2013年4月21日 星期日

Kyoto can be fun for kids

Rocks to the left of us, rocks to the right. With the Hozu River rushing in between, our oarsman swung the boat hard, threading the boulders as water splashed overboard and onto my 10-year-old daughters lap.

You never know how kids will react to new experiences, but not to worry. Daddy, my daughter said, beaming as we headed for more rapids, this must be the best summer ever!

But when my wife and I made plans to take our son and daughter to Kyoto, I had a few doubts. Kyoto is one of the highlights of any trip to Japan, an ancient and fascinating city, packed with temples and shrines, a place to savor refined culture.

But can it be kid- and family-friendly? Most definitely, especially if you take advantage of the variety Kyoto has to offer, hop on the citys easy-to-use bus system, and keep your eyes open for some of its surprising travel bargains.

You could spend months visiting temples and shrines in Kyoto. But to kids, they can start to blur. So put some space in between them. Kyoto is best explored on foot, leaving lots of opportunities for stopping off at interesting destinations along the way to antiquity.

One of our favorite stops was the Nishiki-koji market, a short bus ride from downtown, where Kyotoites stocks their refrigerators and kitchen cupboards. Nishiki is a long, narrow street, covered by an arcade and lined with shops selling all sorts of snackable delicacies, like just-baked rice crackers, sashimi on skewers, and croquettes filled with chocolate, as well as wares like chopsticks and gourmet cutlery.Find a great selection of customkeychain deals. Its as interesting to browse here as to eat, and many places give out samples of their edible wares.

Visit the Toei Uzumasa Eigamura (movie village) and you may well see crews filming a samurai flick or television drama. But even if the cameras arent rolling, the village designed to look like the Japan of yore is fun to wander, offering the chance to meet actors in period costume who are happy to pose for photos. Theres also a theater on site, where live-action ninja shows are staged.

We built a day around the 10-mile ride down the Hozu, starting with a short train ride just outside the city and ending in the lovely neighborhood of Arashiyama.You Can Find Comprehensive and in-Depth carparkmanagementsystem truck Descriptions. Guides pole fiberglass boats seating about 20 people through a deep gorge, where my 8-year-old son spotted turtles, snakes, deer and numerous water birds. Ask your hotel or at the excellent tourist information office inside Kyoto station (tell them you want to go on the Hozu-gawa Kudari) to help you call ahead for a reservation, which is recommended but not required. Tickets cost $42 for adults and $27 for children older than 3 (credit cards not accepted).

Bathing is an almost religious ritual in Japan and can be the centerpiece of a memorable vacation experience. Kyoto is not known for the hot springs that dot much of Japan, but it has a few. We stopped at Sagano Onsen Tenzan-No-Yu, a hot spring spa minutes from Arashiyama on a charming one-car train. A cheaper and more plentiful destination is one of the citys super sentos, public baths with multiple tubs. The tourist office can provide a sheet in English listing these. In either, you wash thoroughly at bathing stations before entering multiple soaking pools, both indoors and out.

Kyoto hosts many festivals throughout the year.The 3rd International Conference on custombobbleheads and Indoor Navigation.Choose the right bestluggagetag in an array of colors. When we visited Kyoto in August, the city was celebrating the weeks around the Tanabata festival with lights and computer-

animated projections on the wall of the citys castle and the launching of thousands of lighted blue plastic balls down the Horigawa, a narrow waterway not far from downtown. In May, the Aoi Matsuri, held at a pair of shrines, features a procession of people in ancient Japanese court costumes. In October, the Jidai Matsuri centers around a parade that highlights various periods in Japanese history.

When youre ready to visit temples and shrines, the challenge is choosing which ones. Kiyomizu temple should be on any itinerary. Yes, its choked with tourists, but worth the trip. The walk uphill to the temple is lined with shops, many giving out samples of the local sweet called nama yatsuhashi, delicious pockets of glutinous rice flour, filled with red bean paste or fruit preserves, dusted with sugar or cinnamon. The temple is famous for its stage, a broad platform that juts over the hillside forest on immense wooden stilts.

We also enjoyed an outing to Fushimi Inari, a shrine known for its gates, which are said to number in the thousands. The shrines main buildings are worth a visit and sit within a minute or two of a train station, but you could spend hours here climbing the forested hill behind the shrine, on paths that lead up through the bright red gates to ancillary shrines, with refreshment stops along the way.

Japan is one of the worlds great food countries. But while Kyoto is known for expensive and delicate kaiseki cuisine, there is a lot more that kids will love and that you can afford. So try a restaurant specializing in okonomiyaki, sort of a dinner pancake, usually cooked on a grill at your table, and filled with meat, vegetables or seafood of your choice. These are casual and reasonably priced places, often popular with students.

Chances are your kids will also like yakitori, a selection of chicken and vegetables, usually sprinkled with salt or brushed with a soy-based sauce,You Can Find Comprehensive and in-Depth carparkmanagementsystem truck Descriptions. and grilled on bamboo skewers. Its traditionally bar food, but is also often served at some of the chain restaurants that offer wide menus.

And dont forget ramen, the steaming bowls of noodles, with toppings like roast pork, in your choice of broth. We arrived in Kyoto late our first night and ended up on a floor devoted to ramen places in a department store straddling the train station. Most ramen places also serve gyoza, fried dumplings that are hard to resist.

Any kid visiting Japan in warmer months will quickly learn to spot banners touting kaki kori, or shaved ice, doused in a choice of fruit syrups and topped with condensed milk. Japans ubiquitous vending machines sell everything from green tea to sports drinks to hot and cold coffee.

Warren Buffett Speech to University of Georgia Students

Well, good morning and welcome. You're a nice crowd, you certainly got quiet quickly. That surprised me. Can you hear me all right? There in the back? Well, for business school, you know it doesn't get much better than this. Having the world's greatest investor come to your campus is quite an honor.

Warren Buffett is Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, a holding company whose investments range from GEICO Insurance, to American Express and Coca-Cola, to Borsheims jewelry store in his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska.

Mr. Buffett has been described as 'the god of value investors' and 'the Michael Jordon of the investing game.' He began his first investment partnership in the mid-1950s with $100 of his own money. A few years later he began investing in a struggling Massachusetts textile mill called Berkshire Hathaway. Through Berkshire he started putting capital into other businesses, chiefly insurance, which generated cash streams for more investments which have done very well indeed as we all know.Find a great selection of customkeychain deals.

From a share price of about $18 in 1965, Berkshire today trades around $69,100 a share. Think I'm going to go out and buy 500 shares. Over time the company has annualized performances more than double that of S&P 500, and Berkshire today is worth more than $100 billion. But Mr. Buffett is known as much for his unpretentious style as for his lofty success. He has become a champion of investors and is legendary for his aversion to corporate doublespeak. He is rare among CEOs in that he cheerfully admits his mistakes. Three years ago he wrote in his annual report that Berkshire would have done better if he'd simply had gone to the movies. There weren't very many years like that since 1965, believe me.

Berkshire was proudly, even defiantly absent from the dot-com hysteria of the last few years, and now that the bubble has burst as we all know, it's Warren Buffett who's having the last laugh. In his most recent letter to shareholders he wrote, quote, "We've embraced the 21 st century by entering such cutting-edge industries as brick, carpet, insulation, and paint." Try to control your excitement. You know, and personally from reading his letters, I mean it's just a joy. It's a business lesson in itself. I would encourage you, whenever you get an opportunity, to take one aside and read it carefully. You'll learn a tremendous amount.

His wisdom and insights are so valued that some investors buy a share of Berkshire stock just so they can hear him at his legendary annual meeting, or as he calls it, 'Woodstock for capitalists.' He doesn't make speaking appearances often, and we are extremely fortunate to have him with us today. Earl Leonard of Coca-Cola, and our distinguished executive in residence had a lot to with that, Earl, and we're deeply indebted to you for helping to arrange this. Thank you very much.

Our format today will be primarily questions and answers. Mr. Buffett will make some brief remarks at the beginning and then we'll move into your phase. We will have a microphone set up over here. We would like to come around- we're videotaping, so we'd like you to use the microphone, please. So go ahead and begin to line up over there to ask your questions. So would you please give a very warm welcome to the oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett .

Warren Buffett : Testing. 1 million. 2 million. Great, okay. I came in from Nebraska today, and you're probably all familiar with us, mainly by our football team. We have those fellows with the big white helmets with those red 'N's on them. I asked one of our starters the other day, "What's the 'N' stand for?" And he said, "Knowledge." We make it tough on them though. I mean you don't coast through Nebraska just because you're a football player. They major in agricultural economics, and there's a two question final for all of the players. And the first question is, "What did old MacDonald have?" And they were giving that to one of our potential Heisman Trophy winners the other day. He started to sweat. Finally he brightened up, he said, "Farm!" The professor, delighted of course, you don't want to flunk a Heisman candidate. So he said, "Now," he said. "You're halfway home. Just one more question. How do you spell 'farm'?" Now the guy really starts to sweat, and he looks at the ceiling and he looks around. Finally his face brightens up and he says, "Ee-i-ee-i-oh!" So watch for that guy this year, he'll be dynamite.

I really want to talk about what's on your mind, so we're going to do a Q and A in a minute. There are a couple questions I always get asked. You know, people always say,You Can Find Comprehensive and in-Depth carparkmanagementsystem truck Descriptions. "Well who should I go to work for when I get out then?" I've got a very simple answer, we may elaborate more on this as we go along, but, you know the real thing to do is to get going for some institution or individual that you admire. I mean it's crazy to take in-between jobs just because they look good on your resume, or because you get a little higher starting pay.

I was up at Harvard a while back, and a very nice young guy, he picked me up at the airport, a Harvard Business School attendee. And he said,You Can Find Comprehensive and in-Depth carparkmanagementsystem truck Descriptions. "Look. I went to undergrad here, and then I worked for X and Y and Z, and now I've come here.The 3rd International Conference on custombobbleheads and Indoor Navigation." And he said, "I thought it would really round out my resume perfectly if I went to work now for a big management consulting firm." And I said, "Well, is that what you want to do?" And he said, "No," but he said, "That's the perfect resume." And I said, "Well when are you going to start doing what you like?" And he said, "Well I'll get to that someday." And I said, "Well you know, your plan sounds to me a lot like saving up sex for your old age.Choose the right bestluggagetag in an array of colors. It just doesn't make a lot of sense."

I told that same group, I said, "Go to work for whomever you admire the most." I said, "You can't get a bad result. You'll jump out of bed in the morning and you'll be having fun." The Dean called me up a couple weeks later. He said, "What did you tell those kids? They're all becoming self-employed." So, you've got to temper that advice a little bit. Play one game a little bit with me for just a minute and then we'll get to your questions.

I'd like for the moment to have you pretend I've made you a great offer, and I've told you that you could pick any one of your classmates- and you now know each other probably pretty well after being here for a while. You have 24 hours to think it over and you can pick any one of your classmates, and you get 10 percent of their earnings for the rest of their lives. And I ask you, what goes through your mind in determining which one of those you would pick? You can't pick the one with the richest father, that doesn't count. I mean, you've got to do this on merit. But, you probably wouldn't pick the person that gets the highest grades in the class.

Oriental Dragon

There is a kind of salty paranoia that strikes me most commonly in a particular type of Chinese restaurant: a fear that however carefully I read the menu, however much I plot and triangulate the found poetry of the dishes against each other, I'm still going to fail to get the best out of the place. I'll order loads of things that sound interesting only to realise at the end that I've merely had the sort of Chinese food you used to get in those grim joints in Hayes circa 1983, where the spare ribs were a Tango shade of orange and the crispy beef really wasn't. 

As it happens we ate brilliantly at Oriental Dragon, which lurks in one of those dark-shadowed, quasi-residential lanes north of Oxford Street, where the air smells softly of unwashed student. Even so, I still have a feeling I didn't do it justice. As we admitted defeat a dish passed by us full of beautifully arranged, bronzed crinkly things en route to a long table occupied by a Chinese family. Though I reject the notion that a good Chinese place is one full of Chinese people C why do so many go to Wong Kei, which serves some of the worst food in Chinatown? C I couldn't shake the sense that this lot Knew Things. 

Oriental Dragon sounds like the name of a cheap Chinese takeaway and it looks like one, too. There are bare functional tables, bare walls and, at the back, an open kitchen basking under bright white strip lights. More important is the chiller cabinet full of fresh seafood, the ingredients for the day's specials. The chefs are apparently from northeast China. One of my so-called restaurant critic rivals informs me that the food is "Shandong style", which means that presentation matters more than in other Chinese styles. I know nothing of this save that the food looks pretty enough. It speaks of serious knifework. What marks it out is an interest in both the red flash of chillies and lots of wobbly offal. 

All of this viscera and heat is contained within one separate menu. There is another full of Cantonese staples which I attempted to ignore by barking "white boy's food" at my companions C an irritating display of pointless machismo for its own sake. Happily I was shouted down. From that menu we ordered salt-and-pepper squid, which arrived fresh from the deep-fat fryer under shifting dunes of garlic minced so finely and fried to such a crisp so delicately that it resembled sand. Happily it tasted nothing like it. This was compelling, shameless, the stuff of a glorious, raging thirst. 

From the seafood specials we chose razor clams, which came diced with ginger and spring onion and fresh chilli, all of it then returned to the shell. They had the zing and bite and spring only found in seafood that was alive until the unlucky moment you ordered it. 

As dish descriptions go, braised dongpo pork hock with brown sauce is never going to win a literary prize. Mind you, it was accurate: a large lump of animal on the bone arrived under a blanket of something brown and sticky. But oh, what brown stickiness. It was umami central,Shop wholesale bestsmartcard controller from cheap. a huge slap of something intense and deep and savoury and powerful and, to be more precise,An experienced artist on what to consider before you buy chipcard. thoroughly yum. Into this, the meat collapsed, as if recognising it had been offered a righteous resting place.We have a wide selection of handsfreeaccess to choose from for your storage needs. A sharper hit of flavour came from barbecued jewels of lamb and pig kidney, on skewers, showered with ground salt, chilli and cumin, to be eaten within seconds of arrival, as the fat was still running. 

There were other things: a passable kung po chicken, some crunchy dry-fried green beans with minced pork and more chilli, and a tangle of broad ribbon rice noodles with beef that held about them the toasty, smoky sear of a hot wok. 

For 30 a head we ate very well indeed. But we didn't eat enough. Not by a long way. There's still the king prawns with brittle cucumber to try. And the stir-fried pig intestines. And the pig kidney with chilli pepper. And oh, you get the idea. The menu at Oriental Dragon remains an unexplored country. I'm going out there; I may be some time. 

How important is phosphate? Every living thing needs it at the cellular level. If farmers dont have it, crops will be stunted. Without plentiful supplies, the wheels will come off modern agriculture, with its bountiful harvests and ability to feed a teeming planet. 

There are no substitutes for phosphate and there isnt any practical way of recycling the compound. Farmers could maintain phosphate levels in soil if they have access to manure, but that isnt practical for most growers without livestock, except perhaps for small-time operators on the organic fringe. 

Adding to the rich tapestry of bullish details is that nearly 75 per cent of world reserves are located in just one country: Morocco and the disputed territory it is occupying in the western Sahara. 

Just as Saudi Arabia does with oil, Morocco acts as the swing producer of phosphate, adjusting its output to stabilize the market at relatively high prices. Its domination creates concerns about security of supply. 

Other countries with major reserves are in North Africa and the Middle East, including Algeria,The 3rd International Conference on custombobbleheads and Indoor Navigation. Syria, and Jordan, where most investors quite sensibly fear to tread. 

So taking a position in phosphate is a potentially brilliant, long-term investment concept, with one glaring problem: There are hardly any direct ways to play the compound. 

The big, integrated fertilizer producers, such as Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc. and Agrium Inc., offer some exposure. But their phosphate production is embedded in sprawling companies where the upside is diluted by the potentially less promising outlooks for their large sales of potash and nitrogen. Of the majors, Mosaic Co. offers the best exposure. 

The big companies have been struggling to maintain production, another negative. In the U.S., output has been on a down slope for the past two decades. In Canada, Agrium announced last year that it was shutting its nearly depleted open pit mine near Kapuskasing, Ont., replacing the output with supplies from Morocco. 

That leaves the juniors, of which there are slim pickings. Unlike gold, where there are thousands of development stage companies to choose from, phosphate exploration is in its earlier days. Last month, Paradigm Capital put out a list of all the juniors in the world with exposure to phosphate deposits. The list contained only 16 names, since shortened by one, when Toronto listed Rio Verde Minerals, with assets in Brazil, was acquired by B&A Minercao SA.Choose the right bestluggagetag in an array of colors.

2013年4月14日 星期日

Where to go to beat the odds

There were plenty of reasons to be outside on a sunny Saturday morning in early April. Yet the inside of a convenience store on Connecticut Avenue in Norwalk was buzzing with activity near the lottery counter,Shop wholesale solarlight controller from cheap. with several people scratching tickets and others calling out strings of numbers to be fed into the terminal for the daily lottery draw in hopes of hitting it big.

If hitting it big is what the folks at One Stop Variety in Norwalk were looking to do, they were in the right place. A Hearst Connecticut Media Group analysis of lottery winners over the last four years shows that the store, which is in a strip mall near exit 14 of Interstate-95, has sold more lottery tickets with prizes of $10,000 or greater than any other store in Southwestern Connecticut.

Between April 2009 and late March 2013, One Stop Variety sold 11 big winners, putting the store in a tie with a Shop Smart in Seymour and a Stop & Shop in Branford for top retailers in the state in that time.

We get the most winners on 10X Cash, he said, walking over to a plastic display case, where the $10 ticket was sitting in a cubby, labeled No. 44 of the more than 50 varieties of tickets the store had for sale.

Victor Figueroa, 47, of Stamford is one of three people who have earned a $10,We have a wide selection of handsfreeaccess to choose from for your storage needs.000 prize as a result of buying that particular ticket at the Norwalk store, in what he called a lucky shot.

Sometimes I stop in that store in the morning, when the guys I work with are grabbing breakfast at the deli in that strip mall, he said Wednesday evening. Its just down the street from where I work, so Ill play a little here or there. Not every day, but if Im there in the morning, Ill probably get a $5 or $10 scratch-off, whatever I have in my pocket.

On Feb. 5, he happened to have $10 in his pocket, and after a few scratches on a 10X Cash, he soon had $10,000. It wasnt the first time Figueroa won big at the store. In October of 2012, he won $10,000 on a $5 scratch-off ticket, purchased at the same store. Still, he says he likes the odds best on 10X Cash.

You know, its funny, believe it or not, my neighbor across the street won $10,000 on 10X in downtown Stamford a couple months before I won on it, he said. Its a good game a lucky one.

In addition to the three $10,000 winners One Stop Variety has sold for that ticket, there have also been smaller winners trickling through the teller on a regular basis, said Memon, who pointed to a string of banners taped to the walls and called out winners who have taken home $550, $2,Shop for streetlight dolls from the official NBC Universal Store and build a fun collection for your home or office.000 and $5,000 from the ticket.

Memon asked if I wanted to try again, but at $10 a pop, and with only $20 in my pocket, one failure was enough for me.An bestrtls is a network of devices used to wirelessly locate objects or people inside a building. A moment later, Gwen Grimes from Bridgeport bought the next ticket in the line.

Nothing so far, she murmured as her hand moved halfway down the card. By the end of the ticket, she declared that she had bought a dud.

While 10X Cash is the winningest scratch-off in the state, during the four years analyzed, with 102 winners claiming $10,An experienced artist on what to consider before you buy chipcard.000 or more, the ticket only pays out a winner once in every 3.95 tickets on average. While One Stop Variety has had more big winners than any other store in the state on the 10X Cash card, Stamford is home to the most large winners on the ticket than any other town.

Stamford has sold more lottery tickets paying out $10,000 or more than any other city in the state, with a total of 51 such payouts in the four-year period, including a $1 million Powerball ticket sold at Shippan Candies, which brought a windfall upon a group of employees at Toyota of Stamford in November 2012 and a $254 million Powerball prize sold nearby at the Shippan Point Getty in November 2011.

The city of Norwalk has sold the second-most big prizes, with 44, thanks in large part to One Stop Variety, and is tied with Bridgeport for the No. 2 spot. Danbury follows at No. 4, with 42 wins, and New Haven rounds out the top 5 with 36 winning tickets paying out $10,000 or more.

Private bus owners in the city are mulling the introduction of smart cards to avoid change woes being experienced by the bus crew and commuters alike. But the real benefits are more. There will be better accountability and facility for advance payment. Over and above all these, this system can be effected with the minimum required personnel.

We would like to switch over to the smartcard-based payment system which will ensure that no money or coin related issues will pop up between the conductor and the commuter. It will be implemented on a trial basis in some of the buses within three months, said M.B.Satyan, president of the Private Bus Owners Federation.

From the users side, all that the passenger has to do is to purchase a smartcard and recharge it once or twice a month. While travelling, its handed over to the conductor who just flashes the smartcard over the specially designed ticketing machine after entering the code of the starting and de-boarding stops.

However, Satyan says small-time bus operators who own only a few buses, are apprehensive of the technological application. They cite the money wont be in liquid form and hence wouldnt be able to meet the day-to-day expenses like employees wages, he said.

Nishant P.R., an engineering graduate who has successfully developed a software for the purpose, said the smartcards could be recharged just like mobile phones from shops or through the ticketing machines of conductors. The cash collected through cards will get transferred to the account of the concerned on a daily basis.

The Motor Vehicle Department too welcomes the initiative. If the KSRTC too implements the system, it will help in realising huge funds in advance. Further, the system would be helping in implementing GPRS services like locating a bus, an official said.

A View From the Front

The changes in the digital world today represent a dramatically sped-up version of the changes the world underwent in a century of industrialization.How cheaply can I build a solarlantern? It is a paradigm transformation of our world: Notions of a nations size, wealth, power, military might, population and G.D.P. mean something altogether different from what they meant a generation ago.

These relations are in constant flux, and old assumptions no longer hold. Today, a small, poor East European country can be a world leader in e-governance and cybersecurity.

In February, the United Nations praised Estonias e-Annual Report system, by which entrepreneurs can submit annual reports electronically, as the best of the best e-Government application of the past decade. Last autumn, Freedom House ranked Estonia first in Internet freedom for the third year in a row (the United States and Germany were second and third).

At the same time, Estonia is also remembered as the first publicly known target of politically motivated cyberattacks in April 2007, which inundated the Web sites of Parliament, banks, ministries, television stations and other organizations.

Disruptive as the attacks were, they were by todays standards primitive, consisting of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), which essentially overload servers with signals from hijacked, hacker-controlled PCs. Six years later, as computing power and IT dependency have increased hugely, cyberattacks are far more sophisticated and our vulnerabilities are far greater.

Cybersecurity needs to be taken seriously by everyone. We continue to think of cyberthreats in military or classical warfare terms, when in fact cyber can simply render the military paradigm irrelevant. The whole information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure must be regarded as an ecosystem in which everything is interconnected. It functions as a whole; it must be defended as a whole.

Today, almost everything we do depends on a digitized system of one kind or another. Our critical infrastructure our electrical, water or energy production systems and traffic management essentially interacts with, and cannot be separated from, our critical information infrastructure private Internet providers, lines of telecommunications and the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (Scada) systems that run everything from nuclear power plants to delivery of milk to our supermarkets.

Understanding that cybersecurity means defending the entirety of our societies, we need to re-examine many assumptions of security. In cyberwarfare, it is much harder to identify the attacker, and therefore to know how to retaliate.

In a modern digitalized world it is possible to paralyze a country without attacking its defense forces: The country can be ruined by simply bringing its Scada systems to a halt. To impoverish a country one can erase its banking records. The most sophisticated military technology can be rendered irrelevant.A solarstreetlight is a portable light fixture composed of an LED lamp. In cyberspace, no country is an island.

This requires rethinking some of our core philosophical notions of modern society: the relations between the public and private spheres, between privacy and identity.

This may have been true in the past, when only national governments had the ability to monitor citizens. Today, as we know, a single hacker can access the most intimate details of your digital and nondigital life, your finances and your correspondence.

This is a clear case of market failure. A bank that builds identity theft and fraud into the cost of doing business is an example of market failure. A power company that treats a cyber-induced power outage as an act of God, no different from a tornado or earthquake, demonstrates market failure.

If the private sector is unwilling to take the necessary steps to guarantee the integrity of its online activities, the government must step in to fulfill its most fundamental task to ensure the security of its citizens; that is, to provide them with a secure identity.

Identity lies at the core of security online. Virtually all breaches of computer security involve a fake identity, be it stealing a credit card number or accessing the internal documents of the European Commission. A three-digit security code on the back of a credit card does not provide you with a secure identity, nor does an ordinary computer password. The fundamental question is whether you can be sure the person you interact with online is who he claims he is.

The key to all online security is a secure online identification system. But a nebulous fear of an imagined Big Brother prevents citizens in many places from adopting a smart-chip-based access key that would afford them secure online transactions.

In Estonia, the government has become the guarantor of secure transactions online, while identity is authenticated by a body independent of the government. We use a two-factor identification system in which the ID is protected by both a chip and a password. A binary key or public key infrastructure guarantees securely encrypted transfer of information.This model includes 2 flush mounted reverse cableties. Thus far, our system has proved secure. Even during the DDoS attacks of 2007, our digital government system remained online and intact.

Precisely because we offer a verifiable and reliable identification system, Estonia has gone further than any other country in investing in digitizing the basic processes of society. A quarter of the electorate votes online; 95 percent of tax returns are done online, and 95 percent of prescriptions are filled online.

By the end of 2012, Estonians gave more than a hundred million digital legal signatures. Citizens, as legal owners of their own data, have access to their digital medical and dental records. And we have more and more e-services available every year.

In the future, we hope to connect our digital services and make them interoperable with our neighbors in Northern Europe. In the longer run, were looking toward uniting systems in all of Europe. Ultimately, government data will move across borders as freely as e-mail and Facebook and follow the international flows of commerce and trade.

The job of cybersecurity is to enable a globalized economy based on the free movement of people, goods, services, capital and ideas. This can only be accomplished if identities are secure.

Undoubtedly the most effective means by which our societies could be safeguarded from cyberattacks would be to roll back the clock to go back to the pen, typewriter, paper and mechanical switch. We should give up on mobile phones, iPads, online banking, social media,He saw the bracelet at a realtimelocationsystem store while we were on a trip. Google searches everything we have become accustomed to in the modern world. But that wont happen.Here's a complete list of fridgemagnet for the beginning oil painter.

I Spent a Fair Amount of My Life Despising Margaret Thatcher

I dont remember where I got it a Marxism Today conference, perhaps (kids, thats what we did for fun in the late 1970s) but I have a strong recollection of the mood of those times. It felt like Britain was falling apart. Every week there seemed to be an IRA terrorist attack or a transportation disaster a devastating fire in a train station, the sinking of a pleasure boat in the Thames. Whatever the cause,Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a plasticmould can authenticate your computer usage and data. as soon as the surviving victims were bandaged up and rendered presentable, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would show up at the hospital for a photo op. This filled Brits like me with a combination of rage and terror. Thus the Thatchcard: In the event of an accident,Of all the equipment in the laundry the chinagembeadsfactory is one of the largest consumers of steam. the holder of this card wishes it to be known that he/she does not wish to be visited by Mrs. Thatcher in any circumstances whatsoever.

I know how churlish that may sound now.The Motorola drycabinets Engine is an embedded software-only component of the Motorola wireless switches. I carried around a ridiculous piece of plastic announcing that if one of the leaders of the free world took the time to visit my sickbed, I wished her turned away. In my defense, in that era Britain was suffused with such intense Thatcher-hatred that the enmity Obama truthers express for the president seems like a love affair by comparison.

Id spent my elementary school years yelling Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher, because I was one of the kids deprived when, as education secretary, she abolished free school milk. Until that policy went into effect, Id spent every morning complaining bitterly about having to drink those odd little bottles of curdling room-temperature milk at least thats how it was served in my school but that didnt stop me from protesting the reform. And from the time I was in high school until I left Britain not long after I graduated from university, a sure-fire way usually the only way to perk up a protest was to start the chant to which Britons of a certain age have a Pavlovian response: Maggie, Maggie, Maggie!, Out, out, out!

Why was Thatcher such a hated figure? Yes, it was about her policies privatization, the selling off of public housing, her wars against Argentina in the Falklands and against the miners and the working class in Britain but there was something else at work.We offer over 600 solarlamp at wholesale prices of 75% off retail. On some level she was hated because she was a woman. Between men who hated themselves for responding to Thatchers stern, dominatrix-like scolding (watch You turn if you want to; the ladys not for turning and tell me you dont get chills) and women who wondered why our breakthrough female politician had to be a woman like her (though we surely knew that only an Iron Lady could have smashed the mold of British politics), the fact that Thatcher was female complicated things. Even her name was a hostage to ideology: Those on the left always used a condescending diminutive Maggie Thatcher while her devotees on the right used the honorific Mrs. Thatcher.

But in the typical British way, I have always believed that it was her slippery position in Britains rigid class system that ramped up the levels of loathing. She grew up the daughter of a Midlands grocer in what the Guardians Michael White called the respectable working class. Although she famously learned to speak in a posh accent as she climbed the political ladder, she grew up in a house without an indoor bathroom. Although throwing in her lot with the Conservative Party made her a traitor to her own class, the Tories apparently celebrated their colleagues upward mobility they did, after all, make her their leader, even if she was never quite one of them.

By some estimates, tens of thousands of Christians have left post-revolution Egypt. Like the former textile maker, they have left due to concerns over rising Muslim conservatism and a general instability they say is emboldening attacks against them.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of sectarian tension yet occurred Sunday in central Cairo, where a crowd attacked Christian mourners after they emerged from a funeral in Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral. The funeral was for four men killed in a Cairo gunfight Friday, in which a Muslim man also was killed. Some of the mourners, joined by sympathetic Muslims, filed out of St. Mark's Cathedral shouting exhortations against Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and his largely Islamic government.

The crowd responded to the demonstrators with rocks and gasoline bombs. Police eventually moved in, but numerous and independent news agencies reported police appeared to take the side of crowd, firing tear-gas canisters into the St. Mark's courtyard and taking no action to stop the attacks on the Christians and their church.

"It is now clear that the state needs to take that responsibility far more seriously," responded Bishop Angaelos, general bishop of the Coptic Orthodox Church in the United Kingdom, in a statement released after Sunday's violence. Since the 2011 popular uprising that deposed former President Hosni Mubarak, Angaelos said, "we have seen escalating and increasing attacks on Christians, Christian communities, churches and now the Patriarchate during this past period of expected improvement, and so questions must be asked. What are the authorities waiting for? More bloodshed, violence, hostility, alienation, marginalisation, division, or just more anarchy?"

She declined to say how many requests her embassy had received recently, or how they could be religiously broken down, but she insisted it was "too easy" to assume Christians were leaving due to religious persecution, suggesting they, as their Muslim compatriots, were seeking "better security and economic opportunities" in other countries, including hers.

There are no official figures for how many Christians have left Egypt since the revolution, though estimates range as high as in the tens of thousands.

"When there is no clarity, rumors abound," said Ibrahim Isaac Sedrak,About buymosaic in China userd for paying transportation fares and for shopping. Patriarch of Egypt's estimated 250,000 Coptic Catholics. "There are those saying hundreds of thousands, others saying thousands, but there are people leaving, this we know - and not only Christians, Muslims are leaving as well."

He and other Christian leaders, including Pope Tawadros, have publicly called on their communities "not to be afraid," and to "pray for stability and peace in the homeland." But some have also admitted that convincing their communities to stay is becoming harder to do.

"I don't have what is needed to convince them not to travel abroad," Sedrak said. "All I can do is to tell them we are here in our country, (and) we have a message. Yes, we have difficulties here, but there are difficulties outside too."

2013年4月9日 星期二

Learning to become more eco-friendly

The College at Brockport loves advertising the fact that we are considered to be a green campus. And for the most part, we are. Every week the blue recycle bins located in the dorms are set out in the hallway, full of empty pizza boxes and old notebook papers, and every week they are magically emptied. Wherever we look, a new recycle bin has popped up, whether that be by the bus stop across from Tower Fine Arts or at Kinetic Kafe, Brockports newest on-campus eatery which probably house the best recycle bins on campus.

Its great that we are all being so eco-friendly on campus. However, there is still so much that isnt being done to support the environment. Things as simple as throwing your pizza box in the recycle bin instead of the garbage at Trax. Yet these simple actions will never be taken if they are not addressed.

Lets talk food. Brockport is known for its food. On a larger scale, the United States is known for its food, too. We are a nation of people who stereotypically love to eat, and we dont like to skimp on the portions.

But what happens to all the food we dont eat? Often at home it gets thrown away.Shop the best travel chinamosaic online. Sure, there are health codes preventing anything but this from happening, but one health code shouldnt mean the waste of plates upon plates of food.

What about compost? The amount of food students leave uneaten on their plates at dinner alone is mind-blowing. There are people all over the world who have nowhere near the same access to food as us, yet we swipe our Eagle One card and are offered an open buffet of all kinds of food imaginable, and are encouraged to put as much on our plate as is physically possible.

Once dinner is over, we dump the food in the garbage and go on our way. How hard would it be to have one garbage can for paper napkins and un-compostable material such as dairy products and one container for compostable food? This uneaten food could then be used to make fertilizer, instead of simply being thrown in a landfill somewhere.

The untouched trays of food in the dining halls, too,Cheap logo engraved indoortracking at wholesale bulk prices. could be composted, instead of simply being thrown in the garbage at the end of the breakfast, lunch or dinner shift.

Composting our discarded food shouldnt be limited to the dining halls. It wouldnt be difficult to make a separate trash receptacle in our houses and apartments for compostable food and then create a community compost bin.

According to dosomething.org, We generate 21.5 million tons of food waste each year. If we composted that food, it would reduce the same amount of greenhouse gas as taking 2 million cars off the road.

Paper products are also constantly being wasted. One of the most popular places to hang out on campus after a Friday or Saturday night out is Trax. The tables are always full, and there are often times when people have to be kicked out once closing time comes around.

If this is such a popular place to eat, why is nothing offered except to-go boxes? Even if the campus wants to stick with using paper products at Trax, a paper plate uses half the amount of paper a box does. While a plate is an option at Trax, most people dont know about it. Because servers do not ask whether orders are going to be eaten at a table or taken to-go, boxes wind up being the go-to for almost every meal.

Utensils used at Trax are also discarded. It would take barely any work to insert a container for recyclable plastic next to the garbage and paper containers at Trax, as is done at Kinetic Kafe, yet this is not done.

Does BASC or the student population hate the Earth? Of course not. However, often people simply do not open their eyes to reality. We are the generation of today, and everything we do has an impact on this earth, no matter how small.

That cigarette you casually flick to the ground on campus (yes, we all know the smoke free campus idea didnt catch on; just check out the lawn by Mortimer) could be ingested by a squirrel or bird, or picked up by the wind and carried to a water supply, where the chemicals and toxins will then be released into the ecosystem.

As a basis for Tempo's expanding commercial-industrial LED lighting product line,Shop for wholesale free shipping bobbleheads directly from China. the CLIP begins with the extruded raceway housing that serves as the industrial-strength backbone for mounting and thermal management. Fully integrated light engines, consisting of drivers, emitters and optics, are then mated to this multifunction raceway housing.Find a great selection of floortiles deals. With its rigid design and adjustable mounting points, the CLIP can be installed in high ceiling applications without requiring the addition of a costly truss mounting system, while greatly reducing the number of necessary power feeds.We sell 100% hand-painted oilpaintingsforsale online. CLIP-based systems are targeted towards the breadth of commercial & industrial applications typically addressed by surface- or pendant-mounted fluorescent linear solutions and high-power HIDs. Examples include grocery stores, manufacturing and warehouses, convention centers, parking structures or large retail spaces.

Tempo Founder, Chairman and CTO, Dennis Pearson, principal architect of Tempo's vision for LED lighting product and systems development, commented, "We conceived of CLIP as an encompassing architecture to address well-established challenges in LED lighting, including thermal management, and user-accessible modularity with a design that provides maximum flexibility and longevity, regardless of the application. We quickly realized that CLIP solves challenges that were rather more fundamental to all commercial and industrial lighting as it massively reduces the overall costs of building electrical design, installation, commissioning and maintenance. The design of the housing and integral drivers, mounting methods, maintenance access and adaptability to the changing use of space were all key factors."

Terrence Walsh, President & CEO of Tempo commented, "It was Frank Lloyd Wright's prescription that 'form follows function' and CLIP embodies that precept, allowing designs in which the lighting platform serves as an extension of the overall architectural intent. CLIP was designed with both attention to current technical requirements as well as to the rapidly changing landscape of the SSL/LED market where future technical breakthroughs must be incorporated smoothly."