http://www.alternet.org/workplace/106195/

The election results pretty much confirmed the extent to which Main Street is rightly livid about the Wall Street mentality that led to our financial crisis. During his historic victory speech, President-elect Barack Obama told supporters, and the rest of the world, "If this financial crisis taught us anything, it's that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers."

But, it seems that Wall Street didn't get that memo. It turns out that the nine banks about to be getting a total equity capital injection of $125 billion, courtesy of Phase I of The Bailout Plan, had reserved $108 billion during the first nine months of 2008 in order to pay for compensation and bonuses.

Paying Wall Street bonuses was not supposed to be part of the plan. At least that's how Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson explained it to Congress and the American people. So, on Oct. 1, when the Senate, including Obama, approved the $700 billion bailout package, the illusion was that this would magically loosen the credit markets, and with taxpayer-funded relief, banks would first start lending to each other again, and then, to citizens and small businesses. And all would be well.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/07/adobe_reader_exploit/

If you haven't updated your Adobe Reader program lately, now would be a good time. Three days after the company rushed out a critical update, miscreants are actively exploiting a security flaw to execute malicious code on vulnerable machines.

The SANS Internet Storm Center says here that researchers have spotted laced PDF files being circulated online. Its discovery comes on the heels of the public release of proof-of-concept code exploiting CVE-2008-2992. According to SANS, none of the 32 top anti-virus programs were detecting the malicious files.

SANS handler Bojan Zdrnja said the PDFs are being spread using drive-by advertisements on sites deemed "suspicious." At the moment, distribution is fairly light, but Zdrnja expects that change soon. Once the rigged PDF is opened, the exploit calls the mshta application in Windows to execute HTA files.

"It retrieves the trojan from a different web site and executes it on the infected machine," Zdrnja wrote in an email to The Register. "The trojan then does all sort of malicious things (I haven't analyzed that further)."

"The Bush administration sent Russia proposals aimed at revising a nuclear-disarmament agreement and assuaging Moscow's growing opposition to a U.S. missile-defense system for Europe, according to senior American officials.

Washington's overture comes as the Kremlin has increased its criticism of the U.S. in recent weeks, particularly its program to deploy antimissile batteries and radars in Poland and the Czech Republic. On Wednesday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev threatened to dispatch Iskander missiles to Russia's border with Poland in order "to neutralize" Washington's missile-defense system.

This week, the State Department communicated to Moscow the outlines of an enhanced program to allow Russian military officials greater access to U.S. missile-defense installations in Europe. "We remain hopeful that we can find a solution" to address Russia's concerns, said John Rood, the State Department's acting undersecretary for arms control."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122602931118207871.html

"BAGHDAD, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- Iraqis want a "fixed date" for withdrawal of U.S. troops despite U.S. demands that a pullout hinges on security conditions, Iraq's chief spokesman said.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have been negotiating a "status of forces" agreement needed for continued U.S. troop presence in Iraq after a United Nations authorization mandate expires Dec. 31.

"Iraqis would like to know and see a fixed date," spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told The Washington Post."

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/11/07/Iraq_insists_on_fixed_date_for_pullout/UPI-32691226063996/

http://spectrum.ieee.org/nov08/6961

5 November 2008—Digital signal processors—those practically ubiquitous circuits that make cellphone conversations understandable and MP3 players possible—come in a great many varieties, but until recently, there was one variety no one had even thought to make. Called continuous-time digital signal processing (CT DSP), it has the ability, unique among such circuits, to consume dynamic power in proportion to the intensity of the signal it processes. When there’s no signal, such as during the silent spots of a cellphone conversation, the processor is practically inactive. But when the signal appears, it kicks into gear. Its inventor, Columbia University electrical engineering professor Yannis Tsividis, says the device’s miserly management of power could make it attractive for small systems—such as biomedical implants and remote sensors—that deal with “bursty” signals in need of real-time processing. Industrial firms are also interested in using the technology for telecommunications and power conversion.

In conventional discrete-time DSPs, the clock signal that triggers the sampling must have a frequency of at least twice the highest frequency of interest in a signal. But the clock has to go on nonstop at that frequency whether or not there’s a signal and whether or not that signal has any high-frequency component to it at a given time, which is a waste of power.

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http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,178688,00.html

In the case of the neocons, safe haven amounts to a well established network of think tanks, academic citadels and media outlets. Among the scholars and fellows camped out at the American Enterprise Institute are Kagan, John Bolton, Lynne Cheney, David Frum, Newt Gingrich, Irving Kristol (Bill's dad and the "godfather of neoconservatism"), Richard Perle, Gary Schmitt, the completely despicable Paul Wolfowitz and the possibly even more despicable John Yoo. Midge Decter, Steve Forbes and Richard Scaife anchor the board of trustees at the Heritage Foundation; Bill Bennet and Ed Meese hang out there too. Meese, Condi Rice, John Abizaid, Tom Sowell and James Woolsey haunt the hallowed halls of Stanford for the Hoover Institution.

John Yoo, whose sophist interpretation of the president's constitutional powers made young Mr. Bush into a virtual deity, teaches law at the University of California, Berkley. Bill Kristol is on the faculty at Harvard's Kennedy school of Government, and Mackubin Thomas Owens, coauthor of the neocon manifesto Rebuilding America's Defenses, is associate dean of academics at the U.S. Naval War College. Donald Kagan, father of Robert and Fred Kagan, is a professor of history at Yale. Condi will doubtless reclaim her chair at Stanford, even if she has to step over the corpses of half the student body and faculty to get to it.

"An airline crew used duct tape to keep a passenger in her seat because they say she became unruly, fighting flight attendants and grabbing other passengers, forcing the flight to land in North Carolina.

Maria Esther Castillo of Oswego, N.Y., is due in court Thursday, charged with resisting arrest and interfering with the operations of a flight crew aboard United Airlines Flight 645, from Puerto Rico to Chicago.

Castillo, 45, struck a flight attendant on the buttocks with the back of her hand during Saturday's flight, FBI Special Agent Peter Carricato said in a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Charlotte. She also stood and fell onto the head of a blind passenger and later started pulling the person's hair, the complaint stated.

Ankle cuffs kept slipping off Castillo, so the flight crew and two passengers were forced to use duct tape to keep her in her seat"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081106/ap_on_re_us/odd_passenger_duct_tape

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/03/world/europe/03moscow.html

MOSCOW — Thousands of Russians from the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi gathered in front of the United States Embassy here on Sunday night carrying jack-o’-lanterns inked with the names of war victims and charging that the war in Georgia was part of an American plot to improve Senator John McCain’s electoral prospects.

As music by Johnny Cash and the Allman Brothers played from loudspeakers, a stream of young people climbed off buses that had carried them to Moscow from far-flung provincial capitals. They held the pumpkins aloft for a moment of silence as a deep bass thumped and carnival-style lights played on the embassy’s facade.

In a film projected on several large screens, an actor playing President Bush (though with a heavy Russian accent) delivered a speech in which he gloated over the United States’ control over world affairs. The film asserted that the United States orchestrated World Wars I and II so that the American economy could overtake Europe’s, carried out the Sept. 11 attacks to broaden government powers and planned to brand every person on the planet with the “mark of the beast,” as referred to in the Bible.

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Junior Field Reporter 08/11/05(Wed)06:18 No.9449   File: 1225894704456.jpg -(49310 B, 300x375) Thumbnail displayed, click image for full size. >>9435 >the war in Georgia was part of an American plot to improve Senator John McCain’s electoral prospects. >improve Senator John McCain’s electoral prospects. Proof of their FAIL. Pic very related. >the United States orchestrated World Wars I and II so that the American economy could overtake Europe’s, carried out the Sept. 11 attacks to broaden government powers and planned to brand every person on the planet with the “mark of the beast,” as referred to in the Bible. Tinfoil hat-wearing BS-believers, much?

>>	Junior Field Reporter 08/11/05(Wed)20:08 No.9460   File: 1225944520963.jpg -(52600 B, 428x336) Thumbnail displayed, click image for full size. I've had encounters with Russian ultra-nationalists before, Crazy bunch.

>>	Junior Field Reporter 08/11/06(Thu)12:20 No.9471   File: 1226002802061.jpg -(244016 B, 1440x900) Thumbnail displayed, click image for full size. Hay guise what's going on here? Can I talk to the Czar?

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Junior Field Reporter 08/11/06(Thu)12:46 No.9472   File: 1226004383724.jpg -(43277 B, 435x599) Thumbnail displayed, click image for full size. The Tsar has been seriously off the map since the February Revolution, which was righteous and just but unfortunately went south quickly in October due to agitation fomented by the neocons, sorry I mean bolsheviks. These were fired up by Lenin, a sad example of a social virus, cunningly injected by imperial Germany into effervescent Russia via sealed train from Switzerland. The tsar did not exactly make it big after the October Revolution, but I hear some mediums may still be in contact.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/06/cannabis_psychosis_study/

Regular readers will recall the confused mess that is this government’s (UK) cannabis policy. There has been a drop in cannabis consumption since it was downgraded from Class B to C, but nevertheless they want to put it back up to Class B again. Yes, we know all about the argument that what you ingest is entirely your business, it being your body and all that but morals are always trumped by politics.

In the comments section to our last piece the general consensus was that the policy was driven either by a craven servility to the Murdoch press or, as a daring alternative, a bending to Daily Mail woo woo. The general consensus however was that it was Puritanism, that awful fear that someone, somewhere, might be enjoying themselves and that this situation cannot be allowed to continue. We’re arguing over whose Puritanism, not whether.

(...)

Thus there really is no logical leg for the government to stand upon in its reclassification of cannabis: there's not in fact one reason against the legalisation of the damn stuff and the increase in liberty and freedom that would result.

"KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — An airstrike in northwest Afghanistan killed 13 Taliban militants and seven civilians Thursday, Afghan officials said, a day after President Hamid Karzai demanded a halt to civilian casualties in U.S.-led coalition operations.

The United States has conducted missile strikes in Afghanistan and in Pakistan's tribal areas along the border — strikes U.S. Gen. David H. Petraeus said Thursday have killed three of the top 20 extremist leaders there.

The strike came just days after another coalition airstrike in the south of the country killed 37 people, mostly woman and children."

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hvWEqwq3CrRvaQCmt21MfoYhjZJQD949ECCG4