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This is yet another example of the patheticness that is modern software development. Instead of going headfront and fixing the actual problems, most systems cope out and just sweep the problem under the carpet, hoping no-one will notice.

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One of the mysteries about the outbreak of the particularly vicious strain of E. coli is that most of the victims have been women.

The cause of the outbreak: cucumbers.

Post your “comment of the week” right here:

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A SENIOR member of the Church of Scientology has been charged by police for intimidating a young girl who wanted to report sexual abuse allegations within the church.

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"A company that pays a terrorist organization that kills thousands of people should get the capital punishment of civil liability and be put out of business by punitive damages," said attorney Terry Collingsworth, who filed one of the first lawsuits on behalf of Colombians.

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I decided to make a whole page for the BP disaster as there is so much information that the majority of people do not know.

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Apple® CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software – Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS® X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®; and iCloud®, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.

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Getting beyond the drama of the Chevrolet Volt and its high-profile development process was supposed to mean that General Motors could focusing on enjoying the car’s green halo. But that has not exactly been the case. On the other side of numerous awards and glowing reviews there have been the sales numbers and stories of dealer gouging. Speaking of dealers, a new story by Mark Modica on the National Legal and Policy Center site suggests that Chevy dealers are selling Volts to one another and claiming the car’s $7,500 federal tax rebate for themselves, then selling the cars to private buyers as used sans rebate.

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Following a time-honored Washington tradition of dumping required but embarrassing information on a Friday night before a major holiday, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas finally released the details of his wife’s income from her year or so working for the tea party group Liberty Central, which fought President Obama’s health care reform law. His new financial disclosure form indicates that his wife, Virginia, who served as Liberty Central’s president and CEO, received $150,000 in salary from the group and less than $15,000 in payments from an anti-health care lobbying firm she started.

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Facebook just made two more friends in D.C.

It’s hiring two aides of former President George W. Bush as lobbyists.

Joel Kaplan, previously deputy chief of staff in the Bush White House, is joining Facebook as vice president of U.S. public policy, a new position in which he will oversee the company’s public policy strategy and interact with federal and state policymakers.

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Arctic reindeer can see beyond the “visible” light spectrum into the ultra-violet region, according to new research by an international team.

They say tests on reindeer showed that the animal does respond to UV stimuli, unlike humans.

The ability might enable them to pick out food and predators in the “UV-rich” Arctic atmosphere, and to retain visibility in low light.

Details are published in the The Journal of Experimental Biology.

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Former Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who retired this January, has been hired as an international adviser to Goldman Sachs.

“Judd Gregg’s experience and insight will contribute significantly to our firm and our continuing focus on supporting economic growth,” said Goldman’s chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein in a statement announcing the move.

Gregg was first elected to the Senate in 1992, after serving as governor of New Hampshire for four years. Before that, he spent eight years in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“A strong financial sector is critical to our nation and one of the key engines of job creation in our country,” the former senator said. “I hope that I can bring to Goldman Sachs some ideas and perspectives that will help the firm continue to be a leader in supporting its clients in their pursuit of the capital, credit and advice they need to be successful.”

During his tenure in the Senate, Gregg served as ranking member of the budget committee and occupied a seat on the banking committee that oversaw institutions like Goldman Sachs. He voted against the financial regulatory overhaul of 2010.

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The Pentagon has adopted a new strategy that will classify major cyber attacks as acts of war, paving the way for possible military retaliation, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

The newspaper said the Pentagon plans to unveil its first-ever strategy regarding cyber warfare next month, in part as a warning to foes that may try to sabotage the country’s electricity grid, subways or pipelines.

“If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks,” it quoted a military official as saying.

The newspaper, citing three officials who had seen the document, said the the strategy would maintain that the existing international rules of armed conflict — embodied in treaties and customs — would apply in cyberspace.

It said the Pentagon would likely decide whether to respond militarily to cyber attacks based on the notion of “equivalence” — whether the attack was comparable in damage to a conventional military strike.

This is a bit dated (May 12), but the issue is unresolved and I thought it was very interesting commentary on the debate about raising the U.S. public debt ceiling from Ezra Klein.

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The negotiation that we’re having, in theory, is how to cut the deficit in order to give politicians in both parties space to increase the debt limit. But if you look closely at the positions, that’s not really the negotiation we’re having. Republicans are negotiating not over the deficit, but over tax rates and the size of government. That’s why they’ve ruled revenue “off the table” as a way to reduce the deficit, and why they are calling for laws and even constitutional amendments that cap federal spending rather than attack deficits. (…)

If we were really just negotiating over the deficit, this would be easy. The White House, the House Republicans, the House Progressives, the House Democrats and the Senate Republicans have all released deficit-reduction plans. There’s not only apparent unanimity on the goal, but a broad menu of approaches. We’d just take elements from each and call it a day. But if the Republicans are negotiating over their antipathy to taxes and their belief that government should be much smaller, that’s a much more ideological, and much tougher to resolve, dispute. The two parties don’t agree on that goal. And if the Democrats haven’t quite decided what their negotiating position is, save to survive this fight both economically and politically, that’s not necessarily going to make things easier, either. Negotiations are hard enough when both sides agree about the basic issue under contention. They’re almost impossible when they don’t.