Friday, October 5, 2007

Richard Roberts, the President of Oral Roberts University, and his wife, Lindsay Roberts, are accused of illegal political contributions, financial wrong-doing, and wrongful firings in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

The lawsuit was filed by three former professors who claim “they were wrongfully dismissed after reporting the school’s involvement in a local political race.” According to KTEN television news, “Roberts’ statement says personal expenses are charged to him and he personally pays them on a monthly basis.” On October 3, Roberts “told students and faculty during his weekly chapel Wednesday that the lawsuit is about intimidation, blackmail and extortion.”

Richard has been president of ORU since his father, Oral Roberts university founder and former faith healer, “semi-retired” in 1993.

Wednesday, October 5, 2005

Government delegates are meeting this week at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) general assembly in Geneva to discuss the WIPO Development Agenda. The meeting will determine how developing countries must implement existing controversial intellectual property rights laws including copyrights, patents, and trademarks. They will also consider the disputed proposal for a global Treaty on the Protection of Broadcastings and Webcasting Organizations.

The Broadcastings/Webcasting Treaty proposal, pushed by traditional broadcast organizations, and lobbyists for a handful of Internet publishers, including Yahoo, is being pushed hardest by the United States government, which ironically, has never considered such legislation domestically. The treaty would create a new layer of intellectual monopoly rights for broadcasters, potentially including ‘webcasters’. Broadcasters would then be able to claim rights over material they broadcast–even material that was in the public domain or licensed under creative commons or copyleft licenses.

Many developing countries including Brazil, South Africa, India, Iran, Chile, and Venezuela are asking for time to evaluate and study the proposals, and opposition to the treaty has been registered by numerous NGOs and public interest advocates. Fearing a repeat of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), when US copyright law was made more strict to conform to WIPO standards, a coalition of U.S. NGOs is currently circulating a sign on letter calling for public hearings on the implications of the Broadcaster Treaty.

In a recent Financial Times article Professor James Boyle (Law, Duke University) [1] raised objections to the Broadcasting/Webcasting Treaty, saying “intellectual property laws are created without any empirical evidence that they are necessary, or that they will help rather than hurt”. He elaborated that such laws are made “as though it were just a deal brokered between industry groups,” and that concerns for “public interest in competition, access, free speech, and vigorous technological markets takes a back seat.” Professor Boyle fears that “communications networks are increasingly built around intellectual property rules” with harmful effects.

Sunday, January 14, 2007

Western Australian government authorities say they believe a toxin may be responsible for the recent mysterious death of an estimated 5,000 birds found in the area of Esperance – on the state’s south eastern coastline. Autopsies by toxicologists from the WA Department of Agriculture will test for organochlorins, organophosphates and heavy metals.

Esperance residents first noticed large numbers of dead birds littering their streets and gardens on December 7 last year. Populations of honeyeaters, wattle birds and miners have reportedly been effected.

The birds were being found vomiting and convulsing in bushland and suburban backyards over an extensive area. Department of Environment and Conservation‘s (DEC) nature conservation coordinator Mike Fitzgerald says toxic wetlands near Esperance are the most likely reason for the mass bird deaths.

The DEC says it has failed to figure out the cause of death despite interviewing industry groups, farmers, grain handlers and timber companies about pesticide and chemical use.

Birds Australia, the peak group dedicated to the conservation, study and enjoyment of Australia’s native birds and their habitats, said it had not heard of a similar occurrence. “Not on that scale, and all at the same time, and also the fact that it’s several different species,” chief executive Graeme Hamilton told the Sunday Times. “You’d have to call that a most unusual event and one that we’d all have to be concerned about.”

Mike Fitzgerald said the DEC were looking at something “pretty potent.” “This is not a normal situation. The common thing that we have seen and heard is that the affected birds have an insatiable thirst… If it turns out to be a toxin that is responsible, that will raise more questions because there is no obvious source of exposure.”

The deaths could be a result of a drier than normal winter, causing algal and bacterial blooms in the Esperance Lakes Nature Reserves. Esperance recorded 457mm rainfall in 2006; the average is 620mm.

Initially, health authorities feared a virus, such as the deadly avian bird flu, was responsible. That was quickly ruled out, along with poisoning from bacteria or eating poisoned insects.

The first deaths were reported by Esperance resident Michelle Crisp – who lives close to the worst-affected area. Dozens of native birds began dying in her back yard a week before Christmas. She says she contacted neighbours to discover if they were experiencing the same thing. Mrs Crisp found four dead birds, then 16, then 30 and finally up to 80.

Mike Fitzgerald said that any one of hundreds of toxins could be causing the deaths but so far all leads had not produced any answers.

Wednesday, March 2, 2005

Bucharest, Romania — The city centre of Bucharest, the capital of Romania, is set to get a major facelift due to a real estate project called Esplanada (The Esplanade), which will be constructed by TriGranit Development Corporation. The total investment in the project will be greater than 800 million euro and aims to build a modern commercial pedestrian area in downtown Bucharest, with several shopping malls, office buildings, hotels and dwellings. It will be the largest real estate program in Romania since the fall of Communism in 1989.

Bucharest is currently looking at possibilities to improve its appearance and rebrand itself as a lively, creative and vibrant city. Many initiatives have sprung up to improve the city, including the organisation of CowParade later this year. Additionally, the old town centre will be restored. Due to Romania’s current economic boom, several other major construction projects are taking place.

Bucharest City Hall has blocked traffic in the city center due both to the old town restoration and to the Esplanada project.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

File:CyanogenMod Cid.svg

The developers of CyanogenMod, an open source free Android-based operating system for smartphones, announced yesterday their incorporation following a successful venture capital campaign which netted the open-source project a US$7 million nest egg, and plan to roll out a simple installation app on Google Play for their Android firmware.

Android runs nearly 80% of new mobile devices; CyanogenMod operates on at least 7 or 8 million of those. CyanogenMod replaces the read-only-memory image in android devices which have been ‘rooted’ —control acquired of the device’s superuser account— allowing continuing development for, and backporting abilities of new generations of the operating system to, older devices.

Investor Mitch Lasky wrote on his blog “We believe that CM is poised to become one of the largest mobile operating systems in the world.” Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures are part of the capital providers to form Cyanogen Inc.

“The only limitation we have right now is with the number of engineers and designers we currently have. As we hire more people and build this company, we’ll be able to work on so many cool things”, said Koushik ‘koush’ Dutta, who took questions alongside Steve ‘cyanogen’ Kondik and team social media manager Abhisek “ciwrl” Devkota in a Reddit Ask Me Anything event shortly after making the announcement on the CyanogenMod blog. The team of 17, including Boost co-founder Kirt McMaster as CEO, are in Palo Alto, California and Seattle.

Kondik says Cyanogen mod is named after him. “I’m terrible with names, so I just slapped ‘mod’ onto the end of my handle and ran with it”, he explained in the incorporation announcement.

An early question raised in the Reddit event concerned profit-making: “Monetization isn’t an immediate concern and our investors […] feel the same”, said Dutta, adding “Creating disruption in a multibilion dollar market is enough to make any investor raise their eyebrow.” This means CyanogenMod would continue to be free. Follow questions asked if the company was planning to release their own model of android device. “We certainly couldn’t take on the monumental task of building/testing hardware [right now]. Hardware would be one of many potential very long term paths we could take”, said Dutta.

The firm’s first announced step is to improve the process of installing the software on owner’s devices, which Kondik described as “hideous”. A new installer app is planned to be released “in the coming weeks” on Google Play. The installer app will not require rooting the device, instead installing by simply clicking a button.

A further step, broadly described without any details, is a project with an unnamed original equipment manufacturer (OEM). “We have a least one OEM partnership in the works, there will be an announcement next week regarding our plans there”, said Kondik. The team mentioned OEM licensing several times during the Q&A session on Reddit.

In addition to these corporate steps, there were questions regarding the roadmap for development of the ROM, which already has improvements regarding privacy and security over the native android loader. With “plenty of things in the product pipeline already” Dutta lists additional security features, AirPlay mirroring, screen recording, and Voice+ as upcoming. The mood throughout the event was jovial, with humourous questions such as “can you guys PLEASE release a CM build for my toaster? I’m not sure what model it is, but it’s white and I got it at Savers.” Kondik promised “Ship it to me and I’ll duct tape a G1 running CM to it”. Dutta said his “10 of your favorite lines of source code” are “The ones that worked when they shouldn’t have.”

Sunday, April 17, 2005

The Norwegian Dawn, a 965-foot-long luxury vessel, was struck by “a freak wave that caused two windows to break in two different cabins,” the owners, Norwegian Cruise Line, said in a statement. It changed course, docking in Charleston late Saturday afternoon instead of completing its planned travel to New York.

The wave, estimated at 7-stories-high, flooded 62 cabins and injured 4 passengers with cuts and bruises. Company spokeswoman Susan Robison said the wave reached to deck 10.

The hull was damaged but the vessel was not in any trouble, according to the Coast Guard, and the safety of the ship “was in no way compromised by this incident.” Passengers were told to don their flotation jackets anyway.

The ship left New York last Sunday on a week-long round-trip cruise to and from the Bahamas.