For years, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne has maintained a loony crusade against Wall Street traders, claiming there was a conspiracy to sell his company's stock short. (He may well have been onto something — but then again, a stopped clock is right twice a day.) CIO reveals a far more serious problem affecting Overstock's financials: A botched installation of Oracle software which has led to the restatement of five years' worth of earnings. In 2005, Byrne apologized to shareholders for a $14.2 million quarterly loss related to the troubled installation. Today's restatement suggests he was too busy chasing naked shorts to actually fix the problem. Why didn't he just blame it on the software all along?

Barack Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died today of cancer. Dunham, 85, largely raised Obama, from the age of 10 on, while his mother worked in Indonesia. She's a huge figure in his book, in his speeches, and in his campaign—the campaign he suspended to visit her just last week. Obama issued a statement with his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng:

The problem with the staunch individualism bred into most Americans is their utter inability to band together for the greater good once every few years or so. Instead, we jealously hoard whatever we have, suspiciously eying our neighbor and selling him a broken lawn mower. Obama will maybe-probably win tomorrow, and a rally in Chicago is all planned. The black market for the free-yet-sold-out tickets is, of course, on Craigslist. Ticketholders have taken capitalism to its fullest conclusion, selling the tickets they originally got for nothing. (Hey, ill-gotten infusions of capital are what this country was built on!) They're are being offered in some cases for $1000 a pair: "No sob stories need apply—we're saving to put 3 kids through college, so I don't need to hear about your student loans and how you can only afford $20." Well God bless you, too! There's also flirtation-for-Obama tickets, date-for-Obama tickets... one thing's for sure: we ain't above sellin' it.Of course, it wouldn't be Craigslist without somebody coming on to tell us that we're all pathetic:

We've been vexed, terribly vexed by Joaquin Phoenix's slurred proclamation to Extra that he planned to give up acting to follow in the illustrious, thesp rock footsteps of The Bacon Brothers and 30 Odd Foot of Grunts. Was he seriously quitting the business, or was it all a ruse for some forlorn, Sundance Channel takeoff of Punk'd? Then, at the Saturday AFI Fest part for Che, Phoenix did what any actor ready to leave Hollywood would do: a full red carpet press tour, complete with the hastily scrawled words "Bye!" and "Good" on opposite knuckles (perhaps he takes his sentence structure cues from the backwards "B"-sporting Ashley Todd). Said Phoenix to the AP:

Programmer Richard Stallman's 25-year crusade to banish proprietary software from planet Earth hasn't had many victories. Most recently, One Laptop Per Child stabbed RMS in the face by replacing its Stallman-approved freeware with a Windows operating system. OLPC head Nicholas Negroponte, who originally backed a free-software configuration, believes it's a necessary compromise to sell the low-price laptops in a Windows-centric world. Stallman's response compares Negroponte to a drug dealer handing out free samples at the playground.

Last week we had a very clear piece of advice for human campaign prop Joe "Wurzelbacher" The Plumber: get to plumbing! All this hype he's getting as a McCain hack isn't worth shit except free advertising for his core business of Roto-Rooting. But Joe has failed to heed our warning, surprisingly. He's broke, and he's not afraid to complain about it on national television shows such as the respected Inside Edition! Thank god those mysterious checks that appear in his mailbox regularly are at least temporarily offsetting the freeloading Obama supporters trying to take food off his family:

You know when a layoff's really bad? When the CEO calls Valleywag to spin it. Spot Runner's Nick Grouf rang us up to let us know he was laying off 115 of the 385 or so employees at his online-advertising concern, which helps small businesses manage the complicated process of buying TV ads. The cuts follow a round of 50 layoffs in August. Grouf is also moving some key employees from an office in Fremont, Calif., which Spot Runner picked up when it acquired local-search startup Weblistic, to L.A. Grouf says Spot Runner is getting out of the search-ads market and "exploring strategic alternatives" for Weblistic, which is corporatespeak for trying to find a buyer. When he wasn't sounding like a get-out-the-vote robocall, Grouf did a decent job of feigning optimism."I feel really bullish about the business," Grouf tells us. But he was not bullish enough to reveal any numbers — like how much of the $51 million in venture capital Spot Runner raised earlier this year still remains in its bank account, and to what extent he reduced the company's monthly cash burn through these layoffs. He was more forthcoming about Joanne Bradford, the Microsoft executive he hired, briefly, as an executive vice president. She left Spot Runner after less than six months to join Yahoo, which had long been courting her. "Tell me about it," Grouf groused when we brought up Bradford's rapid departure. "After the Yahoo-Microsoft dance was over, they needed to move quickly on their ad sales group, and they made her an offer she couldn't refuse. The shame is we reorganized the business the way she wanted it to run, and she left midstream."

· Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson are searching for financing and distribution partners for their Tintin series after Universal passed. Sony is said to be interested in splitting the costs, with one studio insider explaining "A $140 million movie about some French Belgian explorer dude with a mini-pompadour and little Wire Fox Terrier that no American kid has ever heard of? Where do we sign?" [THR] · Universal won a bidding war for video game Dante's Inferno, revolving around a "journey through the depths of hell" presumably separate from the one parents will experience taking their kids to see Dante's Inferno. [Variety] · McCain's appearance on SNL, an amazingly chipper performance considering Tina Fey was literally inches away from him tearing his running mate to shreds, brought the episode a 9.0 household rating/20 share. (And a seriously funny Keith Olbermann sendup from Ben Affleck. We give props where props are due.) [THR] After the jump: Jack Bauer's back, and he's more pro-torture than ever!· 24 will debut in a two-part premiere on January 11 and 12. [Variety] · The early release of Quantum of Solace overseas earned $38.6 million in countries like the U.K., France, and Sweden. [Variety] · Miramax picked up Keira Knightley and Eva Mendes drama Last Night for $4 million. [THR]

Friedman Billings Ramsey analyst Craig Berger claims his industry contacts know that Apple's Q4 iPhone production will be more than 40 percent lower than Q3. So, even though poor people are the iPhone's largest growth market, overall sales are expected to be off because rich people stop buying gadgets when the Nasdaq drops. I'm getting tired of this global-downturn talk. Where's my reality distortion field? (Photo by otakuchick)

Bruno's Straight Man? A report this morning suggests Sacha Baron Cohen did not visit yesterday's Yes on 8 rally as the flamboyant firebrand Bruno, but rather as the comic's newer, closeted character Straight Dave. While that would no doubt explain his mall-refugee threads, confusion persists about the language barrier that would influence Straight Dave's placard to reject gay marriage "even zough zey're nice." And that is Bruno's Milan-crashing coiffure. Yes? No? Make your voice heard — the issues can wait. [Filmdrunk via Spout Blog]

A reader asks, "Emily Gould and Keith Gessen—are they back together?" Emily Gould is a former editor of Gawker who wrote a cover story for The New York Times Magazine about working at Gawker and dating a different Gawker editor who wrote a Page Six Magazine story about dating her. Then she started dating Keith Gessen, whom she'd written about, somewhat critically, on Gawker. Gessen is a novelist who co-founded a literary journal called n+1 and wrote a novel about being a dude named Keith who went to Harvard, like Keith Gessen. The journal and the novel are the Most Important Journal and Novel of Our Time, respectively. They dated, and then they broke up, and then Keith went to Russia, and we stopped writing about both of them, mostly. But apparently you, the readers, demand to know what's up! Here is THE SCOOP: Emily went to visit Keith in Russia. She stayed a month. Now she's back in New York. We suppose that sort of counts as "back together" except now, obviously, they are thousands of miles apart, again. (The kitten we got Keith that he couldn't take because he was going to Russia did find a home.) The End.

There's so much bad news in the print media world these days that we just have to roll it all up for you in one convenient post that you can read here, on the internet, where we are responsible for killing print. Today in the Death Of Print Daily: Big layoffs at Rodale and the Seattle Times, the death of Out Traveler, and a tipster describes just how poor the Village Voice is these days:

Compared to its Tina Fey-scripted, Debbie Matenopolous-spoofing skits of yore, Saturday Night Live's parody of The View this week felt awfully underpopulated. On today's actual episode of the daytime chat show, the ladies speculated as to why SNL left out two-fifths of the show's hosts, leading Sherri Shepherd to conclude, "I think they ran out of blacks!"Of course, Shepherd's theory is only bolstered by the fact that SNL can't cover Michelle Obama unless Maya Rudolph's got a free weekend, but later in the show, head writer Seth Meyers came out to do some damage control. "Next time we do it...Sherri, you can come and play yourself," he offered. Is there no end to SNL's 30 Rock poaching? Somewhere, we imagine that an exhausted Tina Fey just muttered "Blergh" and collapsed into her Sabor de Soledad.

Mountaineer, philanthropist, and longtime Microsoftie Jeff Dossett has a new claim to fame: He's brave enough to join Yahoo — but it took a while to convince him. Two months ago, Dossett, who joined Microsoft in 1991, went through a curious back-and-forth: BoomTown's Kara Swisher reported he was leaving Microsoft to join Yahoo. A Microsoft rep promptly denied the report, claiming Dossett was leaving a job at the software giant's MSN Web business, but looking at other opportunities within Microsoft. We could speculate about how Microsoft and Yahoo were bidding for Dossett's services, but the real lesson here is: Never, ever believe a Microsoft flack. Dossett replaces Scott Moore, who's leaving Yahoo as reported.

Have you ever been unemployed? Have you had to call the temp agency to tell them to "reactivate my file"? Is your net worth $240... in ones? Let the lyrics of REM to console us: everybody hurts. And everybody, according to the overwhelming amount of you're-fired stories we've been getting (tips@gawker.com), has been fired. But have you been fired by someone telling your kid instead of you? Or by finding a "people to fire" doc on your boss's computer? Did you unwittingly collate on your own "exit package"?SylviaFired.doc:

Tragedy was narrowly averted on the set of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, a colorful report circulating the UK gossip press claims, when Robert Downey Jr. very nearly set his penis ablaze in a pipe-smoking incident gone terribly wrong:

As the election approaches, more bloggers are noticing ads from backers of Proposition 8, the gay-marriage ban appearing on Californians' ballots, courtesy of Google. The search engine's algorithm is mindlessly matching them to phrases like "gay marriage," regardless of whether the blog in question is for or against. Scott Beale, who blogs about Internet culture at Laughing Squid, has blocked the yes-on-8 ads, and, for good measure, taken Google's ads off his site altogether until after the election. He's not alone; one fashion website adminitrator tells Valleywag she's taken similar measures.I haven't heard of any cases of the opposite happening, but I wouldn't be shocked if some socially conservative bloggers were similarly offended by no-on-8 ads placed on their blog by Google. Which returns me to my original question about these ads: If Google's algorithms are so good at placing ads, why aren't they able to gather whether a blog's audience generally supports or opposes gay marriage, and target ads where they'll do the most good? (Screenshot by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

The polls in NYC will be open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. today. You can find your local polling site here, or you can call 1-866-VOTE-NYC. (If you're outside the city, check here.) Not sure if you're registered to vote? You can look yourself up here.

Longest. Election. Ever. After two years of baskstabbing, backslapping and backbiting, we'll know by early Wednesday morning which Senator will be signing the Executive Orders for emergency food supplies and government assistance disbursements when the economy goes into the metaphorical Andy Gump port-a-john. Your future, however, does not depend on the Electoral College, but on the stars. If today - November 3 - is your birthday: While it would seem logical to take down that Sarah Palin effigy this week, keep it up well through the holiday season. That flow of Scientology solicitors has all but but dried up. More astrological excitement after the jump!

Vastly overqualified for an administrative assistant job, yet willing to sublimate your ego by doing grunt work? Twitter CEO Ev Williams has a job for you. He and cofounder Biz Stone are seeking a "future entrepreneur" who's willing to make copies one day and invent a business model for the revenueless microblogging service the next. Here's the job listing: