White Collar and Covert Affairs returns Tonight Video 8 June 2011 {HD} White Collar 3
Continue reading …Boxee hits London with updated iPlayer app, Blinkbox video and new Media Server
June 8, 2011 No Comment
Boxee threw a meetup in London last night where it revealed the return of its BBC iPlayer app and upcoming addition of streaming movies and shows from Blinkbox. This continues a trend that has seen the addition of Headweb video on-demand for Scandinavian regions and Databazaar’s library of Bollywood flicks in the last week. Boxee had iPlayer before but it stopped working after some technical changes, while the blog post reveals Blinkbox support is expected arrive around the end of the year. Boxee flashed its iPad app at the party too, promising to bring the existing experience to your tablet plus the ability to send video back to a Boxee Box for watching on the big TV screen. Finally, VP of marketing Andrew Kippen mentioned streaming locally stored video to the iPad from new Boxee Media Server software. While adding Plex-style functionality is nice by itself, we’re just excited to see any kind of reference to the software for PC and Macs that seemed to have been ignored since Boxee got into the box business, so we’ll keep an eye out for any additional news on that front. Boxee hits London with updated iPlayer app, Blinkbox video and new Media Server originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Jun 2011 07:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …Steve Jobs presents ideas for new Apple super campus to Cupertino city council
June 8, 2011 No Comment
“It is like a spaceship” The guy is pretty busy with WWDC’s Keynote ending yesterday Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : 9 to 5 Mac Discovery Date : 08/06/2011 07:46 Number of articles : 4
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We hear from doctors, nurses, community workers and those living with HIV and Aids about attitudes towards the virus in their countries Liz Ford Lisa Villani
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Emma Donoghue’s novel is 2/1 favourite to take £30,000 award for women’s writing Room lost out on the Booker to Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, but Emma Donoghue’s story of a boy and his mother locked in a tiny room for years is emerging as the frontrunner to take the Orange prize this evening. Donoghue’s novel, which took as its jumping off point the Josef Fritzl case, was picked yesterday by a “shadow” youth panel of teenage judges as their favourite on the six-strong shortlist, ahead of this evening’s main announcement. It is also 2/1 favourite at William Hill to win the overall Orange prize for fiction, and has sold 470% more copies on Amazon.co.uk than its nearest rival, Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love, since the shortlist was announced in April. “We all agreed Room stood out. For us, it was the most accessible and gripping, and a real page-turner,” said youth panel member Martha Samano, 16. “It’s an horrific tale told with powerful innocence – we all felt it changes the way you view the world and makes you question your environment.” Donoghue said she was “tickled pink” to be the Orange prize youth panel winner. “When I wrote Room I was imagining a reader anything from 11 up, so I’m really chuffed it’s finding so many young readers,” said the Irish author, who has already seen the book, her seventh novel, shortlisted for the Booker and win the Irish novel of the year award. William Hill made Forna’s tale of post-war Sierra Leone The Memory of Love its second favourite to take the £30,000 Orange prize for women’s writing, at 5/2. Emma Henderson’s Grace Williams Says It Loud and Nicole Krauss’s Great House were both given odds of 5/1, with Kathleen Winter’s debut novel Annabel and Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife at the back of the pack, at 6/1. At Amazon.co.uk, meanwhile, head of books buying Darren Hardy said that Room “has been one of the standout books of the past year”. It “has performed consistently well since being shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2010, spending more than five months in the bestseller list on Amazon.co.uk,” he said. “A win on Wednesday night could see it shoot to the top of the book chart and attract even greater success for the author.” Since the shortlist was announced in April, Room has taken 69% of the shortlist’s sales through Amazon.co.uk. The Memory of Love took 12%, The Tiger’s Wife 8%, Henderson’s novel 7%, Annabel 3% and Krauss’s Great House just 1%, said the online bookseller. Orange prize for fiction Fiction Awards and prizes Emma Donoghue Alison Flood guardian.co.uk
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Social network turns on new feature to automatically identify people in photos, raising questions about privacy implications of the service Facebook has come under fire for quietly expanding the availability of technology to automatically identify people in photos, renewing concerns about its privacy practices. The feature, which the giant social network automatically enabled for its more than 500 million users, has been expanded from the US to “most countries”, Facebook said on its official blog on Tuesday. Marc Rotenberg, president of the non-profit privacy advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the system raised questions about which personally identifiable information, such as email addresses, would become associated with the photos in Facebook’s database. He also criticised Facebook’s decision to automatically enable the facial-recognition technology for its users. “I’m not sure that’s the setting that people would want to choose. A better option would be to let people opt-in,” he said. Internet security consultancy Sophos noted that many Facebook users had seen the facial recognition option turned on without any notice in the last few days. “Yet again, it feels like Facebook is eroding the online privacy of its users by stealth,” commented Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos. Facebook’s “Tag Suggestions” feature uses facial recognition technology to speed up the process of labeling friends and acquaintances in photos posted on the site. Facebook has been repeatedly criticised for changing settings involving privacy and identity in favour of making more data public in ways that means its users have to opt out of, rather than opt in to, the service. Facebook, which announced in December that it planned to introduce the facial recognition service in the US, acknowledged that the feature was now more widely available. The site also said in an emailed statement that “we should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them”. The statement noted that the photo-tagging suggestions are only made when new photos are added to Facebook, that only friends are suggested and that users can disable the feature in their privacy settings. While other photo software and online services such as Google Inc’s Picasa and Apple Inc’s iPhoto use facial recognition technology, its use on a social network like Facebook could raise thorny privacy issues. Google has stepped away from the widespread implementation of its Google Goggles service, which would try to identify people based on facial recognition through mobile phones running its Android operating system. Instead it only uses it for translating text and identifying objects. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, said earlier in June that he had concerns about its use with people. “We do have the relevant facial recognition technology at our disposal. But we haven’t implemented this on Google Goggles because we want to consider the privacy implications and how this feature might be added responsibly,” he said. “I’m very concerned personally about the union of mobile tracking and face recognition.” Rotenberg noted that Apple’s iPhoto software gave users control over facial recognition technology by letting them elect whether or not to use it with their personal photo collections. Facebook’s technology, by contrast, operates independently, analysing faces across a broad swathe of newly uploaded photos. Last year the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint about Facebook’s privacy practices with the US Federal Trade Commission, which Rotenberg said was still pending. He noted that he planned to take a close look at Facebook’s new announcement involving facial recognition technology. Facebook Internet Social networking Privacy Privacy & the media Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk
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Men in south-east England live four years longer than Scots, while London’s richest outlive Glasgwegians by decade or more A four-year north-south divide in life expectancy at birth for men is revealed in official figures for the UK published on Wednesday. For men in the south-east of England it is 79.4 years, while in Scotland the figure is 75.4, according to the Office for National Statistics . For women the gap is slightly less: 83.3 in south-east and south-west England against 80.1 in Scotland. But the differences are even more stark at a local level. In the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, men stand to live 84.4 years and women 89 years. That is more than a decade longer than the Glasgow figure of 71.1 years for men and 77.5 for women. Health areas with lowest life expectancy are Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Hartlepool, Western Isles, Liverpool and Blackburn with Darwen. The pattern in the geographic age gaps remains similar to those of previous years, showing just how stubborn social and economic inequalities remain. Overall we are living longer. Life expectancy at birth across the UK as a whole improved from 76.5 to 77.9 years for men between 2003-05 and 2007-09. In the same period it went up from 80.9 to 82 for women. Office for National Statistics Scotland James Meikle guardian.co.uk
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PERUGIA, MONTEFALCO FIAT PANDA CC 900 BENZINA Aydin’da AK Parti-MHP pankart gerginligi AKP İzmir Mitingi 04.06.2011 Lorraine_10_25 says: @NicaNicsReenah4 couz …! Usta na have u eatenss..??!
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Business secretary tells MPs the government could alter the tax regime if banks do not keep their side of the Project Merlin deal Banks will face higher taxes if they do not bolster lending to small businesses, Vince Cable said on Wednesday as he warned that restricted credit to businesses could hamper any economic recovery. The business secretary also told the Business Innovation and Skills select committee of MPs that he was “pressing” banks for evidence that executive pay was linked to lending, as had been pledged under Project Merlin . Signed in February after months of prevarication, Merlin involved promises by banks to lend £190bn to businesses and reduce the size of their bonuses. Cable was speaking just hours before the heads of Britain’s four major banks – Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group, HSBC and Barclays – were due to appear before the Treasury select committee to discuss the proposals by the independent banking commission. All four banks signed up to Merlin. Cable restated his case that a separation of retail banks from “casino” investment banks was “desirable for the real economy” but said the government was waiting for the final report by Sir John Vickers in September before reaching conclusions on the future shape of the industry. Cable said that there was a “serious problem” with lending to small businesses, that was greater than the banks were prepared to acknowledge. He said that if in a year’s time the banks had not kept their side of the Merlin deal, the government would be “absolved” of its promises not to alter the tax regime. “The chancellor and prime minister have made it clear that if we don’t get results, they have said we should take further action with tax on banks,” Cable said. “Clearly we do have the option of approaching the taxing of profits, or bonuses or balance sheets in a different way.” He added: “It is hard to imagine we could penalise individual banks.” Banks tend to argue that there is a reduced demand for loans because of the fragile economic conditions, while small businesses argue that the banks are restricting supply. The first update on Merlin published in May showed that the industry was missing its commitments . The shortfall was in lending to small and medium-sized businesses, which was £2bn short of targets set by the Treasury, rather than to large businesses. Cable said: “We can debate how much is lack of demand and how much is supply. We believe there is an issue with the supply and cost of finance and it is inhibiting recovery. If it’s not dealt with, it will inhibit recovery as we move into more rapid growth.” Asked if Merlin was producing any change in behaviour, Cable said that small business lending was now discussed at a board level each month at Lloyds, which is 41% owned by the taxpayer after being bailed out in October 2008. He said Lloyds was leading the way “in cultural change”. He also appeared to indicate that Santander was living up to its pledges. As well as the “stick” of higher taxes, Cable said executive pay could also be affected – but said he was disappointed by the evidence of links between pay and lending. Banking Project Merlin Executive pay and bonuses Vince Cable Jill Treanor guardian.co.uk
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Powerful business lobbyist says ministers failing on 12 of 13 environmental indicators after series of policy U-turns The UK government is failing on almost every environmental indicator, the Confederation of British Industry warned on Wednesday, as ministers have damaged business confidence and provided scant detail on their plans. The CBI tracks government aims on the environment and climate change through an online tracker, by which it judges the success of announced measures against the progress that needs to be made to hit the UK’s targets. But in the latest climate change tracker , ministers are shown to have failed on 12 out of 13 key indicators. Improving energy efficiency in buildings has been too slow, while greenhouse gas emissions from transport and industry are likely to remain high as new policies are not taking effect, the CBI said. Katja Hall, chief policy director at the CBI, said: “One year on from pledging to be the ‘greenest government ever’, the coalition has still not delivered the policy landscape needed to ensure we meet tough emissions targets. Decisions being taken now will make or break the UK’s low-carbon economy. Our latest tracker shows that progress is failing to match the government’s ambition.” She pointed to “sudden and unexpected policy shifts”, such as last autumn’s decision to divert funds raised from the carbon reduction commitment to the Treasury , instead of being reinvested in businesses to encourage energy efficiency, as well as the U-turn on feed-in tariffs , when ministers decided to confine the subsidies to households instead of allowing larger solar panel installations to reap the higher rate of tariff. The organisation – one of the UK’s most influential business lobbyists – warned: ” Investor confidence remains low .” Its analysts pointed to separate research which found that the UK had fallen from 3rd to 13th in a global ranking of low-carbon investment . Uncertainty also surrounds a number of major policies, according to the CBI, including electricity market reform, funding for carbon capture and storage technology, the renewable heat initiative and consumer grants for low-carbon vehicles. Hall said: “The carbon floor price and CRC have been dressed up as helping to achieve carbon targets but they risk becoming little more than revenue raisers for the Treasury. Meanwhile, there is also genuine concern about how the green deal and electricity market reform will work.” The Guardian recently revealed research showing that the green deal would not result in savings to consumers at commercial interest rates. The research said the initiative, by which householders can gain access to loans of up to £10,000 to carry out improvements such as insulation and potentially even solar panels , would be worthless unless ministers stepped in to ensure the deal could be provided with interest rates lower than those on offer in the markets. Citing an estimate that £150bn of investment will be needed to decarbonise the energy sector alone, the CBI laid out a series of actions it would like the government to take in the next six months to bring down emissions and stimulate the green economy. They are: Publish the electricity market reform white paper by July, providing greater clarity on the transitional arrangements for renewable energy. • Use the energy-intensive industries strategy to set out plans to protect vulnerable industries from carbon leakage. • Finalise the nuclear generic design assessment and designate the national policy statements for energy as soon as is practical. • Incentivise businesses to invest in energy efficiency measures by simplifying the CRC and wider issues of policy overlap. • Make a decision on the winner of the first carbon capture and storage demonstration plant, and confirm the future funding arrangements for CCS, the renewable heat incentive and the consumer grant for low-carbon vehicles. • Enact the localism bill by the end of 2011 and include provisions to streamline the fast-track process for major infrastructure, and ensure that crucial sub-national infrastructure can be delivered. • Enact the energy bill and work closely with industry to develop the secondary legislation that will successfully deliver the green deal. Carbon emissions Climate change Green politics Fiona Harvey guardian.co.uk
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