hiroyukinagato: April 2013

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Online poker is back: Legal website launches in NV

The home page for Ultimate Poker by the company Ultimate Gaming is seen on a computer screen at the company's headquarters, Monday, April 29, 2013, in Las Vegas. The social gaming company is expected to launch the first legal, real-money poker site in the U.S. Tuesday morning. The Ultimate Gaming site will be available only to in players in Nevada, but likely represents the shape of things to come for gamblers across the country. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

Ultimate Gaming chairman Tom Breitling, left, and CEO Tobin Prior sit for a photo at their company headquarters, Monday, April 29, 2013, in Las Vegas. The social gaming company is expected to launch the first legal, real-money poker site in the U.S. Tuesday morning. The Ultimate Gaming site will be available only to in players in Nevada, but likely represents the shape of things to come for gamblers across the country. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

A sample poker game is played on the soon-to-be launched Ultimate Gaming website, Monday, April 29, 2013, in Las Vegas. The social gaming company is expected to launch the first legal, real-money poker site in the U.S. Tuesday morning. The Ultimate Gaming site will be available only to in players in Nevada, but likely represents the shape of things to come for gamblers across the country.(AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

LAS VEGAS (AP) ? Poker devotees will soon be able to skip the smoky casino and legally gamble their dollars away on the couch ? at least in the state of Nevada.

A Las Vegas-based social gambling company is expected to launch the first legal, real-money poker website in the United States on Tuesday morning.

The site, run by Ultimate Gaming, will accept wagers only from players in Nevada for now, but likely represents the shape of things to come for gamblers across the country.

Internet poker, never fully legal, has been strictly outlawed since 2011, when the Department of Justice seized the domain names of the largest offshore sites catering to U.S. customers and blacked them out.

This crackdown, dubbed "black Friday," left poker fanatics with two options: They could either get dressed and visit a visit a card room, or break the law and log into an offshore site.

More recently, the federal government softened its stance on Internet betting, and three states ? New Jersey, Delaware and Nevada? have legalized some form of online wagering within their borders.

With Tuesday's launch, Nevada wins the race to bring Texas Hold 'em back to the Internet.

"There was black Friday, and now we're going to have 'trusting Tuesday,'" said Ultimate Gaming CEO Tobin Prior. "Players won't have to worry if their money is safe. They are going to be able to play with people they can trust and know the highest regulatory standards have been applied."

The site, UltimatePoker.com, will look familiar to those who participated in the poker craze of the 2000s. Only the account setup and login process have changed. Instead of checking a box certifying they are older than 18, players will have to endure a lengthy account setup process involving a Social Security number and a Nevada address. Only those older than 21 will be allowed to play.

Ultimate Gaming and the two dozen other companies still fine-tuning their Nevada poker sites hope they will win the trust not only of players, but of regulators and politicians.

"It's an opportunity to show the world how to properly run online poker," Ultimate Gaming chairman Tom Breitling said.

Several cash-hungry states are weighing legislation that would allow them to tap into what is expected to be a multibillion-dollar market. Some bills would legalize only poker, as Nevada has, while others would throw open the gates to all casino games, including slots, as New Jersey and Delaware have done.

Earlier this year, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval approved legislation that gives him the ability to sign deals with other governors to facilitate interstate Internet gambling.

Online gamblers around the world currently wager an estimated $35 billion each year, according to the American Gaming Association. A fully realized U.S. online poker market could generate $4.3 billion in revenue its first year, and $9.6 billion by year five, according to London-based research firm H2 Gambling Capital.

Still, with federal efforts to legalize Internet poker stalled, it may be a while before a critical mass of states link together to lure professional players back from overseas and drive up jackpots.

Nevada, a state of just 2.8 million, attracts 47 million visitors a year? more than the population of California. But who wants to go on vacation just to fire up their laptop and play some virtual cards?

"I think the real excitement will be when we get a very populous state like a California or a New York allowing these companies to expand," ITG casino analyst Matthew Jacob said. "But these changes often take longer to occur than people assume. It requires a change in law and then it takes a while from when the law passes until the sites are up and running."

Prior says he intends to make Ultimate Poker profitable within a matter of years, in part through cross-promotion with mixed martial arts giant Ultimate Fighting Championship. The companies share a common owner: Frank Fertitta III and his brother Lorenzo, who also own Station Casinos Inc., an extensive chain that caters to locals in Las Vegas.

The Ultimate Poker logo has enjoyed prime placement in the UFC fight octagon for months. The Ultimate Poker Facebook page, which steers fans to a zero-stakes version of the site, features a mix of UFC glamour shots and stock images of guys in hoodies staring into laptop screens.

"When you look at the demographic of the UFC fan and the online poker player, it's almost a perfect overlap," Breitling said.

In the coming months, Ultimate Gaming will have to prove that its technology and 111 employees can prevent minors and out-of-state players from wagering real dollars, and guard against money laundering.

It will also have to pay 6.75 percent of its revenue in Nevada state taxes.

It's unclear how much of a boon the new market will be to the cash-strapped state. In 2012, the Pew Center on the States analyzed 13 states that had recently legalized new types of gambling, and found that more than two-thirds of "failed to live up to the initial promises or projections."

The gambling industry is hoping the return of Internet poker will revitalize interest in the game and help brick and mortar casinos capture a younger market.

The rise of Internet poker is generally credited with helping spark the poker fad of the last decade. The end of online gambling is thought to have helped quash interest in the game.

In the coming months, the industry will be watching closely to see if poker players come flocking back from their new hobbies, replacement computer games and illegal offshore gambling sites.

"This is a really huge moment for our company, the state of Nevada and the gaming community," Breitling said. "We're hoping to make poker fun again."

___

Hannah Dreier can be reached at http://twitter.com/hannahdreier

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2013-04-30-US-Internet-Gambling/id-0adca925d91c4dc095078416641aa096

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UK to risk EU court challenge over tougher insurance rules

By Huw Jones

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain intends to implement a tougher version of European Union rules on capital adequacy for its own insurers, even at the risk of a legal challenge in the bloc's courts, a top regulator has said.

Andrew Bailey, chief executive of Britain's Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), said EU rules known as Solvency II, due to come into effect in 2016 at the earliest, would not be comprehensive enough.

"To mitigate this risk, we plan to use 'early warning indicators' in our supervisory work," Bailey said in a letter to Andrew Tyrie, chairman of parliament's Treasury Committee.

The PRA wants to avoid a repeat of the Equitable Life scandal, which saw the world's oldest life assurer nearly collapse after making promises to policyholders that it could not keep.

It is the latest example of Britain, which is home to the EU's biggest financial centre and had to bail out a number of its banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, losing patience over EU curbs on national supervisors.

Solvency II is a set of European rules requiring insurers to use approved in-house models to calculate their capital buffers.

Bailey said the indicators to be applied to British-based insurers, which he did not detail, would trigger "immediate supervisory action" if they suggested that insurers were using the models to cut back on capital.

Tyrie said this was probably necessary as complex models are all too easily circumvented.

Solvency II is a part of an EU drive for "maximum harmonisation" that leaves little wiggle room for national insurance supervisors to top measures up or water them down.

"We believe we can implement these early warning indicators in the UK within the S-II framework, but in any event we would pursue this approach and accept the risk of EU challenge," Bailey said.

If it imposes add-on rules, Britain could be taken to the European Court of Justice, which has the power to enforce their removal.

Britain has also been fighting for discretion to introduce extra capital requirements on banks beyond EU-agreed levels from 2014; the insurance indicators echo moves by Bailey to counter investor scepticism over how banks use in-house models to determine capital requirements.

Bailey said flexibility was needed in the regulation of insurers because Solvency II did not fully address risks such as troubled sovereign debt.

Solvency II has been a decade in the making and was due to come into effect this year, but has been delayed until at least 2016 because of disagreements over some of the fine detail.

"In particular, it is unclear to us that the French authorities will now be able to agree to any directive that we consider prudentially acceptable," Bailey said. Germany is also looking for a long phase-in of a decade or more, he added.

(Reporting by Huw Jones; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/uk-risk-eu-court-challenge-over-tougher-insurance-230610420.html

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Saturday, April 27, 2013

Galaxy S4 teardown reveals the silicon beauty within the plastic beast

What's in a Galaxy S4? A whole lot of easily repairable parts, it turns out. The fine folks at iFixit recently got their hands on Samsung's smartphone flagship and wasted no time in tearing it asunder. Scoring an eight out of ten on the repairability scale, the GS4 puts up little defense to tinkering hands with only 11 screws standing between you and its innards. The front panel serves up the single source of difficulty since the glass and LCD are fused together and glued into the frame -- so, you'll have to scoop out most of its components to get to it and the Synaptics S5000B chip powering the tweaked capacitive display. Other than that, there aren't really any component surprises. But don't let that stop you from taking a full tour of the gore-y silicon glory at the source.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Samsung

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Source: iFixit

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/26/samsung-galaxy-s4-teardown/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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How To Lose The Sequestration Fight (talking-points-memo)

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Friday, April 26, 2013

The Daily Roundup for 04.26.2013

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/26/the-daily-roundup-for-04-26-2013/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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Monday, April 8, 2013

Dengue cases may be 4 times more common than thought

Jorge Saenz / AP, file

Miriam Torres, 28, veiled by a mosquito net recovers from dengue fever at the Hospital General Barrio Obrero, in Asuncion, Paraguay, Thursday, Jan. 17, 2013.

By Maria Chen, The Associated Press

LONDON--?There may be nearly four times as many people infected with the tropical disease dengue globally than was previously believed, according to a new study.

The World Health Organization has estimated there are about 50 million to 100 million cases of dengue, also known as "break-bone fever," every year. But new research puts the number at around 390 million ? though about two-thirds of those people have only mild illness and don't need medical attention. The study was published online Sunday in the journal Nature.

The data won't change how patients are handled but could prompt a speedier search for a vaccine for the mosquito-borne disease. The study was funded by the Wellcome Trust, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and others.

WHO said it wasn't surprised by the higher estimates. "We fully agree the spectrum of dengue is very wide and there was every chance we were missing cases," said Raman Velayudhan, the agency's global dengue coordinator. WHO was not involved in the new research.

"The new numbers are not out of the realm of what was expected," said Jeremy Farrar, director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Vietnam, one of the study authors. He said the figures came from analyzing more evidence than was used in the past and included other factors that influence dengue.

Dengue causes symptoms including fever and severe joint pains. The disease mostly affects people in Asia, Africa and Latin America though it has also recently popped up in parts of Western Europe and the U.S.

There are four kinds of dengue and catching it once doesn't ensure immunity; subsequent infections raise the risk of severe dengue and may include hemorrhaging. The death rate is usually below 1 percent if patients get treated quickly, but can rise to 10 percent if not.

Clarence Tam, an infectious diseases expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said more research was needed on the significance of the nearly 300 million people who have mild dengue.

"Whether these cases are an important source of dengue infection for others is not well known," he said. "But there is clearly more dengue in the world than we thought."

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/653387/s/2a6f21ab/l/0Lvitals0Bnbcnews0N0C0Inews0C20A130C0A40C0A70C176420A910Edengue0Ecases0Emay0Ebe0E40Etimes0Emore0Ecommon0Ethan0Ethought0Dlite/story01.htm

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Sony unveils 30-and 56-inch professional 4K OLED monitor prototypes

The 56-inch OLED TV Sony trotted out at CES may not be headed to the consumer market, but it is becoming a reality, at least in the professional sector. The company showcased a pair of 4K OLED prototypes at NAB 2013, outing a 4,096 x 2,160 30-inch model as well as a 3,840 x 2160 56-inch display. Both panels boast of wide viewing angles and low color shift, promising accurate signal reproduction for industry professionals working with 4K content. No word yet on pricing, but professionals can look forward to upgrading sometime in next year. Sony also announced a refresh for its existing line of professional OLED displays. The A series will replace seven older skus, again promising better viewing angles and color shift than the previous generation. Hit the break for the official press release, item skus, and a quick break down of what products the A series will be replacing.

Update: The 30-inch 4K OLED prototype is looking at a 2014 release date, while the A series monitors will be available in May.

Filed under: Displays, HD, Sony

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/07/sony-unveils-professional-4k-oled-monitor-prototypes/

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