Yostivanich

“Con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tor Michael Sav­age, real name Michael Alan Weiner, is one of 22 peo­ple barred for fos­ter­ing extrem­ism or hate.” Free­dom of the speech peo­ple we have it, Britain not so much.

“You can be good with­out god”, too con­tro­ver­sial for Indiana.

Sex ed over the cell­phone, pretty neat.

“Two media free­dom cam­paign groups have crit­i­cised Yemen for what they say are attempts to sup­press report­ing about protests in the south of the country.”

“Using some prelaunch log-in cre­den­tials pro­vided by the Wol­fram team, I decided to run my own Wol­fram Alpha ver­sus Google test. I used a hand­ful of search terms that could pro­duce data-centric answers and tried vari­a­tions in a few cases to see what might hap­pen.” Pretty inter­est­ing differences.

“The ques­tion remains how far those fig­ures can be trusted because some offi­cial Chi­nese sta­tis­tics have proved ques­tion­able in the past and because some cru­cial indi­ca­tors sug­gest a far less opti­mistic pic­ture.” Go China manip­u­lat­ing data to prove a point.

Intel will start adver­tis­ing it’s brand as opposed to the company’s role in well everything.

“Sen­a­tor Arlen Specter, Republican-turned-Democrat of Penn­syl­va­nia, may be his state’s senior sen­a­tor, now in his fifth term after first being elected in 1980. But as far as com­mit­tee assign­ments go, Mr. Specter now ranks below all other Democ­rats, includ­ing Pennsylvania’s junior sen­a­tor, Bob Casey, who was only elected in 2006. Per­haps fit­ting for this curi­ous turn of events, Mr. Casey, 48, now out-ranks Mr. Specter, 79, on the Spe­cial Com­mit­tee on Aging.” That is kinda funny.

“The judge over­see­ing Chrysler’s Chap­ter 11 pro­ceed­ings says the automaker can start tak­ing steps toward sell­ing the vast major­ity of its assets to Italy’s Fiat.” And Chrysler’s long recov­ery begins.

Twit­ter first new and pop­u­lar form of search since Google and Microsoft hasn’t been able to build a Google Killer. This idea actu­ally makes some sense.

Oh we won’t miss you SCO.

“One of Twitter’s charms is that it demands almost noth­ing of us.”

“…Ora­cle has to also learn a lot about open source devel­op­ment and work­ing with the com­mu­nity.” Ora­cle has never been much of a friend in the open­source world.

“Matthews: See how you’re hedg­ing. This is why peo­ple don’t trust Repub­li­cans.” Impressed with you Chris Matthews.

No die, die IE6.

“Don Knuth has been very gen­er­ously send­ing these checks (now cer­tifi­cates of deposit at The Bank of San Ser­riffe) as reward for my bug reports about his books.” 8 Knuth checks, wow.

“It started early Mon­day morn­ing with Yahoo’ers chat­ter­ing that the long awaited Microsoft search deal, first floated in the mid­dle of last year when an out­right merger was aban­doned, may be near. Some­thing inter­nal at Yahoo set these guys off, and non C level exec­u­tives got wind of it. The buzz started, with one call I received say­ing a deal was clos­ing now. As in ASAP.” Are we finally about to end this crap?

“Vin­cent van Gogh did not cut off his own ear but lost it in a fight with fel­low artist Paul Gau­guin in a row out­side a brothel, it has been claimed.” Of Van Gogh, what­ever you did you still crazy and an awe­some artist.

“US Vice-President Joe Biden has said Israel must back a two-state solu­tion to the con­flict with the Pales­tini­ans.” There are days when I am amazed that Biden can form a coher­ent sen­tence, I kid somewhat.

“Even as com­peti­tors like Cir­cuit City go bust, B&H remains packed with loyal cus­tomers. And that makes me very happy. For a busi­ness owner, there’s noth­ing more sat­is­fy­ing than watch­ing hon­est deal­ers expand their oper­a­tions while the schmucks, with their going-out-of-business markups, go down the drain. It’s inspir­ing to know that start­ing with the premise of treat­ing your cus­tomers well really does pay off.” Sums it up.

“The judge over­see­ing Chrysler’s bank­ruptcy case in Man­hat­tan ruled Tues­day after­noon that the group of dis­si­dent secured debthold­ers in the case must make their iden­ti­ties pub­lic, rul­ing against their effort to sub­mit their ros­ter under seal. But the judge, Arthur J. Gon­za­lez, said that the cred­i­tors could not ben­e­fit from court pro­tec­tion of their iden­ti­ties sim­ply because they were tak­ing an unpop­u­lar posi­tion.” Indeed.

“The Chrysler head­quar­ters build­ing is a spec­tac­u­lar sight from I-75 in Michi­gan. But the Auburn Hills edi­fice and its sprawl­ing cam­pus sit in the mid­dle of one of the most eco­nom­i­cally depressed areas in the coun­try. When the build­ing was erected in the early 1990s, it was designed so it could be repur­posed into a shop­ping mall with­out too much mod­i­fi­ca­tion if the peren­ni­ally trou­bled Chrysler should go out of busi­ness.” That says it all.

“Accord­ing to an NPD sur­vey, the five top-selling smart­phones between Jan. 1 and March 31 were the Black­Berry Curve, the Apple iPhone 3G, the Black­Berry Storm, the Black­Berry Pearl (not includ­ing the Pearl Flip) and the T-Mobile G1 with the Android oper­at­ing sys­tem.” Good for BlackBerry.

“Face­book tried to buy Twit­ter. Google and Microsoft have been giv­ing the red-hot Internet-messaging startup the eye. But we hear it’s Apple that’s clos­est to seal­ing a deal, pos­si­bly for as much as $700 mil­lion.” I just don’t see it, what do they have in common?

“Mex­ico says it has writ­ten to the World Trade Orga­ni­za­tion (WTO), demand­ing an expla­na­tion from coun­tries which have restricted its imports over swine flu. Econ­omy Min­is­ter Ger­ardo Ruiz Mateos said such bans lacked a basis in sci­ence and would not be per­mit­ted.” Good for Mex­ico, bad Rus­sia, China and you other countries.

“Peo­ple love to talk about Apple buy­ing other famous com­pa­nies. Some­times they say that deals are in the works (although I won­der if any of the rumored trans­ac­tions even reached the talking-it-over stage). Other times, they just wist­fully hope that a deal might hap­pen, or won­der what would tran­spire if it did.” Lots of rumors not much deal making.

“US Pres­i­dent Obama’s admin­is­tra­tion has announced a $63bn health plan to fight Aids and other ill­nesses over­seas.” A con­tin­u­a­tion of Bush’s work on this front.

“A woman from Texas has become the first US res­i­dent believed to have died from swine flu.” The sec­ond H1N1 flu death out­side of Mexico.

Hey who knows.

“A group of lenders unhappy with the recon­struc­tion of Chrysler — in Chap­ter 11 bank­ruptcy pro­tec­tion — has asked a New York court to halt the process.” My bet, not going to happen.

“Wash­ing­ton DC city coun­cil has voted to recog­nise same-sex mar­riages con­ducted in other US states. Because Wash­ing­ton DC is not a state, the deci­sion will now have to be approved by Con­gress before it can become law.”

“You see, in Win­dows NT, 2000, XP and Vista, Explorer used to Hide exten­sions for known file types. And virus writ­ers used this “fea­ture” to make peo­ple mis­take exe­cuta­bles for stuff such as doc­u­ment files.” Still there.

“Microsoft Corp said on Tues­day it is lay­ing off more work­ers, almost com­plet­ing its plan to cut 5,000 jobs by June 2010, and left the door open for yet more job cuts.” Still only 5%, Microsoft isn’t hit to bad by this econ­omy, just get­ting rid of the cruft.

“Under the new stan­dard from the National High­way Traf­fic Safety Admin­is­tra­tion, the roof must with­stand three times the curb weight of the vehi­cle, and there is no longer a 5,000-pound max­i­mum. Fur­ther­more, pres­sure will be applied first to one side and then the other side of the roof. For years, some safety advo­cates have asked for a two-sided test. They have argued that it bet­ter dupli­cates what hap­pens when a vehi­cle rolls.” Make sense.

“Results indi­cate that polit­i­cal ide­ol­ogy influ­ences biased pro­cess­ing of ambigu­ous polit­i­cal mes­sages and source in late-night com­edy. Using data from an exper­i­ment (N = 332), we found that individual-level polit­i­cal ide­ol­ogy sig­nif­i­cantly pre­dicted per­cep­tions of Colbert’s polit­i­cal ide­ol­ogy. Addi­tion­ally, there was no sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between the groups in think­ing Col­bert was funny, but con­ser­v­a­tives were more likely to report that Col­bert only pre­tends to be jok­ing and gen­uinely meant what he said while lib­er­als were more likely to report that Col­bert used satire and was not seri­ous when offer­ing polit­i­cal state­ments. Con­ser­vatism also sig­nif­i­cantly pre­dicted per­cep­tions that Col­bert dis­liked lib­er­al­ism. Finally, a post hoc analy­sis revealed that per­cep­tions of Colbert’s polit­i­cal opin­ions fully medi­ated the rela­tion­ship between polit­i­cal ide­ol­ogy and individual-level opin­ion.” Are you kid­ding me?

“At some point the vaunted Repub­li­can noise machine stopped being about win­ning elec­tions and became instead a feck­less attempt at mass jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, pop­ping out one lame excuse after another for the party’s fail­ures.” Pretty much.