Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When we show up, we win.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

It’s the corruption, stupid.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

In my day, never was longer.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

People are weird.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

The Supreme Court is corrupt. Democrats must win in November and force court reform.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

There’s always a light at the end of the frog.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

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Free Markets Solve Everything

Homo Sapiens – Patent Pending

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I didn’t know that a company could patent two of the genes that cause breast and ovarian cancer:

The patents granted to Myriad give the company the exclusive right to perform diagnostic tests on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes and to prevent any researcher from even looking at the genes without first getting permission from Myriad. Myriad’s monopoly on the BRCA genes makes it impossible for women to access alternate tests or get a comprehensive second opinion about their results and allows Myriad to charge a high rate for their tests.

That was how it worked until yesterday, when the ACLU and allied groups won a suit in federal court, which ruled those patents invalid. The ACLU claims that this will affect patents on 2,000 human genes.

Of course, this will remove the incentives for innovation and all drug companies will immediately close down. The only explanation for my satisfaction that Pfizer can’t patent my DNA must be an ignorance of the free market.

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Cyberwolverines!

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Former NSA director Mike McConnell thinks we need to gear up for cyberwar, and he has a modest little plan:

We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to reengineer the Internet to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable.

“Reengineer the Internet”? But what are we going to do after breakfast, Admiral?

Instead of funneling billions into the Department of Defense, here’s another idea: why don’t put a tiny bit of effort into regulating all the computer-based electronic devices we’re deploying, like “smart electric meters”. We have 8 million of those in the field, and a utility company study found they contained “security failures we’ve known about for the past 10 years.”

Almost every commercial, computer-based system failure follows the same pattern: weak regulatory standards, closed-source software, reliance on security through obscurity, and shoddy engineering discovered after the fact. If we required that every widely-deployed computer-based system was subject to regulation and open review, we’d close the kinds of vulnerabilities that have dogged technology like voting machines and SpeedPass.

Of course, it’s not as much fun to talk about regulation and open review of devices used by millions, mainly because you can’t talk about reacting in milliseconds, use cool code names, or refight the last war:

Ultimately, to build the right strategy to defend cyberspace, we need the equivalent of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Project Solarium. That 1953 initiative brought together teams of experts with opposing views to develop alternative strategies on how to wage the Cold War.

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First Lemming Over The Cliff

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Rupert Murdoch has just announced that he’ll be charging $1.50 a day, $3 a week ($155/year) for the privilege of reading the London Times and Sunday Times over the Internets.

In further craziness, he’s decided that an iPad subscription to the Wall Street Journal is worth $18/month, while one delivered by the regular Internet is around $8/month. I’d assume this means that the Journal is building a special iPad app that will do something other than deliver words to the screen of the iPad. Perhaps it will cause ice-cold beer to flow from the docking connector.

Maybe Rupert isn’t aware that the iPad will have a web browser and Internet connection that Journal subscribers can use if they want to save a sawbuck. Or, more likely, his iPad pricing is just another example of the SkyMall syndrome: the belief that one’s product is so special, and one’s audience is so captive, that a ridiculous surcharge will be tolerated.

I have no explanation for the Times pricing, other than the onset of senility.

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Dying Empire Update

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Viacom made big headlines two years ago when they filed a billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube for “brazen copyright infringement”. Today, YouTube released their side of the story, which includes a few interesting facts:

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users.

YouTube’s no angel in this dispute, either, but at least they’re not trolling for a billion dollars.

Meanwhile, the dinosaurs at Universal have lowered CD prices to a max of $10. I’d wager that most of Universal’s target market has forgotten that CDs even exist, but I’m sure McMegan or someone like her will see this as more evidence of nimble innovation in the face of market pressure.

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First Thing We Do

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I’d missed yesterday’s Times piece on Lehman, but it’s worth mentioning that US corporate lawyers come off looking pretty good:

Here, the investment bank used repos to temporarily park assets off its books to make its end-of-quarter debt levels look better than they did — while calling them sales instead of loans.
The accounting tactic, first used by Lehman in 2001, had one catch, according to Mr. Valukas: no American law firm would sign off on its use.

Of course, after Lehman found some British lawyers who would sign off on this fraud, their accounting firm, Ernst & Young, dutifully fell into line.

Remember Enron, brought to you in part by Arthur Andersen?  Maybe if Ernst & Young  is destroyed by this, as Andersen was, auditors will raise their ethical standards to the lofty heights of corporate lawyers,  or at least Catholic Popes.

And let’s not forget that the 2002 response to Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley, created an “overly complex regulatory environment” for financial services firms like Lehman.

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