ICE BOX TO BE IN THE MONEY AT THIS YEARS DERBY! USE HIM IN EXACTA BOXES AND TO RUN FIRST AND SECOND IN THE TRI AND SUPER!

Kentucky Derby 2010 | Ice Box has the ability

Colt fares well vs. top horses

Ice Box isn't coming into Saturday's 136th Kentucky Derby cold-calling on the top Triple Crown contenders. Last week's bullet workout at Churchill Downs sold his supporters on the fact that Ice Box is red hot for the premier showdown of 3-year-old thoroughbreds.
But it was his victory by a nose in the GradeI Florida Derby at odds of 21-1 over Pleasant Prince that earned him enough money to make a trip to the Run for the Roses. The Gulfstream Park effort also earned him a reputation as a strong closer. Ice Box has won 3of7 lifetime starts and is sixth on the Derby's graded stakes earnings list with $457,500.

“We were happy with his win in the Florida Derby,” said trainer Nick Zito, who has teamed with owner Robert LaPenta on three previous Kentucky Derby starters: The Cliff's Edge, fifth in 2004; Andromeda's Hero, eighth in 2005; and Cool Coal Man, 15th in 2008.

The timing of the Florida Derby puts six weeks between starts for Ice Box. But his workout last Friday didn't throw any cold water on Zito's Derby plans, when the colt had the fastest time for a half-mile workout, 462/5 seconds. Zito had Ice Box out again Monday for a gallop of about 11/2 miles with exercise rider Dennis Chavez.

Zito said he can draw some comparisons between Ice Box and his first Derby winner, Strike the Gold in 1991.

“Just like Strike the Gold, he's a late-developing horse,” Zito said. “He ran in Florida … ran the right races. Of course, Strike the Gold finished second in the Florida Derby and this horse won.

“I like his chances, I really do. … It's good to have a horse this week training the way he does.”

Ice Box, who will have Jose Lezcano riding, also has the breeding: The chestnut colt was sired by Pulpit, fourth in the 1997 Derby, and his second dam, Crown of Sheba, is a half-sister to 1985 Derby winner and Horse of the Year Spend A Buck.

LaPenta became involved in thoroughbred racing in 1998, when he signed on as one of basketball coach Rick Pitino's partners, then launched his own stable in 2001. LaPenta, who is CEO of L-1 Identity Solutions, also was the founder of L-3 Communications.

With Monday's defection of Rule, Zito-trained Jackson Bend joined the top 20 Derby list based on graded stakes earnings, with $230,000. LaPenta owns the Florida-bred colt with the breeders, Fred and Jane Brei's Jacks or Better Farm.

Jackson Bend, who will be ridden by Hall of Fame jockey Mike Smith, heads into Saturday's showdown off three runner-up finishes this year in graded stakes. He was second in the GradeIII Holy Bull, the GradeII Fountain of Youth and the GradeI Wood Memorial, the last two behind Eskendereya. As a 2-year-old Jackson Bend reeled off five wins in six starts.

“We're very excited to have him in there,” said Zito, who also had Jackson Bend out for a long gallop on a misty Monday morning. “He's certainly worthy of a start, that's for sure, being second two times to Eskendereya in two big races. He's kind of a gem of consistency, that's what we want. … He really didn't duck anybody to get in this field.”

Paul Rolfes can be reached at (502) 582-4221. http://www.courier-journal.com

By Nate Anderson

If you want the fastest average broadband speed in the world, don't move to Japan. Instead, buckle up your Birkenstocks and pile into the VW Bus, because it's time for a road trip to Berkeley, California, home of the fastest average Internet speeds on earth.

This nugget of data comes courtesy of the most recent State of the Internet report from Akamai Technologies, which collects and analyzes a unique data set of worldwide speeds and IP address usage. When all of the company's speed data was sorted by city, three US locations top the list before South Korea and Japan begin to dominate.

Those three spots are Berkeley (average speed: 18.7Mbps), Chapel Hill, North Carolina (average speed: 17.5Mbps), and Stanford, California (average speed: 17.0Mbps). The next US city on the list is Durham, North Carolina (average speed: 13.6Mbps) in eighth place, followed by Ithaca, New York; Ann Arbor, Michigan; College Station, Texas; Urbana, Illinois; Cambridge, Massachusetts; University Park, Pennsylvania; and East Lansing, Michigan.

If you're not from the US, you might not see the pattern: each of these cities houses a major research university. Akamai obtained these results by filtering out all cities with less than 50,000 unique IP addresses, to make sure that the averages weren't affected by outlying small cities. The result was that "so-called 'college towns' are some of the best connected in the United States."

As someone who lived in Chapel Hill for years and spent plenty of time in Durham, this result raised a huge and obvious question: are these high speeds truly representative of what home users in those communities can purchase, or are they largely a result of on-campus high-speed access from Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill? (My guess would be the latter, especially in Durham.)

The college town advantage

Akamai had the same question, fortunately. Their answer: "However, what this likely represents is the extremely high speed connections these university/college campuses have to the Internet, as opposed to particularly high-speed consumer broadband services available to local residents. (However, it may also be the case that the speed of local consumer broadband offerings is potentially higher than average.)"

Regular readers may recall that last week we looked into the claim by Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg that US broadband was number one in the world. Akamai's data, showing that these top US cities beat out anything in Japan, south Korea, and Europe, would seem evidence for that assertion. But consider Akamai's explanation; if universities are actually the drivers of these high speeds, which are not then available to community residents, they don't say much about the state of US consumer broadband at all.

Indeed, when you filter the list to exclude US towns with a major college in the middle of them, every US city on the list goes away. This also applies to other countries, of course; Norway's top entry on the list is Trondheim (average speed: 10.6Mbps), home to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The UK's top entry is Oxford. South Korea's top city, Masan, also has a couple of colleges.

The data, then, is of limited use if we care about arguing over consumer broadband and where it's best. But it does remind us of one thing: around the world, if you want fast Internet, it's good to be a student.

Obama administration spending billions on new global strike weapons

By Bill Van Auken
24 April 2010

The Obama administration is spending billions of dollars to develop new weapons systems, including powerful conventional warhead missiles capable of striking any target in the world within less than an hour.

The US Air Force carried out two separate test launches April 22—one at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and the other at Cape Canaveral, Florida—designed to further the development of these weapons systems.

The first system, known as Conventional Prompt Global Strike, or CPGS, would be capable of striking anywhere across the globe within under an hour of a launch order, using intercontinental ballistic missiles fired from the US to deliver conventional warheads against targets in other countries.

Capable of striking a target with an impact speed of up to 4,000 feet per second and a payload of up to 8,000 pounds, these warheads would be able to obliterate everything within a 3,000-foot radius.

The Obama administration has requested $240 million in appropriations by Congress to pay for developing CPGS in 2011, an increase of 45 percent over this year’s budget. The total cost of the program is expected to mount to over $2 billion by 2015, by which time the Pentagon hopes to have deployed the first elements of the weapons system.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) carried out a test launch Thursday of a space plane known as the Falcon, or Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (HTV-2), a suborbital vehicle that is the prototype for the CPGS delivery system.

It was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a decommissioned ballistic missile, from which the plane separated just outside of the atmosphere, hurtling back to the Earth at a speed of more than 13,000 miles per hour, more than 20 times the speed of sound. The plane was supposed to crash into the Pacific Ocean near a US military test site on the Kwajalein Atoll.

The other unmanned space vehicle launched Thursday from Cape Canaveral was the X-37B. The Pentagon remained tight-lipped about the highly classified program, refusing to say even when the 29-foot plane—which resembles a smaller version of the space shuttle—would return to earth, much less specify what it was carrying or give any detailed explanation of its mission.

While it is estimated that the cost of developing the X-37B will run into the billions, the precise amount also remains classified, included as part of the Pentagon’s “black” budget.

Gary Payton, the deputy undersecretary for Air Force space programs, would say only that the test flight was designed to further “development programs that will provide capabilities for our warfighters in the future.”

It is widely believed that the vehicle is being developed as part of a US effort to militarize space, providing a weapons platform and launch pad for smaller spy satellites. There is also speculation that it is being developed as part of the Prompt Global Strike system.

Advocates of Prompt Global Strike have promoted the weapons system as a means to respond instantaneously to intelligence on the location of alleged terrorists or supposed threats of an imminent launch of weapons of mass destruction. They have also argued that the deployment of the new weapons would reduce the dependence of the US military on its nuclear arsenal.

Critics, including Russian officials, have pointed out, however, that the launching of intercontinental ballistic missiles, even if they were carrying conventional warheads, could easily trigger a nuclear war.

“World states will hardly accept a situation in which nuclear weapons disappear, but weapons that are no less destabilizing emerge in the hands of certain members of the international community,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters earlier this month in Moscow.

In a state of the nation address following the announcement of the proposed weapons system under the Bush administration, then-Russian President Vladimir Putin warned, “The launch of such a missile could provoke a full-scale counterattack using strategic nuclear forces.”

Largely as a result of such warnings, Congress previously failed to provide funding for the program. The proposal “really hadn’t gone anywhere in the Bush administration,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in an interview on the ABC news program “This Week.” Gates, who was held over in his post by incoming President Barack Obama, noted that the weapons system had been “embraced by the new administration.”

The New York Times reported Friday that in an interview Obama had defended the weapons system as a “move towards less emphasis on nuclear weapons” and argued that it would insure “that our conventional weapons capability is an effective deterrent in all but the most extreme circumstances.”

In a separate interview with the Times, Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, the head of the Strategic Command, argued that the weapons system was needed to give the White House more military options.

“Today we can present some conventional options to the President to strike a target anywhere on the globe that range from 96 hours, to several hours maybe, 4, 5, 6 hours,” Chilton told the Times.

“That would simply not be fast enough, he noted, if intelligence arrived about a movement by Al Qaeda terrorists or the imminent launching of a missile,” the newspaper said. “‘If the president wants to act on a particular target faster than that, the only thing we have that goes faster is a nuclear response,’ he said.”

Advocates of the program within the military and the administration have claimed that the danger of Russia or China interpreting the launch of a Prompt Global Strike missile as the beginning of a nuclear attack could be alleviated by positioning launch vehicles above ground, giving them a different flight path and even opening launch sites up for inspection. Military analysts point out, however, that such a system would provide an ideal subterfuge in the event that Washington decided to launch a “preventive” nuclear war.

Moscow’s concern over the proposed weapons system found expression in the recently signed New Start nuclear weapons treaty agreed by the US and Russia, which requires that the introduction of any US intercontinental ballistic missile carrying a conventional weapon capable of reaching Russian soil be compensated by the decommissioning of an existing nuclear-armed missile.

Obama’s rhetoric about the new weapons system contributing to nuclear disarmament notwithstanding, there is ample evidence that Washington remains committed to maintaining and upgrading its nuclear arsenal.

Speaking Thursday at the NATO foreign ministers meeting in Estonia, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejected proposals from European governments for the removal of so-called tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons that the US has deployed on the continent.

“We should recognize that as long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance,” Clinton told the gathering in Tallinn. “As a nuclear alliance, sharing nuclear risks and responsibilities widely is fundamental.”

Meanwhile, at a recent hearing of the House Armed Services Committee, General Chilton, the head of the US Strategic Command, assured members of Congress that the military is proceeding with work on a “follow-on to the current Ohio-class Trident submarine fleet,” which carries D-5 nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Sounding the same theme, James Miller, the principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, said, “The department is currently looking at the mix of long-range strike capabilities that the military will need for the coming decade or two,” adding that both nuclear and conventional weapons would figure in this “mix.”

The development of these new weapons systems will only provide Washington and the Pentagon with another instrument for carrying out so-called “preventive wars” and acts of aggression, giving the US president a non-nuclear capacity to kill thousands of people virtually instantaneously with the push of a button.

Morpheus (pronounced /ˈmɔr.fjuːs/; Greek: Μορφεύς, Morpheus, or Μορφέας, Morpheas, "he who shapes [dreams]") is the Greek god of dreams and sleep. Morpheus has the ability to take any human's form and appear in dreams, but is described as having wings on his back when in his true form.

Family

He is the son of Hypnos, the God of sleep. His mother is Pasithea, the goddess of hallucination. Morpheus' uncle is Thanatos, the god of death (Hypnos brother), his grand mother is Nyx, the goddess of the night, and his grandfather is Erebus, the god of darkness.

Morpheus and his brothers have a close connection with Hades and other Olympian gods as well.

In other myths, he was the son of Hades.

Morpheus, along with his brothers Phobetor (also known as Icelus), and Phantasos have wings on their backs, which they were given by his father Hypnos. Morpheus used his wings to go to others to help them in their dreams. He also used his wings to carry his father to Morpheus' dream world to keep him safe in a cave next to the river of forgetfulness. Phobetor and Phantasos live in Morpheus' dream world.

It is unknown if Morpheus had a wife, though a suspected wife was often portrayed as Iris (the personification of the rainbow).

Abode

Morpheus' dream world is protected by the Gates of Morpheus, which had two monsters capable of becoming one's fears, a method to drive one away. Only other Olympians could enter Morpheus' Dream World. It is notable that his dream world is where his family lived - other gods that were exiled out of Mount Olympus. Notable features of Morpheus' dream world are the Rivers of Forgetfulness and the River of Oblivion.

As Morpheus goes to and from the mortal world, he leaves his brother Phantasos in charge when he is absent from his home

Attributions

It is said that Morpheus is always watching in one's dreams as a shadow.

Morpheus sends images of humans in dreams or visions, and is responsible for shaping dreams, or giving shape to the beings that inhabit dreams. Phobetor made fearsome dreams (etymologically related to "phobia" from the Greek φόβος "fear"). Phantasos produced tricky and unreal dreams (hence "fantasy", "phantasmagoria", etc.). Together, these attendants of Hypnos rule the realm of dreams.

Morpheus also had special responsibility for the dreams of kings and heroes. For these reasons, Morpheus is often referred to as "Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams", in superiority to his brothers.

The drug Morphine is named after Morpheus for its ability to make one sleepy and dreamy.

Appearances

• Morpheus is spoken of in the Metamorphoses of Ovid. According to Ovid, Morpheus concentrated on the human elements of dreams, his brothers Phobetor and Phantasos being responsible for animals and inanimate objects, respectively.
• It is also believed that in the Iliad he is spoken of as "Dream".
• He is referred to in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590). He sleeps on an ebony bed in a dimly lit cave, surrounded by poppy flowers.
• Morpheus, under the name "Dream" is the principle character in Neil Gaiman's comic book series, "Sandman". As the embodiment and ruler of the dreams, he uses many different names, one of which is "Morpheus".
• Morpheus is featured in episode 3, season 1 of Xena Warrior Princess, where he is the object of worship of a corrupted dream cult. He is also in Homer's Adventures of Odysseus/Ulysses.
• Morpheus as a reference to Morphine is used in a song by the American rock band "Hurt" in a song off their "Vol. I" album called "Overdose"
• Morpheus is also referred to in "Comatose (In the Arms of Slumber)" from the album "Desireless" by Eagle Eye Cherry.
• Morpheus makes an appearance in the "The Last Olympian" by Rick Riordan - the fifth book of his "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" series - as the god of dreams. He puts all of New York City to sleep.
• Morpheus "appears" (only his darkness) in God Of War: Chains of Olympus
• Morpheus is mentioned in the song "The Safest Way Into Tomorrow" by Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Reference is also made to his wings which he is "offering" in the song (to the person being addressed).
• In the film The Matrix (1999), Morpheus (interprted by Laurence Fishburne) is the leader of a team of free humans and enables Neo to wake up from his "sleep".

References

• Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XI, at Google Books
• John Potter, "Archaeologia Graeca, or The antiquities of Greece. To which is added, an appendix, containing a concise history of the Grecian states", 1818, Chapter XIII - Of Divination by Dreams, at Google Books

God of dreams & sleep
Abode	Morpheus' dream world
Symbol	Poppy
Consort	Iris (suspected)
Parents	Pasithea and Hypnos or Hades
Siblings	Phobetor (uncle in some portrayals) and Phantasos

1St Ammendement Does Not Matter!

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 22, 2010

Virginia's Department of Motor Vehicles is so accustomed to drivers trying to sneak lewd, gross, hateful or racist messages onto personalized license plates that it has a rigorous process to root them out.

A manager in the Personalized Plates Work Center reads through every application, putting any suspicious combination of letters and numbers into a computer program that analyzes the potential plate for hidden meaning. Questionable messages go to a 20-person Word Committee for review and a vote. Among the few printable examples of rejected license plates, according to Melanie Stokes, a member of the Word Committee, are "JERKA55," "IPOOPD," and "HORNI1."

But sometimes, the system doesn't quite work.

The owner of a Ford truck bearing the license plate 14CV88 will have to find a new message after the DMV on Wednesday canceled its earlier approval of that series of letters and numbers.

A photo of the truck hit the Web a few days ago, went viral on car and other blogs and finally came to the attention of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group for American Muslims. On Wednesday morning, the group complained to the DMV that the plate contained a white supremacist and neo-Nazi statement.

A few hours later, the DMV agreed that the plate contains a coded message: The number 88 stands for the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, doubled to signify "Heil Hitler," said CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper. "CV" stands for "Confederate veteran" -- the plate was a special model embossed with a Confederate flag, which Virginia makes available for a $10 fee to card-carrying members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. And 14 is code for imprisoned white supremacist David Lane's 14-word motto: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

The giveaway that something was amiss, Hooper said, was the truck itself. An enormous photo of the burning World Trade Center towers covers the entire tailgate, with the words: "Everything I ever needed to know about Islam I learned on 9/11."

Hooper at first thought the picture was a Photoshopped hoax. But when he called the DMV and discovered the plate was registered in 2005 to a Ford F-150 pickup truck, Hooper started to worry.

"If the license plate had been on a VW Beetle with nothing else on it, or a Volvo station wagon, no one would probably have noticed," said Hooper. "But when the Confederate flag is thrown in . . . it shows the convergence of anti-government and anti-Islamic sentiments that unfortunately seem to be growing."

The DMV would not release the identity or location of the vehicle owner, citing privacy laws. Virginia has the highest percentage of personalized plates in the nation.

"Even with our rigorous process, we miss a few," Stokes said. "And we missed this one."

No word on whether the truck, shown in the photo in a parking spot reserved for the handicapped, has the requisite disability tags.

THANKS TO ALL THE COOL PEOPLE WHO HAVE CHECKED OUT THIS BLOG! I WILL HAVE A HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE END OF JUNE THAT WILL PUT YOU IN SHOCK! STAY TUNED!

Like Newspaper Revenue, the Decline in Circ Shows Signs of Slowing By Mark Fitzgerald Published: April 26, 2010 CHICAGO Fittingly, the spring Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) Fas-Fax report was released in the middle of earnings season. And so the many newspapers reporting that ad revenue was still falling, but at a slower pace, were mostly also posting circ numbers that continue to slide but not accelerate. There were plenty of ugly numbers in Monday's Fas-Fax, especially among the metros that seem never to run out of "junk" circulation to wring out. But there were signs that circ could be on its way to stabilizing. Overall average paid daily circulation fell 8.7% year-over-year for the six months through March, ABC said. That's an improvement on last fall's numbers, which were down 10.6% year-over-year. Sunday was down 6.54% in this report compared to a 7.5% drop in 2009. But at the top of the circulation charts, the big just keep getting smaller -- often much smaller. Of the top 25 dailies, only The Wall Street Journal managed to record a year-over-year gain, and at that, the 0.5% rise would in past years be described as flat. Journal circulation is boosted by an unusually large e-edition circulation, which was reported Monday as 414,025, nearly four times more than the next big e-edition user, The Detroit Free Press which encouraged subscribers to switch to them when the paper cut home delivery to three days. USA Today was down 13.58% in the period as the collapse in business travel that sustained its strong growth for two decades continues to take its toll on hotel sales. Of the 21 big metros whose circ could be directly compared to the year-ago period, fully 10 fell by double-digit percentages. Two dailies fell by more than 20%, The Dallas Morning News (down 21.47%) and the San Francisco Chronicle (down 22.68%). There was a new kid in the top 10 as the San Jose Mercury News posted a weekday circulation of 516,701 by incorporating the Oakland Tribune and Contra Costa Times as editions of the Mercury News. Despite the signs of a moderating circulation picture, industry figures continued their campaign deemphasizing the sales of newspaper copies. "Although audited circulation data at a local level remains important to certain types of advertisers -- particularly insert advertisers -- bottom-line paid circulation data in an aggregated industry level does not tell the whole story about the vitality of the newspaper industry," Newspaper Association of America CEO John Sturm said in a statement. ABC itself is introducing new reporting rules that will report paid circulation as just one part of data on the total audience for a print daily, new digital newspaper products such as mobile and tablets, and related publications such as commuter dailies. And newspapers -- including some that reported big declines in print paid circ -- showed significant growth when print and online audiences are combined. The Chicago Tribune, for instance, fell below 500,000 circulation in this Fas-Fax, as its paid sales dropped 9.79%. But it was among the top 25 gainers when print and online are combined. The Trib increased 9.73% to 3,599,458. The Star Tribune, down 7.71% in the Fas-Fax, was up 6.02% in the combined print and online audience. The complete chart of the combined audience is posted on E&P's business-oriented Fitz & Jen blog.
Top 25 List by Daily Circulation Newspaper Circ as of 3/31/10/ % Change
1. The Wall Street Journal 2,092,523 +0.5%
2. USA Today 1,826,622 -13.58%
3. The New York Times 951,063 -8.47%
4. Los Angeles Times 616,606 -14.74%
5. Washington Post 578,482 -13.06%
6. Daily News (New York) 535,059 -11.25%
7. New York Post 525,004 -5.94%
8. San Jose Mercury News* 516,701 N/A (1/1/10 To 3/31/2010)
9. Chicago Tribune 452,145 -9.79%
10. Houston Chronicle 366,578 -13.77%
11. The Philadelphia Inquirer** 356,189 N/A 1
2. The Arizona Republic 351,207 -9.88%
13. Newsday 334,809 -9.07%
14. The Denver Post*** 333,675 N/A
15. Star Tribune, Minneapolis 295,438 -7.71%
16. St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times 278,888 -1.49%
17. Chicago Sun-Times 268,803 -13.88%
18. The Plain Dealer, Cleveland 267,888 -8.14%
19. The Oregonian 263,600 -1.83%
20. The Seattle Times*** 263.468 N/A
21. The Dallas Morning News 260,659 -21.47%
22. Detroit Free Press 252,017 -13.31%
23. San Diego Union-Tribune 249,630 -4.45%
24. San Francisco Chronicle 241,330 -22.68%
25. The Star-Ledger, Newark, N.J. 236,017 -17.79% * The Mercury News since 1/1/10 has made Oakland Tribune and Contra Costa Times editions of the daily. **Philadelphia Daily News circ is now included as an edition of the Inquirer. ***In Seattle and Denver, joint operating agreement partners ceased publishing a print newspaper. ---- This list has been corrected. In compilng this list, ABC reversed the circulation results of the San Francisco Chronicle and San Diego Union-Tribune.

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Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is editor of E&P.