Bill Tupman, an expert on counter-terrorism from Exeter University, told BBC News: “The problem is trying to predict the mind of the al-Qaeda planner; there are so many things they might do.

“And it is also necessary to reassure the public that we are trying to outguess the al-Qaeda planner and we are in the process of protecting them from any threat.”

No, idiot, you need to convince the public to refuse to be terrorized.

Oh wait, that would make your job obsolete, right? Well, that explains your statements…

An Adobe product manager has apologized for allowing a potentially serious bug in Flash Player to remain unfixed for more than 16 months.

The admission, by Emmy Huang, product manager for Flash, came a week after Apple CEO Steve Jobs lambasted Adobe engineers as “lazy” and said when Macs crash, “more often than not it’s because of Flash.” Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch struck back, insisting that at Adobe, “we don’t ship Flash with any known crash bugs.”

The crash bug at issue in Huang’s blog post published over the weekend was reported in September 2008, but it has yet to be excised from release versions of Flash. She said a beta version of Flash scheduled for official release later this year has fixed the problem.

Pity the world has to rub your face in it before you admit it, Adobe.

Kicking off their controversial national convention in Nashville last night, Tom Tancredo, the one time GOP Congressman, presidential candidate and confirmed wing-nut, presented the opening speech. To make certain that the event got off to the right start, Tancredo proceeded to give the most racist speech I can recall since David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan leader turned politician, amazed us with his vile dribble.

Ripping into Obama, Tancredo announced that the president had won his office because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.”

This was no accidental choice of words. Back in the days of the Jim Crow south, literacy tests were used to take away the right to vote from the majority of African Americans. It was a practice successfully employed to deny these rights from the late nineteenth century right on through to the 1960’s when it was mercifully ended by The Voting Rights Act of 1965, and one that continues to be one of the darkest stains on our national history.

But Tancredo was just getting warmed up.

People who could not spell the word vote or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House — name is Barack Hussein Obama.”
Via Fox News

But he wasn’t finished yet. He still had to point out that America’s problems are the result of the nation’s “cult of multiculturalism.” Tancredo basically did everything he could to make his racist point short of handing out copies of “Mein Kampf” and carrying a sign reading, “If you ain’t white, you ain’t right.”

The director of national intelligence affirmed rather bluntly today that the U.S. intelligence community has authority to target American citizens for assassination if they present a direct terrorist threat to the United States.

Feel safer yet?

In response to an environmental lawsuit filed against the oil giant, Chevron has fortified its defenses with at least twelve different public relations firms whose purpose is to debunk the claims made against the company by indigenous people living in the Amazon forests of Ecuador. According to them, Chevron dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste in the Amazon between 1964 and 1990, causing damages assessed at more than $27 billion.

The company is being criticized by people and organizations from across the social and political spectrum for its unethical behavior in regards to the case. Originally filed in U.S. federal district court back in 1993, the lawsuit was eventually moved to courts in Ecuador at Chevron’s behest. Having initially lauded Ecuador’s legal system in an effort to have the case moved there, Chevron later changed its mind and began attacking the system when that system found the company liable for damages.

Shareholders are also upset with Chevron for its gross mismanagement of the case in which it has sidestepped the rule of law and employed guerilla-style tactics in a last ditch effort to fend off an unfavorable ruling. Part of this includes hiring Hill & Knowlton, the same firm that represented the tobacco industry during its indictment over tobacco causing cancer, to perform the same task concerning toxic oil contaminants.

From the Denver Police Department Operations Manual:

205.07. Violations by Colorado Legislators.

(1) Pursuant to Article 5, section 16 of the Colorado Constitution, no member of the Colorado General Assembly may be arrested while in route to or from legislative sessions, except for treason or felony violations..

(4) In the absence of felony violations, should an officer have reason to believe a legislator is driving under the influence, the officer may cite for a violation which caused an accident or was the reason for a traffic stop. For the safety and welfare of the public and the legislator, the officer will arrange for other transportation for the legislator and his/her vehicle will be parked and locked

So….It’s ok for a politician to drive falling-down drunk on his way to work or back home. In fact, he’s given a free ride home — or to the capitol to cast an intoxicated vote.

Who makes these crazy laws? Oh, right…the same politicians who are falling over each other to pass tougher drunk driving laws.

The Haitian lawyer for 10 U.S. Baptists charged with child kidnapping tried to bribe the missionaries’ way out of jail and has been fired, the attorney who hired him said Saturday night.

Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. are doling out shares that employees can sell within months—much sooner than normally allowed. Other giant banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC, let certain employees borrow money to relieve personal cash crunches. And some U.K. banks have considered raising base, or cash salaries—funds that won’t be subject to the country’s new 50% tax on bonuses.

Such moves are a contrast to concessions recently made by large financial firms in hopes of defusing public anger, and political retaliation, over the comeback of sky-high compensation. Many banks and securities firms are paying bonuses with a bigger percentage of stock. Goldman, for example, sharply reined in pay and benefits during the fourth quarter. This week, the firm told partners that 60% of their 2009 bonuses will be in the form of restricted stock.

[..]

“I know it sounds ridiculous to Main Street, but it’s a hardship,” says Gary Goldstein, who runs Whitney Group, a financial-services job-search firm in New York. “So firms are trying to help out any way they can.”

Non-performing loans in China have risen into the “trillions of renminbi” because of poor lending practices, an insolvency lawyer said.

“We work really closely with SASAC, the state-owned enterprise regulator in China, and there are literally trillions and trillions of renminbi of, frankly, defaulting loans already in China that no one is doing anything about,” Neil McDonald, a Hong Kong-based business restructuring and insolvency partner with Lovells LLP, said at an Asia-Pacific Loan Market Association conference yesterday. “At some point there’s going to be a reckoning for that.”

Christians are fatter than other Americans. One of several studies revealing this, published by a Purdue University team in 2006, found that 30 percent of Baptists are obese, followed by 22 percent of Pentecostals and 17 percent of Catholics, compared to only 1 percent of Jews and 0.7 percent of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. According to the Journal of the Southern Baptist Convention, health screenings were given at the SBC’s 2005 annual meeting: Over 75 percent of its 1,472 participants were found to be significantly overweight.

OH SNAP!! Google had one of their Streeview camera cars parked in front of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt right here in Berlin. We put a GPS tracking device it and are following it right now!!!! Check this awesome large map we threw together (updates every 2 min) and follow what we see at @fffffat (twitter)

“Regarding crashing, I can tell you that we don’t ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today,” Lynch wrote. “Addressing crash issues is a top priority in the engineering team, and currently there are open reports we are researching in Flash Player 10.”

Adobe Defends Flash, Calls Apple Uncooperative

If you go to this page with Flash enabled, your browser will crash in a few seconds. Adobe has known about that bug since 2008.

Bah, teleprompters are for those elites who can work things like elitist projectors and elitist stands with a pane of glass attached.

Your red-meat eating real ‘merican writes on her hand and tries not to smear it by doing elitist fat-cat things like washing your hands after using the bathroom.

(Christian Post)

Four Christians on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit challenging the recently enacted Hate Crimes Prevention Act, arguing that it seeks to criminalize deeply held religious beliefs that are in opposition to homosexuality.

The 27-page long complaint was submitted by the Thomas More Law Center on behalf of Gary Glenn of the American Family Association of Michigan and Pastors Levon Yuille, James Combs, and Rene B. Ouellette, who are also based in Michigan. It names U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr., as the defendant.

We must assume that the Thomas More Law Center has read the law. And because the law has no effect on their rights to belief or expression of belief, the only logical conclusion is that these four Christians wish to plan for, conspire to commit, or commit an act of violence.

“Allowing gays to serve openly in the Army is a long overdue reform, but it must be accompanied by an assurance that heterosexuals will be able to serve openly in the Navy.”

There has been a lot of discussion of how foreign companies will be able to influence elections and politics given the Citizens United deal. But foreign companies are already dominating our politics.

Consider Richard Shelby’s decision to place holds on all of Obama’s nominees unless some federal money that may benefit Alabama gets released.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put an extraordinary “blanket hold” on at least 70 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate, according to multiple reports this evening. The hold means no nominations can move forward unless Senate Democrats can secure a 60-member cloture vote to break it, or until Shelby lifts the hold.

The key issue is that Shelby wants the Air Force to tweak an RFP for refueling tankers so that Airbus (partnered with Northrup Grumman) would win the bid again over Boeing. The contract had been awarded in 2008, but the GAO found that the Air Force had erred in calculating the award. After the Air Force wrote a new RFP in preparation to rebid the contract, Airbus calculated that it would not win the new bid, and started complaining. Now, Airbus is threatening to withdraw from the competition unless the specs in the RFP are revised.

Essentially, then, Shelby’s threat is primarily about gaming this bidding process to make sure Airbus–and not Boeing–wins the contract (there’s a smaller program he’s complaining about, too, but this is the truly huge potential bounty for his state).

“Trust me, after taxes, a million dollars is not a lot of money,”

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele

A high level Pakistani diplomat has been rejected as Ambassador of Saudi Arabia because his name, Akbar Zib, equates to “Biggest Dick” in Arabic. Saudi officials, apparently overwhelmed by the idea of the name, put their foot down and gave the idea of his being posted there, the kibosh.

According to Anand, the idea was first conceived by an Indian physics professor at the University of Maryland, who, in his travels around India, realized how widespread bribery was and wanted to do something about it. He came up with the idea of printing zero-denomination notes and handing them out to officials whenever he was asked for kickbacks as a way to show his resistance. Anand took this idea further: to print them en masse, widely publicize them, and give them out to the Indian people. He thought these notes would be a way to get people to show their disapproval of public service delivery dependent on bribes. The notes did just that. The first batch of 25,000 notes were met with such demand that 5th Pillar has ended up distributing one million zero-rupee notes to date since it began this initiative. Along the way, the organization has collected many stories from people using them to successfully resist engaging in bribery.

One such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success. Had the zero rupee note reached the old lady sooner, her granddaughter could have started college on schedule and avoided the consequence of delaying her education for two years. In another experience, a corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen.

Anand explained that a number of factors contribute to the success of the zero rupee notes in fighting corruption in India. First, bribery is a crime in India punishable with jail time. Corrupt officials seldom encounter resistance by ordinary people that they become scared when people have the courage to show their zero rupee notes, effectively making a strong statement condemning bribery. In addition, officials want to keep their jobs and are fearful about setting off disciplinary proceedings, not to mention risking going to jail. More importantly, Anand believes that the success of the notes lies in the willingness of the people to use them. People are willing to stand up against the practice that has become so commonplace because they are no longer afraid: first, they have nothing to lose, and secondly, they know that this initiative is being backed up by an organization—that is, they are not alone in this fight.

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!

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 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.

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.

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…