In our special report on the election we analyse the two candidates’ economic plans. Here, we ask professional economists to give us their views - the economist - daniel morgan
this all is pretty said. i want to figure out how much of this subprime mortgage issue and subsequent speculations leading to problems at Lehman, AIG, and other financial entities are real and how much of those issues are mere speculation.. i m afraid i will find more of the latter.. - Hayk
it is not sad, it is just a revaluation, a good thing - Gregory Lent
Gregory, depending from which perspective! Seeing that Goldman Sachs will take over the MarketMakers unit of Lehman for whatever amount of time, one can claim it is beneficial for the GS. Also, the fact that all those WS-used people will go looking for other jobs (think "Leave Wall Street Join A Startup"), it is good as well fro startups!! Matter of perspective. - Hayk
the other good thing, a lot of the near-criminal tricks are being exposed .. they will have to invent new ones! - Gregory Lent
"At the time, her daughter was 14 years old. Moreover, Alaska's rape rate was an abysmal 2.2 times above the national average and 25 percent of all rapes resulted in unwanted pregnancies. But Palin's position was palatable within the state's largely Republican political circles." - newsjunk.com
I hope the debate moderators are paying attention. She should be asked this question in the VP debate. - Dave Hussein Winer
the moderator did that, it could be conceived as picking on a family situation. - Ruth Ferguson
From wikipedia: "Bernard Shaw, the moderator of the debate, asked Dukakis, "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis [his wife] were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?" Dukakis replied coolly, "No, I don't, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life," and explained his stance. After the debate, Dukakis told Estrich he was sorry and didn't realize it was that question[7]. Many observers felt Dukakis' answer lacked the passion one would expect of a person discussing a loved one's rape and death. Many — including the candidate himself — believe that this, in part, cost Dukakis the election, as his poll numbers dropped from 49% to 42% nationally that night. Other commentators thought the question itself was unfair, in that it injected an irrelevant emotional element into the discussion of a policy issue and forced the candidate to make a difficult choice. - Steve Garfield
The Common Craft things are ads and are paid for. I hear they get $20,000 or more to do these things. But I love them anyway, especially if they help get more people into our world. - Robert Scoble
Robert, I'm not sure what you are getting at. Common Craft is not hiding the fact that this video was commissioned by Google. On their blog post they say "The Google Reader team hired us to create this one minute introduction to Google Reader." In fact they make it very clear that they are hired to produce videos: http://www.commoncraft.com/wor... Hey, you get paid to make videos and I watch those too. Are you saying that they shouldn't get paid to make videos? - Scott Beale
I don't think anyone has ever doubted the commercial nature of their videos, disclaimers or not. That said, I think they are uniquely effective at making technology approachable. I deeply admire their work. - Christopher Sacca
Actually, Common Craft *did* get paid to make *some* of their videos (and as Scott says, always with full disclosure when that was the case), but a lot of them were made for nothing but the love of it (the Twitter one for instance, and of course RSS, Wikis etc.) Lee & Sachi have stopped doing client work now to focus on their Common Craft store - selling licensed versions of the videos for commercial use and making them freely available for bloggers. What's the issue with getting paid here? The videos rock, period. - Michael Pick
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I just found it interesting that below this video was a link for "How to Survive a Zombie Attack, in Plain English" - Glenn Batuyong
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“I noticed something. When I read my feeds on Google Reader, I get smarter. When I read Twitter I learn how boring our lives usually are. When I read FriendFeed I find out how smart you are. All three have their place. :-)”
I feel the humor factor shows up better here than Reader and Twitter. - Scot Duke
Twitter doesn't make me realize how boring our lives are, just that our lives are all very much the same no matter who we are, where we live, and/or what we do. Which is kind of cool to me. - Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)
still got to catch with all the friendfeed updates!! Still hanging around with fcbk and orkut!! - Moksh Juneja
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Thinking about it, I agree with you, Robert - Migger
Well said... I mostly just use Twitter and FriendFeed but should get back on habit of reading what matters at Google Reader. - Daniel Schildt
And of course, you posted on friendfeed instead of twitter. ;-) - Brent Logan
so everone on FF uses Google Reader, whereas I use Bloglines. Why Google Reader? - anna awesomesauce
As people transition from Blogs to Friendfeed to comment on articles does that make the blog seem less of a place for smart conversation? - Josh Chandler
I've abandoned both Google Reader and Twitter. - Thomas Hawk
Left Twitter. Too much downtime and a lot of tweets by twits. (Probably including me.) - Abby Martin
LOL. funny but true. i still use all three. but i use FF most of the time and also incorporated it into my blog. to make it look a little smarter :) - ~C4Chaos
i use the hell of of ff and greader, but they lack the humanity of twitter. i'm an infojunkie, but there has to be more to life online than just data. - eric mortensen
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I find Google Reader the most useful of the three by far. But when I want to discuss something or see what others with like interests are talking about, I find FriendFeed to be the place to go. - Jeff P. Henderson
Actually, I feel like I learn so much on FF that I get smarter here. - Abby Martin
Robert, I try to have the same effect from all three :) when i m done with the daily minimum i switch to the second effect and finally third :) - Hayk
On the consumption end, I agree. On the production end, however, I find that I share more in FriendFeed directly than sharing from GoogleReader (because I can attach pictures to the share in FF -- plus it shows up immediately). That seems to make my FriendFeed feed smarter than my GoogleReader feed. (Doesn't matter that much, tho, as they're combined in the end.) - Christopher Galtenberg
I have to say that I'm a FF addict like the rest of us, but the past few days I've found it kinda boring and self-serving. Now that's bound to happen, but the chatter seems to have become less interesting of late and more like graffiti IMO. Maybe it's an end of summer thing. - Jason Goldberg
Well that would be a judgement upon your friends, not the service, nay? :) (update: lol, just saw your friendfeed subscription come thru - the pressure's on!!) - Christopher Galtenberg
@christopher sorta yes, of course. the question i do have is how much will be graffiti vs. substance? again, i'm an addict, just wondering - Jason Goldberg
@Jason, it's time out for the Olympics! - asiriusgeek
@jason we need a friendfeed substance pledge! (actually just a way to mark FF contributions as private graffiti, to use your helpful terminology) - Christopher Galtenberg
Friendfeed indirectly feeds my google reader - so it makes me smarter too - George Smith
I have to agree with this one totally Robert. Top 3 in my 'social graph' right now. I do pick up an occasional important passing item from Twitter (when time allows). GReader would be better if more people shared. Friendfeed is providing the best remote networking opportunity I've ever seen (and can be fun too!). All of the other 'new' tools bear watching and are all 'pipes' for those looking to promote themselves, or their products. - Charlie Anzman
Trying to figure out what Identi.ca makes me. People don't tend to just blabber on identi.ca as much as Twitter. I find there are a lot of really smart developers there, so is it becoming a community for developers then? - Jesse Stay
Every once in a great while now, when things seem to take a momentary awkward silence on FF, I may poke my head in to twitter or my rss feeds. There's just so much good activity here, it's hard to turn my head away sometimes. - Pete Delucchi
Lovely comment Robert! Had me laughing... - Mitchell Tsai
Yap, but Twitter also shows how crazy people can be driven ;) - Martin Gommel
I'm starting to get this. Thanks for the coaching. - Pete Steege
I didn't configure my home page, but it is chrome://navigator-region/locale/region.properties - Morton Fox
With tabbed browsing its many: Gmail, Hellotxt, Flickr and DeviantART in Firefox - Kol Tregaskes
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SFGate. I like to see what's up in the analog world of restaurant robberies, car wrecks, status of the marine layer and tiger-taunting criminals. - Sue Radd
mine is about:blank. Clean slate. If I open up my browser I prob have something in mind already. - daniel morgan
I have six of them that open at once - techmeme, igoogle, hacker news, Analytics and G Reader and popurls - they change based on how and what I get from them. - Mrinal Desai
Mine is set to Google right now. Fast, and plain. - Sean Brady
Blank - I hate the delay of opening a homepage when I'm trying to get to a website. - Bill Sanders
Can someone make a video like this about Trolls? Do not feed the Trolls! LMAO - Igor The Troll
What I want to see is a giant cigarette come and attack the next Asshole I see flick a lit cigarette butt out the window on the freeway! - Jeff P. Henderson
fun, but is it really a good idea to put optical illusions in a parking garage? - Robin Barooah
This is the same tower that has an observation cube that slides out the side of the building and then turns the switchable windows off - http://www.skydeck.com.au/ - Bryce
Caption: :The Simses of Old Greenwich, Conn., gather to read after dinner. Their means of text delivery is divided by generation." - Steve Rubel
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Informative article, thanks for posting this. Would love to see some studies comparing neuronal activity of book reading to reading on the web. I was glad to see some mention of different forms of literacy - much needed in this sphere of discourse. Based on my own behavior I know most of my time spent on the internet is reading and writing, and since I work remotely that's usually 6-8 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. I can't say if it's affected my offline reading habits, though. - Adam Bohannon
adam, nice, about the neuronal activity ... don't know if you can feel your own brainwaves, a lot of meditators can, you would probably agree that the neuronal activity is quite different, and i will offer that it is "better" ... it is a higher order of brain functioning that happens reading on the net ... the "what" is important though ... following ideas in friendfeed is nearly an astral experience, and is transformative, without a doubt .. dlisted.com, not so much - Gregory Lent
Mark - act 3 on saturday!! (I think that may mean tonight at midnight). Ken - don't worry, especially during the summer, you aren't missing anything. Mike - huh, thanks for the pointer, gonna check it out. :) - felix
Act 3 should be coming out at midnight tonight. I'm loving it so far. My fiancee, being a huge Joss Whedon fan has already recorded the songs and is trying to write down the lyrics to memorize them. - James Ferguson
James... just to save your fiancee some time. :) http://imaekgaemz.com/?page_id... I was curious about Freeze Ray but too lazy to do the work myself and found this. :) Can't get the damn song out of my head. - felix
It's fun. I really liked the beginning of Part 1, when it was an actual video journal by Dr. Horrible. Hope we get back to that at some point. - Lon Harris
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I think it's fun. Cheesy at times, but doogie done good. - daniel morgan
I liked it. Fun approach to the superhero genre. Once the musical started it really came together. Liked the blog entry style. Didn't Josh Whedon also do a Buffy episode as a musical? - Larry Kless
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Dr. Horrible was a cute opera. Could definitely use more of those today - the format really works for YouTube. - Dossy Shiobara
Larry - yeah, Joss did Once More With Feeling, a musical buffy episode. I think I'm the only Buffy fan in existence that didn't love it. You can see echoes of those songs in some of Dr. Horrible's. - felix
i totally loved it. the songs are still stuck in my head. especially the first one of the 3rd act, "look around, we're here amongst the lost and found..." - Brian Ries
Don't think this will pass, but the plant will always have a nickname... At least I hope it doesn't pass. @george it does make SF look childish. - daniel morgan
