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Sunday, December 4, 2011
iPhone Live 182: 2011 iPhone gift guide
Subscribe via iTunes: Audio | Video Subscribe via RSS: Audio | Video Download directly: Audio | Video Show notes Rene, Georgia, and Seth talk iOS 5.1, Siri hacking, iPhone 5 rumors, Infinity Blade II and iTether, and pick our favorite accessories and...
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Peru anti-mine roadblocks lifted, government calls talks (Reuters)
LIMA (Reuters) ? Peruvian protesters opposed to a $4.8 billion gold mine project abandoned roadblocks on Saturday as government officials called weekend talks with regional leaders to try to resolve the conflict.
Earlier this week, U.S.-based Newmont Mining Corp agreed to a government request to stop work temporarily on the Conga mine after the protests turned violent.
The demonstrations in the northern region of Cajamarca, which included roadblocks designed to pressure the government to cancel the largest mining investment in Peru's history, started 10 days ago.
Local political leaders want President Ollanta Humala to stop the gold mine from being built, saying it would replace a string of alpine lakes with artificial reservoirs and cause pollution.
Protesters also have criticized Humala for moving too far to the right and for supporting the project, which would generate thousands of jobs and enormous tax revenues.
"The main access routes have been cleared after police went in and opened up the roads," regional government spokesman Segundo Mata said.
"There's access for vehicles, the situation has got back to normal and vehicles carrying fuel, food and tourists are passing," he said. The blockades around the city of Cajamarca had started to cause shortages of basic goods.
Protest leader Wilfredo Saavedra said mine opponents had agreed to dismantle the blockades. "Today, activity is normal in Cajamarca."
The unrest has challenged Humala, who campaigned on promises to steer more social spending to rural towns to help defuse social conflicts over natural resources while assuring companies they could move ahead with billions of dollars in mining and oil projects in Peru.
The administration of Humala, who has been trying for weeks to mediate in the conflict over water at the proposed mine, called regional officials and community leaders in for more talks on Sunday.
"We call on the people of Cajamarca not to let themselves be dragged into violent actions led by groups that don't want the population to prosper in peace and democracy," a government statement said.
Saavedra said protesters had not been invited to Sunday's proposed meeting with regional leaders.
The Conga project, which Newmont owns with Peruvian precious metals miner Buenaventura, would produce 580,000 to 680,000 ounces of gold a year and open in 2014.
It has gold deposits worth about $15 billion at current prices and sits 13,800 feet high in the Andes, about 600 miles north of Lima.
(Reporting by Teresa Cespedes; Writing by Helen Popper; Editing by Peter Cooney)
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Knobroom: Use Hardware Sliders with Adobe Lightroom
Knobroom is a plugin for Adobe Lightroom that lets you adjust the various photo-editing tools with a hardware MIDI controller.
I’ll be honest. The reason I started writing this post was the name, Knobroom, for obvious reasons. But while I came for the schoolboy humor, I stayed for the immensely practical hack.
Knobroom lets you plug a [...]
I’ll be honest. The reason I started writing this post was the name, Knobroom, for obvious reasons. But while I came for the schoolboy humor, I stayed for the immensely practical hack.
Knobroom lets you plug a [...]
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Has US learned the lesson of Enron 10 years later?
FILE - In this May 2, 2006 file photo, Enron Corp. founder Kenneth Lay, right, is escorted by Houston police Sgt. K.R. Perkins to the federal courthouse in Houston. People didn't know how Enron made money because it was a nearly impossible given the 3,000 private deals that came to light in its collapse, partnerships with names like Raptor, Condor and Chewbacca. Those allowed it to shunt billions of debt off its books and convince investors it was safe _ as long as they didn't ask too many questions. (AP Photo/Ric Feld, File)
FILE - In this May 2, 2006 file photo, Enron Corp. founder Kenneth Lay, right, is escorted by Houston police Sgt. K.R. Perkins to the federal courthouse in Houston. People didn't know how Enron made money because it was a nearly impossible given the 3,000 private deals that came to light in its collapse, partnerships with names like Raptor, Condor and Chewbacca. Those allowed it to shunt billions of debt off its books and convince investors it was safe _ as long as they didn't ask too many questions. (AP Photo/Ric Feld, File)
FILE - In this July 16, 2004 file photo, Martha Stewart, flanked by U.S. Marshals, leaves after sentencing at Manhattan federal court, in New York. Stewart, who built her cooking and decorating business on an image of homespun goodness, faced a grilling from regulators that suggested a life more tawdry than tidy: She had dumped shares of a drug company on what appeared to be an illegal tip from her Merrill Lynch broker, and then allegedly lied to cover her tracks. The amount the one-time billionaire saved by selling early was $51,000. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)
FILE - In this June 20, 2005 file photo, former Adelphia Communications Corp. CEO John Rigas speaks to the media following his sentencing outside Manhattan federal court, in New York. Rigas, revered for turning a $300 purchase of a small Pennsylvania firm into a cable TV empire in 31 states, was arrested with his two sons shortly after his company collapsed. They were accused of hiding billions of debt off the books of Adelphia Communications, and running it like a ?personal piggy bank.? (AP Photo/ Louis Lanzano, File)
FILE - In this June 18, 2007 file photo, Kenneth Rice, former chief of Enron Corp.'s high-speed Internet unit, arrives at Houston's federal courthouse where he was sentenced to 27 months in prison. People didn't know how Enron made money because it was a nearly impossible given the 3,000 private deals that came to light in its collapse, partnerships with names like Raptor, Condor and Chewbacca. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan, File)
FILE - In this March 26, 2004 file photo, former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski leaves the Manhattan State Supreme Court, in New York. By the end of 2002, Kozlowski would be indicted for stealing $150 million from shareholders and his Tyco International bankrupt. (AP Photo/ Louis Lanzano, File)
NEW YORK (AP) ? From humble origins as a natural gas distributor, Enron became a trading operation with the Midas touch. It made bets on oil, water, Internet traffic, even the weather. Wall Street's brightest worked there. Its stock tripled in two years.
Virtually no one knew how it had made so much money.
Ten years ago Friday came the answer: It hadn't.
Enron's bankruptcy on Dec. 2, 2001, revealed a fraudulent illusion. Investors swore they would not be so profoundly deceived again. But it was only the beginning of a decade when so much in the economy was not as it seemed.
Can't-lose Wall Street guys turned out to be cheats. Home values did not go up forever. Promising signs of recovery after the Great Recession turned out to be nothing, and hard times endure.
The theme was shredded faith ? that and debt, the more the better.
"We have faith in the big score," financial historian Charles Geisst says, trying to explain why Americans have, time and again, believed in what was too good to be true.
In the simple story of the past decade, a journey from corporate scandals to a housing bubble, then to a collapse and a frustratingly slow recovery, the villain is Wall Street and the victim Main Street. The reality is more complicated.
THE BEGINNING
One reason people didn't know how Enron made money was that it was an amalgam of 3,000 private deals that came to light in its collapse, partnerships with names like Raptor, Condor and Chewbacca.
Behind those obscure names, Enron shunted billions of dollars of debt off its books. Investors were safe as long as they didn't ask too many questions. The company borrowed from Wall Street banks, mutual funds and insurers, pledging its hot stock as collateral.
The collapse wiped out $11 billion in stock value, nearly 10 percent in the 401(k) retirement accounts of Enron employees.
A month later, an outspoken, Harley-riding CEO with an uncanny ability to pull profits out of a seemingly dull New Hampshire manufacturer appeared on BusinessWeek's list of top corporate managers. His name was Dennis Kozlowski. By the end of 2002, he was indicted for stealing $150 million from shareholders, and his company, Tyco International, was bankrupt.
Several other heroes of capitalism toppled after him. Bernard Ebbers drove WorldCom into bankruptcy after misleading investors in his high-flying company in an $11 billion accounting fraud. John Rigas, who turned a $300 purchase into a cable TV empire, was convicted of fraud after prosecutors said he ran Adelphia Communications like a "personal piggy bank," including using $26 million of company money to buy timberland next to his home to preserve his view.
Martha Stewart, who built her cooking and decorating business on an image of homespun goodness, faced a grilling from regulators that suggested a life more tawdry than tidy: She had dumped shares of a drug company on what appeared to be an illegal tip from her Merrill Lynch broker. She was convicted of lying, though never accused of insider trading. The amount the one-time billionaire saved by selling early was $51,000.
It was a time of plummeting stocks, trashed retirement accounts, lost jobs and lost trust. One headline from 2002: "Scandals Shred Investors' Faith."
Regulators cracked down, offering hope. Congress created a board to police the accounting industry. It also passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, requiring executives to sign off on financial statements so they could be criminally liable for posting phony numbers.
Investors were thought more vigilant, too. But they got sloppy again, and almost immediately.
Around the time of Enron's collapse, press reports detailed how Italy, years earlier, had struck complicated "currency swap" deals with banks so it could borrow money without having to recognize the debt on its books. Later, Greece was shown to have camouflaged its debt in a similar way.
In 2002, no one seemed to care. By the end of the year, Italy was paying about 4 percent a year in interest on its national bonds, roughly what the U.S. was offering and a sign that few investors were worried.
THE HOUSING BUBBLE
In 2003, as jurors heard how Kozlowski got Tyco to pitch in $1 million for his wife's birthday party, featuring an ice sculpture of Michelangelo's David that urinated vodka, the seeds of a new crisis were being planted.
American consumers had run up debt to record levels by the end of 2003, and more of them than ever were filing for bankruptcy. Yet the stocks of companies extending mortgages to the riskiest borrowers, so-called subprimes, were rising fast.
Subprime was a euphemism for people who had too little income, too much debt, a bad record of paying lenders back ? or all three. As home prices rose, worry that they would not meet their mortgage payments was replaced with faith that, even if they couldn't, they could always sell the home for more than they borrowed and return the money.
Lenders eventually grew so cocky that they seemed willing to give money to virtually anyone who wanted a home. They also offered mortgages on top of mortgages ? so-called home equity loans that allowed people to tap their magically rising values to raise cash for flat-screen TVs or Caribbean vacations. Or to pay their credit card bills.
"If your home keeps appreciating, why not use the equity," Robert Cole, CEO of mortgage lender New Century, said at the time.
If the lenders were duping Americans, they made easy targets.
Long before the housing boom, Americans were borrowing more, saving less and increasingly convinced they would not suffer the consequences. In the 1980s, Americans saved more than 6 percent of what they earned each year in income. Their debts totaled 70 percent of take-home pay. By 2007, they were saving nearly nothing, and debt had exploded to 140 percent of income.
"People were using their homes like automated teller machines," says David Rosenberg, chief economist at Gluskin Sheff & Associates and a big critic of lending during the boom. "At some point, people have to own up to their mistakes."
Stoking all this borrowing was the Federal Reserve, which had slashed benchmark interest rates to 46-year lows after the 2000-2001 tech-stock bust, pushing the cost of loans lower. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that buy mortgages from lenders, played a role by targeting ever-riskier loans.
The biggest, most sophisticated Wall Street firms fooled themselves, too.
Banks bought subprime lenders whole. Elegant mathematical formulas from their "risk management" departments told them their gambles were fine. Standard & Poor's and other credit rating agencies provided reassurance by slapping their highest ratings on bundles of risky mortgages.
Wall Street was gripped by what chronicler Roger Lowenstein called a "mad, Strangelovian" logic. Not content to bundle thousands of subprime mortgages into mortgage securities, banks bundled the bundles into something called collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. Next, they created bundles of bundles of bundles, called CDO-squared.
They created something known as synthetic CDOs that didn't even contain mortgages but merely referenced them, exchanging cash between two parties taking opposing bets that a mortgage lender unconnected to them would get its money back.
Adding to the confusion, it wasn't clear which financial firms held many of the original mortgages on which everyone was betting. They had been bought and sold so many times among investors that no one could follow the paper trail.
By 2006, the men who had wounded a nation's faith in capitalism were finally getting justice. Enron's former president, Jeffrey Skilling, began serving 24 years in prison. Kenneth Lay, the chairman, died before he could be sentenced. Rigas, the cable titan, got 15 years, Ebbers and Kozlowski 25 each.
But we were about to discover that the lies we tell ourselves can be more damaging.
THE COLLAPSE
In 2007, subprime lenders went bust, one after another. Then all the mounting debt, made possible by years of half-truths and self-deceptions, turned the fall of a single industry into a worldwide financial crisis.
In March 2008, investors fearing bad mortgage bets at Bear Stearns pulled money out of the bank, leaving it to collapse into the arms of a rival.
Unable to untangle the web of mortgage risk, they began to wonder who was next. They focused on Lehman Brothers, and as that bank teetered, it became clear that the danger of complexity wasn't the only lesson from Enron that had been ignored.
Lehman had hidden debt just like Enron.
Using a financing technique called Repo 105, the bank had borrowed money in a series of deals structured to make it seem as though it had been "selling" assets to raise money. Lenders demanded money back, triggering a run on the bank and leaving ordinary investors scrambling to understand just how much the company had borrowed.
Lehman's bankruptcy in September 2008 froze credit worldwide and helped turn the U.S. recession into the worst since the Great Depression. Stocks eventually fell to 12-year lows, retirement accounts were devastated, and many Americans' biggest asset, their home, plummeted in value.
By the end of 2008, Bernard Madoff was arrested for lying to investors in a $60 billion Ponzi scheme over two decades. A few months later, President Barack Obama started talking up the strengths of the economy, but that soon proved a bit of a mirage, too.
More than a year later, the White House announced its "Recovery Summer," a series of public projects to goose economic growth. But a year and half later, the unemployment rate is stuck at 9 percent and economic growth uninspiring.
A sad footnote: After an overhaul of Wall Street rules last year, broker MF Global turned to the same Lehman-like Repo 105 deals to fuel its bet on indebted European governments. The heavy borrowing helped send the firm run by ex-New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine into bankruptcy, throwing 1,000 people out of work and creating chaos in markets as brokerage customers scrambled to get their money back.
A month after the firm's collapse, regulators still can't find $1.2 billion of customer funds.
THE RECKONING
Now Europe is paying for years of using government debt to fund early retirements and long vacations that its citizens really couldn't afford. Streets are choked with protesters, governments are toppling and interest rates rising, some to crippling highs.
Rosenberg, the prescient housing critic, sees trouble for America, too.
Frightened investors are buying Treasury bonds, which is making it cheaper than ever for Washington to borrow despite its trillion-dollar-plus deficits. The danger is that low rates could lull Americans into believing that, even if they themselves can't borrow recklessly, it's OK for their government to.
"A government debt bubble is already creating misery in Europe," Rosenberg says. "If we don't watch out, we'll face the same problem."
Stocks have barely moved in the decade of lost faith. On the Friday before the Enron bankruptcy, the S&P 500 closed at 1,139. Last Friday it closed 19 points above that. The incomes of many middle-class Americans haven't kept up with inflation. Home prices are still falling.
Pretending we were wealthier has made us poorer.
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Friday, December 2, 2011
FAA: Changes coming to prevent tarmac delays
FILE - In this May 24, 2011 file photo, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Administrator J. Randolph Babbitt testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington. Babbitt described Wednesday a disastrous scene at the Hartford, Conn., airport during October's snowstorm, with airliner tugs that couldn't get traction on the ice, frozen luggage belts and other problems that kept hundreds of passengers trapped on the tarmac. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)
FILE - In this May 24, 2011 file photo, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Administrator J. Randolph Babbitt testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington. Babbitt described Wednesday a disastrous scene at the Hartford, Conn., airport during October's snowstorm, with airliner tugs that couldn't get traction on the ice, frozen luggage belts and other problems that kept hundreds of passengers trapped on the tarmac. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Obama administration officials promised Wednesday to make changes before the Christmas travel season aimed at preventing nightmare scenarios like the one in October when hundreds of passengers were trapped for hours on planes in Hartford, Conn., during a freak snowstorm.
"We can act fast," Federal Aviation Administrator Randy Babbitt said as he and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood discussed the changes with reporters.
Babbitt described a disastrous scene at Bradley International Airport in which airliner tugs couldn't get traction on the ice, power outages shut down luggage belts and other problems.
Much of the chaos might have been mitigated with better communication among airlines, airports and air traffic controllers, he said.
Planes crammed with hundreds of passengers on Oct. 29 could have been accommodated at other airports if airlines had known so many flights were going to Hartford, Babbitt said. Instead, travelers were stuck on planes, some for more than seven hours, after 28 flights were diverted to Bradley because of weather and equipment problems at New York area airports.
Transportation Department rules limit tarmac delays to a maximum of three hours before airlines must allow passengers to get off the plane. Airlines that exceed that limit face fines of up to $27,500 per person. But sometimes the lack of open gates or Customs officials make it impossible for airlines to let passengers disembark.
In the October storm, carriers only knew of their own diversions and not what other airlines were doing, Babbitt said
No one, including controllers, had a complete picture of what was happening, Babbitt told over 100 aviation officials at a forum on tarmac delays hosted Wednesday by FAA and the Transportation Department.
"There is a lot of knowledge out there," Babbitt said. "If everyone had access to the whole picture they wouldn't have continued to send planes to (Bradley)."
The diversions overwhelmed Bradley, which has only 23 gates. The airport received 20 inches of snow during the storm, which marked the first time that area of Connecticut had received over an inch of snow in October in more than a century of record-keeping, a National Weather Service official told the forum.
The storm knocked out power to the airport several times during the day. Luggage belts quit working. Tugs that move planes out of the way couldn't get traction on the ice. Planes had trouble refueling and de-icing because of the power outages, preventing departures. Seven of the diverted planes were international flights, but there weren't enough Customs officials working to handle a large number of unexpected passengers who had to wait for more officials to arrive.
If a plane can't get de-iced, "you might as well just weld the aircraft to the ramp ? it's not going anywhere," Babbitt said.
And if planes can't depart, there's no room to unload planes that have landed.
Among FAA's proposals to airlines and airports for better information-sharing:
? Creating a webpage monitored by FAA where airports can continuously update. Airline dispatchers could check the site before deciding where they want to send flights unable to land at their intended destination. Airlines, rather than controllers, decide which airports they want to send diverted flights to based on factors such as personnel and equipment at the airport.
For example, if a plane spends too much time on the ground, the flight crew may exceed the maximum number of hours they're allowed to work in a single day under FAA safety regulations. In those cases, airlines have to find another flight crew and get them to the plane before the flight can depart.
? Expand FAA-hosted teleconferences with airlines to include airports. FAA and airline officials exchange information in teleconferences each day about weather-related and other difficulties affecting the flow of air traffic around the country, but airport officials generally don't join those conversations.
? Create a better system for air traffic controllers to identify diverted flights. While special handling would not be provided based sole on diversion status, it would heighten situational awareness about the potential for congestion on the ground at airport and for planes in the air to run low on fuel.
FAA's review of problems that occurred on Oct. 29 showed it wasn't necessarily obvious to controllers that an unusually large number of flights were being diverted to Bradley, agency officials said.
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Big East will seek dismissal of WVU lawsuit Dec. 5
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) ? The Big East will seek dismissal of a West Virginia University lawsuit aimed at invalidating conference bylaws and speeding up the Mountaineers' departure for the Big 12.
At a scheduling conference in Morgantown, Big East attorneys said they plan to file a motion Monday in Monongalia County Circuit Court, asking Circuit Judge Russell Clawges to either dismiss the case or put it on hold while a parallel lawsuit plays out in Rhode Island. That's where the Big East is based.
Attorney Benjamin Block said the Big East believes WVU has failed to lay a foundation for its claim that the bylaws are invalid. But if the judge believes there are grounds to move forward, he said, the case should be heard in Rhode Island.
WVU is trying to have the Big East's breach-of-contract lawsuit tossed from the Rhode Island court, arguing it has sovereign immunity as an agency of the state of West Virginia. A hearing on that motion to dismiss is set for Dec. 16, the lawyers said Thursday. In it, WVU also notes that it filed the lawsuit in Morgantown four days before the conference countersued.
The Mountaineers are making plans to join the Big 12 in 2012. WVU argues it should be allowed to leave now because the Big East breached its fiduciary duty by failing to maintain a balance between football-playing and non-football members.
But the Big East is seeking unspecified damages and an order that West Virginia stay in the conference for 27 months. Commissioner John Marinatto says West Virginia helped construct the bylaws and agreed to abide by them.
WVU has already sent half of the required $5 million exit fee to the Big East. The university contends that by accepting the down payment, the Big East agreed to the immediate withdrawal.
WVU attorneys pressed Clawges to fast-track the West Virginia lawsuit, saying the university needs a resolution by June 30.
"We need to know whether we're going to stay or go," said WVU lawyer Stephen LaCagnin.
However, Clawges was doubtful such a timeline can be met.
"My immediate reaction is ... it ain't gonna happen," the judge said.
Clawges agreed to an aggressive schedule for the West Virginia case but told the attorneys it will be up to them to make it happen. He also noted it could end with a settlement before ever getting to a jury.
"This is probably going to be worked out ? as opposed to a jury room ? in a conference room," he said.
WVU said it will reply to the Big East's motion to dismiss by Dec. 9, and Clawges has scheduled a hearing on the motions for 1 p.m. Dec. 19 in Morgantown. He may rule from the bench that day.
The trial is tentatively set for June 25, 2012.
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