Category: News

Mini Ice Cream Cookie Cups (Pillsbury)

Oh no! News organizations everywhere are reporting a backlash against the winner of the Pillsbury Bake-Off. Mini Ice Cream Cookie Cups earned a cool $1 million and guest appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show for their creator, Sue Compton. The New Jersey mom combined refrigerated sugar cookie dough baked in muffin tins with chocolate, jam and ice cream for the kind of treat that, well, any 6-year-old could make.

And there’s the problem. Dissenters are arguing the face that these sugar balls don’t involve any actual cooking.

The San Jose Mercury News has a particularly amusing recounting of the kerfuffle.

I’m thinking: People. Get a life. It’s the Pillsbury Bake-Off.

I’m also thinking: Mmmm….mini ice cream cookie cups….

What are you thinking?

MINI ICE CREAM COOKIE CUPS

Prep Time: 20 Min

Total Time: 45 Min

Makes: 24 tartlets

INGREDIENTS:

1 package (16 oz) refrigerated sugar cookies (24 cookies)

4 teaspoons sugar

1/3 cup walnuts, finely …

GUANTANAMO BAY — Sometime during this hearing, Omar Khadr’s lawyers intend to call as a witness someone identified only as “Interrogator #1.” Interrogator #1, his lawyers told Col. Patrick Parrish, the military judge here, will testify to personally threatening Khadr with rape during Khadr’s detention at Bagram Air Field in 2002. But before Interrogator #1 ever says a word in Parrish’s proceedings, the prosecution got to work undermining the credibility of his account.

Navy Capt. John Murphy, one of the prosecutors, asked FBI Special Agent Robert Fuller, who interrogated Khadr six times at Bagram in October 2002, if Fuller ever heard Khadr discuss “rape, being shipped to Egypt” or anything of the sort. ”No, I did not,” Fuller replied.

Did Khadr have the opportunity to raise such threats with Fuller? “Certainly at the beginning or end of interviews or even during interviews,” Fuller said. “But we typically asked him at the end of interviews well-being questions.”

It is unknown why Interrogator #1 plans on potentially incriminate himself on Khadr’s behalf. The defense claims that another pseudonymous intelligence operative, known as Interrogator #3, materially misrepresented a report that would have corroborated Interrogator #1’s account and discovered that misrepresentation in a Justice Department inspector general’s report.

Unless you don’t have a TV, you’ve probably seen the new ads for General Motors where GM CEO Ed Whitacre touts the amazing rebound of the car manufacturer, and how they repaid their “government loan in full, with interest, five years ahead of the original schedule.” Yeah, well that might not be exactly true.

Points out Daniel Howes in the Detroit News:

What he doesn’t tell viewers is that a) the repayment of $4.7 billion came from taxpayer funds advanced to GM and b) that the feds still hold 61 percent of GM — valued at something like $43 billion.

The ad has also caught the attention of those on Capitol Hill. Yesterday, Rep. Darrell Issa wrote a letter to Whitacre expressing his misgivings:

We are concerned that GM, under your leadership, has come dangerously close to committing fraud, and that you might have colluded with the United States Treasury to deceive the American public.. If someone relies on your statements in the future… your false statements may expose GM to millions of dollars in damages, further reducing the value of the taxpayer-owned company.

But an unnamed GM exec defended the TV spot to the Detroit News. “We do have to walk a fine line,” said the executive. “You’re right: In the ad, we did not say we repaid the loans but we still owe $40 billion…. We didn’t say anything false.”

Do you think the ads are intentionally misleading?

GM ad glosses over the reality [Detroit News]

Almost exactly one month ago, Verizon added Push-to-talk support to the BlackBerry Tour! Hurray! Unfortunately, it cost $5 extra a month. Un-hurray.

It looks like Verizon might be having a bit of trouble getting people to sign up — or, at least, they want to kickstart the number of people using it. They just dropped the price down to an always-welcome amount: free. But you’ve gotta act (somewhat) fast.

In an e-mail sent to Tour owners today, Verizon says that they’re making Push-to-talk “Free for life” (in other words, as long as you keep up your contract) for all BlackBerry Tour owners that add the option by June 30th. So what happens after that? Will Verizon have a big enough Tour push-to-talk users in place to be able to sell the feature to newcomers, or will they just keep it free? It’s anyone’s guess at this point — but if I was a Tour owner, I wouldn’t risk waiting to find out.

[Via CrackBerry]

Jodie Sweetin — the now two-time divorcee who grew up before our eyes playing Stephanie Tanner on the ’80s & ’90s sitcom Full House –– is expecting her second child with a man she’s been dating for just a few months, The National Enquirer spills in its May 10 edition.

Jodie, 28, has blamed her recurrent addiction to meth and alcohol for fueling her divorce from second husband Cody Herpin. Now clean and sober, Sweetin’s managed to rebound with Hollywood DJ Morty Coyle in a whirlwind romance that has friends of the blonde concerned about her future.

“She split with Cody and moved in with her parents,” a family friend divulges. “She slipped back into the Hollywood club scene where she met Morty, quickly fell in love — and got pregnant. Now they’re talking about getting married.”

Morty and Jodie will welcome their first child together in July — much to the chagrin of Sweetin’s set designer ex Cody. He has a 2-year-old daughter, Zoie, with the former child star and although the exes have successfully managed to share custody in peace, Herpin tells The Enquirer that Jodie lacks the skills to remain sober while coping with motherhood.

As long as she’s off drugs and taking good care of Zoie, we’re not sure that what Jodie does with her personal life is any of her ex’s concern, but let’s hear him out….

“I’m totally disgusted with Jodie right now,” spits Cody, who just learned of Jodie’s relationship with Morty and her subsequent pregnancy a few weeks ago. “Raising a child takes a lot of time and patience. Jodie hasn’t put in nearly enough time with our daughter — and now she’s having another child! I find it hard to believe that Jodie will keep upher sobriety with the choices she keeps making,” he added. “To have a child with somebody is no small thing. Hopefully, Morty realizes having a child with Jodie is a full-time job. That’s something I had to learn the hard way.”

The simplest way to print from one of these mobile devices is not to print at all: it’s to do what most users probably do, which is to e-mail yourself the photo, link, or note in question and then wait until you get to a Mac or PC, retrieve the e-mail, and either access the URL or print the attached photo or the contents of the message. Though simple, this is not an especially easy or elegant solution. Its biggest merit is that it works consistently and reliably, and almost ensures you don’t lose vital information.

Fortunately, third-party app makers have come out with a number of products designed specifically for printing from your iPhone. Some of these apps have been upgraded many times since their introduction—including new hybrid versions that run on the iPad as well as Apple’s other devices.

via Printing from your iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad | Printers | iPhone Central | Macworld.

Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite (R-Fla.) waited until today to announce her retirement from Florida’s 5th District, giving potential successors no time to file the necessary paperwork by the state’s noon deadline. Well, except for her chosen successor, that is.

Brown-Waite released a statement today citing medical concerns (specifically her pancreas) as the reason for her withdrawal.

As I have prepared for my campaign, I have been troubled by persistent health problems and have come to the disappointing and sad conclusion that I cannot run for reelection.

And she also took time to announce her heir apparent, Hernando County Sheriff Richard Nugent. “This past week Rich told me he would stand in my place for election to Congress,” Brown-Waite said in the statement.

It doesn’t appear that this decision was long in the making. Brown-Waite’s announcement came less than a day after her campaign team announced on its website an endorsement from Maggie’s List PAC, which promotes fiscally conservative women for office.

Jimm Phillips contributed to this story.

H/T Swing State Project

The Dow is near its lows of the day — over 100 points — with Goldman Sachs (GS) leading the nosedive.

This is beginning to feel like one of those Fridays, where everyone is wisely taking a little bit off the table before a big weekend.

And this should be a big weekend.

The oil slick won’t take the weekend off. Neither will the Greece negotiations.

And it will be along weekend. Several foreign markets will be closed on Monday. Anything can happen over three days.

Don’t miss: Here’s who’s getting pounded when Greece collapses >

Join the conversation about this story »

In a Recovery Act cabinet meeting yesterday, US Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Vice President Biden announced a large amount of research funding for three different types of advanced projects directly related to the future of transportation. The funding comes from the Advanced Research Projects Agency — Energy (ARPA-E) stimulus funds and will go to 37 different institutions in 17 states.

The projects will attack three goals: using microbes and electricity to directly convert materials into biofuels (“electrofuels”), developing a new generation of low-cost, ultra-high energy density batteries, and creating revolutionary new carbon capture technologies to make coal power zero emissions.

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A few weeks ago, Citigroup and the real-estate investment firm Redwood Trust announced they had organized the sale of new mortgage-backed securities. They reported that they had picked 255 high-quality jumbo mortgages — mortgages too big to be backstopped by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — issued by Citigroup in California to back the financial instruments. Every borrower put down more than 20 percent in cash, and the average remaining balance on each loan was $933,000 — these borrowers, Redwood said, were rich and cash-rich. Redwood pegged the value of the Sequoia Mortgage Trust at $222.4 million and prepared to bring it to market.

But this is the first private issuance of mortgage-backed securities in more than two years — and it has sparked a market frenzy. Redwood Trust’s Brett Nicholas proclaimed, “This transaction has broken the ice in the private mortgage securitization market, which has been essentially frozen since 2008.” Investor demand was high enough that Redwood Trust cut its yield. And citing a turnaround in the private mortgage securities market, Wells Fargo said it is rebuilding its housing finance team.

Gearing up for the market reawakening, Redwood hired Moody’s to rate the securities — expecting a AAA rating, meaning no more of a likelihood of default than the U.S. government. Moody’s delivered. But then, its chief rival in the credit ratings business, Standard & Poors, without having been hired to assess the Redwood mortgage-backed deal, decided it had something to say. On Wednesday, it released a note saying that it did not believe the Redwood residential mortgage-backed securities met its AAA standards. These “jumbo” loans were riskier, it said. Some of the loans have periods where the mortgage-holder only pays the interest rate, and some become adjustable-rate after five years. “If mortgage rates rise, property values remain flat, and the extension of credit is limited, we believe borrowers may face difficulties refinancing,” S&P said.

But the point of this post is not to question whether the Redwood deal is good or not, or whether the unfreezing of the private mortgage-backed securities market is good or not, or whether anyone should care about this deal or not. It is to point out the inanity of the credit ratings business. These Redwood securities have received more scrutiny than any other mortgage deal in recent memory. Investors and the press have poured over them with a fine-tooth comb. They have ginned up hundreds of inches of newspaper space, and hundreds of blog posts and a number of research reports. Presumably, the financial sophisticates buying up the Redwood securities pool have done extensive homework on everything from the risks of these precise Californian jumbo mortgages to the possibility of housing finance bills changing the marketplace down the line.

Nobody really needed the credit ratings agencies to analyze this deal, per se. But the credit ratings agencies did analyze it and… came up with different conclusions. It is as good an argument as any for ignoring the ratings and doing one’s own due diligence. And I wonder, since the financial regulatory reform bill does little to reform the way credit ratings work, whether that might become more common — for sophisticated investors to not care about (and therefore not demand) ratings on smaller and highly transparent financial instruments.

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

As dorky character Ned Ryerson said in movie “Groundhog Day”: “Am I right or am I right? Or am I right? Am I right?” Apple is shuttering the Lala service on May 31. While pundits galore said Apple was moving into the streaming music business, I asserted something else: That Apple bought Lala to improve music discovery and to combat Google music search.

Apple announced the Lala acquisition in December, when I blogged “Lala could make iTunes’ Genius smarter.” As I explained then, the acquisition is about “improving iTunes music discovery and competitively combating Google search.” About two months before Apple bought Lala, Google improved its music search capabilities, which included free streams from various services, including Lala.

I sometimes complain about how bloated iTunes has become, but Apple can’t be much faulted for music discovery. The iTunes player-store combination is simply one of the best mechanism’s for new music discovery. However, Google music search put that discovery and underlying revenue stream at risk. Googling, say, Green Day or Ke$ha leads to free Lala streams of four songs. Lala charges for streams, too — just 10 cents, which can be applied to purchase of the track.

Or Lala did. The service has stopped taking new subscribers, according to a notice on the Website: “Lala is shutting down. The Lala service will be shut down on May 31st, 2010. Unfortunately, we are no longer accepting new users.” By buying Lala, Apple set the stage to remove a cheaper streaming alternative, with option to buy, backed by the power of Google search.

But Apple also acquired technology it can use to improve music discovery. One option: Within iTunes, offer one full-length stream per track, instead of the 30-second sample. Streaming then wouldn’t be a separate business but means of improving the music purchase experience and even generate more sales.

In the days and weeks that followed the Lala acquisition announcement, commentator after commentator pontificated about how Apple would move into the streaming music business, ala Lala. But that business makes no sense for Apple, which generates revenue from selling music — not giving it away or streaming it on the cheap. More importantly, streaming offers limited benefits to iPhone OS devices. Apple already sells low-margin content to generate sales of high-margin devices. Streaming doesn’t make sense, particularly when Apple has done so well with content people own — or in the case of movies, sometimes rent.

However, a TV subscription service would make sense because of its potential to disrupt how people consume the content. Hulu shows there is demand. If Apple offered the long-rumored TV subscription service for the rumored 30 bucks a month — heck, even $50 — I’d cancel my AT&T U-verse account the same day. Cheap portable TV is the logical next stage beyond DVRs. Apple has the devices to do just that, whether the content is streamed, downloaded with DRM protection — or both.

For Apple, a TV or other video subscription service is a more logical use of Lala technology and staff than music streaming. I would watch for TV subscriptions long before Apple would set up a music streaming service. So that makes a third major reason — and one I didn’t give in December — for Apple acquiring Lala.

I think Apple Watchers don’t seriously enough regard how big Apple’s plans may be for Lala. In December, I explained:

There is something about this deal that reminds me of late 2000. That summer, Apple released new iMacs missing something: CD-RW drives. Windows PC manufacturers were going CD-RW, but not Apple, which stuck with DVD drives. In August 2000, I wrote for CNET News.com: Apple misses the tune on CD-RW drives.” The Mac community flamed me. I got more than 200 e-mails (CNET didn’t have comments back then), most of which essentially called me an idiot for not understanding that Apple was about movies not music.

Not long after my CNET News.com story posted, Apple bought SoundJam, which technology became the core of iTunes, which Apple announced in January 2001. The first iPod followed about 10 months later. My intuition is that Lala could be as big for Apple as SoundJam was — and it’s not for running a streaming music service but something much more.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

[JURIST] Germany’s Federal Court of Justice ruled Thursday that the use of thumbnail preview images pulled from websites by Google is not a violation of copyright law. The original lawsuit was brought against Google by an artist who had images of her work pulled from her website and displayed on Google’s image search index without her express permission. The court stated that because the plaintiff had not used adequate protections on her website to block Google from pulling the data in question, she was implicitly agreeing to the use of her images by other websites. The court also indicated that in light of last month’s ruling at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) that, even if they had found that Google’s use of the images constituted a violation of copyright law, Google would only have been liable for damages if someone posted the artist’s images without her consent. Managing counsel for Google Germany, Arnd Haller, said that with the court’s ruling “News websites on the Internet, online providers of pictures and posters, artists, photographers, designers and many more who depend on the web for their livelihoods can go on using the service as a significant distribution platform.”
The German copyright case was one of several pending against Google. Earlier this month, several visual artist organizations in the US filed a class action suit alleging copyright infringement resulting from the company’s book scanning project. Last month, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) urged a federal court to reject the proposed class action settlements in a separate copyright suit between text authors and Google due to copyright and antitrust concerns. In February, a federal judge heard arguments on the proposed settlement but did not indicate when a ruling can be expected.

It’s WES week, so you know there’s plenty to talk about in the BlackBerry world. We did see two devices announces, ones that we’ve been anticipating for months. CDMA carriers will get the BlackBerry Bold 9650 next month, while GSM carriers will get the Pearls 9100 and 9105. That’s not the big topic of discussion, though. No, that would be OS 6.0.

So click on over here to hear the BBGeekcast (10 min, 4 sec)

And don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you won’t miss future episodes!

You can also subscribe to the BBGeekcast in iTunes.

Highlights include:
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Sempre que vemos um supercarro, daqueles que provavelmente nunca teremos em nossas vidas, se acidentar ou algo do tipo, bate uma pena tão grande no peito… Pelo menos eu sou assim. Me senti dessa forma quando vi essa Ferrari F430 Spider em chamas no meio da rua em Singapura.

Pelo que parece, o carro estava há alguns dias atrás sendo conduzido normalmente, e não existem maiores informações sobre a causa do incêncio. Mesmo com a tentativa da Defesa Civil de Singapura para tentar salvar o veículo, o carro foi incendiado completamente, nem mesmo as placas do carro sobraram.

Felizmente, o motorista da F430 conseguiu sair do carro a tempo, e não se feriu. Ao menos externamente. Imagino a dor que o dono de uma Ferrari de R$ 1,5 milhão, sente ao ver sua máquina se reduzir a meras ferragens carbonizadas.

Via | Top Speed

As weird as it may sound (or not) a Ferrari F430 Spider was caught bursting into flames somewhere in Singapore. The exquisite Spider reportedly caught fire on April 28th at 11:56 am (local time) and until now, there are no specific details available as to how the commuter charred to ashes. Luckily there was no one injured in the mishap but despite quick efforts by the Singapore Civil Defense Force to save it from burning completely, the final result was the same. Brings tears to our eyes.

Let’s see a show of hands. How many of you know what I’m talking about? Yes, this was the call to action for Speedy Gonzales, the fastest cartoon mouse (and before the lawyers get involved, Speedy Gonzales and Looney Tunes are trademarks and or trade names of Warner Brothers. All rights reserved). A direct translation of it means: Up! Up! Go on! Go on! And he’d usually yell it out before speeding off to his next adventure. I can still hear myself reciting it when I drove my very first sports car on the freeway during the early morning hours oh so many moons ago.

Now I chant it under my breath when I see Concurrent CFD in action. This type of simulation software is named Concurrent because CFD is fully embedded in CAD; as a result, you can conduct fluid flow and heat transfer analysis throughout a product’s design process. When you’re ready to analyze your new model, you simply prepare it for analysis right there and then inside CAD without transferring your data to another software or person. There’s been a fair amount of press on it lately so I won’t go into too much detail here. But the reason why Concurrent CFD reminds me of Speedy is that Concurrent CFD can reduce simulation time by as much as 65 to 75 percent in compare to traditional CFD tools. ¡Ándale! ¡Ándale!

Analysis results on an LED light. Image courtesy of Voxdale.

While all markets and products are time sensitive to a certain degree, the electronics market seems to be an extremely fast moving one.  Every day we are bombarded by ads showcasing the latest/newest/shiniest mobile phone. TVs are getting bigger and thinner by the hour. In short, time is of essence for companies developing any electronic product. So it would be helpful to do thermal validation and optimize airflow as quickly as possible. If you’re involved in electronics design and are interested in how Concurrent CFD can help, then I’d like to invite you to the Concurrent CFD for Electronics Cooling Applications online presentation. During this 45-minute presentation Travis Mikajaniec will give you a bit more background information on Concurrent CFD and show you how to take advantage of it to make your life a whole lot easier. Hope to see you there.
Until next time,
Nazita

The company that brought you the comedy gold of Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates gabbing about footwear has solved humor forever, the end. Meet Microsoft’s education competency guide to humor, and please remember to tip your waitress: More »