The New York Times has an excellent (and very long) piece on how militias and other groups are now so numerous in Iraq that there’s very little room for hope the country will get back on its feet any time soon.
Some random speculation on which companies will get snapped up next by Google, Yahoo and the like.
That’s not really news, but here’s the proof, courtesy of Wired News.
More Kryptonian sweetness, as the clock counts down to my most anticipated movie of the year. There’s a few more bits and pieces in this new trailer, and the scene at the very end…..well, just download it.
The required gadgetry isn’t here yet, but eminent prognosticators are predicting that in a few years we’ll be toting around combo wifi/cell phones. This does the cellular providers no good, of course, and they’ll fight it tooth and nail, particularly here in Canada, which has the worst options and least whiz-bang phones available.
Foreign Policy has an interview up with Michael Scheuer, the former head of the Osama Bin Laden intelligence unit of the CIA, and the author of Imperial Hubris, a book I haven’t read yet but will definitely pick up after reading this interview. Scheuer says the last thing you want is a general in charge of a spy agency, and that pretty much everything the Bush Administration has done post-9/11 to address flaws in the intelligence apparatus has been an abysmal failure.
We all use Youtube (which seemingly came out of nowhere) to fire off short videos, trailers and the like to each other on a daily basis. But how can this upstart service, currently pumping out millions of streams, make a buck? Engadget is on the case.
The second 9/11 movie of the summer, World Trade Center, is due to hit theatres in August, and with no less than Oliver Stone (JFK, Nixon, Platoon, *cough*Alexander*cough*) at the helm. The trailer can be seen here. I’m a little conflicted…on the one hand, I agree that 9/11 is as legitimate an event to document through film as any other piece of history, and I’d rather see Ollie tackle it than say….Uwe Boll, but at the same time….yeesh. United 93 at least eschewed any moralizing, didn’t have any stars, and tried simply to recount what happened as it happened. Though by neccesity it had digital effects, it didn’t feel in the least bit slick. Having said that, I only needed to see it once….any more than that and I think you’re cheapening both the film and the event itself.
At any rate, I’ll probably succumb and see World Trade Center, simply because I’m partial to Oliver Stone, and it’s a subject of great interest to me. But I can see how a lot of people might not want to relive that day, especially in (from what I can see) a fairly Hollywoodized package.
Canwest’s print bid for the Canadian youth market, Dose, is no more. The plug got yanked yesterday on the print edition of the paper, though it will survive as a website. Personally, I thought it was a fairly well-put together, slick little rag, which isn’t surprising since it was more or less the pet project of one of the Canwest poobah’s children. But it wasn’t anything I’d read on a daily basis.
Full disclosure: I used to work for the Vancouver edition of Metro, one of Dose’s competitors, and I occassionally do a little freelance work for them.
Well, despite all the predictions of addiction, I’ve managed to keep my WoW playing in a relatively balanced state. Of course, because of this, my character, a sixth level zombie mage named HueyNewton, isn’t all that powerful. Mel’s a lot further in the game than I am; her level 12 dwarf hunter character, Monalingus, has a pet bear, and is quite a little asswhupper. We’ve pretty much fallen into a routine where she plays the game on my laptop and I sit next to her on the couch, reading a book until something interesting happens in the game. So not only am I not addicted, I’m actually making productive use of my time AND being an attentive boyfriend. Yeah! Go Me! And…so forth. 🙂