billso.com

USA: Yahoo! News - BUSH YOUTH?: “Sure, I’ll vote for Kerry,’ says my friend, a staffer for many notable Democratic campaigns. ‘But I sure won’t work for him.’ Another pal, a former operative in the Clinton White House, confides: ‘The liberal base, especially the kids, find this guy horrifyingly boring. [Kerry is] better than Bush — who wouldn’t be? — but their attitude is, ‘I’m not gonna send him money, I’m not busting my ass.”

USA: Yahoo! News - Drilling Finds Crater Beneath Va. Bay: “From the depths came jumbled, mixed bits of crystalline and melted rock that can be dated, as well as marine deposits, brine and other evidence of an ancient comet or asteroid that slammed into once-shallow waters near the Delmarva Peninsula.

Cape Charles is considered Ground Zero for the resulting 56-mile-wide depression below what’s now the Chesapeake Bay. The drilling project marks the first time the geologists explored the inner portion of the inverted-sombrero-shaped crater.”

USA: Yahoo! News - Enron Traders Caught On Tape: “Four years after California’s disastrous experiment with energy deregulation, Enron energy traders can be heard on audiotapes obtained by CBS News gloating and praising each other as they helped bring on, and cash-in on, the Western power crisis.

‘He just f — -s California,’ says one Enron employee. ‘He steals money from California to the tune of about a million.’ ”

Tech: Outsourced IT staff fingered porn stash banker - from The Register: I find it funny because his own IT staff burned him, and his last name is similar to mine.

“Porn-surfing bank supremo Michael Soden was caught with his browser down last week by the very same staff he outsourced to HP at the start of his reign at the Bank of Ireland.

Soden hit the headlines last year in Ireland when staff took industrial action in protest of the department’s shift to Hewlett Packard. Staff were unhappy about the prospect of becoming HP employees, as they had enjoyed considerable perks at the Bank of Ireland: favourable mortgage and loan deals for instance. Now it seems that he has been forced to resign thanks to the very department which he sent merrily on its way.

Staff informed the bank that they had discovered pornography on Soden’s machine on Wednesday last week, during routine maintenance. Soden resigned his post on Saturday, after the internal investigation into the discovery was leaked to the local press.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that the ‘routine maintenance’ was anything other than that, but it’s clear that Soden’s machine was thoroughly attended to.

The outsourcing move was Soden’s second high-profile decision after his appointment as chief executive. His first was to update the acceptable use policy that prohibits staff from accessing porn using company equipment.”

Tech: CNN.com - Simple passwords no longer suffice: “‘A password is a construct of the past that has run out of steam,’ said Joseph Atick, chief executive of Identix Inc., a Minnesota designer of fingerprint-based authentication. ‘The human mind-set is not used to dealing with so many different passwords and so many different PINs.’”