Child Survives Crash of Yemeni Jet Carrying 153
http://tr.im/qknK
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Wicked video remix with Alan Iverson at the press conference about missing practice
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http://tr.im/qk2Q
Monday, June 29, 2009
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Discover How You Can Flip Foreclosures In This Market Using NO Cash Or Credit Of Your Own
http://tr.im/pAFh
http://tr.im/pAFh
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
HFA is the foremost mechanical licensing, collection, and distribution agency for music publishers in the U.S.
http://tr.im/p1oS
http://tr.im/p1oS
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Monday, June 15, 2009
Could Confiscation Happen Again? Michael Maloney answering whether or not confiscation will happen again
http://tr.im/oB7s
http://tr.im/oB7s
Your gold is safe with us, mint tells clients
Reassurance comes amid fears there will be a 'run' on holdings
http://tr.im/oyeS
Reassurance comes amid fears there will be a 'run' on holdings
http://tr.im/oyeS
Amazon to pay $51 million to settle Toys 'R' Us suit
Amazon.com must pay Toys "R" Us $51 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the toy retailer in May 2004.
Back then, Toys "R" Us sued Amazon for violating the terms of the 10-year partnership the companies forged in 2000. Toys "R" Us claimed Amazon violated the agreement by allowing other vendors to market toys and baby products on its site.
On Friday, Amazon said in a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the money must be paid in the third quarter of 2009 and that the sum was "unanticipated."
The Web's largest retailer said that Toys "R" Us has agreed to dismiss all claims and counterclaims.
Not long after Toys "R" Us filed its original claim, Amazon filed a counterclaim as well as an official request to terminate the partnership.
The retailer asked for $750 million in damages and claimed the toy retailer failed to meet its end of their bargain. Toys "R" Us, according to Amazon, was unable to meet demand for top-selling toys, games, and baby products, especially during the holidays.
In 2006, the court entered a decision favoring Toys "R" Us that terminated the contract.
The two companies joined forces during the dot-com era, after Toys "R" Us stumbled badly trying to build an online franchise. The toy giant turned to Amazon, agreeing to pay the retailer a $200 million premium for exclusive rights to sell toys and baby items through its site.
A spokeswoman for Toys "R" Us declined to comment.
Imran Khan, a J.P. Morgan analyst, lowered his second quarter forecast for Amazon but said "We do not see the settlement as representing anything other than a one-time item," Khan wrote in a note sent Friday afternoon. "We believe Amazon's continued market share gains justify the stock's premium valuation."________________________________________________________________
Sunday, June 14, 2009
NASA hopes for Wednesday shuttle launch
NASA managers Sunday deferred making a formal decision on whether to reschedule the delayed shuttle Endeavour for launch Wednesday or press ahead instead with launch of the agency's $583 million Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission aboard an unmanned Atlas 5 rocket.
But with both missions facing tight launch windows, Mission Management Team Chairman LeRoy Cain said the agency's preference was to launch Endeavour on Wednesday, if possible, to maximize the number of launch opportunities for both programs.
"If shuttle goes first on the 17th, then the most opportunities we can give LRO is two, and that would be on the 19th and 20th," Cain said. "If LRO goes first on the 17th, then the most opportunities we could get for the shuttle is one opportunity, and that would be on the 20th."
A final decision on how to proceed must be made Monday to provide enough time for the Air Force Eastern Range, which provides required tracking and telemetry support for all rockets launched from Florida, to set up its systems to support one launch or the other.
But Cain said if no additional problems develop, and if work to repair a leaky hydrogen vent line umbilical plate on Endeavour's external tank goes smoothly, NASA likely will opt to press ahead with an attempt to launch the shuttle at 5:40:50 a.m. EDT Wednesday.
Engineers prepare to replace a critical seal in a hydrogen vent line umbilical plate on the side of the shuttle Endeavour's external tank.
(Credit: NASA TV)"We're going to see how the processing goes," Cain said. "If we have some good fortune, if we have some good weather, or at least not too much bad weather, in the next 24, 36 hours, then we think it's achievable for us to get to a (shuttle launch) on the 17th."
The forecast for Wednesday calls for a 70 percent chance of good weather for the shuttle's pre-dawn launch window and a 60 percent chance of acceptable conditions for the lunar orbiter's window Wednesday afternoon.
If LRO is not off the ground by June 20, the flight will slip to the end of the month. If Endeavour is not off the ground by June 20 or 21 at the latest, the shuttle launch will be delayed to July 11 because of temperature constraints related to the space station's orbit.
Endeavour was grounded during fueling overnight Friday when the gaseous hydrogen vent line umbilical on the side of the shuttle's external fuel tank began leaking potentially dangerous vapors as the hydrogen section of the tank was filled.
A technician peers into Endeavour's gaseous hydrogen vent line.
(Credit: NASA TV)Some of the supercold liquid hydrogen propellant inside the tank constantly turns into a gas that is routed overboard through a vent line to a flare stack near the pad where it is harmlessly burned away. The vent line attaches to the tank at an umbilical plate that pulls away at liftoff.
During an attempt to launch the shuttle Discovery last March, a gaseous hydrogen leak in the umbilical plate triggered a four-day delay. Engineers were unable to duplicate the leak under ambient conditions--it only occurred when cryogenic hydrogen was filling the tank--but after replacing a critical internal seal, the umbilical worked normally and Discovery was able to take off.
A virtually identical scenario is playing out with Endeavour. Engineers were unable to duplicate the leak after the tank was drained and mission managers decided to press ahead with a seal replacement.
Launch Director Pete Nickolenko said engineers discovered small areas where the seal in question appeared to have pulled away from the external tank slightly, possibly due to exposure to cryogenic conditions. The gaps seen are similar to those found during troubleshooting of the leak that grounded Discovery in March.
Engineers are trying to figure out what caused seal problems in two of the last three shuttle flights, but in the meantime, "we are on the path of installing a new quick-disconnect and a new flight seal," Nickolenko said.
The work is expected to be finished early Tuesday.
per⋅en⋅ni⋅al [puh-ren-ee-uhl]
–adjective
1. lasting for an indefinitely long time; enduring: her perennial beauty.
http://tr.im/otmd
–adjective
1. lasting for an indefinitely long time; enduring: her perennial beauty.
http://tr.im/otmd
Does Microsoft's Bing have Google running scared?
Microsoft may have developed a contender that threatens Google's Web search dominance.
In a story headlined "Fear grips Google," the New York Post reports that the launch of Microsoft's Bing search engine has so upset Google co-founder Sergey Brin that he has top engineers working on "urgent upgrades" to Google's service. Brin is said to be leading a team to determine how Microsoft's search algorithm differs from the closely guarded one Google employs. The tabloid also notes that it's rare for Google's co-founders to have such a hands-on involvement in the company's daily operations.
"New search engines have come and gone in the past 10 years, but Bing seems to be of particular interest to Sergey," an anonymous source described as an "insider" to the newspaper.
A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the level of Brin's involvement but did tell the newspaper that the company always has a team working on improving search.
Microsoft, which launched as Bing as its default search engine earlier this month, is reportedly spending $80 million to $100 million in an ad blitz to tout its latest search effort. Rival Google, meanwhile, spent just $25 million total on advertising last year, according to an AdAge report.
Bing's launch bumped Microsoft's search share up to 11.1 percent last week from 9.1 percent the prior week, according to numbers released by market analyst ComScore.
However, that initial increase didn't seem to impress Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who was pretty tight-lipped earlier this week when queried about Bing's arrival.
"It's not the first entry for Microsoft," Schmidt said Tuesday in an interview with Fox Business Network. "They do this about once a year."
Google Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette said Tuesday that the company planned to hold "a review tomorrow on it with the executive committee."
While Microsoft has a long way to go before it makes a dent in Google's business, Bing may end up being the only true alternative to Google if Yahoo decides not to compete in the search market over the next few years.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
We actually got on a call with Shaq's REI teacher
last Thursday. ( Go Here To Watch The Replay )
http://tr.im/ooGX
last Thursday. ( Go Here To Watch The Replay )
http://tr.im/ooGX
Safari numbers still dwarfed by Firefox downloads
Apple has been desperately trying to turn Safari into a mainstream browser player. Unfortunately, its numbers simply don't compare to Firefox.
Safari 4.0 notched 11 million downloads in just three days. While significant, this number is almost a rounding error compared with Firefox 3.0.11, which pulled down 150 million downloads in just 24 hours,as Mozilla's Asa Dotzler reports.
With more than 300 million active users of Firefox, Mozilla is miles ahead of Safari in terms of users. Firefox also dwarfs Safari (and Internet Explorer) in community; indeed, it is Firefox's rich ecosystem of add-ons and extensions that arguably render irrelevant any performance advantages Safari claims.
Perhaps for this reason, despite the apparent rise of Safari, Firefox is actually gaining at its expense, as Dotzler calls out:
Safari, just like IE, gets virtually all of its usage by shipping as the bundled and default browser with its operating system...
Safari usage is growing...the explanation, though, is not more people choosing Safari; it's more people choosing Mac. That's a very different thing. Having chosen Mac, Safari users, about 27% of them, have opted out of the bundled and default browser and instead chosen Firefox.
That's an even higher conversion to Firefox rate than we're seeing on Windows.
I'm an example of this. I was one of those 11 million Safari downloads, but I did so because the Apple update system pushed the update to me, not because I actually wanted it. (Nor am I alone in this.) I use Safari roughly twice per month: once when I check my bill on Comcast.com (which doesn't seem to work with Firefox), and once when I review Net Applications for browser market share (which, again, doesn't seem to work properly with Firefox).
Other than that, it's all Firefox, all the time.
I'm a Mac fanatic, but that doesn't mean I swallow Safari along with it. Safari lacks the add-ons that make my Firefox experience so rich. Safari may be fast, but it's like having a fast car without enough room to seat my family or accommodate a stereo and cup holder. I'm sure there's an audience for that, but I'm not it.
So, while Microsoft resorts to charitable donations to goose its IE8 downloads, and Apple claims misleading Safari numbers, Firefox wins because it's simply better.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Apple's Safari 4 tops 11 million downloads in 3 days
Apple's Safari 4 Web browser was downloaded more than 11 million times in the first three days of release, the company said Friday.
And more than 6 million of the downloads came from Windows users.
Safari's Top Sites feature.
(Credit: Apple)Since Safari 4's public beta release in February, Apple has touted the browser as the fastest in the world, when compared with other popular browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer 8.
According to Apple, Safari 4 tops IE 8 and Firefox by three times or more when loading HTML Web pages. With its Nitro JavaScript engine, the company claims, Safari executes JavaScript almost eight times as fast as IE 8 and more than four times as fast as Firefox.
Based on the open-source Webkit browser engine, Safari includes HTML 5 support for offline technologies and is the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project's Acid3 test.
Safari includes several enhancements, such as Top Sites, the ability to search history, Google Suggest, and Full Page Zoom, to make browsing the Web a bit easier.
'Spam king' could face criminal charges in Facebook case
Sanford Wallace in 1997, around the time he dubbed himself the king of spam.
(Credit: CNET News)In a move that could land Sanford Wallace in jail if convicted, a federal judge on Friday referred a lawsuit Facebook filed against the "spam king" to the U.S. Attorney's office for possible criminal proceedings.
A written ruling from Judge Jeremy Fogel in U.S. District in San Jose, Calif., is expected early next week, a court clerk said. The action came at a hearing on a Facebook motion that Wallace be found in criminal contempt for allegedly continuing to send spam on Facebook.
Facebook sued Sanford and two others in February alleging they used phishing sites or other means to fraudulently gain access to Facebook accounts and used them to distribute phishing spam throughout the network.
The judge had earlier entered a preliminary injunction against Wallace for failing to appear in court for the original proceedings, said Sam O'Rourke, Facebook's lead counsel for litigation and intellectual property. Wallace appeared in court on Friday in what is believed to be his first court appearance in any of the cases filed against him, according to O'Rourke.
Facebook also had asked for a default judgment in the case, but the judge was prevented from taking action on that since Wallace filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Thursday and civil actions seeking monetary sanctions are automatically stayed when a defendant files for bankruptcy, O'Rourke said. Facebook believes Wallace filed for bankruptcy to avoid a default judgment and criminal contempt order, he said.
Facebook plans to ask the bankruptcy court to lift the stay so a ruling can be made on the default judgment to become a creditor, O'Rourke said.
"We're very pleased Judge Jeremy Fogel agreed that there were grounds for criminal contempt and that the U.S. Attorney's office should investigate Wallace," Facebook said in an e-mail statement. "Wallace filed for bankruptcy, which is not unexpected and only delays our judgment temporarily. We will continue to pursue the judgment and will be reviewing his filing very closely."
The order should serve as a strong deterrent against spammers, Facebook said. "Fogel's ruling demonstrates that judges will enforce restraining orders and spammers who violate them face criminal prosecution" the statement said.
A year ago, Wallace and another defendant were ordered to pay MySpace.com $234 million following a trial at which Wallace repeatedly failed to turn over documents or even show up in court.
In the largest judgment in history for a case brought under the Can-Spam Act, the federal court in San Joseawarded Facebook $873 million in damages late last year against a Canadian man accused of spamming users of the site.
Longtime Microsoft executive leaving company
Microsoft confirmed on Friday that longtime executive Sanjay Parthasarathy is leaving the software maker after 19 years.
Parthasarathy
(Credit: Microsoft)Parthasarathy, the corporate vice president in charge of Microsoft's Startup Business Accelerator program, plans to retire from the company in September, a Microsoft representative said. Microsoft said his departure had been planned for some time and that it is unrelated to recent job cuts at the company.
His responsibilities will be taken over by Amit Mital, who runs the "Unlimited Potential" unit that handles emerging markets. Mital will handle duties for both units, though they will remain separate operations. Mital, like Parthasarathy, reports to chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie.
Prior to heading the start-up unit, Parthasarathy had been running Microsoft's developer and platform evangelism team--the group responsible for efforts such as Channel 9 and the Imagine Cup competition.
He joined Microsoft in August 1990 as a product manager in the Windows multimedia group.
Parthasarathy's departure was reported earlier Friday by PaidContent.org.
On Jamendo artists allow anyone to download and share their music. It's free, legal and unlimited. http://tr.im/oibt
Your Facebook business name: Already reserved?
Facebook employees and tech journalists aren't the only ones whose names have been reserved ahead of the big Facebook vanity URL land grab that will open up at midnight Eastern time Saturday morning. The company already has "tens of thousands" of business names and terms on its restricted list, waiting to be assigned, Facebook spokesperson Larry Yu told me.
Also on the list: Generic terms and obscenities that will never be used.
Unlike the simple process to grab a user name as a vanity Facebook URL--go towww.facebook.com/username and hope for the best--the procedure for nabbing a business or trade name involves two steps. First, a business can request that a term be put on the restricted list so a user can't grab it for their vanity URL. Facebook is currently building this list based on input from this form and terms it's put on the list itself. Getting the term on the restricted list doesn't assign it to anyone, but it does prevent a user from grabbing it in the midnight land rush. To put a name on the restricted list go to this form.
Second, once the vanity URLs become available, you can request a name from the restricted list for your Facebook URL. Facebook won't give those names out to just anyone who asks. Companies may be asked to prove legal right to use a name or mark before they get it.
Some of the "edge cases" for name conflict resolution have not been resolved yet. For example, it doesn't necessarily matter who put a name on the restricted list. If another company with the same name requests the URL first, it may get it. "It's first come, first served," said Yu, who said also that, "we don't know the scale of potential conflicts."
I predict plenty, because just as there are many people who have the same name, there are many businesses that share the same names and that are perfectly non-competing due to geographic separation. There's probably more than one Joe's Flowers, for example, so who gets Facebook.com/joesflowers?
"There have been some anxious exchanges," Yu told me.
The best advice we have for business owners, given the confusion that we predict will overwhelm Facebook come Saturday morning: if you want a Facebook URL, get in line with the rest of the people to try to grab your domain name on Saturday morning (Friday night West Coast time).
But I also feel it necessary to remind business owners of two things: the best Internet presence is your own Web site, not a spur off a social network. Get that first. And remember that whether you have a vanity URL on Facebook or not, people will still be able to find you there using their favorite search engines.
A users' guide to personalizing your Facebook URL
It really shouldn't be this much of a media sensation, but let's face it: Everybody's talking about how Facebook is finally letting members reserve vanity URLs, letting them customize the Web addresses that lead to their profiles. The feature goes live at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday (9:01 p.m. PDT on Friday) and already, the pundits are going mad.
"This is more than 200 million users, already engaged, simultaneously scrambling in the greatest territory dash since the Oklahoma Territory's land run of 1889, albeit with fewer shotgun injuries," author Douglas Rushkoff wrotein an editorial piece on The Daily Beast about the occasion.
Well, it's not quite that momentous. The thing about vanity URLs is that they're nothing new: MySpace has made it possible for members to replace the string of numbers in their profiles with www.myspace.com/username for years now. Aside from the fact that your profile may have more "Google juice" and it'll be easier to tell people how to find you on the social network, this isn't going to be a huge deal for Facebook members--yet. Except that we all get possessive, and the territory battle for your full name, your old college nickname, or your AOL screen name circa 1996 could get ugly.
The potential difficulty for some users is that Facebook is leaving a lot of questions unanswered. So here's CNET News' quick cheat sheet to what will and what might happen--in case you were wondering.
What happens when the vanity URL feature goes live?
Until this point, Facebook members' profiles have been accessible by unique URLs, but they're hard to remember because they use identification numbers rather than custom names. But starting Saturday at midnight Eastern, Facebook will start bringing up an alert message to members who visit the site--unless they're members who registered after 3:00 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, or brands that created "fan pages" after May 31. If your Facebook account falls under these criteria, there may be a delay because of Facebook's concern that people will snap up names just to "squat" on them and sell them. That's been a problem in the domain name business forabout as long as the Web has been around.
So, assuming you fit Facebook's timeline, the alert message will pop up and give you a number of options for selecting your new custom name: your full name, your first name and last initial, your first initial and last name, or other options that happen to be available. You can also type in your own, provided it's at least five characters long and doesn't include any characters besides letters, numbers, and the dot symbol (though presumably you can only use the dot in between alphanumeric characters). It doesn't appear to be a mandatory switch, though Facebook will probably keep bugging you about it if you don't switch immediately.
Are any names taken already?
Yeah, if your name is "Mark Zuckerberg" but you aren't that Mark Zuckerberg, you might not get what you want even if you're the first guy logging in at 12:01 a.m. Some Facebook employees have already started using their vanity URLs, and some very popular brands' "fan pages" have them set already as well. Facebook has a request form for businesses that want to make sure their trademarks stay out of other members' user names.
More recently, Facebook also reserved names for some public figures who were at the risk of impersonation or URL squatting, and additionally offered names early to some journalists and analysts covering or working with Facebook--which means that, yes, www.facebook.com/carolinemccarthy is reserved already. (For what it's worth, Facebook told me I could accept that user name that they'd reserve, but if I wanted any other one I'd have to wait until the public name selection became available.
So it doesn't have to include my real name?
Facebook has always been adamant about making sure that members use their real names in their profiles. That's not the case with the new vanity URLs; you are officially allowed to use a nickname, your Twitter username, or the results from what happens when you run your name through a pirate name generator, as long as nobody's claimed it already. If it contains obscenities, though, Facebook will probably flag it for removal.
Is it really true that I can't change it?
That's what it sounds like. Facebook has well over 200 million members. Customer service has never been its greatest strength, either. Good luck getting them to accept your extremely urgent need to add your middle name.
Will Facebook's servers hold up?
We don't know. But considering the PR disaster that would ensue if Facebook crashed during the "land grab," it's safe to assume that the social network has been working very hard to make sure it can withstand the onslaught of members eagerly logging on as early as they can.
"We underwent testing before announcing the feature and we are taking steps to handle additional traffic," Facebook spokesman Larry Yu said in an e-mail. "It's hard to get into specifics since it's difficult to predict what traffic will actually be like."
For a second opinion, we sent an e-mail over to a representative at uptime monitoring firm Pingdom to see if it thinks there's a serious possibility that Facebook could crash entirely. Its answer: probably not.
"What I suspect is that we won't see any slowdown, and if we do it won't be much," the company's e-mail response read. "But who knows? The only ones with a clue right now are Facebook's engineers. However, if they have enough of a performance margin for several months of organic growth in their user base, they should be able to handle the increased number of visitors tomorrow."
Where will this go from here?
Facebook user names could go in a heck of a lot of directions; the post announcing the vanity URLs coyly hinted that "we expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook user name in the future." It's a good guess that at some point you'll be able to log into the site with your user name, rather than your e-mail address. This, obviously, could then be extended to sites using the Facebook Connect or even the site's forthcoming virtual currency.
So what do I do now?
If you care enough about Facebook vanity URLs to have read this all the way through, I guess it's time to set an alarm clock.
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