poor relations with the Nigerian government and group concentration in a volatile area, the Ogoni are an organized and cohesive group.
The group has received much attention in recent years because of their struggle for compensation from Shell Oil and the Nigerian government for damage to their lands caused by the oil industry. Nigeria's oil industry accounts for 90% of its export earning, and even the smallest disruption has been threatening to the government. They are located in the Niger Delta, in the far south of the country, and they have not moved very far from their traditional territory . The Ogoni had autonomy over their territory until 1914, when Britain consolidated the area. Since that point, the other larger ethnic groups in the country have dominated them, due to their small numbers. The British practiced indirect rule in Nigeria as they had in much of the rest of their colonial states. However, for various reasons, the British favored the Ibo, and this favoritism led to further conflict with other groups when the Ibo were placed in authority positions in the north and southwest. As the press for independence intensified, the Ibo came to support the National Council for Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), led by Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe. The Yoruba mainly supported the Action Group (AG), and the Hausa/Fulani supported the Northern People's Congress (NPC). The NCNC and NPC formed a coalition that led the country to independence in 1960. The AG was largely marginalized from the federal government during the early years of independence, which led to a renewal of Yoruba factionalism. In January 1966, an Ibo-lead coup took control of the government.
Following the Biafra war, civilian rule was restored for a brief time in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Power became more and more entrenched in the hands of northerners during the 1980s and 1990s. On 31 December 1983, Muhammad Buhari led a military coup and banned all political activity in the country. The new military government was popular with northern Muslims. In August 1985, Ibrahim Babangida took power in a peaceful coup. During the 1980s, religious overtones became more and more important in the rivalries between the Hausa/Fulani and Yoruba and Ibo.
By 1987, Babangida announced that he was preparing to turn the government back to civilian rule. During the preceding two years, unrest was growing between Muslims and Christians, and there were sporadic outbreaks of violence. In June 1993, presidential elections were held in the country. Two parties were allowed to contest the elections: the National Republican Convention (NRC) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP). The former was led by a northerner Alhaji Bashir Othman Tofa, an economist and businessman. The latter drew large support from the Yoruba community and was led by a prominent Yoruba businessman, Moshood Abiola. Voter turnout was reportedly low, but the elections were thought to be free and fair. When it became apparent that Moshood Abiola, a prominent Yoruba businessman from the south, was going to be the victor, Babangida declared the elections null and void. Abiola declared himself president, but later fled the country in the wake of death threats against him. Violent protests and strikes took place over the next two years in an attempt to return Abiola to power. He eventually returned to the country and was subsequently arrested on charges of sedition. Nigeria plunged into its worst crisis since the Biafra war from 1967-70. Babangida resigned in August 1993. The government was taken over by an interim council, but the real power was in the hands of General Sani Abacha, then secretary of defense. He led a very oppressive regime under which thousands were jailed and countless numbers killed, particularly in the Niger Delta.
Sani Abacha died in June 1998. Within a month of taking power, the new military leader, Abdusalam Abubakar, released some political prisoners, held talks with opposition groups, and announced that general, multi-party elections would be held in order for a civilian president to take over. As of 1999, Nigeria was under civilian rule for only 14 years. Presidential elections were held in March 1999 in which former military leader and Yoruban Olusegun Obasanjo was declared the victor. The Ibo boycotted the legislative elections in February 1999 and urged their kin to vote against Obasanjo in the presidential elections, claiming that he could not represent Ibo interests. Shortly after the election, he set up a panel to investigate the abuses of the previous 15 years of military regimes. In the Delta region and the Muslim north, thousands were killed in communal conflict or anti-state activity during the 1990s.
The Ogoni are confronted with both demographic and ecological disadvantages. Compared to the majority of Nigerians, they suffer worse and continually declining health conditions, have a lower life expectancy, and face environmental problems due to the high levels of pollution in the Niger Delta. Due to the repressive actions taken by the Nigerian government in the past and present, many Ogoni have left the region entirely. Many of the restrictions that the Ogoni faced have been removed since the elections of 1999 and international awareness of their plight. Nonetheless, the group is still excluded by the majority of the country in political matters due to historical neglect, and no current policies are in effect to remedy the situation (POLDIS01-03 = 2).
The group has faced severe repression by the government both before and after the transition to democracy in 1999. In 1999 there were killings by the government in the Niger Delta, torture was used against the group, and there was a saturation of military presence. The Nigerian military effectively sealed off the area to outsiders after the Ogoni became vocal in their demands, and Ogoniland became a militarized region. In 2000 an Ogoni leader's house was destroyed and he was arrested. As of the end of 1999, at least 2,000 Ogoni had been killed since their peaceful protests against Shell Oil began. In the period 2001-2003, the level of repression against the group seemed to have decreased, although some arrests and high degree of military and police presence continued.
The main group representing the Ogoni is the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), which had been led by Ken Saro-Wiwa before his execution. The group has consistently accused Shell of causing major environmental damage to the area. Shell denies the problem is as big as the Ogoni claim, but independent environmental assessments of the area before it was closed to outsiders in 1993 support the Ogoni claim of extensive environmental damage. Some of the damage includes leaking pipelines, polluted water, oil in villagers' fields, air pollution, flooding resulting from the building of canals for the oil industry and disruptions of fresh water supplies. The Nigerian government has long refused to negotiate with MOSOP, claiming it was not a legitimate organization. Further, the oil companies of the region appeared at times to be in complicity with the government, possibly even involved in some of the violence against the Ogoni people. The group also relies on support from exiled Ogoni in other areas of the world, such as Canada. Additionally, there are many non-governmental organizations which work to promote the condition of the group and provide information on their campaign against Shell.
Until 1993, the Ogoni were politically inactive. Their campaign against Shell oil and the Nigerian government began in June 1993 when thousands of Ogoni held a peaceful protest. These protests have continued through to the year 2003 (PROT01 = 3, PROT02-03 = 2). The group has managed to always keep their protest activities peaceful and have never reverted to militant strategies to protest their situation.
There are some political restrictions on the MOSOP's activities; however, there has been a increase in the number of conventional political parties representing the group. The Ogoni continues to face significant economic (ECDIS01-03 = 4) and political disadvantages due to their historical marginalization. While there were no intergroup conflicts in their period, there were a few instances of intragroup fighting over leadership and land ownership issues. The group main demands continue to be the ones that have had historical importance for the Ogoni: limited autonomy, political rights, and funds for group development and compensation from the government and Shell for land use and pollution.
Africa South of the Sahara. 1995. Published by Europa.
Lexis/Nexis. 1990-2003. Reports from various news services including BBC, Reuters, Inter Press Service, Africa News Service, Xinhua News Service.
Nigeria, A Country Study. 1992. Helen Chapin Metz (Ed.). Library of Congress.
Human Rights Watch, various reports. 2001-2003.
U.S. Department of State. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. 2001-2003.
Search Refworld | http://www.refworld.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/rwmain?page=country&category=&publisher=MARP&type=&coi=NGA&rid=&docid=469f3abac&skip=0 | dclm-gs1-055950001 |
0.070616 | <urn:uuid:6039bd9e-ef16-4cf6-bd26-579aab903653> | en | 0.959256 | • Fri
• Dec 26, 2014
• Updated: 4:03pm
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PUBLISHED : Sunday, 08 September, 2013, 12:00am
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Dai Muff
If they cared about these poor fishermen they could simply have paid them better for the sharks fins for all these years.
Exactly. Humans can find other jobs and livelihoods. Sharks can't grow back their fins or recover their lives. The HK Marine Products Association people are amongst the most immoral scum I've ever seen on this earth.
Airlines are doing the right thing. People should spread the words that shark fins are simply nutritionally inferior to ordinary foods, so don't waste your money.
I think it is the deplorable way the sharks are killed - fins cut off while in the ocean and sharks sink to the bottom to suffocate - that most people have a problem with. The 'poor' fishermen don't seem to need the rest of the shark meat.
The Japanese kill their own whales with their "research vessels", so they probably don't need any airlines to ship the meat.
I could be biased, but I just find it interesting that the outrage against Japan and Norway's whale hunting doesn't seem nearly as fierce as those about shark fins.
Just because some people make a living out of doing something does not make the thing moral or right. It also does not mean they should be guaranteed to the same livelihood forever. People in all sorts of industries would loose their jobs or have to close their businesses because of new technologies that replace their products, changes in social attitude towards their products, or changes in policy. Society progresses and things change, and it is inevitable that some industries will go down and others will thrive.
The decline in shark fin import to HK is a positive change that should be welcomed. Good job with the environmentalist campaign. It is unfortunate that these fishermen have to suffer, but they will eventually move on, just as the VHS producers, photo film developers, and slave traders moved on and found other things to do.
The Japanese has declared to the world they rejected CITES, this means they will carry on to kill sharks and whales for commercial purposes. Just want to know which airline is working for them to deliver the goods!
They still wanna us consume Poisonous Shark Meat and Fins, NO WAY !!!
Stop making this a cultural or ethnicity thing. Culture has nothing to do with this. Europeans wiped out a lot of native fauna when they settled in North America and Australia. And even today many Americans complain that environmental policies protecting natural habitats are hurting their "livelihoods", in a manner not unlike what this Ricky Leung is doing. Human overpopulation is the culprit for all the environmental problems, not just any specific culture.
It's time for the government to step up and do something to resolve the opposite stances.
SCMP.com Account | http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1305878/shark-fin-imports-hong-kong-tumble-after-airlines-refuse-carry-them?page=1 | dclm-gs1-055970001 |
0.019026 | <urn:uuid:5812fd5c-7a40-45f2-8323-4cca2591c07b> | en | 0.989893 | my brother William is 4 years older then me and he is very protective
My brother William is sexy he is 6'2" has muscles that are prefect, he has honey brown eyes an soft lips that make a girl faint as soon as they touch her skin an he has a 10 an a half inch cock that is 4 inches thick.I have always loved my brother even before we fucked for the first time but the first time was absolutely amazing. I was 14 and my brother was 18 he was a senior in high school and he had a girlfriend name Jessie she was always rude to me and pushed me around an told me to stay away from Will finaly my brother dumped her sorry ass after that he became really close with me he always wanted to hang out and goof around and this went on for month. Three weeks before my 15th birthday William asked me what I wanted as a gift and I told him I wanted something I would never forget but like most guys he kept asking an I would give home the same answer, finaly it was my birthday. I woke up around 8a.m. to take a shower an notcied my mom an dad had already left for work an William was still sleeping so I took off my pjs and turns some 80's music on and started the shower leavingbthe door to the bathroom opened I got in the shower and pure my brothers bodywash all over my D cup tits and slathered it up and down my body I moaned softly as I gently rubbed my clit I began rubbing it faster and moaned louder as I played with my sensitive clit I rinsed. Off the bodywash an leaned against the wall I opened my legs to were the hot water fell hard against my pussy and began fingerings myself I imagened that I was being fucked hard by a tall handsome man an fingeres my pussy faster an harder slamming my finger as deep inside me as it would go my body tensted up as I half screamed in pleasure at the thought of have cum pumped in to my tight wet pussy as I slowed my pace I rinsed off against an wash my hands with bodywash then turned the water off at that moment I could hear that my brother was up and I started to panic.
"Kylie, hurry I have to take a piss."
"Don't rush me its my brithday plus you know damn well you can take a piss anytime you want."with that I began to dry of my dripping wet tits as William walked in his eyes widen and he froze and just looked me up and down a whispered "damn, your sexier then Jessie." He chuckled lightly"now I know why she hated yo she wanted your body." William slowly walked to me an ran his fingers down my cheek he moved closer as. He moved his hand down my body my pussy was soaked in reaction to his gentle touch I moaned as he Grande my waist and pulled me against his body he slowly kissed my lips sending spasms down my spine an making my pussy wetter then it was.
"Do you want your gift baby." He sighed into my ear as he stared kissing my neck
"Yes buba please." I replied in pure ecstasy. He let go of me an closed the bathroom doorthen pulled his boxers down and he rubbed his huge cock an commanded me to bend over and grab the tub so I did as he said I teased him a little by sliding my finger in and out of my soaking wet hole he whispered
"Baby it will hurt OK but ill make it all better just hold your breath." I nodded and held my breath right then he grabbed my hips and slammed. His cock inside me popping my cherry I one hard thrust as I bit my lower lip I tasted blood, William Began fucking me hard and fast and I moaned half in pain half in pleasure.
"So you like a little pain." William pulled my head back by my hair as he fucked my thight little pussy harder an deeper making me moan and yelp I started grinding my hips into him meeting his thrust his breathing got heavy and he put his hand round my mouth and stood me up as he fucked me faster he moaned and so did I. My body tensed an began shaking as he began to tens I came all over him as he explore deep in my pussy filling me all the way he kept fucking me hard as he pumped more inside me then he slowed and held me tight and whispered a part of my favorite song into my neck
"I love you till the end." After we took a shower and washes each other he carried me to his room and laid me on his bed he laid next to me and held me tight as we fell asleep. After about a hour I felt his cock harden on my back so I sat up and grabbed his cock and softly kissed it from the tip to his balls then lick my way up he woke up and looked at me the look in his eye were not that of a brothers love for his sister but that of a husband's love for his wife so I lick his cock and then slowly sucked the head in to my mouth William. Pulled my hair up so I let him take complete control of me he then push my head down an forced his cock unbroken my mouth the put my head up I looked up into his eyes as he held my head still and thruster in an out of my mouth making me gag each time by the twelve time down he blew a large load of hot sticky cum into me. Outhouse and told me to drink it all so I smiled an swallowed what as in my mouth an said yes master and cleaned his cock dry. After eating ever bit of his cum I crawled up onto his cheast an kissed him softly then fell asleep listening to his heart beat
anonymous readerReport
2012-07-20 02:55:48
Could you please graduate from 5th grade before you attempt writing again? Do you even realize how illiterate this thing is?
You are not logged in.
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0.02257 | <urn:uuid:2d689904-ccc0-445d-871c-c32137ae1678> | en | 0.908894 | Three vignettes demonstrate what gets lost and found in translation
MerdePhoto from Liberation Entertainment
Easily capturing the paradoxical essence of the world's largest megalopolis seems about as likely as a phalanx of harajuku girls uniformed in Little Bo Peep costumes successfully scaling Mount Fuji. Now imagine that Bo Peep army solely consists of two Frenchmen and a Korean, and you have a sense of the heady task undertaken by the filmmakers of Tokyo!, a French production comprising a fantastical triptych of stories about the celebrated city from writer-directors Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-ho.
The first, Gondry's Interior Design tells the intimate fable of Hiroko and Akira, a spirited young Japanese couple who relocate to the big city and become confounded by its mix of vast possibility and soul-crushing suffocation. The aimless Hiroko eventually succumbs to a fate that curiously mixes urban alienation, cultural traditions of utilitarian uniformity, and the whimsical surrealism of an old-fashioned folktale. The result is a sweetly touching, delicately composed encapsulation of old- and new-guard Japanese culture.
Carax's Merde stars Denis Levant (1991's Lovers on the Bridge) as a homicidal sewer dweller — part evil clown, part C.H.U.D. — who wreaks havoc on Tokyo out of an avowed hatred for the Japanese. A half-cocked homage to Godzilla, the titular Merde (yes, that's French for "shit") represents a cartoonish outsider's view of Tokyo and its denizens. Is it a sly attack on cultural isolationism or just myopic, er, horse merde? Either way it's painful to watch.
After that unfortunate palate cleanser, Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho (2006's The Host) channels Michelangelo Antonioni by way of Haruki Murakami in Shaking Tokyo, an atmospheric tale of a shut-in (or hikikomori) who is literally jolted out of his hermetic existence by a strong earthquake and a comely pizza delivery girl with an unusual set of instructional tattoos. Bong's story effectively conveys the internal turmoil caused by modern disaffection and fear (here, Tokyo itself is the monster), but it would have been nice to see a story that explores the city's teeming life in all its richness, vigor, and eccentricity instead of envisioning what it would be like without it. Seriously, where's a harajuku girl when you need one?
TOKYO! opens Fri/20 in Bay Area theaters.
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0.039528 | <urn:uuid:c23089cd-85d8-4434-9ec2-6c0479d9702d> | en | 0.942643 | Author: Sorting Last Post on Top Message:
MOTIVATED@LAST Posts: 14,288
11/28/12 6:42 P
You should always be sceptical of any claim of burning more than 800 calories in an hour - only very fit people can support this level of intensity for that length of time.
I always get worried by people who place blind reliance on HRM's. Those with high blood pressure or on certain medications can get an increased heart rate, which leads to an HRM overestimating calories burned. Poor contact between the skin and the unit can also cause problems.
But when I see an HRM (especially a new one) reporting about double what you might otherwise expect, my suspicion is the units of measure. Check the settings and manual on your HRM. Some seem to default to using your weight in kilograms (1 kg = 2.2 lbs), which leads to a calorie estimate of about double what you are actually burning.
Spark's calorie counter assumes that calorie burn is proportional to your weight. This holds true for weight-bearing activities like running, walking, etc. But for activities like the elliptical, where you are working against the resistance of the machine rather than your bodyweight, this can lead to an overestimate for heavier people. (No personal judgement intended here - just describing how the math works).
The calorie counters on ellipticals aren't always the most accurate, but in this case, it seems like its the only one that is producing an even vaguely feasible estimate.
KRISTEN_SAYS SparkPoints: (73,428)
Fitness Minutes: (35,001)
Posts: 5,088
11/28/12 3:24 P
I always trust what my HRM says, but wow, that seems awfully high!
VBCABELLO72 Posts: 105
11/28/12 3:19 P
I'm having a little bit of the same issue with my Fitbit and SP. My Fitbit is giving me a calorie burn of more than 100 than what SP estimates. My main concern is the number of calories SP is allowing me per day. I think it is too high, since I have only lost about 5 lbs in 6 weeks and all 5 of those were in the first week. I haven't lost since. I have chosen to eat fewer calories this week. I hope that it will help instead of hurt me.
KJELLYBEAN15 Posts: 240
11/28/12 3:06 P
Thank you very much for your time. I will check my user's manual and see if I can get it adjusted.
SPARK_COACH_JEN Posts: 56,691
11/28/12 3:00 P
If I had to guess, I'd say a realistic number would be somewhere between what the elliptical and SP are telling you. The HRM number sounds way too high, so you might want to double-check the settings on it to make sure it's giving you accurate information.
Coach Jen
KJELLYBEAN15 Posts: 240
11/28/12 2:26 P
Sorry. It's for 65 minutes.
SPARK_COACH_JEN Posts: 56,691
11/28/12 2:25 P
How long is the workout?
Coach Jen
KJELLYBEAN15 Posts: 240
11/28/12 2:24 P
Elliptical - 718 cals
Spark People - 1006 cals
Heart Rate Monitor - 1284 cals
SPARK_COACH_JEN Posts: 56,691
11/28/12 2:17 P
What kind of differences are you seeing? Can you give an example?
Coach Jen
11/28/12 1:54 P
If you are looking for accuracy I suggest you use none since all are based on averages which automatically excludes 50% of a given population and are only marginally accurate for a minority of the other 50%. Chose one and use it consistently to give you some sort of number if you want/need a number to post.
It is more accurate to monitor the calories you take in since those values are laboratory research based. The only caveat with those values is that portion sizes are often less than what is normally consumed to lower the calorie number.
KJELLYBEAN15 Posts: 240
11/28/12 1:07 P
I often see a significan difference in the calories that the elliptical says that I have burned compared to what Spark People says I have burned. I have been using the one from the elliptical because it is considerably less and I didn't want to overestimate what I was doing.
Last weekend I purchased a heart rate monitor with chest strap. This has recorded even higher than Spark People. Now the wheels are turning and I now have even more questions.
Which one would you use?
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| http://www.sparkpeople.com/ma/Heart-rate-monitor-vs-machine-vs-Spark-People?/6/1/29465316 | dclm-gs1-056020001 |
0.088445 | <urn:uuid:ce431381-a628-4a78-b4ef-2ea7cb0a921f> | en | 0.955481 | Simi Valley, Westlake take Marmonte cross country titles
Group effort leads girls; Westlake wins boys
Boys Team scores
1. Westlake 47
2. Thousand Oaks 77
3. Moorpark 80
4. Simi Valley 102
5. Royal 117
6. Newbury Park 119
7. Agoura 170
8. Calabasas 175.
Boys top finishers
1. Mikey Giguere (Westlake) 15:18
2. Sam Worley (Thousand Oaks) 15:49
3. Ryan Klachko (Royal) 15:50
4. Frankie Moncada (Simi Valley) 15:55
5. Devin Borjas (Calabasas) 15:58
6. Teerth Patel (Moorpark) 16:01
7. Jonathan Byrne (Newbury Park) 16:05
8. Tamas Gyalay (Moorpark) 16:06
9. Rocky Peterson (Westlake) 16:07
10. Nick Sommers (Westlake) 16:07.
Girls Team Scores
1. Simi Valley 26
2. Thousand Oaks 64
3. Royal 102
4. Westlake 109
5. Newbury Park 133
6. Moorpark 141
7. Agoura 180
8. Calabasas 226.
Girls top finishers
1. Sarah Baxter (Simi Valley) 17:03
2. Erika Barr (Simi Valley) 17:44
3. Brianne Holland (Royal) 17:47
4. Karla Vernola (Simi Valley) 17:50
5. Jenny Giguere (Westlake) 17:54; 6. Monika Gyalay (Moorpark) 17:55
7. Melanie Joerger (Thousand Oaks) 18:06
8. Desirae Jones (Simi Valley) 18:11
9. Nicki Ghazarian (Westlake) 18:15
10. Sophie Mateu (Royal) 18:16.
Sarah Baxter's dominance in cross country is so great she sometimes overshadows the greatness of her teammates.
But the way things are going these days, it figures Baxter and her Simi Valley High teammates will both receive more than their due.
Baxter won the Marmonte League girls championship at Agoura High on Thursday with a time of 17 minutes, 3 seconds for the 3-mile course, while Simi Valley won the team championship with an impressive 26 points.
Meanwhile, Westlake's Mikey Giguere won the boys race in 15:28 and led the Warriors to the team title by 30 points.
Simi Valley's girls easily won the team championship over runner-up Thousand Oaks, which had 64 points. Royal was third (102), followed by Westlake (109), Newbury Park (133), Moorpark (141), Agoura (180) and Calabasas (226).
The Pioneers' scorers finished a remarkable 1-2-4-8-11, just one point more than they had at last week's Ventura County Championships at Lake Casitas, and once again they were just as dominant behind Baxter, a sophomore.
"I, obviously, am very, very pleased with the performance," coach Roger Evans said. "We worked on being packed in and fast behind Sarah Baxter. That's a simple secret, but it's not as simple to do as it is to say."
Senior Erika Barr finished second with a time of 17:44. She overtook Royal freshman Brianne Holland in the last 200 meters. Holland settled for third in 17:47.
Baxter said it's frustrating that so often she receives the lion's share of the attention, instead of her team, which is solid from first to last.
"I really wish it would center on the team as a whole and not just me as much," Baxter said, "because the team is doing so well this year and I just feel like we could really make it in postseason and all of that."
Barr said Baxter has nothing to worry about. There is absolutely no jealousy among any of the Pioneers.
"Not at all, not at all," Barr said. "I am so proud of her and honestly, she pushes us to go harder and it's not like overshadowing us at all. We don't even think like that at all. We just love having her run with us and she's just pushed us so hard."
Simi's Karla Vernola, another senior, finished fourth in 17:50, followed by Westlake's Jenny Giguere (17:54) and Moorpark's Monika Gyalay (17:55). Other Simi Valley scorers were freshman Desirae Jones (eighth, 18:11) and junior Rachel Vinas (11th, 18:18).
Holland thought her race went very well, despite being passed by Barr.
"Actually, things went amazing because I PR'd by almost 30 seconds," Holland said. "It was really helpful because Erica was able to push me and I'm really proud of her especially since it's her senior year."
Westlake, with 47 points, took control of what was billed as a wide-open boys race, bettering Thousand Oaks (77 points) and Moorpark (80). Next were Simi Valley (102), Royal (117), Newbury Park (119), Agoura (170) and Calabasas (175).
Mikey Giguere overtook Thousand Oaks' Sam Worley (15:49) in the last mile to win the race by 21 seconds. Ryan Klachko of Royal was third (15:50), followed by Simi Valley's Frankie Moncada (15:55) and Calabasas' Devin Borjas (15:58).
Other Westlake scorers were Rocky Peterson (ninth, 16:07), Nick Sommers (10th, 16:08), Sean O'Bryan (11th, 16:11) and Chris Costa (16th, 16:15).
"It means a lot to us," Giguere, a sophomore, said of winning the team title. "Our goal is to keep going and going until the state meet, so I just want to thank the coaches for training us and fans for supporting us."
Westlake coach Joe Snyder said the victory has historical significance.
"It's the first time, really since 1979, that we've had a league title," Snyder said, "so we're really pleased, and it's a young team. Last year we had a great team, but this year with this team it was just unbelievable because they're so young, we were just thrilled each week that they've raced." | http://www.vcstar.com/sports/simi-valley-packs-it-in | dclm-gs1-056180001 |
0.020843 | <urn:uuid:319d3762-79e5-4c4e-ac6b-e1ad2eed07b4> | en | 0.960615 | A month ago, Gen. Muhammad-Ali Aziz Jaafari, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, vowed to stop further antiregime demonstrations in Iran and break what he termed "this chain of conspiracies." But this week the "chain" appeared to be as strong as ever: Students across the nation defied the general and his political masters by organizing numerous demonstrations on and off campus.
The various opposition groups that constitute the pro-democracy movement have already called for another series of demonstrations on Dec. 27, a holy day on the Muslim Shiite calendar. Meanwhile, the official calendar of the Islamic Republic includes 22 days during which the regime organizes massive public demonstrations to flex its muscles. Since the controversial presidential election last June, the pro-democracy movement, in a jujitsu-style move, has used the official days to undermine the regime.
Antigovernment demonstrators at Tehran University, Dec. 7. Getty Images
On Nov. 4, the anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, the opposition distanced itself from the regime's anti-American rhetoric. The democrats instead expressed anger against Russia and China, which are perceived as allies of the Islamic Republic. One slogan was "The Russian Embassy is a nest of spies!"
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Mark Bowden: How Iran's Revolution Was Hijacked
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It is clear the democracy movement is in no mood for deals with Mr. Khamenei, who they castigate for having betrayed his constitutional role of arbiter by siding with Mr. Ahmadinejad even before the official results of the election were declared. The demonstrators now burn his effigies, tear up posters showing his image, and chant violent slogans against him. One popular slogan goes: "Khamenei is a murderer! His guardianship is invalid!"
By cracking down ruthlessly on the protestors, the regime has only radicalized the movement. Even such notorious dealmakers as Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president now opposed to Mr. Ahmadinejad, have made it clear they would not accept any formula that would leave the "landslide winner" in place.
Last week, Mr. Rafsanjani refused to attend a much-publicized "reconciliation event" concocted by Ali Ardeshir Larijani, the speaker of Iran's ersatz parliament. The reason? Mr. Rafsanjani did not wish to be seen under the same roof as Mr. Ahmadinejad. Later, in a speech in Mash'had, Mr. Rafsanjani spoke of the regime's "long, deep and, potentially lethal crisis."
To judge by their most popular slogans, demonstrators across Iran are bent on regime change. Even rumors that the regime is working on scenarios for ditching Mr. Ahmadinejad—ostensibly on "health grounds"—after the Iranian New Year in March, have failed to halt the spread of regime-change sentiments.
Given the nation's mood, Messrs. Mousavi and Karroubi have abandoned their earlier talk of "realizing the full potentials of the existing constitution." An adviser to Mr. Mousavi tells me that "They wanted to make an omelet without breaking eggs. They now realize that [the people] have moved faster than imagined." More significantly, perhaps, Mr. Mousavi appears to have put his plans for an ill-defined "green organization" on the backburner. He is beginning to understand that the antiregime movement is too wide to fit into a centrally controlled framework.
Over the past six months, thousands of people have been arrested and hundreds killed in the streets. And yet, despite promises to squash the movement by Gen. Jaafari, it persists. To make matters worse for the regime, the Shiite clergy, often regarded as the backbone of the Islamic Republic, is beginning to distance itself from the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad tandem. Some ayatollahs, such as Messrs. Montazeri, Bayat, San'ei, Borujerdi and Zanjani, are especially annoyed at Mr. Ahmadinejad's claim of being in contact with the "Hidden Imam"—a messiah-like figure of Shiism whose second coming is supposed to occur at the end of times.
Mr. Ahmadinejad claims that the "return" is imminent and that he, as one of the "pegs" designated by the Hidden Imam to prepare the ground for the advent, has a mission of chasing the "Infidel" out of Muslim lands and liberating Palestine from "Zionist occupiers." In a speech in Isfahan last week, Mr. Ahmadinejad claimed that the pro-democracy movement was created by the Americans to sabotage his mission and thus prevent the return of the "Hidden Imam."
In response, a mid-ranking cleric in Qom tells me: "The way Ahmadinejad talks, he must be a sick man . . . by backing such a man, Khamenei has doomed the regime."
The Ahmadinejad-Khamenei tandem is also coming under attack for its alleged incompetence. The regime is now plagued by double-digit inflation, a massive flight of capital, and unprecedented levels of unemployment. Divisions within the ruling clique mean that the president has been unable to fill scores of key posts at middle levels of government. Rapidly losing its popular base, the regime is becoming increasingly dependent on its coercive forces, especially the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
Revolutionary Guard commanders appear on TV almost every night, presenting themselves as "guardians of the system." Gen. Jaafari himself says he is attracted by the "Turkish model" in which the army acts as a bulwark of the republic.
However, the general may not have all the time in the world to ponder his next move. The pro-democracy movement is deepening and growing. Much work is under way to connect it to independent trade unions and hundreds of formal and informal associations that lead the civil society's fight against the evil of the Islamic Republic.
Iran has entered one of those hinge moments in history. What is certain is that the status quo has become untenable.
| http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704240504574585853987954522?mod=_newsreel_2&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052748704240504574585853987954522.html%3Fmod%3D_newsreel_2 | dclm-gs1-056230001 |
0.024132 | <urn:uuid:76b9594e-7a4f-47e8-994f-a85312bea04e> | en | 0.953327 |
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0.650304 | <urn:uuid:cca22a09-84af-4fd0-bbae-d584fd90d663> | en | 0.887784 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
Possible Duplicate:
Installing Ubuntu on a Pre-Installed UEFI Supported Windows 8 system
How do I install Ubuntu 12.10 on a laptop with windows 8 pre-installed, such that the bootloader of windows 8 is used everytime the laptop boots.
share|improve this question
marked as duplicate by Luis Alvarado, Takkat, Ringtail, Eric Carvalho, nitstorm Jan 4 '13 at 4:47
I don't think that is quite possible right now, There's been a lot of question about dual booting Windows 8 and Ubuntu. – Uri Herrera Dec 11 '12 at 5:09
1 Answer 1
You can use EasyBCD for using the Widnows bootloader.
Run it from inside Windows, and you can make the desired changes.
share|improve this answer
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0.095832 | <urn:uuid:0c3e390a-d04d-4251-bf24-5d899d842078> | en | 0.963309 | PEF’s cost savers and legislative support
As the battle over state worker contracts unfolds, lawmakers are starting to run interference for the unions, backing a proposal that would force cost/benefit analysis regarding the use of outside contractors in the IT field.
Unions including the Public Employees Federation have long complained that these outside contractors are costing the state money, which they say could be saved by doing the work in-house.
The disputes and debates over outside contractors have raged for years, what’s notable is the bills by Sen. Joe Robach and Assemblyman Harry Bronson which, if passed, could give the issue a bit more traction. Both are from the Rochester area, Robach is a Republican and Bronson a Democrat.
Here’s the PEF release:
The New York State Public Employees Federation (PEF) released new research today that identifies savings of $300 million annually if the state takes reasonable steps to reduce the excessive use of consultants.
The state spent $2.8 billion on consultant services in SFY 2010-11. The majority of the billing went to information technology (IT) and engineering services for work that cost an average of 70 percent more than what it costs to have state employees do the same work, including the cost of state employee benefits.
“Too often state agencies rely on costly contractors for services due to the lack of sufficient in-house staff, even though in-house staff is usually the most cost effective solution,” said PEF President Ken Brynien. “The situation has been exacerbated by years of attrition and hiring freezes.
“The best example of the state’s wasteful spending on engineering consultants is the bridge inspection program. State and federal law require the inspections at least once every two years. The Department of Transportation complies with these requirements by using a blend of in-house staff and consultants even though their own studies show consultant inspectors cost up to 50 percent more than state employee
inspectors,” Brynien said.
The average hourly rate for an IT consultant is 77 percent more than the average state employee hourly rate.
“We have long acknowledged there is a need for private consultants on short term projects,” Brynien added. “But on continuing work such as bridge inspections and IT services the state is needlessly wasting millions of taxpayer dollars.
“The governor has announced several efforts to identify and reduce state waste through mergers and consolidations. The potential benefits of reducing the state’s reliance on consultants and contractors must be a part of the savings strategy,” said Brynien.
PEF is urging legislators to pass cost-benefit analysis legislation (S3093/A5128-A) sponsored by Senator Joe Robach and Assemblyman Harry Bronson. The bill would simply require state agencies to do a cost comparison to determine whether state employees could do the same work at a lower cost.
PEF is the state’s second-largest state-employee union, representing 56,000 professional, scientific and technical employees.
1. ResidentX says:
this is where things get dicey.
- the detractors are going to say “PEF just wants more members”
those in support will counter with..
- there are an awful lot of people with their hand in the pot of contracting. Just look at Joe Bruno for the most recent proof. Many politicians and even directors/deputy directors get kick backs for contractors. The more you reduce the state work force (which is already the smallest that it has been in decades) the more reliant we become on contractors which in turn is more money for the politicians and others with their hand in the pot. Its also not easily traced money. Therefor most of the press dont bother following the money due to the effort involved.
many politicians are getting BIG TIME financial campaign support etc for promoting the use of contractors. The state isnt even using a competitive process that might save money. They have a limited number of firms that they deal with and those firms coordinate to set rates. We wont get into the fact that many of the contractors have been here for years and years thus eliminating any benefit of going the contract route.
would you rather pay a DB admin 75,000 a year throw in benefits etc to the tune of $105,000
or would you rather pay a contract rate of $320,000 for 18 months that is pretty much automatically renewed every 18 months.
10 years down the road youre looking at a little over 1 million in cost for the state employee and 3.2 million for the contractor
lets not also mention how much of that money is funneled OUT OF THE STATE AND COUNTRY. Many IT contractors are foreign. If they do take another contract job they take the money with them often to another state. Some go back home taking that money out of the country. Some of the contract firms are international and that money is funneled out of the state and country.
2. jack says:
consultant services for IT are not even close to State employees, they make way more and some of these jobs go on for years. Has state employee bashing gotten so important that the Tax Payers must pay 70% more for the same ongoing work ? Why so afraid of a study, is it because it will show state workers get the same work done much cheaper for the tax payer ? Stop wasting our money on Consultants for on going work.
3. Frequent Visitor John says:
This is something that is long over due. Why have people accusing state employees of not doing their jobs; when it is clear the state employee can do the job if given the chance and at a considerable savings to the tax payers.
In this I take my hat off to PEF for being on the forefront to get something done to get rid of these costly private consultants.
4. ResidentX says:
your private sector at work…
THIS is what corporate America is pushing for. THIS is why the push is on to destroy any sort of benfits etc.
You people think Unions arent necessary… they are as necessary now as ever. Big business is simply incapable of policing themselves and acting responsibly. If it will make then more $$ they will do it… regardless of the consequences.
5. Jim says:
If they use the prevailing wage + benefits for private sector employees and the prevailing wage + benefits for state employees there is still a gap in total compensation especially at the professional level. The fair and equitable way to compare is to look at comparable jobs. The lower cost of state employees will become apparent rather quickly.
6. Dave says:
Oh yes..Government in NY can do it better..Thats why 49 other states can do the “businesses of the people” at a fraction of the cost of NY and we have the highest taxes in the nation and the biggest bloated most expensive dysfunctional government in the nation..
7. twopondsnorth says:
PEF strongly supports the converting of consultants to state worker status, without taking a civil service test. Why, you ask? Because they get new members. PEF cares only about membership numbers and nothing about individuals.
8. Sri says:
@ Frequent Visitor John and Jim,
You both make a very good point.
9. b sarbane says:
No, Jim, the fair analysis is: outside contractor fees actually charged versus (wages + benefits + lifelong pension + lifelong benefits during retirement) costs of state workers to do the same job.
We crossed the point years ago where private sector workers were less expensive than government workers. If there is an accurate analysis which includes the fully-loaded costs of state workers (not just wage vs wage, but including all costs) the PEF people will always wind up making more. That is the problem with NYS government today — it is fundamentally inefficient compared to having private sector workers do the same work. What would be most efficient would be a bid process for virtually every aspect of state government work. The most comparable example is the construction industry, where non-union labor is about 30 percent cheaper and more people wind-up having jobs.
10. optivity says:
Most of the IT workers being hired into NYS civil service items today come from India or China.
If we cannot export our jobs over seas we import foreign labor instead.
Wake up America… Corporations are selling us out, lock, stock & barrel.
11. bgbytoys says:
funny when you have to pay a union prevailing wage to non union workers i think it works out to be the same.
12. BarbaraNNY says:
Just do the study. Get rid of the consultants, as much as possible.
While you are at it, have each department do a cost effective analysis of their entire department. Reorganize, save money. Basic economics.
If I am stressed by my household budget, I have to reevaluate and make changes. The reevaluation needs to take place in NYS.
13. Council82 says:
Consultants are also retired state workers who normally held MC positions and are well connected with Commissioners of various state agencies. The work they are given can easily be performed by the Agency itself. However, patronage is well entwined within state agencies and the use of “consultants” to assist these individuals in boosting their earning on top of their retirement pensions is basically a form of high income welfare. I with the leadership of PEF the best of luck. I would start with the NYS Power Authority. That normally is the Governor’s baby to hide his “consultants.” NYS Homeland Security must also have some “waiver” consultants. PEF’s $300 million sounds a little on the low side when you add up every type of “consultant” hiding in a patronage job.
14. orangecounty says:
Comapring wages to wages is not always accurate. When you work as a consultant you may be a ‘free agent’ or, and this is more likely, working for a consulting firm who will get x amount of dollars for their worker. The worker in turn is paid by the agency and believe me is not getting the full amount. If the same consulting firms are placing workers with the state year after year they get rich, we get the bill. There is no savings there, kickbacks maybe but no savings.
15. Dave says:
The only point is ..if governmenr did its job effectively..NY would have the lowest taxes in the nation instead of the highest..NY is one of only two states to lose 2 House of Rep Seats because NY has lost half the population of its upstate cities..We do not need and can’t afford NY’s bloated most expensive and totally dysfunctional government..No other state gets to tax the world economy (Wall Street) at NY’s highest tax rates in the nation either..All that and NY is so tax expensive and its government so dysfunctional we have the highest taxes in the nation instead??.. 49 other states manage the peoples business at a fraction of the cost in NY.. NY government it the picture post card of bankruptcy and failure and what not to do!!! Government failure for dummies!!! I am sure there is a Country Western song in there and a book..
16. Joking? says:
Remember, though… hire a state employee potentially for “life.” Consultants are finite contracts that can be easily discontinued. Not so with a regular employee.
Long-term cost vs. short-term.
17. Rolio says:
Pef is sounding very desperate these days. How about we cut both union, and non union.
18. upstate says:
Interesting to see all the analogies, but take this from someone who has been a state employee and contractor. Why in the first place would you need contractors, are you suggesting that there’s not enough state employees to handle the work or that these employees don’t need the challenge in the first place? Sure, pay for another study to point out the obvious. There might be an instance when a contractor has special expertise but these situations are very rare and besides what are you left with? Most of the time the contractor just has to stay a little bit ahead of the average state employee to justify their existence, say by actually reading a manual. Probably the worst abuse is hiring contractors to facilitate meetings, really, out of an entire agency workforce they can’t get someone to run a meeting? Thanks for listening.
19. G says:
CSEA needs to join PEF in highlighting this issue.
20. upstate ny'er says:
the Gov said he would announce which prisons are closing within 30 days from the date the budget was passed. it has been more then 30 days and still no word. Just more head games from Albany?
21. Ohreally says:
I work for the state and believe me we couldn’t do without consultants. The “PEF” workers aren’t skilled, agencies don’t pay to train them, IT is ever changing and the pace that government works at is so slow, we’d never get anything done without them.
Yes, we should do a full blown cost analysis, we’d see just where we stand.
22. Tiny says:
Mr. sarbane you are just making stuff up because you don’t know the facts. There is plenty of information on how much benefits are worth. Unless a state employee started in the early 1970s, they have contributed to their pension. I contributed over $80K to my pension over many years. The new tiers will also contribute – that said – the benefits are good, but retired workers are not living large. Their medical insurance is subsidized by the state, but they still have to pay their portion of the premium. If the retiree was lucky enough to have been relatively healthy during their career, they can use the value of their sick time (up to around 8 months) to pay for their share.
Outside contractors (programmers) cost the state over $100 hour – that’s $200,000 a year minimum. Tell me that the $75,000 state programmer costs more – are you saying that the benefits are worth $125,000? They are more likely worth $30-$35K.
I have heard first hand that some very talented and hard working consultants have accepted state positions – the agencies were happy to get them at a reduced cost. Since consultants work for companies which only pay the workers a portion of the amount charged the state, the savings were even greater.
Construction work is not a good comparison – farm workers were also cheaper when they were not unionized.
23. Connie says:
@ ResidentX
Your typical DB admin IT consultant is being paid only when she/he works – no vaction, sick days, personal days, family leave, etc. The state is not paying to recruit, train or manage payroll and benefits for this person. The consultant can be discharged at any time for any reason without the state fearing a lawsuit which can cost more than continuing to pay the person for not working. The state does not owe the consultant any present or future health care, disability, unemployment, workers compensation or pension benefits which are sinking the Empire State.
And your typical DB admin IT consultant who is pretty much renewed every 18 months is not making $320,000 for 18 months or $213,000 for 12 months, not today.
24. Hudsonian says:
Just a thought that has probably been brought up before – Is it possible that the State hires more of these consultants because it’s exponentially easier to get rid of bad ones? Think about it – you have two employees sitting side by side. After a period of time – say two years – they both proved to be slugs. Which one would be easier to fire – the State worker or the consultant? I think we all know the answer to that one.
Maybe the state should hire more consultants? How does all employees of DMV being hired by a firm who then sends them to work at DMV sound to everyone. No more obnoxious “public servants” scowling at you because you interrupted their solitaire game of Facebook conversation.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
25. b sarbane is misrepresenting the facts. Pure and simple.
Yes State Employees get pensions after they retire. But, did you happen to notice, THEY PAY INTO THAT PLAN. Get real people. This is a red herring, a straw man, a false line of debate.
Having seen the numbers, I can state b sarbane’s position that PEF employees make more than consultants is, again, false. Where are your numbers coming from b sarbane? The committee to defraud New York? Or, possibly, are you one of the contractors (“consultants”) getting rich off of the honest State Employees and other tax-paying New Yorkers?
26. BRealistic says:
B Sarbane, more then a few regulars here to these forums with FAR more knowledge in these matters then you obviously do with your over generalized partisan attack post have crunched the actual numbers and have proven you wrong many a time here.
27. question says:
@b sarbane
How do you figure . Using Residenx X numbers , 10 years of a state worker with benifits =1 million , 10 yrs of a contractor..3.2 million . A state worker at that level after 35 years if they live until 85 would be work approx 1.3 million . It looks like you will see the retirement savings within the first decade of the outsourcing.
As for the ineffinecy , when you have contractors all over the place doing YOUR work , how can you be effecient? I know many it professionals that are willing and capable to work but everytime there is a new project , the consultants come rolling in …. once again , the state workers are not the villans here..
28. BRealistic says:
I also happen know for a fact a whole lot of contractors were given the OPTION of joining the state or continuing in their contract work and the vast vast majority choose their private contractor position over the state because they were making FAR more money then the state workers and got sizable regular raises to boot !
29. ResidentX says:
“b sarbane”, your opinion is false. Something YOU dont take into account is that 80+% of a pension is funded by INVESTMENT RETURNS. This is not coming out of tax payer’s pockets and thus should not be included in the numbers. Of course facing reality is tough for some of you and you will believe only what you want to believe.
and Dave, by your own statements the contract issue is real. We use an insane amount of money in contracting that could be better spent. Would you rather pay a state employee 75k a year (110k total in benefits, 165k for 18 months) or would you rather pay a contract amount of 320k per 18 months? The argument is that contractors are short term. The reality is that they are actually renewed at almost a 90% rate. Many contractors currently working for the state have been here for a decade or more.
if you think we make more… why is it that when most of these contractors were offered state items they flatly refused because of the significant pay cut?
ill say it again so that perhaps it sinks in. Current average pension is around 18,000-22,000. I would say that this is FAR from rolling in dough. 16,200-19,800 of that pension money comes from investment returns and NOT OUT OF THE TAX PAYER’S WALLET. This is a fact that so many of you either cant understand or refuse to accept.
politicians get HUGE kickbacks from contracting firms and some directors/deputy directors do as well. Heck, some have partial ownership/financial interest in the contracting firms.
30. ResidentX says:
that 80% should 90+%
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0.13229 | <urn:uuid:d6d69174-c77c-4347-b07c-4c4b5e1bf5b6> | en | 0.970246 | HOME > Chowhound > All New England Archive >
Turducken...just want to try it
Where can I try this gastronomical peice of...I do not know what....since I would never attempt to make....Is it worth trying ?
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1. It's fabulous, but I ordered mine and had it shipped to me from the south. You can get different stuffings too but it's a chicken, stuffen in a Duck, stuffed in a turkey (all boneless with stuffing in the middle).
2 Replies
1. re: lexpatti
Thx lexpatti...How big was it..it is just me and my husband if they are really big.I wouldl be eating it for a year...funny.... do you have a website for the company you bought it from
1. re: pacer45
I'm pretty sure it was this company:
and we had ordered the roll (smaller and boneless).
2. I watched Paula Deen make one and it looked delicious although as you can imagine, it was heavily butter laden. I have wanted to try one as well although duck is my least favorite bird. I have a feeling that it must be very rich. I will be interested to see the response you get from this post frm people that have actually tried one.
1. I bought a boneless version at Stew Leonard's in Norwalk, CT. It was a big hit with everyone who ate it.
1 Reply
1. re: Elizzie
Elizzie...I have a Stew Leonard pretty near to me...will try them..Thx for letting me know
2. Somebody at work found it at Stop n Shop in Manchester NH a while ago.
1. I made one for the first time last year, will do it again for this Thanksgiving. It was a large meal, I used a 17-18# turkey, but will go slightly larger this year for more "working" room. Since it is a Southern recipe, it called for a fair amount of spices and Hot Sauce in each layer. I also used three different stuffings; one herb style, one cornbread, and one spicy Andouille sausage. Since I was feeding a large crew, I found that not everyone's taste appreciated the sausage/hot sauce combo. If you have a choice of stuffings, keep that in mind as you will undoubtedly be feeding a few people with your Turducken. I'll be making the Andouille on the side, heavier on the sweet cornbread this year. It was a delicious alternative to same-old-turkey dinner, very tender since it is a slow cook, just a bit time-consuming to prepare.
3 Replies
1. re: RussW
Wow! You made it! Our (rather large - we usuallly have somewhere around 25 or 30+ people for holiday dinner) family began "importing" a turducken maybe three or four years ago - and we love it! It's a great addition to the table (although we usually also do a "plain dressed" and a smoked turkey - nothing succeeds like excess) - and we've talked and talked about doing one ourselves. That boning, though...how bad was that part? - and yes, we love turducken!
1. re: Alice Letseat
It's not that difficult. If you try following directions on how to bone the birds, it sounds overwhelming. Once you realize that you are creating a formidable feast, and that no one will go hungry if you don't manage to save every little piece of meat, it becomes more manageable. You should be careful to try not to slice through the skin, since you are using it to hold each of the stuffed layers together. Size of each bird is also important, I think I'll try about a 20# turkey, 9-10# chicken, and about a 6# duck to leave room for more stuffing.
It's actually an enjoyable and satisfying meal to create; problem is, it's a little too "grand scale" to cook one up any given weekend just to refine your recipe! Once a year is enough...
1. re: Alice Letseat
If you want to avoid the boning, a good butcher will do that part for you, for a nominal fee. I'd agree with RussW that it's not terribly difficult, but I do find it tedious and time consuming.
Once you've tried it the traditional way, I'd recommend to anyone experimenting with the types of birds you use. This is the big advantage, to me, in having the butcher do the bonning: it allows this wonderful preparation to become a more regular thing to cook. By using different birds, you not only create for a range of different flavors, but you have more control over the size. Just make sure to buy naturally raised heritage varieties, so that the differences between the types of fowl really stand out.
The version I make most frequently, because of its small size, involves a pheasant, a small chicken, such as a rock cornish, and a quail or partridge. The biggest I ever made, which was way more than enough for fifty people, involved a goose, a guinea fowl, a wild turkey, a chicken (capon), a duck, a pheasant, and a partridge. The most important thing is to match an appropriate stuffing to each bird (however, this subtlety is largely lost when you have a seven bird monstrousity; makes all the difference with three birds, though, especially three smaller birds). | http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/452405 | dclm-gs1-056420001 |
0.656841 | <urn:uuid:46a15903-bf93-4b94-8d5b-23cac0336fb4> | en | 0.927491 | HOME > Chowhound > Home Cooking >
Cheesecake without Cream Cheese
• k
• 9
I have been looking for a recipe for cheesecake without the cream cheese in it. I do not like traditional cheesecake because it is just to rich. My grandmother used to make a cheesecake with farmer's cheese but lost the recipe years ago. Can you help?
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1. I was going to suggest ricotta; it makes a fabulous cheesecake. You can take any recipe and just about sub the farmer's or ricotta for the cream cheese
2 Replies
1. re: Cherylptw
Most Italian-American cheesecake recipes will use ricotta. I do find that you need to strain most ricotta cheeses before substituting it directly for cream cheese. If you have some muslin cloth, simply drop the ricotta into the cloth, close it with some string and hang it until it stops dripping. Or line a fine mesh strainer with a dish towe, non-bleached paper towel or some coffee filters and let it drip into the sink or a bowl.
1. re: smtucker
Maybe due to the flour, the one I posted has never needed draining, but it's not a sub for cream cheese, just a different recipe entirely.
2. Here's one that's very easy to make and accepts whatever flavoring you choose:
1. Use a combination of plain Greek yogurt and mascarpone.
2:1 ratio of yogurt to cheese works well.
1. Goat cheese cheese cake is fabulous.
2 Replies
1. re: cocktailhour
Can you substitute marcepone cheese for cream cheese?
1. re: joaniesl
I don't see why you couldn't, the consistancy is about the same.
2. If you would like a cheesecake with farmer's cheese, Rick Rodger's has a recipe in his wonderful cookbook, "Kaffeehaus" for Topfentorte (Farmer's Cheesecake).
You can find the recipe online here: http://www.recipe-recipes-message-boa... | http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/728841 | dclm-gs1-056460001 |
0.024468 | <urn:uuid:e354c496-6d39-488d-9d86-187bfa8efa93> | en | 0.953574 | HOME > Chowhound > Cookware >
Tramontina clad, Cuisinart MCP or other 2 qt. stainless steel saucepan?
• 9
I have 1.5 qt AC and 3 qt Martha Stewart (many years ago) stainless steel saucepans, but am looking for a 2 qt one. Have been looking at the Tramontina clad and the Cuisinart MCP. Both lines tend to get good reviews - do you have a preference between those or can you recommend any other 2 qt. sauce pans? Under $100 (or I'd get Viking!) and not All Clad b/c I really do not like the handles. Thank you!
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1. Both pans should be fine. Since you know you hate the handles of AC, make that a big part of your selection process. If you can, handle the pans to see how the handles feel.
I like Cuisinart pots generally, but hate the handles. I've seen some marvelous Tramontina pots, but I don't remember the handles specifically. I think either pot would perform for you.
There are many Tramontina advocates here.
I've ordered a new Sitram Profiserie saute/chef's pan, and am eager to get it. Part of the reason for my choice was the handle, which I think should be comfortable. Also price.
1. For a 2 qt or even a 2.5 I would always get a full clad sauce pan. The reason is because these small sauce pans have too small of a disk bottom. The flames and heat from a gas stove would easily pass the disk and scorch the sides of the pan as well as what you're cooking.
Try to get something with a rolled lip for easy pouring. It takes some skill to pour liquids out of my Anolon Saucier which doesn't have a rolled lip. Too slow it drips down the side. Too fast and you'll miss your target. But it doesn't bother me too much.
1. Don't think you can go wrong with almost any clad pan. Rolled lips are useful but not all are created equal. My Henkles pan lips pour much better than my Kitchenaid lips did, though both were rolled. (The KA pans had awful handles too.) So maybe take a bottle of water to the store?
I have KA, Henkles and All-Clad pans (all full clad). Cooking isn't too different on any of them (maybe the AC is a bit more responsive).
I like the pour and the handles on the Henckles the best:
1. If it's possible for you to handle each of these, that's the best way to make a decision. For me, the Cuisinart Multi-Clad Pro is the one that feels right; I like the slightly more open proportions, and the pouring lip.
The handle is where the Tramontina would have the advantage; it looks more comfortable. But for a pan as relatively light as a 2qt, the Cuisinart handle is fine for me. It stays relatively cool.
1. I know you said you didn't like it, but I never fail to be impressed with the rice and quinoa that comes out of my 2 qt AC pan. The tall one that looks like a piece of stovepipe with a handle. It cooks evenly, no sticking, each grain is cooked the same. I quit using my rice cooker, I get better results with the AC. | http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/907851 | dclm-gs1-056470001 |
0.315434 | <urn:uuid:0c9b2910-af59-4420-b11f-0c6743aac7c4> | en | 0.962275 | HOME > Chowhound > Spain/Portugal >
Jamón ibérico, new labels
• 3
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1. Hmm, I need to read up on this more, because I'm really confused now. The free-range bellota pigs don't eat bellotas exclusively. They a such foragers. They eat grass, plants, bugs, lizards and whatever else is out there in the "monte."
And what about the "recebo" pigs who graze and eat bellotas in the dehesas, but then get fattened up at the end with grain--especially necessary during years when the bellotas are scarcer. These hams are often of very good quality, and so much cheaper than the "bellota" ham. It seems there would be less incentive to produce these hams now.
2 Replies
1. re: butterfly
According to what I've read, the recebo designation has been eliminated. I guess those pigs will now be considered cebo de campo.
I think the thing about the bellota pigs is that they are fed only acorns by the farmers and whatever they forage on their own is their business.
1. re: SnackHappy
Oh, I think that's a shame. If you go to small-town Extremadura--those almost-bellota hams are such an excellent deal, especially from smaller producers. Some years there just aren't enough bellotas to go around. Though this year wasn't one of them--the trees were absolutely bursting with acorns this fall. | http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/930846 | dclm-gs1-056490001 |
0.032304 | <urn:uuid:62c4d9c1-1f5d-4fd3-9f50-0bc0904fc123> | en | 0.860117 | Appalachian mixed mesophytic forests
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Appalachian mixed mesophytic forests
Hansons Point.JPG
Hanson's Point in the Red River Gorge, Kentucky
Appalachian mixed mesophytic forests map.svg
Biome Temperate broadleaf and mixed forest
Bird species 200[1]
Mammal species 73[1]
Area 192,200 km2 (74,200 sq mi)
Country United States
Habitat loss 14.8%[1]
Protected 8.37%[1]
The Appalachian mixed mesophytic forests is an ecoregion of the Temperate broadleaf and mixed forests Biome, as defined by the World Wildlife Fund. It consists of mesophytic plants west of the Appalachian Mountains in the Southeastern United States.
This ecoregion consists of the following EPA level III ecoregions:
This ecoregion is located in the plains and hill country west of the Appalachians in northwest Alabama and east central Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina and Virginia, most of West Virginia, western Maryland, southeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. These forests are known for their rich diversity of plants and animals, which is due to several contributing factors, especially that the area was an unglaciated refugia for many species. It shares species with the high elevation Appalachian-Blue Ridge forests to the east, the hardwood forests to the west, and the mixed hardwood/conifer forests to the south.
The climate varies from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south.
They are one of the most biologically diverse temperate forest regions on earth. It has an unusually diverse tree flora, with as many as 30 tree species at a single site including many relics of the ancient forest that once covered North America more widely. Along with the forest there is a rich undergowth of ferns, fungi, herbaceous plants, shrubs and small trees as well as areas of glade, heath, shale, peat bog and cranberry bog.
Mesophytic forests[edit]
Mesophytic forests are found on deep and enriched soils in sheltered topography such as coves and low-elevation slopes. They are often found near small streams. The herb layer is very rich and, in undisturbed areas, the trees can grow very large. Typical trees include sugar maple (Acer saccharum), beech (Fagus grandifolia), tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera), basswood (Tilia americana), northern red oak (Quercus rubra), cucumber tree (Magnolia acuminata), and black walnut (Juglans nigra). Other trees found here are eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), white ash (Fraxinus americana), sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua), and yellow buckeye (Aesculus flava).[2]
Dry calcareous forests[edit]
The southern Ridge and Valley/Cumberland dry calcareous forests occur on dry to dry-mesic calcareous habitats on low escarpments of the Cumberland Plateau. They are often found on deep soils in a variety landscapes within their range. Trees are mainly oaks and hickories, with other species less abundant. Oaks include white oak (Quercus alba), northern red oak (Quercus rubra), post oak (Quercus stellata), chinkapin oak (Quercus muehlenbergii), and Shumard oak (Quercus shumardii). Hickories include shagbark hickory (Carya ovata). Other trees can be sugar maple (Acer saccharum), eastern red-cedar (Juniperus virginiana), or pines.[3]
Appalachian cove forests[edit]
Appalachian cove forests are found in sheltered concave slopes with a moist environment. Characteristic tree include yellow buckeye (Aesculus flava), sugar maple (Acer saccharum), white ash (Fraxinus americana), basswood (Tilia americana), tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera), Carolina silverbell (Halesia tetraptera), eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), beech (Fagus grandifolia), cucumber tree (Magnolia acuminata), and Fraser magnolia (Magnolia fraseri).[4]
Dry-mesic oak forests[edit]
Dry-mesic oak forests cover large areas at lower and middle elevations on flat to gently rolling terrain. Mature stands have a variety of oak and hickory species adapted to dry-mesic conditions. Oaks include northern red oak (Quercus rubra), white oak (Quercus alba), black oak (Quercus velutina), and scarlet oak (Quercus coccinea); hickories include mockernut hickory (Carya tomentosa), shagbark hickory (Carya ovata), red hickory (Carya ovalis), and pignut hickory (Carya glabra). In addition, red maple (Acer rubrum), sweet birch (Betula lenta), and yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis) are common; sugar maple (Acer saccharum) is occasional. In areas that have been recently disturbed, white pine (Pinus strobus), Virginia pine (Pinus virginiana), or tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) can be abundant. Areas of impeded drainage sometimes harbor small wetlands, including non-forested seeps or forested wetlands with red maple (Acer rubrum), swamp white oak (Quercus bicolor), or black tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica).[5]
Dry oak forests and woodlands[edit]
The Allegheny-Cumberland dry oak forest and woodland forest system is found on acidic soils on the Allegheny and Cumberland plateaus, and ridges in the southern Ridge and Valley. The forests are typically dominated by white oak (Quercus alba), southern red oak (Quercus falcata), chestnut oak (Quercus prinus), scarlet oak (Quercus coccinea), with lesser amounts of red maple (Acer rubrum), pignut hickory (Carya glabra), and mockernut hickory (Carya tomentosa). A few shortleaf pines (Pinus echinata) or Virginia pines (Pinus virginiana) may occur, particularly adjacent to escarpments or following fire. Sprouts of chestnut (Castanea dentata) can often be found where it was formerly a common tree.[6]
Low-elevation pine forests[edit]
Southern Appalachian low-elevation pine forests occur on a variety of topographic and landscape positions, including ridgetops, upper- and mid-slopes, and in lower elevations (generally below 2,300 feet (700 m)) such as mountain valleys. These forests dominated by shortleaf pine (Pinus echinata) and Virginia pine (Pinus virginiana).Pitch pine (Pinus rigida) may sometimes be present. Hardwoods are sometimes abundant, especially dry-site oaks such as southern red oak (Quercus falcata), chestnut oak (Quercus prinus), and scarlet oak (Quercus coccinea), but also pignut hickory (Carya glabra), red maple (Acer rubrum), and others. The shrub layer may be well-developed, with hillside blueberry (Vaccinium pallidum), black huckleberry (Gaylussacia baccata), or other acid-tolerant species most characteristic. Herbs are usually sparse but may include narrowleaf silkgrass (Pityopsis graminifolia) and Goat-rue (Tephrosia virginiana).[7]
Montane oak forests[edit]
Montane oak forests occur on exposed ridges and on south- to west-facing slopes at middle elevations. Soils are thin and nutrient-poor and trees are often stunted and wind-flagged. Northern red oak (Quercus rubra) and white oak (Quercus alba) are common, as are sprouts of American chestnut (Castanea dentata). Winterberry (Ilex montana), flame azalea (Rhododendron calendulaceum), catawba rhododendron (Rhododendron catawbiense), and great rhododendron (Rhododendron maximum) are common shrubs.[8]
Hemlock-northern hardwood forests[edit]
Hemlock-northern hardwood forests are found at higher elevations. They include yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis), mountain maple (Acer spicatum), sugar maple (Acer saccharum), beech (Fagus grandifolia), and eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis). Mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) and rhododendron (Rhododendron spp.) are found in the understory.[9]
Spruce-fir forests[edit]
Spruce-fir forests occur at the highest elevations, above 3,200 feet (980 m). Their environment is cool and wet, with frequent fog and precipitation. Red spruce (Picea rubens) and Fraser fir (Abies fraseri) dominate the forest canopy.[10]
Cranberry bogs harbor species typical of ecoregions found to the north. These species include cranberry and blueberry (Vaccinium spp.), bog rosemary (Andromeda glaucophylla), and buckbean (Menyanthes trifoliata). These bogs are relicts that have survived since the last glacial period.
Other habitats[edit]
More unique, restricted habitats within these forests include glades, heath barrens, shale barrens, and sphagnum bogs. These often support endemic plants and land snails.
Prehistoric period[edit]
During the Last Glacial Maximum about 18,000 years ago, the influence of Arctic air masses and boreal vegetation extended to about 33° N. latitude, the approximate latitude of Birmingham and Atlanta. Forests of the glacial period were dominated by various spruces (Picea spp.) and jack pine; fir (Abies spp.) was abundant in some locations. With the exception of the absence of certain prairie elements, the understories of these forests were generally typical of modern spruce-fir forests within and near Canada. Temperate deciduous forests dominated from about 33° to 30° N. latitude, including most of the glacial Gulf Coast from about 84° W. longitude. Regional climate was similar to or slightly drier than modern conditions. Oak, hickory, chestnut, and southern pine species were abundant. Walnuts, beech, sweetgum, alder, birch, tulip poplar, elms, hornbeams (Carpinus spp.), basswoods, and others that are generally common in modern southern deciduous forests were also common then. Grasses, sedges, and sunflowers were also common.
The woodlands of the area are rich in wildlife. In particular they are important habitat for migrating birds including wood warblers, vireos, and thrushes. The rivers of the ecoregion have the highest species richness of any freshwater ecosystem. In particular, there are a large number of endemic fish and shellfish species.
This ecoregion is considered critically endangered with 95% of the habitat degraded or converted to commercial forest. Large areas have been destroyed and fragmented through surface mining, including mountaintop removal. Large areas have also been logged and then converted to plantations of fast-growing tree species, such as Loblolly Pine (Pinus taeda) which are then used to produce wood pulp, which is particularly a problem in the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee. Another threat to habitats come from growing numbers of deer. Major rivers in the ecoregion, such as the Tennessee River, have been dammed. This has resulted in the threatened or endangered status of many species of native fish, amphibeans, and shellfish.
Natural areas[edit]
The remaining forest is mostly found in protected areas.
See also[edit]
2. ^ "South-Central Interior Mesophytic Forest". NatureServe Explorer. Retrieved 8 October 2012.
3. ^ "Southern Ridge and Valley / Cumberland Dry Calcareous Forest". NatureServe Explorer. Retrieved 2 November 2012.
4. ^ "Southern and Central Appalachian Cove Forest". NatureServe Explorer. Retrieved 8 October 2012.
5. ^ "Northeastern Interior Dry-Mesic Oak Forest". NatureServe Explorer. Retrieved 8 October 2012.
6. ^ "Allegheny-Cumberland Dry Oak Forest and Woodland". NatureServe Explorer. Retrieved 11 October 2012.
7. ^ "Southern Appalachian Low-Elevation Pine Forest". NatureServe Explorer. Retrieved 11 October 2012.
8. ^ "Central and Southern Appalachian Montane Oak Forest". NatureServe Explorer. Retrieved 10 October 2012.
9. ^ "Appalachian (Hemlock)-Northern Hardwood". NatureServe Explorer. Retrieved 8 October 2012.
10. ^ "Central and Southern Appalachian Spruce-Fir Forest". NatureServe Explorer. Retrieved 8 October 2012. | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_mixed_mesophytic_forests | dclm-gs1-056560001 |
0.243789 | <urn:uuid:531b7bf3-81be-46d0-bcf4-59b00a4ca620> | en | 0.941948 | IBM System/34
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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IBM System/34 (model 5340)
The IBM System/34 was an IBM midrange computer introduced in 1977.[1] It was withdrawn from marketing in February, 1984.[1] It was a multi-user, multi-tasking successor to the single-user System/32. Most notably, it included two very different processors, one based on System/32 and the second based on older System/3. Like the System/32 and the System/3, the System/34 was primarily programmed in the RPG II language. One of the machine's interesting features was an off-line storage mechanism that utilized "magazines" - boxes of 8-inch floppies that the machine could load and eject in a nonsequential fashion. Borrowing mainframe features such as programmable job queues and priority levels, the System/34 ran on 64K of memory.
Physical appearance and requirements[edit]
The System/34 5340 System Unit resembled a huge washer-dryer in appearance, and was noisy, due to its internal cooling fans. It had several access doors on both sides. Inside, were swing-out assemblies where the circuit boards and memory cards were mounted. It weighed 700 pounds and used standard household 220V power. The system cost US$100,000-plus.
IBM abbreviations[edit]
IPL - Initial Program Load
APAR—Authorized Program Analysis Report
PTF - Program Temporary Fix
IBM would distribute bug fixes on diskettes called PTF diskettes. By applying PTFs, the user could address software problems. When the next release was issued (S/34's last release was Release 9 in 1981) the old PTFs were incorporated into the release update diskettes the user received, and the old diskettes became useless. Since PTFs were only temporary in the sense that they were superseded by later releases of SSP, using the name "PTF" was considered odd.
F1, I1, S1-S3, and M1.01 - M2.10[edit]
These are proper names given to system equipment.
SSP, The System/34 Operating System[edit]
Language compilers[edit]
The S/34 had five: RPG II, COBOL, BASIC, FORTRAN, and Assembler. RPG was cheaper, created compact code sizes, and became the best-seller. Cobol was popular in the business community. Fortran is not very practical for data processing purposes, and while Basic was nice, it was implemented as an interactive 40K session. Assembly language is efficient, but it is a little too easy to accidentally create a processor check on the System/34.
SDA - Screen Design Aid[edit]
SORT - The system sort utility[edit]
// RUN
SEU - Source Entry Utility[edit]
WSU - Work Station Utility[edit]
Terminals, displays, screens, workstations and monitors[edit]
An operator sat in front of a device that vaguely resembles today's PC, except the monitor was small, expensive (US$2,000), low-resolution (24x80) and the available colors were green and bright green. Colour screens (7 colours) arrived later.
For preparing data input diskettes, as a successor to card punches, there was a special workstation called a "dual display" (3742) which employed a system of mirrors to split a horizontally mounted screen into two 12x80 displays. Two users sat on either side of it with two keyboards and two diskette drives.
IBM colors[edit]
Before 1984, the 5251 monitor predominated - it was US$2,000 and what IBM called "dual color" (green and bright green). However, by 1984, the IBM 3180 terminal helped usher in the age of IBM Color - seven colors (pink, red, blue, yellow, green, white, and turquoise.) By 1984, the price of the 3180 terminals was under US$2,000, though there was a graphics-capable terminal. By 1986, there was another type of "color" monitor - instead of green, the displayed characters were yellow ("amber," in IBM-speak).
Programming IBM colors[edit]
The five lights[edit]
The 5251 and 5291 terminals used an 83-key keyboard with a similar key arrangement to the IBM PC 5150. Later 5250-compatible terminals used a 122-key or 102/103-key keyboard. There was a special terminal and keyboard for Katakana, a syllabary of the Japanese Language
Configuring devices[edit]
Printers and workstations had a series of binary switches known as "dipswitches" for configuration. The binary OFF settings, zero ("0") and one ("1") were used to switch back and forth internally. In U.S. English and UK English, the British use the pound sterling ("£") and the Americans use the dollar ("$"). A switch could be set up on printers and monitors where in the zero position the British value would display or print. In the one position the American value would display or print. .
Setting the address[edit]
Configuring using CNFIGSSP[edit]
The CNFIGSSP procedure was used to configure the system, including the devices. Each device is assigned a two-character ID. The first letter must be alphabetic; the second must be alphameric. The system also reserved certain IDs; the device can't be called I1 or F1, for example. I1 is the name of the diskette drive; F1 is what the system calls the hard drive (stands for "fixed disk," since it's not a removable disk pack.)
S/34s had two processors, the Control Storage Processor (CSP), and the Main Storage Processor (MSP). The MSP was the workhorse, based on System/3 architecture; it performed the instructions in the computer programs. The CSP was the governor, a different processor with different semi-RISC instruction set, based on System/32 architecture; it performed system functions in the background. Special utility programs were able to make direct calls to the CSP to perform certain functions; these are usually system programs like $CNFIG which was used to configure the computer system. These two processors worked in tandem.
Clock speed of the CPUs inside a System/34 was fixed at 1 MHz for the MSP and 4 MHz for the CSP. In today's PC-based world, the S/34 was the computational equivalent of a 16 to 20 MHz intel 80386 microprocessor.
Memory and disk[edit]
Typical System/34 offerings would include:
System security[edit]
There are three types of System/34 security: the badge reader that almost nobody ever bought, so it isn't discussed here; password security; and resource security.
The System/34 sign on looked like this:
* SIGN ON W1
* USER ID......... ________
* PASSWORD........ ____
* MENU (OPTIONAL). ______
* LIBRARY......... ________
Files and libraries[edit]
SSP provides for two different data objects called files and libraries. Files contain records, almost always with a fixed record length. Libraries contain programs which can reference and access these files. SSP contained more than 60 different commands that allowed operators to create, delete, copy, edit/change, and secure files and libraries.
Disk space metrics[edit]
Program sizes[edit]
Since the S/34 ran "16-bit" programs, the largest program that could be compiled and run was 64K. Most were not nearly that large. Since memory addresses were stored in 16 bits, a 64K program was often a giant monster RPG screen program with 3,000 lines of code, five or six files, and forty-odd array/table entries.
<<Read this section with caution; much more than 48K RAM was available on S/34; the process to squeeze a program into a smaller executable size was called overlaying.>>
SPOOL is an acronym for Simultaneous Peripheral Operations On Line.
The need for spooling[edit]
Computer printers are slow. On the S/34, computer programs could write data to the printer much faster than the printer can print and there can be more than one program writing to a printer at the same time.
How spooling works[edit]
Forms numbers[edit]
When the operator prints paychecks, it is important that paycheck information printed on checks forms and not on plain paper; likewise, a regular printout should never print on expensive check forms. Therefore, forms numbers were created. A forms number is a one-to-four-character alphameric field that programs and operators use. Programmers use the PRINTER OCL statement as follows:
SYS-1404 OPTIONS (012 )
Forms alignment[edit]
The expensive check forms must be perfectly aligned or all of the numbers won't fit in the little boxes. Therefore, an alignment can be performed using the PRINTER OCL statement:
SYS-5825 OPTIONS (012 )
Jobs and job queues[edit]
Sometimes a needed report should be run in the background so as not to delay the users. If the parameters of the report are defined, it shouldn't occupy the user's time or occupy that valuable area on the CRT. For this reason, the Job Queue was invented. Imagine the program standing in line waiting to use the computer processor. A job queue has a size (the number of jobs that can be in line) and a value for concurrency (how many lines there are, or, more accurately, job queue jobs that can run at the same time.)
Program attributes - MRTs, SRTs, NRTs and NEPs[edit]
MRT = Multiple Requestor Terminal program. SSP could attach up to 7 terminals to a program at once. Any operator could start the program at their terminal, then other operators' terminals would be attached when they selected the same program. The maximum number of terminals to be serviced was controllable by the programmer.
SRT = Single Requestor Terminal program. Not a MRT.
NRT = No Requestor Terminal program. Started at a terminal, the NRT releases the requesting terminal and continues. This is similar to an MS-DOS TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) program. By definition, any program that was EVOKEd or submitted to the JOBQ was a NRT.
NEP = Never Ending Program. This was typically an interactive MRT program that would wait after all terminals disconnected until some terminal reconnected, avoiding initiation overhead. This was commonly used to allow large programs to be implemented as a chain of small programs that would pass the terminals from one to another while remaining ready to continue processing for other terminals and/or subsequent transactions. NRT programs could also be NEPs if written to loop and wait for some condition indicating there was work to be done. NEP programs normally did not end until system shutdown, unless written to recognize some special terminate condition.
Other object types[edit]
Screen formats generated object code.
Non-programmers use of the computer[edit]
The non-programmer could create a short sequence of file and input specifications and store them as a source member. A component called Data File Utility could then be used to generate on-screen displays for creating and edit files and print reports. It was not quite the equal of say, Access 2007, but in twenty minutes a file and a report could be designed Alternatively, define the data files and have the system generate a simple report program, using the Create Auto Report command.
Popular System/34 applications[edit]
The Britz Word Processing System was a general-purpose text editor that had mailmerge, label, and basic file editing capabilities.
System/34 magazines[edit]
Migrating to the System/36[edit]
From 1984 until the mid-1990s, businesses began the process of shutting down their S/34s and moving to twice-as-powerful System/36s. The two machines were not object-code compatible; but source code from a System/34 would compile and go on a System/36.
See also[edit]
1. ^ a b IBM Corporation. "System/34". IBM Archives. Retrieved December 4, 2012.
Further reading[edit]
• Massoglia, Charlie. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the System/34 But Nobody Told You.
• Massoglia, Charlie. Writing and Using System/34 Procedures Effectively.
• Lee, Merikay. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About POP But Nobody Told You.
• Massoglia, Charlie. System/3 and System/34 Disk Sort as a Programming Language. | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System/34 | dclm-gs1-056590001 |
0.041231 | <urn:uuid:7a43e35d-6f7b-4a11-9d61-30d57cfd2634> | en | 0.918479 | Threshold limit value
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The threshold limit value (TLV) of a chemical substance is a level to which it is believed a worker can be exposed day after day for a working lifetime without adverse health effects. Strictly speaking, TLV is a reserved term of the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH). However, it is sometimes loosely used to refer to other similar concepts used in occupational health and toxicology. TLVs, along with biological exposure indices (BEIs), are published annually by the ACGIH.
The TLV is an estimate based on the known toxicity in humans or animals of a given chemical substance, and the reliability and accuracy of the latest sampling and analytical methods. It is not a static definition since new research can often modify the risk assessment of substances and new laboratory or instrumental analysis methods can improve analytical detection limits. The TLV is a recommendation by ACGIH, with only a guideline status. As such, it should not be confused with exposure limits having a regulatory status, like those published and enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The OSHA regulatory exposure limits permissible exposure limits (PELs) published in 29CFR 1910.1000 Table Z1 are based on recommendations made by the ACGIH in 1968, although other exposure limits were adopted more recently. Many OSHA exposure limits are not considered by the industrial hygiene community to be sufficiently protective levels since the toxicological basis for most limits have not been updated since the 1960s. The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) publishes recommended exposure limits (RELs) which OSHA takes into consideration when promulgating new regulatory exposure limits.
The TLV for chemical substances is defined as a concentration in air, typically for inhalation or skin exposure. Its units are in parts per million (ppm) for gases and in milligrams per cubic meter (mg/m³) for particulates such as dust, smoke and mist. The basic formula for converting between ppm and mg/m³ for gases is ppm = (mg/m^3) * 24.45 / molecular weight. This formula is not applicable to airborne particles.
Three types of TLVs for chemical substances are defined:
1. Threshold limit value - Time weighted average (TLV-TWA): average exposure on the basis of a 8h/day, 40h/week work schedule
2. Threshold limit value - Short-term exposure limit (TLV-STEL): spot exposure for a duration of 15 minutes, that cannot be repeated more than 4 times per day with at least 60 minutes between exposure periods
3. Threshold limit value - Ceiling limit (TLV-C): absolute exposure limit that should not be exceeded at any time
There are TLVs for physical agents as well as chemical substances. TLVs for physical agents include those for noise exposure, vibration, ionizing and non-ionizing radiation exposure and heat and cold stress.
Defining Acceptable Exposure[edit]
The TLVs and most other occupational exposure limits are based on available toxicology and epidemiology data to protect nearly all workers over a working lifetime. Exposure assessments in occupational settings are most often performed by Occupational / Industrial Hygiene (OH/IH) professionals who gather "Basic Characterization" consisting of all relevant information and data related to workers, agents of concern, materials, equipment and available exposure controls. The exposure assessment is initiated by selecting the appropriate exposure limit averaging time and "decision statistic" for the agent. Typically the statistic for deciding acceptable exposure is chosen to be the majority (90%, 95% or 99%) of all exposures to be below the selected occupational exposure limit. For retrospective exposure assessments performed in occupational environments, the "decision statistic" is typically a central tendency such as the mean or geometric mean or median for each worker or group of workers. Methods for performing occupational exposure assessments can be found in "A Strategy for Assessing and Managing Occupational Exposures, Third Edition Edited by Joselito S. Ignacio and William H. Bullock". [1]
Similar concepts[edit]
The TLV is equivalent in spirit to various occupational exposure limits developed by organizations around the world; however, the materials covered, values recommended, and definitions used can differ amongst organizations. These occupational exposure limits include:
United States[edit]
Other countries[edit] | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_limit_value | dclm-gs1-056600001 |
0.028141 | <urn:uuid:fd3f2b17-b366-4512-8bad-1f8d244ba433> | en | 0.918157 | Submitted by NYC_Gamer 477d ago | preview
Rev3games- Xbox One Hands-On: Titanfall, Killer Instinct, Ryse, and Forza 5
Rev:Max Scoville got a chance to go hands-on at Microsoft's Xbox One booth, and checked out Ryse, Killer Instinct, Forza 5, and of course Titanfall. Find out what he thought of the games, and the Xbox One controller's rumble triggers, in his PAX Prime 2013 hands-on impressions. (Forza Motorsport 5, Killer Instinct, Ryse: Son of Rome, TitanFall, Xbox One)
Attached Video
malokevi + 477d ago
Lol. This guy is like me... doesn't seem to care that much about the details. Just want's to get drunk and beat up his friends in KI. Having a blast playing games.
Makes me excited!
u got owned + 477d ago
Watching this guy was fun. He seems like a guy who just want to play games and its not into the "my console is better than yours" thing. Really nice hands-on.
SkippyPaccino + 477d ago
Wow! The more the people play Ryse, the more this game starts showing it's true colors... It's Lair all over again... Lol
Gamer666 + 477d ago
This is nothing compared to Lair. Lair was just a bad game from the start. Repeatedly delayed and didn't live up to anything.
People aren't saying Ryse is great, but they aren't saying it is downright bad.
SkippyPaccino + 477d ago
How is it not like Lair?
-it's a exclusive launch title
-it's got a good concept behind it
-it's got pretty graphics
-it's game play is buggy and repetitive
Lair could've been a better game if they hadn't tack on those sixaxsis controls to it... Ryse is slowly walking that fine line... All I can say is "I gotta give Sony Santa Monica credit... Making a great hack and slash game is harder then it looks
NYC_Gamer + 477d ago
Ryse needs to be delayed and rebuilt from the ground up with the controller in mind
Ripsta7th + 477d ago
It is, the reason you see the combat like that is because its suppose to be realistic
SkippyPaccino + 477d ago
Realistic!!?? Lol! They try to go realistic and they throw in God powers... It's hider you go full retard (God of war style) or you go moderate and believable (assassins Creed) right now it's stuck in the middle and you don't even have fluent combat... It's all glitchy and boring...
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0.063447 | <urn:uuid:e7a34b11-1e57-45c9-81d5-fd051815e330> | en | 0.936825 |
UK Met Office warns carbon emissions must peak by 2020
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Copenhagen
An aerial view of buildings standing out amid haze engulfing Wuhan, central China
The Met Office says global carbon emissions need to peak by 2020 to hit the G8's target
Keeping global temperature rise under 2C (3.7F) will be almost impossible unless carbon emissions begin to fall within a decade, analysis suggests.
The conclusion comes from a study by the UK Met Office (UKMO).
If you go to 2025 before peaking, it's virtually impossible to stay under 2C
Vicky Pope, UK Met Office
The findings come from the Avoid programme, run by the Met Office in conjunction with other UK research institutions under government funding.
The latest results were presented at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen.
The Avoid programme aims to use the latest scientific understanding to make risk-based assessments of the impacts, global and regional, of rising greenhouse gas emissions.
'Virtually impossible'
Echoing the general conclusion of other analyses, including by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Avoid researchers conclude that the earlier global emissions peak and begin to decline, then the gentler that decline can be.
So peaking in 2018 and shrinking emissions by 4% per year after that would give a 50% chance of keeping warming below 2C, it calculates.
But if the peak came just two years later, in 2020, the decline would then have to be 5% per year for the same odds of staying below 2C.
"If you go to 2025 before peaking, it's virtually impossible to stay under 2C," said Vicky Pope, head of climate science at the Met Office.
Drawing on socio-economic research from other institutions in the project, the Avoid team believes that cutting emissions by more than 5% per year would be the maximum feasible.
'Negative emissions'
A bloc of small island states and vulnerable African countries are demanding that any new deal on climate change should aim to keep the temperature rise below 1.5C.
But the Met Office analysis suggests that would be very difficult.
"There's no way you'd get a 50% chance of avoiding 1.5C," Ms Pope told BBC News.
Graphic of global warming projection (Image: BBC)
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0.036575 | <urn:uuid:053fbc8c-ff69-4e81-8846-6d6db96253f7> | en | 0.854024 | • co-repressors;
• transcription;
• NCOR1;
• epigenetics
1. Top of page
2. Abstract
3. Regulation of Transcriptional Plasticity
4. Co-repressor Roles in Driving Transcriptional Rigidity
5. Therapeutic Implications of Deregulated Co-repressors
6. References
Normal transcription displays a high degree of flexibility over the choice, timing and magnitude of mRNA expression levels that tend to oscillate and cycle. These processes allow for combinatorial actions, feedback control and fine-tuning. A central role has emerged for the transcriptional co-repressor proteins such as NCOR1, NCOR2/SMRT, CoREST and CTBPs, to control the actions of many transcriptional factors, in large part, by recruitment and activation of a range of chromatin remodeling enzymes. Thus, co-repressors and chromatin remodeling factors are recruited to transcription factors at specific promoter/enhancer regions and execute changes in the chromatin structure. The specificity of this recruitment is controlled in a spatial-temporal manner. By playing a central role in transcriptional control, as they move and target transcription factors, co-repressors act as a key driver in the epigenetic economy of the nucleus. Co-repressor functions are selectively distorted in malignancy, by both loss and gain of function and contribute to the generation of transcriptional rigidity. Features of transcriptional rigidity apparent in cancer cells include the distorted signaling of nuclear receptors and the WNTs/β-catenin axis. Understanding and predicting the consequences of altered co-repressor expression patterns in cancer cells has diagnostic and prognostic significance, and also have the capacity to be targeted through selective epigenetic therapies.
Regulation of Transcriptional Plasticity
1. Top of page
2. Abstract
3. Regulation of Transcriptional Plasticity
4. Co-repressor Roles in Driving Transcriptional Rigidity
5. Therapeutic Implications of Deregulated Co-repressors
6. References
The epigenetic control of transcriptional cycling
A high level of organized complexity underpins homeostasis in humans, central to which are the dexterous and integrated actions of transcriptional networks. Frequently, these networks result in transcriptional outputs that oscillate between on and off states. Alternating between these two states can be considered to be a cyclic behavior. As, yet, the master regulators of these alternating and cycling events remain incompletely understood. Developmental programs display such phasic spatial-temporal regulation, for example, in embryonic vertebrate formation, and combine with extrinsic inputs, to generate the circadian rhythm and metabolic control. This oscillating, or cycling behavior also occurs in response to environmental signals, such as in the regulation of inflammatory genes. The nuclear receptors (NRs) also entrain transcriptional cycling in a wide variety of target genes in response to both intrinsic hormonal and extrinsic dietary derived signals.
Transcriptional cycling arises from the actions of distinct activating and repressing complexes that together allow for fine control of mRNA regulation. The choreography of these actions is tightly regulated and allows these regulatory complexes to recognize, interpret and sustain histone modifications on target gene promoters. The number of histone modifications and their combinatorial nature generates a very diverse and malleable interface platform between DNA and transcription factors (reviewed in Ref.1) and is a further driver of transcriptional plasticity. The regulation of histone modifications acts as a type of biological ratchet in which sequential complexes feed forward to initiate and sustain transcription.2, 3 It should be borne in mind that very few, if any, transcriptional targets are governed by a single factor, but rather the patterns of transcriptional regulation reflect the integration of multiple factors acting in concert. Collectively, the endpoint of these interactions is the spatial-temporal distribution of boundaries between transcriptionally rich euchromatin and transcriptionally restricted heterochromatin. The boundaries between these chromatin states are cemented further by regulation of CpG island methylation; thus, histone modifications and CpG methylation are dynamically intertwined.4
Co-activators and co-repressors significantly regulate the control of transcriptional active and inactive states events, respectively. Co-repressors repress transcription by recognizing, initiating and sustaining repressive chromatin environments and contribute the points of minima and limit the maxima on the waves of transcription cycling and thereby significantly regulate the timing of transcription. Given their role to regulate epigenetic events that underlie transcriptional inactivation, the structurally diverse yet phenotypically related co-repressor proteins have emerged as key players in cancer etiology.
Transcriptional rigidity in cancer
Postgenomic analyses of major transcription factor families, in both malignant and nonmalignant cell types, have resulted in a revision of understanding. Transcription factor actions in cancer cell systems appear to exhibit a restricted repertoire of the dexterity and plasticity displayed by normal cell systems. The evolution of a restricted malignant transcriptome is seen clearly in the NR superfamily, but is also apparent in the MYC and AP-1 networks (reviewed in Ref.5).
NRs form one of the largest and most well-understood superfamily of transcription factors. Generally, unliganded NRs repress transcription of targets whereas agonist binding promotes transcription; binding of NRs to either co-repressor or co-activator complexes, respectively, is essential to mediate these effects (reviewed in Ref.6). NR complex composition varies resulting in diverse patterns of transcriptional cycling, in terms of amplitude and magnitude. That is, the constituents of the NR complex change during the transcriptional cycle at different response elements. The implication of this is that the individual complexes both recognize and impart separate patterns of histone modifications and local chromatin structure to allow, for example, for chromatin looping.7, 8
The loss of transcriptional plasticity and the evolution of a restricted transcriptome are displayed by NRs in malignancy. A role for the androgen receptor (AR) in driving proliferation of epithelial progenitor cells within the prostate is well established, for example, through cooperation with WNT and mTOR pathways. However, the AR also controls cell cycle progression and differentiation through direct regulation of gene targets such as CDKN1A and NKX3.1.9 Genome-wide studies have revealed that during cancer progression the AR transcriptome becomes altered and evolves towards the targeting of different promoters of genes that drive proliferation.10, 11 For example, the TMPRSS2/ETS oncogenic fusion protein is a common critical event in prostate cancer, precisely because the TMPRSS2 promoter is sustained in an AR responsive state11; whereas the AR responsiveness of other targets such as NKX3.1 becomes silenced.12 Equally in a range of solid tumors and myeloid leukemia, NRs that normally exert mitotic restraint, such as the vitamin D receptor (VDR), retinoic acid receptors (RARs) and peroxisome proliferator activated receptors (PPARs), become skewed, with selective silencing of antiproliferative target genes.13–18 Combined, oncogenic transcriptional rigidity reflects the simultaneous distorted regulation of target loci such that proliferative and survival signals are enhanced and antimitotic inputs are either limited or lost. Co-repressor proteins contribute significantly to disruption of these processes.
Co-repressor Roles in Driving Transcriptional Rigidity
1. Top of page
2. Abstract
3. Regulation of Transcriptional Plasticity
4. Co-repressor Roles in Driving Transcriptional Rigidity
5. Therapeutic Implications of Deregulated Co-repressors
6. References
NR co-repressor 1 (NCOR1) and NR co-repressor 2/silencing mediator for retinoid and thyroid hormone receptors (NCOR2/SMRT)
NCOR-1 and NCOR2/SMRT are prototypical co-repressors, cloned in parallel in 1995 by the groups of Rosenfeld19 and Evans,20 respectively. These large regulatory proteins of approximately 270 kDa were isolated using NRs as bait to capture interacting proteins. Both proteins display a number of functional motifs including the NCOR2/SMRT and NCOR1 conserved (SNC), and SWI3, ADA2, NCOR1 and TFIIIB (SANT) domains. Although the first SANT domain (SANT1) is dispensable, SANT2 is essential for interaction with HDAC3, HDAC1 and CoREST functions. NCOR1 also interacts allosterically with HDAC3 via the deacetylase interaction domain (DAD). There are 3 different interaction domains (IDs) in NCOR1 (N1-3) and NCOR2/SMRT (S1-3), which contain similar motifs to the co-activators' NR box, and are named “CoRNR box.”
Generally, in the absence of ligand, NR conformation facilitates interaction in large co-repressor complexes (∼2.0 MDa).21 However, more recently mechanisms have emerged, whereby activated transcription factors can recruit NCOR1 and NCOR2/SMRT leading to active gene silencing. For example, ligand-dependent sumoylation of the PPAR-γ ligand-binding domain recruits the NCOR1 and HDAC3 complex to drive transrepression.22 In turn, this prevents NCOR1 recruitment to the ubiquitylation/19S proteasome and promoter clearing.
The list of NCOR1 and NCOR2/SMRT targeted transcription factors is diverse and includes not only NRs but also MAD/MXI, MYOD, ETO, CBF, TFIIB, AP-1 members and nuclear factor-kappa-B (NF-κB) factors. Reflecting this large number of transcription factor interactions, murine knockouts of Ncor1 and Ncor2/Smrt are embryonically lethal. More recently, stem cell components from Ncor1−/− and Ncor2/Smrt−/− mice and conditional approaches have revealed a network of interactions that includes both unique and shared targets.23 Similarly, a knock-in approach circumvented the embryonic lethality and allowed the specific disruption of the interaction of Ncor2/Smrt with NRs. These models revealed dramatically enhanced differentiation rates, notably of adipocytes mediated by PPARγ.24 NCOR2/SMRT also regulates FOXP1 that in turn governs a cohort of genes necessary for proper myocardial development. In wild type hearts, Ncor2/Smrt and Foxp1 are detected on the promoter of Cckn1a (encodes p21(waf1/cip1)) together with H3K9me2 enrichment, which represses p21(waf1/cip1) expression. Consequently, p21(waf1/cip1) levels are basally elevated in either Ncor2/Smrt or FoxP knockout animals, leading to a block of proliferation and thinned myocardium.25
Well-established oncogenic roles for NCOR1 and NCOR2/SMRT have been elucidated in acute promyelocytic leukaemia that results from a fusion between the NR, RARα, and either the promyelocytic leukaemia (PML) or promyelocytic leukaemia zinc finger (PLZF) genes.16 Both chimeric proteins sustain NCOR1 interactions and consequently RARα-mediated cell differentiation is blocked, in part, as a result of maintaining a condensed chromatin structure around the promoters of RARα target genes that govern normal hematopoietic differentiation. In the PML-RAR fusion, this can be overcome by pharmacological dosing with retinoic acid. The PLZF-RAR fusion is resistant to retinoic acid alone and treatment with a combination of retinoic acid and HDAC inhibitors has shown promising results. Similarly, in acute myeloid leukemia (AML), the AML1/ETO fusion protein promotes leukemogenesis by recruiting NCOR1 and again impeding transcriptional regulation.26 The importance of NCOR1 binding in the treatment of these disease states exemplifies the relevance of the co-repressors, in first, driving critical oncogenic events, but, second, providing a rational targeted strategy towards HDACs.
Expression profiling in solid tumors has revealed altered NCOR1 and NCOR2/SMRT expression and localization, for example, in breast, bladder and prostate cancers.13, 17, 27–30 However, to date, uncertainty remain over their precise role in solid tumors, especially in the case of breast and prostate cancers where the etiology of disease is intimately driven by the actions of steroid hormone NRs. Indeed the ability of the ligand-free NR conformation to bind NCOR1 and NCOR2/SMRT is central to therapeutic exploitation with receptor antagonists such as Tamoxifen in the case of breast cancer. Therefore, ambiguity exists over the extent and timing of NCOR1 and NCOR2/SMRT expression changes, as they relate to initiation and progression of disease. Second, it remains unclear how changes in NCOR1 and NCOR2/SMRT expression relate to different NRs and other transcription factors that exert either pro or antimitotic and survival effects. Resolving these ambiguities has significant therapeutic implications in terms of targeting co-repressors as either epigenetic monotherapies using HDAC inhibitors or in combinations with transcription factor targeting.
In prostate cancer cells, elevated levels of NCOR2/SMRT have been detected and suppress VDR responsiveness.13 Similarly, PPAR actions are disrupted and can be targeted selectively by using HDAC inhibitor cotreatments.31, 32 More specifically, elevated NCOR1, and to a lesser extent NCOR2/SMRT correlated with, and functionally drove, the selective insensitivity of PPARα/γ receptors toward dietary-derived and therapeutic ligands32 most clearly in androgen-independent disease. Similar roles for NCOR1 and NCOR2/SMRT appear in the development of breast cancer. NCOR1 and NCOR2/SMRT levels appear unchanged in estrogen-dependent disease that responds to Tamoxifen, whereas they are downregulated in murine models and patients samples of emergent Tamoxifen resistance.27 ERα activation initiates a feed-forward effect on transcription by initiating NCOR1 proteosomal degradation. Possibly reflecting the loss of this negative control loop, elevated levels of NCOR1 occur in ERα negative disease and, in turn, attenuate antimitotic actions of VDR. Again, this molecular lesion can be targeted in ERα negative breast cancer cell lines with cotreatments of VDR ligand (e.g., 1α,25(OH)2D3) plus HDAC inhibitors resulting in selective reexpression of VDR target genes, notably VDUP1 and GADD45A.17 Combined the studies in breast and prostate cancer suggest NR specificity of interactions with co-repressors. NCOR1 appears to be involved in the regulation of receptors such as the VDR and PPARs and NCOR2/SMRT with steroid hormone receptors and reflect the emergent specificities of NR interactions in the murine knockout models.
Given the list of targeted transcription factors, it is unlikely that deregulation of NR actions is the only oncogenic impact of altered NCOR1 and NCOR2/SMRT expression. These questions are perhaps more clearly addressed in cancers where the biology is not so exquisitely associated with NRs, such as colon cancer. Considering post-translational modifications that regulate NCOR1 and NCOR2/SMRT activity reveals other deregulated aspects of these co-repressors. Phosphorylated NCOR133 and NCOR2/SMRT translocate out of the nucleus. NCOR1 and NCOR2/SMRT impede β-catenin binding to LEF/TCF target genes such as CCND1, therefore, mediating suppression of TCF4 transcriptome. Consequently, there appears to be increased co-repressor cytoplasmic export and location in colon cancer.34–36 Similarly, roles have emerged for interleukin-1b to drive NCOR1 export from the nucleus37 allowing transactivation mediated in part by the TIP60 co-activator complex of a specific subset of NF-κB-regulated genes. Furthermore, enhanced NF-κB signaling also leads to NCOR1 and NCOR2/SMRT phosphorylation that enhances further cytoplasmic export. Also, repression domains (RD1-3) at the N-terminal region facilitate interaction with TBL1 and TBLR138 leading to ubiquitination and therefore governs co-repressor half-life of the complex. To date, it remains unclear if the capacity of TBL1/TBLR1 to initiate degradation of NCORs is distorted in malignancy.
Together these findings considering different transcription factors suggests that both enhanced and impeded NCOR1 and NCOR2/SMRT activity occur in cancer and will require comprehensive analyses to identify the critical transcription factor interactions. Similar contextual aspects to function have emerged for other co-repressors as outlined later. Generation of this knowledge concerning the timing and specificity of interactions with transcription factors and the epigenetic machinery may pave the way for more targeted therapeutic exploitation.
C-terminal-binding proteins (CTBP1, CTBP2)
The C-terminal domain of viral E1A proteins were used as bait to identify interacting proteins including CTBP139 and CTBP240 that in turn modulate multiple aspects of transformation. For example, CTBP1 and CTBP2 colocalize with polycomb group complexes thereby leading to gene silencing.41 CTBP1 also displays dehydrogenaze activity and appears to serve as a cellular redox sensor with repression being acutely sensitive to NAD+/NADH levels.42 CTBPs interact with transcription factors through a PXDLS motif to generates a large repressive complex, again, similar to the NCORs, in the order of 1.3 to 1.5 MDa, including components such as REST/CoREST, HDAC1 and HDAC2. More recently, to underline the cooperative role between co-repressor complexes, Rosenfeld and coworkers have established that CTBPs and NCOR2/SMRT complexes together mediate a combined transcriptional repression checkpoint that must be overcome to initiate transcription.43
Like the NCORs, the oncogenic actions of CTBPs also appear to be context-dependent. CTBP1 is implicated in the transrepression events mediated by ERα44, 45 and, again, its deregulation suggests a role that distorts and restricts the normal flexibility of receptor transcription. For example, CTBP1 was found to interact in vitro and in vivo with the zinc-finger protein ZNF366 and mediate selective estrogen-dependent and HDAC-mediated repression of ERα target genes in breast cancer cells.46 Similarly, in hepatocellular carcinoma, CTBP1 binds to the INK4 family member, p19INK4D, suppressing its expression and leading to increased invasiveness.47 Other workers have focused on the oncogenic role of WNT signaling in colon tumorigenesis, and demonstrated that upregulation of CTBP1 is a critical step downstream of loss of APC either prior to, or independently of, β-catenin nuclear localization further supporting a role for establishing transcriptional rigidity in the oncogenic process.48 By contrast, CTBP1 is lost in melanoma cells allowing increased expression of a number of LEF/TCF target genes resulting in increased invasiveness.49 Thus, the specificity and timing of transcription factor interaction is critical to evaluate the CTBPs oncogenic properties.
Rest corepressor (RCOR/CoREST)
REST/CoREST is present in a wide variety of cell types and complexes with RE1 silencing transcription factor/neural-restrictive silencing factor (REST/NRSF) to block expression of key target genes50 and, in turn, is part of a complex with HDAC1, HDAC2, BHC80, BRAF35 and the histone demethylase KDM1/LSD1. The interaction with this KDM illustrates further aspects to co-repressor distortion.
KDM1/LSD1 recognizes methylated histone lysine residues, notably H3K4 and K9. However the demethylation of these residues leads to opposite phenotypic events; demethylation of H3K4 is associated with gene repression,51 whereas demethylation of H3K9 leads to gene activation.52 Therefore, the specificity of complex sequestration for this important enzyme is pivotal. Specificity is in part contributed by the action of site-specific tridemethylases whose actions govern the availability of the respective di-methylated substrate for KDM1/LSD1. Family members of the JARID proteins target H3K4me353; whereas JMJD2 members target H3K9me3,54 and these proteins themselves have emerging roles in cancer etiology. KDM1/LSD1 sequestration, for example, into the REST/CoREST complex that promotes demethylation of H3K4me2 at active loci and subsequent recruitment of MeCP2 to facilitate CpG island methylation and the generation of repressive chromatin structure51, 55 (Fig. 1).
thumbnail image
Figure 1. A model for the deregulation of co-repressors leading to stable targeted repression. (a) In normal systems the balance of co-activator (CoA) and co-repressor (CoR) expression are in dynamic equilibrium (left) such that they are rapidly recruited to and released from transcription factor (TF) complexes to control tightly the underlying epigenetic events. Such a dynamic choreography can give rise to patterns of mRNA expression that are alternating, or cycling. The net result is the rapidly responsive and alternating kinetics of mRNA expression (right). (b) Elevated CoR expression in malignancy limits the extent of the transcriptional cycle and reduces the peak height and accentuates the minima. (c) The sustained expression of CoRs generates a repressive chromatin environment that can selectively attract the CpG methylation machinery and lead to transcriptional silencing that is stably inherited and complete attenuation of transcriptional responsiveness. [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at]
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Other CoREST complex functions include association with the chromatin-remodeling complex, SWI/SNF to lead to enhanced tumorigenicity.56 CoREST can also form a larger complex with ZNF217, which is a Kuppel-like transcription factor, and CTBP1/2. Specifically, ZNF217 is a strong candidate oncogene found in breast cancer at the 20q13.2 amplicon and there appears to be a link between overexpression of ZNF217 and the loss of TGF-β responsiveness in breast cancer leading to the transcriptional suppression of targets such as p15ink4.57
Runt-related transcription factor (RUNX)
RUNX transcription factors were originally identified in embryonal carcinoma cells after they underwent RAR induced differentiation. The α-subunits (RUNX1/AML1/PEBP2αB, RUNX2/PEBP2αA or RUNX3/PEBP2αC) heterodimerize with the β subunit of PEBP2/CBF to increase DNA affinity. Although RUNX2 represents the best-understood family member, its actions are also highly context-dependent. RUNX2 haploinsufficiency is associated with cleidocranial dysplasia—a disorder characterized by a range of skeletal abnormalities. This phenotype is in part mediated by the loss of interaction of RUNX2 with the CDKN1A promoter activity, that is mediated by members of the transducin-like enhancer of split (TLE)/Groucho (Grg) family of proteins.58, 59 Its carboxy terminal has also been shown to be a potent repressor, for example, by recruitment of HDAC6 from the cytoplasm to chromatin.59
The direct oncogenic potential of RUNX2 has been demonstrated by Vaillant et al. creating a transgenic mouse with Runx2 under the control of the Cd2 promoter, that perturbed thymocyte development and lead to spontaneous lymphoma.60 Increased expression of RUNX2 has also been observed in breast cancer cell lines and is thought to be involved in bone metastasis; a possible mechanism of action that reflects the significant bone biology of RUNX2. RUNX2 expression appears to be downstream of WNT signaling61 and forms a RUNX2 enriched network, for example in prostate cancer,62 and therefore this co-repressor has been proposed as a critical novel drug target.63
Breast cancer metastasis suppressor 1 (BRMS1)
Several key co-repressors have been identified in breast cancer. For example the MTA gene family has been examined in detail in breast cancer and linked to ERα signaling.64 For more detail the reader is referred to an excellent review on MTA1 and MTA3.65 Another co-repressor identified in breast cancer is BRMS1, which was identified as part of strategy to reveal metastasis suppressors,66, 67 by examining frequently deleted genomic regions in metastatic breast carcinoma. Critically, studies on BRMS1 illustrate the importance of loss of function of co-repressors in the oncogenic process. The protein is ∼28.5 kDa with several phosphorylation sites, two functional NLS and interacts, for example, with Retinoblastoma Protein-1, the mSin3-HDAC complex and Hsp90. BRMS1 complexes modulate NF-κB actions by blocking IκBα (inhibitor of NFκB68) phosphorylation and degradation and in turn suppressing NF-κB activity. BRMS1 participates in the direct repression of the RelA/p65 subunit via HDAC1-dependent deacetylation. Consequently, BRMS1 knockdown allows recruitment of acetylated-RelA/p65 to NF-κB-dependent antiapoptotic genes.69, 70 More recently, it has emerged that other key targets regulated by BRMS1, that contribute to metastasis suppression, are microRNAs including miR-146.71
BTG3-associated nuclear protein (BANP)/Scaffold/matrix-associated region 1 (SMAR1)
Another example of co-repressor loss of function leading to malignancy is illustrated by Scaffold/Matrix-Associated Region-1 (SMAR1).72 SMAR1 acts with Cux, either synergistically or independently, as transcriptional repressor for the Eβ enhancer. Studies have demonstrated that SMAR1 also forms heterocomplexes with HDAC1/SIN3 and pocket Rbs (p107, p130). Thus, depletion of SMAR1 generates an open chromatin structure as demonstrated by the acetylated histones at the CCND1 promoter73 indicating an alternative mechanism of cell cycle deregulation in cancer cells. Reflecting this, SMAR1 is down-regulated in malignant breast cancer tissues leading to a more active TGFβ signaling and promoting invasion with prognostic significance.74 By contrast, overexpression of SMAR1 significantly delayed tumor growth in mice through direct interaction with p53 and downstream activation of p21(waf1/cip1).75
Zinc finger and BRCA1-interacting protein with a KRAB domain 1 (ZBRK1/ZNF350)
ZBRK1/ZNF350 undergoes homo-oligomerization and a C-terminal domain represses transcription in a BRCA1-dependent, HDAC-dependent and promoter-specific manner, for example, of GADD45A.76 Similar to other co-repressors, this complex interacts with downstream target genes, such as the HP1 family of heterochromatin-associated proteins thereby leading to stable silencing (Fig. 1). This repression is present in the absence of DNA damage whereas on UV–methyl methanesulfonate treatment the ubiquitin–proteasome pathway mediates ZBRK1/ZNF350 BRCA1-independent degradation.77 This damage-dependent de-repression of cell cycle gatekeepers exerts a tight control over cell proliferation. ZBRK1/ZNF350 also forms a repressor complex on the Angiotensin-1 (ANG-1) promoter and loss of expression is consistent with Brca1-deficient mice models where Ang1 is over-expressed and accelerates tumor growth rate.78
Altered expression of ZBRK1/ZNF350, both over-expression and under-expression, has been found on primary breast carcinoma, and not surprisingly mRNA levels are not prognostic. However, a significant correlation exists between two ZBRK1/ZNF350 polymorphisms and mRNA levels79 and expression in colon cancer is reduced.80
NR-interacting protein 1 (NRIP1/RIP140)
NRIP1/RIP140 was first identified as an ERα interacting protein that binds in a ligand-dependent manner to a wide range of NRs to limit activation. At higher ligand concentrations, NRIP/RIP140 binding is associated with ERα trans-repression functions. To achieve these functions it interacts with HDAC1 and HDAC3 as well as HDAC2, HDAC5 and HDAC6, possibly in a redundant manner.
Therapeutic Implications of Deregulated Co-repressors
1. Top of page
2. Abstract
3. Regulation of Transcriptional Plasticity
4. Co-repressor Roles in Driving Transcriptional Rigidity
5. Therapeutic Implications of Deregulated Co-repressors
6. References
The primary role of co-repressors complexes is to re-model chromatin and attenuate the kinetics of transcriptional initiation. In malignancy elevated co-repressor expression leads to suppressed gene expression, most likely by suppressing the ability to initiate the positive aspects of mRNA cycling, as illustrated by NCORs. It has also emerged that loss of co-repressor expression, such as BRMS1, leads to the opposite, enhanced transcriptional activity. The specific details and consequences of co-repressor interactions are often more nuanced, depending on the interacting transcription factor and gene (or miRNA) being targeted. However, the consequence of deregulated co-repressor function is the same; normal plastic transcriptional cycling is lost and a state of rigidity emerges. Reflecting the biological importance of this control, the number of co-repressor proteins continues to grow, for example NRIP1,81, 82 COPS2/TRIP15/Alien,83 TCERG1/CA150,84 SLIRP85 and LCOR86 are well-characterized biologically, but their roles in cancer remain to be clarified.
The transcriptional distortion and rigidity in cancer induced by changes of co-repressor expression, localization and interactions is mediated by the actions of a diverse number of histone modifying enzymes. It is likely that a greater understanding of how histone modifications combine1 in a so-called histone code87 will help to reveal further the specificities of target gene regulation. Of the varied histone modifications, deacetylation and demethylation are intimately linked and are significant mediators of transcriptional repression. In the absense of DNA methylation, these inter-relationships are highly dynamic, with target gene promoters often poised to be subsequently pushed towards a fully active or a more stably repressed state. For example, non-expressed genes retain low level RNA POLII association, simultaneous HDAC and HAT activity, and modest transcriptional initiation.88 It seems that the presence of H3K4 methylation perhaps holds these promoters in this poised state.
Elevated co-repressor expression can act to suppress this poised state. Sustained repressive histone modifications also have a significant role to restrict transcriptional plasticity further as they attract DNA methylating events associated with stable gene silencing. For example, NCOR1 and NCOR2/SMRT complexes deacetylate H3K9ac and thereby facilitate H3K9 methylation by several mechanisms. The loss of acetylation makes K9 accessible to methylation for example by SUV39H1. H3K9me2 status is subsequently targeted by HP1 and leads to further stable gene silencing through recruitment of DNA methyltransferase 1 (DNMT1) and DNA methylation of adjacent CpG islands. Similarly NCOR1-mediated gene silencing involves interaction with Kaiso, a methylation dependent transcriptional repressor that allows interaction with the methylated CpGs present in the promoter of target genes, silencing their transcription.89 Recently, histone activating marks and CpG methylation have emerged to be even more dynamically intertwined than previously thought, with lower density CpG regions transiently regulated, for example during the transcriptional cycle of NRs90 adding further potential control to the plasticity of transcription. One possible consequence of increased CpG island hypermethylation is the generation of stably maintained transcriptional rigidity displayed in cancer cell systems. Thus, it is reasonable to suggest that elevated expression of co-repressors favors histone modifications that in turn are targets for the DNA methylation machinery and lead selectively to regions of the genome acquiring heterochromatin like characteristics. These repressive states are fixed in a more stable and heritable manner and thereby limit the choice of promoters (Fig. 1). The loss of co-repressor expression and/or functions theoretically will induce the opposite chromatin states, but this remains to be established formally.
Importantly, these epigenetic lesions are individually highly targetable with clinically available small molecular weight inhibitors targeted to specific histone deacetylation events and more recently this has been extended to include histone methylation events,91 coupled with agents that target CpG methylation (reviewed in Ref.92). Thus, comprehensive understanding of the key co-repressors in malignancy, delineating the key transcription factors interactions and the critical targets that are thereby disregulated may have considerable prognostic utility, specifically through the capacity to stratify patients for specific tailored epigenetic therapies.
1. Top of page
2. Abstract
3. Regulation of Transcriptional Plasticity
4. Co-repressor Roles in Driving Transcriptional Rigidity
5. Therapeutic Implications of Deregulated Co-repressors
6. References
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Graham JS, Kaye SB, Brown R. The promises and pitfalls of epigenetic therapies in solid tumours. Eur J Cancer 2009; 45: 112936. | http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.25181/full | dclm-gs1-056800001 |
0.785265 | <urn:uuid:839d9cef-9cf9-4e22-95ad-f739789436d1> | en | 0.941303 | Given the strategic importance of achieving global integration and worldwide learning for most multinational enterprises (MNEs), this article focuses on “shared vision” as a critical mechanism for realizing both goals. Specifically, this paper investigates the impact of three types of control mechanisms—formal (headquarters imposed rules and decisions), personal (the presence of expatriates), and social (social interaction among subunits) control—on building shared vision in subsidiaries and examines the subsequent impact of having shared vision on subsidiary learning. Overall, data from 99 subsidiaries located in the United States and headquartered either in Europe or Japan show that personal and social mechanisms of control are effective in building shared vision whereas formal control mechanisms have no impact. Results also support a significant relationship between shared vision and subsidiary learning. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. | http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tie.21490/abstract | dclm-gs1-056810001 |
0.475039 | <urn:uuid:46a5e609-0c9b-4354-9b4f-d956bb752f78> | en | 0.664798 | Auxiliary material for this article contains a text file and two figures.
See Plugins for a list of applications and supported file formats.
Additional file information is provided in the readme.txt.
grl26630-sup-0001-readme.txtplain text document2Kreadme.txt
grl26630-sup-0002-txts01.texapplication/x-tex999Text S1. Methods and data analysis.
grl26630-sup-0003-txts01.pdfPDF document119KText S1. Methods and data analysis.
grl26630-sup-0004-fs01.epsPS document7532KFigure S1. Illustration of the method used to deduce the FD modulation parameter gamma.
grl26630-sup-0005-fs02.epsPS document14657KFigure S2. Comparison of the global average correlation for all cloud layers as a function of the time lag between the sensitivity test, control event 1 and Fd event 1.
grl26630-sup-0005-tab01.txtplain text document1KTab-delimited Table 1.
| http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009GL041327/suppinfo | dclm-gs1-056820001 |
0.019684 | <urn:uuid:55e81121-bdd8-41c7-aa41-28216adece1e> | en | 0.93287 | Chert in the Cow Head Group is mainly a replacement of limestone and shale and, to a lesser extent, an interparticle cement. Its field occurrences are distinct as: (1) silicified margins on coarse conglomerates and thinly bedded limestones; (2) nodules within limestone and shale; (3) pervasively silicified beds of limestone and shale; and (4) clasts or partial replacement of clasts within conglomerate.
Radiolarians and sponge spicules are composed of microquartz or calcite and are particularly common in the Ordovician part of the succession where most chert occurs. In limestone spatially associated with chert, the use of cathodoluminescence demonstrates that calcite-replaced radiolarians and spicules are volumetrically more important than realized through transmitted-light petrography. Petrographic relations between siliceous and rare pyritized radiolarians further indicate that these particles may be dissolved prior to compaction. No trace of their former existence remains, other than indirectly through the presence of silicified limestone and shale. Crushed grains cemented by chalcedony indicate that chert was precipitated during or after compaction. The history of silicification and the replacement or dissolution of siliceous bioclasts is protracted, ranging from near the sediment-water interface, where it is concomitant with early limestone lithification, to deeper burial, postdating mechanical compaction. | http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-3091.1987.tb00805.x/abstract | dclm-gs1-056830001 |
0.055312 | <urn:uuid:ca838beb-676b-42de-b1a4-366f24fcb9ee> | en | 0.932497 | • Self-sufficiency;
• safe blood and blood products;
• voluntary non-remunerated blood donation
All countries face challenges in making sufficient supplies of blood and blood products available and sustainable, while also ensuring the quality and safety of these products in the face of known and emerging threats to public health. Since 1975, the World Health Assembly (WHA) has highlighted the global need for blood safety and availability. WHA resolutions 63·12, 58·13 and 28·72, The Melbourne Declaration on 100% Voluntary Non-Remunerated Donation of Blood and Blood Components and WHO Global Blood Safety Network recommendations have reaffirmed the achievement of ‘Self-sufficiency in blood and blood products based on voluntary non-remunerated blood donation (VNRBD)’ as the important national policy direction for ensuring a safe, secure and sufficient supply of blood and blood products, including labile blood components and plasma-derived medicinal products. Despite some successes, self-sufficiency is not yet a reality in many countries. A consultation of experts, convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) in September 2011 in Geneva, Switzerland, addressed the urgent need to establish strategies and mechanisms for achieving self-sufficiency. Information on the current situation, and country perspectives and experiences were shared. Factors influencing the global implementation of self-sufficiency, including safety, ethics, security and sustainability of supply, trade and its potential impact on public health, availability and access for patients, were analysed to define strategies and mechanisms and provide practical guidance on achieving self-sufficiency. Experts developed a consensus statement outlining the rationale and definition of self-sufficiency in safe blood and blood products based on VNRBD and made recommendations to national health authorities and WHO. | http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1423-0410.2012.01630.x/abstract | dclm-gs1-056840001 |
0.561029 | <urn:uuid:af00a83c-642b-4635-899e-2fd0ea40fdf2> | en | 0.880717 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
I have a list of strings (words like), and, while I am parsing a text, I need to check if a word belongs to the group of words of my current list.
However, my input is pretty big (about 600 millions lines), and checking if an element belongs to a list is a O(n) operation according to the Python documentation.
My code is something like:
words_in_line = []
for word in line:
if word in my_list:
As it takes too much time (days actually), I wanted to improve that part which is taking most of the time. I have a look at Python collections, and, more precisely, at deque. However, the only give a O(1) operation time access to the head and the tail of a list, not in the middle.
Do someone has an idea about how to do that in a better way?
share|improve this question
Is there any reason you can't work with a set of words instead? There may be 600 million lines, but there are far fewer English words in use (even including leading and trailing punctuation, if you don't clean it.) Testing membership in a set should be very quick. – DSM Jun 8 '12 at 0:02
@DSM: O(1) in fact, assuming relatively few hash collisions :) – Joel Cornett Jun 8 '12 at 0:26
You can't check if an item is in a list efficiently. That's not what lists are for. You need to choose your data types (particularly collections) to be suitable for what you're going to do with them, because no data type is good at everything. – Ben Jun 8 '12 at 1:54
4 Answers 4
up vote 3 down vote accepted
You might consider a trie or a DAWG or a database. There are several Python implementations of the same.
Here is some relative timings for you to consider of a set vs a list:
import timeit
import random
with open('/usr/share/dict/words','r') as di: # UNIX 250k unique word list
all_words_set={line.strip() for line in di}
all_words_list=list(all_words_set) # slightly faster if this list is sorted...
test_list=[random.choice(all_words_list) for i in range(10000)]
def set_f():
count = 0
for word in test_set:
if word in all_words_set:
return count
def list_f():
count = 0
for word in test_list:
if word in all_words_list:
return count
def mix_f():
# use list for source, set for membership testing
count = 0
for word in test_list:
if word in all_words_set:
return count
print "list:", timeit.Timer(list_f).timeit(1),"secs"
print "set:", timeit.Timer(set_f).timeit(1),"secs"
print "mixed:", timeit.Timer(mix_f).timeit(1),"secs"
list: 47.4126560688 secs
set: 0.00277495384216 secs
mixed: 0.00166988372803 secs
ie, matching a set of 10000 words against a set of 250,000 words is 17,085 X faster than matching a list of same 10000 words in a list of the same 250,000 words. Using a list for the source and a set for membership testing is 28,392 X faster than an unsorted list alone.
For membership testing, a list is O(n) and sets and dicts are O(1) for lookups.
Conclusion: Use better data structures for 600 million lines of text!
share|improve this answer
Or a suffix tree – dawg Jun 8 '12 at 0:27
This sounds great. My first code needed about 500 days of calculus, and about 50 days with a clever re-factoring. Now, it only needs something like 1 hour! Even if my set is 200,000 long, that's impressive. – Jiehong Jun 8 '12 at 8:53
@user1443418: The key delaying factor is the Python operator in against a list. If you mix these two data structures and use a list for data access (i.e., use for word in test_list) and use set for membership storage (i.e., if word in all_word_set) it is even faster. Sets are way faster for membership testing; lists are faster to create access in a linear fashion. Know your tools Luke. – the wolf Jun 8 '12 at 9:40
It's what I've used after I saw your answer! Thanks again. – Jiehong Jun 8 '12 at 10:25
@Jiehong: Feel free to accept the answer if it helped you out. – the wolf Jun 8 '12 at 10:26
This uses list comprehension
words_in_line = [word for word in line if word in my_list]
which would be more efficient than the code you posted, though how much more for your huge data set is hard to know.
share|improve this answer
There are two improvments you can make here.
• Back your word list with a hashtable. This will afford you O(1) performance when you are checking if a word is present in your word list. There are a number of ways to do this; the most fitting in this scenario is to convert your list to a set.
• Using a more appropriate structure for your matching-word collection.
• If you need to store all of the matches in memory at the same time, use a dequeue, since its append performance is superior to lists.
• If you don't need all the matches in memory at once, consider using a generator. A generator is used to iterate over matched values according to the logic you specify, but it only stores part of the resulting list in memory at a time. It may offer improved performance if you are experiencing I/O bottlenecks.
Below is an example implementation based on my suggestions (opting for a generator, since I can't imagine you need all those words in memory at once).
from itertools import chain
d = set(['a','b','c']) # Load our dictionary
f = open('c:\\input.txt','r')
# Build a generator to get the words in the file
all_words_generator = chain.from_iterable(line.split() for line in f)
# Build a generator to filter out the non-dictionary words
matching_words_generator = (word for word in all_words_generator if word in d)
for matched_word in matching_words_generator:
# Do something with matched_word
print matched_word
# We're reading the file during the above loop, so don't close it too early
a b dog cat
c dog poop
maybe b cat
share|improve this answer
I'm not clear on why you chose a list in the first place, but here are some alternatives:
Using a set() is likely a good idea. This is very fast, though unordered, but sometimes that's exactly what's needed.
If you need things ordered and to have arbitrary lookups as well, you could use a tree of some sort: http://stromberg.dnsalias.org/~strombrg/python-tree-and-heap-comparison/
If set membership testing with a small number of false positives here or there is acceptable, you might check into a bloom filter: http://stromberg.dnsalias.org/~strombrg/drs-bloom-filter/
Depending on what you're doing, a trie might also be very good.
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Your Answer
| http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10941479/python-how-to-check-that-if-an-item-is-in-a-list-efficiently | dclm-gs1-056980001 |
0.732893 | <urn:uuid:8e6bab58-7295-4c90-80bd-d5602313745a> | en | 0.694093 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
I have a PHP function creating a DOMDocument XML file, i need to get the DOMDocument into Javascript, i have thought about using
The function in PHP returns the DOMDocument, this is the PHP function
function coursexml($cc, $type){
$xmlfile = new DOMDocument();
if (@$xmlfile->load("books.xml") === false || $cc == "" || $type == "") {
$string = "";
$xpath = new DOMXPath($xmlfile);
$nodes = $xpath->query("/bookcollection/items/item[courses/course='$cc']");
$x = 0;
foreach( $nodes as $n ) {
$id[$x] = $n->getAttribute("id");
$titles = $n->getElementsByTagName( "title" );
$title[$x] = $titles->item(0)->nodeValue;
$title[$x] = str_replace(" /", "", $title[$x]);
$title[$x] = str_replace(".", "", $title[$x]);
$isbns = $n->getElementsByTagName( "isbn" );
$isbn[$x] = $isbns->item(0)->nodeValue;
$bcs = $n->getElementsByTagName( "borrowedcount" );
$borrowedcount[$x] = $bcs->item(0)->nodeValue;
if ($string != "") $string = $string . ", ";
$string = $string . $x . "=>" . $borrowedcount[$x];
if ($x == 0) header('location:/assignment/errors/501');
$my_array = eval("return array({$string});");
$coursexml = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'utf-8');
$coursexml->formatOutput = true;
$node = $coursexml->createElement('result');
$root = $coursexml->getElementsByTagName("result");
foreach ($root as $r) {
$node = $coursexml->createElement('course', "$cc");
$node = $coursexml->createElement('books');
$books = $coursexml->getElementsByTagName("books");
foreach ($books as $b) {
foreach ($my_array as $counter => $bc) {
$bnode = $coursexml->createElement('book');
$bnode = $b->appendChild($bnode);
$bnode->setAttribute('id', "$id[$counter]");
$bnode->setAttribute('title', "$title[$counter]");
$bnode->setAttribute('isbn', "$isbn[$counter]");
$bnode->setAttribute('borrowedcount', "$borrowedcount[$counter]");
return $coursexml;
So what i want to do is call the function in Javascript, and returns the DOMDocument.
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2 Answers 2
Try the following
<?php include('coursexml.php'); ?>
var xml = <?php $xml = coursexml("CC140", "xmlfile");
echo json_encode($xml->saveXML()); ?>;
document.write("output" + xml);
var xmlDoc = (new DOMParser()).parseFromString(xml, 'text/xml');
share|improve this answer
While in the source code shows the output in the source, their appears to be a error as nothing appears on the screen – Craig Weston Feb 26 '13 at 19:09
@CraigWeston what's the error? – Musa Feb 26 '13 at 19:11
There was a typo in the code try it now. – Musa Feb 26 '13 at 19:13
There seems to be a problem using xml as a XML type, this is the code i have now <script> var xml = <?php $xml = coursexml("CC140", "json"); echo json_encode($xml->saveXML()); ?>; books = xml.getElementsByTagName('book') document.write("<form name='books' action='course2.php' method='get'>"); document.write("<select name='book'>"); for (var i=0;i<books.length;i++) { id = xml.getElementsByTagName('book')[i].getAttribute("id"); document.write("<option value=" + id + ">Book</option>"); } document.write("</select>"); </script> – Craig Weston Feb 26 '13 at 19:40
@CraigWeston xml is currently a string if you want it as an XML document you'll have to parse it, see update. – Musa Feb 26 '13 at 19:48
you can simply put this function to a URL ( eg have it in a standalone file? that's up to you ), and call it from the client side via AJAX. For details on doing such a call, please reference How to make an ajax call without jquery? .
Edit: try to create a simple PHP file that includes and calls the function you have. From what you've described so far, it will probably look like
print coursexml($cc, $type);
assuming this file is called xml.php , when you access it via your browser in http://mydomain.com/xml.php you should see the XML document (nothing related to Javascript so far).
Now, in your main document, you include a piece of Javascript that will call upon this URL to load the XML. An example would be (assuming you are using jQuery, for a simple Javascript function reference the above link) :
url: "xml.php",
success: function(data){
// Data will contain you XML and can be used in Javascript here
share|improve this answer
I had been looking at $.ajax({ url: "test.html", context: document.body, success: function(){ $(this).addClass("done"); } }); But i'm not sure how to format it, to call the function i want, and handle the return. – Craig Weston Feb 26 '13 at 17:49
first you need to put the above function into a php file, such as xml.php in a way that when the file is browsed ( eg mydomain.com/xml.php ) the XML is displayed. that depends on how you have setup your application. after that, use the above quoted function to call that URL. – hexblot Feb 26 '13 at 17:53
I have numerous functions in a set functions.php, does it need to be in its own PHP file? For the output would outting it like $xml = coursexml($cc, $type); $string = htmlspecialchars($xml->saveXML()); work? – Craig Weston Feb 26 '13 at 17:57
you can just have xml.php include the function.php file, and just do a function call to it, such as <?php print coursexml($cc, $type); or any similar variant. – hexblot Feb 26 '13 at 17:59
you've lost me there, how does that fit in with the Javascript? and how do i pass variables through to the function when being called by Javscript – Craig Weston Feb 26 '13 at 18:07
Your Answer
| http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15095424/transferring-domdocument-from-php-to-javascript-using-function/15097172 | dclm-gs1-057020001 |
0.033243 | <urn:uuid:5144e823-33f4-4a33-9b4a-f9bac67ca326> | en | 0.906835 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
I need to measure how much of memory do my JUnit tests consume.
1. So the most obvious (but not convinient) way is to run JVM with arguments like "-Xms128m -Xmx512m" and track when I'll get the OutOfMemory error.
2. The second way is to request a heapdump after running all my tests and then use Memory Analyzer Tool. But it isn't useful to do this every time I'm running tests.
The desired way is, let's say, to log memory consumption into a file with such values as maximum memory consumption, average consumption, GC calls count etc. Or even draw a diagram which will show how memory was used.
And the question is, are there any tools, or methods, or instruments to do this? Or, maybe, my wishes are unreal and naive and there is no way to gather such data?
Tests are running under IntelliJ Idea with JUnit4. I'm free to use any other environment. Thanks in advance for any advice!
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Well, if you use some Linux or Unix server, an easy way would be to make a shell that monitors your PID and print out the memory size at given intervals. You would have to start the program with a low -Xms and a high -Xmx. This way you would not monitor the exact size of your object heap, but at least the real consumption of your process. Another idea that occurs to me is to find out how ApplicationServers print GC information to log files and see if you can configure your setup to print "Verbose GC info". This normally includes detailed information which you can interpret later as needed. – Martin Jun 13 '13 at 15:16
jvmmonitor.org for Eclipse, or just use jconsole, etc. – Charlie Collins Jun 13 '13 at 15:17
Can't you just use a profiler, say from Eclipse? – Bob Flannigon Jun 13 '13 at 15:17
Thanks for your answers! Ways to go with nix-servers are ok, but I better prefer something local. jvmmonitor and profiler are interesting, so I've started looking something the same but for IntelliJ IDEA. – sainr Jun 14 '13 at 6:55
1 Answer 1
up vote 4 down vote accepted
You can use JConsole,
It comes with your JDK
share|improve this answer
Thank you, JConsole is quite useful! I wonder, whether is it possible to automatically run JConsole and connect to newly created process with unit-tests? – sainr Jun 14 '13 at 6:52
I'm not fully sure, but I think it is not possible what you are mentioning. You can introduce a delay in your test in order to connect the JConsole to your JUnit process when the test is executed at first time. For example @Test public void delayTestForConnectJC(){Thread.sleep(30 * 1000);}. But you will have to connect manually JConsole with your JUnit process. – Juan Jose Fidalgo Jun 14 '13 at 9:10
The idea with delay looks interesting, thank you! But anyway, I'll try to find something which will go automatically. – sainr Jun 17 '13 at 9:29
Your Answer
| http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17090643/ways-to-measure-memory-consumption-while-running-junit-tests | dclm-gs1-057030001 |
0.71055 | <urn:uuid:1dd17a7d-c135-4f85-b269-40965e2d1f85> | en | 0.870266 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
I'm using PhoneGap 3.0.0 and I need to debug a Windows Phone 8 App.
The PhoneGap WP8 documentation is outdated since it's about a downloaded version though NodeJS seems to be mandatory with version 3.0.0.
I can open the project generated by PhoneGap with VS2012 but I don't see any log in the console... Did anybody have the same problem ?
PhoneGap WP8 doc: http://docs.phonegap.com/en/edge/guide_platforms_wp8_index.md.html#Windows%20Phone%208%20Platform%20Guide
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Rather than edit the question to add your answer you should create an actual answer. This will help other people looking at your question in the future as it makes it more obvious that you've found the solution. – Matt Lacey Sep 17 '13 at 13:29
2 Answers 2
up vote 0 down vote accepted
I've found the solution: you need to run the application in debug mode (unlike android).
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During the Debugg process, go to Debug>Window>JavaScript Console or press Strg+Alt+V
Now you must see the console.log output
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Your Answer
| http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18829105/phonegap-in-visual-studio-2012-how-to-use-console-log | dclm-gs1-057050001 |
0.021042 | <urn:uuid:8583b48b-e658-4dbd-a2c6-dc4506ecb560> | en | 0.855433 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
I want to read the content of a pen-drive data connected to a FTDI board through a c program. I have the following code using which I can read partial data but that also happens sometimes not every time I connect the board to PC. Can you please tell me what changes should be made to the code
#include <termios.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int n = 0;
struct termios tty;
struct termios tty_old;
unsigned char buf[100];
int fd;
fd= open("/dev/ttyUSB0", O_RDWR| O_NOCTTY);
printf("Port opened\n");
memset (&tty, 0, sizeof tty);
printf("set attributes\n");
/* Error Handling */
if ( tcgetattr ( fd, &tty ) != 0 )
printf("Error from tcgetattr:%d \n",strerror(errno));
/* Save old tty parameters */
tty_old = tty;
/* Set Baud Rate */
cfsetospeed (&tty, (speed_t)B9600);
cfsetispeed (&tty, (speed_t)B9600);
/* Setting other Port Stuff */
tty.c_cflag &= ~PARENB; // Make 8n1
tty.c_cflag &= ~CSTOPB;
tty.c_cflag &= ~CSIZE;
tty.c_cflag |= CS8;
tty.c_cflag &= ~CRTSCTS; // no flow control
tty.c_cc[VMIN] = 1; // read doesn't block
tty.c_cc[VTIME] = 5; // 0.5 seconds read timeout
tty.c_cflag |= CREAD | CLOCAL; // turn on READ & ignore ctrl lines
/* Make raw */
/* Flush Port, then applies attributes */
tcflush( fd, TCIFLUSH );
if (tcsetattr (fd, TCSANOW, &tty) != 0)
printf("Error from tcsetattr:%d \n");
printf("Do read and write\n");
n = read(fd,&buf, sizeof buf);
if (n < 0)
printf("Error reading:\n ");
else if (n == 0)
printf("Read nothing!\n");
share|improve this question
I assume you're using an FTDI USB-to-Serial converter. My experience is that it is important to first plug the converter into the USB port and only then connect the peripherial to the converter. This is because the operating system tries to do some handshake when the serial device node shows up, which might confuse your peripherial. Not sure whether this is the case here. – Jonas Wielicki Nov 23 '13 at 9:46
Should I add delay before reading? – Appie Nov 23 '13 at 10:16
No, you don't need a delay (I think). Only make sure you first plug the FTDI into the USB and then connect your pen-drive. – Jonas Wielicki Nov 23 '13 at 10:19
Your suggestion worked only on the first trial. Any more idea? – Appie Nov 23 '13 at 10:30
2 Answers 2
up vote 2 down vote accepted
As you are using an FTDI USB-to-serial converter, care must be taken in which order you connect the devices.
After you connect the FTDI to the computer, the operating system sees a new serial device. Usually, this will make it try to handshake with the serial device (you can see that on some FTDI adapter boards on the blinking LEDs for rx/tx).
However, your peripherial might not be able to deal with that handshake and gets into an inconsistent or unknown (to you) state.
Thus it is important to first connect the FTDI to the computer and then connect the peripherial (your pen-drive) to the FTDI. This makes sure that the device does not see the handshake and your program can directly talk to it.
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I tried your answer but got the output only for the first time ... for subsequent trials I'm not getting the expected answer – Appie Nov 23 '13 at 11:51
Check the timing. Run the code with no device connected: it will end because n==0. I suppose the program is running after the data has been sent and the OS was not receiving data because port was not open. When it's running ok is because you got the timing between starting program and switch on the device.
To avoid this, don't stop the loop when 0 is returned. Put a condition like a key being pressed or after some time running. And remove some printf's to avoid see too many messages on console.
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A read of 0 should not happen, unless you disconnect the USB device. So in fact first running the program and then connecting the device is a good plan. – Jonas Wielicki Nov 23 '13 at 9:45
But the serial is set up to non-blocking, with only half a second for read timeout. It will return 0 when no byte is found, which can happen when the device was faster than program starting, don't you think? – Erick Nov 23 '13 at 10:01
No, I think it will block: The manpage describes the interaction of both TIME and MIN being nonzero as: TIME specifies the limit for a timer in tenths of a second. Once an initial byte of input becomes available, the timer is restarted after each further byte is received. read(2) returns either when the lesser of the number of bytes requested or MIN byte have been read, or when the inter-byte timeout expires. **Because the timer is started only after the initial byte becomes available, at least one byte will be read.** Admittedly, this is hidden well below the fields‘ description – Jonas Wielicki Nov 23 '13 at 10:09
I still don't agree since we are talking about non blocking read, a situation where you might need to pool the buffer and continue your job if still there are no bytes to process. Take a look here which discuss about slow files, like a socket or a serial port are. – Erick Nov 23 '13 at 10:25
I have no unix machine to test this code now, so could you try some things? 1) you're not closing the port after the loop. This could explain why it works first time and not anymore. 2) take a look at Serial Programming Howto, specially on source code on "3.3. Asynchronous Input"; this will keep the port opened and you can try switch on and off the peripheral in order to see if data aquisition is the same on each time. – Erick Nov 23 '13 at 12:10
Your Answer
| http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20160544/reading-serial-data-from-c-program-is-working-partially | dclm-gs1-057070001 |
0.327674 | <urn:uuid:fc372b83-0db9-42cc-8723-3b04d7dc984d> | en | 0.862281 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
As far as I know and researched, arrays in Java are not objects but they're reference-types. My doubt is, when I want to return an array should I return a deep copy (like you would do with an object) with a clone() method for example, or can I return the variable countaining the array like it was a simple-type variable (ie. int or double) with a get method? For clarification porpuses, I will insert an example code to expose this situation:
public class List
// Instance Variables ----------
private int[] list1;
private int[] list2;
// Constructors ----------
public List()
list1 = new int[0]; list2 = new int[0];
public List(List x)
list1 = x.getList1();
list2 = x.getList2();
// Get methods
public int[] getList1()
return list1;
public int[] getList2()
return list2;
// Set methods
public void setList1(int size)
list1 = new int[size];
public void setList2(int size)
list2 = new int[size];
// Compare reference between an array and the instance variables
public boolean equals (int[] x)
if ( x == list1 || x == list2)
return true;
return false;
And now I have a TestClass the uses class List like this:
List listx = new List();
int[] listy = listx.getList2();
boolean test = listx.equals(listy);
System.out.printf("Result: " + test );
With this said, when I use the method equals to see if the two arrays share the same reference or adress, I get always the result true!! Am I breaking OOP basic principals with this? Will I loose control because listy is pointing to listx instance variable? Well, I'm really confused with this and I don't know if this is right(being array a non-instantiable class) or If I should send some kind of deepcopy insted of shallow using a Clone method in other to ensure that all basic OOP principals are fulfilled, and with this principals I mean that the class method should be acessed only by the API and that the internal state(instance variables) can only be acessed by the class itself.
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You are probably much better of using ImmutableList of Guava. – Micha Wiedenmann May 7 at 21:26
"I get always the result true!!" listx.equals(listx); calls equals(Object o) (herited from the Object class) and obvioulsy return true since listx is the same object. – ZouZou May 7 at 21:26
Arrays are objects, but the elements are references. Whether you need deep copying is entirely up to your requirements. – EJP May 7 at 21:29
I'm sorry but I ment, boolean test = listx.equals(listy); It was a long day at work :/ sorry about that!! – absinto10 May 7 at 21:31
That depends on what you want your program to do. Depending on your application logic, sometimes you may need to expose some objects as components of a collection or array so that other classes can operate on them (or even add/remove from the collection or array). Some other times you do not want your objects to be mutated, so you give access to a deep copy only. I don't think that any of the two approaches is, by itself, better practice than the other. – abl May 7 at 21:31
3 Answers 3
up vote 0 down vote accepted
You are not breaking OOP principals. However, you are breaking principals of functional programming. Functional programming views leaking of access as losing of control.
Whether or not you want to practice functional programming is up to you, Java doesn't take a stance in that matter.
You may want to consider if it's important not to leak access for this particular class. If you find it important not to leak access then make this class immutable.
You can also guard the instance variables. In this scenario any possible changes to the variables must be handled by the instance class. However, the instance could be modified from separate contexts and result in loss of control. For this reason functional programming only allows immutable classes.
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Thank u so much Mikuz!! – absinto10 May 7 at 21:50
@absinto10 It's my pleasure – Mikuz May 7 at 21:53
If you want the invoker of the method to be able to modify the original array, you don't need to do a copy. Otherwise, you do.
Check your implementation of equals(). It should be reflexive, symmetric, and transitive, which is not the case on yours.
share|improve this answer
yep I know I'm not implementing the method equals correctly, it was just for the example porpuse and notice that, I only wanted to compare the addresses between an array and the instance variable to check where they're pointing. But I understand what you are saying Andres, thank you very much. – absinto10 May 7 at 21:52
You're welcome. – Andres May 7 at 22:17
It depends on your use-case if you want to deep copy or not. If your elements are immutable you normally not need to do a deep copy. If they can change, it depends if you want to see the changes in your receiver of the copy or not. Typically when you want a snapshot of the given data you will have to deep copy it. However keep in mind that Arrays are most of the time not a good argument or return type for APIs anyway.
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Your Answer
| http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23528725/is-it-necessary-to-deep-copy-an-array-in-java | dclm-gs1-057090001 |
0.91749 | <urn:uuid:343f76a5-781d-4784-a70e-881be650b04e> | en | 0.886089 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
I'm new to managed c++ and I'm attempting to design a program for a presentation. I am attempting to have a class inherit from an ABC and I'm getting the Error C2504. The code in question is as follows:
ref class Item : Auction //Error C2504 here {
//More code for the class Auction is defined in a different .h file.
Let me know if there are any other questions or if you need to see more of the code.
share|improve this question
2 Answers 2
Auction hasn't been defined at that point, at a guess you're not including it in the file where you're seeing the error (or it's header file).
From http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dw443zc0(VS.71).aspx
// C2504.cpp
class A;
class B : public A
{ // C2504, define A before using it as a base class
int main()
share|improve this answer
up vote 0 down vote accepted
Fixed it... Forgot public before Auction so it was defaulting to private inheritance... Doh!
share|improve this answer
Your Answer
| http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2774909/managed-c-error-2504-error/2775292 | dclm-gs1-057110001 |
0.073785 | <urn:uuid:61e95374-7580-43f7-ba21-bd3b978d4e43> | en | 0.878711 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
I can't believe I'm the only person to run up against this problem. I've been googling for hours and have not had any luck. The Java security documentation doesn't seem to address PKCS12 certificates thoroughly.
I am trying to setup Java for user specific PKCS12 certificates. Among other things, this will be used so that, in Eclipse, I can access a Trac server that is authenticated via certificates. I am using the Trac Mylyn integration plugin for eclipse.
Here is the setup:
• user home directories are at /home
• multiuser mount at /central
• each user has a personal certificate at: ~/user.p12
• password for personal certificates is: pass1234
• the users password is stored in a 0400 file at ~/password.txt
• a read-only trust store for the ca is at: /central/ca.jks
• no password for the truststore
• JDK 1.6 installed at /central/jdk_1.6.0
• Eclipse 3.4 installed at /central/eclipse_3.4.0
• JAVA_HOME=/central/jdk_1.6.0
• JAVA_HOME is set to the JDK location because Eclipse needs this
• ECLIPSE_HOME=/central/eclipse_3.4.0
• JRE lives at $JAVA_HOME/jre
• each user has a ~/.java.policy file
• there is a trac server running at https://trac.internal/trac
• the trac server authenticates using certificates
Now, I want to be able to have each user simply modify some file that they own (like the ~/.java.policy file, for example), and be able to launch the central Eclipse application and access the Trac repository. Seems simple enough.
Right now, the only way I can get this to work is to edit the $ECLIPSE_HOME/eclipse.ini file and add
Ok, that works, but there are two problems with it:
• Each user has to have their own ecipse install. (or can eclipse read that from a user file?)
• It is Eclipse specific, I'd ultimately like to have this as a Java configuration.
Also, I remember from some time back that you can edit the $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/security/java.security file and add
But Eclipse doesn't seem to pick that up. Could it be because my JAVA_HOME points to a JDK, and not the JDK's nested JRE?
I've seen the Java PKCS#11 Reference that references the following properties: keyStoreURL="NONE" keyStoreType="PKCS11" keyStorePasswordURL=some_pin_url
There was another reference I saw that said you could edit the ~/.java.policy file to include:
keyStore "file:///home/user/user.p12", "PKCS12", "SunJSSE";
keyStorePasswordUrl "file:///home/user/password.txt";
But that doesn't get picked up either. Maybe it actually does work and its not getting read for the same reason the java.security file doesn't work, or maybe it just doesn't work at all.
Some system properties I've seen:
So, right now, I guess I'm stuck with having each user to have their own Eclipse intall. I know it sounds like a complicated setup, but this shouldn't really have anything to do with Eclipse as far as the certificate setup... its really a Java setup for user specific certificates.
Any ideas?
share|improve this question
2 Answers 2
up vote 3 down vote accepted
Use a user-specific configuration.
Setting the private configuration area location
The default location for a private configuration area is:
share|improve this answer
you could store all those information into a file and read from it and set each variable in the code using:
Let me know when that solves your problem.
share|improve this answer
There is no code, its just eclipse plugins so I can access trac through eclipse. – John Ellinwood Nov 8 '11 at 16:37
Your Answer
| http://stackoverflow.com/questions/663890/how-to-set-up-java-to-use-user-specific-certificates-for-eclipse | dclm-gs1-057160001 |
0.052961 | <urn:uuid:c1921409-8ea3-49e3-9001-66a394d76b9a> | en | 0.852008 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
Possible Duplicate:
Detect chinese character using perl?
Is there any way to detect Chinese character using Perl?
And is there any way on how to split Chinese character with symbol dot '.' perfectly?
share|improve this question
migrated from webapps.stackexchange.com Aug 4 '11 at 9:37
marked as duplicate by daxim, bmargulies, Robert Harvey Aug 5 '11 at 4:17
Detect chinese character using perl? in webapps.stackexchange.com is post by me, thanks. – deepWebMie Aug 26 '11 at 6:10
1 Answer 1
something like
use utf8;
my $str = "a银行系统时间表";
$str =~ m/(\p{Han}+)/;
print join('.', split(//, $1));
PS: I can't read/speak chinese so I have no idea about what $str says. If it's rude soz ^^
share|improve this answer
In general, you can look up names of scripts in the perluniprops documentation – Leon Timmermans Aug 4 '11 at 12:49
It says "Schedule for the banking system" so don't worry. Also China usually uses 。 for punctuation rather than '.' at the end of a sentence. – Rincewind42 Aug 4 '11 at 14:49
@Rincewind42 oki thx. Yeah it was came from HSBC website ^^ – Kakawait Aug 4 '11 at 15:01
well, I need to split 银.行.系.统.时.间.表 to 银行系统时间表. – deepWebMie Aug 26 '11 at 6:11
| http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6939138/how-to-detect-chinese-character-using-perl | dclm-gs1-057170001 |
0.043874 | <urn:uuid:fcabbb8e-0952-41dc-b723-6926eecb2a68> | en | 0.896063 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
I'm using the SQL Server 2008 R2 version of the Database diagram tool. Search as I might, I can't seem to find a way to rename tables in the UI. Is this really not possible? Renaming a column is easy, but the only way I've been able to "rename" a tables is to recreate it with the new name, make the appropriate foreign key relationships, and then delete the old table.
thanks, Sylvia
share|improve this question
I just use SQL Management Studio to rename tables. – Daryl Nov 9 '11 at 15:49
3 Answers 3
up vote 4 down vote accepted
Nope you can't do that..however just click on the table in Object explorer, hit F2 and rename it
share|improve this answer
+1 but since you've left the Diagram tool (what the user asked about) you could also mention sp_rename, although the Object explorer experience is much closer to the diagram tool than sp_rename – Conrad Frix Nov 9 '11 at 17:11
This is actually better than what I was doing before. The key for me was to close the database diagram before doing the rename. That way when it opens up, it just gives you a message about the table being dropped, then you can re-add it, with a minimum of problems. I was getting messy errors when I left the database diagram tool open during the rename – Sylvia Nov 10 '11 at 7:57
Yes, you can rename table in the Diagram tool. If you select the table, you can change the table's name in the Properties pane. If you do not see the Properties pane, simply press F4 and it should automatically appear on the right side of the Studio Manager.
The top section of Properties is (Identity) and Name is the first property. Simply change the value of the Name property and save.
share|improve this answer
It is possible to rename the table. We can change the name of existed table by following code.
EXECUTE sp_rename 'oldTableName' , 'newTableName'
EXECUTE sp_rename 'tb1' , 'tb2'
It really work try it.
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Your Answer
| http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8067571/in-sql-server-2008-r2-can-you-rename-a-table-in-the-database-diagram-tool | dclm-gs1-057220001 |
0.023349 | <urn:uuid:cf7f6cc6-3aa9-4d87-8116-ed25a41885bb> | en | 0.947714 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
I have developed a multithreaded web application that runs in Tomcat. But I cannot use
Tomcat didn't stop gracefully. In the debugger I saw that threads continue to run after shutdown command. Do I have to fix my application code to meet special requirements ? Thanks.
share|improve this question
3 Answers 3
up vote 11 down vote accepted
... and to tie the other responses to the workings of Java Servlet environments;
if you don't declare your threads as daemon threads, the way to signal the server shutdown to the threads is to implement a ServletContextListener and configure it to your web application (web.xml). When Tomcat is shutting down, it will first shut down each application, which in turn will cause contextDestroyed() method of the listener to be called - and this is where you can signal your own threads that they should finish ther work.
share|improve this answer
You need to cancel your threads, preferably by calling interrupt on them and making sure they are written in such a way that they respond to the interruption -- meaning, checking their interrupted flag and responding intelligently to InterruptedExceptions (not just eating them and continuing on).
The above advice assumes you don't want your threads to drop what they're doing immediately. If you are ok with that then make them daemons.
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Problem that I use 3rd part libraries that create own threads. And with these threads is problem. – user710818 Dec 30 '11 at 14:49
@user710818: yes, that's a bad problem. I'd hope the libraries would provide some way for you to tell them to do a graceful shutdown. – Nathan Hughes Dec 30 '11 at 14:58
Any threads that are still running will keep the Java (Tomcat) process alive. Make sure all your threads exit. Once your threads exit, Tomcat will be able to shut down.
See the javadoc for Thread. Note the following:
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Your Answer
| http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8680465/should-threads-have-special-design-to-be-shutdown-gracefully-by-tomcat/8680727 | dclm-gs1-057250001 |
0.189638 | <urn:uuid:f9574088-c0dd-4ebd-a715-40f055d7e3a3> | en | 0.716877 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
How do I implement the onClick event on my blog menu in such a way that when the user clicks the button it will call a javascript function on my blogger template that the gets the most viewed or popular post?
How to implement this snippet below:
<script type="text/javascript">
function getYpipePP(feed) {
var i;
var pTitle = feed.value.items[i].title;
<script src="http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?YourBlogUrl=http://www.MYURL.com&ShowHowMany=10&_id=390e906036f48772b2ed4b5d837af4cd&_callback=getYpipePP&_render=json"
I want to implement this on blogger, but one of my blogs does not support this kind of code. So, my idea is to put an onClick on a link then call a function that contains the modified code above and redirect the user or alike to the most popular post.
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1 Answer 1
Create a mostPopulars()-function and call it from LI.
var pList = "<LI onclick=\"mostPopulars();\">" ...
share|improve this answer
I am new to javascript sir can you focus your answer in finding the most popular post. Honestly I am really confuse on how to edit the code above. Thank you. – rahstame Jan 29 '12 at 12:36
Sorry, I thought that you have that function already. Without seeing more code it's hard to say anything. – Teemu Jan 29 '12 at 13:18
Your Answer
| http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9051611/onclick-event-finding-the-most-popular-post-in-blogger/9053120 | dclm-gs1-057280001 |
0.729554 | <urn:uuid:70910cb4-dbb3-4f3c-8a0a-433d2f22a656> | en | 0.932819 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
I'm writing cms like application and I would like my images to be stored as attachments in couchdb. The problem is in naming the attachments because I don't want my images to be named the same (e.g. /db/doc_id/thumb.jpg)
Ideally attachments names should depend on doc.name field. To make this work I would have to rename attachment each time user changed the name (description|alt) of current photo document.
So my question is: how to change attachment name? or maybe I should go other way in solving my problem?
share|improve this question
2 Answers 2
up vote 2 down vote accepted
I'd suggest considering using UUIDs for the document names, and storing the attachment as something "static" like "original", "thumb", "300wide", etc. The name given by the user when they upload the file can be stored as a key, and you can use a MapReduce index to retrieve the image/file using that name later.
If you go that route, though, you'll have to come at the "duplicates" problem a bit differently--as you could easily upload the same image multiple times with the same user-provided name and there would be no conflict.
Depending on what you're building, though, making the user provide a unique name is generally unwise--Flickr (among many others) doesn't, for instance.
If you really do need to make the doc_id == the name given by the user, then it would still be wise to store the attachments under static names, so you don't have to update the attachment name.
Lastly, if you feel you really must change the attachment name (and there are certainly cases where you need to), the simplest way is to GET the attachment from the old location (or with the document), PUT it as the new name, and DELETE the attachment with the old name.
Hope that helps!
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Doesn't the GET/PUT/DELETE sequence require the attachment's mime-type for the PUT? How would I get that? (The only way I know is to get the document and look at the properties of the attachment stub in the _attachments field, but this seems like too much overhead if there are a lot of attachments.) – Mitchell Model Feb 27 '13 at 18:43
If you know the name of the attachment, you could use a HEAD request to get its mime-type. If you don't, you could use MapReduce to build an index of all the _attachments and their mime-types. Then use the results of that as the basis for your GET/PUT/DELETE runs. – BigBlueHat Mar 6 '13 at 13:49
Use this command >
curl -v http://localhost:5984/database/DocumentID/OldFileName?rev=RevisionID -X MOVE -H "Destination: NewFileName"
share|improve this answer
MOVE was only briefly supported by CouchDB and removed before 0.9 was released: wiki.apache.org/couchdb/HTTP_Document_API#MOVE – BigBlueHat Jul 2 '12 at 16:03
Your Answer
| http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9566396/couchdb-how-to-rename-an-attachment | dclm-gs1-057300001 |
0.021761 | <urn:uuid:9da1f4cc-4a43-4723-83d8-fe9efa2383e8> | en | 0.98641 | Column: Could Garnett be following in Jordan's shoes?
Chicago Tribune
Published Saturday, May 22, 2004
Sure, they had Michael Jordan, and he was the MVP that season. But he didn't win the big ones. He was 28 and known for spectacular play and losing in the playoffs.
And then Jordan and his underappreciated team showed up to play the wily veteran former champions.
No chance, right?
Fast forward to 2004.
"The Lakers are a big challenge, but I feel we're up for it," said Kevin Garnett, whose Minnesota Timberwolves open the Western Conference finals Friday at home against the Lakers.
That's 28-year-old MVP Garnett, whose team finally overcame its playoff "billy goat" after seven consecutive first-round ousters. Garnett put on one of those Jordanesque, otherworldly big-game performances against the Sacramento Kings Wednesday night with 32 points, 21 rebounds, five blocks, four steals and the offensive and defensive plays of the game. It left Garnett with averages of 23.9 points, 15.4 rebounds, 4.3 assists and 3.4 blocks for the series and everyone searching for adjectives.
"The performance from KG was one for the record books," said Timberwolves backup Mark Madsen, a former Laker. "You talk about the great ones in the history of the league and you're talking about KG."
So is it Garnett's time? The 1991 playoffs became Jordan's time. Before that, his reputation around the NBA suggested George Gervin with a nice smile. He'd get you points, but not the big ones.
Likewise with Garnett, who was written off as lacking after last year's playoff loss to the Lakers. He supposedly didn't come up big in the biggest games. He wasn't a fourth-quarter performer. He didn't make teammates better. He had the trophies, but not the rings.
"I don't read ya'll columns so I don't know what ya'll think of me," Garnett said after the Game-7 victory over the Kings. "I don't hear I'm not a fourth-quarter scorer. I was just telling everyone to follow my lead. I kept telling Sam (Cassell) and Spree (Latrell Sprewell) to give me the ball and feed off me. I felt like I had to be the example to everybody. I didn't want to be driving home and wondering if I could have done more."
It's the stuff of greatness, and this series offers the best of it.
Yes, everyone said that with the Lakers and Spurs, and the Spurs had the portfolio as defending champions. But in Garnett and Kobe Bryant, this series has the two most dynamic individual players in the game. If you're looking for players to haul a team around with their individual brilliance, they're probably the two best.
"From the first preseason game to the last game, his focus doesn't change," former Bull Fred Hoiberg said of Garnett. "It's unlike anything I've ever seen. Playing with him this season has shown me how much leadership means on the floor. There are so few like him. To have that same focus every day is amazing."
The Lakers won't be able to collapse in the lane quite as much as they did against the Spurs because the Timberwolves are a better perimeter-shooting team. They'll throw Madsen and their centers at O'Neal and hope he continues to shoot 37 percent on free throws. The Lakers will lean on their playoff experience to offset the Timberwolves' home court and 3-1 edge in games this season, though the Lakers' Big Four didn't all play until the last game, which was an easy win.
"Nobody is going to give us a chance other than the people in Minnesota," said Wolves center Ervin Johnson, a veteran of the '96 Finals with Seattle. "They'll say say the Lakers have four Hall of Famers and should win."
Just as they did in 1991 about Magic Johnson's Lakers. The Bulls had home court, the MVP who then was 28, and a legacy of losing and disappointment. The Timberwolves have Garnett and a bunch of underappreciated guys.
Is it their time? | http://staugustine.com/stories/052204/spo_2342320.shtml | dclm-gs1-057330001 |
0.024744 | <urn:uuid:7472db8f-0e4b-4b3d-87f6-3301e4f3b62a> | en | 0.96606 |
User reviews: Mostly Positive (1,002 reviews)
Release Date: Jun 7, 2012
Packages that include this game
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Steam Big Picture
About This Game
Key Features:
• Spectacular and tactical battles!
• Many secondary quests to complete
System Requirements
• Processor: AMD/INTEL DUAL-CORE 2.2 GHZ
• Memory: 2048 MB
• DirectX®: 9
• Hard Drive: 7 GB
Helpful customer reviews
78 of 89 people (88%) found this review helpful
7.8 hrs on record
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14 of 18 people (78%) found this review helpful
6.8 hrs on record
Posted: October 24
• Soundtrack the same as in the show
• Authentic imagery of G.R.R Martins world
• Clunky movement and camera controls
Despite all that, I'm having a good time with it.
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5 of 7 people (71%) found this review helpful
5.3 hrs on record
Posted: October 7
Good but not great. Worth it.
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5 of 7 people (71%) found this review helpful
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2 of 2 people (100%) found this review helpful
18.3 hrs on record
Posted: December 19
The video game industry has received a great deal of attention from the Game of Thrones fans recently with the release of the Telltale's Game of Thrones game. It was the opportunity for me to test another video game based on the tv series/books. This one, developed by Cyanide, was released in 2012. Here's my review:
(See rating at the end of the review)
GAMEPLAY: Game of Thrones is a very classic RPG in terms of gameplay. It's a third person action game, which reminded me the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic series. The offensive and defensive options are divided between melee attacks, magic powers and potions. Magic skills and sword attacks must be combined to be efficient, which forces the player to stay active during the fighting parts. In addition, it is important to use your companions as often as you can. In order to make this easier, it is possible to use an "active pause system", which on the one hand makes fights more tactical but on the other hand slows them down. So nothing new in terms of gameplay, but it works.
VISUALS, MUSIC & ATMOSPHERE: On this aspect, this could be way better. Cheap graphics and poor voice acting (except for some of the main characters) kinda ruin it. In a way, the game is close to the world of the books but it doesn't really recreate all its beauty. And it becomes quite annoying because the game is not focused on fighting but on the story of Westeros and its background. The soundtrack and some of the artwork are from the tv series.
STORY: This is the good aspect of the game. The story, which happens just before the death of Robert Baratheon, is fictional but totally fitting with the books. It is full of choking deaths, revelations and secrets, but also clear of manichaeism - in others terms, the good characteristics of the books. There are many twists until the ending scene, which serves as a narrative climax. The story is really the key point of the game, and while it is well written, the huge amount of dialogs could be disappointing for some players.
LENGTH: Quite good. It probably takes between 14/16 hours to finish the game without hurrying youself, which is neiter too short nor too long. You can probably add 5 hours if you want to complete all the extra quests.
Gameplay 3/6
Visuals, music and atmosphere 2/6
Story 5/6
Length 2/2
- -
Global Rating 12/20
Even if the game stays true to the books, it is limited by low production means and a lack of originality. The game is still entertaining but doesn't match the books's quality.
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3 of 4 people (75%) found this review helpful
11.2 hrs on record
Posted: October 18
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4 of 6 people (67%) found this review helpful
0.9 hrs on record
Posted: November 29
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5 of 8 people (63%) found this review helpful
11.5 hrs on record
Posted: October 18
Some flaws with the combat system can easily frustrate you towards the end of the game, but if you can overcome them, the story is great and if you're a fan of the show, you can't go wrong. It's well worth purchasing.
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5 of 8 people (63%) found this review helpful
38.1 hrs on record
Posted: July 29
The story is compelling and the chracters likable. Mors is more of a badass with a violent surface a soft core and most people will probably like him more then the other potagonist who tends to care more about status, family and his city. I won't go into spoilers but there are a bunch of twists throughout the whole game, a few expected ones but overall quite enjoyable. The pacing is often good, but some chapters seem a bit too long and tedious, especially if you want to see more of Mors this will be quite annoying at times but it is ok. There are still enough interesting things that keep it going.
If you know games like Dragon Age you will be quite familiar with this. you can pause (here: slow down) the game and activate skills to kill or interrupt enemies while adding states like stun, bleed, poison etc. on them. There is a cast bar for any skill or action you take, so anticipating moves is often required. A random aggro system is there that depends on damage dealt and there are skills to provoke enemies, but apart from that they often seem to attack randomly. There is also an armor system with different types of weapons having a greater effect on certain type of armor, combined with the ability to switch weapons this makes for a very good combat system - on paper. Effectively this is pretty pointless, as the damage bonus is always the same (15%) and there is no penalty. In addition you would of course need another weapon and the skill to fill the second weapon slot, apart from that you have 3 weapon types but only 2 weapon slots (unless dual-wielding). Add the fact that light armor grants low health and heavy armor high health in general what makes it obviously more beneficial to invest into things that increase damage against heavy armor, the rest dies anyway. There are also criticals, deflection and dodge effects, but I will come to them in the next section. Basically everything your character can do, the enemy can do as well, except for instant interrupts (only the interrupting part is instant, those skills still activate like any other).
Character Development
There are multiple things that have to be considered: attributes, abilities, skills and traits.
Attributes directly influence your characters stats, like damage or health. An important point is that upon creating your character you can already maximize 2 attributes and set one at 8 (of 10) considered you keep 2 stats at minimum. As you gain attributes very slowly (5 over the course of the game) this takes a lot of momentum from your progression, because you amost cap effectiveness (of attributes) upon creation. There is also some kind of discrepepancy between the (pretty much exclusive) resistance mechanics, deflection and dodge vs health and damage resistance. As abilities always hit once they activate deflection and dodge will not help anything against them, to counter those you would need abilities to interrupt (some ability trees have little to offer there) and enough energy to cast them, so you will probably need to invest a lot into intelligence. After deflecting you still take damage and you can only dodge after a deflection (there is one ability that changes that slightly) so you will still die unless you have someone to take all aggro from you.
Abilities are aquired by investing points in a chosen tree. There are at most 2 trees that can be acquired, the second can be either another weapon stlye tree or a specialization of the first. Some are more useful than others but the majority is balanced. There are some serious issues with trees failing horribly in certain situations, like Mors' Magnar tree only having one costly interrupt that can be dodged unless the enemy has low health, while the defense tree offers way more for way less. It should also be noted that ablities seem use weapon damage, NOT dps, thus slow high damage weapons seems to be the better choice here.
Skills are the ability to use a certain weapon or armor. Skilling anything where you don't get a bonus is pretty useless as you waste too many points. You will have enough to max a weapon of choice and your armor of choice, depending on intelligence even two weapons/armors may be possible.
Traits can be choosen and acquired through the game giving small bonuses to the character. most of them are pretty balanced, but there are some issues here and there where it would seem unfair (if you knew the other bonus at least).
Your progression will be pretty slow at the start and only picks up when your are about lvl 7-8 because you get another tree and level up more quickly after that. you are able to (iirc) pick all specialized abilities and all but 2 standard abilities upon reaching max level, so you should choose which skills you do not need.
The easier difficulties will be underwhelming. You don't need to think much there, often enabling buffs and just letting them kill everything works. Lord is challenging but I see certain builds that don't stand a chance here. There is also a "cookie cutter" strategy where you just focus the enemy with the lowest health, kill him and move on, as most enemies do the same amount of damage (unless they use an ability that has to be interrupted ofc). This gets a bit tedious later on, as you essentially always do the same. another option is having both charcters pick up AoE skills and nuke the group until only the big ones are left standing. Buying weapons early will make this even easier.
As stated above some builds won't stand a chance in certain situations, this only holds for Lord diffculty however and you can just tone it down for a short time, but that itself is not a good design choice. Some dialogue choices are also unfair, offering certain quests or similar things where you really can't expect it. There are no major issues here but some small things that may annoy you if you ever find out about it. Another bad thing is that at three points where you can decide to undertake a more difficult approach, be it attacking without killing sentries first, not taking an escort or clearing the more dangerous part of the castle. Seriously, if they don't want you to do this, then they shouldn't add that option, as these things are very frustrating on the highest diffculty.
Not much to say here, loot is pretty balanced, you get a ton of gold though and can buy anything without problems once the more valuable stuff drops. Every drop is scripted so no surprises there. One issue is the high drop rate of two handed weapons, that seems wasted, as there is only one tree that can use them at all.
Very interesting quests, at times a bit linear but the conversations are what this game is about. The side quest are really great. Good characters and you almost always have some kind of choice that changes the outcome (mostly kill someone or not or whom to side with but sometimes there are other benefits).
The atmosphere and design of the locations are very well made. There was one door in King's Landing that couldn't be opened at all so you always had to run around (often running into a deadend) so that ♥♥♥♥ed me off severely.
Apart from that, they did a good job.
Style, Interface
Inventory, character screen etc. are pretty basic. It is very easy to get used to it, and everything is easily accessible. But the minimap designer should have been sent to the wall. It can't be called "map", because you do not see any layout only relative distance to points of interest and it's not even locked. Very bad choice here. Another thing is the sheath/unsheath animations at the start/end of battle, staying in battle mode (adding a key to enable/disable it) would haven been way better.
Overall decent game, but way too many minor flaws to be anything more. They should have taken more time.
Was this review helpful? Yes No | http://store.steampowered.com/app/208730/?snr=1_200_200_253_201_12 | dclm-gs1-057340001 |
0.06835 | <urn:uuid:95e7300c-3ba6-4f15-8454-ef96b5822d0f> | en | 0.904225 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
A long story originally my Windows 8 in my ssd failed and I try to install ubuntu but unfortunately the installation is disrupted. I end up installing centos on my disk. Now I just want to install windwos 8 back to my disk. But the windows installer said the disk is locked and I see there are no partition suitable for installation. I view from centos that the major space is taken up by a disk with format lvm2... I
I don't mind erasing the centos or whatsoever. I just want to be able to install windows back, just like when I start with a fresh new ssd drive. Hope someone can help!
share|improve this question
Can you delete the locked partition or does windows just not see your disk at all? – Zoltán Jan 14 '13 at 9:21
1 Answer 1
You can use the Ubuntu CD, select 'Try Ubuntu' and then from inside Ubuntu start GParted. There you can delete all the partitions. After that, Windows should be able to see it as unpartitioned space.
Windows tends not to see UNIX file systems.
share|improve this answer
Your Answer
| http://superuser.com/questions/535878/faulty-partitions-format-a-hard-disk-completely | dclm-gs1-057430001 |
0.02165 | <urn:uuid:23ecb002-07c5-43eb-8de3-1e2af3ca0df3> | en | 0.964467 | 2 arrested after burglary, police chase in Md.
GLEN BURNIE, Md. (AP) — Anne Arundel County police have arrested two men they say led them on a vehicle chase into Baltimore after a burglary at a Glen Burnie store.
It happened about 1:45 a.m. Wednesday at Bart’s Sports World. Police responding to a 911 calls saw pickup truck that appeared to have been rammed into the business. Three people were in the truck.
Authorities say police tried to stop the truck, but the driver sped off and led police on a chase on several interstate into Baltimore. Police say the truck stopped and all three occupants ran away. Two were arrested.
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0.082296 | <urn:uuid:3204084e-f5aa-4ba9-be2d-f20f8ad4f6e5> | en | 0.945493 | 5 Articles
1 / 1
45Ferrari production to increase under Marchionne
5Ferrari to launch new model every year, keep production limited
63Ferrari looking to become even more exclusive
While most automakers are clawing and scratching for every possible sale, it sounds like Ferrari is content in losing a few potential customers in the name of better exclusivity and higher profits. Autocar reports that Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo recently stated that the Italian automaker hopes to sell fewer than 7,000 units globally in 2013 compared to last year's tally of 7,318.
9Good things come to those who wait: Ferrari to end 18-month waiting list
If you're like us you've been waiting for your new Ferrari for what seems like forever. If instead you actually put down a deposit and signed physical paperwork at a Ferrari dealer, you might have been waiting for as long as 18 months for your new Italian steed. That's the typical lag time between order and delivery from Maranello. If it's a 599 GTB you want, you're looking at around two years' wait.
1 / 1 | http://www.autoblog.com/tag/ferrari+production/ | dclm-gs1-057570001 |
0.131716 | <urn:uuid:97f12910-ca2d-4960-9c0a-9d9893fd819f> | en | 0.663656 | Idinagdag 186 listahan
Tingnan ang lokasyon Aparthotel Marinada
Ang mga kostumer na tumingin sa Aparthotel Marinada ay tiningnan din ang:
Hotel Dorada Palace
Ang pinakabagong booking sa hotel na ito ay ngayon 03:07
Score mula sa 1004 review Napakaganda 8.1/10
Apartamento Central Park
hotel Featuring an outdoor pool and sun terrace, Apartamento Central Park is located in Salou. Bars and restaurants are 50 metres away while Capellans Beach is 500 metres away.
Internacional II
hotel Internacional II is 500 metres from Salou Beach, on the Costa Daurada. It offers a seasonal outdoor pool with loungers, and studio apartments with a private balcony and well-equipped kitchenette.
Score mula sa 147 review Maganda 7.3/10
Hostal Tahiti
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• hyperfine structure
hyperfine structure (HFS)
A similar effect of line splitting is caused by mass differences (isotopes) of atoms in an element and is called isotope structure, or isotope shift. These spectral lines are sometimes referred to as hyperfine structure but may be observed in an element with spin-zero isotopes (even atomic and mass numbers). Isotope structure is seldom observed without true HFS accompanying it.
• superconductivity
BCS theory
...the BCS theory. The theory supplies a means by which the energy required to separate the Cooper pairs into their individual electrons can be measured experimentally. The BCS theory also explains the isotope effect, in which the temperature at which superconductivity appears is reduced if heavier atoms of the elements making up the material are introduced.
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Or click Continue to submit anonymously: | http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/296634/isotope-effect | dclm-gs1-057600001 |
0.959322 | <urn:uuid:1b3422d6-0e31-4089-91e3-d53090958317> | en | 0.941698 | A water line with an internal radius of 5.40 10-3 m is connected to a shower head that has 22 holes. The speed of the water in the line is 1.2 m/s.
(a) What is the volume flow rate in the line?
(b) At what speed does the water leave one of the holes (effective radius = 4.6 10-4 m) in the head? | http://www.chegg.com/homework-help/questions-and-answers/water-line-internal-radius-540-10-3-m-connected-shower-head-22-holes-speed-water-line-12-m-q1605963 | dclm-gs1-057640001 |
0.031507 | <urn:uuid:44ae6da8-d54d-4cdc-8420-860bc59f8cf8> | en | 0.945142 | Guitar Tablature: "The Cruel War Is Raging"
How to Create a Travis Guitar Picking Pattern
Guitar Tablature: "All My Trials"
What is Carter-Style Guitar Playing?
Carter-style playing is a guitar picking style named after the famous Carter family, whose members included June Carter, “Mother” Maybelle, and “Uncle” A.P. To play Carter style, you play the melody on the low strings with the thumb while the fingers provide an accompaniment in the form of brushes.
This style works well for songs with melody notes that fall mostly on beats 1 and 3. (The brushes occur on beats 2 and 4.) But if a melody note falls on beat 2 or 4, you can simply omit the brush on that beat.
You can play this style just as easily by using a pick as you can with the fingers, so try it both ways and see which is more comfortable for you.
The following figure shows a Carter-style passage in which the melody falls entirely on the lower strings. It uses a traditional melody, called “Wildwood Flower,” that the Carter family made famous. Woody Guthrie wrote his own lyrics and called it “The Sinking of the Ruben James.”
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How to Play Travis Picking on Guitar | http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/what-is-carterstyle-guitar-playing.html | dclm-gs1-057820001 |
0.752879 | <urn:uuid:3974e73b-7c89-4a10-b089-11e3801c66fb> | en | 0.888669 |
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#86 - sweetjessierose (07/19/2013) [-]
You know what happens when the head lion gets killed by one of the young ones? Do you know what the lionesses do? They go straight into heat for the new head of the family. It's like hubby's dead on the grass, all the cubs have been slaughtered and suddenly everybody's singing Can You Feel the Love Tonight.
Friends (0) | http://www.funnyjunk.com/funny_pictures/4689698/Long+live+the+king/86 | dclm-gs1-057920001 |
0.023808 | <urn:uuid:5a3012ed-971b-4301-a69b-ba65ac5bd49e> | en | 0.927384 | Roof Repair in Akron
Select Local Merchants
The craftsmen of HammerDown Construction feel most at home on top of other homes. They specialize in roof and gutter work, reporting to residences after storms to patch up leaks and stave off costly water damage. Even if the roof just needs an inspection or a few shingles replaced, they'll administer a quick roof tuneup, which also includes the resealing of caulked seams and a gutter cleaning. The team—which consists entirely of full-time workers—also spruces up home exteriors with power-washing services.
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109 Pleasant Dr | http://www.groupon.com/local/akron/roof-repair | dclm-gs1-057990001 |
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