Yostivanich

“When it was announced last month, the all new MySpace Mail was touted as an instant big player in the web-based email client mar­ket. With 130 mil­lion global users, that would make it the 4^th largest email provider in the world and the sec­ond largest in the US. Of course, these num­bers refer to the total num­ber of MySpace users, not nec­es­sar­ily the num­ber that will be using MySpace Mail for gen­eral email use.”

“We spend a lot of time think­ing about how infor­ma­tion trav­els around the globe. After all, there are Googlers liv­ing and work­ing in dozens of coun­tries — and we’re pretty sure our prod­ucts are used in many more. So we’re famil­iar with the need to trans­late infor­ma­tion across bor­ders, and we’ve been work­ing hard to build the tech­nol­ogy to enable you to do just that. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve added nine new lan­guages to Google Trans­late: Afrikaans, Belaru­sian, Ice­landic, Irish, Mace­don­ian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh and Yid­dish. That means that Google Trans­late now sup­ports 51 lan­guages and 2550 lan­guage pairs — includ­ing all 23 offi­cial EU lan­guages.” Very awesome.

“The arrival of Ms. Sawyer will com­pre­hen­sively alter the long-established image of an avun­cu­lar male nightly news anchor. With Katie Couric, who took the CBS anchor posi­tion in 2006, two of the three main net­work news voices will be female, a role that in the past has pun­ished oth­ers, like Bar­bara Wal­ters and Con­nie Chung.”

“Google is mak­ing one mil­lion pub­lic domain books avail­able free on the Cool-er e-book reader, a would-be com­peti­tor to Amazon’s Kin­dle. The deal, which cov­ers books that Google has scanned from libraries and whose copy­rights have expired, comes on the heels of sim­i­lar agree­ments that Google has struck with Ama­zon rivals like Sony and Barnes & Noble. The Cool-er, a device made by British com­pany Interead, has got­ten poor reviews.”

“As expected, Sony Elec­tron­ics unveiled a wire­less touch-screen elec­tronic read­ing device on Tues­day, dubbed the Daily Edi­tion, which it plans to sell start­ing in Decem­ber in time for the hol­i­day sea­son. The $399 device, which will have a seven-inch screen, will help the com­pany catch up with Amazon.com’s Kin­dle, which has been wire­less since its first ver­sion was intro­duced in 2007. The Kin­dle, which does not have a touch screen, is priced at $299. A larger edi­tion, the Kin­dle DX, has a 9.7-inch screen that is bet­ter suited for read­ing news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines and costs $489.”

“Their fail­ures, com­bined with the greater fail­ure of social­ist economies, set the stage for the ascen­dancy of laissez-faire eco­nom­ics. Much of Asia moved to a market-based sys­tem and expe­ri­enced stun­ning improve­ments in liv­ing con­di­tions. As Krug­man writes, “cap­i­tal­ism could with con­sid­er­able jus­ti­fi­ca­tion claim the credit.” These suc­cesses, how­ever, cre­ated their own excesses. The prin­ci­ples of laissez-faire cap­i­tal­ism were ele­vated to the sta­tus of reli­gious scrip­ture, with Alan Greenspan as high priest. In “The Cost of Cap­i­tal­ism,” Robert J. Bar­bera, a long­time Wall Street econ­o­mist, notes that Greenspan and oth­ers con­fused the fact that mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism was thebest eco­nomic sys­tem with the mis­guided notion that it was the per­fect sys­tem.” A new edi­tion of Adam Smith’s piv­otal work whose intro­duc­tion presents Smith as being a more nuanced character.

“Ama­zon, Microsoft and Yahoo are plan­ning to join a coali­tion of non­profit groups, indi­vid­u­als and library asso­ci­a­tions to oppose a pro­posed class-action set­tle­ment giv­ing Google the rights to com­mer­cial­ize dig­i­tal copies of mil­lions of books.” I’m shocked.

“I don’t know about you, but I never really con­sider Sep­tem­ber to still be the Sum­mer. But it is, until Sep­tem­ber 22, any­way. Why that mat­ters is that AT&T promised iPhone users in the U.S. MMS capa­bil­i­ties by “late Sum­mer.” So, tech­ni­cally AT&T, you have three weeks.”

“As a result, com­pa­nies are not only reluc­tant to cre­ate new jobs, but have fewer job open­ings to fill from attri­tion. For the 14 mil­lion Amer­i­cans look­ing for work — a num­ber expected to rise in Friday’s jobs report for August — this lack of turnover has made a tough job mar­ket even tougher.”

“Under­scor­ing its reliance on out­side con­trac­tors, the State Depart­ment said Wednes­day that it had extended a con­tract in Iraq with a sub­sidiary of the com­pany for­merly known as Black­wa­ter, even though the busi­ness was denied an Iraqi gov­ern­ment license to oper­ate in the coun­try. The con­tract, for avi­a­tion ser­vices, was to expire Thurs­day, at which time the com­pany, now known as Xe Ser­vices, was to be replaced by Dyn­Corp Inter­na­tional. But State Depart­ment offi­cials said Dyn­Corp was not ready to take over the work, which involves fer­ry­ing diplo­mats and other Amer­i­can offi­cials around Iraq, mostly by helicopter.”

” TABC offi­cials have diss­missed the alco­hol protests that have delayed per­mits in Lub­bock. In a press release issued this after­noon, TABC says that any protests filed in Texas based solely on incor­rect wet/dry cer­ti­fi­ca­tion will be dis­missed. The TABC has received sev­eral protests regard­ing appli­ca­tions for new licenses and per­mits for alco­hol in Lub­bock County.”