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Qualcomm invests in Sharp to drive MEMS display
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LONDON Communications technology company Qualcomm has agreed to invest up to 9.9 billion yen (about $120 million) to take about a 5 percent stake in struggling consumer electronics and liquid crystal display manufacturer Sharp.
The proposed equity investment will be used to expand an agreement between Qualcomm subsidiary Pixtronix Inc. and Sharp to develop and commercialize MEMS-based displays that could be manufactured using Sharp LCD production lines.
Qualcomm Inc. (San Diego, Calif.) announced it had acquired Pixtronix Inc. (Andover, Mass.) early in 2012 for a sum reportedly between $175 million and $200 million. The Pixtronix display called PerfectLight is based on a MEMS-based digital micro shutter that modulates light from an RGB LED backlight. A high switching speed makes it suitable for applications ranging from full-speed video to e-reader operation and Pixtronix claimed that the display offered greater than 170 degree viewing angles, more than 3,000:1 contrast ratio and 24-bit color depth at one quarter of the power consumption of equivalent size and resolution liquid crystal displays.
Pixtronix digital microshutter uses MEMS instead of liquid crystal to control light transmission.
In a statement Sharp said investment from Qualcomm, of up to 9.9 billion yen, would be devoted to development and capital costs to establish commercialization of the MEMS display. Sharp plans to use its LCD panel plant in Yonago, Tittori prefecture to develop the MEMS display.
Qualcomm said its equity investment in Sharp would take place in stages, and the consummation of the transaction is subject to certain contingencies.
"Expanding our existing relationship with Sharp to jointly commercialize new MEMS display technologies will help both companies realize their shared goal of driving high performance, lower power displays for a variety of devices, including smartphones and tablets," said Derek Aberle, executive vice president and group president of Qualcomm, in a statement.
"Sharp is targeting to accelerate the commercialization of MEMS displays by combining Sharp's cutting-edge IGZO technology and Pixtronix's MEMS display technology," said Yoshisuke Hasegawa, executive managing officer of Sharp, in the same statement.
The wording, while not absolutely clear, suggests that Qualcomm will not try to be the sole source for the MEMS display but will let Sharp manufacture and sell the technology under its own name.
Indium gallium zinc oxide [IGZO] is a semiconductor material introduced by Sharp as an alternative to amorphous silicon as the transparent thin-film transistor in the active matrix for an LCD screen. With higher electron mobility it allows smaller pixels faster reaction times.
Although Sharp is recognized as a technology leader in displays it has been struggling for some time and entered into a deal with Terry Gou, the founder of contract manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry, which trades as Foxconn. However, Sharp's falling share price since March of 2012 led to calls to renegotiate the deal.
Related links and articles:
News articles:
Sharp said to be in talks with Intel, Qualcomm
Sharp, dulled by losses, running out of options
Sharp mortgages factories to keep going
Foxconn outfoxes Sharps sharpest


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Ghostly Graphic Adventures 3
For sale: books, cds, dvds, hobby, leisure and sports in Nigeria
Ghostly Graphic Adventures 3
Price in Naira: NGN 12,597
Location: All Nigeria
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Fast Delivery Straight To You. You Too Can Own Ghostly Graphic Adventures 3
Book Description
The Lighthouse of Terror
Book Details
- Media: Library, 32 pages
- Publisher: Abdo Group
- Dimensions: 0.25 x 7.25 x 9.50 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.50 lbs
We provide express delivery nationalwide including Lagos, Kano, Ibadan, Kaduna, Port Harcourt, Benin,Maiduguri,Zaria, Aba, Ilorin and other areas.
Delivery fee withing Lagos: N900
Delivery fee outside Lagos: N2000
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Text formatting options added to commenting
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We think this dramatically increases the functionality of the comments section on the new GazetteXtra. Frankly, it was much needed. We hope you like it.
We're not done working on commenting, but other features are going to take time. My question to you is, what would you most like to see be added to commenting functionality on the new GazetteXtra?


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Rev. Lynne Ellis - Sun Feb 7, 2016
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Jan 22, 2017 "Jesus' Thought Provoking Questions." - Ven. Ron Corcoran | Reason: Part of a Wounded Healers Conference.


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Former USPTO Director David Kappos kicks off SuperConference. All photographs by Andrew Westel.
The energy was high at this year's SuperConference. As usual, the event—in its 13th year—featured inspiring keynote panels, informative breakout sessions and engaging discussions that provided law department leaders with valuable insight and new ideas.
Hundreds of attendees joined InsideCounsel at the Fairmont Hotel in Chicago on May 7 and 8 to attend the two-day educational and networking event. Each day boasted an agenda that included keynote panels, breakout sessions and networking events.
On the following pages, InsideCounsel shares highlights from the 2013 SuperConference. For all the inside information on SuperConference that we couldn't fit into the magazine, you can find our online coverage, complete with daily reports from the show, here.
Keynote–Kicking Off
David Kappos, the former under secretary of commerce and former director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), was the first to speak. Kappos, who is now a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, discussed the America Invents Act (AIA) and how it is affecting companies of all types and sizes.
"It's a huge change to our patent system," Kappos said. "It puts the U.S. in a leadership position in terms of government agencies dealing with intellectual property. … We're finally moving in the direction of being aligned globally with what is already a global commercial system."
Kappos said the AIA, which shifted the U.S. patent system from a first-to-invent to a first-to-file system, is improving patent quality, timeliness and cost.
Gregory Gallopoulos, senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary of General Dynamics, delivered the second keynote address, focusing on how lawyers can balance their roles as company employees and objective, independent professionals.
"While [these roles] are always going to be in tension, I do not actually believe that they need to be mutually contradictory. They can be resolved," Gallopoulos said.
The final keynote address came from J. Weili Cheng, senior vice president and deputy general counsel of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co. Cheng discussed tips for engaging in globalization and implementing risk-mitigation strategies to overcome legal challenges. Some of her guidelines include picking the right partners, focusing on relationships, maintaining communication and integrity, balancing global standards and local marketplace requirements, and planning for worst-case scenarios.
Social Media–Tackling Challenges
As in-house counsel continue to face myriad social media-related challenges, one SuperConference breakout session offered some valuable help.
Lathrop & Gage Partner David Vogel moderated "Searching for Social Media Evidence," which featured panelists including Lathrop & Gage Partner David Bernard; Sara Kagay, associate general counsel of labor and employment at Brunswick Corp.; and John Kasher, vice president and chief legal officer at GN Hearing Care Corp.
According to Vogel, social media issues were at the center of 689 lawsuits in 2010 and 2011. And such litigation won't subside anytime soon—particularly when it comes to action on the part of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which has taken a tough stance on overly broad social media policies and continues to issue rulings related to employer actions.
Panelists discussed how they handle social media when it comes to hiring and firing at their companies.
"It's difficult to control what a hiring manager will look at," Kasher said. "It doesn't work to tell our folks, 'Don't look at social media.'"
Kagay added that recruiters at her company frequently look at candidates' LinkedIn profiles because they say the social media site is the "wave of the future" when it comes to hiring.
As for termination tied to social media, panelists urged in-house lawyers to err on the side of caution, given the NLRB's aggressive attitude toward employers that punish employees for their social media postings.
"It's typically been enough to tell employees, 'It's been brought to our attention that you have this blog or these postings,'" Kagay said. "They usually take them down or stop after that."
Law Department Management–Conducting Change
For employees, change can set off a range of emotions. It can be exciting if a company's moving forward, relieving if it's fixing a problem, or scary if jobs are at stake. As leaders of their legal departments, general counsel are the ones responsible for executing these changes, and getting buy-in. That presents its own set of challenges, as discussed in the SuperConference panel "Embracing Change Within Your Legal Department."
General counsel have a "laundry list of to-dos," says Colleen Batcheler, executive vice president and general counsel at ConAgra Foods, which includes things like cutting costs and improving efficiency. Unfortunately, "many, if not most, significant change initiatives fail," she says. According to Batcheler, this is because lawyers tend to "think of change as an event instead of a process."
To combat that kind of thinking, Batcheler and her co-panelist Lee Cheng, chief legal officer and senior vice president at NewEgg.com, recommend following John P. Kotter's eight-step process from "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail":
- Establish a sense of urgency
- Form a powerful guiding coalition
- Create a vision
- Communicate the vision
- Empower others to act on the vision
- Plan for and create short-term wins
- Consolidate improvements and produce more change
- Institutionalize new approaches
"Significant change is a long journey and fatigue can quickly set in," Batcheler says. "Remember that not everyone else has this as their top priority. You have to remind them why it's important."
At the end of the panel, Batcheler and Cheng traded war stories about implementing changes in their own legal departments. Cheng described NewEgg's struggle with building a document management program, dealing with costly consultants and a glitchy program. Eventually, after three years of toil, they abandoned the system.
"The takeaway from this case study is to be very honest when you try to implement change and acknowledge if there are errors," Cheng says.
Ethics–Ethically Speaking
"The world is gray. It's hard to understand."
That's how Philip Favro, discovery counsel at Symantec Corp., appropriately kicked off SuperConference 2013's first ethics session on May 7. The discussion focused on several topics governing ethics in the legal profession.
Favro, the panel's moderator, began the discussion with a focus on the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which require in-house counsel to stay abreast of technology and ensure their clients keep up with any changes. "We need to know technology, how it's used," said panelist Kathleen Edmond, chief ethics officer for Best Buy. "But we also need to know how it's misused and where it can go wrong."
The panelists discussed several specific challenges to the Model Rules, such as Rule 1.6, which requires the preservation of confidentiality. Recent technology, such as email, text messaging and social media, has presented particular challenges for legal departments with regard to privilege. "[Privilege] is not new," said Pat Gage, senior principal and deputy general counsel at Promontory Financial Group. "But the way we now deal with it is new."
Favro and the panelists suggested that all companies do an analysis of their communications risk factors, such as how easy it is to disclose information to third parties or mistakenly send a message to the wrong recipient, among others. Gage pointed to Cc and "reply all" options in email, which open up myriad opportunities for privilege violations. "This didn't happen back when you wrote things down on a piece of paper," she added.
Short of disabling software functions to prevent these types of slipups or oversights, training employees about appropriate email usage is the only tried and true method for prevention, according to the speakers.
The panelists also discussed best practices for these digital age communications, such as creating effective social media policies and training employees on those policies. But Gage also warned about not crossing any lines. "If you're writing a policy, be mindful of the [National Labor Relations Board] and the work they've been doing the past year," she said.
The panelists agreed that the evolution of technology regularly keeps in-house counsel up at night.
"There will never be a bright line," Edmond said. "As soon as you think you've got it, you don't. It's always changing."
From left to right: Jeffrey Carr, Don Liu and Tom Sabatino
GC Panel–Inside Advice
Within a company, the general counsel sits at a crossroads, helping to advance business goals while still ensuring legal compliance. Given the unique nature of this job, who better to give law department leaders advice than their fellow GCs?
In "Top Challenges Fortune 500 General Counsel Face," panelists Don Liu, senior vice president, general counsel and secretary of Xerox Corp.; Thomas Sabatino, executive vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary of Walgreens; and Jeffrey Carr, senior vice president, general counsel and secretary of FMC Technologies Inc. gave in-house counsel tips on building stronger legal departments and avoiding common pitfalls.
One of these pitfalls is buying into the idea that in-house lawyers can contribute legal expertise, but not business advice, to their companies. Instead, Liu says, GCs must be deeply knowledgeable about the business drivers at their organizations. "I'm amazed when a public company in-house lawyer isn't intimately familiar with their K or their Q or their profits statement, which every shareholder presumably reads pretty carefully," he said.
Both Liu and Carr schedule regular meetings to discuss quarterly earnings reports and other key metrics with their legal teams, and they advise GCs—even those who may not have the benefit of regular earnings reports—to analyze metrics including internal and external costs, and legal spend as a percentage of their company's revenue.
Of course, giving solid legal advice is still a crucial part of every general counsel's job, and Liu advises GCs to do so in clear, comprehensible language, rather than overwhelming nonlawyer colleagues with a flood of legalese.
But talking isn't the only important communication skill that lawyers need, Sabatino cautions. Listening is just as important. "Lawyers want to show that they are smart. … But one of the skill sets that all good GCs have is the ability to listen, to synthetize information, to figure out what you don't know, to ask questions and to then create a strategy around solving problems," he said.


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Wisconsin has better solutions than just building bigger highways
Wisconsin's transportation system is in trouble. Roads and bridges are aging, and maintenance needs are increasing. Funding for public transit has been slashed as demand for transit rises.
For many, including the Gazette Editorial Board, the solution is to find more money (more or higher taxes or both) to build bigger highways.
I propose two different solutions. First, let's cut wasteful spending. Second, let's re-evaluate our plan to make sure our priorities reflect how we want to get around, today and in the future.
Let's start with waste. In 2011, state leaders approved four new major highway projects, which will cost taxpayers roughly $2 billion. WISPIRG, with the assistance of a former career DOT planner, analyzed the official documents for these projects and found unanswered questions, outdated justifying data and insufficient review for all four projects, including the widening of Interstate 90/39 through Janesville.
A May 2013 WISPIRG study of six highway projects recently completed across Wisconsin—totaling over $1 billion in taxpayer investment—revealed that traffic on many new roads is failing to materialize as originally projected by WISDOT.
Gov. Walker campaigned on cutting wasteful spending and bringing accountability to Madison. The state highway budget desperately needs his attention.
As for priorities, over the last several years, Wisconsinites have been providing a powerful reason to re-evaluate our transportation investments: We've been driving less, and taking transit, biking and walking more. Today, the average Wisconsin resident drives fewer miles than in 1997—more than a decade and a half ago.
Highway builders and their allies suggest that, as the economy returns to life, drivers will flood back onto Wisconsin's roads. The only problem is, it hasn't happened. We drove fewer total miles in 2012 than we did in 2003—a time when Wisconsin's population was 4 percent lower and our economy 7 percent smaller.
No age group has experienced a greater change in its driving habits than young people, who have the most to gain or lose from the transportation system we build today. According to the National Household Travel Survey, from 2001 to 2009, the annual number of vehicle-miles traveled by 16- to 34-year-olds decreased from 10,300 miles to 7,900 miles per capita, a drop of 23 percent. At the same time, the annual number of miles traveled by 16- to 34-year-year-olds on public transit increased by 40 percent.
There are a number of compelling reasons to believe the economy is not the only factor behind these changes. The decline in driving began years before the Great Recession and has continued despite recovery. Also, even among young people with jobs, per-capita vehicle travel declined by 16 percent.
Throwing more taxpayer money into a budget that is fraught with waste and misplaced priorities is not only bad for taxpayers, it's bad for Wisconsin's future. Through a serious re-evaluation of our needs and travel trends, we might find that the "more money, bigger highways" solution is tired and outdated and that, instead, there's a better way to go.
Bruce Speight is the director of WISPIRG, a statewide, membership-based public interest organization. Readers can contact Speight by email at firstname.lastname@example.com.


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Apartment Allée du Golf I
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Please note that the full amount of the reservation is due before arrival. NOVASOL will send a confirmation with detailed payment information. After full payment is taken, the property's details, including the address and where to pick up the keys, will be sent to you by email.


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As the insurance market begins to harden, with insurers boosting premiums or seeking stricter terms for some types of coverage, risk managers for the most part are accepting those changes.
A recent survey by Hanover Stone Partners shows only a minority of companies have responded to price hikes or stricter terms by switching their insurer or broker or adjusting their retentions. But John Kelly, managing partner at Hanover Stone, a network of risk management advisers and services firms, predicts that as the insurance market continues to tighten, more companies will look for ways to contain their costs.
"There are pretty tight budgetary constraints and financial expectations that really put a lot of pressure on risk managers in a rising market to maintain stabilization of the pricing," Kelly notes.
The survey looked at about 100 renewals of a variety of types of insurance coverage by Fortune 500 companies in the quarter ended Oct. 1. The responses show that the majority of companies are seeing premiums rise on renewal.
For example, 50% of the companies surveyed saw an increase of 1% to 5% to renew general liability coverage, while 10% saw an increase of 6% to 10%. Ninety percent made no change to achieve better pricing, while 10% changed their broker.
For workers compensation coverage, 43% of companies saw an increase of 1% to 5% upon renewal, while 15% saw an increase of 6% to 10%. Thirteen percent responded by changing their broker and another 13% changed their carrier, while 74% made no change.
Property coverage was a line where companies saw both higher prices and changes in terms. On U.S. property coverage, 72% saw premiums rise on renewal, with 14% seeing increases of more than 15%, 29% seeing hikes of 6% to 10% and 29% seeing hikes of 1% to 5%. And insurers offered higher retentions or deductibles to 29% of the companies, and both restricted terms and higher retentions to another 14%. While 72% of companies made no changes, 14% agreed to more restrictive terms and 14% adjusted their retentions or deductibles.
For global property coverage, 75% of buyers saw premiums increase, with 25% seeing increases of 11% to 15% and 25% seeing hikes of 6% to 10%. Companies renewing global coverage were not offered more restrictive terms, though. Their response to the price hikes: 33% changed carriers, while 67% made no changes.
The differing responses in the U.S. and global property markets reflect "the competitiveness in the global property market," says Kelly, pictured at left. "Looking at a global program, there are more viable alternatives, and I think there are markets in global property that are trying to position themselves to take advantage of pressures and gain market share."
Hanover Stone expects insurance prices will continue to rise this year. Kelly notes that since interest rates aren't likely to rise in the short term, insurers will continue to see limited returns on their investments.
And changes to catastrophe modeling in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, whose impact the models failed to accurately predict, will mean upward pressure on property premiums in particular. "We can almost be assured that they will come up with new additions to cat models that will suggest larger exposure to loss on the East Coast," Kelly says. "That will continue to put pressure on pricing as we go through 2013."
But insurers' finances have held up well. "The market was able to absorb Hurricane Sandy with one quarter of its earnings," Kelly says. "There's still an abundance of capital."
Despite the series of natural disasters, he says, "we think the marketplace is able to absorb those losses and is looking to recover on the basis of relatively speaking modest increases and maybe a little more disciplined underwriting."
For more on this topic, see Uncertainty Rules Risk Management Outlook and Insurance Rate Increases Seen Remaining Modest.


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How do you feel about possibilites for 2014?
I awoke Jan. 1 with a surge of HOPE for New Year 2014! I did NOT stay up to welcome New Year 2014 at midnight, but I have been following the welcoming events for New Year 2014 throughout the world via BBC News, Norwegian Broadcasting's "Dagsrevy" and other electronic and print media. These welcoming events bolstered my HOPE for New Year 2014! How did you feel as you welcomed New Year 2014?
Checking my regular email, I was intrigued by the title of Sarah Van Gelder's OpEd article published by "YES! Magazine" to which I am a subscriber, "10 Hopeful Things That Happened in 2013 to get You Inspired for What's to Come," so I read it. WOW! Yes, for sure! The article added a very significant surge to my audacity of HOPE for New Year 2014. I urge you to read it and comment.
Van Gelder grabbed my attention with her opening paragraph, "There was something almost apocalyptic about 2013. Typhoon Haiyan slammed into the Philippines, the strongest storm ever recorded on land. It killed more than 6,000 people and affected millions. But it was just one of the 39 weather-related disasters costing $1 billion or more in 2013."
She catalogs major natural disasters with the theme of "apocalyptic." Then she shifts the perspective to HOPEFUL developments in 2013, "a new pope focused on inequality, successful minimum wage campaigns spread across the country, and the number of states allowing gay marriage doubled."
She puts the spotlight on responses to the threat of the climate crisis which she asserts is a seed sown this year (2013) that could make 2014 transformational. I am impressed by the 10 SEEDS OF HOPE which Van Gelder identifies, are YOU? I ask you to read the content of her case for each SEED before you comment, please:
1. We saw surprising new leadership on the climate issue
2. Native peoples took the lead in the fossil fuel fight
3. The middle and lower classes fought for economic justice
4. A new economy is in the making
5. U.S. military strikes didn't happen
6. Pope Francis called for care and justice for the poor...
7. Gays and lesbians got some respect
8. There were new openings for a third party
9. Alternatives to Obamacare are in the works
10. An education uprising began
Van Gelder concludes, "We live in interesting times, indeed. The growing climate emergency could eclipse all the other issues, and the sooner we get on it, the more we can use the transition for innovations that have other positive spin-offs.
"There's not a moment to lose." NOT A MOMENT TO LOSE… here we go…
I PRAY FOR HUMANKIND – all the people of the world – a New Year 2014 during which the seeds of 2013 germinate and mature. I have audacity of hope for 2014. Do you?
Last updated: 7:23 pm Friday, January 3, 2014
John W. Eyster lives in the Edgerton area. He is an adjunct professor assigned with the online/distance education faculty of Viterbo University, LaCrosse. He continues his personal mission supporting democracy/civics education in Wisconsin K-12 schools through Project Citizen, We the People, Discovering Democracy (Milton HS). John is a community blogger and is not a part of The Gazette staff or management.


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Three Craig graduates to be added to honor wall March 21
JANESVILLE — Craig High School will add three graduates to its honor wall in a ceremony Friday, March 21.
The school has honored 35 graduates since the wall was created in 2006.
This year's honorees include a former nurse, government organizer and activist; a leading engineer and author; and a decorated member of the U.S. Air Force and advocate for cystic fibrosis research.
Craig High School provided information about each:
-- Erin Murphy, Craig Class of 1978, got her bachelor's degree in nursing at UW-Oshkosh before receiving a master's degree in organizational leadership at the University of St. Catherine.
She then attended Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota as a policy fellow. This led to Murphy serving as the former executive director of the Minnesota Nurses Association. She also worked for the organization as a lobbyist and organizer.
Before that, Murphy worked in state government as a legislative director for former Minnesota Attorney General Hubert H. Humphrey III and as community relations director for the Minnesota Department of Children, Families, and Learning.� She was also an operating room nurse at the University of Minnesota Medical Center.
During her time at Craig, she was involved with Spotlighters, A Cappella Choir, Drama Guild, Phoenix, ski club and thespians.
She resides in St. Paul, Minn., and is serving her fourth term as a representative for the Minnesota State Legislature.
-- David Douglas, Craig Class of 1981, got his bachelor's degree in science and master's degree in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986.
Douglas between 1986 and 1993 worked for Thinking Machines, where he was a lead designer on Connection Machine 5, the fastest computer in the world at the time. He was then vice president of cloud computing and chief sustainability officer at Sun Microsystems.
He co-authored the book "Citizen Engineer," detailing how engineers can make the world a better place.
During his time at Craig High School, Douglas participated in cross-country, basketball and tennis.
He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and three children. Since 2007, he has served as a member of the board of directors for the National Ecology Observatory Network, which is a $500 million National Science Foundation project that gathers data about the impacts of climate change, land usage and invasive species on natural resources and biodiversity.�
-- Matthew Butler, Craig Class of 2005, joined the U.S. Air Force, continuing his education through the Community College of the Air Force and Thomas Edison State College online as he served on active duty.
While in the Air Force, Butler was awarded First Airman Award No. 1 Base Military Training Honor Graduate in 2009, Senior Airman Below the Zone Award in 2011, Army Achievement Medal in 2011, The 12 Outstanding Airmen of the Year Award in 2011, Commendation Medal in 2012 and the John L. Levitow Award for Airman Leadership in 2013.
Butler is involved in the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation as a congressional advocate promoting legislation affecting medical research and finding a cure.
He was inspired to become involved in the organization when his son Adrik was diagnosed with the disease.
At Craig, Butler was involved in DECA, Christian Fellowship, Spotlighters, A Cappella Choir and football. He was voted most admired, best personality and prom king by his classmates.
Butler and his wife, Danielle, have two sons, Adrik and Kyler.


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Dick Rost remembered as lover of life, golf, interior design
JANESVILLE—Dick Rost loved golf, and he was very good at it.
One day, Rost came into the clubhouse, and a friend asked him how he did on the links that day. He said he didn't know. He had stopped keeping score.
"He just enjoyed being out there," recalled Ted Thompson.
"He enjoyed it every step of the way—Mr. Sweet Swing," said another friend, Duke Kelly.
"He had the sweetest swing you'll ever see," Thompson added.
The longtime golfer, interior designer and Janesville businessman died Saturday at age 84.
Some of Rost's friends spoke at their daily meeting at the Wedge Inn on Tuesday. Rost was a member of the Toast and Jelly Breakfast Club, a tradition that started at a downtown restaurant in 1961.
The silver-haired club members expressed great affection for their friend but said he was a private man who didn't always say what he had been up to.
They agreed that an old-fashioned word described him well: gentleman.
"I don't think I ever met anyone who didn't like Dick Rost. He was just a nice guy, a caring person, and he had a great sense of humor," agreed Ken Hulen, the former golf pro at the Janesville Country Club, who spoke from his home in Texas on Tuesday.
Although Rost had health problems that included surgery and kidney dialysis in later years, "I never even once heard him complain," Hulen said. "… He just took it all in stride."
Rost's love for golf led to the Rost Cup, an annual country club event for several years that mimicked the U.S.-versus-Europe Ryder Cup.
Rost would captain the U.S. team, Hulen the Europeans.
"He had them rename it the Rost Hulen Cup. That's the kind of person that he was," Hulen recalled.
The Toast and Jelly gang said Rost was particular about aesthetics. He never owned a plaid flannel shirt, jeans or corduroys.
The club bought him a shirt and jeans one year, and he gave them back.
That sense of style carried over into his interior design/furniture business, which started in 1951 when he came home after getting a fine arts degree from the University of Colorado.
Rost joined his father, who ran a sign company and sold paint, draperies and other decorating supplies on North Main Street in Janesviille. They expanded the business to include furniture and carpeting and became E.W. Rost and Son, and later, Exclusively Rost's.
Rost designed corporate and home projects locally, in Madison, Lake Geneva and sometimes out of state, but he never bragged, said Scott Owen, a friend since childhood.
Rost gave about 40 interior designers their start over the years. Lana Van Galder is one of those.
When the furniture store closed in a tough economy in 1988, Rost and Van Galder continued as design consultants. They worked together 44 years.
"We never had a disagreement, never had harsh words. I can't say that for everybody else in my life," Van Galder said.
Van Galder still runs the business, called Interiors, at 109 W. Milwaukee St.
Van Galder admires Rost's sense of style, calling him the Ralph Lauren of the Midwest.
"Rost told friends he was the longest-tenured member of the American Society of Interior Designers, something in which he took pride.
"He was always thinking of young people and the future of the industry, and he just really believed in quality things," Van Galder said.
"You could always tell if Dick had done the room. It was understated, perfectly coordinated. He was always the perfectionist. He would do less rather than more," she said. "…Dick's designs always functioned very well for people. They were not just beautiful, but they served a lifestyle."
That was perhaps not a surprise, as Rost was a great admirer of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, whose motto was "form follows function."
Rost loved to visit Wright-designed buildings, friends said.
Rost married a few years after his return to Janesville. He met Joann, a schoolteacher, on a blind date. They had three children.
"He was a very good father in every way," Joann recalled.
"He probably got as much out of life as anybody I know, and he did it as pleasantly as anybody I know," Hulen said.
In later years, health problems forced Rost to give up golf and another pastime, skiing, Owen said.
"I always remember him smiling, even when he was having those operations up in Madison and the dialysis," Owen said. "He had a great outlook on life, and we all were better because of him."
A visitation is set from 4 to 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 19, 2014, at Schneider Apfel Schneider & Schneider Funeral Home and Crematory, 1800 E. Racine St., Janesville. Private family services will be held Thursday.
Last updated: 5:52 pm Tuesday, March 18, 2014


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Bitcoin seems to be everywhere these days. What was once an esoteric topic discussed only by mathematicians, cryptographers, end-of-the-world doomsday predictors, and the occasional conspiracy theorist has grabbed front-page headlines around the world and become a leading topic presented at financial services industry events. Regulators, journalists, bankers, consultants, and venture capitalists have poured time, money, and energy into understanding what a bitcoin is and trying to determine how the virtual currency fits into the global payments landscape.
The bitcoin payment mechanism emerged in 2008 under extremely mysterious circumstances. The term "bitcoin" was supposedly coined by someone named Satoshi Nakamoto, who wrote a paper titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." As of this writing, no known individual, organization, agency, or government has ever maintained that it created the bitcoin infrastructure or technology platform. Various theories have been floated, and a few mainstream publications—including The New York Times and Fast Company—have launched serious investigations, but so far no one really knows how bitcoin payments got their start.
The bitcoin currency is entirely digital. Although publications sometimes use photo montages of gold-embossed coins to accompany articles about bitcoins, these are purely mock-ups. Bitcoins do not exist in the physical world; the best way to think of a bitcoin is as a long sequence of data. Individuals who want to make bitcoin-denominated purchases can buy the currency through one of several exchanges, including Bitstamp; Kraken; CampBX; and Mt. Gox, which is the most prominent and popular. Bitcoins' value fluctuates vis-à-vis the U.S. dollar and other traditional currencies. Users can track exchange rates at sites such as bitcoinexchangerate.org and preev.com. Through most of 2013, the price of a bitcoin has hovered in the $100 to $140 range, but it fluctuated from a low of US$20 in January to around US$220 in April, and it's back up to just over US$240 today.
Owners of bitcoins transact using an open-source, peer-to-peer file-sharing technology that is similar in many ways to the music-sharing Napster technology from the late 1990s. Each bitcoin transaction utilizes cryptography—the mathematical science that goes into keeping communications secure from unwanted third parties—to protect the identity of its owners while ensuring the transaction's integrity. Each transaction is time-stamped and is permanently recorded in a public ledger called the "blockchain."
A secondary market for bitcoins is beginning to appear, but it does not yet represent a strong and viable platform for speculation. For people who are technologically challenged, two options for bitcoin investments are the SecondMarket Bitcoin Investment Trust and the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust—launched this summer by the famous Winklevoss twins, who were involved in the lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg enshrined in the 2010 film "The Social Network." These vehicles enable investors to put money into bitcoins without actually directly trading in the currency, in much the same way that an investor might elect to fund a REIT mutual fund rather than buy a piece of real estate directly.
Bitcoins Gain Purchase in the Public Eye
Payments experts tend to think that bitcoin-denominated payments appeal primarily to three groups of people. First are people who believe the virtual currency is a good mechanism for speculation, and that the bitcoin will soon be a highly valuable commodity. Second are people who inherently distrust authority. These individuals find the notion of anonymity appealing and consider bitcoin transactions to be less traceable than deals made in traditional currencies, since bitcoin has no central bank or central banker. Finally, the bitcoin platform appeals to criminals who are trying to cover their tracks—money launderers, terrorists, and the like. In theory, they can avoid scrutiny by any government if they use bitcoin payments to move funds, compensate employees, and initiate other types of transactions. ZDNet has referred to the bitcoin platform as "the world's largest floating black market."
In early 2012, the mainstream media and investors began paying a great deal of attention to the potential inherent in bitcoin-based businesses. Venture capital funds in California started funding startups that manage, trade, track, and process bitcoin-denominated payments. With names like Coinbase, Vaurum, Coinsetter, Tradehill, CoinLab, BitInstant, Gliph, Alydian, BitPay, and TruCoin, these various startups remain at the vanguard of the emerging payments mechanism.
At the same time that funding began flowing into the community of bitcoin-related startups, the platform was involved in a number of very public incidents that demonstrated its ability to capture the attention of the mainstream media and the public. Several high-profile renegades began accepting donations from their supporters via bitcoin exchanges. Julian Assange's WikiLeaks organization has reportedly received nearly $500,000 in bitcoin donations since the late-2010 blockage of donations to WikiLeaks by Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Western Union. More recently, the legal fund for Edward Snowden, the alleged U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) leaker, supposedly received $13,000 in bitcoin-based contributions within the first two weeks of its launch.
Then, in September 2013, the U.S. FBI shut down the drug market website called "Silk Road." In doing so, the agency specified the volume of bitcoin currency that it had seized. This was one of the first investigations to mention bitcoin so explicitly, and the idea of bitcoins as a viable currency for legitimate businesses suffered a bit as a result of the publicity.
It remains to be seen whether virtual currencies will gain widespread acceptance among typical consumers and businesses. However, regulatory bodies in numerous countries are studying them and weighing in on their legitimacy, which indicates that many people believe virtual currencies will remain with us in some form in the future.
What's a Corporate Treasurer to Do?
Despite the brouhaha that's arisen when people like the Winklevoss twins have become involved in the market, bitcoins are currently an impractical means of payment for most business-to-business and business-to-consumer transactions. Of the approximately 10 million to 11 million merchants in the United States, the number of legitimate businesses accepting bitcoins for payment remains very small—although it does run the gamut from tourism agencies and restaurants to technology and other business-services firms. Sites such as spendbitcoins.com, bitcoinlocator.com, and usebitcoins.info provide visual maps that show people where they can spend their bitcoins. Qugelmatic Books, Gadgets Direct, and Alpaca Socks all accept bitcoin-denominated payments, as do WordPress, WikiLeaks, Khan Academy, and diasporafoundation.org (the Facebook competitor focused on privacy).
Only time will tell whether bitcoin payments will become ubiquitous in day-to-day transactions around the exchange of legitimate goods and services. It is reasonable to assume that most companies won't be transacting in virtual currencies for at least another 12 to 18 months. However, as bitcoins grow in popularity (and notoriety), corporate treasury professionals need to keep an eye on the crypto-currency. Having a grasp of the technology, approach, and attitudes of the appropriate regulatory authorities will enable treasurers to perform their jobs more cogently.
Corporate treasurers who think their organization might make or receive bitcoin-denominated payments at some point in the future need, first and foremost, to track what regulators in the jurisdictions in which their company operates are saying about virtual currencies. Around the world, there appears to be very little regulatory consistency. For instance, Thailand and Germany have responded in almost opposite manners.
Thailand has issued guidance that bitcoins should not be used in Thailand, nor in exchange for the Thai baht, until the Bank of Thailand has an opportunity to consult with other relevant regulators and ministries in the Thai government. Tangibly, what this means is that Thai-based bitcoin operators who apply for licenses to serve as exchanges must discontinue their operations until final rules are confirmed. In contrast, the Finance Ministry in Germany opted to formally recognize the bitcoin as what it calls a "unit of account" appropriate for private transactions. This ruling also provides the German tax authorities with the right to tax such accounts for sales on purchases and capital gains on investments; of course, this right to tax assumes that the anonymity issues involved in owning bitcoins can be resolved, which is questionable.
In the United States, the Department of Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a document in March 2013 titled "Application of FinCEN's Regulations to Persons Administering, Exchanging, or Using Virtual Currencies," which states that bitcoin operators must register as money services businesses (MSBs) and comply with traditional anti-money laundering regulations. Some states within the U.S. have developed their own bitcoin-related policies or independently undertaken enforcement actions. For example, in May 2013, California's Department of Financial Institutions sent a cease-and-desist order to the Bitcoin Foundation. Then in August 2013, New York State's Department of Financial Services subpoenaed 22 companies that deal in bitcoin payments in order to learn more about how that market operates.
In 2004, Eric M. Jackson wrote an excellent book titled The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth. It details the rise—and the many almost-falls—of PayPal in its early days. A few sections describe PayPal's interactions with specific state regulators. The tales seem almost prescient when it comes to the current bitcoin debates.
Where Will Bitcoins Go From Here?
It's reasonable to expect bitcoins to remain a fairly marginal financial services instrument for the foreseeable future.
Corporate treasurers who are asked to weigh in on whether their organization should accept virtual currencies such as bitcoins would be wise to take a wait-and-see approach. In the absence of strong market demand, it may not make sense to accept bitcoins and/or bitcoin-denominated transactions until the various legal issues are resolved by both FinCEN and the New York State Department of Financial Services. Treasurers whose organization is moving forward with making or receiving bitcoin-denominated payments need to ensure that their colleagues in risk management and compliance have put in place appropriate controls that will prevent them from getting into trouble with regulatory and law enforcement officials.
Only when regulators have become comfortable with the idea of a virtual currency, and when the public at large is ready to begin making bitcoin payments widely and proudly, will the average corporate treasury team be forced to start engaging in bitcoin-denominated transactions. By then, bitcoin may even have competition. Although bitcoins are currently the most well-known and widely used virtual currency, alternative crypto-currencies such as litecoin and Peercoin are slowly gaining a foothold as well.
Despite the uncertainty, the concept of a virtual currency is intriguing, and it will be fascinating to watch the bitcoin tale unwind over the next few years.
Joram Borenstein is vice president for NICE Actimize. He is a recognized expert in financial crime, anti-fraud, payments protection, consumer identity protection, risk management, IT audit, and compliance who has instructed regulators from the U.S. FDIC, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), the Federal Reserve, and the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA).


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John Anderson remembered as tireless, selfless volunteer
JANESVILLE—Until a about year ago, Janesville resident John Anderson did the best he could to keep a small part of the Janesville Rotary Gardens beautiful.�
At the Rotary Gardens' Italian garden, Anderson would follow along behind his wife, Joanne Olsen-Anderson—the real gardener of the two—and take orders from her.
While Joanne pruned plants and landscaped, John would tend to the small details. He'd push a wheelbarrow and fill buckets full of weeds he'd pulled in the hot summer sun.
Light duty, maybe, but still hard work for a man in his mid-80s whose body had started to slow down.
More than a decade ago, Anderson was one of several volunteers instrumental as chairman of a fundraising group that made the Rotary Gardens a reality. Yet as a puller of weeds and a pusher of wheelbarrows at the gardens, Anderson wasn't there to handle things. He was there to help.
For the last half of his life, help was all Anderson did. His work at the Rotary Gardens was one of more than a dozen volunteer roles he held throughout Rock County.
Some of his volunteer work included leadership roles with The Boy Scouts of America, the Salvation Army, the YMCA of North Rock County, Rock County Habitat for Humanity and various area chambers of commerce.�����
Anderson's helping hand is gone now. He died Nov. 23 at 86 years old.
Andy Olsen, director of the Boy Scouts' local Indian Trails District, became Anderson's colleague and friend during part of the 40 years Anderson spent on directory boards with the Boy Scouts, including a long stint as president of the former Sinnissippi Council.
Olsen said Anderson was the one of the most faithful, dependable volunteers he's ever known.
"I've listened to a lot of people who tell me their beliefs, but John lived a life wreathed with action," Olsen said. "He was a guy you could call on and count on to get doors open for kids. I'm sure a lot of things John did weren't personally convenient, but he did them out of his own personal belief of what John Anderson wanted to become. What he became was selfless."
Don Draeger of Janesville, a former Boy Scouts Sinnissippi Council official and a friend of Anderson, said Anderson had great skill at gathering support for the causes for which he volunteered.
Draeger, 98, remembers how Anderson got him to chip in a cash donation to build out the Rotary Gardens facility.
"He got $250 out of me for the (Rotary) Gardens just like that. That money just seemed to part ways with me," said Draeger.�
Draeger, who was an accountant for several local businesses, got to know Anderson when Anderson was vice president and part owner of SSI Technologies in Janesville. Draeger said Anderson was dignified, classy and always neatly dressed—but never showy.
"I think John was a member of one of the country clubs, but I don't remember that he even golfed. He was the last guy you'd ever see driving a flashy Cadillac all over the place. He had a regular house, nothing fancy. You'd have to say he was an old, plain Joe," Draeger said.
Anderson, who was class valedictorian at West Milwaukee High School, was a metallurgical engineer and a World War II veteran in the U.S. Army.
Local resident Gary Smith, who worked with Anderson through Rotary Gardens, said Anderson was a quiet but sincere man who contemplated his words before he spoke.
"He didn't seem to get excited about anything. He'd form a thought, and it always got to the root. It made sense. When he spoke, people listened," Smith said.
Draeger said the hardest part of volunteer work isn't finding people with big ideas, but finding those who see the ideas through. Whether it was seeing a Boy Scouts office at Palmer Park to completion or selling every last ticket to an annual fundraiser concert, Anderson always followed through, Draeger said.
"He was reliable and timely. If there was a matter to tend to, it got tended to right then," he said. "John did not let it slide."
Olsen said he's not sure how groups such as the Boy Scouts that rely heavily on volunteer service will fare in the future. He views Anderson's generation—and Anderson himself—as the last of a breed who view volunteer service as an honor, not just another responsibility.�
"It sounds really pessimistic, but guys like John, they're irreplaceable," he said. "Sadly, I don't see it (volunteering) on the same level with younger generations of men. He leaves a void that I'm not sure that gets filled. We speak to that shortage, but politically, we're uncomfortable talking about it.
"Fact is, I see more guys worried about whether they're driving a $30,000 Harley on the weekends than helping with kids or doing anything else volunteer. That was not John."


text: Propane gas can be used for a number of purposes and a variety of different appliances. From fireplaces to patios, this source of energy comprises an important industry and a potentially valuable source of help for customers. People interested in propane gas can research the range of technologies with which it can be applied.


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TFM-45/42 Binding Post Upgrades
LR: AudioEngine wireless link from family room preamp to Barcus-Berry 2002R Sonic Maximizer to GlowPower Zyxt IC's to Sunfire 300x2 to Nordost 6M bi-source wires to AOS 28" MDF spherical speakers using six 6.5" woofers and eight 1" dome tweeters symm. arranged around the surface.
SS system: CX-995V DVD to AV-634x 3-4 channel amp (center/rears) & M1.0t mk-II opt2(fronts).
Garage: 300 disk changer to Entech 202.5 DAC to MXR150 Receiver (pre) to TFM-42 to EPI 400 speakers.


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Wildlife and landscape photos by Scott Weberpal
Glen Loyd
Friday, January 31, 2014
Scott Weberpal is a gifted photographer from Southern Wisconsin. I teamed up with him to put this video together. To see more of Scott's photos, check out his website: scottweberpal.com.
Press play and then click the "Full screen" button in the bottom right corner of the video window for a larger view.
Last updated: 7:33 am Monday, February 3, 2014
Glen Loyd lives on the Rock River in Janesville 15 days a month. He is a former public information officer for Wisconsin Consumer Protection, publishes a weekly consumer protection blog. Glen is a community blogger and is not a part of The Gazette staff. His opinion is not necessarily that of the The Gazette staff or management.


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Cone snail
Moderator: BioTeam
5 posts • Page 1 of 1
Cone snail
I found this critter (or hundreds of them to be exact) off the coast of Rhodes. I identified it as a cone snail, perhaps Conus ventricosus or similar. I've understood that all cone snails are predators and venomous. They have a barbed stinger that they use to poke at their prey or enemies.
However, what happened with this snail is that when I picked it up, it soon stung me with this odd appendage it had in the rear end of its shell. First I thought it was the poison stinger it had used, but I later read that the stinger is located in the animal's mouth, not in the tail end.
So the question is: what is this barbed appendage that the critter used to poke my thumb? It is not well seen in the image, but the "tail" is hard, barbed and crescent-shaped and not visible unless the animal lashes out. The animal also used it to turn itself into correct position, if I placed it on its "back". The whip of the tail was very fast (I always thought that snails are slow!). What is the primary use of the "tail"? Self-defense? Correcting the animal's position? Attack? Also, is the real stinger supposed to be inside that sack-like structure that is located between the eyes? How easily does one get stung? Should one avoid stepping on a cone snail if walking along the ocean floor? (I know that handling the more exotic cone snails can be dangerous, even fatal - but what about these common ones?)
Someone with knowledge of marine mollusca please help me out, this thing has bothered me for quite a while and all Google has to offer me is that they have a poisonous, barbed mouth-piece (specialized radula). But nobody says anything about pointy and nasty tail!
p.s. Note how the animal gives me an evil eye! I didn't know that water snails have so well-developed eyes... land snails don't have anything as complex, right? Just long stalks with light-sensing knobs at the end?
Umm, yeah. Did I say otherwise somewhere? :)
Anyway, the animal has a barbed "tail" that is located in the wide/posterior end of the shell ("rear end", as I put it). The eyes and mouth parts an be seen in the narrow/anterior end of the snail, and that is where I assume the real radula-derived poison stinger should also be located. But I was wondering what is this other poking device the animals has, something that I failed to discover by googling? According to my quick observations the snail seemed to use it at least for self defense, but is that the real or only purpose of it?
Sorry, the picture has us looking at the anterior end, so I figured you might have it wrong-way 'round. Is the brown structure across the shell opening from the thumbnail the structure you're talking about? Hard to tell if it's part of the shell makings or sticking to the shell...
Yeah, that brown structure is the "spike" I'm talking about. My best guess is that it is part of the animal's foot, perhaps the end of it has evolved to form such a structure that is visible in the picture. It is not part of the shell, as far as I know.
Heck, I should've dissected one to find out! :P
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Households without children
This topic has been updated with 2016 Census data for all areas. What's this?
In Ardeer, older couples without children account for 7% of total households in 2016.
Households without Children include couples without children and lone person households. They require different services depending on the age of the people in the households. For example young couples who have not had children (yet) compared to older "empty nester" couples whose children may have left home.
For Households without Children in Ardeer, life stage is based on the age of the household reference person (usually person 1 on the Census form):
- Young: Aged 15-44
- Middle-aged: Aged 45-64
- Older: Aged 65 and over
To continue building the story, Ardeer's Household data should be viewed in conjunction with Household Size, Age Structure and Dwelling Type.
Derived from the Census question:
'What is the person's relationship (to each other person in the household)?'
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Census of Population and Housing (opens a new window) 2011 and 2016. Compiled and presented by .id (opens a new window), the population experts.
(Enumerated data)
Compiled and presented in profile.id by .id, the population experts.
Compiled and presented in profile.id by .id, the population experts.
Dominant groups
Analysis of the households without children in Ardeer in 2016 compared to City of Brimbank shows that there was a larger proportion of young couples without children, a smaller proportion of middle-aged couples without children, and a smaller proportion of older couples without children.
In addition, there were a larger proportion of young lone person households, a larger proportion of middle-aged lone person households, and a larger proportion of older lone person households.
Emerging groups
Between 2011 and 2016, the number of households without children increased by 73.
There were no major differences in Ardeer between 2011 and 2016.


text:
Gemcitabine Hydrochloride and Cisplatin With or Without Bevacizumab in Treating Patients With Advanced Urinary Tract Cancer
This study is ongoing, but not recruiting participants.
National Cancer Institute (NCI)
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier:
First Posted: July 20, 2009
Last Update Posted: December 18, 2017
Information provided by (Responsible Party):
National Cancer Institute (NCI)
- Full Text View
- Tabular View
- No Study Results Posted
- Disclaimer
- How to Read a Study Record
No Study Results Posted on ClinicalTrials.gov for this Study
|Study Status:
|This study is ongoing, but not recruiting participants.
|Study Completion Date:
|No date given
|Estimated Primary Completion Date:
|June 30, 2019 (Final data collection date for primary outcome measure)


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Commercial Club Playground
1845 W. Rice St. Chicago, Illinois 60622
(312) 742-7558
Fee: $20.00
Age Range: Any
Midnight Circus presents a true "Big Top" tent extravaganza. Celebrating community and rebuilding parks, one circus at a time.
Since 2007 Midnight Circus has toured Chicago amazing audiences and raising funds for neighborhood parks. This unique partnership between Midnight Circus, the Park District, all volunteer park advisory councils and our sponsors has quickly made this a Chicago tradition. Voted Best Annual Family Event by Time Out Chicago kids in 2012, Midnight Circus in the Parks is not to be missed. Tickets: $20 adults $15 ages 2-18 Note: Children under the age of 2 are FREE & on your lap (they really have to sit on the lap). Purchase tickets at circusintheparks.org


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Gymnastics: Parker, Craig turn in solid performances
Janesville Craig and Janesville Parker finished second in their respective divisions Saturday at the Purgolder Invitational gymnastics competition.
Craig was second in the Gold Division with 130.625, with Madison Memorial winning with a score of 133.525. Parker was second in the Purple Division behind the co-op team of Verona/Madison Edgewood with a score of 115.15.
Parker's Hailey Leisten won the all-around title in the Purple Division with a score of 32.55.
"It was a good experience for us as a team to come up here and compete and have fun," Parker coach Heidi Jegerlehner said. "And some of our girls were able to compete at the varsity level for the first time."
Craig's Sara Malmanger was second on balance beam and fourth on floor exercise, while teammate Michelle Cagney was fourth in the all-around.
"We had a really good meet today," Craig coach Jean Welsch said. "We raised our score from Thursday, and it's always good to see the score go up, especially at an invite where the scores are often tight.
"This was a good test for us since we compete with a lot of these teams in our conference."
Purgolder Invitational
Gold Division
Madison Memorial 133.525, Janesville Craig 130.625, Sun Prairie 129.775, Middleton 128.825.
Vault—1. Madelin Pflaster (Mid), 9.25; 7. Sara Malmanger (JC), 8.4.
Uneven bars—1. Caroline Smith (MM), 9.325; 8. Michelle Cagney and Gabrielle Geller (JC), 7.85.
Balance beam—C. Smith (MM), 9.325; 2. Malmanger (JC), 8.65; 4. Lizzy Schneider (JC), 8.55; 6. Cagney (JC), 8.35.
Floor exercise—1. Skibba (Mid), 8.8; 4. Malmanger (JC), 8.5; 6. Cagney (JC), 8.35.
All-around—1. Alioto (MM), 34.35; 4. Cagney (JC), 32.65; 5. Geller (JC), 32.625.
Purple Division
Verona/Edgewood 124.325, Janesville Parker 115.15, Waunakee/DeForest 114.525, Madison East/La Follette 111.8.
Vault—1. Hailey Leisten (JP), 8.35.
Uneven bars—1. Hannah Semmann (V), 7.85.
Balance beam—1. Michuda (V), 8.35; 2. Leisten (JP), 8.3.
Floor exercise—1. Leisten (JP), 8.4; 3. Mia Toberman (JP), 8.3.
All-around—1. Leisten (JP), 32.55.
Last updated: 11:35 pm Saturday, January 18, 2014


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Why Intel should make chips for Apple, Cisco
26 comments post a comment
Signs point to a shift in emphasis for the world's biggest semiconductor company from a little less on microprocessors to a little more on manufacturing.
SAN JOSE To use Andy Groves well-worn phrase, Intel Corp. is at an inflection point. Its time for the company to re-think what it wants to be in the next phase of its life.
One of its options is to strategically pivot. For years, Intel has led with an identity as a microprocessor designer that has great chip-making capabilities. Maybe its time to lead with its left foot. Intel could be one heck of a foundry that happens to have its own line of very successful products.
Face it, the market has shifted from the desktops Intel dominates to tablets and smartphones where it barely participates. But world-class semiconductor manufacturing is as valuable as ever, even as Moores Law slows.
Here, Intel is still tops. First with high-k metal gate transistors. First with FinFETs. Tons of capacity in leading-edge fabs all over the world. Theres little doubt it will be first to field the extreme ultraviolet lithography that is key to next-generation processes.
Im not saying Intel should pull the plug on processors. It has a huge position with the x86 today and is doing a reasonable job playing catch up in the new game of SoCs. This is just a re-balancing. The corporate weight shifts from the front to the back foot.
Im not alone in thinking this way. Jim Turley of Silicon Insider sees Intels x86 on a slooooow decline along with the PC market and says its time for a change. Intel needs a piece of good news, something that shows they have caught on to next-generation products, not hoping PCs will make a comeback, Turley said.
The shift may already be in the works. Intel has been making chips for a handful of mainly small FPGA companies for a couple years.
I think they used those deals as training wheels, a trial run for a couple years before they would consider taking on some big customers, Turley said,


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Roger A. Roh, Janesville/Muscoda, WI (1946-2013)
May 21, 1946 - November 25, 2013
Roger A. Roh, age 67, of Janesville, passed away unexpectedly on Monday, Nov. 25, 2013, at his residence. He was born on May 21, 1946, in Beloit, the son of Alvin and Melvina (Stephenson) Roh. Roger was an avid musician playing in the Bobby Duell Band for many years. He liked to travel, was generous, a fantastic writer and an avid photographer.
Survivors include his daughter, Tiffany (Will) Wanless of Amherst, VA; a brother, Ed (Kim) Roh of Fountain Hills, AZ; a special and best friend, Rozann Layton of Spring Green; his extended family: Jim (Denise) Layton and their family of Spring Green, Michael (Wendy) Layton and their family of Spring Green, Doug (Jenny) Layton and their family of Richland Center, Lisa (Michael) Rossi and their family of Valrico, FL, Barb (Todd) Newton and their family of Spring Green, Donnie Layton and his family of Lone Rock, Bonnie (Randy) Wehler and their family of Baraboo. Roger was preceded in death by his parents, Alvin and Melvina Roh; his son, Jon Roh; and his stepfather, Cletus Laufenberg.
Funeral services will be held on Monday, Dec. 2, 2013, at 11 a.m. at the RICHARDSON-STAFFORD FUNERAL HOME in Spring Green. Rev. Joel Bauman will officiate with burial in the Muscoda Cemetery at 2 p.m. Visitation will be held on Sunday, Dec. 1, 2013, from 3 until 5 p.m. at the FUNERAL HOME and again on Monday from 10 a.m. until the time of service. "I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars." On line condolences available at www.staffordfuneralhomes.com.
Richardson-Stafford Funeral Home
HWY 23 South, Spring Green, WI
(608) 588-2181


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Ed Barrie, director of foreign exchange and treasury operations at Itron, a company that sells metering systems and solutions to utilities around the world, just finished bringing Itron subsidiaries in six European countries into compliance with the Single Euro Payments Area. Based on his experience, Barrie said talk about the difficulties involved in implementing SEPA has been somewhat exaggerated.
"The industry has made SEPA compliance and the technical side of it sound more complicated than it really is," said Barrie, pictured at right. "The technology solution is not that big an effort if the system you're using supports it. But there are a lot of things that go into SEPA, like getting your reference data—your vendors' BIC and IBAN numbers—and working with the banks, testing and end-to-end validation."
Itron's SEPA effort was part of a bigger project to shift to a single company-wide instance of Oracle's R12 ERP system, while also moving to an IT2 treasury workstation and implementing SWIFT connectivity to its banks. If the company's SEPA implementation hadn't been tied to the ERP project, "we probably could have gotten the XML payments with SEPA compliance done in three to five months, realistically, since Oracle R12 natively supports the format after installing a specific update patch," Barrie said.
While IT departments may view SEPA as a big custom integration project, Itron found that "Oracle R12 out of the box supports PAIN.001.001.03," the XML payment initiation message required under SEPA, Barrie said. "We were able to download the appropriate patch and apply it, and within a few hours get a base version of that PAIN XML file generated and send it to the bank for validation."
Once Itron had the basic format for the PAIN payment message, it went to its banks to check what each bank required in terms of fields, in what Barrie calls a "harmonization exercise." Itron also asked banks about optional fields, and whether they would reject a payment message that included optional fields they didn't use, which is referred to as "data over-population."
"We went through that exercise with seven banks and that really helped us think about using Oracle and having a standardized map, instead of having to develop customized maps for banks one on one," Barrie said.
The biggest challenge involved in the SEPA project, he said, was getting the BIC and IBAN numbers for the company's suppliers and configuring the required master data on banks and bank branches in Oracle. Itron dealt with that by purchasing a directory, SWIFTRef, from SWIFT and using it to populate the bank and branch numbers in its customer records. Employing that data "just gives us better assurance that we didn't have any errors," Barrie said. "We had a few typos in manually captured vendor IBAN values, but we corrected those records when we validated against the SWIFTRef IBAN directory."
The effort seems to have paid off. "We've not had one payment rejected or been kicked out or delayed since we went live Aug. 1," Barrie said, adding that Itron has been achieving nearly 100% reconciliation rates on the payments that it has migrated to SEPA.
In Itron's new system, payment files move automatically from Oracle through SWIFT FileAct to the company's banks, with a copy of the payment file also fed into IT2 for real-time updating of the cash position. When the bank statements come back, they are automatically loaded into IT2, then fed in a normalized data feed into Oracle, where "those transactions automatically are reconciled in Oracle on a daily basis," without any human intervention, Barrie said.
As it continues to move subsidiaries around the world onto the new Oracle ERP system, Itron hopes to switch all of them to the PAIN message format. "Our vision is to have the one format and leverage it wherever possible for as many payments as possible to standardize the straight-through processing of reconciliation back into the Oracle system," Barrie said. "The thing to keep in mind is that the PAIN XML format can be leveraged for most payments types, including local ACH, cross-border wires, check issuance and FX payments, and not just SEPA payments."
In the European countries in which Itron has switched to SEPA, the company's treasury has achieved "a level of visibility and transparency we've never had before," Barrie said. "We have real-time visibility into when payments are made, the number of payment, the amount of payments, which accounts are being debited and the value dates. We are anxious to finish migrating our remaining subsidiaries in Europe to Oracle so that they will be SEPA compliant and receive the many benefits of our automated end-to-end process."
When it comes to reconciliation, "if we're getting all the data correctly from the bank and we're mapping correctly into IT2 and Oracle, then those payments get automatically matched off, otherwise the transaction has to be manually matched in Oracle," he said.
"The banking community still has a long way to go in terms of statement reporting," Barrie added. Legacy BAI and MT940 statements provide only limited information, he said, and argued for more use of CAMT XML end-of-day statements.
Barrie predicts that the biggest savings Itron will realize from SEPA will reflect the time staffers no longer need to devote to reconciliation because of the auto-matching. "Where it might have taken a person five hours a month to reconcile bank accounts, now it's taking two hours, so they can devote time to other things," he said. "There is a labor savings and a cost savings associated with that."
At health insurer Aetna, treasury manager Craig Allocca said treasury has been working for a year with the company's Aetna International subsidiary, which has customers in most European countries, to prepare for SEPA. The SEPA project has two components, one related to the payment files Aetna sends to its bank and the second to the manual payments initiated by treasury.
To bring the payment files into compliance, treasury examined the company's data, redesigned its file formats to work with its bank's new global payments platform, and is doing testing. Aetna will go live with the new system in November.
Meanwhile, Aetna's treasury is working to comply with SEPA on the manual payments it initiates by implementing a new treasury workstation that can handle international payments better and by working with its business partners to gather the additional data it needs on the parties it pays, said Allocca, pictured at left.
Aetna is taking the opportunity to gather not only the IBAN and BIC, but other information that it could use to minimize the risk of payments not being applied correctly, Allocca said. "We've been asking for the full beneficiary address, phone numbers, bank address."
"The two biggest challenges were the education of our internal business partners on what the requirements were and what to ask their customers for, what banking information, and then the reprogramming of the internal files to be compliant as they go into the banking system," he said.
Allocca hopes the work treasury has done in preparation for SEPA will result in fewer payment errors and returns. "Our goal is to get the data correct upfront from the beneficiary and just have straight-through processing," he said. "That's the biggest efficiency I can see that we gain."
Read the October Special Report on SEPA.
Ready, Set, SEPA
Rupee's Slide Ruffles Outsourcing Customers
China Makes Life Easier for Treasuries
To Boldly Go
Standardize, Re-engineer, Rationalize
SEPA: The Gateway to New Value-Added Services


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Friday, November 4, 2016
Can the Rosary Really Help During Times of Crisis? (American Life League, 11/3/16)
Posted by Bioethics and More! at 5:37 AM
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Matthew 25:40
Reflections on individual chapters of the Compendium
- God's Plan Of Love for Humanity
- The Church's Mission and Social Doctrine
- The Human Person and Human Rights
- Principles of the Church's Social Doctrine
- The Family, the Vital Cell of Society
- Human Work
- Economic Life
- Political Community
- The International Community
- Safeguarding the Environment
- The Promotion of Peace
- Social Doctrine and Ecclesial Action
- Conclusion, For a Civilization of Love
Reflections on the USCCB's Seven Key Themes of Catholic Social Teaching
Additional References
- Bible
- Catechism of the Catholic Church
- Catholic Medical Ethics: Blueprint for proclaiming the sanctity of life in health care - why conscience protection is invaluable!
- Code of Canon Law
- Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church
- Create in Me a Clean Heart: A Pastoral Response to Pornography
- Dignity of Marriage: A Study Guide to Dignitas Connubii
- Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility
- From Arcanum to the October 2015 Synod
- Gender Theory / Gender Ideology - Select Teaching Resources
- Into the Breach
- Marriage and Religion Research Institute (at CUA)
- Marriage: Unique for a Reason (USCCB)
- National Marriage Project
- National Organization for Marriage
- Questions and Answers About Marriage and Same-Sex Unions
- Say, Hasn't the Church Already Said a Few Things about Marriage/Family/Sexuality?
- Statement Calling for Constitutional Resistance to Obergefell v. Hodges
- Study Guide to St. Pope John Paul II's "Theology of the Body"
- Study Guide to the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church
- Trafficking in Persons Reports
- What is Marriage?
- Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion
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Bucks County Government
Bucks County Parish bulletins, as of Divine Mercy Sunday, 2015
- St. Agnes, Sellersville
- St. Andrew, Newtown
- Assumption BVM, Feasterville
- St. Bede the Venerable, Holland
- St. Charles Borromeo, Bensalem
- St. Christopher, Philadelphia
- St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Jamison
- St. Ephrem, Bensalem
- St. Frances Cabrini, Fairless Hills
- Holy Trinity, Morrisville
- St. Ignatius of Antioch, Yardley
- St. Isidore, Quakertown
- St. John Bosco, Hatboro
- St. John the Baptist, Ottsville
- St. John the Evangelist, Morrisville
- St. Joseph, Warrington
- St. Jude, Chalfont
- St. Lawrence, Riegelsville
- St. Mark, Bristol
- St. Martin of Tours, New Hope
- St. Michael the Archangel, Levittown
- Nativity of Our Lord, Warminster
- Our Lady of Good Counsel, Southampton
- Our Lady of Grace, Penndel
- Our Lady of Guadalupe, Buckingham
- Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Doylestown
- Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, Hilltown
- St. Philip Neri, Pennsburg
- Queen of the Universe, Levittown
- St. Robert Bellarmine, Warrington
- St. Thomas Aquinas, Croydon
- St. Vincent de Paul, Richboro


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Death notices for Nov. 2, 2013
Saturday, November 2, 2013
David Y. Collins, 86, Beloit, died Thursday at Beloit Memorial Hospital, Beloit. Services will be at 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 10, at Unitarian Universalist Church, Rockford, Ill. Visitation will be from 3 to 6 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 9, at Daley Murphy Wisch & Associates Funeral Home and Crematorium, Beloit.
Wendy G. Hartman-Adsit, 63, Janesville, died Thursday at home. No services will be held. Schneider Apfel Schneider & Schneider Funeral home and Crematory, Janesville, is assisting the family.


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1. How will the war between Apple and Samsung end?
"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong." Those words, spoken by the late Steve Jobs to his official biographer, have become legend in the ongoing saga of Apple Inc.'s claims that Google Inc.'s Android operating system is a "stolen product" and that Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.'s phones and tablets—in packaging, hardware design and user interface—are "slavish" copies of Apple's products, as the company claimed in April 2011 in the first of several lawsuits it filed against Samsung. Samsung, for its part, has countersued Apple in jurisdictions around the world and at the International Trade Commission.
The twists, turns, verdicts, determinations, sanctions, injunctions and appeals in the various litigations have grabbed more headlines than any IP dispute in history. How the story ends is far from clear, but experts have begun to speculate on its ultimate impact on the smartphone wars.
Gene Quinn, founder of the blog IPWatchdog, predicts Apple and Samsung will soon settle and may even usher in a new era of cooperation and cross-licensing in the mobile device world. Perhaps the recent settlement and 10-year licensing agreement between Apple and HTC, which Apple had accused of infringing 20 of its iOS-related patents, indicates that Apple CEO Tim Cook may be ready to wrap up the Samsung fight. Quinn says he would be shocked if it continues for much longer. "There's too much money to be made by companies playing nicely," Quinn says. "The battle in these big patent wars is to be the only monopoly standing, which has never happened. And you can make an awful lot of money in an oligopoly."
Chris Carani, a shareholder at McAndrews, Held & Malloy, isn't so sure about that—the issues at stake are big enough that the U.S. litigation (the one that saw a jury award Apple more than $1 billion) is likely headed to the Supreme Court, he says. But when it comes to the ultimate impact of the battle, he says, it's clear in this case that "design reigns supreme."
Apple broke ground by launching a design patent offensive to protect the aesthetics of its products and then aggressively enforcing its patents. "This case is really forcing people to take a hard look at design rights—and these aren't just companies that deal with [décor or handicrafts]," Carani says. "These are large, high-tech companies. You're already seeing it play out in companies that typically would have a patent department and a trademark department: Now they're launching design departments and … employing sophisticated and aggressive design patent protection programs."
The focus on design makes cross-licensing tricky, Carani adds. The aesthetics of a company's products are its persona.
2. How will companies—and the patent office—deal with the implementation of the America Invents Act?
The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) introduced sweeping reforms to the U.S. patent system when it became law in September 2011, and its key provisions have effective dates of September 2012 and March 2013. Already, people are beginning to grapple with understanding and interpreting the patent system it creates, which Wil Rao, a shareholder at McAndrews, Held & Malloy, says is a parallel track to the pre-AIA patent system.
"Maybe 20 or so years from now, when the last vestiges of the pre-AIA system fade away, we'll find that the U.S. patent system overall is better," Rao says. "Until then, the new parallel-track patent system is poised to create a higher degree of uncertainty and complexity and, potentially, a new drag on innovation and efficient market operation."
Some of the key changes the AIA introduced are:
Phasing out the first-to-invent system: The AIA will move the U.S. toward a first-inventor-to-file system in March, phasing out the current first-to-invent system that stands apart from other countries' approach. Now the patent office will grant patents to the first person to file his patent application. The legislation also expands the definition of prior art. For instance, it now includes international prior public use or sale. "To what extent do you comb the world for prior public use or sale, in addition to printed publication, in assessing whether your patent is valid or in trying to invalidate a patent asserted against you?" says Jeanne Gills, a partner at Foley & Lardner. "It's moving us to take a more global view of prior art and, arguably, of the filing date: Now, an application filed anywhere in the world is your effective filing date."
An anti-joinder provision: The AIA raises the bar for bringing multidefendant patent suits, a favored practice of nonpracticing entities (NPEs) wishing to cast a wide net in asserting their patents. The rule has spawned some complications, however. "Transfer and pre-suit consolidation has become a more complex area because NPEs still want to bring actions against many companies [in one suit] but have to face the fact that they have to sue them separately," says Pavan Agarwal, a partner at Foley & Lardner.
New Patent Trial and Appeal Board hearings: The AIA gives parties a new way to contest patents within nine months of their grant with its new post-grant review proceedings. After nine months, they can file for the similar inter partes review. Both have shorter time frames than litigation, and they provide a new strategic card for parties to play. It's yet to be seen what effect the availability of the new proceedings has on litigation. "The U.S. is trying to parallel the system of opposition proceedings in Europe, and it's really efficient," says Kelly Burris, a shareholder at Brinks Hofer Gilson & Lione. "If you're contesting the patent, you can do so very quickly."
3. Are human genes patentable?
In November 2012, the Supreme Court granted cert in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., a lawsuit challenging Myriad's patents on BRCA1 and BRCA2, two human genes. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) granted Myriad patents for the genes as a composition of matter—one of the four categories of patentable matter. Myriad figured out how to isolate and purify the genes to effectively test them for mutations associated with an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancers and to inform treatment options.
The plaintiffs in the Myriad case fear the patents are delaying further research and testing of BRCA1 and BRCA2 and thus are limiting treatment options for patients. Biotechnology companies such as Myriad counter that if they can't patent and profit from their discoveries, innovation will suffer.
The Federal Circuit has twice upheld Myriad's patents, once in light of the Supreme Court's March 2012 opinion in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc. In that case, the Supreme Court held a Prometheus-invented method for determining the effectiveness of a drug in patients was unpatentable because it involved a law of nature and "simply tells doctors to engage in well-understood, routine, conventional activity previously engaged in by scientists in the field. Such activity is normally not sufficient to transform an unpatentable law of nature into a patent-eligible application of such a law."
In light of Mayo v. Prometheus, biotech companies "are working to make sure the [patent claims] focus more on the novelty and the testing processes at the exclusion of computers for processing bioinformation in patent claims," says Edward Reines, a partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges.
The Supreme Court took up the Myriad case on one question: Are human genes patentable? Its answer, expected this year, could have huge implications. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, about 20 percent of human genes are patented.
But as it did in Mayo v. Prometheus, the Supreme Court could deliver another fact-specific analysis without crafting a definitive standard, says Jonathan Harris, a partner at Axinn, Veltrop & Harkrider.
"In Mayo, the court generally discussed what to analyze or review in assessing patent eligibility without giving a clear bright-line test, and I think they'll do that again," Harris says. "But a lot of people in the industry are concerned that they're going to limit eligibility by striking down these claims. It's hard to know, but they took the Myriad case for a reason. There's obviously something the Federal Circuit did that they did not like."
4. Who will fill Kappos' shoes?
If this is the PTO's Pax Romana, recently departed Director David Kappos is its Augustus. Kappos, former engineer and IP head at IBM Corp. who took his PTO post in August 2009, announced in November 2012 that he would step down at the end of January. Seemingly across the board, the patent bar was sad to see him go. It appears that Kappos' experience at IBM—one of the country's most prolific licensing programs and largest holders of patents—gave him a unique understanding of the interplay between the patent office and patent attorneys, and the Kappos directive was to work with patent applicants rather than against them.
"From a patent practitioner's standpoint, I've noticed there is more of a spirit of cooperation at the patent office compared to an adversarial relationship in the past," says Kelly Burris, shareholder at Brinks Hofer Gilson & Lione. "[Kappos] has really turned things around, and I hope his successor is able to take that baton and run with it."
Among the agency's achievements under Kappos was a reduction of the PTO's infamous patent application backlog by nearly 150,000 despite a 5 percent annual increase in filings, thanks in part to new patent-examiner hires and the opening of satellite patent offices. Kappos also led the agency as it began the task of implementing the AIA.
Deputy Director Teresa Stanek Rea will serve as acting director after Kappos' departure, and she is on every shortlist of potential Kappos successors.
5. How will companies manage the new gTLDs?
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has spent years preparing to roll out its new generic top-level domain names (gTLDs) and working with applicants to assign them. In 2013, the roll-out begins (absent any further delays).
How does it work? Consider a company like The Walt Disney Co., which currently owns Disney.com and has to monitor for cybersquatters who try to set up shop at, say, Disney.net or Disney.sy. Now companies will have a chance to register for gTLDs—soon we may visit Disney.film or Disney.toys—and "dot-brand" TLDs like .disney.
While the new gTLDs offer new branding opportunities, they also present new risks and expenses for brand owners facing hundreds of new TLDs to monitor for cybersquatting or to buy up defensively.
"Suddenly there are all these new top-level domains, and we can't even know how to protect ourselves until we know what consumer behavior is going to be and how [gTLDs] will be used," says Pamela Chestek, proprietor of the blog Property, Intangible and former in-house IP attorney at Red Hat Inc. "It's a brave new world out there for brand owners."
Built into the gTLD system is a Trademark Clearinghouse meant to help brand owners protect their trademark rights in the face of the new TLDs, and ICANN continues to meet with stakeholders, take comments and refine the system. The clearinghouse raises its own set of questions, notes Erik Pelton, a former PTO examiner who now manages the boutique firm Erik M. Pelton & Associates.
"We're getting closer to ICANN launching a system where brand owners can make objections or file [to protect their trademarks] … and we're still waiting to see how that plays out," Pelton says. "What will this clearinghouse look like? What will the timeline be for brand owners to participate in it? How expensive will it be? How beneficial will it turn out to be?"
Some companies have been active participants in the gTLD process—Canon Inc. acquired .canon; Google applied for domains including .youtube and .lol.
"The vast majority of companies are keeping an ear to the ground and paying attention to what's out there," says Joshua Jarvis, a lawyer at Foley Hoag. "Many are looking at the list of TLDs ICANN has published to consider both opportunities and risks—where's the harm going to come from?"
6. How will IP issues play out on mobile platforms?
Brand owners largely have gotten the hang of policing websites for trademark infringement, but mobile platforms and the rise of apps have introduced a host of new issues. While much of the regulatory and legal focus surrounding mobile devices has been privacy-related, IP issues are beginning to percolate, and brand owners, platform operators and app developers are beginning to grapple with some of the associated complications. On the web, for instance, brand owners simply report static webpages for takedown; in the mobile world, they may be confronting infringement by apps that millions of users have already downloaded. The money users sink into in-app purchases can further complicate matters.
Third parties have developed technologies to help brand owners police various mobile platforms, but as the weight of the user base shifts to mobile, IP issues will come to the forefront, says Randi Singer, a partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges.
"It's much, much harder for trademark and brand owners and copyright owners to police things in an app store—the apps themselves and things inside the app," Singer says. "The policing has become infinitely more complicated, and it's always a moving target whether somehow your brand has been co-opted inside an app, the app itself infringes or the title infringes."
7. What are the copyright rules when TV and the Internet collide?
The copyright law surrounding established technologies such as cable TV, video-on-demand and VCRs/DVRs is fairly settled, but new-media twists on TV-watching have led to a host of cases examining how to apply the existing law to technologies that hadn't yet been conceived of when the law was set.
A particularly action-packed area surrounds one question in particular: What hath Cablevision wrought?
The 2nd Circuit delivered a 2008 ruling in The Cartoon Network LP v. CSC Holdings, Inc. concerning cable provider Cablevision's DVR service, which stores video remotely in a centralized cloud and streams it to users who wish to "record" the shows. The appeals court found that the service does not infringe on the public performance rights of The Cartoon Network and other copyright owners because "each … playback transmission is made to a single subscriber using a single unique copy produced by that subscriber," and therefore they are effectively analogous to VCR recordings.
New services have since launched that seem aimed at the window the Cablevision case opened. The Internet startup Aereo, for example, provides cheap streaming television to users via thousands of tiny antennae that users lease. In the inevitable legal challenges to the service, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in July 2012 denied networks' request to shut down the service, reasoning that Aereo's services provide private video streams and thus, under the Cablevision reasoning, are not unlicensed public performances in violation of the Copyright Act. The 2nd Circuit heard oral arguments in the case on Nov. 30, 2012.
FOX Broadcasting Co. has launched another high-profile legal fight against Dish Network Corp.'s Hopper DVR service, claiming Dish copies its entire primetime schedule to stream it back to users commercial-free.
"In some ways the cases are quite simple to describe," says Todd Larson, a lawyer at Weil, Gotshal & Manges. "Can we create this centralized VCR? Is this technology more like the Internet version of the DVR, or more like Internet-delivered video-on-demand? How you answer that simple question has very different legal implications, and very quickly, you get into the finer points of arcane copyright law definitions, including especially what it means to 'publicly perform' a work under the copyright law."