not enough, the federal government started to put in place on Friday a sweeping plan to restore confidence in the financial markets.

The actions began to get under way on Thursday with discussions between the Treasury, Federal Reserve and Congressional leaders on what could become the biggest bailout in United States history, a plan likely to authorize the government to buy distressed mortgages at deep discounts from banks and other institutions.

Stocks Surge as U.S. Acts to Shore Up Money Funds and Limits Short Selling - NYTimes.com

SALT LAKE CITY, Sept 17, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/ -- Overstock.com, Inc. chairman and CEO Patrick M. Byrne comments on the SEC's September 17, 2008 press release (see http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2008/2008-204.htm) that purports to protect investors against naked short selling.
Dr. Byrne commented, "At the core of the SEC announcement is a decision that if a hedge fund naked shorts a stock, its broker isn't supposed to let them naked short again. But guess what: they were not supposed to naked short in the first place. Instead of giving the buyer who receives the fail the right to put it back to the naked short selling participant, the SEC once again opts for no penalties for financial rapists.
"If the SEC were anything but a hedge fund bootlick," continued Byrne, "it would not have taken the half-measure of a pre-borrow requirement applied only as a penalty for those failing to deliver within T+3, but would have instituted a market-wide pre-borrow requirement (as it did in its July 15, 2008 Emergency Order protecting Upper Caste financial firms), and mandatory buy-ins at T+3. null

Overstock CEO Comments on SEC's New Rules Against Naked Short Selling - MarketWatch

The market is now consolidating this industry, with the strong eating the weak, which will impose its own fiscal discipline. Good. Maybe then more of our next generation of math geniuses will think about going into engineering the next great global industry — energy technology — rather than engineering derivatives.

Op-Ed Columnist - Keep It in Vegas - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

A more likely alternative is that enterprises will finally begin making the most out of the little silicon chips housed on the motherboards of the PCs they’ve already bought. A few years ago, major OEMs began shipping PCs with Trusted Platform Modules (TPM), security chips used to store credentials and user certificates. While the technology is only on enterprise-class PCs today, it is widely expected to be on all PCs shipped within the next year or so and could be here tomorrow. null

I think his assessment is highly optimistic but he has the right idea -- security isn't going to get any better until we move away from the fantasy land that user passwords can ever be made secure.

Call off the dogs--authentication solution already in enterprise-class PCs | Tech News on ZDNet

The real-estate industry logically prefers a protected market to a free one. It argues that capital would drain out of housing. "This is antihousing," says Jerry Howard, chief executive of the National Association of Home Builders. "You will do some serious damage to states with strong vacation economies." You can see why home builders are upset: their margins are fattest on luxury homes; a policy that pushes prices toward the middle, as egalitarian as it might sound, would end their party.

But tax policy was never intended to function as a price support. Even less should it support a putative housing bubble. Even the president's directive mentioned sustaining housing ownership — not sustaining housing prices. High prices may even be a disincentive to ownership. And the housing market, the panel concluded, is overcapitalized anyway. Thanks to the interest deduction and other breaks, the effective tax rate on owner-occupied real estate in the U.S. is estimated to be only a fraction of the tax on business. Some of the capital being plowed into McMansions with Olympic-size lap pools would earn a higher return (tax considerations aside) in medical research or pollution control.

From 2006 and probably even more to the point today.

Tax Break - Who Needs the Mortgage-Interest Deduction? - NYTimes.com

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) has been granted an Operational License by the US Air Force for the use of Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on the Florida coast. Receipt of the license, in conjunction with the approved Site Plan, paves the way for SpaceX to initiate Falcon 9 launch operations later this year.

SpaceX Receives USAF Operational License for Cape Canaveral Launch Site | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference

When NASA astronauts return to the moon and begin establishing a lunar outpost, they will need power sources on the lunar surface. Engineers at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland have been exploring the possibility of nuclear fission to provide the necessary power and have taken initial steps toward a non-nuclear system-level technology demonstration of this type of power system.

A potential fission surface power system on the moon would generate a steady 40 kilowatts of electric power, enough for about eight houses on Earth. Fission surface power systems depend on splitting uranium atoms in a reactor to generate heat that is converted into electric power. They offer many potential advantages over other power sources, including the ability to produce large amounts of power in harsh environments, like the surfaces of the moon and Mars, without depending on sunlight. The primary components of fission surface power systems are a heat source, power conversion, heat rejection and power conditioning and distribution.

I hope this pans out because then they can put it on deep space probes which are stuck in the meantime since we're out of Pu-238.

NASA Developing Fission Surface Power Technology | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference

When the Soviet Union chucked Sputnik into space in 1957, it galvanized America to come from behind and win the space race. The federal government opened its checkbook to finance an array of projects. Students shifted to new subjects like astronautical engineering and Russian studies to help the United States understand and eclipse the Soviet Union. The moon shot inspired a patriotic nation and produced useful commercial technologies along the way. The space race was expensive, but it worked.

Thomas L. Friedman’s latest book is a plea for a new Sputnik moment. His breezy tour of America’s energy policy documents a nation that has become dangerously dependent on fossil fuels. The bulging bank accounts of oil exporters like Russia, Iran and Venezuela give them the swagger and ability to cause lots of mischief.

Books of The Times - A Call to Arms in ‘Hot, Flat, and Crowded’ by Thomas L. Friedman - Review - NYTimes.com

Kohl's office is asking each carrier to explain the method behind the text message rate madness, including any cost, technical, or other factors that justify the 100 percent increase between 2005 to 2008. Kohl also wants data on how text messages are utilized, comparisons of how text message packages stack up against competitors, and—perhaps most importantly—price comparisons against per-minute charges for voice plans, and per-KB charges for mobile Internet and tethering plans. It should be fun to hear AT&T defend why it charges over $1,300 per megabyte for text messages.

Senator to cellular carriers: UR TXTS R 2 XPENSIV

What made a six-year-old article about a bankruptcy filing by United Airlines reappear on Wall Street traders’ screens on Monday as if it were fresh news, prompting a sell-off that erased $1 billion in the company’s market value in a matter of minutes? The path the article followed from forgotten archive entry to present-day stock-killer has begun to emerge, and it raises some interesting questions about how news rockets around the Web.

Both human error and far-from-foolproof technology seem to have played a role in the episode, which involved a 2002 Chicago Tribune report; the web site of the Sun Sentinel, a Florida newspaper owned by the same company; the Bloomberg News financial wire service; and Google, all apparently unwittingly.

A Stock-Killer Fueled by Algorithm After Algorithm - The Lede - Breaking News - New York Times Blog