Many of the people writing those articles are just too young to remember when Apple Computers began in a garage. Even though  the original founders of Apple, Steve Jobs a  software engineer, and Steve Wozniak the inventor of the personal computer respectively, have evaded the ‘dark lord’ reputation that Bill Gates acquired, they did have some techno – karma to repay.

Nowadays people may regard The Beatles as some lordly muses of musicology, and refer to them in awed tones. Or they may indeed fail to see the relevance of the band entirely, even though Rock Band sales of their music has done well. Perhaps fewer still remember that The Beatles were not rock gods at first for many years after they began. Certainly not everyone in the sixties thought that The Beatles music was all that good. Several other bands of the era had enormous followings and in fact still do. The first rumblings of metal would soon reverberate across the pond as well.

Today some might even say that it was the press, and the particular way that crowds were filmed, which made The Beatles package seem like it was a bigger phenomenon than it actually was. Regardless of your interpretation of the biblical amount of Beatles history, the acquiescence of the ‘other’ Apple signals not only a truce, but the sunset of a fifty year era.

Apple and Apple reaching across the aisle has more significance than just a mere economics lesson. It is the death of a particular zeitgeist. The sixties, heralded as America’s creative, flower strewn past is fifty years gone by. Michael Jackson who at one time The Beatles publishing rights, has passed on. Over time, The Beatles franchise is no longer guaranteed success with the next generations. Musical tastes change. Exclusivity, and keeping the songs off online distribution meant dwindling into obscurity.

During those early  not – so – popular years The Beatles attempted to start their own rudimentary brand. The Beatle’s Apple grew in the1960s to replace a first failed attempt, called Beatles Ltd. They produced some records as Apple, with the green granny smith apple spinning in the middle of the vinyl. But that didn’t last long and they changed labels. You could say that a green apple and a rainbow apple are not the same thing. One was a graphic design, and the other was a fruit photo. Apple Corp. might sound like a different enough name from Apple Computers but it wasn’t.

Beginning in the late seventies when I was in high school and college, I remember well all the disputes between the two Apple companies over their trademarks rights. Those legal battles continued right up to 2007.

As a condition of the settlement, in 1981 Apple Computer agreed not to enter the music business, and Apple Corps agreed not to enter the computer business. However as time went by and technology grew, computers used music for games, MIDI and audio-recording. Many game franchises that are still going on today began on the Apple II, which was the first to have an Ensoniq synthesizer chip. So in 1989 they were all back in court.

The legal battles stalled the advancement of music technology. Who knows, something like iTunes might have come a couple years sooner. As late as 2003 Apple Corp. was suing Apple due to the use of an Apple on iTunes. Finally in 2006 the court ruled in favor of Apple Computer. It was time for Apple Corp. to get over it. There was just no way that The Beatles defunct company logo had any reality as infringing on iTunes, which they never could have imagined back in the sixties.

The settlements ended the ongoing trademark lawsuits between the two mega companies. Hands Across the Water. It must have been tough for guys who were Beatles music fans, to accidentally get screwed repeatedly to the tune of millions of dollars and years stalling the advancement of technology. To be so embroiled in multi million dollar money pits against The Beatles management company, is ironic today. If you need to check a logo for copyrights, you can look it up online. Those legendary garage geeks need to use a time machine, and tell themselves to invent the Internet at the same time as the PC. One thing is for sure, we can expect more of The Beatles music on future Apple Computer press roll outs.

In Companions there are two game modes, which are the quick play ‘Single Map’ mode, and the Campaign mode. Each of the members of the four person team has a little backstory. The controls are simple taps on the characters and then a tap on the enemies to attack. Each party member has three special skills that they can equip at a time. They are limited by cool down times as you would normally see.

Graphics are limited. It’s very pixelish. You don’t actually see your characters in three dimensions. They look like little icons, or pac men. I’m not one for retro style gaming, it might be a love it or hate it type of choice of tastes. I prefer the newest most cutting edge in graphics and gameplay. The old days don’t hold any charm for me. Also the characters are so tiny and hard to see, it is difficult to know what they are doing. For the amount of graphics that are here, it might as well be a text adventure.

There were a few things that bugged me with this game. Annoyingly your characters will not attack correctly unless they are in range of the enemies and facing the right direction it’s a pet peeve of mine. I thought we were done with that old problem, now that we’re using iPads. I don’t know what they were going for here when they have competition like Order and Chaos by Gameloft to contend with. The group formation and party-wide commands do make the game act more like a strategy game, or even a puzzle game than an RPG.

Another problem is that the four of them are always are always static Minotaur, Female Elf, Human, and Dwarf and are not customizable. There are three classes to choose from for each of the the races in the four member party that changes up their stats, but still not enough to make it interesting, or to keep up with other iOS games. This one still needs some work because when you tap a particular character and nothing happens it leads to unnecessary deaths.

Companions has an inventory system, with randomized drops falling you can collect loot. Although there isn’t any shop, yet anyways. There is a way to control time in the game which is different. Called a ‘tactical pause’ it stops the game while you set up. The time is limited, but it provides a work around for the other troubles in the game.

Though Companions isn’t a perfect game it will appeal to those who like strategy games and don’t mind a challenge. If you go into it without expectations you may find it to your liking. It has the retro ambiance to it that some people really like. For me it’s a Pass, perhaps until there are some updates.

Since then the story has fallen completely off the paranormal radar. What interested me was that the quality of the metals being described as expensive and difficult of not impossible to reproduce. The pictographs them selves were quite interesting, and I’ve considered many different Celtic, Anglo Saxon, Oghams, Pictish and other extinct forms of writing to be close but not it.

What does give the story of the Grasdorf plates have less credence is that they were found below three sets of identical crop circles. Most crop circles that we have seen pictures of are faked. Grasdorf was one of, if not the first crop circle ever discovered. So it could be that it was the first and best hoax, which was later copy catted? Or is it that the first was the only real incident, where the gold, silver and bronze plates were brought up? Who can say now because the plates themselves have been taken into the custody of an unknown private collector.
Looking at the plates one might think of them as a star map. There looks to be a cluster on there of four stars. I couldn’t be the first one to think of the pictograms from the Grasdorf Plates as being a star map of the Trapezium Cluster am I? Studying the photos of the plates only seems to lead to more questions. Perhaps an astronomer could tell us more about the meaning of the pictographs.

If something other than present day humanity did create these plates, then just why was it so important to show us these designs, and what is their significance?

I would love to have the resources that the SyFy network has at their disposal when they send out the Fact or Faked team, they always have the newest cutting edge paranormal and engineering equipment to use. I would like to see radiation tests, and geology tests, ultra sound and dowsing results from that area. A night scan would be great for gathering even more information too.

Some of the background on the incident is that it happened July 22,1991 near Grasdorf in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony. The large German crop circle was not discovered until the next morning by people who were out jogging past the farm. The crop circle was said to be roughly 110 yards long by 55 yards wide. The whole pattern of circles were said to have covered an area of about 6,000 square feet. The pattern consisted of different seven symbols within thirteen circles. One pattern had attached an ‘x’ to the circle, which looks similar to many ancient symbols of the sun.

The location of the find could have archaeological significance. Nearby is the Thieberg, which was a “Thing” or an ancient Teutonic tribal sacred space. The historically rich area in the immediate vicinity is the Wuldenberg, which is an ancient Germanic Wotan sacred site. Like many pre christian sacred locations it was sacked and razed then a church was plopped on top of it by Charlemagne. The Holy Grove of the Teutons, which was fought over right into the Middle Ages, until a feudal lord gave the order to fell the sacred grove in 1273, he was murdered by the people of Grasdorf, and a small war was the result. The enchanted wood stayed untouched until the 19th century. This neo-pagan wonderland has the heritage of ancient Saxon heartland. The spirit of the land there remained alive far longer than in other places and resisted being christened. The grove of the Saxons, had been sacred for at least 4,000 years.

There is a report that someone named Christian Fiedler from Grasdorf had seen an orange colored, pulsing light, that night in the area in question.

The three metal plates were found there one an unusual type of bronze, a very pure silver and a very pure gold disk too. They were said to have been shown at an internationally UFO conference, “Dialogue with the Universe”, in Dusseldorf, Germany in October, 1992. Which I would like to see confirmation of, or clips of.

A piece on the Grasdorf case was made for for the US TV program, “Encounters” in April, 1994. In addition ot os said that:
“Tugingen lawyer, Dr Roemer-Blum, arranged a scientific evaluation at the German Federal Institute for Material Research (Bundesanstalt fur Materialpufung) in Berlin. Their conclusion, after carefully analyzing both plates was: “Plate one (silver color) consisted mainly of quite pure silver, with an additional ingredient accounting for less than 0.1%. The weight of the plate was 4.98kg (11lbs). Plate two (bronze color) consisted of a copper-tin alloy (of which the tin content amounted to 10%-15%), nickel and traces of iron amounting to less than 0.1%”.

Sources at the time reported the silver plate consisted of 99.9% pure silver, even purer than sterling-silver. A spectrographic analysis done of both plates proved that they had not been made from a cast but from some kind of conglomerate of silver nuggets and natural copper and tin pieces of the type found in Germany’s Harz forest, not far from Grasdorf. They had been produced, in an unusual fashion, that could not be determined at the time. Neew testing methods could certainly tell us more if the plates could be brought forward. Some theories of how they were created is by heating metal globs up to a degree that partially melted the metals, or they did it in a low-gravity environment. The gold plate was said to be made from some of the finest quality that had been seen by the examiner.

One of the main selling points about the BlackBerry PlayBook is the rock solid operating system called  QNX . Each week seems to bring another story of how Android based devices have leaked information, been back-doored or hacked. You most likely won’t hear that about the PlayBook.

It is slightly smaller than an iPad at seven inches. It will play Flash. But for some reason there is no 3G. That could be a downside. It measures up at 0.4-inches thick being less than a tenth thicker than an iPad 2. And it is heavier than the .83 pound Galaxy Tab. It comes in 1GB of RAM and 16, 32, or 64GB sizes. The prices start at $499 and goes up a $100 more the same as iPads.

As more reviews and tests are being done critics might not be gushing praise about the thing. But it does seem to be the first reliable tablet to compete with iPad.

They have added a new, full-fledged crafting system planned to come out in several phases over the next few months. Crafting will be divided into three schools: elemental, divine, and arcane. Players earn experience in each school separately. Each school makes different items, and crafting devices will be required to both deconstruct old items and create new items. Depending on your skill, each recipe has chances to succeed, and if failed, you could lose the components. This April they will have Update 9, presenting a four-part storyline by Wizards of the Coast and Atari.