Its task for most of the past 100 years has been to regulate growth — not to manage decline. Much of the commentary you saw prior to 2008, such as Ben Bernanke’s sincere lack of concern about a US housing bubble (“I guess I don’t buy your premise. It’s a pretty unlikely possibility. We’ve never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis…”) is, of course, duplicated today as we confront a similar endgame in sovereign debt.
CNET’s Download.com site has been embedding adware into the install process for all kinds of software, including open source software like NMAP. For the unwary, some of the ads could have been read to suggest accepting the advertised service (e.g., the Babylon translation tool bar) was part of the installation process. Users who weren’t paying attention may also have clicked “accept” simply by accident. In either event, after their next restart, they would have been surprised to find their settings had been changed, new tool bars installed, etc.
[If] there’s fur inside the computer, causing HP to declare his computer a “biological hazard” and send it back un-repaired.
“However, we need to inform you that credits are not considered as payments on credit accounts,” the representative wrote. “Therefore, the credits (of $1,450) were not considered as payments on this account, and the interest charges were applied correctly.”
“But within an hour, it was all surging out on Twitter and Facebook,” the deputy director said. The CIA homed in on 12 to 15 users who tweeted situation reports and cellphone photos of demonstrations
“This is not a time right now for wishful thinking that governments are going to sort things out,” Rastani said on an interview with BBC on Monday morning. “The governments don’t rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world.”
At first blush I thought, ‘At long last, the truth’ but it turns out that the BBC was likely punked. -sigh- -Ed.
…the Fed will be able to specifically target information being put out by news web sites and even individual users (in forums or comments) and then respond to that information in kind by either contacting “key bloggers” and “influencers,” or simply ramping up their public relations machine to either discredit the message…
The complaint said the company had a “boiler-room style sales culture” in which recruiters were instructed to use high-pressure sales techniques and inflated claims about career placement to increase student enrollment, regardless of applicants’ qualifications. Recruiters were encouraged to enroll even applicants who were unable to write coherently, who appeared to be under the influence of drugs or who sought to enroll in an online program but had no computer.
Yet another example of why we should privatize education – Ed.
Apparently the police in Long Beach, California, have a policy that says if a police officer determines that a photographer is taking photos of something with “no apparent esthetic value,” they can detain them.
Long Beach was my hometown for about 20 years and I can tell you it’s not a good idea to mess with any cop in that town – Ed.
Dispatches From The Front 