Dead or alive? Check whether a famous person is still alive or if they have passed away. Find birthdays too at: http://www.deadoraliveinfo.com/dead.nsf/pages-nf/main Thanks, Pete.

Books of the Year 2011 The Atlantic’s literary editor picks the five best of the crop.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/12/books-of-the-year-2011/8712/

Twelve Months of Reading with articles from authors, and people in the business world
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204466004577102800650505034.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_editorsPicks_2

Quote For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice. Little Gidding II.
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) American born English editor, playwright, poet and critic

Little Gidding II by T.S. Eliot http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/p109g/gidding1.html

The maker of a fake driver's license app that was yanked from Apple's App Store this week has fired back, saying the free app was "specifically and deliberately designed ... to prevent the creation of counterfeit identification." Apple pulled DriversEd.com's two-year-old "Driver License" app from its iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch online app outlets at the urging of U.S. Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania who in 2010 helped organize the Senate's Global Internet Freedom Caucus to promote online freedom in countries like Iran and China. Casey and the Coalition for a Secure Driver's License told Apple that they were concerned that the app, which contains templates for driver's licenses for all 50 states, could be used produce a "high quality digital image of the completed template," which could then be sent to an email account. "From the email attachment, the image can then be printed and laminated, creating a high quality counterfeit driver's license difficult to discern from one that's genuine," the coalition said in a letter sent to Apple. But DriversEd.com founder and chief operating officer Gary Tsifrin said such concerns were unfounded. "By design, it would take more effort and expertise to modify the product of the DriversEd.com Driver License app than to construct a counterfeit from scratch," Tsifrin said. Rather than high-quality license replicas, he added, the app produces images at just 72 dpi, not suitable for printing. DriversEd.com said it used design elements in the app that "deliberately do not correspond to government-issued IDs." The licenses created "incorporate obvious layout differences, font and color discrepancies, and the words 'MOCK by DriversEd.com' in proximity to the word 'license,' while containing "none of the security features of a modern government-issued ID," the company said.
DriversEd.com created the Driver License app to help market its core business, a free, full-featured driving test preparation suite, which is currently available in the App Store and in Google's Android Market
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2397565,00.asp

Many automobile owners are spending more than they need on motor oil, believing that it should be changed every 3,000 miles even though almost no manufacturer requires such an aggressive oil-change schedule. The long-held notion that the oil should be changed every 3,000 miles is so prevalent that California officials have launched a campaign to stop drivers from wasting millions of gallons of oil annually because they have their vehicles serviced too often. "Our survey data found that nearly half of California drivers are still changing their oil at 3,000 miles or even sooner," said Mark Oldfield, a spokesman for the California Department of Resources, Recycling and Recovery, which has launched the Check Your Number campaign to encourage drivers to go with the manufacturer's recommendations. Improvement in oils, friction proofing and car engines have lengthened the oil-change interval, typically 7,500 miles to 10,000 miles for most vehicles. Changing motor oil according to manufacturer specifications would reduce motor-oil demand in California by about 10 million gallons a year, the agency said. The state has created a website, checkyournumber.org, where drivers can look up the suggested motor-oil change interval number for their vehicles. "The 3,000-mile oil change just says that the marketing campaign by quick-lube companies has been effective," said Steve Mazor, manager of the Auto Club of Southern California's Automotive Research Center. It made sense years ago, when "we had cast-iron block engines with cast-iron pistons that would expand when they got hot and older lubricants," Mazor said. Jerry Hirsch http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-autos-oil-change-20111215,0,4554184.story

Aides to Representative Rick Larsen, Democrat of Washington, broadcast via Twitter how cool it was to be sitting in the seat of power at midday while drinking Jack Daniels and watching Nirvana videos on the taxpayers’ dime. For good measure, these Aides Gone Wild sent out a couple of bad mots about their “idiot boss.” Within an hour of hearing about the indiscretions, which had continued for months on personal, not Congressional, Twitter accounts, the boss fired all three young people. Facebook, Twitter, cell phone text messages and palm-size appliances yet to sprout from Apple’s labs allow all of us to be banal in real time. From one (I’ll protect him here, even if he won’t do the same thing for himself by going silent for a day), a man known for daring urban design ideas, came these recent insights on his Twitter account:
Stuck in traffic. OMG, this light is long!
Just had the best burrito of my life!
Saw my first deliveryman on a Segway — how cool is that?
Not very, actually. Where did this compulsion for light confession come from?
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/please-stop-sharing/

CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University. See an example and read about applications and guidelines at: http://www.captcha.net/

Thieves at South Gate High School in Southern California pried open a door and torn the band room apart while hunting for a specific instrument. "All they took were tubas," music teacher Ruben Gonzalez Jr. said. Losses included an upright concert tuba and a silver sousaphone — or marching-band tuba — worth a combined $13,000. Several weeks earlier, band members at Centennial High School in Compton experienced a similar shock when they found that eight sousaphones were missing. And on Dec. 6, burglars broke into Huntington Park High School and spirited away the school's last tuba, according to band instructor Fernando Almader. A silver Jupiter tuba had been stolen earlier in the school year. Those are just the latest in what police and music instructors are describing as a rash of unsolved tuba thefts at high schools in southeast Los Angeles County. The thefts, according to band leaders, were probably spurred by Southern California's banda music craze, as well as the high prices the brass instruments fetch on the black market. A high-quality tuba can cost well more than $5,000, but even an old, dented tuba can sell for as much as $2,000, music teachers say. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-tuba-thefts-20111212,0,5110587.story

Christmas truce was a series of widespread unofficial ceasefires that took place along the Western Front around Christmas of 1914, during the First World War. Through the week leading up to Christmas, parties of German and British soldiers began to exchange seasonal greetings and songs between their trenches; on occasion, the tension was reduced to the point that individuals would walk across to talk to their opposite numbers bearing gifts. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, many soldiers from both sides – as well as, to a lesser degree, from French units – independently ventured into "No man's land", where they mingled, exchanging food and souvenirs. As well as joint burial ceremonies, several meetings ended in carol-singing. Troops from both sides had also been so friendly as to play games of football with one another. The truce is seen as a symbolic moment of peace and humanity amidst one of the most violent events of modern history. It was not ubiquitous, however; in some regions of the front, fighting continued throughout the day, whilst in others, little more than an arrangement to recover bodies was made. The following year, a few units again arranged ceasefires with their opponents over Christmas, but to nothing like the widespread extent seen in 1914; this was, in part, due to strongly worded orders from the high commands of both sides prohibiting such fraternisation. The truces were not unique to the Christmas period, and reflected a growing mood of "live and let live", where infantry units in close proximity to each other would stop overtly aggressive behaviour, and often engage in small-scale fraternisation, engaging in conversation or bartering for cigarettes. In some sectors, there would be occasional ceasefires to go between the lines and recover wounded or dead soldiers, whilst in others, there would be a tacit agreement not to shoot while men rested, exercised, or worked in full view of the enemy. However, the Christmas truces were particularly significant due to the number of men involved and the level of their participation – even in very peaceful sectors, dozens of men openly congregating in daylight was remarkable. Find information on books, film, music, television and description of a monument. A Christmas truce memorial was unveiled in Frelinghien, France, on 11 November 2008. Also on that day, at the spot where, on Christmas Day 1914, their regimental ancestors came out from their trenches to play football, men from the 1st Battalion, The Royal Welch Fusiliers played a football match with the German Panzergrenadier Battalion 371. The Germans won, 2–1) at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce