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Blockbuster Canada’s remaining stores are set to close soon, and hundreds of retail jobs at the national movie rental chain are about to disappear, victims of the digital movie revolution.

The receiver in charge of selling Blockbuster Canada wants a court order to shut down the movie rental company’s 253 remaining retail locations, saying Wednesday it had been unable to find a buyer willing to invest in the business.

Each Blockbuster store employs an average of 10 people, meaning about 2,500 people could be out of work. An estimated 1,400 people lost their jobs during the first round of store closures earlier this summer.

About 150 Blockbuster Canada stores were closed in June, as it grappled with a shift to digital downloads, a tepid economy and new ownership of the U.S. Blockbuster chain which left the Canadian chain in debt.

“As a result of the significant changes in Blockbuster Canada Co.’s competitive landscape, the company’s ‘bricks and mortar’ business model has experienced significant challenges over the last few years, largely due to the proliferation of various alternatives available to media consumers in Canada,” the receiver said in a statement issued late Wednesday.

The receiver said Wednesday the closure process should begin in the next few days, and existing gift cards and rewards programs will no longer be accepted.

A court hearing to consider the full-out closure is scheduled for next Tuesday.

No liquidation plans outlined

There were long lines at stores set to be shuttered when the first round of liquidation sales began in June, with customers stripping the shelves bare in only a few hours as they bought stacks of $4 DVDs.

Wednesday’s statement from the receiver did not outline liquidation plans.

The receiver said it has tried to sell the company, but was unable to reach a deal with a buyer that was willing to make the necessary investments to keep the business going.

Blockbuster Canada was placed into receivership by an Ontario court in May in the face of US$70 million in claims from various movie distributors, including Hollywood studios that provide its DVDs, and other suppliers.

The Canadian operations had acted as a guarantor for Blockbuster’s U.S. business, which went into bankruptcy protection in September and was later auctioned off for $320 million US to American satellite TV provider Dish Network Corp.. Dish did not buy Blockbuster Canada, which was left to pay the bills. Dish shares closed 6.5 per cent higher on the Nasdaq Wednesday at $24.86 US.

Earlier this month, a New York court delayed a hearing that would have decided whether Blockbuster Canada could legally use the brand name as it went through receivership.

Struggled to stay relevant

The new owner of Blockbuster USA had said it did not want the Canadian retailer to use the name, while Blockbuster Canada argued it had paid fees for that right. Blockbuster stores had operated in Canada for 21 years.

The receiver in charge of selling Blockbuster Canada had argued that stripping the chain of that right would “devastate” its business.

Blockbuster Canada had been struggling to stay relevant in a time of increasing digital movie downloads.

U.K.-based HMV, once a top music retailer, sold off its Canadian arm in June to Hilco, a company that agreed to invest up to $25 million to fund the evolution of the national music, video and game retailer as it adjusts to the new world of digital entertainment. HMV was drowning in debt and needed to sell off HMV Canada to pay its bills.

HMV Canada had recently been boosting its offerings to focus on a broader selection of music and film-related products, including T-shirts, headphones, video game controllers, mobile phones and other electronics, in an effort to curb declining revenues as disc sales weaken and more shoppers opt for downloads.

No, Google didn’t hire me nor did they extend an offer to me. That’s right ladies and gentleman – the big G turned me down. Why you ask? I’ve thought a lot about it and in all honesty I don’t know why. Unfortunately Google didn’t tell me why I didn’t receive the job but in in their defense withholding that type of information is a pretty standard HR practice amongst large corporations.

Maybe it was my personality? Maybe it was my GPA? Maybe I answered a question wrong? Maybe I presented an incorrect solution to a theoretical problem? Maybe I didn’t do enough to verbalize my thought process? Maybe I posted something on my blog they didn’t like?

From day one of my campaign I told you all I wasn’t entitled to a job at Google just because I dug into my savings and created a campaign for them. At the end of the day they judged me on the same criteria they judge every other candidate on and I didn’t meet those criteria – plain and simple. Regardless of the reasoning behind Google’s decision, I fully respect their choice and think no less of them. Google has great people and great products. Everyone at Google was nothing but kind to me – from the employees that e-mailed me with good luck wishes to the recruiters that made me sweat during my interviews.

It turns out that scattering cash into the wind would have been more efficient than the United States’ system for awarding reconstruction contracts during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A two-year inquiry by a congressionally created panel finds that at least15 percent of the $206 billion-with-a-B spent on wartime contracts thus far has been lost to waste, fraud and abuse. That very conservative estimate is likely to grow — and it amounts to an indictment not just of wartime contracts, but the wars themselves.

The Commission on Wartime Contracting concludes that “vast amounts” of contract money in Iraq and Afghanistan provided “little or no benefit” to the war efforts. (.PDF) The commission confirmed $31 billion in contractor cash lost to corruption or dysfunction. But it warned that the true figure could be as high as $60 billion, or “$12 million every day for the past 10 years.”

And even that massive figure — almost 30 percent of all wartime contract dollars — isn’t the whole story. Iraq and Afghanistan remain riddled with corruption. That corruption endangers all the “apparently well-designed projects and programs” that the U.S. has launched in both countries. Untold “billions of dollars” are liable to “turn into waste” in the future “if the host governments cannot or will not commit the funds, staff, and expertise to operate and maintain them” — especially money spent on the Afghan military and on Iraqi health-care centers.

How did wartime contracting turn into a sludge of waste and fraud? It’s not just the Pentagon’s sole-source contracting jones, which Sharon Weinberger has shone a spotlight onto all week long here at Danger Room. (Although the Commission writes that the U.S. has “awarded task orders for excessive durations
without adequate competition.”) It’s also the sheer ignorance of U.S. war planners.

“U.S. officials lack an understanding of the need to reconcile short-term military and longer-term development goals and objectives,” the Commission finds, “realistically assess host-country conditions and capabilities, and work within the constraints of local economies’ absorptive capacity for influxes of cash.”

Afghanistan’s GDP is about $27 billion. Yet onto that barren economic landscape, the U.S. has dumped about $450 billion in war-related cash. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies incisively observed last year that the huge cash infusion made corruption “an ‘existential necessity’ for those who could get the money.” Yet the U.S. never considers its own war spending to be a systemic driver of the corruption that squanders it.

Nor does prolonged time on the ground in either Iraq or Afghanistan rectify that ignorance. “Lack of knowledge of local contractor and subcontractor companies” is rampant, the Commission finds. Look no further than the warlords and insurgent pals that the U.S. has hired to guard its military bases, a trend that’s accelerating for special operations forces in Afghanistan. Not only can that ignorance undermine the very goals of the war, but it’s a “major contributor” to wasted money.

And on top of all of that is another systemic failure. The Commission finds that the Pentagon still lacks sufficient numbers of dedicated personnel to perform basic oversight of its mega-contracts. There isn’t an “acquisition personnel and structures needed to manage and oversee an unprecedentedly large contractor force that at times has outnumbered troops in the field.”

That helps explain how a company like Blackwater could set up a shell company called Paravant to win a contract training Afghan soldiers without anyone at the Pentagon noticing. Astonishingly, the supposed watchdogs at the Defense Contract Audit Agency has a backlog of unaudited incurred costs that will “exceed $1 trillion in 2016.”

Ten years of war haven’t changed the Pentagon’s acquisitions mindset. War contracts get less emphasis than big-ticket items like planes and ships. ”More than half of Defense’ contract spending is for services and not for hardware procurement,” the Commission finds. “Yet Defense’s culture and processes remain focused on weapons systems.”

One major oversight of the Commission’s own: it doesn’t focus on the CIA’s contract personnel. CIA cash receives extremely little public scrutiny, and it can go to things that undermine U.S. war goals, like, say, propping up Afghan warlords like Ahmed Wali Karzai.

The Commission provides numerous recommendations for what it calls “urgent” reform, from hiring tons more contract overseers to curbing the use of private security contractors. And one of the Commission’s sponsors, Sen. Jim Webb, a Virginia Democrat and Reagan-era Navy Secretary, promises that its report will be more than unhappy bedtime reading. “I would like to express my strong view that these recommendations will be listened to and, when appropriate, acted on by the United States Congress,” Webb told reporters on Wednesday.

But it’s been ten years of waste, fraud and abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, and both wars are winding down. If there ever is any contractor reform, it may come too late for the wars the U.S. is actually waging. And the Commission finds that a major driver of all the wasted cash is basic ignorance — a problem that can’t be solved by implementing any well-intentioned set of reformist bullet points.

Source: Wired.com

On Wednesday, Scientists from Seoul National University in South Korea announced that they have created a glowing dog while utilising a cloning technique designed to find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Pictured is the team’s genetically modified female beagle, Tegon, which was born in 2009 and was found to glow in a fluorescent green colour while under ultraviolet light.After two years of testing, the research team has found that the glowing ability is triggered by a doxycycline antibiotic and can be turned on or off by adding or removing certain drugs to the dog’s food.

“The creation of Tegon opens new horizons since the gene injected to make the dog glow can be substituted with genes that trigger fatal human diseases,” explained lead researcher Lee Byeong-chun. He went on to state that humans and dogs have 268 common diseases, and that creating dogs with artificial symptoms could help in the treatment of these deadly diseases that affect humans.

Full story and pics at Toms Guide

BusinessInsider is reporting that the U.S. government now has only $54 billion in cash in the bank. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has a current net worth of $56 billion dollars which means $2 billions more than the U.S. government.

The U.S. Government has total amount of $73.8 billion while Apple had cash of $76.2 billion by the end of June 2011. Today’s news is only because the Federal Government doesn’t have that cash in the bank.

That’s great Microsoft! But Apple still the winner!

The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern. The rocks are each 16 feet tall, with four of them weighing more than 20 tons apiece. Together they support a 25,000-pound capstone.

Nobody knows exactly who commissioned it or why. The only clues to its origin are on a nearby plaque on the ground—which gives the dimensions and explains a series of intricate notches and holes that correspond to the movements of the sun and stars—and the “guides”, written in many different languages on each side, instruct a future society on how to conduct itself.

The story of the stones is just as strange as the monument itself. It’s since been covered in mystery and controversy. Books have been written, TV and press have swarmed to it and conspiracy theorists have pulled a mass of ideas for it’s use, from UFO landing sites to satanic cults ready to take over the world.

Wired magazine’s fascinating article writes:

The astrological specifications for the Guidestones were so complex that Fendley had to retain the services of an astronomer from the University of Georgia to help implement the design. The four outer stones were to be oriented based on the limits of the sun’s yearly migration. The center column needed two precisely calibrated features: a hole through which the North Star would be visible at all times, and a slot that was to align with the position of the rising sun during the solstices and equinoxes. The principal component of the capstone was a 7\8-inch aperture through which a beam of sunlight would pass at noon each day, shining on the center stone to indicate the day of the year.

The main feature of the monument, though, would be the 10 dictates carved into both faces of the outer stones, in eight languages: English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Swahili. A mission statement of sorts (LET THESE BE GUIDESTONES TO AN AGE OF REASON) was also to be engraved on the sides of the capstone in Egyptian hieroglyphics, classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Babylonian cuneiform. The United Nations provided some of the translations (including those for the dead languages), which were stenciled onto the stones and etched with a sandblaster.

Read the full article at Weird Wired

Here in the UK there are a couple of companies that have setup call centre’s in India to call people in the UK.

They will initialize the call by asking if you are the owner of the Computer in the house hold.

They dont have full details and rather are just calling random numbers in the UK, it doesnt matter where you are based.

Most of these companies will say that they have several offices around the world and within the UK in locations like London.

When you talk with the person and ask them for the address details they will play with you for around 3 mins and give you some fake address and then hang up.

I personally have had these sort of calls already 3 times, I run an IT business but I play the fool when they call.

So here is how it goes:

• They call you telling you that you have a problem on your PC, virus related or illegal copy of windows which is what usually people experience with their computers.
• How do they know? They will tell you that their internet servers have informed them about the problem and thats the reason why they call you.
• Credentials: They will mention they are part of Microsoft, but in reality they are not.
• Where are they: They are all based in India but the owners are from Russia.
• Why Russia? Because thats where these fake antiviruses come from, since people are not falling for giving their credit card details for the fake antiviruses (which are actual viruses) then they now resolve to call people randomly to get your details.
• Why can they do this? Because these viruses/trojans are all over the place lately and more than likely it has infected 8/10 people that use the internet. Its a huge market to exploit.
• What will they do: They will ask you for credentials to login remotely to your PC (please dont do this) – I have virtual test machines that are not infected to see what they do, they just login, do a couple of DOS commands that might be fancy for people that are not familiar with computers and inject the fake antivirus if you decide not to purchase their solution/software.
• Payment: They will convince you that their solution will be the only solution out there to protect you, although you dont even need it. They will take you to a payment website thats not even certified by verisign for payment.
• Remote control: They use the Logmein Support app, which is a trial version and not even paid for.

So watch out who you give your details to, dont trust these people, usually sellers from other countries such as India are bad news, the scammers cannot afford call centres here in the UK or USA due to expense.

If you ever have a technical problem with your PC make sure its checked out by a professional in your area or by a trusted technician.

There are many services out there that are well known.

Smoothosting provides IT Support as well, you can call them on 0844 410 8000

New “voluntary” website blocking proposals, with cursory legal oversight, are being pushed by copyright lobbyists. Leaked recently, these censorship proposals would mean a dangerous revocation of the rule of law, in favour of a lawless Internet, where lobby groups would decide what you are allowed to see and read.

If you are a UK citizen, you can help by emailing your MP here. Feel free to share the following link with your friends: http://s.p2.pe/freemynet.

MPs Julian Huppert, Tom Watson, Robert Halfon and Eric Joyce have written a parliamentary motion (EDM) that calls for the government to reconsider the Digital Economy Act and its many proposed website blocking schemes, and for an examination of these matters by the appropriate Parliamentary Select Committee. It is high time that the UK government understood the serious consequences of its proposed Internet laws for freedom of expression and privacy. It is vital that they begin to understand how their policies are affecting our rights. Write to your MP now and ask them to sign the EDM.

Fight Disconnection – Sign the petition.

“We, the signatories, call on the new Parliament to repeal sections 11-18 of the Digital Economy Act, dealing with copyright infringement and website blocking powers. We call on Parliament to refuse to pass any Statutory Instrument that would institute interference with families’ or organisations’ communications as a punishment for actual or alleged civil copyright infringement.”

You can sign the petition to repeal sections 11-18 of the Digital Economy Act using the following link: http://s.p2.pe/repeal-it.

Ryan Dunn, who will forever be known for sticking a Hot Wheels car up his own ass in the movie “Jackass,” and another as-of-yet-unidentified person, both died in a crash outside of Philadelphia early this morning.

News Source = Gizmodo

A massive collaborative act of music video creation by — and for — his fans has helped make sure of that. Thousands of MJ fans worldwide contributed to the posthumous Michael Jackson music video for “Behind the Mask” released Tuesday on the star’s Facebook page (watch below).