Avoid these Common Condom Mistakes
For being such an inexpensive item, condoms pack a powerful punch. They protect its users against many sexually transmitted diseases as well as guarding against pregnancy. In the heat of the moment, however, many couples do not stop during foreplay and pull out the condom instructions from the box to ensure they are using the condoms properly. So, for those condom users who are not currently engaged in sexual activity, here is a brief rundown of some condom no-no’s for you to peruse.
• A very good friend of mine met her husband in college and she recalled the first time they were about to have sex. Being a responsible man, he pulled the condom he kept in his wallet out as they were about to leap from third base and slide into home. He opened up the condom wrapper and the package was empty. The condom had expired years earlier and had disintegrated into a powder. Lesson learned? Never use condoms that have expired (they may no longer exist, as in this case) as they become weaker with age and more prone to breakage.
• If you are planning a night of unbridled passion and plan to have sex at least four times, pack at least four condoms. Add to that number any other kind of sex you plan to have, including oral or anal. Never use the same condom multiple times. If, for instance, you are using a condom and have just engaged in oral sex and are planning on moving to vaginal sex, dispose of the used condom and start with a new condom before engaging in the vaginal sex. Along the same lines, if one single sex act is continuing beyond thirty minutes, it would be an excellent idea to put on a fresh condom to avoid the condom breaking.
• While double-bagging your groceries may be an excellent idea to avoid your groceries from spilling all over your back seat, you will want to avoid double-bagging your condoms. Use only one condom at a time. The extra friction caused by rubber rubbing against rubber is sure to result in breakage.
• Never expose your condoms to anything that could cause it to potentially tear, rip or break. Some things you will want to keep away from a condom include, but are not limited to, the following: hot cars on summer days, pointy fingernails, sharp teeth, scissors or box cutters, fresh stubble, chainsaws, etc, etc.
• Once the sexual act is complete and the man has ejaculated into the condom, never let the penis go flaccid inside or the condom is likely to leak or slip off exposing those same fluids you were trying to protect. Also, never pull out without holding firmly onto the condom at the base of the shaft. This will also prevent unnecessary leakage.
• As tempting as it may be to only wear the condom towards the end of the sexual activity right before ejaculation, resist the temptation. Never let genitalia touch before you are protected with a condom.
• When friction becomes a problem with condom use, turn to a water-based lubricant for aid. Never resort to using petroleum jelly, lotions or oils as these products can cause latex to weaken and break.
• Never put on a condom so tight that there is no space for the semen to accumulate after ejaculation. When rolling a condom on, be sure to leave an air-free space at the tip.
Reference: A condom is a device most commonly used during sexual intercourse. It is put on a man’s erect penis and physically blocks ejaculated semen from entering the body of a sexual partner. Condoms are used to prevent pregnancy and transmission of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs—such as gonorrhea, syphilis, and HIV). Because condoms are waterproof, elastic, and durable, they are also used in a variety of secondary applications. These range from creating waterproof microphones to protecting rifle barrels from clogging.
Most condoms are made from latex, but some are made from other materials. A female condom is also available. As a method of contraception, male condoms have the advantage of being inexpensive, easy to use, having few side-effects, and of offering protection against sexually transmitted diseases. With proper knowledge and application technique—and use at every act of intercourse—users of male condoms experience a 2% per-year pregnancy rate.
Condoms have been used for over 500 years. In the early twentieth century, with the invention of disposible latex condoms, they became one of the most popular methods of contraception. While widely accepted in modern times, condoms have generated some controversy. Improper disposal of condoms contributes to litter problems, and the Roman Catholic Church generally opposes condom use.
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Eva Longoria Parker (born March 15, 1975) is a Golden Globe Award-nominated American film and television actress. She plays Gabrielle Solis in the ABC television series Desperate Housewives. She has also become an internationally recognized model after appearing in several high-profile advertising campaigns and numerous men’s magazines. Longoria is also known for her high profile relationship with French NBA guard Tony Parker, whom she married in 2007.
The Chevrolet Corvette is a sports car that has been manufactured by Chevrolet since 1953. It is built today at a General Motors assembly plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky, but in the past it was built in Flint, Michigan and St. Louis, Missouri. It was the first all-American sports car built by an American car manufacturer. The National Corvette Museum and annual National Corvette Homecoming are also located in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
This is it. The speculation, rumors and half-truths can now be set aside — this is the 2009 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1, officially revealed for all the world to see. Powered by a supercharged LS9 6.2L small-block engine, the ZR1 hasn’t even received an official horsepower number from the engineers toiling away at the General. All Harlan Charles, project manager for the Corvette team was able to tell us last week was the new high-powered ‘Vette engine is “capable of producing at least 100 horsepower per liter. That’s at least 620 horsepower, and approximately 595 lb.-ft. of torque.” Chevrolet wasn’t even able to give us a time on the 0-60. Charles was only willing to say “it’s in the low three seconds.” The small-block engine under the hood is only able to hit those massive numbers due to the addition of the positive-displacement Roots-type supercharger with a new, four-lobe rotor design plus an integrated charge cooling system that reduces inlet air temperature for increased performance. That’s the “go” end, but the “whoa” end is just as impressive. The ZR1 gets some simply huge carbon-ceramic, drilled disc brake rotors. They’re so big and are required to be so powerful they’re using the same 15-inch-diameter discs found on the front of a Ferrari 599. Except on the ZR1, they go on the 20″ tires in the rear. In the front, they’ll be getting even larger 15.5-inch-diameter rotors. Yup, they’re simply breathtaking to see up-close. For the time being everyone else will have to check out the gallery below or the full press release after the jump.
Egypt to copyright pyramids
Cairo - In a potential blow to themed resorts from Vegas to Tokyo, Egypt is to pass a law requiring payment of royalties whenever its ancient monuments, from the pyramids to the sphinx, are reproduced.
Zahi Hawass, the charismatic and controversial head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, told AFP on Tuesday that the move was necessary to pay for the upkeep of the country’s thousands of pharaonic sites.
“The new law will completely prohibit the duplication of historic Egyptian monuments which the Supreme Council of Antiquities considers 100-percent copies,” he said.
“If the law is passed then it will be applied in all countries of the world so that we can protect our interests,” Hawass said.
He said that a ministerial committee had already agreed on the law which should be passed in the next parliamentary session, while insisting the move would not hurt Egyptian artisans.
“It is Egypt’s right to be the only copyright owner for these monuments in order to benefit financially so we can restore, preserve and protect Egyptian monuments.”
However, the law “does not forbid local or international artists from profiting from drawings and other reproductions of pharaonic and Egyptian monuments from all eras - as long as they don’t make exact copies.”
“Artists have the right to be inspired by everything that surrounds them, including monuments,” he said.
Asked about the potential impact on the monumental Luxor Hotel in the US gambling capital of Las Vegas, Hawass insisted that particular resort was “not an exact copy of pharaonic monuments despite the fact it’s in the shape of a pyramid.”
On its website, the luxury hotel describes itself as “the only pyramid shaped building in the world,” but Hawass said its interior was entirely different from an ancient Egyptian setting.
Hawass’s declarations came after the opposition daily Al-Wafd published an article on Sunday called for the Las Vegas hotel to pay a slice of its lodging and gambling profits to the city of Luxor.
“Thirty-five million tourists visit Las Vegas to see the reproduction of Luxor city while only six million visit the real Egyptian city of Luxor,” the paper lamented.
Samir Farag, head of Luxor town council in southern Egypt, home to the legendary Valley of the Kings, said that it would be difficult to prohibit use of pyramid shapes.
“We can’t forbid people from using the name of Luxor and copying monuments from (Luxor) city, which is the world’s richest city for monuments,” he said, adding that “tourists going to Las Vegas doesn’t affect our city’s business.”
Reference: The Pyramids of Egypt are among the largest structures ever built and constitute one of the most potent and enduring symbols of Ancient Egyptian civilization. Most were built during the Old and Middle Kingdom periods.
By the time of the early dynastic period of Egyptian history, those with sufficient means were buried in bench-like structures known as mastabas.
The first historically documented Egyptian pyramid is attributed to the architect Imhotep, who planned what Egyptologists believe to be a tomb for the pharaoh Djozer. Imhotep may have been the first to conceive the notion of stacking mastabas on top of each other creating an edifice comprised of a number of “steps” that decreased in size towards its apex. The result was the Step Pyramid of Djozer which was designed to serve as a gigantic stairway by which the soul of the deceased pharaoh could ascend to the heavens. Such was the importance of Imhotep’s achievement that he was deified by later Egyptians.
The most prolific pyramid-building phase coincided with the greatest degree of absolutist pharaonic rule. It was during this time that the most famous pyramids, those near Giza, were built. Over time, as authority became less centralized, the ability and willingness to harness the resources required for construction on a massive scale decreased, and later pyramids were smaller, less well-built and often hastily constructed.
Long after the end of Egypt’s own pyramid-building period, a burst of pyramid-building occurred in what is present-day Sudan, after much of Egypt came under the rule of the Kings of Napata. While Napatan rule was brief and ceased in 661 BCE, the Egyptian influence made an indelible impression, and during the later Sudanese Kingdom of Meroe (approximately in the period between 300 BCECE 300) this flowered into a full-blown pyramid-building revival, which saw more than two hundred indigenous, but Egyptian-inspired royal pyramid-tombs constructed in the vicinity of the kingdom’s capital city.
How Clinton Lost Her Invincibility
When Hillary Clinton launched her campaign nearly a year ago, the media buzz deemed it near impossible for the likes of Barack Obama and John Edwards to overcome her daunting campaign machine. The endorsements, the money, and the cream-of-the-crop strategists combined with the former First Lady?s incumbent image to make her the clear-cut choice of the Democratic Party establishment.
But the onset of the Iowa caucuses finds Clinton aides racing to lower expectations, bracing for a possible loss there and contemplating a dwindling lead in the polls in New Hampshire and South Carolina. So, what has stripped the mighty Clinton campaign juggernaut of its image of invincibility?
For one thing, it has been a victim of the media hype it helped create. The campaign?s warnings that Iowa was going to be a tough state for Clinton fell mostly on deaf ears. “Iowa was always going to be a challenge and we consistently said that,” says Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson. “Nobody hands anyone a presidential nomination.” But her campaign also failed to invest in Iowa until it was nearly too late. While Obama and Edwards spent the better part of the year moving in hundreds of staff and building relationships with grassroots Democratic constituencies, Clinton in the last month belatedly added a hundred staffers.
And while the Clinton campaign hired the best and brightest faces to run its Iowa shop, there?s only so much that can be done without the resources or the candidate. A month away from the caucuses, Clinton had spent 52 days in state, visiting just 38 counties compared with the 99 visited by Edwards and the 68 by Obama. Since then, her campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle has moved out to Iowa to personally oversee the operation here, while Clinton has spent an additional 11 of the last 14 days in the state, adding another 14 county visits.
“She has never really been ahead here in Iowa,” says Arthur B. Sanders, a politics professor at Drake University in Des Moines and author of Losing Control: Presidential Elections and the Decline of Democracy. “Her national lead made it easy to assume she would win here as well, especially since her national campaign gave off an image of her ‘inevitable’ victory. And a national press that had not spent time here did not really understand how different the situation was here.”
Clinton has also shaken up her message in recent weeks, trying on different hats: angry Hillary; warm-and-fuzzy mommy Hillary; commander-in-chief Hillary; insurgent change-candidate Hillary. “It’s a very close race in Iowa, and quite naturally, the Clinton campaign has decided to throw in everything it’s got, plus the kitchen sink,” says Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia?s Center for Politics. “She?s both the candidate of change and the candidate of experience, the candidate with a hard side and a soft side, and the candidate of the establishment past and the progressive future. Maybe voters are getting confused, or maybe she?s patching together just enough voters to win or tie. We’ll all find out together on January 3rd.”
In the last week, Clinton straddled both the past and future. She?s paraded an impressive stream of former Clinton Administration officials — including former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, former Veteran Affairs Secretaries Togo West and Hershel Gober, former NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark and, of course, her husband, President Bill Clinton — through Iowa while declaring herself an agent of change. “Somebody said at one of my events a little while ago, ?You know, it looks like it takes a Clinton to clean up after a Bush,? and I?m ready for the job if that?s what it takes,” Clinton said at a town hall event in Johnston, Iowa, last week.
In harkening to the 1990s, Clinton risks alienating voters who want change. The majority of likely Democratic caucus-goers, 56%, believe change is more important than experience, according a December 19 ABC News/Washington Post poll of likely caucus-goers. Of those, half said they support Obama and 23% are committed to Edwards. Clintongarnered only 15% of the change vote. Conversely, 33% of those polled said they preferred experience over change, and Clinton led amongst those voters, 49% to Edwards? 15% and Obama?s 8%.
Wolfson argues that it takes experience to bring about change: “Hillary brings a lifetime record of accomplishments to this campaign — and yes, some of them were during the ’90s. We think voters are asking — at a time when every candidate is talking about change — who actually has a record of accomplishing it their entire adult life?”
Next week, Clinton will roll out her final pitch to Iowan voters, a tour entitled ‘Time to Pick a President? in which she?s expected to underline her experience in the White House and promise to restore the nation’s good times. “Her closing argument is that America faces huge challenges and has enormous opportunities, and that the nation needs a President with the strength and experience to lead on day one and make the changes we need,” Wolfson says. The jury’s still out on whether the Democratic base in Iowa will buy the idea of insider experience as an effective force for change. But not for long.
Reference: Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (born October 26, 1947) is the junior United States Senator from New York, and a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 presidential election. She is married to Bill Clinton—the 42nd President of the United States—and was the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001.
A native of Illinois, Hillary Rodham attracted national attention in 1969 when she delivered a controversial address as the first student to speak at commencement exercises for Wellesley College. She began her career as a lawyer after graduating from Yale Law School in 1973, moving to Arkansas and marrying Bill Clinton in 1975, following her career as a Congressional legal counsel; she was named the first female partner at Rose Law Firm in 1979 and was listed as one of the one hundred most influential lawyers in America in 1988 and 1991. She served as the First Lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992, was active in a number of organizations concerned with the welfare of children, and was on the board of Wal-Mart and several other corporate boards.
As First Lady of the United States, she took a prominent position in policy matters. Her major initiative, the Clinton health care plan, failed to gain approval by the U.S. Congress in 1994, but in 1997 she helped establish the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Adoption and Safe Families Act. She became the only First Lady to be subpoenaed, testifying before a federal grand jury as a consequence of the Whitewater scandal in 1996. She was never charged with any wrongdoing in this or several other investigations during her husband’s administration. The state of her marriage to Bill Clinton was the subject of considerable public discussion following the Lewinsky scandal in 1998.
Moving to New York, Clinton was elected to the United States Senate in 2000, the first time an American first lady ran for public office and the first female senator from that state. There she initially supported the George W. Bush administration on some foreign policy issues, which included voting for the Iraq War Resolution. She has subsequently opposed the administration on its conduct of the Iraq War and has opposed it on most domestic issues. She was re-elected by a wide margin in 2006. Long described as a polarizing figure in American politics, during 2007 she has consistently been the front-runner in polls for the 2008 Democratic nomination for president.
FBI planning world’s largest biometric database
The FBI has announced it plans to assemble the world’s largest biometric database, nicknamed the Next Generation Identification system. Currently, the FBI stores fingerprints, facial features, and palm print characteristics at its facilities in Washington DC. The agency’s $1 billion dollar database, however, will hold far more information on any given person.
Moving forward, the FBI expects to make this comprehensive biometric database available to a wide variety of federal, state, and local agencies, all in the name of keeping American safe from terrorists (and illegal immigration). The FBI also intends to retain (upon employer request) the fingerprints of any employee who has undergone a criminal background check, and will inform the employer if the employee is ever arrested or charged with a crime.
Lofty goals are one thing, practical implementation is another. The biometric database the FBI envisions will rely heavily on realtime (or very nearly realtime) comparisons. According to the Washington Post, this could include general face recognition, specific feature comparison (notable scars, shape of the earlobe, etc), walking stride, speech patterns, and iris comparisons. To date, facial-recognition technology hasn’t exactly reshaped the face of law enforcement. A German study last year showed some progress in the technology—existing implementations proved more than 60 percent effective during the day—but accuracy fell to 10-20 percent at night. German law enforcement officials have stated they would accept a 0.1 percent error rate across a 24 hour period, which leaves current technology with quite a gap to close.
The FBI plans to work closely with the CITeR (Center for Identification Technology Research) research center to improve existing metrics and create new ones. CITeR is reportedly working on an iris scanner that can identify people at up to 15 feet as well as a facial-recognition scanner capable of identifying faces accurately at a range of up to 200 yards.
The FBI’s decision to implement this kind of tracking and identification system raises a number of concerns regarding citizen privacy , as well as serious questions about the accuracy of collected data. Any database that isn’t closely monitored and continuously updated will inevitably grow out-of-date. It’s also not clear that a biometric system of the type the FBI espouses couldn’t become confused simply by the natural aging process, weight loss, weight gain, injury, or permanent disability. While there are proven methods of identification that remain accurate even in the presence of such factors, none of them yield realtime results that can be immediately pegged as belonging to an individual even in a crowd of people.
Certain aspects of the FBI’s track record in recent years make this proposal even less attractive. In 2003, the FBI exempted its National Crime Information Center, the Central Records System, and the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime from subsection (e) (5) of the 1974 Privacy Act. That particular subsection mandates that each agency that maintains a system of records shall “maintain all records which are used by the agency in making any determination about any individual with such accuracy, relevance, timeliness, and completeness as is reasonably necessary to assure fairness to the individual in the determination.”
According to the FBI, discharging this duty conflicts with the agency’s primary purpose as a law enforcement organization, because it is “impossible to determine in advance what information is accurate, relevant, timely, and complete.” Information once thought innocuous may also eventually prove to be critical may eventually shed critical details as an investigation continues, and the restrictions of (e) (5) “would limit the ability of trained investigators and intelligence analysts to exercise their judgement in reporting on investigations and impede the development of criminal intelligence necessary for effective law enforcement.”
At this point, the FBI’s proposed biometric identification system contains no recourse for citizens who are misidentified, no formal method for the update and correction of biometric information, and no indication that citizens would even be allowed to view their own biometric profiles.
The organization’s technology track record is anything but good. The organization’s Trilogy project launched in 2000 as an effort to update the FBI’s IT infrastructure and create a new type of Virtual Case File (VCF) ended in collosal failure in 2005. The agency is currently working on a new, more ambitious system (codenamed Sentinel), but little information is available on how that project is progressing at this time. Once considered the definitive voice of bullet analysis, a six month investigation by CBS television show 60 Minutes and the Washington Post recently uncovered fundamental flaws in the FBI’s methodology and basic premises. As a result, evidence presented as fact for the past 40 years has now been called into serious question, simply because the FBI, which claimed it could match bullet fragments to similar bullets—right down to the very same box—never scientifically tested the basic premise.
Even in the best of scenarios, it’s unclear whether or not any national database of biometric information could be kept secure, updated, and available for citizen review. The FBI’s past history and the agency’s decision to remove itself from the requirements of the 1974 Privacy Act leave the current scenario far from ideal, and open the door for any number of misidentifications or abuses.
Wikipedia Reference: Biometrics (ancient Greek: bios =”life”, metron =”measure”) refers to two very different fields of study and application. The first, which is the older and is used in biological studies, including forestry, is the collection, synthesis, analysis and management of quantitative data on biological communities such as forests. Biometrics in reference to biological sciences has been studied and applied for several generations and is somewhat simply viewed as “biological statistics.”
More recently and incongruently, the term’s meaning has been broadened to include the study of methods for uniquely recognizing humans based upon one or more intrinsic physical or behavioral traits.
Some researchers, have coined the term behaviometrics for behavioral biometrics such as typing rhythm or mouse gestures where the analysis can be done continuously without interrupting or interfering with user activities.
Biometrics are used to identify the identity of an input sample when compared to a template, used in cases to identify specific people by certain characteristics.
possession-based: using one specific “token” such as a security tag or a card
knowledge-based :the use of a code or password.
Standard validation systems often use multiple inputs of samples for sufficient validation, such as particular characteristics of the sample. This intends to enhance security as multiple different samples are required such as security tags and codes and sample dimensions.
Biometric characteristics can be divided in two main classes, as represented in figure on the right:
physiological are related to the shape of the body. The oldest traits, that have been used for more than 100 years, are fingerprints. Other examples are face recognition, hand geometry and iris recognition.
behavioral are related to the behavior of a person. The first characteristic to be used, still widely used today, is the signature. More modern approaches are the study of keystroke dynamics and of voice.
Strictly speaking, voice is also a physiological trait because every person has a different pitch, but voice recognition is mainly based on the study of the way a person speaks, commonly classified as behavioral.
Other biometric strategies are being developed such as those based on gait (way of walking), retina, hand veins, ear recognition, facial thermogram, DNA, odor and palm prints.
Biometric systems
The diagram on right shows a simple block diagram of a biometric system. When such a system is networked together with telecommunications technology, biometric systems become telebiometric systems. The main operations a system can perform are enrollment and test. During the enrollment, biometric information from an individual is stored. During the test, biometric information is detected and compared with the stored information. Note that it is crucial that storage and retrieval of such systems themselves be secure if the biometric system is be robust. The first block (sensor) is the interface between the real world and our system; it has to acquire all the necessary data. Most of the times it is an image acquisition system, but it can change according to the characteristics desired. The second block performs all the necessary pre-processing: it has to remove artifacts from the sensor, to enhance the input (e.g. removing background noise), to use some kind of normalization, etc. In the third block features needed are extracted. This step is an important step as the correct features need to be extracted and the optimal way. A vector of numbers or an image with particular properties is used to create a template. A template is a synthesis of all the characteristics extracted from the source, in the optimal size to allow for adequate identifiability.
If enrollment is being performed the template is simply stored somewhere (on a card or within a database or both). If a matching phase is being performed, the obtained template is passed to a matcher that compares it with other existing templates, estimating the distance between them using any algorithm (e.g. Hamming distance). The matching program will analyze the template with the input. This will then be output for any specified use or purpose (e.g. entrance in a restricted area).
Jay-Z stepping down as Def Jam president
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Universal Music Group said on Monday that rap artist and hip-hop mogul Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter is stepping down as president of its Def Jam Records unit, effective by the end of the year.
Carter, 38, has been president of the rap label since 2005, and has signed acts including R&B singers Rihanna and Ne-Yo.
Universal said Carter, a top-selling rapper who performs as Jay-Z, will continue recording for its Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam label. But the company did not give a reason for his decision to quit the executive suite.
“Now it’s time for me to take on new challenges,” he said in a statement. “I am pleased to have had the opportunity to build upon the Def Jam legacy,” he added.
Carter will focus on his expanding franchise of 40/40 Nightclubs over the next year and other businesses, according to a source familiar with his plans.
Carter regularly tops the lists of richest hip-hop moguls, and was No. 9 on Forbes’ Celebrity 100, the annual roster of the world’s most powerful — and best paid — celebrities, with an estimated compensation of $83 million.
Carter, who has said he was a street hustler growing up in the Marcy public housing project in a tough section of Brooklyn, New York, has sold millions of records and launched an array of media and fashion businesses.
Though known for his cutting-edge rap lyrics and rags-to-riches story, Carter often is mentioned in local gossip columns because of his romantic relationship with R&B singer Beyonce Knowles. Last week, he denied rumors that the couple had married in secret.
The rapper joined Def Jam as president to help turn around the fortunes of the then-struggling seminal rap label. His move to management followed his 2003 retirement from recording. His albums, including “Hard Knock Life” (1998), “The Blueprint” (2001) and his classic debut “Reasonable Doubt” (1996).
He returned to recording last year with the album “Kingdom Come” and this year followed up with an album inspired by the movie “American Gangster”.
Def Jam’s successes during his tenure as president, included Rihanna and Ne-Yo, who this month racked up 11 Grammy nominations between them.
“Jay made it clear to us that he feels the time has come to take on different challenges in his life. While we regret his decision to move on, we certainly respect it,” said Antonio ‘L.A.’ Reid,” chairman of Island Def Jam.
Universal Music, a unit of French media and telecommunications group Vivendi, is the world’s largest music company with 30 percent of the worldwide market share.
Wikipedia Reference: Shawn Corey Carter (born December 4, 1969) better known by his stage name Jay-Z, is an American rapper and current president and CEO of Def Jam Recordings and Roc-A-Fella Records. In addition, he co-owns The 40/40 Club and the New Jersey Nets NBA team. He is one of the most financially successful hip-hop artists and entrepreneurs in America. Known for his flow and blending of street and popular style, he can compose lyrics without the use of pen and paper. His critically acclaimed album, The Blueprint, was allegedly written in only two days. After announcing his retirement from recording music in 2003, he returned in late 2006 with the album Kingdom Come which sold 680,000 copies in its first week, Jay-Z’s highest-selling album in a one-week period.
Along with Damon “Dame” Dash and Kareem “Biggs” Burke, Jay-Z was one of the founders of Roc-A-Fella Records, a hip hop record label. Jay-Z is the richest hip hop Entertainer (followed by Sean “Puffy” Combs, a.k.a. Diddy), having a net-worth estimate of $547 million.
Bale to segue from “Dark Knight” to “Terminator”
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Christian Bale is in negotiations to star in “Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins,” the fourth installment of the hit science fiction series.
McG (”Charlie’s Angels,” “We Are Marshall”) is directing the movie, which will be distributed by Warner Bros.
The series, which originated with filmmaker James Cameron and made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star, centered on a robot from the future, when machines wage war against humanity, whose goal was to kill Sarah Connor, the mother of the future leader of the human resistance. As the movies progressed, the son, played by Edward Furlong in “T2″ and Nick Stahl in “T3,” took a more prominent role.
“T4’s” story, by David Campbell Wilson, John Brancato and Michael Ferris, focuses on John Connor, now in his 30s, as he leads what is left of the human race against the machines.
Bale, who appeared this year in “3:10 to Yuma,” “Rescue Dawn” and “I’m Not There,” is currently filming Warner’s “Batman Begins” sequel, “The Dark Knight.”
Christian Charles Philip Bale (also known professionally as Christian Morgan Bale; born 30 January 1974) is a British actor who is known for his roles in the films Newsies, American Psycho, Shaft, Equilibrium, The Machinist, Batman Begins, and The Prestige, among others. Bale is also known for his versatility as an actor, including mimicking nearly any English-language-based accent, harsh regimens of shedding and gaining weight (particularly for The Machinist, Batman Begins and, most recently, Rescue Dawn), and generally inhabiting the characters he plays. Before he found success in playing Batman, he was heavily involved in independent films.
Bale first caught the public eye when he was cast in the starring role of Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun at the age of 13, playing a British boy who becomes separated from his parents and subsequently finds himself in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Since then, he has portrayed a wide range of characters. Bale is especially noted for his cult following. The tenth anniversary issue of Entertainment Weekly hailed him as one of the “Top 8 Most Powerful Cult Figures of the Past Decade,” citing his impressive cult status on the Internet. In a 2007 poll of IMDb users, he was voted their favorite actor who is under 40. Entertainment Weekly also called Bale one of the “Most Creative People in Entertainment,” after his dynamic performance in American Psycho.
Astronauts test sex in space - but did the earth move?
US and Russian astronauts have had sex in space for separate research programmes on how human beings might survive years in orbit, according to a book published yesterday.
Pierre Kohler, a respected French scientific writer, says in The Final Mission: Mir, The Human Adventure that the subject is taboo both at Nasa and at mission control in Moscow, but that cosmic couplings have taken place.
“The issue of sex in space is a serious one,” he says. “The experiments carried out so far relate to missions planned for married couples on the future International Space Station, the successor to Mir. Scientists need to know how far sexual relations are possible without gravity.”
He cites a confidential Nasa report on a space shuttle mission in 1996. A project codenamed STS-XX was to explore sexual positions possible in a weightless atmosphere.
Twenty positions were tested by computer simulation to obtain the best 10, he says. “Two guinea pigs then tested them in real zero-gravity conditions. The results were videotaped but are considered so sensitive that even Nasa was only given a censored version.”
Only four positions were found possible without “mechanical assistance”. The other six needed a special elastic belt and inflatable tunnel, like an open-ended sleeping bag.
Mr Kohler says: “One of the principal findings was that the classic so-called missionary position, which is so easy on earth when gravity pushes one downwards, is simply not possible.”
Wikipedia Reference: Sex in space is distinguished mainly by the absence of gravity (unless artificial gravity is created in the space ship) which leads to some difficulties surrounding the performing of most sexual activities. Because no certain sexual intercourse in space is known to have occurred, the topic is hotly disputed to clarify its potential impact on human beings in the isolated, confined, and hazardous environment of space. However, the ongoing discussions often include several speculations (e.g., about the STS-47 mission, on which married astronauts Mark C. Lee and Jan Davis flew), and even hoaxes, such as Document 12-571-3570.
It is assumed that the nervous and vestibular systems may fail to develop properly in individuals growing up in a low or zero gravity environment, and that this would have implications for space-born humans making the trip to Earth though the possibility of human pregnancy under spacecraft conditions is currently uncertain.
Though NASA generally avoids the topic, it has examined animal and plant reproduction in several experiments.
Science fiction and popular science writer Isaac Asimov made conjectures in writing about what sex would be like in the weightless environment of space, in 1973. He anticipated some of the benefits of engaging in sex in an environment of microgravity.
A leading Soviet research facility in the field of space medicine, The Institute of Biomedical Problems, has been involved for decades in the sex-related studies of living species in space. The Institute’s interest in topic began in the early 1960s, when it noticed a difference in behavior between two dogs that had flown in space, Veterok and Ugolyok. Ugolyok, unlike Veterok, maintained quite a healthy libido during his longer-than-average life span.
A 1976 article reported that an exposure of Wistar rats to 22 days of weightlessness and other space flight factors induced no morphological changes in the spermatogenic tissue or disorders in the spermatogenic process of the rats, and the offspring of the male “space rats” was normal in all aspects.
Regarding human sex, Dr. Anna Goncharova said that if crew members are just colleagues and friends, one should never impose on them any intimate relations for the sake of their psycho-emotional stability. It was rumored that the unhappy marriage of Soviet cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova and Andrian Nikolayev was in part instigated by the pressure of the IBP.
Zero-gravity sex is a common topic in science-fiction.
In his book Honeymoon in Space published in 1901 George Griffith described a phallic spaceship with “curtains of ribbed steel” going deeper and deeper through the Solar System while the young maid exclaims how she wants to see more and more.
In the James Bond film Moonraker, James Bond (played by Roger Moore), and the token Bond girl, Dr. Holly Goodhead, have sex in the cargo bay of the Moonraker 5 Space Shuttle in one scene.
The comedy Moving Violations (1985) suggests the main characters, played by actors John Murray and Jennifer Tilly, have an intimate encounter in a weightlessness simulator.
The Sci-fi horror Supernova (2000) featured sex between several of the characters in zero-gravity areas of the Medical Ship.
Private Media Group filmed a brief scene the space-themed pornographic film The Uranus Experiment in a Russian aircraft flying a parabolic track (similar to NASA’s Vomit Comet). The Uranus Experiment features around 20 seconds of actors Sylvia Saint and Nick Lang (who portray astronauts living on a space station) having sex in freefall. The scene was controversially nominated for a Nebula Award, but did not win.
KDE 4.0 to be Released in January
The KDE Release Team has decided to release KDE 4.0 this coming January. The release was originally planned for mid-December. The KDE developers want to solve a couple of essential issues before releasing. Having solved some of those issues, among which were glitches in the visual appearance, and in Konqueror, the KDE community hopes to have a KDE 4.0 that will live up to the high expectations for it. Read on for more details.
Meanwhile, the progress towards KDE 4.0 is astonishing. Most parts, such as the KDE Development Platform and a lot of applications are considered stable and well-usable.
Some parts of the desktop experience do not yet meet the KDE community’s quality standards and expectations for a stable release. There are also some issues which need to be addressed upstream, for example a bug in certain codecs of xine that cut off audio fragments prematurely. The developers are confident to be able to release a more polished and better working KDE 4.0 desktop in January. The changed plans involve releasing on January 11th, 2008.
At the same time, the release team’s call for participation is repeated. To make KDE 4.0 a success, your effort is needed. An overview of current showstoppers can be found on Techbase, KDE’s knowledge platform.
This is also a call to the wider Free Software community, and also to companies working with KDE. If you have the resources to contribute, assistance in fixing the remaining bugs is most welcome.
KDE Reference: KDE (K Desktop Environment) is a free software project which aims to be a powerful system for an easy-to-use desktop environment. The goal of the project is to provide basic desktop functions and applications for daily needs as well as tools and documentation for developers to write stand-alone applications for the system. In this regard the KDE project serves as an umbrella project for many standalone applications and smaller projects that are based on KDE technology, such as KOffice, KDevelop, Amarok, K3b and many more.
KDE was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, who was then a student at the Eberhard Karls University of T?bingen. At the time, he was troubled by certain aspects of the UNIX desktop. Among his qualms were that none of the applications looked, felt, or worked alike. He proposed the formation of not only a set of applications, but rather a desktop environment, in which users could expect things to look, feel, and work consistently. He also wanted to make this desktop easy to use; one of his complaints with desktop applications of the time was that his girlfriend could not use them. His initial Usenet post spurred a lot of interest, and the KDE project was born. The name KDE was intended as a word play on the existing Common Desktop Environment, available for Unix systems. CDE was an X11-based user environment jointly developed by HP, IBM, and Sun, through the X/Open Company, with an interface and productivity tools based on the Motif graphical widget toolkit. It was supposed to be an intuitively easy-to-use desktop computer environment. The K was originally suggested to stand for “Kool”, but it was quickly decided that the K should stand for nothing in particular. Additionally, one of the tips in certain versions of KDE 3 incorrectly states that the K currently is just meant to be the letter before L in the Latin alphabet, the first letter in the word Linux (which is where KDE is usually run).
Matthias chose to use the Qt toolkit for the KDE project. Other programmers quickly started developing KDE/Qt applications, and by early 1997, large and complex applications were being released. At the time, Qt did not use a free software license and members of the GNU project became concerned about the use of such a toolkit for building a free software desktop and applications. Notably, KDE was removed from Debian because the project interpreted the GPL as not allowing KDE to be linked to Qt. Two projects were started: “Harmony”, to create a Free replacement for the Qt libraries, and the GNOME project to create a new desktop without Qt and built entirely on top of free software.
In November 1998, the Qt toolkit was licensed under the free/open source Q Public License (QPL). This same year the KDE Free Qt foundation was created which guarantees that Qt would fall under a variant of the very liberal BSD license should Trolltech cease to exist or no free/open source version of Qt be released during 12 months. But debate continued about compatibility with the GNU General Public License (GPL). In September 2000, Trolltech made the Unix version of the Qt libraries available under the GPL, in addition to the QPL, which has eliminated the concerns of the Free Software Foundation. Starting with the release of Qt 4.0, it is available as free software for the Unix, Mac and Windows platforms, indicating that the next major version of KDE applications and libraries will have native support on these platforms.
Both KDE and GNOME now participate in freedesktop.org, an effort to standardize Unix desktop interoperability, although there is still some competition between them.
