New York Rider Dies Protesting Mandatory Motorcycle Helmet Law →
"The medical expert we discussed the case with who pronounced him deceased stated that he would've no doubt survived the accident had he been wearing a helmet," said state Trooper Jack Keller.Darwin award nomination right here.
Microsoft to Partner With China's Leading Search Engine →
A year and a half after Google pulled its popular search engine out of mainland China, its rival Microsoft has struck a deal with the biggest Chinese search engine, Baidu.com, to offer Web search services in English.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Favorite Artists
A rough approximation (approximately in order) of my favorite artists and my favorite album and song of theirs:
- Phil Wickham, Heaven and Earth (Expanded Edition), "Heaven Song"
- Shane & Shane, Clean, "Embracing Accusation"
- Rich Mullins, Songs, "Awesome God"
- Red, Until We Have Faces, "Pieces"
- Starfield, Starfield, "Rediscover You"
- Switchfoot, Hello Hurricane, "Your Love is a Song"
- David Crowder Band, Illuminate, "Only You"
- Steven Curtis Chapman, Speechless, "With One Voice"
- Mark Schultz, Mark Schultz, "Until I See You Again (Ballad Version)"
- Building 429, Space In Between Us (Expanded Edition), "Singing Over Me"
A tough set of decisions. You can probably see patterns (male vocalists, strong lyrics, over-represented acoustic music).
Power Grid Change May Disrupt Clocks →
And everything else, apparently:
A yearlong experiment with the nation's electric grid could mess up traffic lights, security systems and some computers — and make plug-in clocks and appliances like programmable coffeemakers run up to 20 minutes fast.Great start to a news article...
"A lot of people are going to have things break and they're not going to know why," said Demetrios Matsakis, head of the time service department at the U.S. Naval Observatory, one of two official timekeeping agencies in the federal government.
Organizational Charts (via Bonkers World)
The iCloud Will Not Be Televised →
The inability/unwillingness/indifference to integrating Apple TV into the iCloud platform has left Apple's living-room flank exposed just as competitors are marshaling their forces there.One of those competitors being, of course, Microsoft. With Kinect, voice-control and motion largely eliminate the UI barriers to television input and with live TV integration coming in the fall, the Xbox360 will take a commanding lead in the living room as an entertainment system, not just a gaming console.
This is not to say Microsoft is unbeatable. Apple has the strategic ability to win content and deal with content providers. The hardware manufacturers like Google. But I think Microsoft has shown that its entertainment business has a cohesive strategy, supported by broad and diverse efforts within the company and partners without.
The Lego Barad-dûr →
This is insane. 50,000 lego pieces and 2 months of work:
Even more nerdy is the full Lego LOTR world others helped create along with it.
Instant Email: Hotmail 10x Faster →
Caching, prefetching, and asynchronous operations hit the Hotmail web interface, making common email operations up to 10x faster. The NextWeb goes so far as to say:
No longer can we chide Hotmail for being horrifically slow. That is now Gmail's bag to carry.
I'm one of the few people on the entire team not working on performance for the last couple of months, but this is a huge win for everybody. If you've got Hotmail, go check it out.
Price Gap: Storage vs Bandwidth →
We decided to take a look at how well Internet bandwidth to the home has kept up with another key ingredient of the cloud: hard drive prices. Below is the comparison and, unfortunately, it seems that while hard drive manufacturers have done a phenomenal job of capacity increases and price reduction - bandwidth to the home has not kept up.