Schwarzenegger directed that the pay of nearly 140,000 rank-and-file employees be cut to the federal minimum wage of $6.55 an hour. About 30,000 management employees would be paid $455 a week, and another 8,000 workers, mostly doctors and attorneys, would get nothing. All those workers would get the remainder of their normal paychecks after the budget is approved.

The controller has refused to implement the Terminator’s evil plan, hence the lawsuit. Withholding pay does nothing to solve the gaping California deficit so all it does is hold state employee’s pay hostage to Schwarzenegger’s cynical, heartless plan.

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Two security researchers have developed a new technique that essentially bypasses all of the memory protection safeguards in the Windows Vista operating system.

By taking advantage of the way that browsers, specifically Internet Explorer, handle active scripting and .NET objects, the pair have been able to load essentially whatever content they want into a location of their choice on a user’s machine.

This is beyond bad.

“The genius of this is that it’s completely reusable,” said Dino Dai Zovi, a well-known security researcher and author. “They have attacks that let them load chosen content to a chosen location with chosen permissions. That’s completely game over.”

Researchers who have read the paper that Dowd and Sotirov wrote on the techniques say their work is a major breakthrough and there is little that Microsoft can do to address the problems. The attacks themselves are not based on any new vulnerabilities in IE or Vista, but instead take advantage of Vista’s fundamental architecture and the ways in which Microsoft chose to protect it.

Emphasis added.

Noted security expert Bruce Schneier says “This is huge.”

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“The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds.” say Strandbeest creator Theo Jansen. They move solely powered by wind.

They even have “brains” capable of the most basic processes. For example, one Strandbeest sucks air through some tubing. If water from the surf or a tide pool obstructs the tube, the mechanism reverses to move in the opposite direction. His most recent creations even stored excess wind energy in lemonade bottles for calmer days… or rather minutes.

Inhabitat has more.

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BBC News was fired on while reporting from the front lines in Georgia. The image is from the same report.

From DealBreaker, a serious, non-snarky (and for them, being non-snarky is quite unusual!) discussion of what’s happening in Georgia.

Who started it?

JR: “De jure, the Georgians. De facto, the Russians.

No, really — Who started it? Who can we blame?

DV: “The Georgians are to blame for being hotheaded and for not thinking out their game-plan; the Russians are to blame for taking the retaliation to a level so disproportionate that it seems more shocking by the hour.”

War batters Russian markets

Many very powerful people in Russia are going to begin losing significant sums because of the Kremlin’s military misadventures, which could lead to a variety of new, unpredictable pressures on the leadership.

The ramifications, fallout, and unpredicted consequences from this war (and it is a war now) will be long-lasting. While some on the Left are desperately trying to figure out who to support, I say the choice between the lesser of two thugs still means you’re supporting a thug. However -

From Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan.

But we cannot just say that all the major powers involved are behaving terribly. That is true but not enough. Lenin’s Tomb has an excellent analysis. But it is marred by the tendency of the left to think anyone opposed to Bush must be a good thing, and so give Putin the benefit of the doubt. Putin has plenty of blood on his hands also, and not only in Chechnya.

The truth is that life for ordinary people in the ex Soviet countries which have had “Orange Revolutions” like Ukraine and Georgia, is much, much better than in those which have not, like Belarus, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. That is so evident as to be undeniable to anyone who has actually been there.

Yet resurgent Russian nationalism is a major threat to Europe, and so Georgia must be supported as Russia tries to increase its hegemony over the former Soviet Union.

But if Georgia must be supported, then the question becomes - how? Sending in fighter planes? Had the US wanted to truly support Georgia, wouldn’t just the threat of sending in fighter planes have backed off Russia? The US and Europe have done such small amounts of saber-rattling that you have to wonder why.

Yes, the tendency of some on the Left to support Putin because he supposedly stands against imperialism is bizarre indeed. (I’ve actually heard some make the same argument for Mugabe.) Putin is an imperialist, and a billionaire exploiter at that. Thinking the foe of my foe must be a friend is simplistic, naive, and dangerous.

I don’t have any answers. Neither, to my knowledge, does anyone else. We are in uncharted, murky territory.

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The big question is whether Saakashvili is another US proxy who over-estimated US support (q.v. Saddam Hussein), or whether the US put him up to the attack to distract the Russians prior to some sort of operation against Iran.

Just paranoid speculation, right?

[Kuwait] has reportedly activated its “Emergency War Plan” as a massive U.S. and European armada is reported heading for the region.

The fear is the armada will blockade Iran.

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Among their well-presented and well-researched data, The Oil Drum says,  referring to the chart - does it look like prices are crashing?

So, at this point, I’m still happy to continue my “Countdown to $200 oil series” and see no reason why the recent lull in prices would be a sign of a serious trend change in the market.

In fact, I’ll say again that our energy policies should focus on one thing first and foremost: demand reduction.

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David McLellan at SolveClimate crunches the numbers and shows that wind is closing the gap with nuclear in cost per kilowatt. Further, the price of proposed nuclear plants keeps soaring, sometimes doubling or tripling, while the cost of wind doesn’t.

However, the primary reason for the gap closing is that nuclear plants take many years to get permits for, then build, and the money must be borrowed.

The average financing costs of the nuclear plants [described in the article] is 71% of the pre-financing price.

Bottom line: Nuclear and wind energy right now — from a purely financial perspective — seem to be about neck and neck, but increasing capital costs and unknown disposal and security costs are quickly going to put nuclear energy out of reach if present trends continue.

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Just noticed this in Wordpress.com fastest growing blogs

http://southosetia.wordpress.com/

Do you know the truth of war in South Ossetia?

The real people, real histories, real events…

The Georgian murderers!

Apparent on the scene blogging from those in South Ossetia whose homes have been destroyed, lives shattered, friends and family killed by Georgian troops.

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