Gerald Buckley

It's bad times...... - yanchao

The economy will remain this way until people stop complaining about it, and start doing things to help it. - Spencer

Spencer, kind of like the weather. Seriously, this is not just people complaining, it's people explaining. Getting an understanding of what is happening in a global economy is useful to individuals. IMO, this economy can't be fixed without going through some pain, which includes de-leveraging the over-leveraged economy. This means stop bailing out companies, and stop lowering interest rates and printing money. Real estate is over-bought, and needs to come down in price. - Chris White

""Nothing underscores the government's weakness and its capitulation to the settlers more than the continued existence of the illegal outposts," wrote Aluf Benn, a venerable diplomatic correspondent for the daily newspaper Haaretz. One of the unspoken fears fueling that impotence, Benn wrote, is that Israeli forces in the West Bank are increasingly filled with settlers and their supporters. A serious push against the settlements or outposts could trigger a divisive loyalty test that would split both the army and society." - Sean McBride via Bookmarklet

"unless there is a major change in attitude on both sides" - Well, when Hamas, Fatah or Hezbollah stop calling for the elimination of Israel that would be a big step. So would repudiating the Khartoum Resolutions http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20t... Did you read them? "No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it" You pretend to care about both sides but only emphasize the problems "caused" by Israel. That's wrong. - Al Pasternak

Al - you're missing the key point here: Americans are not supplying Islamists with hundreds of billions of dollars of aid, and Islamists do not exert enormously powerful influence in American politics, in both major political parties and in the mainstream media. Also: the Israeli government and the Zionist establishment have provided support for religious extremists in Israel for decades now. The settlements are a mainstream, not a fringe problem in Israeli politics. Most Americans would like to extricate themselves from these endless and destructive religious and ethnic conflicts in the Mideast altogether. - Sean McBride

"He came off as more bearish than Roubini last night in this latest Charlie Rose interview, and advocates only putting on "bi-modal" trades where you use a small percentage of capital to place "black swan" type option bets on out of the money strikes, so to speak. But he has kept lots of dry powder, 80%-90% in cash and equivalents, at the remainder in risky investments. He does not like "medium risk" investments, because they probably are higher risk than you think." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet

"Watching her take the pistol from her belt, unbutton her jeans and slip into bed I somehow couldn’t quite equate the woman in my arms with the bodies I had seen in the local morgue, their heads shattered by gunshots at close range, murders she confessed to having committed. High on a combination of the heady tropical climate, local rum, grade A cocaine and in the arms of nubile 22-year-old, fantasy and reality became blurred. It felt like I was living in a Quentin Tarantino movie." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet

Great story, and for someone with such a short attention span I'm glad I stuck with it. - Toby Graham

"“When I killed the first person, I was afraid, I was scared. I killed the first person just to see if I could. But there is an obligation to kill. If you don’t, they kill you. That’s why the first was very hard, because the person I killed was kneeling down begging, crying and saying, ‘Don’t kill me. I have children.’ That’s why it was difficult and sad. But if you don’t kill that person, someone else from the AUC will kill you. After the killing, you keep trembling. You can’t eat or talk to anyone. I was at home, but I kept imagining the person begging not to be killed. I shut myself inside, but with time I forgot everything. The superiors always say, ‘Don’t worry, that was just the first time. When you kill the second one, it will all be OK.’ But you keep trembling. “The second time is only a bit easier, but as they say here, ‘If you can kill one, you can kill many more.’" - bob

The semantic web is really interesting. But I think it will take some time before it "happens". I've been using the semantic interest network Twine for awhile...quite cool, although the semantics are still a bit rough at the edges. - Patrik Johansson

Interesting. Semantic web stratifying, unifying and ultimately destroying the web. The stratifying, unifying sounds like an undesirable potential side effect of Greader's new "bundle" algorithm. - Brad

cheers Robert, I've commented over there (in short: it won't "Think", but it'll help us in thinking/decision-making) - Danny Ayers

"How did the citizenship rumor get started? Ironically, it began when the Obama campaign tried to debunk some other conspiracies. After Obama locked up the nomination in early June, low-level talk radio and blog chatter peddled rumors that Obama's real middle name was Muhammad, that his father was not really Barack Obama, and that he was not really born in Hawaii. The campaign released a facsimile of Obama's certificate of live birth. Requested from the state in 2007, the certificate reported that Obama was, indeed, born in Honolulu at 7:24 p.m. on Aug. 4, 1961. The certificate was a bullet that didn't put down the horse." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet

I love the fringe elements that FF somehow attracts. - Christopher Sacca

Christopher. I understand well that many, possibly 99% of those reading this will think I qualify for the nut house. For those who don't, please join this room: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/9-... - bill giltner

guessing it's not through an official relationship w/ sfgate as their own search is powered by yahoo. - James Miao

Judging by http://googleblog.blogspot.com... it's "when [Google] detect[s] a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of [Google's] snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users." Not that that explains much of the how. - Scott from Canada

google is sure getting clutter and featureitis - i dont want all these gimmicks i just want a good efficient search. Not getting it anymore. - Joelle Nebbe

"As for social disruption, Hanauer gave a quick summary of what he meant: —If everyone thinks it’s a great idea, it probably sucks. —If people understand it, you’re too late. —If people don’t like it and don’t understand it, it probably still sucks. So entrepreneurship is a dangerous field, he said. “The difference between being an idiot and being a genius is very, very thin.”" - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet

"So they pull up behind a state trooper to ask for his help in getting to the hospital. Do they get his help? They do not. They get a ticket instead, for $100, and have to wait while the cop finishes the ticket he was already writing for someone else. And after this woman in labor and her husband have been made to cool their heels and have been slapped with a $100 dollar ticket -- after all that -- the trooper tops it off by asking Jennifer Davis, the woman in question, to prove she was pregnant." - Thomas Hawk via Bookmarklet

Bad time to run into a black and white thinker. - Internet Strategist

Reading the original story, it seems to me that the cop was an ass, but these people were also rather stupid. She wanted to give birth 30 miles away, but when she went into labor they didn't set out to drive until her contractions were 5 minutes apart EVEN THOUGH IT WAS RUSH HOUR. They took their time arranging things, had they hurried then they would probably not have been in a panic on the highway. They are all irate now, but these people could have avoided all their problems by planning for things. - Joelle Nebbe