[Quote:]

The Nigerian suspect in a failed Christmas Day airliner bombing turned against the cleric who claims to be his teacher and has helped the U.S. hunt for the radical preacher, a law enforcement official said Thursday.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian who faces terrorism charges in the Christmas bombing, has been cooperating with the FBI for days, providing information about his contacts in Yemen and the al-Qaida affiliate that operates there.

But, but, but…. we haven’t waterboarded him yet!

[Quote:]

Investment banks have been told that every bonus issued must comply with the regulatory guidelines – or they face having their licences to operate in Britain revoked.

In an extraordinary ultimatum that has shocked some of the City’s biggest companies, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) told bank bosses that 60pc of all pay must be deferred, with no exceptions, even for those whose contracts conflicting with the edict.

Many of the global players have in recent weeks made representations to the City watchdog, in particular about pre-existing employment contracts that guarantee bonuses over a year or more. But their appeals have been met with the FSA’s toughest yet response.

One pay executive in a major bank told The Daily Telegraph: “The message came back that while the FSA agreed that it does not have jurisdiction over contractual law, it does have jurisdiction over issuing bank licences in London, and that we should go away and unwind the contracts.”

[..]

One headhunter said: “Many of these contracts have guarantees that 50pc of the bonus will be paid in cash. These are tricky things to unpick. But cleverly, the FSA has put the onus on the banks to unwind the contracts, rather than itself getting embroiled in a complex legal row.”

So a “you fucked up, you fix it” attitude is now called “cleverly”?

Oh, and you have to love this:

One executive faced with dealing with the new ultimatum said: “It was pretty amazing but we actually chuckled because it’s the sort of hard ball we would have played if we’d been in the FSA’s shoes.”

Part 1

Part 2

Conclusion

O’Reilly: “Do you feel bad when you take something and cut it up to make them look like an idiot?”

Well, Bill, how about we look at the full, unedited version then?

Just goes to show you that even Bill O knows his audience are morons, enough that he can make fun of them and they will never even realize it.

[Quote:]

Say, for example, that you get a letter accusing you of violating copyright and demanding that you stop. You know that you haven’t been, and you think that it was probably the tech-savvy kid from next-door breaking into your wireless. What can you do? On most consumer-grade equipment: nothing. The wireless routers that have been distributed by ISPs do not support strong enough encryption to keep him out, nor do they keep detailed enough logs to vindicate yourself. To put it simply: once the accusation has been made you cannot escape it, since the tools are not available to you to prove your innocence.

The result of this is, as Lord Lucas points out, that the record companies can accuse absolutely anyone they feel like, and the person will have no choice but to pay the fine they demand – it is legally sanctioned blackmail:

In a civil procedure on a technical matter, it amounts to blackmail; the cost of defending one of these things is reckoned to be £10,000. You can get away with asking for £500 or £1,000 and be paid on most occasions without any effort having to be made to really establish guilt. It is straightforward legal blackmail.

[Quote:]

Another example: When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.

They could have had what Apple is going to deliver with iWorks for the iPad almost a decade ago, if it weren’t for the internal politics…