Congress should do all of this right away

Facing heat for high gasoline prices, President louis vuitton sunglasses Obama tried to shift the focus to Congress, Republicans and energy traders, calling for legislation that he said would "put more cops on the beat" to crack down on potential manipulation of the oil market. Obama called on Congress to provide more money for regulators and increase penalties for market manipulators. The president, flanked by Treasury SecretaryTimothy F. Geithnerand Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., suggested that traders and speculators are affecting the price of oil and digging burberry handbags into Americans' pocketbooks. "We can't afford a situation where some speculators can reap millions while millions of American families get the short end of the stick," Obama said in brief remarks in the Rose Garden on Tuesday. "That's not the way the market should work." Obama's proposal would add $52 million to the budget for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees oil futures markets, to pay for improved technology and additional employees. The president also proposed increasing the maximum civil and criminal penalties for manipulative activity in oil futures markets and beefing up data collection. Republicans have pushed to trim the CFTC as part of their budget-cutting push. Independent analysts and Republicans Ray ban sunglasses quickly questioned whether Obama was exaggerating the effect of speculation on the market. The White House did not point to any evidence that illegal conduct was on the rise. Independent analysts have said speculators are a factor in the recent surge in oil prices but are not the main reason. A study last month by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis said global demand has been the main driver of higher oil prices over the last decade. Speculation was the second-largest factor, accounting for about 15% of the rise, the study said. Republicans on Capitol Hill labeled the proposed legislation burberry ties a political ploy. But the president argued that the measures were necessary to prevent illegal trading as the volume of trading increases. "Imagine if the NFL quadrupled the number of teams, but didn't increase the number of refs," Obama said. "You'd end up having havoc on the field, and it would diminish the game. It wouldn't be fair. That's part of what's going on in a lot of these markets." Obama's expected Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, accused the president of over-regulating industries and slowing production. "He's made it harder through trying louis vuitton handbags to push the [Environmental Protection Agency] into regulating fracking for natural gas and oil, made it harder to get a reliable supply of gas, made it harder for those that mine coal and for those that use coal, made it harder to drill for oil," Romney said as he campaigned near western Pennsylvania's coal country. Domestic oil and gas production actually has increased, and fracking — a technique primarily for producing natural gas — is not a direct factor in the price of gasoline. Still, the issues of energy and regulation are likely to resonate further as long as commuters are paying more oakley sunglasses at the pump. It's possible that gasoline prices already have peaked. Prices have fallen nationally for the last two weeks after reaching a high of $3.941 on April 2. Crude oil futures prices, which have risen steadily since October, also have gradually been edging lower, according to Energy Department data. But prices remain markedly higher than they were a few months ago, which has helped make energy a weak spot for Obama. A Pew Research Center survey released Tuesday found that two-thirds of voters called energy a very important issue in the election. Romney had a slight edge with voters who saw energy as a top priority. The White House's strategy for changing that dynamic looks much like its strategy on other pressing issues — use the unpopular and deadlocked Congress as a political foil, putting the onus on lawmakers to act and chiding them for disagreeing with the president. "Congress should do all of this right away," Obama said. He also blasted congressional Republicans for blocking legislation that would have eliminated subsidies for oil companies. "Here's a chance to make amends, a chance to actually do something that will protect consumers by increasing oversight of energy markets," he said. Some analysts said Obama's proposal would at least make oil prices less volatile. "It's gotten way too out of control," said Discount louis vuitton bracelets for women classic best outlet silvery Ben Brockwell, director of data pricing for the Oil Price Information Service, an energy information company. "The speculators are a prime mover in this market." But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) dismissed Obama's proposal as an election-year gimmick. "If I were to guess, I'd say today's proposal by the president probably polls pretty well. But I guarantee you it won't do a thing to lower the price of gas at the pump," McConnell said.

Judge Alsup warned both legal teams

Oracle attorney Michael Jacobs came out louis vuitton sunglasses swinging hard at Google on April 16 in his opening argument as the company began its $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit against the Web services giant in federal district court in San Francisco. Jacobs, a partner in the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Morrison & Foerster law firm, attempted to convince a 12-person jury and presiding Judge William Alsup that Google IT managers were quite aware that they used proprietary Java application programming interfaces owned by Oracle to create the Android mobile-device operating system -- one that now runs Ray ban sunglasses more than 300 million smartphones and tablet PCs. In an opening statement that went for about 60 minutes, Jacobs said that Oracle "will prove to you from beginning to end ... that Google knew it was doing the wrong thing. "This case is about Google's use, in Google's business, of somebody else's property without permission," Jacobs said. "You can't just step on someone's IP because you think you have a good business reason for it." Oracle first filed suit in August 2010, claiming burberry handbags that Google illegally used seven Java application programming interfaces that Oracle owns to help build the Android operating system. Google contends that the APIs it uses cannot be copyrighted because doing so would be similar to copyrighting a technique used to perform a task. Legally, techniques are not considered intellectual property. Internal Google Emails Shown to Jury Jacobs showed the jury a group of Google emails from 2005 to help state his case. In that year, several months before Sun released Java to the open source community in November 2006, Google Android team manager Andy Rubin sent an email to Google co-founder Larry Page proposing to buy a license for Java and its APIs. "We'll have to pay Sun for the license," Rubin said in the email. But an email two years later from Rubin to then-CEO Eric Schmidt shows that Mountain View, Calif.-based Google "consciously decided against burberry ties taking a license," Jacobs said. "I'm done with Sun (tail between my legs, you were right)," Rubin wrote to Schmidt. "They (Sun) won't be happy when we release our stuff." Judge Cautions Both Teams About Evidence At one point, Judge Alsup warned both legal teams louis vuitton handbags that they will need "to show good cause for any evidence submitted at trial to be kept from the public," and that unsavory details about either company might go into the public record. "Unless it's the recipe for Coca-Cola, it's going to be public," Alsup said. "If it reveals something embarrassing about the oakley sunglasses way one of these companies works, too bad. That's going to be out there for the public to see." Google's lawyers from the San Francisco firm of Keker & Van Nest will present their opening statements April 17. Selection of the 12-person jury began early April Discount louis vuitton bracelets for women classic best outlet silvery 16 at the Phillip Burton Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in downtown San Francisco. The court clerk said the trial could go as long as 10 weeks. Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle is asking the U.S. District Court in Northern California for $1 billion in damages and an injunction against Google from louis vuitton mens shoes using its IP in Android.

The Hamburg prosecutor’s office is still pursuing a criminal investigation

On the 100th anniversary of the ship's sinking on louis vuitton sunglasses April 15, 1912, the 3-D version of James Cameron's "Titanic" held the No. 4 spot with $11.6 million. The rerelease has earned $44.4 million domestically to lift the lifetime total for "Titanic" to $645.2 million. If you were hoping to get some online gaming in before you have to start a new work week tomorrow, you better get your fix in early. That is, if you’re a PS3 gamer. Sony will be shutting down the PlayStation Network for more than half of the day. The company said this is for necessary maintenance on the network, so nothing is terribly broken. It’s just going in to optimize things and clean up processes. The network will go offline at 9:00 AM Eastern Time. “This maintenance will last roughly 13 hours,” said PlayStation Digital Platforms senior manager Matthew Harper in a PlayStation Blog post. “During much of this time, users won’t be able to access the PlayStation Store, PlayStation Home, Account Management or play online. PSN enabled websites will not be able to service users, including [the PlayStation Blog].” Surprisingly, Harper also addressed users who are disappointed with these usually terse messages about network downtime. “Part of my job is to make sure that the lines of communication are open between our users and PlayStation. While I don’t have more details to share at this time regarding the downtime, I will certainly work to include more info in future posts,” he said. One of the most audacious projects ever to come out of Google was the plan to photograph and map the inhabited world, one block at a time. But a report over the weekend from federal regulators has rekindled questions over exactly what the company Ray ban sunglasses was doing — questions the search giant has spent years trying not to answer. The Federal Communications Commission censured Google for obstructing an inquiry into the Street View project, which collected Internet communications from potentially millions of unknowing households as specially equipped cars drove slowly by. But the investigation, described in an interim report, was left unresolved because a critical participant, the Google engineer in charge of the project, cited the Fifth Amendment and declined to talk. Google was fined $25,000 for obstruction, a penalty it can challenge. It and the F.C.C. are wrangling over how much information can be revealed in the final report. In the interim report, many passages were heavily redacted. Privacy advocates said the F.C.C. report was only a start. “I appreciate that the F.C.C. sanctioned Google for not cooperating in the investigation, but the much bigger problem is the pervasive and covert surveillance of Internet users that Google undertook over a three-year period,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He said that on Monday he would ask the Justice Department to investigate Google over wiretapping. Google said Sunday that it disagreed with the F.C.C.’s characterization of its lack of cooperation, but that its collection of what is called payload data — Internet communications, including texts and e-mails — was legal, if regrettable. “It was a mistake for us to include code in our burberry handbags software that collected payload data,” a spokeswoman said. As part of the Street View project, as Google was collecting photographs on every street, it was also gathering information about local wireless networks to improve location-based searches. But the Google engineer wrote a program for the project that went beyond what was originally envisioned. Using this program, Google collected the data computers were sending out. The data proved be a snapshot of what people were doing at the moment the cars rolled by — e-mailing a lover, texting jokes to a buddy, balancing a checkbook, looking up an ailment. Google spent more than two years scooping up that information, from January 2008 to April 2010. The photographs were used to refine Google’s maps, the wireless information to improve searches. Google had not figured out what, if anything, to do with the personal data, nor had it even looked at it, when rumors about the secret project began in 2010. People, mostly in Europe, were furious. Google first said it did not collect personal data. Then it said such data was in fragments. Then it conceded there were things like entire e-mails. Even in the United States, where regulators take a more restrained approach to privacy issues than in Europe, there was widespread concern. A multistate inquiry was begun by state attorneys general. The Federal Trade Commission looked into it. Google, by simultaneously apologizing, burberry ties promising to do better and saying as little as possible, made the issue go away. It is unclear whether the engineer acted on his own initiative or under the direction of supervisors. Coincidentally, the F.C.C. opened its investigation of the Street View project on the same day in 2010 that the F.T.C. ended its inquiry. While staff members from the two entities spoke about their efforts, they were looking at potential violations of different statutes and their investigations took place separately. Some F.C.C. staff members argued strongly that Google should be charged with a violation of the Communications Act, and the agency and Google spent weeks debating whether Google’s capture of unencrypted Wi-Fi communications violated the Wiretap Act or the Communications Act. The F.C.C.’s enforcement division finally declined to charge Google with violating the Communications Act after determining that there was no precedent for applying the statute to Wi-Fi communications. But by publicly reprimanding Google for its conduct, louis vuitton handbags the F.C.C. is hoping that Congress will see that the law has not kept up with advances in digital communications and will rewrite the statutes. Encryption technology did not exist when the Communications Act was written. Google argued that the few precedents that do apply favor a broad interpretation of what is permissible under the two laws. People close to the discussion said that determination was affected by inconsistent language between the two statutes. The Communications Act prohibits intercepting radio communications “except as authorized by” the Wiretap Act. The Wiretap Act says it is “not unlawful to” intercept unencrypted communication, but it does not give specific permission for the oakley sunglasses interception of unencrypted communications. Federal courts have generally given a broad interpretation, however. But the F.C.C. was not able to determine if there had been actions that clearly would violate the statutes — say, if Google intercepted and made use of encrypted information — because the Google engineer who would know invoked his Fifth Amendment right. The determination not to charge Google with a Communications Act violation was made by the enforcement division staff. Google can decide whether to oppose the obstruction charge and fight the fine, eventually taking the fight to the five-member commission and perhaps to federal court. In Europe, where the outcry against Google was greatest, most government data protection regulators have settled their disputes with the company. Some countries, like Ireland, asked Google in 2010 to simply destroy the data it had gathered illegally in their jurisdictions. Google informed Ireland and other countries that it had done so and no penalties were levied. On April 5, the Dutch Data Protection Authority closed its investigation after Google gave residents in the Netherlands the option of removing their Wi-Fi routers from Google’s global tracking database. But in Germany, where Google’s collection of personal data was first uncovered by a regulator in Hamburg, two proceedings are officially up and running. The Hamburg prosecutor’s office is still pursuing a criminal investigation, which it opened in May 2010, into whether Google broke German law by illegally intercepting private data through electronic means. Johannes Caspar, the Hamburg regulator, said in a recent interview that he was delaying his own administrative review of the situation until Discount louis vuitton bracelets for women classic best outlet silvery the Hamburg prosecutor decides whether or not to press criminal charges. J. Trevor Hughes, president of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, said the Google case represented what happened when technical employees of technology companies made “innocent” decisions about collecting data that could infuriate consumers and in turn invite regulatory inquiry.

The smoke in the backroom was so thick

There was a moment when Cory Booker "thought burberry handbags we were not going to make it." "No air," the Newark, N.J., mayor said Friday. "I just could not breathe. That's when I thought, 'If I don't find this woman in a few minutes, we're both going to die.' " Less than 12 hours earlier, Booker had dashed into a neighbor's burning home and carried a woman to safety, but only after arguing with a police detective assigned to protect him. "It was just one of these moments in life when you just decide to jump in," said the 6-foot-3 former Stanford University tight end. The woman was reported to be in stable condition Friday, with second-degree burns on her neck and back. Booker suffered minor burns and smoke inhalation and was hospitalized briefly late Thursday. Already lionized in some corners for his good deeds, Booker, 42, is a rising star in the Democratic Party and considered a potential candidate gucci sunglasses for governor or the U.S. Senate. Instead of living in posh, mayorly quarters, he resides in one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the city to better stay connected with the people. During a 2010 blizzard that paralyzed the city, Booker grabbed a shovel and got to work. He has been known to ride along with police on late-night patrols, once even chasing down a robbery suspect. The Peabody award-winning Sundance Channel series "Brick City" documented his efforts to decrease Newark's crime rate and tackle financial problems. Profiles have appeared in Time magazine and Esquire. And when Conan O'Brien began taking potshots at Newark, Booker turned the joke back on the late-night talk-show host, banning him from using Newark Liberty International Airport and demanding a public apology. The running "feud" ended when Booker appeared on O'Brien's show. A Rhodes scholar with degrees from Yale, Stanford and Oxford, the social-media-savvy Booker also has been interviewed by Oprah Winfrey and attracted a $100 million donation for schools from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Booker's latest actions shouldn't hurt his political oakley sunglasses aspirations (unless someone accuses him of taking a job away from a firefighter). The rescue story, of course, exploded nationally overnight. At one point Friday morning, "Cory Booker" was the most searched term on Google. NPR crowned him "today's hero." The story also took on a humorous life of its own on Twitter, with social-media types trying to outdo themselves with made-up #corybookerstories. (Example: "When Chuck Norris has nightmares, Cory Booker turns on the light & sits with him until he falls back asleep.") At a news conference, Booker framed his experience with the fire in religious terms. "I feel a sense of gratitude today to God that I'm here," said the mayor, in office since 2006. "I had my proverbial come-to-Jesus moment in my life." He said one of the detectives riding with him saw the flames first and called a dispatcher about 10 p.m. and then knocked on a Classic burberry bracelet cheap discount 2012 brown beige window. The detective, Santos Duran, compared the situation to "a scene from the movie 'Backdraft.' " "It was really intense," Duran said. Some occupants did not realize the two-story house was on fire. Coley Whitaker, a retired truck driver who was asleep, said a voice shouting that there was a fire — the mayor's voice — awakened him. Whitaker said the blaze was in the kitchen upstairs and that he and the building's owner tried to extinguish it. But water seemed to make it worse, Whitaker said. Lamar Hodge, who was downstairs, said he heard his sister, Zina, screaming for help from upstairs, beyond the kitchen. Detective Alex Rodriguez, on the mayor's security detail since June, said he went to the second floor with Booker right behind. They also heard Zina Hodge's screams. By then, 2012 chanel fashion sunglasses discount for sale CREWR248 Rodriguez said, flames had scaled the wall and were fanning across the ceiling, and they could hear what he described as small explosions. Booker moved toward the kitchen. Rodriguez said he held him back and that the two "exchanged words." "I said: 'I can't let you in, that's my job. I have to keep you from danger,' " Rodriguez recalled. Booker tried to charge into the flames a second time, the detective said, and he again restrained the mayor, this time by grabbing his belt. The two again had words, Rodriguez said, and Booker this time laid out the situation in no uncertain terms. "He gave me an order, and I complied," Rodriguez said. "The order was, 'Let me go.' " The smoke in the backroom was so thick that he "couldn't see anything," the mayor said. He said he was "frightened" because he could not find Hodge, 47, at first. Once he located her, he said, he lifted her over one shoulder "and ran as quickly as I could through the kitchen, which was on fire, and to Rodriguez, who assisted me in taking her out of the house." The mayor played down the idea that he had been a hero. "I'm a neighbor who did what most neighbors burberry ties would do, which is jump into action," he said, adding, with a nod to Rodriguez: "I think most people would have done the exact same thing. The only difference is I had to convince somebody to let me go who was doing his job to protect me."

The station listens for radio transmissions from mariners and aircraft

“For most workers, it is best to exit burberry ties quietly and not burn any bridges," outplacement expert John Challenger said in a statement in March. "New employers may need to contact your former boss for references, and loose talk may be the difference between a new job and continued unemployment. Even a rant about a former employer on Facebook can become an obstacle to new employment.” Muto, in his first article as the Fox Mole, said he had never intended his job at Fox to be a long one. "The plan was simple: get hired, keep my head down and my views to myself, work for a few months, build my résumé, then eventually hop to a new job burberry outlet that didn't make me cringe every morning when I looked in the mirror," he wrote. He joined Fox in 2004. He said he settled into life at Fox after numerous efforts to find other jobs failed. In his first blog as Fox Mole, Muto labeled his employer's website as the "seedy underbelly of the Fox News online empire." He singled out one post on the site, illustrated with pictures of black celebrities who visited with the president on his 50th birthday last August, under the headline "Obama's Hip Hop BBQ Didn't Create Jobs." "The post neatly summed up everything that had been troubling me about my employer: Non sequitur, ad hominem attacks on the president; gleeful race baiting; a willful disregard for facts; and so on," Muto wrote. The partygoers also included many Washington politicians and White House staffers, he said. Muto's posts included a two-minute video of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's off-air banter in an interview with Mr. Hannity. "I think Mitt loses points with the GOP base burberry shoes for men for his correct pronunciation of dressage," Muto posted. On Wednesday afternoon, Fox and Muto engaged in an unusual game of cat and mouse. A representative told website Mediaite.com that the TV network had identified the person and was exploring its legal options, but Muto taunted Fox with another post saying, "I Am the Fox Mole, And I'm Still Here." That changed late on Wednesday, Muto wrote, when he was ushered into a Fox attorney's office and "suspended indefinitely ... with pay, oddly enough." That posting was made before Fox confirmed that Muto would be fired. Two Coast Guard members were fatally shot Thursday at a communications station on an island off Alaska in what officials said appeared to be a double homicide. They have yet to identify a suspect. The victims were found at their work Ray ban sunglasses areas inside the Kodiak Island station early Thursday by another Coast Guard member, spokeswoman Sara Francis said. Officials believe a third person was involved in the shooting, she said, adding the rest of the roughly 60 enlisted personnel and civilians working at the station have been accounted for. Capt. Jesse Moore, commanding officer of the Coast Guard base on Kodiak, said the shootings likely occurred sometime between 7 and 8 a.m., soon after the two victims arrived for work inside one of the communication station buildings. The captain said he was not aware of any threats Oakley sunglasses or anything else that might have indicated problems at the station. The station is equipped with security cameras, but it was not yet known if they captured any evidence, he said. Moore said the base was “deeply saddened” by the loss of two shipmates. “This is a tragic event and we are going to do everything we can to look after the families of victims, to take care of them and to protect the residents and citizens and other Coast Guard employees in Kodiak,” Moore said. After the shooting, security was increased at the base, about 8 miles from the island’s largest city of Kodiak. Officials called on the city’s 6,300 or so residents to remain calm and vigilant. Francis said added security was in place at burberry outlet the base and an adjacent school. The station listens for radio transmissions from mariners and aircraft, Petty Officer Charly Hengen said. The staff is responsible for relaying distress calls to other Coast Guard stations and offices. The station has “secure front doors,” Hengen said, and requires staff and visitors to show identification. Francis said visitors and those not actually working at the station are usually provided escorts. The Coast Guard said the victims’ identities would be released after family members were notified. The FBI said agents flew to Kodiak from Anchorage, about 250 miles away. Chole sunglasses, designer chloé eyewear, cheap chloe glasses 2012 sale. Rear Adm. Thomas Ostebo, the commander of Coast Guard operations in Alaska, was in New London, Conn., for a conference at the Coast Guard Academy but left ahead of schedule. Ostebo could not be reached for comment, according to academy spokesman David Santos. The shooting occurred almost 11 years after another fatal shooting involving the Coast Guard on another Alaska island, St. Paul Island, which is about 660 miles west of the city of Kodiak. A man killed a Coast Guard officer whom he louis vuitton hairpin believed was having an affair with his estranged wife. Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Zuckerberg noted that users can maintain their Instagram photos off Facebook

Facebook's $1 billion gobbling up of Instagram burberry handbags has sent disgruntled fans of the quirky photo-sharing app to the delete button. Twitter and other online platforms buzzed Wednesday with depictions of Facebook as a corporate monster trampling over a defenseless community of creative, free-spirited types. "Guess it's time to delete my instagram app before Facebook ruins it," Twitter user Charlie Robinson griped. In another tweet, Ray ban sunglasses Jay El Nino Garcia moaned: "Nice facebook just bought instagram. Another thing to delete." According to analysts at Crimson Hexagon, which studies social media content, just 12 percent of 201,000 relevant Twitter mentions of the takeover were positive. Ten percent registered "disgust" with Facebook and another 10 percent promised to quit Instagram. Why the outcry? Facebook is wildly popular and has the same basic mission as Instagram -- encouraging people to build virtual networks on which to share their lives. But for Instagram's 30 million users, the Oakley sunglasses cult-status app has a very different identity to the mass market Facebook. Unlike Facebook, there is no advertising, and certainly no selling of users' personal details to advertisers. It's single-minded, pure. Sure, the main burberry watches point is to share snaps, which can be made to look cool with filters, but Instagram's mobile-to-mobile traffic is seen as safe from the privacy problems said to plague Facebook's advertiser-friendly pages. "Its ability to let its users delicately toe the line between public and private gave us a little breathing room from the all-pervasiveness of Facebook, and to see it whisked away feels like a tangible loss," wrote Jenna Wortham on The New York Times tech blog. "The sale of Instagram brings a harsh reality into focus, burberry ties the realization that the secret rooms or private spaces online where we can share, chit-chat and hang out with our friends are fading. The few safe havens that do exist are quickly being encroached upon or are next on the shopping list for a company like Google, Apple or Facebook." New York magazine compared Facebook to an alien spaceship and said that for "some users, this looks like a sellout. And that's because it is." Facebook founder burberry watches for men outlet Mark Zuckerberg went out of his way to reassure Instagram purists that they needn't get their hands dirty. On his own Facebook page, Zuckerberg noted that users can maintain their Instagram photos off Facebook and also keep their Instagram followers separate. "We need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram's strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook," Zuckerberg said. Zuckerberg may not be popular in all quarters of the global online world, but his announcement notched up over 140,600 "likes." Juicy Couture sunglasses, cheap Juicy Couture glasses sale. Among the many positive comments were "great decision" and "congrats!" But even on Zuckerberg's virtual doorstep there were dissenters mourning the arrival of mega money into a cozy hipster world. "A picture's worth a thousand words," louis vuitton lady outwear wrote Peter RonPaul Kallman, crossing out "thousand words" and replacing them with: "billion dollars."

Cuban insisted that he failed in trying to make the situation work

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban had burberry handbags noticed Lamar Odom's uninspired play numerous times before, and kept hoping things would change. It took one reply by Odom during a heated halftime exchange in his last game, when Cuban questioned the player's commitment to the team and Odom told him to quit playing games, to realize it was time for the two sides to part ways. "Just his response to it. Everybody goes through ups and downs. Every player does. We tried to put him in a position to succeed. ... It didn't work," Cuban Ray ban sunglasses said Tuesday night, his first public comments since the team confirmed a day earlier that Odom was done in Dallas. Their halftime exchange came after Odom played an uninspired four minutes Saturday night at Memphis. "I just asked him, does he want to go for it or not. Is he in or is he out? I think he thought we were playing poker. I just didn't get a commitment. And that was the end," Cuban said. "This was a big game for us, and he wasn't connecting to that. And if you're not positive energy, you're negative energy." When asked if that was the first time he noticed Odom having such a demeanor, Cuban responded, "No, but the first 17 times, I Oakley sunglasses decided to try to help him and turn it into a positive." That never happened. Odom's averages of 6.6 points, 4.2 rebounds and 20.5 minutes in his underwhelming 50-game stint in Dallas were career lows. He was also often late for team activities such as practices and meetings. The Mavericks didn't release him and instead said Odom would be listed inactive for their remaining nine games. That started with Tuesday night's game against Sacramento. "He didn't want to play. He decided to go elsewhere or do something else. Now we regroup and go forward," Cuban said. "We kept on hoping things would turn out right. It just burberry watches got to the point where there weren't enough games in the season to try to find out." The defending NBA champion Mavericks were only one game ahead of ninth place in the Western Conference standings going into the game against the Kings. Dallas acquired the NBA's reigning Sixth Man of the Year from the Los Angeles Lakers just before the lockout-shortened burberry ties season. It was a low-risk deal for the Mavericks, who gave up a first-round pick and the trade exception from a deal that sent Tyson Chandler to the New York Knicks. The Lakers seemed compelled to move the 6-foot-10 forward, who made $8.9 million this season, after trying to send him to New Orleans in a Chris Paul deal that was nixed by the league. There were also the personal issues for Odom, whose 24-year-old cousin was murdered last summer only days before the player was involved in a fatal car accident that killed a teen pedestrian after the car he was riding in as a passenger collided with a motorcycle. Cuban said the Mavericks knew about Odom's discounted burberry watches for men fragile emotional state when they got him. "Yeah, but we thought we could fight through it," Cuban said. "We knew that's why he was available." Cuban insisted that he failed in trying to make the situation work, and that he didn't have to talk to anyone else to know the end had arrived. "If I'm going to be the guy who smiles with my hand on the trophy, I've got to be the guy who takes the responsibility," Cuban said. "It was just my initiative, just paying attention. ... I was working with him, tried to get him back on the horse. Puma sunglasses, cheap puma glasses wholesale 2012. When I failed, it was my job to recognize it, and deal with it." Odom, the husband and reality TV co-star of Khloe Kardashian, still has a year left on his four-year contract. Any team that has the 13-year veteran on its roster on June 29 must give him a $2.4 million buyout or be responsible for the full $8.2 million he would be due in 2012-13. "The way his contract is structured, it cheap louis vuitton mens shoes will hopefully create some opportunities for us," Cuban said, acknowledging he thinks Odom is tradeable. "Absolutely. It's in his best interests to get his act together, and I'm sure he will. Lamar is still a talented basketball player. He just went through some issues this year. We thought we could work through them with him this year and we weren't able to. Next."