Not sure I have the patience to wait for this to come out on android...I might have to go buy an ipod touch just for this app. - Evan Parker
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And what's up with it being announced yesterday but still not up on the app store? - Evan Parker
It wasn't announced yesterday. There is no official word from the company about it yet just an article in the New York Times. If this had been launched there would be a post here: http://googlemobile.blogspot.c... - Adewale Oshineye
@Adewale - good point. Apple's app approval (app*3? :) process is slow, so who knows when it will be out. - Evan Parker
It's your basic square 3-minute statement from the President on the issues of the week. This week he points out that the economy is awful, that he's running a summit about it, and gives a statement of philosophy about what we should do (continue to pretend vigorously that crony capitalism benefits all etc etc) - j1m
Having listened to both, I think your description and my description both describe both speeches pretty well (though the philosophy in the Obama speech isn't consistent with the particular snarky comment I made about Bush's philosophy) - j1m
Agreed, good find. Here's the transcript of obama's address: http://change.gov/newsroom/ent.... Not as long or substantive as FDRs, but then again obama isn't president yet. I hope he can live up his promises once in office. - Evan Parker
"initial traffic spike following launch coverage in the New York Times and TechCrunch which evaporated in mere days. He said it took four months to return to the initial activity level, in between which the team went through varying stages of excitement, strategizing, realism and depression, while they openly questioned what they might have been doing wrong - having a history of successful product launches at Google. However, not too long later, traffic began to balloon in the beginning of 2008, reaching a hockey stick spike from March to June, during which the team's excitement turned to sheer panic, as they looked to scale their product and maintain speed and reliability amidst unprecedented demand." - Evan Parker
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I've started having a lot of quick 30 second - 2 minute video conversations b/c of this feature. Saves so much typing and waiting. It's actually changed the way I work. Nice job, Sweden & Seattle. - Keith Coleman
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"And in the spirit of open communications, we designed this feature using Internet standards such as XMPP, RTP, and H.264, which means that third-party applications and networks can choose to interoperate with Gmail voice and video chat." Come on libpurple! - Erica Baker
Awesome! Where was this last week when I wanted to video-conference in to all the election night festivities from China? :) - Ana
I wish it didn't require installing a plugin though. I'm sure there's a good reason for it but without it working out of the box I doubt I'll ever be able to use it to chat with certain people (my Grandparents use Gmail but I don't think they'd know how to install this). - Benjamin Golub
1/2 Skype + 1/2 Tokbox + Google = death to Skype and Tokbox? - George Lee
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Benjamin, you're right. And if you have to install something, why not just make it a standalone program? Like an update to the Google Talk client? My mum and sister both use Google Talk but they've never used the web interface of Gmail because they know how to use Outlook Express already. - Tony Ruscoe
Side-note: When you have Google Update installed as Firefox plugin, then clicking Google's installation button won't trigger a security dialog, but just start the installation. - Philipp Lenssen
@Evan If libpurple can get this implemented, you could just use Pidgin. - Erica Baker
A plugin? Reminds me of the original Google video. Why don't you use flash Keith? - Paul Buchheit
Tony: Updating Google Talk leaves all the Mac users out. Now if I could just get a free VNC client or something that punched through firewalls well on Macs I could install this for my parents now instead of next time I see them. - Brett Cannon
Brett: If you use the listening VNC viewer, you can have your parents make their VNC server connect to you. - Gabe
"The assertion and expansion of presidential power is arguably the defining feature of the Bush years. Come January, the current administration will pass on to its successor a vast infrastructure for electronic surveillance, secret sites for detention and interrogation and a sheaf of legal opinions empowering the executive to do whatever he feels necessary to protect the country. The new administration will also be the beneficiary of Congress’s recent history of complacency, which amounts to a tacit acceptance of the Bush administration’s expansive views of executive authority. For that matter, thanks to the recent economic bailout, Bush’s successor will inherit control over much of the banking industry. “The next president will enter office as the most powerful president who has ever sat in the White House,” Jack Balkin, a constitutional law professor at Yale and an influential legal blogger, told me a few weeks ago." - Bret Taylor
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Hopefully one of his first moves is to give that power back to where the constitution says it should be. He could use Ron Paul as his "Constitutional Advisor" :) - Chris Lamprecht
"The fact that many senators have to spend so much time away from Capitol Hill means less time for Senate work. It has also eroded the fabric of the institution." ... "today’s Senate is still no match for an executive branch that works 24 hours a day, seven days a week" - I've always wondered why senators spend so little time in washington. - Evan Parker
Great quote, Bret, it's enlightening to see it all stacked up like that. The bit about the banking industry is the coup de grace. - j1m
Scary. No matter how much i love a candidate, that's a power in a government hands, not a single man's hands. Not a fan to hear this. - Patricia
My number 1 reason for casting my vote for Obama was/is the hope that he will quickly work to counter some of the vast power grab perpetrated against this country by its current president. Flip/flop McCain had forfeited any credibility he had, as the article points out. Obama's statements indicated that he might (might being the operative word) do what I am hoping. If he does not, I will be gravely disappointed as well as ashamed of my support of him. - Jim Jannotti
@Evan, since the study was conducted in China and Taiwan I suspect that milk / dairy products were not a big part of the study? Lactose intolerance occurs at much higher frequencies in those parts of the world than some others. - Ruchira S. Datta
one thing for sure, junk food, restaurant food, prepared food, all are short of "life-force", and "vitamins" are crude concepts that only approximate what nutrition is .. so whether this book has anything new to say i don't know, but re-thinking food has to be one of the programs in a new paradigm of social functioning ... and meat? you need less than you think, unless you are an innuit - Gregory Lent
I highly recommend reading "In Defense of Food" by Michael Pollan as a prerequisite to reading of any book containing the word "nutrition" ;) - Igor Krivokon
Igor: thanks, added to my wishlist as well. - Bret Taylor
I wonder how much merit there is to the book's critics who started a few discussions on Amazon. Here's just one example: http://www.amazon.com/Colin-Ca... (and no, I have not and do not plan to read the complete forum on Amazon: it's just too many people arguing with each other). - Michal Cierniak
@MiniMage, the evidence in the book is pretty overwhelming that reducing your intake of animal products is just generally healthy. @Ruchira, the book includes lots of research, from controlled studies of mice to small controlled studies of humans in the US to the really large observational China Study; the studies of mice in particular show that casein (the main protein in dairy products) is likely a cancer promoter. - Evan Parker
@Evan, drinking cow's milk is supported by one adaptation, lactase, which isn't even spread throughout the human population, let alone among rodents and primates. It may well be supported by additional adaptations, so I'd be rather skeptical about transferring results from a mouse model directly to lactose-tolerant humans. In any case, it seems like an interesting question to look into some time! - Ruchira S. Datta
@Ruchira, good point, the book admits at the end of ch. 3 that controlled human studies would be needed to generalize the casein results to humans. The china study itself showed a strong correlation between intake of animal protein and many types of cancers, but as an observational study it can only demonstrate correlation, not causation; it also did not shed light on casein specifically, and was obviously done in China where lactose intolerance is common. - Evan Parker
One particularly convincing small controlled study by one Dr. Esselstyn took 18 people with severe heart disease and put them on a mostly vegan diet. "Within the 8 years leading up to the study, these eighteen people had suffered through 49 coronary events...In the following 11 years [after starting the diet], there was exactly 1 coronary event among the 18 patients who followed the diet. That one event was from a patient who strayed from the diet for 2 years." - Evan Parker
Quite frankly, I would take anything coming out of China with a grain of salt. The lifestyle, levels of pollution, and healthcare, etc. is quite different from most developed nations, and drawing conclusions based on a foreign study is not a good idea. I think that examination of food alone is incomplete without an examination of the entire lifestyle. - Piaw Na
"At the end of August, as Hurricane Gustav threatened the coast of Texas, the Obama campaign called the Red Cross to say it would be routing donations to it via the Red Cross home page. Get your servers ready—our guys can be pretty nuts, Team Obama said. Sure, sure, whatever, the Red Cross responded. We've been through 9/11, Katrina, we can handle it. The surge of Obama dollars crashed the Red Cross Web site in less than 15 minutes." - I love these tidbits. - Evan Parker
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"eleventh-hour scrambling by Bush and aides to alter rules and regulations on the environment, civil liberties, abortion rights, and other issues." can we put a transaction around this and rollback in its entirety? - Gregor J. Rothfuss
Yikes, Bush seemed so reasonable in his assurances of a smooth transition, I thought maybe he'd turned over a new leaf, but looks like I was too optimistic. - Evan Parker
I worry that he's going to burn down the White House when he leaves. - Rekha Murthy
"President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year." - Evan Parker
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This is a great site, I think it continues the feelings of hope and inspiration that started his campaign. It would be great if they would eventually build out this page in particular to help people find places where they can help. I think people will happily volunteer for a day, but less so if they have to spend a couple hours figuring out how to do it. It's like going shopping, you'll walk around the store for hours, but you want the least number of steps from the car to the door. - Mandi
I'm a big fan of this. Boy, does he have a great read on how to connect with people. - Chieze Okoye
Yeah, making it easy for people to help is key. I really hope Obama can do it :) - Evan Parker
Guess I was ahead of my time ;-). I blogged about an idea for compulsory community service in America a bunch of years ago -- http://www.bladam.com/main/ent... -- (and it sadly got pretty panned). - Adam Lasnik
asian and european markets are up, but "buy the rumor sell the news"...I'm worried it might go down tomorrow - Evan Parker
I am betting that it will go past 10,000 at some point tomorrow. Hopefully it will close over 10,000 - Bindu Reddy
Looks like it is going to close down. I think the market's recent run was somewhat baseless. People thought things were low, so they started buying heavily. But, I don't think we know how bad things really are... or how long it will take for the economy to recover. I'm confident it will recover... but it is likely to take a year or two. - Michael Leggett
Well there goes my prediction :( I thought Obama's victory would help reduce some of the uncertainity and the general euphoria that the nation seemed to feel would translate to the market.. but that did not seem to be the case. - Bindu Reddy
"By a vote of 5-0, the FCC formally agreed to open up the "white spaces" spectrum -- the unused airwaves between broadcast TV channels -- for wireless broadband service for the public." - Evan Parker
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Wohoo! I watched Bussard give a talk at Google (before he died) on his electrostatic fusion device (see http://video.google.com/videop... for a short version of this talk), unclear whether the tech will work, but if it does then it will go a long way towards helping solve global warming. - Evan Parker
