Reid postpones vote on anti-piracy bill (AP)

WASHINGTON ? Yielding to strong opposition from the high tech community, Senate and House leaders said Friday they will put off further action on legislation to combat online piracy.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he was postponing a test vote set for Tuesday "in light of recent events." Those events included a petition drive by Google that attracted more than 7 million participants and a one-day blackout by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

House Judiciary Committee chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, quickly followed suit, saying consideration of a similar House bill would be postponed "until there is wider agreement on a solution."

The Senate's Protect Intellectual Property Act and the House's Stop Online Piracy Act have strong support from the entertainment industry and other businesses that lose billions of dollars annually to intellectual property theft and online sales of counterfeit products. But they also have strong opposition from Internet-related companies that argue the bill would lead to over-regulation and censorship of the Internet.

Reid has also seen at least a half-dozen senators who sponsored the bill announce they now oppose it.

Reid said counterfeiting and piracy cost the American economy billions of dollars every year and "there is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved." He said he was optimistic about reaching a compromise in the coming weeks.

The main Senate sponsor, Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said he respected Reid's decision to postpone the vote but lamented the Senate's unwillingness to debate the bill.

"The day will come when the senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem," he said. Criminals in China, Russia and other countries "who do nothing but peddle in counterfeit products and stolen American content are smugly watching how the United States Senate decided" it was not worth debating the bill.

The two bills would allow the Justice Department, and copyright holders, to seek court orders against foreign websites accused of copyright infringement. They would bar online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as credit card companies from doing business with an alleged violator. They also would forbid search engines from linking to such sites.

The Tuesday vote was on whether to move the legislation to the Senate floor for debate. With the recent desertions and a statement Thursday by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell that it is too early to consider the bill, it appeared supporters lacked the 60 votes needed to advance the measure.

McConnell on Friday applauded Reid's decision, saying it would "prevent a counterproductive rush toward flawed legislation."

In the House, Smith said he had "heard from the critics" and resolved that it was "clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products." Smith had planned on holding further committee votes on his bill next month.

The bill's opponents were relieved it was put on hold.

Markham Erickson, executive director of NetCoalition, commended Congress for "recognizing the serious collateral damage this bill could inflict on the Internet."

The group represents Internet and technology companies including Google, Yahoo! and Amazon.com. Erickson said they would work with Congress "to address the problem of piracy without compromising innovation and free expression."

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who has joined Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., in proposing an alternative anti-piracy bill, credited opponents with forcing lawmakers "to back away from an effort to ram through controversial legislation."

But the CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, former Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, warned that, "as a consequence of failing to act, there will continue to be a safe haven for foreign thieves." The MPAA, which represents such companies as Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., is a leading advocate for the anti-piracy legislation.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120120/ap_on_en_ot/us_internet_piracy

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How Imperative Is nice Prospecting In Automotive Online marketing ...

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This entry was posted in Uncategorized by Franek. Bookmark the permalink.

Source: http://paintthetownread.com/2012/01/22/how-imperative-is-nice-prospecting-in-automotive-online-marketing/

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Experts see tough road for Kodak to reinvent self

An unidentified person enters Kodak Headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., Thursday, Jan. 5, 2012. Eastman Kodak Co. said early Thursday Jan. 19, 2012 it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, as it seeks to boost its cash position and stay in business. (AP Photo/David Duprey)

An unidentified person enters Kodak Headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., Thursday, Jan. 5, 2012. Eastman Kodak Co. said early Thursday Jan. 19, 2012 it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, as it seeks to boost its cash position and stay in business. (AP Photo/David Duprey)

CHICAGO (AP) ? Even in bankruptcy, Kodak boasts some enviable strengths: a golden brand, technology firepower that includes a rich collection of photo patents, and more than $4 billion in annual sales of digital cameras, printers, and inks.

But all that may not be enough to revive its declining fortunes in a Chapter 11 overhaul. Kodak is at a crossroads: It could go the way of fallen Montgomery Ward and Circuit City, two corporate names that never recovered from long declines. Or Kodak could prosper after bankruptcy like General Motors.

Of the many restructuring experts interviewed by The Associated Press on Thursday, none are optimistic that Kodak can make a strong comeback.

Selling select business lines and patents and making the right bets on a limited number of new technology products could allow the Eastman Kodak Co. to survive, several experts said. But none see a path back to anything close to the glory days of the former photography titan.

"You can pick your metaphor: 'Stick a fork in them,' 'They're over the cliff' -- they're done," said Bill Brandt, chief executive of turnaround consultant Development Specialists Inc. in Chicago. "The Kodak as we know it is done, unequivocally."

The company's only hope, Brandt said, is to reinvent itself as an intellectual property company. But first it will have to put its patent portfolio up for sale and determine whether it wants to sell them based on what's offered, he said, or retain them and try to remake the company over a period of years.

Kodak said only that it has appointed a chief restructuring officer to head the effort: Dominic DiNapoli, vice president of FTI Consulting. It expects to complete its U.S.-based restructuring next year.

Whatever the company does now is likely to be too little, too late, said Gary Adelson, managing director of turnaround firm NHB Advisors in Los Angeles.

"I can't imagine a big future for Kodak," said Adelson, who thinks the company should just sell its assets. "I think it's going to be another one of those companies that didn't make the transition to the future."

Some experts think the company can get by once it cuts debt by reducing pension and employee benefit costs in bankruptcy, then disposes of its least valuable products.

Only a much leaner, more focused Kodak can survive, said Haresh Sapra, an accounting professor and bankruptcy specialist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. "They probably should go back to basics and focus on one or two of those business lines that are self-sustaining," he said.

The primary hope lies in digital businesses that generated some $4.5 billion in revenue last year, an amount Kodak said accounted for about 75 percent of total sales. That includes consumer devices such as self-service photo kiosks, printers and high-volume document scanners.

"If they can take their existing products and improve them and make them much cheaper, I see no reason why the company can't emerge with a healthier balance sheet," said Edward Neiger, a partner at New York bankruptcy law firm Neiger LLP. "It's going to be a shell of what the old company was, but I don't think they need to liquidate."

In a statement accompanying the Chapter 11 filing on Thursday, the company touted its "pioneering investments in digital and materials deposition technologies" in recent years.

The best-case scenario for Kodak in the long run may be to end up like Polaroid, suggested Eli Lehrer, who heads the nonprofit Heartland Institute's Center on Finance, Insurance and Real Estate in Washington. The company long known for its instant-film cameras stopped making them and filed for bankruptcy in 2008. The Polaroid name, however, lives on under private ownership, albeit as a much smaller firm.

Kodak has a better brand name, Lehrer said, although "That doesn't necessarily translate to people keeping their jobs, or stockholders keeping anything."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2012-01-19-Kodak-How%20to%20Fix/id-5e56f30adb12480f94fa07a0c4cc141d

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Rosa spins the roulette wheel for Sin City SmackDown in Las Vegas

Hours before "Sin City SmackDown" got underway, SmackDown General Manager Theodore Long gave new WWE Tag Team Champions Primo & Epico and the beautiful Rosa Mendes an early crack at the roulette wheel. What match stipulation did Primo & Epico receive for their showdown with The Usos? Watch this exclusive WWE.com video to find out.

Source: http://www.wwe.com/shows/smackdown/2012-01-13/smackdown-rosa-spins-wheel

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Apple announces iBooks 2, iBooks Author

Apple

By Rosa Golijan

"Education is deep in our DNA, and it has been since the very beginning."

With those words,?Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing?Phil Schiller kicked off the company's invitation-only education event on Thursday, according to?Technologizer's Henry McCracken. At this event,?Apple introduced the newly interactive iBooks 2, a first wave of $14.99 school textbooks from the top educational publishers and a new tool for educators to make their own textbook. The company also revamped its iTunes U program for sharing multimedia educational material.

After his opening remarks, Schiller went on to explain that Apple is "proud to help students learn" and that it has noticed that iPads are finding their way into classrooms.

"It's not a big surprise that students get excited to learn on the iPad ? it was No. 1 on teen's wish lists this holiday," Schiller said, quoted by The Verge's rapid-fire liveblog. Between the 20,000 education apps on the iPad and the sheer volume of content in the iBookstore, it's certainly understandable that there are over 1.5 million iPads being used in education.

But Apple wants to make things even easier and better ??by taking two actions.

The first, says Schiller, is reinventing the textbook.?Textbooks, he explains, aren't the most ideal learning tool. They can be cumbersome, they get dogeared, they suffer from wear, they're not interactive, and they're certainly not easily searchable.?

The iPad, on the other hand, is pretty darn portable, durable, and searchable.

So the natural step to take?? raise your hand if you didn't see this coming?? is to put textbooks onto the iPad.?Apple intends to do this with the brand new iBooks 2.

iBooks 2 ??the second generation of Apple's popular app ??will bring movies, multitouch gestures, links, lightning-fast searches, photo galleries, visual Q&A sections,?3-D models and other interactive elements to textbooks.?iBooks 2 will be available for download today (and, like its predecessor, the app itself will be free).

Apple

Now we've established that the snazzy new interactive textbooks will be used in iBooks (and downloadable through the iBookstore), but where will they come from? How are they made?

Easily, says Schiller. A free Mac app for authoring books will be made available. The app will be named?? all too obviously?? iBooks Author.??iBooks Author offers templates, drag-and-drop controls, auto-formatting and allows for custom elements.?The Verge describes it as looking like "Keynote mixed with Pages."

This clever tool aside, Apple's got plenty of partners lined up as well ??so that it can offer textbooks priced at $14.99 or less.?In fact, it's got three major textbook publishers ??Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt???on its side.?"These companies make 90 percent of the textbooks available," says Schiller.

But all of this isn't enough ??Apple wants to do more for education. Which brings us to the second part of Apple's presentation: A?new iTunes U, previously a collection of free videos and podcasts.?This new version of iTunes U will feel very familiar to those who have used iBooks, says?Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet software and services.?It "lets teachers do everything on their iPad," he added.

The new app will?offer customizable topics, have room for things such as office hours, allow teachers to post messages or list assignments, and make lectures streamable or downloadable.

The new iTunes U app will be free and?is no longer limited to universities ??K-12 schools will be able to use it as well.

Related stories:

Want more tech news, silly puns or amusing links? You'll get plenty of all three if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on?Twitter, subscribing to her?Facebook?posts, or circling her?on?Google+.

Source: http://gadgetbox.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/19/10189773-apple-announces-ibooks-2-ibooks-author

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London mayor: UK to study new airport proposal (AP)

LONDON ? London Mayor Boris Johnson says his proposal for a major new airport in the Thames River estuary east of London is gaining some support.

Johnson told BBC radio Wednesday that the government is getting increasingly interested in the proposal. He says both Prime Minister David Cameron and Treasury chief George Osborne have recently discussed the project.

Johnson first proposed the costly and controversial idea in 2008.

Famed architect Norman Foster has also produced a plan for a possible estuary airport.

Critics says the cost, environmental impact and time needed for the construction argue against the proposal.

London's Heathrow Airport is already badly overcrowded and the government has ruled out construction of a third runway there.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/britain/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120118/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_britain_new_airport

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Obama, GOP back in tussle over oil pipeline (AP)

WASHINGTON ? President Barack Obama and Congress are back where they were before Christmas, locked in an election-season tussle over a proposed 1,700-mile oil pipeline from Canada to Texas.

Republicans hope to again force Obama to make a politically risky decision, while he is seeking to put it off until after the November election.

Obama blocked the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline on Wednesday, at least temporarily, but Republicans immediately signaled their intention to try again to force the issue. Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he will call Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who recommended Obama's rejection, to testify at a hearing as early as next Wednesday, the day after Obama gives his State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress.

"This is not the end of the fight. Republicans in Congress will continue to push this because it's good for our country and it's good for our economy and it's good for the American people," especially those who are out of work, said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.

Republicans are looking to drive a wedge between Obama and two key Democratic constituencies. Some labor unions support the pipeline as a job creator, while environmentalists fear it could lead to an oil spill disaster.

The plan by Calgary-based TransCanada Corp. would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, through a 1,700-mile pipeline across six U.S. states to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Obama was already on record as saying no, for now, until his administration could review an alternate route that avoided environmentally sensitive areas of Nebraska ? a route that still has not been proposed. But in an unrelated tax deal he cut with congressional Republicans, Obama had been boxed into making a decision by Feb. 21.

The deal required that the project would go forward unless Obama declared by that date that it was not in the national interest. The president did just that Wednesday, generating intense reaction from all sides.

"This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people," Obama said in a written statement. "I'm disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision."

Republicans got out their toughest rhetoric for the occasion.

Newt Gingrich, campaigning for the GOP presidential nomination in South Carolina, called Obama's decision "stunningly stupid," adding, "What Obama has done is kill jobs, weaken American security and drive Canada into the arms of China out of just sheer stupidity."

Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney said the decision was "as shocking as it is revealing. It shows a president who once again has put politics ahead of sound policy."

Project supporters say U.S. rejection of the pipeline would not stop one from being built. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said Canada is serious about building a pipeline to its West Coast, where oil could be shipped to China and other Asian markets.

TransCanada said it would submit a new application once an alternative route for the pipeline is established. Company chief Russ Girling said if approved, the pipeline could begin operation as soon as 2014. He said TransCanada will continue to work with Nebraska officials to determine the safest route for Keystone XL that avoids the environmentally sensitive Sandhills area, which he said should be completed this fall.

But Assistant Secretary of State Kerri-Ann Jones told reporters that if TransCanada submits a new application for a different pipeline path, it would trigger a new review process.

"We cannot state that anything will be expedited at this time," she said. "We would look to information that is out there to extent we can. It is a new permit application so the process would have to be started over again."

The proposed $7 billion pipeline would pass through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma en route to Texas.

The pipeline is a dicey proposition for Obama, who enjoyed strong support from both organized labor and environmentalists in his winning 2008 campaign for the White House.

Environmental advocates have made it clear that approval of the pipeline would dampen their enthusiasm for Obama in November. Some liberal donors even threatened to cut off funds to Obama's re-election campaign to protest the project, which opponents say would transport "dirty oil" that requires huge amounts of energy to extract.

But by rejecting the pipeline, Obama risks losing support from organized labor, a key part of the Democratic base, for thwarting thousands of jobs.

"The score is job-killers two, American workers zero," said Terry O'Sullivan, general president of the Laborers' International Union of North America.

O'Sullivan called the decision "politics at its worst" and said, "Blue-collar construction workers across the U.S. will not forget this."

Yet some unions that back Obama oppose the pipeline, including the United Auto Workers, Service Employees International Union and Communications Workers of America.

TransCanada says the pipeline could create as many as 20,000 jobs, a figure opponents say is inflated. A State Department report last summer said the pipeline would create up to 6,000 jobs during construction.

Obama appeared to have skirted what some dubbed the "Keystone conundrum" in November when the State Department announced it was postponing a decision on the pipeline until after this year's election. Officials said they needed extra time to study routes that avoid a 65-mile stretch through the Sandhills area, which supplies water to eight states.

The concerns were serious enough that the state's governor and senators opposed the project unless the pipeline was moved. Any new route would have to be approved by Nebraska environmental officials and the State Department, which has authority because the pipeline would cross an international border.

Obama said his decision does not "change my administration's commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil."

To underscore the point, Obama signaled that he would not oppose development of an oil pipeline from Oklahoma to refineries along the Gulf of Mexico. TransCanada already operates a pipeline from Canada to Cushing, Okla. Refineries in Houston and along the Texas Gulf Coast can handle heavy crude such as that extracted from Canadian tar sands ? the type of oil that would flow through the Keystone XL pipeline.

Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said he doesn't believe the Keystone XL is dead. He said the Obama administration did not have enough time to review the project, given the Republican-imposed timeline.

"I don't believe this is the end of the story," Conrad told The Associated Press. "My personal view is that it should be constructed. It's clear Canada is going to develop this resource, and I believe it is better for our country to have it go here rather than Asian markets."

Bill McKibben, an environmental activist who led opposition to the pipeline, praised Obama's decision to stand up to what he called a "naked political threat from Big Oil."

___

Associated Press writers Ben Feller, Dina Cappiello, Laurie Kellman and Sam Hananel in Washington, Shannon McCaffrey in Warrenville, S.C., Ramit Plushnick-Masti in Houston and James MacPherson in Bismarck, N.D., contributed to this story.

___

Follow Matthew Daly on Twitter: (at)MatthewDalyWDC.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/gop/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120119/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_oil_pipeline

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