http://www.thankyouforthrowingyourshoe.com/

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Credit Suisse Group AG’s investment bank has found a new way to reduce the risk of losses from about $5 billion of its most illiquid loans and bonds: using them to pay employees’ year-end bonuses.

The bank will use leveraged loans and commercial mortgage- backed debt, some of the securities blamed for generating the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, to fund executive compensation packages, people familiar with the matter said. The new policy applies only to managing directors and directors, the two most senior ranks at the Zurich-based company, according to a memo sent to employees today.

[..]

The securities will be placed into a so-called Partner Asset Facility, and affected employees at the bank, Switzerland’s second biggest, will be given stakes in the facility as part of their pay. Bonuses will take the first hit should the securities decline further in value.

“It’s monstrously clever,” said Dirk Hoffman-Becking, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein Ltd. in London who has a “market perform” rating on Credit Suisse stock. “From a shareholders’ perspective it’s great because you’ve got rid of some of the assets and regulators will be pleased because you’ve organized a risk transfer.”

No, from the shareholders perspective it is fucking ridiculous and outright robbery. These execs didn’t spend their own money buying these assets (as, in a wya, shareholders did) and didn’t lose a fortune (as shareholders did) as they became worthless, but they stand to gain a lot of money if these securities recover even a little bit, and now shareholders won’t. Plus, since these things have no public value but the execs do know how they are performing, they can cherry pick the best performing ones for themselves and stick the bank with the crappy ones.

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No more runway left = Must rotate! Look at where the 1000 ft marker sign and where the plane is! One heart-stopping takeoff! The front gear of the plane actually got up before the ’1′ marker but the body remains heavy. I think the pilots know exactly where to rotate. The Ilyushin also kicked up a large sandstorm on the beach and it was barely above it after finally airborne. IL86 is such a beast! [Nikon D2x, High speed crop mode]

More awesome pictures by the same guy are here, here.

via

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Scientists say they now have unambiguous evidence that the warming in the Arctic is accelerating.

Computer models have long predicted that decreasing sea ice should amplify temperature changes in the northern polar region.

Julienne Stroeve, from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union that this process was under way.

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Google has updated the 3D buildings in Google Earth for New York City! This is a HUGE update with at least hundreds (if not thousands) of new 3D buildings with photo textures applied. Basically, Google has completed nearly every building in Manhattan Island for Google Earth. Just fly to “New York City” and turn on the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth. Tilt your view so you can see the buildings in all their glory. This is the largest city i’ve seen done with photo-realistic textures to date.

As a comparison, here is what New York’s 3D photo-realistic buildings looked like in January 2007:

And here is what it looks like today:

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An insurance company with a potential $25 million liability from a 2007 Houston office fire is claiming smoke that killed three people was “pollution” and surviving families shouldn’t be compensated for their losses since the deaths were not caused directly by the actual flames.

Great American Insurance Company is a bunch of scumbags.

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So we’re busy preparing the major upgrade from 9.5x and 9.6x – and what’s more obvious than calling it Opera 10? What’s in a name, or a version number?

Apparently a lot of trouble.

As Andrew Gregory already noticed, we’re the first browser ever to release with a two-digit version number. If websites assume that version numbers always have a one-letter “major” part and look for a single digit, they are going to “detect” Opera 1!

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It was a little before 8 at night when the breaker went out at Emily Milburn’s home in Galveston. She was busy preparing her children for school the next day, so she asked her 12-year-old daughter, Dymond, to pop outside and turn the switch back on.

As Dymond headed toward the breaker, a blue van drove up and three men jumped out rushing toward her. One of them grabbed her saying, “You’re a prostitute. You’re coming with me.”

Dymond grabbed onto a tree and started screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” One of the men covered her mouth. Two of the men beat her about the face and throat.

As it turned out, the three men were plain-clothed Galveston police officers who had been called to the area regarding three white prostitutes soliciting a white man and a black drug dealer.

All this is according to a lawsuit filed in Galveston federal court by Milburn against the officers. The lawsuit alleges that the officers thought Dymond, an African-American, was a hooker due to the “tight shorts” she was wearing, despite not fitting the racial description of any of the female suspects. The police went to the wrong house, two blocks away from the area of the reported illegal activity, Milburn’s attorney, Anthony Griffin, tells Hair Balls.

After the incident, Dymond was hospitalized and suffered black eyes as well as throat and ear drum injuries.

Three weeks later, according to the lawsuit, police went to Dymond’s school, where she was an honor student, and arrested her for assaulting a public servant. Griffin says the allegations stem from when Dymond fought back against the three men who were trying to take her from her home.

a police mistake leads to an innocent 12-year-old getting violently snatched up and roughed up by a group of plainclothes cops jumping out of a van . . . and they charge her for resisting?

What the fuck?

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Majel Barrett Roddenberry, “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry’s widow who nurtured the legacy of the seminal science fiction TV series after his death, has died. She was 76. Roddenberry died of leukemia Thursday morning at her home in Bel-Air, said Sean Rossall, a family spokesman.

At Roddenberry’s side were family friends and her son, Eugene Roddenberry Jr.

Roddenberry was involved in the “Star Trek” universe for more than four decades. She played the dark-haired Number One in the original pilot but metamorphosed into the blond, miniskirted Nurse Christine Chapel in the original 1966-69 show. She had smaller roles in all five of its television successors and many of the “Star Trek” movie incarnations, although she had little involvement in the productions.

She frequently was the voice of the ship’s computer, and about two weeks ago she completed the same role for the upcoming J.J. Abrams movie “Star Trek,” Rossall said.

There will be no Nativity Scene in Washington DC this year! This isn’t for any religious reason, they simply have not been able to find Three Wise Men in the Nation’s capital, nor could they find a virgin.

P.S. There was no problem, however, finding enough asses to fill the stable.

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Gary McGraw, Brian Chess, and Sammy Migues interviewed nine executives running top software security programs in order to gather real data from real programs. In the course of analyzing the data to create a maturity model, they unearthed some surprises.

Just for good measure, here’s the top ten displayed in one easy-to-read chart.

[..]

9. Not only are there are no magic software security metrics, bad metrics actually hurt.

8. Secure-by-default frameworks can be very helpful, especially if they are presented as middleware classes (but watch out for an over focus on security “stuff”).

7. Web application firewalls are not in wide use, especially not as Web application firewalls.

6. Involving QA in software security is non-trivial… Even the “simple” black box Web testing tools are too hard to use.

5. Though software security often seems to fit an audit role rather naturally, many successful programs evangelize (and provide software security resources) rather than audit even in regulated industries.

4. Architecture analysis is just as hard as we thought, and maybe harder.

3. Security researchers, consultants and the press care way more about the who/what/how of attacks than practitioners do.

2. All nine programs we talked to have in-house training curricula, and training is considered the most important software security practice in the two most mature (by any measure) software security initiatives we interviewed.

1. Though all of the organizations we talked to do some kind of penetration testing, the role of penetration testing in all nine practices is diminishing over time.

0. Fuzz testing is widespread.