I’m still trying to figure out why eBay is paying $2.6 billion (or more, depending on performance, for Skype. Judging from the Business Week article, analysts are having trouble figuring out what’s going on as well. Here’s the closest Business Week comes to taking a stab:
EBay buyers and sellers can communicate with each [...]
I just finished reading Reza Aslan’s No god but God,which I picked up after watching the author interviewed on The Daily Show and reading Phil Carter’s recommendation over at Intel Dump. The author succeeds at his main task — explaining the history of Islam, from its origins in the Arabian desert, through the life [...]
Pfizer is offering free prescription drugs to Katrina survivors.
I also heard from a friend who told me that Time Warner converted some trucks that they normally use for promotional events to help provide on the scene Internet access to Katrina survivors. The trucks have a satellite link to the Internet and a bunch of terminals [...]
It seems like every day, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina offers up more outrages (created by humans), and my energy for commenting at length is ebbing. Some outbound links:
FEMA prevents volunteers from setting up low power radio station to serve refugees in the Astrodome. In all of this, the thing that pisses me off the most [...]
I have no use for an iPod nano, and yet I want one. It’s sleek, gorgeous, and tiny, and it has a color display. The iPod nano goes for $199 in the 2 gig model and $249 in the 4 gig model. The iPod Mini is no more, being that it is inferior to [...]
The BBC reports that Yahoo’s Hong Kong operation helped the Chinese police track down a journalist who published a Communist Party memo. The guy wound up with a 10 year prison sentence. Reporters Without Borders has more.
I think it would be silly to privatize disaster relief, but it’s hard to miss how much better corporations did in planning for and responding to Katrina than the government did at any level. When President Bush looks for a replacement for FEMA chief Michael Brown, he ought to go beyond his list of cronies [...]
Apparently the reports of Potemkin food distribution stations set up for President Bush’s aerial survey of New Orleans were misreported.
Mark Schmitt describes the willingness of people to place their faith in President Bush in terms of cognitive dissonance without describing it as such:
But there’s a factor here that I think is always neglected in these polls: There’s always a thin line between what we believe and what we wish to be true, [...]
Did you know that Hurricane Katrina struck before New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin had a chance to distribute hurricane preparedness DVDs to New Orleans’ low income population that would have let them know in advance that in the event of an evacuation, they would be left to their own devices? This is not a man [...]