The following letter and photograph was sent to Michael Yon from LTC Jim Crider, the commander of the 1-4 CAV soldiers based at FOB Falcon whose progress reports have recently been published on this site.
The famed King Ranch and a coalition of environmental groups sued Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson in federal court Tuesday, seeking to require extensive environmental review and public comment on two planned wind power projects along the Gulf Coast in Kenedy County.
The coalition, the Coastal Habitat Alliance, also sued over the wind project in state District Court in Travis County. That suit claims that the state's Public Utility Commission illegally denied the alliance's request to participate in permit hearings for the wind project's transmission line.
The discovery in 390-million-year-old rocks suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were far larger in the past than previously thought, said Simon Braddy, a University of Bristol paleontologist and one of the study's three authors.
Speaking as a misfit unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of holidays.
The foundation of winning at Blackjack is to utilize proper basic strategy in playing the hands. "Proper" means that each decision you make on hitting, standing, doubling or splitting pairs is the correct mathematical play for that hand. There is no room for intuition, gut feelings or guessing when it comes to basic strategy; you must make the "percentage" play each time. Even if you've doubled an 11 against a dealer's 10 five times in a row and lost, when that hand comes up a sixth time you must double. Consistency is a big part of playing a winning game, so resolve right now that you are going to make the proper play, regardless if the dealer rolls his eyes upward or the other players at the table groan quietly when you do it.
Free Clinics are private, non-profit organizations that provide medical, dental, pharmaceutical and/or mental health services at little or no cost to low-income, uninsured and underinsured people. These clinics are truly free - both to their clients and to the taxpayers.
Unlike federally-qualified so-called "free clinics", they do not submit receipts to Medicare or Medicaid for reimbursement. St. Luke and the other authentic Free Clinics in Virginia do not submit bills to anybody for reimbursement.
It was halftime at the Lake Fenton-Mount Morris game, seemingly just another high school football contest during another homecoming week on another October Friday night in another American suburb.
But this time the fix was in.
The novelist Doris Lessing yesterday claimed that men were the new silent victims in the sex war, "continually demeaned and insulted" by women without a whimper of protest.
Lessing, who became a feminist icon with the books The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, said a "lazy and insidious" culture had taken hold within feminism that revelled in flailing men.
Young boys were being weighed down with guilt about the crimes of their sex, she told the Edinburgh book festival, while energy which could be used to get proper child care was being dissipated in the pointless humiliation of men.
"I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed," the 81-year-old Persian-born writer said yesterday.
For far too long our media and government have failed to fully inform us–even to the point of lying–about Iraq.
NEW YORK - Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five'' and "Cat's Cradle,'' died Wednesday. He was 84.
1/4" phone plug to locking 4-pin connector for use between instrument and A-T UniPak™ body-pack wireless transmitters. 36" (0.9 m) cable.
During havoc-wreaking ERP implementations, the researchers found that team composition, top management support and organizational communication proved more important than change management. During ERP upgrades, change management fared similarly, coming in fourth behind team composition, organizational communication and project management.
For example, I work with a CIO who produces an annual report that shares what the business has accomplished with IT’s support. It also talks about where they will jointly focus their effort and dollars for next year. As with any good annual report, it discusses the financials: spend versus budget, benefits of previous projects versus plan, cost-saving initiatives versus plan, etc. It also discusses what they’re doing to prepare for the future from an architecture and technology standpoint. It has been extremely well-received, and this is in a non-high-tech company
The “atomization” of technology (many more subcomponents and vendors) also means that no IT department can afford to supply or even be competent in every technology. At the same time, companies don’t want to be locked into a single vendor or approach, with no endgame in sight. They want to avoid creating the legacy environment of the future.
Popular Mechanics designed a test pitting seven common CFLs against a 75-watt incandescent bulb. To gather objective data, we used a Konica Minolta CL-200 chroma meter to measure color temperature and brightness, and a Watts up? Pro ammeter to track power consumption. Our subjective data came from a double-blind test with three PM staffers and Jesse Smith, a lighting expert from Parsons The New School for Design, in Manhattan. We put our participants in a color-neutral room and asked them to examine colorful objects, faces and reading material, then rate the bulbs’ performance.
And afterward instead of feeling guilty or regretting that second fistful of French fries, we both agreed that we would look back on that delicious 10 minute period exactly as if it was some of the most spectacular sex we’ve ever had in our lives.
In her new role, Ms. Burrowes will be responsible for advising on communication challenges, managing potential media crises, monitoring the media, writing press releases, newsletters and positioning statements, and liaising with the media as well as with clients. She will report to the Managing Director.
Troncossi PR names new consultant
The public relations firm Troncossi has appointed Sandra Burrowes as a consultant, it was announced in a press statement.
Ms Burrowes will be responsible for advising on communication challenges, managing potential media crises, monitoring the media, writing press releases, newsletters and positioning statements, and liaising with the media as well as with clients.
Ms Burrowes headed Ready, Aim, Market!, a consulting business providing publishing, marketing and media relations expertise to publishers, authors, and industry organisations.
How does it work? Very well. I focused on a bookshelf and photographed it from across my study in available light. The focal length was 200 mm (equivalent to a 300-mm lens on a traditional 35-mm film camera) and the shutter speed was about 1/6 second. With the VR mechanism turned on, the image was quite sharp. With VR turned off—notwithstanding my steady hands—it was rather blurry.
The report identifies three broad ways to manage IT spending: resource management, work management and demand management. But those are basic principles of good governance in any IT organization--keep projects running well, keep infrastructure and people costs under control and have a good spending management process in place. They are necessary whether you are spending 25 percent of revenue on IT, as some financial services companies do, or less than two percent, as some retailers do.
What would really help is a better way of justifying the proper level of ambition of IT in the specific context of the company, its competition and its customers. For example, how information-intensive are the company’s products? How decentralized is the company? Are there obvious opportunities to create new products or business capabilities using IT that could justify being considered over and above the usual IT budget?
Starting with an average number and then trying to justify why internal spending should be higher or lower seems like a terrible way to determine your fate as an IT organization. How about starting with the business strategy of the company and proximity of customers to information products and services and working back to a number from there?
The Story of ... Rush which aired on MuchMusic in 2002.
On the other hand, I'm far more inclined to take seriously a picture of Baghdad that comes from a life-long Baghdadi than one coming from a Westerner who has parachuted into town for a while, and who doesn't speak the language.
Imagine abandoned, destitute, or abused children who are given love, shelter, food and education so they may thrive in a world that once seemed almost hopeless. That is what Dr. Prabhavati Dwabha envisioned as a result of her spiritual practice on the banks of the River Ganga in Northern India, so she formed Ramana’s Garden Home for Destitute Children (Ramana's Seva Samiti) there more than 10 years ago.
All the letters are out so I think it is safe to say it in this venue: this June we're moving to St. Paul where I will be the pastor of Fairmount Avenue church. The official language is, "It is the intention of Bishop Sally Dyck to appoint (me) to Fairmount Avenue United Methodist Church."
Coal and oil are, over the long term, far more valuable as chemical feedstocks than as fuels anyway, and burning them is unacceptably filthy regardless of greenhouse issues. We should replace them as soon as possible with nice, clean, greenhouse-friendly nuclear plants and other environmentally friendly power technologies. Burning less carbon is good planetary hygiene, and good practice generally, regardless of what you think of global warming. So, I suppose, in a way we should be pursuing global warming remedies regardless of what you think about global warming.
The gethuman project is a consumer movement to improve the quality of phone support in the US. This free website is run by volunteers and is powered by over one million consumers who demand high quality phone support from the companies that they use. More info.
Teaching life-long computer skills in our schools offers further benefit in that it gives students insights that they're unlikely to pick up on their own. In contrast, as software gets steadily easier to use, anyone will be able to figure out how to draw a pie chart. People will learn how to use features on their own, when they need them -- and thus have the motivation to hunt for them. It's the conceptual things that get endlessly deferred without the impetus of formal education.
I’m stupid, clueless, dumb – hell, I’m a complete moron. I’m so inept, in fact, that a new word has been created to capture my incompetence: “luser.” I feel terrible about it, I really do; it was never my intention to upset my IT department – heck, the whole IT industry – by not being bright enough to use the wonderful tools they give me. But I just can’t seem to get it right.
iTunes has a (deservedly) bad reputation for taking total control of your music and videos, including where they live on your computer. It wasn't always easy to move your library in past versions of the software, but happily iTunes 7 makes relocating an existing media library pretty painless - that is, with a little know-how. Here's how to get it done.
I keep three types of labels in Gmail: permanent/manual labels, permanent/filter-based labels and temporary labels. Each has certain naming conventions.
Permanent labels (underscore, all caps): Being an "eat your own dog food" type 'o girl, I keep my Gmail inbox empty using my previously-published Trusted Trio system of 3 buckets: Action, Archive and Hold. Since Gmail archive's built right in, the trusted Trio in Gmail is actually the Dependable Duo: _ACTION and _HOLD (since archived messages go out of sight anyway.) The underscore keeps these labels - the most important ones - at the top of the list, and the all caps is just for emphasis.
Filter-based labels (parens): I've also got a few longer-term labels for automatically shuttling messages out of my inbox: like tips email, mailing list messages, and unwanted messages that might very well be spam. I use parentheses to sort them below the "Dependable Duo."
Short-term labels (asterisk): Last, I keep a couple of short-term labels for current projects (like the Lifehacker book) sorted at the bottom of the list using an asterisk (like "*book.") These labels will be deleted at some point when I don't need them anymore.
A swarm of petulant blind men are gathered around an elephant, searching him inch by inch for something at which to sneer. What they resent is not so much that he towers over them, and can see farther than they can imagine. Nor is it that he has been trying for nearly half a century to warn them of the tigers approaching through the distant grasses downwind. They do resent these things, but what they really, bitterly resent is his damnable contention that they are not blind, his insistent claim that they can open up their eyes any time they acquire the courage to do so.
Unforgivable.
I must mention a "derived" benefit from dynamism that flows from its effects on productivity and self-realization. A more innovative economy tends to devote more resources to investing of all kinds--in new employees and customers as well as new office and factory space. And although this may come about through a shift of resources from the consumer-goods sector, it also comes through the recruitment of new participants to the labor force. Also, the resulting increase of employee-engagement serves to lower quit rates and, hence, to make possible a reduction of the "natural" unemployment rate. Thus, high dynamism tends to bring a pervasive prosperity to the economy on top of the productivity advances and all the self-realization going on. True, that may not be pronounced every month or year. Just as the creative artist does not create all the time, but rather in episodes and breaks, so the dynamic economy has heightened high-frequency volatility and may go through wide swings. Perhaps this volatility is not only normal but also productive from the point of view of creativity and, ultimately, achievement.
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Hydrogen is only a source of energy if it can be taken in its pure form and reacted with another chemical, such as oxygen. But all the hydrogen on Earth, except that in hydrocarbons, has already been oxidized, so none of it is available as fuel. [...] The trouble is that making hydrogen requires more energy than the hydrogen so produced can provide. Hydrogen, therefore, is not a source of energy. It simply is a carrier of energy. And it is, as we shall see, an extremely poor one.
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