Pickens, who made his fortune in oil and private equity, is the man behind plans for the world’s biggest wind farm, a risky play sizable enough to significantly multiply or divide even his ample assets. For a big win, he needs the support of the government to help build supporting infrastructure –- hence the big move. - Will DeLuca via Bookmarklet
Wow, shocked! isn't this the guy behind the swift boat veterans campaign back in 2004. I read a gawker piece about this guy last week. http://gawker.com/tag/retro/?i... - gregory
His major investments (billions+) into wind-energy certainly color his motives a bit more grey... - Will DeLuca
“I'm really not into "U" for "you", "ur" for "you're", and "r" for "are". Maybe if you have a dumbphone and are texting, but otherwise, spend the extra .02 seconds to make it right. Kthxbai.”
I kinda left that in to be MYSTERIOUS. *raises one eyebrow* - Steve Isaacs
Hear. All my friends use the shortcuts, which might be okay for texting but FREAKIN IM? WHAT IS WRONG WITH THEIR MINDS? - Yuvi
Vowels in SMS are like dealing with pennies. It all adds up. - Ken Sheppardson
omg wth idk y u r so y2k bc abbrevs r gr8, lol...sok, i gtg but we r still bff, cu l8r! - Hao Chen
As someone who has been a Prince fan for most of her life, I must D-b8 wit U. - MiniMage
Thanks Hao, you made me feel old. I really can't understand wtf you're saying. - Marcos Marado
I feel sad - I can actually understand Hao Chen's message :( - Yuvi
Who still carries around a dumbphone these days? Most people I know have a smartphone or Internet access somehow. - Matt Donders
I'm guilty as charged for using these abbreviations on Twitter. But for good reason! Character conservation. - Andrew Dobrow
I want a Like button on comments for Hao's comment - kthnxbai - Mike Doeff
@Matt: The US isn't the only country in the planet! :) - Yuvi
ahmm @Matt.. sorry.. but "dumbphones" are the majority (significantly) - Naor
@Yuvi - I know its not, just seems like a lot of people are carrying are smartphones everywhere.
@Naor - Haha, I know I guess sarcasm is hard over the Internet. - Matt Donders
WTF? for brief typing, especially in character limited situations, it's a necessity. So I wouldn't write a formal letter/article that way, but it's just the new form of shorthand. - clarke thomas
yeah, Im with Andrew on this - I dont think the 140 character limitation on twittr is helping your cause. - sedgewick
Clarke - that's exactly my problem with it, I don't think it should be cool to use as shorthand away from a non-qwerty phone. It's lazy. - Steve Isaacs
Steve - it's lazy to do between qwerty devices, but you don't always know that someone you're SMSing to has qwerty or not. I have run into the situation where I've received the 2nd half of the SMS prior to the 1st, thus I end up replying to something previously covered. I would say I use shorthand in IM, twitter(when I need the extra space), and actually e-mails when I single handed typing. - clarke thomas
lol ok @Matt , I just had a meeting today explaining the same thing to a very nice young guy (but he was serious) :) - Naor
But but but - I just saw you use "cya" in the Comic Con room! ;) - Heather Cee
I kinda see cya in the same way as online speak, not text speak. Almost LOL-ey. A fine line. - Steve Isaacs
well l33t vs IRC vs TXT speak comes into play - clarke thomas
_Exactly_ - Skip the short-hand, people, we're only talking two-hundredths of a second. It doesn't mean the difference between an Olympic medal or not that often http://query.nytimes.com/gst/f... ... <playing devil's advocate and slathering on the ironic, but single-letter abbreviation should be used as last resort - drives me nuts when gratuitous> - Micah Wittman
With anything public, like Twitter, I spell everything out. I think people who know how to spell are a dying breed and I don't want to be lumped in with the people who don't know how to spell. (Sometimes I wonder how some of my co-workers became managers!) But with private text messages, I'll take a few shortcuts because, even though I have a Treo, some of my friends don't and I'd rather have my message show up on one screen and on one text, especially when some people pay for each message. - Oliver Ortega Chua
Also your for you're. Unless texting, I always spell things out and "attempt" to spell correctly. It just reads better. +1 - @steve & @oliver - Les
Was in a casino when they got into the final two sets. Huge screen captivated everyone .... and probably saved me from losing money :) - Charlie Anzman
I have been using mint for a few months now. Reminds me of yodlee and its simple to use. I love how I can see the big orange pie piece for where the majority of my spending goes (to my home). - Andrea Baker
I'm impressed with Mint. Data presentation is attractive and to the point. - Howard Keziah
Clean, yes. But suddenly I find myself wanting just a custom category or two, and I have to settle for Labels, which don't fit well. - matt shobe
Love it - great service. Continually improving. - Steve Isaacs
OK. I took the plunge and signed up. How do you handle expenses that don't meet the Mint categories?? Labels?? - Kevin Donahue
As a user of both Mint and Yodlee I can attest to the fact that Mint's interface is much friendlier for the user. Mint has done a great job of creating a clean and relatively intuitive user experience, although there are a number of feature details that they haven't fully thought through that I'd like to see fixed (e.g., if I can set a budget, let me easily visualize how my expenses compare to my budget over a window of time of my choosing). Minor quibbles aside, I would recommend giving Mint a try. - Andrei M. Marinescu
I use Mint for basic account tracking. I love the budget features; they help me to keep track of my expenses quite well and let me know when I'm about to go over my normal limit. @Nathan, I don't think they have a mobile site yet. - Brandon Titus
seems like it does a lot of what American Express Platinum does for me. Then again I do use cash more often, and CC for fuel, travel, and larger items. - clarke thomas
I quite like the finance/community at http://wesabe.com seems very interesting, however not good with international banks - Peter Efland
I got signed up through Mint and -- I must say -- it is very, very good. I would like to be able to modify the budget categories, but... I can understand how that would throw off their larger scale trends. - Kevin Donahue
guys do sudoku at the firehall ,,leo - fotographic
Someone tweeted me the site http://fitbrains.com - seems similar to Lumosity but it's free. And, of course, I've done Brain Age on the DS. Similar games. - Leo Laporte
Leo, I think if you love what you are doing and are excited every day about life and can't wait to get up and doing, then your brain will still rock on WAY into your 100s. You got the juice Leo! You'll last all the way. The bliss of being engaged in something exciting, inspiring, helpful, etc --- that's the best for me to keep my mind clear. That and a book to index on molecular neuropharmacology! - Jeff Evans
Has anyone used both Lumosity and Fit Brains that can recommend one? $7/month isn't bad, and is half the price of WoW. :-P - Matt Horton
I do this kind of thing all of the time. I recently decided to go back and revisit algebra and calculus just for the mental exercise. - Akiva Moskovitz
Thanks Leo for the links to Lumosity and FitBrains - cool - Susan Beebe
Susan Beebe just tweeted FitBrains. I'm about to sign up for it now. Looks fun :) - Corvida
I hate to be cynical, but their ratio of two developers to six bloggers/copywriters/PR peeps sounds about right. When your product is a commodity, marketing makes all the difference. - Jake
We saw the exchange, Mike. I think in retaliation, you should make Techmeme only display stories from the TechCrunch network, for a full day. - Louis Gray
@julianbaldwin Are you serious, the thought of not checking Techmeme almost seems sacrilegious to me. There is a huge stream of really interesting stories coming from around the blogosphere and Techmeme helps me to sort the good from the crap! - Josh Chandler
i usually trust my own judgment to sort the crap out. - Nathan Eckenrode
you must be talking about the threaded echoes ? word. - Julian Baldwin
@julianbaldwin you are so right, that is the one thing that annoys the heck out of me at Techmeme! I don't know what they think is benefiting us by doing this! - Josh Chandler
ditto Josh, for me Techmeme is critical for avoidance of drowning in noise - Sean Savage
Techmeme is fine for it's purpose, but if you really want to hear what people are saying, try subscribing to blogs not related to technology or social media - Julian Baldwin
Like Julian, I don't check Techmeme as often since starting on friendfeed. Mostly it's just to see if there's anyone interesting I can follow here. - klecu
That's funny Michael. Thanks for the honesty :-) - Brian Carter
@julianbaldwin Exactly... It's like Cliff Notes for the echo chamber, so you can just stick your head in there from time to time to see the notable memes of the day -> more time to spend w/ more diverse sources - Sean Savage
"The Iraq war is to blame for high gas prices as its cost has weakened the dollar and driven oil speculation, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), a national co-chair of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, said today." - newsjunk.com
Discussion about the connections between the Iraq War, the rotten economy and stratospheric prices for oil and gas should be front and center in American politics. But the very same neoconservative mainstream media which served as cheerleaders for the war want to keep subject far away from the consciousness of the American public. - Sean McBride
More Democrats, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), finding blame instead of offering substantive solutions to the price of gas. - Paul W. Swansen
An excellent start to bringing down the price of oil and gas would be to stop threatening to attack Iran. It would also help to stop dumping several trillions of dollars down the drain in Iraq, with the sole effect of greatly increasing the power of Muslim fundamentalists in the region and devaluing the dollar. Neoconservatives in the Republican Party who control John McCain have promised to escalate these problems, not solve them. - Sean McBride
I call it "Bush's tax." See, Republicans always say "we don't increase taxes." But yet they do when they spend billions of dollars with no other way to find them. See, when we don't pay for what our government is doing in real taxes, the treasury just prints more dollars, decreasing the worth of the dollar (and THAT is a HUGE decrease in real worth -- just go to London or Paris and see how badly we've faired in the past four years) and increasing prices for anything we import, including oil. - Robert Scoble
Paul, if we put political biases aside for a moment, isn't it reasonable to identify a problem's causes as a precursor to identifying viable solutions? - Kevin Fox
I view the Iraq war as far more an economic problem than geo-political at this point. We can't afford this war. It's had a negative effect on the dollar and you know who does fund our debt? Foreign nations like China and Japan. That's who we owe - more and more. The problem is - a majority of Americans don't understand debt themselves! - AJ Kohn
Robert - Bush has effected a huge transfer of wealth (trillions of dollars) from the American middle class to the military-industrial complex and super-wealthy (billionaires, decamillionaires and hectomillionaires), while greatly devaluing the dollar and pushing the price of oil and gas into the stratosphere. Bush hit the trifecta. Much more of these trendlines, and we will witness the economic collapse of the United States. I'm surprised that real Republicans (fiscal conservatives) aren't running around with their hair on fire. - Sean McBride
Wow someone mentioned the elephant at the tea party! - Jim Stewart
What I find most frightening about the current state of the economy is not it's current state, but rather the decade(s) it may take to fully recover. - Sean Brady
Sean: the Republicans I met with last week on the Hill weren't very happy with Bush, that's for sure. Washington DC is waiting for someone to push the reboot button. - Robert Scoble
Robert: it's too bad Republicans didn't do a better job of protecting their best principles and interests when they had a chance over the last eight years. The damage is going to be difficult to repair. And Bush and Cheney could inflict much more damage before the reboot. (Giving a green light for Israel to attack Iran is one possibility.) - Sean McBride
Robert: I hate politics. If the republicans on the hill see the need to push the reboot button, why are they not pushing it. I guess the answer is politics. Ugh. - Sean Brady
We had one of those not too far from my hometown, Trondheim. It was known as Speilsalen ("hall of mirrors"): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.... Sadly it collapsed last autumn - one of the very tangible effects of a warmer climate. - Thomas Brox Røst
I saw one of those last year in Iceland. Incredible experience. - Ole Begemann
