I didn't know about the move to https, but I just went to Twit with Firefox on linux; then tried Safari on a Jobs machine.

The error page tells me politely, "Something is technically wrong. Thanks for noticing ..."

Anybody else getting this?

Slashdot wrote about this last year, after Playboy wrote about it. Playboy's story was pretty good.

The moral of the story is anyone who gives good Powerpoint is destined to grow rich

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http://whitherthenytimes.blogspot.com/

The Times did a good job on this, but there are some questions.

They did mention that Penney is (or was) a big Google advertiser, but you've got to wonder who else has succeeded in doing this.

I read a blogger Whither the NY Times who's doing a pretty funny review of the Times day by day, with the looming paywall in the background.

He asks who else, and wonders how did the Times scope this out?

Businesses seem to rise and fall in their Google rankings in weird ways. Maybe the search engine optimizers have figured something out. Or maybe Google just looks the other way once in awhile

The whining science teachers are implying that they used to do it better.

Unless I'm so old that my memory is failing, my high school science courses sucked. I learned more from those glossy Time-Life (if that was the name then) books than I ever did in class. I generally read the book they gave us during the first few classes and then stared out the window for the rest of the year. I can still hear my biology teacher reciting his outline of the species in a particularly dull monotone.

It's no wonder that idiot politicians get away with saying the things they do. In a scientifically literate society, any politician who mutters that evolution is just a theory would be tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail.

Who's that other guy in a cape and tights?

As if Google doesn't watch its competition and try to see if they can improve their results.

In a corporate, capitalist environment looking over the other guy's stuff is not covered by "Do no evil." I'm surprised Google is whining about this. They're still way better than Bing.

If his doctor takes Medicare, he'll use it. So will Gates, Ellison and anyone else.

Who said that thing: The rich are different from you and me. They have more money.

Now there's a blast from the past.

It's always convenient to start the story at a particular point in history. You choose the early 50s. Others might choose a point a couple thousand years ago when the Persians invaded Greece. Therefore, Greeks need atomic weapons? You might try any point in time. In any case, Persia's never been the same since Alexander, who was followed by the Arabs, and then the Turks, and finally the Brits.

Another problem is the "what ifs" in history. You can assume that any moment of hope would have blossomed into a perfect world, but it almost never works like that. For instance, since the Shah was overthrown, does anyone in Iran talk about Mosaddegh -- or is it against the law since he was a godless socialist?

If reposting a news story with attribution in a couple obscure blogs can seriously damage that paper, if the Review Journal can so easily be diminished, it's a pathetic operation that ought to be put out of its misery immediately.

I bet they even have pretentions of claiming some special First Amendment rights, but they don't deserve them.

I'd say when they hired a roomful of sleazy lawyers, they were admitting their complete defeat as a newspaper, as a journalistic enterprise.

Somebody's going to do much better searches than Google, which is after all, a word-based search ranked by a linking scheme.

But it's going to be hard to tell the world about it when it happens because of the enormous advantage Google has in indexing. It's so fast, it's almost an eye on the web, and that will take more hardware than will fit in anyone's garage. No one's going to finance the billions needed on the basis of a limited, meagre sample (like this very informal study).

Then there's the name recognition and holier-than-thou reputation -- tarnished by privacy issue but few people seem to care about that.

You don't really believe Microsoft's going to do it. It's got the money, but it's a big corporate bureaucracy that won't overcome the herd mentality either in business matters or in science and engineering, and therefore in R&D.

I joined Facebook and looked up the girl I had the hots for in high school. I found out that she's a health food shaman who gives people enemas for a living. Do I care what movies she watches or what brand of sneakers she wears?

I'm over Facebook, like people who are over AOL, MySpace and all sorts of other so-called tech businesses that have come and gone. But who cares about my personal anecdote when you can clutch a briefcase of unaudited financial results?

And somewhere in the folds of my brain, I remember that Wall Street makes money from commissions, fees and expenses, and not from careful analyses of the fundamentals. And wasn't Goldman Sachs sued by the SEC a few months ago for fraud over mortgage-backed securities.

I didn't say they sell ads. I said they sell information.

You don't really need to have a user sign in with name, address and ssn to get some sort of user profile together from the cookies and collate that information with that of other sites, not the least of all would be Yahoo's own cookies from using its mail, tv listings, and whatever else they offer. You don't need lunatic conspiracy theories to believe someone pays good money for data on user habits on the web, whether partially anonymized or not.

Surely, you don't think Yahoo invested all that money to be helpful to you out of the goodness of its heart, do you?

Put it another way: It's a gimmick to have to describe what your tastes and habits so that the owner of this public service can sell its profile of you to adverstisers.

The most insidious thing about all this is to discourage learning and discovery and all change -- all so retailers can make you the target of their ads. Do we really want to exist only in order to make purchases?