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Since when is Israel our enemy? They are likely our only real ally and friend in the Middle East.

Just because they're an ally, don't assume that they aren't trying to spy on us:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/05/AR2005100501608.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard

2008.

What they do with the weapons: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/world/americas/03venez.html?_r=1&hp
What violent games do: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/02/AR2008110202392.html

the malware discussed in the blog posts linked from the summary illustrates how the crooks are defeating securID-like tokens, as well. Zeus, eg., is often seen in an attack rewriting the HTML of the bank's Web site as the victim sees it in his or her browser. In the simplest case, where the code is required at login, the attackers simply serve the victim with a maintenance page (down for maintenance, please try back in 15 min). e.g., Beware of Error Pages at Bank Web Sites Some banks require businesses to provide a SecurID or other token key when they initiate a wire or ACH transfer. This is getting closer to the solution, but a lot of commercial banks don't like to require that because many customers initiate such a high number of transfers each day, that it becomes impractical. The hard-to-attack solution, which really doesn't address the usability issue -- is to require the SecurID number both on login and on transfer.

Apple needs to stop marketing itself as immune from viruses. They have never been immune, just not targeted and fortunately better built so that only a true idiot user with correct privileges can take down the whole system. Unfortunately their marketing that Macs are immune leads to user complacency and foolhardiness. The OS security is useless when the users circumvent or ignore it, which is what has happened with Mac malware, as well as a lot of newer Windows stuff. An idiot Mac user with admin privileges is just as dangerous as one in Vista or 7.

What they have largely been immune (not always) to is the worms and remote exploits for which Windows has been vulnerable.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/23/AR2009082302381_pf.html

I guess he thought that we'd mistake his "C" grade promises of no more lobbyist influence for "A" grade work. Apparently he's been working so hard to give these lobbyists acres of fine print in his bills in which to play that he already needs a vacation. Didn't he visit a National Park a couple of weeks ago? Man, I wish I could get a vacation from my vacation! Somehow I don't think that'd fly, though. I haven't lied to enough people yet.

bolsters the notion that keeping 1 in 25 Americans in prison

That's 1 in 100 adults, or about 1 in 130 Americans. Not that this is a good number, but it's not nearly so high as 1 in 25.

Detainees Shown CIA Officers' Photos

The Justice Department recently questioned military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay about whether photographs of CIA personnel, including covert officers, were unlawfully provided to detainees charged with organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

Treason, no?

Why this adjustment ? Oh, to make data fit to your conclusion ? You live in a violent country, deal with it.

Isn't that quote about our large prison population which is a result of prohibition + our growing fascism? Unless your poor you usually aren't exposed to the violent areas of this country.

I guess it is based on bullshit data. For instance, Switzerland has a much higher life expentancy, see here. 80 years for men, 84 for women.

adjusted for the effects of premature death resulting from non-health-related fatal injuries

Why this adjustment ? Oh, to make data fit to your conclusion ? You live in a violent country, deal with it.

Close - it is bullshit analysis. What they did was fit a curve to the OECD data set for injury and per capita income, then using the U.S. per capita income and the assumption that it is a normal OECD country they calculate its "adjusted" life expectancy. They are thus crediting the U.S. with both a typical OECD injury death rate and a typical OECD relationship for GDP to life expectancy, when in fact it is much lower.

Take a step back and ask if you believe that (a) Americans are genetically more likely to die young;

Remember that, genetically speaking, white Americans are mostly a subset of European genes, but not a representative one : in all centuries, those who left Europe for the US were certainly more adventurous than those who stayed.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that this results in a violent country, where people are more likely to die young.

Here is a comparison of life expectancies between the US and Europe.

I guess it is based on bullshit data. For instance, Switzerland has a much higher life expentancy, see here. 80 years for men, 84 for women.

adjusted for the effects of premature death resulting from non-health-related fatal injuries

Why this adjustment ? Oh, to make data fit to your conclusion ? You live in a violent country, deal with it.

Not all regulation is good, not all deregulation is bad; what you need is effective regulation.

Actually, you need effective regulators. No more kickbacks, incompetence, and laziness.

Actually this administration is very much checking on anti-competitive industries unlike the previous administration. It's unlikely this sort of thing would get approved.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/11/AR2009051101189.html

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/31/fcc-takes-on-apple-and-att-over-google-voice-rejection/

It's already shining a light on many major companies like Google, AT&T, Apple, and Microsoft.

This post isn't trolling. Obama admitted in his book "Dreams From My Father" that he had used both cocaine and pot. That would disqualify him from any security clearance.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/02/AR2007010201359_pf.html

Oh geeze, I knew I shouldn't have waited to submit a story on this, as the Guardian article linked is pretty crappy, which isn't a surprise considering how opposed the Guardian usually is to manned spaceflight in general. It doesn't even list the options the Committee is presenting to the White House. Here's some better sources:

The actual presentations from the meeting: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/meetings/08_12_meeting.html
http://www.space.com/news/090812-nasa-spaceflight-options-refined.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081302244.html
http://www.spacepolitics.com/2009/08/13/show-exploration-the-money/

Basically, the Augustine Committee concluded that you can't do too much with the $10B budget spaceflight currently has, but a number of interesting options open up if you increase that by $3B. Basically, there's two main types of scenarios which have been outlined:

• Lunar focus: Similar to the current plan, focusing on lunar exploration and settlement with a mind towards future Mars exploration
• Deep space: Exploration of Lagrange points, near-earth asteroids, and Phobos, with an emphasis on building the in-space infrastructure which will make it easier to explore the Moon and Mars

Some items of interest regarding both scenarios:

• Most of the scenarios don't include the Ares I, which suggests that the problem-ridden program is quite likely to be cancelled
• Just about all the scenarios will have a big boost to commercial spaceflight to low-earth orbit, with the goal of making commercial providers the primary way to get to LEO by 2016
• Most of the scenarios place an emphasis on in-orbit refueling, which is something the previous administration avoided for some fairly dodgy reasons. Refueling is a major enabler when it comes to spaceflight, and helps you do a lot more with existing boosters. It also provides a market for promoting the growth and cost-efficiency of new rockets.
• Most of the options include restoring technology development funding at NASA, which was largely scrapped to help pay for the Ares I development

I've been researching this, and it's certainly interesting that the FAA is looking into this, but I'm really inclined to say NO.

A Predator B drone crashed in the southwest in 2006. They blamed pilot error. The North Little Rock Police Department has been testing an unmanned helicopter over rural airspace, and the helicopter crashed during a test flight in June. They blamed software error. Technology has outpaced law, they say. We have to change the law to keep up with technology, they say. Uh, why don't we wait to say that until the technology is stable enough that it doesn't put innocent lives at risk to let these things dart around in commercial airspace?

Dear Houston and Miami,
Look up and wave. The FAA already approved for police departments in these areas to use unmanned aerial vehicles over populated areas.

Interesting side note: I don't know how many people it takes to operate a normal drone, but the helicopter drone that the NLRPD was operating took 4 people to run it.

I love when life gives you these things that you just can't make up.

Since I should put up or shut up, I found this resource which claims that a hair over 62% of all bankruptcies are medical, at least for the year 2007, and these were largely middle class people with jobs and medical insurance.

So, the GP's claim that the majority of bankruptcies are people living beyond their means are demonstrably false, since the majority are provably medical.

I can't tell if you're trying to be witty, but I'll just assume you're ignorant of the facts. In the United States, more than 60 percent of all personal bankruptcies are attributable to medical bills. If you weren't aware of that, you might want to watch the news sometime. We have this new president over here, see...

That was interesting. According to the NPR report, the average GM hourly cost was 31.35/hour while Toyota's was 27/hour (not surprising, GM's is older and more experienced). So, now we look at what the report shows as high; Health care costs. GM's is 1500 while Toyota's is 200 (both per car). So, is that REALLY, the health care costs of JUST THE UNION WORKERS?
Last year the automaker, known for its innovative approach to health care, spent $5.2 billion to cover 1.1 million retirees, employees and their families. Prescription drugs cost GM $1.9 billion, and the company projects overall medical spending will increase by $400 million this year. That could be offset by a provision in the Medicare drug benefit to pick up a portion of firms' retiree drug costs. But the figure that prompted Wagoner to raise his voice is $1,500. That is the amount of money added to the price of every single vehicle to cover health care, a cost that his foreign competitors do not bear.
The answer is NO. That is the TOTAL HEALTH CARE OF THE COMPANY (the executives, management, retires, and of course, the union workers), being divided up amongst JUST THE UNION WORKERS.

Now look. I realize that ppl like you LOVE to read and follow Faux news and almost certainly you just HATED thinking for yourself. It is hard for neo-cons to think intelligently (I love the part where you neo-cons bitch about the monster obama defict, but ignore the fact that 10 TRILLION DOLLARS of 12 TRILLION DEBT is owned by republicans). But the simply fact is, if you USE YOUR FUCKING BRAIN FOR JUST 30 SECONDS, you will realize that 1500/car did not even make sense. The average time to put together a small car at GM was 17 hours (and 19.5 at toyota for same class of car; Toyota is not as efficient). So, you were thinking that a person who put together about 2 cars / week was really paying 3000 PER WEEK for health care or 12,000 PER MONTH? SERIOUSLY? YOU REALLY HONESTLY THOUGHT THAT? COULD YOU NOT DO SOME SIMPLE FUCKING MATH? You just accepted FAUX NEWS' and rush's garbage?

When you graduate high school, then come back and start posting again, dumass (see, I can act just like you) And try to learn some manners.

In Java, casting from one generic type to another is meaningless, since they are the same class in runtime, so I'd imagine that the cast would be eliminated by the compiler, since it's just casting List to List. That is, IMHO, the biggest problem with Java generics, and shows them to be somewhat of a hack job.

I know the underlying reason, and I agree with your assessment of it being the biggest problem with generics.

Are you promoting amending the Constitution or disempowering the people here?

I am merely stating a fact that many U.S. citizens tend to forget. What to do about it is up to you guys (as I'm not a U.S. citizen or even resident), though from my perspective, I'd say the more realistic way to fix this would be to ditch electoral college (and the less realistic way would be to roll back the federal/state power balance to where it was before 1861).

Smoke too much marijuana and you will... die of lung cancer just like you would smoking anything.

Yeah, that's what Dr. Donald Tashkin of the University of California was sure of too when he started studying marijuana 30 years ago. Then after conducting the largest study of its kind, involving more than 2,200 cancer patients, his results showed that there was no association at all between marijuana smoking and an increased risk of cancer. None at all, even amongst the heaviest smokers. Actually, their findings showed that smoking marijuana seemed to actually *reduce* the risk of cancer.

THC may be medicine - but strangely enough, it doesn't seem to have much therapeutic effect unless it's taken with the proper rituals, the one they use in drug culture (in other words, smoking it).

The Institute of Medicine, American Academy of Family Physicians, American Nurses Association, American Public Health Association, American Society of Addiction Medicine, AIDS Action Council, British Medical Association, California Academy of Family Physicians, California Legislative Council for Older Americans, California Medical Association, California Nurses Association, California Pharmacists Association, California Society of Addiction Medicine, Colorado Nurses Association, Kaiser Permanente, Lymphoma Foundation of America, Multiple Sclerosis California Action Network, National Association of People with AIDS, National Nurses Society on Addictions, New Mexico Nurses Association, New York State Nurses Association, New England Journal of Medicine, Australian Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health, Florida Medical Association, and Virginia Nurses Association would all disagree with your statement.

The DemiGod Particle.

This style of advertising never really went away, it's just a bit more subtle. Madison Avenue pays big money for product placement in TV shows - a quick Google turned up this 2008 article from the Washington Post which contains the line "Among the top 10 broadcast television shows, advertisers paid for 26,000 product placements in 2007." Advertisers pay for product placement on TV, in the movies, and in video games. They pay for celebrities to get photographed using or wearing products.

I don't think more of it will be a big winner for advertisers, because the market is already saturated. You could argue we'll see a return to overt product flogging in electronic media, but it's difficult to believe it's actually more effective. If the hero is seen drinking a Duff Beer I may subconsciously connect Duff drinking to some testosterone-infused fantasy. But if the action stops and the hero turns to the camera and says "you know folks, when I want a cold one I reach for a Duff!", that segment won't make it through the advertising filter in my head.

You failed to get my point that US politics is so polarised that one side cannot even contemplate the views of the other.

Now I understand: the paint program analogy is "threshold" or "posterize, 2 levels".

In British parliament systems an act known as "crossing the floor" used to be commonplace. Crossing the floor was to change allegiance to the other party by literally crossing across the parliament chambers to the other parties bench.

In U.S. legislatures, there's crossing the aisle, and then there's Specter the Defector.

Also Politics it two dimensional, Socialist (left), Capitalist (right) Authoritarian (up) and Liberal (down).

I've seen the compass with authoritarian on the bottom, but I get your point.

All political entities have an X and a Y coordinate on the political compass.

Two dimensions would be better represented by a U-V color plane than by "black", "white", and "gray".

Agreed. At some point, the republican party lost it's 'small government' brand and switched it's base to far right conservatives, so they are in essence, one in the same. They realized how easy it is to mobilize that right, especially with fear tactics and a wee bit of stretching the truth. Make them afraid and they will come. This is the root of all their identity issues. It's a total love-hate relationship. Here they have a fanatical loyal base that is hard to give up for the vastness that are moderates, but now they have ejected all of the 'moderate' republicans, and the only ones left that will have them are the conservatives. A rock and a hard place.

When the percent of folks who identify as Republican drops to the same percent who are far right in ideology, you know you've pretty much burned every bridge you own.

Some people at NASA are talking about deorbiting the ISS as early as 2016. This report is probably a red-herring to raise mroe funds from Congress. But some people are thinking about dumping it. Russians think it can last until 2020 or 2030. Partners could pick it up if US drops out.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/25/AR2009072500878.html

FTFA:

"One of the inalienable rights of digital nomads is starting their workday well after many of their colleagues out at the cubicle farm have spent hours preparing for and getting to their workstations... It wasn't until about 11 that Gruber, a 31-year-old product strategist for AOL, arrived at the Hilton pool with Consalvo, his business partner."

Well, his hard work is clearly paying off for AOL. Oh, wait...

Released/posted after close of business on a Friday? I'd say this is part of a coordinated effort to say as little as possible about this.

BTW, a better/original story link is here:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/

You mentioned the Dell N-series, but that series still forces you to pay for a Windows license fee, even though there's no Windows on the machine (i.e. an N-series PC is the same price as a Vista machine).

Commissions for installing unregistered shareware are thought to subsidize the copy of Windows. Evidence: At one time, Sony experimented with charging customers extra for a "fresh start" install with no unregistered shareware. (Later, "fresh start" was offered at no charge.)

they have problems communicating with other planes:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/09/AR2009070903020_4.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2009071001019

and don't seem to like the rain:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_07/019076.php

among other things like jammed canopies.

And it's funny too. People who don't like unions, bloated government and stimulus packages seem to think the government owes them a job when it comes to flawed weapons systems and unneeded military bases.

But it's nice to see A10s and B52s still in service. Made dack when the US actually knew how to build something.

But the "fuel" for the wind turbine is just wind - which is free

And that is compensated by the construction cost, which is extremely high. Everything included, wind electricity is substantially more expensive, per kWh, than conventional sources (coal, nuclear, hydropower).

Beat THAT with your nuclear reactors and their uranium mines,

What, the amounts of uranium needed are very small. And don't pretend wind farms don't need mines, for their hundreds of tons of iron and copper and whatnot. And more interestingly, lanthanide metals ("rare earths"), for high-density permanent magnets in the wind motors. Interesting because these occur in the same ores that thorium is mined from (not exactly uranium, but another nuclear fuel and radiologically similar).

See for instance Atlantic's recent Clean Energy's Dirty Little Secret, subtitle: "Hybrid cars and wind turbines need rare-earth minerals that come with their own hefty environmental price tag."

processing plants

The amounts of material used in enrichment facilities, or in chemical reprocessing plants, is very small, and it is manipulated in hot cells, and not released into the environment in any meaningful quantities. (I consider this the great theme of nuclear power: everything is "small", because the energy density is extraordinarily dense.) In contrast, (e.g.) solar photovoltaics go through large amounts of solar photovoltaic waste, which is not held to the high standards of radiological material, but (in many countries) simply dumped. Sure not in the US, but then we do import much of our PVs, no?

See for example WP's Solar Energy Firms Leave Waste Behind in China (about dumping of SiCl4 byproduct used in Si-cell manufacture), or CNET's E-waste looms behind solar-power boom, which points out that PV cells die and need special disposal considerations, because they contain toxic pollutants.

Citation? The major study I'm familiar with, performed by a consortium of major media outlets -- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12623-2001Nov11.html -- found that a statewide recount of the votes would have Gore the winner.

True. But in the real world the military industrial complex has replaced social security. Look at the F-22. It's basically a nation-wide welfare and jobs program. It's never been flown in combat, the pentagon doesn't want any more, each one costs the equivalent of 11,000 family health insurance policies, and, apparently, it can't survive rain. But, fiscal conservatives are falling over each other trying to keep the program running.

Similar thing happened to the mayor of Berwyn Heights, MD. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/30/AR2008073003299.html

oops!

The difference is that the supply of gold fluctuates unpredictably based on natural deposits, industrial use, and the activity of mining companies, while the supply of dollars fluctuates deliberately according to the monetary policy imposed by the central bank. Generally we're better off when the supply is controlled by people who know what they're doing rather than random fluctuations -- if you think business cycles are bad now, take a look at how they worked before the Federal Reserve -- although the outcome can be catastrophic when it's controlled by people who have no clue (i.e. Zimbabwe).

So you're saying the people who didn't see the current crisis coming, assured us it was contained, and then told us we barely avoided catastrophe know what they're doing and are the perfect stewards for our monetary system?

Ben Bernanke: There is no housing bubble to go bust.

Ben Bernanke: Subprime Mortgage Problems Contained

Ben Bernanke: We barely avoided catastrophe

The Federal Reserve was founded in 1913. The Great Depression started 16 years later.

The intrinsic value of gold is that it is rare enough to hold large quantities of wealth and cannot be manufactured arbitrarily. The second reason is why every fiat currency has historically failed, despite the fact that people were told by the bankers that they knew what they were doing this time.

"...of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper-money." -- Daniel Webster

Wrong. The details are public and exploits could be happening in the wild. How do you know they're not?

From http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/07/stopgap_fix_for_critical_firef.html

Instructions showing hackers how to exploit an unpatched, critical security hole in Mozilla's new Firefox 3.5 Web browser have been posted online.

It'll be permanent until the ISS is de-orbited in 2016, eh?

Well considering the $170 million the government spent on FBI software that didn't work (The FBI Software Upgrade That Wasn't), $18 million is par for the course. I'll be surprised if this recovery.gov get completed for $18 million. The FBI fiasco is an example of how government tech contractors reap millions in overruns. The contractors let the government clients run amok with their requests allowing huge scope creep, and when the project doesn't get completed within budget or on time, the contractor points to the client and blames them--knowing all the while the project was headed for disaster. It's a good paying gig if you can get it. The contractor for the FBI, Science Applications International Corp., had $7 BILLION in annual gross revenues as of 2006 when the Washington Post article was published. And you thought AIG had a good racket ;)

No offense (really), but this sounds like projecting a whole lot of your own biases on to the population at large. The iPhone found a base in the consumer market, where smartphones hadn't been strong to begin with. To my knowledge, it's stayed there. iPhone won, but Windows Mobile didn't exactly lose either (except in *potential* profit, which no one but the RIAA considers legitimate).

The 360 is doing substantially better than the PS3 (which is the closest direct competition), while trying to lure in a few Wii enthusiasts. Until Natal launches, we have no idea how it will do. I'm a semi-hardcore gamer who owns both a Wii and a 360, and while I like the Wii's controls (when well executed) and low power draw, the games available fall into roughly three categories:

1. First party releases
2. Okami (okay, and maybe 3 others)
3. Crap

The 360 has far more variety of games available, a much better online multiplayer experience, etc. The attach rate is also higher: Fewer 360 consoles are sold, but the players buy more games (and given the thin margins on consoles, attach rate is much more important in measuring success).

Vista, while admittedly a resource hog, is not nearly the dog of an OS people make it out to be. It's not the best thing since sliced bread, but it's not the worst thing since Hitler either. They rewrote the core of the OS, and that caused a lot of problems (poorly tested drivers causing blue screens and the like), but with the drivers now stable, and the new focus on speed, Windows 7 may be received far more readily; again, don't (dis)count chickens before they hatch. They actually listened to consumer customer complaints and acted on them, which is fairly new to them.

As for the ribbon UI, it's not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. It's new, and people need to relearn their habits, and it even provides a window where people might switch from Office to Office 2003-esque clones, but that doesn't seem to be happening at present. People complained about the endlessly cascading menus, and MS came up with a way to reduce the problem. There's a short learning curve, that's all.

In summary: The world != you, so don't assume that your disagreements mean that MS is ignoring changes in "the world."

I do that anyway.

Because:
1) I don't trust either IE or Firefox to be secure enough.
2) I don't use AV software for my machines - AV software is getting crappier nowadays, it's getting harder to tell whether a machine is infected by malware or crappy AV software.

e.g. Lots of things running slower? System instability? Weird/dubious shit happening[1]? Hard to uninstall the crap? All of the previous?

BTW both Symantec and McAfee recently agreed to settle charges that they automatically charged customers software subscription renewal fees without their permission.

From a _technical_ viewpoint Linux is just as insecure as Windows, if not more so.

See the zero-day exploit for Firefox here: http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/34235

Even though it was exploited on windows there's NOTHING technically preventing it from being exploited on Linux. And keep in mind Firefox is not normally part of the default install of windows but it's in the default install for most Desktop Linux distros.

At least Vista and Windows 7 have IE sandboxed out of the box. Neither ubuntu nor opensuse have firefox sandboxed by default yet. I have made some suggestions to both Ubuntu and Opensuse on how to improve their stuff, maybe they'll get to them in 5 years time. Maybe never.

FWIW, I use Windows, Linux and FreeBSD at home.

[1] http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/10/139229
http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2009/03/10/what-is-piftsexe/
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/03/symantec_users_complain_of_mys.html

"Find out if the bank manger smokes .. Get a few of those USB thumb drives from trade shows"

- The attackers somehow got the Zeus Trojan on the county treasurer's PC, and used it to steal the username and password the treasurer needed to access e-mail and the county's bank account.

- The attackers then logged into the county's bank account by tunneling through the treasurer's Internet connection.

- Once logged in, the criminals changed the judge's password, as well as e-mail address tied to the judge's account, so that any future notifications about one-time passphrases would be sent to an e-mail address the attackers controlled.

- They then created several fictitious employees of the county (these were the 25 real-life, co-conspirators hired by the attackers to receive the stolen funds), and created a batch of wire transfers to those individuals to be approved.

- The crooks then logged into the county's bank account using the judge's credentials and a computer outside of the state of Kentucky. When the bank's security system failed to recognize the profile of the PC, the bank sent an e-mail with the challenge passphrase to an e-mail address the attackers controlled.

- The attackers then retrieved the passphrase from the e-mail, and logged in again with the judge's new credentials and the one-time passphrase. Once logged in, the crooks were able to approve the batch of wire transfers.

From the site:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/07/an_odyssey_of_fraud_part_ii.html?hpid=sec-tech

one reader wrote in:

"I guess we don't know how the attackers somehow got the Zeus Trojan on the county treasurer's PC (presumably the county doesn't want to say and the FBI told them not to discuss details of the case anyway), but I'm curious whether that PC had security software installed, whether it was up to date, which security software can deal with the Zbot (ZeuS bot) Trojan, etc.

---------

Well, i have an idea, and it's TFO (Totally Frackin' Obvious)... and might be how it happened. A poor old cleanup crew member may have been elicited to put a USB device on a bank manager machine that might not have been watched by a camera. Might have trained the cleaner to surveil the PCs, determine their visibility to cameras, then trained the dupe into deftly/swiftly attaching a USB attack device while feigning scraping something sticky from the floor, or emptying waste bins that were tough to get the bag from....

Just my eye-dea... and the FBI may not want THAT to get out lest other banks suffering poor camera placement succumb to the same thing...

Or, a native of the Ukraine/U-area working at the bank might have been subjected to manipulation of some sort, but trained to be deft and not come under suspicion. Just my inflation-deprived-$0.02-cents...

Right, lets stop the irony and blame the greenies, lets ignore the fact the dams are 80yrs old, poorly designed and commercial fishermen want them altered/removed to allow salmon to spawn. Seems to me it's simply a failure to invest in modern infrastructure (fish ladders), failure to reinvest seems to be a bad habit power companies have picked up these days.

Both of the referenced articles are utter nonsense. The purported change of search engine pointed at the Windows file indexer, not the Internet search. The most likely explanation by far is that the Google toolbar mis-fired its warning on initialization after an upgrade. The facts and illustrations in the article support this. As for the "previous time" the company has beeb "caught", this has already been shown to be http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/05/microsoft_update_quietly_insta.html/ (read the comments) completely false as well. I am really sick of this site's propensity for publishing any ridiculous attack on Microsoft as if it were gospel. None of the headline authors seem to have any critical thinking skills whatever. I have enough morons in my life without having to wade through them for tech news.

Right now, we in America -- of all places -- have a silent crisis: an HIV epidemic. Read the shocking article published recently by "The Washington Post". About 3% of the residents of the District of Columbia is infected with HIV. That percentage is roughly the percentage in Uganda and parts of Kenya.

The only way to eradicate this virus is either (1) universal mandatory testing for all Americans and visitors to America (followed by tough enforcement of laws prohibiting unsafe behavior by those who are infected) or (2) a gene therapy that transfers the natural immunity enjoyed by a few Europeans to the American population. As for point #1, mandatory testing is taboo and would never be implemented. As for point #2, a small percentage of Europeans have a cellular mutation that prevents HIV infection.

Did you say DNA records? I can't wait until there's a practical field procedure for generating a DNA profile. Get pulled over for speeding? "Sir, we're going to need some saliva now. Thanks for cooperating."

Here's someone writing about a State department report: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/04/we-are-now-indonesia.html but I haven't found the report itself. I think the specific issue of waterboarding is kind of besides the larger point of torture, but it is strong enough on its own as well: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201170.html

After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding.

Why is Sony in such a hurry?

China has announced they are delaying their Internet filter. "Critics are likely to see the announcement, giving no fresh date for a launch, as a way for the government to escape quickly from the domestic and international controversy..."

Our supposed "right to know" ends when it can cost someone else their life in exchange

This is all very convincing, and I nearly swallowed NYT's argument myself, until I realized, that it could have (should have?) been applied to some inflammatory things they did publish earlier.

The Abu Ghraib abuse photos are the most obvious example — imagine NYT and wire-agencies respecting a Bush administration's request not to publish them so as not to "negatively affect" the US military's mission — and cost a lot of lives...

What else are the media and Wikipedia valiantly suppressing right now for the "greater good"?..