Wow, I haven't posted in awhile.

Guess that's what happens when blogger.com is so slow that I can't wait for it.

Anyhow, I saved the headlines I found interesting. Lucky you.

Credit Suisse First Boston was sneakily trying to make themselves money. Apparently they would give people pre-IPO if they would turn around and reinvest those profits immediately into other companies, through CSFB, at really expensive commissions. Whereas I'd pay Datek $9.99, they'd be paying $80,000. They were buying larger amounts of stock (Datek might charge more for that much stock), but they were charging a lot more.

Ford and Toyota are possibly going to work together on hybrid technology. I think this is smart. Everyone has to come up with it, but the R&D is really expensive. Especially with gas prices as low as they are (I paid $1.11 yesterday!), there's no immediate reason for them to build. But California's still saying that they expect zero-emissions at some point. I think that's as likely as HDTV or 911-triangulating cell phones, but eventually... the article also notes that Toyota might soon surpass Chrysler to become America's #3 automaker. Wow!

George Harrison died last night. He was pretty much before my time, but everyone's talking about it, so I suppose I would be remiss to leave it out.

I've always said it was dumb to use non-bank ATM's. And even then, only your own bank's ATM's. I never understood using public ATM's. They didn't seem as safe and several different banks lined up to rape you when it came to the fees involved in just getting your money. Which is why I've always advocated banking with a super-bank like Smells Fargo (my favorite), or Spank of America or Washington Screwuall (the worst bank in the world!) because they have ATMs everywhere. Well, turns out the Russian mob was operating a company that placed ATMs in delis and other convenience stores in New York. But the ATMs were all rigged. The mobsters were later able to get all the credit card numbers and PIN numbers out of the machines, print their own cards and make all kinds of withdrawals. They got caught, but it's a funny and clever idea. And even if some people go to jail, I doubt they recover all the money. So, in summary, I like the mob, using non-bank ATMs is dumb.

I read an interesting article. A poorly written article. An article that mostly read like a second grade book review. Where every paragraph starts the same. But in the parts where the book's content is discussed, it's kind of interesting. About how the music industry blew it. Because we all know the music industry blows.

People are already ripping apart their XBoxes. Which to me is cool. If it's going to become the centerpiece of a new entertainment system, eventually having a digital video recorder and stuff like that built in, why not figure out how to trick it out like you can a computer? People are already theorizing about how to add more memory and hard drive capacity, and finding that simple things like replacing some wiring make it run faster. Not to mention they're already building software to allow them to play multi-player games over the internet. I thought XBox was supposed to offer this, but...? Whatever. Rip the Xbox and make it better.

And a new study says that internet users watch less TV. They say that internet usage comes at a cost to television. I actually think that people without the internet are more easily entertained with the crap that people are putting out as television. I watch less TV. Because there's less worth watching and I feel guilty about how much I do watch. And even more than that, I record a lot of what I watch, and then watch it without commercials. Because commercials are lame.

Speaking of crap, ABC canceled Thieves. Sorry, uncle Jesse. Of course, I never watched the show, but isn't that half the battle, making it seem interesting enough to check out? How come Full House and Dukes of Hazard both had an uncle jesse? Were they trying to make Full House cooler?

And AOL can't weasel its way out of a lawsuit because it was automatically dialing in on long distance numbers without informing users. Who were getting giant phone bills. I thought this was what unscrupulous pornographers did. You probably got more bang for your buck from the porno people.

Weird stuff going on in Alaska, they're boiling the ionisphere in order to find underground structures on the other side of the planet.

And one last cool one... unmanned spy planes. Neat.

Happy Thanksgiving, belated.