title: Azadirachta indica

text: The neem tree is often confused with a similar looking tree called bakain. Bakain also has toothed leaflets and similar looking fruit. One difference is that neem leaves are pinnate but bakain leaves are twice- and thrice-pinnate.


title: Azadirachta indica

text: The neem tree is noted for its drought resistance. Normally it thrives in areas with sub-arid to sub-humid conditions, with an annual rainfall of . It can grow in regions with an annual rainfall below 400 mm, but in such cases it depends largely on ground water levels. Neem can grow in many different types of soil, but it thrives best on well drained deep and sandy soils. It is a typical tropical to subtropical tree and exists at annual mean temperatures of . It can tolerate high to very high temperatures and does not tolerate temperature below . Neem is one of a very few shade-giving trees that thrive in drought-prone areas e.g. the dry coastal, southern districts of India and Pakistan. The trees are not at all delicate about water quality and thrive on the merest trickle of water, whatever the quality. In India and tropical countries where the Indian diaspora has reached, it is very common to see neem trees used for shade lining streets, around temples, schools and other such public buildings or in most people's back yards. In very dry areas the trees are planted on large tracts of land.


title: Azadirachta indica

text: Neem is considered as a weed in many areas, including some parts of the Middle East, most of Sub-Saharan Africa including West Africa and Indian Ocean states, and some parts of Australia. Ecologically, it survives well in similar environments to its own, but its weed potential has not been fully assessed.


title: Azadirachta indica

text: In April 2015, "A. indica" was declared a class B and C weed in the Northern Territory, Australia, meaning its growth and spread must be controlled and plants or propagules are not allowed to be brought into the NT. It is illegal to buy, sell, or transport the plants or seeds. Its declaration as a weed came in response to its invasion of waterways in the "Top End" of the territory.


title: Azadirachta indica

text: After being introduced into Australia, possibly in the 1940s, "A. indica" was originally planted in the Northern Territory to provide shade for cattle. Trial plantations were established between the 1960s and 1980s in Darwin, Queensland, and Western Australia, but the Australian neem industry did not prove viable. The tree has now spread into the savanna, particularly around waterways, and naturalised populations exist in several areas.


title: Azadirachta indica

text: Neem fruit, seeds, leaves, stems, and bark contain diverse phytochemicals, some of which were first discovered in azadirachta seed extracts, such as azadirachtin established in the 1960s as an insect antifeedant, growth disruptor, and insecticide. The yield of azadirachtin from crushing 2 kg of seeds is about 5 g.


title: Azadirachta indica

text: In addition to azadirachtin and related limonoids, the seed oil contains glycerides, diverse polyphenols, nimbolide, triterpenes, and beta-sitosterol. The yellow, bitter oil has a garlic-like odor and contains about 2% of limonoid compounds. The leaves contain quercetin, catechins, carotenes, and vitamin C.


title: Azadirachta indica

text: Neem leaves are dried in India and placed in cupboards to prevent insects eating the clothes, and also in tins where rice is stored. The flowers are also used in many Indian festivals like Ugadi. "See below: #Association with Hindu festivals in India."


title: Azadirachta indica

text: The tender shoots and flowers of the neem tree are eaten as a vegetable in India. A soup-like dish called in Tamil (translated as "neem flower rasam") made of the flower of neem is prepared in Tamil Nadu. In Bengal, young neem leaves are fried in oil with tiny pieces of eggplant (). The dish is called and is the first item during a Bengali meal that acts as an appetizer. It is eaten with rice.


title: Azadirachta indica

text: Neem is used in parts of mainland Southeast Asia, particularly in Cambodia, Laos (where it is called ), Thailand (where it is known as or ), Myanmar (where it is known as ) and Vietnam (where it is known as and is used to cook the salad ). Even if lightly cooked, the flavour is quite bitter, and the food is not consumed by all inhabitants of these nations. In Myanmar, young neem leaves and flower buds are boiled with tamarind fruit to soften its bitterness and eaten as a vegetable. Pickled neem leaves are also eaten with tomato and fish paste sauce in Myanmar.


title: Azadirachta indica

text: Products made from neem trees have been used in the traditional medicine of India for centuries, but there is insufficient clinical evidence to indicate any benefits of using neem for medicinal purposes. In adults, no specific doses have been established, and short-term use of neem appears to be safe, while long-term use may harm the kidneys or liver; in small children, neem oil is toxic and can lead to death. Neem may also cause miscarriages, infertility, and low blood sugar.


title: Azadirachta indica

text: Neem is a key ingredient in non-pesticidal management (NPM), providing a natural alternative to synthetic pesticides. Neem seeds are ground into powder that is soaked overnight in water and sprayed on the crop. To be effective, it must be applied repeatedly, at least every ten days. Neem does not directly kill insects. It acts as an anti-feedant, repellent, and egg-laying deterrent and thus protects the crop from damage. The insects starve and die within a few days. Neem also suppresses the subsequent hatching of their eggs. Neem-based fertilizers have been effective against southern armyworm. Neem cake may be used as a fertilizer.


title: Azadirachta indica

text: Applications of neem oil in the preparation of polymeric resins have been documented in recent reports. The synthesis of various alkyd resins from neem oil is reported using a monoglyceride (MG) route and their utilization for the preparation of PU coatings. The alkyds are prepared from reaction of conventional divalent acid materials like phthalic and maleic anhydrides with MG of neem oil.


title: Azadirachta indica

text: According to the American Journal of Neuroradiology, neem oil has the ability to cause some forms of toxic encephalopathy and ophthalmopathy if consumed in quantities exceeding 150ml (5.07 us fluid ounces).


title: Azadirachta indica

text: In March 2020, false claims were circulated on social media in various Southeast Asian countries and Africa, supporting the use of neem leaves to treat COVID-19. The Malaysian Ministry of Health summarized myths related to using the leaves to treat COVID-19, and warned of health risks from over-consumption of the leaves. There is no evidence for the effectiveness of neem leaves in the treatment of COVID-19.


title: Azadirachta indica

text: Neem genome and transcriptomes from various organs have been sequenced, analyzed, and published by Ganit Labs in Bangalore, India.


title: Azadirachta indica

text: ESTs were identify by generation of subtractive hybridization libraries of neem fruit, leaf, fruit mesocarp, and fruit endocarp by CSIR-CIMAP Lucknow.


title: Azadirachta indica

text: The name Nimai ('born under a neem tree'), of the Bhakti movement Vaishnava saint and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (believed to be an incarnation of Radha Krishna in Gaudiya Vaishnavism and ISKCON) is due to his birth under a neem tree.


title: Azadirachta indica

text: In 1995, the European Patent Office (EPO) granted a patent on an anti-fungal product derived from neem to the United States Department of Agriculture and W. R. Grace and Company. The Indian government challenged the patent when it was granted, claiming that the process for which the patent had been granted had been in use in India for more than 2,000 years. In 2000, the EPO ruled in India's favour, but W. R. Grace appealed, claiming that prior art about the product had never been published in a scientific journal. On 8 March 2005, that appeal was lost and the EPO revoked the Neem patent.


title: Azadirachta indica

text: The biopesticide produced by extraction from the tree seeds contains limonoid triterpenes. Currently, the extraction process has disadvantages such as contamination with fungi and heterogeneity in the content of limonoids due to genetic, climatic, and geographical variations. To overcome these problems, production of limonoids from plant cell suspension and hairy root cultures in bioreactors has been studied, including the development of a two-stage bioreactor process that enhances growth and production of limonoids with cell suspension cultures of "A. indica".


title: Brian Baumgartner

text: Brian Baumgartner (born November 29, 1972) is an American actor. He is best known for playing Kevin Malone, a character in the NBC sitcom "The Office" (2005–2013).


title: Brian Baumgartner

text: Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Baumgartner attended Holy Innocents' Episcopal School. He attended and graduated from The Westminster Schools in 1991, one year before his co-star on "The Office" Ed Helms graduated. During his time at The Westminster School, Baumgartner competed in competitive speech events, drama, reaching the national finals his senior year. Between his junior and senior year of high school, Baumgartner also attended Northwestern University’s National High School Institute, where he focused on theater. He later attended Southern Methodist University, where he majored in theater and graduated in 1995. He later moved to Los Angeles and served as Artistic Director of Hidden Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he received multiple awards for artistic and acting excellence. Later, Baumgartner performed regionally at the Guthrie Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Children's Theater Company, and Theatre de la Jeune Lune.


title: Brian Baumgartner

text: Baumgartner has had roles on the television shows "Jake in Progress", "Arrested Development" and "Everwood". He served as a celebrity talent scout on "Last Comic Standing" with his "The Office" co-star Kate Flannery and starred with Robin Williams, Mandy Moore and John Krasinski in "License to Wed". In June 2007, Baumgartner won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Broadband Program - Comedy for his work on "" webisodes. His co-stars Angela Kinsey and Oscar Nunez also shared the award. He also appeared in Ingrid Michaelson's music video for "Time Machine". Baumgartner is an accomplished golfer. In 2020, he hosted and executive produced "An Oral History of The Office", a podcast for Spotify that featured interviews with his "The Office" co-stars. In 2021, he hosted and executive produced a podcast for iHeart: "The Office Deep Dive with Brian Baumgartner." This podcast features the full-length, in depth interviews with the cast and crew of "The Office" originally heard in "An Oral History of The Office."


title: The Butler

text: The Butler (full title Lee Daniels' The Butler) is a 2013 American historical drama film directed and co-produced by Lee Daniels and with a screenplay by Danny Strong. It is inspired by Wil Haygood's "Washington Post" article "A Butler Well Served by This Election".


title: The Butler

text: Loosely based on the real life of Eugene Allen, who worked in the White House for decades, the film stars Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines, an African-American who is a witness of notable political and social events of the 20th century during his 34-year tenure serving as a White House butler. In addition to Whitaker, the film's all-star cast also features Oprah Winfrey, Mariah Carey, John Cusack, Nelsan Ellis, Jane Fonda, Cuba Gooding Jr., Terrence Howard, Minka Kelly, Elijah Kelley, Lenny Kravitz, James Marsden, David Oyelowo, Alex Pettyfer, Vanessa Redgrave, Alan Rickman, Liev Schreiber, Robin Williams, and Clarence Williams III. It was the last film produced by Laura Ziskin, who died on June 12, 2011, and it was also the final film appearance of Clarence Williams III, who retired from acting in 2018 and died on June 4, 2021.


title: The Butler

text: The film was theatrically released by the Weinstein Company on August 16, 2013, to mostly positive reviews from critics, with many praising the cast but criticizing the historical accuracy, particularly the portrayal of President Reagan. The film grossed over $176 million worldwide against a budget of $30 million.


title: The Butler

text: In 2009, an elderly Cecil Gaines recounts his life story while waiting at the White House to meet the newly inaugurated president.


title: The Butler

text: Gaines was born and raised on a cotton plantation in Macon, Georgia. In 1926 at the age of seven, the owner rapes his mother, Hattie, and his father, Earl confronts him and is killed. Cecil is taken in by the estate's caretaker, who trains Cecil to be an house servant.


title: The Butler

text: In 1937, at the age of 18, Cecil leaves the plantation. Desperately hungry, he breaks into a hotel pastry shop. The elderly master-servant, Maynard, takes pity on Cecil and gives him a job. Cecil learns advanced serving and interpersonal skills from Maynard, who later recommends Cecil for a position in a Washington, D.C., hotel. While working there, Cecil meets and marries Gloria, and the couple have two sons: Louis and Charlie.


title: The Butler

text: In 1957, Cecil is hired by the White House during Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration. White House maître d'hôtel Freddie Fallows introduces Cecil to head butler Carter Wilson and co-worker James Holloway. Cecil witnesses Eisenhower's reluctance to use troops to enforce school desegregation, then his resolve to uphold the law by racially integrating Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas.


title: The Butler

text: Louis, the elder son, becomes a university student at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, although Cecil feels that the South is too volatile. Louis joins a student program led by Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) activist James Lawson, which leads to a nonviolent sit-in at a segregated diner, where he is arrested. Gloria, who feels that Cecil puts his job ahead of her, descends into alcoholism.


title: The Butler

text: In 1961, after John F. Kennedy's inauguration, Louis and others are attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan while on a freedom ride to Birmingham, Alabama. Louis participates in the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade, where dogs and water cannons are used to stop the marchers, one of the movement's actions which inspires Kennedy to deliver a national address proposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. After Kennedy is assassinated, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, enacts the legislation. As a goodwill gesture, Jackie Kennedy gives Cecil one of the former president's neckties.


title: The Butler

text: Louis participates in the 1965 Selma Voting Rights Movement, which inspires Johnson to demand that Congress enact the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Johnson also gives Cecil a tie bar.


title: The Butler

text: In the late 1960s, after civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Louis tells his family that he has joined the Black Panthers. Cecil orders Louis and his girlfriend to leave his house. Louis is arrested again. Cecil becomes aware of President Richard Nixon's plans to suppress the Black Panthers.


title: The Butler

text: Charlie confides to Louis that he plans to join the war in Vietnam. After enlisting, Charlie is killed and buried at Arlington National Cemetery. When the Black Panthers resort to violence, Louis leaves the organization and returns to college, earning his master's degree in political science and eventually running for a seat in Congress, although Cecil continues to hold resentment against him.


title: The Butler

text: Cecil repeatedly confronts his supervisor at the White House over the unequal pay and career advancement provided to the black White House staff. With President Ronald Reagan's support, Cecil prevails, his reputation growing to the point that he and his wife are invited by the Reagans to be guests at a state dinner. Cecil becomes uncomfortable with the class divisions in the White House. After witnessing Reagan's refusal to support economic sanctions against Apartheid South Africa, Cecil resigns.


title: The Butler

text: Gloria encourages Cecil to mend his relationship with Louis. Realizing his son's actions are heroic, Cecil joins Louis at a protest against South African apartheid; they are arrested and jailed together.


title: The Butler

text: In 2008, Gloria dies shortly before Barack Obama is elected as the nation's first black president. Two months, two weeks and one day later, Cecil prepares to meet the newly inaugurated President, wearing the articles he received from Kennedy and Johnson. White House Chief Usher Stephen W. Rochon approaches Cecil and tells him the president is ready, preparing to show him the way to the Oval Office. Cecil tells him that he knows the way and walks down the hall to the office.


title: The Butler

text: Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson are depicted in archival footage.


title: The Butler

text: Melissa Leo and Orlando Eric Street were cast as First Lady Mamie Eisenhower and Barack Obama, respectively, but did not appear in the finished film.


title: The Butler

text: Danny Strong's screenplay is inspired by Wil Haygood's "Washington Post" article "A Butler Well Served by This Election". The project received initial backing in early 2011, when producers Laura Ziskin and Pam Williams approached Sheila Johnson for help in financing the film. After reading Danny Strong's screenplay, Johnson pitched in her own $2.7 million before bringing in several African-American investors. However, Ziskin died from cancer in June 2011. This left director Daniels and producing partner Hilary Shor to look for further producers on their own. They started with Cassian Elwes, with whom they were working on "The Paperboy". Elwes joined the list of producers, and started raising funding for the film. In spring 2012, AI Film, a British financing and production company, added a $6 million guarantee against foreign pre-sales. Finally the film raised its needed $30 million budget through 41 producers and executive producers, including Earl W. Stafford, Harry I. Martin Jr., Brett Johnson, Michael Finley, and Buddy Patrick. Thereafter, as film production started Weinstein Co. picked up U.S. distribution rights for the film. David Glasser, Weinstein Co. COO, called fund raising as an independent film, "a story that's a movie within itself".


title: The Butler

text: The Weinstein Company acquired the distribution rights for the film after Columbia Pictures put the film in turnaround.


title: The Butler

text: The film's title was up for a possible rename due to a Motion Picture Association claim from Warner Bros., which had inherited from the defunct Lubin Company a now-lost 1916 silent short film with the same name. The case was subsequently resolved with the MPAA granting The Weinstein Company permission to add Lee Daniels in front of the title, under the condition that his name was "75% the size of "The Butler". On July 23, 2013, the distributor unveiled a revised poster, displaying the title as "Lee Daniels' The Butler".


title: The Butler

text: Principal photography started in June 2012 in New Orleans. Interior White House scenes were shot at Second Line Stages. Production was originally scheduled to wrap in early August 2012 but was delayed by the impact of Hurricane Isaac.


title: The Butler

text: In its opening weekend, the film debuted in first place with $24.6 million. The film topped the North American box office in its first three consecutive weeks. The film has grossed $116.6 million in Canada and the United States, it earned $51.1 million elsewhere, for a total of $167.7 million.


title: The Butler

text: "The Butler" received generally positive reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 72% rating based on 201 reviews with an average score of 6.60/10. The site's consensus says, "Gut-wrenching and emotionally affecting, "Lee Daniels' The Butler" overcomes an uneven narrative thanks to strong performances from an all-star cast." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 65 based on 47 reviews, indicating "generally positive reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "A" on scale of A to F.


title: The Butler

text: Todd McCarthy praised the film saying, "Even with all contrivances and obvious point-making and familiar historical signposting, Daniels' "The Butler" is always engaging, often entertaining and certainly never dull." Richard Roeper lauded the film's casting in particular, remarking that "Forest Whitaker gives the performance of his career". "Rolling Stone" also spoke highly of Whitaker writing that his "reflective, powerfully understated performance...fills this flawed film with potency and purpose".


title: The Butler

text: "Variety" wrote that "Daniels develops a strong sense of the inner complexities and contradictions of the civil-rights landscape". "USA Today" gave the film three out of four stars and noted that "It's inspiring and filled with fine performances, but the insistently swelling musical score and melodramatic moments seem calculated and undercut a powerful story". Miles Davis of the "New York Tribune" gave the film a negative review, claiming the film to be "Oscar bait", a cliche film designed to attract Oscar nominations.


title: The Butler

text: Kenneth Turan of the "Los Angeles Times" was more negative: "An ambitious and overdue attempt to create a Hollywood-style epic around the experience of black Americans in general and the civil rights movement in particular, it undercuts itself by hitting its points squarely on the nose with a 9-pound hammer." Several critics compared the film's historical anecdotes and sentimentality to "Forrest Gump".


title: The Butler

text: President Barack Obama said, "I teared up thinking about not just the butlers who worked here in the White House, but an entire generation of people who were talented and skilled. But because of Jim Crow and because of discrimination, there was only so far they could go."


title: The Butler

text: Regarding historical accuracy, Eliana Dockterman wrote in "Time": "Allen was born on a Virginia plantation in 1919, not in Georgia... In the movie, Cecil Gaines grows up on a cotton field in Macon, where his family comes into conflict with the white farmers for whom they work. What befalls his parents on the cotton field was added for dramatic effect... Though tension between father and son over civil rights issues fuels most of the drama in the film, [Eugene Allen's son] Charles Allen was not the radical political activist that Gaines's son is in the movie."


title: The Butler

text: Particular criticism has been directed at the film's accuracy in portraying President Ronald Reagan. While Alan Rickman's performance generated positive reviews, the director and screenwriters of the film have been criticized for depicting Reagan as indifferent to civil rights and his reluctance to associate with the White House's black employees during his presidency. According to Michael Reagan, the former president's son, "The real story of the White House butler doesn't imply racism at all. It's simply Hollywood liberals wanting to believe something about my father that was never there."


title: The Butler

text: Paul Kengor, one of President Reagan's biographers, also attacked the film, saying, "I've talked to many White House staff, cooks, housekeepers, doctors, and Secret Service over the years. They are universal in their love of Ronald Reagan." In regard to the president's initial opposition to sanctions against apartheid in South Africa, Kengor said, "Ronald Reagan was appalled by apartheid, but also wanted to ensure that if the apartheid regime collapsed in South Africa that it wasn't replaced by a Marxist-totalitarian regime allied with Moscow and Cuba that would take the South African people down the same road as Ethiopia, Mozambique, and, yes, Cuba. In the immediate years before Reagan became president, 11 countries from the Third World, from Asia to Africa to Latin America, went Communist. It was devastating. If the film refuses to deal with this issue with the necessary balance, it shouldn't deal with it at all."


title: Sayyeshaa

text: Sayyeshaa Saigal (born 12 August 1997), known mononymously as Sayyeshaa, is an Indian actress and dancer who primarily appears in Tamil-language films. After working in a Telugu film "Akhil" (2015), she made her Hindi debut in Ajay Devgn's "Shivaay" (2016), and her Tamil debut in the film "Vanamagan" (2017). She made her Kannada debut in the film "Yuvarathnaa" (2021).


title: Sayyeshaa

text: Sayyeshaa is the daughter of actors Sumeet Saigal and Shaheen Banu. She is the grandniece of actors Saira Banu and Dilip Kumar.


title: Sayyeshaa

text: On 10 March 2019, she married Arya (her co-star in the films "Ghajinikanth", "Kaappaan" and "Teddy"), according to Muslim traditions in Hyderabad. Their daughter Ariana was born on 23 July 2021.


title: Sayyeshaa

text: Sayyeshaa made her debut in the cinema industry with the Telugu film "Akhil" (2015). She made her Bollywood debut opposite Ajay Devgn in his second directorial film "Shivaay". Her movie "Vanamagan" hit the theatres in June 2017, marking her Tamil debut.


title: Sayyeshaa

text: In 2018, she starred in "Kadaikutty Singam" with Karthi, "Junga" with Vijay Sethupathi and "Ghajinikanth" with Arya. In 2019, she starred in "Kaappaan" alongside Suriya, Mohanlal, and Arya. She made her Kannada debut in the film "Yuvarathnaa" alongside Puneeth Rajkumar.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: Status Quo are a British rock band that formed in 1962. The group originated in London as The Scorpions and was founded by Francis Rossi and Alan Lancaster while they were still schoolboys. After a number of lineup changes, which included the introduction of Rick Parfitt in 1967, the band became The Status Quo in 1967 and Status Quo in 1969. As of 2022, the group have been active for 60 consecutive years (despite announcing a breakup in 1984, they would play Live Aid the following year and resume normal activities in 1986).


title: Status Quo (band)

text: They have had over 60 chart hits in the UK - more than any other rock band - including "Pictures of Matchstick Men", "Down Down", "Rockin' All Over the World", "Whatever You Want", "In the Army Now", and "What You're Proposing". Twenty-two of these reached the Top 10 in the UK Singles Chart, and fifty-seven reached the Top 40. They have released over 100 singles and 33 albums, most of which were bestsellers. Since reaching number 5 on the UK albums chart in 1972 with "Piledriver", Status Quo have achieved a career total of 25 UK top ten albums, extending all the way up to their most recent release, "Backbone", in 2019. As of 2015, they were one of only 50 artists to have ever achieved more than 500 total weeks on the UK Albums Chart. With their various records for both single and album releases, Status Quo are one of the most successful bands of all time in the UK.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: In July 1985 the band opened Live Aid at Wembley Stadium with "Rockin' All Over the World". In 1991, Status Quo received a Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. Status Quo appeared on the BBC's "Top of the Pops" more than any other band. Their success and longevity as well, in part, as their connections to the British Royal Family, including philanthropic work with the Prince's Trust, have seen them frequently described as a "national institution" by the media.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: Status Quo was formed in 1962 under the name The Scorpions by Francis Rossi and Alan Lancaster at Sedgehill Comprehensive School, Catford, London, along with classmates Jess Jaworski (keyboards) and Alan Key (drums). Rossi and Lancaster played their first gig at the Samuel Jones Sports Club in Dulwich, London. In 1963, Key was replaced by John Coghlan and the band changed their name to The Spectres. After changing their name, Lancaster's father arranged for the group to perform weekly at a venue called the Samuel Jones Sports Club, where they were noticed by Pat Barlow, a gasfitter and budding pop music manager. Barlow became the group's manager and secured them spots at venues around London, such as El Partido in Lewisham and Café des Artistes in Chelsea. In 1965, when Rossi, Lancaster and Jaworski left school, Jaworski opted to leave the band and was replaced by Roy Lynes.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: They began writing their own material, and later that year met Rick Parfitt who was playing with a cabaret band called The Highlights. By the end of 1965, Rossi and Parfitt – who had become close friends after meeting at Butlins – made a commitment to continue working together. On 18 July 1966, the Spectres signed a five-year deal with Piccadilly Records, releasing two singles that year, "Hurdy Gurdy Man" (written by Alan Lancaster) and "I (Who Have Nothing)", and one the next year called "(We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet" (a song originally recorded by New York psychedelic band the Blues Magoos). All three singles failed to make an impact on the charts.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: By 1967, the group had discovered psychedelia and named themselves Traffic, but were soon forced to change it to Traffic Jam to avoid confusion with Steve Winwood's Traffic, following an argument over who had registered the name first. The band secured an appearance on BBC Radio's "Saturday Club", but in June their next single, "Almost But Not Quite There", underperformed. The following month saw Parfitt, at the request of manager Pat Barlow, joining the band as rhythm guitarist and vocalist. Shortly after Parfitt's recruitment, in August 1967, the band officially became The Status Quo.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: In January 1968, the group released the psychedelic-flavoured "Pictures of Matchstick Men". The song hit the UK Singles Chart, reaching number seven; "Matchstick Men" became the group's only Top 40 hit in the United States, peaking at number twelve on the "Billboard" Hot 100. Although Status Quo's albums have been released in the United States throughout their career, they never achieved the same level of success there as they have in Britain. Though the follow-up was the unsuccessful single "Black Veils of Melancholy", they had a hit again the same year with a pop song penned by Marty Wilde and Ronnie Scott, "Ice in the Sun", which climbed to number eight. After the breakthrough, the band management hired Bob Young as a roadie and tour manager. Over the years Young became one of the most important songwriting partners for Status Quo, in addition to playing harmonica with them on stage and on record.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: After their second album, 1969's "Spare Parts", failed commercially, the band abandoned psychedelia and Carnaby Street fashions in favour of a hard rock/boogie sound, and faded denims and T-shirts, an image which was to become their trademark throughout the 1970s. Lynes left the band in 1970 and was replaced in the studio by guests including keyboard player Jimmy Horowitz and Tom Parker. By 1976, Andy Bown – an ex-member of The Herd, Judas Jump and the Peter Frampton Band – was brought in to cover keyboards, although as he was contracted as a solo artist with EMI he was not credited as an official member of Status Quo until 1982.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: After two relatively poor-selling albums, "Ma Kelly's Greasy Spoon" and "Dog of Two Head" in 1970 and 1971, their major breakthrough came when they signed with the heavy rock and progressive label Vertigo. Their first album for Vertigo, "Piledriver", was released in 1972 and heralded an even heavier, self-produced sound. This album was essentially the stylistic template for each album they released up to and including "Blue for You" in 1976. Quo's more popular songs from this era include "Paper Plane" (No. 8 in the UK chart) (1972), "Caroline" (No. 5 in the UK chart) (1973), "Break The Rules", (No. 8 in the UK Chart) (1974), "Down Down" (No. 1 in the UK chart) (1975), "Roll Over Lay Down" (No. 10 in the UK chart) (1975), "Rain" (No. 7 in the UK chart) (1976), "Mystery Song" (No. 11 in the UK Chart) (1976), "Wild Side of Life" (No. 9 in the UK chart) (1976), "Rockin' All Over the World" (No. 3 in the UK chart) (1977) and "Whatever You Want" (No. 4 in the UK Chart) (1979). "Down Down" topped the UK Singles Chart in January 1975, becoming their only UK No. 1 single to date. In 1976, they signed a pioneering sponsorship deal with Levi's. Quo have now sold approximately 118 million records worldwide.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: From 1977 onwards, the band's sound became more polished as they began to employ outside producers. These included Pip Williams, Roger Glover, and John Eden. Glover was the first outside producer to work with Quo since Pye's John Schroeder in the early 1970s, and produced "Wild Side of Life" and its B-side "All Through The Night" in 1976.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: 1977's "Rockin' All Over the World"s title track, a minor hit for its writer John Fogerty (formerly of Creedence Clearwater Revival), became one of Status Quo's most enduring anthems. Sales remained high in the UK throughout the 1980s.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: Tensions within the band saw Coghlan leaving late in 1981. His replacement early the following year was Pete Kircher from the 1960s pop band Honeybus. Andy Bown joined the band in an official capacity at this time. Although contracted to record more albums, this line-up played its last full-length gig on 21 July 1984 at the Milton Keynes Bowl. "Everybody was coked-up and hating each other", Rossi recalled, "and I'd started drinking tequila on that tour. I don't remember that show at all – the encores or anything; just falling flat on my back at one point." "Deciding to retire from the road – all that was about was getting Francis a solo career," declared Lancaster. "Nobody on the outside knew it, but he didn't want to work with me or Rick anymore."


title: Status Quo (band)

text: Status Quo's final appearance with the Kircher line-up opened the Live Aid charity event at Wembley Stadium in July 1985. That year, Rossi recorded and released two solo singles with long-time writing partner Bernie Frost. Parfitt recorded a solo album, "Recorded Delivery", with bass player John "Rhino" Edwards and drummer Jeff Rich. The album remains unreleased, although some tracks were reworked and released sporadically as Quo B-sides until 1987.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: In mid-1985, Rossi, Parfitt and Bown, with Edwards and Rich, started work on a new Quo album. Lancaster – by this time more or less settled in Australia – took out a legal injunction to stop the band using the Status Quo name on records, citing increasing musical differences, notably during sessions for 1983's "Back to Back". The specific dispute concerned two tracks that became hits for the group around that time. Lancaster had co-written "Ol' Rag Blues", but was angered when the producers chose to release a version with Rossi singing the lead vocal instead of one sung by himself. The injunction also prevented the release of a single, "Naughty Girl", for which a catalogue number was issued by Vertigo.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: An out-of-court settlement was made in January 1986, enabling the new Status Quo line-up to continue recording "In The Army Now", for which "Naughty Girl" was reworked as "Dreamin'". Lancaster remained in Australia, and in 1986 joined an Australian supergroup, The Party Boys, featuring Angry Anderson of Rose Tattoo, John Brewster of the Angels and Kevin Borich, but achieved little success outside Australia. Lancaster left Status Quo formally in 1987.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: In 1986, Quo supported Queen on the latter's Magic Tour. The commercially successful "In the Army Now" album was released later that year. Its title track became one of the band's biggest UK singles, reaching number 2. The following album, "Ain't Complaining", in 1988, was less successful but produced the number 5 hit "Burning Bridges". Rerecorded (with new lyrics) in April 1994 with Manchester United F.C. as "Come On You Reds", the single would have given the band their second UK Number 1, but it was credited as 'by Manchester United'.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: The early-to-mid-1990s saw falling album sales for the band. To promote the release of the "Rock 'Til You Drop" album (1991), Quo performed four arena gigs in Sheffield, Glasgow, Birmingham and London in the space of 12 hours, earning them a place in the Guinness Book of Records. The 1994 Quo album "Thirsty Work" included a cover of the Jennifer Warnes song "I'm Restless" revealing an alternative and lighter sound to the band. "Don't Stop" (1996), and "Famous in the Last Century" (2000) consisted almost entirely of cover versions, (with the only exception being the title track to the latter). The former brought some chart success for Quo with covers of Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop" and The Beach Boys' "Fun, Fun, Fun". The band became involved in an acrimonious dispute with Radio 1 after the station refused to include the "Fun Fun Fun" single on the radio station's playlist.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: In 1993, Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt attracted a crowd of over 25,000 when they performed the annual Blackpool Illuminations lights switch-on.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: Parfitt underwent quadruple by-pass surgery in 1997, but was able to make a full recovery and returned with a performance at the Norwich City Football Club ground Carrow Road three months later. Status Quo also returned to Australia in 1997, completing their first tour there since 1978. A greatest hits compilation, "Whatever You Want – The Very Best of Status Quo" was also released, achieving silver sales in the UK that year. In 1999, Quo toured Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Dubbed the 'Last Night of the Proms', the band were backed by a full orchestra during the concerts.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: Rich left in 2000 and was replaced by Matt Letley. Andrew Bown also took a year off at the same time following the death of his wife, and was temporarily replaced on stage by Paul Hirsh, formerly of Voyager.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: In November 2000, the band played a gig at Grandchester in the outback in Australia, performing on a carriage of Australia's Orient Express, the Great South Pacific Express.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: In 2005 Rossi and Parfitt made cameo appearances in the long-running ITV soap opera "Coronation Street" in a storyline which involved them being sued by the notorious layabout Les Battersby, and performing live at his wedding as compensation.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: In December 2005, it was announced that Parfitt had been taken ill and was undergoing tests for throat cancer. All subsequent dates of the UK tour were cancelled as a result. However, the growths in Parfitt's throat were later found to be benign and were successfully removed. In May 2006, a fully recovered Parfitt and the band returned to the NEC Birmingham to play the show that they had postponed in December. This was their 40th show at the venue, and was recorded for a DVD, entitled "Just Doin' It".


title: Status Quo (band)

text: On 1 July 2007, they performed in front of 63,000 people at the newly built Wembley Stadium as part of the "Concert for Diana". They also appeared on the TV programme Tiswas Reunited, in which the band got the usual greeting of custard pies and buckets of water whilst playing the song, "Gerdundula".


title: Status Quo (band)

text: On 15 September 2007, Rossi and Parfitt appeared on ITV programme Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and won £50,000 for their 2 charities Ebbisham Association and Nordoff Robbins.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: Their twenty-eighth studio album, "In Search of the Fourth Chord", was released on the band's own Fourth Chord label in September 2007 in the UK, and on Edel Records in the rest of Europe. The title is a self-satirical response to the frequent criticism that they are a three-chord band. Produced by veteran producer Pip Williams, who had worked with Quo in the studio since 1977, the album was only moderately successful.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: In 2008, they teamed up with German techno group Scooter to record a jumpstyle version of their 1979 single "Whatever You Want" entitled "Jump That Rock (Whatever You Want)". In December 2008, they released their 75th single and first Christmas single, entitled "It's Christmas Time", which peaked at No. 40 in the UK Singles Chart.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: Rossi and Parfitt were each awarded the OBE in the 2010 New Year Honours for services to music. Their long-standing work for charities includes The Prince's Trust, British Heart Foundation and Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: "Classic Rock" magazine had reported on 17 March 2010 that the band had patched up their relationship with Alan Lancaster, and were discussing the possibility of a future collaboration. The article stated "While the band are back on friendly terms with Alan, it's unlikely we'll see any future reunion, with Quo continuing as normal and Lancaster busy with charity events and overseeing the activities of his son's band The Presence".


title: Status Quo (band)

text: On 20 September 2010, Status Quo was honoured with a PRS for Music plaque commemorating their first gig at the Welcome Inn in Well Hall Road, Eltham, where the band first performed in 1967.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: On 26 September 2010, a new version of "In the Army Now" was released through Universal / UMC. All profits from this updated and lyrically reworked version will be donated equally to the British Forces Foundation and Help for Heroes charities.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: A box set of sessions, live concerts and TV appearances at the BBC was released on 25 October 2010, titled "Live at the BBC". The full 7CD version (+DVD) covers almost all appearances, while the 2CD and 4CD version present some highlights.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: Their twenty-ninth studio album, "Quid Pro Quo", was released in a deluxe format exclusively at Tesco on 30 May 2011. The regular edition was released elsewhere on 7 June. The album peaked at number 10 in the UK chart.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: December 2011 saw Status Quo undertake their first all-arenas UK winter tour. Quo also performed for the first time at The O2 in London. The tour was dubbed "Quofest" and featured Roy Wood and Kim Wilde as support for all shows. They joined the band during the encore.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: In August 2011, Status Quo began filming their first cinematic documentary with film director Alan G. Parker and Producer Alexa Morris. Entitled "Hello Quo!", the production opened in cinemas on 22 October 2012. A Blu-ray/DVD release followed, through Anchor Bay Productions, on 29 October. The movie included contributions from Brian May, Jeff Lynne, Cliff Richard, Joe Elliott, Paul Weller, Joe Brown, Jim Lea, Andy Scott and Steve Diggle.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: In April 2012, Status Quo announced they were shooting their first feature film, over several weeks in Fiji. A 90-minute action comedy, entitled "Bula Quo!", taking its name from the islanders' traditional Fijian greeting, and also referencing the title of the band's best-selling album, "Hello!" featuring the band as themselves, and also starring Jon Lovitz, Craig Fairbrass and Laura Aikman. The film was directed by Stuart St. Paul, produced by Tim Major and was released in cinemas on 5 July 2013. The film was accompanied by a soundtrack album of the same name, the band's 30th studio album, released on 10 June. It featured nine new songs and ten re-records and live tracks. "Bula Quo!" debuted in the UK chart at number 10.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: On 9 July 2012, the band released the single "The Winner" for the 2012 Summer Olympics. In July 2012 Coles, an Australian national supermarket chain, signed Status Quo to record a version of "Down Down" using Coles' tag line 'Down, down, prices are down'. In September 2012, the band performed at Hyde Park for BBC Radio 2 "Live in Hyde Park". In November 2012, Coles continued their association with Status Quo, producing a series of television adverts with the band appearing and performing "It's Christmas Time". In 2013, new adverts were released by Coles with Quo using "Whatever You Want" as the new jingle.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: In December that year, Quo toured under the Quofest banner for a second year, this time supported by Bonnie Tyler and Eddie and the Hot Rods. On 17 December 2012, Matt Letley announced his decision to leave the band after 12 years, and subsequently departed following completion of their 2012 winter tour. However, Letley toured with Quo their Australia and Mexico tour in March and April 2013, due to limited time to find a new drummer after the Frantic Four Tour.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: The 1970–76 line-up (Francis Rossi, Rick Parfitt, Alan Lancaster and John Coghlan) reunited in March 2013 for a series of dates in Manchester, Wolverhampton, Glasgow and London. The last date of the tour, at Wembley Arena on 17 March, was filmed for a DVD, released in September 2013.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: In May 2013 Leon Cave became Quo's new drummer. In the latter months of 2013, Status Quo embarked on their Bula Quo tour, supported by Uriah Heep on German dates, and by 10cc in the UK. This was followed by nine concert dates in the UK during 2014. On 25 November 2013, it was announced that Status Quo would headline the second stage at the Download Festival in June 2014.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: In January 2014, Wychwood Brewery announced they would be releasing a Status Quo brand of beer, named after their 1972 album "Piledriver", exclusively in JD Wetherspoon pubs across the UK in February, before going on general sale in April. March 2014 saw the second 'Frantic Four' reunion tour featuring Rossi and Parfitt with original members Alan Lancaster and John Coghlan with their last gig being at The O2 in Dublin. Rossi indicated that this would be the last reunion tour of the 'Frantic Four' line-up. On 8 March 2014, Rossi and Parfitt appeared on ITV show "Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway" performing "Rockin' All Over the World" with McBusted.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: In August 2014, it was reported that founding keyboardist Jess Jaworski had died. In October 2014, Parfitt and Rossi appeared on BBC's "The One Show", performing an acoustic version of "Pictures of Matchstick Men". In May 2015, the twosome appeared on BBC's "Later... with Jools Holland", to talk about their "Aquostic - Stripped Bare" album. On 9 May 2015, they performed "In the Army Now" at the .


title: Status Quo (band)

text: On 22 October 2014 the band launched the "Aquostic" album with a 90-minute performance at London's Roundhouse, with the concert recorded and broadcast live by BBC Radio 2 as part of their "In Concert" series. Footage from the concert was later used, interspersed with interviews with Rossi and Parfitt, in BBC Four's "Status Quo: Live and Acoustic", in January 2017.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: On 5 June 2015 Status Quo were the headline act at Palmerston Park in Dumfries, at the stadium of Queen of the South and were supported by Reef and Big Country, in the first ever live concert at the venue.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: On 1 February 2016, it was announced that Status Quo, in addition to the spring and summer dates already scheduled, would tour Europe starting in October. The final dates would take place in the UK towards the end of the year, after which the group would retire from playing 'electric' tours. The 'Last of The Electrics' tour was subsequently extended into 2017, with additional concerts outside the UK.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: In September 2016 the band performed, in Aquostic line-up, at BBC Radio 2's "Live in Hyde Park" from Hyde Park, London for the second time.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: On 28 October 2016, Parfitt permanently retired from live performances after suffering a heart attack earlier the same year. On 24 December, he died in hospital in Marbella, Spain as a result of severe infection, after suffering an injury to his shoulder. Parfitt's funeral was held at Woking Crematorium on 19 January 2017. Irish guitarist Richie Malone, who had substituted for Parfitt during some 2016 live shows, took his place in the group on rhythm guitar, playing on both recorded material and at live shows. The band had to postpone a concert in June 2017 after frontman Rossi became ill.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: On 14 June 2019, the band announced that they were working on "Backbone", their 33rd studio album – the first Status Quo studio album not to feature Parfitt. On 25 August 2019, the band appeared on ITV show "The Sara Cox Show" where Rossi spoke about the new album "Backbone" and also his autobiography "I Talk Too Much", after which they performed an upcoming track called "Liberty Lane" as well as "Rockin All Over The World". The album was released on 6 September 2019 and it reached number 6 in the UK Albums Chart. On 15 September 2019, the band performed at BBC Radio 2's "Live in Hyde Park" from Hyde Park, London for the third time. They were third from top of the bill, playing in the early evening and followed by Westlife and then The Pet Shop Boys. On Christmas Day 2019, the band appeared on Channel 4's "The Great British Bake Off", performing "Rockin All Over The World". On 11 August 2020, Status Quo cancelled their forty-date Backbone UK and European tour because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Various commitments for the following year meant the band were unable to reschedule the shows in 2021. On 20 August 2020, Rossi appeared on ITV daytime show "This Morning" and spoke about what he was doing during lockdown and the pandemic, and announced a new tour called "Out Out Quoing" to be scheduled for 2022.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: On 26 September 2021, co-founder Alan Lancaster died at the age of 72, following a long battle with multiple sclerosis.


title: Status Quo (band)

text: Status Quo have performed a career total of at least 3700 documented gigs as of September 2022. After the addition of early undocumented gigs and various lost performances, the concert total is likely to be higher and is estimated by the band to be over 6000, with an audience in excess of 25 million people. The band have performed over a hundred gigs in a single year several times, with the recorded peak of 144 (1971) resulting in a live show every 2.5 days. The band calculated that after 48 years of touring activity, they had "travelled some four million miles and spent 23 years away from home". With the sole exceptions of 1980 and 1985, Status Quo embarked on multinational tours every year between 1968 and 2019 (predominantly in Europe, though they have visited every populated continent). The band took a complete break from touring in 2020 and 2021, including cancelling the largely sold-out "Backbone" album tour, in part due to restrictions imposed by the global response to COVID-19. They are touring again as of 2022, with extra dates added to their 2022 Out Out Quoing tour.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: The Batman is an American animated television series based on the DC Comics superhero Batman. Developed by Michael Goguen, Marcus McNaughton, Duane Capizzi, and produced by Warner Bros. Animation, the series first aired on Kids' WB on September 11, 2004, then Cartoon Network on April 2, 2005. The show would become exclusive to the former network for its third, fourth, and fifth seasons in early 2006. "The Batman" won six Daytime Emmy Awards over the course of its run. Many elements from previous Batman storylines were borrowed and adapted, such as those from the comic books, film series and the animated shows like "" from the DC Animated Universe, but it remained strictly within its own distinct continuity. "Jackie Chan Adventures" artist Jeff Matsuda served as art director and provided the character designs. The production team altered the appearances of many of the comic books' supervillains for the show, such as the Joker, the Penguin, and the Riddler.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: All five seasons are available on DVD. In 2005, a direct-to-DVD movie titled "The Batman vs. Dracula" was released. "The Batman" also received a spin-off comic book series, "The Batman Strikes!", published by DC Comics; it was set in the same continuity as the show and featured the same art style.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: The Batman, the costumed protector of Gotham City, is secretly billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne (voiced by Rino Romano). The series focuses on Batman's earlier years of his crime-fighting career, as he began fighting crime three years prior to the start of the series, and the Gotham City police do not publicly acknowledge the vigilante's existence. Operating out of a secret lair underneath Bruce Wayne's mansion—known as the Batcave—Batman and his butler, Alfred Pennyworth (voiced by Alastair Duncan), stop crime with the assistance of high-tech gadgets and a supercomputer.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: At the start of the first season, crime in Gotham is in decline, but Gotham Chief of Police Angel Rojas (voiced in the pilot by Edward James Olmos and later by Jesse Corti), orders his officers to hunt down Batman. This marks the first acknowledgment of Batman's existence in the series. Despite the chief's orders, one of his detectives, Ethan Bennett (voiced by Steven Harris), believes the city needs Batman. At the start of the series, Bennett is assisted by a new partner from Metropolis, Ellen Yin (voiced by Ming-Na), who slowly becomes torn between her commitment to law and order and her personal feelings toward Batman.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: Throughout season 1, both Bennett and Yin are tasked with capturing Batman. During this first season, Bruce Wayne finds himself torn between his responsibilities as Batman and his regular life, though the latter is supported by Gotham's mayor, Marion Grange (voiced by Adam West who played Batman in the 1960s "Batman" TV series). By the end of the season, Bennett is tortured and mutated by the Joker, transforming Bennett into Clayface. As Clayface, he is forced into hiding, while his partner Yin finally realizes she was right about Batman and forms an alliance with him.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: Among the villains introduced this season are the Joker (voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson), the Penguin (voiced by Tom Kenny), Catwoman (voiced by Gina Gershon), Mr. Freeze (voiced by Clancy Brown), Firefly (voiced by Jason Marsden), the Ventriloquist and Scarface (voiced by Dan Castellaneta), Man-Bat (voiced by Peter MacNicol), Cluemaster (voiced by Glenn Shadix), and Bane (voiced by Joaquim de Almeida in the first appearance, Ron Perlman in the second, and Clancy Brown in the third).


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: Throughout the second season, Batman continues to act outside of the law even though he has Detective Yin as an ally. Batman begins making a name for himself as a force for good when he saves a group of policemen from certain doom. In this season, his heroic act prompts the officers to support him rather than pursue him as a criminal. In the season finale, Police Chief Rojas finally uncovers Yin's involvement with Batman, forcing her to go on the run. Around this time, Commissioner James Gordon (voiced by Mitch Pileggi), the main law enforcement figure in most of the Batman mythos, rejects Rojas' belief that Batman is a criminal. Commissioner Gordon instead believes Batman to be an ally of the Gotham police force and is particularly impressed when Batman and Yin capture the Joker, Penguin, and Riddler. He is revealed to be Batman's secret ally off-screen and develops a signaling searchlight, the Bat-Signal, allowing Batman to know that the police are firmly on his side.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: This season introduces more villains, including Rag Doll (voiced by Jeff Bennett), the Riddler (voiced by Robert Englund), Killer Croc (voiced by Ron Perlman), Spellbinder (voiced by Michael Massee), and Solomon Grundy (voiced by Kevin Grevioux). Another new villain, Hugo Strange (initially voiced by Frank Gorshin, the original Riddler from the 1960s "Batman" TV series, who is later replaced by Richard Green after Gorshin's death), is portrayed as a secondary character in the season. The characters Yin and Police Chief Rojas make their final appearances at the end of the season.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: In the third season, the show introduces a younger incarnation of Barbara Gordon (voiced by Danielle Judovits), who is the police commissioner's daughter. Over the course of a two-part story, she secretly becomes Batgirl. The show's opening title sequence changes this season, and the opening theme music (performed by U2 guitarist The Edge) is substituted with a lighter, '60s theme performed by Andy Sturmer. Throughout season 3, Barbara tries to become Batman's sidekick and be as good of an ally as her father. However, Batman frequently refuses to accept her help, although she proves herself to him by the end of the season.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: This Batman-Batgirl storyline differs from the comic books. In previous incarnations of the story, Batman's first partner is Dick Grayson, who becomes Robin and joins Batman as his apprentice, later leaving to become Nightwing. The decision for Batgirl to be Batman's first sidekick in "The Batman" was due to Robin not permitted to be used in the show due to him being used in the "Teen Titans" animated series, which aired on Cartoon Network and due to the Bat-embargo (a restriction in place regarding usage Batman's allies and enemies in multiple animated shows based on the comics). This season also sees the destruction of Batman's original Batmobile, which is replaced by an updated version for the remainder of the series.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: Several more new villains from the Batman mythos are introduced this season, including Poison Ivy (voiced by Piera Coppola), a different version of Gearhead (voiced by Will Friedle), Maxie Zeus (voiced by Phil LaMarr), the Toymaker (voiced by Patton Oswalt), Prank (voiced by Michael Reisz), Temblor (voiced by Jim Cummings), and D.A.V.E. (voiced Jeff Bennett). Hugo Strange becomes a villain this season, having orchestrated the events of "A Fistful of Felt" and "Gotham's Ultimate Criminal Mastermind." The season finale concludes with his incarceration at Arkham Asylum.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: With the conclusion of "Teen Titans" in 2006, the fourth season introduces Dick Grayson (voiced by Evan Sabara). The opening episode of the season focuses on Dick Grayson's origins as Robin. Through the loss of Grayson's parents in a murder made to look like a circus accident, he is adopted by Bruce Wayne, who assists Grayson in bringing down the mafia boss responsible for his parents' deaths. The second episode in the season leads to Batgirl officially becoming part of the team, with each member divulging his or her secret identity to the others. This reveal eventually leads to Batgirl and Robin forming a sibling-like rivalry. One of the highlights of season 4 is the episode "Artifacts", which described a possible future in the year 3027. Featuring flashback scenes to 2027, the audience gets a glimpse of an older Batman, Dick Grayson operating as Nightwing (voiced by Jerry O'Connell), and Barbara Gordon, now reliant on a wheelchair and having become the Oracle (voiced by Kellie Martin). The episode also features elements from Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns", including the designs of both the Batman costume and the Batmobile. In the season finale, an alien invasion by entities called "The Joining" causes Batman to work alongside another superhero from the DC Universe and an original member of the Justice League, Martian Manhunter (voiced by Dorian Harewood), to thwart the aliens' plans. This is when Batman becomes part of the Justice League of America.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: More villains with new interpretations are once again introduced, including Tony Zucco (voiced by Mark Hamill, who voiced the Joker in the DC animated universe), Killer Moth (voiced by Jeff Bennett), Black Mask (voiced by James Remar), Rumor (voiced by Ron Perlman), the Everywhere Man (voiced by Brandon Routh), Harley Quinn (voiced by Hynden Walch), and Francis Grey (voiced by Dave Foley). The season also brought an end to Ethan Bennett's version of Clayface, including a storyline that redeemed Bennett by curing him of his condition. This gave writers the opportunity to introduce Basil Karlo's version of the villain (voiced by Wallace Langham in the first appearance, and Lex Lang in the second appearance). Season 4 also featured a redesign of Bruce Wayne, with a more square facial and chin structure, making him reminiscent of the DC animated universe Batman design.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: This was the final season worked on by Jeff Matsuda and Michael Jelenic, both of whom departed from the show after the season finale.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: The final season on "The Batman", season 5, focused primarily on Batman and Robin, with the pair teaming up with some of the DC Universe's characters to battle different villains. These team-ups included Superman (voiced by George Newbern, reprising his role from "Justice League" and "Justice League Unlimited"), Martian Manhunter , Green Arrow (voiced by Chris Hardwick), the Flash (voiced by Charlie Schlatter, who previously voiced Flash in ""), Green Lantern (voiced by Dermot Mulroney), and Hawkman (voiced by Robert Patrick). Producer Alan Burnett described the season as the show's ""The Brave and the Bold" season". Both Batgirl and Commissioner Gordon were relegated to either guest or cameo appearances during the season, where Barbara Gordon, having graduated from high school, now attends college. The series finale (shown as a 40-minute movie) features all the members of the Justice League who made an appearance in the series, along with Batgirl, as they fight against a renewed effort of the Joining to invade Earth.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: Most of the villains featured in the season are reinterpretations of those that fought against the DC heroes who teamed-up with Batman. These villains include Lex Luthor (voiced by Clancy Brown, reprising his role from the DC Animated Universe), Mercy Graves (voiced by Gwendoline Yeo), Metallo (voiced by Lex Lang), Count Vertigo (voiced by Greg Ellis), the Toyman (voiced by Richard Green), the Shadow Thief (voiced by Diedrich Bader), Sinestro (voiced by Miguel Ferrer), and the Mirror Master (voiced by John Larroquette). Only the Terrible Trio (voiced by David Faustino, Grey DeLisle, and Googy Gress), the Wrath (voiced by Christopher Gorham), and Phosphorus are reinterpretations of Batman villains. Phosphorus differs in the show from the comic version, in that Firefly mutates into him, giving him the same radioactive skills and incorporating Phosphorus's insanity, while the Terrible Trio mutated themselves and their victims into human-animal hybrids using a mutagen created by Doctor Kirk Langstrom.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: All of the DVD releases of The Batman are released by Warner Home Video (via DC Entertainment and Warner Bros. Family Entertainment) and presented in its original broadcast version and in story continuity order. The DVD releases of "The Batman" are also presented in a 4:3 fullscreen aspect ratio. However, the entire series is available in its original 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio on Amazon Video, Blu-ray, Google Play, HBO Max, and the Xbox Video Store. The first two seasons and "The Batman vs. Dracula" movie are available on iTunes in 16:9. On March 1, 2022, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment released the whole series on Blu-ray for the first time. The "Batman vs. Dracula" film is not included in the complete series Blu-ray release.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: "The Batman" Plug and Play TV Video Game (a.k.a. Plug 'n Play) was released in 2004 by Jakks Pacific. It features "The Batman" tracking down notable villains from the show, including The Joker, Firefly, Mr. Freeze, Bane, and Penguin. The game comes with a custom "The Batman" controller which connects to a TV via RCA connectors.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: "The Batman": The CobbleBot Caper is a Macromedia Flash Toonami game released on cartoonnetwork.com in 2005. The video game featured a series of levels involving a kidnapped scientist, with gameplay resembling that of the Jakks Pacific's "The Batman" Plug and Play Video Game released in 2004, with a level in CobbleBot Manor being almost an exact replica of a similar level in the TV Game. "The CobbleBot Caper" features The Batman tracking down and fighting two notable villains from the show, Penguin and the Kabuki Girls. The game is no longer available on cartoonnetwork.com.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: The Batman Strikes! is a DC comic book series featuring Batman and is a spin-off comic book series of "The Batman". Part of DC's line for young readers, the series lasted 50 issues in total, with the last issue shipping in October 2008.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: "The Batman" received Annie Award nominations for Best Animated Television Production in 2005 and 2006, and for Best Music in a Television Production in 2006.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: "The Batman" was nominated for 12 Daytime Emmy Awards during its five-year run, with a total of six wins.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: In 2005, it was nominated for Outstanding Special Class Animated Program, an Outstanding Performer in an Animated Program (Kevin Michael Richardson as the Joker), Outstanding Achievement in Music Direction and Composition, and Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing – Live Action and Animation (for which it won).


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: In 2006, it was nominated and won Outstanding Special Class Animated Program and Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing – Live Action and Animation.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: In 2007, it was nominated for Outstanding Special Class Animated Program and won Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing – Live Action and Animation.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: In 2008, it was nominated for Outstanding Special Class Animated Program and Outstanding Performer in an Animated Program (Kevin Michael Richardson as the Joker), and won Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing – Live Action and Animation, and Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing – Live Action and Animation.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: "The Batman" was also nominated for Motion Picture Sound Editors "Golden Reel Awards" for Sound Effects Editing in 2005, 2008, and 2009, winning in 2008.


title: The Batman (TV series)

text: "The Batman" received a mostly favorable response from fans and critics (7.3/10 IMDb), with praise aimed at the modernized take on the classic Batman comic book mythos, the unique and interesting twists to the characters, and the performances of the voice cast, such as Rino Romano's portrayal of Bruce Wayne/Batman. However, the show never won over diehard fans the way the earlier animated series did, with criticism leveled on the odd character designs, deviations from the Batman mythos and animation style. Nevertheless, "The Batman" was a critical and commercial success and popular enough to last for five seasons.


title: MongoDB

text: MongoDB is a source-available cross-platform document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database program, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. and licensed under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) which is deemed non-free by several distributions.


title: MongoDB

text: 10gen software company began developing MongoDB in 2007 as a component of a planned platform as a service product. In 2009, the company shifted to an open-source development model, with the company offering commercial support and other services. In 2013, 10gen changed its name to MongoDB Inc.


title: MongoDB

text: On October 20, 2017, MongoDB became a publicly traded company, listed on NASDAQ as MDB with an IPO price of $24 per share.


title: MongoDB

text: MongoDB is a global company with US headquarters in New York City, USA and International headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.


title: MongoDB

text: On October 30, 2019, MongoDB teamed up with Alibaba Cloud, who will offer its customers a MongoDB-as-a-service solution. Customers can use the managed offering from BABA's global data centers.


title: MongoDB

text: MongoDB supports field, range query, and regular-expression searches. Queries can return specific fields of documents and also include user-defined JavaScript functions. Queries can also be configured to return a random sample of results of a given size.


title: MongoDB

text: MongoDB provides high availability with replica sets. A replica set consists of two or more copies of the data. Each replica-set member may act in the role of primary or secondary replica at any time. All writes and reads are done on the primary replica by default. Secondary replicas maintain a copy of the data of the primary using built-in replication. When a primary replica fails, the replica set automatically conducts an election process to determine which secondary should become the primary. Secondaries can optionally serve read operations, but that data is only eventually consistent by default.


title: MongoDB

text: If the replicated MongoDB deployment only has a single secondary member, a separate daemon called an "arbiter" must be added to the set. It has a single responsibility, which is to resolve the election of the new primary. As a consequence, an idealized distributed MongoDB deployment requires at least three separate servers, even in the case of just one primary and one secondary.


title: MongoDB

text: MongoDB scales horizontally using sharding. The user chooses a shard key, which determines how the data in a collection will be distributed. The data is split into ranges (based on the shard key) and distributed across multiple shards. (A shard is a master with one or more replicas.) Alternatively, the shard key can be hashed to map to a shard – enabling an even data distribution.


title: MongoDB

text: MongoDB can run over multiple servers, balancing the load or duplicating data to keep the system up and running in case of hardware failure.


title: MongoDB

text: MongoDB can be used as a file system, called GridFS, with load balancing and data replication features over multiple machines for storing files.


title: MongoDB

text: This function, called grid file system, is included with MongoDB drivers. MongoDB exposes functions for file manipulation and content to developers. GridFS can be accessed using mongofiles utility or plugins for Nginx and lighttpd. GridFS divides a file into parts, or chunks, and stores each of those chunks as a separate document.


title: MongoDB

text: MongoDB provides three ways to perform aggregation: the aggregation pipeline, the map-reduce function, and single-purpose aggregation methods.


title: MongoDB

text: Map-reduce can be used for batch processing of data and aggregation operations. But according to MongoDB's documentation, the Aggregation Pipeline provides better performance for most aggregation operations.


title: MongoDB

text: The aggregation framework enables users to obtain the kind of results for which the SQL GROUP BY clause is used. Aggregation operators can be strung together to form a pipeline – analogous to Unix pipes. The aggregation framework includes the $lookup operator which can join documents from multiple collections, as well as statistical operators such as standard deviation.


title: MongoDB

text: JavaScript can be used in queries, aggregation functions (such as MapReduce), and sent directly to the database to be executed.


title: MongoDB

text: MongoDB supports fixed-size collections called capped collections. This type of collection maintains insertion order and, once the specified size has been reached, behaves like a circular queue.


title: MongoDB

text: MongoDB claims to support multi-document ACID transactions since the 4.0 release in June 2018. This claim was found to not be true as MongoDB violates snapshot isolation.


title: MongoDB

text: MongoDB Enterprise Server is the commercial edition of MongoDB, available as part of the MongoDB Enterprise Advanced subscription.


title: MongoDB

text: MongoDB is also available as an on-demand fully managed service. MongoDB Atlas runs on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.


title: MongoDB

text: On March 10, 2022, MongoDB warned its users in Russia and Belarus that their data stored on the MongoDB Atlas platform will be destroyed.


title: MongoDB

text: MongoDB has official drivers for major programming languages and development environments. There are also a large number of unofficial or community-supported drivers for other programming languages and frameworks.


title: MongoDB

text: The primary interface to the database has been the mongo shell. Since MongoDB 3.2, MongoDB Compass is introduced as the native GUI. There are products and third-party projects that offer user interfaces for administration and data viewing.


title: MongoDB

text: As of October 2018, MongoDB is released under the Server Side Public License (SSPL), a non-free license developed by the project. It replaces the GNU Affero General Public License, and is nearly identical to the GNU General Public License version 3, but requires that those making the software publicly available as part of a "service" must make the service's entire source code (insofar that a user would be able to recreate the service themselves) available under this license. By contrast, the AGPL only requires the source code of the licensed software to be provided to users when the software is conveyed over a network. The SSPL was submitted for certification to the Open Source Initiative but later withdrawn. In January 2021, the Open Source Initiative stated that SSPL is not an open source license. The language drivers are available under an Apache License. In addition, MongoDB Inc. offers proprietary licenses for MongoDB. The last versions licensed as AGPL version 3 are 4.0.3 (stable) and 4.1.4.


title: MongoDB

text: MongoDB has been removed from the Debian, Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions due to the licensing change. Fedora determined that the SSPL version 1 is not a free software license because it is "intentionally crafted to be aggressively discriminatory" towards commercial users.


title: MongoDB

text: Due to the default security configuration of MongoDB, allowing anyone to have full access to the database, data from tens of thousands of MongoDB installations has been stolen. Furthermore, many MongoDB servers have been held for ransom.


title: MongoDB

text: In September 2017; updated January 2018, in an official response Davi Ottenheimer, lead Product Security at MongoDB, proclaimed that measures have been taken by MongoDB to defend against these risks.


title: MongoDB

text: From the MongoDB 2.6 release onwards, the binaries from the official MongoDB RPM and DEB packages bind to localhost by default. From MongoDB 3.6, this default behavior was extended to all MongoDB packages across all platforms. As a result, all networked connections to the database will be denied unless explicitly configured by an administrator.


title: MongoDB

text: In some failure scenarios where an application can access two distinct MongoDB processes, but these processes cannot access each other, it is possible for MongoDB to return stale reads. In this scenario it is also possible for MongoDB to roll back writes that have been acknowledged. This issue was addressed since version 3.4.0 released in November 2016 (and back-ported to v3.2.12).


title: MongoDB

text: Before version 2.2, locks were implemented on a per-server process basis. With version 2.2, locks were implemented at the database level. Since version 3.0, pluggable storage engines were introduced, and each storage engine may implement locks differently. With MongoDB 3.0 locks are implemented at the collection level for the MMAPv1 storage engine, while the WiredTiger storage engine uses an optimistic concurrency protocol that effectively provides document-level locking. Even with versions prior to 3.0, one approach to increase concurrency is to use sharding. In some situations, reads and writes will yield their locks. If MongoDB predicts a page is unlikely to be in memory, operations will yield their lock while the pages load. The use of lock yielding expanded greatly in 2.2.


title: MongoDB

text: Up until version 3.3.11, MongoDB could not do collation-based sorting and was limited to byte-wise comparison via memcmp which would not provide correct ordering for many non-English languages when used with a Unicode encoding. The issue was fixed on August 23, 2016.


title: MongoDB

text: Prior to MongoDB 4.0, queries against an index were not atomic. Documents which were being updated while the query was running could be missed. The introduction of the snapshot read concern in MongoDB 4.0 eliminated this phenomenon.


title: MongoDB

text: Although MongoDB claims in an undated article entitled "MongoDB and Jepsen" that their database passed Distributed Systems Safety Research company Jepsen's tests, which it called “the industry’s toughest data safety, correctness, and consistency Tests”, Jepsen published an article in May 2020 stating that MongoDB 3.6.4 had in fact failed their tests, and that the newer MongoDB 4.2.6 has more problems including “retrocausal transactions” where a transaction reverses order so that a read can see the result of a future write. Jepsen noted in their report that MongoDB omitted any mention of these findings on MongoDB's "MongoDB and Jepsen" page.


title: MongoDB

text: MongoDB Inc. hosts an annual developer conference which has been referred to as either MongoDB World or MongoDB.live.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Kotlin () is a cross-platform, statically typed, general-purpose programming language with type inference. Kotlin is designed to interoperate fully with Java, and the JVM version of Kotlin's standard library depends on the Java Class Library,


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: but type inference allows its syntax to be more concise. Kotlin mainly targets the JVM, but also compiles to JavaScript (e.g., for frontend web applications using React) or native code via LLVM (e.g., for native iOS apps sharing business logic with Android apps). Language development costs are borne by JetBrains, while the Kotlin Foundation protects the Kotlin trademark.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: On 7 May 2019, Google announced that the Kotlin programming language is now its preferred language for Android app developers. Since the release of Android Studio 3.0 in October 2017, Kotlin has been included as an alternative to the standard Java compiler. The Android Kotlin compiler produces Java 8 bytecode by default (which runs in any later JVM), but lets the programmer choose to target Java 9 up to 18, for optimization, or allows for more features; has bidirectional record class interoperability support for JVM, introduced in Java 16, considered stable as of Kotlin 1.5.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Kotlin has support for the web; by compiling to JavaScript (i.e., Kotlin/JS with the classic back-end, is declared stable since version 1.3), while the newer Kotlin/JS (IR-based) is in beta as of version 1.5.30. Kotlin/Native (for e.g. Apple silicon support) is considered beta since version 1.3.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: In July 2011, JetBrains unveiled Project Kotlin, a new language for the JVM, which had been under development for a year. JetBrains lead Dmitry Jemerov said that most languages did not have the features they were looking for, with the exception of Scala. However, he cited the slow compilation time of Scala as a deficiency. One of the stated goals of Kotlin is to compile as quickly as Java. In February 2012, JetBrains open sourced the project under the Apache 2 license.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: The name comes from Kotlin Island, near St. Petersburg. Andrey Breslav mentioned that the team decided to name it after an island, just like Java was named after the Indonesian island of Java (though the programming language Java was perhaps named after the coffee rather than the island).


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Kotlin 1.0 was released on February 15, 2016. This is considered to be the first officially stable release and JetBrains has committed to long-term backwards compatibility starting with this version.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Kotlin 1.2 was released on November 28, 2017. Sharing code between JVM and JavaScript platforms feature was newly added to this release (as of version 1.4 multiplatform programming is an alpha feature upgraded from "experimental"). A full-stack demo has been made with the new Kotlin/JS Gradle Plugin.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: On 7 May 2019, Google announced that the Kotlin programming language is now its preferred language for Android app developers.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Kotlin 1.4 was released in August 2020, with e.g. some slight changes to the support for Apple's platforms, i.e. to the Objective-C/Swift interop.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Development lead Andrey Breslav has said that Kotlin is designed to be an industrial-strength object-oriented language, and a "better language" than Java, but still be fully interoperable with Java code, allowing companies to make a gradual migration from Java to Kotlin.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Semicolons are optional as a statement terminator; in most cases a newline is sufficient for the compiler to deduce that the statement has ended.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Kotlin variable declarations and parameter lists have the data type come after the variable name (and with a colon separator), similar to Ada, BASIC, Pascal, TypeScript and Rust. This, according to an article from Roman Elizarov, current project lead, results in alignment of variable names and is more pleasing to eyes especially when there are a few variable declarations in succession and one or more of the types is too complex for type inference or needs to be declared explicitly for human readers to understand.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Variables in Kotlin can be read-only, declared with the keyword, or mutable, declared with the keyword.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Class members are public by default, and classes themselves are final by default, meaning that creating a derived class is disabled unless the base class is declared with the keyword.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: In addition to the classes and member functions (which are equivalent to methods) of object-oriented programming, Kotlin also supports procedural programming with the use of functions.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Kotlin functions and constructors support default arguments, variable-length argument lists, named arguments and overloading by unique signature. Class member functions are virtual, i.e. dispatched based on the runtime type of the object they are called on.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Kotlin 1.3 added support for contracts, which are stable for the standard library declarations, but still experimental for user-defined declarations. Contracts are inspired by Eiffel's design by contract programming paradigm.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Kotlin code may be compiled to JavaScript, allowing for interoperability between code written in the two languages. This can be used either to write full web applications in Kotlin, or to share code between a Kotlin backend and a JavaScript frontend.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Kotlin relaxes Java's restriction of allowing static methods and variables to exist only within a class body. Static objects and functions can be defined at the top level of the package without needing a redundant class level. For compatibility with Java, Kotlin provides a codice_1 annotation which specifies a class name used when the package is viewed from a Java project. For example, codice_2.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: As in C, C++, C#, Java, and Go, the entry point to a Kotlin program is a function named "main", which may be passed an array containing any command-line arguments. This is optional since Kotlin 1.3. Perl, PHP and Unix shell style string interpolation is supported. Type inference is also supported.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Similar to C#, Kotlin allows adding an extension function to any class without the formalities of creating a derived class with new functions. An extension function has access to all the public interface of a class, which it can use to create a new function interface to a target class. An extension function will appear exactly like a function of the class and will be shown in code completion inspection of class functions. For example:


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: By placing the preceding code in the top-level of a package, the String class is extended to include a function that was not included in the original definition of the String class.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Similar to Python, the spread operator asterisk (*) unpacks an array's contents as comma-separated arguments to a function:


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: "Destructuring declarations" decompose an object into multiple variables at once, e.g. a 2D coordinate object might be "destructured" into two integers, and .


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: In Kotlin, to derive a new class from a base class type, the base class needs to be explicitly marked as "open". This is in contrast to most object-oriented languages such as Java where classes are open by default.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Abstract classes define abstract or "pure virtual" placeholder functions that will be defined in a derived class. Abstract classes are open by default.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Kotlin provides the following keywords to restrict visibility for top-level declaration, such as classes, and for class members: codice_3, codice_4, codice_5, and codice_6.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Kotlin supports the specification of a "primary constructor" as part of the class definition itself, consisting of an argument list following the class name. This argument list supports an expanded syntax on Kotlin's standard function argument lists, that enables declaration of class properties in the primary constructor, including visibility, extensibility and mutability attributes. Additionally, when defining a subclass, properties in super-interfaces and super-classes can be overridden in the primary constructor.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: However, in cases where more than one constructor is needed for a class, a more general constructor can be used called secondary constructor syntax which closely resembles the constructor syntax used in most object-oriented languages like C++, C#, and Java.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: The Sealed classes and interfaces restrict the subclass hierarchies, meaning more control over the inheritance hierarchy.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Kotlin's codice_7 construct defines classes whose primary purpose is storing data. This construct is similar to normal classes except that the key functions codice_8, codice_9, and codice_10 are automatically generated from the class properties. In Java, such classes are expected to provide a standard assortment of functions such as those. Data classes are not required to declare any methods, though each must have at least one property. A data class often is written without a body, though it is possible to give a data class any methods or secondary constructors that are valid for any other class. The codice_11 keyword is used before the codice_12 keyword to define a data class.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Kotlin can also be used as a scripting language. A script is a Kotlin source file (.kts) with top level executable code.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Scripts can be run by passing the codice_13 option and the corresponding script file to the compiler.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Kotlin makes a distinction between nullable and non-nullable data types. All nullable objects must be declared with a "?" postfix after the type name. Operations on nullable objects need special care from developers: null-check must be performed before using the value. Kotlin provides null-safe operators to help developers:


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: Lambdas are declared using braces, . If a lambda takes parameters, they are declared within the braces and followed by the operator.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: // the following statement defines a lambda that takes a single parameter and passes it to the println function


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: When Kotlin was announced as an official Android development language at Google I/O in May 2017, it became the third language fully supported for Android, in addition to Java and C++. As of 2020, Kotlin is still most widely used on Android, with Google estimating that 70% of the top 1000 apps on the Play Store are written in Kotlin. Google itself has 60 apps written in Kotlin, including Maps and Drive. Many Android apps, such as Google's Home, are in the process of being migrated to Kotlin, and so use both Kotlin and Java. Kotlin on Android is seen as beneficial for its null-pointer safety as well as for its features that make for shorter, more readable code.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: In addition to its prominent use on Android, Kotlin is gaining traction in server-side development. The Spring Framework officially added Kotlin support with version 5 on 4 January 2017. To further support Kotlin, Spring has translated all its documentation to Kotlin and added built-in support for many Kotlin-specific features such as coroutines. In addition to Spring, JetBrains has produced a Kotlin-first framework called Ktor for building web applications.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: In 2020, JetBrains found in a survey of developers who use Kotlin that 56% were using Kotlin for mobile apps, while 47% were using it for a web back-end. Just over a third of all Kotlin developers said that they were migrating to Kotlin from another language. Most Kotlin users were targeting Android (or otherwise on the JVM), with only 6% using Kotlin Native.


title: Kotlin (programming language)

text: In 2018, Kotlin was the fastest growing language on GitHub with 2.6 times more developers compared to 2017. It is the fourth most loved programming language according to the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey.


title: The Lego Group

text: Lego A/S (trade name: The Lego Group) is a Danish toy production company based in Billund, Denmark. It manufactures Lego-brand toys, consisting mostly of interlocking plastic bricks. The Lego Group has also built several amusement parks around the world, each known as Legoland, and operates numerous retail stores.


title: The Lego Group

text: The company was founded on August 10, 1932, by Ole Kirk Christiansen. The name "Lego" is derived from the Danish words , meaning "play well". In the first half of 2015, The Lego Group became the world's largest toy company by revenue, with sales amounting to , surpassing Mattel, which had in sales.


title: The Lego Group

text: The Lego company was founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter whose primary business of producing household goods had suffered due to the Great Depression. Initially producing wooden toys, the company later developed a system of interlocking bricks. Manufacturing of plastic Lego bricks began in Denmark in 1947. After a fire in the woodworking department, Ole's son, Godtfred, decided to stop the production of wooden toys and solely focus on plastic products and the Lego system. He also built an airport in Billund to facilitate the sale of Lego toys around the world.


title: The Lego Group

text: In North America, Samsonite managed the Lego brand from 1961 until 1972 (United States) and 1986 (Canada).


title: The Lego Group

text: The name "LEGO" is a contraction of the words Danish: "leg godt" (English: "play well").  However, the name also means in Latin either "I collect", "I compose" or "I read".  These additional meanings, the first two of which are very relevant, only made sense when the company started making plastic blocks with knobs (lego blocks) so that they could be put together.


title: The Lego Group

text: Since the expiry of the last standing Lego patent in 1989, a number of companies have produced interlocking bricks that are similar to Lego bricks. The toy company Tyco Toys produced such bricks for a time; other competitors include Mega Bloks and Best-Lock. These competitor products are typically "compatible" with Lego bricks, and are often marketed at a lower cost than Lego sets.


title: The Lego Group

text: One such competitor is Coko, manufactured by Chinese company Tianjin Coko Toy Co., Ltd. In 2002, Lego Group's Swiss subsidiary Interlego AG sued the company for copyright infringement. A trial court found many Coko bricks to be infringing; Coko was ordered to cease manufacture of the infringing bricks, publish a formal apology in the "Beijing Daily", and pay a small fee in damages to Interlego. On appeal, the Beijing High People's Court upheld the trial court's ruling.


title: The Lego Group

text: In 2003, The Lego Group won a lawsuit in Norway against the marketing group Biltema for its sale of Coko products, on the grounds that the company used product confusion for marketing purposes.


title: The Lego Group

text: Also in 2003, a large shipment of Lego-like products marketed under the name "Enlighten" was seized by Finnish customs authorities. The packaging of the Enlighten products was similar to official Lego packaging. Their Chinese manufacturer failed to appear in court, and thus Lego won a default action ordering the destruction of the shipment. Lego Group footed the bill for the disposal of the 54,000 sets, citing a desire to avoid brand confusion and protect consumers from potentially inferior products.


title: The Lego Group

text: In 2004, Best-Lock Construction Toys defeated a patent challenge from Lego in the Oberlandesgericht, Hamburg.


title: The Lego Group

text: The Lego Group has attempted to trademark the "Lego Indicia", the studded appearance of the Lego brick, hoping to stop production of Mega Bloks. On 24 May 2002, the Federal Court of Canada dismissed the case, asserting the design is functional and therefore ineligible for trademark protection. The Lego Group's appeal was dismissed by the Federal Court of Appeal on 14 July 2003. In October 2005, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that "Trademark law should not be used to perpetuate monopoly rights enjoyed under now-expired patents" and held that Mega Bloks can continue to manufacture their bricks.


title: The Lego Group

text: Because of fierce competition from copycat products, the company has always responded by being proactive in their patenting and has over 600 United States–granted design patents to their name.


title: The Lego Group

text: In 2003, The Lego Group faced a budget deficit of ( at then-current exchange rates; equal to ), causing Poul Plougmann to be replaced by Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen as president. In the following year, almost one thousand employees were laid off, due to budget cuts. However, in October 2004, on reporting an even larger deficit, Kristiansen also stepped down as president, while placing of his private funds into the company.


title: The Lego Group

text: In 2005, The Lego Group reported a 2004 net loss of on a total turnover, including Legoland amusement parks, of .


title: The Lego Group

text: For 2005, the company returned a profit of , having increased its revenue by 12% to in 2005 against in 2004. It also cut expenditures and disposed of amusement parks and a factory in Switzerland.


title: The Lego Group

text: In 2011, sales for the company grew 11%, rising from in 2010 to in 2011. Profit for 2011 fiscal year increased from to . The increased profit was due to the enormous popularity of the new brand Ninjago, which became the company's biggest product introduction ever.


title: The Lego Group

text: In 2012, it was reported that The Lego Group had become the world's most valuable toy company ahead of Mattel with a value at over .


title: The Lego Group

text: The Lego Group delivered a turnover of in the first half of 2015 with an increase of 18% compared with the same period in 2014 measured in local currency (i.e. excluding the impact of foreign exchange rate changes). Net profit for the first half of 2015 was compared with for the first half of 2014. First half-year sales were driven by double-digit growth across all geographical regions and strong product innovation on themes such as Lego Ninjago, Lego Elves and Lego Creator.


title: The Lego Group

text: The Lego Group announced on 4 September 2017 its intention to cut jobs following reduced revenue and profit in the first half of the year, the first reported decrease in 13 years. The revenue losses are due to a more competitive environment, where the company has to compete not only against its traditional competitors Mattel and Hasbro, but also against technology companies such as Sony or Microsoft as more children use mobile devices for entertainment. The job cuts account for 8 percent of the company's total work force. In May 2018, the company made it to "Forbes" top 100 World's Most Valuable Brands 2018, being 97th on the list.