[Quote:]

A prominent Senate Democrat on Wednesday said federal and local police should use custom software to monitor peer-to-peer networks for illegal activity, and he wants to spend $1 billion in tax dollars to help make that happen.

At an afternoon Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing about child exploitation on the Internet, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it’s “pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation” simply by looking at file names.

Somebody break out a fresh clue-bat for Senator Biden…

[Quote:]

The company uses re-purposed artificial snow machines to generate the floating ads and messages, dubbed Flogos. The machines can pop one Flogo out every 15 seconds, flooding the air with foamy peace signs or whatever shape a client desires. Renting the machine for a day starts out at a cost of about $2,500.

Designers use computer software to make a stencil that when placed into the snow machine, “cuts the foam in the exact right shape,” said Flogo inventor Francisco Guerra.

The Flogos are about two feet long and nearly a foot wide, and generally last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, depending on conditions in the atmosphere, according to the company.

“They will fly for miles,” Guerra said. “They are durable so they last a while.”

They generally bob to heights of 300 to 500 feet (90 to 150 meters), the inventors say, though they can rise up to 20,000 feet (6,100 meters) in the air.

Guerra says that Flogos are environmentally friendly as the soaps that make up the foamy shapes are derived from plants, and that eventually a Flogo “just evaporates in the air.”

“It does not pollute the skies,” he told LiveScience.

I disagree with your limited explanation of the word “pollute”.

[Quote:]

Hedge fund managers, those masters of a secretive, sometimes volatile financial universe, are making money on a scale that once seemed unimaginable, even in Wall Street’s rarefied realms.

One manager, John Paulson, made $3.7 billion last year. He reaped that bounty, probably the richest in Wall Street history, by betting against certain mortgages and complex financial products that held them.

Paulson, the founder of Paulson & Company, was not the only big winner. The hedge fund managers James Simons and George Soros each earned almost $3 billion last year, according to an annual ranking of top hedge fund earners by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine, which comes out Wednesday.

Meanwhile, here’s what these robber barons have done last year:

[Quote:]

Merrill Lynch & Co. posted its third-straight quarterly loss Thursday and said it would cut another 4,000 jobs, as damage from a poorly managed plunge into risky credit-market activities under its previous chief executive continued to hurt the U.S. broker.

The loss of $1.96 billion, or $2.19 a share, was driven by $6.6 billion in write-downs related to mortgages, complex securities called collateralized debt obligations, and loans made to junk-rated companies. Merrill wrote down another $3.1 billion in mortgage-related securities held at its U.S. banks, though that hit for accounting reasons only showed up on the broker’s balance sheet.

[..]

Merrill’s loss would have been a lot deeper had it not been for a $2.1 billion gain booked on the declining value of the bank’s own debt. The move, while counterintuitive, is a legitimate quirk of mark to market accounting. Merrill’s Wall Street peers also book such benefits, though Merrill’s was unusually large.

[Quote:]

Turnout at the “100 Mayors for Hillary” rally was a little under 20 percent.

Nineteen mayors of Pennsylvania cities showed up for Tuesday’s rally in the Rotunda of the Pennsylvania Capitol. Other mayors’ names were listed on placards supporting Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York for the Democratic presidential nomination.

[Quote:]

Who owns a recipe? Yesterday, the McCain campaign Web site had to dismantle its “Cindy’s Recipes” page after the Huffington Post revealed that the recipes were not lovingly created by Cindy McCain, so much as clumsily copied from the Food Network.

[Quote:]

The audacity of cynicism:

[Quote:]

Feted at the White House on his 81st birthday, Pope Benedict XVI praised Americans for their deep religious beliefs Wednesday but later told the nation’s bishops that the scourge of clergy sex abuse had sometimes been “very badly handled.”

[..]

Benedict returned to the clergy sex abuse scandal that has cost the American church more than $2 billion, most paid out to victims in the last six years, calling it a cause of “deep shame.” He decried the “enormous pain” that communities have suffered from such “gravely immoral behavior” by priest.

Sounds fine, right? Well, no. Guess who gets the blame for it all:

Benedict addressed clerical molesters in the wider context of secularism and the over-sexualization of America. “What does it mean to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media widely available today?” he asked.

Because, you see, it wasn’t the poor priests who raped these kids for years and years and then tried to hide the facts from the world, it was that evil secularism that did it – and the media, of course…!”

[Quote:]

One memorable montage of clips Stewart presented showed, in order, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, Vice President Cheney, President Bush, and former CIA Director George Tenet all saying, “We don’t torture.”

Quipped Stewart, “You may know that group as the non-profit organization ‘People for the Ethical Treatment of Nobody.’”

Video clip at the link. They are fucking war criminals.

[Quote:]

Reflecting what seemed to be the main consensus of the night - that ABC botched this debate, big time - Charlie Gibson tells the crowd there will be one more, superfluous commercial break of the night and is subsequently jeered.

“OH…” he declares, hands raised in defense. “The crowd is turning on me, the crowd is turning on me.”

over 11,000 comments appear to agree that ABC fucked this one up.

[Quote:]

Air pollution is killing the smell of flowers, possibly eliminating the “scent trail” that helps guide those terribly important pollinators, like bees, to the plants that depend upon them for survival, scientists believe.

The discovery could be one of several factors in the “colony collapse disorder” that is wiping out honey bees around the world.

While it is still too soon to determine the full impact of air pollution on the symbiotic relationship between insects and the flowers they pollinate, researchers at the University of Virginia are confident they have shown that pollutants are killing the scent trail, and that could turn out to be extremely significant.

[Quote:]

The flowers are losing their scent
The buzz of bees is diminishing
The stock of the forest is spent
The banquet of fish is finishing
The glaciers are melting and dying
The frogs are all covered in mould
The birds have given up flying
The soil’s become sterile and old
Every colourful creature that flew or that crept
Will disappear utterly. Nobody wept
At their fading; no-one will notice until
Every path, every road grows silent and still
If you dwell on the scene, you’ll see the decay:
So put the pleasure back into driving by purchasing a new H2 Hummer today.

[Quote:]

The government has refused to investigate BT’s covert wiretapping of thousands of its customers in 2006 and 2007, despite its own expert’s view that without consent Phorm’s advertising targeting technology is a breach of criminal law.

Whitehall’s willingness to turn a blind eye to the fact that tens of thousands of people were spied on by big business in order to serve up targeted marketing has angered web users. “I’m absolutely sickened and appalled,” Pete John, who has tried to interest authorities, told The Register this week.

BT customers who have attempted to report the secret listening and profiling experiments to the police have been told to approach the Home Office. One was subsequently told over email by an official: “It is important to remember that private companies such as ISPs are allowed to do certain things under section 3 of [the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act] that Law Enforcement Agencies cannot do without permission.”

All Hallow the Corporation!

[Quote:]

For the first three quarters of 2007, $1.1 trillion in Army accounting entries hadn’t been properly reviewed and substantiated, according to the Department of Defense’s inspector general. In 2006, $258.2 billion of recorded withdrawals and payments from the Army’s main account were unsupported. It’s as if the Army had submitted multibillion-dollar expense reports without any receipts.

I would suggest looking into the books of Halliburton, Blackwater, the defense companies, and Dick Cheney’s offshore bank accounts for the money.

[Quote:]

As you well informed blog readers all know by now, last week ABC broke an interesting little story. It was about how Condi Rice, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, Colin Powell, George Tenent, John Ashcroft and other Bush “Principals” all gathered in regular meetings in the White House to discuss and approve of the various torture methods being used against prisoners held by the United States in the War On Terror. ABC interviewed the president a couple of days later and asked him if he was aware of these meetings and he said he was not only aware of them, but that he’d approved of them. Moreover, he specifically said he had no regrets about what was done to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who we know was tortured with simulated drowning — also known as “waterboarding” — which is considered by the entire civilized world to be torture.

As I said, we know all this. The blogs have been writing about it non-stop since last week, stunned and appalled at the picture of these high level public officials sitting around watching power point presentations about the efficacy of sexual humiliation and CIA operatives “acting out” various torture techniques for their approval.

[..]

They were aware that what they were doing was wrong, immoral. Attorney General John Ashcroft warned them that by doing such things, right in the White House, “history would not be kind.” But they did it. The president approved it. ABC reported it. And nobody else in the media cares.

I think they don’t care because, hey, it wasn’t Condoleezza Rice’s pastor who made the weird statements, right?

This is making the rounds, and it is claimed to be an internal microsoft video.

I think it is so astonishingly bad, I somehow doubt it is real. But if it is real, it tells you a lot about Microsoft today…