Brian Gongol
Show notes from the WHO Radio Wise Guys - March 15, 2008
Some audio highlights are available at WHORadio.com
Google CEO says he's not planning to buy the New York Times
It's an interesting notion, though, to wonder what it would look like if Google started buying content providers, much like Microsoft went head-first into projects like MSNBC. On a related note, Mark Cuban has some thoughts on why newspapers shouldn't have weblogs -- not that they shouldn't be in the business of producing news all the time, but rather that they shouldn't try to be like everybody else. And calling something a "blog" is being like everybody else.
Tricks to manipulating incoming Gmail
Adding a "+" after the username and before the "@" symbol allows one to create multiple e-mail addresses on one Gmail account
General in charge of new Air Force Cybercommand takes public questions
Among other things, he deflects a question about China's aggressive use of Internet attacks
Welcome to the 21st Century
A story that could never, ever have happened fifteen years ago: A high-school student in Des Moines sent threatening text messages to a girl at UNI, who reported them to police. Campus officials sent out automated alerts to the entire student body via voice mail, text messages, and e-mail. The university's website nearly crashed when people went to find out what was going on. News reports are now relying heavily on Iowa's online court registry and the suspect's MySpace page to fill in the blanks. And yet some of our lawmakers are so behind the times they think the Internet is made of plumbing. If that doesn't make the case for lots and lots of public education about science and technology, there's no telling what possibly could.
IBM security researchers say Internet crooks have the equivalent of a Swiss Army knife
That is, they've learned how to put crooked tricks together in such a way that makes them more powerful than ever before. That's obviously not a good thing.
Newton vs. Michor
If you didn't already hate PowerPoint, try this
Look at what happens when good speeches are marred with bad PowerPoint presentations. That doesn't necessarily make the technology itself bad, but it does highlight the importance of putting the message first.
Prediction markets expect higher taxes within three years
That shouldn't be surprising -- we have rapidly-mounting liabilities in the form of entitlements that the Baby Boomers are about to start receiving, and Congress and the White House have shown a general disregard for responsible fiscal policy for the last eight years. Mount some additional costs on top of that -- like the irresponsible "fiscal stimulus package" of late and the need to spend billions making long-overdue repairs and replacements to infrastructure, and it's time to lock down those wallets. A bumpy ride is most assuredly in the forecast.
Expect flooding in Iowa this weekend
Buffett: "Just like you and me, except for the $62 billion fortune"
It's a positive profile, but calling Omaha "unfashionable" seems like a cheap shot
US energy regulators plan "grid reliability" meeting
In particular, they're meeting to discuss what happens when the grid becomes unstable and disrupts operations at the nation's nuclear power plants. Despite major blackouts in Florida in 2008 and all over the East Coast in 2003, everyone from the White House on down to the average voter in the street seems to want to ignore how the power grid is badly outdated and susceptible to massive failures.
No hydropower for Fort Dodge
What your US Air Force was up to today
UK still not sure if it wants to get deeper into the EU
They're having trouble on the other end of the spectrum, too: The Scottish don't seem too excited to trumpet their allegiance to the Queen right now, either
Problems with Vista? You're not alone. Microsoft execs have been similarly disappointed.
Compatibility issues have annoyed a lot of Vista users, particularly the early adopters. And their bad experiences have given the operating system a (perhaps deserved) bad rap. Some of those early adopters were high-placed Microsoft executives who found they couldn't use their own software. Vista still has yet to prove itself a Great Leap Forward over Windows XP.
In case you've completely lost your mind
A service called "Dinner in the Sky" will hoist up to 22 dinner guests 50 meters (about half a football field) in the air and serve them dinner while their seats and table are suspended from a crane. Why?
Nebraska probably just can't win against Mother Nature this year
The Subprime Primer
How, more or less, the banks got into the subprime mortgage mess.
How natural are mergers between social-networking sites and big portals?
It doesn't seem obvious (on the surface, at least) that social-networking sites like Facebook would necessarily become better for having tighter connections with portals like Yahoo or shopping sites like Amazon.
Back to the future isn't a good environmental policy
Mass transit may not exactly be the environmental panacaea some people might claim -- self-guided vehicles that can make better and safer use of existing trafficways could be much better.
Computer warfare is the new weapon of choice
The capacity for denial-of-service attacks (which slow down or even crash specific websites by overloading their systems) has risen from almost nothing in 2003 to downright huge amounts today. Because the bad guys are increasing their ability to disrupt Internet systems at a much faster rate than the good guys can create solutions or build new capacity to reduce their exposure, computer-based warfare should be expected to become one of the new weapons of choice for terrorists, garden-variety crooks, and totalitarian states alike. Even the routine junk -- spam, for instance -- is taking up more and more bandwidth all the time, congesting the high-speed communications lines we require to keep the Internet afloat.
The Fed needs to back off economy-tweaking and get back to controlling inflation
Where in the world is the US military?
Defense Department report says we have 823 permanent facilities abroad in 39 different countries
Putin on Medvedev: "I do not think our partners will have it easier with him"
NOAA completes its tsunami-warning system
We now have 39 buoys around the oceans and seas that will be used to relay data on ocean levels in real time to forecasters who are trying to make sure we aren't caught unprepared for a major tsunami. Now that we've finished that task, perhaps we can get around to expanding the nation's network of WSR-88D weather radars. There are, in fact, still some parts of the country that aren't covered by the National Weather Service's network of weather radar installations. Moreover, even those places that are covered are too thinly-distributed. The effective range of WSR-88D radar is about 125 miles, but due to the angle of inclination required to see inside storms and the curvature of planet Earth, those places that are more than about 60 miles out from any individual radar installation are simply not getting adequate coverage close to the ground. Since "close to the ground" is where most of us live, that's a critical place for coverage. Ironically, on top of all of that, places like the upper Midwest, which are already too lightly-covered by radar are now attracting lots of wind farms, which in turn interfere with radar reports, making the need even greater for additional radar installations.
Show notes from the Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio - March 9, 2008
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