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Moses, who has been hailed as a “holy cow”, was born last week at a dairy farm in Sterling, Connecticut, a small rustic town on the Rhode Island border.

The mostly brown calf is half Jersey, half Holstein. Local children gave him his Biblical name.

His owner, Brad Davis, told WFSB-TV he thought the marking may be a message from above, though he is still trying to worl out what that message might be.

If only there were some sort of story that warned of using young cows for monotheistic religions to go by.

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Digital rights groups and bloggers have heaped criticism on Facebook’s changed privacy policy.

Critics said the changes were unwelcome and “nudged” people towards sharing updates with the wider web and made them findable via search engines.

The changes were introduced on 9 December via a pop-up that asked users to update privacy settings.

Facebook said the changes help members manage updates they wanted to share, not trick them into revealing too much.

“Facebook is nudging the settings toward the ‘disclose everything’ position,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the US Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic). “That’s not fair from the privacy perspective.”

[..]

Jason Kincaid, writing on the Tech Crunch news blog, said some of the changes were made to make Facebook more palatable to search sites such as Bing and Google.

Let me translate “more palatable to search sites” for you: Facebook can sell more advertising space. They don’t give a shit if your thirteen year old niece is stalked as long as they can get the ad-click-through…

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The United States said Wednesday that it remained opposed to international inspections of biological weapon sites, even though it stressed its commitment to a UN treaty covering such arms and invaded Iraq in part over its alleged stalling of — UN weapons inspectors.

Wasn’t there some country that got invaded because of this kind of refusal? It rings a bell, but I just can’t put my finger on it….

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One of the most senior figures in the financial world surprised a conference of high-level bankers yesterday when he criticised them for failing to grasp the magnitude of the financial crisis and belittled their suggested reforms.

Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, berated the bankers for their failure to acknowledge a problem with personal rewards and questioned their claims for financial innovation.

[..]

“I wish someone would give me one shred of neutral evidence that financial innovation has led to economic growth — one shred of evidence,” said Mr Volcker, who ran the Fed from 1979 to 1987 and is now chairman of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

He said that financial services in the United States had increased its share of value added from 2 per cent to 6.5 per cent, but he asked: “Is that a reflection of your financial innovation, or just a reflection of what you’re paid?”

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New analysis released by climate change NGO Sandbag has revealed that the UK’s richest resident, Lakshmi Mittal, CEO and major shareholder of the steel giant ArcelorMittal, could make over £1 billion between now and 2012 from his company’s participation in the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme.

ArcelorMittal has over 14 million emissions permits that it does not need in 2008, a figure which Sandbag estimates will rise to 80 million by 2012 making it by far the biggest beneficiary of the scheme across the EU.

Sandbag has written to CEO Laksmi Mittal urging him to commit to cancelling his company’s unneeded emissions permits in what would be the largest act of climate philanthropy on record. If cancelled the 80 million surplus permits would prevent 80 million tonnes worth of pollution going into the world’s atmosphere, equivalent to the annual emissions of Denmark, the country where critical climate change talks are just commencing. Such an act would also come close to matching the cuts required the UK’s whole carbon budget between now and 2012.

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The Pirate Party’s Christian Engstrom is already making waves in the European Parliament. After his hard work on the Telecoms Package amendment he’s now working to set up an Internet Bill of Rights, attempting to codify some of the core beliefs of the Pirate Party. To achieve this he wants your help.

“The tea party nation announced that Sarah Palin will headline what is being called the first national tea party convention in February. It is expected to be the nation’s largest ever gathering of misspelled signs.”

–Seth Meyers

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Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling said the U.K. will force banks awarding discretionary bonuses of more than 25,000 pounds ($40,800) to pay a one-time levy of 50 percent.

The tax, effective today, will be paid by all banks that operate in the U.K., including U.S. firms such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Employees will still have to pay income tax on their bonuses, the Treasury said. The top tax rate on earnings of more than 150,000 pounds will rise to 50 percent in April, a measure announced earlier this year.

[..]

“This will further damage the image of the City as a global financial centre,” said Shaun Springer, chief executive officer of Square Mile Services Ltd., which advises London financial firms on pay. “This is politically motivated.”

If you can call “keeping greedy ass-hats from ruining the economy again” a political motivation, then yes, it is.

“On a bonus of 1 million pounds, the new tax will be 500,000 pounds, National Insurance will be 130,000 pounds, and personal income tax is 400,000 pounds,” said Chris Maddock, tax director of Vantis Group Ltd. “This makes a total of 1.03 million pounds for the Treasury.”

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The words of Yahoo! chief executive, Carol Bartz.

She comments further, “This week we got a huge uplift: Front Page, News, Sports, Gossip. He just filtered through the whole place. It is better than Michael Jackson dying; it is kind of hard to put an ad next to a funeral.”

So basically his two favourite things in the world are people dying and divorce. Nice guy.

The most powerful nation on Earth, populated by the, seemingly, most simple-minded people on Earth, and this gal is one of the (many) people you can blame.

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AT&T is moving even closer to charging special usage fees to heavy data users, including those with iPhones and other smartphones.

Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, today came the closest he has so far in warning about some kind of use-based pricing. He spoke to attendees at a UBS conference in New York.

“The first thing we need to do is educate customers about what represents a megabyte of data and…we’re improving systems to give them real-time information about their data usage,” he said. “Longer term, there’s got to be some sort of pricing scheme that addresses the [heavy] users.”

Translation: stop using the phone the way we advertised it to you!

and talking about advertising, is AT&T planning to allow iPhone users to block advertisers in the apps they’re using? No? Gee, what a surprise. I guess it’s really time for Apple to end the exclusive deal

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Der Tiefschlag kam ohne Ansage: „Dies ist eine Microsoft-Veranstaltung“, wies ein Manager einen Fachjournalisten barsch zurecht. „Hier haben Apple-Produkte nichts verloren.“ Als in die Stille am Tisch im Münchner Schickeria-Restaurant „Maria und Josef“ verlegene Lacher ob des Scherzes aufzukommen drohten, setzt er nach: „Das meine ich ernst.“

Das Vergehen: Der Journalist hatte beim Dinnertalk gewagt zu erwähnen, dass er noch nie ein so einfach zu bedienendes Telefon besessen habe wie sein iPhone. Und das auf der Vorstellung des Windows Betriebssystems Mobile 6.5. „Die Emotionalität hat mich überrascht“, sagt ein damals anwesender PR-Berater. „Es zeigt, dass die Nerven blank liegen.“ Kein Wunder. Tage vorher hatte eine getwitterte Meldung für Aufsehen gesorgt. „Wir haben es versaut mit Mobile 6.5“, zitiert Paul Jozefak, Teilnehmer des Microsoft Venture Capital Summit, den CEO Steve Ballmer. „Ich wünschte, wir hätten Windows Mobile 7 im Markt.“ Das soll 2010 kommen.