[Quote:]

Conservatives for Patients Rights is a front group organized in 2009 by Richard Scott to fight U.S. president Barack Obama’s proposals for health reform. According to the Politico news site, Scott has raised $20 million to fight health care reform.

Maggie Mahar at the Century Foundation’s Health Beat blog reports that Scott previously started the for-profit hospital chain in 1987 that later became the $23 billion Columbia/HCA. He was ousted from this post in 1997 after an FBI investigation of Columbia/HCA that led to 14 felony convictions and $1.7 billion in criminal and civil fines for Medicare fraud.

Well, if I managed to swindle 1.7b from a system, I’d be opposed to changing it as well..

[Quote:]

The new qualifications watchdog for England has made its presence known with a damning report on the standards of general science and physics GCSEs, which it says require “immediate, firm action”.

[..]

They can mean that students do not really have the opportunity to demonstrate the full extent of their knowledge, particularly the requisite knowledge for a grade A.

Here are some examples taken from examining bodies offering the GCSE science paper.

GCSE Science (Edexcel, 2006)

Our moon seems to disappear during an eclipse. Some people say this is because an old lady covers the moon with her cloak. She does this so that thieves cannot steal the shiny coins on the surface. Which of these would help scientists to prove or disprove this idea?

A) Collect evidence from people who believe the lady sees the thieves

B) Shout to the lady that the thieves are coming

C) Send a probe to the moon to search for coins

D) Look for fingerprints

GCSE Science (Edexcel, 2006)

Many people observe the stars using

A) A telescope B) A microscope C) An X-Ray tube D) A synthesiser

GCSE Biology (AQA 2008)

When we sweat water leaves the body through…

A) Kidneys B) Liver C) Lungs D) Skin

Higher paper in science GCSE, Edexcel

At the astronomical club Alec and Louise discuss the possibility of intelligent life existing on other planets.

Which of the following statements supports the possibility of existence of intelligent life in our galaxy?

A) The galaxy is expanding very quickly

B) The earth is over four billion years old

C) The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence has spent millions of hours analysing signals from space

D) There are so many stars in the galaxy

[Quote:]

Are you listening to me? Didn’t I just tell you to get your coat? Helloooo! It’s cold out there…

So goes many a conversation between parent and toddler. It seems everything you tell them either falls on deaf ears or goes in one ear and out the other. But that’s not how it works.

Toddlers listen, they just store the information for later use, a new study finds.

[..]

“For example, let’s say it’s cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside,” Chatham explained. “You might expect the child to plan for the future, think ‘OK it’s cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm.’ But what we suggest is that this isn’t what goes on in a 3-year-old’s brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it.”

[Quote:]

Charter Communications Inc. on Friday filed for a prearranged Chapter 11 bankruptcy to get relief from its creditors, as the nation’s fourth-largest cable operator strives to keep its head above water and still compete with phone companies and satellite TV providers.

The St. Louis-based company seeks to emerge from bankruptcy as early as the end of summer and doesn’t plan on selling any of its assets to competitors. After Chapter 11, interest costs at Charter, which has never posted a profit since going public in 1999 due to massive debt interest payments, will be cut in half to $830 million a year.

The filing restructures about $8 billion of debt at Charter, which is controlled by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, but leaves about $13 billion of debt on its books.

Charter has about 5.7 million customers. That’s about 2280 dollars of debt per customer. I don’t think they’re ever going to be able to pay off that debt.

[Quote:]

Not content with destroying the world’s economies, the banking industry is also bent on ruining us individually, it seems. Take a look at Verified By Visa. Allegedly this protects cardholders – by training them to expect a process in which there’s absolutely no way to know whether you are being phished or not. Even more astonishing is that this seen as a benefit!

Frame inline displays the VbV authentication page in
the merchant’s main window with the merchant’s
header. Therefore, VbV is seen as a natural part of the
purchase process. It is recommended that the top
frame include the merchant’s standard branding in a
short and concise manner and keep the cardholder
within the same look and feel of the checkout process.

Or, in other words

Please ensure that there is absolutely no way for your customer to know whether we are showing the form or you are. In fact, please train your customer to give their “Verified by Visa” password to anyone who asks for it.

Craziness. But it gets better – obviously not everyone is pre-enrolled in this stupid scheme, so they also allow for enrolment using the same inline scheme. Now the phishers have the opportunity to also get information that will allow them to identify themselves to the bank as you. Yes, Visa have provided a very nicely tailored and packaged identity theft scheme. But, best of all, rather like Chip and PIN, they push all blame for their failures on to the customer

[Quote:]

200 children in the UK, some as young as 13, have had files opened on them by the British anti-terror cops as potential terrorists — even though they have committed no crimes. The children were reported to the anti-terror squad by their teachers on the basis of school work, journals and conversations that, in the teachers’ view, indicated that the children were susceptible to extremist beliefs. The programme is only 18 months old and has already identified 200 children who should be treated as terrorism suspects. At this rate, every child in Britain should be on the watch list by, what, 2018?

[Quote:]

Stephen Mallon might be sitting on some of the most newsworthy pictures never seen.

Stephen, a New York City industrial photographer, was hired by Weeks Marine, the maritime crane company involved in the recovery of US Airways Flight 1549 from the Hudson River, to document the recovery process.

Those who have seen the pictures say he did a wonderful job. He was given unlimited access on the water, to the plane’s interior, virtually anywhere he wanted to go. He had the full cooperation and blessing of his immediate client, Weeks Marine; of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB); and of USAirways. He never signed a Work for Hire agreement, and his client had no problem with him publishing the work non-commerically—like, on his website, where he posted them.

[..]

Then he got a letter from a law firm, not sent directly but passed to him by insurance giant AIG—yup, that AIG—asserting that Stephen has no rights to his pictures, and that the pictures absolutely can’t be released to anyone, ever—not even news outlets for news purposes. AIG (through its lawyers) apparently seeks total suppression of the work, indefinitely.

Based on…what rights, explicitly? Stephen isn’t sure. Like any photographer, Stephen owns the rights to his pictures, except those rights he signed away in his contract with Weeks. AIG is US Airways’ insurer. Ultimately, they’ll be paying for the salvage operation and for a new airplane. But they weren’t Stephen’s client.

[Quote:]

Uh oh Apple — it looks like even your attorneys are dirty, thieving jailbreakers. Tipster a|e§ was poring through that iPhone biometric security patent application we posted earlier and noticed that the images show a jailbroken phone, complete with Installer.app, SMBPrefs, and the iWood Realize theme from the iSpazio repository. We’re guessing the fine folks at Kramer, Levin Naftalis & Frankel are going to have some ‘splainin to do on Monday morning — but at least they get to run apps in the background.

[Quote:]

We bailed them out. We bailed them out to help them start lending.

As a small business owner with 15 employees I have been struggling to keep us above water for the past 3 months. We’re living payroll to payroll. All three partners stopped taking salary so as not to lay off any people. We’ve been teetering on the edge but somehow we’ve postponed the drop month by month. Last week we saw our first glimmer of hope with a few extra sales – light at the end of the tunnel.

Yesterday Citi pulled our Line of Credit.

[Quote:]

From 1945 until around 1980, the financial sector was one industry among many in the United States. Then something happened.

People in finance started making more money,* jobs in finance became more desirable, financial institutions became more influential, and the linkages between the financial sector and the political establishment became stronger. At the same time that our financial sector became more leveraged and more risky, it also became more powerful. The result was a confluence of interests between Wall Street and Washington – one more normally found behind the scenes of emerging market crises, the kind the IMF is called on to resolve.

[Quote:]

The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary.

Interesting paper clips

However, I don’t think I could resist using them backwards.

[Quote:]

The Oklahoma House of Representatives has passed a bill that says that a student can receive a passing grade in an Earth Science class if they say that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the Earth an hour ago, and then planted false memories into every single living creature on Earth to make it seem like they’ve been around longer.

Of course, that’s not the intent of the bill. The intent is that a student can say the Earth is 6000 years old and still get a passing grade. The bill itself says that a student cannot be graded down if they say that what they are being taught interferes with their religious beliefs.

Specifically, the bill states:

A school district shall treat a student’s voluntary expression of a religious viewpoint, if any, on an otherwise permissible subject in the same manner the district treats a student’s voluntary expression of a secular or other viewpoint on an otherwise permissible subject and may not discriminate against the student based on a religious viewpoint expressed by the student on an otherwise permissible subject.

It’s the “otherwise permissible subject” phrase that’s sticky. That can easily be interpreted as meaning tests, besides just normal classroom discussion.

[Quote:]

82 x 82 cm burned square, the size of one pixel from an altitude of 1 km.

via

[Quote:]

Microsoft Corp. abandons kitschy with its newest PC ad campaign and goes straight for the customer’s tight wallet.

One commercial features Lauren, who is hunting for a laptop on a budget. She tries the Apple Store, and doesn’t like it.

“For $1,000 they only have one computer available, that’s a 13-inch screen,” she says, concluding, “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.”

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:0bb6a07c-c829-4562-8375-49e6693810c7&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Laptop Hunters $1000 – Lauren Gets an HP Pavilion">Video: Laptop Hunters $1000 – Lauren Gets an HP Pavilion</a>

Microsoft claims their agency “recruited unwitting subjects by posing as a market research firm studying laptop purchasing decisions.” However, Lauren is an actress.

But forget about that for a moment. Rule 1: If you’re actually number 1 in the market, you never mention your competition by name.

And you really don’t admit they’re “cool”.

I guess Microsofts marketing message is: “if you are too poor to buy the actual products, you can always make do with our junk”.

[Quote:]

French President Nicolas Sarkozy criticised Societe Generale SOCN.PA on Friday for awarding stock options to top executives after the bank took state aid to help it weather the financial crisis.

Societe Generale said management would not exercise any options while the group was benefitting from government support as it sought to calm the mood after other leading politicians branded the move “indecent” and “bizarre”.

“Clearly some people are having trouble understanding what we said,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy told a press conference in Brussels. “I repeat that when there is … state aid, bonuses, stock option plans and exceptional payments are unacceptable.”

He added that such moves would be a “scandal”.

[Quote:]

This photo was taken by photographer Jack Bradley and depicts the exact moment this boy, Harold Whittles, hears for the very first time ever. The doctor treating him has just placed an earpiece in his left ear. Date unknown.

[Thursday, April 16, 1998:]

But before the cash cow of Chase Manhattan starts making cow-eyes at the thundering herd of bulls of Merrill Lynch, Congress had better take a close look at the downside of upsizing across the old boundaries.

1. No private enterprise should be allowed to think of itself as ”too big to fail.” Federal deposit insurance, protecting a bank’s depositors, should not become a subsidy protecting the risks taken by non-banking affiliates. If a huge ”group” runs into trouble, it should take the bank down with it; no taxpayer bailouts should allow executives or stockholders to relax.

(Oh, and ditto for msnbc)

[Quote:]

“After receiving a Rule 11 Sanctions Motion (PDF) in a Houston, Texas, case, UMG Recordings v. Lanzoni, the RIAA lawyers thought better of proceeding with the case, and agreed to voluntarily dismiss the case ‘with prejudice’, which means it is over and cannot be brought again. The defendant’s motion papers detailed some of the RIAA’s litigation history against innocent individuals, such as Capitol Records v. Foster and Atlantic Recording v. Andersen, and argued that the awarding of attorneys fees in those cases has not sufficiently deterred repetition of the misconduct, so that a stronger remedy — Rule 11 sanctions — is now called for.”

[Quote:]

Rule 11 requires all papers to be signed by the attorney (if party is represented). It also provides for sanctions against the attorney or client for harassment, frivolous arguments, or a lack of factual investigation. The purpose of sanctions is deterrent, not punitive. Courts have broad discretion about the exact nature of the sanction which can include consent to in personam jurisdiction, fines, dismissal of claims, or dismissal of the entire case. The current version of Rule 11 is much more lenient than its 1983 version. Supporters of tort reform in Congress regularly call for legislation to make Rule 11 stricter.

In other words, RIAA was seriously scared that their lawsuit would be called frivolous. A Rule 11 ruling on your record is a very serious black spot for a lawyer.

I guess we’ll see a lot more rule 11 motions filed…

[Quote:]

Wall Street and Washington: Will those two crazy kids ever get together again?

To judge from the assembled Wall Street luminaries at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Finance Conference, it might take marriage counseling, because the folks here are full of anger at the way they have been treated by Washington:

“We have no rule of law in this country,” groused one financial executive. “We slammed Russia for years, saying we would not do business there because there was no rule of law. Look what’s happening here. We don’t know what Congress will do next. They’re ignoring all the old rules, and they’re making new rules whenever they want.”

The executive and one of his rivals commiserated over how betrayed they feel by U.S. lawmakers. “I want my campaign contributions back,” the executive said. His companion agreed, “When the government embraces this kind of destructive populism, they have to understand the dangers that it presents to our economy –and our personal safety. It is hard to put that fire out.”

[Quote:]

Anti-capitalists today claimed responsibility for vandalising the home of disgraced former Royal Bank of Scotland boss Sir Fred Goodwin.

Several windows in the ex-RBS chief executive’s luxury villa in Edinburgh were smashed and a Mercedes in the driveway damaged early this morning.

Sir Fred, who is at the centre of a huge row over his £16million pension, was said to be ‘shaken’ by the vandalism but was not thought to be at the house at the time.