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POPSFinding business in a down economy How to reach the top information technology professionals – C-level decision makers - from small to large biz, with an active purchase intent in proposal including ERP implementation, enterprise solutions, Oracle E-Business Suite(EBS), Financial • Supply Chain Management • Distribution • Human Resource Management Systems • Customer Relationship Management.
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POPSWill Tone of MSNBC Change w/Comcast Merger? I have a pretty basic Comcast package and ever since I heard people complaining that they removed the MEssNBC, I found it up on stn.#128, away from the more "regular" channels, so I'd advise one to scan their sets, you may still have it. (I can't believe I'm helping anyone find the thing;-) Anyway, I think it would be too obvious for Comcast to make it any more scarce. Maybe it's just as well to keep those nutjobs (Olbermann, Matthews, Maddow,etc.) all in one place where they think they've really got something goin' on. Otherwise who knows what kind of hell they'd raise with their whining.
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POPSGiveaway of the day. Free software! “We decided to participate in Giveaway of the Day because of the excellent opportunity to promote a product and collect lots of users’ feedback. Actually, in just one day, we’ve heard more opinions about our software than we typically hear from our own website visitors in two weeks! Being happy with GOTD team service and our promo statistics, we decided to get back there soon with our new products”
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POPSBarbara Ehrenreich: The Swine Flu Vaccine Screw-up More: According to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the government was misled by these companies, which failed to report manufacturing delays as they arose. Her department, she says, was "relying on the manufacturers to give us their numbers, and as soon as we got numbers we put them out to the public. It does appear now that those numbers were overly rosy." If, in fact, there's a political parable here, it's about Big Government's sweetly trusting reliance on Big Business to safeguard the public health: Let the private insurance companies manage health financing; let profit-making hospital chains deliver health care; let Big Pharma provide safe and affordable medications. As it happens, though, all these entities have a priority that regularly overrides the public's health, and that is, of course, profit…
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POPSPro-Pot - Anti-Gay Election Results
Yesterday in the state of Maine there were "pro-pot," and "anti-gay," referendums on the ballot. Results: Pot, yea; Gay, No. But...maybe that exaggerates the results. It wasn't like the people of Maine voted to pass out marijuana at the schools (they formalized a distribution method) and it wasn't like the voters of Maine wanted to start gay folks witch hunts (they didn't want to approve state "marriage status," to gays). There are lots of ways of looking at these political decisions. Should gay rights even be an item up for vote or a right protected by the Constitution? But is gay marriage a gay right? Maine is now the 31st state to have a direct referendum on gay marriage and they have all turned it down. Maine is now the 5th state to allow the "medical," use of marijuana. With Obama telling the Feds not to prosecute individual users acting in accord with their state's laws, I'd expect a lot more states to go this way. No knighthoods being given out, in either cas
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POPSMadeleine McCann: Online Video Appeal Video did not clip for some reason. It is at the site. Interpol - the gateway into 187 countries, Europol and national police agencies worldwide are supporting the initiative which is in seven different languages – English, Arabic, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
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POPSWhite House Uses Taxpayer Dollars To Send Spam E-Mails on Health Reform
It is still unknown how much taxpayer money the White House provides to Govdelivery for its services. "This is yet another ominous chapter in the administration's rabid campaign to jam its radical health care scheme onto an unwilling public by any means necessary," Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan said in a statement. Govdelivery sent hundreds of e-mails from senior adviser David Axelrod asking supporters to help rebut criticism of Obama's health care plan circulating on the Internet. It also sent e-mails highlighting Obama's speech to the Muslim world in Cairo and the announcement of Sonia Sotomayor as a Supreme Court nominee. On Monday, the White House implemented several new changes to its Web site, apparently aimed at reducing the number of people who receive unsolicited e-mails and at fighting charges that it's collecting personal information on critics. The White House also pulled the plug on a controversial e-mail address, flag@whitehouse.gov . . .
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POPS Obama's Disdain for Constitution That's why they are "so-called Founders" to him. Here is Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address, March 4th, 1801: "A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government." Thomas Jefferson, "so-called Founder." Thomas Jefferson: "Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated." So-called Founder. John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Governments of the United States of America, 1787: "The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence."
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POPSU.K. Economic Contraction Is Longest on Record The British economy has now contracted for six successive quarters, making this the longest downturn since the agency started its data series in 1955. And it is starting to further lag behind the 16-member euro area, where France and Germany are contributing to broad improvements in manufacturing, services and consumer demand. Jean-Michel Six, chief European economist at Standard & Poor’s, said the divergence appeared to stem from the higher level of consumer indebtedness in Britain. “U.K. consumers are coming out of a period of very significant leveraging, and the process of unwinding that is long and painful,” he said. “You would expect savings rates to grow and credit demand to fall, weighing on the economy.” Meanwhile, German business confidence in October rose to its highest level in 13 months, according to the Ifo economic research institute in Munich.
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POPSGang Finds Suing New York Pays Better Than Crack The gang's leader, Anthony Lawrence, was shot multiple times in his apartment in August. The robbers weren't there to steal his crack profits; they were after the $17,000 settlement he'd received in his latest suit against the city.
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POPSObama Administration and Medical Marijuana Good to see some progress on this issue. I think that, given current law, this policy strikes a good balance. It recognizes that recreational use of marijuana is illegal but that there are medicinal benefits of using this drug that should not be ignored. We don't allow recreational use of morphine, but we don't deny that the drug is useful. We can at least do that for pot.
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POPSWall Street Derivatives: So complex as to be "Computationall intractable" MORE: In principle, an alert buyer can detect tampering even if he doesn't know which asset classes are the lemons: he simply examines all 1000 CDOs and looks for a suspicious overrepresentation of some of the asset classes in some of the CDOs. What Arora et al. show is that is an NP-complete problem ("densest subgraph"). This problem is believed to be computationally intractable; thus, even the most alert buyer can't have enough computational power to do the analysis. Arora et al. show it's even worse than that: even after the buyer has lost a lot of money (because enough mortgages defaulted to devalue his "senior tranche"), he can't prove that that tampering occurred: he can't prove that the distribution of lemons wasn't random. This makes it hard to get recourse in court; it also makes it hard to regulate CDOs. Everyone on Wall Street... UP AGAINST THE WALL, THE LOT OF YOU BASTARDS!
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POPSEconomists Search for New Definition of Well-Being
"GDP has increasingly become used as a measure of societal well-being and changes in the structure of the economy and our society have made it an increasingly poor one," Stiglitz told the news agency Bloomberg in a recent interview. "So many things that are important to individuals are not included in GDP." In the model they unveiled last week in Paris, the academics recommend including other factors, such as sustainability and education. Significant Shortcomings Even the inventor of the gross domestic product measure, the late Russian-American economist Simon Kuznets, was aware that the classic method of computing GDP had significant shortcomings. "The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income," he said in 1934. This is because the growth rate says nothing about the distribution of wealth in a country, the state of health of its citizens or their life expectancy. The number provides no information about the cleanliness of rivers or the amo
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POPSMexican Power Union Power Struggle
Calderón has attacked one of Mexico's most powerful unions. In Mexico, unions are powerful because of the power they enjoy to disrupt daily life for ordinary people, who just want to get to work and home again and be safe. Governments have been too pusillanimous to intervene to stop their illegal blockage of public spaces. See the six-month sit-in in 2006 that paralyzed Mexico City and took billions of pesos from people as work dried up for the poorest who lost their "job" washing and parking cars in Mexico City's chaotic downtown. Etc Etc. Calderón effectively lost a battle with the mega teacher's union"the largest in Latin America. The "teachers" blocked highways and city centers throughout the nation and Calderón's "reforms" were immasculated (not that they would have done any good anyway). Now he's taken on the electricians' union and with it the cultural icon of the government power company. Mexicans are taught to believe that their nationalized power company is a "right
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POPSTwitter Talks Data With Microsoft, Google — All Things Digital All this without tarnishing the noisy service as a shill, because it lets you listen to only what you want. The deals would be nonexclusive and may not happen, All Things Digital reports " which only feeds the casual cred Twitter has been cultivating, taking its time about coming up with a business model that produces operating revenue, while it rakes in VC money at a level that values the three-year-old private company at about $1 billion. The “Let them do it” philosophy works like a charm for Twitter, whose content comes from the general public and whose best interfaces come from third-party developers making full use of the company’s freely available API. Along with the recently announced “lists” initiative, Twitter seems to be carefully setting the table so that partners can leverage its data " and the way it is organized " to enter new markets, while it sits back and maintains a server farm.
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POPSInvisible hand in invisible matter. Dark matter might not exist. Dr Famaey added, "If we account for our observations with a modified law of gravity, it makes perfect sense to replace the effective action of hypothetical dark matter with a force closely related to the distribution of visible matter." The implications of the new research could change some of the most widely held scientific theories about the history and expansion of the universe. Lead researcher Dr. Gianfranco Gentile at the University of Ghent concludes, "Understanding this puzzling conspiracy is probably the key to unlock the formation of galaxies and their structures." What about NASA's direct proof on dark matter's existance? Broken study? This is actually makes sense, but so far is a little hard to accept. Does anyone have any ideas about this?
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POPSBlack-Footed Cat I had never heard of this species of cat before and it was a very interesting article about them.
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POPSGlobal Muslim population hits 1.57 billion "Of roughly 4.6 million Muslims in the Americas, more than half live in the United States although they only make up 0.8 percent of the population there. About 700,000 people in Canada are Muslim, or about 2 percent of the total population."
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POPSiiNet case could set piracy precedent To me it is a problem between the owner of the rights and the people abusing those rights. They have the details of who downloaded, who uploaded and who sneezed. The laws are cockeyed. In Australia, if you go to the pub, get pissed, drive and have an accident, you can sue the licensee of the pub. The govt will have already booked the licensee for selling to an intoxicated person.