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The U.S. taxpayer-funded rescue program set up to save banks from collapse during the financial crisis makes future reckless behavior more likely, the government’s bailout watchdog said in a quarterly report.A quarterly report to Congress on the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, made available in draft form late on Saturday, said financial firms seen as too big to fail before 2008 have only grown larger as they feasted on subsidies from the bailout program.”To the extent that institutions were previously incentivized to take reckless risks through a ‘heads I win, tails the government will bail me out’ mentality, the market is more convinced than ever that the government will step in as necessary to save systemically significant institutions,” the report from the Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, said.

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The true story behind Comrade Mario.

And in case you’re wondering, the music is Farewell of Slavianka performed by the Red Army Choir, written by the composer Vasily Agapkin in honour of the Bulgarian women bidding farewell to their husbands who left for the First Balkan War. The march premiered in Tambov in 1912 and was subsequently released as a single. Slavianka means “Slavic woman”.

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Yes. Five. We want to bring all five of our productivity apps to iPad: OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniPlan, OmniFocus, and OmniGraphSketcher.

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In his book The Political Brain, psychologist Drew Westen, an exasperated Democrat, tried to show why the Right often wins the argument even when the Left is confident that it has the facts on its side.

He uses the following exchange from the first presidential debate between Al Gore and George Bush in 2000 to illustrate the perils of trying to explain to voters what will make them better off:

Gore: “Under the governor’s plan, if you kept the same fee for service that you have now under Medicare, your premiums would go up by between 18% and 47%, and that is the study of the Congressional plan that he’s modelled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries.”

Bush: “Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers.

“I’m beginning to think not only did he invent the internet, but he invented the calculator. It’s fuzzy math. It’s trying to scare people in the voting booth.”

Mr Gore was talking sense and Mr Bush nonsense – but Mr Bush won the debate. With statistics, the voters just hear a patronising policy wonk, and switch off.

For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: “One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious.

“Obama’s administration made a tremendous mistake by not immediately branding the economic collapse that we had just had as the Republicans’ Depression, caused by the Bush administration’s ideology of unregulated greed. The result is that now people blame him.”

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President Obama traveled to a House Republican retreat in Baltimore on Friday and delivered a performance that was at once defiant, substantive and engaging. For roughly an hour and a half, Obama lectured GOP leaders and, in a protracted, nationally-televised question-and-answer session, deflected their policy critiques, corrected their misstatements and scolded them for playing petty politics. (Full video and transcript available HERE.)

White House officials told the Huffington Post they were absolutely ecstatic. MSNBC’s Luke Russert, who was on the scene in Baltimore, relayed that a Republican official and other GOP aides had confided to him that allowing the “cameras to roll like that” was a “mistake.”

So effective was the president that Fox News cut away from the broadcast 20 minutes before it ended.

Translation: “We forgot that he is intelligent.”

No surprise, really, if you see what candidates they come up with themselves.

Lee Brimelow is a Platform Evangelist at Adobe focusing on the Flash, Flex, and AIR developer communities.

And he posted this, apparently to show that the iPad doesn’t fit his own browsing experience.

He gets bonus points for linking to a porno site, even if he removed the image later.

The problem is, if you remove games from his screenshots (because people who want to play games on an iPad are not likely to do that on a website), and if you remove video (because video isn’t a problem on the iPad and iPhone, and more and more video sites are offering h264 instead of flash, which works much better not just on the Apple hardware but on other devices as well) there’s not much left.

And there’s another side to browsing without flash.

Sorry, dude, go look for an other job, because the technology you’re promoting has started a well-deserved decline.

(oh, and that porno site? They have an iPhone optimized version – you don’t need flash for your porn either)

I finally had some time to watch the keynote.

Now all you folks saying that the iPad is just a bigger iPod Touch, go watch the iWorks demo in the keynote presentation.

Go ahead, I’ll wait….

Back again? Okay. Now ponder the following things:

- multi-touch (as in, three fingers or more)
- user interaction design

There’s some major progress being made here. Regardless of hype, the way Apple does introductions and all that. The real progress being made will not be by iPhone apps being scaled up. The real progress will be made with the mundane productivity apps.

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Watson claimed that many developers of applications for the iPhone OS–which the iPad uses–are not making money. Developing applications for the iPhone and iPad is expensive, he said, because iPhone OS uses the Objective C language rather than Microsoft’s more pervasive .NET platform. And Apple’s control over the platform has alienated some people that make software for its products, he said.

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Yes, there is much jealousy from iPhone developers at the sacks full of money being made by Zune and Windows Mobile app developers.

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Frontier Foundation, established seven years ago by Congressman Steve Buyer (R-Indiana) to award scholarships, has yet to help any students, but it has financed Buyer’s golf game. Buyer’s foundation has collected more than $800,000, while not giving out a single scholarship, and prompting a government watchdog group to ask for an investigation of the congressman’s operation.

I guess his kids aren’t of college age yet…

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Remember way back to January 2007, when the iPhone was announced? Oh Internets, you wailed and gnashed your teeth endlessly. No 3G network? No MMS? No apps on the iPhone? No replaceable battery? Oh, your complaints were endless. You were sure that the iPhone was doomed because it didn’t meet all your requirements.

And what happened? Well, Apple has sold 40 million iPhones. FORTY MILLION. They have become the largest mobile device company in the world.

So today, you moan on and on about all the features you expected and demand in the iPad. What no Verizon? No two-way camera? It’s not weightless? A full half inch thick? Only 10 hours of battery life? You make tons of predictions on the success and failure with scant details and without ever actually trying one.

[..]

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” – Steve Jobs

The video is available here.

I can’t wait for the next generation – I expect Apple, just like with the iPod, to introduce an iPad Nano….

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Claiming that he completely forgot about the much-hyped electronic device until the last minute, a frantic Steve Jobs reportedly stayed up all night Tuesday in a desperate effort to design Apple’s new tablet computer. “Come on, Steve, just think—think, dammit—you’re running out of time,” the exhausted CEO said as he glued nine separate iPhones to the back of a plastic cafeteria tray. “Okay, yeah, this will work. This will definitely work. Just need to write ‘tablet’ on this little strip of masking tape here and I’m golden. Oh, come on, you piece of shit! Just stick already!” Middle-of-the-night sources reported that Jobs then began work on double-spacing his Keynote presentation and increasing the font size to make it appear longer.

Remember, everything Steve does during a keynote is on purpose:

On Amazon, a product with one single 5 star review is rated higher than a product with 200 reviews an average 4.5 star rating.

Is that product with just one reciew better? I don’t think so, so on 20orbetter.com, I only list products that have at least 20 reviews to their name. Amazon doesn’t let you filter based on the number of reviews, so this is filling a gap left by Amazon.

There’s a few features I still want to add – but I’d love some feedback as well. Do I need to add a full-text search? Anything else?

[Quote:]

Event	Instructions
Obama says “let me be clear”	Do one shot
Obama says “change isn’t easy”	Do one shot
Obama says “make no mistake”	Do one shot
Obama says “Let me be clear, change isn’t easy, make no mistake.”	He’s screwing with you to get you drunk, so five shots
Joe Wilson yells something	Do two shots
Obama yells back	Finish the bottle
Obama says “jobs”	Do one shot, two if you’re unemployed
Obama says “health care”	Do not drink, you will not be given a replacement liver
Nancy Pelosi claps like a seal	Do one shot
Nancy Pelosi becomes a seal	STOP DRINKING FOR THE LOVE OF GOD
Obama mentions Bo	Put beer in your dog’s water bowl
Michelle Obama wears a slinky dress	Go immediately to the HuffPost Style page for close-ups
Joe Biden nods-off/laughs inappropriately/starts talking before the speech is over	Do three shots
Obama uses the term “Congressional leadership”	Do two shots carefully as all that laughing will make it difficult to swallow
Obama says he’s “fighting for you”	Do one shot, two if you believe him
Obama mentions Haiti	Text “Haiti” to the number 90999 and donate $10 to the Red Cross

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Consumer organisation Which? said it has received over 150 enquiries from people who believe they have been wrongly accused of pirating copyrighted content.

ACS:Law sends out letters offering to settle the file-sharing accusation in exchange for £500. The company gets its information from internet service providers.

The scheme was run by lawyers Davenport Lyons but was transferred, along with some staff, to ACS:Law last summer.

Which? said it had been contacted by over 150 people, with even more getting in touch after the last wave of letters.

One letter to Which? said: “My 78 year old father yesterday received a letter from ACS law demanding £500 for a porn file he is alleged to have downloaded. He doesn’t even know what file sharing or bittorrent is so has certainly not done this himself or given anyone else permission to use his computer to do such a thing.”

In other words, ACS law is just running an old-fashioned protection racket. Imagine what would happen if they could cut off your internet after the third letter…

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Frustrated by continued demands from viewers for more awesome and extreme programming, Science Channel president Clark Bunting told reporters Tuesday that his cable network was “completely incapable” of watering down science any further than it already had.

“Look, we’ve tried, we really have, but it’s simply not possible to set the bar any lower,” said a visibly exhausted Bunting, adding that he “could not in good conscience” make science any more mindless or insultingly juvenile.

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You have two one-hour fuses: If you light one, it will be consumed in exactly one hour.Unfortunately, they’re badly made — some sections of each fuse burn faster than others. You know only that each full fuse will burn in one hour.Using only these two fuses and matches to light them, how can you tell when 45 minutes have passed?

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A new poll shows Fox News is the only major TV news operation in the country given a positive review, thanks to Republicans and independents.

Public Policy Polling reports 49 percent of those surveyed trust Fox. The other big media guns – CNN, NBC, CBS and ABC – are wallowing in red polling territory.

[..]

As for the poll, after Fox comes CNN, with 39 percent of those polled saying they trust the cable giant. Next is NBC, with 35 percent trusting it; 32 percent trust CBS; 31 percent back ABC.

The most trusted network is also the network whose target audience has the lowest level of critical thinking skills.

Makes sense.

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At some banks, the relationship between pay and profit is a bit tenuous. In 2005, for instance, Morgan Stanley made a pretax profit of $7.4 billion. That year, compensation at the bank averaged $212,000 for each employee. Last year, Morgan Stanley made about $857 million before taxes. But compensation averaged $235,000 for each employee.

In other words, Morgan Stanley employees collected roughly 61 cents out of every dollar the bank made in 2005, and about 94 cents of every dollar last year.

[..]

“If the shareholders would wake up, executive compensation would not be what it is,” he said.

The problem is that the larger shareholders, who could presumably do something about this, are usually big institutions themselves, like pension funds. The people running those have no personal interest in curbing executive pay, so they won’t. Meanwhile the small shareholder, and the owner of a pension fund, is getting royally screwed.