Seems doubtful to me. Yahoogroups is the only thing I use made by Yahoo, and they don't really "make" it as such. The content is all from other users. Yahoo hasn't done a good job monetizing it either. They happily send me a digest every so often which has no branding or ads or anything.

Clearly some sort of brilliant minimalist marketing strategy I don't comprehend.

My ISP converted all their email accounts over to Yahoo, but I don't exactly use Yahoo for that either. I have Gmail POP it. From my perspective, it's a Gmail account. And after that, it's an account with my ISP, not Yahoo.

For the others, well, never used Flickr. Once or twice used Yahoo auctions. Do they even still have them? Yahoo Japan auctions are good but that's not really the same company. Never used Tumblr. Had to stop and think, who was it again Yahoo bought. It's so irrelevant I paid it almost no attention.

Marissa Mayer DOES bother me, though. My boss has started emulating certain aspects of Ms. Mayer's work habits and compelling myself and fellow employees to follow along. That's great if you actually are a Marissa Mayer with huge responsibilities and commensurate compensation. But when you are a low-level mid-five-figure team lead for a software company which actively hates its customers and employees, these superboss work habits amount to jack shit. They don't fix anything at our level and they don't matter to anyone above you either, much less the executive team. Riding the team under you as if you are a Mayer when you are not is like watching whatshisname do his funky cowboy hop. It's not a real cowboy. My boss is not a real Marissa Mayer.

You, sir, have earned a beer.

The big "spoilers" are all over wikipedia and IMDB so is there truly a LOT of point in going so far out of the way to avoid talking about them that you can't actually review the movie?

Look, if a film has to tentpole on spoilers that are going to get revealed the first time people I dunno, SEE THE MOVIE, then the film needs something else to drive it. You cannot structurally support an entire movie meant to be in theaters for months based on the idea that the major plot device is going to be a secret the entire time. And then when the DVDs and BDs come out, is this charade going to repeat again?

Shhhh! Don't talk about Khan or Klingons being in the movie! Oh oooops.

At what point will it be acceptable again to discuss who is actually IN the damn film? Years from now? Instead of protecting this great secret, we SHOULD be asking why it has to be such a secret and why is that secret so important to the movie. What about whether these things -or anything else- makes the movie GOOD.

Where the hell is Roger Ebert when we need him to teach us about movies. Oh yeah. Well, that is a problem.

MY response to this movie was or order Wrath of Khan on BD. There was damn little wrong with that movie that ever needed to be fixed and it looks great on a nice HD screen.

Worked on a DR project this week with a MAJOR consulting company. Everything was going peachy until they let drop that a major part of the DR process involved restoring data they kept on a Jaz drive.

This is not some old leftover process step, either. We've done this DR thing with them for years and this is the first year they have mentioned a Jaz drive. An awful lot of things ended up relying upon this Jaz drive.

I kept the horror to myself.

Well, the telescope GOT there somehow so it's possible to GET there again with a robotic resupply vehicle. Couple of manipulator arms, hoses and fittings and a load of helium transferred in no time flat.

Refueling telescopes is not as sexy as rovers finding more rocks ("They're still rocks -beige this time!") or astronauts bobbing around doing whatever the heck they DO on the ISS, but a service mission to L2 is certainly doable. The telescope would need to have been designed with this idea in mind, which did not happen, so it's all moot anyway.

Nobody wants to bother with stuff like this. Ultimately that's the real answer why it's not done.

Ever since they stuck their heads in the sand and said the iPhone cannot be done, therefore it would not be done, BB has had a habit of pretending challenges can't exist, therefore they don't exist, and they keep on the track they had already decided to follow.

The iPhone got done. I can't stand the device myself but I admire the heck out of Apple for upsetting the, er, apple cart that was the feature phone and forced everybody to innovate. Except BB. No, they had it mapped out and figured out and BES was going to live forever!

Except, well, the sand BB stuck their head into got fused into glass when the fires of innovation rolled across Waterloo.

This.

For a pillow fight, this one needs more coeds in lingerie.

MyPillow was naive for expecting some product that didn't exist and hadn't been tested to deliver advertising effectiveness rates, or whatever. This is holy grail stuff of advertising wet dreams. IF this could be done so easily that a small company could just sort of order it up like dinner, then the big ad agencies with deep pockets would be doing it. In which case MyPillow should, um, hire an ad agency to tell them this stuff. Believe me, they will work for money. Amazing how that works.

OR you hire the TV infomercial people. Many of them have very good sales metric tracking. They know what sells, which channels, when, to whom, etc. Call Sully Sullivan.

These pillow people are also naive for going to a huge complex company like Salesforce with apparently not clue one about what they were getting into. You don't walk up to a company like Salesforce or SAP or IBM or Northrup Grumman or Oracle or Xerox or whatever with a checkbook and a wish list and ask them to sell you something. The salesperson will love it and will sign you up for it, of course. Alligators love raw meat. They'll eat as much of it as you've got, and then eat you too. Big consulting companies are the same except they want cash. It's not what you want to pay; it's what can you pay. Never walk up to a man or woman who bills for a living and tell them to send you a bill.

And involving AMEX is profoundly stupid. That company is like a focal point for idiotic member spending and they are used to idiots overspending and refusing to pay so there's nothing they haven't seen before. They will play hard ball to collect. AMEX is a great product but it's a lot like a gun: when used properly and carefully and respectfully, it is safe. When used carelessly and stupidly, it will bite you, blow off your foot and make you hurt in ways you didn't know you could hurt. And then you get to meet Junebug and Bubba and see how lonely they are.

Combine all of this and wow what fun!

OK OK, I forgot Playboy. But that one is running out. There's a joke there. I used to be a stockholder in that company but I've stopped caring as much since they went, er, private. Hef's gotten on my nerves lately. So not going to renew that. The Playboy Bunny Harlem Shake video is amazing but completely a-typical for that brand. Not enough to keep me.

I would also get QST from the ARRL except I figured out you could get a "blind persons" membership for cheap and the only difference was that they won't send the magazine, which I don't want. They provide it for free online anyway.

Only two now: MaximumPC and Consumer Reports. MaxPC makes their back issues available for free and I also pay for access to CR's website, but I find the dead tree version works better on the throne, quite honestly. And I don't have time to sit and read anywhere else.

Why pay for these? Both mags offer content that I like and which is more or less difficult to obtain elsewhere, and it's in a format I like. For MaxPC, I am a long-time reader going back to when it launched as boot magazine, and I prepay for years in advance because I want the mag to stick around. CR I simply use as an info source and comparison tool when I need to buy something out of my usual areas of expertise. I pay them to offer advise on which paint or vacuum cleaner or laundry detergent to buy, because I have no idea myself and no time or money to just guess. It works well. Don't have to agree with their choices. As with MaxPC's reviews, having their opinion is useful even if I may not blindly follow it.

And I have tried the digital magazines. The tablet PDF version does not tolerate moisture well and requires things like a charged battery, some pre-planning to take the device along, etc. and you are stuck holding it and usually can't also use it for something else. The paper mags simply sit there waiting for someone to read. Doesn't care if I take a shower -there are no moisture sensors to trip. Does not matter if I drop it on the floor. It won't shatter into hundreds of dollars worth of parts or get flushed.

Total cost for the two mags is about $30 a year plus another $60 for the CR website. ... bleah actually that's a lot of money. Maybe I need to rethink CR.

FB has to try this because the media says they do, and thus, so do their investors. And when it flops, because it will, this will be the final step in FB's rise to prominence and the first media -identified step on their path to being the next Myspace.

Besides... HTC? Really? That's like betting your future on a brand that may cease to exist any moment. What is FB thinking? Maybe they can blame any flop on the poor choice of partner.

My cheap employer has a better way for dealing with supplies. Mostly, the employees buy their own.

You figure out what you want, you go to Walmart or Staples or whatever and you buy it. That's it. No reimbursement either. You buy it. It's yours. You own it. You take it home at night if you want.

If somebody leaves or gets fired, the coworkers descend upon the desk and strip it of any goodies left behind. In this way, the desks are self-cleaned by ravenous office supply cravers.

Now the company will supply some very cheap pens, but they are crap nobody would want to use. So you are better off buying your own anyway.

Well, I have a cheap Chinese JXD S6600 Android tablet which works ok as a photo gallery display, little more than a glorified digital photo frame.

But. The screen res sucks. It's dim, the colors are something "other than photo realistic" and it does weird scaling and resizing. So this makes porn pics look weird, off-color, and just not very appealing. By comparison, the same images look stunning on a Nexus 7. I've tested this quite a lot.

Perhaps a cheap tablet stuck in a humid bathroom is fine though.

Can you suggest a good dashcam? I ordered one online and it worked well for a whopping three days before it just broke. Got a refund. Now I need to find a good one that will last.

And a fine scripted comedy show it is, perhaps the funniest comedy show on TV. I'd grant them a LOT of leeway to make jokes. They tend to make them pay off.

Have you BEEN to gun store lately? There's few firearms available and damn near zero ammo, especially in common sizes like 9mm. All you will find are bare shelves -and if you do find some ammo, you better buy it. Don't even stop to look at the prices.

About the only ammo easily in stock is shotgun shells and slugs. Everything else is gone the moment it hits the shelves. It's been this way since 2008, had gotten better but went to hell in a handbasket after Sandy Hook.