- One of the most unusual scenes in recent Major League
Baseball history unfolded Friday as the Minnesota Twins released Japanese infielder Tsuyoshi
Nishioka. The nove didn’t come as a bit surprise as Nishioka spent most of 2012
with the Triple-A Rochester Red Wings, batting .258 with two home runs and 34
RBIs in 392 at-bats. After the Twins bid more than $5.3 million to his Japanese
team to gain negotiating rights and signed him to a three-year, $9.25 million
contract before the 2011 season, he broke his lower left leg just five games
into his rookie year and played in only three games for the Twins this summer,
making two errors plus several other mistakes in the field and going 0 for 12
with one sacrifice fly. His release came at his own request, which is unusual
but not unprecedented, but what made it so rare was that Nishioka accepted
blame for his failure to produce at the plate or play capable defense at
shortstop and second base and waived his right to his $3 million salary for the
2013 season and a $250,000 buyout. That means the Twins don't owe him any more
money and he is now a free agent. "I would like to thank the Twins
organization for helping me fulfill my dream of playing in Major League
Baseball," Nishioka said.
"I take full responsibility for my performance which was below my own
expectations. At this time, I have made the decision that it is time to part
ways. I have no regrets and know that only through struggle can a person grow
stronger. I appreciate all the support the team and the fans in Minnesota and
Rochester have shown me." Some of his odd approach could be ascribed to
the culture he comes from and the differences between the United States and
Japan when it comes to money, duty and personal responsibility. For a
small-market team like Minnesota, the financial blessing is immense, even if it
means admitting failure after signing a player who was the Nippon Professional
Baseball batting champion in 2010 and won the equivalent of a Gold Glove award
for his defense………
- If anyone had forgotten that hackers can take down or
access just about any site they want if they are talented enough, the plight of
the websites
of Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank and PNC Bank since
Sept. 19 should serve as a nice reminder. All five sites have suffered day-long
slowdowns and been sporadically unreachable for many customers during that
span. Bank of America was the first target and the attacks were sequential and
methodical. Security experts characterized the attcks as one of the biggest
cyberattacks they've ever seen. The “denial of service” attack is predicated
upon directing massive amounts of traffic at a website to crash it. Banks are
common targets for hackers, but this time their sizeable defenses were simply
overmatched. Many experts seemed flabbergasted by the scale of the attacks,
calling them unprecedented and at as much as 20 times the volume usually seen
in such hacking operations. To fuel their sinister plot, the attackers seized thousands
of high-powered application servers and pointed them all at the targeted banks. Bank of America and Chase's servers crashed on Sept. 19 and Wells
Fargo and U.S. Ban went down Wednesday, followed by PNC on Thursday. PNC
confirmed only that a high volume of traffic on Thursday was affecting users'
ability to access the website, but refused any further comment. Denial of
service attacks are incredibly simple and don’t involve any actual hacking, so
no data or personal information from customers was stolen. Instead, the goal
appears to have been temporarily knocking down the banks' websites. To carry
out the plot, the attackers would have needed months of planning to acquire the
servers and tie them together into a network called a "botnet." Those
launching DNS attacks typically have much simpler plans and use malware
installed remotely through viruses on the hard drives of unsuspecting users
whose machines are turned into virtual zombies at the control of hackers. There
is one primary culprit in the bank attacks, but researchers are divided over
how seriously to take claims of responsibility by the Islamist group Izz ad-Din
al-Qassam Cyber Fighters. Determining who was responsible would be a quality
first step to preventing such an attack from happening again……….
- One Direction may be a hack-tacular attempt to revive
the man-band era, but it’s the British pop twits’ rip-off of a classic British
punk rock band’s work that has earned Louis Tomlinson and his fellow man banders a
massive wave of condemnation. The group’s current horrible single is “Live
While We’re Young” and it sounds suspiciously (exactly, to be more accurate)
like The Clash’s iconic track “Should I Stay Or Should I Go.” When two songs
sound that much alike, there are only two viable options. The first is to pull
a Vanilla Ice when asked why the opening bars of his one and only hit “Ice Ice
Baby” sounds like a carbon copy of the opening bars of David Bowie’s famed
“Pressure.” When confronted, Vanilla Ice denied the two songs had identical
beginnings and claimed that one small octave change allegedly used in his song
makes the tracks completely different. The second option is to do what Tomlinson did
and admit that his group ripped off Joe Strummer’s crew, but argue that they
really didn’t have an option because there are only so many unique riffs
possible in music. "I assume it must be quite difficult to do a unique riff now
because there have been so many songs - surely there's only so many riffs you
can pull out?" Tomlinson asked. Fellow One Directioner Harry Styles admitted
that the similarity between the two songs was no accident. “It was kind of on
purpose though. It's a great riff,” he said. Yes, it is a great riff and it was
two-plus decades ago when The Clash came up with it. Twitter users lit One
Direction up for their blatant musical thievery, suggesting the man banders
should start paying royalties to The Clash. That wouldn’t be too difficult,
given that the members of the newest incarnation of 98 Men Street Town Sync
have made around $150 million collectively in the last two years and will undoubtedly rake in more from the
musically clueless masses when they release their second album “Take Me Home”
on Nov. 12…………
- Riot Watch! Riot Watch! The rage continued Friday in
Yemem, where thousands of protesters
marched in the capital city of Sanaa on Friday, demanding the return of
millions of dollars that were allegedly stolen by the country's former dictator,
Ali Abdullah Saleh. Stealing millions of dollars from an impoverished nation is
a great reason to riot and Friday’s uprising came a week after several nations
backing Yemen's political transition pushed for sanctions against Saleh's
loyalists for undermining the country's shift to democracy after a year fraught
with bloodshed and turmoil. Saleh managed to accumulate significant wealth
during nearly 30 years in power in Yemen, which coincidentally happens to be the
poorest country in the Middle East. A popular uprising forced him from power
earlier this year and Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi was elected president in February,
but that didn’t cause the people to forget about Saleh’s alleged crimes. Protests
againt Saleh have raged regularly over the past few months and opposition
groups have demanded that he members of his family be tried in court on
corruption charges and over killings of protesters during the revolt.
Protestors released a statement Friday calling on Hadi and his western allies to
help trace and retrieve Saleh's alleged stolen millions. Both Hadi and Yemeni
opposition groups agree that Saleh and his supporters are sabotaging the
country's transition process, which should lead to a new constitution within a
year and general election by early 2014. Some sanctions were hinted at last
week when diplomats from several Western nations and Gulf states that brokered
Yemen's power transfer deal recommended international sanctions against Saleh's
loyalists, the country southern secessionists and members of the largest
Islamist group. As the transition progress has ground to a halt, nearly
everyone involved has grown increasingly frustrated. Al-Qaeda has increased its
presence in Yemen and done plenty to escalate the violence. Hadi has feebly
tried to battle the group and has the United States’ support, but opposition
groups worry some of the new president's opponents may support the terrorist
group. In other words, it’s a ginormous clusterf*ck, so why not add a
well-timed riot to the mix………
- New and exciting developments are happening in the world
of implanting artificial components into the human body. For example, on Friday
the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved
a heart defibrillator that helps to restore regular heart rhythms with leads
that can be implanted just under the skin instead of connected directly into
the heart. Implantable defibrillators constantly monitor a person’s heart
rhythm and can deliver a therapeutic dose of electricity to restore the rhythm
when it senses the heart is beating dangerously fast (tachycardia) or erratically
(sudden cardiac arrest). This subcutaneous version is different than other
implantable defibrillators on the market, which require a physician to insert
one or more electrical conductor wires into a vein in the upper chest and guide
them into the patient’s heart using X-ray fluoroscopy, a real-time imaging
method. The Subcutaneous Implantable Defibrillator (S-ICD) System has the green
light to hit the market and it relies on a lead that is implanted just under
the skin along the bottom of the rib cage and breast bone. Physicians can
implant the device without accessing a patient’s blood vessels or heart and
without the need for fluoroscopy because the lead is placed under the skin
rather than through a vein into the heart. “The S-ICD System provides an
alternative for treating patients with life-threatening heart arrhythmias for
whom the routine ICD placement procedure is not ideal,” said Christy Foreman,
director of the Office of Device Evaluation at FDA’s Center for Devices and
Radiological Health. “Some patients with anatomy that makes it challenging to
place one of the implantable defibrillators currently on the market may
especially benefit from this device.” The overall purpose of the device is the
same as other implanted defibrillators, but it is approved only for patients
who do not require a pacemaker or pacing therapy. The FDA granted approval
after reviewing a 321-patient study in which 304 patients were successfully
implanted with the S-ICD System. The S-ICD System was successful at converting
all abnormal heart rhythms that it detected back to normal rhythms, which was
good enough for the U.S. government to sign off on the idea………
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