[Quote:]

Former Bear Stearns Cos. hedge fund managers Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, arrested early this morning at their homes in New Jersey and Manhattan, were indicted for mail fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud, the first prosecution in a U.S. crackdown on subprime fraud.

The two men were charged with misleading investors about the health of two Bear Stearns hedge funds whose collapse last year ignited the subprime mortgage crisis. Cioffi was also charged with insider trading. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued the men today, claiming they duped investors before the funds imploded.

[Quote:]

Americans drove 1.4 billion fewer highway miles in April than they did in April 2007, the Department of Transportation said Wednesday.

That marks the sixth consecutive monthly drop and coincides with record gas prices and an increase in transit ridership, Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said.

[..]

Peters expressed concern that the cutbacks have resulted in the collection of fewer taxes on gasoline. Such taxes are funneled to the federal Highway Trust Fund, which gets 18.4 cents per gallon from gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon from diesel fuel.

So because you drive less, the roads will be worse…

[Quote:]

Plans to compress internet (VoIP) phone calls so they use less bandwidth could make them vulnerable to eavesdropping. Most networks are currently safe, but many service providers are due to implement the flawed compression technology.

The new compression technique, called variable bitrate compression produces different size packets of data for different sounds.

That happens because the sampling rate is kept high for long complex sounds like “ow”, but cut down for simple consonants like “c”. This variable method saves on bandwidth, while maintaining sound quality.

VoIP streams are encrypted to prevent eavesdropping. However, a team from John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, US, has shown that simply measuring the size of packets without decoding them can identify whole words and phrases with a high rate of accuracy.

[Quote:]

McCain has a mixed record on supporting off-shore drilling in the senate, but this decision seems to be a bit of a capitulation to the oil companies who are in favor of searching for new sources of oil. McCain is against drilling in ANWR.

“Tomorrow I’ll call for lifting the federal moratorium for states that choose to permit exploration,” McCain said. “I think that this and perhaps providing additional incentives for states to permit exploration off their coasts would be very helpful in the short term in resolving our energy crisis.”

“short” term is a relative thing:

[Quote:]

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently did a detailed study of the likely outcome of offshore drilling for their Annual Energy Outlook 2007, “Impacts of Increased Access to Oil and Natural Gas Resources in the Lower 48 Federal Outer Continental Shelf (OCS).” The sobering conclusion:

The projections in the OCS access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.

And the impact of the projected 7% (!) increase in lower-48 oil production that might result in 2030 thanks to opening the OCS is … wait for it …

… any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.

Yes, the man who would be president has sold out his principles to garner support from the oil industry while achieving no benefit to the American gasoline-consuming public whatsoever even a quarter century from now!

[Quote:]

The Orlando, Fla. vendor of the Barack Obama/White House button that touched off a furor said today that he sold only four of the $2 buttons at last week’s Republican Party of Texas state convention, including one snapped up by a newspaper employee.

In the first interview he’s given on the flap, Jonathan Alcox said he came up with the button’s message — “If Obama is President… will we still call it the White House?”—based on a newspaper cartoon showing Obama in front of a sign for the White House, thinking to himself something like: “That’s the first thing I’ll change.”

“I’m not crazy,” Alcox said. “Why would I go out there and purposely put a button out there that’s going to offend people? We’re in this for business.”

“I thought what we were doing was clever and funny,” Alcox said. “We’ve never had a black president… It was just a mistake.”

[..]

Party spokesman Hans Klingler said today: “This vendor need not apply to another Texas GOP state convention. The proceeds from their booth space will be donated to charity. We will not tolerate nor profit from bigotry.”

[Quote:]

I recently watched the tendering process for a fairly simple development project. Maybe 5 pages all said an done, all implemented inside an existing sharepoint solution.

Provider 1 quoted about what it should cost. $6000 - cost of the work involved, and a mark up for the hassle of having to spec and bid for the job, and deal with a bureaucracy on completion.

Provider 2 and 3, having had relationships with the company before, quoted 335,000 and 425,000 respectively.

Provider 1 was excluded. Obviously their quote was so low because they were a mickey mouse company that didn’t understand what was required. Provider 2 was questioned closely because they were so much lower then provider 3, and eventually after much reassurance from the sales people of Provider 2, they were selected.

One of the techies from another department saw the quote and asked to see the rest of the spec, assuming there was more to the job then what he was seeing. After the project manager confirmed that no no, that was the spec on which the company had quoted 335,000 - the techie expressed his concerns that the quote was vastly too high. The project manager called back and said ‘One of my advisors thinks this price is really too high’ - the sales monkey put him on hold, came back about 90 seconds later and knocked the price down to 235,000.

Project Manager thinks he got a bargain. Techie got a round of congratulations. And the company spent 40 times as much on the project as they should have.

[Quote:]

A 16-year-old boy whose family relies on faith rather than medical treatment has died after suffering from stomach pain and shortness of breath, police said.

Gladstone, Ore., police said the boy’s relatives, members of the Followers of Christ Church, told police that he had refused medical treatment after becoming ill a week ago. Under state law, anyone over 14 has the right to refuse treatment.

If it weren’t so deeply sad, I’d say it’s evolution in action…

[Quote:]

There is a buy-it-now listing on eBay today where the seller is offering $630 in cash, which he will send electronically to the buyer through PayPal.  The current price for this listing is $715.  Why would someone pay $715 for $630 in cash?  Well, you may have heard that Microsoft recently launched a ridiculous “cash back” promotion in the hopes of bribing Google customers to switch to Microsoft’s search engine, Live.com.  Seems some resourceful people found a loophole in the system.  Apparently, you can get a 10-35% cash back reward for all buy-it-now eBay purchases if you access the eBay listing through Live Search.  So, people are simply selling cash and arbitraging the cash back reward.  Your move, Ballmer.

[Quote:]

The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability.

In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees.” He called the abuse “systemic and illegal.” And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in the New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement.

[..]

“In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. . . .

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

[Quote:]

A patient whose skin cancer had spread throughout his body has been given the all-clear after being injected with billions of his own immune cells.

Tests revealed that the 52-year-old man’s tumours, which spread from his skin to his lung and groin, vanished within two months of having the treatment, and had not returned two years later.

Doctors attempted the experimental therapy as part of a clinical trial after the man’s cancer failed to respond to conventional treatments.

The man is the first to benefit from the new technique, which uses cloning to produce billions of copies of a patient’s immune cells. When they are injected into the body they attack the cancer and force it into remission.

[Quote:]

The market is full of oil and the rising price trend is “fake and imposed,” Iran’s president said on Tuesday, partly blaming a weak U.S. dollar which he said was being pushed lower on purpose.

“At a time when the growth of consumption is lower than the growth of production and the market is full of oil, prices are rising and this trend is completely fake and imposed,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a televised speech.

“It is very clear that visible and invisible hands are controlling prices in a fake way with political and economic aims,” he said when opening a meeting of the OPEC Fund for International Development in the central Iranian city of Isfahan.

[Quote:]

“Half the Mac OS X boxes in the world (confirmed on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard) can be rooted through AppleScript: osascript -e ‘tell app “ARDAgent” to do shell script “whoami”‘; Works for normal users and admins, provided the normal user wasn’t switched to via fast user switching.

ARDAgent is part of Apple Remote Desktop. This only works for accounts where the user is logged on at the time of the exploit. Here’s how to fully remove it:

## Remove old components
rm -rf "/Applications/Remote Desktop.app"
rm -rf "/System/Library/CoreServices/ARD Agent.app"
rm -rf "/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement"
rm -rf "/Library/Receipts/RemoteDesktop"*

## Remove preferences
rm -rf "/Users/[ADMIN USER NAME]/Library/Preferences/com.apple.RemoteDesktop.plist"
rm -rf "/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ARDAgent.plist"
rm -rf "/Library/Preferences/com.apple.RemoteDesktop.plist"
rm -rf "/Library/Preferences/com.apple.RemoteManagement.plist"

## Remove local database
rm -rf "/var/db/RemoteManagement"

Or less destructively:

cd /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/
sudo tar -czf ARDAgent.app.gz ARDAgent.app
sudo chmod 600 ARDAgent.app.gz
sudo rm -rf ARDAgent.app

[Quote:]

To bolster the idea that marijuana is more addictive today, the ONDCP notes that “16.1% of drug treatment admissions [in 2006] were for marijuana as the primary drug of abuse,” compared to “6% in 1992.” But referrals from the criminal justice system account for three-fifths of these treatment admissions, and marijuana arrests have increased by more than 150 percent since 1990.

By arresting people for marijuana possession and forcing them into treatment, the government shows why it has to arrest people for marijuana possession. That’s our self-justifying drug policy in a nutshell.