You can go buy the iPad Air right now . You can either order Apple's new, thinner 9.7-inch tablet
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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/fhVgTXPpwQw/you-can-go-buy-an-ipad-air-right-now-1456647987
Circle Internet Financial has launched with $9M of Series A funding to increase mainstream adoption of digital currencies like Bitcoin by providing a payment platform for consumers and merchants. Investors include Jim Breyer, Accel Partners and General Catalyst Partners.
All three invested in Circle founder Jeremy Allaire’s previous startup Brightcove, an online video platform that went public in 2012.
Circle is a payment platform that wants to make it easy for businesses and consumers to use Bitcoin and other digital currencies. Despite its association with Deep Web black market Silk Road, as well as concerns over its stability, more consumers and companies are beginning to show interest in Bitcoins because they can facilitate online payments at lower costs and with greater security and privacy than existing electronic payment methods. One potential draw for merchants is avoiding the fees and risks of fraud and chargebacks associated with credit cards.
For consumers, Circle says it is building a secure platform that will protect consumer privacy. For businesses and charities, it will provide tools and services that enable them to accept digital currency payments with no transaction fees.
Circle’s Series A is one of the largest–if not the largest–amounts of funding secured so far by a digital currency startup. Other Bitcoin-based companies that have recently landed significant investment include Coinbase, which raised a $5 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures, and BitPay, which has received about $2.5 million to date from Founders Fund and various angel investors.
Other startups that have recently launched to take advantage of the increasing interest in Bitcoin include London-based Bitcoin exchange Coinfloor; music jukebox hack Beatcoin; micropayment platform BitWall; and whitelabel exchange Buttercoin.
In order for companies like Circle to be successful, however, they will have to allay concerns about regulatory issues. As Shakil Khan, founder of Bitcoin news Web site CoinDesk, pointed out last week during a Disrupt Berlin panel, average customers want to see some kind of regulation before they adopt Bitcoin. On the other hand, there are potential opportunities for digital currency companies around the world. For example, China’s government is beginning to show interest in Bitcoins (and a division of Chinese Internet giant Baidu recently started accepting Bitcoin payments).
Circle is based in Boston, with international operations headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. The company is regulated by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the U.S. Department of Treasury, as a money transmitter and is seeking state licenses. John Beccia, the former chief regulatory counsel for the Financial Services Roundtable in Washington, D.C., will also serve as Circle’s general counsel and chief compliance officer.
Allaire also co-founded of Allaire Corporation, creators of Web development language ColdFusion. Allaire Corp. was acquired by Macromedia in 2001, where Allaire became CTO and helped oversee the creation of a Flash-based application platform.
“Bitcoin and digital currency represent a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shape the future of the Internet and global commerce,” said Alliare in a statement. “There’s a tremendous opportunity to make payments easier, more secure and less costly for consumers and businesses. Digital currency can dramatically reduce the friction and costs currently experienced in the world by merchants and consumers.”
Jim Breyer, Partner at Accel Partners, will join Circle’s board of directors, as well as David Orfao of General Catalyst Partners.
“The dramatic global growth in mobile, social and online commerce is creating the need and potential for a real global digital currency. With Jeremy’s vision for Circle and track record as an Internet pioneer, the opportunity here is to potentially build a significant global company,” said Breyer.
You may have read about the lost cow tunnels of New York City yesterday
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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/z-wU8HB71Lg/photoshop-contest-what-else-is-hiding-in-new-york-city-1456408007Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has spent a total of six months in space. In his new book, he writes that getting to space took only "8 minutes and 42 seconds. Give or take a few thousand days of training."
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has spent a total of six months in space. In his new book, he writes that getting to space took only "8 minutes and 42 seconds. Give or take a few thousand days of training."
While floating weightless in the International Space Station last spring, Commander Chris Hadfield recorded his own version of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" — a video that's now been viewed more than 18 million times on YouTube. But when he wasn't busy being an Internet phenomenon, the Canadian astronaut was witnessing awe-inspiring beauty, facing life-threatening dangers and, at times, holding onto a spaceship orbiting Earth at 17,500 miles an hour.
Hadfield has flown three space missions, conducted two space walks and spent a total of six months in space. On Earth, he's been the chief of international space station operations in Houston and chief CAPCOM commander — the person at mission control who communicates directly with astronauts in orbit. In a new book, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, he shares some of the lessons he learned in space.
"There are no wishy-washy astronauts," Hadfield tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "You don't get up there by being uncaring and blase. And whatever gave you the sense of tenacity and purpose to get that far in life is absolutely reaffirmed and deepened by the experience itself."
On what it's like to do a spacewalk
I've been so lucky to have done two spacewalks. If you looked at your wristwatch I was outside for about 15 hours, which is about 10 times around the world. ...
The contrast of your body and your mind inside ... essentially a one-person spaceship, which is your spacesuit, where you're holding on for dear life to the shuttle or the station with one hand, and you are inexplicably in between what is just a pouring glory of the world roaring by, silently next to you — just the kaleidoscope of it, it takes up your whole mind. It's like the most beautiful thing you've ever seen just screaming at you on the right side, and when you look left, it's the whole bottomless black of the universe and it goes in all directions. It's like a huge yawning endlessness on your left side and you're in between those two things and trying to rationalize it to yourself and trying to get some work done.
On doing a spacewalk amid Southern Lights
I was coming across the Indian Ocean in the dark. I was riding on the end of the robot arm ... [and] I thought, "I want to look at Australia in the dark," because everyone lives along the coast, starting with Perth and across and it's like a necklace of cities. So I shut off my lights, and I let my eyes completely adjust to the darkness, but as we came south under Australia instead of seeing just the lights of the cities of Australia we flew into the Southern Lights. Just like the Northern Lights they erupt out of the world and it's almost as if someone has put on this huge fantastic laser light show for thousands of miles. The colors, of course, with your naked eye are so much more vivid than just a camera. There are greens and reds and yellows and oranges and they poured up under my feet, just the ribbons and curtains of it — it was surreal to look at, driving through the Southern Lights. ...
To me it was taking time to notice something that is almost always there but that if you didn't purposefully seek it out you would miss — and that is our planet and how it reacts with the energy from the sun and how our magnetic field works and how the upper atmosphere works — what it really is, is just beauty.
On claustrophobia
They don't want claustrophobic astronauts, so NASA is careful through selection to try to see if you have a natural tendency to be afraid of small spaces or not. Really, it's good if you've managed to find a way to deal with all of your fears, especially the irrational ones. So during selection in fact, they zip you inside a ball, and they don't tell you how long they're going to leave you in there. I think if you had tendencies toward claustrophobia then that would probably panic you and they would use that as a discriminator to decide whether they were going to hire you or not. For me, being zipped inside a small, dark place for an indeterminate amount of time was just a great opportunity and nice time to think and maybe have a little nap and relax, so it doesn't bother me. But you can get claustrophobia and agoraphobia — a fear of wide open spaces — simultaneously on a spacewalk.
On coping with moments of fear and panic in space
Half of the risk of a six-month flight is in the first nine minutes, so as a crew, how do you stay focused? How do you not get paralyzed by the fear of it? The way we do it is to break down: What are the risks? And a nice way to keep reminding yourself is: What's the next thing that's going to kill me? And it might be five seconds away, it might be an inadvertent engine shutdown, or it might be staging of the solid rockets coming off. ... We don't just live with that, though. The thing that is really useful, I think out of all of this, is we dig into it so deeply and we look at, "OK, so this might kill us, this is something that would normally panic us, let's get ready, let's think about it." And we go into every excruciating detail of why that might affect what we're doing and what we can do to resolve it and have a plan, and be comfortable with it. ...
“ It's not like astronauts are braver than other people; we're just meticulously prepared.
It's not like astronauts are braver than other people; we're just meticulously prepared. We dissect what it is that's going to scare us, and what it is that is a threat to us and then we practice over and over again so that the natural irrational fear is neutralized.
On losing orientation in space with no sense of "up"
What does it feel like when you close your eyes when you're weightless? Normally on Earth when you close your eyes you can feel your feet on the floor or your rear end on your chair or something and that gives you a sense of up. You can balance with your eyes closed, you can walk with your eyes closed because of all of the external references. When you're weightless and you close your eyes it's as if you just stepped off a cliff into complete blackness and you're falling forever, so the perception of that is really odd. You can do it as like a thought experiment and instead of closing your eyes and thinking that you're just floating, close your eyes and picture that you've just stepped off the Half Dome in Yosemite and are now falling into the blackness, and it's interesting to see how your body reacts to it.
On losing friends and colleagues in the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster
I'd already been an astronaut for a decade when the crew of Columbia was killed. ... Rick Husband and I were out at Edwards at test pilot school together. He was the commander of Columbia ... I knew everybody onboard and I was very close with Rick. So it was an awful thing to go through ... they die so publicly.
... It's redoubled my efforts to try and do this job right in the future and to try and convince everybody that we can solve problems like this and we can be smart and brave enough to take those risks again. And to our credit, it took years, but we made significant changes in a lot of the way we did business.
We flew out the rest of the entire space shuttle program without hurting anybody else. We finished building the space station and we've learned so much about how to safely fly in space as a result of those guys losing their lives. So yeah, it's not a risk-free business when you want to try something hard and new, when you want to explore someplace you haven't been before.
On space travel and faith
The big pervasive feeling onboard looking at the Earth [from space] is one of tremendous exquisite privilege that it exists. ... But I think what everyone would find if they could be in that position — if they could see the whole world every 90 minutes and look down on the places where we do things right, and look down where we're doing stupid, brutal things to each other and the inevitable patience of the world that houses us — I think everybody would be reinforced in their faith, and maybe readdress the real true tenets of what's good and what gives them strength.
Circle Internet Financial has launched with $9M of Series A funding to increase mainstream adoption of digital currencies like Bitcoin by providing a payment platform for consumers and merchants. Investors include Jim Breyer, Accel Partners and General Catalyst Partners.
All three invested in Circle founder Jeremy Allaire’s previous startup Brightcove, an online video platform that went public in 2012.
Circle is a payment platform that wants to make it easy for businesses and consumers to use Bitcoin and other digital currencies. Despite its association with Deep Web black market Silk Road, as well as concerns over its stability, more consumers and companies are beginning to show interest in Bitcoins because they can facilitate online payments at lower costs and with greater security and privacy than existing electronic payment methods. One potential draw for merchants is avoiding the fees and risks of fraud and chargebacks associated with credit cards.
For consumers, Circle says it is building a secure platform that will protect consumer privacy. For businesses and charities, it will provide tools and services that enable them to accept digital currency payments with no transaction fees.
Circle’s Series A is one of the largest–if not the largest–amounts of funding secured so far by a digital currency startup. Other Bitcoin-based companies that have recently landed significant investment include Coinbase, which raised a $5 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures, and BitPay, which has received about $2.5 million to date from Founders Fund and various angel investors.
Other startups that have recently launched to take advantage of the increasing interest in Bitcoin include London-based Bitcoin exchange Coinfloor; music jukebox hack Beatcoin; micropayment platform BitWall; and whitelabel exchange Buttercoin.
In order for companies like Circle to be successful, however, they will have to allay concerns about regulatory issues. As Shakil Khan, founder of Bitcoin news Web site CoinDesk, pointed out last week during a Disrupt Berlin panel, average customers want to see some kind of regulation before they adopt Bitcoin. On the other hand, there are potential opportunities for digital currency companies around the world. For example, China’s government is beginning to show interest in Bitcoins (and a division of Chinese Internet giant Baidu recently started accepting Bitcoin payments).
Circle is based in Boston, with international operations headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. The company is regulated by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the U.S. Department of Treasury, as a money transmitter and is seeking state licenses. John Beccia, the former chief regulatory counsel for the Financial Services Roundtable in Washington, D.C., will also serve as Circle’s general counsel and chief compliance officer.
Allaire also co-founded of Allaire Corporation, creators of Web development language ColdFusion. Allaire Corp. was acquired by Macromedia in 2001, where Allaire became CTO and helped oversee the creation of a Flash-based application platform.
“Bitcoin and digital currency represent a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shape the future of the Internet and global commerce,” said Alliare in a statement. “There’s a tremendous opportunity to make payments easier, more secure and less costly for consumers and businesses. Digital currency can dramatically reduce the friction and costs currently experienced in the world by merchants and consumers.”
Jim Breyer, Partner at Accel Partners, will join Circle’s board of directors, as well as David Orfao of General Catalyst Partners.
“The dramatic global growth in mobile, social and online commerce is creating the need and potential for a real global digital currency. With Jeremy’s vision for Circle and track record as an Internet pioneer, the opportunity here is to potentially build a significant global company,” said Breyer.
LONG BEACH, Calif. -- As sweat dripped through his dreadlocks after a spirited workout on Thursday, Daniel Straus declared himself a happy man.
"Fight week is awesome," the American Top Team fighter said. "I live for this s---. I love to compete."
Straus, who challenges Pat Curran for the Bellator featherweight title on Saturday's main card at Long Beach Arena, hasn't fought for more than a year.
"To be out for so long, it sucks. To know that you're supposed to be doing one thing, .... I've been waiting and itching for my time to fight."
The Cincinnati native has been out of action, but that doesn't mean he's been out of the headlines. In a tumultuous late-winter span, Straus first had to pull out of the originally planned April 4 date against Curran due to a broken hand suffered in training. Then he was arrested in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and charged with driving with a suspended license and possession of marijuana, synthetic cannabis, and ecstasy.
The 29-year old Straus eventually reached a plea deal in order to receive probation and stay out of prison.
The way Straus sees it, the adversity he faced this year will only make him stronger as he goes to meet Curran.
"I just rolled with the punches," Straus said. "My hand held up through rehab, I dealt with my issues and kept pursuing my dream I'm here for. I'm here to be a world champion. Ups and downs don't bother me, ins and out don't bother me."
What did bother him, though, was the way his arrest was portrayed.
"It wasn't me just in the car," Straus said. "It didn't come out in the media because nobody knew that. So they didn't know it wasn't solely me. But that wasn't how it came out. It was heartbreaking to see how it did come out and how people portrayed it. I kind of took offense to the fact that no one came to me and asked me my side. Everyone just wanted to run and report what they read somewhere else. No one ever came and got it out of my mouth. That was heartbreaking."
With his troubles just about in his rear-view mirror, Straus can focus on his bout with Curran. This is a rematch of a 2009 match in Illinois contested in the XFO promotion, won by Curran on a second-round knockout.
Straus views the loss as the most important learning experience of his career. Since that time, he's won 17 of 18 fights.
"I can't go to that fight, examine that fight, and try to fight him again off that fight," Straus said. "I'll lose, again. Pat can't watch that fight, examine that fight, and fight me again. He'll take the ass-whipping I got that night. We're both two different fighters from the time I first met. We've grown as people, we've grown as fighters."
In fact, he feels so much has changed since that time, there's almost no point in going back and looking at the tape of the first fight.
"It really opened my eyes as to the sport. Since that fight of won 17 of 18 fights, I went on a two-year winning streak of 12 fights. That fight changed me because going into that fight I knew I could beat Pat. And I got beat. So I started taking this sport seriously."
Curran, meanwhile, returned the sentiment.
"He's so much better, so much more of a complete fighter than he was for our first fight," Curran said Thursday. "I'm better, he's better, I'm looking at this like a brand-new challenge, not like a rematch."
Win or lose, Straus is just glad he's back doing what he loves.
"I love this sport, it's been good to me," Straus said. "Being an athlete's been good to me. Sports have always been my savior. I've always been in and out of this, in and out of that, but I've always come back to sports. It's good. I don't want to be that guy that's losing 12 in a row and fighting for a paycheck."
In this Oct. 22, 2013 photo, Saw Min lies still on a bed with weights on her eye after receiving local anesthesia ahead of a cataract operation at a government hospital in Bago, Myanmar. Saw Min waited with hundreds of Myanmar's poorest villagers to be prepped for the simple, free surgery she hopes will restore her sight. My heart is racing," said the 38-year-old mother of five, who lost all vision in her left eye one year ago and, in the months that followed, all but 20 percent in her right. (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)
In this Oct. 22, 2013 photo, Saw Min lies still on a bed with weights on her eye after receiving local anesthesia ahead of a cataract operation at a government hospital in Bago, Myanmar. Saw Min waited with hundreds of Myanmar's poorest villagers to be prepped for the simple, free surgery she hopes will restore her sight. My heart is racing," said the 38-year-old mother of five, who lost all vision in her left eye one year ago and, in the months that followed, all but 20 percent in her right. (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)
In this Oct. 22, 2013 photo, a patient with an eye patch rests inside a makeshift mosquito-net at a Buddhist monastery following a simple operation to remove a cataract in Bago, Myanmar. Five decades of isolation, military rule and woeful health care have left Myanmar with one of the highest rates of blindness in the region. Now the veil of darkness is starting to lift, thanks to an “assembly line” surgical procedure that allows cataracts to be removed safely, without stitches, through two small incisions. (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)
In this Oct. 22, 2013 photo, patients receive assistance after undergoing cataract surgeries at a government hospital in Bago, Myanmar. Accurate statistics concerning public health are difficult to come by in Myanmar, which only opened up to the outside world two years ago. The World Health Organization puts blindness prevalence rates at under 1 percent, high for the region in Myanmar, but one outside survey showed it peaking at 8.1 percent in some rural areas. (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)
In this Oct. 23, 2013 photo, Buddhist monks with eye patches exit a room in a Buddhist shrine following simple operations to remove cataracts in Bago, Myanmar. Five decades of isolation, military rule and woeful health care have left Myanmar with one of the highest rates of blindness in the region. Now the veil of darkness is starting to lift, thanks to an “assembly line” surgical procedure that allows cataracts to be removed safely, without stitches, through two small incisions. (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)
In this Oct. 22, 2013 photo, a woman suffering from blindness has tears dripping from her eye as she waits to enter an operation room to follow a simple surgical procedure to remove cataracts at a government hospital in Bago, Myanmar. Five decades of isolation, military rule and woeful health care have left Myanmar with one of the highest rates of blindness in the region. Now the veil of darkness is starting to lift, thanks to an "assembly line" surgical procedure that allows cataracts to be removed safely, without stitches, through two small incisions, a technique pioneered by Nepalese master surgeon Sandut Ruit. (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)
BAGON, Myanmar (AP) — Five decades of isolation, military rule and woeful health care have left Myanmar with a particularly high rate of blindness. Now the veil of darkness is starting to lift, thanks in part to an "assembly line" surgical procedure that allows cataracts to be removed safely, without stitches, through two small incisions.
Nepalese surgeon Sandut Ruit, who helped pioneer the technique, oversaw nearly 1,300 operations at two massive eye camps in 10 days in October, with dozens of local ophthalmologists looking on and helping.
Despite improvements over the last two decades, the vast majority still use a microincision surgical technique that requires two sutures. Doctors were confident the no-stitch procedure — cheap, easy to learn and taking as little as five minutes — would catch on quickly.
"This is a turning point in our cataract history," said Dr. Tin Win, the chief of Yangon Eye Hospital. He said his goal is to have all 60 eye centers in the nation of 60 million using the procedure by the end of next year. He says he will pass on the information to all doctors, together with training manuals and videos, at a nationwide eye conference in early November.
"If we succeed, we can double our cataract surgical rate," he said. "We can start getting rid of our cataract backlog."
Several organizations focused on preventing blindness have focused on Myanmar as a country in particular need of help. A 2005 survey conducted by the South Australian Institute of Ophthalmology in the rural Meiktila district of central Myanmar found that 8.1 percent of the population there was blind.
Ruit, who travels throughout the developing world holding free mass eye camps, was working in Myanmar for the first time.
He and his team were initially scheduled to perform 1,000 surgeries, but added nearly 300 patients due to the overwhelming response by potential candidates.
After the operation, some patients expressed hope they would be able to work again. Others were eager to see the faces of their children and grandchildren.
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/bbd825583c8542898e6fa7d440b9febc/Article_2013-10-31-AS-Myanmar-Gift-of-Sight-Photo-Essay/id-c1915ef26c1147e9b5bc5e0a387c4b2a
