Tag Archives: PDF

Michael Hall: Ubuntu Document Viewer Hackfest

Last week was certainly an exciting one, between the Ubuntu Edge campaign announcement and several coworkers being at OSCON, I wasn’t able to keep the Hack Days going.  So we’ve decided to pick up where we left off this week, covering the remaining Core Apps on our list.  Just like before we’ll be hanging out in #ubuntu-app-devel on Freenode IRC from 9am to 9pm UTC, and will be more than happy to walk you through the process of getting started.

Today we’re going to work on the Document Viewer, a necessary app for most people, which is at the same time both simple and very complicated.  The app itself doesn’t require a lot of functionality, but it does need a lot of behind-the-scenes components to load and render documents of different formats.  Great progress has already been made on our dogfooding requirements list:

  • Load a text file. DONE!
  • Load an image file. DONE!
  • Load a PDF.
  • View the file. DONE!
  • Forward/back pages on PDF.
  • Pinch to zoom.

Until just yesterday, there wasn’t a released version of our desktop PDF library (Poppler) that had Qt5 bindings.  However, with the release of Poppler 0.24 yesterday, we should not be ready to start implementing the PDF support.  We also need to replace the existing C++ wrapper used to launch the app with the new Arguments QML component, but when we do that we’ll need another QML plugin that will give us the mime-type of the files that are being loaded.  And of course we need to make sure we have full Autopilot test coverage for all of these parts.  So whether your skill set is Python, QML, Javascript or C++, there is something you can contribute to on this app.

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Prison Psych Boss Promoted Despite Federal Findings About Mentally Ill Prisoners Brutalized Under His Watch

By Matt Stroud, Contributor

At the end of May, the U.S. Department of Justice released a scathing report (PDF) confirming allegations of severe abuse against mentally ill prisoners in a solitary confinement ward at a central Pennsylvania state prison. After nearly two-years of investigations, DOJ came to the same conclusions I did in a report for The Nation last May: that the conditions at the State Correctional Institution at Cresson (SCI Cresson) about 90 miles east of Pittsburgh were inhumane on a level that was “mentally torturous” to the prisoners, routinely leading “to psychosis and a serious worsening” of prisoners’ mental health. The focus of DOJ’s (and my) investigation was a prison ward known as the Secure Special Needs Unit or SSNU. The SSNU houses mentally ill prisoners who have been deemed by administrators to be unruly or dangerous. Staffed by correctional officers as well as psychology staff, the SSNU is designed to oversee mentally ill prisoners and usher them carefully through a therapeutic, five-step mental health program toward re-entering the prison’s general population. Instead, the SSNU devolved into “chaotic conditions”; instead of providing therapy, the SSNU warehoused the mentally ill in solitary confinement for indefinite periods of time, in brutal, often unbelievable circumstances. One section describes a circumstance in which “three of Cresson’s psychology staff …  witnessed a senior member of the staff telling SSNU prisoners with intellectual disabilities that they had to sing, ‘I’m a little teapot’ if they wanted to improve their living conditions and obtain more mental health treatment.” Though that description may sound like fiction, it soon became very real. That prisoner, who had an IQ of 70, devolved into near insanity due to his treatment at SCI Cresson. During five months in the SSNU, this prisoner fell into a “downward spiral,” the report describes. At no time was he offered group therapy or one-on-one therapy. He was mocked and taunted by correctional officers, called a “retard” repeatedly, forced to wear a thin, paper like smock in a solitary confinement cell while temperatures dropped to near freezing temperatures. COs spit in his food, declined to provide him with toilet paper, took away his mattress so he was forced to sleep on cold concrete. The report, which references the prisoner as “LL,” indicates “he was smearing feces on the wall of his cell” by May 2011. Two months later, he was threatening self-harm. The report continues: …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest

OCR makes short work of digitizing your docs

The file cabinet looms large in the office, yet it guards its secrets jealously…even from you. It’s time to convert those papers to space-saving, easy-to-find digital documents. For that, you need a scanner to turn them into digital images and an Optical Character Recognition program to convert those images into editable and searchable documents. I took four of the latest OCR programs and a free online OCR service for a test spin. All of them work to varying degrees.

To test the programs, I ran 22 varied and not particularly clean scans of documents—including one hand-written note—through four OCR programs and one free service. I looked for accuracy in text recognition, image extraction, and the ability to recreate them in a Word document. In addition, I processed 264 separate scans from a yearbook for output as a searchable PDF.

Free-OCR

You don’t actually need to install OCR software if you need to convert only a couple of small documents. You can use a free service such as Free-OCR (also known as Free-OCR.com) and upload a scan of your document. File size is limited to 2MB and 5000 pixels in any direction, which is about 150 dpi for a standard page. The OCR engine handles 29 languages, including English.

Free-OCR makes you jump through a CAPTCHA hoop, but does it apologetically.

Although you don’t have to register or even fork over your email address, the Free-OCR site does make you fill in one of those annoying CAPTCHAs. (Thanks, Web bad guys, for making everyone’s life more difficult.) However, those CAPTCHAs serve to remind one just how difficult OCR can be. If humans, with our incredible heuristic abilities, occasionally have problems with these, just think how poor straight-line software perusing a stream of bits must feel.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Video: Document Expert Could Topple The Obama Administration

By Kris Zane

There have been many lawsuits challenging Barack Obama’s eligibility to be President—most based on the fact that Obama is not a natural born citizen, his father being a Kenyan. Other lawsuits challenge the validity of Obama’s PDF long-form birth certificate, riddled with strange anomalies like multiple layers and eight different fonts.

The lawsuits have all crashed and burned in flames for two reasons: 1. The court hearing the lawsuits have treated the cases as a joke instead of a valid question of Constitutional requirements. And 2. The plaintiffs haven’t had Reed Hayes on their side.

Reed Hayes is a forensic document expert who may be the man who finally brings down the Obama administration.

In an extensive and scathing forty page report on Obama’s birth certificate prepared for the upcoming eligibility lawsuit before the Alabama Supreme Court, Hayes concludes the following:

…Based on my observations and findings, it is clear that the Certificate of Live Birth I examined is not a scan of an original paper birth certificate, but a digitally manufactured document created by utilizing material from various sources. In over 20 years of examining documentation of various types, I have never seen a document that is so seriously questionable in so many respects. In my opinion, the birth certificate is entirely fabricated.

You might be saying: Okay, there has been something like two dozens lawsuits. They’ve all failed. The court and Obama’s lawyers always deem any experts against Obama’s birth certificate as quacks. So what’s different this time?

Two words: Perkins Coie.

Sound familiar? It should. It’s the law firm that has represented Barack Hussein Obama in virtually every single eligibility court challenge.

And guess who has done extensive work for and testified on behalf of Perkins Coie?

Forensic document expert Reed Hayes, whose abridged list of training, experience, and court cases goes on for a dozen pages.

How will Obama’s lawyers discredit a forensic document expert that their own law firm extensively relied on?

Answer: They won’t be able to discredit him. If they do happen to try to discredit him, every single case Perkins Coie has employed Reed Hayes for will also be discredited.

How’s that for a catch-22?

But that isn’t the half of Obama’s problems.

The gaggle of Perkins Coie lawyers will be arguing that Obama is eligible to be President before the Alabama Supreme Court, with none other than Roy Moore presiding as Chief Justice. Moore is a conservative and strict constitutionalist who has voiced his concerns in the past regarding Barack Obama’s eligibility to be President. In fact, he is the judge who supported Lt. Colonel Terry Lakin’s refusal to deploy to Afghanistan until Obama provided proof that he was a natural born citizen.

Oh, but there’s one more problem. A very big problem: Obama’s lawyers have produced a birth certificate in their brief to the Alabama Supreme Court. Problem: It differs from the birth certificate Obama released on April 27, 2011!

Whoops!

Will Barack Hussein Obama again slither out of another legal challenge to his eligibility?

Is forensic …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Western Journalism

Review: Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional Edition does clean OCR and is easy to use

Anyone who’s purchased a multifunction printer or scanner recently will probably recognize the name FineReader, as the Sprint version ships with many such products. Obviously, there are deals being made, but there’s no questioning that the program also does a very nice job of OCR. Text extraction is great, though it’s not quite as good at recreating complex documents in Word and RTF files as Acrobat or OmniPage.

Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional ($170, 15-day free trial) is straightforward and easy to use. The main window shows a list of images in a column to the far left, the image being processed in a pane next to it, and the OCR’d text and elements in a pane on the right side. This side-by-side arrangement, shared with OmniPage Standard 18, makes it super-easy to spot mistakes and compare page elements.

Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional’s easy-to-understand interface makes it easy to use even if you’re new to OCR.

Abbyy FineReader 11 is fast, recognizes text in 189 languages, and outputs in a number of different formats including editable PDFs, Microsoft Word, ePub and even open-source PDF competitor DjVu.

FineReader created a searchable PDF of my yearbook scans just fine, but like OmniPage, it was over-zealous at rotating images trying to find text until I turned off this feature. With most OCR programs, you’re better off using Windows’ own Photo Viewer to rotate scans to their correct orientation before OCR’ing.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Convert a PDF for Kindle viewing, no software required

If you rely on a Kindle (or Kindle app) for reading, you probably know that it supports not only ebooks, but also PDFs.

In fact, if you’ve done your homework, you also know that your Kindle (or Kindle app) has its own email address, meaning you can send any PDF straight to your device just by attaching it to an email. (You can find this address in the Kindle’s Settings area.)

Unfortunately, most PDFs arrive exactly as they are: static images that aren’t optimized for Kindle viewing, and therefore require a lot of zooming and scrolling. If you ask me, they’re almost unreadable in this state.

But here’s a little-known fact: Amazon will convert your PDF to raw text when you put the word convert in the subject line of the email.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Unusual file-infecting malware steals FTP credentials, researchers say

A new version of a file-infecting malware program that’s being distributed through drive-by download attacks is also capable of stealing FTP (File Transfer Protocol) credentials, according to security researchers from antivirus firm Trend Micro.

The newly discovered variant is part of the PE_EXPIRO family of file infectors that was identified in 2010, the Trend Micro researchers said Monday in a blog post. However, this version’s information theft routine is unusual for this type of malware.

The new threat is distributed by luring users to malicious websites that host Java and PDF exploits as part of an exploit toolkit. If visitors’ browser plug-ins are not up to date, the malware will be installed on their computers.

The Java exploits are for the CVE-2012-1723 and CVE-2013-1493 remote code execution vulnerabilities that were patched by Oracle in June 2012 and March 2013 respectively.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Daniel Holbach: Gute Arbeit, deutsches Übersetzungsteam!

:)

The German translations team have done it! They brought the German translation of the Ubuntu Packaging Guide above 70%, which is the magic threshold for us to enable the translation in the package. Since earlier today you will find this in the Packaging Guide Daily Build PPA (soon going to land in Debian and then in Ubuntu too):

daniel@daydream:~$ apt-cache search german packaging guide ubuntu
ubuntu-packaging-guide-html-de - Ubuntu Packaging Guide - HTML guide - German version
ubuntu-packaging-guide-pdf-de - Ubuntu Packaging Guide - PDF guide - German version
ubuntu-packaging-guide-epub-de - Ubuntu Packaging Guide - EPUB guide - German version
daniel@daydream:~$

You can also check out the HTML version, single page HTML, PDF version and EPUB version on the web.

This is great news for everyone who wants to get started with Ubuntu development as it will make the first steps easier. Let’s get the translations up to 100% now!

Current translations stats are looking like this now:

  • Spanish (96%).
  • Brazilian Portuguese, Russian (83%).
  • German (72%).
  • Traditional Chinese (28%).
  • Japanese (14%).
  • French (10%).
  • Dutch, Indonesian (5%).
  • Chinese Hong Kong (1%).
  • Italian, Greek, Telugu, Australian English, Vietnamese, Kannada, Macedonian, Swedish, Turkish, Simplified Chinese. Latvian, Slovenian, Croatian, Hungarian, Catalan (0%).

Please help out making the guide available in your language as well. Start here.

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

McAfee spots Adobe Reader PDF-tracking flaw

McAfee said it has found a vulnerability in Adobe Systems’ Reader program that reveals when and where a PDF document is opened.

The issue is not a serious problem and does not allow for remote code execution, wrote McAfee’s Haifei Li in a blog post. But McAfee does consider it a security problem and has notified Adobe. It affects every version of Adobe Reader, including the latest version, 11.0.2, Li wrote.

McAfee recently detected some “unusual” PDF samples, Li wrote. McAfee withheld some key details of the vulnerability, but did generally describe it.

The issue occurs when someone launches a link to another file path, which calls on a JavaScript API (application programming interface). Reader warns a user when they are going to call on a resource from another place, such as a link on the Internet.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Why People Hate Obamacare

By John Maxfield, The Motley Fool

Filed under:

Three years ago, President Obama signed into law one of the most sweeping pieces of legislation in recent memory, the Affordable Care Act — or “Obamacare,” as most Americans know it.

To say that the law was and remains controversial would be an understatement. Over the past month, we’ve published a number of articles on the topic ranging from 12 shocking truths about it to the impact Obamacare will have on taxes. And our readers have had a lot to say in the comment sections of each article.

What follows, in turn, is a collection of the five biggest complaints our readers have expressed about Obamacare in the articles that we’ve published on the subject. To generate the list, I’ve curated our best articles on the subject from the past two months.

1. Higher taxes
The biggest complaint is that Obamacare raises taxes. This is particularly true with respect to Medicare taxes for higher-income earners.

As Dan Caplinger discussed in “How Obamacare Changed Your Taxes,” single taxpayers earning more than $200,000 a year in wages or other work-related earnings will pay an additional 0.9 percentage points in Medicare tax – the threshold increases to $250,000 for taxpayers filing jointly. And taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes exceeding the same thresholds will see a portion of their investment income taxed at the higher rate as well.

Beyond this, as Dan also brings up, is that it decreases the amount that lower-income earners can set aside in a flexible spending plan to $2,500 a year and raises the floor on deductible medical expenses from 7.5% to 10% of adjusted gross income.

2. Skyrocketing health-care costs
One of the principal purposes of Obamacare is to drive down the costs of medical care and insurance premiums. But as Sean Williams noted in “Is Obamacare About to Skyrocket Your Health Care Costs?” there’s reason to be skeptical that it will succeed in doing so.

Sean cites a report (link opens a PDF) by the Society of Actuaries estimating, among other things, that the inclusion of non-group members participating in the insurance pools will increase average individual claims cost by 32%. The increase won’t be uniform across states. In five states, underlying claims are expected to drop. In 37 others, claims costs are expected to increase by 20% or more. The reason is simple: Under the legislation, 32.4 million of the currently 52.4 million uninsured Americans (who often carry the highest risk) will gain coverage.

3. Additional costs on employers
A key provision of the Affordable Care Act mandates that companies with 50 or more employees must provide full-time workers with health insurance or face a penalty of $2,000 per employee. In “Will Obamacare Cost You Your Job?” the Fool’s Keith Speights observed: “For some small businesses, the extra costs for this coverage are forcing tough decisions.” Keith cites two examples in particular. First, small businesses with more than 50 employees could scale back their payroll.

Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Why something moving in the periphery of the screen immediately grabs your attention

Chances are that you’ve experienced this (probably quite a few times): You’re currently concentrating on what happens in the center of your screen, focusing your eyes on it, when suddenly something blinks, moves, appears or disappears in a corner or at an edge of the screen. Whether you would have known what it was without looking at it or not, your attention is immediately drawn to it. If this happens more than once, it becomes an annoying distraction which may be hard to ignore.

There is a simple reason for that: As you might remember from Biology class, there are two kinds photoreceptor cells in the human eye: Cones and rods. Cones are used for high-resolution color vision and are concentrated in the fovea centralis, which catches light from the object you’re focusing on. Rods, which are more common in the periphery of the retina (in fact they’re almost completely absent in the fovea centralis), are used for low-light vision and are especially good at detecting motion.This is useful to spot and quickly react to e.g. an attack coming from the side in the periphery of our field of vision.

Even though attacks are fortunately not that all that common for most of us nowadays, we are still biologically designed to focus our attention on anything that’s moving in the periphery. In the context of a computer screen, a sudden change of color or shape, something quickly appearing or disappearing can also be interpreted as movement. This is great if the movement signals something which actuallydeserves our immediate attention, but if it’s something that we don’t actually need to pay attention to at the moment but which grabs our attention anyway, it quickly becomes annoying. And if you finally manage to ignore the constant annoyance, you may miss if information which actually is important to you comes up in the periphery.

Accordingly, peripheral displays with moving information were found to decrease performance in information browsing [1] and text editing [2] tasks (though another study [3] did not find significant performance decrease in a browsing task).

So, bottom line / takeaway / tl;dr: If you need to grab your users’ attention, just animate/change something in the periphery and it’s pretty sure to work. But resist the urge to put something constantly moving like a scrolling ticker on the edge of the screen, it’s scientifically proven to distract users from their main task.

[1]J. Somervell, R. Srinivasan, K. Woods, and O. Vasniak, “Measuring distraction and awareness caused by graphical and textual displays in the periphery,” in Proceedings of the 39th Annual ACM Southeast Conference, 2001. PDF
[2]P. P. Maglio and C. S. Campbell, “Tradeoffs in displaying peripheral information,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 2000, pp. 241–248. PDF
[3]D. S. McCrickard, J. T. Stasko, and R. Catrambone, “Evaluating animation as a mechanism for

From: http://sessellift.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/periphery-grab-attention/

Review: LyX is an advanced but easy-to-use document processor based on LaTeX typesetting

When one thinks of document editors, it’s usually Microsoft Word and Google Docs that come to mind. But in the world of word processors there are marquee names, and then there are some worthies not yet in the limelight. Advanced cross-platform document processor LyX has its merits. LyX is free and Open Source. LyX’s workflow is something of an adjustment from Microsoft Word, but learning it can pay off. The results are similar to professional typesetting.

Creating our first document on LyX is as simple as any other: Go to File – New. You can copy-paste or type your first text without bothering about any formatting. To start with formatting, we will say LyX uses Environments. Environments are lot like Microsoft Word and its use of Styles to format documents with consistency. But Environments give far greater control across a variety of document types.

Document processors are usually WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). LyX is WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean), though the frontend does not differ much from any other document editor. The way LyX controls the layout of the document lies in the background, where it uses powerful typesetting markup language LaTeX.

The default Environment is Standard. LyX has different Environments for typesetting sections, lists, sub-lists, verses, quotations, bibliography etc. Expanding the dropdown, we can choose to apply the appropriate ones and within a few clicks, our basic document now starts looking more professional. Different Text Styles can be used on the text. It can be previewed with a PDF reader.

The idea is to separate the content from its presentation. Precise control over layout is a must for academic and scientific authoring. This is where LyX comes into its own. LaTeX is complicated. LyX is the friendly GUI. The program handles the final presentation, leaving the writer with only the business of writing the content. The end result is a more attractive and consistent document.

Different documents like a book, a thesis, a letter etc. need to be typeset differently. LyX uses Document classes which tell it how to typeset the document so that we don’t have to bother about the distinctions. Each choice of a Document class also changes the Environments which go with it. Some are built-in but many Document classes and layout options are available online which allow us to extend LyX for all types of document processing needs.

LyX is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, with unofficial ports for OS/2 and Haiku. For a fresh installation on Windows, opt for the 200MB bundle, which is fully functional and includes the complete LaTeX distribution (MiKTeX) and a bibliography manager. A 35MB update installation is available for older versions of LyX with LaTeX already installed on the system.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2034830/review-lyx-is-an-advanced-but-easy-to-use-document-processor-based-on-latex-typesetting.html#tk.rss_all

Congress OK Sought to Sell Boeing C-17 Globemaster to Kuwait

By Rich Smith, The Motley Fool

Filed under:

The U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency — the outfit responsible for coordinating military sales contracts between the U.S. and its allies, and getting Congress’ OK on such sales before they can proceed — notified Congress of no fewer than five such upcoming “foreign military sales” contracts Wednesday. The biggest of the sales involving actual arms was a proposed sale [link opens in PDF] to Kuwait of a single Boeing C-17 Globemaster III transport aircraft.

The aircraft, equipped with F117-PW-100 engines from United Technologies subsidiary Pratt & Whitney, is expected to cost approximately $371 million all-in. DSCA told Congress that in addition to securing the revenues for Boeing and UTC, selling this plane to Kuwait is a good idea because “Kuwait continues to be a key ally and strong supporter of U.S. foreign policy and national security goals in the Persian Gulf region. The proposed sale will enhance the United States foreign policy and national security objectives by increasing interoperability among the Kuwait Air Force (KAF), the United States Air Force, Gulf Cooperation Council countries, and other coalition forces.”

Additionally, noted DSCA, adding a second C-17 to Kuwait‘s Air Force “will allow the KAF to better participate in humanitarian support operations.”

link

The article Congress OK Sought to Sell Boeing C-17 Globemaster to Kuwait originally appeared on Fool.com.

Fool contributor Rich Smith has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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Buenaventura Announces Contractors Strike at Uchucchacua Mine

By Business Wirevia The Motley Fool

Filed under:

Buenaventura Announces Contractors Strike at Uchucchacua Mine

LIMA, Peru–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Compañía de Minas Buenaventura S.A.A. (“Buenaventura”) (NYSE: BVN; Lima Stock Exchange: BUE.LM), Peru‘s largest publicly traded, precious metals mining company announced today that the Uchucchacua contractors began a strike yesterday.

The cited reason for the strike is for obtaining special economic benefits.

The Company would like to point out that annual negotiations between the Contractors with their Unions were closed in January.

The Peruvian Ministry of Labor has denied the proceeding of the strike at this time.

The Company will update accordingly as any developments occur.

Company Description

Compañía de Minas Buenaventura S.A.A. is Peru‘s largest, publicly traded precious metals Company and a major holder of mining rights in Peru. The Company is engaged in the mining, processing, development and exploration of gold and silver and other metals via wholly owned mines, as well as through its participation in joint exploration projects.

Buenaventura currently operates several mines in Peru (Orcopampa*, Poracota*, Uchucchacua*, Breapampa*, Mallay*, Antapite*, Julcani*, Recuperada*, El Brocal, La Zanja, Coimolache and CEDIMIN*).

The Company owns 43.65% of Minera Yanacocha S.R.L (a partnership with Newmont Mining Corporation), an important precious metal producer; 19.58% of Sociedad Minera Cerro Verde, an important Peruvian copper producer, and 49% of Canteras del Hallazgo S.A, owner the Chucapaca project.

For a printed version of the Company’s 2011 Form 20-F, please contact the persons indicated above, or download a PDF format file from the Company’s web site.

(*) Operations wholly owned by Buenaventura

Note on Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may contain forward-looking information (as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995) that involve risks and uncertainties, including those concerning the Company’s, Yanacocha’s and Cerro Verde’s costs and expenses, results of exploration, the continued improving efficiency of operations, prevailing market prices of gold, silver, copper and other metals mined, the success of joint ventures, estimates of future explorations, development and production, subsidiaries’ plans for capital expenditures, estimates of reserves and Peruvian political, economic, social and legal developments. These forward-looking statements reflect the Company’s view with respect to the Company’s, Yanacocha’s and Cerro Verde’s future financial performance. Actual results could differ

From: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/04/17/buenaventura-announces-contractors-strike-at-uchuc/

2 Winners and 2 Losers From Cheap Pump Prices

By Justin Loiseau, The Motley Fool

Filed under:

Park the Prius: Pump prices are heading lower for the second straight summer. But even as individual drivers get more for less, shifting preferences could sideline some auto investors. I’ll look at the price predictions, and I’ll outline two winners and two losers from this latest trend.

Pump it up
The Energy Information Administration released its 2013 Summer Fuels Outlook report (link opens a PDF) this week, and things are looking up for gas prices to head down. According to the report, summer retail gasoline prices will drop to a national average of $3.63 per gallon, $0.03 below 2012’s summer and $0.08 below 2011’s price tag.

Two winners
Heavyweights win on this latest news. In the game of supply and demand, cheaper gas prices make gas guzzlers more affordable for Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Ford and General Motors are revving up their latest line of pickups, and new sales could pour in with less wear on drivers’ wallets. General Motors announced last week that its new Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra will sport the most fuel-efficient V-8 engines in their market. The Silverado’s 5.3-liter engine will get a whopping 23 mpg, with more pulling power than any of its competitors.

In an ironic twist of fate, Ford’s F-150 could make even more gains than GM. The F-series has been America’s best-selling truck for more than 30 years, and GM‘s efficiency ace-in-the-hole could come up short of toppling the Blue Oval‘s omnipotence. Ford sold 14,000 more trucks than GM in March, and cheap gas could keep this upward trend constant through summer months.

Who killed the electric car?
Innovation drives our economy, but the greatest solutions only emerge from the greatest problems. With high oil supplies and cheap prices, who needs fuel-efficient cars? Tesla Motors is a pure-play electric automaker that could feel a major summer squeeze. Founder and CEO Elon Musk is trying fancy new financing tricks to make his luxury vehicles more affordable, but the price might just not be right for the gas-vs.-electric argument.

Likewise, Toyota Motor‘s fuel-efficient fleet could suffer significantly. The automaker’s Prius has long demanded a price premium for its light consumption and currently controls 68% of the non-plug-in hybrid market. Overall hybrid sales grew 14% in Q1 2013, but Ford’s F-Series and GM‘s Chevy Silverado remain the No. 1 and No. 2 best-selling vehicles in America. Cheap gas prices certainly won’t help lightweights like the Prius topple those top picks.

When macro affects micro
Summer pump prices could put fuel efficiency on the back burner, significantly affecting upcoming sales for your investment. But cheap gas for a few months is no substitute for visionary engineering and innovation. The companies that can consistently create the best vehicle at the best value will win out in the long term, and investors should make their portfolio picks accordingly.

Worried about Ford?
If you’re concerned that Ford’s turnaround has

From: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/04/14/2-winners-and-2-losers-from-cheap-pump-prices/

Google search results are 5 times safer than Bing's

Bing just got served a piece of its own Scroogle pie, after an independent study found that Microsoft’s search engine delivers malware-infested websites in its results at nearly five times the rate of Google.

Researchers at the AV-Test security institute in Germany spent 18 months investigating more than 40 million websites delivered as search engine results in order to gauge which search sites include pages infected by malware or phishing attacks. Its findings [PDF] are flattering for Google, but not so much for Bing.

According to the study, out of 20 million websites provided by Google and Bing in equal part, 272 Google results contained malware, while Bing delivered almost five times as many infected websites: 1285 poisoned pages. In the overall ranking, however, Russian search engine Yandex delivered the most malware results, almost ten times more than Google.

“If we factor in the fact that Google processes around 2 to 3 billion search requests every day, however, it becomes clear that hundreds of thousands of infected websites are delivered to users on a daily basis,” Markus Selinger from AV-Test concluded in the report, which found a total of 5000 potential pieces of malware throughout the testing period.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2034105/google-search-results-are-5-times-safer-than-bings.html#tk.rss_all

Import and Export Prices Drop for March

By Justin Loiseau, The Motley Fool

Filed under:

Export and import prices are both down for March, according to a Labor Department report (link opens in PDF) released today.

After bumping up 0.6% in February on high fuel prices, a subsequent 1.9% fuel price drop pushed import prices down 0.5% for March. Export prices also dipped, down 0.4% after February’s 0.7% increase.

Market analysts were on the nose for imports, having expected a 0.5% decrease. Exports, however, missed analysts’ mark of a 0.1% increase.

On a country-level basis, import prices from China dropped 0.2% for March and are down 1.1% for the last 12 months. European Union import prices fell 0.7% from February.

Agricultural prices have been a major driver behind export price increases over the last year, but a 1.8% slump for March prices was the primary pull behind export’s month-over-month price reversal.

link

The article Import and Export Prices Drop for March originally appeared on Fool.com.

Y
ou can follow Justin Loiseau on Twitter, @TMFJLo, and on Motley Fool CAPS, @TMFJLo.
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From: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/04/11/import-and-export-prices-drop-for-march/

Should CEOs Talk Politics?

By Justin Loiseau, The Motley Fool

Filed under:

Chief executives are born leaders. But when private sector heads become soapbox pundits, it can drastically affect their business. Overstepped boundaries can cause public outcry, consumer backlash, or — at times, overwhelming support. Let’s look at an emerging hot topic and two historic examples to see what separates corporate gaffes from corporate gold.

“Mountains of debt”
In case you haven’t heard, the U.S. government has a lot of debt. Tax hikes and spending cuts have sparked economic and political controversies nationwide, and hundreds of executives are offering their own opinion.

On Monday, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers issued a statement outlining his argument for Congress to cut debt. In a 500-word letter released via Duke’s Investor News website, the CEO urged citizens to push Washington’s prioritization of the national debt. Although Rogers touched on some specifics, the larger voice behind his letter came from the announcement that he’s one of the latest CEOs to join the Campaign to Fix the Debt.

The 350,000-strong “non-partisan movement to put America on a better fiscal and economic path” includes over 170 executives organized as a “CEO Fiscal Leadership Council.” The list (link opens PDF file) contains dozens of corporate superstars, including Microsoft‘s Steve Ballmer, General Electric‘s Jeffrey Immelt, and JPMorgan‘s Jamie Dimon.

What’s your job description?
Whether or not our national debt needs fixing isn’t relevant to the question at hand: Should business leaders partake in political debate? The links connecting government to corporations are undeniable, and each entity directly and indirectly affects the other.

My answer to this question: It depends. Let’s take a look at two prominent CEOs’ political polemics to see what separates gaffe from gold.

Papa’s got a brand new bag
Papa John’s founder and CEO John Schnatter is no fan of Obamacare. After the Affordable Care Act was first proposed, Schnatter told shareholders he expected the new legislation to cost his company around $5 million to $8 million a year, costing the company $0.11 to $0.14 more per pizza.. To cover costs, Papa John‘s proffered two options: (a) raise pizza prices  and (b) cut employee hours to disqualify them from company coverage.

Supporters and naysayers flooded the Internet, airwaves, and Investor Relations office with their own two cents. Speaking to Naples News, Schnatter reflected that he “got in a bunch of trouble” for his double-edged dialogue.

Although I commend him for drawing a direct link to his business that consumers can understand, this connection is also his argument’s greatest flaw. $0.11 to $0.14 per pizza? That’s quite a calculation, and seems to micromanage Obamacare’s effects.

Buffett’s bluff
While Schnatter’s comments focused on the issue of government spending, Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett recently offered his take on taxation. In a Nov. 25, 2012 New York Times editorial, Buffett outlined his bullish case for a minimum tax for the wealthy.

Just like Papa John‘s, the Oracle of Omaha’s words were simultaneously lauded and laughed

From: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/04/11/should-ceos-talk-politics/

Nebraska Trial Courts Announce Electronic Service of Documents Now Integrated in eFiling

By Business Wirevia The Motley Fool

Filed under:

Nebraska Trial Courts Announce Electronic Service of Documents Now Integrated in eFiling

LINCOLN, Neb.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– The Nebraska Administrative Office of the Courts has launched a long awaited component of their state-wide eFiling service for County and District courts. Electronic service of documents (eService) allows attorneys eFiling in the Nebraska trial courts to receive email notification when actions are filed on cases where they represent one or more parties.

The eFiling process is available to any attorney in good standing with the Nebraska State Bar Association. Filers submit case information and PDF documents via a web interface, which are then delivered instantly to any of the 189 courts across the state. With eService, when a document is filed, the attorney can see which counsel will be served electronically, and can select the service method used to deliver the document to any party/attorney where electronic service is not an option. View the demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IjxlkpnR6Q

“The integration of electronic service into our online filing system has been a goal of the courts for some time,” said State Court Administrator Janice Walker. “We want to streamline processes and provide better access to the trial courts in Nebraska.”

The Nebraska Trial Court online services suite also includes:

  • Court Case Payments: Make payments on Civil, Small Claims, Criminal, Traffic and Juvenile cases
  • Court Case Searches: Search case history in all county and district courts by party name
  • Court Hearing Calendar: Find hearing dates, times and room numbers for trial courts (also available for iPhone and Android)

The Nebraska electronic filing system is available for civil, criminal, juvenile and probate cases. Over 30,000 documents a month are processed through the online service.

Users can find out more about online Government services in Nebraska through:

RSS feeds: http://www.nebraska.gov/rss.xml

Twitter: http://twitter.com/nebraskagov

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/nefanpage

About Nebraska.gov

Nebraska.gov (http://www.Nebraska.gov) is managed by Nebraska Interactive,

From: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/04/11/nebraska-trial-courts-announce-electronic-service-/

AVG Research Finds 90% of Game Hacks Are Infected with Malware

By Business Wirevia The Motley Fool

Filed under:

AVG Research Finds 90% of Game Hacks Are Infected with Malware

– Thousands of gamers are needlessly putting themselves at risk –

AMSTERDAM & SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)– AVG Technologies N.V. (NYS: AVG) , the provider of Internet and mobile security, privacy and optimization to 146 million active users, has today published the second edition of its new monthly newsletter, AVG Insight.

The April AVG Insight reveals how the AVG Viruslab Research Group has identified that more than 90% of all unauthorized ‘hacks’ for major computer games are infected with malware. These hacks take many forms, including cheats, patches and ‘keygens’ that enable use of pirated games, but all are designed to appeal to players looking to either accelerate their in-game process or get something for free. However, while the hacks may appear attractive at first glance, most are created by cybercriminals looking to pry, disrupt or steal.

Although only a small percentage of those gamers will go looking for a hack, the top 5 games are played by an aggregate total of around 330 million players worldwide, meaning the potential target market for the cybercriminals is still huge – even if just 0.1% of players go looking for a hack, that could mean 330,000 gamers are at risk of falling victim to the malware.

To read the full AVG Insight on the AVG Media Center, or to download a PDF copy, please click here.

About AVG Technologies (NYSE: AVG)

AVG’s mission is to simplify, optimize and secure the Internet experience, providing peace of mind to a connected world. AVG’s powerful yet easy-to-use software and online services put users in control of their Internet experience. By choosing AVG’s software and services, users become part of a trusted global community that benefits from inherent network effects, mutual protection and support. AVG has grown its user base to 143 million active users as of September 30, 2012 and offers a product portfolio that targets the consumer and small business markets and includes Internet security, PC performance optimization, online backup, mobile security, identity protection and family safety software.

www.avg.com

Keep in touch

From: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/04/11/avg-research-finds-90-of-game-hacks-are-infected-w/