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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- The Penn State Smeal College of Business Real Estate Advisory Board welcomed seven new members at its most recent meeting, held in mid-November at Penn State's University Park campus.
New members include Carl Berquist, chief financial officer and executive vice president of Marriott International Inc.; Michael Croce, vice president of business and development at Pat Croce & Co.; Robert Fenza, chief operating officer of Liberty Property Trust; Mark Hertz, managing director of AIG Global Real Estate Investment Corp.; Jonathan Knipe, senior vice-president and general counsel of Silverstein Properties Inc.; Jeffrey Perrone, tax partner in real estate service at Deloitte Tax LLP; and Charles Snell, president of New England Design Associates.
As the advisory board continues to grow so too does the wider presence of the Real Estate Society, chaired by Larry Colorito. Colorito is leading the charge to develop membership and identify leadership in the growing regional groups of Penn State alumni in the real estate industry.
The Los Angeles and New York City regions both have leadership in place, and membership in the Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., regions continues to grow. In addition, the Penn State Real Estate Group on LinkedIn has grown to 1,080 members.
The Real Estate Society's mission is to connect Penn Staters in the real estate industry with each other, and with the University and its students. Members' engagement with the college provides a critical link between the industry and students studying real estate.
To find out more about the Real Estate Advisory Board or how you can get involved in the Real Estate Society, visit the website of the Institute for Real Estate Studies at www.smeal.psu.edu/ires. The IRES is a research center within Smeal aiming to foster discussion and research between academics and business professionals in the area of real estate and to provide a focal point for real estate education at Penn State.


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Blue Eagle 5 v1.5.5 has been Released (22 Nov 2020)
The Kunena team has announce the arrival of Kunena template Blue Eagle 5 v1.5.5 which is now available for download. This version addresses most of the issues that were discovered in development.
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"I'm Gonna Tell You What I'm Gonna Do": What It Was Like To Guard Michael Jordan, According To Craig Ehlo | "I'm gonna catch it on the left elbow, and then I'm gonna drive to the left to the baseline, and then I'm gonna pull up and shoot my fadeaway." Read »
Reports: A Bloodied Cricket Bat Was Found At Oscar Pistorius's Home And Reeva Steenkamp's Skull Was "Crushed" | The bat was said to have been covered in "lots of blood." Read »
Reports: Former Roger Clemens Mistress Mindy McCready Commits Suicide | McCready reportedly died of a self-inflicted gunshot, little over a month after it was reported that her boyfriend and father to her infant son, David Wilson, also shot himself to death in his Arkansas home. Read »
Here's Your NBA Slam Dunk Contest Final Round GIF Collection | Terrence Ross wins! Read »
Futility: A 2013 Slam Dunk Contest Supercut | While the dunks that did find the basket weren't terrible, far more attempts were aborted or failed entirely. Here are all of those attempts. Read »
How To Cook Sausage And Peppers: A Guide For The Stir Crazy | We'll start in a pan and finish in the oven; it'll take a little while, but there won't be a ton of work involved. Set down the ax and let's get started. Read »
How Clark Olson Beats Everyone Else In Fantasy Everything | "There's almost no sports knowledge going into it," Olson said. "I'm generally taking projections I've found from sources I trust and then the spreadsheet's all analytical." Read »


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Everyone else seems to be. They're talking about women and sex and "Girls" and sex and feminism and sex and HBO and sex and the sexual revolution as failure and the sexual revolution as success.
It feels a little weird to be writing this, honestly, being that it's 2012 and all. But with whom and where and how and how often women are doing it remains a hot topic. As it should. Sex, after all, is hot. And our sex lives are as integral to who we are as our professional lives — and collectively, every bit as much of a barometer as to what's going on with women as salary surveys and graduation rates and polls about who's doing the housework.
Of course, as is generally the case in discussions about women, women and our changing place in the world, and/or women and sex, there lurks just the faintest whiff of judgment. In a piece entitled "The Bleaker Sex" in Sunday's New York Times, Frank Bruni takes to the Opinion pages with his thoughts on Lena Dunham's upcoming HBO series "Girls":
The first time you see Lena Dunham's character having sex in the new HBO series "Girls," her back is to her boyfriend, who seems to regard her as an inconveniently loquacious halfway point between partner and prop, and her concern is whether she's correctly following instructions…
You watch these scenes and other examples of the zeitgeist-y, early-20s heroines of "Girls" engaging in, recoiling from, mulling and mourning sex, and you think: Gloria Steinem went to the barricades for this? Salaries may be better than in decades past and the cabinet and Congress less choked with testosterone. But in the bedroom? What's happening there remains something of a muddle, if not something of a mess…
In a recent interview, presented in more detail on my Times blog, she told me that various cultural cues exhort her and her female peers to approach sex in an ostensibly 'empowered' way that she couldn't quite manage. "I heard so many of my friends saying, 'Why can't I have sex and feel nothing?' It was amazing: that this was the new goal."
First, not so fast, Bruni: while salaries may be better and Congress less choked, the numbers are still far from impressive. While clearly we have made progress on those fronts, I challenge anyone to make the case the work's been done, equality achieved. The numbers certainly indicate otherwise, as we've pointed out from time to time.
Now to the sex: While yes, I'll give you that sexual scenes painted in this and other previews of "Girls" (I haven't seen it; the show premieres on April 15) do indeed indicate a bit of a muddle, if not a mess, I don't see that as problematic. On the contrary: I'd argue said muddle makes perfect sense. And I'll raise you one: I think said muddle is an apt metaphor for what women are going through in every realm.
Women today are raised on empowering messages: from the time we're little, we're told girls can do anything boys can do. (As we should be.) We come of age in the relatively safe, comfortable confines of school, believing in this message and in its natural conclusion–that feminism's work if over, its battles won. So too do we believe in the natural conclusion of that other message–that "girls can do anything boys can do" also means that we should do things the way they do.
And then, buoyed by the beliefs that feminism is old news and that men and women are not only equal but basically the same, we smack up against the realities of the real world: the judgments, the biases, the roles that don't fit, the obstacles to changing them. The inequities. The shoulds. And we think there must be something wrong with us–that we're alone in the muddle. When the reality is that the world still has not caught up to the messaging we're fed, nor does the messaging necessarily have it right. Women are wandering uncharted territory. And, without a map, everything looks a muddle. We're feeling our way through.
As Hanna Rosin wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal,
The lingering ambivalence about sexuality is linked, I think, to women's lingering ambivalence about the confusing array of identities available to them in modern life.
Exactly (and I'm not just saying that cuz I wrote an entire book about it). The doors have opened, but the trails have yet to be cleared.
And then, of course, there's this (I can only imagine the backlash I'm gonna take for this one, but I'm gonna say it anyway, because I make the point often in the context of work): women and men are different. There's neurobiology and all kinds of research to support this idea–and yet, it's an idea that's traditionally been seen as dangerous. And it's seen as most dangerous by women: the worry being that to say that men and women are different, we do things differently, we experience things differently, must necessarily mean that one way is better, one's worse. As though to claim a difference would be to set us off on a slippery slope of regression, inevitably sliding right back onto Betty Draper's miserable, unempowered couch. Or as though to recognize a difference is to divide everyone into two overly simplified extremes, opposite ends of a spectrum–men are dogs and women just want to be monogamous. People are too complex for generalizations (generally speaking). So I guess my real question is this: Why is sex without feeling anything the goal? What exactly are we aspiring to there? Who decided that's what empowerment looks like?
I mean, isn't feeling something kind of the fun of sex?
And back to those messages: isn't it ironic that women today are raised on the message that it is their right (hell, their responsibility) to (enthusiastically!) embrace their sexuality–and that one's sexuality is indeed one's own for the embracing–even while this very notion is again (still!) under attack? Not only is our sexual and reproductive freedom–the freedom to express our sexuality outside the confines of marriage without threat of banishment (let alone death by stoning, a freedom not shared by many women walking the earth) or biology–staggeringly new, it's tenuous. Something we're raised to take as a given is something that still needs fierce defending. Every step we take, we battle anew.
It's tempting to buy into the idea that the fight is over, as tempting as it is to put a cheery, tidy spin on what came before. In that piece of Rosin's that I mentioned earlier, she refers to the success of the sexual revolution, attributing it to, among others, "sex goddess Erica Jong." Jong penned a response at The Daily Beast, which she kicked off with a quick anecdote and the line, "That was the way we weren't." Here's a bit from her piece:
Of course I was delighted to be called a sex-goddess and bracketed with Dr. Ruth Westheiner, whom I adore, but when Rosin said the '70s were all about the sexual revolution and that the sexual revolution was one of the props of women's current success, I felt a chill run down my spine. 'Dear Hanna-you just don't get it,' I wanted to say. 'If only you'd lived through some of the things I have–being trashed as the happy hooker of literature, being overlooked for professorships, prizes, and front-page reviews because it was assumed I was–'tis a pity–a whore, you might see things differently. And then, if having lived through that, the pundits now said you were rather tame, you might wonder whether women could ever be seen for what we are: sexual and intellectual, sweet and bitter, smart and sexy. But I am grateful to be a sex goddess all the same.'
…As a young and even middle-aged writer, I used to attend pro-choice rallies with GOP women. No more. Will my daughter's generation now believe that feminism, like democracy, has to be fought for over and over again? We cannot be complacent about birth control, abortion, the vote, or our daughters' and granddaughters' future. Just when things look rosiest for women, a new Rick Santorum will be waiting in the wings. And his wife recruited to put a new spin on his misogyny. Just when colleges graduate more women than men, and women are beginning to be paid a little more than a pittance, the press and publishers trot out female quislings to announce that the woman "problem" has been solved. Rubbish.
The fight goes on. There's plenty to battle against. So again, that muddle? Seems pretty clear to me.


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You must be the global administrator in the global zone to perform this procedure.
Become superuser, or assume the Primary Administrator role.
To create the role and assign the role to a user, see Using the Solaris Management Tools With RBAC (Task Map) in System Administration Guide: Basic Administration.
Use the zlogin command with the -C option and the name of the zone, for example, lx-zone.
global# zlogin -C lx-zone [Connected to zone 'lx-zone' console]
If you start the zlogin session immediately after issuing the zoneadm boot command, boot messages from the zone will display:
INIT: version 2.85 booting Welcome to CentOS Press 'I' to enter interactive startup. Configuring kernel parameters: [ OK ] Setting hostname lx-zone: [ OK ] [...] CentOS release 3.6 (Final) Kernel 2.4.21 on an i686
When the zone console displays, log in as root, press Return, and type the root password when prompted.
lx-zone console login: root Password:
Recall that the root (superuser) password is root when the zone is installed from the Sun tarball. The root (superuser) password is unset (blank) when the zone is installed from ISO images or a CD.


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The US attorney in Arizona violated Justice Department policy by providing Fox News with information apparently aimed at undercutting the credibility of a federal agent who helped reveal the botched arms-trafficking probe called Operation Fast and Furious, the Justice Department's inspector general said Monday.
There was substantial evidence in the 2011 incident that then-US attorney Dennis Burke's motive for disclosing a memo by federal agent John Dodson was retaliation, the inspector general's report said. In testimony to a House committee just two weeks earlier, Dodson had raised serious concerns about Fast and Furious.
In Dodson's memo, which was eventually leaked, Dodson proposed a tactic similar to the one being used at the time. Dodson proposed acting in an undercover capacity to deliver firearms to a suspected firearms trafficker, but taking no enforcement action upon delivering the firearms.
Dodson later told investigators that he and other ATF agents had proposed the transaction in hopes that it would shock their superiors into realizing what they were doing in Fast and Furious. Instead, a superior approved Dodson's proposal and Dodson sold six firearms to the suspect. Dodson later told investigators that he regretted delivering the firearms.
The Fast and Furious operation used a tactic called gun-walking in an attempt to follow illicit gun buyers to major arms traffickers and dismantle the gun rings supplying weapons to drug cartels in Mexico. The tracking effort was largely unsuccessful and hundreds of weapons wound up at crime scenes in the US and Mexico. Two of the weapons were found at the site of the death of US border agent Brian Terry.
After Terry's death, Dodson and several other agents from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives described the gun-walking tactic to Republican senator Chuck Grassley, and to the House oversight and government reform committee.
As the controversy grew, Burke and Justice Department officials exchanged emails about Dodson's earlier memo, the report said.
"Unbelievable," Burke said in one message. "This guy called Grassley and CBS to unearth what he in fact was proposing to do by himself. When you thought the hypocrisy of this whole matter had hit the limit already … "
The report noted that in a separate incident, Burke had told the deputy attorney general that he himself had improperly disclosed information to The New York Times about a criminal suspect in Operation Fast and Furious.
According to the inspector general, Burke knew at the time of his disclosure of the Dodson memorandum that he was under investigation by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility for that earlier leak.
The inspector general's office is referring its report to OPR to determine whether Burke's conduct violated rules in the states where Burke is licensed to practice law.


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Top Items:
New York Times:
The Supreme Court Correctly Affirms the E.P.A.'s Authority — The Clean Air Act is a complex and often confusing piece of legislation, especially when it comes to confronting the challenges of global warming, which were not fully understood when the original law was passed in 1970.
Discussion: SCOTUSblog
Lyle Denniston / SCOTUSblog: Opinion analysis: EPA mostly wins, but with criticism
New York Times:
Which Supreme Court Justices Vote Together Most and Least Often
Which Supreme Court Justices Vote Together Most and Least Often
Discussion: Outside the Beltway and Washington Post
Jonathan H. Adler / Washington Post: Which pairs of justices agree the most often?
Adam Liptak / New York Times:
Justices Uphold Emission Limits on Big Industry
Justices Uphold Emission Limits on Big Industry
Discussion: ThinkProgress, Washington Post and Hullabaloo
Ari Phillips / ThinkProgress: Supreme Court Reaffirms EPA's Greenhouse Gas Authority, With Minor Limitation
Robert Barnes / Washington Post: Supreme Court: EPA can regulate greenhouse gas emissions, with some limits
Thereisnospoon / Hullabaloo: A win for the EPA at the Supreme Court, by @DavidOAtkins
Associated Press:
Supreme Court limits EPA global warming rules
Supreme Court limits EPA global warming rules
Discussion: The Daily Signal
Andrew Kloster / The Daily Signal: Supreme Court Fails to Rein in EPA
Scott Lemieux / American Prospect:
Supreme Court Hampers EPA on Greenhouse Gases But It Could Have Been Worse
Supreme Court Hampers EPA on Greenhouse Gases But It Could Have Been Worse
Discussion: Off the Kuff, Daily Kos and Lawyers, Guns & Money
Charles Kuffner / Off the Kuff: Another win for the EPA at the Supreme Court
Meteor Blades / Daily Kos: In a split Supreme Court decision on curbing greenhouse gas emissions, the EPA mostly wins
Scott Lemieux / Lawyers, Guns & Money: The Supreme Court and the EPA
Leslie Larson / NY Daily News:
Chelsea Clinton: I tried to care about money but couldn't — The daughter of former President Bill Clinton and ex-secretary of state Hillary Clinton explained in a recent interview why she left lucrative professions and opted for working with her family's philanthropic foundation.
Discussion: Guardian, No More Mister Nice Blog, Power Line, Weasel Zippers, Rush Limbaugh, National Review, Twitchy and Hot Air
John Hinderaker / Power Line: There's Only One Political Genius in the Clinton Family, and He Isn't Running
ZIP / Weasel Zippers: Hillary's Millionaire Daughter Removes Silver Spoon From Her Mouth Just Long Enough To Say She …
Jonah Goldberg / National Review: Chelsea and Money — Hillary Clinton is struggling …
Sarah Desprat / Twitchy: She's just like us! Chelsea Clinton reveals her struggle to care about money [Photoshop]
Allahpundit / Hot Air: Great news from Chelsea Clinton: I tried to care about money, but I just can't
Brian Beutler / The New Republic:
Hillary Clinton Just Tipped Her Hand About Her 2016 Platform
Hillary Clinton Just Tipped Her Hand About Her 2016 Platform
Discussion: Washington Post, The Hill, Washington Monthly, Hot Air and The Dish
Daniel W. Drezner / Washington Post: You're rich enough, Hillary Clinton ... or are you?
Justin Sink / The Hill: Biden highlights bootstraps lifestyle
Ed Kilgore / Washington Monthly: About HRC as "the Democrats' Romney"
Andrew Sullivan / The Dish: You're Bankable Enough, Hillary
Danielle Sacks / Fast Company:
Discussion: Politico, Fox News and Patterico's Pontifications
Danielle Sacks / Telegraph:
Chelsea Clinton interview: 'I will always work harder than anyone'
Chelsea Clinton interview: 'I will always work harder than anyone'
Discussion: Business Insider, Gawker, Mediaite and The Daily Caller
Hunter Walker / Business Insider: Chelsea Clinton Says She Doesn't 'Care About' Money
Hamilton Nolan / Gawker: Chelsea Clinton: Money Ain't a Thing
Evan McMurry / Mediaite: Chelsea Clinton Can't Bring Herself to Care About Money
Jeremy W. Peters / New York Times:
Testy Exchange Erupts as I.R.S. Chief Is Questioned on Messages — WASHINGTON — Representative Darrell Issa of California, the Republican who is leading one of the investigations into the Internal Revenue Service's scrutiny of Tea Party groups, accused the I.R.S. commissioner on Monday of lying …
Washington Free Beacon:
REMINDER: IRS Commissioner John Koskinen is Major Democratic Donor
REMINDER: IRS Commissioner John Koskinen is Major Democratic Donor
Discussion: Ace of Spades HQ, BizPac Review, Scared Monkeys, Hot Air, The PJ Tatler, Power Line, The Gateway Pundit, The Daily Caller and Washington Post
Michele Kirk / BizPac Review: Trey Gowdy OWNS smug IRS Commissioner: Learn the law before you spew talking points
Scared Monkeys: Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) Shreds IRS Commissioner John Koskinen ... "You Don't Have Any Idea …
Duane Patterson / Hot Air: Virginia Democrat Grills IRS Commissioner, Discovers Democrats' 2014 Campaign Strategy
Paul Mirengoff / Power Line: Turnaround specialist uninterested in turning IRS around
Patrick Howley / The Daily Caller: Darrell Issa Questioning IRS Commissioner John Koskinen On Missing Lois Lerner Emails At 7 P.M. [VIDEO]
Michael Warren / Weekly Standard:
Video: IRS Head Waited 2 Months to Tell Congress, FBI About Lost Emails
Video: IRS Head Waited 2 Months to Tell Congress, FBI About Lost Emails
Discussion: Twitchy and Ed Driscoll
Alexandra Jaffe / The Hill:
Will Mississippi mudslinging give Dems a chance in South? — If Chris McDaniel on Tuesday knocks off Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), national Democrats will have a rare offensive opportunity in the Deep South. — The nasty, divisive primary fight comes to a close in tonight's runoff election …
Discussion: Hot Air, Talking Points Memo and RedState
Daniel Strauss / Talking Points Memo: Cochran Campaign Staffer Arrested For Destroying Tea Partier's Yard Signs
Erick Erickson / RedState: The National Republican Senatorial Committee's Incumbent Protection Plan Pours Money in Mississippi
Daniel Strauss / Talking Points Memo:
McDaniel Campaign Attacks Sen. Cochran's Daughter With '#Who'sYaDaddy' Meme
McDaniel Campaign Attacks Sen. Cochran's Daughter With '#Who'sYaDaddy' Meme
Discussion: BuzzFeed, Liberaland, Washington Post, Senator Chris McDaniel and RedState
Andrew Kaczynski / BuzzFeed: Chris McDaniel Posts "#Who'sYaDaddy" Meme Attacking Thad Cochran's Daughter
Alan / Liberaland: McDaniel Campaign Purposely Misquotes Cochran's Daughter In Sickening Campaign Push
Senator Chris McDaniel / Facebook: Thad Cochran's daughter had the audacity to write this, in an attempt to criticize me.
Goldwaterconservative / RedState: Thad Cochran's Liberal Daughter Rails Against McDaniel Supporters
Josh Marshall / Talking Points Memo:
Dems Ain't Happy Either
Dems Ain't Happy Either
Discussion: Washington Monthly, Little Green Footballs and Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality
Ed Kilgore / Washington Monthly: Where Tactical Voting Means Staying Home
Little Green Footballs: Tea Party Mounts Massive Effort to Support Crazy Neo-Confederate in Mississippi
New York Times:
Poll Finds Dissatisfaction Over Iraq — Dissatisfaction with President Obama's conduct of foreign policy has shot up among both Republicans and Democrats in the past month, even though a slim majority supports his recent decision to send military advisers to Iraq to confront the growing threat …
Jay Bookman / Ajc Blogs:
Is the First Amendment only for Christians? — Jody Hice, a Baptist minister and talk-radio host, is running for Congress in Georgia's 10th Congressional District as a stern defender of the First Amendment and religious freedom. But that freedom does not apply to those of the Muslim faith.
Discussion: Talking Points Memo
Caitlin MacNeal / Talking Points Memo: GOP House Candidate: Islam Not A Religion, Not Protected By Constitution
Eric W. Dolan / The Raw Story:
Georgia GOP candidate Jody Hice: Muslims not protected by the First Amendment
Georgia GOP candidate Jody Hice: Muslims not protected by the First Amendment
Discussion: PoliticusUSA and Hinterland Gazette
Hrafnkell Haraldsson / PoliticusUSA: The Truth is, Religious Bigots, if Islam is Not a Religion, Neither is Christianity
The existential crisis of the liberal millionaire — David Brock has a message for liberal millionaires: Don't sweat being called hypocrites. — Brock, a former "right-wing hit-man"-turned-top big money Democratic operative, is part of a behind-the-scenes campaign to convince donors it's OK …
Discussion: Hot Air, Washington Monthly and Poynter
Ed Morrissey / Hot Air: Politico: The vast liberal billionaire conspiracy is for real
Ed Kilgore / Washington Monthly: Democracy Alliance and the Koch Network
Kristen Hare / Poynter: Liberal donors group shared photos of feared reporters
After Exchanges Close, 5% of Americans Are Newly Insured — More than half of newly insured in '14 got insurance through exchanges — PRINCETON, NJ — Five percent of Americans report being newly insured in 2014. More than half of that group, or 2.8% of the total U.S. population …
Discussion: Real Clear Politics and Hot Air
Skip Navigation / ACLU:
U.S. Releases Targeted Killing Memo in Response to Long-Running ACLU Lawsuit — Appeals Court Ordered Memo's Disclosure — NEW YORK - In response to a court order in consolidated Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times …
Discussion: ccrjustice.org, Firedoglake, Hit & Run and TalkLeft
Kevin Gosztola / Firedoglake: Release of Legal Memo Justifying Anwar Al-Awlaki's Killing Paves Way for Disclosure of More Records
Scott Shackford / Hit & Run: DOJ's Defense of Drone-Killing American Alleged Terrorist Without Trial: Because War
Mark Hosenball / Reuters:
Court releases memo of U.S. justifying drone attacks on citizens
Court releases memo of U.S. justifying drone attacks on citizens
Discussion: Business Insider, Politico, New York Times, The Daily Caller, Mediaite and Shakesville
Michael B Kelley / Business Insider: The New York Times Skewers Obama's 'Slapdash' Legal Justification For Killing An American By Drone
Josh Gerstein / Politico: Court makes drone legal memo public
Charlie Savage / New York Times: Targeting Anwar al-Awlaki Was Legal, Justice Department Said
Giuseppe Macri / The Daily Caller: Government Releases Memo Justifying Killing US Citizens With Drones
Andrew Kirell / Mediaite: Drone Memo Revealed: Here's the U.S. Govt's Justification for Killing American Citizen
Melissa McEwan / Shakesville: Drone Policy for US Citizens
Paul Steinhauser / CNN:
First on CNN: Romney to endorse Scott Brown — (CNN) - Mitt Romney's making another endorsement, and this time it's in a crucial Senate race in his own backyard. — CNN has learned that next week the 2012 GOP presidential nominee will endorse Scott Brown, the frontrunner among …
Discussion: OnPolitics
Catalina Camia / OnPolitics: Mitt Romney to back Scott Brown for Senate in New Hampshire
Hadas Gold / Politico:
Free Beacon's 'Hillary Files' under scrutiny — A Republican opposition researcher who obtained Hillary Clinton-related documents from the University of Arkansas and provided them to the Washington Free Beacon signed an agreement stating that those documents would not be published without permission …
Discussion: The Daily Caller
Matt K. Lewis / The Daily Caller: Does Oppo Research Belong in The Newsroom?
Ruby Cramer / BuzzFeed:
Conservative Website Relied On Republican Opposition Researcher For Clinton Stories
Conservative Website Relied On Republican Opposition Researcher For Clinton Stories
Betsy Rothstein / The Daily Caller: INCEST DESK: BuzzFeed, Media Matters Launch Attack On Conservative Website
Dylan Scott / Talking Points Memo: Reports: Free Beacon Paid Ex-GOP Operative To Research Hillary Tapes
Jeannie DeAngelis / American Thinker: In what may turn out to be the most delicious irony in the history …
Dana Davidsen / CNN:
Michelle Obama: Woman president should happen ASAP — (CNN) - Michelle Obama said Monday she's "definitely" not jumping into politics, but suggested the United States might not be too far away from having its first woman commander in chief. — Asked at the Washington event if she would consider …
Discussion: Hinterland Gazette
Glenn Harlan Reynolds / USA Today:
Problems with collective action: Column — The VA scandal is another government example of the failure to follow a collective mission — Government, we are sometimes told, is just another word for things we choose to do together. — Like a lot of things politicians say, this sounds good.
Discussion: The Hill
James Joyner / The Hill: Why all VA executives are above average
Andrew Hasbun / FOX 10 News:
MCSO launches investigation into Gilbert dog deaths — As the owners of 20 dogs wait for answers as to why their pets died at a Gilbert boarding service, Fox 10 News has learned that the son and daughter-in-law of US Senator Jeff Flake were tasked with caring for the dogs while the boarding house's owners were out of town.
Discussion: Washington Post, Arizona Republic, Fox News and The Daily Caller
Abby Phillip / Washington Post: Sheriff: Sen. Jeff Flake's son was in charge when 20 dogs died at Ariz. boarding house
Betsy Rothstein / The Daily Caller: Sen. Jeff Flake's Son Responsible For Death Of 17 Dogs
Walter Russell Mead:
The Jihadi Menace Gets Real — A group more radical than al-Qaeda, better organized, better financed, commanding the loyalty of thousands of dedicated fanatics including many with Western and even U.S. passports? And this group now controls some of the most strategic territory at the heart of the Middle East?
Discussion: Power Line and The Dish
Paul Mirengoff / Power Line: The jihadi menace reaches a high water mark
Andrew Sullivan / The Dish: Obama's Iraq Plan, Ctd
Wingnuts' destructive shenanigans — and the media who enable them — Here's why one side is to blame — and why it matters — The latest Pew Poll deep dive into American political attitudes inspired a very bored Ron Fournier to sigh deeply, dust off his lace cuffs and blithely wave off all concerns about …
Discussion: Hullabaloo
David Heinzmann / Chicago Tribune:
New sensors will scoop up 'big data' on Chicago — The curled metal fixtures set to go up on a handful of Michigan Avenue light poles later this summer may look like delicate pieces of sculpture, but researchers say they'll provide a big step forward in the way Chicago understands itself.
Discussion: Weasel Zippers, Engadget, RT and The Daily Caller
Hayley Hoefer / The Daily Caller: New Lamp Posts In Chicago Raise 'Big Brother' Fears
New York Times:
2nd Bridge Inquiry Said to Be Linked to Christie — Investigations into the Christie administration and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey have zeroed in on possible securities law violations stemming from a $1.8 billion road repair agreement in 2011, according to people briefed on the matter.
Discussion: Taylor Marsh and Liberaland
Dave-Dr-Gonzo / Liberaland: A Second BridgeGhazi Scandal?


text:
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text:
Redlands Connection is a concoction of sports memories emanating from a city that once numbered less than 20,000 people. From the Super Bowl to the World Series, from the World Cup to golf's U.S. Open, plus NCAA Final Four connections, Tour de France cycling, major tennis, NBA and a little NHL, aquatics and quite a bit more, the sparkling little city that sits around halfway between Los Angeles and Palm Springs on Interstate 10 has its share of sports connections. – Obrey Brown
Davis Phinney took over the post-race media conference after winning the yellow jersey at the 1986 Redlands Bicycle Classic.
Phinney was a cycling rock star.
He'd just ridden a handful of days, pushed over the line by runner-up Raul Alcala, an Olympic bronze medalist for his native Mexico a couple years earlier. Phinney also held off future teammate Jeff Pierce in that Memorial Day weekend event.
Interviews centered around, naturally, of Phinney's Tour de France success. Wasn't that big news?
Wouldn't Redlands like to connect with a guy that was in cycling's greatest race?
After all, he would eventually become the first-ever American to win a stage at that European-dominated event. Americans, at that point, had rarely competed in that event.
Team 7-Eleven had raced across the pond in the globe's most important cycling race. Until Greg LeMond came along, the Americans weren't successful at any level in Europe.
In Redlands, Phinney was trying to be kind, but he knew why he was there. Phinney's presence, along with his pre-eminent 7-Eleven cycling team, had been whisked to Redlands in order to help try and send the one-year-old event to the next level of popularity.
There were enough questions about European racing. Mostly mine. I was thinking globally, not locally.
"Let's stop talking about the Tour de France," said Phinney, in a manner of taking over the post-event media conversation, "and talk about the Tour of Redlands."
Fair enough. We're on U.S. soil. On hand for those moments were handfuls of Redlands race organizers, no doubt delighted over their guest's manners in trying to highlight their race.
Team 7-Eleven's presence might have been paramount in keeping Redlands afloat. Eighteen years into the next century, it's still pertinent and relevant in the cycling world.
In 1997, that team was inducted into the U.S. Cycling Hall of Fame. That original 7-Eleven squad had sent two teams to Redlands for that 1986 Memorial Day weekend trek.
Team manager Jim Ochowicz, a Hall of Famer in his own right, had organized a remarkable collection of mainly U.S. riders.
Racing in Redlands that weekend was Tom Schuler and Bob Roll, Ron Kiefel and Doug Shapiro, plus Alex Stieda, Roy Knickman, Chris Carmichael, not to mention Phinney and Alcala.
It was a showcase for Redlands, its area fans, perhaps, not yet connected to cycling.
Don't forget Eric Heiden, the Olympic speed skater who captured multiple medals at the 1980 Lake Placid (N.Y.) Games while also qualifying as an alternate for Team USA's cycling squad later that summer.
And don't overlook another Hall of Famer. Knickman, who rode for La Vie Claire and Toshiba-Look alongside the famous teams that included LeMond, Andy Hampsten and Frenchman Bernard Hinault.
We're told the U.S. Cycling Hall of Fame, which has limited hours in a Northern California city of Davis – just outside Sacramento – isn't all that impressive. That it exists is, in itself, a major bow to the sport.
Team 7-Eleven's presence in Redlands that year, I was told, came after plenty of negotiation – with Ochowicz, I believe – to help lift Redlands' race to prominence. It was hard to bring his team west when most of the most important competition and events were in Europe.
Perhaps spurred on by his Redlands success, Phinney won the third stage that summer at the Tour de France, copping the 12th stage a year later.
Phinney, meanwhile, was accorded a high honor in Redlands when organizers proclaimed "Legendary" status on him at a ceremony in 2012.
It was a Hall of Fame moment, a Redlands Connection and a huge chapter for the Redlands Classic.


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Theodore L. Jones has held season tickets on the 43-yard line at Tiger Stadium, home of the perennial football powerhouse Louisiana State University, for almost 20 years. Because of the Baton Rouge lawyer's lobbying in Congress in 1986, he and thousands of other fans get a tax break on donations they make as a condition for buying seats.
The deduction Jones helped craft is now costing U.S. taxpayers more than $100 million a year in revenue that the Treasury can't collect, based on data compiled by Bloomberg.
It is the sort of provision that Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans say they will target if they win this November's elections. There are hundreds of write-offs in the tax code that lawmakers of both parties say could be restricted to help lower the deficit. Rep. Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican and a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee, urges a tax overhaul to bolster the economy.
"We need to look at everything," Brady said when asked about the deduction on donations linked to college sports tickets. No one has specifically targeted the provision. "It's important, vitally important to somebody, but the overall goal is still: How do we create that pro-growth tax code?"
Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, advocates curtailing breaks so he can lower personal and corporate rates, though he hasn't provided specifics. Various deductions for charitable contributions to education cost the Treasury $5.7 billion this year, according to Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation. The estimate doesn't break out the loss of revenue from donations linked to sports tickets.
At the same time, the college seat-donation tax break may show how hard it would be to simplify the tax system. In this case, hundreds of universities - many of them large, state- supported institutions - and thousands of voters benefit from the provision. It is one of hundreds of exemptions around which entrenched interests have organized their own economies and which they would probably fight to retain.
"College athletics are extremely popular," says Marcus Owens, a lawyer in the Washington law firm Caplin & Drysdale. He is a former head of the Internal Revenue Service's Exempt Organizations Division. "They are often associated with state institutions. In a lot of states, a significant percentage of the adult population went to some state institution, has an allegiance to the athletic teams and represents a considerable voting bloc."
No government agency has totaled the cost to taxpayers of the deduction for donations linked to college sports tickets. Neither has the 75-year-old Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan Washington research group.
Some colleges with the most popular teams in football, basketball and hockey take advantage of the provision to market higher prices to season-ticket buyers. They set the face value, then demand additional hundreds or thousands of dollars in what are designated contributions as a condition of sale. The pitch is that under U.S. law, the fans can write off 80 percent of the mandatory donations when they itemize deductions. Other schools don't set specific donation levels. Instead, they award seat locations using point systems in which giving may be one element.
To obtain a sampling of the data, Bloomberg made public- records requests to the 54 state-sponsored universities in the six largest football conferences. Some schools said they don't require donations to buy season tickets, and several said they couldn't provide the data. At some institutions, the gifts are collected by nonprofit booster clubs that don't report donations by type.
The 34 that reported seat donations said they received $467.2 million in such contributions for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2011. Ohio State University collected the most, with $38.7 million. The only two schools that initially qualified under the provision ranked second and third: LSU, with $38 million, and the University of Texas at Austin, $33.9 million.
For those 34 schools, that means taxpayers could deduct as much as $373.7 million, or 80 percent of the total of donations. Based on a 28 percent tax rate - the third-highest, for married couples reporting incomes between $142,700 and $217,449 - that would reduce revenue to the Treasury by $104.6 million. That cost estimate assumes the seat donations would all be deducted from individuals' tax returns; the universities in the survey don't break out gifts tied to ticket purchases by corporate buyers.
The total of lost federal tax receipts may be some multiple of that amount, because more than 1,000 university sports departments are eligible to demand such deductible gifts with ticket sales. Based on the Bloomberg sampling, it wouldn't be unreasonable to estimate that giving related to season tickets may total $1 billion a year, according to Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., who has written 12 books on the business of sports.
In 1988 after the seat-donation provision was expanded, Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation calculated that it would cost less than $500,000 a year in forgone tax collections.
For Ted Jones, the 78-year-old LSU fan, here's how it works for his seats in "Death Valley," the stadium where LSU has won almost three-quarters of its games since 1924. His two seats on the 43-yard line, which were passed on to him by the family of a friend who died, are 34 rows from the field. He pays $410 for each ticket, plus a required $950 donation per seat. For two other seats around the 10-yard line, the tickets also cost $410, after he makes a $900 donation for each.
So to qualify for buying $1,640 of tickets to eight games this season, he had to donate an additional $3,700. He gets to write off 80 percent of that, or $2,960, when he itemizes deductions on his tax return. Because Jones says his income has put him in the top 35 percent bracket, the provision saves him $1,036.
Jones has been going to LSU football games since the 1960s. The home team has put a tiger named Mike on the sidelines for decades. Jones recalls a game in a downpour in the late 1970s against the appropriately named Oregon Ducks. Another memory is of the "earthquake game" in 1988, when LSU beat Auburn University, 7-6, on a last-chance pass. As local lore has it, the roar of the crowd registered on the school's seismograph.
Donations required to buy season tickets in the LSU stadium range from $210 for end-zone seats to $3,000 for club seats, according to Herb Vincent, a spokesman for the athletic department. The money goes to scholarships, facilities and other costs, he says.
The school has an athletic budget of $107.3 million, according to its fiscal 2011 filing with the National Collegiate Athletic Association. LSU's football team, usually a contender for the national championship, is currently ranked No. 6 in the Associated Press and USA Today polls.
The roots of the seat-donation deduction go all the way back to the Revenue Act of 1950 during the Truman administration, according to Owens, the former IRS official. In an effort to rein in profits for untaxed groups such as charities, Congress in the 1950 law imposed taxes on their "unrelated business income." But the act's legislative history specified that the U.S. couldn't tax revenue from college athletics tickets, the primary source of sports revenue then, Owens said.
As Congress was writing the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the IRS had ruled that donations required for ticket purchases shouldn't be tax-exempt. At the time, Jones was a lobbyist for the state in Washington, and LSU's athletic director, the late Bob Brodhead, asked him to push to protect the deduction.
Brodhead wanted to expand Tiger Stadium to add premium seats that he could leverage into increased donations. He asked Jones "to make sure that if LSU built suites, it would be deductible," Jones says. He approached Senator Russell Long, the senior Democrat on the Finance Committee, about amending the 879-page bill. Long was an LSU graduate who represented Louisiana for 39 years.
"I said, 'We need to exempt LSU on the donation deduction on the seats,"' Jones says. Long agreed and asked "Who else?" because he didn't want the amendment to be a "rifle shot" with just one beneficiary, Jones says.
Jones recalls suggesting the University of Texas at Austin, another football power. He thought Democratic Rep. Jake Pickle, a UT graduate on the Ways and Means Committee whose district included Austin, would be supportive, he says.
According to another version, UT contacted Pickle on the matter, and he discussed it with the tax-writing committee, whose bill already had passed the House. When Long's provision was raised later during negotiations, Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, the late Illinois Democrat, asked whether any of his members cared. Pickle's interest was recalled, and the two-school measure stuck, according to a former House aide familiar with the matter who declined to be identified. Pickle and Long have since died.
The provision they crafted became section 1608 of the historic measure, which eliminated many business tax breaks and overhauled levies on individuals. The amendment allowed LSU and UT season ticket buyers to deduct 100 percent of donations linked to their seats. It described the schools eligible for the tax break in such a way that no others could qualify. Here is the language covering UT:
"Such institution was mandated by a State constitution in 1876; such institution was established by a State legislature in March 1881; is located in a State capital pursuant to a statewide election in Sept. 1881; the campus of such institution formally opened on Sept. 15, 1883; such institution is operated under the authority of a 9-member board of regents appointed by the governor."
The law declared that donations to the schools "shall not be disqualified because such taxpayer receives the right to seating or the right to purchase seating in an athletic stadium of such institution."
When the identities of the two schools later became known, other colleges complained. Rather than repeal the provision, Congress voted in 1988 to extend the benefit to all of them, while reducing the deduction to 80 percent of contributions.
Jones defends the long-term effect of the write-off, saying it has allowed LSU to fund women's sports and channel millions of dollars a year into academics. In fiscal 2011, the athletic department paid $10 million for student-athlete scholarships and gave $3.6 million to the university for academics, according to the school. Jones likened the tax break to Senator Long's description of the benefits from the old business deduction for the three-martini lunch.
"Those kinds of deductions are like fertilizer to a farmer," Jones said, quoting Long. "They increase the yield."
The $33.9 million in gifts that UT collected in connection with sales of season tickets in fiscal 2011 helped the athletic department generate $150.3 million in revenue. That made it the richest sports program among American colleges, based on data compiled by Bloomberg. The university reported spending $9 million on athletic scholarships.
DeLoss Dodds, the UT athletic director, didn't respond to multiple interview requests.
At Texas A&M University in College Station, the $20 million in gifts tied to season tickets will only go up over time as fans compete for the best seats, says Miles Marks, who was president of the 12th Man Foundation booster club until Oct. 1, when he stepped down. The seat-donation total was ninth-highest in the Bloomberg sampling.
A&M has a fundraising advantage because of its strong football tradition and dedicated fan base, Marks says. At schools that can't demand seat donations in the thousands of dollars, the only way to increase revenue if lawmakers eliminate the tax deduction would be to raise ticket prices, he says.
"Demand would go down," Marks says. "There is a trickle- down effect."
LSU's Tiger Stadium has 92,542 seats, more than any venue in the National Football League. Of those, 67,000 command a donation, according to the spokesman Vincent. Now the school is spending about $80 million to double the number of luxury boxes to 140 and the number of premium club seats to 7,000.
This will enable LSU to increase revenue from seat donations by as much as $15 million, according to R.G. Richard, president of the Tiger Athletic Foundation, a tax-exempt booster organization that helps raise money for sports. Even after the expansion, there will be 1,500 people on the waiting list for club seats and 100 for suites, says Richard, who is a retired Marine Corps major general.
The 10 to 15 most powerful football programs, including LSU, probably don't need the tax break to persuade fans to pay up for seats, Richard says.
"It's commonly said of LSU that roughly 80 percent of the state's business is done in a five-hour period Saturday night in the premium seating area," Richard says.
No matter which candidate wins the presidential election, there may be little stomach in Congress for taking away tax breaks that help college athletics, says Owens, the Washington tax lawyer. Since the 1980s, Congress and U.S. courts have consistently overridden IRS moves to tax college sports on TV revenue and sponsorship income, he says.
University athletics benefit from other tax breaks. Donors can usually write off gifts for athletic facilities. College programs are excused from paying taxes on billions of dollars in revenue from television, advertising, sponsorships, licensing and royalties. Stadiums built or renovated using municipal debt benefit from lower costs as buyers of the bonds are exempt from taxes on interest.
Zimbalist, the sports economist at Smith College, argues that Congress should weed out many of the preferences, including the seat-donation deduction and the tax exemptions on TV and sponsorship revenue. The IRS has attacked some of the breaks "until it is blue in the face" and has "basically succumbed," he says.


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Return To Abstergo
When the mission begins, walk forward towards the elevators to trigger a fight with Abstergo security guards.
Just like in combat with Connor, use the Parry and then Counter the guards to eliminate them. Use Kill Streaks for faster results. Once that's done, approach the elevators to trigger a short scene.
After the cutscene, climb to the upper floors and shimmy to the elevator door on the left. Use a Ledge Kill on the guard and then toss the rest down the open elevator door.
Enter the doorway on the LEFT side to a large conference room and a few more guards. Eliminate the guards to clear the room and then make your way outside to the upper catwalks to encounter more guards.
There will be two sets of guards on the catwalks, so take them all down! Exit the catwalks by entering the broken window and making a LEFT in the hall. Approach the doorway to trigger a cutscene.
After the cutscene, chase after Cross! Ignore the guards and follow Cross through the halls and out the crashed glass where he jumped out. Traverse the upper railings and search for Cross below.
Once you catch sight of Cross, chase after him and assassinate him to trigger the next set of cutscenes
Eliminate the two waves of guards that rush into the room. After all are gone, the receptionist will open the doorway for you, so enter through the door to trigger the next set of events.
When prompted, assassinate Vidic to end the mission.
As you walk out of the building, eliminate the rest of the guards by using the Apple on them. Simple as it sounds.
ACHIEVEMENT/TROPHY UNLOCKEDThe End Is Nigh
Make your way up the stairs to the northeast. Make a right at the top and climb from bar to bar to the next ledge.
Take the stirway up and then make a right to trigger a cutscene with Juno.
After the cutscene, approach the orange-colored pillars and climb it. Shimmy to the left and then move right to the next ledge. Jump down to the iron bars below and swing to the opposite wall.
Climb the wall to the top and then make a right turn to trigger another cutscene with Juno.
After the cutscene, jump towards the wall and shimmy all the way to the right side. Jump down at the ledge and and walk up to the console to insert the final power source! Once that's done, make your way back down to the cave and speak with your team and then get back on the Animus to start Sequence 11.
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Jen hasn't visited any places yet.
Driving people nuts with my insistence on good water during photo shoots for far too long. My family does not understand my need for loose-leaf tea, and I have tired of trying to explain other than just handing them a cup.
My tea comes along with me from sea to shining sea—as a documentary photographer, I get to enjoy a great deal of travel photographing the country and my especial joy, classic cars. Leaving our pets—collie Benedict and cats Buckley & Lucy—behind is a bit tough, but they are at least happy to see us come home!
The open road, USA.


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Article content
NEW YORK - A man from Long Island, New York, is facing up to 30 days in jail and a $500 fine after a neighbour complained to police he was laughing too loudly, his lawyer said on Wednesday.
Police issued Robert Schiavelli, 41, two tickets for disturbing the peace for laughing out the window of his home in Rockville Centre on Long Island at about 6 p.m. on Feb. 12 and Feb. 13, his lawyer said.
Schiavelli said the neighbour regularly mocks his disability, and the best response to those taunts is laughter.
"He just ridicules me all the time and the only thing I can come up with is laughing," Schiavelli said in a telephone interview.
His lawyer, Andrew Campanelli, said his client has frequent seizures as a result of neurological impairments but denied his laugh is loud or boisterous.
"He's like a big teddy bear, he's got a low laugh," Campanelli said.
Schiavelli lives with his mother, Suzanne Schiavelli, who said in an interview on Wednesday that he had a "fairly loud" laugh.
"I think it's infectious. It's cute," she said. "When my husband died, we said to ourselves, 'We're going to make sure to laugh every day and make the most of life.'"
Daniel O'Hanion, the neighbour who made the complaint, could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.
O'Hanion and Schiavelli live in adjacent private homes about 20 feet apart, separated by two driveways.
The Rockville Centre Police Department said they issued the summonses after receiving complaints about an ongoing pattern of noisemaking.
"On two occasions, police actually observed this individual creating a disturbance directed at neighbours and in violation of local law," police said in a statement.
Schiavelli's mother said O'Hanion often calls her son a "retard," parodies his speech and mocks his walk. Relations worsened when they had builders in to renovate their house over O'Hanion's objections, she said.
Campanelli said that a judge declined a motion to dismiss the case at a village court hearing on Tuesday.
tap here to see other videos from our team.


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World Anti-Doping Agency proposing doubling length of sanctions for athletes caught doping under new anti-doping code.
The World Anti-Doping Agency's top officials spent the weekend honing a new global code which includes doubling suspensions for some drug cheats.
WADA's executive committee and foundation board met in Montreal to review the third draft of the proposed 2015 World Anti-Doping code, which will come up for approval at the November 12-15 World Conference on Doping in Sport in Johannesburg.
WADA revealed last November it planned to increase bans for serious violations from two years to four years and its president, John Fahey, said the final revision over the weekend was intended to make the code shorter and sharper.
Fahey said WADA had received almost 4,000 individual comments about the code since starting the review in November 2011.
"WADA values the input of these stakeholders and is pleased with the level of their engagement throughout the review process," Fahey said in a WADA statement.
"The Agency continually seeks to enhance the framework that supports the anti-doping system, and revisions depend on these contributions."
Tougher sanctions
As well as the longer sanctions for athletes caught using prohibited performance-enhancing substances, the proposed new code also defines punishments in cases involving coaches and other athlete support staff among other amendments with an emphasis on testing and investigations.
"Quality WADA-approved testing programs are needed to ensure that testing is effective and that sophisticated cheaters are found," Fahey said.
"This will ultimately advance the fight against doping in sport.
In other matters from the weekend meeting, WADA decided to immediately implement a modification to increase the threshold level for marijuana to ensure that athletes using the substance in competition will be detected.
The Athlete Committee was also urging Kenya's government to put in place an independent inquiry to investigate the doping allegations involving some Kenyan athletes.


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In September of 2015, not long after Sweden followed the SNB and ECB in going "full NIRP", we warned that "Sweden Goes Full Krugman, Gets Massive Housing Bubble", in which we first showed the unprecedented surge in Swedish home prices, which have been the one asset class to "benefit" the most from the Riksbank's ultra loose monetary policy hoping to stimulate inflation, even as broader economic inflation failed to materialize.
Since then things turned increasingly more surreal for Swedish home prices, culminating with a very explicit warning from Moody's in March of 2016, in which the rating agency warned that as a result of NIRP, the country is most at risk of an "ultimately unsustainable asset bubble."
... the unintended consequences of the ultra-loose monetary policy are becoming increasingly apparent -- in the form of rapidly rising house prices and persistently strong growth in mortgage credit", adds Ms Muehlbronner. In Moody's view, these trends will likely continue as interest rates will remain low, raising the risk of a house price bubble, with potentially adverse effects on financial stability as and when house prices reverse trends. In all three countries, households are highly leveraged, and while they also have high levels of financial assets, returns on these assets will be under increasing pressure if the negative interest and yield environment persists.
Moody's also said that "the Riksbank will find it difficult to achieve its objective of significantly pushing up consumer price inflation in a deflationary global environment, while the sustained and strong growth in mortgage lending and house prices risks leading to an (ultimately unsustainable) asset bubble."
Nearly a year and a half ago, we concluded that we expect "this latest warning to be soundly ignored because after all, what else can the central banks do in this global coordinated effort to stimulate economies with ever more debt, which by definition can only work if rates are not only at zero, but increasingly more negative."
Sure enough, since then nothing has changed in Sweden's monetary policy, and at its latest meeting, the Riksbank kept its repo rate at an all time low of -0.50%.
In some ways one almost commiserates with the Swedish Central Bank and its governor Stefan Ingves, the sad looking gentleman shown below...
... who over the past few years has lost monetary independence, becoming a hostage to the monetary policies of his neighboring central banks, especially the ECB. This was on exhibit most recently one month ago, when the Riksbank once again failed to even hint at a trace of hawkishness, while keeping its rate at -0.5% (even lower than that of the ECB).
And while markets have become increasingly convinced that Sweden's central bank needs to abandon its extreme dovishness as the economy shows signs of overheating - Sweden's inflation recently and finally rose above the Riksbank's 2% target - suspicions that the ECB will stick with its negative rates well into the future piles further pressure on the Riksbank to keep its own interest rates on hold.
You see, Sweden's small size compared to the eurozone complicates the central bank's decision-making: Ingves has repeatedly cautioned that making a move before its larger neighbor risks an unacceptable rally in the krona which could unleash a deflationary tsunami in Sweden... oh and lead to devastating downstream effect on the country's various asset bubbles.
Of course, going back to our discussion of Sweden's housing market, nowhere would the bursting of Sweden's unprecedented asset bubble be more concerning than in the country's home prices. And to get a sense of just how bad it could get, here is a chart from Nordea's Andreas Wallstrom, showing nearly 140 years of real house prices in Sweden's capital, Stockholm, with an emphasis on the exponential surge in the past 2 decades. As Wallstromg sarcastically points out, the big irony in this is that "the current monetary policy regime, which aims for "price stability", started in 1995."
Ah yes, presenting "price stability", aka the world's biggest housing bubble.
Perhaps the biggest irony here is that even Ingves knows how this ends. As the FT reported over two years ago, "Sweden's central bank governor has warned that new crisis-busting tools policymakers are embracing around the world to counter asset bubbles and other financial dangers are susceptible to political inaction and turf wars. Stefan Ingves, governor of the Riksbank, said so-called macroprudential policies — such as capital requirements and leverage limits — had so far failed in Sweden where house prices and personal debt levels have soared to record levels."
"Macroprudential, particularly if markets are going up, up, up is about saying 'no'. Apparently that's hard to do," Mr. Ingves said.
Ironically, to nobody more so than to Mr. Ingeves himself. And, as one senior banker added in September 2015, "To have such a low interest rate at the same time as Sweden has rather good economic growth and rapid increases in house prices — it seems crazy."
Two years later, the Stockholm housing bubble - as well as the global asset bubble - is the biggest it has ever been.


text: Ibid is a multi-protocol, general purpose, instant messaging chat bot written in Python. It aims for a naturalistic interface rather than strict-syntax commands. Ibid understands many protocols, including IRC, Jabber/XMPP/Google Talk, Campfire, NMDC, and SILC. It also interacts over SMTP, HTTP, and various RPC protocols. Ibid aims to make plugins as easy as possible to write. It ships with a large collection of plugins for looking up information, performing conversions, storing factoids, delivering messages, and much more.


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I was pretty sure Miley didn't have a big enough pair to sit one of the veterans instead of Kearns.
I was pretty sure Miley didn't have a big enough pair to sit one of the veterans instead of Kearns.
The 2/3 black hole. Yippee.
kearns needs to start getting some ABs soon. i like this lineup fine, though.
Surprising to see Junior playing on wet turf (if they play at all).
Yeah, me too. I thought another day of rest for Jr. might be in order given the field, with Kearns playing.Originally Posted by GoReds
Miley has Griffey(.705 OPS) and Casey(.542 OPS) batting ahead of Dunn(1.100 OPS). Unreal. I don't get the guy at all.
Code:Reds vs Wells Dunn 24 ab's .375/.464 /.708/1.173 JR 11 ab's .273/.500 /.636/1.136 Kearns 15 ab's .400/.471 /.667/1.137 Casey 16 ab's .250/.250 /.375/.625 Pena 7 ab's .143/.143 /.143/.246
We need to pick one game thread. Mods? A merge?
It's obvious Miley doesn't look at stats.Originally Posted by westofyou
Well, in the above cases, that is a rather limited sample size...Originally Posted by OnBaseMachine
Yeah... but he still doesn't look at stats.Originally Posted by membengal
Someone let him know about Earl Weavers 3x5's
It's still obvious.Originally Posted by membengal
I would have sit Casey again. He can't hit a ball off a tee right now.
Only when it suits what he already wants to do. He sat Dunn last Saturday he said because he had struggled against Pettitte.Originally Posted by westofyou
Hopefully, you just guaranteed today he would break out of the slump.Originally Posted by OnBaseMachine
"Rounding 3rd and heading for home, good night everybody"
And he probably won't start hitting without getting AB's. Don't be surprised if todays the day he busts out.Originally Posted by OnBaseMachine
Board Moderators may, at their discretion and judgment, delete and/or edit any messages that violate any of the following guidelines: 1. Explicit references to alleged illegal or unlawful acts. 2. Graphic sexual descriptions. 3. Racial or ethnic slurs. 4. Use of edgy language (including masked profanity). 5. Direct personal attacks, flames, fights, trolling, baiting, name-calling, general nuisance, excessive player criticism or anything along those lines. 6. Posting spam. 7. Each person may have only one user account. It is fine to be critical here - that's what this board is for. But let's not beat a subject or a player to death, please.


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HyperRogue Gold v9.0p
You are a lone adventurer in a strange, non-Euclidean world. Gather as much treasure as you can before the nasty monsters get you. Explore several different worlds, each with its own unique treasures, enemies, and terrain obstacles. Your quest is to find the legendary treasure, the Orbs of Yendor. Collect one of them to win! Or just ignore your quest and collect smaller treasures.
The twist is the unique, unusual geometry of the world: it is one of just few games which takes place on the hyperbolic plane. Witness a grid composed of hexagons and heptagons, straight lines which seem to be parallel, but then they diverge and never cross, triangles whose angles add up to less than 180 degrees, how extremely unlikely is it to reach the same place twice, and how the world seems to be rotated when you do return. All this matters for the gameplay. The game is inspired by the roguelike genre (although in a very minimalist way), works of M. C. Escher, and by puzzle games such as Deadly Rooms of Death.
Play HyperRogue for free, or download HyperRogue Gold for Euclidean mode, cheats, and online achievements and leaderboards (via Google Games Services). HyperRogue Gold is also updated more frequently (currently, it contains seven more lands with unique mechanics). If you want a small app, download HyperRogue Lite without music. Also play the desktop version of HyperRogue!


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Steamboat Dinner
>> Thursday, July 12, 2007
It's always nice to have a steamboat dinner on a cool day- adds 'umph' to the atmosphere :) Last Sunday was quite a cool day, after a few hours of shower. My family (uncles, aunties, cousins, etc) had a warm time together, eating to our heart satisfies :P
Steamboat is actually just a pot of stock/soup (usually chicken or pork bones boiled with the stem of the 'pak choy' to make the soup more tasty) where you 'throw' in a variety of meat & vegetables to cook before scooping them up with specific utensils i.e. a small ladle & a ladle with holes (not sure what it's called in specific).
Ladles used in steamboat; one with holes to 'fish' out the meat/vegie, & another without holes to scoop the soup (picture taken from Google)
When I first Googled for the origin of Steamboat, what I found was the ship type of steamboat. *sweat* Apparently, this food-kinda steamboat is referred to as the 'Hot Pot'. I found out that this dish is usually eaten during winter, when the weather is cold! Mmm..I'm sure a hot pot of stock with meat & vegie would do SO good during winter!! :D Reminds me of Korea & the 'Jjigae' dishes, which is the Korean spicy steamboat :P Argh...I miss the good food in Korea & I wanna have some good food in Malaysia!!
It is believed that the Steamboat originated from Mongolia (strangely!) & traditionally, the pot is coal-heated, unlike the modern gas/electric ones now :) I can still remember how the old steamboat pot looks like. It's like a pot with a hole in the middle for the coal to burn :D
Traditional steamboat pot (picture taken from Google)
I'm not gonna ramble 'bout Steamboat for now :P If you would wanna know more about it, check out these sites. Enjoy the photos & hope that it'll whet your taste buds to crave for some Steamboat!
- All about Steamboat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_(food)
- All about Hot pot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_pot
- Steamboat/Firepot: http://uktv.co.uk/food/ingredient/aid/511539
The variety of food that can go into the soup (meatballs, beancurd, beancurd sheets, vegie, meat slices...chilli sauce/boh is a must when it comes to dips!)
When the soup is boiled, put in the vegie or meat
Allow the assortment to cook (cover the pot/dish)
When it's done, it looks like this!
Time to makan! 'Dig-in!'
- Ruth


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ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at firstname.lastname@example.com.
- Arizona State University
- Kassing, Jeffrey
- 1 Mean, Lindsey
- 1 Qin, Yuchun
- 1 Waldron, Vincent
- 1 Wise, Greg
- 1 English
- Mass Communications
- 1 social network sites
- Reverse Fountain Cytoplasmic Streaming in Rhizopus Oryzae
- Diné Research Practices and Protocols: An Intersectional Paradigm Incorporating Indigenous Feminism, Critical Indigenous Research Methodologies and Diné Knowledge Systems
- Developing an Augmented Reality Solution for Mapping Underground Infrastructure
- Characterization of 2D Human Ankle Stiffness during Postural Balance and Walking for Robot-aided Ankle Rehabilitation
- Using Molecular, Cellular and Bioengineering Approaches Towards Understanding Muscle Stem Cell Biology
Although the social network site (SNS) Facebook achieved great success around the world, in China, it was over taken by the local website Kaixin001. Using comparative analysis and interviews, this thesis compared the architecture of the two websites and Chinese users' attitude towards them. From one side, the result indicates that they are almost the same, but not quite. Kaixin001 is a copycat which adapts to local cultures and political regulations. From the other side, the research also highlights that people associate Kaixin001 with a game platform rather than a social tool. It suggests that there are two layers of …
- Contributors
- Qin, Yuchun, Wise, Greg, Kassing, Jeffrey, et al.
- Created Date
- 2011


text:
Blunt is a freelance programmer and writer in Seattle. He can be reached at [email protected]
Despite the popularity of Linux, despite the rich support for applications from industrial-strength databases to enterprise server applications, despite its reputation for performance and robustness, and despite support for multiple hardware architectures, Linux has always been a second-class operating system when it comes to support for multithreaded applications. Until now.
Heavy hitters, such as Apache, have traditionally been built on multiprocess design rather than multithreaded design, in large part because Linux's threading model had serious performance and functional drawbacks. Which is not to say that multithreaded applications could not be built: MySQL has been multithreaded for years. But the MySQL manual makes no bones about the drawbacks of threads on Linux:
Downside: Lots of processes. Thread creating is slow. If one thread dies the rest are usually left hanging and you must kill them all before restarting. Thread switching is somewhat expensive...
MySQL Reference Manual, Appendix E.5
The authors neglect to list an upside.
Enter the Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL). Introduced with Version 2.6 of the Linux kernel, and soon to be standard on a distribution near you, NPTL brings full compliance to the POSIX Standard for all major features, and performance boosts varying from outstanding to orders of magnitude.
A Brief History of Threads for Linux
The Linux kernel has been internally multithreaded from the start, but it wasn't until Version 1.09 in 1994 that support for threaded applications became readily available, and even that was strictly in user space. Kernel-level support for threads didn't come along until Version 1.3 in 1995, and this was a primitive support at best. Developers who wanted POSIX threads or something like them still had to rely on third-party libraries. Reliability, functionality, and performance suffered. Porting from a POSIX-compliant OS was frustrating. In short, Linux was late to offer production-level support for true multithreaded development.
The best alternative for applications that could benefit from concurrent execution was multiprocess design utilizing interprocess communication, such as signals, pipes, or sockets.
One of the early third-party libraries, authored by Xavier Leroy and named "LinuxThreads," became incorporated into the standard distribution with Linux kernel 2.0. LinuxThreads was a POSIX implementation, using the Linux clone() system call. Adopted by Ulrich Drepper and tied closely to glibc, LinuxThreads has been the standard tool for multithreaded development on Linux from 1996 to the present day.
Despite improvements over the years, the implementation of LinuxThreads still relies on cloning a full process and using a special "manager thread" to provide the appearance of a multithreaded application. Of course, one look at the process table and the illusion crumbles. Users executing facilities such as top or ps might see a veritable plague of processes, often seeming to consume more memory than the machine contains! Software manuals are filled with explanations like this one, from the BIND9 FAQ: "Linux threads each show up as a process under ps...Note that the amount of memory used is not cumulative; if each process is using 10M of memory, only a total of 10M is used." Current distributions of LinuxThreads continue to have major functional divergences from the POSIX specification, as well as serious performance and scaleability limitations.
With the growth of windowing systems, graphic applications, and enterprise-level server applications, the inadequacies of LinuxThreads could not be ignored. In 2003, IBM released the Next Generation POSIX Threads (NGPT), which offered substantial improvements over LinuxThreads. It improved support for the POSIX standard, and was notable for providing an M:N threading model in which M user-space threads are executed on N kernel threads, as opposed to Linux's traditional 1:1 model.
Not all problems could be solved in a user-space library, however. One reason that LinuxThreads remained the dominant thread library for so long was that the remaining obstacles to POSIX compliance, and some of the major performance limitations, were inherent in the existing kernel design. A series of kernel patches introduced by Ingo Molnar of Red Hat into the 2.5 (development) series of kernels laid the groundwork for a new library that would finally make a robust, high-performance, standards-compliant multithreaded design possible on Linux. This library, part of the glibc distribution maintained by Ulrich Drepper, also of Red Hat, is NPTL.
The NPTL Implementation
It is instructive to understand the design choices that went into developing NPTL.
After the release of NGPT, the Linux community debated the merits of M:N versus 1:1 threading models. When Ingo Molnar introduced the O(1) scheduler into the Linux kernel, however, the debate was largely closed. (The fact that Drepper's glibc Version 2.3, a core component of any new Linux distribution, did not support IBM's NGPT undoubtedly helped kill that project.)
A 1:1 approach is simpler to implement, and with a constant time scheduler, there is no performance penalty. Molnar reported a demonstration in which one million concurrent threads could be run on a high-end machine. (What application could make use of such riches remains an exercise for the imaginative.)
In a 1:1 model, each thread has some characteristics of an entire process. Molnar, however, revised the clone() call to optimize thread creation. The kernel supports thread-specific data areas limited only by the available hardware resources. A new mechanism for tracking threads was introduced to improve scalability and performance. Likewise, exit handling was improved for threads to dramatically reduce overhead of thread exit. In short, using clone() to spawn a thread is no longer a heavyweight task. Application designers need no longer resort to thread pools created as part of the startup cost of an executable (although that may still be the correct design approach for certain applications).
Other kernel changes provided the foundations for corrections to the functional problems in LinuxThreads. Signal handling is now performed within the kernel for the process as a whole, effectively solving the problems with POSIX compliance for signal handling. Collapsing the kernel identification of all threads to a single Process ID (PID) solved many problems in areas of both functionality and performance. Resource usage is correctly tied to this single PID, making the system view of a multithreaded application accurate.
The addition of the Fast Userspace Locking (futex) into the kernel enabled a complete reimplementation of mutexes and other synchronization mechanisms without resorting to interthread signaling. The futex, in turn, was made possible by the introduction of preemptive scheduling to the kernel.
Finally, the transition from a parent-child relationship among threads to a true peer relationship has eliminated a number of obscure bugs prohibiting correct functionality of interthread synchronization.
Migrating to NPTL
LinuxThreads and NPTL are both implementations of POSIX 1003.1c. Although neither offer truly 100-percent support for the specification, both fully implement the API. Accordingly, applications that compile and link successfully against LinuxThreads will also compile under NPTL. Many applications will require no work at all to take advantage of the performance improvements NPTL offers. Just link and load.
There are two notable exceptions:
- getpid(). Under LinuxThreads, in violation of the POSIX Standard, the getpid() system call returns a different ID for each thread. NPTL corrects the behavior. (See Listing One, check_pid.c for a demonstration.)
- However, unless an application is using the getpid() function to name threads (which would be both nonconforming and wildly unnecessary in light of the canonicaland fully functionalpthread_self() call), this is less likely to be a problem in the application itself than it might be for supporting scripts. Shutdown scripts, for example, may be designed to scan system facilities for the PID of both parent and children to ensure that shutdowns are thorough. Monitors that expect to see some number of child processes as an indicator of the health of the application will panic.
- The good news, of course, is that an application with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of threads will no longer overwhelm users who happen to execute top. System resource and memory usage will now be correctly reported without raising eyebrowsor heartbeats.
- Signal handling. Undoubtedly, the largest obstacle to robust, multithreaded application development under LinuxThreads involved signal handling. Because each thread had its own process ID, asynchronous signals could only be sent to a particular thread, not to the process as a whole. The POSIX Standard declares that such signals can be handled by any thread that does not block the signal, and must apply to the entire application. However, the notion of an "entire application" was only imperfectly achieved under LinuxThreads. The deviation from expected behavior is most apparent in the handling of SIGSTOP, SIGCONT, and SIGIO. Should users execute Ctrl-z, for example, only one thread stops. (The case of signals that terminate the application is less problematic. Any thread that calls abort() or exit() successfully terminates the group.) One common workaround for signal problems was to dedicate one threadusually the original "parent" threadto wait for signals. Existing applications that implement this workaround, or any of the many other custom mechanisms that attempt to provide correct signal handling for an application, undoubtedly benefits from simplifying this code.
Demonstrated Performance
In one paper early in the process of NPTL development, Ulrich Drepper and Ingo Molnar published some impressive performance data. In new implementations of their profiling methodology, I have tested thread performance against a stable 2.6 kernel on the x86 architecture. (The machine is an AMD Athlon XP, 2600 in 1 GB of RAM, but the significant data is, naturally, the comparison rather than any absolute numbers.)
Unsurprisingly, the most dramatic performance improvement NPTL offers is in the area of thread creation and destruction. With the new lightweight implementation, creating threads is fast and scalable. Testing thread creation begins by creating a collection of top-level threads, each of which spawn a number of child threads until some number of total threads has been reached (source code can be viewed in create_prof.c, in Listing Two). NPTL is nearly eight times faster than LinuxThreads for a small number of parent threads, and remains constant regardless of the creation conditions. LinuxThreads shows linear performance degradation. (Figure 1 presents the results of this test.)
A second interesting test of thread performance measures performance of thread contention. For this test, I provide an implementation of Dr. Edward G. Bradford's "csfast5a" application, which simulates a pipeline model by walking threads around a ring of mutexed "critical HASH(0x1875d14)." This test was originally implemented to demonstrate that spreading a set number of threads across a varying number of critical HASH(0x1875d14) would show performance improvements with an increase in the number of critical HASH(0x1875d14). Drepper's early paper published results for this test showed modest improvements in NPTL over LinuxThreads.
The original implementation, however, yields wildly variable results for any given run because it makes no effort to prevent the scheduler from racing each thread around the ring sequentially. Naturally, threads that do not block are not going to consume much time. This implementation provides such synchronization. Using additional instrumentation not included in this listing for space reasons, I found that start-up synchronization yielded an extremely reliable number of blocking events per application run, and tightly clustered timing results. Additionally, instead of running across a variable number of critical HASH(0x1875d14) (which is not a particularly interesting scenario for our purposes), I ran a variable number of threads to better observe system behavior for different conditions. (This application is cont_prof.c, see Listing Three.) The results in Figure 2 show a strong 2x performance improvement.
Practical Notes for Developers
Upgrading a kernel will often require upgrading the toolchain as well. Any stable distribution should, of course, include the optimal toolset for the kernel version, but at the time of this writing, two years after the initial release of kernel 2.6 to the developer community, it remains "in development" at most big name distributions. To make NPTL available to developers as soon as possible, Red Hat backported NPTL to kernel 2.4, although installing this port is widely regarded as a delicate operation.
Unless you are working with a distribution that guarantees the complete toolchain, note Table 1, which lists the recommended versions for compilers and libraries to smooth the process of developing against NPTL.
Because Linux distributions continue to support LinuxThreads for backward compatibility with critical applications that have not yet ported to NPTL, the most commonly asked question in newsgroups is simply, "Which version am I using?"
For applications that link at runtime (dynamic linking), the version linked is dictated by the kernel version. For kernels 2.6.+, an application will link the installed NPTL library. To verify this, perform this command-line test:
getconf GNU_LIBPTHREAD_VERSION
If, however, you want (or need) to link against LinuxThreads on a 2.6 kernel at runtime, you can set the "LD_ASSUME_KERNEL" environment variable like so:
export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.10
Now your application will link against LinuxThreads. (Use getconf to confirm.)
For applications that link at compile time (static linking), the library linked depends on where your distribution puts the libraries, and what your default paths are. This can be confusing, because for a statically linked binary, the just-mentioned tests are meaningless. Moreover, the default library for static linking on many distributions is actually the LinuxThreads library. Some distributions may not include a static NPTL library at all.
One trick to locate your libraries is to build a dynamically linked binary and run ldd on it:
ldd ./test-app
This provides information on what libraries will be linked at runtime and where they are. Perform this test once with LD_ASSUME_KERNEL set to your 2.6 version, and once set to some 2.4 version, and you will find your two libraries. If your distribution offers an archive library for static linking, you can then adjust your environment or link line to pick it up.
Remaining Issues
NPTL brings the standard threading model on Linux very close to the POSIX Standard. Early in NPTL development, Jonathan de Boyne Pollard identified a number of areas in which NPTL was non-compliant. Using kernel 2.6.8, glibc 2.3.2, and NPTL Version 0.60, I confirmed that only the following items in his list remain problematic:
- User and group information is specific to each thread. Accordingly, setuid() only sets the user ID for the executing thread. This problem also exists with the LinuxThreads library.
- Although process memory and resource consumption are now correctly reported by facilities such as ps and top, within the application, calls to rlimit and rusage remain thread specific. In August 2004, Roland McGrath submitted a patch to glibc that purports to correct this problem, so distributions with glibc 2.3.4 should show correct behavior.
- Similarly, the times() call reports clock times in a thread-specific manner, where process-wide values are expected.
Additionally, the web site http://nptl .bullopensource.org/status.php continues to track some other, very minor divergences from the POSIX Standard.
Although NPTL offers impressive performance improvements over its predecessors, developers have shown that there are still easy wins for further performance improvement. In particular, the "fast" in futex should be taken with a grain of salt. Of course, a block-and-context-switch is never free, no matter what the technology. Good thread design must still strive to minimize contention. But kernel hackers are trading patches and design techniques that improve the performance of mutex and condvar operations further still. Because this is the way open-source software development works, the best of these patches and techniques gradually will be incorporated into future releases.
Writing high-performance, robust, multithreaded applications for Linux has traditionally been a risky proposition, requiring creative workarounds and nonstandard approaches. Existing thread libraries represent ingenious attempts to solve a problem that, prior to Version 2.6, was simply not well supported within the kernel. Given the widespread adoption of Linux in corporate, academic, and governmental bodies around the world, it may seem odd to call the most prevalent server in the world unfinished, but until now, that is exactly what Linux has been. Offering thread facilities that were clearly inferior to all its UNIX cousins and every commercial operating system, including some whose lifespan had already ended for other reasons (BeOS, NeXT), the poor support for threaded applications was perhaps Linux's only shortcoming, but it was a galling one.
With NPTL, this shortcoming has been removed. As major distributions ramp up their 2.6 kernel releases over the coming year, the first Linux that can truly be considered "industrial strength" will be available in stable form to everyone. Developers with projects that naturally lend themselves to multithreaded design will no longer need to consider Linux ports or original development with trepidation. For the first time ever, multithreaded design for Linux can genuinely offer performance and reliability improvements over multiprocess design.
#include <pthread.h> #include <unistd.h> /* for getpid() */ #include <stdio.h> #include <malloc.h> void* _obtain_thread_pid(void* arg) { long *exit_status = malloc(sizeof(long)); (void) arg; /* keep compiler quiet. */ *exit_status = getpid(); return exit_status; } int main() { pthread_t thread; void *status_ptr; long *thread_pid; long process_pid = getpid(); /* a well behaved application tests the return value of ** pthread_create to ensure there is no error. */ pthread_create(&thread, NULL, &_obtain_thread_pid, NULL); pthread_join(thread, &status_ptr); thread_pid = (long*)status_ptr; if (*thread_pid != process_pid) printf("This is linked to the LinuxThreads library.\n"); else printf("This is linked to the NPTL library.\n"); return 0; }Back to article
Listing Two
#include <pthread.h> #include <sys/time.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <errno.h> #define __USE_POSIX #include <limits.h> static pthread_attr_t attr; static void* _noop_thd(void* arg) { (void) arg; return NULL; } static void* _thread_maker(void* arg) { int to_produce = *(int*)arg; /* Sequentially create a number of threads that trivially exit. */ while (to_produce) { pthread_t noop; pthread_create(&noop, &attr, &_noop_thd, NULL); pthread_join(noop, NULL); to_produce--; } return NULL; } int main(int argc, char **argv) { struct timeval start; struct timeval fin; int top, sub; pthread_t *thread; pthread_attr_init(&attr); /* Minimize stack size per thread so that we can ** create more threads. */ pthread_attr_setstacksize(&attr, PTHREAD_STACK_MIN); /* Accept command line params.*/ if (argc < 3) { printf("\nUSAGE: <#thread-producers> <#produced>\n\n"); return 1; } else { top = atoi(argv[1]); sub = atoi(argv[2]); if (top < 1) top = 1; if (sub < 1) sub = 1; printf("Using %d parents and %d children for %d threads.\n", top, sub, top * sub); } thread = calloc(top, sizeof(pthread_t)); /* Start timer. */ if (gettimeofday(&start, NULL)) { printf("Time of day failed."); abort(); } for (int i = 0; i < top; i++) pthread_create(&thread[i], &attr, &_thread_maker, &sub); for (int i = 0; i < top; i++) pthread_join(thread[i], NULL); /* Stop timer. */ if (gettimeofday(&fin, NULL)) { printf("Time of day failed at end."); abort(); } /* Calculate the delta. */ { int usec = fin.tv_usec - start.tv_usec; int sec = fin.tv_sec - start.tv_sec; if (usec < 0) { sec--; usec += 1000000; } printf("Time %d sec %d usec\n", sec, usec); } return 0; }Back to article
Listing Three
#include <pthread.h> #include <sys/time.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <malloc.h> #include <string.h> #define __USE_POSIX #include <limits.h> static int crit_max; /* number of critical HASH(0x1875d14). */ static int iterations; /* total per-thread iterations. */ static int thread_count; /* total number of threads. */ static int start_count; /* global protected by start_signal */ static pthread_cond_t go; static pthread_mutex_t start_signal; static pthread_mutex_t *critical_region; static void _obtain_first_lock(int locknum) { pthread_mutex_lock(&critical_region[locknum]); pthread_mutex_lock(&start_signal); start_count++; if (start_count == thread_count) { /* wait until all threads are here! */ pthread_mutex_unlock(&start_signal); pthread_cond_broadcast(&go); } else { pthread_cond_wait(&go, &start_signal); pthread_mutex_unlock(&start_signal); } } static void* _contention_loop(void* arg) { int curr, prev, iter; iter = 1; prev = curr = *(int*)arg; _obtain_first_lock(curr++); while (iter < iterations) { iter++; if (curr == crit_max) curr = 0; if (curr == prev) { /* don't block on our own lock! */ curr++; continue; } pthread_mutex_lock(&critical_region[curr]); pthread_mutex_unlock(&critical_region[prev]); prev = curr; curr++; } pthread_mutex_unlock(&critical_region[prev]); return NULL; } static void _configure(int argc, char** argv) { if (argc < 3) { printf("\nUSAGE: <threads> <per-thread-iterations>\n\n"); abort(); } else { thread_count = atoi(argv[1]); iterations = atoi(argv[2]); if (thread_count < 1) thread_count = 1; if (iterations < 1) iterations = 1; } crit_max = thread_count + 1; } static void _prepare(pthread_attr_t *attr, pthread_t **thds) { pthread_attr_init(attr); pthread_attr_setstacksize(attr, PTHREAD_STACK_MIN); critical_region = calloc(crit_max, sizeof(pthread_mutex_t)); for (int i = 0; i < crit_max; i++) pthread_mutex_init(&critical_region[i], NULL); start_count = 0; pthread_cond_init(&go, NULL); pthread_mutex_init(&start_signal, NULL); *thds = calloc(thread_count, sizeof(pthread_t)); } int main(int argc, char **argv) { const int usec_per_sec = 1000000; long tot_usec; struct timeval start; struct timeval fin; pthread_t *thread; pthread_attr_t attr; _configure(argc, argv); _prepare(&attr, &thread); gettimeofday(&start, NULL); /* start timer */ for (int i = 0; i < thread_count; i++) { int *j = malloc(sizeof(int)); *j = i; pthread_create(&thread[i], &attr, &_contention_loop, j); } for (int i = 0; i < thread_count; i++) pthread_join(thread[i], NULL); gettimeofday(&fin, NULL); /* stop timer */ tot_usec = (fin.tv_sec - start.tv_sec) * usec_per_sec; tot_usec += fin.tv_usec - start.tv_usec; printf("Total run time %.3f sec.\n", (double)tot_usec / usec_per_sec); return 0; }Back to article