Greg In The Desert

In fact, no one in 45 years has crash-landed an airplane in the water with no fatalities, the tabloid said.

All told, Intel's earnings report tells essentially the same story we've been seeing here for the past week or so: demand across almost all segments of the PC market completely evaporated in the fourth quarter (right around the time Lehman went bankrupt and the economy really nosedived), except for netbooks, which saw massive growth (revenue from Atom was up 50 percent).

Intel Corp. (INTC) reported a 90% decrease in fourth- quarter net income, largely due to a $1 billion write-down, but declined to give a formal outlook for the current quarter in a sign of how difficult it is to predict the depth of the current downturn.

So let's imagine a typical money-laundering scenario: (1) Make numerous below-the-radar deposits to accounts in different banks. (2) Consolidate the funds via wire transfer in a single account in, say, Tampa. (3) Wire that to a London bank. (4) Convert the funds to certificates of deposit. (5) Use those as collateral for a loan from a bank in the Cayman Islands. (6) Transfer the loan proceeds back to your front company in Tampa. Result: a confusing trail for the feds to follow, most of it electronic, with no need for small unmarked bills or other crime-fiction cliches.

he good news is that it's very easy to protect yourself. If you are on Windows, just stop using Safari until a fix is released. If you are using OS X 10.5 Leopard, make sure Safari isn't your default RSS reader. In Safari, select Safari > Preferences and click the RSS tab. From the Default RSS Reader pop-up menu, change the application to anything other than Safari. If you are using OS X 10.4 Tiger or earlier this problem doesn't affect you.