Dvorak News Blog

Chuck Norris sues – tears don’t cure cancer

By Eideard Monday March 16, 2009

Tough-guy actor and martial arts expert Chuck Norris has sued publisher Penguin over a book he claims unfairly exploits his famous name, based on a satirical Internet list of “mythical facts” about him.

Penguin published “The Truth About Chuck Norris: 400 facts about the World’s Greatest Human” in November. Author Ian Spector and two Web sites he runs to promote the book, including www.truthaboutchuck.com, are also named in the suit.

The book capitalizes on “mythical facts” that have been circulating on the Internet since 2005 that poke fun at Norris’ tough-guy image and super-human abilities, the suit said.

It includes such humorous “facts” as “Chuck Norris’s tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried” and “Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits,” the suit said, as well as “Chuck Norris can charge a cell phone by rubbing it against his beard…”

“Defendants have misappropriated and exploited Mr. Norris’s name and likeness without authorization for their own commercial profit,” said the lawsuit.

I thought he could walk on water, too – like all the other nutball heroes.

30-year veteran of PA legislature convicted

By Eideard Monday March 16, 2009

12 Comments

Daylife/AP Photo by Matt Rourke

A 30-year veteran of the Pennsylvania State Senate has been convicted of committing $3.5 million in fraud, taking money from two nonprofits and using state employees to do political and personal tasks.

After more than four days of deliberation, a federal jury of 10 women and two men unanimously found the former senator, Vincent J. Fumo, guilty on all 137 counts of conspiracy, fraud, obstruction of justice and tax violations for using state employees and consultants to do political work and run personal errands.

Mr. Fumo, a Democrat who represented South Philadelphia, sat stony faced as the jury foreman repeatedly said “guilty” on all counts in a verdict that took 13 minutes to read.

Taking the stand in his own defense, Mr. Fumo admitted that his political work overlapped with his work as a state lawmaker, but he argued that it was acceptable for his employees to do personal chores for him because Pennsylvania has no written laws on the amount of assistance that they can give a lawmaker.

Smells like a lot of state legislators..

Out Of Work? Getting Desperate? How About Advertising Yourself On A Billboard!

By Uncle Dave Monday March 16, 2009

9 Comments

My brother, Uncle Don, saw this guy’s sign in Milwaukee. Here’s his webpage and LinkedIn page. Interesting background including:

Mark served in Iraq in 2008 as a contractor in a military detainee camp holding upwards of 18,000 detainees and 8,000 military and contractor personnel.

Could you imagine if this catches on? Could be fun if the right pair of billboards were placed next to each other.

Even Fed Chief Bernancke’s Boyhood Home Has Been Foreclosed On

By Uncle Dave Monday March 16, 2009

9 Comments

Travis Jackson walks through his modest ranch house, admiring the kitchen’s built-in spice rack and the red-oak floors. He draws back the curtains, and sunlight illuminates the pride on his face.

The young banker just bought Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s childhood home at a foreclosure sale.

“This is where it all happened,” marvels Mr. Jackson, a 27-year-old loan officer at First Citizens Bancorp, which is down the street from the old Bernanke place. “Kind of a surreal feeling, isn’t it?”

Mr. Bernanke’s family sold the property more than a decade ago. It ended up on the block late last year after its former owners fell behind on their mortgage payments.

The small town that gave the Fed its chairman is suffering more than most from the financial and economic crisis he’s struggling to fix. Already hit by the long decline of the local tobacco and textile industries, Dillon County is facing a fresh assault of plant closings and layoffs that have pushed its unemployment rate to 14.2% — almost double the national average.

So, has anyone been buying homes (assuming you have a job to be able to afford one) or trying to buy a home (but can’t get a lender to lend) or do you still think we haven’t hit bottom yet and are waiting? If you are buying, is a regular, sign in the yard, for-sale home or a foreclosure?

Steam from Car Radiator Causes Panic

By John C Dvorak Monday March 16, 2009

27 Comments

Apparently steam from a car radiator caused someone to yell “bomb” and then all hell breaks loose. Cripes. Then again these idiots are lined up for America’s Next Top Model, a show for boneheads. What would you expect?

Found by Aric Mackey.

What’s that in your Lunchbox? Obama Fingers!?!?

By McCullough Monday March 16, 2009

28 Comments

DEU Obama Fingers

A German frozen food company hopes to raise sales with a new product: Obama fingers. The tender, fried chicken bits come with a tasty curry sauce. The company says it was unaware of the possible racist overtones of the product.

Selling products has, of course, become a bit more difficult than usual these days. No wonder then that companies everywhere are turning to optimistic marketing messages in an effort to counteract the steady drum beat of negativity coming from front page headlines around the globe. Not wanting to miss the boat, a German food company has now gotten into the act. Sprehe, a company that has all manner of frozen delicacies on offer, has come up with a new product it calls “Obama Fingers.” Far from being real digits, though, the “fingers” in question are “tender, juicy pieces of chicken breast, coated and fried,” as the product packaging claims. The idea, she claimed, was to get in on the Obama-mania which is continuing to grip Germany. The word “fingers” in the name refers to the fact that it is a finger food. “It’s like hotdogs,” Witting said. “No one would ever think they are actually from dogs.”

For Americans in Germany, though, there is a risk that the product might be seen as racially insensitive. Fried chicken has long been associated with African-Americans in the US — naming strips of fried chicken after the first black president could cause some furrowing of brows.

Stupid yes, but is it racially insensitive? I don’t think so.

Rape complaints were not classified as crimes by London police

By Eideard Monday March 16, 2009

42 Comments

The Metropolitan police failed to investigate scores of rape allegations because officers did not record them as criminal offences, the Guardian has learned.

An internal review by Scotland Yard found that women who complained to police that they feared they may have been raped or suffered a serious sexual assault had their concerns dismissed in up to six London boroughs. In a breach of police policy, officers instead classed the incidents as crime related incidents [CRI], meaning the cases were not investigated properly, informed sources say…

The practice of dismissing women’s fears of rape and failing to class them as crimes is believed to have continued for several years and was ended last year. The review that identified the practice was triggered by the Worboys case.

When the procedure was corrected it led to a spike in recorded rape cases, up by 25% over the past year, at a time when overall crime in London fell.

Reflect upon how much of policing can be politics – and shouldn’t be.

Should You Be Hired Or Fired? Don’t Ask Me, Ask The Data Mining Program.

By Uncle Dave Monday March 16, 2009

17 Comments

Based on a mathematical analysis of work at an undisclosed Internet company, each circle represents an employee. Those who generate or pass along valuable information within the company are portrayed as large and dark-colored. And the others? “On a relative scale, they don’t add a hell of a lot,” says Elizabeth Charnock, chief executive of Cataphora, the Redwood City (Calif.) company that carried out the study for a client. The upshot for managers faced with a mandate to downsize: Small and pale circles might be a good place to start cutting.

For most of its eight-year history, Cataphora has focused on digital sleuthing. The company hunts for statistical signs of fraud. But in the past few years, Cataphora has been dispatching its data miners into a new market: statistical studies of employee performance. […] Companies can now model and optimize operations, and can calculate the return on investment on everything from corporate jets to Super Bowl ads. These successes have led to the next math project: the worker.

[…]How to hold on to hotshots? New software offers a data-mining approach. An employee retention program developed by software company SAS, for example, crunches data on employees who have quit in the past five years—their skills, profiles, studies, and friendships. Then it finds current employees with similar patterns. Another SAS program pinpoints the workers most likely to suffer accidents.

[…]In a number-driven labor market, the value of their skills will rise and fall. With these figures in hand, companies will be able to carry out cost-benefit studies on recruiting, training, and employee retention (along with its counterpart, layoffs).

[…]What about the worker who dispenses priceless wisdom the old-fashioned way, through spoken words at the coffee machine? Much of that goes unrecorded by the analytic team. So there are limits to number crunching. Machines may advance in HR, but humans will retain a strong supporting role.

Number 6: Who are you?
Number 2: The new Number 2.
Number 6: Who is Number 1?
Number 2: You are Number 6.
Number 6: I am not a number, I am a free man.
— The Prisoner

A Complete Idiot in Action

By hhopper Sunday March 15, 2009

26 Comments

Not so funny.

Will the Gov’t Refund Taxes paid because of the Madoff Swindle?

By McCullough Sunday March 15, 2009

44 Comments

Those of us fleeced by Bernard Madoff are looking to get some of our money back from the government, which taxed us on money we never earned. In my case, I not only lost $5 million in the Ponzi scheme, but I paid almost $75,000 to the state of New Jersey and $275,000 to Uncle Sam in taxes over the past three years on income reported by me, which, as we all know now, never existed.

We Madoff investors, creditors, survivors—please call us anything other than victims—realize we will get back pennies on the dollar from Madoff if we’re lucky, but getting back the money we paid the government and which we’re entitled to apparently won’t be easy.

Madoff robbed me of $5 million and New Jersey now wants to rob me of $75,000.

Take New Jersey, for instance. On Feb. 20, the New Jersey Division of Taxation came forth with a “Ponzi Schemes and Amended Returns” notice on its website acknowledging that “many people with investments managed by Madoff are likely to have paid taxes on income that was never actually generated by them (phantom income).”

Roosevelt Blamed for Length of Great Depression

By John C Dvorak Sunday March 15, 2009

115 Comments

More recently I’ve seen nothing to encourage competition as one company buys a competitor at will. All the small banks have been bought by the big banks. Now everything is too big to fail. We are on the same anti-competition track that began with Clinton and the Republicans (yes, it is what I meant) repealing all the banking laws that prevented abuses of the past. And when is the last time anyone talked about anti-trust issues?

It’s all about bigger is better.

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years…

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

“President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression…

The number of antitrust cases brought by the Department of Justice fell from an average of 12.5 cases per year during the 1920s to an average of 6.5 cases per year from 1935 to 1938, the scholars found. Collusion had become so widespread that one Department of Interior official complained of receiving identical bids from a protected industry (steel) on 257 different occasions…

Found by Guy Fawkes.

Where in the World is Bernie Madoff?

By McCullough Sunday March 15, 2009

13 Comments

Last Night:

berniecell-tbi

His old digs:

berniefloorplan

Looks pretty cushy!

Juror sending ‘tweets’ during $12.6 million trial?

By Eideard Sunday March 15, 2009

19 Comments

A building materials company and its owner have appealed a $12.6 million verdict against them, alleging that a juror was posting related messages on Twitter.com while hearing the case.

The motion filed Thursday seeking a new trial claims the juror sent eight messages — or “tweets” — to the micro-blogging Web site via his cellular phone. One read in part: “oh and nobody buy Stoam. Its bad mojo and they’ll probably cease to Exist, now that their wallet is 12m lighter.”

Another describing what “Juror Jonathan” did today, read: “I just gave away TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS of somebody else’s money.”

The motion filed by the lawyer for Russell Wright and his company, Stoam Holdings, alleges the juror researched the case and communicated with others outside the jury. Wright did not appear in court when the case was heard in Washington County in late February.

A new message posted Friday by a Johnathan Powell of Fayetteville read: “Well, I’m off to see a judge. Hope they don’t lock me under the jail, and forget about me for four days.”

Powell did not respond to messages for comment.

Har! The idiot has responded to – and offered up – enough messages already, hasn’t he?

Note to Facebook generation: What you say online can and will be used against you!

By SN Sunday March 15, 2009

16 Comments

The net is all up in arms because a Canadian court has made a plaintiff in a lawsuit divulge content from her “private” Facebook account, which was set as “friends only.” There is absolutely no reason to be upset about this ruling. This has been the law for centuries.

Under the law if you divulge secrets to third parties, they’re no longer secrets. So if I write even one friend about my secret and mark it as private, it can be subpoenaed even though it as marked as private. Even if I get my friend to promise never to divulge the secret, it’s still discoverable in court. (If relevant, of course.)

The same is true of Facebook. Merely marking a Facebook page as private does not change the fact that it was used to give out information to third parties.

The only exception to this is if there is some sort of privilege. Such as when the third party is a priest or your therapist and is legally obligated not to divulge your secret. Then there’s an expectation of privacy that you keep. (And there are limitations to that, too.) But if you tell your friends secrets, those secrets are discoverable under the law.

Note to the internet generation: If you want to keep secrets, don’t fricken tell anyone your secrets!

Stephen Baldwin debates Ron Paul on legalizing Marijuana, Huh? Stephen Baldwin??? WTF?

By McCullough Saturday March 14, 2009

59 Comments

Is Stephen Baldwin running for something? At one point he indicates marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to alcohol… ummm, Really? So does that mean he is a prohibitionist? And why is it he always looks stoned… hmmm? Ridiculous.