Friday, April 06, 2012
Tsunami 'ghost ship' sunk by US Coast Guard cannon fire
KODIAK, Alaska -- The US Coast Guard used cannon fire Thursday to sink a derelict Japanese "ghost ship" that was left drifting towards the US following last year's devastating tsunami.
The unmanned Ryou-Un Maru fishing boat was sent more than 6,000 feet to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean by a gunnery crew on a Coast Guard Cutter.
Coast Guard Pet
ty Officer 1st Class David Mosley told NewsCore the 200-foot-long ship sank at around 6:15 p.m. Alaska time.
The crew began firing rounds at the slow-moving vessel from a 25-millimeter cannon at around 1 p.m. Alaska time, when the boat was 180 miles west of Sitka, Alaska.
The ship had entered heavily trafficked waters, where large cargo vessels and tankers travel from North America to Asia. The Coast Guard said it posed an "imminent threat" to sailors and the environment.
The Coast Guard reported a light fuel sheen on the water, which was expected to quickly dissipate, and a small amount of floating debris in the spot where the vessel went down.
The vessel had more than 2,000 gallons of fuel on board, although the Coast Guard does not believe this will cause any problems on shore, saying it should be dissipated naturally by the wind, wave and weather patterns before reaching land.
Earlier this year experts warned of a vast, loose debris field drifting inexorably toward the US West Coast following the magnitude 9.0 earthquake of March last year.
The wreckage could include virtually anything that floats, oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer told FOX News -- and that includes portions of houses, boats, ships, furniture, cars and even human remains. Close to 19,300 people are believed to have died in the disaster.
While the bulk of the debris was expected to hit some time in 2014, Ebbesmeyer said, "I would not be surprised to see some fishing vessels by April, and the main mass of debris start arriving a year from this March."
Oakland university shooter was hunting staff member who had left the school
The man accused of slaughtering seven people at Oakland's Oikos University was hoping to find and kill an administrator who no longer works at the school, police said Thursday.One Goh -- who is reported to have confessed to the Monday killing spree -- was angry that the woman, whose name has not been released, refused him a full refund of his $6,000 tuition fees when he dropped out of his nursing classes late last year, the Oakland Tribune reported.
The woman's identity is being kept a secret due to concerns for her safety, but police said she left the school soon after Goh.
When he failed to find the woman, Goh instead killed six students and a receptionist with a semiautomatic handgun, also wounding three others, before stealing a victim's car and driving to nearby supermarket where he admitted his crimes to staff and was arrested.
He has been charged with seven counts of murder and related offenses, and faces the death penalty. Arraigned Wednesday, he is next scheduled to appear in court April 30 2012, when he is expected to enter a plea.
The husband of one victim, Efanye Chibuko, said Goh's poor behavior while he was a student at the school had been reported by his wife Doris, the class president, to staff.
"The school was aware of his violent tendencies," he said.
Also Thursday, police -- who are still trying to recover the murder weapon -- rushed to a trash can near the Oikos campus after a homeless man reported seeing a gun inside, but a search did not find a firearm. They are continuing to search waterways between the crime scene and arrest site.
Facebook friends Nasdaq
Facebook has tapped Nasdaq to list its shares ahead of its much anticipated market debut expected in May, delivering a blow to Nasdaq’s arch-rival, the New York Stock Exchange.
The social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg is said to have picked the tech-heavy Nasdaq over the Big Board because it delivered a more attractive marketing and branding pitch, said sources close to the process.
Facebook will file revised initial public offering documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission later today to announce its decision, a source said.
Facebook, whose expected IPO next month could raise as much as $10 billion, will trade under the ticker symbol “FB,” as first reported by The Post.
Part of Nasdaq’s appeal is that it offered Facebook top billing in co-branded ads on TV and billboards, the source said.
Nasdaq, run by CEO Robert Greifeld, and NYSE CEO Duncan Niederauer have been locked in a pitched battle to woo the tech giant in a high-stakes competition to nab the biggest tech IPO listing since Google went public in 2004.
Both CEOs courted Zuckerberg’s company by personally flying to Facebook’s home turf in the Silicon Valley to deliver their pitches to Facebook executives.
Sources say that Zuckerberg wasn’t intimately involved in the selection process, leaving the decision to Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.
While there was little difference between the two Wall Street exchange platforms, sources said, marketing prowess tipped the scales in favor of Nasdaq, which is already home to tech giants such as Apple and Amazon.
Nasdaq’s win is a huge victory for Greifeld and solidifies the exchange’s position as the go-to platform for the biggest tech companies.
The decision is about more than bragging rights. Bagging Facebook further bolsters Nasdaq’s ability to lure tech darlings like micro-blogging outfit Twitter that have yet to go public, observers say.
Sources say that the loss marks a setback for Niederauer’s NYSE, which had been making inroads into tech IPOs with big listings such as Pandora and LinkedIn.
Last year, the NYSE listed 44 percent of the technology IPOs in the US, bringing 19 new tech companies public. But the exchange has been pushing to take a bigger bite out of Nasdaq’s tech dominance.
One source notes that the NYSE had been hoping to build up enough cachet with a Facebook listing to try and lure away more established companies like Apple from Nasdaq.
An NYSE spokesman declined to comment on the exchange’s plans or the Facebook listing.
A Nasdaq spokesman did not return a call for comment, while a message for comment to Facebook was not immediately returned.
How the Brett Favre scandal derailed Jenn Sterger's dream
She was a bad girl gone good -- until Brett Favre brought her back down. Jenn Sterger's winning physique rocketed her to national fame on Sept. 15, 2005, when a TV camera's pan of the bleachers found her sitting pretty in a tight pair of jeans shorts, a bikini top and a cowboy hat at the Florida State-University of Miami football game.
Overnight, Sterger, now 27, gained a cult following. She decided to move to New York to pursue a career as an actress and model.
She graced both Maxim and Playboy and began her stint as a "game-day hostess" for the Jets in 2008. The job was created for Sterger and entailed wearing cleavage-baring jerseys while reporting feature spots from the sidelines.
But in 2009, the vixen decided to shed her image as a walking pair of silicone 34Ds.
While in Tampa for Super Bowl week, she set her sights on manager Phil Reese.
"I thought she was very charismatic," Reese said in an exclusive interview, in which he agreed to tell the story of Sterger's dealings with sexual harassment and the NFL.
"We traded barbs throughout dinner," he recalled of their first meeting. "She was instantly likeable, and that's what I look for in clients. You can't teach someone how to light up a room at a pitch meeting. You either have it, or you don't, and she had it."
At the time, Sterger was living in Hoboken and working on "The Daily Line," a sports show on the Versus cable network. But she told Reese she harbored grander ambitions, he said.
"She obviously got a lot of mileage out of the implants, and it became a problem, professionally and personally," Reese said. "She wanted to be seen as Jenn, not as a chest."
Reese agreed to take her on as a client. But he couldn't predict how her sex-kitten past would come pawing back.
Sterger was Reese's only female client, he said, and he looked after her like a sister.
"She mentioned she wanted to get the implants removed, and I was all for it," said Reese, who scored her a spread in Cosmopolitan magazine, where she talked about removing her breast implants.
"My boobs were not only the first thing some producers saw," she wrote in the story. "They were also the only thing."
The magazine spread was supposed to be the beginning of a new chapter for Sterger, Reese said.
But less than a year later, her attempt to be acknowledged as something other than the "hot chick" derailed spectacularly.
On Oct. 7, 2010, the sports Web site Deadspin published e-mails, voice mails and pictures Sterger allegedly received from Favre when he was the Jets' quarterback.
Samsung designer on ripping off the iPhone: “The Galaxy is original from the beginning”
One could easily opine there are only so many ways to design a tablet or a smartphone. The argument has its merits and isn’t far from truth. With today’s mobile gadgets increasingly becoming basically a piece of glass framed by a bezel of sorts, the question of who’s copying who gets muddied.As you know, Apple filed the first in a series of “look-and-feel” lawsuits against Samsung in April 2011 over the design of the iPhone and iPad, forcing the South Korean consumer electronics conglomerate to fire back with infringement allegations of its own.
As both companies remain entangled in a complicated web of lawsuits in courts around the world, Samsung Mobile’s vice president of design Lee Min-hyuk has gone on the record to say he did not rip off the iPhone when designing the original Galaxy S smartphone…
We’re not sure what Jonathan Ive, Lee Min-hyuk’s counterpart at Apple, would have to say about this.Be that as it may, here’s what Samsung’s design guru said Friday in an interview with Reuters:
I’ve made thousands of sketches and hundreds of prototype products (for the Galaxy). Does that mean I was putting on a mock show for so long, pretending to be designing? […] As a designer, there’s an issue of dignity. The Galaxy is original from the beginning, and I’m the one who made it. It’s a totally different product with a different design language and different technology infused.
An Apple court filing recently discovered by The Verge proves Apple met with Samsung four times in 2010, trying to settle patent woes. In July of 2010, according to Bloomberg, Steve Jobs himself reached out to Samsung, Apple’s biggest supplier of displays, flash NAND chips and processors powering its gizmos. Talks went nowhere so Apple eventually proceeded with litigation.
Lee Min-hyuk also told Reuters his job as a designer is “to blend new functions and technology with aesthetic beauty”. Interesting enough, Samsung too has different teams studying new technology trends, “working on future design trends and Samsung’s own design identity, and they’re all regularly exchanging ideas with designers”.
This sounds a lot like Apple’s approach where the design process takes center stage, from the earliest phases of product conceptualization all the way through to how it’s gonna look and feel in your hand.
I also like this quote suggesting that Samsung is finally beginning to realize that it’s the software, stupid:
We were told so many times until the early part of last year that Samsung is not good at software. We’re not hearing that as often any more. I’m confident that one day Samsung will make a product that defines our time, and I hope it’s one of mine.
Again, Ive and his design team are deeply involved in not only the physical aspects of the product, but the underlying software as well. In a recent interview with Mark Prigg of the London evening Standard from Apple’s headquarters, Ive gushed:
The iPhoto app we created for the new iPad completely consumes you and you forget you are using an iPad.
iPhoto for iPad lets you make quick edits to your photos and share them across social networks. The app topped one million downloads in ten days, raking in $5 million in revenue (it costs $4.99 a pop).
And in a profile over at The Chicago Tribune, Lee Min-hyuk confesses he isn’t Samsung’s Ive (yet):
I might not be at (Ive’s) level yet, but I believe Samsung will produce such iconic products one day. It’s not just effort that makes it possible for a new product to be a massive hit. It also has to be timely, and technology should be ready to make a certain design a reality.
London-born Ive is one of Apple’s most prized assets. Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson that he made sure nobody can touch his “spiritual partner”, as he put it. “That’s the way I set it up”, Jobs told Isaacson.
Jony, as friends affectionately call him, thinks while other manufacturers strive to create something different and marketable, his team at Apple is focused on making something they love, knowing other people will love it, too.
As you can see in the above depiction of the Apple vs. Samsung design, courtesy of AppleInsider, there are more than a few similarities between the iPhone 3GS and Samsung’s Galaxy S smartphone, both on hardware and software fronts.
With that in mind, I really do wish common sense prevailed and both firms settled patent issues out of the court, so we could all put this behind and move on.
Aren’t you too getting tired of these patent suits already?
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Almighty Alice
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (commonly shortened to Alice in Wonderland) is an 1865 novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world (Wonderland) populated by peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures. More about Alice here
Friday, July 22, 2011
Monday, July 18, 2011
Marine getting his Ass Whooped
Australian Army Corporal Bone from the 1st Aviation Regiment in Darwin, gets the upper-hand on her United States Marine opponent during the unarmed combat practise bouts at Camp 'Rocky', Rockhampton, during Exercise Talisman Sabre 2011.
Sunday, July 03, 2011
Orangutan Crisis
The purpose of Orangutan Outreach is:1. To conserve orangutans in their native habitat.
2. To raise and promote public awareness of, and participation in, conservation strategies for orangutans through grassroots campaigns, community involvement and global communication.
3. To collaborate with Indonesian conservationists in the running of orangutan rehabilitation centers.
4. To fund rescue efforts of orangutans confiscated on palm oil plantations.
5. To fund rescue efforts of orangutans held illegally by private owners, whether commercial or individual, who are in direct violation of CITES.
6. To collaborate with zoos and animal parks in North America to promote awareness of orangutan conservation efforts.
7. To use the Internet to provide orangutan-related curriculum materials free of charge.
8. To fundraise locally and globally to support these goals.
Affiliated With
ORANGUTAN OUTREACH INC
Donations Go To…
ORANGUTAN OUTREACH INC
A 501(c)(3) nonprofit
A 501(c)(3) nonprofit
Positions
- Orangutans need to be protected
- Indonesian forests must be protected
- We must stop using palm oil
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Professor suspended after featuring strippers in business ethics class
La Salle University may have originated from the teachings of the Christian Brothers but, apparently, that doesn’t mean they don’t know how to party as the school has come under fire for housing a symposium featuring lap dances and strippers.
La Salle University may have originated from the teachings of the Christian Brothers but, apparently, that doesn’t mean they don’t know how to party as the school has come under fire for housing a symposium featuring lap dances and strippers.
According to students, as told to Philadelphia’s City Paper, La Salle assistant professor of management Jack Rappaport led a symposium on business ethics. But while the subject matter of the symposium was on Platonic and Hegelian ethics, Rappaport provided a little extra value in the form of strippers giving lap dances.
La Salle University may have originated from the teachings of the Christian Brothers but, apparently, that doesn’t mean they don’t know how to party as the school has come under fire for housing a symposium featuring lap dances and strippers.
According to students, as told to Philadelphia’s City Paper, La Salle assistant professor of management Jack Rappaport led a symposium on business ethics. But while the subject matter of the symposium was on Platonic and Hegelian ethics, Rappaport provided a little extra value in the form of strippers giving lap dances.
The class, which requires a $150 admission fee [ED. NOTE: In traditional stripper environments, this would be known as a "cover charge"], featured three exotic dancers in bikinis who serviced students and Rappaport himself with lap dances during the lesson.
Rappaport had told students that strippers were booked for the class weeks in advance, though many students expected them to be a prop in the lesson rather than so hands (and crotch) on.
Forty five minutes into the class, the dean of the Business School came into the lecture hall and broke up the class.
The school is “launching a full investigation” and Rappaport will be suspended until they come to a decision.
This just seems like a simple matter of mis-communication, in my eyes. Students came to the classroom expecting a lesson on ethics as espoused by G.W.F. Hegel. But instead, clearly Rappaport meant that he would teach the students about ethics and Kegels, also known as the exercises designed to flex and strengthen the vaginal muscles. It’s not Rappaport’s fault that his love of two interests so seemingly unrelated were misinterpreted like that.
Plus there’s a lot of things you can learn about business ethics from strippers. Mainly that the best way to get your way in this world is to vigorously rub your genitals on the crotch of someone with money. That’s pretty much our entire ad sales process here. FUCK, I'de gladly give $150.00 if she was tutoring and giving demo's!!!Wednesday, June 15, 2011
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