Dude... Dude, mountain lion is not the preferred nomenclature. Felis Concolor, please.

Those were not guys, they were nuns (so the confusion is understandable).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmQ3f1PRnw0

It was good marketing, in the sense that it got your attention, but it was awful in the sense that it told you nothing about why you would actually want this, or what it does.

I always thought that Magneto's "magnetic personality" power was stupid. How does having control over electro-magnetism give you control over other people's actions? Stupid! Or is it?!? Next they'll publish a story about radio-active spiders and their numerous health benefits...

That is incorrect. It's certainly a highly potent alcoholic spirit, but it has no hallucinogenic drugs in it. That part is pretty much made up. It's basically just regular booze. It's certainly nothing like Psilocybin mushrooms.

This site has a pretty good FAQ:

http://www.wormwoodsociety.org/

Artificial intelligence! Sounds mighty impressive. So this search algorithm can pass a Turing test, huh? What a breakthrough!

Sounds like data mining to me. The concept is not new, and the incorrect use of buzzwords is a serious red flag. Perhaps the system is indeed powerful and maybe even innovative, but AI? No. If this thing gains sentience and annihilates mankind, I will apologize to it for saying that.

I would be more concerned about my home town (well, home area, it's really several towns) if other parts of the US seemed to be prospering. But the way I see it, we're still doing as well as any, and better than most. We are still home to companies that get a lot of good press and make a lot of money. Yes, it costs a lot to live here, because this is still a great place to live.

The better question, to me, is whether or not the US in general is in long-term decline. I think the jury is still out on that one. There's certainly cause for concern. But how many of the products we use every day were invented in China? Fireworks and spaghetti? The simple fact is that top talent still seems to be dying to get out of China (or India, or Eastern Europe, or wherever) and come here.

People have been writing this type of story for decades now. They've all been wrong so far. That doesn't mean that they'll always be wrong. But I'm going to go ahead and stick it out here, and watch stories on the news about blizzards that happen to other people. All good things do come to an end, but I think we've got at least one more good boom left in us.

>>Wouldn't you really just need to have two accounts

Yeah, that's one way to go. But it's a hassle to be signed into two at once. Not a huge hassle, but using two browsers at once is just beyond the average dipshit user.

Companies need to tread very carefully when they make big changes. One thing I used to enjoy about Yahoo previously was the aliases. You signed into your account with one main ID, but you could have sub accounts that looked to others just like a separate account. So it was easy to be "JohnRSmith" to one group and "hung4fun" to another. They did away with that, and the outcry resulted page after page of angry comments on the developer's blog.

And then to add insult to insult, they made a second huge error at the same time, in a belated effort to be more facebookey. They blanked out everyone's profile, in an effort to force them to migrate to the new facebook-ish profiles. And now a year later, the vast majority of Yahoo users have blank profiles. They simply didn't use Yahoo in the same way they used Facebook, and they didn't want to.

I think it all came about as a result of Yahoo realizing that their core constituents were aging, and that the kids had moved on to something new. The right way to respond to that was to buy MySpace in about 2001, but Yahoo is too slow and dumb to do things like that. I was working at Yahoo in 2001 when a co-worker said "dude, you gotta check out this MySpace thingy. It's full of hot young babes and it's free". Within a month, all the Yahoo employees had a MySpace account. When all of your employees are using some other website, that's maybe a clue that you need to take action. But companies get big, then they get slow, and then they get dumb. Then they (usually) die. It's the circle of life, I suppose.

Timothy McVeigh was no Muslim, you bigot.

I think this is an excellent point. You don't need an MBA to understand that the digital version costs less to produce than the physical version, whether we're talking about books, newspapers, audio, or video. If the digital version isn't less than half the cost of the physical one, most people will see it as a rip-off.

Five dollars a week to read a website seems insane to me. I'd have gone with a model that still gave away plenty of free content, but charged a modest fee (30 bucks a year or so) to read "premium" content. The free stuff is what you can get anywhere, and tends to be brief and superficial. The in depth coverage, the actual reporting, is what costs you most to provide, and is what people should be most willing to pay a bit for. I seems like that model has worked well enough for espn.com over the years.
The model ought to work even better if you're Rupert Murdoch or a similar bastard, and you run about a million media outlets. He could have offered premium access to all Murdoch sites for 5.95 a month, while still providing enough free content to keep the (legions of) broke people showing up. That might actually have found a few takers.

Your post reminds me of this Seanbaby quote: [quote]You're only allowed to bring three ounces of liquid on a plane. Kind of. You might have a four-ounce bottle of toothpaste that's almost empty, but airport security guards are so stupid they're not allowed to do that kind of math. This is a problem, but I have an idea. Since we don't have enough money to hire dentists to inspect everyone's toothpaste, we should put a chimpanzee at each checkpoint. Then, every passenger gets to select two items from their bags to carry into battle against the chimp. This will not only quickly identify each commuter's two best weapons, but if they choose toothpaste, hold on, there's something up with this guy's toothpaste.[/quote] It's all so ridiculous... All of this is designed, essentially, to prevent "another 9/11". But another 9/11 was already impossible on 9/11/01, as proven by the fact that the fourth plane did not hit its target. Once ordinary people realized what was going on, they were essentially willing to die rather than allow another plane to get used as a missile. It takes a clever idea to succeed in terror, and those clever ideas tend to only work once.

Most terrorists are pretty stupid. But in the rare cases when they are clever, we're going to be too busy inspecting the shoes of elderly travelers to notice that something is up.

>>ad blocker can't do anything about those

They do though. By blocking the ads, they speed up the page load time, which helps you to get through all 17 pages (to read a 200 word article) in a shorter time. Plus, the lack of distracting flashing objects also reduces the total time required to read the article.