The new study of sick bees disclosed fragments of ribosomal RNA in their gut, an indication of damage to the ribosomes.

New clue found to disappearing honey bees - Yahoo! News

The American government -- which we once called our government -- has been taken over by Wall Street, the mega-corporations and the super-rich. They are the ones who decide our fate. It is this group of powerful elites, the people President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "economic royalists," who choose our elected officials -- indeed, our very form of government. Both Democrats and Republicans dance to the tune of their corporate masters. In America, corporations do not control the government. In America, corporations are the government.

Rule number one of actually calling for a national strike - set the date before writing the oped piece.

I thought Krugman's sentiment yesterday was also resonate:

But it’s hard to avoid the sense that a crucial opportunity is being missed, that we’re at what should be a turning point but are failing to make the turn.

Thats exactly right.

Larry Flynt calls for a national strike

We had a John Huges party on Sunday morning and given the collection of movies at hand the group selected 16 candles. Nevertheless it was determined that Pretty in Pink had a better soundtrack, inspite of its overwhelming chickflickness, including this song which was recorded years earlier and is now stuck in my head. The Furs don't suck.

This is the original video, for the darker, more snarling original recording from the second Furs album, TALK TALK TALK.

YouTube - The Psychedelic Furs - Pretty In Pink (original version)

Renowned documentary photographer Tomas van Houtryve entered North Korea by posing as a businessman looking to open a chocolate factory. Despite 24-hour surveillance by North Korean minders, he took arresting photographs of Pyongyang and its people—images rarely captured and even more rarely distributed in the West. They show stark glimmers of everyday life in the world’s last gulag.

The land where its illegal to smile at a camera.

Foreign Policy: The Land of No Smiles

Criminals have a wide variety of clever devices available to swipe your ATM card data and your PIN right at the ATM itself. No software compromise is necessary.

Some nice pictures of ATM card skimmers if you haven't seen one. A coworker literally plucked one off an ATM in Sandy Springs earlier in the summer.

How ATM Card Skimming and PIN Capturing Scams Work - Security Watch

Acidus wrote:
About a month ago, Lord Tivo (PBUH) willed me to start watching Bones. It's not as good as Law and Order but it's a solid show.

Totally disagree. Bones is way better than L&O. In fact Bones is the only thing I'm watching on TV right now. I'll fully admit that is a generationally biased opinion and YMMV.

L&O smacks of authoritarianism at times. The system does bad things in L&O but usually to people who are guilty. Its black and white boomerthink. I don't usually find myself identifying with the characters and it doesn't have the political dimensions of something like the Shield. It doesn't feel real to me. Its an idealization. You wish things were that clear cut all the time. They aren't.

Bones is not a cop show - its more about science and characters than laws. Its more encyclopedia brown than dragnet - the drama comes from trying to figure out the puzzle moreso than from wondering if the bad guy will escape punishment through careful legal maneuvering. The characters are quirky Gen-Xers with difficult pasts. The main scientist uses hyper-rationality as a way of escaping difficult emotions. The FBI agent listens to Social Distortion and reads comic books. You know people like them. They're a lot like your friends.

RE: Suspect in model's murder found dead in Canada - CNN.com

Before the Apple II had floppy drives, however, it had an audio cassette interface for storing programs and data.  This was a very primitive system, requiring you to hook up a cassette recorder to your computer and fiddle with the volume knob until things started working.  To read data from tape, you specified a range of memory to fill, and hit the "play" button on your tape recorder.  If all went well, the computer cheerfully beeped at you and off you went.  Loading BASIC programs was even easier, because the start location was pre-determined, and the length was stored on the tape.  All you had to do was type "LOAD".

I recently found myself extracting software from cassette tapes purchased on eBay.  At the start of the project, I thought to myself, "it's awkward to get at the data, but at least there's no copy protection."  As it turns out, I was wrong.

A little walk down memory lane.

Early Copy Protection on the Apple II

Mexico enacted a controversial law on Thursday decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs while encouraging government-financed treatment for drug dependency free of charge.

Mexico Legalizes Drug Possession - NYTimes.com

Can DDOS help nationstates manipulate international politics? Yes.

A colleague alerted me a couple of days ago to a massive DDOS attack against Kyrgyzstan ISPs www.ns.kg and www.domain.kg which essentially shut them down on January 18, 2009. There are only 4 ISP providers for the entire country so this attack was clearly sending a message. Since the attacking IPs were Russian, and since the Russian government supports the current Kyrgyzstan President, I’m thinking that its a message to the opposition party.

The Kyrgyzstan Cyber Attack That No One Is Talking About at IntelFusion

For additional commentary, you may read them on my blog here:

Napkin #1: The health care equation.

Napkin #2: It's not about health care.

Napkin #3: The plans on the table.

Napkin #4: What's it mean to me?

This is a pretty good explanation of the different healthcare options, although I wish more space was devoted to the pros and cons of the different options.

Digital Roam: American health care on (4) napkins. Now all together!