By Andrew Liszewski
Short of a subterranean mountain fortress, there?s nothing that will absolutely guarantee your safety in the event of a natural disaster. Everything else is a game of chance, which is maybe why the creators of the Life Armor designed this floating emergency life pod to look like a giant Magic 8 Ball.
?Will this giant sphere keep me safe??
?Ask again later.?
PARIS (Reuters) - Former Societe Generale
Kerviel announced he would go to France's highest court after losing his first attempt to overturn the sentence for taking huge, risky bets that cost the bank 4.9 billion euros ($6.35 billion) and hit its reputation.
Earlier in the day, the Paris appeals court upheld his 2010 conviction and demanded Kerviel repay SocGen the billions lost, potentially a life-time claim on part of his earnings.
"Without hesitation, I will call for a review of the ruling," the 35-year-old told RTL radio. Kerviel said he was shocked by the appeals judge's decision as he had hoped to be acquitted after a four-year legal battle.
The Supreme Court will rule only on whether procedures were properly followed in the previous rulings, rather than on the merits of the case. However, Kerviel cannot be put behind bars before it passes judgment.
Several outside observers said Kerviel's appeal would delay the start of his sentence for one or two years but it was difficult to see how the conviction would be overturned.
"The Kerviel affair is pretty much over for the financial community ... The appeals court has confirmed the initial verdict and the chances of the Supreme Court cancelling it are slim," said Hubert de Vauplane, a partner at Kramer Levin.
FAILED APPEAL
Kerviel has never denied masking the 50 billion euros in market positions that went wrong as the financial crisis unfolded in early 2008. However, he has always said his bosses knew what he was doing, an accusation SocGen denies.
The appeals court ruled on Wednesday that Kerviel was wholly responsible, upholding the first court's verdict from 2010.
"Jerome Kerviel was the sole creator, inventor and user of a fraudulent system that caused these damages to Societe Generale," the appeals court said in its ruling.
After the hearing, a nervous-looking Kerviel, who chewed his nails as he heard the verdict, was spared being sent immediately to prison. French law allows for a separate judge to negotiate exact terms of imprisonment.
In all, Kerviel's sentence is for five years in jail, two of which are suspended.
NO SMOKING GUN
SocGen has spent years trying to shake off the scandal, while other banks fight lawsuits over their behavior in the crisis era and the wider financial industry faces public perceptions that it is too risky.
The lack of a new "smoking gun" during Kerviel's appeal that might have radically shaken up the case meant that outside observers saw his chances of walking free as slim.
But if the judge had put any responsibility onto SocGen for the losses, the bank might have had to repay 1.7 billion euros in tax write-offs on them. The bank has already said it would be reasonable in reclaiming the 4.9 billion euros, seen as a future claim on Kerviel's earnings rather than a one-off fine.
(Reporting by Lionel Laurent; Editing by Christian Plumb and David Stamp)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ex-socgen-trader-kerviel-given-three-years-jail-115748095--finance.html
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ScienceDaily (Oct. 25, 2012) ? ForcePhone is a mobile synchronous haptic communication system. During phone calls, users can squeeze the side of the device and the pressure level is mapped to vibrations on the recipient's device. Computer scientists from University of Helsinki indicate that an additional haptic channel of communication can be integrated into mobile phone calls using a pressure to vibrotactile mapping with local and remote feedback. The pressure/vibrotactile messages supported by ForcePhone are called pressages.
Mobile devices include an increasing number of input and output techniques that are currently not used for communication. Recent research results by Dr Eve Hoggan from HIIT / University of Helsinki, Finland, however, indicate that a synchronous haptic communication system has value as a communication channel in real-world settings with users that express greetings, presence and emotions through presages.
-Pressure and tactile techniques have been explored in tangible interfaces for remote communication on dedicated devices but until now, these techniques have not been implemented on mobile devices or been used during live phone calls, says Eve Hoggan.
Using a lab based study and a small field study, Doctor Hoggan and her co-workers show that haptic interpersonal communication can be integrated into a standard mobile device. The new non-verbal design was also appreciated.
-When asked about the non-verbal cues that could be represented by pressages, the participants in our study highlighted three different approaches: to emphasize speech, express affection and presence, and to playfully surprise each other, she says.
When asked about the specific ways in which they adapted their communication style to accommodate the tactile modality, all of the participants stated that they tended to pause briefly after sending a pressage to 'make space for it in the conversation'.
According to the longitudinal study results the participants' phone calls lasted on average 4 minutes and 43 seconds with an average of 15.56 pressages sent during each call. All phone calls involved the use of pressages.
The prototype developed in this research, ForcePhone, is an augmented, commercially available mobile device with pressure input and vibrotactile output. ForcePhone was built at the Helsinki Institute of Information Technology and Nokia Research Center, Finland.
The research paper Pressages: Augmenting Phone Calls with Non-Verbal Messages by Eve Hoggan, Craig Stewart, Laura Haverinen, Giulio Jacucci and Vuokko Lantz was presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology UIST'12 in Boston, MA, USA, October, 2012.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/strange_science/~3/3MqPGHhQ5jc/121025112925.htm
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TechNet Wiki life?is "organised chaos"
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Anyone can add anything they like, whenever they like, however they like!
However, many people don't include a?table of contents,?follow the style guidelines, understand how to use the Editor?or include the common tags
Some articles are pure advertising spam, some are outrageous plagiarisms,?some are?invaluable -?but disorganised.
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There is a growing?army of TechNet friends getting noticed for their tireless work tidying other people's contributions.
They add tags, the [toc] marker, spellcheck, remove spam, format, comment, and translate the article into many other languages.
Most articles come with at least a set of tags that help to index the actual content, but there's often more you can add.
More and more articles are getting linked together, creating a true ecosystem of information for every subject imaginable.
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The TechNet Wiki web site has done a great job of organising this flood of content into top level lists.
However, other than the My Pages?link, there is not much customisation to the delivery of the flood of content.
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It is a Windows?8 app, in response to a recent call-to-arms by Peter Geelen.
I have begun documenting?the TechNet Wiki Widget?here,?plus I am very honoured to have recently been interviewed about it here.
My?hope is that,?as more of you pick up Windows 8 on your phone, slate, laptop or desktop, then you will join me?in shaping an app that is truly useful.
Currently, TWW collects the most useful RSS feeds and presents them to you.
Unlike a regular RSS reader, I am able to tailor the feed presentations?and promote?the different fields they use, those that are most relevant to the reader, for that feed.
For example, for "article updates", I want to link to the revision changes, not the revision itself.?It is the?highlighted differences?that show me how the article has changed.
The "article updates" feed only provides the actual revision article link. I take that revision number, and instead link the user to the awesomely useful?"version compare" feature of TechNet Wiki.
TWW also allows you to Tweet an article URL to your Twitter account. In this way, you can help us promote TNWiki articles to other networks.
These are some of the ways I hope to help you, in your wiki life.
??
I?hope?to make this app genuinely useful to YOU?the people who regularly use TechNet.
What I need to understand is how you USE TechNet.
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What kind of searches?you?make regularly?
What RSS feeds do you already subscribe to?
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Which stats are of most interest?
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These and many other questions will help us all better define how best to organise and consume TechNet Wiki contributions.
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I am building the TN Wiki Widget?for YOU, so feel free to let me know when you think of?a feature that would help you, in your wiki life.
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Please post your ideas?and comments below,?or on the wiki article, or just in reply to future posts about updates.
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Here's hoping Santa stuffs your stockings full of Windows 8 devices this Christmas!
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Pete Laker (XAML Guy)
(Yes, I'm English, we spell organised with an 's' ;)
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In this Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2012, photo, an AT&T logo is displayed on an AT&T Wireless retail store front, in Philadelphia. The flow of customers into AT&T's wireless stores slowed further in the latest quarter, putting the company far behind rival Verizon Wireless. AT&T Inc. on Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2012, said it added a net 151,000 new customers on contract-based plans from July through September, the lowest number for that period since at least 2003. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
In this Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2012, photo, an AT&T logo is displayed on an AT&T Wireless retail store front, in Philadelphia. The flow of customers into AT&T's wireless stores slowed further in the latest quarter, putting the company far behind rival Verizon Wireless. AT&T Inc. on Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2012, said it added a net 151,000 new customers on contract-based plans from July through September, the lowest number for that period since at least 2003. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
NEW YORK (AP) ? The flow of customers into AT&T's wireless stores slowed further in the latest quarter, putting the company far behind rival Verizon Wireless.
AT&T Inc. on Wednesday said it added a net 151,000 new customers on contract-based plans from July through September, the lowest number for that period since at least 2003.
The Dallas-based company is blaming short supplies of the iPhone 5, which launched a week before the end of the quarter. But that didn't hold back Verizon Wireless, which last week reported adding 10 times as many contract-signing customers as AT&T did.
AT&T said the shortage of iPhones meant that most of them went to people who were already AT&T customers. Only 18 percent of the 4.7 million iPhones it activated in the quarter went to new subscribers, the lowest number yet.
AT&T suggested that it suffered in comparison to Verizon because it launched its new data-sharing plans later in the quarter. Verizon launched "Share Everything" just before the start of the quarter and said it prompted people to add lots of extra devices to their plans. AT&T waited until August to introduce "Mobile Share" and was less aggressive about it. At Verizon, "Share Everything" was the only choice available to new customers, while AT&T kept its old plans alongside the new one.
"For years, Verizon and AT&T have performed a nearly impossible feat; both companies have consistently and significantly outperformed an industry of which they already represented the overwhelming share," said Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett. "Simple math says that can't be sustained forever ... Verizon Wireless is still outperforming industry metrics. But AT&T isn't anymore."
"We're not reliant on connecting more people," said Ralph De La Vega, the head of AT&T's wireless division, on a conference call with analysts. The company's strategy now is to expand services, getting existing customers to spend more, for instance by hooking up their homes to AT&T's security and automation services, he said.
At the end of the quarter, AT&T was sending out bills for 77.3 million devices on its network, while Verizon served 95.6 million. Both have millions more devices on their networks through wholesale arrangements, but these pay much less.
AT&T's wireline business, which makes up nearly half of revenue, continued to shrink slowly, as people cancel their landlines and move from phone-line broadband to cable modems.
AT&T's quarterly results were largely flat with a year ago. Net income was $3.64 billion, or 63 cents per share, nearly unchanged from $3.62 billion, or 61 cents per share, a year earlier.
For the latest quarter, analysts expected earnings of 60 cents per share.
Revenue was also essentially flat from last year, at $31.46 billion. Analysts expected $31.57 billion.
Comparisons to last year were affected by the sale of AT&T's phone book business in May. The unit was profitable but shrinking, so AT&T sold a controlling stake to a private equity firm for $950 million. When subtracting the phone book business from last year's results, AT&T's earnings rose about 2 percent in the latest quarter, as customers kept shifting from regular phones to smartphones with more expensive service plans. Revenue grew nearly 3 percent.
AT&T shares fell 15 cents to $34.85 in late morning trading.
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VATICAN CITY (AP) ? The Vatican tribunal that convicted the pope's ex-butler of stealing private papal correspondence sharply condemned the theft on Tuesday as causing "reprehensible" damage to the pontiff, the Holy See and the entire Catholic Church, and said investigations are continuing.
The three-judge tribunal issued its written explanation of how it reached its Oct. 6 verdict against Paolo Gabriele, who was convicted of aggravated theft and sentenced to 18 months in prison, currently being served under house arrest.
Gabriele confessed to photocopying papal documents and giving them to an Italian journalist, saying Pope Benedict XVI wasn't being informed of the "evil and corruption" around him and that he believed that exposing the problems publicly would put the church back on the right track.
The revelations of petty bureaucratic infighting, intrigue and allegations of corruption and homosexual liaisons marked the biggest Vatican security breach in modern times.
Noting what they called Gabriele's "simplistic" intellectual capacity, the judges acknowledged that he had thought he was doing the right thing by leaking the documents. But they said Gabriele's crime was a "reprehensible" violation of trust that damaged the pope himself and the rights of the Holy See, the Vatican City state and the entire Catholic Church.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, noted that the investigation into Gabriele remains open and that prosecutors could charge him with other crimes.
Lombardi repeated that Benedict has the authority to pardon Gabriele. On Oct. 6 Lombardi had said a papal pardon was "concrete, likely" ? though on Tuesday he would only say it was "a possibility" and that it wasn't known if or when a pardon might be granted. He said his choice of words Tuesday was intentional.
Prosecutors have a few more days to decide whether or not to appeal the sentence, as they can do in the Vatican. Gabriele's attorney has decided not to appeal.
Once the deadline passes, Gabriele will begin serving his sentence in a Vatican detention facility, Lombardi said. Previously the Vatican had said he would serve it in an Italian prison, given that the Vatican doesn't have a long-term detention facility.
Italian author Gianluigi Nuzzi's book, "His Holiness: Pope Benedict XVI's Secret Papers" convulsed the Vatican for months and prompted an unprecedented response, with the pope naming a commission of cardinals to investigate the origin of the leaks alongside Vatican magistrates.
A co-defendant, Claudio Sciarpelletti, a computer expert in the Vatican secretariat of state, was accused of aiding and abetting Gabriele's crime. Through his lawyer he has said he is innocent. His trial is due to start Nov. 5, Lombardi said.
In their ruling, the judges said there was no proof that Gabriele had any accomplices. Nevertheless, they noted that investigations are continuing "into the existence of other possible responsibilities in the leaks of reserved documents."
They confirmed the conviction of aggravated theft, rejecting the defense claim that Gabriele was merely guilty of "misappropriation" and detailing the way he violated the trust that had been granted him due to his position.
"Gabriele was able to commit the crime because of his relationship of service to the Holy Father, which is necessarily based on trust that allowed the pope to leave in his care documents that he illegally approrpriated," the judges wrote.
They said that while Gabriele himself may not have profited financially from stealing the documents, he obtained an "intellectual and moral" profit by doing so ? a legal requirement to finding him guilty of theft.
Despite the violation, the judges said they could exclude that Gabriele was in general a criminal and, based on the length of his sentence, rejected the prosecutors' request that he be barred from work in any Vatican public office.
Gabriele, a 46-year-old father of three, is a Vatican citizen and resident of the Vatican city state. Lombardi said he didn't know if he was continuing to draw a salary or whether he would continue to be granted Vatican citizenship.
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Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/vatican-court-butlers-theft-harmed-pope-church-093203834.html
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The Mini can be pre-ordered from Friday (26 October), the day after UK customers can get their hands on Amazon?s Kindle Fire, and Apple claims all models will be available by late November.
The most basic version, 16GB with wi-fi, is, at ?269, only ?60 less than the starting price for the iPad.
Apple?s launch message pitched the Mini as exactly like the iPad, with nothing taken away, but small enough to be used, in the words of product design chief Jony Ive that "will be used in so many different places in so many different ways".
Phil Schiller, the marketing chief who company recently locked in to 2016 with a $60m package, unveiled the Mini at yesterday?s launch with the claim it was "as thin as a pencil" and "as light as a pad of paper" and 53% lighter than the iPad.
It has the same 1,024x768 resolution display as the iPad as well as Siri and Facetime.
Apple has produced a characteristically slick product demo video featuring Ive, as well as Michel Tchao, vice president iPad product marketing, and Dan Riccio, senior vice president product engineering.
It has the edge on the Kindle Fire demo video (below), though Amazon has raised its marketing game with a recent brand-focused TV campaign ahead of the Fire?s launch.
Source: http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/rss/1156270/Apple-shaves-60-off-iPad-Mini-launch/
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