Eideard

This is what a Real Man in Japan should look like

In feudal Japan, a beard was considered a symbol of power or a declaration of belligerent intent but bureaucrats in one town could find themselves sent to the bathroom, razor in hand, for sporting even the suggestion of a five o’clock shadow.

Authorities in Isesaki, Gunma prefecture, have ordered all male employees to shave off their facial hair, and banish all thoughts of growing any, following complaints from members of the public who said they found dealing with bearded bureaucrats “unpleasant”.

The ban, the first of its kind among Japanese public officials, applies to any manifestation of facial hair, from lovingly cultivated full beards to trendy goatees and designer stubble.

The only acceptable public face of Isesaki, the local government said, is a clean-shaven one. “Some citizens find bearded men unpleasant, so beards are banned,” an in-house notice warned this week…

The Isesaki ban is reminiscent of the strict rules on physical appearance enforced by conservative companies in the postwar period in the belief that Japan’s rise to economic superpower required absolute conformity.

But this was the first time that an absence of whiskers had been enforced among civil servants, the internal affairs and communications ministry said.

I have to smile in retrospect – thinking of the years I worked with Asian companies, especially Japanese.

I haven’t been without a beard since 1979. My system couldn’t stand the shock of shaving.

An internet firm linked to many of the internet’s criminal gangs has been shut down.

The US Federal Trade Commission said Belize-based 3FN aided gangs that ran botnets, carried out phishing attacks and traded in images of child abuse.

The servers and net hardware of 3FN have been seized and are due to be sold off as the firm is dismantled.

The operators of 3FN must also pay back $1.08 million they are reputed to have made by hosting criminal sites…

It was involved in distributing spyware, viruses and trojans, had a hand in many phishing schemes and helped gangs sell illegal images. It also acted as a discussion forum for many spammers.

In particular, said the FTC, the net firm worked with fraudsters who run botnets and helped them steal data by seeding hijacked computers with keyloggers. It maintained a library of more than 4500 malicious programs that could pilfer data from hijacked PCs.

In June last year, the FTC used an injunction to cut 3FN off from other hosting providers and sever its connections to the net.

Now the FTC has gone a step further and won a court order that will see the company stop trading and its hardware confiscated. The FBI has been ordered to carry out the shut down and seizure operation.

Overdue.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

The efforts by leaders of Turkey and Brazil to broker a nuclear deal with Iran reflects growing dissatisfaction with the traditional world order in which the United States is the only superpower, which they view as outdated and unjust.

And their intervention on the Iran issue reflects a growing perception among many countries that the United States is unable to resolve international conflicts alone.

The visit this week to Tehran by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was a rare show of personal, high-stakes diplomacy by a pair of world leaders.

Turkey and Brazil hailed the agreement they reached for Iran to ship some of its nuclear fuel out of the country as a major step toward resolving Iran’s years-old standoff with the West.

But it was promptly pooh-poohed by the United States, which, a day after the deal was announced, introduced a sanctions resolution to the United Nations Security Council in what was perceived widely in Ankara and Brasilia as an American snub of two close allies…

While U.S. officials were prepared to be pleasantly surprised if Lula and Erdogan were able to produce a deal that addressed all their concerns about Iran’s nuclear program, they didn’t think that it would happen and were concerned the deal would complicate efforts to pass the U.N. resolution…

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks, Marc Perkel

“Zoe” opening up to the Press
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

French carmaker Renault is facing a [miniscule] backlash over plans to christen a new model Zoe.

Parisian Zoe Renault, 23, has hired lawyers to insist that Renault scrap its branding.

“I could not bear to hear: ‘Zoe’s broken down’ or ‘We need to get Zoe overhauled‘,” she told Le Parisien newspaper.

Renault is facing other petitions from women called Zoe. A Renault spokesman said Zoe was not a “definitive choice”.

The all-electric Renault Zoe ZE (zero emission) is set for launch in 2012. Zoe – which means “life” in Greek – was apparently chosen to underline the car’s environmental credentials.

Zoe Renault – who has no apparent family link to the company – said in an interview with Le Parisien that she could not bear to be associated with a car for the rest of her life, and all the inevitable sarcastic gibes.

Her lawyer David Koubbi, who specialises in the protection of first names and is representing other Zoes, said he had sent a letter to Renault’s chief executive arguing that the plans were an attack on the rights of his clients.

If the company does not change its plans, Mr Koubbi said he would take the case to court.

Cripes. A lawyer whose specialty is the protection of first names?

Sound like the practice of law in France attracts as many unproductive parasites as does the U.S. bar.

Man-made DNA has booted up a cell for the first time.

In a feat that is the culmination of two and a half years of tests and adjustments, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute inserted artificial genetic material — chemically printed, synthesized and assembled — into cells that were then able to grow naturally.

“We all had a very good feeling that it was going to work this time,” said Venter Institute synthetic biologist Daniel Gibson, co-author of the study [.pdf] published May 20 in Science. “But we were cautiously optimistic because we had so many letdowns following the previous experiments.”

On a Friday in March, scientists inserted over 1 million base pairs of synthetic DNA into Mycoplasma capricolum cells before leaving for the weekend. When they returned on Monday, their cells had bloomed into colonies.

“When we look at life forms, we see fixed entities,” said J. Craig Venter, president of the Institute, in a recent podcast. “But this shows in fact how dynamic they are. They change from second to second. And that life is basically the result of an information process. Our genetic code is our software…”

“They rebuilt a natural sequence and they put in some poetry,” said University of California at San Francisco synthetic biologist Chris Voigt…

The ultimate goal, of course, is a brand-new genome from the ground up. Now, Voigt said, “what do you do with all that design capacity?”

The whining will begin from several sources, of course: skeptics who won’t read the research, who will doubt the truth before their eyes.

Thanks, WOK3

Undated file photo
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The man credited with inventing the world’s first automatic cash machine has died.

John Shepherd-Barron passed away at the age of 84 on Saturday after being treated for a brief illness at a hospital in northern Scotland.

Shepherd-Barron once said that he came up with the idea after being locked out of a bank, and that his invention was inspired by a machine that dispensed chocolate candy bars.

“It struck me there must be a way I could get my own money, anywhere in the world,” he said in a BBC interview in 2007 to mark the ATM’s 40th anniversary.

“I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash.”

He later sold his concept for an automatic teller machine, now known as an ATM, to Barclay’s Bank more than 40 years ago…

Today, there are at least 1.7 million ATM machines around the world.

Enough for every novice hacker – or mugger – to practice on.

RTFA. Enjoyable. Bright dude.

California funeral directors are eager to start offering clients a new natural and greener way to dispose of their loved ones’ remains, but they need a change in state law first.

Funeral homes and crematoria want to use a liquid chemical process to dissolve bodies instead of cremating them with fire.

“It’s green. It’s clean. It’s environmentally friendly and it reduces the carbon footprint,” said California state Assemblyman Jeff Miller (R-Corona), who wrote legislation to make the so-called bio-cremation method legal.

Miller said his bill was prompted by a funeral home director in his district who might may buy a bio-cremation machine. The measure would broaden the definition of cremation to include the use of either both fire or and water…

Though no one has started using bio-cremation commercially, the technology already has grabbed the funeral industry’s attention, said Bob Achermann, executive director of the California Funeral Directors Assn.

“There will be consumer demand,” he said, especially among people who have personal or environmental qualms about combustion cremation.

One advantage of bio-cremation to the state’s 1,000 funeral homes and crematoria is that it doesn’t require them to go through the difficult and expensive procedure for obtaining air emission permits from local air pollution agencies.

Sounds neat to me. A couple hundred dollar$ more than traditional cremation. So they say.

I’d love to be poured on the ground next to my favorite tree.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A U.S. congressional committee, slighting the Pentagon for a fourth straight year, cleared continued work on an alternate engine by General Electric Co and Rolls-Royce Group Plc for the multinational F-35 fighter jet program.

The U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, in its version of a defense spending bill for the fiscal year starting October 1, added $485 million for the program on Wednesday in a move with bipartisan support.

Without competition, Pratt & Whitney, a United Technologies Corp unit, would have a decades-long monopoly on the projected $100 billion engine market for the more than 3,000 F-35s due to be bought by the United States and partner countries.

The Defense Department has tried to kill the second engine for four years as unaffordable and unnecessary. It has failed to persuade Congress, which holds the purse strings.

The panel, one of four congressional committees with jurisdiction over military spending, also approved the purchase of eight Boeing Co advanced F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets beyond the 22 the Pentagon had sought along with 12 Boeing EA-18G “Growler” electronic attack aircraft for $2.8 billion.

That action came in a late night amendment sponsored by Rep. Todd Akin, a Republican from Missouri, where the F-18 is manufactured…

The legislation also provides an increase of $88 million for cooperation with Israel on missile defense.

RTFA. The more things change the more they stay the same.

We should continue to throw out the obviously useless. The corporate bootlickers and buttkissers.

Yup – roll out the heavy hitter!

Lawyers for hundreds of people across the country who say their kidneys were harmed by over-the-counter oral laxatives — used to prepare them for colonoscopies and other medical procedures — are close to reaching a final settlement with the maker of the products, C.B. Fleet Co. of Lynchburg, Va…

Those who sued say they suffered from kidney failure and chronic kidney disease after drinking two bottles of the laxative within 24 hours. That amount was promoted by Fleet and prescribed by doctors, according to the suit.

In the most serious cases, the suit says, those who drank the laxative needed dialysis or kidney transplants. In a few instances, the kidney damage resulted in death.

The suit also claims Fleet received numerous reports of the harm its products caused dating back to at least 1992, it suppressed that information, downplayed the risks and reassured doctors the products were safe for most patients…

Fleet took them off the market in December 2008, after the FDA issued a safety alert.

Phew. Can you imagine the effect on someone drinking a simple preparation like this – prior to a medical procedure which is nothing more than uncomfortable – and ending up with disability or even death?