8 states vow 3.3M zero-emission vehicles by 2025

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The governors of eight states including California and New York pledged Thursday to get 3.3 million zero-emission vehicles on roadways by 2025 in an effort to curb greenhouse gas pollution.

Representatives from all eight states were scheduled to gather in Sacramento at 8:30 a.m. to sign a memorandum of understanding that would increase infrastructure and make other changes to help increase market share for electric cars, hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. By 2015, there are expected to be more than 200,000 zero emissions vehicles on the road.

"This agreement is a major step forward to reducing the emissions that are causing our climate to change and unleashing the extreme weather that we are experiencing with increased frequency," New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said in a statement.

The other states involved are Massachusetts, Maryland, Oregon, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont. The eight states together represent about 23 percent of the U.S. auto market.

Each state has already, separately adopted rules to require a percentage of new vehicles sold to be zero emission by 2025. California's mandate alone of 15.4 percent calls for a total of 1.5 million zero-emission vehicles to be on the state's roads by that time.

It's a steep curve. In California, plug-in-hybrids and electric vehicles currently make up less than 2 percent of the auto market.

Under terms of the memorandum, the states will first establish a taskforce to share ideas that will help expand the network of charging and fueling stations needed to make electric and hydrogen-fueled vehicles more attractive to consumers.

"The idea is to broaden the pool of people talking about this and working their way through the challenges that come up in setting up this kind of infrastructure, and growing this kind of a market," said Dave Clegern, a spokesman for California's Air Resources Board, which regulates auto emissions.

There are now 16 zero-emission vehicles from eight manufacturers on the market; nine that run on batteries alone, two hydrogen fuel cell cars and five plug-in hybrid models, which can run on battery alone or gasoline.

Officials say that every automaker will have a zero-emission model by 2015.

Car dealers, who are under pressure to help meet these 2025 goals, say getting fueling infrastructure like charging stations in place quickly is the only way to get average consumers used to a new product that requires new driving habits.

"We think that is going to be necessary for some of the range anxiety and other acceptance barriers that need to be broken down," said Brian Maas, president of the California New Car Dealers Association.

"The cars are coming - they're here already - but if you don't have a place to charge them, there's not going to be the level of consumer acceptance."

Governors signing the memorandum all hailed the cooperative effort as a way to more quickly solve the inevitable problems that arise when making such far-reaching changes in people's everyday lives.

And some see future economic benefits from the switch to new vehicles.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick said more electric vehicles are key to his state's efforts grow the region's economy.

"Diversifying transportation fuels and providing drivers with options will help reduce vulnerability to price swings in imported oil that hurt consumers and our economy," Patrick said in a statement.

___

Jason Dearen can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/JHDearen

• Transportation
• Environment
• California

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/8-states-vow-3-3m-zero-emission-vehicles-150331894.html
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The Arcade Fire Album Is Here To Hear

Arcade Fire just released its entire album Reflecktor on YouTube. And it's basically one, big 85-minute lyric video. The album is officially out October 29.

NPR Music will broadcast a special live performance by the band the night before the album release date, from Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, beginning at 10 p.m. ET.

Courtesy of the artist/YouTube

The Entire Arcade Fire album 'Reflektor' is here

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2013/10/24/240603837/the-arcade-fire-album-is-here-to-hear?ft=1&f=1039
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Play the Slate News Quiz

According to reports out of Philadelphia, a man in Upper Macungie Township, Pa., had his Jell-O stolen from a workplace refrigerator on Oct. 10. Angry at yet another on-the-job snack theft, the man snapped and called in the cops. "The incident remains under investigation," confirm local police. Even if that dastardly crime is never solved, I hope you can solve the 12 questions on this week's Slate News Quiz.

Question 1 of 12

According to a sobering Millward Brown report, what had a remarkable 99.6 percent failure rate in early October?

Nine and a half million people visited the Obamacare portal in its first week of operation, according to the report, but only 36,000 successfully completed enrollment.

Question 2 of 12

The villages of Viganella, Italy, and Rjukan, Norway, located in deep valleys, have both done what to brighten up the dark winter months?

The tilting mirrors atop a nearby ridge will project a 2,000-square-foot circle of light into Rjukan's town square, where a skating rink will be installed.

Question 3 of 12

A violin sold by a British auction house on Saturday went for $1.78 million. Why was this particular violin in such high demand?

Question 4 of 12

What did David Babcock, a Missouri university professor, also accomplish while running the Kansas City Marathon on Saturday?

Question 5 of 12

An AP investigation revealed Tuesday that guards have been caught napping multiple times while the doors were left open where?

These are clear violations of the Air Force's "weapon system safety rules" for its nuclear missiles.

Question 6 of 12

How did Utah Scoutmasters Dave Hall and Glenn Taylor violate the Boy Scouts' "Leave No Trace" policy on a recent camping trip?

The video of the clueless scoutmasters in Goblin Valley went viral, costing them their Scouting positions and leaving them open to criminal charges.

Question 7 of 12

Last week, Saudi Arabia lobbied for and then, confusingly, rejected what?

Turning down a two-year Security Council seat is unprecedented. The Saudis blamed the U.N.'s failures in Syria and Palestine.

Question 8 of 12

Where did Greek police find Maria, the little girl rather appallingly dubbed "the blonde angel" by the media?

Maria's identity is still unknown, but the Roma couple who posed as her parents are being tried for child abduction. They now say Maria's mother abandoned her as a baby.

Question 9 of 12

A Las Cruces, N.M., hazmat team was brought in last Wednesday to fight a cloud of what?

Habanero particles from a nearby spice company got into an industrial park's ventilation system, leading to bloody noses and breathing problems.

Question 10 of 12

What was shut down in San Francisco for four days this week?

Question 11 of 12

Iran hanged a convicted drug smuggler named "Alireza M." on Oct. 9. What happened the following day to complicate the matter?

Morgue workers discovered the following day that the hanged man was still breathing. Iran announced at first that there would be a second hanging, but has since walked that back.

Question 12 of 12

The Romanian thief who stole $24 million worth of paintings from a Dutch museum last year was back in court Tuesday. Why?

"I could not imagine that a museum would exhibit such valuable works with so little security," complained Radu Dogaru, clearly the real victim here.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_slate_quiz/2013/10/the_slate_quiz_with_quizmaster_ken_jennings_play_the_news_quiz_for_the_week_2.html
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What's A 'Glitch,' Anyway? A Brief Linguistic History

Not all glitches are unintentional and problematic. Glitch art introduces, on purpose, digital typos that would otherwise be edited out in an image.

Kevin Wong/Flickr

Not all glitches are unintentional and problematic. Glitch art introduces, on purpose, digital typos that would otherwise be edited out in an image.

Kevin Wong/Flickr

HealthCare.gov, the faulty website where people can sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, has become nearly synonymous with the word "glitch" — sometimes defensively, sometimes mockingly.

The linguistic firestorm probably was sparked, or at least fanned, by HealthCare.gov's champion, President Obama himself. As he said on Oct. 1, the first day of the HealthCare.gov rollout:

"Now, like every new law, every new product rollout, there are going to be some glitches in the sign-up process along the way that we will fix. I've been saying this from the start."

If the word choice was intentional, it could have been a way to normalize potential problems, says Robert Terrill, associate professor of rhetoric and public culture at Indiana University.

"People are used to it. They're used to having glitches on software and websites," he says. "It seems to connote something small and easily repairable."

Some have argued that the problems with HealthCare.gov are too large to qualify as mere glitches. But that depends, of course, on where you place "glitch" on the hiccup-to-catastrophe spectrum. And a little digging around old dictionaries and newspapers shows that its place on the spectrum has changed over time.

Spacecraft 'Abnormalities'

To complicate things, the origins and etymology of "glitch" are unknown, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

But it seems to first come into the vernacular in the 1960s and '70s — in the context of small, unforeseen technical errors in space travel.

Astronaut John Glenn used the word in his 1962 book, Into Orbit: "Another term we adopted to describe some of our problems was 'glitch'. Literally, a glitch ... is such a minute change in voltage that no fuse could protect against it."

In 1965, The St. Petersburg Times reported that a glitch ("as technicians call such abnormalities," it clarified) had altered the computer memory inside the U.S. spacecraft Gemini 6. Six years later, The Miami News talked about a failure in Apollo 14 that almost prevented a successful moon landing:

"Nobody knows yet why the mechanism failed. Engineers were unable to make it fail in hundreds of tests on the ground. Such 'glitches' worry engineers — they can't cure a disease if they are unable to diagnose it."

Uses like that may have led a 1978 thesaurus to include the word as a synonym for catastrophe. (In comparison, modern thesauruses often equate it to a flaw.) If then-President Jimmy Carter was introducing a new program, his speechwriters probably would have steered clear.

The Golden Age Of Glitches

Little by little, as computers became more widespread in society, so did glitches.

One was blamed for causing Social Security to underpay hundreds of thousands of recipients in 1994. Another, in 1997, stopped customers of America Online from logging on for 2 1/2 hours (a problem that actually was given space in the newspaper).

And it was the perfect word to describe a computer bug that many feared would cause an apocalyptic crisis: Y2K. Remember that? "Glitch" found linguistic fame as people speculated about what would happen when computer clocks turned to Jan. 1, 2000.

Some folks stocked up on water bottles and canned food in case the electricity went out; the U.S. and Russia feared a nuclear warhead might be accidentally launched; and airlines and air traffic controllers reportedly spent $2.5 billion "to assure that their computers could read the year 2000 correctly," according to The New York Times.

Despite all warnings, as the clock struck midnight, nothing much actually happened. Perhaps that's the association Obama was trying to make, too.

"The pre-hype to [Y2K] was that this was going to be something catastrophic, and it turned out to be merely a glitch," says Terrill, from Indiana University. "If that's the most common use of a term, I can see why it carried over to the Obamacare website."

Terrill notes that words are often the battleground of politics, as leaders try to "grab hold of language and define terms in particular ways." So the meaning of the word may change as the HealthCare.gov conversation continues.

Obama, for one, may already be distancing himself from it. He had many words to say about his frustrations with the site in a speech Monday, but "glitch" was not one of them.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/24/239788307/whats-a-glitch-anyway-a-brief-linguistic-history-meaning-definition?ft=1&f=1019
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Kate Bosworth: East Coast FABB for Lucky Magazine

Enjoying a truly feminine event, Kate Bosworth attended Lucky Magazine's East Coast FABB: Fashion and Beauty Blog Conference in New York City on Thursday (October 24).

The "Blue Crush" star wore a long-sleeved cream top and silver short skirt as she posed with her gorgeous magazine cover.

Also plugging her Kate Bosworth for Topshop collection, the 30-year-old actress enjoyed herself, tweeting, "Had the BEST time speaking with @evachen212 at #LuckyFABB - thank you @LuckyMagazine - what a great audience, could have stayed forever!"

Speaking about the new line, Kate explained, "The collection is tailored and classic. For fall, we wanted to create luxurious pieces with a strong minimalist approach. Slim silhouettes are cloaked in a masculine shape, staying true to the mix of masculine/feminine balance that exists in my personal aesthetic."

Source: http://celebrity-gossip.net/kate-bosworth/kate-bosworth-east-coast-fabb-lucky-magazine-949329
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Portugal reopens missing Madeleine case, new leads

LISBON, Portugal (AP) — More than six years after British girl Madeleine McCann vanished from her bedroom during a family vacation in Portugal and five years after Portuguese police gave up trying to find her, authorities reopened the case Thursday, citing new evidence.

Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, had long campaigned from their home in central England for the Portuguese investigation to resume. In a statement Thursday, they said they were "very pleased" at the development.

"We hope that this will finally lead to (Madeleine) being found and to the discovery of whoever is responsible for this crime," Kate and Gerry McCann said. The couple, both doctors, continue to care for Madeleine's younger siblings, twins Sean and Amelie.

Madeleine went missing shortly before her fourth birthday. Her disappearance sparked global interest as pictures of her and her grieving parents beamed around the world. Her parents briefly met with Pope Benedict XVI in St. Peter's Square in June 2007, a month after Madeleine disappeared, and the pontiff held a picture of their daughter.

Then, in a stunning twist, Portuguese police briefly considered the parents suspects before they were cleared and returned home.

Portuguese police closed the case in 2008 because authorities had detected no crime. However, a team of detectives from Porto, in northern Portugal, began reviewing the evidence in March 2011. They had not been involved in the original investigation.

The public prosecutor's office in Lisbon said it decided to reopen the investigation after new leads emerged during the case review. It did not elaborate. The case is subject to Portugal's judicial secrecy law, which forbids the release of information about investigations.

British police, meanwhile, launched Operation Grange in 2011 to try to find out what happened to Madeleine. British detectives have been sifting through the case files in Portugal and say they also have identified new avenues of investigation. They say both the timeline and the version of events surrounding the girl's disappearance have changed significantly as new information has emerged.

Madeleine disappeared from her family's resort apartment in Praia da Luz, a coastal town 200 kilometers (120 miles) south of Lisbon, while her parents and their friends were eating dinner nearby.

British detectives say it's possible that Madeleine is still alive.

Ten days ago, British police released a computer-generated image of a person they were interested in questioning about the girl's disappearance. Police asked the public for help and worked with the BBC on a "Crimewatch" TV show, which drew more than 2,000 calls offering possible new leads.

Police said the images were based on information from witnesses who spotted a man in the Portuguese resort the day Madeleine was last seen.

In London, Scotland Yard said the reopened Portuguese investigation will run parallel to the British police's efforts, and British police will be traveling regularly to Portugal.

"Both sides of the investigation are at relatively early stages, with much work remaining to be done," Scotland Yard said in a statement. "This new momentum is encouraging, but we still have a way to go."

Experts say all those efforts are worthwhile.

Even after so many years, officials should "do whatever it takes" to ensure that grieving parents get closure, said Delphine Moralis of Missing Children Europe, an umbrella group of 28 non-governmental organizations in 19 European Union countries and Switzerland.

"It's essential to keep the ball rolling" on efforts to find missing children, Moralis said by telephone from Brussels.

She cited as examples the cathartic resolution provided in the cases involving Natascha Kampusch, who was found eight years after being kidnapped in 1998 in Austria, and three women rescued in May after being held captive in a Cleveland house for about a decade.

____

Gregory Katz in London contributed to this report.

• Society & Culture
• Crime & Justice
• Madeleine McCann
• Portugal
• British police

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/portugal-reopens-missing-madeleine-case-leads-161504439.html
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Microsoft grows earnings, revenue in Q1, helped by server software

Microsoft's revenue and earnings per share grew more than 15 percent each in its first fiscal quarter of 2014, during which enterprise server software products sold particularly well, the company said Thursday.

Microsoft generated revenue of $18.5 billion in the quarter, ended Sept. 30, up 16 percent compared with last year's first quarter and topping the $17.8 billion consensus estimate of Wall Street analysts polled by Thomson Financial.

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Net income came in at $5.2 billion, or $0.62 per share, up from $4.5 billion, or $0.53 per share, in last year's first quarter. That comes out to about a 17 percent increase in earnings per share.

These numbers include the deferral of $113 million of revenue primarily related to Windows 8.1 pre-sales, the company said. Meanwhile, last year's first-quarter report included the deferral of $1.4 billion of revenue related to several Windows and Office offers and pre-sales.

On a pro forma basis, which excludes certain one-time items, earnings per share were $0.63, down 3 percent year on year but exceeding the consensus expectation of analysts by 9 cents.

"Our devices and services transformation is progressing and we are launching a wide range of compelling products and experiences this fall for both business and consumers," said CEO Steve Ballmer in a statement.

Ballmer, who is slated to retire at some point in the coming 10 months or so, was referring to the company's ongoing effort to reinvent itself from a provider of packaged software into a provider of hardware devices and cloud-hosted services.

In this quarter, Microsoft is introducing a new financial reporting format for breaking down its revenue and profits. The format splits the company's business into two main buckets: Devices & Consumer and Commercial. The first bucket in turn has three subcategories, and the other one has two subcategories.

Devices & Consumer revenue grew 4 percent to $7.46 billion. Microsoft highlighted that in this category Windows OEM revenue fell 7 percent year on year, while revenue from the company's Surface tablets grew to $400 million, including an increase in revenue and units sold compared sequentially with the fourth fiscal quarter of 2013. Search advertising, provided via websites like the Bing search engine, grew 47 percent year on year.

In the Commercial category, revenue grew 10 percent to $11.2 billion, helped by strong sales of server software products like SQL Server, Lync, SharePoint and Exchange, as well as by a jump of more than 100 percent in revenue from enterprise cloud services.

When it announced the new reporting format last month, Microsoft said that it would provide more transparency and clarity into its business. The company also said the new format better represents the company's transformation into a provider of hardware devices and cloud services.

However, some critics pointed out at the time that the new format might accomplish just the opposite, making it more difficult to evaluate how certain products are faring in the market, because of two main reasons.

First, the new format mixes very different products into the same subcategories, complicating efforts to single out how a particular product performed. Second, the new format also splinters the results of certain key products like Windows and Office into several subcategories, making it hard to get a unified view of their sales.

Indeed, in the press release Microsoft issued to announce the first-quarter results, the company didn't provide enough granular data in it for investors, customers, analysts and other interested parties to get a clear view of how many of its products did during the period.

It remains to be seen if the company will provide more details later Thursday afternoon during the conference call to discuss the results.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/microsoft-grows-earnings-revenue-in-q1-helped-server-software-229523
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