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Did you know that some Christian dingbat has dubbed today the “Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies?” Well here they are, at the Wall Street bull statue thing, praying to Jesus for money. The dingbat has explained, “We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems.”

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Just a clue: there’s this book called “the bible” that these people claim to follow, but I suspect they’ve never actually read it, or they might have seen Exodus 32.

In the good old days, a question to tech support got you a exhaustingly correct answer.

Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $5 each. The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them.

The man bought thousands at $5 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort.

He further announced that he would now buy at $10. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again. Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms.

The offer increased to $15 each and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it.

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50. However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on his behalf.

In the man’s absence, the assistant told the villagers “Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $45 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.”

The villagers rounded up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys. Then they never again saw the man nor his assistant, only monkeys everywhere!

And THAT ladies and gentleman is how the stock market works…

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The [Australian] Federal Government is attempting to silence critics of its controversial plan to censor the internet, which experts say will break the internet while doing little to stop people from accessing illegal material such as child pornography.

Internet providers and the government’s own tests have found that presently available filters are not capable of adequately distinguishing between legal and illegal content and can degrade internet speeds by up to 86 per cent.

[..]

Colin Jacobs, chair of the online users’ lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia said: “I’m not exaggerating when I say that this model involves more technical interference in the internet infrastructure than what is attempted in Iran, one of the most repressive and regressive censorship regimes in the world.”

[..]

Ironically, Senator Conroy has himself accused critics of his filtering policy of supporting child pornography - including Greens Senator Scott Ludlam in Senate Estimates this week.

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However, none of the filters were completely accurate. They allowed access to between 2 per cent and 13 per cent of material that should have been blocked, and wrongly blocked between 1.3 per cent and 7.8 per cent of websites that should have been allowed.

“Why would you want to damage the performance and utility of the internet and not actually keep the bad stuff out anyway,” said John Lindsay, carrier relations manager at Internode.

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Terrorists may be using child pornography websites to exchange data, according to anti-terror experts.

It is thought Islamist extremists are concealing messages in digital images and audio, video or other files.

Police are now investigating the link between terrorists and paedophilia in an attempt to unravel the system.

The perfect combination to get any law you want passed.

Also, a lot of cocaine smugglers are hiding their kilos in bales of marijuana… right?

Here.

Try to translate “Barack Obama” from English to German

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the US private military contractor embroiled in controversy over its actions in Iraq — has sent a private sector warship equipped with helicopters to the Gulf of Aden, and is offering its services to shipowners concerned with Somali piracy.

The vessel, McArthur, is described as a multipurpose unit designed to support military and law-enforcement training, peace-keeping and stability operations.

The ship and its helicopters have the ability to patrol a commercial vessel’s route, thereby avoiding the need to hire security contractors to ride on board.

So private companies now how their own war ships?

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“I’ve signed up for online, ‘All-Electronic’ billing,” Dave H writes, “and no matter what I do, they continue to send me monthly notifications in the mail telling me that my bill is now available online. ”

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This election has not been working out as planned for John Laughlin of Westerville, Ohio. “I voted for Paul in the primaries. When that didn’t stick, we started a write-in campaign for Ron. My yard sign has been proudly displayed for thirty two weeks now and I haven’t had one theft yet. It’s a bit discouraging”

The sign is displayed prominently in Laughlin’s yard on a busy side street. He guided me through some of his defenses. “I spent $150 on motion detectors and $75 on extra cable for my webcam.” His plan to capture possible thieves in the act has gone unexecuted. “I’ve got the sign pulled up so that getting it out of the ground would not take much effort.”

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Early voters in North Carolina, most of whom were black,  were heckled and mocked by McCain supporters as they their cast their ballots Sunday.  According to Washington Times reporter Christina Bellatoni primarily white McCain supporters shouted “terrorist” and complained that “Sundays are for  church not voting”

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Answering questions from the floor at the Royal Television Society conference in London last month, Minister for Truth Andy Burnham said:

“The time has come for perhaps a different approach to the internet. I want to even up that see-saw, even up the regulation [imbalance] between the old and the new.”

The idea that the internet was “beyond legal reach” and a “space where governments can’t go” was no longer the case.

[..]

According to Andy Burnham, the introduction of a ratings system for internet content would not be “over-burdensome”. We have asked the Ministry of Truth (aka Department for Culture, Media and Sport) on several occasions how such a system might work and how its Minister’s view that such regulation would be easy to implement could be squared with general consensus that it would be unworkable. Or, as one expert put it: “bonkers”. We asked again last week.

The Ministry did not feel they could elucidate further. A spokesperson explained that as the UK Council for Child Safety on the Internet had only just been set up, and would be making recommendations about regulating the internet in due course, “it wouldn’t be helpful or appropriate for us to speculate about what those recommendations might be”.

In other words, Ministerial speculation is okay, but speculating about speculation is not. The Reg took up the challenge and with the help of a pencil and the back of an envelope came to some startling conclusions.

Youtube puts up approximately 10 hours – or 600 minutes – of new content every minute. Classifying that material would take 600 people watching 24 hours a day. Assuming that individuals could function productively for six hours, YouTube has just gained an additional 2,400 employees.