Decius wrote:

Poised as the world's leading supplier of green tea, ITO EN is dedicated to the promotion of the fine taste, traditions, and benefits of green tea.

Generally speaking, Americans are not fond of drinking unsweet tea. Although (blessfully) many restaurants in the south offer it, you're not actually supposed to drink it that way. It always comes delivered with a collection of sweetener packets and with a big spoon sticking out of the glass, and I've gotten my share of odd looks from waiters when the first thing I do is pull the spoon out and then proceed to drink the beverage au naturale.

You're supposed to drink corn syrup. Coke in some areas, Pepsi in others. In the south sweet tea is an accepted substitute and unsweet is offered merely as an accommodation to diabetics, who are expected to load the beverage up with their artificial sweetener of choice if they aren't willing to drink one of the high tech "diet" beverages the cola companies are pushing. Don't believe me? Try to buy unsweet tea in a can. Good luck with that. I really wonder what the hell diabetic people in the United States drank before artificial sweetener was invented.

The recent popularity of green tea has resulted in a number strange iced green tea beverages hitting the market here. They can't just sell iced green tea in a bottle. No way. Americans aren't going to drink that! Often these green tea concoctions are so loaded with corn syrup that they are worse for you than cola! Diet versions are offered with those same high tech sweeteners, or honey. This is not what green tea is supposed to taste like!

The reason people in Japan are healthier than you isn't because anti-oxidants in green tea have some sort of magical power. Its because for every corn syrupy cola or rat poisoned diet beverage you've slugged away in your life they have chosen to drink a natural beverage without any sweeteners. And it tastes better that way! Fortunately the company that makes a significant portion of Japan's unsweet green tea does bottle and sell their product in America. You can order cases of it off of their website, but I ran into two liter bottles at Target recently.

It tastes good, its good for you, and its got plenty of caffeine. Please pick up a bottle and keep them in business over here so I don't have to go back to trying to brew the stuff myself!

Hear hear. I've been off soda for about 5 years now. Green tea all the way.

Still, I miss Nitro Cola. It's the only "extreme" cola I found palatable.

RE: Ito En

bucy wrote:

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's NASA transition team is asking U.S. space agency officials to quantify how much money could be saved by canceling the Ares 1 rocket and scaling back the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle next year.

YES! Kill the stick!

Not a fan? I thought it was a good plan to have a crew rocket and a payload rocket.

RE: SPACE.com -- Obama to Review Costs of Shuttle Replacement Vehicle

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. and LOS ANGELES, Calif. - November 24, 2008 - The Processing project today announced the immediate availability of the Processing 1.0 product family, the highly anticipated release of industry-leading design and development software for virtually every creative workflow. Delivering radical breakthroughs in workflow efficiency - and packed with hundreds of innovative, time-saving features - the new Processing 1.0 product line advances the creative process across print, Web, interactive, film, video and mobile.

Whups! That's not the right one. Here we go:

Today, on November 24, 2008, we launch the 1.0 version of the Processing software. Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students. Its open source status encourages the community participation and collaboration that is vital to Processing's growth. Contributors share programs, contribute code, answer questions in the discussion forum, and build libraries to extend the possibilities of the software. The Processing community has written over seventy libraries to facilitate computer vision, data visualization, music, networking, and electronics.

Students at hundreds of schools around the world use Processing for classes ranging from middle school math education to undergraduate programming courses to graduate fine arts studios.

+ At New York University's graduate ITP program, Processing is taught alongside its sister project Arduino and PHP as part of the foundation course for 100 incoming students each year.

+ At UCLA, undergraduates in the Design | Media Arts program use Processing to learn the concepts and skills needed to imagine the next generation of web sites and video games.

+ At Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska and the Phoenix Country Day School in Arizona, middle school teachers are experimenting with Processing to supplement traditional algebra and geometry classes.

Tens of thousands of companies, artists, designers, architects, and researchers use Processing to create an incredibly diverse range of projects.

+ Design firms such as Motion Theory provide motion graphics created with Processing for the TV commercials of companies like Nike, Budweiser, and Hewlett-Packard.

+ Bands such as R.E.M., Radiohead, and Modest Mouse have featured animation created with Processing in their music videos.

+ Publications such as the journal Nature, the New York Times, Seed, and Communications of the ACM have commissioned information graphics crea... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Processing 1.0 released

Decius wrote:

"Photos like nude shots of someone's spouse are not the only sensitive data on a smartphone," Tom Cross, IBM X-force researcher, told InternetNews.com.

How often do you get a quote like that?

In other iPhone data confidentiality news...

RE: InternetNews Realtime IT News - Nude Photos on iPhone a Wakeup Call

Neil Fraser, a software engineer at Google, took 9 carefully selected cross sections from a MRI scan and glued them on wooden blocks to create a 3D representative model. The result is a collection of 60 1-inch cubes, of wich 94 outside faces are simply varnished, and 266 internal faces feature a square slice of the MRI images. One can then "dig" into the brain to carve out custom shapes.

Wooden Model of a 3D MRI Scan

Acidus wrote:
Ran across an old document today at work. When SPI was purchased by HP a little over a year ago my boss had me compose a memo about why we needed completely unfiltered internet access. HP IT doesn't like us very much...

Nice writeup.

The main problem with unfiltered/unproxied access is logging/accountability. Passive URL monitoring via the IDS devices takes care of web logging and as long as the hosts are static/reserved DHCP and authenticated, there's your accountability too. Since you won't be getting authenticated proxy logs, you'll have to correlate auth and access logs.

It's a bit more work to accommodate the "problem children" but at the end of the day all the regulatory nuts and bolts are still effectively intact with that sort of monitoring system.

RE: Memo from Work

Remember that more than a year ago Subprime Mortgage Bonds forecast a total meltdown in that industry, and that nearly all of the companies in that space would go bankrupt. We were told that this sort of "Armageddon" scenario would not and could not occur, and that the credit market was playing "histrionics". A number of so-called "smart money" investors (Wilbur Ross anyone?) stepped in and bought these supposedly-undervalued instruments - and promptly got slaughtered when the actual performance was worse than the credit markets were forecasting.

The credit market was right and those who said it couldn't happen were wrong.

Now the credit market is saying that we are going to have more defaults than happened during The Great Depression. That is, it is forecasting a Greater Depression that worse than the 1930s. The TNX (10 year yield) is threatening to break three percent, down another 6% (!) this morning to 3.16%. The bottom going back as far as my charts extend is 3.07%. Almost there.

The 13 Week T-Bill (IRX) stands at 0.1%, which is for all intents and purposes zero. The Effective Fed Funds trading rate has been between 0.2 and 0.3% since the last putative rate cut to 1% - that is, effectively zero.

Corporate AAA commercial mortgage spreads are at extreme wides, standing at over 700 bips; added to reference this means that super senior AAA commercial mortgages now yield more than 10%. Given the level of credit enhancement in these deals this forecasts default rates of more than thirty percent in this space. Similar extreme spreads are found among both the "high grade" and "high yield" corporate bond markets.

The credit market is telling you that we are headed for an S&P 500 trading at three hundred and a DOW at under three thousand. That we are headed for unemployment north of 20% on the U6 (broad) measure, and GDP contraction of twenty percent cumulatively from top to bottom.

That's one person in five in the US without a job, deflation of 20% cumulatively or more in prices, over 2 million businesses going bankrupt in the next three years, and literal starvation and privation - all across America. No part of this nation will be spared.

The market callers are all saying all this is impossible.

Even though every thing the credit market has forecast thus far since this problem began has been not only proved correct but conservative; that is, if you bought believing that it would not be as bad as the credit market is forecasting, you have had your head handed to you.

So who are you going to listen to?

Ben Bernanke ("we won't have a recession") and Hank Paulson ("the economy is fundamentally strong"), along with all the market "callers" on CNBC, who have been wrong every single time for more than 18 months?

Or the credit market which has been right 100% of the time thus far since this crisis began?

This Isn't The Bottom Part Deux

Remember that more than a year ago Subprime Mortgage Bonds forecast a total meltdown in that industry, and that nearly all of the companies in that space would go bankrupt. We were told that this sort of "Armageddon" scenario would not and could not occur, and that the credit market was playing "histrionics". A number of so-called "smart money" investors (Wilbur Ross anyone?) stepped in and bought these supposedly-undervalued instruments - and promptly got slaughtered when the actual performance was worse than the credit markets were forecasting.

The credit market was right and those who said it couldn't happen were wrong.

Now the credit market is saying that we are going to have more defaults than happened during The Great Depression. That is, it is forecasting a Greater Depression that worse than the 1930s. The TNX (10 year yield) is threatening to break three percent, down another 6% (!) this morning to 3.16%. The bottom going back as far as my charts extend is 3.07%. Almost there.

The 13 Week T-Bill (IRX) stands at 0.1%, which is for all intents and purposes zero. The Effective Fed Funds trading rate has been between 0.2 and 0.3% since the last putative rate cut to 1% - that is, effectively zero.

Corporate AAA commercial mortgage spreads are at extreme wides, standing at over 700 bips; added to reference this means that super senior AAA commercial mortgages now yield more than 10%. Given the level of credit enhancement in these deals this forecasts default rates of more than thirty percent in this space. Similar extreme spreads are found among both the "high grade" and "high yield" corporate bond markets.

The credit market is telling you that we are headed for an S&P 500 trading at three hundred and a DOW at under three thousand. That we are headed for unemployment north of 20% on the U6 (broad) measure, and GDP contraction of twenty percent cumulatively from top to bottom.

That's one person in five in the US without a job, deflation of 20% cumulatively or more in prices, over 2 million businesses going bankrupt in the next three years, and literal starvation and privation - all across America. No part of this nation will be spared.

The market callers are all saying all this is impossible.

Even though every thing the credit market has forecast thus far since this problem began has been not only proved correct but conservative; that is, if you bought believing that it would not be as bad as the credit market is forecasting, you have had your head handed to you.

So who are you going to listen to?

Ben Bernanke ("we won't have a recession") and Hank Paulson ("the economy is fundamentally strong"), along with all the market "callers" on CNBC, who have been wrong every single time for more than 18 months?

Or the credit market which has been right 100% of the time thus far since this crisis began?

This Isn't The Bottom Part Deux

How many of the automaker CEOs (and by the way, that includes Gettlefinger, if my viewing of the hearings is correct) travelled commercial to get to Congress yesterday and today?

Zero.

.....

All three CEOs - Rick Wagoner of GM, Alan Mulally of Ford, and Robert Nardelli of Chrysler - exercised their perks Tuesday by flying in corporate jets to DC. Wagoner flew in GM's $36 million luxury aircraft to tell members of Congress that the company is burning through cash, asking for $10-12 billion for GM alone.

.....

GM and Ford say that it is a corporate decision to have their CEOs fly on private jets and that is non-negotiable, even as the companies say they are running out of cash.

.....

Fine.

As a US Taxpayer this is my answer to your request for a bailout:

Is that clear enough or do you need it spelled out one letter at a time?

Show Of Hands

janelane wrote:

Decius wrote:

Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, predicts that many homeowners who have little or no equity will stop paying their mortgage and then reduce their income to get the biggest payment cut possible. They could stop working overtime or, if two spouses work, one could quit. After the modification, they could try to boost their income again.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Schiff says. "People are going to feel like complete morons if they don't participate. The people getting punished are the ones who never made an irresponsible decision to buy a house they couldn't afford."

You can say that again.

This is a seriously asinine proposition. Quit a job? In this economy? Reduce your income and go into foreclosure on purpose?

We don't need to compound our financial woes by suggesting that responsible people turn irresponsible, or that they'll be "punished" for fulfilling their debt obligations on their rationally structured mortgage loans.

-janelane, spending 14%

BTW, Schiff is not advocating this loan restructuring program. The quote is ambiguous. Just wanted to make sure that got cleared up.

RE: You Might Want To Think About Stopping Your Mortgage Payments and Reducing Your Income