Random Linkage

Former Sen. Tom Daschle, tapped by President Obama to lead his healthcare reform campaign, failed to pay more than $128,000 in taxes in the three years before Obama nominated him in December to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

The disclosure — involving unreported income and the use of a car and driver provided to Daschle — comes 2 1/2 weeks after Obama’s choice to head the Treasury Department, Timothy Geithner, admitted that he had not paid about $43,000 in taxes.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning, Defense Secretary Robert Gates made clear that the era of defense spending largesse is over. “The spigot of defense funding opened by 9/11 is closing. With two major campaigns ongoing, the economic crisis and resulting budget pressures will force hard choices on this department,” Gates said, “we will not be able to do everything, buy everything.” New budget realities will force DOD to “critically and ruthlessly separate appetites from real requirements – those things that are desirable in a perfect world from those things that are truly needed in light of the threats America faces and the missions we are likely to undertake in the years ahead.”

It’s no secret. He sat down every morning, without fail, and wrote. His daily goal was to produce three pages of writing that were up to his standards. He stuck to that goal for decades; through all the ups and downs of daily life, John Updike produced his three pages every day.

And it added up. Over the course of years, those daily three pages added up to a body of work that is truly monumental.

The cutout was pulled from the line recently, Hoagland said, because the firm learned that Obama does not wear glasses. (The original Obama cutout is holding a pair of glasses and isn’t wearing a wedding ring.) As Hoagland tells it, a retailer contacted Advanced a couple of weeks ago to report he had heard from a customer who said the real Obama signed his cutout and remarked that he knew the hands weren’t “his” because he wouldn’t be holding glasses.

Even top executives whose banks made such risky loans they imperiled the economy have been largely spared any threat to their jobs, as Washington pumped billions in taxpayer money into the companies. Less fortunate are more than 100,000 bank employees laid off during a two-year stretch when industry unemployment nearly tripled, bank stocks plummeted and credit dried up.

“The same people at the top are still there, the same people who made the decisions causing a lot of our financial crisis,” said Rebecca Trevino of Louisville, Ky., a mother of three who was laid off from her job as a Bank of America training coordinator in October. “But that’s what tends to happen in leadership. The people at the top, there’s always some other place to lay blame.”

Chris Ogle of New Zealand was in Oklahoma about a year ago when he bought a used MP3 player from a thrift store for $9. A few weeks ago, he plugged it into his computer to download a song, and he instead discovered confidential U.S. military files.

Google has been playing with Gears technology for couple of years now, having leveraged its potential to harness offline functionality in its web applications such as Reader and Google Docs. The welcomed addition became an instant hit in these applications since it keeps users in sync with their online content when they need it most - offline. For instance, Google Docs users can continue working on documents they keep up in the cloud even when their network connection goes down. It will automatically sync changes made in offline mode the next time they’re online. What most users wanted though, is an offline mode in Gmail so their account would be at their disposal while in offline mode, including the ability to read messages and reply to them.

It is this policy that Burger King ran afoul of this month with its “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign, which offered a free hamburger to anyone who severed the sacred bonds with 10 of the friends they had accumulated on Facebook. Facebook suspended the program because Burger King was sending notifications to the castoffs letting them know they’d been dropped for a sandwich (or, more accurately, a tenth of a sandwich).

Google Earth has proven useful for a plethora of things—finding your house from space, checking out islands in the Pacific Ocean, and now, finding massive fields of weed. At least that’s what happened in Switzerland, when Swiss police managed to come across a “large marijuana plantation” while using Google’s popular software.

We have created a way to use fusion to relatively inexpensively destroy the waste from nuclear fission, says Mike Kotschenreuther, senior research scientist with the Institute for Fusion Studies (IFS) and Department of Physics. Our waste destruction system, we believe, will allow nuclear power—a low carbon source of energy—to take its place in helping us combat global warming.

• View each areas’ overall “Lethal Index” which tells you how dangerous that area is. The Lethal Index is made up of a separate “Wildlife Index,” “Crime Index,” “Disease Index,” and “Disaster Index.”
• View crime, disease, and accident rates for each area.
• Link to Wikipedia entries on all the risks to learn more. Are you visiting a new city and want to know how dangerous the crime?

In an interview with MSNBC’s Keith Olberman, Russell Tice, who was fired by the NSA in May of 2005, explained that he had been tasked with monitoring the communications of specific groups, which he described as an attempt “to try to harpoon fish from an airplane,” which he contrasted with the “collecting all the fish” approach of data miners. Among those targeted, said Tice, were American reporters and news agencies.

uring the same critical period, Vice President Cheney was urging Secretary of StateColin Powell to consider seriously the possibility that Iraq might be connected to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Powell found the case worse than ridiculous and scornfully concluded that Cheney had what Powell termed a “fever.” (In private, Powell used to call the Pentagon policy shop run by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, who shared Cheney’s burning interest in supposed ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq, a “Gestapo office.”)

Powell was right to conclude that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden did not work together. But Cheney and Powell did not have this crucial debate in front of the president — even though such a discussion might have undermined one key reason for war. Cheney provided private advice to the president, but he was rarely asked to argue with others and test his case. After the invasion, Cheney had a celebratory dinner with some aides and friends. “Colin always had major reservations about what we were trying to do,” Cheney told the group as they toasted Bush and laughed at Powell. This sort of derision undermined the administration’s unity of purpose — and suggests the nasty tone that can emerge when open debate is stifled by long-running feuds and personal hostility.

Waking and installing such complex apparatus— as well as producing telephones, cables and thousands of other kinds of equipment used in your service—is Western Electric’s job as manufacturing unit of the Bell System. For 68 years, we’ve made good equipment that serves long and faithfully — with a minimum of upkeep. It makes possible the familiar miracle of clear, dependable, low cost telephone service—the kind you want and get.

Today, Google and YouTube announced the launch of www.youtube.com/vatican, the YouTube channel dedicated to the activities of the Pope and events in the smallest state in the world, Vatican City. Footage on the channel comes from Centro Televisio Vaticano (CTV) and Vatican Radio (RV), so the primary language is Italian, but there will be information in Spanish, English, and German as well. Pope Benedict XVI stated that the page has been set up “so that the Church and its message continue to be present in the great Areopagus of social communications…and so that it is not a stranger to those spaces where numerous young people search for answers and meaning in their lives.”

Scientists have come a bit closer to achieving the “Star Trek” feat of teleportation. No one is galaxy-hopping, or even beaming people around, but for the first time, information has been teleported between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter — about a yard.

More than 200,000 job cuts have been announced so far this year, according to company reports. Nearly 2.6 million jobs were lost over 2008, the highest yearly job-loss total since 1945.

He said that I’d have to pay for any repairs, even though the machine was still under warranty, and I might as well get a new one because the amount it would cost to fix it would be the same as buying another one, she said.

The Morton Umbrella Girl got her start in 1914. The logo was produced as part of a series of ads in Good Housekeeping. The concept was that Morton Salt - unlike regular salt of the day - poured without clumps, even in damp weather. The company added magnesium carbonate as an absorbing agent to ensure that its table salt poured freely (it had since been changed to calcium silicate).

At first, the advertising agency suggested “Even in rainy weather, it flows freely” as the company’s motto. Morton felt that it was too long, and the motto was changed to the catchier “When it Rains it Pours.”

NEW EXECU-CHAIR IS DIFFERENT This is the first chair designed exclusively for the office. Closed… it looks like a regular office chair… blending perfectly with any decor. It is a comfortable chair to sit on. Yet it flips open in just a second… almost effortless into full-length 76″ long bed with a pillow rest for the head.

Under an Obama administration, some form of broadband stimulus package is coming—and $6 billion is already being kicked around as a starting point. But if you build it, will they come? Pew’s Internet & American Life Project reminds us that a hardcore contingent of holdouts won’t, no matter how cheap or how fast the connection is.

This is just a “rough and ready” hack to put Skype on your USB stick and future releases of Skype may cause this hack to stop working. I am hoping that Skype will eventually bring out an official portable version that works for ALL portable USB sticks, not just the U3.

It is a problem to the point where many collegiate authorities are attempting to focus on the campus problem and reach a solution. Dr. Blaine of Harvard, Sarah Blanding of Vassar, and Prof. Kirkendall of Oregon State University have voiced concern over sex on the campus.

Why is it wrong? It leads to out-of-wedlock pregnancies, or unwanted marriages, venereal diseases, divorce, unhappy homes, the abrupt end of education and possibly careers. These can lead to many more frustrating and traumatic experiences than can the ability to say “no” to an ardent and ego-nurturing “lover.”

From Harry Clarke to 1890’s storybooks, if you’re looking for unique images or clipart for use on your web pages or in other design or craft projects you’ve come to the right place. There’s a treasury here at Grandma’s Graphics that you probably won’t find anywhere else online. Some of these graphics are quite large and take time to load, but be patient, they’re worth the wait.

If you’re dying to try out Windows 7 but aren’t ready to give up your installation of XP or Vista, let’s take a look at how to dual boot Windows 7 with XP or Vista.

At the request of the incoming Obama Administration, leading members of Congress have drafted legislation to delay the digital TV transition for close to four months, justifying their action as a way to protect needy Americans from losing access to their local TV station programming. But is this the real reason for the delay?

“The moral is that the DC cops and inauguration committee folks screwed up,” said a Washington foreign-policy hand on condition of anonymity who was caught in the tunnel for four hours and, like others, ended up missing the entire inauguration. “They knew exactly how many ticket holders there were. They knew people would show up early in massive numbers. They had months to prepare … And their planning was clearly woefully inadequate and put thousands of people at risk of injury (not to mention, historic disappointment).