An eight-minute riff-and-rip from Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) fanboy Jon Stewart on the company’s role in giving Gizmodo journalist Jason Chen’s “the meth lab treatment” and sending security to the iPhone seller’s house; “Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) was supposed to be the evil one now you’re busting down doors in Palo Alto while Commandant Gates is ridding the world of mosquitoes. What the f* is going on?” Full clip embedded below.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Appholes | ||||
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Whether you’re a customer or a critic, Steve Jobs wants you to know once and for all why he does not allow Flash, made by his very old and dear friend Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE), on iPhones, iPods and iPad. In a 1,671-word message posted in Apple.com Hot News section. Jobs smacks down claims that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is banning Flash for competitive reasons and that Apple is a closed system.
The upshot: “Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. … Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.” (Translation: nothing gets between us and our Hanes.)
Some highlights:
—Who’s really closed?: “Adobe’s Flash products are 100 percent proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.” Jobs admits Apple’s OS is proprietary but “Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. … Apple even creates open standards for the web.” (Translation: it’s ok for Apple to be closed as long as we’re open about it.)
—‘Full web’: Jobs brushes off the complaint that Apple doesn’t allow access to the “full web” because some 75 percent of video is done in Flash. But Jobs points to YouTube’s availability on the i-devices; that’s roughly 40 percent of all web video and that most video is available in the “more modern” H.264 format. Tossing in a laundry list of sites with video that’s viewable, he insists “iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.” (Translation: so what if you see blue boxes instead of video a lot on my devices? You can see the video I think you should see.)
True, you can’t play Flash games either. “Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.” (Translation: You don’t need those common Flash games when you have ours to play.)
—Touch: Running Flash on the i-team wouldn’t add anything because it doesn’t take touch into account. Flash was designed for mice, not fingers. “Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?” (Translation: Don’t rehab, rebuild.)
—Just say no to x-platform development: Jobs goes into great detail why cross-platform development is bad and the kinds of problems it can cause by being beyond Apple’s control. “It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.” (Translation: Nobody puts Mac OS X in the corner.)
Back to you, Adobe.
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One day after union talks broke down, the Rell administration and state employee unions are still at odds over the failure to approve an early retirement program for state employees.
The two sides cannot even agree on what happened at the meeting. The Rell administration blames the unions, while the unions blame Rell.
Rell says flatly that the unions summarily rejected the ERIP, but the unions say it’s more complicated than that.
‘The talks broke down last night because the administration’s representatives left the room,” said Matt O’Connor, a spokesman for the State Employee Bargaining Agent Coalition, known as SEBAC. “I was there. I was in the room while both sides talked. I was in the room while the union leaders caucused.”
The union leaders had met for about 45 minutes in a pre-meeting caucus before budget director Robert Genuario, chief negotiator Saranne Murray of the Shipman and Goodwin law firm, and others arrived at the Council 4/AFSCME union hall in New Britain. O’Connor estimated that there were 20 representatives of the Rell administration and 30 union representatives in the room.
Republicans say that an estimated 8,000 state employees would be eligible for the ERIP, and an estimated 2,000 would take the retirement package. If 1,000 positions are re-filled, the state workforce would then drop by 1,000 positions at an estimated savings of $65 million per year.
Rell’s supporters said the union leaders were adamant that they didn’t want to talk about anything but the ERIP.
“Never said that,” O’Connor said. “What we did say was we should be talking about the ERIP. … We did say we wanted to talk about our 18-point plan – our cost-savings proposal. There are immediate cost savings. There are cost savings that are much more long-term in nature.”
Regarding the union’s contention that the Rell administration “stormed out” of the meeting, Rell’s supporters say that Genuario, who is known for being calm, cool and collected, remained that way Monday night. Some insiders say it was Murray who made the first move to leave the meeting after saying “we’ll take that as a no” on the ERIP.
At the meeting, the unions were asking for numbers to show exactly what would happen to state services if the ERIP is approved and if, for example, 1,000 state employees left their jobs. In addition, they wanted to know what would happen to the unfunded liability in the state pension fund.
“That shouldn’t be that tough to produce,” O’Connor told Capitol Watch. “It shouldn’t have been that tough to show up with some numbers yesterday. … This is a serious proposal. You come with your arguments. … We did ask some actuaries to give us some estimates” for the union.
“We didn’t see the details of the plan until last night,” O’Connor said. “Maybe this should have been presented much sooner. Maybe back in January when we first met – when we presented the 18-point plan.”
Since then, the Rell administration has sought various concessions, such as additional furlough days and additional wage freezes. Those have been rejected, and the legislature has been struggling to balance the budget for the next fiscal year before the legislative session ends at midnight on May 5.
House Republican leader Larry Cafero of Norwalk says that union leaders have been under pressure from members who want to take the early retirement incentive.
After the dust-up on Wednesday night, no further talks have been scheduled.
“We can all agree there was no agreement,” O’Connor said.
Courtesy of Hedgeye, this chart sums up quite nicely why Germans don’t want a thing to do with countries like Greece, Spain, and Portugal.
Why hitch your wagon to economies going in the exact opposite direction as yours?
Join the conversation about this story »
The Motor City’s own Kid Rock will be hosting this year’s CMT Music Awards, airing live from Nashville on June 9.
“The rumors are true – I’m hosting the CMT Awards live from Nashville on June 9th… All I can promise is I will be awesome,” the rap-rocker, who counts country stars Kellie Pickler, Sheryl Crow, and Keith Urban among his celebrity pals, penned in a message to fans posted on his website Thursday.
Rock is best known for incorporating elements of hip hop, rap metal, blues rock, southern rock, funk, and country into his music.
Article Tags: Papers Challenging AGW
The list continues to grow.
The consensus continues to collapse.
The good folks at Popular Technology are now up to 700 scholarly papers challenging the theory of man-made global warming. Here they are. Here is CFACT’s coverage of the original 450.
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A 2000-year global temperature reconstruction based on non-treering proxies (PDF) (Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Numbers 7-8, pp. 1049-1058, December 2007) – Craig Loehle
– Reply To: Comments on Loehle, “correction To: A 2000-Year Global Temperature Reconstruction Based on Non-Tree Ring Proxies” (Energy & Environment, Volume 19, Number 5, pp. 775-776, September 2008) – Craig Loehle
A Climate of Doubt about Global Warming (Environmental Geosciences, Volume 7, Issue 4, December 2000) – Robert C. Balling Jr.
A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions (PDF)(International Journal of Climatology, Volume 28, Issue 13, pp. 1693-1701, December 2007) – David H. Douglass, John R. Christy, Benjamin D. Pearson, S. Fred Singer
– Addendum to A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model Predictions (PDF)
(Submitted to the International Journal of Climatology, 2007) – David H. Douglass, John R. Christy, Benjamin D. Pearson, S. Fred Singer
Click source to see FULL report with LINKS from CFACT
Source: cfact.eu
From a distance the volatile political situation appears completely confusing and chaotic.
Upon closer inspection it only becomes more so.
It’s about democracy, corruption, traditional power structures, money, and guns. Worse yet, nobody is quite sure who is on the same team, even within the military, and many thousands of people have been killed or injured.
Here we attempt to peel back some of the layers.
We have included many videos in the following slides as supplements, feel free to skim through them as needed, they can be skimmed without losing the essence of what’s going on.
Color-themed groups whether they be red, yellow, or ‘multi-colored’ shirts have roamed the Thai capital Bangkok over last few years demanding political changes.
These range from the red shirts’ recent demand for fresh elections, to the pro-government yellow-shirt mob’s current goal of not having an election in order to protect the political party in control right now.
The red and yellow shirts have clashed on frequent occasions with both each other and security forces, causing thousands of casualties along the way and interrupting Thailand’s usual calm with sharp and sudden bouts of violence over the last couple years.
Yet oddly, most of the time life in Bangkok goes on as usual. Bars, malls, and restaurants are still packed. Most people won’t even mention the politics in your every day life.
Still, clashes and tension has become particularly severe ever since one month ago when the red shirts took over one of central Bangkok’s main shopping areas filled with five star hotels and designer brands.
Reds have been particularly enraged over an April 10th attempted crackdown by the military in another part of the city that resulted in 25 deaths including some soldiers.
The government has turned down requests for a broad multi-party investigation into the incident. We’ll touch on this complex situation further later because it says much about the entire situation, but here is a video of the event we posted previously, below. If you haven’t seen it before, beware that it gets quite graphic at the end.
Just yesterday, police and red shirts clashed again.
Red shirt protesters attempted to reinforce a new rally site beyond their main central Bangkok encampment, but were met by hundreds of soldiers who were reported to have fired both rubber and live ammunition.
Eighteen people were injured and one soldier was killed in what appeared to be a friendly fire incident.
Image: REUTERS/Kerek Wongsa
The red shirts are the ‘United Front For Democracy Against Dictatorship’ (UDD).
They were originally Thais rallying around Thailand’s previous prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his political party, who were ousted in a coup during 2006. The UDD is mostly made up of lower-income Thais from both the up-country provinces outside of Bangkok and Bangkok itself.
Thaksin’s previous sweep to power was the result of the substantial attention he paid to developing and meeting the needs of Thailand’s oft-forgotten provinces. Yet despite the red’s mostly low-income origins, make no mistake of the fact that they are backed by wealthy business and military interests centering around Thaksin’s political party which has reincarnated itself as ‘Peu Thai’, which can be translated as ‘For Thais/Thailand’.
The reds recently switched to wearing non-red clothing in order to escape police and military checkpoints and make any government crack-down much more difficult. Thus they sometimes refer to themselves as ‘multi-colored’ now.
The red shirts are opposed primarily by the pro-government yellow shirts, know as the ‘People’s Alliance for Democracy’. Note they use the term ‘democracy’ despite the fact they are trying to avoid elections right now. They essentially back the ‘Democrat Party’ who is currently in power, yet it is important to note that this party has never won an election since Thaksin was ousted, and they are closely aligned with military elements who instigated the 2006 coup.
The yellows are comprised mostly of middle and upper class royalist Thais, and infamously took over the Bangkok international airport with a huge sit-in in 2008. They are backed by business people and elites who were none too happy with the previous prime minister Thaksin’s rapid rise to wealth and fame.
Note the yellow’s have recently tried to ditch their yellow shirts and appear ‘multi-colored’, in a similar fashion to the red’s, in a bid to appear as if they represent ‘all Thais’. Thus the colors lines are becoming blurred, visibly at least, as each side tried to appear as the voice of the majority.
This is from when yellow shirts took over the Bangkok international airport, pressing for the red-shirt friendly and elected government to step down. The key moment, in terms of understanding the current conflict over holding fresh elections, is at about 1:00 where the man says he is against holding elections.
Many thousands of ‘red shirt’ protesters have created an enormous bunker zone in the commercial center of Bangkok.
This bunker zone is compete with multiple tire walls reinforced with wooden stakes and lines of red shirt ‘guards.’ Inside is an encampment sustained by all kinds of daily amenities maintained by red shirt organizers. Protesters never have to leave the site, and as a whole have already been there for weeks.
The graphic below, from the BBC, gives a sense of how large the bunkered zone is. Note the scale on the graphic. The longest red zone is about 3 kilometers long. Each main entry point has barricades and red shirt-manned checkpoints.
Despite looking rather crude in photos, this is actually a highly sophisticated operation, with substantial logistics in place, in-house television broadcast capabilities, and even security features such as red-shirt monitored surveillance cameras.
Government sources might say the crowd is only a few thousand, while sources within the zone might say it is many tens of thousands. Perhaps at times it has hit 100,000 or more, since the crowd is reported to swell at certain times of night as more supporters stream in.
There are also countless more red-shirt supporters all over the country, who have recently shown their strength by blocking military and police convoys bound for Bangkok.
Both sides are inevitably distorting the true number of red shirts in Bangkok right now, but the red shirts are undoubtedly a massive group.
If one includes their silent supporters they could easily represent the largest political constituency in Thailand since the red shirt-backed Peu Thai party has won the most votes of any party in every elections going back to Thaksin. Yellow shirts have been able to turn out in very large numbers as well, though it seems that the reds are ultimately a larger group.
One of the peculiar aspects of Thailand’s political turmoil is the way that its political protests maintain a positive, carnival-like atmosphere. Key leaders sing songs to dancing crowds and perform the equivalent of stand-up comic routines before delivering vitriolic attacks against their opposition. Bands are invited to play and it is usually a big party.
Many foreigners speak very positively about their times with the red shirts, for example, saying how friendly, caring, and festive everyone is.
This is true for vast majority of the time. Unfortunately, both sides, red and yellow, have a thuggish minority who has engaged in extreme forms of violence. There have been clashes between rival supporters as well as mysterious bomb attacks some even blame on a ‘third hand’ hidden group trying to foment instability.
Image: Links International Journal
While the red shirts may have begun as a group simply backing the previous ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and wanting his return, one shouldn’t be so quick as to write off the current conflict as simply a battle between business interests. The red shirt movement as of late has grown into something far larger.
Its rallying call has moved away from simply Thaksin Shinawatra’s past leadership and has tapped a longstanding sense of injustice felt by Thailand’s lower class citizens, especially after the 2006 coup and successive post-coup elections rendered their votes meaningless.
Thus the pro-Thaksin supporters have expanded their mandate into a broader push for democracy, and are now simply asking for fresh elections, and by doing so, have been joined by pro-democracy advocates and simply disenfranchised Thais as well.
The most visible proof of this evolution has been the way red shirts have rallied around the Thai term ‘Prai’, which means ‘commoner’ or even ‘serf’, and against the ‘Ammat’, which means ‘elite’.
In a brilliant subversion of a word that these days has insulting connotations, red shirts now call themselves “prai”, literally, “commoner”, much as marginalised American blacks pushed back by co-opting the insult “nigger”. But Thailand no longer has the great, deferential, unwashed mass on whom the old political system rested. As one commentator puts it, a typical red-shirt villager probably has a secondary education, a pick-up truck and a healthy scepticism of Bangkok officials. Mr Thaksin’s policies of universal health care, microcredit and so on, contributed to the change. But the red-shirt movement, for all that it remains inchoate, has outgrown Mr Thaksin.
This has turned into a revolution of rising expectations. And the chief expectation, as Federico Ferrara, an expert on Thailand, puts it, is to put the aristocracy back into the more ceremonial role it once occupied.
So, at the risk of over-simplifying things, it’s now a conflict between the red shirts asking for an election and the pro-government yellow shirts trying to block fresh elections due to concerns that the current political party can’t win an election. Yet neither side is squeaky clean, both have a minority which has resorted to violence, and both are backed by a nebulous alliance of business, military, and political interests….
The media has also progressively been censored over the last few years since the 2006 coup, most recently in an extreme fashion whereby the views of the current protesters, the ‘red shirts’ are now almost exclusively distributed through rebellious methods. The internet has been a substantial challenge for the government as the red shirts are well organized online with multiple redundant video channel sites the government censors can’t keep up with, twitter feeds, and even their own UDD media team. Speeches from their central Bangkok protest zone are broadcast with the video-editing quality of a well-funded television show. They appear far more tech-savvy than their pro-government competitors, perhaps because they must be due to massive Thai government censorship of most positive views towards their movement.
Here’s where things start to become particularly convoluted. The conflict isn’t simply about people vs. the military, but also involves a back-door power struggle between military leaders.
For example, the current government has said that it would consider elections in one year, which might sound reasonable from afar. Yet within the context of Thailand’s military politics it is unacceptable to the red shirt protesters due to the fact that in September of this year, if the current government stays in power, a perceived hard-line Thai general, Prayuth Ocha, could take the top slot from the more moderate current military leader Anupong Paochinda.
Red shirts worry that Prayuth would be more willing to use force against protesters in the future, while Anupong has tried to avoid a large violent crackdown on the main protest site so far. Prayuth would also be a long-term problem for the ousted Thaksin to deal with. Yet Anupong has to keep Prayuth happy to some extent despite being his superior, since he’ll require protection once forced to retire in September…
The excerpt below might help to understand the complexity of Thailand’s military situation, it is the view of New Mandala, an academic blog at the Australian National University, and is written by a researcher who claims to have gotten behind the scenes information about Thailand’s military politics. We can’t vouch for any of it, having never been close to the military back story personally, but present it as third-party opinion.
New Mandala:
But, on the military side, that reshuffle is an extremely tense matter. Anupong is the key to this delicate transition to an Army commander from Class 12. He in turn requires Prayuth’s guarantee of safety during his retirement from investigation into corruption involving the flawed GT 200 bomb detectors and the multi-million-baht airship that has proved useless in spotting insurgents during actual operations in the Deep South. This factor is central to understanding Anupong’s need to accommodate Prayuth during the present crisis. For his part, and in addition to waiting uneasily for his promotion to Army commander in June or July at the earliest, Prayuth needs to ensure in advance his dominance of the Army during at least the first year of the projected four years that he will spend in that post.
The career concerns of these two officers ladder of these two generals remain crucial to the evolving political situation. They help explain why the mass rallies of the “Prai” [red shirts, ‘commoners’] are so fierce in their retaliation against the forces of the “Ammat”. [yellow shirts, ‘elite’]
And here’s the curve ball where the entire situation goes topsy-turvy… on the April 10th military crackdown, which we showed in a previous video from Thai-FAQ, and which resulted in 25 deaths including soldiers, one pro-government faction of the military, suffered substantial casualties to its officer ranks…. some which may have been inflicted by mysterious black-clad and highly trained rogue fighters who seemed to come out of nowhere.
New Mandala:
But the forces of alliance…. [in the] Gen Prem alliance suffered the most damaging casualties in the 10 April clash at Dinso Road in front of Satri Withaya School. Promotions have for some time rewarded officers who enjoyed the benevolence of… Gen Prem, to the dissatisfaction of members of other classes and factions. Bed-ridden senior officers now recovering from injuries sustained on 10 April in the special ward on the twentieth floor of Phramongkut Hospital insist that the black-hooded snipers active that evening were well trained army officers. They were probably former members of Marine SEAL units, the Army’s special warfare unit in Lopburi, and another specially trained secret unit in the Air Force. “They rab job (were paid for a task) to kill us. They did not come to chase us away or to lend the Red Shirts moral support, but to undertake that single mission,” officers wounded on 10 April told this writer. These officers believe that what happened was not the work of a disbanded group of specialist military rangers or tahan pran but rather of more skilled mercenaries.
These gunmen succeeded in causing a serious loss to the Prem… alliance. For they killed a rising star in Queen’s Guard from Prachinburi, Col Romklao Thuwatham, and seriously injured a number of senior officers, including Burapha task force head Maj Gen Walit Rojanapakdi and his colonels. Among the seriously injured soldiers was Lt Col Kriengsak Nanthapotidet, half-brother of the late Lt Col Narongsak, a member of Class 8… Narongsak created and gave fame to the Queen’s Guard unit.
Here’s one video below that has been used to allege that a mysterious third party (referred to as a ‘the third hand’ in Thai) was involved on April 10th, obviously we can’t verify any of this. Suffice to say the situation is far more complicated than it seems and the closer you get the more layers of intrigue you unearth. What we’ve shown is just the tip of the iceberg even. The behind the scenes machinations are vast in Thailand, probably more so than in most countries’ politics.
We don’t justify any violence that has happened, but we would like to merely point out that Thailand is another example of how the political evolution towards democracy is rarely the simple affair many think it to be.
Even if new elections are held and the current situation ends peacefully, Thailand still has a very long way to go. The yellow shirts might even come out in force to argue against new elections just as the reds are arguing for them.
Let’s just hope at least that the country’s political development keeps moving forward rather than backward.
There are a lot of good intentions involved, on both sides. In fact, from our experience with people on both sides, most of the people involved, are indeed well-intentioned. We feel they just need a free media to protect them from disinformation and representative political institutions that allow people to feel they have a say and can choose their leaders in a peaceful way.
Unfortunately, neither of these things exist in abundance right now of which the current violence is the inevitable outcome.
Just back in 1992, the military opened fire on masses of protesters. The preceding situation sounds eerily similar to what’s happening right now. Hopefully this never repeats itself.
Join the conversation about this story »
“He looked like an orangutan swinging-swinging around. It was scary, very scary,” said Chicago resident Wilma Ward about her recent run-in with a raccoon. Ward, who lives in Chicago several miles away from the nearest forest, found herself face to snout with a raccoon she described as being almost her height. She was forced to barricade herself in an upstairs bathroom until morning, and when she emerged she discovered the raccoon had bent steel window-bars to get into her kitchen. Others in the neighborhood have described these raccoons as being the size of German Shepherds.
While Wilma’s story is extreme, it is becoming more common, as the ring-tailed rascals are increasingly taking up residence in the concrete jungle. It isn’t hard for them to find a place to stay, either, since over 75,000 homes have been foreclosed on in the last year. Most people don’t properly board up their homes when the bank kicks them to the curb, which gives raccoons easy access to a habitat fit for a human.
Raccoon infestations aren’t a bother to former homeowners, but rather to the people still living in the neighborhood. No raccoon in Illinois has ever tested positive for rabies, according to Dr. Donna Alexander of the Cook County Animal Rabies Control, but that’s not the only concern. She fears that many urbanites, who have never seen a wild animal except for maybe a squirrel or rat, might mistake the raccoons for a furry play-thing. “The most important thing is that it is not a pet, it is a wild animal,” she explains.
Local government officials are trying to prevent further problems by educating the urban communities about the proper way to deal with raccoons. They explain that raccoons are just looking for something to eat and a place to stay, so if trash cans are properly sealed and foreclosed homes are effectively boarded up, they will search for shelter somewhere else.
Something else communities are beginning to notice is property damage. Most of it goes unnoticed for months or even years, as these homes go uninhabited for extended periods of time, but James McClelland of Mack Industries, who purchases foreclosed homes and fixes them up for future sale, says the cost can be sky high…or at least ceiling high. It is common, he explains, for raccoons to fall through roofs and ceilings, which are expensive to repair. Often, when they fall into a home from above, it is impossible for them to get out, so they try as hard as they can to scratch and bite their way out-attempts which are often in vain, and often leave serious damage. McClelland says the damage done by raccoons can cost anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.
Michigan Football
This is probably piling on, but hey, that doesn’t make it any less funny.
History’s taught us Rich Rodriguez will try to win now
First of all, what a title. I am glad that Rodriguez is going to start trying to win now… what was he doing in his first two seasons?
The whole article is humorous, here are some highlights:
You know it’s bad for a guy when Joe Biden can use your name at a memorial service and turn it into an applause line. An applause line! I’ve been to a few funerals and memorial services and I have never heard applause at the mere mention of a single person. With the departure of Matt Millen, Rodriguez has quickly become the least popular person in Michigan sports. And in some ways, you have to give him credit for a near-meteoric rise. On the field and off, almost all the Michigan Football news has been bad. And almost all of it can be attributed to him.
Yeah, that is pretty bad (if you don’t know what this is referring to, check out the 2:10 mark in this video).
1. He desperately wants to win.
2. He believes strongly that he has the right philosophy to win.
Supposedly Albert Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
I don’t know if he actually said that or not, but whoever said it, I think it applies nicely in this instance.
And finally:
So if this is a do-or-die season for Rodriguez, I have little doubt that he’ll treat it the same way that he treated his first two. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we all saw how those two turned out.
And with that, I am done covering the train wreck that is Michigan football for awhile (unless something particularly hilarious comes up, which seems to happen quite a bit these days).
Is it juvenile to laugh at them while they are down? Probably. But it is a long off season, and you can only rehash the same topics so many times before they become stale.
Michigan football will rebound (eventually), and the greatest rivalry in the history of sports will be restored, but for now let’s just sit back and enjoy the circus.
Also, for some administrative whatnot, I am going to try to start posting things on a schedule for the off season.
Position analysis on Mondays, recruiting updates on Tuesdays, some sort of historical analysis on Wednesday or Thursday, and then something lighter for the weekend (like some Michigan comic relief).
If you have any suggestion for things you would like to see just let me know.
Luke Timmerman wrote:
[Updated: 10:15 am Pacific] Scientists have been dreaming for a century about therapies that actively harness the power of the body’s immune system to kill cancer cells like an invading virus or bacteria. Today, Seattle-based Dendreon has made history by winning the first-ever FDA approval for this kind of cancer-fighter. Shares climbed 15 percent to $45.50 after the news broke.
The good news for Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN) came today when it received clearance from the FDA to start selling sipuleucel-T (Provenge) to men in the U.S. with terminal prostate cancer that has spread, even after prior rounds of standard hormone-deprivation therapy, according to a statement on the FDA website. The agency gave the green light after Dendreon showed in a trial of 512 men that patients lived a median time of 25.8 months if they got Provenge, compared to 21.7 months for those on a placebo. Patients on the drug had minimal side effects of fever and chills that lasted a couple days.
The FDA’s decision will have far-reaching impact for years. The drug is the first marketed product for Dendreon, which has piled up a deficit of more than $700 million in its 18-year development quest. The product is forecasted by analysts to exceed $1 billion in U.S. sales after a couple years on the market. Dendreon could morph into the regional anchor Seattle’s biotech community has lacked since Immunex was acquired by Amgen in 2002. For the 27,000 men in the U.S. who die each year from prostate cancer, the drug represents some hope for a longer life, and a higher quality of life alternative to chemotherapy. And for researchers, it offers new possibilities for a mode of treatment beyond surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and targeted biotech pills and antibodies that must be taken chronically.
“This is a huge advance,” said Dr. John Corman, a urologist at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, and an investigator in Provenge clinical trials for eight years. “This is the first immunotherapy agent that’s been shown to provide a survival benefit for prostate cancer patients. And it’s a completely new class of therapy that provides remarkable opportunities for R&D.”
While today’s FDA approval is groundbreaking, it’s worth being precise about what this means, and what it doesn’t. Treatments like Dendreon’s are most accurately referred to as “active immunotherapies,” although scientists sometimes loosely call them “cancer vaccines” in the media. Just to be clear, Dendreon’s product is a treatment that people get after they’ve already been diagnosed with prostate cancer, so it isn’t a vaccine in the traditional sense that prevents people from getting a disease. Because Dendreon’s treatment “teaches” the immune system to recognize certain cancer cells and fight them on its own, for months or even years, it’s considered an “active” immunotherapy. That’s also different from what researchers sometimes call “passive” immunotherapy. It’s fair to consider an intravenous-delivered antibody drug, like Roche’s rituximab (Rituxan), a “passive” immunotherapy because it works in part by stimulating the immune system to fight cancer cells, at least while the drug is active in the blood. It’s also fair to call Merck’s human papillomavirus vaccine (Gardasil) a cancer vaccine, because it prevents women from getting infected with a virus known to cause cervical cancer.
Whatever you choose to call Provenge, the anticipation of today’s FDA approval has already transformed Dendreon. A few weeks before the defining clinical trial data arrived in April 2009, the company’s stock was trading around $2, cash was running low, and it had about 200 employees. After the data arrived and was presented at a urology meeting in Chicago, Dendreon raised $630 million from investors, announced plans to grow to 600 employees, added two more drug factories, and saw its stock climb to more than $40 a share.
Plenty of questions remain about …Next Page »
UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS
Microsoft has released an updated version of the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP. The update can be downloaded from here and brings the following improvements.
Examples of what’s new & changed include:
Read more about the update at the WindowsteamBlog here.
by Mary Bruno
Like the oil, there’s more news spilling out of (or is it into?) the Gulf of Mexico. And none of it is good.
Where to begin? The 5,000-foot-long pipe that links the oil well to Transocean’s now submerged rig has sprung a third leak, which could explain why scientists at NOAA just upped their estimate for the amount of oil gushing into the Gulf from 1,000 to 5,000 barrels a day. (British Petroleum officials dispute the new figures.) The slick is about 16 miles off the Louisiana coast and closing in. Forecasters expect a landfall sometime on Friday, but strong winds could send a rogue oil patch into Louisiana’s Pass-A-Loutre Wildlife Management Area even sooner. Governor Bobby Jindal has asked the feds for help.
Emergency crews set a small section of the spill ablaze on Wednesday in what they say was a “successful” burn. But attempts to use a remote vehicle to cap the belching well have proven unsuccessful so far, and the proposed solution for actually capturing the oil (with a submerged dome) is weeks out at best, untested at the 5,000-foot depth of the leak, and a little pie-in-the-sky, don’t you think? In a sign that BP may be in over its head in the cleanup department, Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary E. Landry hinted that the Defense Department may be scrambled to provide techno assistance to the effort.
Meanwhile, Louisiana’s shrimping fleet is mobilizing to help deploy more than 20 miles of booms that may or may not protect the state’s fragile coastal wetlands from the encroaching slick, and the state’s fishing industry has filed a class action suit against BP, Transocean and others, charging negligence and seeking millions.
On the bright side, I guess, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs assured us that President Obama, a fan of offshore drilling, is closely tracking the situation in the Gulf. In fact, the president started his day with a special 20-minute briefing on the matter and pledged “all available resources,” including the U.S. military, to try and prevent what looks to be an ever more likely environmental disaster.
As the oil spreads, and the Gulf burns, we are reminded once again that the risks inherent in offshore drilling are simply not worth taking.
Related Links:
The story of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill [SLIDESHOW]
Louisiana shrimpers file lawsuit over U.S. oil spill
The politics of the Gulf oil spill
Greek debt has rallied on the news that the EU and the IMF are close to agreement on a €120 billion ($159 billion) rescue package. Other PIIGS sovereign debt is also getting a breather. This has been the pattern throughout the crisis: there’s some positive development, there’s a rally, and then everyone remembers that Greece is still anchored right smack in between of Scylla and Charybdis, and yields shoot back up again.
The idea of the bailout is to prevent contagion to other countries. But will it? In a way, the Greek rescue package makes it less likely that anyone else is going to get help from their eurobrethren. The IMF and the constituent governments only have so much money that they can pour into Club Med, and Greece is taking really quite a lot of it. Forget Spain, which is too large for anyone to launch a Greek-style rescue; even Portugal will be a stretch.
Maybe this calms markets and stops the crisis here. But governments are overstretched as it is, and this just makes the problem worse. We may have found some institutions that are Too Big Not to Fail.
The Huffington Post — taking a cue from Foursquare, the location-based social network that allows users to win “badges” for checking in at various places — has launched a similar feature for regular readers of the news site. The beta offering includes three badges that readers can win — known as the “Networker” badge, the “Superuser” badge and the “Moderator” badge — based on the amount of activity they engage in on the news site. For example, connecting with other readers on the site will earn you a Level One “Networker” badge, and connecting your Huffington Post reader account with either your Facebook account or your Twitter account will bump you up to a Level Two Networker, and your comments on the site will be a different color from those posted by non-Level Two users.
The badges are just the latest offering aimed at implementing social features on the site: the Huffington Post was one of the first to implement Facebook Connect when it launched, and the service was tightly integrated into the rest of the site — for example, showing readers who connected their accounts a special sidebar with news that had been read and/or recommended by their Facebook friends. The badges extend that idea, and are clearly designed to encourage readers to spend more time on the site.
A FAQ describes the different badges: Networker is based on connections with other readers and with Facebook or Twitter, while Superuser rewards readers for commenting on stories and for sharing them through services such as Twitter and Facebook, and Moderator is based on how many comments a reader flags. It’s not clear how much of a given activity you have to engage in to win the badges, however. The Moderator badge says you have to have flagged 20 comments to get a Level One, but only says these flags have to display “a high ratio of good flags to mistaken flags.” I’ve asked Huffington Post for comment on why the requirements aren’t defined, but it’s likely so that the site has some leeway in deciding who gets rewarded.
The way Huffington Post is using badges makes much more sense to me than something like the Wall Street Journal’s recent partnership with Foursquare. Offering news tips and Foursquare badges based on where readers are checking in with the location-based network is a nice marketing gesture, but the conversion rate from Foursquare user to WSJ reader is likely to be fairly low. Huffington Post’s badges, on the other hand, may seem a tad gimmicky but they’re focused on the right thing: increasing engagement with readers.
It’s a similar approach to that taken by sites such as Slashdot, which has one of the most devoted reader communities online: Regular readers who behave properly by providing a real name, posting and/or flagging comments and contributing in other ways get “karma points” which then enhance their status on the site. It’s a reputation management system, and one that is functionally identical to the way that players of World of Warcraft and other games “level up” through their activity in the game (which is why everything is becoming a game). The idea is that being rewarded for behavior encourages more of that behavior, and also builds a stronger relationship with readers.
It will be interesting see what kind of response Huffington Post readers will have to the badges, and also what kind of effect they will have on metrics such as time spent on the site, repeat visits, etc. According to CEO Eric Hippeau, the implementation of Facebook Connect had a dramatic impact on reader activity such as commenting.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
Social Advertising Models Go Back to the Future
It’s WES week, and surely you’ve heard all the big news. Yes, we’ve finally heard something official on the upcoming BlackBerry devices, the Bold 9650 and the Pearls 9100 and 9105. We’ll touch on them, just because we love any kind of news on devices, plus reveal some other developments from the week. It looks like we could see plenty new from RIM during the next eight months.
Skyfire today launched the first Flash Video enabled mobile web browser for Android phones! Not only does it allow for viewing flash video (which was not possible on mobile phones until recent) yet brings a faster mobile Internet experience via cloud computing (like Opera Mini for Android), social recommendations, and social sharing of content with ease.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t00fEV2_kE
Download it and check it out today either by scanning the QR code we’ve placed above or visit http://get.skyfire.com/dl_android.php. Of course our Android App Review with Video Review is forthcoming!
You know what application environment works the best? The one where consumers can purchase any application and get a great experience across any carrier network. Sounds simple and obvious, but diametrically opposed goals of developers and service providers have traditionally kept this scenario from seamlessly happening. Shaking up the old way of thinking, Alcatel-Lucent has introduced application enablement, a new, revenue-generating app environment for everyone.
According to Alcatel-Lucent, the following norms appease both application content providers (ACPs) and carriers:
Besides voice, there’s only one application that works across all carriers, and that’s SMS. When an application works across all carriers it can be enormously successful. When there’s competition, “walled gardens” slow down application deployment. Wouldn’t it be great if all data applications worked as seamlessly and ubiquitously as SMS? That’s the goal of the Alcatel-Lucent Open API Service, which gives ACPs access to network assets such as location and payment systems. The API forgoes the need to understand each carrier’s nuances (there are plenty) and the need to develop complex technical and business relationships.
Want to get involved? If you’re a developer, visit the Alcatel-Lucent Open API Service developer space. And if you’re a carrier, read “Helping Service Providers Increase Relevance and Revenue with Application Enablement” (PDF).
Click here to view all Alcatel-Lucent posts
[JURIST] A group of Senate Democrats on Thursday introduced legislation aimed at curbing foreign and corporate influence in elections after a recent Supreme Court decision eased restrictions on campaign spending. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court struck down Section 203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), which prohibited corporations and unions from using their general treasury funds to make independent expenditures for speech defined as an “electioneering communication” or for speech expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate. According to a press release, the legislation, entitled the DISCLOSE Act, seeks to:
partly restore those limits – by barring foreign-controlled corporations, government contractors and companies that have received government assistance from making political expenditures – and also require corporations, unions, and other organizations that make political expenditures to disclose their donors and stand by their ads.The lawmakers hope to pass the DISCLOSE Act by July 4 so that it will take effect for the 2010 elections.US President Barack Obama has sharply criticized the Supreme Court’s holding in Citizens United, most notably in this year’s State of the Union speech. Obama warned of the increased potential for powerful interest groups, both foreign and domestic, to wield excessive influence over American elections and called for bipartisan support of legislation to counteract the decision. Earlier this month, the US Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the effects of the Citizens United decision.
Credit: Wikimedia
The perfunctory FountainSide Cafe in Centennial Olympic Park will be replaced by a new 175-seat restaurant modeled after New York’s redoubtable Shake Shack in Madison Square Park and elsewhere, the Atlanta Business Chronicle reports. If it’s anything like Shake Shack, expect lines. Serious lines.
In other news:
by Kate Sheppard
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The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt van RijnPhoto: Wikimedia Commons. The 1995 Chicago heat wave was one of the most brutal weather events the United States has ever experienced. On July 13, the thermostat hit 106 degrees F. Many of the city’s poor and elderly residents had no air conditioning; many of those who did lost power as blackouts swept the city. Soon, thousands were suffering from dehydration, kidney failure, and respiratory distress. The hospitals were overloaded; the city couldn’t cope with the flood of 911 calls. Over the following days, more than 600 people died from heat-related illnesses, with hundreds of bodies temporarily stored in refrigerated meat trucks because the city morgues were full.
The Chicago disaster was the worst heat wave in recent U.S. memory. But if greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current path, health experts say catastrophic heat waves are likely to become far more common. Heat-related deaths in Chicago are expected to quadruple by 2050, up from the current annual average of 182, according to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a government study. Rising temperatures and accompanying atmospheric changes will alter disease patterns and aggravate all manners of medical conditions, from asthma to respiratory diseases to—believe it or not—kidney stones. In May 2009, the medical journal The Lancet and University College London’s Institute for Global Health issued a major report concluding that climate change is the “biggest global health threat of the 21st century.”
All of this means new costs for the U.S. health care system—which will almost certainly be passed on to consumers in the form of higher insurance premiums. What is the insurance industry doing to prepare?
So far, not much. In 2008, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the group representing state government regulators of property, health, and life insurers, announced that all such companies would be required to report both the risks and opportunities that climate change poses to their businesses. Some were eager to get started. Property insurers, says Joel Ario, chair of NAIC’s climate task force, “are probably the only people I know who are more worried about climate change than the environmentalists.”
But the health insurers have been resistant. In a survey by NAIC, America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s powerful lobby group, responded that it “has not adopted specific practices to identify climate change-related risks.” It added, “While we continue to monitor climate change as it pertains to the global health care situation there is no conclusive information currently available to address the effects of climate change on health care.” The American Council of Life Insurers argued in a letter that “knowledge in this area is not sufficiently developed to warrant an immediate, significant, costly, and possibly damaging change to the content and nature of annual statement reporting.” After pushback from the broader insurance industry, NAIC made disclosure voluntary on a state-by-state basis. (Some states intend to move forward with the mandatory disclosure policies as planned.)
It’s true that there are many unanswered questions about exactly how rising temperatures will affect human health. But there’s mounting evidence that the impact will be significant, according to major research efforts from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Health Organization, and the National Institutes of Health 2009 report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program found that any decrease in hypothermia-related deaths thanks to warmer winters “will be substantially less than the increase in deaths due to summertime heat extremes.”
The U.S. health care community is so far behind on the issue of global warming that it’s only starting to calculate the cost of these changes. But what little research exists suggests the bill could be big. Lyme disease already costs more than $2.5 billion a year in medical expenses and lost work time—and climate models predict that the area where Lyme-carrying ticks can survive will more than double over the next 70 years. Any increase in asthma would likewise boost the condition’s massive price tag— currently $18 billion annually. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that kidney stones could increase by 30 percent or more in some areas of the U.S., due to dehydration. That would cost the U.S. health care system more than $1 billion per year.
These are just a few of the anticipated health effects—accumulated, they could pose a major liability for insurers. It’s a “time bomb,” says Michael Gresty, managing principal of the sustainability consultancy Altanova, which works with corporate clients to reduce risks in this area. “When the industry is not prepared for a sudden shock like this, they either have to dig into their reserves, or they have to increase their premiums to cover the increased costs of providing care.”
On the bright side, one underappreciated benefit of tackling climate change is that it could yield major health care savings. The European Environment Agency has found that the European Union’s plans to reduce carbon emissions 20 percent by 2020 would cut health costs by $44 billion dollars annually. No equivalent analysis has been done for the U.S. But a study by the Clean Air Task Force found that shuttering dirty coal plants could save more than twice as many lives as seat belts do each year. Programs to reduce emissions, like providing better public transportation, could also result in indirect health care savings by way of lower obesity rates and fewer respiratory and heart problems. And a January study from the University of Wisconsin found that the benefits of improved air quality that would come from weaning the country off fossil fuels would likely outweigh the short-term costs.
Some insurance firms are beginning to acknowledge that climate change may affect their businesses. In a 2008 submission to the Carbon Disclosure Project—a voluntary program that helps major businesses assess climate change-related risks—Prudential said it had teams examining the implications of increased infectious disease and extreme weather events. The company is also “paying attention more” to markets like Mexico, India, and China, where diseases like malaria may spread, says Mary O’Malley, chair of Prudential’s environmental task force. But, she says, Prudential is only starting to evaluate the risks and hasn’t made substantial changes to its business model. Likewise, Aetna concluded in a submission to the disclosure project that global warming may lead to “higher health care costs for everyone.” But it, too, is in the early stages of assessing the problem.
Smart insurers, says Gresty, should work to calculate climate-related risks and push for policy changes to reduce those risks. “That would be an investment in the future that would be protective of their business,” he says. And given the industry’s massive lobbying tab, policymakers might well listen. Says Harvard’s Epstein, “Through their own policies as well as national policies, the insurers can have a huge voice.”
Related Links:
EPA scientist warns Atlantic seaboard will be swallowed by rising seas
What climate change means for the wine industry
Details emerge on study of cancer near U.S. nuclear plants
