Noteworthy News

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Drivers.com: High gas prices - it's personal

Drivers

by PDE Publications Inc.

April 14, 2005

High gasoline prices have been a fact of life in Europe for decades, but auto-dependent North Americans have had soft easy times. Now the other shoe is falling, and it's personal.

Cheap gas prices lured us into gas-guzzling hummers, fuel hungry SUVs and bigger, more powerful family cars. Some can afford this, and higher gas prices will probably not affect them much, but most of us will feel the crunch, and if it keeps up, it will affect our lifestyles. It may even seriously damage the national economy.

The Seattle Times: Local News: Many in U.S. to need passport

The Seattle Times (WA)

by Lornet Turnbull

April 6, 2005

If you travel to the Caribbean, Mexico or even Canada, the federal government soon will require that you have a valid passport to get back home. For the first time, Canadian's will need a passport to travel south.

Aimed at further reinforcing the U.S. perimeter against terrorist threats, the new rules for air, land and sea travel, announced yesterday by the departments of State and Homeland Security, will be phased in over two years between December 2005 and December 2007. The impact of these changes could be especially strong in the Pacific Northwest, just south of Canada's British Columbia, site of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

EU health foods crackdown 'wrong'

BBC News (UK)

April 5, 2005

A plan to tighten rules on vitamins and food supplements should be stopped, a leading European judge has indicated.

European Court of Justice Advocate General Leendert Geelhoed said the EU health foods directive infringed guidelines in his opinion. But he said he was not opposed to the legislation in principle - opening the way for officials to redraw it. The court has to make a final decision on the rules, which critics say will ban thousands of health foods.

Homeschooling Alone

Reason Magazine

by Greg Beato

April 5, 2005

Why corporate reformers are ignoring the real revolution in education.

Would-be reformers continue to give generously to a public school system they routinely condemn as inefficient, dysfunctional, and hopelessly obsolete. A survey of Fortune 500 companies found that teaching employees "basic skills" accounted for 17 percent of their training costs in 2002.

"I'd know a false confession if I saw one": A comparative study of college students and police investigators

works.bepress.com

by Saul M. Kassin, et al.

April 1, 2005

College students and police investigators watched or listened to ten prison inmates confessing to crimes. Half the confessions were true accounts; half were false-concocted for the study.

Consistent with much recent research, students were generally more accurate than police, and accuracy rates were higher among those presented with audiotaped than videotaped confessions. In addition, investigators were significantly more confident in their judgments and also prone to judge confessors guilty. To determine if police accuracy would increase if this guilty response bias were neutralized, participants in a second experiment were specifically informed that half the confessions were true and half were false. This manipulation eliminated the investigator response bias, but it did not increase accuracy or lower confidence. These findings are discussed for what they imply about the post-interrogation risks to innocent suspects who confess.

Intel cans its open source licence

ZDNet UK

by Ingrid Marson

March 31, 2005

Intel has been congratulated for its 'great leadership' after deciding to shelve its open source licence, which has fallen into disuse

The issue of licence proliferation has caused concern among some in the open source community as it can increase the cost for companies wishing to adopt open source software, as they need to review and manage each type of licence. Intel decided to get rid of its licence after finding that it had not been used within the company for several years and is not often used outside Intel, according to an Intel spokesman. Smith said that it does not want the "de-approval" of the licence to be retroactive to past uses, as it does not want to force companies to re-license code. Intel's decision was praised by Martin Fink, the vice-president of HP's Linux division, who recently told ZDNet UK that the number of open source licences needs to be reduced from the current figure of more than 50 to "something less than 10".

Arnold Schwarzenegger - The Governator gets serious.

Slate

by Seth Faison

March 31, 2005

The antics that Arnold Schwarzenegger employs each day would turn any other politician into a joke. The Governator of California drives around in an olive-green, doorless Hummer with the license plate "Reform 1."

He holds court in a majestic white tent outside the governor's office, like an Arab sheik, so that he can smoke the cigars that are forbidden inside state buildings. He encourages visitors to touch the sword he brandished in Conan the Barbarian . His conversation overflows with winking references to the "part" he is now playing, or the "theatrics" of a political battle, and he often relies on his trademark "I'll be baaaaahck!"

Ignoring suffering of everyone who isn't Terri Schiavo

The Arizona Republic

by Ed Montini

March 29, 2005

There is a con man's technique that politicians sometimes use to manipulate the public and never has it worked better than with the tragic case of Terri Schiavo.

The scheme involves making a very big deal about the plight of a single person to get us to ignore the plight of hundreds, thousands or even millions of others. Two-bit hustlers use distraction and diversion techniques to lift your wallet or empty your bank account. Political flimflammers use the tragedy of a single family to distract you from the horror they are inflicting upon your friends and neighbors.

IRS Collects $3.2 Billion from Son of Boss; Final Figure Should Top $3.5 Billion

Uncle Fed's Tax Board

by National Tax Services, Inc.

March 24, 2005

The Internal Revenue Service announced today that taxpayers participating in the Son of Boss tax shelter settlement have so far paid in more than $3.2.

Son of Boss was an abusive transaction aggressively marketed in the late 1990s and 2000 primarily to wealthy individuals. The settlement initiative required taxpayers to concede 100 percent of the claimed tax losses and pay a penalty of either 10 percent or 20 percent unless they previously disclosed the transactions to the IRS.

Free File Tops Last Year's Total

Uncle Fed's Tax Board

by National Tax Services, Inc.

March 23, 2005

The Internal Revenue Service announced today that more people have used Free File this year than for all of last year.

As of March 16, 3.55 million tax returns have gone through Free File, up 44 percent compared to the same time last year and exceeding last year's total of 3.51 million. "This is another record-setting year for Free File," said IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson. "The success of Free File reflects a broader increase in the overall e-file program. People like the ease and convenience of filing electronically."

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