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More proof that politicians pass laws to please their political donors and lobbyists, without understanding their implications. These infringement notices have been shown to be unreliable and easily spoofed.

http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080605-study-paints-grim-picture-of-automated-dmca-notice-accuracy.html
http://torrentfreak.com/study-reveals-reckless-anti-piracy-antics-080605/
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/the-inexact-science-behind-dmca-takedown-notices/

So now any New Zealander can have their internet connection cut if anyone knows their IP address: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/95089

So today's Political Enemy of the Internet Award goes to New Zealand's Judith Tizard, who joins Australia's Stephen Conroy and Britains Andy Burnham. I could handle it when all politicians did was rort the system, but this is getting really annoying. I don't recall voting for any of this stuff, and I'll put them last on the ballot next time.

Talking about computing & journalism is a tough conversation to without specific examples. As with non-journalism software, results depend on the problem that's being solved. Good examples of state of the art Computational Journalism are USAToday.com's airport capacity monitor and NYTimes.com's Represent ... they're automated apps that aren't so much data mining as they are coherent presentations of useful, interesting data in flux, a distinction that the source article author failed to grasp.

What if I am wearing my seat belt?

There is a reason that race car drivers strap in, rather than pinning their hopes on a fancy balloon:

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2005/07/18/which-would-you-rather-have-a-seat-belt-or-an-air-bag/

You don't seriously think a pack of armed citizens could actually stop the government from tyrannically taking away its rights do you? We've seen how successful "militia" groups have been when put face to face with ATF.

I think a pack of armed citizens would make it a lot harder for the government to do that. Look at all the trouble some insurgents armed with rifles and homemade explosives have caused for us in Iraq.

You can't even say you're ashamed of your president without the public lashing out against you and branding you a traitor.

Umm, where the hell do you live? There's several regions of this country where your just as likely to be called a traitor if you aren't ashamed of the President. New England, California, New York (downstate anyway), the Pacific Northwest, Chicago, etc, etc.

In the last two election cycles, we watched citizens, pundits, and politicians each call the "other guy" a dangerous lunatic with dangerous connections whose dangerously wrong ideas will bring about the end of life on our continent and perhaps the world. And in the next breath, these same people screaming that the end was nigh, made low-brow jokes about those candidates.

Democracy isn't pretty. If you think that's unique to the last two election cycles you didn't pay attention in history class.

If each election determines the fate of humanity, why do we still laugh and sing, and act as if it's business as usual?

Because most sane people who aren't party hacks realize that each election isn't determining the fate of humanity?

I think the reality is that if things should ever come to Nazi Germany here in the US, the vast majority of Americans will shit their pants and hope that by buying a new iPod or pledging allegiance to a favorite cable news company, they will be left alone.

I have more faith in the American people than that but I hope that we never have to find out which one of us is right.

of those Americans who do own guns, more than half of them will shoot their loved ones in the faces, blow out their TVs, accidentally kill a neighbor, or take out a street lamp

What are you basing this on? Most of the citizens I know with guns are better shots than the local police -- which admittedly isn't saying much, but I'd like to know what you are basing these assumptions on.

But maybe, just maybe, the ordinary citizens that comprise our military will refuse to take those tanks into suburbia too.

I would hope so. In the United States the military swears an oath to uphold the Constitution. They don't swear an oath to POTUS.

I don't think I'd trust any armed civilian militia to protect me

Protect you from what? The militia has many functions. I'd rather have an armed civilian militia around in times of natural disaster than a disarmed populace completely at the mercy of criminal thugs. It's an NRA cliche but you'll note how the shops with armed owners weren't vandalized or robbed during the LA riots.....

The armed citizenry of the 18th century had something the armed citizenry of the 21st lacks: a sense of duty to the higher cause of Liberty and a real, qualified distrust of our leaders

Well I'll give you that. I think we've gotten too fat and happy. History suggests that the pendulum will swing back the other way in time though.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/magazine/04risk-t.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/magazine/04risk-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

In New York City, if a cop tries to smash your camera or arrest you on a trivial charge for taking their picture, then the cop should get disciplined. The New York Times had an entire article about cops and video: Officers Become Accidental YouTube Stars

Investigative Journalism Rescues Data Mining

"Colleges and universities obtained fewer than 250 patents a year before 1980, when the Bayh-Dole Act gave them ownership of inventions developed through federally financed research. Now they acquire about 3,000 a year, according to the Association of University Technology Managers, whose members work in tech transfer offices. In 2006, association members made $45 billion from licensing fees and equity in spinoff companies; research powerhouses like Stanford and New York University made $61 million and $157 million, respectively."

Let's keep a few things in mind:

1. This was "a technology he created as an intern at NASA in the summer of 2007." It's not like he was an undergraduate sitting in a classroom -- he was working for NASA when he made the invention.

2. "The iShoe researchers used some of their own work and previous NASA data ," the latter presumably taken with "an expensive device about the size of a phone booth" in the creation of their invention. So NASA's data (and presumably equipment) were needed to produce the invention.

3. While an intern, Lieberman was also a federally-funded (i.e., taxpayer-supported) graduate student, receiving money from both the National Science Foundation and Department of Defense, through his university, for his research. Like many (perhaps substantially all) graduate researchers in US universities, he was being paid by his university to do research. The fact that the research was being conducted at NASA doesn't change the fact that Lieberman was on the university payroll at the time the invention was made. Welcome to internships.

4. His company has also filed for federal funding to develop the idea for market and, "[o]nce funding is obtained, the iShoe could be for sale in 18 months, Lieberman said." So he's still using taxpayer money to develop the invention for market.

5. We don't know what the "hefty royalty" is (unless I missed it, it's not in any of the linked articles), but $75,000 is peanuts. "The iShoe has a way to go to reach the market [...] Lieberman estimates $1 million is needed for a broad clinical trial, and $3 million to $4 million to bring the insole to market." As a startup, his monthly burn rate will be much more than $75,000.

Frankly, I'm fine with institutions receiving a financial return on the work of their paid employees -- especially if taxpayers are ultimately footing the bill. In fact, I would argue that Mr. Lieberman is getting a sweetheart deal; I think once he gets into industry himself he'll find that the commercial sector typically requires employees to assign all rights to any future inventions (at least, in the company's field of interest) to their employer starting on Day 1, usually with trivial or no compensation.

It will be interesting to see what intellectual property policy the new iShoe company establishes for its own employees. As CEO, will Lieberman let his iShoe researchers invent and patent without expecting that those inventions will belong to iShoe?

Actually, Jews are more similar genetically to Arabs than white Europeans, and real research beats a Google Image search:

Dr. Ariella Oppenheim of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem said she had found considerable similarity between Jews and Israeli and Palestinian Arabs, as if the Y chromosomes of both groups had been drawn from a common population that began to expand 7,800 years ago.

"DNA research carried out at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School and University College in London has shown that many Jews and Arabs are closely related."

Jews Are The Genetic Brothers Of Palestinians, Syrians, And Lebanese

Jerusalem Post - Experts find genetic Jewish-Arab link "The researchers found that the Arabs are more closely related to Jews than they are to the Welsh"

etc etc...

The NYT article mentioned some of the diamond is hexagonal: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/science/02impact.html

This is a type of diamond that seems to form when meteors enter the atmosphere and it a called Lonsdaleite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonsdaleite

This material is of interest as a replacement for structural steel since it can be formed in a simple manner using chemistry. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2008/01/anaximenes-way.html

Some of these new machines can cost several million dollars and offer amazing franchise opportunities... providing enough procedures can be scheduled on the machines during their operating lifetimes to amortise the cost and produce a profit.

Several million would be cheap compared to some devices. According to this article, accelerators can exceed $100 million per machine.

Evidence for Cyberknife's efficacy using lower dosages wrt convential treatments is still being gathered, especially for prostate cancer treatment.

One of the more remarkable twists governing medical devices in the USA is that, unlike pharmaceuticals licensed with health claims, medical devices do not have to demonstrate conclusively in clinical trials that they are of proven benefit or greater efficacy than existing treatments.

Some of these new machines can cost several million dollars and offer amazing franchise opportunities... providing enough procedures can be scheduled on the machines during their operating lifetimes to amortise the cost and produce a profit.

Evidence for Cyberknife's efficacy using lower dosages wrt convential treatments is still being gathered, especially for prostate cancer treatment.

One of the more remarkable twists governing medical devices in the USA is that, unlike pharmaceuticals licensed with health claims, medical devices do not have to demonstrate conclusively in clinical trials that they are of proven benefit or greater efficacy than existing treatments.

Some of these new machines can cost several million dollars and offer amazing franchise opportunities... providing enough procedures can be scheduled on the machines during their operating lifetimes to amortise the cost and produce a profit.

You have it backwards. 99% of the world (outside of Pakistan) probably applauds the bombings and hopes for more of them.
Hint: their main export

Car Generator

If you get the chance to move out, consider getting a Passive House, where it has super-thick insulation and is hermetically sealed. You wouldn't have to worry about frozen pipes in that kind of setup.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world/europe/27house.html

I'm glad Germany seems to have backed down from its anti-hacker legislation. Wasn't it last year we heard they were threatening their security experts and admins with legislation to take away even such benign utilities as password recovery tools?

I was going to your right to publish such information wouldn't be violated in America, but then I remembered the subway-hack kids and the guy who took a plea bargain for distributing Hezbollah satellite feeds in NY...

When your company has an 80% margin and you donate stuff that costs you nothing, like "the right to use your software" and record the gift at retail price, you net a greater tax benefit than it costs you to make the gift. That's net profit for giving, which is not generous -- it's just good accounting. If, from your profits for giving stuff that costs you nothing, you also give "medicine" that's generous because it's not required. Still, if you net a profit from giving, your giving can't be considered anything more than an accounting trick because some good no matter how unlikely, might have been served by paying the tax - some tax money is spent generously or well and wisely after all.

It's not really philanthropy unless you give more than you got. This is charity. Here's my money. Give it away in the best way you can. That's also trust. They say trust is earned. Let's hope BillG deserved Warren Buffet's trust because the ill that can be done with that much gelt is serious.

Nearly all of the African continent is inflamed with horrors beyond imagining. Terror rules more of the modern world than it has for a very long time. The fate of South America is uncertain. Maybe the best use of the Gates Foundation would be to husband their resources well until such a time as they might have some hope to turn the tide. Now is not it. This groundbreaking of the $500M Gates Foundation Campus is definitely not it. You can do a lot of philanthropy for half a billion dollars.

Is it correct to call a cat a dog because by the year 2704 it might have become the generic word for a carnivorous quadruped?

My argument is not that in the FUTURE the phrase will be correct. My argument is that the "incorrect" version of the phrase is ALREADY the main usage. The NY Times used the phrase 17 times last year, and only 2 of those were used in something approaching the "correct" way... and one of those was a quote. When the editors at the Times can't even stop the incorrect version of the phrase in their own publication, it's over. You've lost.

And, yes, if it is the year 2704 and you find yourself speaking 2000-era English you would probably be checked into a loony bin.

The problem is that we've moved beyond that stage and now even the big established print media can be spotted using the new meaning. Give up, it's over. There is absolutely nothing that you can do to effectively change this new idiom.

Sorry to hear that: like another child poster, I've had extraordinarily good look with buying physical books from Amazon and don't think I've bought anything else from them. I'm not opposed to the company in general, as they usually have the lowest prices on new books and an easy interface for buying used books.

But I am opposed to lies and disappointed that media organizations are propagating them, although I'm not terribly surprised. The Kindle's DRM issue, of course, practically speaks for itself. But for books and DVDs, they've been excellent. Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It in the New York Times describes my book habits well.

But the numbers do little to tell us how good (or bad) Amazon's season really was. The company didn't disclose whether shoppers bought more or fewer high-priced items than in previous years or whether discounts ate into profit margins. It didn't disclose revenue or even the total volume of products it shipped throughout the holiday season.

What's more, as consumers do more and more of their shopping online, where Amazon is the leading retailer, a "record" season at Amazon is hardly surprising. Amazon has claimed that its holidays were the "best ever" or "busiest ever" every year since at least 2002.

Oh please spare us the BUSHCO crap. The I-35 bridge didn't suddenly deteriorate over the past 8 years. Taking the nation's infrastructure for granted has been going on since it was first created. Short-term profits were what drove the 90s. Remember the dot com boom and bust? Grow up. There was a decent Op-Ed piece in the NYT discussing this issue: Reboot America

The majority of wealth comes from one choice alone: Choosing wealthy parents. I choose not to reward that.

Go back to your Objectivist reading club.

Perhaps you should return to your Liberal propaganda club first. 80% of the millionaires in the United States are first-generation affluent, according to the New York Times. The reason you aren't as successful is because you're lazy and/or stupid, not because you didn't have wealthy parents. The facts among millionaires are as follows:

Only 19 percent receive any income or wealth of any kind from a trust fund or an estate.

Fewer than 20 percent inherited 10 percent or more of their wealth.

More than half never received as much as $1 in inheritance.

Fewer than 25 percent ever received "an act of kindness" of $10,000 or more from their parents, grandparents, or other relatives.

Ninety-one percent never received, as a gift, as much as $1 of the ownership of a family business.

Nearly half never received any college tuition from their parents or other relatives.

Fewer than 10 percent believe they will ever receive an inheritance in the future.

We wasted huge sums of cash in the 90's, but we came out the other end with many profitable long term ventures that set up growth or the US economy. Of course some people, comfortable with their 10 million dollar a year jobs did not embrace such a path to growth, and spent most of the past decade fighting or perverting the change that would cost them their jobs and often fraudulent pay checks, so the path to the next big thing is not clear. It never is, especially when we just do the same old thing . What is clear is that we are wasting out money helping old line and fraudulent businesses. For instance, for the amount of money we are giving to the automakers, who knows how much will just go to bonuses, and accounting costs for the planned elimination of half the line workers jobs, we could have a lottery to give away coupons for 80% discounts on American cars for at least 200,0000 people, thus clearing the backlog. You see, innovative ideas for innovate futures, but of course such an idea has not bonuses for the bosses.

The United states has technology for renewable energy, but very little money. Someone is going to make a lot of money on this, and the oil comapanies will lose a lot of money, unless they stop selling buggy whips. Even now I wonder if there is well in the US that can be profitably drilled for $40 a barrel. Someone is going to make a huge amount of money delivering content using TCP/IP, but the broadcasters and cable will lose money, unless they get off their butts and do it. The nice thing about this is that the middle man can be cut out, and the US can distribute to the world, if we have the bandwidth to not only deliver such content to the US population, but also to the world, which we don't.

I don't know what else the US can do, but it has to be more than selling poorly engineered cars and fraudulent financial services. Of course a work ethics that promotes such innovation will have to encouraged, which means that some of he easy jobs, the ones like the we heard about prior to the collapse of the USSR where people got paid to sit around, play chess, and drink vodka all day, will have to go.

If one subscribes to the idea that violence in the region is Israel's own doing, obviously the dead girls are killed (ultimately) due to actions of Israel.

Your line of logic, although correct, is longer, than most people's attention spans, unfortunately. They see a dead child on a screen and blame whoever's weapon killed him. That's it...

For crying out loud, Americans have elected a Vice President — chosen, supposedly, for his "foreign policy expertise" — despite his saying, on national TV the following utter senility:

When we kicked -- along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, "Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don't know -- if you don't, Hezbollah will control it."

The above statement was wrong on so many levels, but almost nobody noticed — none of his supporters, and very few of his opponents.

http://www.itproportal.com/articles/2008/05/13/text-messaging-costs-more-receiving-data-hubble/
http://www.physorg.com/news129793047.html
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/costs-of-text-messaging-vs-space-transmissions/

Do you seriously think rocket fuel is readily available for everyone on Gaza? That everyone on Gaza fires rockets at Israelis?

When 84% of Palestinians polled support the cold-blooded murder of unarmed Jewish students,

You make it sound that Israel is blameless.

"Israel's apartheid policies worse than South Africa's" - former president Jimmy Carter.

Search on youtube for "Israel's apartheid" for more by Jimmy Carter

It's worse than that. The US Government PAID small business people, in the form of tax incentives, to buy those particular gas guzzlers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/25/opinion/25krugman.html?pagewanted=print

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-16108152_ITM

Did your subscription to Google expire?

As recently as 31 Dec 2007 both GM's and Chrysler's pension funds were "overfunded" http://www.pionline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081027/PRINTSUB/310279968/1031/TOC/. GM's was "overfunded" by $19 billion and Chrysler's was "overfunded" by $3.1 billion.

The UAW (Gettelfinger) has also said the UAW's own pension fund was "overfunded" by $2 billion http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/business/worldbusiness/17auto.html/.

Quite likely the automaker's pension funds were "overfunded" by much more in the past, but they've been siphoning off the "excess" for various non-pension purposes such as http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/business/worldbusiness/17auto.html/ Corporations have been allowed to siphon away pension funds for non-pension purposes for more than a decade because they could pretend they could continue to get 10-12% rates of return for the next 50+ years. After the last stock market downturn in 2001/2002 there were some calls for reform the fantasy accounting of pension funding http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2002/12/09/333483/index.htm/ including Warren Buffet's article in Fortune http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/12/10/314691/warning that companies which continued to play those games were "risking litigation for misleading investors".

No go. So now that we've had another stock market downturn and the auto companies fairy tale projections for the health of their pensions funds haven't turned out happily ever ...

As recently as 31 Dec 2007 both GM's and Chrysler's pension funds were "overfunded" http://www.pionline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081027/PRINTSUB/310279968/1031/TOC/. GM's was "overfunded" by $19 billion and Chrysler's was "overfunded" by $3.1 billion.

The UAW (Gettelfinger) has also said the UAW's own pension fund was "overfunded" by $2 billion http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/business/worldbusiness/17auto.html/.

Quite likely the automaker's pension funds were "overfunded" by much more in the past, but they've been siphoning off the "excess" for various non-pension purposes such as http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/business/worldbusiness/17auto.html/ Corporations have been allowed to siphon away pension funds for non-pension purposes for more than a decade because they could pretend they could continue to get 10-12% rates of return for the next 50+ years. After the last stock market downturn in 2001/2002 there were some calls for reform the fantasy accounting of pension funding http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2002/12/09/333483/index.htm/ including Warren Buffet's article in Fortune http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/12/10/314691/warning that companies which continued to play those games were "risking litigation for misleading investors".

No go. So now that we've had another stock market downturn and the auto companies fairy tale projections for the health of their pensions funds haven't turned out happily ever ...

This reminds me of the Lotus vs Quattro Pro and SCO professional lawsuit http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CEFD7113EF930A35754C0A966958260.

Lotus sued and won over keystroke commands. Quattro and SCO Pro could both emulate Lotus 123 keystrokes and had to be taken off the market. At the time many people were moving from Lotus 123 to Quattro Pro, I thought it would be the next big thing. SCO Professional was great because it was a Lotus 123 clone that ran on Unix and worked great on dumb terminals (or telnet).

Except that bob is the owner of "MunchkinCorp" and is required to report it's activities as well as pay taxes on it. If Bob breaks the law and doesn't then ends up profiting, you might as well say Bob robs a bank because it simply isn't legal.

The section on abusive trusts Arrangements in the instructions for the 1041 says that either the trust, the beneficiary, or the transferor to the trust will pay the tax on income generated by the trust property. Bob is both, the transferor and the beneficery and is living inside the US at least at the point in time of the transfers. This doesn't matter if the trust is hidden in some other country. $100k will be large enough that the bank tranfering it out of the country will flag the transaction to the feds. Even broken down, we are looking at $15ka month or more. The feds will investigate and find that Bob is contributing to a trust that Bob is not reporting or declaring and force disclosure of it. Then Bob will have to pay taxes on it's income like the damn law says. Now if Bob has 20 different companies that he could bounce the money around to, he might be able to hide it a little, but what he is doing is illegal. Just because Panama has some strict secrecy now doesn't mean they will tomorrow, or even the next day. IF they give up the information like banks in Switzerland and other countries have, Bob is in some big trouble and most likely won't be moving out of the country on retirement.

BTW, Sweden and France will help the US find tax cheats and even return them for prosecution. So even if Bob does get away with it, when he all the sudden shows up in a country with cooperation agreements with the US and they discover this 10 million in the bank, they might even look and see that it came from a trust account, then offer him up to the US or worse yet, make him pay their tax rates (jail time would probably be less over there).

In short, Bob can't do what you describe without breaking the law. The chances of him getting caught is pretty high. Bob can try, he might succeed, but he won't be happy if he doesn't.

Some anecdotal information:

Everyone's sales are down BIG. Sure - the big three aren't producing the "vehicles that people want to buy", but who is producing them? Anyone?

I live in Detroit (full disclosure: I hate GM more than anything). When the "snooty foreigners" come here, they tend to buy a bigger vehicle - most often an SUV. What I have noticed is that people tend to buy the most that they can afford as a percentage of income. In Europe, they tax the shit out of gas - so people drive smaller vehicles. Maybe we should do that here (perhaps tax gas when prices are low, using the money exclusively for subsidizing electric vehicle tech).

It takes about 5 years to adopt in the automotive industry. If gas prices go up and people suddenly want different vehicles, it takes a while to develop and get them into the dealer lots.

I recently tried to buy a car - something not so small (a Ford Freestyle). Even though my credit score is 765, I was denied a loan. Perhaps the credit crisis (that was caused by the bailed-out aristocrats) is the real cause of the auto crisis (including Toyota et al). Why can't we give 2 percent of $700 billion to the collateral damage here?

If we can subsidize corn to the tune of billions EVERY YEAR - money that tax payers will never get back - then why can't we just make a small attempt at keeping the auto industry around? Surely, this is in the name of national security.

If we go to war and China decides to stop sending us cars, then what exactly happens to our economy?

Do you seriously think rocket fuel is readily available for everyone on Gaza? That everyone on Gaza fires rockets at Israelis?

When 84% of Palestinians polled support the cold-blooded murder of unarmed Jewish students, you'll have to excuse me if I don't get much comfort from the fact that not all of them are launching rockets.

As for the rest of your comment, you should certainly be modded "flamebait", which means I probably should be taking the time to respond to you.

Then again, you should probably be modded "funny", since I always get a kick out of morons who run around yelling:

"LOLz U wahtc FOX NOOZ, STFU STOOPID N00B!!!11!".

It seems to be a good rule of thumb that the more loudly someone proclaims their disdain for FOX, the more likely they are to be a complete imbecile.

That's still no excuse for a single story to fail so blatantly in providing adequate context.

And this isn't the only instance of one-sided reporting; the contrast of the pieces that happily repeated rumors and insinuations regarding McCain's relationship with a former lobbyist and McCain's wife's past with their refusal to pursue or even acknowledge John Edwards's affair until he did because they don't want to dignify rumors and insinuations is pretty telling in my opinion.

More recently, there's also their refusal to acknowledge any potential conflict of interest in their reporting on Caroline Kennedy's attempts to get herself appointed to the Senate.

I'm not saying that the NY Times (or old media in general) doesn't have a useful role to play, but if you think it's the role of impartial presenter of facts, that horse has already left the barn...

That's still no excuse for a single story to fail so blatantly in providing adequate context.

And this isn't the only instance of one-sided reporting; the contrast of the pieces that happily repeated rumors and insinuations regarding McCain's relationship with a former lobbyist and McCain's wife's past with their refusal to pursue or even acknowledge John Edwards's affair until he did because they don't want to dignify rumors and insinuations is pretty telling in my opinion.

More recently, there's also their refusal to acknowledge any potential conflict of interest in their reporting on Caroline Kennedy's attempts to get herself appointed to the Senate.

I'm not saying that the NY Times (or old media in general) doesn't have a useful role to play, but if you think it's the role of impartial presenter of facts, that horse has already left the barn...

That's still no excuse for a single story to fail so blatantly in providing adequate context.

And this isn't the only instance of one-sided reporting; the contrast of the pieces that happily repeated rumors and insinuations regarding McCain's relationship with a former lobbyist and McCain's wife's past with their refusal to pursue or even acknowledge John Edwards's affair until he did because they don't want to dignify rumors and insinuations is pretty telling in my opinion.

More recently, there's also their refusal to acknowledge any potential conflict of interest in their reporting on Caroline Kennedy's attempts to get herself appointed to the Senate.

I'm not saying that the NY Times (or old media in general) doesn't have a useful role to play, but if you think it's the role of impartial presenter of facts, that horse has already left the barn...

You are parrotting the developing right-wing narrative about the mortgage crisis. It is a misleading and self-serving one. Conveniently it blames minorities as the sole cause of this disaster.

Teaser rates and adjustable rate mortgages during the Bush years were important culprits. Fannie Mae joined the bubble when the real estate industry made it clear they woudn't play ball with them unless they dropped standards like private lenders had. From the private sector we had irresponsible securitization, bad assumptions, insufficient capital requirements. From Democrats like Charles Rangel we had opposition to sensible regulation. We had a White House that saw ever rising house prices as a national economic strategy - White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire.

There is enough blame to go around between both Democrats and Republicans, and private sector and government. The specific emphasis on one factor over another says more about your agenda than anything else.

The free market works great, we just wouldn't know, we don't have one. We're regulated to death....

Actually, "federal officials are on pace this year to bring the fewest prosecutions for securities fraud since at least 1991": http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/business/25fraud.html?hp. One can't help but wonder if this freer market contributed to the economic crisis that exists right now and how something like Madoff's scheme went unnoticed until he decided to spill the beans.

Hell, even Greenspan, once one of the greatest cheerleaders for deregulation, admitted that he "put too much faith" in the free market: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel.html.

Federal regulation can suck at times, but when the core of the country's economy is based on abstract constructs that are intangible (like, say, toxic mortgage assets), I think at least some oversight is needed.

The free market works great, we just wouldn't know, we don't have one. We're regulated to death....

Actually, "federal officials are on pace this year to bring the fewest prosecutions for securities fraud since at least 1991": http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/business/25fraud.html?hp. One can't help but wonder if this freer market contributed to the economic crisis that exists right now and how something like Madoff's scheme went unnoticed until he decided to spill the beans.

Hell, even Greenspan, once one of the greatest cheerleaders for deregulation, admitted that he "put too much faith" in the free market: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel.html.

Federal regulation can suck at times, but when the core of the country's economy is based on abstract constructs that are intangible (like, say, toxic mortgage assets), I think at least some oversight is needed.

No way! This is the NSA. Looks like they took scissors to it before photocopying.

There is one little bit on page 12 where it looks like the bottom row of "pixels" of maybe one word can be seen. I wonder if David Naccache and Claire Whelan could figure out the word.

"Today, there are plenty of banks, and way too many bankers."

So you are suggesting we need some form of natural selection to winnow our crop of bankers, some sort of Malthusian correction for over population of bankers, with wrist slashing being a form of self selection versus natural selection? Seems a little harsh but greedy and incompetent bankers do seem to be threatening the survival of our species so it might be an appropriate response.

If you read Galbraith's "The Great Crash" it does discount the urban legend that there were rampant suicides in 1929. There were a couple high profile suicides directly related to the crash, that drew a lot of press, but there weren't really a lot of people jumping out of windows on Wall Street.

Thomas Friedman, who I usually find kind of overblown and breathless, has a pretty good opinion piece on the New York Times today. He cites a potentially fatal flaw in America's economy, the best and brightest are being drawn to financial engineering instead of real engineering. The end result is we specialized in manufacturing money instead of manufacturing products to sell. Making money the new fashioned way instead of the old fashioned way which seems to be the root cause of our collapsing economy.

News networks seem to be extremely fond of running stock footage showing money being printed lately. I think it indicates the dominate manufacturing industry in America now will have left is printing money. Welcome to the United States of Zimbabwe.

As best I recall FDR took us off the gold standard during the last depression, since it freed him to print money to get the U.S. out of the depression. Having taken the first step on that slippery slope, I think we will soon be seeing the consequence of an unbrindled fiat currency with irresponsible politicians and Fed bankers manufacturing staggering sums of monopoly money, and throwing it out of helicopters over Wall Street.

As a person who avoids debt, and avoided the stock market bubble and crash, I fear my wealth will soon be destroyed by hyperinflation, by a scheme to bail out incompetent bankers who gamed the system, and got rich pocketing their ill gotten gains. While I behaved responsibly I fear my wealth will be destroyed as New York and Washington bail out bankers and borrowers who behaved irresponsibly using a fiat currency as the new financial weapon of mass destruction. I'm desperately trying to figure out where I can put my money where it will be safe and not wiped out by hyperinflation. Gold would be the traditional place but that doesn't seem safe either these days. Everyone is rushing to U.S. Treasuries as a safe half haven but how can they be safe when the U.S. dollar is turning in to Monopoly money.

It sounds like this jack-ass is using the system that Philip M Parker developed to create "custom books" where a computer network scours publicly available sources of information and then pieces together a "book" based on the information that it picks up. To someone scanning the books, you may not notice, but it you try to understand anything in it you can't help but realize that either the person that wrote it was a complete idiot, or it was computer generated.

Science writer Olivia Judson has a post about tools for organizing the source materials for an article. I'd like to know what she writes the actual article with.

Here's her biographical blurb from the NY Times: Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist, is the author of "Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex," which was made into a three-part television program. Ms. Judson has been a reporter for The Economist and has written for a number of other publications, including Nature, The Financial Times, The Atlantic and Natural History. She is a research fellow in biology at Imperial College London.

Not to beat a dead horse, but way back at the start of the year, Warner Brothers chose Blu-ray over HD-DVD. I thought that totally blew chunks. Thankfully, I still have the Looney Tunes Golden Collections to temper my hatred for this company.

I don't understand that. The LED light bulb replacements I've seen have massive heat sinks.