The U.S. military had made great progress in developing a self-steering bullet. The .50-caliber bullets are fitted with optical sensors at the tip to follow moving targets. The bullet’s system is name EXACTO (Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance) and is developed by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The "smart bullets" passed their most successful round of live-fire tests to date, the CNN reported on 29 April 2015.
Videos supplied by DARPA show the bullets making sharp turns in mid-air as they pursue their targets. "This live-fire demonstration from a standard rifle showed that EXACTO is able to hit moving and evading targets with extreme accuracy at sniper ranges unachievable with traditional rounds. Fitting EXACTO's guidance capabilities into a small .50-caliber size is a major breakthrough and opens the door to what could be possible in future guided projectiles across all calibers," said Jerome Dunn, DARPA program manager. Exacto can help shooters compensate for high winds, give shooters greater range and accuracy makes American troops safer.
Job seekers need to be aware that there is always tradeoff between job security, career advancement or high pay in the job process. High paying jobs are usually at high risk for being automated or offers little growth potential over the next few years. According to a study from WalletHub, the top 9 entry-level jobs scores well in all the three categories mentioned. CBS News had compiled their findings on 28 April 2015 to guide college students and high school seniors to consider which field to major in.
Job Starting Pay Median Pay Qualification Growth 9. Financial analyst $51,848 $76,950 bachelor’s degree in business, finance or related - 8. Information security analyst $55,310 $86,170 - 37% 7. Web designer $53,041 $62,500 know programming and graphic design 20% 6. Software engineers $62,522 $90,374 bachelor’s degree in computer science - 5. Environmental engineer $57,266 $86,340 bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering or related 15% 4 Attorney $83,907 $133,470 law degree and pass a state’s written bar exam 10% 3 Network Engineer $61,744 $91,982 degrees in computer science or related 12% 2. Web applications designer $54,586 $59,000 know developer languages such as PHP and HTML 12% 1. Training specialist $47,621 $55,930 college degree and strong communication skills 15%
The starting annual salary and the median pay for all workers in the field are based on the latest information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The salary for software engineers were based on information on the employment site Glassdoor.com. Figures for network engineer and web applications designer were derived from the employment site Payscale.com. The job growth rate is projected from 2012 to 2022 by the BLS. A growth of 10 percent or higher is deemed as normal. A growth rate of 15 percent and above is consider rapid growth.
The information security analyst had the greatest potential growth of 37 percent. Their job entails a simple maintenance routine but once the system gets hacked, they will have to work round the clock to restore the system, pronto. I believe being a hacker is the best qualification for this job but there is no such thing as a certified hacker at the present moment. This may be the reason WalletHub did not list down the qualification for this job. The reason growth is not projected for financial analyst is unclear.
Growth rate for software engineers were not projected as this profession is a bit unusual. While the jobs in this field are plentiful, careers in the field may be short-lived. According to Bloomberg News, most software developers have left the profession by the time they’re 40. The industry tend to favor younger engineers because of the impression that they will be more up-to-date with the latest trends.
Although the training specialist had a low income, it top because of job openings and growth potential. About one-quarter of Web designers were self-employed in 2012 but it is forecasted that employment in this field will grow by 20 percent. I believe the forecaster is expecting these self-employed individuals would grow and had the need for expansion.
Five out of nine of the top entry level job is related to information technology. Unless something revolutionary comes out of the information age, we would see the tail end of this era. At the present moment the web is the main media to disseminate information. It is news, games, entertainment, and a market place. Instead of bulky laptops, phone will do to accesses this information hub. From word of the mouth to print and broadcast, it hard to imagine another media more efficient than the internet. As for devices, hand help phone are good enough already. Anything smaller would make the world go blind. When 4G becomes the entry level there is not much more improvement to be made to speed. Any faster would not make a difference for human perception.
My Casino Gambling Tip is now a mobile friendly website. My next task would be to get XingCai Gambling Tales to be mobile friendly too. I had outlined the step involved to get it mobile friendly in my previous blog and will use the same procedure. The wave of mobile suffers had got Google to cater to them or lose page ranking. This would be a concern for webmasters until they fix the problem.
You have another site on Gambling News, I am impress. I look forward to surf it with mobile.
While Google had written to webmasters with some links to make a mobile friendly website, they provided no link to test the mobile-friendliness of the site. Using W3C tidy up could provide some additional help on the meta tags. After much surfing, I found certification from Google themselves. Visit this link and type in your website’s URL.
Striptease had become popular at funerals in some rural areas in China. Troupes hired to play dirges suddenly changed their tune and began to peel off their clothes. This a relatively new phenomenon. A strong attendance for funeral reflects the honor of the deceased. Some people would be willing to pay troupes to play folk music and perform racy acts to get the crowd. "They want to have as many people as possible attend the funeral. In this way, they feel they fulfill their obligation of fidelity to their elders," said Zhang Chengdong, vice-president of the Jiangsu Festivals and Events Association.
Chinese officials are launching a campaign to crack down on striptease and other lewd shows that have become popular at funerals in some rural areas, the Ministry of Culture said Thursday. "Illegal performances such as strip dances have been occurring in rural areas from time to time that have disrupted the cultural market and created a negative influence on the social environment," the ministry said in a statement posted on its website. The ministry cited two cases in which the shows' organizers have been penalized, the China Daily reported on 24 April 2015.
Traditional opera were once popular at funerals. Six performers with Red Rose Troupe, an art group from Handan, Hebei province, participated in a performance at the funeral of an elder in Handan's Cheng'an County on Feb 15. The performance was characterized by elegies with traditional music and traditional dance. The performers ended the show by stripping of their clothes. Li, the troupe manager, was given 15 days in detention and a fine of 70,000 yuan ($11,000) by the police and county cultural authorities. In the other case, three performers delivered what was said to be an obscene act at a funeral in Zhangtang village of Suqian, Jiangsu province, on Feb 27. Photos indicated that children in attendance at shows featuring scantily clad women.
Picture size is my next task in getting my website to be mobile friendly. In my previous blog on this subject, I figured that reducing the size of navigation menu is a good starting point to design a website to fit mobile device. I used single word for title and double word for subtitle. This seems to work out some of the problem. I figure the next step would be to have a universal width for all pictures. Ideally the picture could be stretch or shrunk to fit across the platform without losing too much picture quality.
Given the size of webpages, stretching and shrinking a picture is not the real problem. Pictures who are magnify twice or reduce by half are never too shabby when it comes to quality. This should be enough do the trick to fit an image into a website. The bigger concern is manipulated images sometimes take a longer time to load. The 4G phones are great for speed but as the best for the current technology they are a minority user. Most people would have the lower 3G speed on their phones. The loyalist to old phone will still surf with 2G and there are still a number of these mobile surfers out there. These people will favor sites who were sufficiently fast for their devices.
I went window shopping for mobile phones using google and decided that I have 3 categories to please. Based on their minimum screen width, I simply name them mini (80 pixels), midi (321 pixels) and maxi (481). After throwing some math around, I decided that all images on my website will be 240 pixels wide. Shrinking 240 to 80 (the lower end of the mini) is one-third reduction. This will likely cause some problem in loading speed. For the higher end of the mini (320 pixels), the image is stretch less than 50% which is acceptable. For the 481 pixels width, there is no stretching of image. The image with text displayed by the side will be at least half of the screen.
I now had all my pictures resize to 240 pixels width. Going through the pictures one by one had been a tedious exercise. Some of my image were name by their sizes. A cat image, for example, had been named cat330x250. The 330 represent the width and 250 is for the height. I still maintain the old name of the image. It would sound silly but once something is publish it is not advisable to make changes. Keeping the old name will ensure that people who link my pictures will not get a blank image. I actually have three manga pages outstanding. These three cartoons are at least 600 pixels wide. The task will be to break them down to smaller pictures who are 240 pixels wide. The main picture that will adopt the old name while new pictures will carry the old name with a sequential numbering suffix.
Going through image by image can also make you see things from a different angle. I redraw two images. I hope the people who had link the old pictures prefer the new pictures. I had also came up with 5 new pictures. These are for the pages which previously did not have a picture. The remaining task, unless new development crops up, I will drop the navigation menu for the mini users.
The pilot of Alaska Airline flight 448 declared an emergency for priority landing when heard screaming and banging from the cargo hold. The flight departed Seattle at 3:15 p.m. Pacific Time. After 14 minutes in flight the aircraft had to turn back and land in Seattle-Tacoma International.
After the plane landed a ramp agent, an employee of Menzies Aviation, was found inside the front cargo hold. According to Alaska Airlines the cargo hold is pressurized and temperature-controlled. The employee told authorities he had fallen asleep. The worker appeared OK but was taken to a hospital as a precaution the CBC News reported 13 April 2015.
This is going to cost the Airline dearly and it would certainly be investigated. It is hard to imagine that one can fall asleep without fellow workers realizing it. Did the employee actually sneaked into the cargo hold intentionally? Once he realized the compartment was pressurized and temperature-controlled he panicked and start banging away. Upon being rescued, he conveniently use sleeping-on-the-job as an excuse.
Kevin Bollaert, who was convicted of 27 felonies for operating a “revenge porn” website based in California, was sentenced Friday to 18 years in prison. He had been found guilty in February of six counts of extortion and 21 counts of identity theft. He created a website that allowed people to post lewd images of people without their consent. The sexually explicit material, primarily of women, was routinely posted by angry former boyfriends and ex-husbands, authorities said. It contained their real names and links to their Facebook profiles.
Bollaert used another website solicited payments from people who wanted to have their photographs deleted. He charges a fee of $250 to $350 to take down the photos. The site made about $30,000 the attorney general’s office said. “Sitting behind a computer, committing what is essentially a cowardly and criminal act will not shield predators from the law or jail. We will continue to be vigilant and investigate and prosecute those who commit these deplorable acts,” Attorney General Kamala Harris.
Bollaert defense attorney admitted her client made moral transgressions but wasn’t legally responsible for the 10,170 photos submitted in the year the websites operated, the CNN reported on 3 April 2015. Bollaert’s father apologized to the victims during Friday’s hearing, saying “how sorry we are here today because of a shameful, stupid, inappropriate thing my son did. My heart goes out to all of you.”
Google wrote me a warning letter 2 weeks ago asking me to make my website more mobile friendly. According to google, the increase demand in mobile phone browsing had been tremendous. Well, it is not a warning for doing something that pissed google off. It was actually a concerned notification. Google anticipated that the wave of mobile surfers will get stronger in with the passage of time and webmasters were advised to cater to their needs. If I took it as a friendly notice I don’t need to do anything. I choose to take it as a stern warning so that I will have to adapt before I get left out.
Heck! I had no clue where to start. I hope I could just wave a magic wand with some code and bingo! Fortunately, google is a good place to start looking for those hocus pocus code. Knowing the right keyword to punch into google would help. Next comes the endless list of reading materials on the technology to make your website flexible to multiple devices. Climbing the steep learning curve was no fun. It’s just nothing but reading without having enough knowledge to start doing something.
I concluded that it was about starting small. Fit the small screen then the bigger ones and eventually the desktop. This calls for a re-engineering as my website was catered for desktop size. I have started with reducing the size of my menu. I used single word titles for the menu items to shorten it for mobile size. Sub menu items could use double or triple word titles. Whoopee, I managed nail down some of the problem. For screen smaller than 320 pixels wide, I may have to do away with the menu. I will get around to this but the next step would be resizing all my images. I am going to do a lot of experimenting to find a good size that could be stretch or shrunk to fit across the platform without losing too much picture quality.
Lincoln Continental is making a comeback. It is poised to restore its lost glamor decades ago. The Continental is about the same length as a Mercedes-Benz S-class or long-wheelbase BMW 7-series. Cadillac’s new flagship sedan is the other contender in the high-end luxury cars market that will give the Continental a run for its money.
The Lincoln Motor Company, Ford's luxury division, mostly sold upgraded versions of Ford cars with little difference beyond the design and some added features. Ford boasts that the Continental has a new turbocharged engine not available in any Ford brand car. Lincoln has a reclining rear passenger seat with a foot rest. A fold out table with an attached tablet computer and a champagne cooler were added to its features.
Lincoln Continental’s backwards-opening rear doors was a stylish icon of the Kennedy era. The Continental name also resonates among Chinese car buyers, according to Ford executives, despite the fact that Lincolns only went on sale there last year, the CNN reported on 30 March 2015.
I tried to convince my readers that gambling requires skill. There are plenty of research that would conclude otherwise. In a recent (2012) study Professor Gerhard Meyer, of the University of Bremen’s Institute of Psychology and Cognition Research, suggested that poker was largely a game of chance. There were 300 participants in his research. They played 60 hands poker each, on tables of six. The players were classified as ‘expert’ and ‘average’ players based on their ability to make money from good, bad and average hands. The research found that ‘expert’ players lost less money on bad hands, but did no better than ‘average’ players on mediocre hands - and made slightly less on good ones. Prof Meyer concluded that ‘poker players overestimate the skill factor in their play’.
A research studied 456 million hands of poker from a year’s worth of online game. Over the course of just a few hands the better-performing players fared better half the time. Their success rate gradually increased until they played 1,471 hands. Given that frequency, they could do better at least 75 per cent of the time. Dr Dennie van Dolder, of the University of Nottingham’s School of Economics, said the study showed ‘skilled players will consistently outperform less skilled players if enough hands…are played.’
Researchers from the University of Nottingham, working with colleagues from Erasmus University Rotterdam and VU University Amsterdam, also noted that players who finished in the top one per cent in the first half of the year were 12 times more likely than others to repeat the feat in the second half. Writer and TV presenter Victoria Coren Mitchell, one of Britain’s top professional players, has won more than £1.5m - including £400,000 at a single event. Dr van Dolder said, “It’s up to legislators to decide whether the role of chance diminishes fast enough for poker to be considered a game of skill,” the Daily Mail reported on 25 March 2015.
I guess Professor Gerhard Meyer study did not include a larger sample size (more games). If Professor Meyer went up to 1471 hands would the result had been the same with Dr Dennie van Dolder?
Vikings ties with the Islamic caliphate existed during the 9th century. Ancient texts and tales recorded the Vikings journeys to the Islamic caliphate but they usually include references to “giants and dragons”. A finger ring excavated during the late 19th century that was inscribed with Arabic letters points to such ties and researchers led by Stockholm University biophysicist Sebastian Wärmländer are re-examining it.
The ring was excavated Swedish grave in the town of Birka, on Björkö Island, about 19 miles (30 kilometers) from Stockholm. The town was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1993 because it was an important Viking trading post. Arabic Kufic writing was inscribed on the ring. The letters appear to read “AL_LLH,” researchers say, which they interpret as meaning “for/to (the approval of) Allah.” It is only ring with an Arabic inscription ever found at a Scandinavian archaeological site, the CNN reported on 19 March 2015.
The ring belong to a women clad in traditional Viking attire but her ethnicity was unknown due to the decomposed state of the bones in the grave. “It is not impossible that the woman herself, or someone close to her, might have visited — or even originate from — the Caliphate (which then stretched from Tunisia to the borders of India) or its surrounding regions,” the researchers said.
About a century ago people made some conclusion on it based on evidence. How much of that opinion will change now as evidence could not be easily altered?
China claims that the Buddha statue, exhibited at the Hungarian Natural History Museum, was stolen from Fujian Province. This statue was a wonder because a 1,000-year-old mummified monk was found encased in it. The China Daily reported on 24 March 2015 that China's State Administration of Cultural Heritage had taken the procedures to retrieve the statue.
The mummified monk statue is currently owned by a Dutch collector. The mummified monk statue made its debut when it first showcased at Drents Museum in the Netherlands last year. The mummy was discovered when a collector brought it to an expert for restoration. Subsequently a team of researchers and scientists was brought in to do a comprehensive study. CT scan show the mummy sitting on a bundle of cloth covered in Chinese inscriptions, revealing its identity as a Buddhist monk called Liuquan, the CNN reported on 23 March 2015.
China's Claim
According to the documents, the monk was a local man who gained a reputation for curing diseases and promoting Buddhist principles. He passed away at the age of 37. Pictures provided by the Da Tian Museum, Fujian and those taken during the exhibition were found to have identical facial expressions as well as scratches on the stomach and the hand. The shape, height and weight of the Dutch collector's statue matches the measurements provided by the Da Tian Museum. The same Chinese character is also carved on the cushion that the Buddha sits on. "There are five proofs of evidence that show that the Buddha statue is the relic stolen in 1995 from a Chinese ancestral temple in Fujian province's Yangchun village," said a spokesman of the Da Tian Museum in Fujian.
The Dutch Collector's Claim
On March 23, the Dutch collector issued a statement saying the statue was acquired in 1994 from a sincere Chinese friend in the art circles. The statue was shipped to his residence in Amsterdam from a workshop in Hong Kong in 1995. Coincidentally, a Buddha relic was reported stolen in China in 1995. The Chinese and Dutch governments will seek a diplomatic solution to address the issue.
The La Plange is a famous alpine ski resort in France. Just type La Plange on your search engine and the list will point you it. Some of the images that show on the search engine can enchant you. This seem like a must visit for a skier.
La Plagne on GPS
Looking up La Plagne on the GPS will result in some ambiguity. There are 3 La Plange listed on the GPS in France. A bus driver found out that choosing the wrong one was be a costly mistake and 50 Belgian tourists paid the price for his mistake on 9 March 2015.
The Pathetic Story
The Guardian reported that the bus driver made a 750 mile (1,200km) detour. The bus driver took the road leading to La Plagne village in the south of France near Spain, some 400 miles (600 km) southwest of the ski resort. The pathetic tourist reached their destination in the Alps 24 hours late.
China’s plan to build a modern-day trading route on the skeleton of the ancient traders’ trail, known as the silk road, have been welcomed by its neighbor. The China Daily reported on 9 March 2015 that the project had led to criticism and misunderstanding….
A solar-powered aircraft took off successfully from Abu Dhabi on 9 March 2015 in its first attempt to fly around the world without any conventional fossil fuel. Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg of Switzerland will take turns to pilot the plane..
Three Tips from a Professional Gambler is base on quotes taken from Ivey versus Crockfords. Phil Ivey sued London casino Crockfords Club for denying him £7.7m which he won in 20 August 2012. The casino withheld the money on the grounds that Ivey cheated.
Edge Sorting
Ivey used a system known as edge sorting to win the money at the baccarat table. The casino claims that this method is not a legitimate strategy because it defeats the premise of the game to nullify the gaming contract.
Kelly Cheung
Cheung Yin Sun (Kelly) assisted Ivey to edge sort the cards by asking the dealer to turn the key cards for baccarat upside-down. The casino referred to Cheung as the unidentified woman.
Casino’s Case Unsustainable
Justice Mitting was impressed by that professional conduct Ivey maintains that he said the casino’s case was “plainly unsustainable”. The case is still on going. At this juncture the case points favorably to Ivey.
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