Yahoo! partners up with Microsoft... but why?

The big news yesterday was that Yahoo and Microsoft have come to an agreement in which Yahoo will get out of the search business and host microsoft's BING on the yahoo homepage, in return Microsoft will stop selling online advertising and let Yahoo take over that aspect of the search/ad-sales business.

weird.

Why did Yahoo turn down Microsoft's offer of $47.5 billion in May of 2008, and then a little over a year later basically give Microsoft what they wanted out of Yahoo anyway.
It makes no sense. They should have just sold the whole company to Microsoft last year.

my prediction: within 5 years Yahoo will be done. Their stock price will continue to plummet, and eventually Microsoft will pick the decent leftover parts of Yahoo like vultures pulling meat off dead bones.

so the big news yesterday really meant this:
yahoo, the internet giant of yesterday is now slowly headed to the dustbins of internet history like AOL or AltaVista.

further reading:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32193887/ns/business-us_business/
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/07/yahoo-microsoft-exchange-vows-for-search-and-ads.ars
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/07/microsoft-yahoo-2/
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/07/yahoo-gives-up/
http://www.thebigmoney.com/features/todays-business-press/2009/07/29/microhoo
http://www.thebigmoney.com/features/todays-business-press/2009/07/30/yahoo-and-microsoft-finally-team

the blue countries drive on the left

... and they need to get with the program!




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Countries_driving_on_the_left_or_right.svg

100 things your kids may never know about

# Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
# Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
# Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations. (Digital tuners + HD radio b0rk this concept.)
# Shortwave radio.
# 3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses.
# Watching TV when the networks say you should.
# Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
# Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
# Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
# Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
# Phone books and Yellow Pages.
# Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees.
# Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it.
# Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.
# Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.
# binaries from Usenet.
# Privacy.

more:
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/07/100-things-your-kids-may-never-know-about/

Jon Stewart: America's Most Trusted Newsman

Well, in a result that he will probably accept as downright apocalyptic for America, The Daily Show's Jon Stewart has been selected, in an online poll conducted by Time Magazine, as America's Most Trusted Newscaster, post-Cronkite. Matched up against Brian Williams, Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson, Stewart prevailed with 44 percent of the vote.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/22/time-magazine-poll-jon-st_n_242933.html

Politicians are a lot like diapers...

they should be changed frequently and for the same reason."
- Ben Franklin

The Prisoner - remake - coming this fall

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/07/qa-sir-ian-mckellen-takes-on-the-prisoners-number-one-tormenter/

He Can Speak French... In Russian

The new Dos Equis ad campaign featuring "the most interesting man in the world" is probably the best advertising for beer that has existed during this decade.
here's an example of what i mean:







"He once had an awkward moment... just to see how it feels."
"He can speak French... in Russian."
"He lives vicariously... through himself."
"I don't always drink beer, but when I do... I prefer Dos Equis.
Stay Thirsty My Friends."

Neuromancer movie in the works!

A screenplay based on Neuromancer, the 1984 novel by William Gibson is in development.

The Great American Bubble - by Matt Taibbi

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine?utm_source=daily-newsletter&utm_medium=email

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multi-billion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden parachute payments as his bank was self destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailedout insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …

But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.



http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine?utm_source=daily-newsletter&utm_medium=email


[excerpts]...
Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investmenttrust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hogwild. The first effort was the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; the bank issued a million shares at $100 apiece, bought all those shares with its own money and then sold 90 percent of them to the hungry public at $104. The trading corporation then relentlessly bought shares in itself, bidding the price up further and further. Eventually it dumped part of its holdings and sponsored a new trust, the Shenandoah Corporation, issuing millions more in shares in that fund — which in turn sponsored yet another trust called the Blue Ridge Corporation. In this way, each investment trust served as a front for an endless investment pyramid: Goldman hiding behind Goldman hiding behind Goldman. Of the 7,250,000 initial shares of Blue Ridge, 6,250,000 were actually owned by Shenandoah — which, of course, was in large part owned by Goldman Trading.

The end result (ask yourself if this sounds familiar) was a daisy chain of borrowed money, one exquisitely vulnerable to a decline in performance anywhere along the line. The basic idea isn't hard to follow. You take a dollar and borrow nine against it; then you take that $10 fund and borrow $90; then you take your $100 fund and, so long as the public is still lending, borrow and invest $900. If the last fund in the line starts to lose value, you no longer have the money to pay back your investors, and everyone gets massacred.

In a chapter from The Great Crash, 1929 titled "In Goldman Sachs We Trust," the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith held up the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah trusts as classic examples of the insanity of leveragebased investment. The trusts, he wrote, were a major cause of the market's historic crash; in today's dollars, the losses the bank suffered totaled $475 billion. "It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity," Galbraith observed, sounding like Keith Olbermann in an ascot. "If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale."

...

The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren't much more than potfueled ideas scrawled on napkins by uptoolate bongsmokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for mega-millions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn't know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system — one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman's later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry's standards of quality control.

"Since the Depression, there were strict underwriting guidelines that Wall Street adhered to when taking a company public," says one prominent hedge-fund manager. "The company had to be in business for a minimum of five years, and it had to show profitability for three consecutive years. But Wall Street took these guidelines and threw them in the trash." Goldman completed the snow job by pumping up the sham stocks: "Their analysts were out there saying Bullshit.com is worth $100 a share."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine?utm_source=daily-newsletter&utm_medium=email

Buddhists have an idea that you can judge a man by the things he repeatedly does

They believe that your essence, or soul, is determined by repetition.
By repeatedly *doing* certain things, those things come to define you.

Modern science has proven this in a way.
The pathways between neurons grow stronger through repetition,
essentially turning a dirt path into an interstate.
This is similar to shadow image burn on older TVs,
and "muscle memory".

Physical Currency Hurts The Economy

http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/st_essay

Over 800 million dollars of tax payer money is spent making coins last year in the U.S.
What is the point of this?

FREE by Chris Anderson

http://books.google.com/books?id=lLZbXN2odVYC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s

poor language skills indicate future alzheimers risk

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/nunstudy/

turn thousand$ into million$

http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2009/07/08/make-millions-from-thousands.aspx

funny, but unfair advertising

Google Chrome Operating System

Apparently Google has built an OS that integrates with their web browser Chrome.
It is a version of Linux with the Chrome web browser, so you can purchase an inexpensive netbook, or laptop only for internet use.
I wonder how this is going to work. Didn't Microsoft get into trouble for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows? At least those were 2 separate things.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html

reward for capture of cat torturer ( and future serial killer)

http://www.woodtv.com/dpp/news/local/grand_rapids/Cat_set_on_fire



http://www.wzzm13.com/news/news_story.aspx?storyid=111215



GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WZZM) The Humane Society of Kent County says the reward is now up to $5,500 for the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for setting a cat on fire.
Hadley, the 1 1/2 year old cat was brought to the Humane Society on July 3rd. He had third degree burns over his ears, neck, back and legs. Authorities from the Humane Society say it appears someone soaked the cat in an accelerant.
Hadley's owners brought the cat in for treatment, but could afford the on-going care so signed over ownership.
It's believed Hadley was burned by someone in the owner's neighborhood. They live on Turner Avenue between Ann and Leonard on Grand rapids Northwest side.
Hadley is now on three types of antibiotics and two pain medications.
If you know who might have set the cat on fire call the Humane Society of Kent County at 616-791-8218 or leave an anonymous tip at 616-453-8900 ext. 302.

open a banana like a monkey

unemployment map

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2435/3704510065_76349159a0_o.png



http://www.billshrink.com/blog/mapping-unemployment-out-of-work-in-america/

Artificial Intelligence or "AI" is a myth

The idea that humans will be able to create machines capable of independent thought is a myth.
I won't happen because it can't happen.
Machines don't think.
It doesn't matter how fast computers can process computations, they only follow commands, and don't "understand" what they're doing.

For something to think, and be intelligent it needs to be alive.
Computers and machines cannot be alive. Not unless people combine computers with something that is already alive. Like implanting chips inside a persons brain.
This is not AI though, it's an artificially augmented human being.

The modern concept of AI is splintered into two main groups of ideas.
Weak AI and Strong AI.
The Weak AI position is that machines can be programmed to *seem* human, but that they won't have a mind or consciousness. Weak AI is then theoretically possible, and it's already happening in some areas, but Weak AI isn't what most people think of when they think of "AI".
The Strong AI position is that machines can become intelligent enough to surpass human intelligence. neither of these things will ever happen.

what lies beyond our universe?

If the big bang theory is true, then the universe is shaped like a sphere.
Everything would have exploded away from a central point at essentially the same speed. Meaning we are on the inside of a giant ball.
WHAT'S ON THE OUTSIDE???


"On the outskirts of creation, unknown, unseen "structures" are tugging on our universe like cosmic magnets, a controversial new study says.

Everything in the known universe is said to be racing toward the massive clumps of matter at more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour—a movement the researchers have dubbed dark flow.

The presence of the extra-universal matter suggests that our universe is part of something bigger—a multiverse—and that whatever is out there is very different from the universe we know, according to study leader Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

The theory could rewrite the laws of physics. Current models say the known, or visible, universe—which extends as far as light could have traveled since the big bang—is essentially the same as the rest of space-time (the three dimensions of space plus time)."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081105-dark-flow.html

Roman Cat Sanctuary

In Rome the cats have an ancient temple all to themselves. The site is known as Torre Argentina and was excavated under Mussolini's re-building efforts in 1929, revealing extensive multi level temple grounds about 20 feet below modern street level. The site is actually composed of several temples as well as part of the famous Pompey's theatre, where in 44 BC Caesar was betrayed and killed on the theatre steps.

Today volunteers care for approximately 250 cats. After the site was excavated, Rome's feral cats moved in immediately, as they do all over the city. The gattare, or cat ladies began feeding and caring for them. Since the mid 1990s the population has grown from about 90 to the current nearly 250, and the organization has ramped up with care for sick or wounded cats, and an extensive spay & neuter program to try to keep the feral population in check. Most of the permanent residents have special needs - they are blind or missing legs or came from abusive homes.

On any given afternoon a small crowd gathers to watch the cats sunbathe on ancient pillars and steps. At first it may be hard to spot the cats, but once you start to see them they are everywhere.

Visitors can admire the cats and their ruins from street level, can volunteer, or even adopt cats.

http://atlasobscura.com/places/torre-argentina-roman-cat-sanctuary

cat catches bat

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Jeff Goldblum Addresses Rumors Of His Own Death

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/220019/june-29-2009/jeff-goldblum-will-be-missed

this is what a firefox looks like

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Panda

you can also download the best web browser in the world here:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html?from=getfirefox

download link

Vicodin & Percocet ban recommendation

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/health/01fda.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

for convenience sake some people are willing to abandon thier first language

I recently read this interesting post on the NY Times blog "freakonomics" titled:
How The Market Influences Which Language You Read In"
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/how-the-market-influences-what-language-you-read-in/

The article mentions how people in the Netherlands would rather read the English translation of a Swedish book than read the Dutch translation.
The reason for this is that there are many more Swedish to English translators than there are Swedish to Dutch translators.
Meaning the Dutch translations generally have more errors than the English translations.

The Dutch people say they'd rather read a proper English translation than an error-filled poorly translated Dutch translation.

If you take this to it's logical conclusion, you will realize that many Europeans in "smaller markets" are already, in some small ways, choosing English over their own language.
Which then means that... eventually... most European people will adopt a more popular language than their own, merely for the sake of convenience.
As languages like Dutch, Swedish, Kashubian etc. fade slowly away, more and more people will gravitate toward English, French, Spanish, and German.
Eventually, over time, English, French, Spanish, and German will be the only languages spoken in Europe.

Over, even more time, these 4 languages will likely blend into one language spoken by all people in Europe, Australia, North and South America.

Over even more time, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese will also merge.

So the good news for people 200 years from now is that there will only be two languages to learn in order to speak to everyone on the planet. European (Spanglish-Franco-Germanic) and Asian (Chinese-Korean-Japanese).


[doesn't really affect us just yet]

the art work of Erika Iris Simmons (aka iri5)