Vodafone Access Gateway hacked #woops
http://t.co/LeiI70e

"The issue of whether Americans should receive subcutaneous wireless RFID chip implants that can link to their electronic medical records emerged again in Wisconsin this week, where former governor and Bush Administration secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson is considering a run for Senate. Thompson was a former board member of VeriChip, the company that renamed itself PositiveID, and once appeared on CNBC with PositiveID CEO Scott Silverman to advocate that everyone receive a chip from birth…"

"As the foundations of this crisis were laid, there were always arguments against massive regulatory intervention to deal with it. Those arguments always sounded convincing. The stayed convincing even as the situation transformed itself from a justified boom in long duration assets driven by advances in diversification and by capital inflows pushing down interest rates, to froth, to irrational exuberance, to a full-fledged bubble."

The magical disappearing address bar: #safari #woops

Ironic that MS links to @brucel’s snarky post abt IE9’s Testing Center as evidence of “strong support from devs” #woops

"The presence of new kinds of investors (with motivations and objectives different from the hedgers and speculators) has altered commodity markets. The latter are now subject to forces different from those in the periods covered by the research studies. The actions of passive index investors are new factors impacting the prices of commodity futures. I wouldn’t necessarily expect commodities to continue performing as they may have performed in the decades before the 2000s – i.e. registering average returns similar to stocks at lower levels of risk and with low correlations to stocks."

"If countries like Germany start to have issues selling their treasury bonds, how long will it take before it impacts the global bond market? It shouldn’t take long. That’s why Europe cannot afford the same quantitative easing as the U.S. has done in the last year. Thus, the Greece Crisis is not well contained yet. Is the Great Depression Avoidable?"

"In 2008 and 2009 exports of debt (the toxic stuff plus the nominally non-toxic stuff (US Treasuries)), only accounted for 3%.

It is common practice to ignore exports of debt when calculating America’s balance of trade. But, conceptually, there is not much difference between selling a foreigner or a foreign government a toxic synthetic CDO (that blows up in his face) and selling him a ship-load of genetically engineered soya-beans (or melamine tainted milk).

The logic for leaving exports of debt out of the calculation is presumably that at some point in the future the CDO that was “sold” will need to be paid back, which will require funds to flow out of USA into the pockets of foreigners, who may then decide to exchange those dollars for something else."

"Don’t you hate when you can’t remove that file full of cleartext passwords from your github account? Even if you git rm it, it still is accessible in previous versions of the tree. So, you need to rewrite the entire tree. Fortunately, this is really easy with git."

You gotta love it when your mom publicly congratulates you on Facebook for breaking your spell of sexlessness. Isn't that right, mom? *high-five* But seriously, knock next time. Also, this sock needs washing.

Hit the jump for three more Facebook faux pas.

""The observation that more than 40 percent of healthy volunteers, who have never been bothered by heartburn, acid regurgitation or dyspepsia, develop such symptoms in the weeks after cessation of PPIs is remarkable and has potentially important clinical and economic implications," said Christina Reimer, MD, of Copenhagen University and lead author of the study. "This study indicates unrecognized aspects of PPI withdrawal and is a very strong indication of a clinically significant acid rebound phenomenon that needs to be investigated in proper patient populations.""

"The concern is that neither the public nor the private sector has shown a tolerance for the pain associated with the type of action needed to address the problem. The longer the situation goes unaddressed or band-aided, the stronger the measures will have to be to solve the situation. In the end, individuals, either as taxpayers or consumers, will need to pay the bill, as well as live with the reduction in benefits and lifestyle."

"This being the case, it's entirely possible that cash-strapped advertisers will have exactly the same kind of "moment of clarity" that shopaholic consumers are reportedly having now that they've seen entire store inventories marked down 50 percent or more in pre-Christmas sales—that is, they may say to themselves, "We knew all along that this stuff was made in China for a tiny fraction of what it sells for here; we were nuts to pay so much in markup for it.""

"Hedge funds are preparing to return between 10 per cent and 50 per cent of their assets under management to investors who want their money back at the end of yet another quarter of dire investment performance.

One prime broker said: “Many funds will have to close. There were a flood of redemption notices at the beginning of the quarter but many investors said they wouldn’t actually withdraw the money if performance improved. It hasn’t.”

One hedge fund said: “We’ve produced 15 per cent returns for 10 years. This year has been bad and our funds under management have been reduced from $2billion to just $300m. This is decimation.”"

SPARK tries to do "open source economic development." But they are trying to trademark the term. Not very open source!

Notes from the Carrboro/Ann Arbor "sister cities" meeting in Ann Arbor this week.

Can't even spell "Lorem ipsum" right...

The Washtenaw County Public Health Department announced today that measles was not the cause of illnesses suffered by nine Ann Arbor Elementary School students last month.