Apple co-founder Steve Jobs dead at 56

By Bruce Newman, San Jose Mercury News October 5, 2011 6:46 PM

Apple Inc. co-founder died Wednesday at the age of 56.

Steve Jobs, who sparked a revolution in the technology industry and then presided over it as Silicon Valley's radiant Sun King, died Wednesday. The incandescent center of a tech universe around which all the other planets revolved, Jobs had a genius for stylish design and a boyish sense of what was "cool." He was 56 when he died, ahead of his time to the very end.

According to a spokesman for Apple Inc. - the company Jobs co-founded when he was just 21, and turned into one of the world's great industrial design houses - he suffered from a recurrence of the pancreatic cancer for which he had undergone surgery in 2004. Jobs had taken his third leave of absence from the company in January of this year, and made the final capitulation to his failing health on Aug. 24, when he resigned as Apple's CEO. After 35 years as the soul of Silicon Valley's new machine, that may have been a fate worse than death.

Jobs died only a few miles from the family garage in Los Altos, Calif., where he and fellow college dropout Steve Wozniak assembled the first Apple computer in 1976. Jobs transformed the computer from an intimidating piece of business machinery - its blinking lights often caged behind a glass wall _ to a device people considered "personal," and then indispensable.

Jobs was the undisputed "i" behind the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, and there was very little about his personality that was lower-case. According to Fortune magazine he was considered "one of Silicon Valley's leading egomaniacs," but Jobs also cultivated a loyal coterie of ergomaniacs - ergonomic designers who created the sleek stable of iHits - whose devotion to him was the centrifugal force holding Apple together. Shares of the company's stock plunged 22 points after Jobs announced his final medical leave on Jan. 17. more

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B.C. Premier Clark sticks with fixed May 2013 election date

Following months of speculation fuelled at times by her own elusiveness on the topic, Premier Christy Clark finally offered on Wednesday a definite answer as to whether not B.C. will head to the polls this fall.

In a last-minute interview with The Province before addressing her caucus in the evening, Clark said she had decided against calling a fall election so that she could focus on her jobs agenda in the upcoming sitting of the legislature.

“I am not going to call an election this fall,” Clark said. “And so the plan is to go to the set election date, May 2013.”

The surprise announcement should bring to a close any talk of an early election call, sparked when Clark, fresh off her February leadership win, expressed her desire to seek a mandate from the public.

Clark said her decision not to send B.C. into an election had nothing to do with poor polling numbers, but rather was the result of extensive conversations she had with “thousands and thousands of people” who advised against it.

Opposition leader Adrian Dix took aim at Clark for allowing the election talk to “disrupt and waste the time of her government,” saying his caucus is ready to continue working.

“This was an internal dispute between the premier and her political advisers, and I think the people of British Columbia have paid a price because of the Liberal party’s obsession with its own interests,” the NDP leader told The Province Wednesday evening.

“All of this election speculation was caused by one person: Christy Clark,” Dix said. “Clearly, the only consideration she had was her own polling results.”

In her announcement, Clark also said she was influenced by the economic uncertainty of the international market and a voter base fatigued by the recent federal election and the upcoming municipal elections.

“We’ve watched all this uncertainty unfold in the international market — that will have a big impact on jobs,” said Clark. “And so I think I have a much bigger responsibility.”

Clark said the government will outline its jobs plan in a throne speech in early October. The plan, said Clark, will set out how the government intends to defend jobs “so that British Columbia families can keep putting food on the table for their kids.”

“I think it’s the right decision [not to call an election] and I think it’s the right decision for our economy,” said Clark. “This is what British Columbians have been telling me. When I said I was going to change government so we started listening to people, I meant it.”

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No wonder the Premier has no time for the sitting of the legislation if she is talking to "thousands and thousands of people". Perhaps she should get down to business instead of just talking.

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B.C.'s other wildfire: HST anger aflame

By Michael Smyth
08-05-2009

The NDP has been handed a pot of political gold with Gordon Campbell's broken-promise HST tax grab.

The party's online petition against the 12-per-cent tax has so far attracted 8,300 signatures in five days. Compare that to the 4,000 signatures the party scraped up in opposition to the carbon tax — and that took five months.

Over at Facebook, the NO B.C. HST group has over 26,000 members and counting. Signatures are flowing in to the B.C. Restaurant Association's online petition, too.

How widespread is anger over the HST? Just watch the Global TV Newshour tonight. Sources tell me they have an exclusive opinion poll and the HST opposition is massive. And I mean huge.

Will the government blink? They're nervous, I can tell you that. Watch for them to cut sweetheart deals with a few favoured special-interest groups to ease the HST sting. But the terms of the government's agreement with Ottawa leaves little wriggle room and a total climb-down looks unlikely, despite the summer flames of protest.

The trick for the NDP, of course, will be sustaining that anger through a long Liberal mandate before the next election. But think about this:

The tax doesn't take effect for another year. Parents will be especially choked when the tax comes due on school supplies in the fall of 2010. Imagine a Winter Olympics budget hangover being revealed at the same time people get slammed with an HST the Liberals promised not to introduce during the election.

Throw in a B.C. Rail corruption trial that tips over a stinking hamper of dirty Liberal laundry and you can suddenly imagine anger at the government lasting for quite some time...

UPDATE: The astonishing numbers from the Global TV poll: 85 per cent opposed to the HST, just 12 per cent in favour. Can the government stand firm in the face of that degree of anger, and ram this tax down people's throats in a recession when so many are that furious? They're shaking in their loafers in Victoria!

msmyth@theprovince.com

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B.C. hockey coach Ernie 'Punch' McLean found alive after 4 days in bush

By Katie Mercer,

The ProvinceAugust 20, 2009 9:01 PM

Ernie "Punch" McLean at a 2006 announcement that he would be inducted in the B.C. Hockey Hall of Fame.

Hockey legend Ernie “Punch” McLean has lived to tell another tale.

Friends say McLean was found late Thursday walking along an old, unused road after going missing Sunday.

“He’s like the proverbial cat with nine lives,” friend Sherry Wiebe joked. (Click here for the rest of the story).

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Michael Smyth: Only one winner in bet-limit hike Now government can grab 8,300 per cent more from fixed poker

Internet gamblers can now say "all in" and wager $10,000 a week at the B.C. Lottery Corp.'s website after the cash-strapped Gordon Campbell government approved a massive increase in online betting limits.

And when those gamblers do plunk down their money at the "Play Now" site — Visa and Interac accepted — they'll find a smiling, friendly face ready and willing to take their loot.

His name is PJ, a "former junior hockey star from Chilliwack" who now works as B.C. Lotteries' animated online poker dealer. The cartoon card-shuffler is one of several animated characters — each with their own name and personal bio — in the "Pacific Hold'Em Poker" game that's been a hit in bars and pubs.

Now the poker game has been introduced to cyberspace — just in time for the 8,300-per-cent increase in online betting limits, from $120 a week — along with other "real-time" gambling games such as bingo, keno and virtual scratch-and-win tickets.

Gaming Minister Rich Coleman, once a fierce opponent of online gambling, said he approved the huge spike in betting limits to try to keep online gamblers closer to home in the cutthroat global market of Internet gambling.

"They [B.C. Lotteries] are competing against sites that are offshore and that are not well regulated," Coleman said yesterday.

"I felt that if there were more people in British Columbia that were making the choice to go offshore into unregulated markets that it would be better for them if they were actually in a regulated market."

Coleman had a very different opinion on the matter back when he was solicitor-general and an anti-gambling crusader.

"Illegal gaming and Internet gaming — those are things we fight to stamp out," he said in 2003. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, eh, Rich?

But don't expect to beat the government's new online poker game. Not even famous Canadian pro Daniel Negreanu, with four World Series of Poker bracelets on his wrist, could beat this B.C. Lotteries money-sucker.

That's because it's not real poker. The cards are not dealt at random, and no amount of poker skill will help you win.

"It's a lottery game with a poker theme," explained B.C. Lotteries spokeswoman Susan Dolinski. "The outcome is predetermined at the outset of each game."

Which is why I laughed out loud when Coleman said yesterday that online gamblers would be better off at the government's Internet site than at one of those sleazy offshore sites such as Party Poker.

B.C. Lotteries will "make sure that they're getting the right odds and the right opportunity with regards to e-gaming," Coleman said.

Not when the outcome of a poker hand is "predetermined," minister. The government's new online poker game is strictly for suckers. Which is obviously why they raised the betting limits, right?

Wrong, insists B.C. Lotteries. "This helps players make responsible choices, so they can set their own limit and play within it," Dolinski said.

The New Democrats are calling the government's bluff. "It's a desperate cash grab," fumed NDP critic Shane Simpson.

No doubt — and a potentially huge one at that. After all, $10,000 a week is $520,000 a year.

So bet it all and let it ride, British Columbia! You'll go broke — but the government will love ya.

E-mail: msmyth@theprovince.com

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