Shares of United plummeted 75 percent on the Nasdaq exchange today before trading was manually halted. All of this because of a chain of events that started when a link to an old story from 2002 on the air carrier’s bankruptcy appeared as a link on the website of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, was picked up by Google News, got written up by a newsletter produced by Income Securities Advisor, which in turn was distributed on the Bloomberg wire.

Read more

In an ideal world, people without a lot of discretionary income are given the electronic edition (which costs [nearly] nothing to distribute) for free. They act like the breezes that loft the dandelion seeds — they go around, telling people about the book and its merits. In this regard, they’re better than random breezes, for they undertake a directed distribution of the book, seeking to bring it to the attention of people who are likely to have a positive response to it.

Once the book lands in the hands of someone who does have discretionary income, that person is given a multitude of opportunities to engage in a commercial transaction with the writer and her publisher. These range from buying the book (which has many positive externalities, such as improving the book’s sales record and hence increasing the writer’s next advance and other stores’ orders of her books) to buying limited editions, memorabilia, tickets to a lecture or reading, etc.

Read more

Kaufman was a popular comedian in the 1970s who was on the TV series Taxi, and for his only starring film role he played a robot accountant in the obscure but amazing Heartbeeps (one of my favorite robot romance movies ever).

Read more

Call me crazy, but I’ve always valued efficiency. That’s what Chrome has done for the browser – it’s given users a capable efficient alternative to the bloated options that they currently have. It’s (unfortunately) a revolutionary concept. That’s exciting

Read more

3. Don’t be surprised to see more ads.

Traditionally, it is Web pages and not the browser itself that serves ads. Google isn’t saying it will change this paradigm, but it’s terms of service don’t rule that out either.

Read more

We do not see any connection between the events in the Caucasus region and the uranium deal. These are completely separate things.

Read more

One of the unsung heroes of the Hurricane Katrina disaster zone was occasional OStatic contributor, Aaron Huslage. Aaron drove from Portland to New Orleans, carting a truckful of telephony equipment, a big heart and a can-do attitude that, in less than a week, brought a rudimentary, improvised telephony network to twelve thousand displaced residents of the city. Six volunteers assembled a makeshift infrastructure, atop cell towers, water towers, powerhouses and other tall structures, using a Wimax backhaul and a 900Mhz Trango wireless link to connect civilian shelters – stretching wirelessly from Gulfport to affected areas over a range of around fifteen miles (Gulfport-Mississippi Power Tower-Waveland-Stennis-Port Bienville).

Read more

In my case, I’ve for the last two months been using Twitter to write a real-time thriller. Hence: Twiller. (Cheap word play is what you get when you disintermediate, as they say, your agent and editor).

Read more

Then he wrote Snow Crash, a book that postulated the Metaverse, an exquisitely fleshed-out vision of a digital alternative world, and Stephenson found himself at the front ranks of cyberpunk authors. “I was sort of going for broke with Snow Crash,” he told me a few years back. “I had tried to write stuff that was more conventional and that would be appealing to a large audience, and it didn’t work. I figured I would just go for broke, write something really weird, and not be so worried about whether it was a good career move or not.”

Read more

Perhaps this is a third sex. The concept of a third sex is one that’s been around for centuries in Indian and Thai cultures, and has come in and out of popularity in the Western world in modern times. Do we need to have a binary view of gender? Is it either/or?

Read more