Updated 104 Days ago
Phil Collins has handed over US$47.5 million (£25 million) to his third wife in the biggest-ever divorce payout by a British showbiz star.
The massive settlement beats the £24.3million Paul McCartney recently handed over to Heather Mills.
Genesis singer Phil, 57, has given the huge cash sum to Swiss beauty Orianne Cevey, 35, after just six years of marriage and two children.
And it is not the first time Phil has had to give away large chunks of his cash.
In 1994 he gave his second wife Jill Tavelman £17million after famously dumping her by fax.
It means he has now paid out more than £42million almost a third of his £140million fortune.
A music industry source said: “Marriage has certainly not come cheap for Phil. He has now made two of the biggest divorce payments in showbiz history.
“At least no one can accuse him of leaving his ex-wives short. When you compare what he’s paid out relative to his own fortune the figures are enormous.”
Orianne even got a much bigger percentage of Phil’s fortune than Heather Mills got from Sir Paul. The divorce payout came to light in the latest accounts for Phil’s personal management company, Philip Collins Ltd.
He met Orianne on tour when she was just 22 and he was still married to Jill. They set up home in Geneva and were together for five years before their lavish three-day wedding.
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.