Should You Take Back That GPS You Got For Christmas?

You might have ripped the wrapping paper off a shiny new GPS unit earlier this week, but should you keep it? A well-meaning loved one might have bought you a new one this week, but that doesn’t mean that they chose the best one for your needs or that you should keep it. How do you know whether the unit … [More]

Source: http://consumerist.com/2012/12/27/should-you-take-back-that-gps-you-got-for-christmas/

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Towing Companies Sue Seattle For Right To Charge More Than $183/Hour

The city of Seattle recently enacted an ordinance that would put a cap on towing an impound fees, but apparently $183 for the first hour of a tow followed by $130/hour after that is not enough for the tow companies of the King City, which have filed suit to stop the city from enforcing the cap.

The Seattle Times report[More]

Source: http://consumerist.com/2012/12/27/towing-companies-sue-seattle-for-right-to-charge-more-than-183hour/

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Options Players Wager Big On Herbalife With Ackman On The Attack

Options on Herbalife continue to change hands at a clip on Thursday, one day after Pershing Square Capital Management founder, Bill Ackman, announced a short position in the stock that sent shares in the marketer of weight management products down as much as 15% during trading on Wednesday.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/12/20/options-players-wager-big-on-herbalife-with-ackman-on-the-attack/

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Why Is Warren Buffett Buying Back Berkshire Hathaway Stock?

Warren BuffettEarlier this month, famed billionaire and Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A) (BRK-B) chairman Warren Buffett dropped a bombshell.

Breaking with past practice, and changing the financial rules he himself laid down, Berkshire is buying back its own stock -- and plans to keep buying back its stock at any price up to and including 1.2 times "book value."

What's book value?

"Book value" is basically the price of a company's constituent parts before they've been assembled into a whole, tradable corporate stock. Technically, book value is defined as: "The net asset value of a company, calculated by total assets minus intangible assets (patents, goodwill) and liabilities."

But don't let that throw you. You don't have to understand any of this financial gobbledygook to get the gist of this story.

What's important is this: A little over a year ago, in September 2011, Warren Buffett announced that Berkshire would begin buying back its shares at any price up to 110 percent of the company's book value. This was surprising because in years past Buffett had been critical of share buybacks -- and how some companies use them to "pump or support [their] stock price."

Regardless, last September, Buffett said he'd start buying back shares, too. And he'd keep on buying as long as the price was at that level or lower, potentially spending billions of dollars buying back Berkshire stock, because in his opinion the company was "worth considerably more" than its shares were selling for.

Fast-forward to today. Earlier this month, Buffett announced that he would go one step further and buy Berkshire shares at up to 120 percent of (or 1.2 times) their book value.

What does the buyback mean?

There are two ways of looking at Buffett's recent announcement. The first way, the way Buffett would spin it, is that Berkshire Hathaway is buying shares simply because they offer an incredible value at today's prices. And there's truth to that.

After all, if you look back through history, shares of Berkshire Hathaway have traditionally sold for much more than 1.1 times book value, or even 1.2 times book. In fact, over the course of the dozen years of this newest millennium, Berkshire shares have sold for an average of more than 1.5 times book value. (And occasionally, for more than twice book value.)

So on the surface, even paying 1.2 times book, Buffett is still buying back his shares at a considerable discount to their usual price -- about 20 percent below average.

What else could it mean?

A more disturbing theory to explain Buffett's decision to spend more on Berkshire stock is this: Doing so is simply choosing the lesser of evils.

Remember, Berkshire's biggest "problem" most years is figuring out what to do with all its money. The company is sitting on $47.8 billion in cash right now. With banks paying 0.1 percent interest, he can't afford just to sit on it, though. He's got to invest it in something.

Elsewhere in the market, we're seeing a wave of mergers and acquisitions as other companies fling bags of cash around, investing their cash in buyouts. In the past few weeks alone, we've seen TJX (TJX) buy Sierra Trading Post for $200 million, and watched Oracle (ORCL) acquire Eloqua for $850 million, while General Electric (GE) took out Avio Aviation for a whopping $4.3 billion. With $48 billion to play with, give or take, Buffett could have done any or all of these deals without batting an eye.

He didn't.

Instead, what did the smartest investor in the world today -- and perhaps the smartest businessman in history -- do? He looked around at a stock market where the average company costs two times book value and muttered to himself "too expensive, too expensive." Then he took a second look at his own stock and said to himself, well, it's not as cheap as it once was, but it's still cheaper than what these other jokers are charging.

And so Buffett upped his spending limit and agreed to buy himself for 1.2 times book, rather than paying nearly twice that for a bunch of lesser businesses.

What does it mean to stock market investors?

No one ever accused Warren Buffett of becoming a billionaire by dumb luck, or by making dumb decisions to overpay for businesses.

The question we need to ask ourselves today is: If Warren Buffett can't find anything worth buying that's cheaper than his own company, and if he is willing to bite the bullet and pay more than he wanted to for his own stock in consequence, what does that mean for us?

Maybe it means we should think twice before putting more money into an overpriced stock market, too.

Motley Fool contributor Rich Smith does not own shares of any company named above. The Motley Fool owns shares of Berkshire Hathaway, General Electric Company, and Oracle. Motley Fool newsletter services recommend Berkshire Hathaway.


Warren Buffett Comments On Stock Purchases On CNBC




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Source: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/12/27/why-is-warren-buffett-buying-back-berkshire-hathaway-stock/

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Will Weak Holiday Sales Bite the iPad Mini?

The iPad mini has largely been met with wide critical praise and high consumer demand. However, a report out today from DigiTimes hints that due to supply constraints, Apple might only be able to ship 8 million this holiday quarter. Amid hand-wringing over iPad mini sales, the company's shares fell another 1.4% today as Nokia edged upward 1.25% and Research In Motion surged 11%.

In the video below, senior technology analyst Eric Bleeker notes that investors should be cautious of any reports from DigiTimes. The company has had "sources" inside Apple's supply chain that were correct, but has also has whiffed badly on other reports. More to the point, Eric points out that tablets should continue showing robust demand for years to come. The iPad mini isn't a device to be measured this holiday season, supply constrains or not, but instead across the next five years as tablet sales are more than set to double. From that standpoint, he says Apple investors should be pleased with reception so far to the newer, smaller iPad.

There's no doubt that Apple is at the center of technology's largest revolution ever, and that longtime shareholders have been handsomely rewarded with over 1,000% gains. However, there is a debate raging as to whether Apple remains a buy. The Motley Fool's senior technology analyst and managing bureau chief, Eric Bleeker, is prepared to fill you in on both reasons to buy and reasons to sell Apple, and what opportunities are left for the company (and more importantly, your portfolio) going forward. To get instant access to his latest thinking on Apple, simply click here now.

Your 98.79% Chance at Beating the Market
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Get this: We arrived at these odds from 10,000 random back-tested portfolios made up of Co-founder David Gardner's personal stock picks between December 2002 and December 2011...

So, what's INSIDE Motley Fool Supernova?!? Simply enter your email address. And David Gardner will take you on a personal tour. And reveal his up-to-the-minute top picks for 3-D Printing, Entertainment, Social Networking, Personal Wellness, Next-Gen Education, and more!

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Source: http://feeds.fool.com/~r/usmf/foolwatch/~3/bSnLMjGbFAA/story01.htm

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Physicist Explains What Discovering The Higgs Boson Feels Like

fabiola gianotti scientist

Fabiola Gianotti was in mid-flow when her audience at Cern, the particle physics lab near Geneva, spotted the result they had so long hoped for amid the garish fonts of her presentation and rose to their feet to whistle, cheer and roar their approval.

She tried to calm them down, told them to wait, that there was more. But the result they had spied – a simple number five followed by the Greek letter sigma, in a little red box – was all the hundreds gathered needed to know.

It told them that the Higgs boson, or at least a particle that looked suspiciously like it, had been found at last. Nothing was going to delay their celebrations.

Scientific discoveries are rarely met with such a raucous response, but the announcement, soon after 10.30am local time on 4 July, was an exception.

This was the discovery of the year, and the culmination of more than two decades of work that drew on a cast of thousands. Many of those in the audience had spent their careers in the search.

Gianotti is head of the Atlas collaboration, a group of 3,000 or so scientists who work on a giant detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Her talk that morning came directly after another presentation, by Joe Incandela, head of the CMS detector group, which also saw the particle.

Everything rested on her talk: had the Atlas group seen nothing, the lab could hardly claim a discovery.

"It was an extraordinarily tense time, but it was also extremely exciting," she says. "We were so focused on producing these results. Throughout June, the evidence for the Higgs-like particle was growing stronger with time; it grew and grew, and every week we had a step forward.

It was a time of great team spirit, when we all worked towards this common goal. People at all levels were working day and night."

For an outsider, it is easy to think of scientists pursuing their arcane goals at a leisurely pace with little stress and plenty of time for intellectual reflection. That was not the case in the runup to the July announcement. It was a punishing and gruelling rush to turn vast piles of raw data into meaningful results that were fit to present to the world.

"You need a lot of motivation, a lot of energy, and a lot of curiosity," says Gianotti. "The search for knowledge is a long and difficult task."

The existence of the Higgs boson verifies a theory drawn up by the British physicist Peter Higgs with a pencil and paper in his office at Edinburgh University nearly half a century ago. The theory says that elementary particles, like the quarks and electrons inside atoms, get their masses from an invisible field that stretches through all of space. Without something to give particles mass, there would be no stars, planets or life as we know it.

Higgs, now 83, was in the audience on 4 July. At the end of Gianotti's talk, when the crowd stood for a second standing ovation, he drew a tissue from his pocket and wiped tears from his eyes, overwhelmed by their reaction to the news. Gianotti went to greet him, and to offer congratulations. She respects Higgs enormously, she says, not only for his genius and insight, but for his deep-seated modesty.

As soon as the particle was found at Cern, there were those who argued it deserved the 2012 Nobel prize for physics. That was unlikely given the conservative nature of the Nobel committee, and in the event, did not happen.

But Gianotti, along with Incandela and five other Cern physicists, did win the most lucrative prize ever established in science, the special fundamental physics prize. Gianotti and her colleague Peter Jenni immediately announced their $1m would support a fund to help struggling physicists within the Atlas collaboration.

There is no doubt that 4 July was a historic day for particle physics, but the questions that remain over the new particle have kept Gianotti and others at Cern occupied, and will for a while yet.

Since the announcement, they have pressed on to try to clarify whether the particle is the simplest form of Higgs boson, or something more exotic that could break radical new ground for physicists.

"The 4 July was an end in that we had been looking for this for many years, but at the same time it was a beginning," says Gianotti. "Since that time, we have made good progress towards understanding one of the big questions the LHC was designed to answer. In the coming months and years we need to look at this in detail. It will take a lot of work to draw up a complete identikit of this particle, and we have just started that work."

In the new year, the LHC closes for two years so engineers can make repairs needed for the machine to switch back on at full energy in 2015. For now, work centres on gathering more and more data from Higgs bosons inside the LHC.

The particle is fabulously unstable, and disintegrates as soon as it is created in the machine. But it leaves behind streaks of more familiar particles, which must be measured with exquisite precision to see if their numbers match the predictions.

"We know there must be new physics. For example, we cannot explain what dark matter is," says Gianotti. "In some sense there may not be new physics through the Higgs boson, but there must be new physics to address these other questions."

The Higgs boson is the missing piece of a jigsaw that physicists have pieced together since the 1970s to explain how the known particles in nature behave. But many physicists hope desperately that the new particle will turn out to be more peculiar than the simplest kind of particle Higgs predicted.

Would that be good news for Gianotti? "It's not about good or bad news, it's about what nature has chosen," she says. "It's always good news when you're closer to the truth."

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

SEE ALSO: The Biggest Science Breakthroughs Of The Year

Please follow Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/uXF6kZxa5KY/discovering-the-higgs-boson-particle-2012-12

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Good News for Defense Contractors Amid the Gloom

Don't let it get away!

Keep track of the stocks that matter to you.

Help yourself with the Fool's FREE and easy new watchlist service today.

I have some good news: The House and Senate Armed Services Committees have reached an agreement for defense spending for fiscal year 2013 -- that's, of course, assuming the nitwits on Capital Hill figure out how to avoid sequestration. While there are deep cuts, there's also some good news for defense contractors and their investors. 

Who benefits?
In a move that's good for Boeing (NYSE: BA  ) , the Armed Service Committee approved a multiyear procurement deal for the Boeing-made Army CH-47 helicopters . Additionally, the budget approved $338 million for the continued production of heavily armored vehicles for the Army.  That's great news for General Dynamics (NYSE: GD  ) , which builds the Army's M1 Abraham Tanks , and London-based BAE Systems (LSE: BA.L  ) , which builds the Bradley platform.

Additionally, the committee approved a $9.8 billion missile defense budget, which is great news for Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC  ) , the prime contractor on the Missile Defense Integration and Operations Center (MDIOC) -- the premier missile defense center for the U.S. Department of Defense.  

The total budget request for defense spending in 2013 is $88.5 billion for overseas operations and $525.4 billion for the base budget -- a total of $613.9. That's quite a bit below 2012's enactment, which was $530.6 billion for the base and $115.1 billion overseas for a total of $645.7. So, while defense contractors are going to have to continue getting lean and mean, it's not a complete gouging to the sector. 

Now what?
Since fiscal year 2001, the defense budget has consistently grown, but with America's wars winding down and current budget crisis looming, any money the government allocates to defense contractors is a win for them. Of course, all of this could change if the idiots -- er, Congressmen -- don't get their acts together before Jan. 1, but at least some departments are acting responsibly. And that's great news for investors who are looking at the long term in defense investing.

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Get this: We arrived at these odds from 10,000 random back-tested portfolios made up of Co-founder David Gardner's personal stock picks between December 2002 and December 2011...

So, what's INSIDE Motley Fool Supernova?!? Simply enter your email address. And David Gardner will take you on a personal tour. And reveal his up-to-the-minute top picks for 3-D Printing, Entertainment, Social Networking, Personal Wellness, Next-Gen Education, and more!

Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin Wordpress | Android Forums | Wordpress Tutorials

Source: http://feeds.fool.com/~r/usmf/foolwatch/~3/3ZUwHNMiebk/story01.htm

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Physicist Explains What Discovering The Higgs Boson Feels Like

fabiola gianotti scientist

Fabiola Gianotti was in mid-flow when her audience at Cern, the particle physics lab near Geneva, spotted the result they had so long hoped for amid the garish fonts of her presentation and rose to their feet to whistle, cheer and roar their approval.

She tried to calm them down, told them to wait, that there was more. But the result they had spied – a simple number five followed by the Greek letter sigma, in a little red box – was all the hundreds gathered needed to know.

It told them that the Higgs boson, or at least a particle that looked suspiciously like it, had been found at last. Nothing was going to delay their celebrations.

Scientific discoveries are rarely met with such a raucous response, but the announcement, soon after 10.30am local time on 4 July, was an exception.

This was the discovery of the year, and the culmination of more than two decades of work that drew on a cast of thousands. Many of those in the audience had spent their careers in the search.

Gianotti is head of the Atlas collaboration, a group of 3,000 or so scientists who work on a giant detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Her talk that morning came directly after another presentation, by Joe Incandela, head of the CMS detector group, which also saw the particle.

Everything rested on her talk: had the Atlas group seen nothing, the lab could hardly claim a discovery.

"It was an extraordinarily tense time, but it was also extremely exciting," she says. "We were so focused on producing these results. Throughout June, the evidence for the Higgs-like particle was growing stronger with time; it grew and grew, and every week we had a step forward.

It was a time of great team spirit, when we all worked towards this common goal. People at all levels were working day and night."

For an outsider, it is easy to think of scientists pursuing their arcane goals at a leisurely pace with little stress and plenty of time for intellectual reflection. That was not the case in the runup to the July announcement. It was a punishing and gruelling rush to turn vast piles of raw data into meaningful results that were fit to present to the world.

"You need a lot of motivation, a lot of energy, and a lot of curiosity," says Gianotti. "The search for knowledge is a long and difficult task."

The existence of the Higgs boson verifies a theory drawn up by the British physicist Peter Higgs with a pencil and paper in his office at Edinburgh University nearly half a century ago. The theory says that elementary particles, like the quarks and electrons inside atoms, get their masses from an invisible field that stretches through all of space. Without something to give particles mass, there would be no stars, planets or life as we know it.

Higgs, now 83, was in the audience on 4 July. At the end of Gianotti's talk, when the crowd stood for a second standing ovation, he drew a tissue from his pocket and wiped tears from his eyes, overwhelmed by their reaction to the news. Gianotti went to greet him, and to offer congratulations. She respects Higgs enormously, she says, not only for his genius and insight, but for his deep-seated modesty.

As soon as the particle was found at Cern, there were those who argued it deserved the 2012 Nobel prize for physics. That was unlikely given the conservative nature of the Nobel committee, and in the event, did not happen.

But Gianotti, along with Incandela and five other Cern physicists, did win the most lucrative prize ever established in science, the special fundamental physics prize. Gianotti and her colleague Peter Jenni immediately announced their $1m would support a fund to help struggling physicists within the Atlas collaboration.

There is no doubt that 4 July was a historic day for particle physics, but the questions that remain over the new particle have kept Gianotti and others at Cern occupied, and will for a while yet.

Since the announcement, they have pressed on to try to clarify whether the particle is the simplest form of Higgs boson, or something more exotic that could break radical new ground for physicists.

"The 4 July was an end in that we had been looking for this for many years, but at the same time it was a beginning," says Gianotti. "Since that time, we have made good progress towards understanding one of the big questions the LHC was designed to answer. In the coming months and years we need to look at this in detail. It will take a lot of work to draw up a complete identikit of this particle, and we have just started that work."

In the new year, the LHC closes for two years so engineers can make repairs needed for the machine to switch back on at full energy in 2015. For now, work centres on gathering more and more data from Higgs bosons inside the LHC.

The particle is fabulously unstable, and disintegrates as soon as it is created in the machine. But it leaves behind streaks of more familiar particles, which must be measured with exquisite precision to see if their numbers match the predictions.

"We know there must be new physics. For example, we cannot explain what dark matter is," says Gianotti. "In some sense there may not be new physics through the Higgs boson, but there must be new physics to address these other questions."

The Higgs boson is the missing piece of a jigsaw that physicists have pieced together since the 1970s to explain how the known particles in nature behave. But many physicists hope desperately that the new particle will turn out to be more peculiar than the simplest kind of particle Higgs predicted.

Would that be good news for Gianotti? "It's not about good or bad news, it's about what nature has chosen," she says. "It's always good news when you're closer to the truth."

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

SEE ALSO: The Biggest Science Breakthroughs Of The Year

Please follow Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/uXF6kZxa5KY/discovering-the-higgs-boson-particle-2012-12

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RIM Earnings: Cash Flow In Focus As BB10 Launch Nears

With BB10 to be launched only in Q1 2013 and competitors such as Apple and Samsung expected to continue to munch on RIM?s market share until then, RIM?s results this quarter are likely to remain weak.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/12/20/rim-earnings-cash-flow-in-focus-as-bb10-launch-nears/

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