An anonymous reader writes “ABC is warning that dirty election tricks are about to start. In the past, they’ve ranged from late-night robo-calls to voter intimidation. ABC has a pretty good list of what to watch out for as told by Allen Raymond, a former Republican operative, who was reformed after spending three months in prison in 2006 for pulling some of the stunts he now helps to prevent.” To make this story timely, last week someone broke into a McCain campaign office in Missouri and stole a laptop personal containing “strategic information” about the local campaign.

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A few days ago, NASA and the US Chess Federation teamed up to host a space vs. Earth chess game. Astronaut Greg Chamitoff is playing one side, while the other side’s moves will be determined by a public vote. Four potential moves will be selected each weekday by a chess club comprised of students from kindergarten through third grade. Once the selections are made, visitors to the USCF’s site can vote for the move they like ideal. The USCF is maintaining a blog to update the moves and board position, and to provide commentary.

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Filed under: International markets, Bad news, Products and services, Management, Competitive strategy, General Motors (GM), Employees, Recession, Financial Crisis

For Detroit automaker General Motors (NYSE: GM) the tough times are being felt outside of the United Says as sales declines in Europe are forcing the troubled manufacturer to suspend production at some European factories.

As the financial crisis that is being felt in America continues to spread, demand for autos outside of the country are also feeling the pressure, and in August, sales in Europe fell by 16%. As a result, General Motors has decided that it needs to reduce its 2008 production by about 40,000 cars by the end of the year.

To accomplish this production shift, the company is going to be shutting down several factories for a few weeks. Starting next week, GM’s factory in Eisenach, Germany, where the company produces its Opel brand, is going to start a three-week shut down period. This news comes as another of the company’s factories, one in Bochum, Germany is completing a current two-week shut down period to help reduce the company’s inventories. Other temporary shut downs are taking place in England and Spain.

While the production halts are probably in the best interest of the company, its labor celebrations are not too happy with the decision, to state the least. Labor representatives voiced their disappointment that they were not consulted before the decision was reached.

Making his feelings known, the head of the division’s works council, Klaus Franz, said that if the two sides could not come together and reach some sort of agreement, that he would be forced to take matters into his own hands and try to get a court order to put a stop to the production halts.

Times are definitely tough for General Motors, which has been struggling to stay competitive as consumers have moved away from heavy gasoline guzzlers and into fuel efficient cars. Another move that the company is considering in order to bring a much need cash infusion is the sale of its headquarters in Detroit.

GM said, though, that it has each intention of staying in the building. It had been leasing the building since 1999, and recently bought the property earlier this year.

GM stock has been taking a beating lately, hitting another new 52-week low today, trading as low as $8.06. Currently, the stock is sitting at that low price.

What is it going to take to bring back the glory days for General Motors? Your guess is as good as mine!

Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last four years working as an analyst for the on the internet investment advisory service Investor’s Observer.

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John Sokol writes “I just heard from a good friend and Linux kernel hacker in Brazil that they’ve just completed their municipal election with 128 million people using Linux to vote. They voted nationwide for something like 5,000 city mayors. Voting is mandatory in Brazil. The embedded computer they are using once ran VirtuOS (a variant of MS-DOS); it now has its own locally developed, Linux-based distro. These are much nicer, smaller, and cheaper than the systems being deployed here in the US. Here’s a Java-required site with a simulated Brazilian voting system. It’s very cool; they even show you a picture of the candidate you voted for.”

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Lumenary7204 writes “The Register has a story about the Huge Synoptic Survey Telescope, a project to build a 6.7 meter effective-diameter ground-based telescope that’ll be used to map some of the faintest objects in the night sky. Jeff Kantor, the LSST Project Data Manager, indicates that the telescope should be in operation by 2016, will generate around 30 terabytes of data per night, and will ‘open a movie-like window on objects that change or move on rapid timescales: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects.’ The end result will be a 150 petabyte database containing one of the most detailed surveys of the universe ever undertaken by a ground-based telescope. The telescope’s 8.4 meter mirror blank was recently unveiled at the University of Arizona’s Mirror Lab in Tucson.”

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