divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/13396?ns=guardianpageName=World+news%3A+Canada%27s+PM+clings+on+to+power+as+parliament+suspendedch=World+newsc3=The+Guardianc4=Canada+%28News%29%2CWorld+newsc5=Not+commercially+useful%2CNorth+America+Travelc6=Suzanne+Goldenbergc7=2008_12_05c8=1129183c9=articlec10=GUc11=World+newsc12=Canadac13=c14=h2=GU%2FWorld+news%2FCanada" width="1" height="1" //divpCanada's prime minister managed to head off the fall of his conservative minority government and cling to power yesterday after engineering the suspension of parliament./ppThe extraordinary decision by Canada's governor general, Michaeuml;lle Jean, to grant Stephen Harper's request to suspend parliament saved him from a confidence vote set for Monday that he was almost certain to lose. It also spares Canadians from going to the polls again, just weeks after elections in October./ppBut the reprieve for Harper takes Canada into uncharted constitutional territory and creates a political vacuum at a time of global economic crisis. It is also temporary. Parliament will resume in the new year and the government is due to introduce its budget on January 27./ppIn attempt to shore up his political prospects in the interim, Harper told reporters in Ottawa yesterday that his budget would include measures to help the economy, and that he would try to regain the confidence of the opposition. "Obviously we have to do some trust-building," he said./ppYesterday's decision brought angry protests from the opposition Liberal and New Democratic parties, which had called on Jean to refuse the prime minister's request to prorogue parliament. They accused her of disregarding the will of the majority in parliament. /ppCanada's crisis was provoked last week when Harper introduced an economic plan that included no stimulus measures but called for a three-year ban on strikes by civil servants and the abolition of public financing for political parties. The Liberal party leader, Steacute;phane Dion, accusing Harper of seeking to politicise the economic crisis, formed a coalition with the leftwing New Democratic party. The two also secured support from the separatist Bloc Queacute;beacute;cois to bring down the government. /ppAlthough Harper retreated on both measures, the opposition refused to back off, raising a political skirmish to yesterday's crisis proportions./ppDonna Dasko, one of Canada's best-known pollsters, said the move to scrap public financing was the tipping point for an opposition that had been demoralised by Harper's re-election. "It was so provocative," she said. "It was purely an effort to take away the modest public support that the political parties have."/ppAs tensions rose, Harper appeared on national television on Wednesday night vowing to block a coalition from coming to power. "Canada's government will use every legal means to protect our democracy, to protect our economy," he said./ppHe said his opponents were undemocratic and accused Dion of being allied with Queacute;beacute;cois separatists. Harper used the word "separatist" four times in the five-minute address./ppSpeaking after Jean's decision, the NDP leader, Jack Layton, said his party would vote down the government in January./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/canada"Canada/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/mq-CanhNnXhxaw8dOmh7uwCUw-4/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/mq-CanhNnXhxaw8dOmh7uwCUw-4/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

I just got my generation 1 Ipod Touch a few days ago. I'm so excited, because of the prospect of watching my MST3K episodes outside of the house. Photos upload fine, music uploads fine... but none of my videos do.

They were originally in AVI format, but I converted them all to mp4 (h.264) with a program called Pazera Free Video To Ipod Converter. I can upload them to iTunes, and they play just fine, but when I try to sync them to my iPod, it simply tells me that "they cannot be played on my iPod."

What's going on here?

Thank you in advance.

A big deal went down between Democrats in the New York Senate today forged by pressure from the so-called gang of three (Sen. Carl Kruger, Sen.-elect Pedro Espada Jr., and Sen. Ruben Diaz), and the likeliness of a same-sex marriage vote coming to pass in the next session of the legislature went down the tube as a result, even though the deal gives Democrats a solid majority.

The New York Daily News has the details.

And here's the unacceptable part:

"A bill to legalize same-sex marriage will not be brought to the floor of the Senate for a vote this year. Smith will announce that he does not believe the measure has sufficient votes to pass - a statement that is at this point undoubtedly true, although it's unclear how long that will last if, as Democrats are hoping, the prospect of being in the minority leads to mass GOP retirements."

If you're on Facebook (especially in NY), you may want to join this group. The name is about to be changed. The new group will serve to:

1. Gather support nationwide to show our opposition to these Senators.
2. Organize demonstrations that will make these Senators feel our political power and show our political support for Malcolm Smith.
3. Organize efforts to oppose any effort on the part of these legislators to interfere with the pursuit of marriage equality in New York, be it legislatively or by referendum.

Background
New York Marriage Equality Bill a Big Question Mark [tr]
A Thanksgiving Thaw for New York Democrats? [tr]
'Rogue' NY Senate Democrats Use 'Gay Marriage' as Bargaining Chip [tr]

Hello,

I just made a partition on my mac (using bootcamp) to put on an XP partition. Everything went fine, and the partition showed up in my Mac finder. After doing all the relevant installs under Windows, I decided to go back to the Mac and continue it under Fusion. I've done this before on an old mac, so assumed VMware would just load up my bootcamp partition.

It didn't. Instead I got a message saying, "The virtual machine appears to be in use."

It isn't. Now my bootcamp partition, and portable hard drive are refusing to mount in the Mac. They've been formatted in NTFS, which I've never had a problem with. As my understanding the Mac can mount NTFS drives it just cannot write to them. I've installed NTFS for Mac, and that cured that in the past, but I've never not been able to mount the drives. Any thoughts?

Also VMware still thinks the virtual machine is in use, even though the windows drive isn't even mounted..

Very annoyed! It's times like these when as a Windows user I would just format and start again.. Not looking forward to that prospect.

http://www.TheMLMSuccessPlan.com/ *Travis Fitzwater explains why MLM fails it's users by forcing them to "attend hype meetings" and use outdated means to market to cold prospects when people can use the power of the internet and effective systems to create success and wealth. If you want to make money online with your MLM and Home Based Business, use systems that the top earners are using to create multiple 5 figure incomes per month!

Auteur : travisfitzwater
Tags : mlm mlm failure network marketing marketing success how to succeed in sucks multi level lead system pro lead leads conversion resources user-category:school
Envoyé : 04 décembre 2008
Note :0.0
Votes :0

!-- pageType= magazinesmall slug= ff_blodget section= techbiz subsection= people headline= Financial Industry Scapegoat Reinvents Himself as Financial Reporter authorName= Daniel Roth creditType= photo credit= Mike McGregor caption= Henry Blodgetis back, and his straight-talking analysis of the Web world is earning him new fans. -- pstrongHenry Blodget/strong has never gotten used to the chorus of hate that follows his every move. He's merely learned to live with it. When he started his personal blog in 2005, the comments a href="http://www.internetoutsider.com/2005/10/welcomeand_than.html"dripped with disgust/a. "You are a boldface liar," a reader wrote. "Give me one reason why I should believe what you are writing," said another. And that was just in response to Blodget's innocuous first entry. /ppDuring his years as a star Wall Street analyst, his pronouncements were welcomed and celebrated; now he couldn't say hello without getting savaged. Just last August, TechCrunch mentioned that Blodget would be one of more than two dozen tech celebrities a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/15/4-new-experts-henry-blodget-josh-kopelman-tim-o%E2%80%99reilly-robert-scoble-join-techcrunch50/"judging a contest/a for startups. Blodget knew what was coming, even if his hosts didn't. "Blodget is scum.... He is no longer the arrogant prick we saw in the '90s, but he's still scum," someone wrote. "A lot of people lost money listening to this dirtbag." "Blodget is a Web 1.0, bubble-creating has-been." "He is unethical." "He's as crooked as they come."/p pI meet a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/henry_blodget.html"Blodget/a at the offices of his new business, a year-old site called a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/"Silicon Alley Insider/a, shortly after the TechCrunch beat-down. Alley Insider is one of many tech business blogs that feed news, earnings info, and rumors to investors and corporate insiders. But Alley Insider has one thing that others don't. Blodget. He's smart, he's skeptical, and he's got the kind of self-assured voice that sells well in the blogosphere. As the market sinks, his opinions are even more in demand, though he's still hated by a large portion of his prospective audience./p pThe site shares two floors of a Manhattan office building with programmers and business staff for some of Alley Insider's sister companies, all of which were started by former DoubleClick CEO a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/kevin_ryan"Kevin Ryan/a. Blodget works in a double-wide cubicle near a window, separated by a low wall from the site's two other editors. They spend their days crawling Twitter and RSS feeds, calling sources, and pumping out about a dozen daily takes on the business world, most with Digg-friendly headlines (no easy accomplishment with bone-dry business stories). "Is Facebook Distracting Us From Porn? No" is a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/is-facebook-distracting-us-from-porn-no"typical/a, or "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/googles_ginormous_food_budget_7530_per_googler"Google's Ginormous Food Budget/a: $7,530 Per Googler, $72 Million a Year." Blodget tells his team to think of the site as talk radio: He wants readers to feel compelled to check in several times a day to get the Alley Insider view on everything going on in their world./p pFor privacy, we duck into a small conference room, and Blodget, tall and skinny, sinks into a ridiculously deep leather chair. His floppy dirty-blond hair gives him a youthful, almost carefree air, but the deep circles that ring his eyes tell a different story. He's managing a 24-hour news startup. It's midday and he's been posting since 5 am. And then there's the burden that comes with being Henry Blodget, digital punching bag./p p"There are obviously a lot of folks who say, 'Now wait a minute, isn't that the guy who....'" He lets the thought trail off. He's legally barred from talking about the incidents that led to his vilification. "To them, I'm emthat/em Henry Blodget. There's not much more I can say. I still can't address specific points. So it's like, 'OK, here's my face. Throw the fruit. When you want to stop throwing the fruit, if you want to listen, great. If you don't, fine.'"/p pIt's been almost a decade since the impulse to greet him with rotten mangos first struck. Back in 1998, as a 32-year-old analyst with investment bank CIBC, he a href="http://www.thestreet.com/markets/analystrankings/977502.html"declared/a that the stock price of Amazon.com would nearly double to $400. Three weeks later it did, and Blodget was a hero. Soon he packed up his spreadsheets mdash; he's never more comfortable than when he is lining up numbers in rows and columns and teasing out their secrets mdash; and moved to Merrill Lynch./p pInvestors followed the new oracle's every utterance, and bankers wanted Blodget to bless the stocks of companies they were hoping to do business with. The lines on his graphs always seemed to point one way mdash; steeply up and to the right. He wasn't just predicting profits, he was selling a revolution: The old metrics didn't apply. Blodget may have counseled people to own only a small percentage of Internet stocks mdash; 10 percent at the most mdash; but nobody listened./p !-- pagebreak -- div id="embed" style="width:370px;" div id="pic" style="width:350px;" img style="width:350px;" src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_blodget3_f.jpg" alt=""/ div id="caption" Launched in 2007, Silicon Alley Insider is gaining on some of its established rivals. br/ emSource: Compete/em /div /div /div pThen came the crash. Five trillion dollars in wealth vaporized in 24 months, leaving behind unquantifiable amounts of rage among the masses of day traders who had believed briefly that they, too, were market savants. When the bubble burst, so did Blodget's aura./p pStill, it wasn't the crash alone that crushed him. It took Eliot Spitzer to turn Henry Blodget into emthat/em Henry Blodget. Spitzer, then New York's crusading attorney general, investigated Merrill in 2001 for conflicts of interest. He discovered a clutch of emails from the young analyst showing that while talking up certain stocks to clients, he was trashing them internally. Companies like 24/7 Media, Excite@Home, and InfoSpace mdash; firms Merrill was publicly cheering mdash; in private were deemed by Blodget to be "shit," "crap," and "junk" (respectively). According to Spitzer's findings, Blodget would have pulled in $12 million in 2001 mdash; quadruple his earnings in 1999 mdash; if he hadn't accepted a buyout that year. In 2003, Merrill's boy genius agreed to pay a $4 million fine and accepted a lifetime ban from working in the securities industry./p pPublic disgrace usually drives a person into hiding, or at least into a different career. Jerry Levin, the brains behind the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger, today runs a href="http://moonviewsanctuary.com/staff"Moonview Sanctuary/a, his wife's spa; Spitzer, forced to resign as governor last summer, is currently discovering the a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2008/06/10/spitzers-next-act-distressed-real-estate/"joys of real estate management/a; Health South CEO Richard Scrushy, while on trial for accounting fraud, a href="http://www.richardmscrushy.com/biography.aspx"became a televangelist/a. Not Blodget./p pOne former colleague says Blodget spent the months when he was being investigated trying to grasp why he was singled out for something that was commonplace in the industry. He figured the controversy would blow over once the public realized his conduct was not unusual. "He was incredulous that the investigation got traction; he said it was silly," a friend says. But there was too much anger in the wake of the bubble, and Blodget's embarrassing emails made him an easy scapegoat. Later, when he was inclined to argue his case, the settlement terms prevented it./p pSo Blodget did what came naturally. He began writing about the companies he used to cover, a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2104656/"first for Slate/a, then on his own blog, a href="http://www.internetoutsider.com/"Internet Outsider/a. Was this journalism mdash; or was it therapy? Rather than hide, he started saying in public what he had once said only in private, using the same brutally frank voice that got him in trouble with Spitzer. He marketed his notoriety to a new Web readership hungry for smart, independent analysis./p pWhen Ryan, an Internet Outsider reader, approached him about starting an industry news site, Blodget jumped at the prospect of a bigger stage. Before working on Wall Street, he'd been a freelance writer; now he could combine the two vocations, borrowing freely from both journalism and equity research./p pThrough Alley Insider, Blodget is trying to erase, post by post, Spitzer's portrait of him as a duplicitous, money-grubbing shill for big business. Blodget has always believed that the Internet changed everything, so naturally he believes it has the power to change the world's perception of him. The venue offers all Henry, all the time (and even when his other writers are posting, it's clear they're channeling him). The result is a unique blend of x-ray analysis and tech evangelism./p pAs we talk, Blodget gets up from his chair, antsy to return to his laptop. I ask him if he understands what he's up against. If the hate has lasted this long, why expect it ever to fade away? "If all I knew about me was what I read during that period," he says, "I'd probably have the same reaction."/p pstrongOn a late summer morning/strong, Blodget waits in the lobby of the Nasdaq building in midtown Manhattan. He's all banker today: blue suit, red tie, black cap-toed Oxfords, his shirt so deeply pressed there are creases down the sleeves. It's 10 am and, ready for his second breakfast, he pries open the plastic case of a turkey and Swiss sandwich and starts wolfing it down. In a few minutes he is supposed to conduct a video interview for Yahoo's Tech Ticker finance site. As soon as Blodget started appearing as a regular host in February, the Furies a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/650/Jerry-Yang-Strikes-Back;-Here%27s-Microsoft%27s-Next-Move?tickers=yhoo,msft"reemerged/a. "Did you not find any other decent, credible guy than Henry Blodget?" one of the first comments read. "Why spoil this new feature with such a scum and spoil the Yahoo reputation?"/p pAs producers prepare to tape the show, Blodget wipes his crumbs off the table. He explains the guiding vision behind Alley Insider. "We don't want to do things we don't care about," he says. "It's nice to say theoretically we're the judge of what's important and what's not, but come on, give readers credit. They'll tell you immediately what they want, and that drives coverage. People are fanatically interested in Apple, Google, Microsoft. It wasn't a tough call to know what to write about."/p pBlodget's focus on content is matched by his apparent indifference to the look of the site. Alley Insider employs a cookie-cutter template of scrolling headlines and thumbnail photos dragged off the Web. But design limitations notwithstanding, by September the site was getting nearly 500,000 visitors a month, rivaling a href="http://allthingsd.com/"AllThingsDigital.com/a, the citeWall Street Journal/cite blog edited by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Since the beginning of the year, traffic to the site has more than doubled, and Blodget's words now carry surprising weight. When a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/apple-s-steve-jobs-rushed-to-er-after-heart-attack-says-cnn-citizen-journalist"he reported/a early this fall that Steve Jobs may have been rushed to the hospital after a heart attack mdash; citing an anonymous (and, as it turns out, fraudulent) post on a minor user-generated news site run by CNN called iReport mdash; Apple's a href="http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/03/technology/apple/"stock dropped/a nearly 10 percent. Critics blamed Alley Insider./p p"I read citeThe New York Times/cite, citeThe Economist/cite, and Alley Insider," says a href="http://www.firebrandpartners.com/principals/index.html"Scott Galloway/a, head of investment equity firm Firebrand Partners, who is best known for his successful public fight to get on the board of citeThe New York Times/cite. "Henry takes a no-mercy, no-malice approach to Web business and media." Valleywag recently called him "the disgraced stock analyst everyone now listens to."/p !-- pagebreak -- div class="wide_img" img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_blodget2_f.jpg" alt="" div class="wide_caption" div class="wide_caption_txt" The team at Silicon Alley Insider (left to right): senior editor Dan Frommer, COO Julie Hansen, cofounder Kevin Ryan, and editor in chief Blodget. br/ emPhoto: Mike McGregor/em /div /div /div br/ br/ pFor all the success today, it took Blodget amp; Co. some time to figure out a winning formula. When Ryan, a New Yorker, launched the site in 2007, he wanted to cover the local startup and media scene. Blodget signed on as CEO and editor in chief, bought a minority stake, and hired citeForbes/cite journalists a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/peter_kafka"Peter Kafka/a and a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/dan_frommer"Dan Frommer/a to help him develop content (Kafka was later hired away by AllThingsD). The first few weeks, the site read like a tourist's guide to spotting B-list Internet companies in the big city, with each firm's location prominently announced: "NoHo-based Meetup has quietly launched a Facebook application"; "Flatiron-based YellowJacket Software has raised $1.25 million." Blodget branched out, taking on the bigger names himself mdash; Apple, Dow Jones, NBC, JP Morgan. It quickly became clear to him that New York's tech industry was too small an arena to contain the ambition of the site. And nearly half the readers were in California anyway./p pAlley Insider soon dropped its Silicon Alley focus but stuck with the moniker. And Blodget began to draw more heavily on his research experience. He created financial models of the companies he was talking about and posted the spreadsheets as Google docs so anyone could download and toy with them. He analyzed the potential revenue YouTube could bring to Google, mapping out his assumptions about viewership and ads watched, and offering a clear bottom-line conclusion. Readers weighed in with their critiques, which Blodget used to sharpen the model. He figured he wouldn't just write about Wall Street, he would also usurp part of Wall Street's business by providing high-quality research, the kind brokerage customers used to prize./p pBut visitors to the site wanted more than analytics. They also craved the edgier Henry of the Spitzer emails. Blodget obliged. In one post, a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/1/ben_stein_is_an_idiot"Blodget declares/a citeNew York Times/cite economics columnist Ben Stein to be either "an idiot" or possibly just "delusional." He suggests that the anonymous sources cited by archrival TechCrunch in its reporting on Microsoft's attempt to purchase Yahoo "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/yahoo_stock_fades_as_techcrunch_microsoft_takeover_sources_sober_up"must have been drunk/a." And in November 2007, when E-Trade lost $9 billion in value as its risky mortgage bets turned to dust, Blodget offered only one piece of advice to the company's shareholders: "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/11/etrade_etfc_total_cost_of_screwup_9_billion"Cry/a."/p p"On Wall Street, I'd consistently submit a report that would say, 'This is going to be roadkill,' and it would come back rewritten as 'We see some weakness,'" Blodget says. "Now I can say, 'It's going to be roadkill.' That's very satisfying."/p pBut even as he delights in railing against corporate giants, he's still disciplined enough to run the underlying numbers mdash; Blodget loves the drama, but he loves the spreadsheets just as much. One post about craigslist should have been something only an accountant could love: a complex set of assumptions and analyses to determine what the company might be worth. Yet Blodget wrote the whole exercise as if it were a mystery plot, parceling out details and stringing the reader along until the very end./p pWhen Yahoo announced this summer that it had hired Bain amp; Co., a consulting firm usually brought in when a company is about to start swinging the ax, Blodget a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/yahoo-fat-farm-how-many-people-does-yahoo-need-to-fire-to-get-fit-"sharpened his own pencil/a. "We're mad as hell ... especially now that Yahoo's wasting millions on Bain." He offered his own, free advice (spreadsheet attached) cataloging how many people Yahoo should fire in each division mdash; 1,804 from its "positively obese" sales and marketing arm alone mdash; in order to goose operating margins to a "more respectable" 20 percent from its current 7 percent. "He pushed us early on to ask, 'What does this mean for profits? How does any news affect a company's numbers?'" Frommer says. "It's great if it makes a company look bad or look good, but is this really going to affect the numbers?"/p pBlodget is also trying things that no mainstream-journalism-trained blogger like Swisher or GigaOm's a href="http://gigaom.com/"Om Malik/a would ever dare. He makes serious-sounding offers to buy companies that he wants to demonstrate are significantly undervalued. It's pure showmanship, but with Blodget's background in finance and his ties to folks up and down Wall Street, no one knows just how far he will take the joke./p pHis first target was CNET. With the a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/12/announcing_our_friendly_takeover_offer_for_cnet"slightest of winks/a, he wrote a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/1/cnet_update_on_our_offer_and_restructuring_plan_part_1"post after post/a explaining how he'd a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/jana_here_s_our_plan_for_cnet"purchase the company/a. At first he proposed a sort of reverse merger, with CNET buying Alley Insider for $50 million in stock, at which point Blodget's team would take over every aspect of the company. Then he detailed the operational changes he would make./p !-- pagebreak -- pRyan got nervous about Blodget's new direction. Blodget's deal with the government forbade him from giving individual research advice, but it didn't say anything about jumping into the private-equity space. Still, there might be legal issues. "Look, why don't we run this by a lawyer just to make sure, because we're getting into securities stuff here," he said to Blodget. When the lawyer asked them "Is this a real offer?" there was a brief silence. For the first time the two really thought about it./p p"You know, yes," Ryan replied. "If they said yes, we would accept $50 million at that time to buy them. So it is a real offer. But we're actually asking them to buy us." The lawyer signed off on the convoluted reasoning./p pAfter Blodget's taunting posts went up, investment firm JANA Partners announced a hostile takeover attempt of CNET. It failed, but by spring 2008 CBS a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/cbs_buying_cnet_for_1_8_billion"stepped in to buy/a the company for $1.8 billion./p pFor one CNET executive, memories of Blodget's unwanted attentions still rankle. "The way you make a big name for yourself on the Web today is to make, for lack of a better word, ridiculous statements," says Zander Lurie, former senior VP of strategy and development at CNET and now CFO of CBS Interactive. Lurie found himself reassuring employees who sent him Blodget's postings and wondered whether their company was at risk. "Everyone knew there was nothing in the offering: He didn't have the capital, the expertise, or any specific insight into our business," Lurie says. "He makes the ridiculous statement and it gets sent all around, and then he claims credit when there's an event the following year, which obviously he had nothing to do with. Less than zero to do with. We all have reputations. And his track record is well known."/p pBlodget has been a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/how-the-new-york-times-nyt-can-save-itself"waging another/a half-serious acquisition fight, this time for the New York Times Company. All he wants is the Web site mdash; the print side is dead, he says. He thinks the paper needs to cut about 80 percent of its costs, at which point it would be the perfect size to be the digital paper of record for a long time to come. "It's a serious offer from our perspective, but it hasn't been taken seriously," Blodget says./p pstrongIn the wake of Wall Street's latest meltdown/strong, Blodget finds himself in even greater demand. He's doing regular TV appearances and is posting again on Slate. When NPR wanted someone to talk about the Wall Street culture of greed, they a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94667073"brought in Blodget/a. The reporter introduced him by pointing out that Merrill is now gone, "and Henry Blodget is gone, too; he's banned from Wall Street after being charged with fraud."/p p"Thanks," Blodget said, stuttering for a second, "especially for that horrific introduction." They both laughed. But by the end, the host was treating Blodget like an elder statesman./p pRecently Blodget has been expanding his franchise. He and Ryan have launched two sister sites: a href="http://www.clusterstock.com/"Clusterstock/a, which will compile and analyze Wall Street research on a much wider range of industries, and a href="http://www.businesssheet.com/"the Business Sheet/a, which will focus on corporate scandals. A third is in the works. For each new site, Blodget provides the bulk of the early posts, seeding the new enterprise with the Blodget touch./p pBlodget is broadening beyond tech to get ready for what he sees as a coming shakeout in the news-blog industry. He says he might even start making acquisitions if the price is right. Ryan's suite of companies has raised $50 million in the past few years, possibly enough to buy out some other interesting small blogs. The winning formula for this new kind of business remains elusive: It's a matter of finding the balance between gossip and analysis, between aggregating news from other sources and doing original reporting. Revenue models that go beyond basic advertising have also been slow in coming. "If you look at the development of every new medium, there's been a new form of journalism that has been made possible by it, and there has always been this period of transition," Blodget says. "There is collective experimentation as people figure out what works and what doesn't, and usually you have some very important publications that are built."/p pAnother way to expand is to sell to a larger media company. Blodget says he'd consider an offer, but Alley Insider is still defined almost entirely by one man. If he left, the value would plummet. Also, some media institutions mdash; the grayer, stodgier ones mdash; may find Blodget's unique baggage unacceptable. The endless barrage of comments, the angry mob that seems to follow him everywhere, may be too much for the sensitivities of some management teams, even in these freewheeling days of media transformation. When Blodget wrote a few small items for citeThe New York Times/cite, the newspaper's a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/opinion/11pubed.html"ombudsman went haywire/a. "The citeTimes/cite luster may help Blodget," he wrote last year, "but some of his taint rubs off on the citeTimes/cite."/p pIt's just the sort of comment Blodget has come to expect from, well, everyone. That may change, but only if this latest reinvention succeeds in burying his past forever. In which case, he will have been right: The Internet really does change everything./p pemSenior writer Daniel Roth /em(a href="mailto:daniel_roth@wired.com"daniel_roth@wired.com/a) emwrote about the a href="/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi"future of the electric car/a in issue 16.09./em/pbr style="clear: both;"/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:e5509a1338aa2d046a0f36f53c86fd46:KTSfKmr30cBfHohgGm6zBCE5aLDI579Ry5%2FoG9QrW9e1KIT2xpDAJhCNE%2FP6%2BodTaIRTxDwhJCc5xg%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to Facebook' alt='Add to Facebook' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/facebook.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:85af8ef1f22075639f5e1be7151d039b:KjXRBL7FimCdPfkcPkDUOZbe%2BR8tiL4gaeJxl%2FnucFQ8UL28mzRmZSeHpMqoJwFUINppaALMULUa'img border='0' title='Add to Reddit' alt='Add to Reddit' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:db4d557cf92ff9467e13e01b1aee6530:PWDj6Lri2aPp2F0l1o37LwimABRJS%2Bw%2FOQMMPSWuRMZRLZhLRGI4Q9jz2JLAIoyYna2BguNYIBWs'img border='0' title='Add to digg' alt='Add to digg' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:064842e7a9d26f4e96559df7ad75369c:Ri7lRQ2YuIojw9J42qFhanIkt9g%2B2lNj7ky0mPfhji4DJCDrd66IrgRLO78oVkOke9RGBuQDA3ra'img border='0' title='Add to Google' alt='Add to Google' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/google.png'//a br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/ pa href="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?a=V04TVZ"img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?i=V04TVZ" border="0"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~4/474334201" height="1" width="1"/

The baby Jesus in the manger continues to be too enticing a prospect for some sticky-fingered pranksters, apparently. We've seen GPS tech harnessed on a small scale in the past to stave off such thievery, but now the counter-attack is going national. LightningGPS and their partner BrickHouse Security have announced that any house of worship or school can rent and use their GPS devices (and hidden cameras!) free of charge throughout the holiday season to protect the baby G and his family, the menorah, and uh... Santa. Nice to see they're covering all the religious bases here.

Filed under: GPS

Baby Jesus and Co. get free GPS devices this holiday season originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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div align="center"a href="http://www.prweb.com/releases/lightning/gps/prweb1701254.htm"img vspace="4" hspace="4" border="1" alt="" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2008/12/gps-jesus.jpg" //abr / div align="left"The baby Jesus in the manger continues to be too enticing a prospect for some sticky-fingered pranksters, apparently. We've seen a href="http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/24/jesus-and-fam-outfitted-with-gps-in-florida-nativity-scene/"GPS tech harnessed on a small scale/a in the past to stave off such thievery, but now the counter-attack is going national. LightningGPS and their partner BrickHouse Security have announced that any a href="http://www.engadget.com/2004/06/22/the-blessed-base-station/"house of worship/a or school can rent and use their GPS devices (and hidden cameras!) free of charge throughout the holiday season to protect the baby G and his family, the menorah, and uh... Santa. Nice to see they're covering all the religious bases here. br //div /divpFiled under: a href="http://www.engadget.com/category/gps/" rel="tag"GPS/a/pp style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/03/baby-jesus-and-co-get-free-gps-devices-this-holiday-season/"Baby Jesus and Co. get free GPS devices this holiday season/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.engadget.com"Engadget/a on Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:43:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href=http://www.prweb.com/releases/lightning/gps/prweb1701254.htmRead/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/03/baby-jesus-and-co-get-free-gps-devices-this-holiday-season/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/forward/1390318/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/03/baby-jesus-and-co-get-free-gps-devices-this-holiday-season/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/_q-Jdpm0EIG4vFtulsbXKrSe8vs/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/_q-Jdpm0EIG4vFtulsbXKrSe8vs/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?a=cfAkNaQI"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?i=cfAkNaQI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?a=HOjr6Kpd"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?i=HOjr6Kpd" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~4/dpFP-lbiwU8" height="1" width="1"/

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/99182?ns=guardianpageName=Politics%3A+Brown+acts+to+stop+wave+of+repossessionsch=Politicsc3=The+Guardianc4=Queen%27s+speech%2CGordon+Brown%2CMortgages+%28Money%29%2CFirst-time+buyers%2CHouse+prices+%28Money%29%2CConsumer+affairs+%28Money%29%2CState+benefits%2CEconomic+policy%2CCredit+crunch+%28Business%29%2CBorrowing+and+debt%2CWelfare+%28Politics%29%2CPolitics%2CMoney%2CBusiness%2CHousing+market+%28Business%29%2CUK+newsc5=Personal+Finance%2CCredit+Crunch%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CBusiness+Markets%2CSocial+Care+Society%2CProperty+Mortgages+and+Interest+Ratesc6=Patrick+Wintourc7=2008_12_04c8=1128414c9=articlec10=GUc11=Politicsc12=Queen%27s+speechc13=c14=h2=GU%2FPolitics%2FQueen%27s+speech" width="1" height="1" //divpHomeowners struggling to pay their mortgages were given a reprieve by Gordon Brown yesterday when he unveiled a plan to let people affected by the economic downturn take a two-year mortgage interest payment holiday./ppThe intervention was aimed at removing the prospect of an increase in home repossessions before a general election and to give people breathing space if they lose their jobs or take a big cut in their income. It is also designed to show that Labour would help middle Britain through the recession./ppBrown's surprise move came amid reports that without the government's intervention, repossessions were set to increase to 75,000 next year, hitting levels last seen in 1991, the worst year of the previous recession./ppEight banks and building societies, covering 70% of the mortgage market, have agreed to allow families struggling with mortgage payments the right to defer all, or part, of their interest payments for two years. The government will underwrite the scheme./ppBrown's surprise was sprung during the debate on a relatively sparse Queen's speech and followed secret Treasury talks with the building societies and banks. Many details, including the qualification rules, have yet to be finalised but officials denied the institutions had been bounced into a premature agreement to provide Brown with some gloss on a grey Queen's speech, which was almost overshadowed yesterday by the war of words between police and parliament over the raids on Conservative MP Damian Green's office./ppThe prime minister said the scheme would cover any household which suffered a redundancy or "significant loss of income". This would, for the first time, extend help to households where one family member loses their job and the other remains in work./ppThe Treasury plans for the scheme to apply to mortgages up to £400,000, and would probably kick in where the applicants have savings of less than £16,000./ppThe government has estimated that the cost of guaranteeing the delayed mortgage payments would add a £1bn contingent liability to government borrowing, but only cost £100m directly in eventual defaults. Building societies and banks would act as gatekeepers of the scheme, deciding whether the request to defer mortgage payments was justified. No definition of "a significant loss of income" was provided yesterday, but government officials said it might cover someone forced to take a less well-paid job or less in overtime./ppTreasury officials said the numbers liable for help would not be so large as to damage the mortgage insurance industry. The help was designed to lift the fear of repossession for those facing job insecurity. Those in safe jobs were going to enjoy falling mortgages, officials said./ppThe move comes as the Bank of England is expected to cut its base rate today. The markets expect a cut of one to two percentage points from the current rate of 3%. A cut of 1.5 points would take the rate lower than it has been since the Bank was formed in 1694./ppBrown told MPs: "Hardworking households that experience a redundancy or severe loss of income as a result of the downturn will be able to defer a proportion of their interest payments for up to two years as they get their family finances back on track."/ppThe Council of Mortgage Lenders said: "It is not a charter for 'won't pay' borrowers to avoid their responsibilities, but it will provide welcome reassurance to the vast majority of borrowers that the government and lenders are doing all they can ... to help those customers who 'can't pay' due to a change in circumstances."/ppBrown said the measure was in addition to protection for the unemployed, who can claim help to meet interest payments after 13 weeks./ppTreasury officials said banks and building societies would not suffer a serious loss of income as a result of the deferment. Brown also confirmed that the code on how banks treat business would be put on a statutory basis. Banks who fell foul of the code could face a range of sanctions, including fines./ppA total of 14 bills were revealed in the Queen's speech yesterday, including two carried over from the previous parliament. Overall, it represented the shortest legislative programme since the government came to power./ppThe programme takes in a new constitution for the NHS, confirmation of a right to seek flexible working for parents, and wider sanctions on the unemployed to make themselves "job ready". There was also a clamp down on "all you can drink" offers in pubs as well as lapdancing and prostitution in what one government official described as "action on the whole night out". Health department officials denied ministers had dropped plans to ban cigarette machines./ppBut internal disputes led to a delay in the constitutional reform bill, seen in 2007 as Brown's flagship legislation./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/queens-speech"Queen's speech/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/gordon-brown"Gordon Brown/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/mortgages"Mortgages/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/firsttimebuyers"First-time buyers/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/houseprices"House prices/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/consumeraffairs"Consumer affairs/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/statebenefits"State benefits/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/economy"Economic policy/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/creditcrunch"Credit crunch/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/debt"Borrowing debt/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/welfare"Welfare/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/housingmarket"Housing market/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/bMuhgms9lowiSc8bfIakg8zQ8y4/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/bMuhgms9lowiSc8bfIakg8zQ8y4/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/62952?ns=guardianpageName=Sport%3A+England+prepare+to+fly+out+after+India+all-clearch=Sportc3=The+Guardianc4=England+in+India+2008-09%2CIndia+cricket+team%2CEngland+cricket+team%2CEngland+cricket+series%2CCricket%2CSportc5=Not+commercially+useful%2CCricketc6=Mike+Selveyc7=2008_12_04c8=1128468c9=articlec10=GUc11=Sportc12=England+in+India+2008-09c13=c14=h2=GU%2FSport%2FEngland+in+India+2008-09" width="1" height="1" //divpEngland are ready to resume their tour of India after a security report from Chennai alleviated safety concerns. That, coupled with the prospect of similar assurance from Mohali, has convinced the England and Wales Cricket Board that it is safe for the two Test matches to go ahead./ppWith the exception of Ryan Sidebottom, ruled out by a side strain, and Stuart Broad, who is being allowed a few more days to recover from a hamstring injury suffered during the recent abandoned one-day series before flying out to Chennai, it will be a full England squad - including Andrew Flintoff and Steve Harmison, and reinforced by nine members of the performance squad - that will fly to Abu Dhabi today for a holding camp, where they will practise before moving on to Chennai on Monday. The first of two Tests is scheduled to begin there on December 11./ppThe announcement from Lord's of the intention to resume the tour came after two days of meetings between ECB officials, security advisers and government departments. "The only consideration in all our discussions has been the safety and security of the team and support staff," explained Hugh Morris, the managing director of England cricket. "We have been delighted by the input of the Professional Cricketers' Association and also the willingness of the Board of Control for Cricket in India to act upon our recommendations regarding security. While we have sought to reassure players that their safety is paramount we have not pressurised any player into making the trip against their will./pp"Those who leave for Abu Dhabi are all anticipating travelling to India if both the head of the PCA, Sean Morris, and I are happy that Reg Dickason's security plans have been activated. The board and players will be kept fully informed." /ppHe added: "The PCA and ECB have worked extremely closely on this issue, and the players have been fully supportive throughout. We will access the highest calibre of security advice on a regular basis so that we can provide the players with the latest accurate information. I have been assured by the ECB that they would never compromise the players' safety and security." Both Hugh and Sean Morris were due to travel to India last night to meet Dickason and will fly on to the United Arab Emirates to brief the players./ppThe key to the unanimous decision to return was the positive assessment of conditions by Dickason, the ECB security expert. Dickason was in Chennai yesterday, inspecting the team hotel, the /ppMA Chidambaram Stadium and the route between the two, and has expressed himself satisfied with the strong arrangements that will be put in place by the Chennai police under its commissioner, Thiru K Radhakrishnan./pp"We can provide absolute total security," the police chief said yesterday after Dickason had completed his tour. Dickason will now carry out a similar exercise in Mohali, before completing his reports. Yesterday the chief executive of the ECB, David Collier, praised the way the Indian authorities had handled the situation. "Everyone has been highly cooperative and helpful," he said. "Everything that Reg has asked for has been agreed."/ppIf it has been viewed as an expensive extravagance to bring the tour party home for such a brief period, then to persuade the Test party in its entirety to return when so much talk was of dissidents is something of a triumph. There had been suggestions from influential figures that several players, possibly Flintoff and Harmison, were intent on staying at home regardless of the outcome of the security report./ppMeanwhile, it was confirmed that West Indies will tour England in the early summer in place of Zimbabwe. Sri Lanka had been pencilled in provisionally, but player commitments to the Indian Premier League, given the backing of their cricket board, meant it was no longer a viable option. The tour will feature two Tests, at Lord's and Chester-le-Street, and three ODIs. West Indies' visit will provide a lead into a busy summer that also includes the Twenty20 World Cup and an Ashes series. Its timing, with the opening Test scheduled for May 6, precludes any hope of a large window of opportunity for England players to ply their trade in the IPL./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/englandinindia200809"England in India 2008-09/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/indiacricketteam"India Cricket Team/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/englandcricketteam"England Cricket Team/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/englandcricketseries"England cricket series/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/cricket"Cricket/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/Vnl8B9fUgtdd1RMSpOSTMcXV1KI/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/Vnl8B9fUgtdd1RMSpOSTMcXV1KI/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

The pound plunged yesterday, with its overall value tumbling to its lowest for 13 years, as another spate of dire economic news left markets convinced that the Bank of England will order a further, drastic cut in interest rates today.

40 fill-in-the-blank templates help turn any business person into a seasoned writer. Articles can help attract prospects to websites so business get a steady stream of new prospects. (PRWeb Dec 4, 2008)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/12/prweb1698184.htm

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