Overhaul

CANADA - Russell Township residents who are wheelchair-bound or with other mobility problems will soon be able to go on errands around town in a cab that meets their needs, and they won’t have to pay extra to have their wheelchair loaded on board. (...)

I was going to save this one for the next Touching Up, but the more I delved into it, the more I realized that this was much more than a bite-sized news morsel. Plus, I really like this game, and this update has just made me like it even more. For those of you familiar [...]

The Florida Chamber today released a statement expressing its opposition to the proposed education governance overhaul pending in the Legislature (specifically the House) -- joining the Florida Council of 100 and newspaper editorial boards across the state. "We urge patience...

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson today unveiled a 218-page plan aimed at revamping the financial framework of the U.S. economy to promote economic growth and stability. The so-called “Blueprint for a Modernized Financial Regulatory Structure” proposes a series of sweeping changes, including “short term” and “intermediate term” recommendations to improve and reform the U.S. regulatory structure. “The current [...]

The US has been driving a 1929 manufactured car for a little too long. It finds that it need to be changed to a faster and more reliable one, one that can face the challenges of the complex financial structure in the country.The Bush administration Monday proposed the most far-ranging overhaul of the financial regulatory system since the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great

Coming in the midst of an economic crisis that has shaken Main Street homeowners and Wall Street investment bankers, the Bush administration’s sweeping proposal to overhaul the financial regulatory system sounds like an emergency measure, but it is the culmination of a longer-running debate about how best to nurture American free-market capitalism.Some of the most [...]

Apparently studied for over a year (and well before the sub-prime mortgage market started its meltdown), the Bush Administration has proposed an extensive overhaul of how the federal government regulates the banking system, although given a Democratic-controlled Congress, the process could take some time. From an L.A. Times story:The Bush administration is proposing a sweeping overhaul of the nation's financial regulatory system, combining what is now an alphabet soup of government agencies into three streamlined regulators. The proposal is the result of a year of study by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and has the support of the president, according to Treasury officials who spoke on condition of anonymity Friday...The Securities and Exchange Commission and a handful of other fe

Paulson calls for total regulatory revamp By Michael Kitchen, MarketWatch Last Update: 10:53 AM ET Mar 29, 2008 NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson plans to call for extensive, wide-ranging reforms to the way the government regulates financial markets, including proposals to give the Federal Reserve more power and create new bodies to monitor mortgages and other transactions. The [...]

Paulson To Propose Broad Overhaul Of U.S. Financial RegulationFederal Reserve will get broad new powers to be primary markets stabilizer. Link - Sat, 29 Mar 2008 07:17:05 GMT - Feed (2 subs) Sent using SendMeRss.com. Visit here to unsubscribe from "2-business" via X2 in Google. Recommended Feeds/Actions Subscribe MSNBC.com: Politics

Now it's up to the House. The Senate just voted 32-4, with Sens. Arthenia Joyner, Nan Rich, Charlie Justice and Stephen Oelrich opposed, for a proposed constitutional amendment that will ask voters to overhaul education governance in Florida. The education...

The next 12 months will see the broadcast sector addressing new business models for distribution and advertising in a bid to retain and attract new audiences. This is one of the key conclusions to be drawn in a new report which says that the transforming communications and entertainment sector is creating a challenging new environment [...]

BETHESDA, Maryland (Reuters, Mar 26 2008) - The U.S. government began a major overhaul of its effort to produce an AIDS vaccine on Tuesday, stressing a return to basic scientific research after the failure of a key clinical trial last year.Government officials at a summit with AIDS scientists pledged to prioritize spending on lab work and animal tests rather than expensive, and thus far disappointing, large-scale vaccine trials on humans."We need to turn the knob in the direction of discovery. That is unambiguous," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who convened the meeting outside of Washington."We really do need new and novel ideas."The vaccine summit follows the failure last year of an experimental HIV vaccine developed by Merc

A few Senate Democrats including Ted Deutch (left) questioned the need for a proposed constitutional amendment overhauling K-20 education governance, but SB 2308 - a priority of Senate President Ken Pruitt - appears headed for passage in his chamber, based...

Major overhaul over at the Phooey Tech Hole is underway and posts will be slow the coming few days. Elements adding to the current My Gears line - Quad-core PC (really overdue) Another monitor for dual monitor mode and as second monitor for the Sony Vaio UX-27 External USB hard disk (for that extra storage) Softwares such as [...]

The proposed legislation to overhaul management of the Johnnie Byrd Alzheimer's Center by putting it under the oversight of USF just cleared its first Senate committee, despite one lawmaker's concerns over financial accountability and research autonomy. The bill (SB 1080)...

The proposal to overhaul education governance with a constitutional amendement is headed to the Senate floor, following a fast track that had the proposal going only to higher education appropriations and a government operations committee. And it just passed out...

Lawmakers' proposal to overhaul education governance in Florida, with an elected education commissioner and weak university oversight board, will "unnecessarily politicize Florida's education system" and cause the university system to "suffer." So says the Florida Council of 100, in a...

This from the Herald-Leader:FRANKFORT, Ky. --The state Senate has approved a bill that would overhaul Kentucky's methods for testing student achievement.The plan calls for ending the Commonwealth Accountability Testing System. That divisiveness of the proposal was reflected in the Senate's 22-15 party-line vote on Friday. The measure now goes to the House for consideration.The bill now moves into choppy waters in the House. Speaker Jody Richards predicted the measure would fail there. Governor Steve Beshear is poised to veto the bill if it passes both chambers.

This from KyPost.com:Gov. Steve Beshear Gov. Steve Beshear today came out strongly against a proposal led by Senate President David Williams to overhaul Kentucky's CATS testing program.The governor said the proposal has multiple flaws, and called on lawmakers to reject it."Although we've made measurable progress in student achievement over the last decade and a half, public education in Kentucky is not yet where it needs to be,'' Beshear said in a statement released Wednesday. "This bill will not help us get there,'' he asserted.Williams and other proponents of the overhaul say the existing CATS program is too subjective, takes too much time to administer and gives parents andeducators too little in the way of useful information about how students are progressing relative to their peers ac

AMD 780 Series Gives Mainstream PCs an Innovation Overhaul: Robust 3D Gaming, Ultimate Blu-ray Experience and Energy Efficiency - AMD today announced the availability of the industry’s most advanced motherboard GPU, the AMD 780 Series, delivering a rich computing experience for casual gamers and multimedia enthusiasts as the core of quiet and energy-efficient PC designs. When paired with an AMD Phenom™ 9000 series quad-core processor or Athlon™ 64 X2 dual-core processor, the AMD 780 [...] More: continued here Other Review: Landslide (Audio CD)

I have grown very sick and tired of ESPN's NASCAR coverage. From the live races to there "NASCAR Programs" like NASCAR Now. They don't seem professional to me and especially their race coverage is boring.This past weekend at Bristol, Kasey Kahne was leading with Newman in second. Caution came out and everyone came down pit road. They never showed Kahne or Newman on pit road except of Kane leaving and being the first off of pit road. They showed other guys on pit road that were much farther back. All the viewers new was that Kahne was the first on and first off. Newman was second on and 4th off. They didn't even really know that, they had to wait for the restart.How many times do they not show the top 2 on pit road especially when they are racing pretty close? Granted, no matter what and no matter what station, Newman does not get much coverage. But running in second should have got some and with Kane leading he should have been shown on pit road. Commercial. Could they possibly have

Toronto Hydro asks for 4% rate hike. Faced with a rapidly deteriorating network of underground hydro cables, Toronto Hydro-Electric Systems has asked the energy regulator for a 4 per cent rate hike to help fund what's expected to be a $1.2 billion system overhaul over the next decade.Canada's largest electric utility filed its latest three-year rate application to the Ontario Energy Board yesterday. If approved, the average residential customer's monthly hydro bill will be $4.46 higher in 2010 compared with today.Customers would pay $3.10 more a month beginning May 1, 2009 and another $1.59 a month the following year. In 2008, however, rates would actually decrease by a modest 23 cents a month. The rate hikes would also apply to small businesses in the city."This is needed investment. We need to invest in our system," said Pankaj Sardana, vice-president of treasury, rates and regulatory affairs at Toronto Hydro.He said the utility anticipates having to spend slightly more than $900

The freelance job listings on Gizfolio have just had a whole bunch of new features and updates, thanks to the feedback of our members and even some non-members. Each listing is now far more interactive and offers more control to both buyer and freelancer… Job listers (buyers) can now link to external websites, PDF documents, google maps and downloadable files in the job description. Potential applicants can ask questions and discuss the project when (or before) they make an offer on it. Hooray! Job listings can be flagged as Spam, Wrong Category, or Duplicate post. This will become more important later, as spammers catch on to free job listings. Gits. Well, that’s it for now - more updates as they happen (we have a room full of cambodian slaves working on it) - and keep an eye out for our first competition to be announced very (very) soon!

Health Care Insurance in CaliforniaCalifornia Senate President Pro Tempore Don Perata (D) and Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez (D) on Thursday merged their health care proposals into a single bill (AB 8) that would require employers to contribute 7.5% of their payrolls to workers' health coverage, the Los Angeles Times reports. The proposal excludes a requirement that all state residents obtain health care insurance -- a "cornerstone" of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's (R) health care proposal, the Times reports (Rau, Los Angeles Times, 6/22).Both chambers of the California Legislature earlier this month approved Democratic plans to overhaul the state health care system and provide health insurance coverage for more uninsured residents. Following the vote, Democratic lawmakers and a spokesperson for Schwarzenegger said that they will work during the summer to negotiate a compromise plan.Schwarzenegger's health insurance plan would levy a 4% fee on businesses that do not provide health b

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, Tuesday announced an ambitious plan to reduce greenhouse emissions by up to 40 percent by 2020, an initiative welcomed by environmentalists but harshly criticized by the energy industry, a powerful lobby. Merkel also ruled out any change to the government's nuclear policy before the next election, scheduled for 2009, that calls for the industry to be phased out in the next 14 years. As part of the emissions-cutting plan, Merkel said she intended to require energy producers to increase efficiency by 3 percent each year and improve conservation. "This is about putting in place a long-term energy policy until 2020 for the environment that includes energy efficiency and energy security," Merkel said after an energy summit meeting attended by the biggest electricity, natural gas and coal companies in Germany. Merkel has made the reduction of greenhouse gases one of the hallmarks of her domestic and foreign policy, and conservation is a central theme

Regular readers may have noticed that we are not posting quite as much at the moment in comparison to our usual output. This is due to the fact that we are busy behind the scenes working on a completely new look for the site to be released to celebrate our first anniversary. The reasoning? To be honest, we’ve become a little bored of orange now (it’s just so ‘yesterday’) and, besides, our present site template has been causing us no end of headaches of late. Not only that, but we have learned a lot whilst designing our new sister site, e-Potpourri, many of the lessons from which we would like to now realise as far as TFTS is concerned. The task is truly mammoth as – never ones to do things by halves – we will have to re-do every single image contained on the whole of the site to allow for a new custom image template. To put that into stark perspective this involves re-doing significantly more than 1000 images one by one (sends a shiver down my spine just thinking about it)

PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- They all voted for it, but that was then. Democratic presidential candidates came out swinging Monday, not at each other but at the No Child Left Behind law. They spoke at the annual convention of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union.While the candidates received a warm response in the City of Brotherly Love, mere mention of President Bush's signature education law elicited loud hisses and boos from the thousands of teachers on hand.The law, passed with broad Democratic support in 2001, requires public school students to be tested annually in reading and math in third- through eighth-grade and once in high school. It is up for renewal this year in Congress.An NEA criticism of the law is that it forces teachers to spend too much time on test preparation instead of other forms of instruction, and many teachers wore buttons or stickers reading, "A child is more than a test score."Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., sported the sticker on his

Democrats in Congress are pushing to overhaul the nation's student loan system with legislation that would cut federal subsidies to lending companies by as much as $19 billion, channel most of those savings to student aid and ease repayment rules for borrowers.The Senate education committee overwhelmingly approved its version of the legislation yesterday, one week after the House education panel took similar action. Senior Democrats predicted that the bills would come to a vote by the end of next month and would be reconciled without significant difficulty.Momentum for the legislation has grown this year as the $85 billion-a-year industry has come under intense scrutiny. Federal and state investigations have found conflicts of interest among lenders, universities and government regulators. In addition, the Democratic takeover of Congress this year has allowed the party to drive its agenda on student loans for the first time in more than a decade.This from the Washington Post.

Voters will get to decide in January whether to phase out Save Our Homes in favor of a massive new homestead exemption, after the Republican-controlled Florida House muscled the sweeping ballot measure through on a party-line vote. The 74-43 vote in the House follows similarly partisan approval in the Senate earlier this afternoon, and it marks [...]

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about my web host, mediatemple or (mt) for short. For the most part, they have been very good and their grid server has been able to handle all diggs, stumbles, slashdots and other traffic spikes with no problem whatsoever. These spikes eat up bandwidth but luckily, many shared web hosting companies out there will offer ridiculous amounts of storage and bandwidth knowing that you will probably use a very small percentage of it. One resource that they do limit you on is CPU usage. If you read the terms of service of pretty much any web hosts, I’m sure you’ll find limits imposed that will greatly limit your service potential. mediatemple is no exception to this rule except that they are very upfront and open about it. They have a system in place to keep track of how much CPU resource you are taking up. I explain it in more detail in this post but basically, (mt) allocates 1,000 GPU units per month, which averages out to u

Five major property developers have been invited to take up the controversial project to redevelop Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum. Spread over an area of 1.75 kms along the Mahim river in Central Mumbai, the slum houses some 57,000 families – about 30,000 people who will be accommodated into free but small 1 bedroom homes in the area. The drive is decided to clean the land for business and development of exclusive high rise buildings. Dharavi occupies 535 acres between the suburbs of Sion and Kurla on one side and the tiny area of Bandra on the other. Prominent developers have shown large interest in the project. It includes DLF Ltd., Kalpataru Construction Pvt. Ltd., Group, Unitech Ltd., Hiranandani Developers Pvt. Ltd. and companies belonging to the Reliance Industries group and the Anil D Ambani Group, told a senior officer at Slum Redevelopment Authority (SRA) who did not wish to be named. The estimated cost of the project is Rs 9,300 crore which has been modified from the earlie

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (AP) — Purdue University is moving ahead with a planned $82 million overhaul of Mackey Arena, which would include building practice, sports medicine, conditioning and office facilities around its more…

By Donna SmithWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Leading U.S. senators reached an agreement on Thursday on immigration reform that would strengthen U.S. borders and grant lawful status to millions of illegal immigrants, a deal that could lead to a major legislative victory for President George W. Bush.This sets the stage for what is expected to be a passionate Senate debate over the plan, which would give some 12 million illegal immigrants legal status, create a temporary worker program and set up a merit-based system for future newcomers.Continue Reading...

Bush Says He Is Winning Immigration Overhaul Support (Update2): BloombergExcerpt:"President George W. Bush said he is gaining new support for immigration overhaul as his administration works with lawmakers in both political parties to try to tackle the issue this year.``I am pleased that some of those who had doubts about comprehensive reform last year are now open to supporting it,'' Bush said in his weekly radio address, without naming who his new supporters are. ``There is a desire on the part of Republicans and Democrats alike to get this problem solved.''"http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=akTlfu6iVMK8&refer=homeAlex

CQ.com: House Passes Disaster Loan Overhaul; GOP Criticizes ‘Double Dipping’ ProvisionExcerpt:"The House passed a bill Wednesday to overhaul the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program, which was criticized for ineffectiveness and delays after the 2005 Gulf Coast hurricanes.The measure, which seeks to enhance the loan program’s preparedness and resources, passed, 267-158. Republicans and the White House complained that the bill (HR 1361) would expose taxpayers to potentially heavy costs."http://public.cq.com/docs/cqt/news110-000002492328.htmlAlex

Screenwriter tapped to rewrite The Hardy Boys big-screen update. Screenwriter Simon Kinberg (Mr. & Mrs. Smith) will overhaul the script for The Hardy Men, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The Fox 2000 movie will star Ben Stiller and Tom Cruise as the now-adult sleuthing siblings from the long-running children’s book series, The Hardy Boys. The mystery book series, which totaled 58 novels, began in 1927 and was written by various ghost writers under the pen name Franklin W. Dixon. The stories revolved around the adventures of amateur teen detectives Frank and Joe Hardy, who often helped their father, a private investigator, in solving crimes. Bob Kosberg, who is producing along with Stiller and Stuart Cornfeld, pitched the idea years ago to have the brothers reunite to solve a mystery after a long estrangement. Kinberg is expected to take the story in a totally different direction. From 1977-79, the ABC primetime series The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, starred Sha

      If you have signed in to your Sampa site on the last few hours you probably have noticed the change. It is big. No... It is huge.       We just released a brand new Site Overview page, which is the first page you see when you sign in to your Design Site. Before, the old Site Overview was ugly plain and it provided you with only a few of useful things you could do despite the fact that it showed you a lot of information.       The new Site Overview (screenshot) is clean, organized, has a nice layout to it and we have made sure that the top activities that you do on the site are just 1-click away, like Upload a Picture, Add a Blog Entry, Add a Page and Edit your profile. And for those of you that are addicted to stats, it

The newest installment of the heroic Headline Animator overhaul series highlights three new additions designed to help you build your online audience by increasing exposure of your content, making that content easily "shareable," and tracking how people are engaging with it. In a nutshell, Mr. Powers, it's really what we do around here. Create and Store Multiple Headline Animators An easy way to increase the exposure of your content is to place it in more places, and nothing says "I have so much more to give" like Headline Animator at the bottom of your emails, on your MySpace page, on forum posts, or on your friend Hendrick's blog. Heck, you can even create an IAB-standard ad unit powered by the content in your feed and place it in an ad network for blogs and feeds. Before today, only one Headline Animator format per feed was allowed. Now? A world without limits! Style up your content to fit its intended destination and store multiple versions with each feed in your FeedBurner ac

Over the weekend Variety posted an article about the MPAA reworking the current ratings system to more accurately reflect film content. It seems that the ‘R’ rating is too broad, and the NC-17 worthless. No mainstream theater will book an NC-17 rated movie, and Blockbuster won’t carry them. Films with a few swear words and brief nudity get the same ‘R’ rating as those with lots of the same, on top of explicit violence. A fix would seem to be in order.I remember when the last ratings adjustment was about to take place, and Siskel & Ebert were lobbying almost weekly for an ‘A’ (for ‘Adult’) rating that would allow for more mature-themed films. This would replace the ‘X’ rating, which wasn’t copyrighted by the MPAA and was quickly adopted by the porn industry as their moniker in various forms.When the change did happen, we ended up with two new ratings: the PG-13 and the NC-17 (which stood for ‘No Children under the age of 17 admitted’). The PG-13 soon beca

Faithful readers are most likely aware of the minutiae that concern us here at FeedBurner inter-agency headquarters, especially when it comes to new features and notable drama such as "We're running low on decaf and 2% milk. OMG!" Today's enhancement to Headline Animator, the FeedBurner service engaged in a renovation comparable to the Dan Ryan expressway reconstruction project (minus the many reflector barrels), is all about expanding the reach of your content and making things look how you want them to look. Place Your Content in More Places, Easily It has been suggested by considerably more than seven of you that we should offer new capabilities to help grow your audience, and that's exactly what we're committed to doing with Headline Animator. It now features step-by-step instructions for placing your content on your MySpace page, a TypePad, Blogger or WordPress.com blog, a bunch of email programs, and "Other," a category we reserve for those interesting places whose names a

So, you may have noticed that things keep changing in foodgeek-land. The foodie decided that he wasn’t happy with the look and feel of our old theme, so he started browsing for some other theme options. After a few tries we settled on this one, because we liked the extra edge room of three columns, and the clean look of the rounded sidebars. Since on top of being a food geek, I am also a computer geek, I spent some time tweaking the layout to fit what we wanted to do with it, and what you see is the mostly final result. You can expect a few more minor changes as we come up with some final touches, but hopefully this is what we’ll be sticking with! So what do you think? We are very open to feedback and suggestions!

In this, the third installment of the widget trilogy that is the Headline Animator overhaul, we're adding to our publisher engagement metrics by providing additional insight into the world's favorite content promotion tool. For the tens of thousands of you currently using FeedBurner's Headline Animator service, you'll notice a new "Headline Animator Stats" option on your Analyze tab. FeedBurner is reporting "Views," the number of times your Headline Animator was requested and displayed on a web site, in a feed, in email or anywhere else (for example, in a feed via email that you're viewing on a web page). This first step on content promotion metrics points out where people are most frequently seeing your content promotion widget. We have several more pieces of work on the Headline Animator front to finish off and then we're going to start weaving together all of the content measurement pieces we provide into a unified engagement dashboard. SUPER BONUS FEATURE: A helpful sign

We are a people who like to provide clues to what we're up to, so when we write "Part 1" in a post title, that is our way of signaling the market that there will be other parts, possibly starting with a Part 2. And lo, here we are with the next phase of the Headline Animator Overhaul from brushed metal ugly duckling of the widget world to multi-functional, multi-purpose content sharing tool. There were lots of publisher requests for default themes, so we've brought the following new favors to the Animator party: nine, count 'em, nine new Theme variations to bring added variety to how you choose to boost subscription to your content. There are new sizes and styles for advertisers, blogs, podcasts, vlogs/videocasts/v-is-for-victorycasts, and a special little number we like to call the Seasonal Theme. This theme's background will update for you automatically as time moves on, with apologies to our friends in the Southern Hemisphere right now for whom this will certainly make no sense

Historians believe that our Headline Animator service was the last known use of brushed metal backgrounds in a public web service. For a couple years now, FeedBurner publishers have courageously placed the one-size-fits-all Headline Animator widget in their sites, email sig files, forums postings, and elsewhere. We finally hitched up our pants, opened our Oscar Wilde phrasebook and announced "Either that brushed metal goes or we do". We hereby violate our own policy of never releasing new features on a friday in order to provide you immediate access to the new "design your own" Headline Animator widget. The New Headline Animator There's a new theme you can choose within the Headline Animator service called "Design your own". When you design your own, you provide us with any background image url, you can even use our default, and this background image becomes a canvas on which you can paint your own headline animator. By "paint", we mean "pick some colors and fonts and then drag a

The Chicklet Creator Wordpress plugin recently got a major update. You now have the ability to select, control and update feed buttons from within the admin panel of your Wordpress blog. It’s just another way we are trying to make getting subscription buttons added to your blog easier. Chicklet Creator Plugin 0.5 Details | Download & Install Page Tags:blog, chicklet creator, feed, plugin

I've decided to change the format of my blog. So, I overhaul much of my previous posts. No longer will my fanart come from deviantart.com. Instead, they will come from Photobucket website. That way, everyone, including those who have Adblock, Flashblock, Jbutton and other blocking tools enabled in their Firefox, Seamonkey, and other Mozilla browsers along with Opera, Kmeleon, and IE7 browsers,