Confused Capitalists

You gotta love this piece about Craigslist in the NYT, demonstrating a major culture clash between financial analysts and Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster. You can almost see them leaving the conference scratching their heads. Hopefully they’ll scratch all the way through to their brains and kill themselves.

(Yes, I run a business myself; no, I’m not being ironic. Not everything has to be about money.)

LCD makers probed for price fixing

ars: Several LCD makers are facing new regulatory probes in the US, Japan, and Korea for anti-competitive practices. Samsung, Sharp, NEC, AU Optronics, LG Phillips, and Chi Mei Optoelectronics are all being examined for allegedly working together to fix prices on LCDs in order to combat falling prices.

Scandanavia…

Isn’t very cold at the moment, but it’s still picturesque. Wouldn’t live there though.

More later.

Medical Defence Union

(See here for an explanation.)

QUESTION: When is an insurer not an insurer?

ANSWER: When it is the Medical Defence Union (MDU) or a copycat version of it. (See Link) (more…)

ECB up 0.25%

That’s half of Cowen’s benefits to home buyers gone. Between that and the frankly idiotic cut in the top level of tax that we’ll probably desperately need next year, I reckon this particular Fianna Failure just flushed Ireland’s future down the toilet for a few years to come. And the opposition will have to clean up after them again.

Cell Phones Don’t Cause Brain Cancer

TIME.com : You can stop worrying about getting brain cancer from your cell phone. A massive study of just about every private cell phone user in Denmark shows no link between gabbing on your mobile and the development of brain tumors.

The 420,000 participants averaged about 8.5 years of cell phone use, although some of them had been using cell phones for as long as 21 years. But there was not even a hint of an increase in brain cancer incidence the longer they used the phone.

A closer examination of different types of brain cancer from gliomas to acoutsic neuromas showed no increase in brain cancer subtypes either, according to investigators, led by Joachim Schuz of the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology of the Danish Cancer Society in Copenhagen.

CIA role claim in Kennedy killing

JFK next?

BBC NEWS: New video and photographic evidence that puts three senior CIA operatives at the scene of Robert Kennedy’s assassination has been brought to light.

The evidence was shown in a report by Shane O’Sullivan, broadcast on BBC Newsnight.

It reveals that the operatives and four unidentified associates were at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles in the moments before and after the shooting on 5 June, 1968.

The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and some of the officers were based in South-East Asia at the time, with no reason to be in Los Angeles.

Security Of Electronic Voting Is Condemned

Like, duh.

Washington Post: Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country “cannot be made secure,” according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government’s premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency.

In a report hailed by critics of electronic voting, NIST said that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine’s software. The recommendations endorse “optical-scan” systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts.

Can your mobile microphone be “activated”?

I consider myself pretty clued-in technically, but this never even occurred to me! Presumably this is possible with European phones too?

News.com: The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone’s microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a “roving bug,” and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.