S&P P/E is a rocket ship - this is what systemic instability looks like.

Normalizing Earnings During Profit Freefalls | The Big Picture

Fuck.

S&P 500 Earnings Decline: 90% | The Big Picture

WASHINGTON - May 6 - During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) oversight, U.S. Senator Russ Feingold questioned DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano about the new administration's policy on customs officials searching travelers' laptops. Last year, Feingold introduced the Travelers Privacy Protection Act in response to a Department of Homeland Security policy allowing customs agents to seize laptops for an unspecified period of time to "review and analyze" their contents "absent individualized suspicion." Feingold has held off on reintroduction of the legislation in order to give the new administration a chance to address the privacy issues raised by the policy.

Feingold Presses DHS Secretary About Laptop Seizure Policy | CommonDreams.org

This is interesting.

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the Patent and Trademark Office and a research company awarded exclusive rights to human genes known to detect early signs of breast or ovarian cancer. The group claims the patents violate speech by restricting research.

You cannot patent laws of nature or products of nature. The claims here that cover looking at these genes for any purpose or cover variants that haven't been discovered seem overbroad. People should be able to do research on these genes.

However I think it should be possible to patent a "breast cancer test" where that test involves taking a DNA sample from a person, running it through a known lab process, and producing a result which tells you whether or not the person is predisposed to breast cancer. That complete process is the product which should be protected - but not any of its constituent sub-parts in any other context. The patent should not protect the mere "abstract thought" that this means there is a predisposition to breast cancer. It also obviously doesn't protect known lab techniques. Its the whole process, from A to B that combines known lab techniques with knowledge of the function of these genes and produces a usable result, which ought to be patentable.

So the argument that the ACLU here makes that this patent has been troublesome because it gives the firm a monopoly on genetic testing for breast cancer seems bunk. Thats exactly what patents are supposed to do - they create business monopolies - and to call that into question is to call the entire patent system into question.

Where the defendant seems to have crossed the line is in filing C&D notices against scientific researchers who are studying these genes but who are obviously not offering a commercial breast cancer testing service. There patents are being abused in a way that prevents scientific research and innovation, which is exactly the opposite of what patents are supposed to do and directly undermines the purpose for which the patent system was created.

In this case the PTO is at fault for not drawing the lines in the right place.

ACLU: Human Gene Patents Infringe Speech | Threat Level | Wired.com

Our legal system works largely because it relies on principles that have withstood the test of time. New information technologies are starting to have a dramatic effect on how these principles work in practice - creating situations where we see a vastly different balance between security and privacy than was originally intended. There are present tense examples involving email, border searches, and cloud computing, that the courts and Congress are working through, but we can foresee greater challenges in the future as technology and policy evolve.

What you will learn: The issues around the intersection between privacy rights and technological change

Speaker: Tom Cross for IBM as the manager of their X-Force Advanced Research team - a renown group of information security experts who are engaged in a daily effort to identify, analyze, and mitigate computer security vulnerabilities. When he isn't fighting computer crime, Tom spends a lot of time thinking and writing about policy issues, and speaks regularly about privacy rights and technology.

Event Date & Location:

Tuesday, May 19th from 7:30am-9:00am

Scientific Atlanta Auditorium of the Busbee Center (Bldg 700) Gwinnett Technical College 5150 Sugarloaf Pkwy / Lawrenceville

I'm speaking in Gwinnett Tuesday morning

I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: an article by William Deresiewicz about how universities should exist to make minds, not careers | The American Scholar

A bill introduced today, similar to one that died in 2007, would reform the plague of National Security Letters and greatly narrow their scope. On top of that, it would mandate the destruction of any wrongly obtained information discovered in audits by the Inspector General that uncovered widespread improprieties in NSLs.

Slashdot | National Security Letters Reform Act Reintroduced

This interesting set of observations points to the notion that Congress has authorized the NSA to suck up the entire Internet, filter everything for key words, and examine anything that is caught by the filters.

Does that mean content filtering is ruled out altogether as an investigative technique? Kris thinks the agencies might have a "decent chance of pulling that off constitutionally if a judge approved the search terms." 

When the Bush administration finally consented to submit its surveillance program to the supervision of the FISA court, it cited recent legal developments that.. gave the Court's imprimatur to "anticipatory warrants"—in other words, warrants sketching out abstract conditions that, if satisfied, would constitute probable cause for a search.

That would dovetail with the pointed omission in the FISA Amendments Act of language requiring that surveillance orders describe a "specific" target—meaning some particular individual implicated in terrorism, whether or not his name is known, as opposed to a series of general traits or properties that would constitute grounds for considering anyone a terrorist suspect. All this suggests an attempt to shift toward a surveillance regime in which huge quantities of data are "filtered" but only those that trip the computer's alarm bells are "acquired."

Analysis: new spying lawsuit asks 'can computers eavesdrop?' - Ars Technica

An Ohio appellate court has upheld the felony hacking conviction of a man who was found guilty of unauthorized access for misusing his computer at work.

This case supports the very very bad idea that it is a crime to do something with a computer that you weren't authorized to do with it. This idea would have people go to prison with felony convictions for reading MemeStreams from work. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Court Upholds Hacking Conviction of Man for Uploading Porn Pics from Work Computer | Threat Level | Wired.com

n Massachusetts, a young woman makes genetically modified E. coli in a closet she converted into a home lab. A part-time DJ in Berkeley, Calif., works in his attic to cultivate viruses extracted from sewage. In Seattle, a grad-school dropout wants to breed algae in a personal biology lab.

These hobbyists represent a growing strain of geekdom known as biohacking, in which do-it-yourselfers tinker with the building blocks of life in the comfort of their own homes. Some of them buy DNA online, then fiddle with it in hopes of curing diseases or finding new biofuels.

In Attics and Closets, 'Biohackers' Discover Their Inner Frankenstein - WSJ.com