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Hoping to halt a market meltdown and prevent a recession, the Federal Reserve lowered its overnight lending rate by three quarters of a percentage point to 3.50% on Tuesday in a rare move between formal meetings.
The 75 basis-point surprise cut came after global financial markets sold off in dramatic fashion on Monday on fears that bad bets in credit markets could spread further and drive the U.S. economy into recession.

Woa.

[Quote:]

A recently-release roadmap for the next major Window release – Windows 7 – indicates that Microsoft is planning to release the new operating system in the second half of 2009, rather than the anticipated release date of some time in 2010.

[Quote:]

Windows 7 will remind us all of the movie Seven.

We’ll have

glutinous Bloatware
Sloth
greedy pricing
DRM lustfully controlling all media.
Proud non-interoperability
and mac -envy

oh and you get the wrath, like in the movie ending where you find can’t take back what is in “the box” because you opened the EULA.

Balmer will play the Kevin Spacey role.

personally I had to leave the theater.

[Quote:]

Just as modern French-speakers who travel to Quebec often find the dialect of French Canadians to be archaic and quaint, English-speakers who visit Washington, D.C., are frequently bemused by the language spoken there. Though the Potomac dialect shares the alphabet and grammar of English, it has a vocabulary all its own. A few examples of Potomac phrases, followed by their English equivalents:

I have great respect for the senior senator.
I am about to drill my elderly colleague a new one.

We have full confidence in his integrity.
We will cut him loose by nightfall.

I don’t pay attention to the polls.
My job-approval rating is 32 percent.

I had some gals come over to the condo to give me a massage.
I paid for sex.

When we have something to announce, we’ll announce it.
We know the answer, but we’re not going to tell you.

Frankly …
The following statement is false.

You are either with us or against us.
You are against us.

(more great translations at the link)

[Quote:]

While the US equities markets were closed on Monday for Martin Luther King Day, stock markets around the world took a nosedive, losing billions in equity; the markets in Australia, South Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Germany, France, the UK, and more countries have dropped at least 5% each (Canada only fell 4.75%), even though most of those markets had already been seriously down for several days prior. India has been hit particularly hard, at one point down a whopping 11%, tripping their markets’ automatic “circuit breakers” for a mandatory time-out period, before scraping back up to close at 8% down. US futures markets are currently predicting a 650+ point drop just at the open Tuesday morning, before even a single trade goes through.

[Quote:]

The Swedish police are doing an exhibition about online crime, and somehow thought that it was a good idea to include The Pirate Bay. Strange, because the Pirate Bay case hasn’t even gone to court yet. Nevertheless, the police decided to put them on display anyway, together with convicted pedophiles and cyber-criminals.

Brokep, one of the founders of the popular BitTorrent tracker couldn’t believe it when he read the news: “There’s no trial. No conviction. TPB has done nothing wrong. And still, the police think it’s OK to show off the site together with convicted pedophiles and other nasty scum. And without asking permission from anyone involved with the site,” he writes on his weblog. Brokep decided to contact the organizers of the exhibition, who admitted that they were wrong, and immediately removed all material about The Pirate Bay.

[Quote:]

US President George W. Bush (C) leans over to talk with a girl (R) after Bush participated in a lesson for young children on the importance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day during a tour of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC, 21 January 2008. By Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty.

[Quote:]

In August 1997, James Schillaci, a rough-hewn chauffeur from the Bronx, dialed Mayor Giuliani’s radio program on WABC-AM to complain about a red-light sting run by the police near the Bronx Zoo. When the call yielded no results, Mr. Schillaci turned to The Daily News, which then ran a photo of the red light and this front page headline: “GOTCHA!”

That morning, police officers appeared on Mr. Schillaci’s doorstep. What are you going to do, Mr. Schillaci asked, arrest me? He was joking, but the officers were not.

They slapped on handcuffs and took him to court on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. A judge threw out the charge. A police spokeswoman later read Mr. Schillaci’s decades-old criminal rap sheet to a reporter for The Daily News, a move of questionable legality because the state restricts how such information is released. She said, falsely, that he had been convicted of sodomy.

What a great potential president…