Tech Boom 2.0: Electric Bugaloo

An interesting theory on Microsoft and Yahoo that I simply could not fathom occurring... until now.

 

May 18 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp.'s plan to buy AQuantive Inc. for $6 billion increases the likelihood that the software maker will also buy Yahoo! Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analyst Anthony Noto said today.

Yahoo would plug a ``strategic hole'' at Microsoft that isn't filled by the purchase of AQuantive, announced today, Noto said in a note to clients. AQuantive, which creates Web ads and measures whether they reach the target audience, doesn't give Microsoft the roughly half a million advertisers required to compete against Google Inc., Noto said.

``We believe the odds of a deal happening over time actually increases,'' New York-based Noto wrote. ``Microsoft is willing to do deals that are a strategic necessity.''

Thank Bloomberg.

 

Obviously, no one learned anything from the 90's.

 

And I would suspect that Yahoo probably does NOT want to be acquired.  That's a fairly clever bunch.  Stay tuned.

 

 

 

The Sequel To The Best PC Game Of All Time

I'm not a young guy anymore, but I'm positively giddy about the game which is arguably the best game of all time.

Introducing: Starcraft II.

Protoss, Terran, and Zerg. These three distinct and powerful races will clash once again in the fast-paced real-time strategy sequel to the legendary original, StarCraft. Legions of veteran, upgraded, and brand-new unit types will do battle across the galaxy, as each faction struggles for survival.

Featuring a unique single-player campaign that picks up where StarCraft: Brood War left off, StarCraft II will present a cast of new heroes and familiar faces in an edgy sci-fi story filled with adventure and intrigue. In addition, Blizzard will again offer unparalleled online play through Battle.net, the company's world-renowned gaming service, with several enhancements and new features to make StarCraft II the ultimate competitive real-time strategy game.

Oh, dear.
Finally a reason to upgrade the computers.
Here's the trailer.

The Credit CARD Act

Usually, I have a natural suspicion of obviously-named bills (see: Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind, etc.).  Not in this case.  I bring you... The Credit CARD Act if 2007 .

 

 

A BILL

To amend the Consumer Credit Protection Act to ban abusive credit practices, enhance consumer disclosures, protect underage consumers, and for other purposes.

 

Where discovered?  Why, The Consumerist, of course.  It's easier to buy into a bill when they are into it.

 

The Credit CARD Act Of 2007 is a bill currently before Congress aiming to end some of the credit card industry's anti-consumer practices. Among H. R. 1461's proposals:

• Advance notice of interest rate increases
• End universal default clauses, the premise that they can raise your credit card interest rate if your credit score changes
• Prohibit credit cards being issued to minors without a parental signature

Here's your chance to stem unadulterated evil, people.  Don't blow this.  Support positive changes in the things that drive you crazy in your everyday life, then marvel at the improvements in your daily existence.

Regular Google Is Not Enough?

If it isn't, try the experimental Google search.

 

Google is always experimenting with new features aimed at improving the search experience. Take them for a spin, and let us know what you think.

I'm actually not exactly sure what this is, but I'm going to try it, anyway.  I'm an early adopter of Google products by nature.

 

Yes, I know that I haven't been posting as much lately.  I promise that I'll make it up to you.

All Things In Moderation

Perfect news for men.

 

Heavy multivitamin users were almost twice as likely to get fatal prostate cancer as men who never took the pills, concludes the study in Wednesday's Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Here's the twist: Overall, the researchers found no link between multivitamin use and early-stage prostate cancer.

The researchers speculate that perhaps high-dose vitamins had little effect until a tumor appeared, and then could spur its growth.

More wonderful news from Yahoo, but don't shoot the messenger.

 

Someone once told me that his doctor told him that if he lived long enough, he'd get prostate cancer.  He did.

Now, too many vitamins might help small cancers beat you?

 

That's it.  It's steak tonight.

 

Population Growth Oddly Making Sense

Over at kotte.org, they noticed a little article from the Wall Street Journal on The Realignment of America.

 

The bad news for them is that the Coastal Megalopolises grew only 4% in 2000-06, while the nation grew 6%. Coastal Megalopolitan states--New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois--are projected to lose five House seats in the 2010 Census, while California, which has gained seats in every census since it was admitted to the Union in 1850, is projected to pick up none.

You see an entirely different picture in the 16 metro areas I call the Interior Boomtowns (none touches the Atlantic or Pacific coasts). Their population has grown 18% in six years. They've had considerable immigrant inflow, 4%, but with the exceptions of Dallas and Houston, this immigrant inflow has been dwarfed by a much larger domestic inflow--three million to 1.5 million overall.

Naturally there are political implications here, but why, do you think, this would happen?

 

If you can't come up with an answer right away, think carefully, Google, and get back to me.

Consider also the how areas in this country grow these days as well.

 

Sometimes, people try to make things more complex than they really are.

 

May 14th - Tappity Tap Tap Tap.

When it comes to privacy, remember that you don't have any on the Internet.  On Monday, you'll have less.

 

May 14th is the official deadline for cable modem companies, DSL providers, broadband over powerline, satellite internet companies and some universities to finish wiring up their networks with FBI-friendly surveillance gear, to comply with the FCC's expanded interpretation of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.

 

Wired said this first.

 

Oh the news, Zombie Hoover sat up in his grave and applauded.  Oddly, the same news made millions of American Internet users shake their heads in disgust.

 

They Take The Titans Seriously In Tennessee

Today's interesting news story brought to you by WBAL, via my good friends at Fark .

 

Ravens quarterback Steve McNair has been arrested in Nashville, Tennessee, and charged with owning a vehicle being driven by a drunken driver.

 

Steve McNair was driving dr.... hey!  Wait a minute...

 

Jamie Cartwright, 31, was driving McNair's 2003 Dodge pickup truck, with McNair as a passenger, northbound on Hillsboro Road at Abbott Martin Road at 11:53 p.m. Wednesday when DUI Squad Officer Harold Taylor saw that the truck was traveling 45 mph in a 35 mph zone. Officer Taylor activated his emergency equipment and Cartwright pulled into a strip mall on Hillsboro Road near Crestmoor Drive.

When Taylor approached Cartwright, he detected an obvious odor of alcohol and saw that Cartwright's eyes were red and glassy. Cartwright admitted to drinking at least two beers earlier in the evening. Taylor administered the standard field sobriety tasks to Cartwright, which indicated impairment. Cartwright was taken into custody for DUI and was asked to submit to a breath alcohol test. He refused.

Because McNair owns the truck and was a passenger with Cartwright, he too was charged with DUI. It is illegal in Tennessee for the owner of a vehicle to knowingly permit its operation by a driver under the influence of an intoxicant. Metro police have charged 43 persons, including McNair, for violating that statute since the first of this year.

So.  To be clear, Steve McNair, who may have been drunk, was riding shotgun with a person that may have been drunk, and Steve McNair (the passenger) was charged with a DUI?  Or is it a PUI.  Hm.

 

Clever.

 

 

 

 

Friends, don't let friends drive your car.  Anytime, just to be safe.

 

 

Hoaxes On The Internet

The way that you can tell that you've been on the Internet for a while is that you've at least seen or heard of most of these, highlighted today by Yahoo:  The Top 25 Web Hoaxes.

 

Some old favorites:

 

2. Sick Kid Needs Your Help (1989)

4. Five-Cent E-Mail Tax (1999)

5. Nigerian 419 E-Mail Scam (2000)

20. Rand's 1954 Home Computer (2004)

21. Microsoft Buys Catholic Church (1994)

Funny how things change so much, yet so little in Internet culture.  In some variety, I still see a lot of these available on the Internet and in my email - some daily.  Do yourselves a favor, folks, seriously:  check Snopes.com before you send that email explaining how Bill Gates is giving away money for just sending an email.  Snopes is a good resource, and is conveniently located on my sidebar.  Oldsters will remember the old Usenet group rec.folklore.urban - from which Snopes was born.  These guys know their stuff and have been writing about Internet and other urban folklore, or urban legends, for years.

Take a look.  I tend to do that before I believe anything that I read on the Internet.

 

 

 

POW! Goes The Blog

Quite unfortunately, last night while doing some blog tweaks, I unfortunately lost my blog template, so things might look a bit strange for a couple of days.  If anyone has any ideas on how to recover an inadvertently lost blogger template, let me know.

 

In the meantime, I have much to do, and will try to have this fixed by the weekend.

Digg Dugg?

Uh oh.  I'm not sure what happened to Digg.com, but something big is definitely afoot.

 

I've never really seen anything like this on user run websites, but chaos is taking place over on Digg. As I have mentioned before, Digg is my favorite website out there, but after they banned me earlier today I got a little pissed. I submitted a story about a T-Shirt with the now famous HD-DVD hex key on it, and I was banned for "violating the terms of use".

Stories were getting deleted and user accounts were being banned all because of a stupid HD-DVD copyright Hex code that can be used to unlock HD-DVD. Digg claimed that they could be sued and what not for it so they decided to censor all of the stories that had to deal with the key. The whole thing is just bull, you can't copyright a sequence of numbers and letters.

Thank TechPwn.

 

Then this, also from TechPwn.

 

Well, as a follow up, digg has shut down story submissions. They have also turned off the ability for stories to reach the front page.

 

This is quite the interesting thing to come home to after a 15 hour day.  Here's a little Digg background.

 

...and here's Digg.com.

 

Slashdot weighs in here. 

 

I am a member of Digg, but I haven't been there lately.  The geek in me finds this revolt... intriguing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Blogging Universe - No Longer Expanding?

Amazingly, according to a post from Valleywag, the number of blogs in existence seems to be stalling out.

 

It's the web media equivalent of the central cosmological constant: does the universe of personal sites expand ad infinitum, or else collapse under its own weight? And we may finally have an answer. The number of active blogs tracked by Technorati has stalled at about 15 million. Now that's still a remarkable number, even before one adds in quasi-blogs, such as pages on social network sites such as Myspace. But, compared with the conventional wisdom -- that every human, and household pet, will eventually have a blog -- the reality is sobering.

 

It's sobering only if your idea of the Internet consisted of a ever growing bunch of people who wanted to blog about their overbearing boss, stalk their ex-girlfriends, or talk in leetspeak.

 

For people that have been writing on the Internet for a while, it's probably not a terrible thing.  Keeping a blog active is kind of a serious thing that is most definitely time consuming.  Being topical on the Internet takes a certain level of dedication.  This I know.  I have a few myself, and you would be surprised at how much time I spend blogging, and I still managed to have a daughter and a wonderful girlfriend, somehow.  And freelance.  And work a couple of jobs.

 

Of course, occasionally I'm a high energy person.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Public Service Announcement

In keeping with Earth Day, that I've decided to stretch out into a kind of Earth Week, because, well, the Earth is kind of important to, you know, the survival of humankind, just in case you didn't know this (and apparently, there are a lot of you out there), plastic isn't a product of magic, or some such: plastic comes from oil.

 

Plastics are everywhere and most Americans have come to rely on plastics in all aspects of their lives. However, very few people realize that plastics are made from oil, further contributing to the problems of energy dependence, greenhouse gas emissions and depleting resources. In fact, nearly 10 percent of U.S. oil consumption - approximately 2 million barrels a day - is used to make plastic.

 

From Yahoo News.  I come not to mock, simply to enlighten.

 

Plastic is made from oil, people.  The more plastic that gets used, the more oil we use.  Hopefully the 70% of Americans that didn't know this can learn from it.

 

 

 

Global Warming

Every now and then, I come across something that seems too ridiculous to be true, and I have to do a double take and reread.  Today I came across one of those items that I found so positively outlandish that I had to read it repeatedly, and I'm still having a hard time digesting it.  From Global Warming:  The World's Endangered Destinations:

 

Northwest Territories, Canada: Polar bears have become one of the more obvious victims of the impact of global warming. With about 23,000 square miles of Arctic sea ice melting every year, the bears' hunting grounds are shrinking rapidly. Some scientists predict polar bears will be extinct in the next century. 

 

What was that, again?

 

With about 23,000 square miles of Arctic sea ice melting every year...

 

23000 square miles?  Really?

 

For a sense of perspective, and with the help of Google Maps, I did a quick sanity check on exactly how big that is, and came up with this:

 

From Denver going south, go to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

From Denver, going east, drive to Kansas City, Missouri.

 

Stop.

 

That's how much Arctic ice will melt this year.

That's insane.  How can that not be an imminent threat?  How far above sea level are Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Manhattan, again?  How about Tokyo?  Or London?

 

 

 

Men: Perhaps The Next Endangered Species?

Men had better make themselves useful, and fast.

 

Women might soon be able to produce sperm in a development that could allow lesbian couples to have their own biological daughters, according to a pioneering study published today.

Scientists are seeking ethical permission to produce synthetic sperm cells from a woman's bone marrow tissue after showing that it possible to produce rudimentary sperm cells from male bone-marrow tissue.

The researchers said they had already produced early sperm cells from bone-marrow tissue taken from men. They believe the findings show that it may be possible to restore fertility to men who cannot naturally produce their own sperm.

But the results also raise the prospect of being able to take bone-marrow tissue from women and coaxing the stem cells within the female tissue to develop into sperm cells, said Professor Karim Nayernia of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Creating sperm from women would mean they would only be able to produce daughters because the Y chromosome of male sperm would still be needed to produce sons. The latest research brings the prospect of female-only conception a step closer.

Thank the Independent for this.  They found the information.  Those Brits sure know how to find the juicy stuff, don't they?

 

Being able to create sperm from, gasp, BONE MARROW is huge.  What a tremendous scientific achievement!  Now, though, I'm envisioning a world without men....

 

- No Super Bowl Sunday.

...I'd miss the commercials, but meh.

 

- No Boy Scouts.

...but we'd still have Girl Scout cookies.

 

- The Pope?  Female.

...interesting idea.

 

- Oprah as President.

...we could do worse.  Much, much worse.

 

- Most popular spectator sport is probably figure skating.

...a terrifying prospect, but who watches TV anymore?

 

So far, I'm shockingly unfazed.  Maybe that's because I have a daughter myself (so the selfish genes will live on), but really, I was waiting for that BLAM impact, and haven't seen it yet.  Interesting.

 

Time to face it, gentlemen: we can be replaced.  Stop being just that guy who only makes an intelligent decision when there is a decent woman there to let you know that you're being a goofball.  Adapt or perish!

 

 

 

 

 

Spiders!

This is just one of those things about nature that I think is so cool.  From Science News:

 

To illustrate the amazing properties of spider silk, Nikola Kojic offers an arresting example. Imagine a circular web with a diameter of 100 meters—about the length of a football field—spun from a silk thread about a centimeter thick. Concentric circles 4 cm apart attach to the web's spokes, also 4 cm apart. This larger-than-life web "could stop a jumbo jet in midflight," says Kojic.

 

Ah, spiders.  Aren't they amazing?

 

 

 

 

 

You know, I only have a deep, abiding and irrational fear of spiders that are too big for me to step on.

 

 

Abstinence Only Education Is Wildly Ineffective

To the great surprise of a shockingly small number of people, the most recent U.S. government study has shown that abstinence only education has a negligible impact on actual abstinence among kids.  The rub?  We spent a fortune on this tidbit of common sense.

 

Other than the fact that $87 million a year has disappeared from our collective pockets just as surely as if the money had been thrown into a furnace, the abstinence-only classes might as well have not existed at all.

 

Who?  Alas, A Blog.

 

Youth, hormones and sex go together like toddlers and sugar.  Burying your head in the sand certainly doesn't help the situation.  My idea?  Educate your kids as much as you can, teach them the values that you have, give them the benefit of your experiences, and watch like a hawk.  The world is full of information; let your kids get theirs from you, and maybe, just maybe, you can have a say in the outcome.

 

 

 

 

 

Mow A Lawn, Or Have A View?

If you are one of those lucky, lucky individuals who finds themselves in the enviable position of having enough money to either rent OR buy your own home, you might want to take a look at this handy app from the New York Times that lets you know, as of today, whether it is better for you to rent or buy based on a few criteria.

 

At the moment, I have a view.

 

But it's a beautiful view.

 

 

Stop That!

What an interesting post.  Presenting...Productivity 501 - 17 things that you should stop doing.

I personally enjoyed these nuggets:

 

Losing Telephone Numbers -- Your cell phone should sync with your computer.  We are past the days where a phone only held 25 numbers.  If someone calls, take the few seconds to record their name in your phone, so it will be transfered next time you sync your computer.

 

Manually Depositing a Paycheck -- That is what direct deposit is for.  If you spend 15 minutes every two weeks dealing with depositing your paycheck that is 65 hours over the next 10 years. Put this time to better use.

 

and...

 

Watching Commercials -- Use Tivo to skip them.  Use Netflix and just skip television all together.  Buy the shows you want to watch off iTunes.  If you had a friend who spent 20% to 30% of your time trying to sell you things you didn't really need, would you put up with it? (If you have a friend in network marketing, you may have already experienced this.)

 

I have to say, on many of the items listed in the article, I have to agree.  I can add some suggestions to this, though, quite easily.

 

- Stop giving every perceived illness, sickness, order or general disorder an acronym.  ADD.  ADHD.  EDD.  EPMD.  Gak.  Call things what they are.  In fact, overall, acronyms are a bane on mankind; instead of telling someone exactly what something is, the vastness of humanity is supposed to decipher an acronym every time someone says something.  Not everyone is an expert on everything, and people that insist on using acronyms imply that they are experts, when in most cases they are most certainly NOT.

 

- Stop over medicating.  Let's be honest with ourselves, you and I.  Everyone is sick, somehow - depression, overweight, allergies, , insomnia, inability to concentrate, etc.  What's not true is that all medications hold the answer, and ingesting a bunch of chemicals into your body for whatever reason isn't always the lifesaver it's cracked up to be.  If you don't believe me, find a friend that's on antidepressant medication and read the list of possible side effects.

 

- Stop under tipping.  I think that this might be a mostly American problem, but does anyone actually know what your average server makes?  I've been one, and I'm here to tell you; it isn't much.  Not only that, but waiting table can be HARD.  If you can't afford the 15%, perhaps you should eat at home.  Please, tip your waitress.

 

- Stop Making Sense.  Ok, I added that just to make sure you are paying attention.  But feel free to pick up that flick - perhaps by using one of the handy ad links to your left.  I doubt you'll be disappointed.

Rule 240

The Consumerist (another of the fantastic Gawker websites) has a GREAT posting on flying and knowing Rule 240.  They explain:

If it's the airline's fault that your flight is delayed or canceled or you missed your connection, whip out a copy of their Rule 240.

Rule 240 refers to the "conditions of carriage" which specify the circumstances in which you're entitled to airline compensation.

You can get meal vouchers, a hotel room, be booked on a substitute flight, or be given a full or partial refund.

The article goes on to explain the flight rules for many U.S. airlines, so it's definitely worth the trouble to take a look the post.  Basically, first you want to do is 1.  Book a flight using one of the handy links that I provide for travel (they are on the right sidebar, and yes, I do get a tiny, tiny spliff for this) 2. Print off a copy of Rule 240, 3. Go flyin'!