ReCycled Newz

Visual Guide to the Cost of Love - Infographic

2012-02-16T11:34:00.000-07:00

February 14, 2012 6:44:32 PM

Love is a Costly Thing: A Visual Guide

www.mint.com

A loving partner is a gift in and of itself, but what about when that gift comes with debt and secretive spending? A marriage not only unites two people for an eternity, but it also brings together past debts and and financial stress. This visual infographic explores how debt and money secrets affect relationships, as well as how to avoid future financial heartache.

Cydia Apps Leak Less Private Data than iTunes Apps

2012-02-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

February 16, 2012 10:01:52 AM

Unauthorized iPhone And iPad Apps Leak Private Data Less Often Than Approved Ones — www.forbes.com — Readability

www.readability.com

forbes.com

A screenshot of the ContactPrivacy feature in the unofficial Cydia iOS app platform.

Users have learned over the last few years that Apple's "walled garden" approach to third party apps isn't quite as protective of their sensitive data as it might sound. More surprising, perhaps, is another revelation: that the popular unauthorized apps outside those walls tend to respect privacy better than the approved ones inside.
After building a tool called PiOS that analyzes private data leaks from iOS apps, the researchers ran their analysis on 1,407 free apps–825 downloaded from Apple's App Store using the website App Tracker, and 526 accessible through BigBoss, the largest repository of unauthorized apps available to users through the Cydia app market for jailbroken iPhones and iPads.

A table from the UCSB study showing how frequently authorized App Store and unauthorized Cydia iOS apps leak private information.

Of those tested apps, 21 percent of official App Store apps uploaded the user's Unique Device Identifier, (UDID) a series of user-specific digits that can be tracked between apps to assemble a profile of a specific person's behavior. Four percent uploaded the device's location, and half a percent uploaded the user's contact list. When the researchers analyzed the unauthorized Cydia apps, on the other hand, only four percent leaked the user's UDID, and only one app out of the 500 tested–a program specifically designed for espionage called MobileSpy–leaked location or contact data.
But why would Cydia's unauthorized apps actually leak private data less often than those that Apple approves? Egele points to Cydia's culture of privacy among administrators and users. "The people who run Cydia seem very conscious of what information is available and can be accessed," says Egele. "The applications you get from Cydia are geared toward more privacy-aware people."
I've contacted Apple for comment and will update this post if I hear back from the company.
"If you care about this kind of thing, you should jailbreak your phone," says Freeman. "Instead of Apple making decisions about what's good and bad, you decide. People think jailbreaking is about deciding that things Apple doesn't like are good. But it also allows you to decide that things Apple likes are bad. We provide you the tools to block the functionality you don't believe apps should have on your phone."

References

^ news that the iPhone app Path uploads users' entire contact lists(thenextweb.com) ( http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/02/07/path-2-uploads-your-address-book-but-says-that-its-for-friend-matching-and-will-be-opt-in-soon/ )
^ here (seclab.cs.ucsb.edu) ( http://seclab.cs.ucsb.edu/media/uploads/papers/egele-ndss11.pdf )
^ discovery by a Singaporean researcher that the social networking app Path uploads users' contact list (mclov.in) ( http://mclov.in/2012/02/08/path-uploads-your-entire-address-book-to-their-servers.html )
^ using security flaws hackers find in iOS's code (www.forbes.com) ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/08/01/meet-comex-the-iphone-uber-hacker-who-keeps-outsmarting-apple/ )
^ ContactPrivacy (www.cultofmac.com) ( http://www.cultofmac.com/145112/how-to-keep-apps-like-path-from-accessing-your-contacts-data-jailbreak/ )
^ PrivaCy (cydia.saurik.com) ( http://cydia.saurik.com/package/com.saurik.privacy )
^ here (seclab.cs.ucsb.edu) ( http://seclab.cs.ucsb.edu/media/uploads/papers/egele-ndss11.pdf )
As the scandal swirled this past week over news that the iPhone app Path uploads users' entire contact lists ¹without permission, I came upon a study (PDF here ²) released last year by a group of researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the International Security Systems Lab that aimed to analyze how and where iPhone apps transmit users' private data. Not only did the researchers find that one in five of the free apps in Apple's app store upload private data back to the apps' creators that could potentially identify users and allow profiles to be built of their activities. They also discovered that programs in Cydia, the most popular platform for unauthorized apps that run only on "jailbroken" iPhones, tend to leak private data far less frequently than Apple's approved apps.
For Manuel Egele, a post-doctoral researcher at UCSB, the discovery by a Singaporean researcher that the social networking app Path uploads users' contact list ³only confirms a pattern he and his co-authors have long seen. Four of the Apple-approved apps he tested last year were found to similarly upload contacts, including one from the location-based social network Gowalla. "Clearly this behavior hasn't changed over the last year. I'm not sure whether there's been any improvement from Apple's side," Egele says. "For easily accessible data, app store apps are much more frequently accessing and leaking that data. The app store is supposed to be a walled garden. Unless Apple gives approval, you can't put things there. But whatever job the company is doing isn't good enough."
With somewhere between 10 million and 15 million users, Cydia's app platform has become the default unofficial app store of users who jailbreak their iPhones and iPads, hacking them to install applications and operating system tweaks that Apple restrictions are designed to block. That kind of device hacking, using security flaws hackers find in iOS's code ⁴to unlock its restrictions against running unapproved code, also introduces new security and privacy risks for users by stripping away the phone or tablet's security features and leaving the device open to malware.
But Jay Freeman, Cydia's creator, points to numerous applications available via Cydia that actually give users privacy and security features they wouldn't otherwise have. Immediately after the Path scandal broke, for instance, a developer named Ryan Petrich created a tweak for Cydia called ContactPrivacy ⁵that warns the user whenever an application wants to upload his or her contact information, (shown above) rather than simply allowing the data to be transmitted by default. Another app that Freeman wrote himself, called PrivaCy ⁶, gives the users a toggle switch that allows them to control whether any particular app can upload usage statistics to a remote server.
Read the study from the International Security Systems Lab and the University of California at Santa Barbara here ⁷.

Original URL:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/02/14/unauthorized-iphone-and-ipad-apps-leak-private-data-less-often-than-approved-ones/

Proposed Law will Force Advertisers to Add a Disclaimer on the Ad

2012-02-16T11:30:00.001-07:00

February 16, 2012 10:04:00 AM

Arizona bill takes aim at airbrushed women in ads — www.azcentral.com — Readability

www.readability.com

by Alia Beard Rau - Feb. 14, 2012 10:57 PM

The Republic | azcentral.com

Women have wrinkles, pores and curves. And there's a movement across the world to make sure advertisers can no longer pretend otherwise.
Now, that movement has come to Arizona.
House Bill 2793, proposed by Rep. Katie Hobbs, D-Phoenix, would require advertisers who alter or enhance a photo to put a disclaimer on that ad alerting customers that "Postproduction techniques were made to alter the appearance in this advertisement. When using this product, similar results may not be achieved."
The bill has little to no chance of success. But Hobbs said that's OK.
"We just wanted to bring it to the table and start a discussion," she said. "We need to bring attention to these body-image issues, especially with young girls. Girls need to know that they don't have to look perfect."
Arizona appears to be the first state in the nation to consider such a bill. There are ongoing efforts to get Congress to take up the matter. Several other countries also regulate or are considering regulating such advertising.

Hobbs said YWCA Maricopa County brought the idea to her.
Sam Richard, who serves on the YWCA Maricopa County board of directors, said the bill is modeled after laws in the United Kingdom.
"As an organization, we are all about empowering women and eliminating discrimination," Richard said. "We want to make sure that young women get a better start and better self-image."
He said girls need to understand that these photos aren't all real. Someone has airbrushed out the model's wrinkles and pores, or put a woman's head on top of a computer-generated perfect body.
"You need to disclose that so our young women don't grow up thinking a poreless face is possible," he said. "That's not the way that I think anyone wants to raise their daughters."
But Louie Moses, creative director of the Phoenix-based Moses Anshell advertising agency, said the advertising industry should be allowed to police itself.
"I don't like legislation that tells us what to do and what not to do in marketing," Moses said. "I know what's right."
He agreed that the evolution of photo-manipulation programs has made it nearly impossible for an average consumer to tell if a photo is real or fake. But he said legitimate advertising companies don't abuse that.
"It's one thing to make the sky bluer. It's another thing to make my body look perfect," he said. "And with the companies we represent, we see an advantage to choosing to tell the truth."
Moses also said people often blame advertising agencies for too many of the evils of society.
"People are always screaming about the images out there, but I think they are overlooking the easiest way to dispel those things," he said, suggesting parents strive to be their children's role models. "We don't want our media raising our kids."
The House Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on the bill this morning, but may not actually vote on it. The bill has to have a vote to move forward.
Seth Matlins, co-founder of Los Angeles-based online women's magazine Off Our Chests, supports Hobbs' effort, calling it "extraordinary."
Off Our Chests is behind the push for similar federal legislation it calls the Media and Public Health Act. The National Eating Disorders Association and other groups have joined the push for a federal law, but no member of Congress has yet agreed to carry it.
"I'm thrilled (Hobbs) is doing this. I haven't heard of any other states trying it," Matlins said.
He said manipulated photo ads create unobtainable beauty ideals.
"People are left feeling worse about themselves because they don't look like something that actually nobody looks like," he said. "We're trying to help the makers of culture understand the relationship between what they do and how people feel."

Original URL:
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2012/02/14/20120214arizona-bill-takes-aim-airbrushed-women-ads.html

Preview: OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

2012-02-16T11:28:00.001-07:00

February 16, 2012 10:08:16 AM

Notification Center, iMessage, AirPlay and more — www.theverge.com — Readability

www.readability.com

OS X 10.8 - Code Name Mountain Lion to Integrate Additional iOS Features and Functions.

by Nilay Patel • Feb. 16, 2012 •

Mountain Lion also represents a dramatic speedup in the pace of OS X updates: Apple says it'll be issuing yearly updates from now on. That's partially to match the breakneck pace of iOS development, but also to capitalize on the growing popularity of the Mac in general — Mac sales have outgrown the general PC market for something like six years now, and Apple says it's investing heavily in the platform to build on that trend.

It's not all iOS features, though. Apple's introducing Gatekeeper, which can only be described as a bold new middle ground for app distribution: an optional setting in OS X 10.8 allows users to restrict their systems to run only apps that have been signed by trusted developers using a free certificate provided by Apple. It's somewhere between the locked-down and curated Mac App Store and the totally unrestricted world of the web, and the goal is to prevent malware from running while still allowing users to download apps from the open web — and turning off all the locks is still just a click away.

In addition, Mountain Lion includes Game Center and GameKit, which allows for cross-platform multiplayer gaming and achievements. There's also enhanced iCloud support across the entire system, further refinements to Mail, new Twitter integration with a iOS-like Share button available across apps, and a host of additions and features specific to China, Apple's fastest-growing market. It's a ton of stuff; Mountain Lion is very much a major new version of OS X, not just a polish-and-stabilize job like Snow Leopard.
Mountain Lion will be out later this summer as a paid update in the Mac App Store, but developers can download preview builds starting today. We've been playing with an early copy for a few days now, and while a few pieces aren't quite finished, it's still pretty impressive — Apple's done a remarkable job of blending core elements of iOS into OS X while still preserving the spirit and functionality of the Mac.

Notification Center

Mac users have relied on the excellent open-source Growl notification system for years now, so the addition of Notifications Center to Mountain Lion seems a bit anticlimactic at first glance. But look a little deeper and it's clear that Apple has a very different idea about how notifications should work — an idea that's unsurprisingly almost exactly how they work in iOS 5. Notifications appear at the top right of the screen as banners that automatically slide away after five seconds or alerts that require some user interaction to disappear, and a new icon on the right side of the menu bar lights up blue when new notifications arrive. Clicking on the icon slides the OS X desktop over to the left to reveal Notification Center itself, which looks identical to iOS 5 — it even has the same linen texture.
You can also use a new gesture to bring up Notification Center: a two finger swipe to the left from the right edge of the trackpad. Swiping right with two fingers from anywhere then closes the panel. It's Apple's first edge gesture, and it adds to OS X's already-intense mix of trackpad moves: two-finger swipes to scroll and navigate, three-finger swipes to manage spaces and full screen apps, and four-finger pinches to bring up Launchpad and show the desktop. In practice I found everything easy enough to remember — it's just another swipe to the left, after all — but a couple times I found myself accidentally going back in Safari when started my swipe in the middle of the trackpad instead of on the right side. Apple says the basic rule is that one finger gestures in iOS are two finger gestures in OS X, but I much preferred the unoffical Lion metaphor of two fingers for app-level commands and three and four fingers for system-level commands. Everything definitely works, but there's also definitely room for it to all work better in the final version.
(The addition of the Notification Center gesture also cements the need for a Magic Trackpad if you're a desktop Mac user — there's no key command to invoke the panel, and the Magic Mouse won't have a gesture for it either. You're stuck clicking on the icon unless you have a trackpad.)
There's a new preference pane to manage notifications and how they're displayed; as with everything else about Notification Center it'll look very familiar to iOS 5 users. Settings like notification type, icon badges, and sounds are managed on a per-app level, and you can order notifications manually or have them auto-sort by time. And… that's really it. Just as in iOS 5, the system works well, but isn't tremendously flexible — Growl users with wild custom configurations are going to bristle against Notification Center's limitations for quite some time. You can't even set notifications to display in a different corner of the screen — it's the upper right or nothing. Apple says the idea is that notifications should disappear to where users can find them again, but I'm hoping that goal is expressed as a default setting that can be changed in the final version, not the only setting.
On the other hand, if you're not using Growl you'll find Notification Center to be a major enhancement to the OS X experience — it's hard to imagine life without centralized notifications after using it for a while. We're just hoping Apple keeps with its recent hiring history and poaches a few people from the Growl team to make Notification Center even better as time goes on.

Messages

iChat's been given a new name, a huge makeover, and some major new functionality in Mountain Lion: it's now called Messages, features a very iPad-like single window interface, and supports Apple's proprietary iMessage service with hooks to launch FaceTime video calls. (FaceTime is still a separate app, but Messages can launch it and initiate a call without any additional steps.) You can actually try Messages out right now — Apple's offering a free beta for Lion users that'll expire when Mountain Lion comes out this summer.
Underneath the hood Messages is just an update to iChat — version 6.1, according to the about box — but apart from the preferences window and buddy list for Google Talk, Jabber, AIM, and Yahoo, you'd never know it. The new interface blends IM, text messaging, and message history search into something else entirely. It's especially great when you use iMessage, which seamlessly spans devices using iCloud: it's easy to start a conversation on the desktop, carry it over to an iPad, and then walk out the door still chatting on an iPhone without any interruption — and then come home and quickly search through your entire message history. When this all works, it definitely feels like the future.
There are still some rough edges in the developer preview, however. The first problem is simply structural: not everyone uses iMessage for everything, and it's easy to find yourself looking at an unwieldy mix of iMessage, Google Talk, and AIM messages all from the same person at the same time. People use different message services for different things, but Messages wants to mix everything together in a way that doesn't always make sense — and only iMessages will sync across devices, so you might find yourself missing pieces on iOS devices. iMessages sent from iPhones that fall back to SMS also won't show up, which can be confusing. It's also a little backwards that the interface requires an extra click to start a new message but search is always open; I want to write new messages far more often than I want to search old ones, after all.
But by far the biggest issue preventing Messages from being the ultimate unified messaging system is that iMessage on the iPhone is tied to your phone number by default, while the iPad and Mountain Lion use email addresses to identify your iMessage account. That means you can send iMessages from your computer to your heart's content, but messages sent to your phone number simply won't show up on your computer or iPad. Switching your iPhone to use your email address for caller ID solves the problem in a roundabout way — anyone replying to you will send iMessages to your email address, but new iMessages sent to your phone number will still only arrive on your phone.
Encouragingly, Apple seemed to understand the caller ID issues with Messages when I asked, so I'm hoping there's a cohesive solution in the works — there's certainly plenty of time before Mountain Lion ships this summer.

AirPlay Mirroring

AirPlay is one of the best features of iOS, and Apple's bringing some of it to OS X — you can now use AirPlay Mirroring with an Apple TV to view your computer's screen on a television. The AirPlay icon simply appears in the menu bar when you're on the same network as an Apple TV, and it's just one click to turn it on. You'll get stereo audio and output is limited by the Apple TV to 720p, but Mountain Lion will automatically switch to the best local screen resolution it can find for your system and scale automatically, so you don't really need to worry about settings. You're able to play iTunes movies and TV shows, but licensing restrictions unfortunately means the local display gets blacked out. (This is particularly stupid, but it's only fair to blame the studios for such foolishness, not Apple.)
AirPlay wasn't yet enabled on our test system, but Apple showed us a very impressive demo of an iPad and a MacBook Air playing Real Racing head-to-head, with the Mac streaming to a TV. We'll have to see how it all works with real-world bandwidth in our own living room, but what we saw was definitely amazing — and we can think of many, many more possibilities for AirPlay on OS X beyond simple mirroring down the line.

Game Center

By the way, you read that right — we saw Real Racing on a Mac being played head-to-head with an iPad. Apple's bringing Game Center and Game Kit to OS X to capitalize on the enormous popularity of games in the Mac App Store, and yes, it's all cross-compatible with iOS. The Game Center app looks and feels just like the iOS Game Center app, with friends, finding multiplayer opponents, leaderboards, achievements, and now in-game voice chat on OS X. We weren't able to try it out on our preview system, but Apple demoed adding a friend for us, and it worked exactly as you'd expect, complete with notification and that super-annoying Game Center bugle audio alert. Thankfully, you can turn it off.
Game Kit lets developers quickly make use of all those features, as well as support cross-device multiplayer for both live and asynchronous games, and Apple says developers who've used the Game Kit APIs for iOS will find it pretty easy to make them work on OS X. We're not sure if the Mac will ever match up against PC gaming when it comes to raw framerates and horsepower, but Apple's certainly sweetening the OS X gaming experience in other ways — and tying the Mac into the huge popularity of iOS gaming certainly seems like a smart move.

iCloud

Mountain Lion is Apple's first OS X release after the launch of iCloud, and the cloud service is woven even more tightly into the system. You're presented with an Apple ID login screen when you first install the OS, and the system pulls down and sets up iCloud, Mac App Store, FaceTime, and iTunes automatically. You're then prompted to setup iCloud itself, and the system will auto-populate your contacts, calendars, and bookmarks for you.
Apple's also added Documents in the Cloud to 10.8, so apps can now store and access files directly from iCloud. It's not currently enabled in our developer preview build, but it worked seamlessly in the demo we saw — Pages documents created on the iPad instantly showed up in the new iCloud-enabled Document Library, and changes made on the Mac were instantly pushed to the iPad. You can also now make folders for iCloud documents using an interface that's much like the iOS app folders UI, but there's still no proper user-visible file system for iCloud, and if you want to share files among apps you'll have to download them to your machine first.
iCloud also does a lot of silent work in the background in Mountain Lion: apps like Messages, Reminders, Calendar, and Notes all seamlessly sync across devices, and Safari syncs tabs across OS X and iOS, much like the new Chrome for Android. Third party apps can of course tap into all these services as well, and a new API lets developers enable Documents in the Cloud and Document Library as well.

China

China is Apple's largest-growing market, and Mountain Lion offers improved Chinese text input with better prediction and autocorrection, the ability to include English characters without switching keyboards, and improved handwriting recognition for Chinese characters. There's also a number of new Chinese services integrated in Mountain Lion, including the Baidu search engine, the Sina weibo blogging service, the Youku and Tudou video services, and the QQ, 126, and 163 mail services.

Calendar

Calendar in Mountain Lion still sports the hideous faux-leather texture treatment it got in Lion, but two of the more glaring interface annoyances have been remedied: clicking the Calendars button now slides open a listing of all your calendars instead of dropping down a popover sheet and you can turn off invitation alerts while leaving meeting reminders active.

Notes

Notes is now a standalone application that looks almost exactly like the iPad Notes app, although thankfully with less faux-stitched-leather accents. (There's still a fake ripped-paper effect at the top of the notes field, and the window header still has a fake leather texture, though. Sigh.) You can double click on a note to pop it open in a standalone window that'll remain open even after you quit the main Notes app, and you can set individual note windows to always stay on top, although the windows disappeared in Mission Control and couldn't be moved on top of full screen apps or other Spaces. (We're hoping this changes in the final build.)
Notes also support inline images and links, and you can format fonts, styles, and colors any way you like. There's also a surprisingly robust bulleted-list feature that kicks in as soon as you type a bullet, which is nice. Notes syncs with iCloud out of the box, but you can also sync with Gmail, Yahoo, and other services that support notes.

Reminders

Reminders were built into iCal in Lion, but Apple's pulled the feature out and built a dedicated Reminders app in Mountain Lion that — surprise! — looks just like the iOS 5 Reminders app. Reminders can be added to iCloud and automatically synced across devices, but you can also sync with CalDAV services like Google Calendar and Yahoo. Mountain Lion doesn't offer any fancy location-aware reminders like iOS 5, but there's all the other basic functionality you'd expect: alerts, due dates, priorities, multiple accounts and lists. Other than that, it's a pretty bare-bones app — it doesn't even have preferences dialog.

Sharing / Twitter

iOS-style share buttons have popped up all over Mountain Lion, offering you the ability to quickly share almost anything via Mail, Messages, AirDrop, Flickr, Vimeo, and Twitter. Twitter is a standout: just like iOS, it's integrated throughout the system, and you'll get notifications for replies and direct messages. You can also sync contact pictures with your Twitter list, and tweets can pick up your rough location using OS X's Location Services.
Once you pick a service in the share drop down, an iOS-style share sheet appears and lets you post directly from whatever app you're in — and you can share anything you can Quick Look from anywhere in the system as well. There's an API that lets developers add share buttons to third party apps, but there's no way to add additional services — a pity, since Facebook and YouTube are notable omissions. (Facebook and YouTube do appear in QuickTime Player's share list and it sounds as though they may come to iPhoto, but they're not system-wide.)

Gatekeeper is a major new addition to Mountain Lion, and a major change for OS X app distribution in general. Apple will now be offering Mac developers the ability to sign their apps before distribution, and Mountain Lion will ship out of the box restricted to running only signed apps and apps from the Mac App Store. (You can still run any app you want by right-clicking on an unsigned app or simply changing the global setting to allow apps from anywhere. You can also lock things down even tighter and only allow App Store apps to run.) Apple's says it's still tweaking a lot of the language and controls around Gatekeeper, so expect the text in the screenshot above to be different when Mountain Lion ships — the company wants to make Gatekeeper easy to understand and use without training users to blindly accept defaults.
Apple says Gatekeeper is a response to the growing threat of malware that relies on clever social engineering to get users to run malicious code hidden within another seemingly-innocuous app — the company doesn't think it's a huge problem now, but it's trying to ward it off at the pass. There's some basic identity verification when developers sign up for a certificate, but the overall process is meant to be quick and easy; Apple is insistent that the goal of Gatekeeper is not to curate or control the broader world of Mac app development, but rather to make getting apps from the web safer for end users. To that end, there's no cost to developers beyond the standard Mac developer program fees, and the key is valid even if the developer quits the program.
It's also important to note that the system is essentially local: your machine will download a list of keys from Apple at least daily, and Apple doesn't track what apps you're running or anything like that. (Your Gatekeeper setting gets sent if you opt-in to diagnostic reports, however.) On paper, it sounds like a clever solution to the malware problem, but Apple's going to have to convince developers to participate for it to work — expect to hear a lot about Gatekeeper in the months to come.

There's a ton of new stuff in Mountain Lion — we've just scratched the surface of the developer preview, and we haven't even talked about the new unified search / address bar in Safari, the VIP filter in Mail, or the complete disappearance of Software Update in favor of App Store updates. And that's just the beginning: Apple says that plenty will be changed and added between now and the final release this summer.
But even with all the rough edges and loose ends in the developer preview, Mountain Lion looks like a must-have update to OS X — the combination of Notification Center, AirPlay, and Messages more than makes up for any of Lion's lingering irritations, and I say that as someone who's stubbornly remained on Snow Leopard for the past seven months. Apple's not saying how much 10.8 will cost when it arrives, but just like Lion, it'll be distributed exclusively in the Mac App Store. Until then, we'll be tracking Mountain Lion's development closely — and trying to dig up as much as we can onnext year's release of OS X.

References

^ Mac OS 10.7 Lion (www.theverge.com) ( http://www.theverge.com/2011/10/24/2510590/mac-os-x-lion-review )
It's only been seven months since Apple launched Mac OS 10.7 Lion ¹, but the company isn't sitting still: it just announced the developer preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, a tweaked and enhanced new version of the operating system that includes major new features like Notification Center, AirPlay mirroring, and iMessage. Yes, those are all headline iOS features as well; Mountain Lion continues Apple's cycle of using the iPhone and iPad to influence Mac development and vice versa.

Original URL:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/16/2801047/mac-os-x-10-8-mountain-lion-preview-photos-video

Cooking Oil Comparison Chart

2012-02-16T11:26:00.000-07:00

February 14, 2012 6:38:08 PM

Cooking Oil Comparison Chart

www.eatingrules.com

The 411 on Valentine's Flowers - Infographics

2012-02-13T22:29:00.000-07:00

February 13, 2012 3:04:48 PM

The 411 on Flower Ettiquette (Infographic)

frugaldad.com

Tomorrow, Americans will buy somewhere in the ballpark of 200 million roses for their Valentine's sweethearts. Except for Feb. 14th, most of us don't really think about flowers. I'll buy the occasional bouquet for a birthday party or a school play, but I usually grab the most colorful, reasonably priced arrangement at the grocery store on my way to an event. We recently ordered flowers for a party and we spent a long time weighing more than cost and color; it turns out flowers are a tricky business. Different flower species and colors are meant for certain occasions and relationships and while guys like me don't tend to think about it, putting more thought than money into the purchase can really make the gift more special.

Buyers just accept that flower prices increase tremendously around Valentine's and Mother's Day. And it's funny that only 30% of annual flower purchases are made for "no special occasion" yet women surveyed say they prefer getting flowers unexpectedly or on non-holidays. For those of us who need to know how to make our floral gifts more meaningful and surprising, this latest infographic serves as a guide.
Check out this helpful guide to buying flowers if you're in the market to buy some Valentine's blooms:

Please share this graphic by embedding it on your site
Source: http://frugaldad.com

Use an Aluminum Can for Perfectly Poached Eggs Every Time

2012-02-13T22:27:00.000-07:00

February 13, 2012 3:02:40 PM

Use an Aluminum Can for Perfectly Poached Eggs Every Time

lifehacker.com

Poaching an egg isn't terribly difficult on its own, but if you have trouble keeping your eggs in a neat little pouch when you crack them into your water, the secret may be twofold: first, make sure to swirl the water a bit before you crack the egg into your pot, second, grab an old aluminum can. Here's how it works.
Swirling water with a spoon is an old trick when it comes to poaching an egg—the swirling motion will help keep the egg together in the center as it cooks. Reader Mary writes in to point out that if you poach eggs often, or poach a lot of eggs in one sitting, save the next aluminum can you empty, rinse it out, and cut off both ends. Then, when you're ready to poach an egg, rub the inside with a little oil (just to make sure nothing sticks) and lower it into your hot water, right over the swirling center of the pot. Crack the egg into the can, and when the egg solidifies, pull the can up. Set a timer, let the egg cook, and pull it out with a mesh ladle when it's finished.
There are a lot of ways to poach a perfect egg, but this sounds like a helpful crutch for people just getting started, or who want to make sure every egg is perfect, every time. It may not be necessary, but it's useful. Do you have any egg poaching tips? Have you tried this method before? Let us know in the comments below.

Travel: Cruisewise Launches Dedicated Travel Site For Booking / Researching Cruises

2012-02-13T22:26:00.000-07:00

February 13, 2012 2:56:16 PM

CruiseWise Launches A Dedicated Travel Site For Booking Cruises

techcrunch.com

CruiseWise , a new online travel agency dedicated to booking cruises, is opening its doors today. The startup aims to simplify the online cruise booking process, bringing it up to par with what you find now when booking hotels or flights.

With site's online search engine, customers can compare prices, routes, cabin choices and other options across multiple cruise lines and see the full amount for the cruise by total number of passengers, including tax.
The startup was founded in 2010 by CEO Amit Aharoni, CTO Nicolas Meunier and COO Steve Davis after realizing that online 10% of total online bookings for cruises happened online, compared with 85% for cars and 75% for hotels. This isn't because more cruise ship passengers are "old" and unaccustomed to using a computer to book travel, they say. The average age of a cruiser is 49, versus 46 as the average age of a hotel stayer. It's not the 3-year age gap that's the problem – it's the user interface. "It's really bad," says Davis.
Due to the complexities of options with a cruise ship – there can be up to 40 different cabin options alone, for example – being walked through the process through an online travel search site like Expedia takes multiple steps. In fact, cruise bookings go through 8 webpages on Expedia, versus 3 for flights, Davis notes.
To cater to the needs of potential cruise passengers, the team decided to build a vertical designed just for booking cruises. The search process is simplified, allowing you to easily compare different packages side-by-side, while also seeing the real prices. Since cruise prices are by person, that ad for a $300 discounted cruise is really $600 for a couple, plus tax. CruiseWise lets you see the full rate when you're searching, so you can make better decisions.

For now, the service is only tracking four top lines: Carnival, Celebrity, Princess and Royal Caribbean, but combined they account for 60% of the market. Six more lines will be added in the next several months, bringing that total up to 80%+ of the market.
CruiseWise also includes information that helps you pick the cruise line of choice, like ship layouts with interactive deck maps, lists of amenities, photos, route information, in-depth port guides and more. The startup even employs half a dozen travel writers who create editorial content about the destinations and submit photos. Other features in the works include an improved cabin selection guide that will help you determine which cabin best suits your needs (quiet or loud? windows? sunrise or sunset view?, etc.) In the future, the service will allow for crowdsourced content and user reviews, too.
Overall, the goal with CruiseWise is not only to improve the booking process, but also to offer better prices for cruises, too. "We're trying to offer people lower prices and more credit back because we spend so much less money to serve them," explains Davis. So it's cheaper? "Cheaper is actually a tricky word in cruising. Cruise lines have very strict policies about the prices you can advertise to people," Davis explains. What they do allow is letting you return the savings to customers in the form of credit, not discounts on the initial package price. But don't worry, you'll spend the credit – after all, what's a vacation without a pina colada and souvenir t-shirt?
CruiseWise, which was the first team to emerge from StartupChile and is funded by SV Angel, NEA, Index Ventures, PROfounders Capital and various angels.

Fair Labor Association begins Foxconn inspections at Apple's request

2012-02-13T22:25:00.000-07:00

February 13, 2012 3:00:32 PM

Fair Labor Association begins Foxconn inspections at Apple's request

www.tuaw.com

Apple has announced that the Fair Labor Association will conduct voluntary audits of Foxconn factories in Shenzhen and Chengdu, China, at Apple's request. Inspections began Monday in Shenzhen.
In a press release issued this morning, Apple CEO Tim Cook said, "The inspections now underway are unprecedented in the electronics industry, both in scale and scope, and we appreciate the FLA agreeing to take the unusual step of identifying the factories in their reports."
The FLA's inspection procedure will consist of three main parts. Interviews with employees regarding living conditions, work place safety, compensation and hours; physical inspections of dormitories and work areas; and review of documents "…related to procedures at all stages of employment."
Apple recently came under fire for working conditions at some of its assembly partners' plants, prompting some concerned customers to deliver petitions to Apple Stores .

Five Best Movie Recommendation Services

2012-02-13T22:24:00.000-07:00

February 12, 2012 2:56:16 PM

Five Best Movie Recommendation Services

lifehacker.com

Whether you're planning a dinner and a movie with a special someone for Valentine's Day, or you just like to read up on what's worth seeing before you spend your hard earned cash on a theater experience, you have plenty of options to read up on what's new in theaters or what's worth seeing before you go. Here's a look at five of the best movie recommendation and review services, based on your nominations.
Earlier in the week we asked you for your favorite movie recommendation service , and you certainly responded. Sadly we can't look at all of them, but here are the top five nominees.

Criticker

Criticker doesn't just match you up with movies that you would like, it also matches you up with other movie lovers who enjoy the same types of movies that you do. If you're a movie buff or a self-described movie critic, Criticker gives you a platform to share your thoughts, rate movies, and comment on other people's ratings. The service is only as good as the movies you rate though, so as soon as you sign up, your best bet is to start rating movies right away so the site can get an idea of what you'd enjoy watching. When it does know what you like, though, it makes some great predictions. Best of all, the algorithm that it uses to determine whether you'd like a movie, the "Taste Compatibility Index," is dynamic, learns from your changing tastes, and can help you determine whether you'd like a new blockbuster before you spend money on it.

Jinni

Jinni, often described as "Pandora for movies," works best when you search for the types of movies, genres, moods, even performers that you like, and you'll see a list of movies that Jinni thinks will fit the bill, thanks to its aptly-named "Movie Genome Project ." Even if you search for "date night," Jinni can suggest some titles for you that are perfect for the atmosphere that both of you will enjoy. Then you can further customize the search by limiting the results to types of films, dates released, genres, and more. If you have an account, you can save your searches, along with any preferences and favorites you have, so Jinni can hone your recommendations even further. Plus, hook Jinni up with your Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon Video, or Blockbuster account to make use of its suggestions.

Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes is the quintessential movie review site. For a lot of people, a "rotten" rating is enough to make them not want to see a movie at all, much less spend money on it in the theaters. Rotten Tomatoes does an excellent job of aggregating movie reviews from all over the web, including the voices of professional movie critics, newspapers reviews, bloggers, and forum and movie fan buzz around the web. The site is a great way to quickly see how well received (or poorly received) a new film that's just landed in the theater has been. You can have your say as well—after registering for an account, you can rate movies on your own and contribute to the community. Think of Rotten Tomatoes as an essential research tool to use to decide if a movie worth seeing—even if it doesn't use your tastes or watch history to help you decide.

ChickFlix

With the tagline "movie reviews by industry chicks," ChickFlix aims to give you a female perspective on the movie industry's latest releases. Operated by three women who started the site by debating what exactly a "chick flick" really is, the blog has grown into an amazing source for movie reviews and perspectives that you won't find represented in newspaper reviews or on other movie review sites. Keep in mind though that ChickFlix doesn't aim to rate movies, or give you detailed background into why movie A is better than movie B, or why you'll like movie C because you liked movie D. Instead, you'll find interesting and engaging movie reviews, information on films that you may like that you may not have heard of, and great suggestions for films that you may not otherwise have investigated.

Metacritic

Metacritic rates just about everything , and movies are no exception. Similar to Rotten Tomatoes, the site is largely sentiment-driven and scores are an aggregate based on reviews from elsewhere on the web, prominent voices, independent reviews, authors, bloggers, commenters, and members of the community who are invited to sign up and rate their own movies and experiences. The process of building a metascore is unique and complex enough that there's a whole page about it , and to this day Metacritic rankings—which fluctuate based on the sentiment of the web—are used to communicate the overall worth of a movie, video game, book, or album, even if that media has been out for years. Again, Metacritic is a research tool, much like Rotten Tomatoes—even though Metacritic covers a much wider series of topics, it's not going to help you decide whether you'd like a film based on other films you like, but it will help you determine whether the overall reception of a movie has been positive or negative, and why.
Now that you've seen the top five, it's time to vote for the overall winner.
Honorable mentions this week go out to the venerable IMDB , which not as many of you nominated as we expected, but is still a great go-to site for information on past movies, actor bios, upcoming projects and productions that your favorite performers are in, trailers, and news. Also worth mentioning is MovieLens , a site that does a really good job of suggesting movies to you that you'd like based on movies you already know you enjoyed or disliked.
Did your favorite not get enough nominations to make the list? Have something to say about one of the contenders we missed? Sound off in the comments below.

BitTorrent doesn’t hurt US box-office, delayed international releases drive downloading

2012-02-13T22:21:00.000-07:00

February 13, 2012 3:04:48 PM

BitTorrent doesn't hurt US box-office, delayed international releases drive downloading

boingboing.net

Economics researchers at Wellesley College and U Missouri have published a study showing that feature films' US box office returns are not correlated to BitTorrent sharing. They also show that shorter delays between the US exhibition and overseas releases result in less file-sharing — that is, people outside the US download movies because they can't buy tickets to them.

The second point is an important one. There's only one Internet, networked culture doesn't respect national boundaries. A particularly effective marketing campaign for a new release in America will stimulate demand in other countries, and if there's no legitimate way to fulfill demand, then some portion of viewers will choose illegitimate routes. For example, the new Muppets movie has only just been released in the UK, some months after the US theatrical release (which was attended by enormous publicity). Presumably, someone at a studio concluded that there were too many UK movies in the pipeline at Christmas and not enough in February, and chose to delay the film's release to now. However, a certain portion of the audience for Muppet movies have been reading reviews, watching viral YouTube clips, and sitting through extended online discussions of the movie without being able to see it and participate. I'm pretty sure that a lot of these people downloaded the movie so that they could be a part of this moment.

Maybe they'll still buy tickets to the cinema, too. I'd guess that a lot of middle-class families with small children will do this. There aren't many kids' movies in cinematic release at the moment, and Muppets is certainly the best bet for a Sunday matinee during the record-breaking cold-snap, when no one wants to take the kids to a park on the weekend. But child-free adults who love the Muppets may well have slaked their thirst, and there are a lot of adults in the Muppet cohort, and adults who like kids' movies often complain about paying a lot of money to attend screenings that are disrupted by crying, talking, squirming children. If you've already seen the movie on your computer, that may be enough. Finally, there are families in the "squeezed middle" who are struggling to pay the bills may want to see the movie in the cinema, but simply lack the funds to do so, and the amount of time that's gone past since the initial release has meant that there are more online copies and that they're easier to download (for example, more BitTorrent seeds) than ever before. For them, the delayed release makes downloading easier and more attractive.

"Anti-piracy" efforts are often painted as life-or-death struggles for the studios. But in the case of international windows, this is about profit maximization, not survival. If the studios can outsource the titanic expense of policing copyrights in delayed-release nations to the countries themselves, they can wring a few more points of profit by delaying release to an otherwise optimum moment. But considered as a societal problem, it makes no sense to spend a million euros on copyright enforcement just so Universal can save a few thousand euros on the cost of making new 35mm prints.

Here's the study: Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales , by Brett Danaher (Wellesley College - Department of Economics) and Joel Waldfogel (University of Minnesota - Twin Cities - Carlson School of Management ; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); University of Minnesota - Twin Cities - Department of Economics).

"Consumers in the US who would choose between the box office and piracy choose the box office (and the remaining US pirates had valuations lower than the ticket price) but that international consumers who would consider both options choose piracy due to a lack of legal availability," wrote the researchers. "If piracy displaced box office sales in the US, we would have expected the slope of the returns profile to shift more significantly as BitTorrent became more widely adopted."
In other words, researchers were unable to discern an irregular drop in returns of domestic box office sales, which could fault BitTorrent as the culprit.
Despite the mounting evidence and studies providing evidence to the needlessness of the movie studios' assault against file-sharing services, their attacks have been intensifying. At the end of the day, these results suggest that, while directing the blame at file-sharing services induces the fear of prosecution among other file-sharing competitors, much of the power to curb piracy remains in the hands of the studios.

Study suggests U.S. box office not affected by BitTorrent (Thanks, Xeni ! )

How Do I Switch from My Bank to a Credit Union?

2012-02-13T22:19:00.000-07:00

February 11, 2012 11:26:08 PM

How Do I Switch from My Bank to a Credit Union?

lifehacker.com

How Do I Switch from My Bank to a Credit Union?

Dear Lifehacker, I'm thinking about switching from my bank to a local credit union. What should I be on the lookout for when I make the switch? Is there anything I should know ahead of time, and how do I go about making the change?

Signed,

Fed Up With Big Banks
Photo by Paul Baker .
Dear Fed Up,

We know what you mean. Saturday was Bank Transfer Day , and even though Bank of America backed down on its debit card fees , many people are just sick and tired with their bank for whatever reason, whether it's high fees, poor customer service, or something else. Credit unions do offer a member-supported, smaller alternative that can provide competitive interest rates on savings accounts, loans and mortgages. Credit unions are also well known for great customer service. That said, there are a few things you need to know before you jump ship.

Things to Check Out Before You Switch

Choose the Right Credit Union for Your Needs . Before you pick a credit union, think about what's prompting you to change. We've talked about why you should switch in the past, but consider what's making you do it. If it's lower interest rates on credit cards, car loans, or mortgages, make sure to check out those rates before you sign up. If it's customer service and low fees that you're interested in, make sure to talk to your friends to see where they've had positive experiences. Compare the financial products between the credit union you're looking at and your bank. Make sure you're really avoiding fees, and the credit union's interest rates are actually better for you.
If it's convenience you're after, see if your employer or any local government or public organizations in your community have credit unions with open membership, or membership that you're eligible for. Many credit unions have opened their doors to the public, but there are still plenty that only allow employees of the patron organization and their families to join. Previously mentioned NerdWallet and credit union finder A Smarter Choice can both help you find a credit union based on your preferences.
Photo by NASA Blueshift .
Find a Credit Union That's Convenient . One of the drawbacks to switching to a credit union is that you give up the idea of having a branch on every street corner or an ATM almost anywhere you go. Most credit unions have a handful of branches in select regions, and their customer service lines are often staffed with real people, which means you might be stuck with limited phone support hours. That won't make much of a difference if you do most of your banking online and use your credit or debit card for your purchases, but it can definitely be a pain if you need a cashier's check or need to walk into a branch for services.
If you find yourself stopping by your bank a few times a month, or even once a month, don't choose the credit union with no branches or ATMs within 50 miles of your home or office, even if it comes recommended by friends. Many credit unions participate in ATM networks like the Co-Op Financial Services network and the Alliance Onenetwork so patrons can use any ATM in the network without paying fees to get their money, which can give credit union patrons access to more ATMs than any commercial bank. The same applies for branches—many credit unions share branch locations and allow you to bank with partner credit unions at any partner location. Unfortunately, even though these networks exist, it will be up to you to find them once you're a customer. You'll have to do your homework to find out where you can go to access your money without paying for the privilege.

How to Make The Switch

Ask for a "Switch Kit" to Make the Transfer Easy . Since credit unions thrive on the patronage of their members, and in most cases are more than happy to help you make the switch from a big bank, many of them have pre-made "switch kits" to help. They usually include all of the forms, identification requirements, and other paperwork you'll need to take to your old bank and fill out for the credit union to make the transition as smooth as possible. Even if they don't have a kit, they likely have some kind of package to make setting up a new account and getting your pay deposited and bills charged simple and easy.
Make the Change On the Phone or Online . With the exception of identification requirements, you can sign up for and set up accounts with most credit unions online. You can also call the credit union's customer support line and let a banking rep walk you through the process on the phone. Many credit unions go out of their way to make managing your account online easy, partially as a way to account for limited hours and fewer branches. It works in your favor though: it means you can do ACH transfers, apply for a personal loan, or open a new account at any time of day, whenever you think to do it.
Photo by m.prinke .
Remember Switching Banks is a Process, not a To-Do . As tempting as it may be to stroll into your bank, flip your bank managers desk, demand your money, and give them a piece of your mind, it's a bad idea. Switching banks is a process that can take several days, especially if you have automatic bill payments and automatic deposits set up. Consider taking out just enough money to get your new account set up while you transfer your automatic deposits and payments to your credit union account. This way, if something unexpected happens and a bill you forgot about tries to hit your old account, you won't be hit with an overdraft fee or penalty, and you don't run the risk of the the bill's issuer complaining to you that they haven't been paid.
Once you're confident that all of your automatic payments and deposits are headed to your new account—usually after a month or so of paying attention to your old and new accounts—you can withdraw the last few dollars from your bank and bid them a not-so-fond farewell.

After Switching, Get Involved to Make the Most of Your Experience

Credit Unions are generally not-for-profit, and they're always member-owned, but remember, they're still in this business to make money and stay afloat. They may introduce changes and fees that may not be popular, and it's up to you to speak up when you're unhappy. Thankfully, when you bank with a smaller organization, the decisions that you make matter more and you have more room to negotiate with banks on interest rates, lines of credit, and other changes. If you get a letter in the mail saying your credit card's interest rate is going up, a few phone calls or a well written complaint letter will usually set them straight and get you back on track. Also, because you're a member and a customer, you're just as responsible for the health and well-being of the credit union as you are entitled to stellar service and competitive financial products.
We hope that helps. There are pros and cons to switching to a credit union from a big bank, but speaking as someone who has accounts with both, I'm far more likely to go to my credit union for a car loan or a mortgage than my regular bank. Once you've experienced the difference in personal attention and customer service, you may actually grow to like your bank. If it's the financial products that matter to you, you'll enjoy the competitive rates and low fees that a credit union has to offer. As long as you go into the switch aware of what you're giving up in exchange, you'll be fine. Good luck!
Love,

Lifehacker

The Ultimate Guide To Becoming A Doer

2012-02-13T22:17:00.000-07:00

February 13, 2012 3:09:04 PM

The Ultimate Guide To Becoming A Doer

www.dumblittleman.com

The Ultimate Guide To Becoming A Doer

Sometimes we spend an inordinate amount of time talking about our ideas, dreams, and aspirations. It is easy to content ourselves with simply having lofty ideas, not realizing their sheer abundance. Anyone who has taken a breath has likely had an idea that could have literally changed the course of his or her life in a revolutionary way. Unfortunately, such ideas rarely get implemented. According to Mark Twain, "the secret to getting ahead is getting started."

If you are tired of inactivity robbing you of your potential, then here are 15 ways to be a doer.
Dreams and Mental Preparedness

Cultivate Your Dream
Relinquish Regret
Forgive yourself today.
Let Go of the Stigma of Failure
Know Yourself
Plan to Win
Prioritize
Start Small
Set a Time Limit on Preparation
Admit the Joylessness of Over-reaching
Banish Eeyore aka Dream-killers
Network With Achievers
Get an Accountability Partner
Delegate
Create an Action Environment
Record and Celebrate Your Progress

Closing Thoughts

Inactivity is one of the greatest thieves of opportunity. Don't be content with simply having a great idea. After all, the idea is often just a small fraction of the journey. It's what you do with your ideas, dreams, and passions that count. In your journey to be a doer, remember, as your thoughts become more, you become more. Therefore, commit to thinking on a higher level, develop high goals and plans of implementation, establish and maintain relationships that add to your life instead of subtract, and diminish the barriers to your motivation. As you apply these steps consistently, you too will be a doer.

[INFOGRAPHIC] How Much Are Your Social Media Skills Worth?

2012-02-13T22:16:00.002-07:00

February 13, 2012 3:00:32 PM

[INFOGRAPHIC] How Much Are Your Social Media Skills Worth?

www.readwriteweb.com

Employment agency OnWardSearch is kicking off Social Media Week by releasing an infographic that gives a snapshot of the state of salaries in the field.

The Salary Guide , which gives the top 20 markets as well as salary ranges for top job titles in each metro area, is coupled with a post on career advice from leading marketers. Not surprisingly, the left coast remains one of the better places to head to if you want to make a living blogging, tweeting or managing brands on social networks, but don't rule out the northeast — particularly New York (which tops the list) and Boston (which checks in at number five).
What will be interesting going forward is seeing how this list changes from year to year: not only are we interested in seeing if salaries for the different positions go up or down and if certain cities move onto or fall off of the list, but we'd be interested in getting a look at whether certain jobs start to make up a bigger percentage of social media employment in years to come.

BBC Reports on America's Homeless Tent Cities

2012-02-13T22:15:00.000-07:00

February 13, 2012 2:56:16 PM

BBC News - Panorama - America's homeless resort to tent cities

news.bbc.co.uk

The world's longest running investigative TV show on BBC One

America's homeless resort to tent cities

'We don't have dinner at home'

Panorama's Hilary Andersson comes face to face with the reality of poverty in America and finds that, for some, the last resort has become life in a tented encampment.
Just off the side of a motorway on the fringes of the picturesque town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, a mismatched collection of 30 tents tucked in the woods has become home - home to those who are either unemployed, or whose wages are so low that they can no longer afford to pay rent.
Conditions are unhygienic. There are no toilets and electricity is only available in the one communal tent where the campers huddle around a wood stove for warmth in the heart of winter.
Ice weighs down the roofs of tents, and rain regularly drips onto the sleeping campers' faces as they sleep.
Tent cities have sprung up in and around at least 55 American cities - they represent the bleak reality of America's poverty crisis.
Black mould
According to census data, 47 million Americans now live below the poverty line - the most in half a century - fuelled by several years of high unemployment.
One of the largest tented camps is in Florida and is now home to around 300 people. Others have sprung up in New Jersey and Portland.

Hilary Andersson presents Panorama: Poor America

BBC One, Monday, 13 February at 8.30pm

Then available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer.

In the Ann Arbor camp, Alana Gehringer, 23, has had a hacking cough for the last four months.
"The black mould - it was on our pillows, it was on our blankets, we were literally rubbing our faces in it sleeping every night," she said of wintering in a tent.
The camp is run by the residents themselves, with the help of a local charity group. Calls have come in from the hospital emergency room, the local police and the local homeless shelter to see if they can send in more.
"Last night, for example, we got a call saying they had six that couldn't make it into the shelter and… they were hoping that we could place them… So we usually get calls, around nine or 10 a night," said Brian Durance, a camp organiser.
Michigan's Republican-controlled state government has been locked into a programme of severe budget cuts in an attempt to balance its books.
The cuts have included benefits for many of the state's poorest residents.
Between the cuts and the economic conditions pinching, there is increased pressure on homeless shelters.
Michigan's Lieutenant Governor, Brian Calley, was asked about the reality of public agencies in his state suggesting the homeless live in tents.
"That is absolutely not acceptable, and we have to take steps and policies in order to make sure that those people have the skills they need to be independent, and it won't happen overnight," he said.
Depression-type poverty
There are an estimated 5,000 people living in the dozens of camps that have sprung up across America.
The largest camp, Pinella's Hope in central Florida - a region better known for the glamour of Disneyworld - is made up of neat rows of tents spread out across a 13-acre plot.

America's middle under-class once again searches for work

The Catholic charity that runs it has made laundry available, as well as computers and phones.
Many of the camps are organised and hold regular meetings to divide up camp chores and agree on community rules. They have become semi-permanent homes for some residents, who see little prospect of getting jobs soon.
These tent cities - and this level of poverty - are images that many Americans associate with the Great Depression.
Unemployment in America today has not reached the astronomical levels of the 1930s, but barring a short spike in 1982, it has not been this high since the Depression era.
There are now 13 million unemployed Americans, which is three million more than when President Barack Obama was first elected.
The stark reality is that many of them are people who very recently lived comfortable middle-class lives.
For them, the economic downturn came too fast and many have been forced to trade their middle-class homes for lives in shelters, motels and at the far extreme, tented encampments.
Panorama: Poor America, BBC One, Monday, 13 February at 20:30 GMT then available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer.

Burnout Is Real: How to Identify and Address Your Burnout Problem

2012-02-13T22:13:00.001-07:00

February 13, 2012 2:54:08 PM

Burnout Is Real: How to Identify and Address Your Burnout Problem

lifehacker.com

Most demanding careers practically guarantee stress, but if you're feeling completely exhausted, unable to concentrate, or as though you're neglecting your own well-being, you may be suffering from burnout. It's a very real condition that's easy to ignore, but you can detect and fix the problem if you know what to do. Here's how.
We often use the term "burnout" as a vague label for an exhausting day or week of hard work, but actual burnout is quite a bit more serious. I experienced serious burnout at my first job out of college. I always knew something was wrong because of the long hours and high levels of stress, but I didn't really realize what it was doing to me until my parents came to visit, saw the disastrous state of my apartment, and made me aware of what I'd been trying to ignore. (I'm usually a very tidy person, so even a small mess indicates a problem.) After leaving that job I learned more about burnout, how my life was a perfect (and extreme) example, and what I needed to do to change it. Burnout can be bad, but it isn't insurmountable. You simply need to recognize the symptoms, identify the causes, and take action—both in the short and long term—to remedy the issues you uncover. In this post, we're going to look at how to do those three things.

How to Identify Burnout and Its Cause

Burnout isn't as simple as extreme exhaustion. When you're truly burnt out, there's very little you'll do that isn't necessary for survival. You won't find a regular vacation very refreshing. You not only lose interest in the work that burnt you out in the first place, but in nearly everything else that you do. Fun won't be fun, every little thing will bother you, and you'll be unhappy without fully understanding why. You'll feel this way on a regular basis, and you'll likely believe there isn't an alternative. Of course, many people describe the symptoms of burnout a little bit differently so I've compiled a list from a few sources (including my own experience) to provide a broad view of what burnout can look and feel like:

A generally negative attitude, often paired with the feeling that nothing is going to work out.
Inability to concentrate.
General apathy towards your work, chores, and other tasks.
Feelings of stagnation.
A lack of interest in social activities and being with others.
Difficulty with healthy habits like exercise, diet, and regular sleep.
Feeling like you're never doing enough.
Neglecting your own needs (and putting the needs of others ahead of your own).
Personal values and beliefs lose their importance.
Short temper.
Constant exhaustion.
Feelings of inefficacy.
Feelings of detachment from people and things you care about.
Frequent boredom.
Psychosomatic complaints, such as headaches, lingering colds, and other issues with a cause that's difficult to identify.
The denial of these feelings.

Sources: Tech Republic , Wikipedia , and Psychology Today .

Because you may not always be able to identify these issues in yourself, it helps to ask friends or family members that you trust for help. Not only can they provide a useful outside opinion, but they can often offer examples of why they believe you are burnt out. When you're having trouble seeing the problem yourself, these examples can help you realize it's really there. Chances are they will tell you that you're working so much that they never see you anymore. Especially honest friends and family members will tell you that you seem disconnected and aren't as fun to be around as you once were. Be prepared to hear that you're currently not at your best and why.

Once you've identified that you are burnt out, you need to figure out why . For the most people, this should be fairly simple because it will be the primary source of your frustration and will take up the majority of your time. When I was burnt out because of a previous job, I found that I rarely had the ability to concentrate on much else. Even when someone was talking to me, I'd often be thinking about problems at my job or worrying about work I needed to finish. I finally decided I needed to quit when a friend was telling me about an important issue in his life, he asked me what I thought, and my response was "I hate my job." I gave notice the following Monday. Jobs aren't the only source of burnout, however, but how you find that source is generally the same. Pay attention to what's consuming your thoughts and you should have your answer.

How to Undo the Effects of Burnout

Once you've identified and accepted that you're truly burnt out, you need to change it. It takes awhile for burnout to manifest and so it can take awhile to undo as well. You'll need to be ready to make serious changes and stick with them for awhile. The good news is that once you start making these changes, you should start to feel more motivated again. Often times change is the necessary catalyst to make you feel like things are going to get better. By taking these changes slowly and rolling them out over a long period of time (e.g. a year or more), you can keep yourself on track.

Cut Off the Source of the Burnout

Before you can make any changes, you have to figure out which ones are relevant. That will, for the most part, depend on the source of your burnout. Whatever is at the source, you need to cut it off. If your source of burnout is job-related, figure out what the problem is and do everything you can to change it. If you change isn't an option within your job, it may be time to quit. That's a scary prospect regardless of the current unemployment rate, so be sure to have enough savings in place to survive for at least a few months or have another job lined up.

When considering your next job, you'll want to concentrate on two things: a comfortable schedule and control. Your schedule is important because you don't want to be overworked. For many people, burnout originates from too many hours on the job and too little time for oneself. Also, having more control over your work is also relevant because you're coming from a situation where you had very little control over your own life. If you move into a job that provides more responsibility, it'll help you feel like things are getting back on track. This also means that you don't want to rule out jobs you wouldn't have considered previously. Apply for jobs that you think you're unqualified to get—because you might be surprised and actually get one of them—and also apply for a job or two that you think you're too qualified to want—because that kind of job might offer the flexibility and control you need. If you can afford to take a large chunk of time off (e.g. a month or more) before heading back to the working world, however, you should. While a vacation won't solve the problem, it will at least help you generate a little more energy before you take your next steps.
Not every source of burnout can be swapped for something better. If for whatever reason there is no way for you to cut off the source of burnout entirely, you need to get as much help as possible to lighten your load. Ask your friends and family to assist where they can so you have more personal time to figure out a long-term solution to your problem.

Be Unusual

Chances are you have a daily routine, and that's in part because you're unmotivated to do a whole lot beyond what you're used to doing every day when you're burnt out. Simply doing something completely out of the ordinary can make a huge difference. If you sit on your butt all day, go take a walk in the park. If you're constantly connecting with technology, try playing cards or board game. If you always wake up early, sleep in. If you like to sleep in, trying getting up early. Reversing your routine is a simple way to feel refreshed and it takes very little work.

Be Healthy

Your health is exceptionally important, but burnout makes it harder to maintain. It can be particularly difficult to overcome unhealthy behavior because the symptoms of burnout encourages you to overlook your own needs. When you have absolutely no emotional desire to exercise and eat better, the best thing you can do is as little as possible. It's easy to say no to 30 minutes of exercise that requires a gym, but it's much harder to procrastinate when your daily exercise only takes five to 15 minutes and you can do it at home. We've previously outlinedmany ways you can get a complete workout with nothing but your body , so just pick a few exercises you like and do them for a short amount of time during the day. So long as you do some kind of exercise each day, you'll be improving your health little by little. Also, just move around as often as you can. A sedentary lifestyle is harmful to your health , but it can be overcome with regular movement each day .

Getting on a better diet will take a little more willpower, as you'll have to forgo a lot of the unhealthy foods you've used to eke out a little bit of joy in your burnt out life. Just like with the exercise, take it easy and work your way up slowly. Consider everything you like to eat on a regular basis and isolate the top five healthiest choices on that list. Concentrate on eating those more often and be diligent about portion control. This won't involve any dramatic changes in your diet, but will refocus what you already eat so you're eating healthier. When you're feeling up to it, start cooking more often. When you make the food, you have greater control over what's going into your body.

Finally, sleep better (and more if you need to). Burnout's primary symptom is long-term exhaustion, so you need to improve the quality of your sleep if you want things to get better. I found technology to be helpful when diagnosing my sleep problems and figuring out a better routine. If your sleep problems are more specific, however, check out these common solutions .

Be Patient

As previously mentioned, undoing burnout takes time. While you may start to feel better quickly, overriding your previous descent into exhaustion is a long-term process and you can't expect to fix it all in a snap. As you work your way back to feeling better, more energized, and generally happier with your work and personal lives, set both long and short term goals to help you remember that this is a process. Seeing yourself achieve these goals over time will help you know that progress is being made even when it feels like nothing is happening at all. Burnout is difficult to overcome, but you'll get there if you're dedicated.
Images by Leremy (Shutterstock) and Roman Sigaev (Shutterstock) .

Sony raised price of Whitney Houston albums after death

2012-02-13T22:13:00.000-07:00

February 13, 2012 2:54:08 PM

Sony raised price of Whitney Houston albums after death

boingboing.net

Sony raised price of Whitney Houston albums after death

At The Guardian , Josh Halliday writes about Sony's rush to profit from Whitney Houston's death .

Sony Music has come under fire after it increased the price of a Whitney Houston album on Apple's iTunes Store hours after the singer was found dead.
The music giant is understood to have lifted the wholesale price of Houston's greatest hits album, The Ultimate Collection, at about 4am California time on Sunday. This meant that the iTunes retail price of the album automatically increased from £4.99 to £7.99.

The clockwork regularity of Sony PR disasters is really something. It's as if a Division of Unbridled Cynicism lurks deep in the bowels of its vast workforce, issuing Spite Directives to ensure an ingeniously varied drumbeat of fail.

Flightfox Outsources Your Airfare Search to Save You a Ton of Time and Money

2012-02-13T22:12:00.000-07:00

February 13, 2012 2:52:00 PM

Flightfox Outsources Your Airfare Search to Save You a Ton of Time and Money

lifehacker.com

If you'd rather not spend hours looking for the absolute best deal on your next flight, Flightfox may be worth your while. The service's "flight hackers" compete to find you the lowest possible fare in return for a $29 finder's fee (refundable if you're not satisfied).
Currently the average savings listed over base flight prices is $373, but if you browse past savings you'll see that international and multi-city flights are especially ripe with possible savings if you let someone else do the searching for you rather than going the traditional Kayak or Expedia route: In a Canberra, Australia to San Francisco, CA contest, the price saved was $2,252 per person (24%), and a flight from Singapore to Hartford, CT $1,203 saved per person (54%).
You can, however, also save a bit on domestic travel too. One flight between West Palm Beach and Austin was priced at $198 on Flightfox, but when I plugged the flight details into Kayak the lowest price I found was $342. Not huge, but still, clearly these travel searchers have other sources.
Flightfox has a few things going for it. As mentioned, the fee is entirely refundable if you don't get the savings you want. Second, you can add in unusual requirements for your trip, such as you're traveling with three cats or one person traveling with you will be flying back at a different time or you demand a TV screen in front of you for the whole trip. It's an alternative to using a travel agent, and the fee covers each person/ticket on the trip (rather than having to pay a fee per ticket).
Worth a consideration, at least, if you have a big flight coming up and don't want to spend hours shopping for it (or learning how to become a travel hacker or the nitty gritty of cheap airfare and so on yourself).
Flightfox | via Gadling

How to Get a Used-Car Warranty (and Not Get Screwed)

2012-02-13T22:11:00.000-07:00

February 13, 2012 2:54:08 PM

How to Get a Used-Car Warranty (and Not Get Screwed) - Popular Mechanics

www.popularmechanics.com

(Photo by fotog/Getty Images)

It's Eric Anderson's job to know how much it costs you to own a car. And number-crunchers like Anderson, a senior analyst at IntelliChoice, know more than they ever have before—thanks partly to the proliferation of certified preowned (CPO) programs that nearly every carmaker in America now offers. These programs offer extended service contracts as part of the package when you buy a used car, which means, among other things, that all the repairs are tracked—and tracked in the same way that repairs done under new-car warranties are.
Anderson's math helps guide IntelliChoice's Best Overall Value of the Year Awards . But the real reason data like his matter to you is that it shows the differences in warranties that various automakers offer on preowned cars—both CPO vehicles and other used autos. Figuring out whether to buy a warranty on a used car, or how to do it, can be a tangled mess. But we're here to help. For some advice on buying used, what warranties are best on the CPO front, and what to watch out for in extended warranties if you don't buy a CPO vehicle, read on. As you might imagine, it all starts with "read the fine print."

Go CPO

Certified preowned-car warranties provide peace of mind because factory warranties are backing the product, but Anderson says there's another crucial factor: manufacturer vetting. CPO cars have to be in good to great shape to be insurable. "The only way [car companies] can offer CPO is because they're making money on the aggregate of the warranties. If they weren't, the business model wouldn't make any sense." Like any insurer, carmakers want to insure mostly healthy patients. But unlike health insurance providers, car companies can inspect every patient top to bottom to make sure it's healthy. They'll do small repairs to prep a CPO for sale, but any vehicle that needs major work, such as a new transmission, will never make it into the certified preowned pool. The upshot: A CPO car is already a good machine or the carmaker would never sell it as such. That puts the dealer in a position where he doesn't feel like he has to hide anything from you.

Shopping for CPOs

But just as new-car warranties differ, not all CPO warranties are created equal. When you're shopping for one, Anderson says, look first at the deductibles. Audi charges $85, BMW $50, and Land Rover $100, none of which may surprise you (though neither Mercedes or Lexus charges a deductible). But it is a shocker that Chrysler charges $150 and Ford $100. Also, check whether the CPO warranty is transferable if the car is sold prior to its expiration, which could apply to you if you're the buyer or the seller. Audi, Infiniti/Nissan, and Lexus all say no, but Kia will let you transfer a warranty, though it charges $40. There's a ton of fine print that comes with CPO warranties. Read it—the details should be on the manufacturers' websites. The information within covers a lot of ground. Can you finance a CPO car? Can you lease a CPO car? Is roadside assistance included? Look for deal-breakers. There's no such thing as perfection; it just depends on where you're willing to bend and where you're not. The biggest question, however, is the obvious one: how much coverage you're going to get and for how long. Lexus offers three-years/100,000 miles, which is one of the best CPO warranties around. It compares favorably witih other programs that offer anywhere from three months comprehensive/12 months powertrain to 24 months comprehensive coverage.

To Extend the CPO Warranty or Not?

Before you buy a certified preowned car, you should investigate not only the warranty details, but also whether you can buy an extended warranty. This is especially true for a luxury car, and even more so if the CPO contract covers only a year or two. Luxury cars are typically expensive to maintain and the extra warranty protection is nearly always a wise play. However, Anderson says, extended warranties are becoming an increasingly smart move even for other vehicles. "Think of Ford's Sync or any other sophisticated electronic system," he says. When it goes south, it requires a great deal of troubleshooting. "Often the parts are cheap, but it takes them a long time to figure out why something isn't working, and at $85 or $120 an hour, that labor adds up quickly." But (you knew there was a but, right?), not all extended warranties are necessarily worth it. Audi doesn't even offer one, nor does Porsche or Mini, and even if you can get one you still need to look at the limitations. For instance, you might find an extended warranty that covers up to five years, but ends at 74,000 miles. If you're buying a car with 60,000 miles on it already, that extended warranty isn't much good. Finally, a little secret of the extended warranty game is that they cost the dealer a set amount. How much isn't public knowledge and carmakers won't share that information, but dealers are free to use it as a bargaining chip. They can throw it in with the purchase price of a CPO car or non-CPO car; they can charge more than it costs them. The point is that it's negotiable, so you should feel free to ask for the time to study what the warranty covers and what it doesn't, and haggle over the price.

Don't Fear if You Don't Buy CPO

Sometimes a certified preowned car isn't an option. What if you inherit a car, buy one from a neighbor or a friend, or buy an ordinary, non-CPO used car? You can still get coverage by purchasing a factory extended warranty from a dealer, or an aftermarket warranty. While the latter idea scares many customers, probably because of a belief that the factory warranty is "better," the truth is that most factory warranties are serviced by the same companies that sell aftermarket warranties. Remember: It's all insurance. Carmakers don't really want to be in the insurance business, they want to be in the car business. So they negotiate contracts with giant companies that provide insurance in the form of warranties.
Both JM&A and EasyCare provide both aftermarket insurance to dealers and new/used-car insurance to dealers and manufacturers. EasyCare lets you buy insurance directly from them, while JM&A processes most of its sales directly through dealers. Do your homework when scouting an aftermarket warranty—and be cautious. Anderson says he's rated the warranties from companies like JM&A and EasyCare because they're safe for consumers and have a long legacy in business. But IntelliChoice actually stopped even bothering to rate the products from a slew of other firms that seemed to come and go every year. He suggests asking for a referral to a BBB rating and even finding out what dealers or car manufacturers the insurance companies work with. If you're on the phone shopping for a quote, the salesperson ought to be able to steer you to that information easily—it's a red flag if she or he can't. The same goes for the shopping experience at the dealer. They may not know off hand about every company, but they should certainly be able to provide you with paperwork so you can do this legwork yourself.

Pimp Your Ride, Void Your Warranty

It's fine to be a tinkerer, and if you're changing your own tires, air filter, or oil, that's usually fine. But if you're doing performance modifications on your used car, then be warned: You're almost surely voiding your base, CPO, or extended coverage. That should be a no-brainer, but it's yet another reason to ask lots of questions before you buy any coverage—you should be able to find out what basic service you can do on your own car without endangering the warranty. "Dealers aren't looking for reasons to deny you coverage," Anderson says, since they're going to get reimbursed for whatever work they do on your car. But they have to protect their own liability. If you put a turbo on your Civic, then you can bet any drivetrain coverage you had went up in smoke.

The Bottom Line

Messy, right? There are some simple rules to follow. Namely: The best plan B for those of us who can't afford driving new is to drive CPO. It's a safer bet at least than driving a car with no warranty of any kind. And don't be afraid of an aftermarket warranty—it you buy it from a legit company with a long record. But there's no default answer to cover every possible car and situation, so do your homework—and know yourself. Weigh what you owe on the car and its potential resale value; then consider whether you can afford to drop multiple thousands of dollars on a new engine or a replacement transmission, or whether the hedge of an extended warranty (which could cost you somewhere between $600 and $2000) is a smarter gamble.
Plus, doing all this math will give you a much better idea of the value of your car and how much you value peace of mind. This is why the risk averse lease, or at least sell once the manufacturer's warranty has expired.

Video of Multibeast - Hackintosh's Best Friend OSx86

2012-02-13T22:10:00.000-07:00

February 13, 2012 2:43:28 PM

Get to Know Multibeast, Your Hackintosh's Best Friend [Video]

lifehacker.com

We give you a basic overview of Multibeast—the handy hackintosh post-installation tool by tonymacx86 and MacMan—in our always up-to-date guide to building a hackintosh , but just enough to give you the basics. In the video above, hackintosher StingRay walks you through every little detail of MultiBeast so you can get to know one of the most vital tools for the process.
In addition to detailing each option in MultiBeast, StingRay explains the best practices involved for each choice you make. Although MultiBeast is an easy tool to use, it can be a little confusing the first time around because it's unfamiliar territory. If you're planning on building a hackintosh, you'll want to watch this video so you're prepared and ready for the job.
Multibeast Overview Video | tonymacx86 blog

Salary Negotiations: Don't be Tough, be Honest

2012-02-13T22:09:00.000-07:00

February 13, 2012 2:43:28 PM

Salary Negotiations: Don't be Tough, be Honest

lifehacker.com

Unless you were born with a peculiar penchant for arguing over your livelihood, salary negotiations are stressful and difficult. We're often told that these negotiations require an iron constitution and a willingness to play the "game", but if that approach has never worked for you, guest writer Jeff Northrop offers an alternative that works for him: Be honest.
I read a blog post the other day about how to properly negotiate a salary. It received a lot attention and generated a heated discussion . Obviously this is important to many of us—me included.
However, I see things differently than Patrick. I've liked almost all of my bosses (five to date), and enjoyed my past places of employment. I've generally felt fairly compensated and when I haven't, I've done my research to make sure my feelings match reality then talked to my boss about it. In short I've treated salary negation like a considerate human relationship, not a game to win. Maybe I've "left money on the table," but I hate playing games and frankly compensation negotiations aren't a game.
The gist of Patrick's post is this: "Be more assertive and shamelessly demand more." I've been thinking about that advice quite a bit since reading it and it makes me feel sorry for those who have to follow this advice at face value.
I do agree that many people need to be more frank about their needs and wants, but why the need to take such an adversarial approach? It's important to keep in mind that you're negotiating with a human being and all the emotional baggage that comes with it.
I guess the original author believes that being difficult in negotiations is the best method to get the most value. Honestly, I haven't tried it, but I imagine it leaves the risk of getting a relationship off on the wrong foot. And, at the end of the day, a large part of your job satisfaction relies on the relationship between you and your manager.
The whole discussion around "don't give the first number" is ridiculous. My "rule number one," and only rule, in going into any negotiation is to know what you want as the result before you start. Given that, if you have done your research and know what salary you want, there is no reason not to come out and state it when asked.
If the hiring manager wants to ask for a number in the first interview, fine with me. "I want around $xxx,xxx. Of course I'll take into consideration the complete package but I think that's a fair starting point."
At that point you can end that line of questioning and decline to get more specific without coming across like you are playing games. If they do persist and ask you for more details (expected vacation, etc.) at this point you can comfortably tell them you don't want to get into those details yet. Unless you do. In that case tell them you like to take every August off to be with your European relatives. Or that you need to work from home every Friday. Why not?
Everyone is different and everyone has their own style and organizations are much the same. So go into negotiations prepared, do your homework on salaries and compensation packages, and know what you want, but in the end be yourself. Then when the final job offer makes you happy, take the job and be happy. Photo by james weston /Shutterstock.
Salary Negotiations, Don't be Tough, be Honest | Jeff Northrop
Jeff Northrop, CIPP/US, CISSP is a software developer, privacy professional, and occasional entrepreneur. Currently a Director at the International Association of Privacy Professionals .

The Frugal Grocery List

2012-02-11T17:23:00.001-07:00

February 11, 2012 11:57:04 AM

A Frugal Family's Grocery List

As fuel costs rise and the demand for food increases, so do the prices at the grocery store. For example, domestic wholesale food prices rose a dramatic 3.9 percent in February 2011, the largest increase in a single month since 1974. Internationally, the cost of food rose 37% in the year between February 2010 and 2011, according to an organization of the United Nations.
In the midst of a recession, even a slight increase in a grocery budget can have a major negative impact on the family budget. The financial burden of digging deeper into your pockets to cover basic needs, like food, often means going without. Instead of making the hard decision between essentials like food, medical expenses or utilities, reworking your grocery list may be the ticket to making your dollars stretch.
The following food items are inexpensive pantry and refrigerator staples that are also the foundations of many tasty and nutritious recipes. Just add a meat (on sale, of course!) and additional vegetable or side, for a simple, budget-friendly meal.
You can also check out MintLife's weekly Frugal Foodie column , as well as this article about how to grocery shop frugally and ethically.
Keeping a continuous stock of these items guarantees you will always have something to feed the family. These items are all on the inexpensive side and because you can make numerous breakfast, lunch and dinner meals by re-using the following ingredients, you will also save money by keeping the grocery list small.

Seasonings

-Garlic -Salt

-Pepper

-Dried Italian Herbs

Produce

-Pre-washed salad greens and at least two other salad vegetables of your choice -Apples

-Potatoes

-Onions

In the Baking Aisle

-All-Purpose Flour -Regular Sugar -Brown Sugar

-Vegetable Oil

-Olive Oil

Grains and Pastas

-Rice -Sliced Bread -Oatmeal

-Spaghetti Pasta

-Ziti Pasta

Canned Foods

-Beans -Crushed Tomatoes -Tomato Sauce

-Chicken Broth or Stock

Dairy

-Eggs

-Milk

-Butter

Example meals include:

-Eggs and toast or oatmeal with brown sugar for breakfast. -Roasted potatoes with garlic and onions and a meat of your choice for dinner.

-Various rice dishes, such as fried rice (rice, eggs, chicken broth, onion and another vegetable of your choice).

-Various pasta dishes (spaghetti, crushed tomatoes, garlic, dried Italian herbs, salt and pepper).

Engagement Ring Shopping on Budget

2012-02-11T17:22:00.000-07:00

Engagement Ring Shopping Tips

Diamonds 101

Before we get started, I have a few words about the "Four C's" of diamonds: Cut, Clarity, Color, and Carat. If you consult a jeweler, it's likely that they are going to give you an in-depth presentation on the importance of these four factors. In my opinion, not all of them should be weighed evenly.
The clarity of a diamond is related to the imperfections within the stone. Most of them are microscopic and cannot be seen with the naked eye. The diamond in my engagement ring actually has a huge flaw in the corner of it. At least, that's what I've been told because it's certainly something I have never noticed. Why pay more for something that isn't noticeable?
The color rating of the diamond is related to the absence of color within the diamond, or how "yellow" the stone is. Yellow, being undesirable. The highest rated diamonds are given a D, E, or F in color. The next tier on the color scale is G, H, I and J. Unless you are comparing a D stone to a J one, the differences in color are difficult to detect with the naked eye. You can save yourself a ton of dough by sticking to the second tier.
Fine jewelry designer Staci, of AnaStaci , says, "A big, colorless diamond with very few inclusions is much more rare to find than one that has some color or a few imperfections. I believe the most important of the 4 C's are cut and carat weight. Color is very personal. I have had clients like a little color in their diamonds, where others love the clear blue vividness of a D color graded diamond."
The cost of a diamond is largely based on the carat, or size of the diamond. There are ways to create the illusion of a larger stone, as mentioned below in this article, but there is another way to cut corners around this one. Purchasing a diamond just below a whole number will dramatically reduce the price. For example, a diamond that is .9 carats, versus 1 carat, is much less expensive. You can use this rule wherever your budget falls on the stone sizing.
The cut of the diamond is what gives it its sparkle. A poorly cut diamond will have a huge impact on how the light reflects off the stone. Think about putting a significant portion of your budget into a diamond that is properly cut. Staci also says, "The cut is the only part of the diamond that is man-dictated, and really defines the brilliance of a stone. Inclusions are hard for many average people to see, so you can 'give' in this area."
Finally, where you purchase your diamond is ultimately more important than any of the Four C's. Diamonds are beautiful and they may last forever, but the social and ethical price to bring them to market is larger than any dollar figure can ever amount to. Some ethical and socially responsible diamond dealers to consider are BrilliantEarth.com and TurtleLoveCo.com.
Now that you are all diamond aficionados, we can get down to the nitty gritty: How to buy an engagement ring on a budget.

Take the pressure off.

Whether your budget is $50 or $50,000, keep in mind that an engagement ring is a symbol love and commitment, not keeping up with the Joneses. Starting a life together with unnecessary financial stress and burden completely misses the point of the meaning behind a marriage proposal. Let go of the idea that the size of the ring is equivalent to the magnitude of your love and settle on a figure that is within your means.

Select a style.

Certain engagement ring styles are more affordable than others. Here are a few to consider:
Pronged Setting. This style uses less metal, which significantly lowers the price of the setting. You can use the extra dollars you saved to invest in the stone or your IRA. Just saying'.
Fancy cuts. The least expensive cut right now is the marquis, an oval-shaped diamond with points at the ends that appears larger than it is. Round cut diamonds are the most expensive, as they are classic and are the only stones that can offer a perfectly mathematical, symmetrical cut to provide the most fire and scintillation. According to Staci, "Princess cuts, ovals and cushions are great options, as they fit nicely in the very popular vintage-inspired settings that many girls like these days. These 'fancy cuts' as they are termed are less expensive per carat than rounds."
Engraving and filigree. Skip eternity settings (bands that are adorned with tiny diamonds all the way around) and opt for engraving or filigree instead. This is an easy way to "fancy" up a band without shelling out big bucks for a ton of sparkle. Fun fact: My wedding ring is intricately engraved all the way around and is often mistaken for an eternity band.
Halo setting. A halo design is where the center stone is surrounded by a circle of smaller stones. This design gives the optical illusion of a larger center stone, if that's what you are going for. Halo settings are high on the "wow" factor and give the ring a vintage feel.

Something old vs. something new.

Certain antique stores carry exquisite and unique alternatives to traditional engagement rings. A family heirloom is also an excellent alternative option that also carries deep meaning. I have a particular fondness for antique engagement rings because they are timeless, one-of-a-kind pieces that come with a rich history.

Think outside the box.

There are plenty of stunning stones that make beautiful alternatives to diamonds. Consider using your partner's birthstone or a stone related to the month of an important date in your relationship. Blue, pink or yellow sapphires are popular alternatives, as are citrine, peridot, moonstone, and pearls. Moissonite, a stone harvested in a lab, is rising in popularity because of its sparkly, inexpensive, and socially responsible nature.
Staci also recommends using alternative stones. "I love tourmaline stones as they are so unique. They come in a range of color from hunter green to watermelon pink. I did an amazing 8-carat bi-color tourmaline (meaning the color of the stone had an ombre effect that started green at one end and faded into a beautiful light pink on the other) set with yellow gold and diamonds.

Thinks waaaaay outside the box.

For some you wild and crazy cats out there, an engagement ring just isn't your thing. There are plenty of cultures that honor marriage in other ways and who says you have to put a rock on someone's finger to symbolize your commitment to each other? Maybe you want to create your own tradition or ceremony when you decide to commit to your partner. The important thing is that you feel connected to the symbol, whatever it may be. There are no rules in love, just… love.

How To: Get the Best Possible Care from your Doctor

2012-02-11T17:20:00.002-07:00

What Your Doctor Needs to Hear So You Get the Best Possible Care

Going to the doctor can be a difficult, frightening experience, and too often we avoid telling our doctors the things they need to know for a proper diagnosis or care. Maybe we're too afraid, or we've rationalized away our symptoms as unimportant. Regardless, being an active participant in your health care has never been more important, and I asked a doctor what he wished more of his patients were up-front about when they came to see him. Here's what he said.

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Make Sure You Get It All Off Your Chest

Dr. Dan Weiswasser is a primary care physician who's been in outpatient practice for seven years. I asked him what patients can do to put their minds at ease, and he responded with an acronym that many of you are familiar with, but applies here: GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). "In other words, if, as a patient, you deliberately provide inaccurate information to or withhold information from your doctor, you may be handicapping the very person who is trying to help you," he said. "If you are anxious about divulging a certain piece of information, be upfront and share that concern with your health care provider. A good provider should be able to address your anxiety. And chances are good that he or she has seen others who are having the same struggles."

In essence, being afraid, even if you think it might mean bad news, is something we all just have to push through. If you're deliberately trying to mislead your doctor, that's bad enough, but if you're rationalizing away real symptoms that you should discuss with your primary care physician or any doctor you see, you have to get through the fog of fear and anxiety and be up-front with what's going on. Here are some tips to remember:

Tell your doctor you're nervous . Most doctors will try to put you at ease and remind you that they're there to help, even if it means they have to tell you some bad news in the process. They'll also likely let you know that they've seen this—or worse—before, and even if they don't say it, keep it in mind. You're likely not the first person to have your symptoms, and you're likely not the first person the doctor's seen with them.
Bad news now is better than worse news later . Personally, I've had friends and family who avoid disclosing symptoms to doctors until their illness was so far along that doctors had difficulty treating it. Rationale aside, it's important to remember that if you don't talk about it now, you will talk about it later, and later may be a more solemn conversation.
Don't be embarrassed . "Many patients are specifically reluctant to talk about psychiatric issues, sexual practice and/or drug use, but, depending on the issues at hand, these behaviors may influence what is in the "differential diagnosis", the list of diagnoses that an provider considers when you come to him or her with symptoms and concerns," Dr. Weiswasser explained. Don't be embarrassed. Your doctor isn't there to pass judgement. They may be human, but their primary obligation is to help you get well, and they need all the information you can provide.
Find a provider you trust . If the reason you have difficulty talking to your doctor is because you "don't trust doctors," or "they're all in it for the money," or "blah blah medical-industrial-big-pharma-complex," then you need to do some digging and find a doctor or health care provider that you trust and who aligns with your values towards health care. We've even mentioned tools that can help you find one .
Don't be afraid to ask questions . A good patient is an educated patient, and you should be an active participant in your health care. Ask questions, get engaged, read up on illnesses and treatments, and how they may impact you. Let your doctor know when you're unsettled. Share your own opinions and the things you've read, but at the end of the day, remember they're the expert. Allow yourself to be educated—not to the point of passivity, but if you have a doctor you trust, you should be able to be open with them about your doubts as well as learn from what they can teach you.

Tests Don't Reveal Everything

Many people hold back, hoping that a battery of tests will reveal their true condition without them having to say anything at all. That's not true. When talking to your doctor, don't assume that "oh, it'll come up on my bloodwork if it's a problem," or "they'll see it when they look at my x-rays." Tests don't reveal everything, and tests don't give your physician the first-hand account they need to empathize with you and try to understand what you're going through.

This "procedural medical drama" thinking may work on television, but it doesn't always work in real doctor's offices and hospitals. What's worse, tests that could be avoided if you and your doctor were on the same page about your symptoms can at times be costly, unnecessary, and delay needed treatment. You may need some tests anyway, but it's better to clear the air first.

What You Say Is Private

Another important thing to keep in mind is the fact that what you say to your doctor can become part of your medical record. If that makes you worry, don't—it's actually a good thing. There are very strict privacy laws around your medical history, and tight controls over who can see it and under what circumstances. "It is true that whatever you say could become a part of your medical record, so it's not right to ask your HCP to omit it once you've mentioned it," Dr. Weiswasser explained. "There are, however, strict regulations, found within the federal HIPAA law (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), which dictate that protected health information must be kept private. Each HIPAA violation can cost a doctor up to $50,000 ."

Make no mistake, there have been instances where somemone's medical records were mistakenly made available to someone who shouldn't have seen them, but it's a rare exception. For most people, what you say to your doctor is private and between you and them, and only used in delivering you the best possible care. Again, if you feel like you can't trust your doctor, it's time to get a copy of your medical records—available to you at any time, usually for a small fee—and find a doctor you trust with your privacy. Whatever you do, it's more important to be able to tell all comfortably than try to eke quality care out of half-truths.

In the end, it's most important to remember that your health and well-being are paramount, and you shouldn't let anything—even your anxiety and worry—stand between you and better health. Dr. Weiswasser sums it up, "by withholding the whole story from your health care provider, you are running the risk of prolonging your suffering and increasing your possible complications. Be forthright. A good provider is there to help and not to judge."

Do you get along well with your doctor? How did you find a doctor you trusted? Share your thoughts and your tips in the comments below.

Dr. Dan Weiswasser is a primary care physician who's been in outpatient practice in Western Massachusetts for seven years. He spends half his time seeing patients of all ages and half his time doing administrative work, focusing on quality issues and an Epic electronic medical record system. He offered his assistance with this story, and we thank him.

PaperKarma: Stops Junk Main with a Snap of a Photo [FREE - For Now]

2012-02-11T17:19:00.002-07:00

PaperKarma Stops Junk Mail with a Snap of a Photo

iOS/Android/WP7: Nobody likes junk mail, but if you're too lazy to go through and unsubscribe to everything individually, PaperKarma is a new app that only requires you to take a picture of the offending mail to remove yourself from the junk mail database.
PaperKarma works on magazines, catalogs, coupons, fliers, credit card offers, and even the Yellow Pages. To sign up for the service, you need to hand over a bit of your own information, including your address and email. Once you do, all you need to do is snap a picture of the junk mail in your mailbox and PaperKarma unsubscribes you from the list. The nice thing is that you can pick and choose what you unsubscribe from. If you like getting a particular catalog, you can keep it on your list.

It's currently a free download for iPhone , Android , and Windows Phone 7 .

PaperKarma | via TechCrunch

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How To: Increase your Spice Tolerance

2012-02-11T17:16:00.001-07:00

Spice Hunting: How to Increase Your Spice Tolerance | Serious Eats

www.seriouseats.com

Fruity, chocolatey pasilla chiles. Worth your while even if you're a spice wimp. [Photographs: Max Falkowitz, unless otherwise noted]
A common complaint I hear from spice newbies is that their palates just can't take hot dishes. And while I'm not one of those people who eats spicy food just for the sake of it, some of the world's best cuisines employ heat as an essential part of their flavor profile. So what's a globally-minded spice wimp to do?
If you didn't grow up eating spicy food, and don't have a natural tolerance for it, there's good reason to not to love it. The capsaicin in chiles is interpreted by the body as pain.* Plants developed capsaicin so we wouldn't eat them, which is enough to make you question why we started eating them in the first place. No wonder spice-fiends are often regarded as cultists by outsiders.
* Is there a German word for the awkwardness when your girlfriend gives your father a habanero burn—the first time they meet?
But chiles carry powerful, vibrant, and wonderful flavors that really are worth your while, even if they cause some pain. Here are some tips to strip chiles of (some of) their fire while keeping their flavor intact.

Buy Whole Chiles and De-seed Them

With pre-ground chiles, you're stuck with whatever heat level the blender decided to use. If you buy whole chiles to grind or soak yourself, you've got some options. Most of a chile's capsaicin lies in the pale membrane-like ribs that cling to the interior flesh, and to a lesser extent the exterior of the seeds. Remove those and you'll significantly cut down on a chile's heat while keeping its flavor intact. To de-seed, lop off the top half-inch of the stem end with a knife and dump out loose seeds. Rub the chile between your fingers to dislodge more seeds (wear latex gloves while doing this if you're really sensitive), then split the pepper in half lengthwise (like splitting a vanilla bean) and pick out the pale ribs.
You can use this same treatment on fresh chiles. Try it on poblanos and jalapeños to preserve their fresh, grassy flavor with less heat. You can also keep the chiles whole from start to finish, which locks in most of the capsaicin. My chili recipe, which packs in lots of chile flavor but not that much heat, calls for a habanero or two floated in the pot—they add a lovely tropical lilt to the chile without their blistering fire.

Stick to Relishes and Hot Sauces

Harissa: fiery, but flavorful in small doses.
There's nothing worse than summoning the bravery to cook a spicy recipe, only to realize it's too hot for you to eat. On the same note, every once in a while you find a freak chile that's way hotter than it should be. Short of adding more mass or burying your plate in sour cream, there's not much you can do to lessen the pain of a too-spicy dish.
That's why I recommend that spice newbies looking to increase their tolerance avoid adding much chile to a dish, and opt instead for fiery, pungent hot sauces, relishes, and chile pastes. Harissa is one of my favorites for this; it packs plenty of heat but also tons of flavor, with verves of cumin, garlic, and lemon. It's the perfect thing to spice up everything from workaday chicken breasts to more ambitiously (but gently) spiced Middle Eastern fare. Also look to fruity hot sauces that temper heat with sweet, bold flavors. Add these in small doses to build up your tolerance. Meat and starch are great starters, as they can absorb a good dose of heat before becoming unmanageable.

Balance with Acids, Sugar, and Fat

Serious larb from Kin Shop in New York. The perfect balance of spice, acid, fat, and sweet. [Photograph: J. Kenji Lopez Alt]
Look to most of the world's hottest cuisines and you'll see that spice is kept in careful balance with acidity, sweetness, and fat. Acids add sharpness that stands up well to chile heat. When tasted together, acids and chiles convey bright flavor over pure fire. Sugar and fat do the opposite—they round out flavors and mellow chiles out. Fats are especially effective at washing out some of the heat from fat-soluble capsaicin.
The best example of this I know is larb , one of my favorite salads, which is built on a platform of ground meat. It's hot—really hot when done right, but is rendered palatable by a bright, tart dressing, moderate amounts of rendered animal fat, and sweet toasted rice powder. When you have so many flavors going on at once, chiles really start to make sense. They become, in their own way, refreshing, like a big spoonful of sinus-clearing horseradish.

And Whatever You Do…

Water is not your friend. All it will do is spread the pain. Fat and casein, a protein found in milk, are. If you overdo the spice, have a lassi, some Thai iced tea, or a glass of kefir by your side and drink through the pain.
About the author: Max Falkowitz is a proud native of Queens, New York. He'll do just about anything for a good cup of tea and enjoys long walks down the aisles of Chinese groceries. He is also known to make ice cream on occasion. You can follow him on Twitter at @maxfalkowitz .

View other entries from Spice Hunting

Tags: chile , chile peppers , Spice Hunting , spices , spicy

How To: Save Money Traveling through Better Research and Online Tools

2012-02-11T17:16:00.000-07:00

How We Used 15 Minutes To Save $600 On Airfare

How To: Save Money Traveling through Better Research and Online Tools

My girlfriend and I are renting an apartment in Paris for a week this summer, which is the first real vacation I have taken since 2006, when I went to Dublin to run a marathon then spend a week recovering in Irish pubs and on Irish seashores (word of advice: no matter how enchanting it seems, don't rent a bicycle on the rocky Aran Islands off the coast of Galway two days after running your first marathon).
The only thing that is further in the past than my last, "real" week-long vacation is the amount of time I've instinctively turned to Orbitz as my first and last shopping destination when booking air travel for business and the weekend getaways that has sustained me for the past six years. According to Orbitz, the first trip I ever booked through the site was in November, 2001 when I flew from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia.
That says a lot about how good Orbitz has been at maintaining my loyalty, but not so much about my savvy shopping skills. With a pair of $1,200+ flights to purchase (based on originall search of Orbitz), I decided it was time to figure out a better way to buy airfare online.

The strategy outlined below takes a few extra steps, and there are certainly similar Web sites you can turn to than the ones I recommend that offer similar services. But what amounted to less than 15 minutes of extra web sleuthing ended up saving us more than $500 on the two flights we purchased.

Figure Out When You Want To Travel

One of the reasons for my Orbitz rut is that my travel has been largely for work and holidays. Searching multiple sites when I had specific travel dates meant there wasn;t going to be much more than a couple of buck in price variations from one site to the next.
Planning a vacation, however, meant I have some flexibility in dates. So I turned to theMatrix Airfare Search offered by ITA Software, a unit of Google. By plugging in a single date, I can see the lowest airfares for that date and the following 30 days. Within a few minutes we were able to figure out the cheapest time for our trip involved a mid-June departure.

Buy Now Or Wait?

Another reason why I liked Orbitz is that if someone booked the same flight on the site for less than I had paid, they would send me a check. It's a nice little price guarantee but it doesn't protect me from price fluctuations on other sites, and it doesn;t help me figure out whether or not prices are going to go down between now and my trip.
Enter Bing's travel search engine , which tried to predict whether or not flight prices will go up or down. Once we had settled on our travel dates for Paris, we searched for the same flights in Bing and tried to figure out if we should book now or later.
While the price for our Paris search held relatively steady when compared to our initial search on Matrix, note the difference in the sample itinerary I'm using for this article:

Another nice feature about Bing is that it opened the same search in Hotwire ,Travelocity , Expeida and Priceline so we could instantly comparison shop.

Track Prices

In both case, the time to buy was when we searched. But had Bing told us to wait, we could have used Yapta to track the price of our flight and even gotten text message alerts sent to our mobile phone when prices dropped.
If we wanted to bid on Priceline to see if we could shave some money off the price of the flight, the Bidding For Travel forum, as well as the Priceline and Hotwire forums onBetter Bidding , are good resources for picking up pointers.

Click "Purchase Now"

As it stands, we were ready to purchase. The best possible price on a flight we could get was on Aer Lingus with a stopover in Dublin. We did one last search of the air carrier's Web site (which is ften the cheapest place to look). Out of loyalty, and because I am such a big fan of getting checks in the mail, I did one last search on Orbitz.

Ultimately, Expedia had the best price. With just a little extra time we were got the price down to $904 meaning we saved close to $600 on what we would have paid for two flights on our initial search.e Tools

20 Commonly Overlooked Grammar Mistakes

2012-02-11T17:15:00.000-07:00

20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Makes | LitReactor

Photo by opensourceway

Below are 20 common grammar mistakes I see routinely, not only in editorial queries and submissions, but in print: in HR manuals, blogs, magazines, newspapers, trade journals, and even best selling novels. If it makes you feel any better, I've made each of these mistakes a hundred times, and I know some of the best authors in history have lived to see these very toadstools appear in print. Let's hope you can learn from some of their more famous mistakes.

Who and Whom

This one opens a big can of worms. "Who" is a subjective — or nominative — pronoun, along with "he," "she," "it," "we," and "they." It's used when the pronoun acts as the subject of a clause. "Whom" is an objective pronoun, along with "him," "her," "it", "us," and "them." It's used when the pronoun acts as the object of a clause. Using "who" or "whom" depends on whether you're referring to the subject or object of a sentence. When in doubt, substitute "who" with the subjective pronouns "he" or "she," e.g., Who loves you? cf., He loves me. Similarly, you can also substitute "whom" with the objective pronouns "him" or "her." e.g., I consulted an attorney whom I met in New York. cf., I consulted him.

Which and That

This is one of the most common mistakes out there, and understandably so. "That" is a restrictive pronoun. It's vital to the noun to which it's referring. e.g., I don't trust fruits and vegetables that aren't organic. Here, I'm referring to all non-organic fruits or vegetables. In other words, I only trust fruits and vegetables that are organic. "Which" introduces a relative clause. It allows qualifiers that may not be essential. e.g., I recommend you eat only organic fruits and vegetables, which are available in area grocery stores. In this case, you don't have to go to a specific grocery store to obtain organic fruits and vegetables. "Which" qualifies, "that" restricts. "Which" is more ambiguous however, and by virtue of its meaning is flexible enough to be used in many restrictive clauses. e.g., The house, which is burning, is mine. e.g., The house that is burning is mine.

Lay and Lie

This is the crown jewel of all grammatical errors. "Lay" is a transitive verb. It requires a direct subject and one or more objects. Its present tense is "lay" (e.g., I lay the pencil on the table ) and its past tense is "laid" (e.g., Yesterday I laid the pencil on the table ). "Lie" is an intransitive verb. It needs no object. Its present tense is "lie" (e.g., The Andes mountains lie between Chile and Argentina ) and its past tense is "lay" (e.g., The man lay waiting for an ambulance ). The most common mistake occurs when the writer uses the past tense of the transitive "lay" (e.g., I laid on the bed ) when he/she actually means the intransitive past tense of "lie" (e.g., I lay on the bed ).

Moot

Contrary to common misuse, "moot" doesn't imply something is superfluous. It means a subject is disputable or open to discussion. e.g., The idea that commercial zoning should be allowed in the residential neighborhood was a moot point for the council.

Continual and Continuous

They're similar, but there's a difference. "Continual" means something that's always occurring, with obvious lapses in time. "Continuous" means something continues without any stops or gaps in between. e.g., The continual music next door made it the worst night of studying ever. e.g., Her continuous talking prevented him from concentrating.

Envy and Jealousy

The word "envy" implies a longing for someone else's good fortunes. "Jealousy" is far more nefarious. It's a fear of rivalry, often present in sexual situations. "Envy" is when you covet your friend's good looks. "Jealousy" is what happens when your significant other swoons over your good-looking friend.

Nor

"Nor" expresses a negative condition. It literally means "and not." You're obligated to use the "nor" form if your sentence expresses a negative and follows it with another negative condition. "Neither the men nor the women were drunk" is a correct sentence because "nor" expresses that the women held the same negative condition as the men. The old rule is that "nor" typically follows "neither," and "or" follows "either." However, if neither "either" nor "neither" is used in a sentence, you should use "nor" to express a second negative, as long as the second negative is a verb. If the second negative is a noun, adjective, or adverb, you would use "or," because the initial negative transfers to all conditions. e.g., He won't eat broccoli or asparagus . The negative condition expressing the first noun (broccoli) is also used for the second (asparagus).

May and Might

"May" implies a possibility. "Might" implies far more uncertainty. "You may get drunk if you have two shots in ten minutes" implies a real possibility of drunkenness. "You might get a ticket if you operate a tug boat while drunk" implies a possibility that is far more remote. Someone who says "I may have more wine" could mean he/she doesn't want more wine right now, or that he/she "might" not want any at all. Given the speaker's indecision on the matter, "might" would be correct.

Whether and If

Many writers seem to assume that "whether" is interchangeable with "if." It isn't. "Whether" expresses a condition where there are two or more alternatives. "If" expresses a condition where there are no alternatives. e.g., I don't know whether I'll get drunk tonight. e.g., I can get drunk tonight if I have money for booze.

Fewer and Less

"Less" is reserved for hypothetical quantities. "Few" and "fewer" are for things you can quantify. e.g., The firm has fewer than ten employees. e.g., The firm is less successful now that we have only ten employees.

Farther and Further

The word "farther" implies a measurable distance. "Further" should be reserved for abstract lengths you can't always measure. e.g., I threw the ball ten feet farther than Bill.e.g., The financial crisis caused further implications.

Since and Because

"Since" refers to time. "Because" refers to causation. e.g., Since I quit drinking I've married and had two children. e.g., Because I quit drinking I no longer wake up in my own vomit.

Disinterested and Uninterested

Contrary to popular usage, these words aren't synonymous. A "disinterested" person is someone who's impartial. For example, a hedge fund manager might take interest in a headline regarding the performance of a popular stock, even if he's never invested in it. He's "disinterested," i.e., he doesn't seek to gain financially from the transaction he's witnessed. Judges and referees are supposed to be "disinterested." If the sentence you're using implies someone who couldn't care less, chances are you'll want to use "uninterested."

Anxious

Unless you're frightened of them, you shouldn't say you're "anxious to see your friends." You're actually "eager," or "excited." To be "anxious" implies a looming fear, dread or anxiety. It doesn't mean you're looking forward to something.

Different Than and Different From

This is a tough one. Words like "rather" and "faster" are comparative adjectives, and are used to show comparison with the preposition "than," (e.g., greater than, less than, faster than, rather than). The adjective "different" is used to draw distinction. So, when "different" is followed by a preposition, it should be "from," similar to "separate from," "distinct from," or "away from." e.g., My living situation in New York was different from home. There are rare cases where "different than" is appropriate, if "than" operates as a conjunction. e.g., Development is different in New York than in Los Angeles.When in doubt, use "different from."

Bring and Take

In order to employ proper usage of "bring" or "take," the writer must know whether the object is being moved toward or away from the subject. If it is toward, use "bring." If it is away, use "take." Your spouse may tell you to "take your clothes to the cleaners." The owner of the dry cleaners would say "bring your clothes to the cleaners."

Impactful

It isn't a word. "Impact" can be used as a noun (e.g., The impact of the crash was severe ) or a transitive verb (e.g., The crash impacted my ability to walk or hold a job ). "Impactful" is a made-up buzzword, colligated by the modern marketing industry in their endless attempts to decode the innumerable nuances of human behavior into a string of mindless metrics. Seriously, stop saying this.

Affect and Effect

Here's a trick to help you remember: "Affect" is almost always a verb (e.g., Facebook affects people's attention spans ), and "effect" is almost always a noun (e.g.,Facebook's effects can also be positive) . "Affect" means to influence or produce an impression — to cause hence, an effect. "Effect" is the thing produced by the affecting agent; it describes the result or outcome. There are some exceptions. "Effect" may be used as a transitive verb, which means to bring about or make happen. e.g., My new computer effected a much-needed transition from magazines to Web porn. There are similarly rare examples where "affect" can be a noun. e.g., His lack of affect made him seem like a shallow person.

Irony and Coincidence

Too many people claim something is the former when they actually mean the latter. For example, it's not "ironic" that "Barbara moved from California to New York, where she ended up meeting and falling in love with a fellow Californian." The fact that they're both from California is a "coincidence." "Irony" is the incongruity in a series of events between the expected results and the actual results. "Coincidence" is a series of events that appear planned when they're actually accidental. So, it would be "ironic" if "Barbara moved from California to New York to escape California men, but the first man she ended up meeting and falling in love with was a fellow Californian."

Nauseous

Undoubtedly the most common mistake I encounter. Contrary to almost ubiquitous misuse, to be "nauseous" doesn't mean you've been sickened: it actually means you possess the ability to produce nausea in others. e.g., That week-old hot dog is nauseous.When you find yourself disgusted or made ill by a nauseating agent, you are actually "nauseated." e.g., I was nauseated after falling into that dumpster behind the Planned Parenthood. Stop embarrassing yourself.
If you're looking for a practical, quick guide to proper grammar, I suggest the tried-and-true classic The Elements of Style , by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White. A few of these examples are listed in the book, and there are plenty more. Good luck!

The Elements of Style (4th Edition)

Author: E. B. White, William Strunk

Price: $9.42

Publisher: Longman (1999)

Infographic: Email Attachments

2012-02-11T17:13:00.001-07:00

February 11, 2012 9:17:04 AM

Attachments Suck

windows.microsoft.com

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Best Sites to Raise Money to Help Get Your Ideas Off the Ground

2012-02-09T21:36:00.000-07:00

February 9, 2012 8:24:48 PM

The Best Sites to Raise Money and Get Your Ideas Off the Ground

lifehacker.com

If you have a brilliant new idea for an mobile app, a handy gadget, a smartphone case that does something cool, an album you want to produce, or even a comic book you want to publish, it's never been easier to get your idea in front of a lot of people and raise money to make it a reality. There are dozens of free and cheap sites designed to boost new ideas, but not all of them are best for your idea. Here's how to pick the best one for you.
Sites like Kickstarter and many others all cater to people with ideas they believe can make it big, but who need money to get them off the ground. The community supports the idea, everyone chips in, and with luck and enough interest and the right amount of money, the product gets made and the contributors usually get first cut or a special perk. Still, even though Kickstarter gets a lot of press, it's not necessarily the best one for your idea.

For The Most Attention: Kickstarter

Kickstarter is the major player in this space, and for good reason. The service gets a lot of media attention, and even though the majority of Kickstarter projects don't go anywhere, it's become the go-to destination for anyone looking to crowd-fund their projects thanks to a few high-profile projects that managed to raise a lot of money. It's not the biggest crowd-funding community, and it's not even the one with the best track record, but it's incredibly easy to use, popular with angel investors and people looking for the next big idea to invest in and get behind, and well organized. Idea creators can set up their profiles for free, founders can pledge as much or as little as they choose, and no money changes hands until time runs out or the project is fully-funded. If the project is fully funded, Kickstarter takes 5% off the top, and the rest goes to the inventor or creator to make their idea happen.

For App-Builders, Game Designers, and Developers:IndieGoGo

IndieGoGo is actually larger than Kickstarter, and more people there use it for more types of projects. The site takes 4% off the top of your fundraising if you reach your funding goal, and encourages creators and developers to offer perks to the community for funding their projects. Unlike some of its competition, IndieGoGo also has its doors open to charities and non-profits. The site is particularly popular with software and app developers, although all sorts of creative projects are up on the site for funding, including documentary and independant films, education projects, and international aid projects. IndieGoGo also has the benefit of being a global site, available to users around the world.

For Inventors and Gadget Creators: Quirky

Quirky has an excellent track record, and some of our favorite gadgets started as Quirky ideas. The process of getting your idea in front of the Quirky community is a bit more involved than at other sites. You submit your idea, the community weighs in first on whether or not it's an idea that could be made into an actual product before it goes in front of the world for fundraising. That's the key, while other sites focus on creative endeavors, most Quirky projects are tangible products that can be manufactured and sold. The Quirky community is active and engaged in idea building and product design and development, and a lot goes on long before the idea ever gets on the site for presale fundraising. Pricing is on a sliding scale—people who get in early can get lower prices than people who get in later, and once the product is made, Quirky can work to manufacture it themselves, or work with a major retail partner to get it on store shelves everywhere.

For Musicians: Bandcamp

We touched on this topic a bit in our previous story on how to release music online so music-lovers can get to it , but while SoundCloud was one of our favorite options for releasing your music for free, allowing people to remix it, and comment on it, Bandcamp is another great solution for musicians looking to set up a free storefront on the web to allow people to buy and download their music directly. Artists and fans both love Bandcamp, and the service handles the entire payment platform, from set-your-own-price albums and songs to artists with a mix of free and paid songs in their discography. Artists can also sell merchandise through their stores, and Bandcamp takes a slice off the top depending on the artist's sales. Fans and music lovers on the other hand get a social platform where they can follow and interact with their favorite artists, get alerts when new music is released, and discover new artists through their friends.

For Crafty Types: Etsy

Crafty types are already well aware of Etsy and how the platform works. When people who made their own hand-made goods, arts, and custom crafts wanted an online storefront that catered more to their needs than a general auction site like eBay, Etsy was born. The site has dozens of categories, including clothing, art, jewelry, household accessories, and more. While most people know Etsy as a craft-lovers haven, the site is also home to a number of stores that manufacture products you wouldn't associate with "arts and crafts," like wall decals, custom motorcycle helmets, and even edible crafts like homemade cookies and beef jerky. Where other similar sites help you get seed money for an idea, Etsy is more of a traditional store, meaning you have to have your idea off the ground and your product ready for sale—even if it's a single item—before you can sell it.

For Global Users: RocketHub

Many of these sites limit their membership to users in the United States, but RocketHub is one of the largest global communities dedicated to crowd-funding new ideas. RocketHub combines a traditional crowd-funding site where individuals can promote and raise money for their own ideas and pet projects with a funding bank where people with inspired ideas can connect with sponsors, non-profits, and funding groups who are willing to share some cash with a particularly motivated or passionate individual. The service works much like Kickstarter or IndieGoGo—sign-ups are free, and the site takes a 4% cut.
Different crowd-funding sites have different goals and different audiences. Depending on the type of idea you have and the audience you want to reach, you have an array of sites to choose from, and this is just the beginning. For example, if you have a random request or want to get the crowd's help in funding a life event like a wedding or a vacation, you can try GoGetFunding , and if you're an industrial designer, Yanko Design is a great resource for like-minded designers.
Whichever site you choose to get your ideas off the ground, make sure it's one where the community is aligned with and supportive of your ideas, and you'll have no trouble raising the funds needed to make it a reality. Have you used any of these sites to crowd-fund a project or idea? Share your experiences in the comments below.

Black SMS Encrypt Text Messages TXT MSG on iOS iPhone

2012-02-09T21:35:00.003-07:00

February 9, 2012 8:18:24 PM

Black SMS Encrypts and Decrypts Your Text Messages

lifehacker.com

iOS: Anyone can pick up your phone and read your text messages. It's also not that difficult for someone to install spy software or for the U.S. government to acquire your messages from your carrier. If you want to keep your text messages private, Black SMS is an app that provides a very simple method for doing so. You simply type in the message, set a password, and send it over to iMessage. The recipient can then use their copy of Black SMS to decrypt the message using the password you set by simply pasting the message into the app and entering the password. (Watch the video above for a demonstration.)
This is a very helpful tool when you're exchanging sensitive data over SMS. You probably won't feel the need to use it for every single text message you use, as the process is a little bit tedious for quick, everyday communication. Nonetheless, when you've got something private to share, Black SMS can help you keep it that way.
Note: A free decrypt-only version of Black SMS will be available soon, but for now you can get the regular version for $1.
Black SMS ($1) | iTunes App Store

A Look Back at How the Thai Floods Affected Hard Drive Prices

2012-02-09T21:35:00.002-07:00

February 9, 2012 8:09:52 PM

HDD Pricewatch: Three Months Into the Thai Floods - TechSpot

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Storage

The hard disk drive supply chain was hit hard late last year when a series of floods struck Thailand. The Asian country accounts for about a quarter of the world's hard drive production, but thousands of factories had to close shop for weeks as facilities were under water, in what is considered the world's fourth costliest natural disaster according to World Bank estimates. That's on top of the human cost of over 800 lives.
Western Digital and Toshiba had factories in the flood zones whereas Seagate was mainly affected by the resulting supply constraints from business partners who were forced to halt production of related components. Among those was Nidec, which produces ~70% of the world's hard drive spindle motors.

All this resulted in hard drive prices shooting through the roof around the end of October as production became more expensive and limited. With the help of price tracking site Camelegg we've checked on a number of mobile and desktop HDDs to get a better overview of how the situation has developed in the last three months.
We observed the first uptick at the end of October, reaching its peak in the first week of November with price increases in the 80-190% range for desktop drives and 80-150% for mobile units. Although we're beginning to see price reductions across the board, on average drives are still about 60-90% more expensive than they were before the flooding.
The graphs below show prices from Newegg from mid-September 2011 until February 1 2012.

Desktop hard drive prices

Before Peak Current Price Increase

% (before vs. current)

Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB $179.99 $429.99 $429.99 138.90%

Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB $129.99 $329.99 $239.99 84.62%

Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB $79.99 $229.99 $129.99 62.51%

Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB $139.99 $279.99 $249.99 78.58%

Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB $134.99 $299.99 $219.99 62.97%

Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB $78.99 $229.99 $129.99 64.57%

Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 3TB $179.99 $399.99 $329.99 83.34%

Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 2TB $109.99 $299.99 $219.99 100.01%

Some drives appear to have been more severely impacted than others. For example, the Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB is currently priced at $429.99, a 138% increase over its pre-flood price of $179.99. The Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 is selling for double the price at the beginning of October. Let's check out similar data for mobile oriented hard drives.

Notebook hard drive prices

Before Peak Current Price Increase

% (before vs. current) Seagate Momentus XT 500GB $99.99 $159.99 $149.99 50.01%

Seagate Momentus XT 320GB $94.99 $149.99 $149.99 57.90%

Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB $134.99 $239.99 $199.99 48.15%

Western Digital Scorpio Black 750GB $89.99 $229.99 $229.99 155.57%

Western Digital Scorpio Black 500GB$69.99 $149.99 $139.99 100.01%

Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB $54.99 $129.99 $99.99 81.83%

Samsung Spinpoint M8 1TB $89.99 $219.99 $114.99 27.78%

Samsung Spinpoint M8 750GB $59.99 $114.99 $114.99 91.68%

Samsung Spinpoint M8 500GB $49.99 $129.99 $89.99 80.02%

On the mobile side of things the Western Digital Scorpio Black 75GB and 500GB are marked up as of today by 155% and 100%, respectively. While announcing its quarterly results earlier this week, Seagate acknowledged that hard drive shortages will most likely continue throughout the calendar year of 2012, with supply trailing demand by about 150 million units by the end of 2012. Western Digital seconded this while saying that manufacturing in their Thailand facilities will be running at full capacity in the September quarter.

Interestingly, while Western Digital saw its earnings fall nearly 36% to $145 million compared to the same period a year ago, Seagate actually grew net profits from $150 million to $563 million in the same time frame. The company says it has struck long-term agreements with several customers to lock down pricing, with some deals running multiple years to ensure continuity of HDD supply. This has worked wonderfully for them but unfortunately for end-users it's unlikely prices will return to pre-flood levels as long as the shortage is ongoing.

Effects felt across the tech industry

PC shipments in 2012 impacted by flooding in Thailand

According to iSuppli, the shortfall in Q1 will be about 3.8 million PCs, while global PC shipments for the whole year are expected to expand by only 6.8% in 2012, down from the previous outlook of 9.5%.
Nvidia and AMD blame hard drive shortages for poor GPU sales

Both firms were indirectly affected by the hard drive shortages. Namely, due to decreased PC production, but also because some OEMs dropped discrete GPUs in their systems due to high HDD prices.
Intel cuts Q4 sales outlook by $1 billion due to hard drive shortages

Intel lowered its revenue forecast in December, anticipating a drop due to hard drive shortages caused by the flooding in Thailand. It was able to beat its own estimates but still saw a drop compared to Q3.
Sony, Sharp, Panasonic announce substancial losses

Even though it certainly wasn't the only factor affecting their business this year, TV manufacturers placed part of the blame for their poor sales performance on the impact the floods had in the supply chain.
Gartner says the worst is yet to come

The hard drive shortage had a limited impact on fourth quarter PC shipments and prices — we checked a few random PCs on Newegg and didn't see any noticeable effects. However, Gartner warns that the major impact will be felt in the first half of this year and potentially continue through the year.

Copy Photo Stream Images to a Folder Automatically

2012-02-09T21:34:00.000-07:00

February 9, 2012 7:59:12 PM

Copy Photo Stream Images to a Folder Automatically

lifehacker.com

Apple's Photo Stream service for iCloud is a great way to keep your photos on your iPhone in sync with your computer, but it requires you use the newest version of iPhoto. If you're not a fan of iPhoto, Macworld forum member DJF3 came up with a script to automate the process and skip iPhoto.
To use this, you need a copy of iLife '11 installed and Photo Stream turned on in iCloud (Settings > iCloud). You also need to do a little scripting yourself. Open Apple Script Editor (Applications > Utilities) and paste in the following code:

tell application "Finder"   set this_folder to "Macintosh HD:Users:user:Library:Application Support:iLifeAssetManagement:assets" as alias   set target_folder to "Macintosh HD:Users:user:Pictures:MyStream" as alias   try     duplicate (every file of the entire contents of this_folder whose name contains "IMG") to the target_folder with replacing   end try end tell

Before you're finished, you have to replace the target path folder (Macintosh HD:Users:user:Pictures:MyStream) to the folder of your choosing on your hard drive.
Click run in Automator and it should copy all your Photo Stream files over to the MyStream folder inside your Pictures folder. You can edit the location to anywhere you like by changing the "Macintosh HD" line. It's not a bad replacement if you're looking to skip the iPhoto step to get your photos from your Photo Stream to a folder. Find more information, help, and a couple other ways to do the same thing over at Macworld.
10.7 Auto-copy Photo Stream images to a folder | Mac OS X Hints

How to Promote Yourself Online

2012-02-09T21:33:00.001-07:00

February 9, 2012 7:57:04 PM

How to Promote Yourself (Without Being Sleazy)

lifehacker.com

Whether due to modesty, timidity, or just a desire not to annoy anyone, most of us suck at self-promotion. But the fact is, promoting yourself and getting your name out there is an essential part of getting the job you want, making new contacts, building your network, and meeting the people who can help you make the most of your talents and abilities. After all, no one's going to do it for you, and no one's going to make sure you get the credit you deserve. The problem: How do you promote yourself without coming off as a sleazy pest? Here's how.

If you want to make a good impression or stand out from the crowd, you need to sell yourself. We've discussed ways to establish your online identity , but that's just the starting point. In this post, we'll detail how to turn your online identity into a portfolio you can use to showcase your talents. After that, we'll talk about how to get your work in front of the people who can offer you the opportunities you want, and for that, you'll need to promote yourself without coming off too strong or being too timid. Here's how to promote your work and skills without coming off sleazy or slimy in the process.

First, You'll Need to Build Your Online Portfolio

The first step to getting your name and ideas where other people can see is to build some kind of personal portfolio where people can learn more about you and your work. We've discussed in the past how valuable personal profile pages can be , like the types offered by About.Me and Flavors.me , and many of them—especially About.me—are great free options for setting up a single page on the web that's all about you, has a memorable URL, and serves as a jumping off point to other places on the web where visitors can learn more about you. If you're a photographer with a Flickr porfolio, or a blogger with your own Wordpress site, or an indie filmmaker with a YouTube account, you can use a personal landing page as a funnel to get eyes on your work.

If you really want to build your personal portfolio however, you'll need your own domain name, and your own self-hosted website—or at least a free host that allows you to use your own URL, like Wordpress , Blogger , or one of the landing page services above. There's no substitute for having an email address from your own URL, a photo gallery on your own site that's populated with your own photos, or a blog with your own URL that's full of your ideas and thoughtful articles. You can even usethe code we've provided to build a personal landing page on your own domain, or supercharge your domain with these clever tips , many of which will help you if you're trying to build a professional web presence, or just make a name for yourself.

When you have your photos hosted somewhere and ready for view, your new blog all set up and full of great content that's not available anywhere else, or insights that you're ready to share with the world, you're ready to move on to the next step: talking yourself up and sharing your work with others.

Build Meaningful Relationships Instead of Broadcasting Aimlessly

We asked Gary Vaynerchuk , entrepreneur, business owner, social media maven, and author of the books Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion and The Thank You Economy , for some tips on how to build an online presence without being putting off the people you want to draw in, and here are a few tips he's shared with us.

Be honest and genuine . Don't pretend you're someone or something you're not, and be honest about the message you want to send and why people should pay attention. If you add a title to your Twitter profile like "SEO Expert" or "Social Media Guru," be ready for the eye-rolling those phrases incite. Gary suggests you ask yourself whether you've ever actually built a business on your advice or consultation in the past before you call yourself a guru—just because you pulled a 6 month stint as a real estate agent, for example, does not make you a "sales expert."
Respond and engage . Even if you have a profile that broadcasts new stories, or tells everyone when you've added new photos to your gallery, make sure you as a person get involved with the people who are looking and offering their feedback. Gary notes that he spends a great deal of time replying to people who tweet at him or send him emails, and it's that conversation with others that makes people really interested in what you have to say. "You're more likely to be heard by listening than talking," he says. "@ replying someone based on information they need is going to convert [people], pushing out into the Twitter firehose isn't."
Don't be spammy . It can be difficult, especially if you take a lot of photos and you want everyone to see them all, or if you write a lot of articles and want everyone to read all of them, but you have to resist the urge to blast your potential audience with updates, emails, and messages from you. Don't overwhelm your Twitter followers with retweets and auto-DMs, annoy your Facebook subscribers with four or five posts an hour, or email the same people multiple times a day begging for their attention. As Gary noted, you'll make more meaningful connections with individuals than you will by broadcasting, so be modest and listen—if people say they're overwhelmed, rein it in.
Know when to give up . If you've reached out to connect with someone, or mentioned you think you'd be a great fit for their company and you'd love it if they'd take a look at some examples of your work, and you're met with silence, don't pester them, or try to up the ante by calling them out. That's a surefire way to come off slimy and desperate, and it's energy better spent elsewhere making new contacts and introducing yourself to new people.
Know where the line is . Most people have a natural compass that will sound an alarm when you're about to do or say something stupid, or when you're pushing your luck. If you're trying to promote yourself in a non-sleazy way, it's more important to listen to that compass than ever. That's no excuse for not hustling and doing as much as you can and meeting as many people are you can, but if you're starting to behave in a way that you know would come off irritating or overzealous if the roles were reversed, it's time to back off. When you're promoting yourself, the best thing you can do is keep the other person's position in mind as often as possible, and try to endear yourself without overwhelming them.

Build a Network of People Who Support Your Ideas

As you meet people, engage them, and interact with them, you should take care to keep track of those individuals who have offered you the most meaningful criticism, support, and encouragement along the way. Those people are your network, and they can help you launch your ideas and find opportunities to bring those ideas to bear. We've discussed some ways to build a professional network, even if you hate the idea of networking in the past, but however you go about it, it's important to build one.

This great piece on networking for introverts from Dale Thoughts also has a few great tips for building a professional network, but the takeaway we thought was most important is that you don't have to go to massive networking events, dinners, or cocktails parties to build a professional network. If that's your style, go for it, but a better way for many is to find a professional society, club, or group that you're passionate about, and join them. In a previous life, I was a project manager, so I joined the Project Management Institute (PMI) to connect with other PMs. When I decided to start writing for a living, the best thing I could do is comment on interesting stories, meet other writers, and learn from their experience. If you're trying to get your name in front of people who can help you find opportunities in your field, meeting others in your field who have something to teach you and can support your efforts is a good way to start. Plus, you'll always be sure you're talking to people who share your interests, instead of people who could care less.

As you build a network, make sure your relationships aren't a one way street. A fast way to come off sleazy is to use people for what they can give you, and to view them as "resources" to be used when you need something. The reason it's called a "network" is because you're a part of it, and connected to other people. Jason Shengave this excellent presentation on personal branding where he explains how important it is to give back whenever possible. Make your network realize and remember that you're a valuable person who cares as much for them as they do for you. It evens the playing field, and as long as you're working on great things with great people that you're passionate about, and that you boost those people as much as they boost you, you'll be unstoppable—and perhaps more importantly, respected.

Don't Underestimate Talent and Passion, and You'll Do Fine

Another point that Gary Vaynerchuk shared with us is that there's a lot to be said for talent. If you're trying to promote yourself in a field that you're not necessarily any good in, or that you're not passionate about, you're not going to get far. Even worse, you may try too hard to make up for the fact that you're not really passionate about what you're doing, and you'll turn people off. If there's anything people—especially on the internet—have grown especially capable of sniffing out, it's BS.

Make sure you're building your portfolio around your talents and strengths, communicating with the right people, building lasting relationships with people who can both help and teach you (as well as benefit from your help and teaching), and make sure you're promoting your best talents—the ones you want the world to see. Not everyone will succeed, but you'll stand a better chance if you're ready to buckle down, hustle, and do the hard work required to make your ideas come to life. You'll be more motivated to do those things if you're working on things you're passionate about and have a talent for, and you'll be more sensitive to making the best possible impression without being disingenuous in the process.

RIAA Chief Whines That SOPA Opponents Were "Unfair"

2012-02-09T21:33:00.000-07:00

February 9, 2012 7:52:48 PM

RIAA Chief Whines That SOPA Opponents Were "Unfair"

yro.slashdot.org

First time submitter shoutingloudly writes "In a NY Times op-ed today, RIAA chief Cary H. Sherman accuses the opponents of SOPA of having engaged in shady rhetorical tactics . He (wrongly) accuses opponents such as Wikipedia and Google of having disseminated misinformation about the bills. He lashes out at the use of the term 'censorship,' which he calls a 'loaded and inflammatory term.' Most /. readers will get the many unintentional jokes in this inaccurate, hypocritical screed by one of the leaders of the misinformation-and-inflammatory-rhetoric-wielding content industry lobby." A gem: "As it happens, the television networks that actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn't take advantage of their broadcast credibility to press their case. That's partly because 'old media' draws a line between 'news' and 'editorial.' Apparently, Wikipedia and Google don't recognize the ethical boundary between the neutral reporting of information and the presentation of editorial opinion as fact."

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