One of the most popular and maybe the most needed safety gear is helmet but one of the best skiing safety tips is really a matter of personal choice - to wear, or not to wear. Although it isn't really mandated, it is encouraged to use helmet.

Planning a camping adventure for first timers can be very frustrating at first. You maybe unsure as to what you should bring along with you and if you have the rights tools. Although a camping vacation can be fun and exciting, it can sometimes be stressful to plan. But don't worry, like they say the first time is always the hardest. And again don't worry because it is not as hard as you think. When it comes to camping you will have to bring multiple items with you because you will be in the wilderness and convenience will be provided for you rather you must bring it with you. It is your first time so what you need to know is how to purchase the right tools and how to avoid fraud while buying. These are your fraud warnings and safety tips: Meeting the buyer- whether you're going to meet up or the buyer would go to your place make sure that you have someone with you. Never go alone or never allow him inside your house alone. Meeting the seller- same goes in meeting the seller. It is best if you meet them at their home addresses where the item for sale is placed. At least no matter what happens you know where the seller is situated. Accepting and paying money- if the item is worth only a few bucks then it is easier and more convenient to pay in cash but if it involves larger amount of money it is safer to carry a check rather than cash. Purchasing online- Only buy from a legitimate site, research information about the site first and read reviews about it. Also you can ask friends who bought items online and go for the same site. If the advertiser wants you to send cash up front you shouldn't do it. Remember not to sent cash or cheques through the post, or place money directly into a seller's bank account, in advance of receiving goods. Ask for the warranty or receipt of the product- once you bought an item from a private seller you will have no legal comeback if it turns out to be faulty so better check it thoroughly before handling the mo

Predicting the future is hard, but that doesn't stop us from trying. We're Wired, after all. Ten years ago, we boldly declared that we'd be living with phones on our wrists, data-driven goggles on our eyes and gadgets that would safety-test our food for us.

Ouya, a USD 99 TV game console project using Android 4.0 has made a stunning debut on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter - hitting a million dollar mark after just 8 hours.

The game console is slated for a March 2013 release and the team behind it promise that it will offer a flexible and open gaming environment that the market wants, which will bring back the good old days of console-TV gaming. As of now, the sleek silver and black cube along with its equally cool controller are just on their prototype stage.

Ouya founder Julie Uhrman said, "It's ironic, all the growth in gaming is moving to mobile platforms, we're seeing a lot of AAA developers leaving their console shops to go to mobile, yet three out of every four dollars is still spent in the living room, a majority of gaming time is still spent on the TV, and if you survey any gamer they'll tell you their No. 1 platform is the TV."

Ouya is now the fastest project in Kickstarter to reach the million dollar threshold in just 8 hours of going live. The team has initially hoped for USD 950,000 pledges in one month for the consoles to be produced. Support for the project has been huge that as of the time of this writing, barely 3 days of being online, the amount of pledges reached USD 4 million already.

"We never anticipated that it would blow up like this," said the Ouya founder to Black Hawk Reviews - Online Games.

Hardware specs for the Ouya console include 8Gb of storage, 1Gb of RAM and NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor which could churn out decent 3D display at 1080 pixels. They don't sound impressive and particularly powerful when compared to PS3 or Xbox but it's a pretty good bargain considering the price tag.

And although it runs on Android, it should not be expected to be have complete touch-based interface. Ouya will have standard wireless controller that includes 8 action buttons, a D-pad, 2 analog sticks and a touchpad for gesture-based controls.

The most appealing thing is that developers could make games for Ouya minus any publishing, retail or licensing fees that usually come with creating a game. That's because its OS is fully rootable and every console will come with a free SDK pre-loaded on it. In fact, Ouya even welcomes hackers to tinker with the system - something that could also backfire to other consumers who might become targets of fraud.

The only condition they require is for developers to have some of the gameplay for free.

"Our only requirement is that the gamer have the opportunity to play some aspect of it for free. We don't like the idea that you pay $60 for a game and feel cheated. We want anybody to have the opportunity to try the game," Uhrman said.

Still, Uhrman is of the opinion that major game publishers might also come on board because their console could give them easy access to an open digital distribution environment - all without reducing their games' values.

The console will also reportedly support game-focused video streaming service, Twitch.tv.

1. Don't Skimp on Design
2. Don't Go for the Hard Sell
3. Do Make It Multimedia
4. Don't Leave Dead Ends
5. Do Run Both Earned & Owned Media
6. Do Make Sharing Easy

1. Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you and move out of their way.

If you feel like you know everything, you're wrong. I know what I don't know and then I find partners who can teach me. A perfect example is my partnership with Patrick Whitesell, my co-CEO at WME. While we take on different roles at the company and focus on different things, we share the same goals and at the end of the day, we're working toward the same end. That's been the key to our success.

2. The only constant in business is change. Get comfortable with it.

When I started in the business, there were four broadcast networks and 19 cable networks. Now there are five broadcast networks, 117 cable networks, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, HBOGo, iTunes, Amazon Prime, VOD - the list goes on and on. Next year there will be more distribution platforms, and in ten years the landscape will have shifted another 180 degrees. The business is changing quickly, and the only way to succeed is to change with it. I always tell my colleagues, there is no such thing as a traditional talent agent anymore. It's about pushing beyond that 10% commission and finding opportunity where it didn't exist before.

3. Fail often, fail quickly.

Nobody fucks up like I do, but you'll never succeed unless you take risks. Big ones. In 2009, we took Endeavor, a company that was doing incredibly well, and merged it with the oldest talent agency in the world. From a cultural and organizational standpoint, it was a big risk. People had their doubts. But we had a vision and a lot of help from very smart people (see #1.) Three years later, our business is stronger, our bench is deeper and smarter, and our deal-making is more innovative. It's a better company - period. You have to lead by example if you want to promote a culture where risk-taking is rewarded.

4. Your schedule makes you dumber.

Force yourself outside of your daily schedule. Be curious and take time to learn about worlds outside of the one you live in. Watch the news, read the paper, educate yourself. Don't be afraid to call people you don't know, start a conversation, and ask for things you need. At the very least, you'll be more interesting. At the most, you'll take your business in new and bigger directions.

5. You only get one shot - make it count.

I learned this the painful way. After being hit by a car and lying face-down in the middle of Wilshire Boulevard, I was confronted with a whole lot more than my mortality. Take advantage of each day that's given to you and do something to move the needle on your business, even if it's just an inch. You've heard it before, but life is not a dress rehearsal. Don't waste your time (or mine.)

6. Good ideas rule all.

In the end, it's all about creative ideas and content - it's the lifeblood of our business. I'm fortunate enough to work with the writers, directors, musicians and actors who are defining culture with their voices. It's why I come to work in the morning. In 100 years, when the world looks different, and we communicate in new ways, and we have more devices and platforms and distribution methods, I believe great artistry will still matter most.

In the wake of the Olympics fever, people across the world had a glimpse of sophisticated and high-end sports gear used by athletes in their games. Not surprisingly, they are using top-of-the-line gears and equipment to help them perform at their best.
And thanks to such an elite market, the advanced and highly-improved gears are made available to the public as consumer products. The technology used to develop gears in professional sports are now adopted by legit manufacturers in improved sports gear for amateurs, minus the fraud alert.
Sleek bicycles in word-class events are mainly from carbon fiber-reinforced plastic known for its durability, strength and lightness. This particular material is now available in high-performance bicycles - from rims, seat posts, handlebars, stems and cranks.
As for helmets, they are also becoming more advanced in terms of design and composition. Originally, helmets are made from leather, effective in protecting it from abrasions. Today, helmets being used in competitions are sometimes with built-in goggles and a wraparound design so that cyclists will have more convenience while having the optimum protection.
Likewise, consumer helmets for skateboarding, football and skiing are created with hard aerodynamic plastic shells that are highly resistant to puncture and have shock-absorbers. Separate visors or ultra-lightweight goggles made from polycarbonate plastic (like bulletproof glass) are also popular.
Bodysuits worn by track and field players of the US has now become part of a popular trend in recycled-materials-turned-fabric. Looks like many of our athletes and outdoor lovers are highly concerned about the impact they are making on the environment; good thing sports equipment firms have quickly responded to the market.
Olympians this year have donned uniforms that are reportedly made from recycled plastics - think old plastic bottles spun into fabric and fibers that combine superb quality with sustainability. Fortunately for you, this green innovation is already available for the public.
Tags: Black Hawk Adventures, Black Hawk Adventures : Olympic-quality sports gear for all, Black Hawk Mines, Black Hawk News Adventures Guide, Blackhawk, Travel
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A teenage hacker who goes by the name of "Pinkie Pie" will receive $60,000 in prize money from Google, by producing the first Chrome vulnerability at the Hack in the Box conference on Wednesday. The exploit was discovered and successfully launched just ahead of the deadline for completion, according to early reports from the event. Before awarding the cash prize, Google had to first verify and confirm the vulnerability - which it just now did, the company tells us via email. More details have also been posted to the Google Chrome blog.

According to the blog post, the hack involves the following exploit:

[$60,000][154983][154987] Critical CVE-2011-2358: SVG use-after-free and IPC arbitrary file write. Credit to Pinkie Pie.
Google has set aside $2 million in prize money for hackers who find security vulnerabilities in its Chrome web browser, with $60,000 being reserved for those who find "full Chrome exploits." $50,000 which is offered for partial exploits, and $40,000 for non-Chrome exploits - that is, other bugs found in Flash, Windows, or a driver that are not necessarily specific to Chrome, but could cause issues for users. Google said in February that it would awards those latter prizes because it also served the company's overall mission of "making the entire web safer." (The prize amounts have since changed.) Incomplete exploits may also be rewarded, based on judges' decisions.

This is the second time "Pinkie Pie" has earned the top prize. In March, the hacker also earned $60,000 in the first "Pwnium competition" (as the event is called) by stringing together six vulnerabilities in order to break out of Chrome's sandbox. According to a report from Infoworld, the hacker was not attending the Hack in the Box event this week, but had a colleague submit his latest entry for him.

In case you're curious, the hacker is only identified by his handle "Pinkie Pie" because his employer doesn't authorize his activity, noted Wired in March. (And yes, "Pinkie Pie" refers to the My Little Pony TV show, which has quite the following on Reddit).

Google has been offering cash rewards for those discovering security vulnerabilities and other bugs for some time. In March 2010, for example, the company began offering bounties for bugs found in the open-source browser Chromium (Chrome's code base), which started at $500 and went up to $1,337 (yep, "leet" in hacker lingo).

AP Chief Medical Writer New research powerfully strengthens the case against soda and other sugary drinks as culprits in the obesity epidemic.

A huge, decades-long study involving more than 33,000 Americans has yielded the first clear proof that drinking sugary beverages interacts with genes that affect weight, amplifying a person's risk of obesity beyond what it would be from heredity alone.

This means that such drinks are especially harmful to people with genes that predispose them to weight gain. And most of us have at least some of these genes.

In addition, two other major experiments have found that giving children and teens calorie-free alternatives to the sugary drinks they usually consume leads to less weight gain.

Collectively, the results strongly suggest that sugary drinks cause people to pack on the pounds, independent of other unhealthy behavior such as overeating and getting too little exercise, scientists say.

That adds weight to the push for taxes, portion limits like the one just adopted in New York City, and other policies to curb consumption of soda, juice drinks and sports beverages sweetened with sugar.

Soda lovers do get some good news: Sugar-free drinks did not raise the risk of obesity in these studies.

"You may be able to fool the taste" and satisfy a sweet tooth without paying a price in weight, said an obesity researcher with no role in the studies, Rudy Leibel of Columbia University.

The studies were being presented Friday at an obesity conference in San Antonio and were published online by the New England Journal of Medicine.

The gene research in particular fills a major gap in what we know about obesity. It was a huge undertaking, involving three long-running studies that separately and collectively reached the same conclusions. It shows how behavior combines with heredity to affect how fat we become.

Having many of these genes does not guarantee people will become obese, but if they drink a lot of sugary beverages, "they fulfill that fate," said an expert with no role in the research, Jules Hirsch of Rockefeller University in New York. "The sweet drinking and the fatness are going together, and it's more evident in the genetic predisposition people."

Sugary drinks are the single biggest source of calories in the American diet, and they are increasingly blamed for the fact that a third of U.S. children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight.

Consumption of sugary drinks and obesity rates have risen in tandem - both have more than doubled since the 1970s in the U.S.

But that doesn't prove that these drinks cause obesity. Genes, inactivity and eating fatty foods or just too much food also play a role. Also, diet research on children is especially tough because kids are growing and naturally gaining weight.

Until now, high-quality experiments have not conclusively shown that reducing sugary beverages would lower weight or body fat, said David Allison, a biostatistician who has done beverage research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, some of it with industry support.

He said the new studies on children changed his mind and convinced him that limiting sweet drinks can make a difference.

In one study, researchers randomly assigned 224 overweight or obese high schoolers in the Boston area to receive shipments every two weeks of either the sugary drinks they usually consumed or sugar-free alternatives, including bottled water. No efforts were made to change the youngsters' exercise habits or give nutrition advice, and the kids knew what type of beverages they were getting.

After one year, the sugar-free group weighed more than 4 pounds less on average than those who kept drinking sugary beverages.

"I know of no other single food product whose elimination can produce this degree of weight change," said the study's leader, Dr. David Ludwig of Boston Children's Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health.

The weight difference between the two groups narrowed to 2 pounds in the second year of the study, when drinks were no longer being provided. That showed at least some lasting beneficial effect on kids' habits. The study was funded mostly by government grants.

A second study involved 641 normal-weight children ages 4 to 12 in the Netherlands who regularly drank sugar-sweetened beverages. They were randomly assigned to get either a sugary drink or a sugar-free one during morning break at their schools, and were not told what kind they were given.

After 18 months, the sugary-drink group weighed 2 pounds more on average than the other group.

The studies "provide strong impetus" for policies urged by the Institute of Medicine, the American Heart Association and others to limit sugary drink consumption, Dr. Sonia Caprino of the Yale School of Medicine wrote in an editorial in the journal.

The American Beverage Association disagreed.

"Obesity is not uniquely caused by any single food or beverage," it said in a statement. "Studies and opinion pieces that focus solely on sugar-sweetened beverages, or any other single source of calories, do nothing meaningful to help address this serious issue."

The genetic research was part of a much larger set of health studies that have gone on for decades across the U.S., led by the Harvard School of Public Health.

Researchers checked for 32 gene variants that have previously been tied to weight. Because we inherit two copies of each gene, everyone has 64 opportunities for these risk genes. The study participants had 29 on average.

Every four years, these people answered detailed surveys about their eating and drinking habits as well as things like smoking and exercise. Researchers analyzed these over several decades.

A clear pattern emerged: The more sugary drinks someone consumed, the greater the impact of the genes on the person's weight and risk of becoming obese.

For every 10 risk genes someone had, the risk of obesity rose in proportion to how many sweet drinks the person regularly consumed. Overall calorie intake and lifestyle factors such as exercise did not account for the differences researchers saw.

This means that people with genes that predispose them to be obese are more susceptible to the harmful effects of sugary drinks on their weight, said one of the study leaders, Harvard's Dr. Frank Hu. The opposite also was true - avoiding these drinks can minimize the effect of obesity genes.

"Two bad things can act together and their combined effects are even greater than either effect alone," Hu said. "The flip side of this is everyone has some genetic risk of obesity, but the genetic effects can be offset by healthier beverage choices. It's certainly not our destiny" to be fat, even if we carry genes that raise this risk.

The study was funded mostly by federal grants, with support from two drug companies for the genetic analysis.