Brian Gongol
Amazon boots WikiLeaks
Apparently the WikiLeaks site had been hosted on Amazon's servers, and Amazon removed the content at the request of Senator Joe Lieberman. One could be excused for having mixed feelings about the decision: On one hand, Amazon has every right to decide what can and cannot be hosted on its servers, and if it didn't want to be involved in the WikiLeaks phenomenon, it had every right to get rid of it. But the problem isn't necessarily that someone is hosting the content, or that it's being read -- it's that the content was in fact leaked in the first place by people who had an obligation not to do so. And if Senators are putting pressure on private companies instead of cleaning up the mess inside the government, then the hosting change is nothing more than a distraction from the fact that there's a problem inside the government itself.
American businesses keep getting more productive
Productivity increased at an annualized rate of 2.5% in the third quarter. Better productivity leads to better economic growth.
Cats as target practice
Wildlife researchers at the University of Nebraska think the only way to protect songbirds from homeless cats is to shoot the felines. Obviously, there are some cat lovers who think otherwise. But what about the birds? The state of Iowa is having trouble getting people to hunt enough deer to keep the population under control -- and deer don't kill songbirds. If the cat population is out of control, then something has to be done about it and it's incumbent upon the cat lovers to come up with a better idea.
Philips moves to China
The Dutch company is moving its headquarters for domestic appliances to Shanghai. Not just production, the headquarters.
Google enhances the crossover between Street View and Google Earth
The distance between yesterday's cartographers and today's real-time imaging is growing by leaps and bounds. Google's latest development seeks to make a nearly-seamless transition between zooming into a location from a whole-Earth angle right down to standing on the street without missing a frame.
If dinosaurs had raked leaves
Kinetic typography and the Shop-Vac
(Video) Someone spent hundreds of hours making up a music video made up of nothing but moving letters (in other words, "kinetic typography") and a handful of graphics. It's a little crazy, but nevertheless fun to see someone doing something creative under some serious restrictions. The beauty of art is in how it deals with constraints.
Iowa can't take water security for granted
