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POPSDoes President of SEIU Have Preferential Access To White House? But you can't automatically disqualify an entry because of a large number of visitors: Stern was among the 393 guests at the White House's St. Patrick's Day event. As far as I can tell, THE Andrew Stern was the top outside visitor to the White House with approximately 20 visits, or about three visits per month, including four relatively small meetings with the president and a dozen with other White House staffers. Stern has openly bragged about the SEIU's $61 million investment in Barack Obama. It certainly bought him a lot of access. Update: And while we're on the subject of the SEIU, here's an interesting entry: On March 3, ACORN spokesman Scott Levenson met with White House political affairs director Patrick Gaspard, who came to the White House from SEIU. Unsurprising, given the groups' close ties. I wonder what they talked about. 10/30
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POPSArmy chiefs accuse extremists of exploiting Britain's servicemen The values of these extremists - many of whom are essentially racist - are fundamentally at odds with the values of the modern British military, such as tolerance and fairness.' The new row came as an apparent list of the party's members and their personal details were posted on the internet, in the third leak of its membership in recent years. The names include former senior members of the military, doctors and professors, according to the spreadsheet posted on the the WikiLeaks website. Everything from their street address, post code, telephone number and mobile phone number is included. It comes amid huge anger over BNP leader Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time on Thursday with the corporation refusing to pull him from the line-up. The BNP has regularly used pictures of soldiers as part of its campaign, alongside quintessentially British images such as Winston Churchill's V for victory sign.
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POPSCan Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb? 
positions shifted. American and Israeli national-security players grudgingly accepted that they could tolerate Iran having some civilian nuclear-energy capacity. Ahmadinejad, Khamenei and the religious radicals wavered; then, as the model reached our present day, their power " another variable in Bueno de Mesquita’s model " sagged significantly. Amid the thousands of rows on the spreadsheet, there’s one called Forecast. It consists of a single number that represents the most likely consensus of all the players. It begins at 160 " bomb-making territory " but by next year settles at 118, where it doesn’t move much. “That’s the outcome,” Bueno de Mesquita said confidently, tapping the screen. What does 118 mean? It means that Iran won’t make a nuclear bomb. By early 2010, according to the forecast, Iran will be at the brink of developing one, but then it will stop and go no further. If this computer model is right, all the dire portents we’ve seen in recent months . . .
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POPSMedia Dozes While Social Security Is On The Verge of Negative Cash Flow Morrissey points out that the report lays bare the fundamental incompetence and/or dishonesty earlier this year of Peter Orszag, President Obama’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget: …. Democrats wanted analysis that allowed them to ignore the problems in Social Security, and Orszag was happy to supply them. Douglas Elmendorf has had to right the ship at CBO while Orszag continues to blow his predictions at OMB, most notably in overall deficit projections, which Orszag had to admit were off by more than 40% and $2.2 trillion over the next ten years. Of course, they were helped along by a complacent media unwilling to do math, and a host of apologists for the Left. …. The situation at Social Security is much worse than this administration and Democrats in Congress want to admit. They want to continue busting the deficit and creating new entitlements while the existing ones careen towards collapse.
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POPSCan Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb? Is Iran going to build a bomb? With the help of his undergraduate class at N.Y.U., he researched the primary power brokers inside and outside the country " anyone with a stake in Iran’s nuclear future. Once he had the information he needed, he fed it into his computer model and had an answer in a few minutes. A tall man with a slab of gray hair, Bueno de Mesquita, who is 62, welcomed me with painstakingly prepared cups of espresso. Then he pulled out his beat-up I.B.M. laptop " so old that the lettering on the A, S, D and E keys was worn off " and showed me a spreadsheet that summarized Iran’s future.The spreadsheet included almost 90 players. Some were people, like the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei; others were groups, like the U.N. Security Council and Iran’s “religious radicals.” Next to each player, a number represented one variable in Bueno de Mesquita’s model: the extent to which a player wanted Iran to have the ability
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POPSThe world in active nuclear weapons How man nuclear warheads does it take to destroy our planet? It’s wonderful that Russia and the U.S. are negotiating to cut the number of nuclear weapons that threaten our world. But isn’t it rather useless? The devastation we wrought on Japan to end the second world war should have convinced any sane person that this weapon is a terrible and highly unethical threat to mankind and should be banned forever.
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POPSCan teenagers multitask better than adults? Don’t teenagers have an advantage when it comes to multitasking? They grew up in a technology-driven world, right? They pop out of the womb with the ability to send 100 text messages per minute.
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POPSAmaze your friends with these tricks!
Rockstar Games suffered from arguably the most controversial Easter egg in history, even though it was an accident. Instead of removing the Hot Coffee mini-game from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas entirely, Rockstar merely cut it off from the rest of the game – leaving the assets on the disc. It proved a simple matter for hackers to get their hands on the mini-game, and the more explicit sexual content caused Rockstar a lot of problems. Despite showing nothing more than fully clothed bumping and grinding between consenting adults, the whole game had to be withdrawn and reclassified. The end result was millions of dollars of revenue lost and several class action lawsuits. Rockstar cheekily renamed the more moderate romance achievement in GTA IV after the incident; a polite cut-away to a building roof now throws up the message 'Achievement Unlocked: Warm Coffee'. Another classic example is the game SimCopter, which was released in 1996. One of the programmers, Jacques Servin, added an
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POPSWhite House Orchestrated Taxpayer-Funded Trips to Help Republican Candidates A new report released today by the House Oversight Committee reveals that the White House orchestrated a huge, taxpayer-funded campaign to ensure Republican candidates were elected into office during the mid-term elections in November, 2006. In an apparent violation of the 1907 Hatch Act - which strictly prohibits the use of public offices to influence the outcome of elections - the efforts were coordinated by the White House Office of Political Affairs, which used political muscle in an attempt to retain Republican control of Congress. The will of the voter gets snuffed in Corporate America in more ways than imaginable.
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POPSDoes the U.S. Need a CTO? Last fall, Kapor was called upon to help Senator Barack Obama define his technology positions. Kapor suggested that Obama, if elected president, should install a federal chief technology officer. Conservatives grumbled at the idea of another layer of bureaucracy, but Kapor and others in Silicon Valley say the government needs cohesive technology practices and policies.
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POPSGoogle Docs: Map it in Your Spreadsheet I've used the techniques described here to create a map of Garage Sales for tomorrow for my particular area of Ottawa, Ontario. I copied them from the Ottawa Citizen classified into a Google Docs spreadsheet. Here's the result... http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pIGLjuEGkGTlp9ODxiMSiAA
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POPSGoogle Browser Coming Your Way Soon? I think the most interesting think to note out of this whole article is the fact that Google has regestered the domain name gbrowser.com. While they may just be covering all of their bases I think that this bodes well for a future release of their own browser. I am sure that some of you will see this as another indication that Google is taking over the world, and while that may be true, I am not quite convinced that Google is as evil as some are making them out to be. Or maybe they are taking over Mwahahahah :)
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POPSWipe the Memory Clean Before YOU Leave! This is outrageous! If you want to access archives, you will need the old software to stay accessible w/o the service packs or hire a secretary to upgrade all your old files, OR SWITCH TO LINUX.
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POPSBudget in Excel I've been using this a while now...it's a great template to use and really useful...it doesn't have graphs and charts as other onlines budget trackers do but still just as handy.
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POPSEucalyptus in Indonesia - Great Crop After reading Pokkets clip on Indonesia and the tree planting scheme, I found this. It appears that the Indonesians are planting trees as crops, not forest replacement.
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POPSDell Selling Linux PC's The beginning of the end of the Microsoft OS monopoly. Stay away from Vista. If your current machine is more than two years old, you should get a new PC that runs XP now, confident that your next machine will run on Linux.
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