Yostivanich

Really good and lengthy arti­cle talk­ing about the lack of proper risk man­age­ment con­trols that caused the mort­gage crisis.

Gmail, oh Gmail, what would I do with­out you?

That’s a scary thought.

“The Obama admin­is­tra­tion plans to realign the United States’ rela­tion­ship with China by putting more empha­sis on cli­mate change, energy and human rights, widen­ing the focus beyond the eco­nomic con­cerns of the Bush years, accord­ing to senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials.” About time.

Really fair crit­i­cism of the stim­u­lus bill work­ing through Congress.

This is so messed up it isn’t even funny.

This is so funny.

“That graphic demon­strates why those peo­ple going around say­ing things like “gov­ern­ment is the prob­lem” are either com­plete idiots or, at best, peo­ple who don’t bother think­ing things through with enough effort to avoid sound­ing like com­plete idiots. When they say “gov­ern­ment is the prob­lem” what they’re really say­ing is “Hav­ing a state police force is the prob­lem.” Hav­ing a jus­tice sys­tem is the prob­lem. Hav­ing schools is the prob­lem. Pro­vid­ing care for the indi­gent elderly and the phys­i­cally or devel­op­men­tally dis­abled is the prob­lem. Pub­lic trans­porta­tion is the prob­lem. This is what they’re say­ing, whether or not they care enough to real­ize that this is what they’re say­ing. And what they’re say­ing is inde­fen­si­ble and abysmally stu­pid.” I totally agree.

Good to know.

I liked this: “Their enemy is progress.”

Essen­tially if you want you log, and why aren’t you log­ging, just log queries that take a long time to run.

“Government-guaranteed home mort­gages, espe­cially when a neg­li­gi­ble down pay­ment or no down pay­ment what­ever is required, inevitably mean more bad loans than oth­er­wise.” Duh, that’s why those sort of loans are stu­pid, they should have been cre­ated in the first place. The per­cent­age of peo­ple own­ing homes barely increased.

I liked this part of the story: “An effort in Con­gress to over­turn the cur­rent ban has had lit­tle sup­port, but Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Wal­ter Jones, a Repub­li­can from North Car­olina, said Tues­day that he would renew his push for leg­is­la­tion to allow the media access when coffins come home. Mr. Jones voted for the use of force in Iraq and helped lead the effort to rename French fries in the House cafe­te­ria as “free­dom fries.” But he came to regret his vote after he attended the funeral of a local Marine, and he began writ­ing let­ters to peo­ple who had lost a loved one in the war.”

Easy way to fur­ther reduce the size of your png’s.

Sci­ence wins again.

Well that’s one good thing about a recession.

Totally agree, Pak­istan is real­is­ti­cally a threat to the US and prob­a­bly causes more harm than any­thing else. Though at the same time just stop­ping being allies with them will cause a lot of prob­lems and has the real poten­tial to cause a col­lapse of the government.

“Printed words are per­ma­nent. Elec­tronic words are pro­vi­sional. The dif­fer­ence is vast and the impli­ca­tions worth pon­der­ing.” I’ve played around with this thought and I think for the time being we are ok, also I think a few areas will also remain almost exclu­sively non-digital, schol­arly works which would be the main area where you would worry about ver­sion changes. The other pos­si­bil­ity is a Wikipedia or CVS sys­tem where changes are recorded and re-viewable.

So it passed, oh boy. 35% is tax cuts, which are sure to do basi­cally nothing.

“For more than four straight days, Philip Rizk said, he was blind­folded, hand­cuffed and inter­ro­gated around the clock by Egypt­ian state secu­rity agents who abducted him on Fri­day after he took part in a march in sup­port of Gaza.” I’m so happy to know we sup­port Egypt as such a mod­er­ate state.

When can you use all those fun new tech­nolo­gies that you know you want to.

Sorry New York Times, Dar­win­ism isn’t dead, yes some of his ideas have changed, but the core ideas are still the same.

“If major pol­icy changes do not hap­pen within Mr Obama’s term of office, they will not hap­pen at all, he warned.” I have to agree, sci­ence has become so deem­pha­sized in the US, that it may only be with Obama that real sci­ence has a chance, scary thought.

Afghan com­man­ders have a stand­ing request for three more brigades, and Rus­sia is open to ship­ping mil­i­tary goods to Afghanistan.

From the arti­cle: “Steven Chu, the new sec­re­tary of energy, said Wednes­day that solv­ing the world’s energy and envi­ron­ment prob­lems would require Nobel-level break­throughs in three areas: elec­tric bat­ter­ies, solar power and the devel­op­ment of new crops that can be turned into fuel. ”

I enjoy the fact that Repub­li­cans will argue that the stim­u­lus will be non-effective while gut­ting it.

Is Ama­zon going to be the leader in cloud-computing?

“The doc­u­ment reveals that Facebook’s inter­nal val­u­a­tion of the com­pany is $3.7 bil­lion” Microsoft got taken.

“More than a quar­ter of major U.S. TV sta­tions intend to shut down their ana­log broad­casts on Feb. 17, stick­ing to the orig­i­nal date despite the wish of the Obama admin­is­tra­tion that they wait until June.” Just saying.

NO hard evi­dence back­ing PETA’s claim that vegetarian’s have bet­ter sex.

“The con­tracts amount to the world’s largest sin­gle deal for new solar energy capac­ity”. Kinda cool.

Think Yelp for the iPhone.

What are “real men” in the web2.0 world.

There is a ton of junk in orbit, some­thing is going to have to be done about it.

Dang it another rea­son to get the iPhone.

It’s kinda cool.

Seems odd con­sid­er­ing ear­lier it sounded like most of his staff used Macs.

One data point to consider.

“a Froogle for auto parts” That’s all you really need to know.

“Authors, pub­lish­ers, and other copy­right hold­ers will get a one-time pay­ment of $60 per scanned book (or $5 to $15 for par­tial works). In return, Google will be able to index the books and dis­play snip­pets in search results, as well as up to 20% of each book in pre­view mode. Google will also be able to show ads on these pages and make avail­able for sale dig­i­tal ver­sions of each book. Authors and copy­right hold­ers will receive 63 per­cent of all adver­tis­ing and e-commerce rev­enues asso­ci­ated with their works.” Seems like a pretty decent deal.

Which are you, opti­mist, pes­simist, or opportunist.

“The House approved a bill cre­at­ing a whitelist of peo­ple who are on the black­list, but shouldn’t be. No word yet about what they’re going to do about peo­ple who are on the whitelist, but shouldn’t be. Per­haps they’ll cre­ate a sec­ond black­list for them. Then we’ll all be safe from ter­ror­ists, for sure.” I have noth­ing to add.

Great tool.

“Down­load the Give Up and Use Tables timer. We’ve sci­en­tif­i­cally deter­mined the max­i­mum amount of time that you should need to make a lay­out work in CSS: it’s 47 min­utes. When your time is up, we’ll even give you the table code you need. Take three min­utes to build a table.” Really funny.

Find and cre­ate a color scheme you like.

Where would you go Europa or Titan.

“The Com­mit­tee to Pro­tect Jour­nal­ists called on the Obama admin­is­tra­tion Tues­day to end the indef­i­nite deten­tion of jour­nal­ists by the United States mil­i­tary over­seas.” I just can’t believe the US is hold­ing jour­nal­ists in prison for no good reason.

“Asian investors have given the $1.5 tril­lion (£1.02 tril­lion) US bank bail-out plan a muted response, fol­low­ing sharp falls overnight on Wall Street.” Well Asia isn’t happy.

Well is it?

Oops our mis­take killed a fire­fighter? What would you say?

Gen­er­ate your own favicon.

“At about four plants per occu­pant (1200 plants in all), the building’s air fresh­ened con­sid­er­ably, and the health and pro­duc­tiv­ity results were stag­ger­ing. Eye irri­ta­tion dropped by 52 per­cent, lower res­pi­ra­tory symp­toms by 34 per­cent, headaches by 24 per­cent and asthma by 9 per­cent. There were fewer sick days, employee pro­duc­tiv­ity increased, and energy costs dropped by 15 per­cent.” Wow, get me some plants in my apart­ment and work.

Just in case.

More out­cry over pos­si­ble war crimes com­mited by Israel.

The UN is fac­ing a host of chal­lenges, increase in the num­ber of mis­sions, scope of mis­sions, and major­ity of it’s mem­bers par­tic­u­larly those with advanced armies *USA* are unwill­ing or unable to sup­port with troops or sup­plies and equipment.

“How­ever, it’s impor­tant to note that what­ever we come up with, Twit­ter will remain free to use by everyone—individuals, com­pa­nies, celebri­ties, etc.” Twit­ter says they will always remain free.

“And the the­ory says it’s safer to stick to a spending-based stim­u­lus plan.” Spend­ing wins.

How do you cover up murder?

Neat idea to pre­tend to live pay­check to pay­check, by at the start of each pay period put what­ever is left in your check­ing account into sav­ings. Good way to increase your sav­ings too.

Very nice, thank you Google.

This is pretty neat.

Hex encode your email links.

Just what I’ve always wanted, ads on my phone.

Spend your money on things that save you money on the long run, like CFL’s or pro­gram­ma­ble thermostat.

Gamma-ray flares from SGR J1550-5418 may have arisen when the magnetar’s sur­face sud­denly cracked, releas­ing energy stored within its pow­er­ful mag­netic field. A mag­ne­tar is a neu­tron star with a super-strong mag­netic field. Gamma-rays — the universe’s most lumi­nous explo­sions — cre­ate bright after­glows. Their light encodes infor­ma­tion about the gas and dust it encoun­ters on its way to Earth.

“save 50% — 75% on being a cunt”

“O’Reilly com­pared Ms. Thomas to “the Wicked Witch of the East” along with dis­parag­ing remarks about her appear­ance and age.” Why Bill, why, it proves noth­ing but makes you look stupid.

I would love this Kindle.