Don’t let your child run off with your cell phone. Not unless you want to risk the chance of the whippersnapper racking up $18,000 in charges and having to tangle with the service provider for the length of a presidential term in order to get it overturned.
Boston.com has a story about a man who went through such hell and has finally gotten his way, convincing the company to stop bugging him for the money. The man’s son, who was in his early 20s, tethered daddy’s phone to his laptop and made the data charges explode.
Which brings us to another piece of advice: Don’t tether your phone to a computer unless you’re sure you’ve got unlimited data.
Verizon forgives balance of $18,000 cellphone bill)”> [Boston.com]
(Thanks, David!)
Paris Hilton has issued a plea to fans on behalf of a young leukemia patient in desperate need of a life-saving bone marrow transplant.
In a post to her page on Monday, the 29-year-old heiress posted a line to the official website of Devan, a four-year-old locked in a race against time to find a donor.
“Hey guys, 4 yr-old Devan has leukaemia. Looking for bone marrow donors www.matchdevan.com. Please help,” Paris wrote.
What made Miley Cyrus famous was her role as “Miley Stewart a.ka Hannah Montana”. How ever, its last episode was aired on March 2011 with “a big one-hour event” and Miley bid farewell to her popular Disney series with a casino-themed bash at hollywood, an L.A. lounge only recently.
According to People, Miley was joined by her castmates, including Emily Osment, and the actress was running around, dancing and singing along as the deejay spun songs like her hit “Party in the USA.” Revelers also enjoyed sushi, hot dogs and fries and a doughnut cart. As for special drinks, guests sipped on blended iced tea. However, Miley’s 17-year-old’s boyfriend Liam Hemsworth wasn’t in attendance. But despite that her boyfriend was not around, Miley’s biggest fans attended the party! Will Smith briefly stopped by to drop off his kids, Willow and Jaden. A source told Hollywood life that Will’s hit song Welcome to Miami was played, and Willow was dancing along with Miley. It was so cute!
A source disclosed to E! Online that during the night, Miley and a couple of guy friends hit the dance floor. “Miley looked so happy when the DJ played ‘Party in the U.S.A’,” the source shared. “When the hit came on, she sang to her song and danced through the crow” the source further told the site that “Episodes were showing on a screen all night long, they showed a final reel of clips at the end. Everyone crowded outside together and looked up at the screen.”
The party seemed to be fun and really makes Hanna Montana’s party an event to be remembered.
No related posts.
Greece’s debt crisis won’t stay in Greece. It’s quickly becoming Europe’s nightmare. Newspapers often refer to Greece’s inability to balance its own checkbook as a kind of “contagion effect” that could spread through the continent. How can a nation’s debt be like a disease?
First, let’s think about debt. A country’s debt — or “sovereign debt” — is the accumulation of past deficits. It equals the total sum of promises to pay back the bonds, or loans, it sells to investors in order to run the country. If the country pays back the bonds on time, hunky dory. If it cannot, the country is in default.
If debt is a promise, default is an acknowledgment that the country was lying, and the “contagion effect” is a paranoia that there are more liars. Here’s how it works: one country gets into trouble — usually with some combination of high deficits, high debt, and weak growth — and becomes at risk of defaulting, or breaking its promise to pay off the whole bond. So investors look around to identify more trouble, assuming that countries with similar problems will suffer similar fates. Think of it as a kind of fiscal discrimination, or profiling. It doesn’t matter if you’re at risk of default. It matters that you look like some other country that is guilty of gross financial recklessness.
Suddenly, these targets of fiscal profiling (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, and Spain… for now) face investor discrimination and lower demand for their debt. So they raise their interest rates to attract buyers. But those higher interest rates only make it harder to pay off their debt. The vicious cycle is self-fulfilling, like a “reverse-Tinker Bell effect”: if investors don’t believe in you, your financial credibility disappears.
How do you stop the contagion from spreading? Remember, contagion is a loss of trust. So its cure could be a guarantee. Here, another comparison is useful. In the Great Depression, when the banks looked unhealthy, depositors rushed to withdraw their money, depleting many banks’ cash reserves and leading to their failure. (That was a kind of contagion, too.) So to prevent future “bank runs” the federal government created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to reassure Americans that their money was safe.
That’s exactly what the European Union is trying to do. It has created a trillion-dollar emergency fund to stand behind Greek debt in exchange for draconian requirements for Greece to raise taxes and cut spending. This will delay, but not dodge, a default in Greece. An austerity shock will shrink the Greek economy, depress income, hurt tax revenues and increase the country’s debt burden as a percentage of GDP (a key indicator for investors). The emergency fund might be big enough to solve an isolated Greek crisis, but it is not big enough to save Greece and inoculate the contagion that could spread to larger countries. In other words, the Eurozone is not strong enough to back up all of its weak member states’ endangered promises. As a result, Greece will almost certainly default on its debt and might face the possibility of dropping the euro.
Greece – United States – Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation – Great Depression – Gross domestic product
Since its launch in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has taken… let’s see… <counting on fingers>… carry the two… about a gazillion pictures of the sky. Not all of them are gorgeous, and not all of them are news-breaking, but an awful lot are really cool but don’t get any press.
That’ll change now. The folks at the European Space Agency side of Hubble Central have created a new feature: the Hubble Picture of the Week. This is pretty much what it sounds like: a new, way cool picture posted once a week. They’ve posted the first three already, like this one:
Click to embiggen. That’s the planetary nebula IC4634, a star that was once much like the Sun, but is now at the end of its life, throwing off great gusts of gas in its final paroxysms before fading away as a white dwarf.
The galaxy image above is another one, NGC 2082, a pretty, face-on spiral about 60 million light years away. I worked on Hubble data for a long time, and I saw a lot of images that should be seen by more people, but there simply wasn’t a way to do it back then. With this new HST PotW, I bet a lot of those will get wider acknowledgment now.
Tip o’ the lens cap to astronomer, my friend, and sometime dance partner Lars Christian Lindberg.
Uma das montadoras chinesas, chamada Brilliance, retornará para a Europa agora que possui um distribuidor próprio. Serão exportados seus modelos BS4 e BS6 para o mercado europeu, agora que estão certos de conseguirem respeitar as regras de emissão que o mercado europeu exige.
O novo distribuidor da Brilliance se chama Shenhua Europe GmbH, e vai ser responsável pelas operações, exportações e fornecimento de peças para os modelos europeus da Brilliance. A Shenhua terá sede na Alemanha e vai ser comandada pelo antigo gerente europeu da Hyundai, Eberhard Niering.
O mercado chinês, como podemos ver, está crescendo bastante. Já são os maiores fabricantes de carros do mundo e planejam expandir seus horizontes. Quando eles chegarão em solo brasileiro para colocar seus modelos baratos à venda? Seria uma vantagem para os consumidores?
Via | Autocar
For our latest mission, we brought the movie Ghostbusters to life in the reading room of the main branch of the New York Public Library. The 1984 movie begins with a scene in the very same room, so we figured it was time for the Ghostbusters to make an encore appearance.
A lot of folks are calling out ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet for his claim that buying European government debt on the secondary market is not the same as quantitative easing.
Yesterday John Hussman called him out, noting that despite plans to “sterilize” the purchases by withdrawing liquidity, there’s still the phenomenon of rotating the ECB’s balance sheet away from healthy debt to toxic debt.
BofA’s Jeffrey Rosenberg (via ZeroHedge) sees the same thing:
We believe undermining the Euros valuation vs. the dollar stands the threat of indirect debt monetization of Greek and other periphery debt. Despite its claims to the contrary, today’s ECB announcement on operational details of its Securities Markets Programme of direct secondary market purchases of sovereign debt suggests the possibility the ECB could end up effectively sterilizing its own sterilization. This occurs as the term deposits used for sterilizing the EUR16.5bn of purchases last week itself are eligible as collateral against ECB repo liquidity. To us that means that the liquidity drain of collecting deposits from banks could be effectively unwound in the scenario whereby the bank used those term deposits as collateral against ECB repo lending, a possibility explicitly permitted in today’s announcement. While we believe such a scenario is highly unlikely, the perception it creates of debt monetization nevertheless is the larger issue to the near term outlook for the Euro, in our view.
The only thing mitigating the likelihood of “reprisals” is the fact that the Germans already know they’re getting screwed.
Remember, they call themselves the “schmucks of Europe” (or at least the famous Bild headline did) because they’re bailing everyone else out.
Join the conversation about this story »
Three people died while 21 are wounded in a recent attack of a suicide car bomber in Kabul, Afghanistan. However, there were others more rushed to private hospitals. A police officer witnessed the explosion and saw an Associated Press correspondent at the site. It was the first major strike since the attack last February 26 that left 16 people dead – six Indians and 10 Afghans. Associated Press reports the presence of a public bus and four utility vehicles that had no markings indicating them as American. The said targets were U.S. vehicles parked around government buildings. Policemen have arrested suspected bombers before but were caught unaware this time. They are alerted to observe a more tightened security and search.
No related posts.
Filed under: Plants/Manufacturing, Honda
Honda may still be dreaming the impossible dream, but it’s not helping the company’s new HondaJet get off the ground. According to Automotive News, the world won’t be seeing the aircraft until 2012. Once upon a time, the Japanese company had planned to take to the skies as soon as this year, but two rounds of delays have pushed that date back by a heady 24 months. The site doesn’t say exactly what caused the setback other than a few component issues.
The HondaJet carries an MSRP of $3.9 million and is slated for production in Greensboro, North Carolina. That is, so long as the company can get its ducks in a row.
[Source: Automotive News – Sub. Req.]
Grounded: HondaJet delayed again due to component delays originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 18 May 2010 08:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Ahhh. Remember that first day of college? Young. Naive. You think you can change the 
world. Then, your parents start bugging you about choosing a career and so you major in business and leave the world-changing ideas in the past.
But do you have to choose one or the other? Can you get your business degree and then set off to save the world? You can if your professor is Dr. Frank-Martin Belz or Ken Peattie, the co-authors of Sustainability Marketing: A Global Perspective.
Released just 10 months ago, the textbook has already sold 1,500 copies and been adopted by universities in the United States, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Austria and more. Sales have been “far more than we expected or the publisher calculated,” said Dr. Belz, Professor at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen.
The Courier Mail reports that Queensland farmers continue to be unhappy about coal seam gas developments on mining land – Surat Basin farmers call for moratorium on coal seam gas mining.
MORE than 500 farmers who attended a protest meeting called for the government to place a moratorium on coal seam gas mining.
Growers lined up one kilometre of farm machinery at a paddock at Cecil Plains west of Toowoomba in a show of strength to demonstrate they are capable of blocking mining company access to their land.
The farmers face up to 40,000 gas wells being drilled across some of the state’s best food-producing land.
Protest organiser Dave Armstrong said famers were gearing up for the fight of their lives. “What other choice do we have?” Mr Armstrong asked. “They have put us in a corner.”
A woman in Brooklyn has accused a local grocery store of slapping a new “sell by” sticker over an expired one in order to unload some old poultry that was past its prime.
She told the The Brooklyn Paper:
I got it home [on May 12], cut off the wrapping and smelled something wrong immediately,” Viljoen told us. “The ‘sell by’ date on the label said May 16. … But the dopes left the original ‘sell by’ sticker underneath it: May 5.”
The store, a Key Foods supermarket, received poor marks in April from state inspectors, but a more recent inspection turned up nothing suspect. That may be why the store manager felt bold enough to tell the Brooklyn Paper that the customer was just a gold digger:
“People try to make money that way,” said Manager Edwin Rodriguez. “It’s absolutely not true. The inspector came in the next day, and everything’s fine.”
“Unfair fowl! Heights Key Food appears to have doctored ‘sell-by’ date on a chicken” [The Brooklyn Paper] (Thanks to Rob!)
While it’s true that there are already few ebook readers for Android (Aldiko), they fundamentally lack the access to Amazon’s ebooks Kindle editions library. Soon it will be possible because Amazon is set to release the long awaited free Kindle for Android app. You can register now to be notified of the release.
The features sound promising. For example, you’ll be able to view the annotations you created on your Kindle, computer, or other Kindle-compatible device. Yes, you’ll be able to read a ebook on multiple devices which is a great news. The bad news is that Kindle newspapers and magazines will not be available on Kindle for Android.
It will work on all devices from Android 1.6 and will required a SD card, probably to store the ebooks. Features include:
Read Kindle books on your Android phone
- Get the best reading experience available on your Android phone. No Kindle required
- Access your Kindle books even if you don’t have your Kindle with you
- Automatically synchronizes your last page read and annotations between devices with Whispersync
- Adjust the text size, add bookmarks, and view the annotations you created on your Kindle, computer, or other Kindle-compatible device
- Read in portrait or landscape mode
- Tap on either side of the screen or flick to turn pages
Shop for books in the Kindle Store optimized for your Android phone
- Buy a book from the Kindle Store optimized for your Android phone and get it auto-delivered wirelessly
- Search and browse more than 500,000 books, including more than 96 of 110 New York Times bestsellers. If you are a non-U.S. customer, book availability may vary
- Find New York Times® Best Sellers and new releases from $9.99
- Get free book samples. Read the beginning of books for free before you decide to buy
- Books you purchase can also be read on a Kindle, computer, or other Kindle-compatible mobile devices
- Kindle newspapers, magazines and blogs are currently not available on Kindle for Android
From a U.S. Central Command press release:
The United States government delivered two Bell 412 EP helicopters to the Government of Pakistan today to assist the Pakistan military in its counterinsurgency efforts.
U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Michael Nagata handed over the helicopters to Brig. Gen. Tippu Karim, 101 Army Aviation commander, during a signing ceremony at Qasim Army Air Base near Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
By sheer coincidence, Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post reports that CIA Director Leon Panetta and Jim Jones, President Obama’s national security adviser, are headed to Pakistan to urge Pakistan’s civilian, military and intelligence leadership to take greater action against extremists in the tribal areas in the wake of the failed Times Square car bomb attempt. National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer explains to DeYoung, “It is time to redouble our efforts with our allies in Pakistan to close this safe haven and create an environment where we and the Pakistani people can lead safe and productive lives.”
So do with those helicopters as you will…
When Exes Attack: The Travis McCoy Edition…..A blast from the past is about to put a damper on Katy Perry’s wedded bliss with funnyman fiance Russell Brand.
Gym Class Heroes frontman Travis McCoy dated Perry on and off for more than three years before the couple finally called time on their sometimes-stormy romance in April 2009, and the musician still feels a twinge of something — jealously maybe? — when he thinks of how quickly the “I Kissed A Girl” hitmaker bounced back from their split and ended up engaged following a whirlwind romance with Brand.
Now Travis is channeling his heartbreak in the form of mixtape titled Forgetting Katy Perry — a new solo project inspired by Brand’s hit movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The 2008 comedy centers around a man struggling to recover from a breakup.
“I think it was inspired by that whole situation. At the end of the day, I think anyone who has been thorough some s**t can relate to (the music). It could have been about my girlfriends before, but I’m (going to) keep it real with you, it was definitely about Katy Perry. I definitely felt a certain way about the whole situation. Having a year and a half to reflect on it, you start questioning everything,” Travis confides in a new interview with Complex.com.
McCoy says he’s no longer in touch with Katy, but he couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at her rebound love affair with the British comic.
“The timelines… she got engaged so quickly after. I was like, ‘Really?’ I had to sit back and reassess what was really going on. After you have some time to start thinking about it, you start putting things together. It’s been a year and a half. I’m over it,” Travis reflects.
“I’m sure she knows. The mixtape is not airing out any dirty laundry. If anything, it’s me poking fun at myself. If you’ve seen Forgetting Sarah Marshall, that’s my life. I’m that dude.”
Harvard Law School doctoral candidate Lisa Kelly has been named one of the 15 recipients of this year’s Trudeau Foundation scholarships, presented by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation.
The prestigious doctoral award offers each Trudeau Scholar up to $180,000 to advance his or her research into critical issues such as labor, mental health, conflict resolution, and the environment, by subsidizing tuition fees and living expenses and allowing recipients to travel for research and scholarly networking and knowledge dissemination. The scholarships are among the most coveted awards of their kind in Canada.
A native of Fernie, British Columbia, Kelly will focus her doctoral research on the legal regulation of children and adolescents at home, at school, and in detention.
In addition to receiving financial support, Trudeau Scholars benefit from the expertise and knowledge of Trudeau fellows and mentors, highly accomplished individuals in the Trudeau Foundation community who are leaders in both academic and nonacademic settings. Interaction with nonacademic milieus, including public policy networks and the public at large, is a key component of the Trudeau Scholarship program.
For more information about Kelly and her research, visit the Trudeau Foundation Web site.
Tyler Hamilton has an article in the Toronto Star about a study into the potential of geothermal energy in Canada – Geothermal could meet Canada’s power needs.
Canada could technically meet all its electricity needs and dramatically lower greenhouse-gas emissions if it moved aggressively to develop enhanced geothermal power projects, according to the first comprehensive assessment of the country’s deep geothermal resources.
The study, published online in the Journal of Geophysics and Geoengineering, reports on the potential of using enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) to tap hot temperatures kilometres below the earth’s surface as a way of generating clean electricity.
It found that the most promising Canadian sites are located in parts of British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan at depths ranging from 3.5 to 6.5 kilometres. Drill deeper, however, and the potential extends right across the country – including parts of Ontario.
“At 10 kilometres we can expect EGS temperatures in the 150 to 200 degrees C range across most of Canada, except some areas of the Canadian shield,” wrote Stephen Grasby, a geologist with the Geological Survey of Canada, and co-author Jacek Majorowicz, an Alberta-based geothermal consultant.
“Given the widespread distribution of geothermal energy, and the high energy content, the potential geothermal resource in Canada is significant,” they concluded.
The findings aren’t surprising – I’ve been pounding on this drum for several years now. But it’s encouraging to finally see it expressed in a peer-reviewed journal. Canada, shamefully, is the only country along the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire that has yet to switch on a conventional geothermal power plant.
The irony is that Canada is home to several of the continent’s leading geothermal power developers. Problem is they’re mostly developing in Nevada, California, Nicaragua, Iceland, Chile – everywhere except Canada, where no formal development program exists.
Maybe now the federal and provincial governments will take the issue more seriously.
This new Canadian study comes three years after the release of a groundbreaking U.S. study led by experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their research suggested EGS in the United States could realistically supply about 100,000 megawatts of power generation capacity by 2050, assuming the proper policies and R&D investments were committed.
For comparison, 100,000 megawatts – or 100 gigawatts—is roughly 80 per cent of Canada’s current power generation capacity. It’s about one-twelfth of current U.S. capacity. And the MIT-led group predicted it could be built less expensively than building new nuclear plants or investing in carbon capture and storage technologies for coal plants.
