Corruption

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/04/110404fa_fact_ioffe?printable=true&currentPage=all An excellent (as always) write-up from New Yorker about a rising star in Russian modern politics Alexey Navalny and the current state of corruption in Russia ( fake government contracts, kickbacks, etc). What is interesting to know (and I happen to agree) that Navalny describes current governing elite in Russia as a just a bunch or crooks, i.e. that nowadays there is no such thing as all-powerful KGB or Mafia, but rather a loosely connected network of highly-corrupt officials motivated mostly by personal financial gain. ...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216?print=true “Financial crooks brought down the world’s economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them” About feds “enforcement” efforts for economic crimes. An excellent article (needs aprox. 30 mins to read)

http://fuji.web.cern.ch/fuji/talk/2007/kelemen-2007-C5-Silent_Corruptions.pdf Interesting paper about data corruption from CERN. Basically they did verify that when you write a file to a disk, it not always come back the way it was written. …. so …. you have been warned ;-)