From a Canadian official who did it: Cutting deficit is no easy task
Topic: United States
2:34 pm EST, Nov 20, 2010
(CNN) -- When Paul Martin became finance minister of Canada in 1993, the government was spending itself into a deep hole. Its spiraling debt was prompting observers to compare it to a Third World country. Martin unveiled budgets that steeply cut the $42 billion deficit and eliminated it in four years without long-term damage to the economy.
The example of Canada has been cited and debated as governments in developed countries around the world are looking for ways to cut spending and reduce the size of their debts. Britain has embarked on sweeping spending cuts with an eye toward Canada as a model. In the United States, the midterm elections focused attention on the size of the budget deficit.
Martin, a Liberal Party member who later became prime minister, says lessons can be learned from his nation's experience, though he says many differences exist between Canada's situation in the 1990s and the U.S. economy today.
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America should consult Canada and learn from their approach and implementation to reducing govt debt.
The clandestine payload going up this time, known only by its launch identification number of NROL-32, is widely believed to be an essential eavesdropping spacecraft that requires the powerful lift provided by the Delta 4-Heavy to reach its listening post.
In an address to the Air Force Association conference in September, NRO Director Bruce Carlson, a retired Air Force general, said this rocket launch would carry "the largest satellite in the world on it."
The NRO has flown various types of communication-interceptors since the dawn of the space age, and analysts say it is virtually certain this Delta 4-Heavy is hauling another.
"I believe the payload is the fifth in the series of what we call Mentor spacecraft, a.k.a. Advanced Orion, which gather signals intelligence from inclined geosynchronous orbits. They are among the largest satellites ever deployed," said Ted Molczan, a respected sky-watcher who keeps tabs on orbiting spacecraft.
The choice, Senator, is clear: either you vote for the new U.S.-Russia treaty to cut nuclear weapons, and you do it right now, or this adorable girl is going to die, right on the greenery of the National Mall. The Cold War is back and going hot, all over New START. -- Pleaaaaaase... too much drama in the political ads...
Behold the U.S.’s new counterinsurgency tool in Afghanistan: the M1 Abrams tank, your ultimate in 30-year old precision firepower.
Increasingly distant are the days when Defense Secretary Robert Gates worried aloud about replicating the Soviet Union’s failed heavy footprint in Afghanistan. Under the command of General David Petraeus, the military’s leading advocate of counterinsurgency, an unconventional war is looking surprisingly conventional.
NATO planes are dropping more bombs than at any time since the 2001 invasion. Special Forces have been operating on a tear since the summer, to the point where Afghanistan’s president is saying enough is enough. The coalition is using massive surface-to-surface missiles to clear the Taliban out of Kandahar. And now the tanks are rolling in.
What do the tanks add to the fight? There’s some attempt at spinning their 120-millimeter guns as precision weapons, but one military official bluntly tells Chandrasekaran, “the tanks bring awe, shock and firepower.” Because “shock and awe” always works.
A report in the Wall Street Journal cites Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg as saying the company is mulling over the possibility of changing its price model and charging users based on speed rather than data consumption. Seidenberg said the chance would be made possible by the carrier's move to its 4G LTE network.
Though these plans are not set in stone just yet, Big Red's CFO, Fran Shammo, echoed Seidenberg's proposal, detailing that the carrier's LTE network can deliver between 1 and 12 megabits per second of data.
"If you want to pay for less speed, you'll pay for less speed and consume more, or you can pay for high speed and consume less," Shammo said yesterday.
In the coming months we’ll see the first dual-core Cortex A9 based NVIDIA Tegra 2 SoCs ship in devices. Sometime next year we’ll see A9 based OMAP4 SoCs in smartphones as well. So what does Qualcomm have in store for us over the next few years?
First we have the MSM8260 and 8660 SoCs. These are based on Qualcomm’s current generation technologies: integrating two Scorpion cores and an Adreno 205 GPU on a single 45nm die. The 8260 features HSPA+ support, while the 8660 supports HSPA+, CDMA2000 and 1xEV-DO Rev. B. These two dual-core SoCs will run at 1.2GHz. We should see a GPU upgrade here as well.
The 8x60 SoCs started sampling over the summer and we should expect to see them in high end smartphones sometime in 2011 at the earliest.
Atlanta, Georgia (CNN) -- A federal judge pleaded guilty Friday to two counts of drug possession and another charge, admitting he had paid a stripper to buy drugs for the two to use together. Senior U.S. District Court Judge Jack Camp Jr. admitted to giving money to a woman to buy drugs, according to prosecutors.
He pleaded guilty to two counts of drug possession, federal prosecutors said. He also pleaded guilty to one count of conversion of government property for giving the woman a government-issued laptop. As part of a plea deal, Camp did not plead guilty to a firearms possession charge included in the initial federal complaint.
