IS MILEY CYRUS A VIRGIN?

YES by Hilton Hater

In a world of sex tapes and naked photos, Miley Cyrus is as pure as a fresh snowfall.

The allegedly racy photos of the young singer never depict her in anything less than underwear. That would be considered bundling up for truly promiscuous celebs such as Tila Tequila.

If Miley says she's a virgin, I see no reason to disbelieve her. What proof does anyone have to the contrary? A Vanity Fair photo shoot featuring her covered by a sheet?

Please.

Aside from Cyrus' word, let's look at her schedule. She's often on tour. She's the star of her own TV show. When would Miley even have time to find a boyfriend and build up the sort of trust needed to allow him into her precious garden of love?

Miley Cyrus has given us such hit songs as "7 Things" and "See You Again."

The least we can do in return is give her the benefit of the virginal doubt.

Continue Reading...

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Brangelina Births a Humongous Photo Spread

People

After the reported $14 million charity payout to parents Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, maybe their little one Knox will become known as Fort Knox. He and his twin sister, Vivienne, sure look cute and a half on the cover of People magazine. The issue hits newsstands tomorrow, but you can catch a tease of the 19-page spread here. Internationally, Hello! magazine secured the rights and has a 17-page spread coming tomorrow as well.

"It is chaos, but we are managing it and having a wonderful time," Jolie tells People and Hello!

We think People's cover may be the best celebrity-baby magazine cover ever. Let us know if you agree in the comments section. And compare how they stack up in our Best of the Celeb-Baby Mag Covers gallery.

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Knox and Vivienne: A First Look at the Brangelina Babies!

They're the most talked about siblings since Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger were paired up in a certain 1988 movie.

Indeed, the first photos of Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline may have sold for almost as much money as the above-referenced film, Twins.

People Magazine reportedly shelled out $14 million for the following pic of Brangelina's babies. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are giving the money to charity. Yes, on top of being gorgeous, these actors are model humanitarians.

Enjoy the shot of Knox and Vivienne after this article's jump...

Pick up a copy of this week's People for 19 pages of Brangelina baby photos!

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With Security at Risk, a Push to Patch the Web

Since a secret emergency meeting of computer security experts at Microsoft’s headquarters in March, Dan Kaminsky has been urging companies around the world to fix a potentially dangerous flaw in the basic plumbing of the Internet.

Dan Kaminsky, a Web security specialist, showing a list of servers and whether they are patched.
While Internet service providers are racing to fix the problem, which makes it possible for criminals to divert users to fake Web sites where personal and financial information can be stolen, Mr. Kaminsky worries that they have not moved quickly enough.


By his estimate, roughly 41 percent of the Internet is still vulnerable. Now Mr. Kaminsky, a technical consultant who first discovered the problem, has been ramping up the pressure on companies and organizations to make the necessary software changes before criminal hackers take advantage of the flaw.


Next week, he will take another step by publicly laying out the details of the flaw at a security conference in Las Vegas. That should force computer network administrators to fix millions of affected systems.

But his explanation of the flaw will also make it easier for criminals to exploit it, and steal passwords and other personal information.


Mr. Kaminsky walks a fine line between protecting millions of computer users and eroding consumer confidence in Internet banking and shopping. But he is among those experts who think that full disclosure of security threats can push network administrators to take action. “We need to have disaster planning, and we need to worry,” he said.

The flaw that Mr. Kaminsky discovered is in the Domain Name System, a kind of automated phone book that converts human-friendly addresses like google.com into machine-friendly numeric counterparts.


The potential consequences of the flaw are significant. It could allow a criminal to redirect Web traffic secretly, so that a person typing a bank’s actual Web address would be sent to an impostor site set up to steal the user’s name and password. The user might have no clue about the misdirection, and unconfirmed reports in the Web community indicate that attempted attacks are already under way.
The problem is analogous to the risk of phoning directory assistance at, for example, AT&T, asking for the number for Bank of America and being given an illicit number at which an operator masquerading as a bank employee asks for your account number and password.

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$700k salary can't get Sony BMG a digital exec

After EMI hired paisley-shirted IT exec Douglas Merrill away from Google to run the record label's digital business, other music groups have been on the hunt for a digital savior. Sony BMG, we hear, has been trying to fill an EVP position to run its digital music ventures. But after dangling a $700,000 salary in front of prospects for 8 months, its search firm, Korn/Ferry, still hasn't been able to fill the job. What this tells us: No one wants the job. One requirement: The candidate must "have a keen eye to find money on opportunities at hand." That graspingness is precisely why the record labels are so unpopular with musicians, their fans, and the the technologists creating the online tools through which people are increasingly stealing — sorry, "discovering" — music. The industry's in such a pathetic state, we thought we'd help Sony BMG and Korn/Ferry by airing the confidential job listing:

COMPANY SonyBMG Music Entertainment
www.sonybmg.com
POSITION Executive Vice President, Global Digital Business
LOCATION New York, New York

COMPANY BACKGROUND
SonyBMG Music Entertainment is a global recorded music joint venture with a roster of current artists that includes a broad array of both local artists and international superstars, as well as vast catalog that comprises some of the most important recordings in history. The company is 50 percent owned by Bertelsmann A.G. and 50 percent owned by Sony Corporation of America. SonyBMG Music Entertainment continues to aggressively move its business from the traditional sale of product through traditional retail channels of distribution to new and evolving digital platforms.

REPORTING RELATIONSHIPS
The Executive Vice President, Global Digital Business will report to the President, Global Digital Business and US Sales.

RESPONSIBILITIES
The Executive Vice President, Global Digital Business will be responsible for the US business development team. He/She will oversee global deal terms (in coordination with Business and Legal Affairs); industry-wide projects, such as Total Music (a joint venture with another major record company), and build the company’s investments in independent companies, such as SonyBMG’s Music’s stake in DADA, MOG and others.
Specific duties and responsibilities will include the following:

• Identify opportunities, structure, negotiate and close deals;
• Develop and coordinate SONY BMG’s business model across multiple existing and new product and licensing opportunities around the world – formulate strategies about how alternative exploitation models and product windows affect each other; drive product/ business model innovation;
• Develop specific business opportunities/partnerships which can be implemented in the near term; creatively help existing partnerships evolve through the challenges and changes in product and usage right configurations;
• Submit sound and achievable budget projections and recommendations; ensure that the Company is managed with strong financial accountability and integrity;
• Create and manage deals that are going to make an impact on a global basis;
• Monitor and evaluate digital business operations outside the US on a consistent basis to ensure plans and objectives are met, expected results are achieved and digital deal guidelines and policies are observed;
• Prepare and distribute information up, down and across the organization to ensure effective communications and information flow and to enable informed decision-making;
• Recruit and train an exceptional team in accordance with the budget and strategy;
• Bring significant experience in developing and understanding businesses and will have a strong grasp of the overall internet and mobile landscape.

PROFESSIONAL QUALIFICATIONS
Prospective candidates will be seasoned “business development” oriented executive who does not necessarily come from the music business, but could. He/She will more likely be an executive from the more broad-based entertainment and media field, but with an appreciation for the unique characteristics of the music industry. The successful candidate should be a strong negotiator with an acute sense of strategy and strong business acumen. He/she should be a strong “closer” in terms of getting deals done and take a pragmatic approach of what can be done.
Specifically candidates will have the following:

• Outstanding negotiation skills;
• Ability to develop and continually refine a vision and to identify strategies, tactics, and the resources required to achieve that vision;
• Strong leadership and management skills which include a hands-on style and the ability to build alliances;
• Solid experience in business and relationship development on a global basis; the ability to forge new relationships in the broad-based entertainment and media sector;
• Strong verbal and written communication skills with the ability to enhance the organization’s culture;
• Highly capable of independently handling complex negotiation situations. Strong “closer” in terms of getting deals done and take a pragmatic approach of what can be done.
• Demonstrated “change management” experience.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS AND COMPETENCIES
Prospective candidates will be passionate, business development oriented executives who can articulate both the vision and market position in a clear and compelling way. Strong leadership characteristics are a must. He/She needs to be able to quickly grasp financial models and capable of rapidly and thoughtfully drawing conclusions about the viability of different alternative business models. With excellent judgment of people and the strategic opportunities, the candidate will have built and crafted an organization to achieve significant revenue goals while focusing on the efficient and effective operation of the business. The ideal candidate must be a focused, proactive and collaborative leader, who can refine and extend the Company’s vision.

• Be a strong contributor to the overall strategy in further developing the music business model.
• Be mindful of the longer implications of changing the company’s business models but also strongly focused on optimizing the short term.
• Have a keen eye to find money on opportunities at hand.
• Be an intelligent, decisive, quick, forward-thinking, strategic and tactical executive; bring exceptional business acumen, common sense, wisdom and insight;
• Have the proven ability to work across an organization at all levels with technical, creative and executive team members; have excellent diplomatic and political skills to build collaborative working relationships across a wide array of constituents.
• Have strong interpersonal skills, good judge of character and great at building lasting and productive relationships.
• Be a strong motivator for the business development team and have a high energy level to drive things forward.
• Be realistic and not over-promise, yet drive, communicate and believe in a bigger vision.
  Most importantly, the successful candidate will have an unquestioned level of personal and professional integrity, as well as an intuitive understanding of and unbridled enthusiasm for the challenges and rewards arising from this unique opportunity.

EDUCATION
Prospective candidates will have an undergraduate degree. An MBA is highly desirable but not required. Experience in the professional culture of a major consulting firm or investment bank would be a plus though again is not required.

COMPENSATION
Compensation will be competitive and commensurate with experience. A customized package, including base salary and incentive bonus will be developed to attract the finalist candidate.

(Photo by pgoyette)

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HP, Intel and Yahoo study ways to make Web a utility

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Three tech giants -- Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo -- said on Tuesday they are teaming up on a research project to help turn Web services into reliable, everyday utilities.
The companies are joining forces with academic researchers in Asia, Europe and the United States to create an experimental network that lets researchers test "cloud-computing" projects -- Web-wide services that can reach billions of users at once.
Their goal is to promote open collaboration among industry, academic and government researchers by removing financial and logistical barriers to working on hugely computer-intensive, Internet-wide projects.
Founding members of the consortium said they aim to create a level playing field for individual researchers and organizations of all sizes to conduct research on software, network management and the hardware needed to deliver Web-wide services as billions of computer and phone users come online.
"No one institution or company is going to figure this out," said Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Yahoo Research who is also a consulting professor of computer science at nearby Stanford University.
Cloud computing has become the industry's biggest buzzword. It is a catch-all term to describe how Internet-connected hardware and software once delivered as discreet products can be managed as Web-based, utility-like services.
"Potentially the entire planet will come to rely on this, like electricity," Raghavan said, referring to the push to make everything from daily communications to shopping to entertainment into always-available, on-demand Web services.
"We are all trying to move from the horse driving the wagon to a million ants driving the wagon," Raghavan said of the need to let computers manage millions of small jobs, adding that the available capacity on the Web would vary widely. "The challenge can be a billion ants one day and a million ants the next." Continued...
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Former Googleers unveil Cuil, a new search engine

MENLO PARK, California (Reuters) - A start-up led by former star Google engineers on Sunday unveiled a new Web search service that aims to outdo the Internet search leader in size, but faces an uphill battle changing Web surfing habits.
Cuil Inc (pronounced "cool") is offering a new search service at www.cuil.com that the company claims can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the Web than Google, which boasts the largest online index.
The would-be Google rival says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on Web links and audience traffic patterns and instead analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.
"Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user," Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.
Danny Sullivan, a Web search analyst and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, said Cuil can try to exploit complaints consumers may have with Google -- namely, that it tries to do too much, that its results favor already popular sites, and that it leans heavily on certain authoritative sites such as Wikipedia.
"The time may be right for a challenger," Sullivan says, but adds quickly: "Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you."
Microsoft Corp, the No. 3 U.S. player in Web search has been seeking in vain, so far, to join forces with No. 2 Yahoo Inc to battle Google.
Cuil was founded by a group of search pioneers, including Costello, who built a prototype of Web Fountain, IBM's Web search analytics tool, and his wife, Anna Patterson, the architect of Google Inc's massive TeraGoogle index of Web pages. Patterson also designed the search system for global corporate document storage company Recall, a unit of Australia's Brambles Ltd Continued...

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A $500 Million Week for Grand Theft Auto - New York Times

Grand Theft Auto IV, the latest iteration of the hit video game franchise, racked up first-week sales of $500 million, Take-Two Interactive, the game’s publisher, plans to announce on Wednesday. The report exceeded the sales expectations of analysts.

The company is expected to report it sold six million copies of the graphically violent game, 3.6 million of them on the first day.

The sales exceed projections of industry analysts who were estimating that some five million consumers would purchase the game in the first two weeks.

The significance of the sales extends beyond buoying Take-Two, a company that has had its share of legal, financial and management struggles in the last few years. The company is the subject of a $2 billion hostile takeover effort by Electronic Arts, which is offering Take Two shareholders $25.74 a share for control of the company. If Take-Two can exceed sales expectations on Grand Theft Auto IV, it has the potential to drive up the share price and force Electronic Arts to raise its offer.

On Tuesday, Take Two’s shares closed at $26.35, up 29 cents.

Electronic Arts’ takeover bid turned hostile after Take-Two management said that it would not negotiate an acquisition agreement with Electronic Arts — or any suitor — until after the release of Grand Theft Auto IV. Now that the game is out, Take-Two may well have entered discussions with Electronic Arts and possibly other suitors who covet the Grand Theft Auto franchise, but Take-Two has declined to comment on whether such discussions are taking place.

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Can Facebook Build a Better Passport? - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

It didn’t take long for Facebook to react to the announcement by MySpace Thursday that it would enable other Web sites to tap into information about its users and their friends.

Facebook’s announcement, in a blog post Friday afternoon, is a bit sketchy on the details and has all the appearance of being rushed to match MySpace. Still, what the company calls Facebook Connect offers many of the same capabilities and a few more, too.

As I wrote yesterday, there is a big shift in how the social networks are thinking about how they relate to other sites and developers. In the first round, the social networks invited others to make their sites better — widgets on MySpace pages, applications on Facebook. Now the social networks are becoming even more extroverted: They are offering to use the information they have about users to make other sites better, too.

MySpace, and now Facebook, will let users who have created profiles on their sites — with photos, favorite bands and so on — use that information to fill out profiles on other sites. Since every site seems to encourage users to create a profile to describe themselves, this can help them avoid copying the same information over and over again.

Facebook Connect adds another feature (which I’m sure MySpace will copy): Web sites will be able to let users log in and create accounts with their Facebook names and passwords.

This is similar to what Microsoft tried and failed to build with its Passport system. AOL tried, too, and no one noticed enough to remember that it failed as well. More recently, there has been a movement towards a standard known as OpenID to allow people to log in to one site with an ID issued by another. But so far, it is too complex to use and hasn’t gotten much traction.

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Trying to Put a Name to a Face of Evil in Myanmar - New York Times

DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN? Ellen Page of “Juno” holds a picture of Myanmar’s dictator, Senior Gen. Than Shwe.

“HITLER is alive in Burma” reads the words scrawled on a cardboard sign, held aloft by a sweet-faced Ellen Page, the “Juno” star, in a 90-second human-rights public awareness message that began showing on video-sharing Web sites last week.

The spot is one of 30 produced for U.S. Campaign for Burma, starring celebrities like Will Ferrell and Jennifer Aniston. They will be distributed on Fanista.com, a social-networking and entertainment retail site, then passed along to sites like YouTube and Google Video every day for the next month. The goal of the campaign is to thrust the cause of human rights in Burma — now known as Myanmar — into the orbit of A-list activist causes, along with Tibet and Darfur, and to encourage international pressure on a government that activists say is one of the world’s most oppressive.

Attention will not be easy to gain, never mind actually pressuring the government. As with other global campaigns, activists must figure out how to make Americans care about a distant crisis with complex causes involving relatively unknown players. And they must also make themselves heard in the glut of worthy causes, all with a chorus of earnest celebrities crying “Urgent!”

To do so, the Burma campaign has decided to use some of the same brand-building strategies — simplified narratives, clear-cut imagery and, of course, the most carefully selected celebrities — used by other successful aid agencies, or even consumer-goods marketers.

“In a certain sense, you have to ‘brand’ it up,” said Jack Healey, the founder of the Human Rights Action Center, a partner in the Campaign for Burma. “It’s the nature of the business now.”

And no wonder. The public today is bombarded by pleas to take action on global warming, Tibet, Darfur, breast cancer, starving children, Africans with AIDS, or Katrina victims, said Daniel H. Adler, the founder of Fanista.com. The company financed much of the series of spots, called “Burma: It Can’t Wait.”

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Steve Jobs Needs A Raise? Apple CEO Out of Top 10 Best Paid CEOs

It’s official! Steve Jobs should ask for a pay raise! According to Forbes, Oracle’s Larry Ellison came first in 2007 as the best paid CEO (although he doesn’t seem to need his salary, since he is no. 14 among the world’s billionaires, with an estimated $25 billion of assets), topping big names such as Apple’s Steve Jobs (no wonder, the poor man is paid $1 for the job!).

The top 10 best paid CEO are as follows: Larry Ellison (Oracle) - $192.9 million, Nabeeb Gareel (MEMC Electronic Materials) - $79.6 million, John Cambers (Cisco) - $54.8 million, Mark Hurd (HP) - $27.6 million, Jen-Hsun Huang (NVIDIA) - $24.6 million, Samual Palmisano (IBM) - $24.3 million, Wendell Weeks (Corning) - $22.6 million, Joseph Tucci, EMC - $20 million, William Sullivan (Agilent) - $17.4 million, Paul Otellini (Intel) - $16.3 million.

Steve Jobs not only didn’t make it on the top 10 list, but 2007 was far less productive than 2006: this time he took home an estimated $14.6 million in compensation, compared to 2006 when he took compensations estimated at $646 million (oh, it’s nice to have stocks!).

The secret to making it to Forbes' top list: don’t lose your job! Yahoo’s former Chief Executive Officer Terry Semel didn’t make it this year, and neither did Michael Dell, the founder of Dell, who is currently working hard to bring Dell to the light (however, he does have some pretty good savings, in case things don’t work out so well; Forbes estimated his value at $16 billion, making him the 40th richest person in the world).

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Miley Cyrus, A Future Teenage Billionaire

Teen pop sensation Miley Cyrus, also known as Hannah Montana from Disney Channel's wildly popular series with the same name, is so rich she could retire right now and live the rest of her life with the money she made so far.

According to People magazine, the 15-year-old singer/actress, who is already richer than her father, country music singer Billy Ray Cyrus, will likely become a billionaire by the end of the year.

Topping the magazine's list of the richest teen celebrities, Miley took home approximately $17 million last year alone from her sold-out tours, about $1 million a week from the estimated $50 million in tour grosses. Her 3-D concert film "Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour" comprising concert footage and behind-the-scene clips from the tour, raked in $29 million from tickets sold during its release weekend.

"Kids are earning more and more and can command huge fees in Hollywood, but no one could have predicted how popular Miley would be. She's a true star," a Disney spokesman said.

However, despite her fortune, Miley still gets a $300 monthly allowance from her dad, while her mother Trish insisted that she refused to let her daughter’s fortune go to her head.

"A lot goes into her (investment fund), which she can’t get until she’s 18," Trish told People. "At the end of the day she doesn’t have much left."

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Revealing Photo Threatens a Major Disney Franchise - New York Times

	Vanity Fair

The cover of the June issue of Vanity Fair and the photograph of Miley Cyrus, inset.

Fifteen years old and suggestively wrapped in what appears to be a satin bedsheet in the June issue of Vanity Fair. Did Miley Cyrus, with the help of a controversy-courting magazine, just deliver a blow to the Walt Disney Company’s billion-dollar “Hannah Montana” franchise?

Some parents reacted with outrage over the weekend when the television program “Entertainment Tonight” began showing commercials promoting a scoop: Ms. Cyrus, the star of the wholesome Disney Channel blockbuster “Hannah Montana,” had posed topless, albeit with her chest covered, for the Vanity Fair photographer, Annie Leibovitz.

Screen grabs of the photo quickly popped up online, sparking a blogosphere debate. “Bonfire anyone?” wrote Lin Burress on her marriage and parenting blog, Telling It Like It Is, referring to the mountain of Hannah Montana retail items — makeup, shoes, clothes — in the marketplace. “Parents should be extremely concerned,” Ms. Burress said in an interview. “Very young girls look up to Miley Cyrus as a role model.”

It is doubtful that one photograph — especially one that is tame in the context of an Internet awash in nude photographs of other starlets — could dent the Hannah Montana machine, said several Wall Street analysts. Retail sales for the franchise are expected to total about $1 billion in 2008. A motion picture is in the works for 2009 and Ms. Cyrus signed a seven-figure book deal with the Disney Book Group last week.

But keeping a teenage entertainment franchise on track in an age when stars are monitored around the clock by bloggers and paparazzi is extremely difficult, even for a company with the experience of Disney. Executives are constantly battling to keep minor slipups from growing into full-blown controversies.

Last week, the public relations problem du jour was a green bra; photos online showing Ms. Cyrus pulling away her tank top to flash her underwear.

Ms. Cyrus and the “Hannah Montana” series have been championed as one of the few entertainment sanctuaries for children, complicating matters. Last month, Ms. Cyrus was chosen favorite television actress at Nickelodeon’s “Kids’ Choice Awards.”

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A Google Prototype for a Precision Image Search - New York Times

Google researchers say they have a software technology intended to do for digital images on the Web what the company’s original PageRank software did for searches of Web pages.

On Thursday at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google scientists presented a paper describing what the researchers call VisualRank, an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar.

Although image search has become popular on commercial search engines, results are usually generated today by using cues from the text that is associated with each image.

Despite decades of effort, image analysis remains a largely unsolved problem in computer science, the researchers said. For example, while progress has been made in automatic face detection in images, finding other objects such as mountains or tea pots, which are instantly recognizable to humans, has lagged.

“We wanted to incorporate all of the stuff that is happening in computer vision and put it in a Web framework,” said Shumeet Baluja, a senior staff researcher at Google, who made the presentation with Yushi Jing, another Google researcher. The company’s expertise in creating vast graphs that weigh “nodes,” or Web pages, based on their “authority” can be applied to images that are the most representative of a particular query, he said.

The research paper, “PageRank for Product Image Search,” is focused on a subset of the images that the giant search engine has cataloged because of the tremendous computing costs required to analyze and compare digital images. To do this for all of the images indexed by the search engine would be impractical, the researchers said. Google does not disclose how many images it has cataloged, but it asserts that its Google Image Search is the “most comprehensive image search on the Web.”

The company said that in its research it had concentrated on the 2000 most popular product queries on Google’s product search, words such as iPod, Xbox and Zune. It then sorted the top 10 images both from its ranking system and the standard Google Image Search results. With a team of 150 Google employees, it created a scoring system for image “relevance.” The researchers said the retrieval returned 83 percent less irrelevant images.

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Paula Abdul hits a sour note on ailing Idol | Entertainment | Reuters

(Hollywood Reporter) - Scandal has always suited "American Idol." From accusations of voting irregularities to the secret personal histories of contestants, Fox's unequaled reality hit produces a flurry of new controversies every season.

Judge Paula Abdul alone has been responsible for countless woozy YouTube moments and at least one severe alleged infraction -- a reported romantic relationship with a contestant during the show's second season.

The more alarmed and critical the media headlines, the more "Idol" has thrived in the ratings.

"'Idol' is all about cast and controversy," said Fox president of alternative entertainment Mike Darnell in a recent interview. "So as soon as you get the right ingredients, the ratings go up again."

But with the show's viewership levels currently at historic lows, will the latest "Idol" incident give the show a curiosity-driven viewership bump? Or further discourage its maturing audience?

On Tuesday's episode, a last-minute procedural change resulted in the judges critiquing contestants' first round of performances instead of waiting until the end of the second round. Abdul gave a negative review of contestant Jason Castro's two songs.

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DailyTech - The Ranting of a Madman: Google $5 Billion Lawsuit Dismissed Twice

Jayne's handwritten court documents (Source: Justia.com)

Pennsylvania inmate loses strange case in court of appeals

Pennsylvania resident Dylan Stephen Jayne saw his bizarre $5 billion “crimes against humanity” lawsuit against Google shot down a second time, this time by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Jayne filed suit against Google last September, seeking $5 billion in damages over claims that Google’s founders committed aided terrorists and violated his privacy – due to the fact that part of Jayne’s Social Security number is somehow visible when the Google logo is turned upside down. His complaint was submitted, handwritten, to a Pennsylvania Middle District court along with motions to expedite nearly every step of his case – including motions to expedite payment, filing exhibits, and even a motion to expedite previously filed motions to expedite.

Pennsylvania District Judge James Munley dismissed Jayne’s suit sua sponte (on its own) nine days after it was filed, on the grounds that Jayne failed to make any actionable claims.

A month later, Jayne sought to appeal – again submitting a handwritten Motion to Appeal, taking the case to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The Appeals court chose to uphold the lower court’s decision, noting that Jayne’s claims – which invoked an obscure law that applied to state actors, to which Google does not apply – failed to demonstrate any instance of Google depriving him of Constitutionally-protected rights while the company acted “under color of state law.”

“It is clear that [none of the] criteria is satisfied here,” said the Appeals Court judge. “As explained by the District Court, Google and its founders are not state actors, and Jayne’s allegation concerning his coded social security number does not constitute a violation of the Constitution or federal law.”

Further, the court agreed that “any amendment of the complaint would be futile.”

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A Worthwhile Cause

CLICK HERE to contribute to a worthwhile cause and get more education on a very important subject!

Cancer sucks, and that's putting it mildly.

So…let's do something about it!

CLICK HERE to donate to Livestrong, the Lance Armstrong Foundation. They're helping the fight against cancer on MANY levels.

Many of you can't or won't contribute anything today, but even if just 1% of you (millions and millions of Perezcious readers) give something, we can make a difference.

It's a worthwhile cause, our new campaign!