RIM now faces legal challenge on "BBM" trademark (Reuters)

TORONTO (Reuters) ? Research In Motion, still smarting over having to change the name of its yet-to-come operating system, faces a similar trademark challenge to its popular instant-messaging service BlackBerry Messenger.

The service, which allows BlackBerry users to send each other text and multimedia files and see when they are delivered and read, is widely known and even promoted by RIM via the shorthand BBM.

That has proven an encumbrance to BBM Canada, which measures radio and television audience data and expects its day in a Federal Court against RIM by February.

The company's chief executive, Jim MacLeod, said he wants RIM to stop advertising the BBM moniker but would also consider changing his much smaller company's name, for a price.

"We have to be practical, they operate worldwide, we don't. But we're not prepared to just walk from our name," MacLeod said.

RIM seems equally determined to keep using the BBM name and not to pay MacLeod's company anything.

"We believe that BBM Canada is attempting to obtain trademark protection for the BBM acronym that is well beyond the narrow range of the services it provides and well beyond the scope of rights afforded by Canadian trademark law," it said in an emailed statement.

RIM has launched its BBM Music song-sharing service in recent months, and heavily promoted third-party apps that tie into its instant messaging product, which boasts some 50 million active users.

BBM Canada was established in 1944 as the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement. It changed its name to BBM in the 1960s and to BBM Canada in the early 1990s, MacLeod said. The company, owned by a collection of broadcasters and advertisers, has annual revenue of around $50 million. RIM's sales were more than $5 billion last quarter.

"I'm sure to a really big company this looks like relatively small numbers, but to us it's a big deal," said MacLeod. BBM Canada employs around 650 people, compared with RIM's roughly 17,000.

Earlier this month RIM dumped the "BBX" name for its new operating system after being served with an injunction in a trademark fight with U.S.-based Basis International. RIM has renamed the platform as BlackBerry 10.

Industry Canada denied RIM's 2009 request to register the BBM trademark, saying the name was already in use, but has granted RIM until January 5 to respond.

BBM Canada launched its legal action late last year.

MacLeod said his company contacted RIM in July, soon after RIM launched a large-scale BBM advertising campaign. In response to BBM Canada's cease-and-desist letter RIM said there couldn't possibly be any confusion between the two names - a similar tactic was later used in the BBX spat.

RIM repeated that line of argument in Friday's statement.

"The services associated with RIM's BBM offering clearly do not overlap with BBM Canada's services and the two marks are therefore eligible to co-exist under Canadian trademark law. The two companies are in different industries and have never been competitors in any area."

MacLeod sought a meeting to discuss the issue with RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie several months ago, but said he has received no response.

McLeod pointed out that RIM had even taken legal action of its own against software startup Kik Interactive over its instant messaging service that includes claims of trademark infringement.

"It's a trademark they don't even own, it's ours," MacLeod said.

(Reporting by Alastair Sharp; editing by Rob Wilson)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/software/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111223/wr_nm/us_rim_bbm

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NBA Fans to Kris Humphries: BOOOOO!

Over the past decade, the New York Knicks have given their fans plenty of reason to boo. Eddy Curry, anyone?

But the crowd at Madison Square Garden reserved its venom last night for an opposing player, as Kris Humphries took to an NBA court for the first time since his divorce from Kim Kardashian. Listen to the extended, loud reaction now:

Kris Humphries Booed at Madison Square Garden

It doesn't sound like anything will get better for Humphries, either, as half the respondents in a new Nielsen poll voted the power forward the Most Hated Player in the league. He beat out LeBron James by two percent.

See, that's what happens when you take your talents to E!.

Fans booking Kris Humphris: Fair or foul?

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2011/12/nba-fans-to-kris-humphries-booooo/

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New FAA rules to help end flying while sleepy (San Jose Mercury News)

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U.N. council members line up to criticize Israel (Reuters)

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) ? Most members of the U.N. Security Council voiced deep concerns on Tuesday about the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and criticized Israel for pressing ahead with the construction of new settlements.

Council members were reacting to a briefing by U.N. assistant secretary-general for political affairs, Oscar Fernandez-Taranco, who told them the search for peace "remained elusive in a context of tensions on the ground, deep mistrust between the parties and volatile regional dynamics."

Statements criticizing Israel were made on behalf of at least nine of the 15 council members.

Representatives of Britain, France, Germany and Portugal said Fernandez-Taranco's briefing made clear to the council that Israeli settlement activity was undermining attempts to restart stalled peace talks with the Palestinians.

"One of the themes that emerged was the severely damaging effect that increased settlement construction and settler violence is having on the ground and on the prospects of a return to negotiations," the four European Union council members said in a joint statement.

"Israel's continuing announcements to accelerate the construction of settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including East Jerusalem, send a devastating message," said the statement, which was read to reporters by British Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant.

The Europeans called for an immediate halt to Israeli settlement activity, adding they hoped the government would follow through on promises to bring settlers guilty of violence to justice.

Without explicitly naming the United States, Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin accused Washington of turning a blind eye to the way efforts to restart the peace process have come to nothing.

"There is one delegation which would not want to hear anything about it, any kind of a statement, which believes that somehow things will sort of settle themselves somehow miraculously out of their own," Churkin said.

ISRAEL BLAMES PALESTINIANS

The United States has veto powers on the Security Council, which it has exercised repeatedly for decades to prevent the council from condemning Israel.

A U.S. spokesman said "the only way to resolve the outstanding issues between Israelis and Palestinians is through serious and substantive direct negotiations."

South African Ambassador Baso Sangqu read a statement on behalf of the 120-nation bloc of non-aligned countries that generally reiterated the European statement, describing settlement activities as "illegal" and "the main impediment to the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

Brazilian Ambassador Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti echoed Sangqu's words in a statement she read on behalf of Brazil, India and South Africa. Lebanon's U.N. envoy Nawaf Salam made similar remarks.

Karean Peretz, spokeswoman for Israeli's U.N. mission, reacted by saying "the main obstacle to peace has been, and remains, the Palestinians' claim to the so-called right of return and its refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state."

Churkin, the Russian envoy, said the series of addresses to the media on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a "completely new development."

Palestinian observer Riyad Mansour told reporters that "one powerful member of the Security Council" - the United States - was preventing it from dealing with the settlements issue and other problems related to the Middle East peace process.

In September, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas submitted an application for full membership in the United Nations, which the Security Council would have to approve for it to go to the General Assembly for a vote.

Churkin said the council was prepared to act on the Palestinian application as soon as a draft resolution is submitted that could be voted on. So far, no country has submitted one, which Churkin suggested was probably due to the fact that Washington would strike it down.

In February, the U.S. delegation vetoed a council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in territories the Palestinians hope to include in any future peace settlement. The United States was the only council member to vote against it.

(Additional reporting by Patrick Worsnip; Editing by John O'Callaghan)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/mideast/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111220/wl_nm/us_palestinians_israel_un

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Shooting deaths rock Perinton neighborhood (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle)

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Lunar telescope passes tough test on Earth

ILOA / Moon Express

An artist's conception shows the ILO-X telescope demonstrator, mounted on the Moon Express lander and receiving beamed commands from its operators on Earth.

By Alan Boyle

After a wild night on top of Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano, researchers report that they've successfully tested the remote-control system for a prototype telescope that could someday be looking at the cosmos from the surface of the moon.

The demonstration for the International Lunar Observatory?precursor instrument, or ILO-X, came a day earlier than originally plannned, due to a wave of chilly, stormy?weather that was sweeping over Hawaii. Temperatures on?Mauna Kea?reportedly dipped to 16 below zero Fahrenheit overnight.

"It was certainly challenging," Steve Durst,?founder and director?of the International Lunar Observatory Association, told me today. "We succeeded after some time in imaging?celestial objects ? not as many as we wanted, because of the extreme conditions."

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ILO science team members?were able to control the shoebox-sized, camera-equipped telescope from stations in Switzerland, California and China, with signals routed via the Internet through a mission control center at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea. Other researchers from India, Japan, Canada and Africa had been planning to participate, but they couldn't scramble quickly enough to tap into the system, Durst said.

Durst said the telescope was aimed at celestial targets including the planet Jupiter and the Pleiades star cluster, using remote-control software developed by Moon Express. The imagery was returned for processing, just as it would be during a moon mission. "That was very rewarding to see happen," said Bob Richards, the co-founder and CEO of Moon Express.

The flight version of ILO-X is destined to travel to the lunar surface aboard the Moon?Express lander, which Richards and his colleagues intend to?launch in 2014 to win a share of the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize. Moon Express has designed and is building the ILO-X instrument with financial support from?Durst's organization.

First telescope on the moon
ILO-X would be the first telescope to make celestial observations from the moon. Richards said the optical instrument "will do what an extremely good amateur telescope could do," but he and Durst stressed that the success of the mission wouldn't be judged by the quality of the imagery alone.

"It's no Hubble," Richards said. "We're not trying to change the astronomy textbooks. We're trying to change people's minds about their place on the moon."

Moon Express

Moon Express software engineer Jake Forsberg readies the International Lunar Observatory precursor (ILO-X) for a global demonstration from the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Durst sees ILO-X as merely the precursor for bigger, more capable telescopes that could eventually be sent to the moon. For example, radio telescopes placed on the far side of the moon would be shielded from earthly interference ? and even on the moon's Earth-facing side, telescopes could have a much clearer view of the cosmos than telescopes on Earth.

"There's no atmosphere to distort the images," Durst explained.

Making money on the moon?
Durst is also experimenting with the idea of using the moon as a broadcasting platform, starting with?ILO-X and continuing with a follow-on lunar mission known as ILO-1. "It's a catalyst for a money-making broadcast operation that we want to conduct," he?told me.

Richards said flying ILO-X on the?Moon Express would?help "buy down the risk" for future lunar telescopes. But that's not Moon Express' only aim. The venture, co-founded by dot-com millionaire?Naveen Jain, is targeting the X Prize purse as well as other lunar business opportunities. "No one has ever captured people?s fascination with the moon," Jain has been quoted as saying. "What if, say, we take a picture of your family on the moon and project it back to you? Or take DNA up there?"

Moon Express is one of several Google Lunar X Prize entrants that have made multimillion-dollar deals with NASA for access to their lunar mission development data. But the?highest-profile payoff is the X Prize itself. To win the prize, the venture will have to put its lander on the moon, then send out a mini-rover to gather data and images and send it back to Earth.

With the ILO-X demonstration completed, Richards said attention will turn to preparing the ruggedized version of the telescope and other components of the lunar probe for the big flight ahead. The clock is ticking, not only for Moon Express but for more than two dozen other X Prize teams. If no one pulls off a successful lunar mission by the end of 2015, the?prize?expires, and the purse goes back to?the?sponsors at Google.

Source: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/19/9565921-lunar-telescope-tested-on-earth

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De-Stressing Balanced Fund Investing

Page 1 of 3

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De-Stressing Balanced Fund Investing

David Allen?s bestselling book Getting Things Done has become a productivity miracle for the stressed, stretched, conflicted and, in short, the unbalanced. Allen describes the antithesis of feeling unbalanced and stressed, what martial artists call ?mind like water? and world-class athletes call ?the zone.? In this state, the mind is clear and we react to our external world instinctively and with ease, a natural flow producing desired results. Allen says this higher state is no longer a luxury but a necessity ?for high performance professionals who wish to maintain balance and a consistent positive output from their work.?

Balanced fund management is sadly nowhere near such a zone of clarity and positive outcomes. Like dedicated stock and bond mandates, active asset allocation has largely become a benchmark-hugging exercise where strong convictions are muted by concerns over career risk and overly aggressive performance measurement. In this issue, we highlight some improvements for those interested in active asset allocation programs.

Fair and Balanced?

Balanced portfolios add value in two primary ways: better security selection (picking stocks that outperform the equity benchmark such as the S&P 500 Index, bonds that outperform the bond index, etc.) and through managing the asset mix (shifting money between stocks, bonds, and other categories.) Given that (on a na?ve basis) half of the value proposition comes through asset allocation management, we would expect to find a sizeable amount of variation in asset mixes in these portfolios. However, as Figure 1 shows, the median equity allocation hovers between 55% and 65% over the seven-plus years analyzed.¹ Further, as the 75th and 25th percentile observations show, the managers do a remarkably good job sticking near one another: Half of the managers were within 5% of the median.

(For a larger view, please click on the image above.)

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To illustrate the thoughtlessness of this allocation ?bunching,? we compared the median balanced manager to two alternative approaches?a ?religious rebalancer? and a ?diehard drifter.? Our ?religious rebalancer? maintains a near-continuous 60% equity allocation by rebalancing the portfolio back to 60/40 every month. In contrast, our ?diehard drifter? never rebalances, allowing his portfolio mix to drift with the whims of the market.

The black line in Figure 1 plots the mid-point between these two allocators. Virtually all of the allocation movement of the peer group is captured by a combination of price drift and continuous rebalancing!

The other interesting tidbit is the performance of stocks versus bonds over this stretch. From June 2004 through September 2011, the S&P 500 underperformed the BarCap US Aggregate Bond Index by a significant margin (2.0% versus 5.8% compound annual return). This underperformance shouldn?t come as a shock as during virtually the entire time horizon?save for a couple of months at the depths of the Global Financial Crisis?stocks were expensive, trading at Shiller P/E ratios well above the historical average. Asset allocation managers evidently don?t put a whole lot of independent thought into these asset mixes.

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Source: http://www.indexuniverse.com/sections/features/10481-de-stressing-balanced-fund-investing.html

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