[Quote:]

The deal was reached as AIG prepared to report on Monday a loss of about $60 billion for the fourth-quarter, due largely to write-downs on certain tax assets and commercial mortgage-backed securities, the sources said.

The loss — which works out to about $460,000 per minute — is mostly non-cash, the source said.

Non-cash. Wow. Now that is fucked up. First they pay out billions of bonus dollars based on all the “profit” they made, and when the truth comes out, the profit never existed, they say, well, no problem, it’s mostly non-cash anyway…

Why aren’t we lynching any of them right now?

[Quote:]

Fredrik Neij – one of the accused in the trial against thepiratebay.org – took some time to manage the website remotely in the middle of the closing argument.

- A server was down and I restarted it, Neij tells expressen.se. He is one of the four founders of The Pirate Bay that stand accused of “complicity to making copyrighted material accessible” (yes, that’s the charge). That didn’t stop him from taking care of a server mishap in the middle of the trial’s closing argument.

Thepiratebay.org was down during the best part of Monday, which had a good deal of file-sharing folks worried that the website might be down for good this time. Thankfully for them, he had his trusty laptop at hand and could restart the server remotely, so that eager fileswappers could get back inside.

[..]

The farcical battle between a sadly incompetent prosecution vs. knowledgeable and sometimes loud-mouthed defendants is almost at an end, and the fact that Neij manages thepiratebay.org’s servers remotely during the trial is just one of several examples that point out the huge gap in technical know-how that the sides have exhibited.

[Quote:]

Members of Parliament have voted themselves the right to withhold their names and addresses from publication. Candidates at Parliamentary elections will get the same right.

This is perhaps less surprising than it ought to have been. Last May, the High Court ruled in a Freedom of Information case that MPs’ addresses should be public information. British citizens ought to be able to check on MP expense claims, or to monitor the living arrangements of individuals such as the Home Secretary.

[Quote:]

The banks need another bailout and countless homeowners cannot handle their mortgage payments, but one group is paying its bills: the dead.

pity they only did this for three out of four mannequins

[Quote:]

And the insistence on offering the same plan over and over again, with only cosmetic changes, is itself deeply disturbing. Does Treasury not realize that all these proposals amount to the same thing? Or does it realize that, but hope that the rest of us won’t notice? That is, are they stupid, or do they think we’re stupid?

I don’t know which possibility is worse.

[Quote:]

The Justice Deparmtent’s Office of Professional Responsibility is finishing an internal investigation of Yoo and is expected to recommend disbarrment proceedings against him and other department lawyers who advocated that Bush be allowed to do essentialy whatever he wanted in the so-called “War on Terror.” Bush then used the memos to justify his actions. Yoo is a tenured professor at Berkeley, who took a leave of absence to work for the Bush Justice Department from 2001 to 2003. Yoo has his law license from the state of Pennsylvania. If he’s disbarred, it will further pressure UC Berkeley to fire him.

[Quote:]

Sacsayhuamán, alternatively called Saksaq Waman, is an ancient Inca ruin at an altitude of 3,701 meters. It is a walled complex laden with mystery near the old city of Cusco, Peru. The immense fortress was built by huge stone blocks weighing upto 300 tons, but nobody knows how these stones were cut, moved and put into place. The construction method of the builders of these megalithic walls is still a mystery, as you cannot fit a single piece of paper between most of the stones. The precise construction work, along with artistically bent corners of the limestone blocks and varied shapes of the walls are the chief factors behind the relic’s continued presence till date.

[Quote:]

“My question to you is, will you tell the American people to whom you lent $2.2 trillion of their dollars?” Sanders asked, referring to the size of the Fed’s balance sheet.

Bernanke responded that the Fed explains the various lending programs on its website, and details the terms and collateral requirements.

When Sanders pressed on whether Bernanke would name the firms that borrowed from the Fed, the central bank chairman replied, “No,” and started to say that doing so risked stigmatizing banks and discouraging them from borrowing from the central bank.

“Isn’t that too bad,” Sanders interrupted, cutting him off. “They took the money but they don’t want to be public about the fact that they received it.”

[Quote:]

he Obama administration on Tuesday endorsed legislation to crack down on offshore tax havens, raising the stakes in a mounting dispute between the United States and bank-secrecy nations such as Switzerland.

[..]

Tax havens are estimated to deprive the U.S. government of more than $100 billion a year, say advocates of the bills introduced by Michigan Senator Carl Levin and Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett, with the backing of other Democrats.

When he was a senator last year, President Barack Obama co-sponsored similar legislation with Levin.

A thriving business in tax evasion developed in recent years on Wall Street among consulting firms, law firms, hedge funds and other elite financial players. Some purveyors even sought patent protection for their off-the-shelf schemes.

[..]

He asked the administration to “look closely at those that are coming and asking for a government bailout, like Morgan Stanley, which has 158 subsidiaries in the Caymans, Citigroup with 90, and Bank of America with 59, to explain why it’s equitable for them to be able to avoid taxes at the same time they’re asking for so much tax money.”

[Quote:]

In Capitol Records v. Thomas, Jammie Thomas has filed the expert witness report of her expert, Professor Yongdae Kim of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Minnesota.

Professor Kim concluded that MediaSentry’s methods are untrustworthy:

MediaSentry claims to have much experience in identifying individual committing copyright infringement. However, they insist that their methods are proprietary and thus cannot be subject to scrutiny by an impartial third party. No academic studies exist of their internal investigative techniques, methods, software, data collection practices, or even employee training in retaining collected data in a way that would allow for it to be used as evidence at a trial. While this report will address specific methodology questions at a later time, it suffices to say for the moment that MediaSentry’s claims of their ability to record activity on the FastTrack network and identity individual computers used to commit copyright infringement are not only unproven, but highly unlikely to be accurate. Combined with the incentive to accuse as many users as possible due to both the supposed deterrent effect on file sharing and the likely per-user compensation scheme that may exist between the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and MediaSentry, their allegations are highly suspect.

And the French president wants scum like MediaSentry to be able to disconnect your internet permanently based merely on their accusations.

[Quote:]

Organized criminal groups are increasingly pirating movies and using the funds to support terrorism, a study from U.S.-based think tank Rand Corp. said.

The non-profit policy-analysis organization released a report Tuesday suggesting that organized criminal groups are increasingly turning to the lucrative and largely unprosecuted street sales of pirated movies as a new revenue source, Rand reported.

The research, supported by a grant from the Motion Picture Association,

And that’s where I stopped reading.

[Quote:]

About 7.5 percent of U.S. adults lost money as a result of financial fraud last year, mostly due to data breaches, according to a new Gartner study to be released on Tuesday night.

In the survey of nearly 5,000 consumers, 70 percent said they had never been a victim of identity theft fraud. Meanwhile 14 percent said they had had their credit card information used to charge purchases or get money, 7 percent said their debit card was used, 6 percent said a new account had been opened in their name, 5 percent had money transferred out of their account, and 4 percent had had checks forged.

Recovering losses was easier for people victimized by brokerage, credit card, and debit card account fraud compared to victims of new loan account fraud, check forgery, and checking/savings account fraud, partly because victims didn’t try to recover money.

[..]

Not only do many victims not report the crime, but many of the crimes go unprosecuted. There were only 564 convictions made for about 800 identity-theft-related fraud cases in 2007, according to the National Institute of Justice’s Electronic Crime Program, a part of the U.S. Justice Department.

“The chances of a criminal getting arrested and convicted for identity theft-related fraud are much less than a half of 1 percent,” the study said.

[Quote:]

However, even iLife has its drawbacks in an educational setting. It simply hands so much to the students that they struggle with software (whether Windows, Linux, or even pro-level software on the Mac) that isn’t so brilliantly plug and play. Yes, iLife rocks in many ways, but the level of spoonfeeding it encourages actually makes me think twice about using it widely, especially at the high school level.

How about teaching them to no longer accept substandard crap from those other places instead?