Former blink 182 drummer, Travis Barker has been in a plane crash in South Carolina with DJ Am and four other people. The private Lear jet crashed across a highway next to the airport.
Travis Barker and DJ Am are alive but listed as critical, although the two crew died along with the other two passengers. [...]

Just like on Vista, is there a way to have a gadgets on windows xp?

the answer is by princebakalakashamalagadingdong :download google desktop. that should work for you.
www.pack.google.com

I have a sandisk cruzer 2.0 and vista recognises it but doesn’t bring upt the password part that lets me in, what am I doing wrong?

the answer is by sowhat? :USB thumb drives don’t have passwords. If you’ve never used it before this is what you do.
1. Go onto your desktop.
2. Click on Computer (in [...]

Just in case you had any doubts that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, and that the inmates were running the asylum, you just might have had some of those doubts removed in the past week. And those doubts were removed in a very dramatic fashion, as in frontal lobotomy fashion.

“George Carlin, why did you have to die so soon, just before all the fireworks started? Did you actually think that the world was becoming so ludicrous that you couldn’t take it anymore, or think that you would run out of material?”

Let’s look at some of the fun things which happened this week:

• Sanlu’s dairy products were found to have killed three babies, and caused injury to several thousand others (at least)
• Baidu was accused of offering to help cover up the scandal by not showing the scope of the scandal in its search results. I wonder what genius came up with the idea that they could cover up a scandal of such immense proportions for a miserable 3M yuan? And who was the genius on the management side who approved such a deal? This would have taken at least two people who had frontal lobotomies. Most of the time, people who come up with dumb ideas like this are only employed in government (Most notably the US government, where they usually run smear campaigns for politicians during elections.) As for Baidu/Alibaba, now Baidu is threatening to sue Alibaba for spreading the Sanlu story. (Isn’t China becoming more like the US every day? At this rate China will be run by lawyers in five years. A sure sign of national dementia.) Are these initial signs that the Americans’ efforts to package and sell stupidity to the Chinese are showing signs of success?
• Lehman Bros., a US investment bank, declared bankruptcy, and Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America for $50B. I have the utmost admiration for John Thain: Imagine taking a company which was rapidly going down the tubes, whose assets were unclear, and whose non-performing CDOs were increasing by the hour, and he SOLD it for $50B, finding a buyer in BA? Wow, that’s neat! How’d he do that? These bankers are amazing. None of that piddly million here, million there kindergarten dotcom stuff for these guys, we’re talking real money here (even though it’s US dollars).
• Is it just me, or am I thinking that Imagethief’s time has come in China? I keep on fantasizing what his first lessons for new official clients might be like. How about this:
  

  “First of all, let’s get it clear that lies, coverups and people getting poisoned are a necessary part of any nation’s path to greatness. There is no need to deny or cover it up; we must celebrate each event as achieving yet another milestone to greatness! Let’s celebrate it! Let’s roll in it! And let’s become more and more like America with each passing moment! Look at how the Americans don’t discriminate against the mentally handicapped anymore; instead they make them their leaders! If America can do that, then why can’t China! Our goal must be to pollute the global financial system on an even greater scale than the Americans have: this will show the world China’s power!”

Hmmm, on second thought…

Technorati Tags: alibaba, America, baidu, China, Chinese, financial, global, government, imagethief, PR, US

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Today, I was requested to delete a blog post about the Sanlu milk powder incident. The public relation capacity of this company is really strong, isn’t that a model of China best enterprise? To tie the interest of the company with the interest of the government and use the government’s administrative power to do the [...]

One of the fun things about China, and the Chinese Internet, is that new issues can pop up very quickly, and become major issues.

This has just happened with the issue of user privacy on the Internet. With more social network sites, and more users posting real information about themselves, along with contact information, etc. this has become a real issue.

I’m not going to offer a solution to this very complex issue. Instead, I’d like to bring up another issue: “How do you have a productive discussion, where all get a chance to contribute to the debate, get heard, and then come to some kind of agreement about a solution?”

Here is the problem. This issue flared up when many SNS sites started blocking Baidu’s spiders from crawling their sites. The official reason: to protect users’ privacy.

The problem is that there has been no discussion about what user privacy is. The definition of privacy is very different for a 12 year-old girl and her 40 year-old mother and, in turn, is very different from a 22 year-old gay man.

Each of them, or their parent/s, may have very different ideas of what constitutes user privacy. The gay man may not want to reveal his sexual orientation except for his closest male partner/s, and may not want anyone else, including family, to know. The same goes for religious affiliation, etc.

These are very real issues which need to be discussed and thrashed out in the open, and people need to be able to put forth their views for discussion. This is a vital and natural part of what constitutes a civil society, which is what the Chinese government supports and advocates.

Unfortunately, there is no clear mechanism for discussing a very complex issue like user privacy in China today.

Instead, we have companies coming out with thinly-disguised excuses about privacy, when in reality it looks more like a pissing match between companies over whose spiders can crawl over whose sites. Are the two groups going to come up with different, even opposing, ideas and definitions about what constitutes user privacy, and force people to choose one or the other? If that is the case, then it’s not really about user privacy, it’s about choosing between one camp or the other, with every user forced to make a choice.

But that isn’t what the Internet is all about. The Internet is all about empowering people so that they can make their own choices. The Internet is about pushing decisions to the edge, where people make their choices, and if they don’t like them, they can change them later on.

This is what is missing in China. Without this system or mechanism, there is just endless bickering and noise, and what should be a serious discussion with a well-thought conclusion, usually ends up in a lot of noise with the loudest shouters winning.

What is an important issue, usually ends inconclusively.

Or as the Chinese say 不了了之。

Chinese Internet users deserve something better.

Technorati Tags: baidu, China, Chinese, government, internet, spiders

I want a gadget for my google sidebar on my windows vista that tells me up to the minute price of gas. i have the stocks gadget, but what stock do i need to type in to get the actual price for a barrel of crude oil/gas/watever… thanks for the help!

the answer is by Cricket [...]

After months of preparation AOL has finally launched officially its new Chinese portal. It is accessible at chinese.aol.com ; I wrote earlier on this blog about whether AOL should purchase the .cn or .com.cn of their domains before launching. It seemed they chose to go the easy way, however with such a long url they [...]

Have a new pc used to be xp now vista, I hate it, how do I change back or is this impossible without a disc?

the answer is by Cameron S :You must buy a Windows XP Disk to downgrade, because it is really another piece of software that you don’t own. On personal experience, [...]

Ever since I got my computer with vista on it when I run iTunes it seems as if it is re-installing the program everytime I open the program. But now that I downloaded 8.0, I get the message that I must restart my computer for my settings to take effect, so in essence, I [...]