About Me 0096: January 2011

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

The Importnace of online reputation management

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Monday, January 24, 2011

personal finance blog

Jeff Attwood:

Coding Horror: Trouble In the House of Google: If these dime-store scrapers were doing so well and generating so much traffic on the back of our content – how was the rest of the web faring? My enduring faith in the gravitational constant of Google had been shaken.... I can't help noticing that we're not the only site to have serious problems with Google search results in the last few months.... Anecdotally, my personal search results have also been noticeably worse lately. As part of Christmas shopping for my wife, I searched for "iPhone 4 case" in Google. I had to give up completely on the first two pages of search results as utterly useless, and searched Amazon instead.

People whose opinions I respect have all been echoing the same sentiment -- Google, the once essential tool, is somehow losing its edge. The spammers, scrapers, and SEO'ed-to-the-hilt content farms are winning.

Like any sane person, I'm rooting for Google in this battle, and I'd love nothing more than for Google to tweak a few algorithmic knobs and make this entire blog entry moot. Still, this is the first time since 2000 that I can recall Google search quality ever declining, and it has inspired some rather heretical thoughts in me -- are we seeing the first signs that algorithmic search has failed as a strategy? Is the next generation of search destined to be less algorithmic and more social?

It's a scary thing to even entertain, but maybe gravity really is broken...

Vivek Wadhwa:

Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google: This semester, my students at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley researched the VC system from the perspective of company founders. We prepared a detailed survey; randomly selected 500 companies from a venture database; and set out to contact the founders. Thanks to Reid Hoffman, we were able to get premium access to LinkedIn—which was very helpful and provided a wealth of information. But some of the founders didn’t have LinkedIn accounts, and others didn’t respond to our LinkedIn “inmails”. So I instructed my students to use Google searches to research each founder’s work history, by year, and to track him or her down in that way.

But it turns out that you can’t easily do such searches in Google any more. Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search.

We ended up using instead a web-search tool called Blekko. It’s a new technology and is far from perfect; but it is innovative and fills the vacuum of competition with Google (and Bing).

Blekko was founded in 2007 by Rich Skrenta, Tom Annau, Mike Markson, and a bunch of former Google and Yahoo engineers. Previously, Skrenta had built Topix and what has become Netscape’s Open Directory Project. For Blekko, his team has created a new distributed computing platform to crawl the web and create search indices. Blekko is backed by notable angels, including Ron Conway, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Clavier, and Mike Maples....

In addition to providing regular search capabilities like Google’s, Blekko allows you to define what it calls “slashtags” and filter the information you retrieve according to your own criteria. Slashtags are mostly human-curated sets of websites built around a specific topic, such as health, finance, sports, tech, and colleges. So if you are looking for information about swine flu, you can add “/health” to your query and search only the top 70 or so relevant health sites rather than tens of thousands spam sites. Blekko crowdsources the editorial judgment for what should and should not be in a slashtag, as Wikipedia does. One Blekko user created a slashtag for 2100 college websites. So anyone can do a targeted search for all the schools offering courses in molecular biology, for example. Most searches are like this—they can be restricted to a few thousand relevant sites. The results become much more relevant and trustworthy when you can filter out all the garbage.

The feature that I’ve found most useful is the ability to order search results. If you are doing searches by date, as my students were, Blekko allows you to add the slashtag “/date” to the end of your query and retrieve information in a chronological fashion. Google does provide an option to search within a date range, but these are the dates when website was indexed rather than created; which means the results are practically useless. Blekko makes an effort to index the page by the date on which it was actually created (by analyzing other information embedded in its HTML). So if I want to search for articles that mention my name, I can do a regular search; sort the results chronologically; limit them to tech blog sites or to any blog sites for a particular year; and perhaps find any references related to the subject of economics. Try doing any of this in Google or Bing

The problem is that content on the internet is growing exponentially and the vast majority of this content is spam. This is created by unscrupulous companies that know how to manipulate Google’s page-ranking systems to get their websites listed at the top of your search results. When you visit these sites, they take you to the websites of other companies that want to sell you their goods. (The spammers get paid for every click.) This is exactly what blogger Paul Kedrosky found when trying to buy a dishwasher. He wrote about how he began Googleing for information…and Googleing…and Googleing. He couldn’t make head or tail of the results. Paul concluded that the “the entire web is spam when it comes to major appliance reviews”.

To many people Facebook is a tool to announce what they are doing or what they have done, yet to some Zambians, it is being used as ‘Agony Aunt’ from which they are seeking advice on many social problems affecting them.

Facebook seems to have filled up the vacuum that Zambians newspapers have failed to fill up. For starters, Zambian newspapers do not have the luxury of space to provide such a service as most of them only go up to 12 pages comprising both editorial and advertising content.

Editorially, the pages are divided into two to three news pages, a business page, a foreign page and a features page, which also carries the editorial and letters columns and one or two features, and a sports page. The rest of the space is dedicated to advertising which means that people seeking advice on personal matters such as marriage cannot be accommodated.

A social work graduate from the University of Zambia, Tina Banda, started a Facebook page called Real Life and Hot Issues Discussion Forum with Tina Banda on which a number of topics are posted everyday and responses given by other Facebook users.

The objective of the Real Life and Hot Issues Discussions is:

Our Ultimatum objective is to shape people’s lives positively and to become the world’s most effective BLOG in educating the public on Real Life issues.

The group focuses on:

OUR focus will be on INFIDELITY,MOTIVATION,JESUS & THE BIBLE TEACHINGS, POLITICS,FINANCE,SOCIAL -ECONOMICAL ISSUES,MARRIAGE /RELATIONSHIPS AND SEX, YOUTH PROBLEMS,EDUCATION,ENTERTAINMENT,CURRENT & HISTORICAL EVENTS,GLOBALISATION,BUSSINESS,TECHNOLOGY,LEGAL ISSUES,ECOLOGICAL ISSUES,FASHION,GOSSIP,CLIMATE CHANGE AND LOVE.We have chosen to come up with the afore mentioned categories as there has been various news on the same issues all over the world…..

A typical contribution goes like this:

Some men are fond of having a permanent girlfriend besides (the) wife. Some just decide to marry as many wives as they want (Due to GREEDY/SELFISH). Must polygamy be encouraged? Can a man genuinely love 2 women the same way? How fair is it to us WOMEN? READ STORY BELOW AND ADVISE Maturely.

Tina i need help very much. Am 33yrs old woman with three kids that i love so very much, i have been married for seven yrs now, and its been a sad stiuation that when my husband was transfered to mufulira he completly changed, he no loger sl…eeps at home, he has inpregnanted his workmet and now he has even shifted to her house and they are staying together, he realy visits his children and now the children are asking me wether i chessed there dad, the whole family have tried and have failed to convince him, he keeps on saying that i love them both and yet i cant see that love for me in him, non of his family members are happy abt this and they had a kitchen party and all his family members did not even attend it, i love this man i miss everything abt him, he pays rent for us and gives us his ration money but not as he used to give out, but i miss having that sweet thing in bed you know, i stay with his brother and i should comfess that i have stated going out with a diferent guy in the hood, and his young brother is suspecting that and he is in support but i feel guilt cause i have never done it before, please help what should i do? go on cheating on him or just relax until he comes back into his senses?

Please help me am dieing with this!!![sick].

A typical response from users goes like this:

Mwenda Sitali says:

You have bn brilliant so far but you ar now messing up yourself.i know its difficult and your ar missing your chocolates in bed.The best thing to do ask your husband to free u up(divorce) so that you can go and look for chocolates elsewhere with a free mind.Your husband is not being fair with u.He is getting his chocolates and you aint getting anything(selfish zambian men)Thats mental torture since you also have a nice taste for chocolates.merry xmas bt no chocs for you.lo[sic]

Meza Mphande says:

Dear Lady: Yours is a familiar case that has happened to many women out there in marriages.It unfortunately has been a trend and other people have come to allude to the conclusion that this happens at some stage in marriage life.But my advi…se is that DO NOT go on with this relationship with this man you are seeing now as you are now doing the very THING you are fighting against your husband.Correctly,so he is very wrong in his actions, regardless of what his side of the story could be becoz marriage is a high institution and there exists channels to solve marital problems that could be of a personal nature between the two of you. Remember,despite all this,you are still legal husband & Wife as you have not divorced.So for now,with all this turmoil, you will continue to devote to your husband.Remain faithful to yourself and him.

If you feel the betrayal is unbearable and cant continue living with him,then you can seek divorce in the courts and set yourself free to start another relationship, and be respected.From your letter, you still love him despite all this, so remain faithful for now, until when you decide to take the step i have put above.

Another topic on the discussion board is about lobola (bride price):

Should lobola correspond to the amount of investment that parents spent on the woman?

Pkapanya Kapanya says:

Nice one Tina! I dont think so. The man marrying is also worth quite something in terms of investment from his family. Id say it should just be enuf to try and compensate for the wman not being home close at hand to help her family freely unlike when she is with the husband and her key responsibilities shift to the man's family. However, i would want mine to be just enuf for me to be able to return incase thngs dnt work out or am not kept well. lol!

Victor Chanda says lobola is not a price for a commodity:

Tina, lobola is not compensation neither is it a price for a commodity. It is a TOKEN of appreciation to the woman's family on how well groomed she is. undersevedly this commercialisation is a misinterpretation of the basis on which this was founded. We are talking of a human being not cattle, to be paid by the highest bidder… Over the years a lot of distortion on this have evolved including the women putting their own price tags. A woman can be formally educated but that does not make her a good wife there a lot of attributes which make a woman a good wife.

The latest topic at the time of writing this post is about a man who had to forge a marriage certificate to register his son as dependant at work and now he wants to marry. The man says:

The certificate bears no signature only our names and name of marrying officer and the witness plus church date stump. A layer said he can challenge her in court but still i will be charged with forgery which in this case i may end up in jail and my employers cant tolerate it, this i know. This will cost me more than i can bear. I offered a lumpsome to make her keep quite but she refused saying all she want is me taking her as my wife thus threatening my fiancee. I forged it coz i loved her but not for a wife coz she isnt a marriage type. We agreed that child maitainance is the allowance she gets which is more than k2.7m per month. Plz what more can a man do to an ex

Asked what motivated 27 year-old Tina, a sales and marketing executive of a Zambian-based Kenyan company, to start Real life & Hot Issues?

She said she was motivated to start the Facebook version of Agony Aunt because of her passion to assist humanity in stressful social situations and occurrences:

I have always wanted to play a role in shaping peoples’ lives, laying [sic] information and enhancing decision making skills in people, motivate the low spirited/hopeless people in society and learn more on cultural diversity and how people from different countries share their perceptions/cultural values and traditions.

I also do not like seeing people go through emotional stress/suffering due to social problems because I have seen how we women are vulnerable in most situations and we fail to open up even to friends or relatives. I always thought bringing out hot issues of the voiceless women/men will always help one or two people on social networks like Facebook and now I get a lot of mails in my Facebook inbox just to have them posted on the Real Life wall so they can get various responses and experiences from other people.

“It is for the above reasons that I developed a passion to talk about real life issues that people got through and other hot issues of humanity affecting society.

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Tuesday, January 18, 2011

People Making Money Net

Last month, Jim Harbaugh was ready to leave Stanford for Michigan. He’d been in secret talks with Michigan AD Dave Brandon – who, after the embarrassing 37-7 loss to Ohio State, had already made up his mind he was going to fire Rich Rodriguez – and was excited at the prospect of returning to his Alma mater. Peter King and other NFL writers reported Harbaugh was down to the Wolverines or the 49ers on the first weekend of 2011. (I firmly believe Harbaugh led Brandon to believe he was taking the job. Good luck getting anyone to confirm that.) But Stephen Ross entered the picture and blew it all up.

Ross is the Miami Dolphins owner. His estimated net worth is in the $3.4 billion range. He’s such a heavy donor to Michigan that the Business School is named after him.

His Dolphins were thumped on the final day of the regular season (Jan. 2) by the Patriots, 38-7. And even though coach Tony Sparano turned a 1-15 Miami team in 2007 into a playoff team in 2008, he struggled the last two years, going 7-9 (a league-worst 1-7 at home this year). This was Ross’s perfect storm – the Dolphins’ season was a disaster (the QB injuries didn’t help), the hottest coaching prospect in the sport was in town for the Orange Bowl and hey, why not try to money-whip him into coming to South Florida?

And I’m hearing that’s what happened. While Michigan was ready to make Harbaugh one of the highest paid coaches in the country – supposedly in the $3.5-4.5 million range, which would put him in the vicinity of Tressel ($3.8) and Miles ($3.9); the John Clayton figure of $5.2 million seems absurd, but who knows – his eyes lit up the weekend before the Orange Bowl when Ross started to sell him on the big boy money he could make in the pros. (Jason LaCanfora of the NFL Network reported Harbaugh’s clandestine meetings in Miami with Ross, but made no mention of money.)

Pete Carroll money.

Carroll, of course, left USC last year for the Seattle Seahawks, where he’s supposedly making $33 million over five years (for control of football operations). You may recall Harbaugh’s mini-rivalry with Carroll a couple years back – the classic “What’s your deal” moment. Did Ross plant the idea in Harbaugh’s head that he can make $6-6.5 million a year in the NFL? How could Harbaugh not be overwhelmed by this interest from the NFL, where some teams appeared ready to double his $3 million salary?

Michigan was out. And Harbaugh’s Monday night destruction of Virginia Tech only drove up his price tag.

Now the question becomes – is Harbaugh willing to transplant his family 3,000 miles across the country to coach the Dolphins (at perhaps $6.5 million a year) or would he rather take slightly less money (guessing: $5.75 million per?) to keep his family on the West Coast and coach the 49ers? Or does he at the last second say, “well, maybe I want to go to a college town where the winters are brutal and coach my Alma mater for significantly less money than stay on one of the coasts and coach in the sunny weather.” ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit seems to think that will happen.

We’ve commented before on the near-impossibilty of teasing decent inflation estimates out of China. Despite that, we were early to comment that inflation was getting out of control. From a joint post with Marshall Auerback in February:

The government has engineered an enormous increase in money and credit in the past year. In fact, it seems to be as great as 5 years’ growth in credit in the previous Chinese bubble. The increase in money and credit is so great and so abrupt that you tend to get a high inflation quite quickly even if there are under utilised resources. Add to this the fact that China simultaneously is providing massive fiscal stimulus.

This combination is the making of a very messy situation. If China seeks to sustain demand via fiscal policy, the result is likely to be a big inflation problem. With many Chinese students steeped in Chicago School monetary theory coming home and assuming positions of authority, they could push for an aggressive, Paul Volcker-style effort to stop inflation.

But, what if the they don’t? Inflation can take off and thereby begin to ERODE the competitiveness of Chinese exports. Nouriel Roubini pointed out this issue in 2007: if China didn’t revalue, inflation would do the trick regardless. A continued high rate of inflation relative to its trade partners would push up the price of goods in home currency terms, which in turn translates into higher export prices. This might be the real reason why China is so reticent to revalue its currency. The Americans might go crazy if the Chinese devalued, but if the inflation is high enough, they might have to do it, as it will severely erode their terms of trade and cause their tradeables sector to collapse.

Or the hard-line monetarists triumphing by fighting inflation and the result is riots as unemployment increases.

Note that we pointed out that China was becoming less dependent on exports, but by increasing investment, which we also saw as unsustainable:

Exports are the only area where China makes any kind of money because they can sell these products for about 10 times what they obtain for a comparable product in the domestic economy (where profits are virtually nil). The export sector is a big contributor to overall super excessive fixed investment in China. Dollar appreaciation means foreign direct investment will go to zero net.

There will be strong forces for a reduction in fixed investment in this large sector. Hence, there is a good chance that even without monetary tightening by the Chinese authorities, the overall fixed investment boom in China will turn down….Nobody is thinking about this scenario but it is a real possibility. And with fixed investment now at fifty per cent of GDP (which is unprecedented in any economy) and exports at more than thirty, we’re looking at ratios that have never been reached before on a combined basis.

And the story in recent months from China has been of evidence of inflation. Consider this recap from Patrick Chovanec:

I’ve consistently argued that pent-up inflation poses a serious threat to China in 2011, I’ve also been predicting that we would almost certainly see the CPI rate dip in December, given the government’s high-profile crackdown on food prices. My reasoning was based on politics, not economics: it was politically imperative for China’s leaders to show they were taking action to rein in the skyrocketing cost of living, and they had the tools at their disposal to enforce a short-term, targeted result.

Price controls, and related crackdowns on speculation and hoarding, make bold headlines but do nothing to solve the economic pressures causing inflation. In China, those pressures arise from the fact that, due to China’s stimulus policies, its money supply has expanded more than 50% over the past two years. There’s just more money out there chasing the same amount of goods. Capping prices can’t change the fact that money buys less; it only changes how people are forced to deal with that fact – usually in a way that creates even bigger problems, like shortages or black market corruption.

Peter Tasker, in a Financial Times comment, argues that rising wages pose a fundamental challenge to China’s strategy:

The China story that has been sold so skilfully all over the world is simply another version of the “new era” thinking that has characterised every investment mania from the South Sea bubble to the dotcom frenzy….

There are good grounds for concern about the future. A significant increase in the profit share of national income, as we have seen in China this century, implies a significant decrease in the labour share – meaning that wages fail to keep up with economic growth. The other side of this is apparent in the gross domestic product numbers – a decline in the contribution of consumption and a ballooning dependence on investment. The longer these trends continue, the greater the ultimate reversal.

We’ve seen this movie before – 40 years ago, to be exact. In the 1960s Japan was achieving year upon year of double-digit GDP growth, fuelled by government-directed investment into infrastructure projects….

In the mid-1950s, Japanese labour had taken 60 per cent of total value added. In the miracle years this ratio fell to 50 per cent, then started a V-shaped recovery in 1970 as the labour market tightened. Ten years later it had soared to a plateau of 68 per cent. These gains had to be fought for. In the 1970s, Japan’s now dormant union movement was in its heyday. Profit margins were squeezed, and in real terms the stock market went nowhere for a decade.

Can workers grab a bigger share of the economic pie before the urbanisation process is complete? In Japan they did. In 1970 Japan’s urbanisation ratio (the proportion of urban population to total population) was still just 53 per cent. Currently the Chinese urbanisation ratio is 45 per cent, roughly where Japan was in 1964. However, Chinese statistics are notoriously unreliable. The floating population of unregistered urban migrants is estimated at between 50m and 140m people. So China’s true urbanisation ratio may already be close to Japan’s in 1970.

If China were to follow Japan, the next stage would be labour strife and inflation. The best way to avoid that outcome would be a radical tightening of the current super-easy monetary policy. But that would risk a serious slowdown and probably necessitate a large revaluation of the renminbi – both anathema to Beijing. Meanwhile, China’s reliance on a cheap currency is helping to fuel a trade war, in the words of the Brazilian finance minister.

There is no good way out of the corner into which China has painted itself. Rebalancing the economy is absolutely necessary. It is also a long-term project fraught with risks for China’s rulers – and for investors who have bought the story of inevitable western decline and unstoppable Chinese ascent.

The tendency of businesses and economies is to push successful models to their breaking point. We’ve over-relied on consumer debt and a cancerous growth of the financial sector; China has become unduly dependent on exports and investment. And each nation is fighting tooth and nail to stick with its old habits, precisely because the elites who’ve benefited from these strategies still wield considerable clout. So change is likely to come about only via disruption.

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Friday, January 14, 2011

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The situation with Aid for family/matrimonial matters is somewhat different and the rules are beyond the scope of this article. Broadly speaking if a litigant is on benefits then they won't have to make a contribution toward their legal costs and it will all be funded by Legal Aid. If they are not on benefits and earning a wage they may have to make a contribution towards the cost of their legal work. It happens that very few people who are not on benefits fall in to the category where all their costs would be publicly funded.

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There are several other specific and little-known steps that can accelerate your success with getting the right kind of mortgage and can help you avoid a bad credit mortgage--make sure to keep reading and researching.

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Obama's Tucson Speech Fails To Accommodate Cable News's Attention ...

Did you watch the memorial service in Tucson last night? It sure seemed to me to be a cavalcade of statemanship -- presidents of nations and universities and student bodies, governors new and old, political figures on the left and right ...

No, your zodiac sign hasn't changed – This Just In - CNN.com Blogs

Tattoo parlor owners must be salivating. An assertion in a Minneapolis Star Tribune article that our understanding of the zodiac is off by about a month -- and that therefore people have been identifying themselves with the wrong sign ...

LePage on NAACP: 'Tell them to kiss my butt' — Bangor Daily News

But leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People pointed out in a news reports published Friday that LePage had declined numerous invitations from the organization. Rachel Talbot Ross, state director of the ...

Thursday, January 13, 2011

personal finance budgets

Intuit-owned Mint.com is heading to schools today with the launch of a free, online program designed to educate middle-school students about personal finance and financial management.

Mint has partnered with educational publisher Scholastic to develop materials that parents and teachers can use to teach children the ins and outs of personal finance management. The materials includes lesson plans as well as an interactive game, to teach children money management, budgeting and goals.

For example, the program teaches children the concept of compound interest with real-life math problems, and encourages children to set goals and budgets with their own current work opportunities (i.e. babysitting).

Mint says the curriculum will be expanded to 30,000 classrooms nationwide early next year. Considering the state of the economy and credit, teaching children financial literacy and sounds personal finance practices at an early edge is an incredibly important initiative. In terms of branding, this is a big win for Mint, which can start building awareness of its tools among students at an early age.

So thinking about starting 2011 with a new and fresh finance app for your new and fresh WP7 device?

You have the chance now! moBudget has just been released for Windows Phone 7.

moBudget is a user friendly budgeting and expense tracking application. It will help you drive and organize both your personal income and outcome budgeting. By doing so, moBudget will also hint you about possible budgeting and money saving opportunities. Its main screen features a summarized dashboard with a set of intelligent indicators which will tell you how you are doing depending on your budgets and on the current date.

Forget about grabbing a calculator each time you need to get any numbers or if worried about making it to the end of the month or not; moBudget will tell you all: what you have, what you will have, what you owe and more. It will either inform, alert or advice you when needed so you don’t need to worry.

By allowing stepping through months, allows you to whether look back to see how you did on previous months or how you will be doing in the upcoming months, so you can fine tune your budgets to the optimal.

Take it with you, record your data and you will see how money won’t cause you a headache anymore!

More after the break.

Key features

Today Hub featuring a main dashboard with intelligent indicators

Upcoming and overdue payments, incomes, bills

Color-based and snapshot styled budget bar graphs for easy reading

Easy and fast input for tracking either expenses, incomes or transfer between accounts

Budget adjustment helper

Actual balance and budget balance adhoc *

Accounts and credit cards usage recording *

Cash flow bar graphs and out of funds predictions *

Credit card payment estimations and warnings

Can create future operations and recurrent operations

Multi currency support

Easy month back and forth navigation

Account balances reconcilation

Password protection in two ways (partial and complete)

Encrypted backups

More…!

* Estimated. Does not pull your bank information, however you can sync balances up to a specific date and moBudget will estimate the current and future balance and cash flow according to the data you register day to day.

Screenshots

So give it a try! App has a 15 day free trial period and currently is at 50% sale for Christmas.

– or- direct download link for Zune.

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Bad News, About Virgin Mi-Fi and Verizon Upgrades - NYTimes.com

Two announcements this week. Two big bummers. Two good things gone.

Apple, News Corp. Delay "Daily" iPad Newspaper | Peter Kafka ...

Turns out you'll have to wait a bit longer to see The Daily, Rupert Murdoch's long-awaited iPad news service. Apple and News Corp. have made a joint decision to push back next week's planned launch.

News Story Details

... McMurry, Schreiner, Sul Ross , Texas Lutheran, and HSU. The winner of the East Division is LeTourneau University of Longview, Texas. For more information, go to: http://www.ascsports.org/news/2010/12/16/GEN_1216105636.aspx ...

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Bad News, About Virgin Mi-Fi and Verizon Upgrades - NYTimes.com

Two announcements this week. Two big bummers. Two good things gone.

Apple, News Corp. Delay "Daily" iPad Newspaper | Peter Kafka ...

News Story Details

Bad News, About Virgin Mi-Fi and Verizon Upgrades - NYTimes.com

Two announcements this week. Two big bummers. Two good things gone.

Apple, News Corp. Delay "Daily" iPad Newspaper | Peter Kafka ...

News Story Details

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Bad News, About Virgin Mi-Fi and Verizon Upgrades - NYTimes.com

Two announcements this week. Two big bummers. Two good things gone.

Apple, News Corp. Delay "Daily" iPad Newspaper | Peter Kafka ...

News Story Details

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Bad News, About Virgin Mi-Fi and Verizon Upgrades - NYTimes.com

Two announcements this week. Two big bummers. Two good things gone.

Apple, News Corp. Delay "Daily" iPad Newspaper | Peter Kafka ...

News Story Details

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Bad News, About Virgin Mi-Fi and Verizon Upgrades - NYTimes.com

Two announcements this week. Two big bummers. Two good things gone.

Apple, News Corp. Delay "Daily" iPad Newspaper | Peter Kafka ...

News Story Details

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Bad News, About Virgin Mi-Fi and Verizon Upgrades - NYTimes.com

Two announcements this week. Two big bummers. Two good things gone.

Apple, News Corp. Delay "Daily" iPad Newspaper | Peter Kafka ...

News Story Details

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Bad News, About Virgin Mi-Fi and Verizon Upgrades - NYTimes.com

Two announcements this week. Two big bummers. Two good things gone.

Apple, News Corp. Delay "Daily" iPad Newspaper | Peter Kafka ...

News Story Details

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Bad News, About Virgin Mi-Fi and Verizon Upgrades - NYTimes.com

Two announcements this week. Two big bummers. Two good things gone.

Apple, News Corp. Delay "Daily" iPad Newspaper | Peter Kafka ...

News Story Details

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Bad News, About Virgin Mi-Fi and Verizon Upgrades - NYTimes.com

Two announcements this week. Two big bummers. Two good things gone.

Apple, News Corp. Delay "Daily" iPad Newspaper | Peter Kafka ...

News Story Details

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Bad News, About Virgin Mi-Fi and Verizon Upgrades - NYTimes.com

Two announcements this week. Two big bummers. Two good things gone.

Apple, News Corp. Delay "Daily" iPad Newspaper | Peter Kafka ...

News Story Details

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Bad News, About Virgin Mi-Fi and Verizon Upgrades - NYTimes.com

Two announcements this week. Two big bummers. Two good things gone.

Apple, News Corp. Delay "Daily" iPad Newspaper | Peter Kafka ...

News Story Details

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Bad News, About Virgin Mi-Fi and Verizon Upgrades - NYTimes.com

Two announcements this week. Two big bummers. Two good things gone.

Apple, News Corp. Delay "Daily" iPad Newspaper | Peter Kafka ...

News Story Details

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Bad News, About Virgin Mi-Fi and Verizon Upgrades - NYTimes.com

Two announcements this week. Two big bummers. Two good things gone.

Apple, News Corp. Delay "Daily" iPad Newspaper | Peter Kafka ...

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Monday, January 10, 2011

Money Making Secrets

The openness and transparency WikiLeaks has given us is invaluable—which is why I’m donating $20,000 to get its founder out of jail.

Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.

Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.

We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.

So why is WikiLeaks, after performing such an important public service, under such vicious attack? Because they have outed and embarrassed those who have covered up the truth. The assault on them has been over the top:

**Sen. Joe Lieberman says WikiLeaks "has violated the Espionage Act."

**The New Yorker's George Packer calls Assange "super-secretive, thin-skinned, [and] megalomaniacal."

**Sarah Palin claims he's "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands" whom we should pursue "with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders."

**Democrat Bob Beckel (Walter Mondale's 1984 campaign manager) said about Assange on Fox: "A dead man can't leak stuff... there's only one way to do it: Illegally shoot the son of a bitch."

**Republican Mary Matalin says "he's a psychopath, a sociopath ... He's a terrorist."

**Rep. Peter A. King calls WikiLeaks a "terrorist organization."

And indeed they are! They exist to terrorize the liars and warmongers who have brought ruin to our nation and to others. Perhaps the next war won't be so easy because the tables have been turned—and now it's Big Brother who's being watched… by us!

WikiLeaks deserves our thanks for shining a huge spotlight on all this. But some in the corporate-owned press have dismissed the importance of WikiLeaks ("they've released little that's new!") or have painted them as simple anarchists ("WikiLeaks just releases everything without any editorial control!"). WikiLeaks exists, in part, because the mainstream media has failed to live up to its responsibility. The corporate owners have decimated newsrooms, making it impossible for good journalists to do their job. There's no time or money anymore for investigative journalism. Simply put, investors don't want those stories exposed. They like their secrets kept… as secrets.

I ask you to imagine how much different our world would be if WikiLeaks had existed 10 years ago. Take a look at this photo. That's Mr. Bush about to be handed a "secret" document on August 6th, 2001. Its heading read: "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." And on those pages it said the FBI had discovered "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings." Bush decided to ignore it and went fishing for the next four weeks.

Supporters of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, hold posters during a protest in front of the British Embassy in Madrid, Spain on Dec. 11, 2010. (Photo: Stringer / AP Photo)

But if that document had been leaked, how would you or I have reacted? What would Congress or the FAA have done? Was there not a greater chance that someone, somewhere would have done something if all of us knew about bin Laden's impending attack using hijacked planes?

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