My first personal website was hosted by GeoCities back in 1990s I don’t even remember the year but. I was free hosting limited in scripting but good enough on HTML. GeoCities was the place where many a modern-day internet nerd cut his or her teeth.

Now days hosting is fairly cheap and accessible, but was the good old days when I was an student with empty pocket looking to host my website for a presence.

RIP Geocities, goodbye old friend.

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Today I’m sad, besides his controversial life, I may say songs like “Billie Jean” was part of the great things back in 1983. In celebration of the music and memories, here is that magical moment to relive all over again.

Michael Jackson was unquestionably the biggest pop star of the ’80s, and certainly one of the most popular recording artists of all time.

Though Michael Jackson has been known for pretty much anything and everything under the sun besides music for the past 15 years or so, his accomplishments during the ’80s will always remain some of the most impressive in music history.

Please share your thoughts and remembrances of the eternal King of Pop.

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Never before the Detroit Big 3 car makers have faced such a big challenge. Their financial condition worsened a lot during this year because of both the malfunction of credit market and the sharp drop in automobile sales. Without government bailout, they are likely to go bankrupt soon and cost millions of jobs in the automotive industry. Even if only one of them collapse, it will drag down countless of suppliers and eventually the other two. To persuade the congress to provide financial bailout, the Big 3 have submitted their rescue plans to Washington DC yesterday. Here below is a summary what they will do:

GM

GM will need US$18 billion loan from the government in order to prevent from bankruptcy. In particular, some $4 billion must be available within this month, showing how alarming its cash reserve level is.

To persuade the congress to accept its request, GM promises the following cost cutting measures:

• Reduce workforce from 95,000 to 65,000-75,000 people
• Reduce dealerships from 6,450 to 4,700
• Sell Saab division
• Sell Hummer division
• Sell or eliminate Saturn division
• Downsize Pontiac to a niche brand
• Negotiate with UAW to cut labor  benefits
• CEO Rick Wagoner will receive $1 salary – yes, one US dollar.

Ford

The financial condition of Ford is healthier than both GM and Chrysler. It predicts it will have enough cash to survive until the end of next year. While it is seeking a government loan of US$9 billion, it hopes the loan will not be actually used. Ford forecasts its balance sheet will return to black in year 2011 through the following cost cutting measures:

• Close 6 plants in the next 3 years
• Sell Volvo division
• Negotiate with UAW to cut labor costs
• CEO Alan Mulally will receive $1 salary – yes, the same as his GM counterpart.
• Sell the company’s 5 corporate aircrafts

Chrysler

Similar to GM, the Cerberus-owned Chrysler needs money within this month to be safe from bankruptcy. The exact figure is US$7 billion. Besides, it also wants another US$6 billion from the government funding for green vehicles. For cost cut, Chrysler did not give details, only mentioning it will rationalise production, forge partnership with other car makers to share platforms and pay its CEO Bob Nardelli a salary of $1 – yes, the same as Rick Wagoner and Alan Mulally.

If your company look for a cheap yet hardworking CEO, you can look no further than Detroit. Yes, they do sometimes take corporate aircrafts to meetings and vacation, but these smart guys can get you billions of free government money.

US sales slide in November

The US auto market is experiencing the most severe sales decline in recent decades. In November, the total sales for all makers dropped 11 percent compare with October, or 37% compare with a year ago. In particular, GM dropped 41%, Chrysler 47% and Ford 31%. Even the Japanese could not escape from sharp decline – Toyota slid 34%, Honda 32% and Nissan 42%. Hyundai group suffered a 39% drop. Porsche lost 48% of sales, reflecting luxury sports cars are hit heavily by economy. Among the big car makers, only Volkswagen group (including Audi) dropped by less than 30 percent, which was 21%.

GM: -41%
Ford: -31%
Chrysler: -47%
Toyota: -34%
Honda: -32%
Nissan: -42%
Mazda: -31%
Mitsubishi: -35%
Subaru: -8%
Suzuki: -46%
Hyundai group: -39%
VW group: -21%
BMW group: -27%
Mercedes: -38%
Porsche: -48%

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German Doctor Cures an HIV Patient With a Bone Marrow Transplant

reporter writes

“HIV is the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Until now, HIV has no cure and has led to the deaths of over 25 million people. However, a possible cure has appeared. Dr. Gero Hutter, a brilliant physician in Germany, replaced the bone marrow of an HIV patient with the bone marrow of a donor who has natural immunity to HIV. The new bone marrow in the patient then produced immune-system cells that are immune to HIV. Being unable to hijack any immune cell, the HIV has simply disappeared. The patient has been free of HIV for about 2 years. Some physicians at UCLA have developed a similar therapy and plan to commercialize it.”

The details:
A Doctor, a Mutation and a Potential Cure for AIDS

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Barak Obama has been elected president beating Republican nominee John McCain. Great, maybe I was expecting what happened back in 2004 and 2000 with Florida. This time was just without disturbance and you could feel the emotions and hope of the people in Chicago thru the TV screen wishing for democrats back to the White House; awesome.

Obama is the first African-American to be nominated by a major American political party for president.  As the 44th president, Obama will move into the Oval Office as leader of a country that is almost certainly in. A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he became the first black person to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Obama’s challenge: fix economy, save world. “There will be no poor.”

It has been eight years since that fateful Election Night when United States stayed up as long as it could through the dark hours without a president, only to wake up to some of the darkest years in American history.

That’s why the sense of hope that swept Barack Obama into the White House now has been felt around the world, from the celebrations in Kenya to the parties in Europe, Asia, and around America herself.

No president, even with an overwhelming majority in Congress like Obama will have, can ever hope to solve all of this. But progress can be made on all fronts. Indeed, just turning in the right direction on some of them would be a huge success.

On the economy, Obama has a great challenge as voters expect results.

• Obama must solve a financial calamity that requires billions of dollars in spending that the U.S. doesn’t have.
• He must address a nation that feels overtaxed, yet is in desperate need of funds to save companies, jobs and homes.
• He must realign a broken financial regulatory system without adding a crippling new set of regulations.
• He must restore confidence in America’s economy in a world that just got sucker-punched by an exported credit crisis that is causing a global recession.
• He must pick a Treasury Secretary under the greatest global scrutiny a President has ever seen, not to mention cabinet posts for Defense, Environment, and even Trade that will take on strategic importance far beyond their historical legacies.
• Most importantly, he must enact as many of the vital social programs as he can while also cutting the national debt and budget deficit.

No doubt his speech was soaring and inspiring. But once he has made it to the White House, his actions will be measured far more than his words. This historic election will be a milestone in American politics. But Obama’s real place in history will measured by whether he actually has the chops to reform and rebuild an economy — the largest in the world — gone horribly and irrevocably awry.

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this is hilarious, are we still here?

Hello? Tap, tap, tap, this thing on? – Engadget

“It worked! The LHC was turned on this morning and has been shown to have worked. Engineers cheered as the proton particles completed their first circuit of the underground ring which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). (And we’re all still alive too!)”

My god… here the details:

09:49 — Confirmed, the first beam of protons has been fired! It took 48-seconds for the pulse to generate and then a tiny flash of light on a computer screen indicated a successful firing around the first 3-km of the 27-km ring — they will methodically extend the range throughout the day.

10:25 — The beam just completed the full ring (in stages) in less than an hour. Things are going much more quickly than expected. They are about to fire the beam around the complete ring, unimpeded.

First Beam Fired – http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4722261.ece

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Here three news articles about the public reaction to the Large Hadron Collider or LHC.

LHC scientists get death threats

So it’s come to this: Death threats against physicists. About what? The earth-destroying Large Hadron Collider, of course. Such is the angst that the American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even had death threats, said Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University… Read More

LHC and Faith-Based Science

Public reaction to the Large Hadron Collider is so ignorant and brain-dead we need a theory to explain what’s going on. I asked Charles King at Pund-IT for a theory. He offered this: I believe that much of the public reaction to the LHC is grounded in a kind of ignorance that might be called… Read More

Stephen Hawking: LHC vital, absolutely safe

Since the geniuses at CERN have failed to assuage amped-up (if entirely unfounded) fears that the Large Hadron Collider is actually a doomsday machine, they have reached up to the mountain to get Prof. Stephen Hawking himself to address the issue. He appeared on BBC 4, as the Telegraph reports.
Read More

For those new to what the LHC is check out the Large Hadron Rap:

CERN Rap from Will Barras on Vimeo.

More… http://webcast.cern.ch/index.html

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There is water ice on Mars within reach of the Mars Phoenix Lander, NASA scientists announced Thursday. Interesting read at Wired Science, read on:
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/mars-phoenix-tw.html

“Are you ready to celebrate?  Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars!  w00t!!!  Best day ever!!” the Mars Phoenix Lander tweeted at about 5:15 pm.

These guys keep celebrating with every success and I’m totally agree with it! keep up the great work NASA!!!

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I’m Dominican, and I can tell you this is true “to continue on the path of stability and progress”. PRD was far from any guarantee with their candidate and forget about PRSC party candidate.

The progressive liberal Fernandez was ahead with 53.9 percent of the vote — enough to avoid a runoff — with more than 62 percent of ballots counted, the Central Election Committee announced on Friday.

Social Democrat Vargas was at 40.4 percent, while PRSC party candidate Amable Aristy Castro was in third with 4.63 percent, the committee reported.

And despite isolated incidents of violence, the voting tool place in a climate of order and organization where every person I know told me, that voted without any trouble or wait.

I’m happy, We are happy as we are a developing country. We want continuity.

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Why you’re paying so much, and why you could soon be paying less.

Filling up at the pump has become such a pain in the pocketbook that for the first time ever, gasoline consumption in the U.S. has stopped increasing. But even though America’s consumption has been virtually flat for the past five years, prices in that same period have nearly doubled, with crude oil recently hitting record highs.

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G-7 continues to monitor the forex market very closely and is concern about the fluctuations in exchange rates. Most of the analysers said that these words would help to the dollar not to lose so fast against the major currency. In World-Signals.com we do not believe the win of the dollar by G-7 meeting. The dollar will remain under new attacks and we can see levels of 1.60 and above this month said George Marshal analyser in World-Signals.com. At the same time the cut of oil production by OPEC will boost the oil above $112 up to $115 in very short time that will help to the euro to gain against the dollar above 1.60. The world economy is in crisis and we are not seeing the bottom yet, said George Marshal. The situation will out of control if all majors banks not start working together to avoid the consequences by the credit crisis and U.S. recession together with strong inflation in Europe. The inflation will remain the main concern for Europe. Europe will give to the world the inflation crisis, while U.S. spread the credit crisis. U.S. and Europe send to the world recession, high inflation, as the crisis already starts in Europe.

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WASHINGTON – A new brain-scan study may help explain what’s going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported.

The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken.

“You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area,” said Camelia Kuhnen, a Northwestern University finance professor who conducted the study with a Stanford University psychologist.

Their research appears in the current edition of the peer-reviewed journal NeuroReport.

The study only involved 15 heterosexual young men at Stanford University. It focused on the sex and money hub, the V-shaped nucleus accumbens, which sits near the base of the brain and plays a central role in what you experience as pleasure.

When that hub was activated by the erotic images, the men were far more likely to bet high on a random chance game that would earn them either a dollar or a dime. Each man made more than 50 gambles under brain scans.

Stanford psychologist Brian Knutson, a lead author of the study, says it’s all about the power of emotion and arousal and our financial decisions. The trigger doesn’t have to be sex _ it could be chocolate or a winning lottery ticket.

“It didn’t matter if the sexy woman didn’t tell you anything about the odds of winning a roulette game,” Knutson said. “What really matters is that the sexy woman is having an emotional impact. That bleeds over into your financial decisions.”

Kuhnen said the same link could hold true for women, but they didn’t test it because it is more difficult to find an erotic image that would appeal to many different heterosexual women compared to heterosexual men.

The link between sex and greed goes back hundreds of thousands of years, to men’s evolutionary role as provider or resource gatherer to attract women, said Kevin McCabe, professor of economics, law and neuroscience at George Mason University, who wasn’t part of the study.

“Risk-taking is a natural way of increasing your relative success, but, of course, there’s a downside to it, what we’re seeing right now in the economy,” McCabe said.

The results of the study jibe with the real life on the trading floor, said Phil Flynn, a former Chicago commodities floor trader and current analyst at Alaron Trading Corp.

“I’m not shocked that it may be part of the deal,” Flynn said Friday. “When you talk about all the euphemisms for trading (on the floor), they can be used for sex as well.”

(“Massaging the market” and “hardcore” were about the cleanest that he and his colleagues could come up with.)

The study conforms with recent research that indicates men shown a pornographic movie were more likely to make riskier sexual decisions. Another suggests straight men think less about their financial future after being shown pictures of pretty women.

One still-to-be-published study at Harvard University found a link between higher testosterone levels and financial risk-taking.

But the study conducted at Stanford, funded by the National Institutes of Health, went deeper, using functional magnetic resonance imaging machines. It’s part of a new but growing field called neuroeconomics that attempts to take the hard-wired science of brain biology and mix it with the softer sciences of psychology and economics to figure out why we make the financial decisions we do.

An earlier study by the same team found that the brain’s reward area lit up at about the same time as risky decision-making.

The erotic pictures experiment was designed to find which was the cause and which was the effect. The answer: Lighting up the reward area, in this case with soft-core pictures, caused the risk-taking, Kuhnen said.

“The more activation there you have, the more prone you are to taking more risk,” Kuhnen said. “It could be a feedback loop.”

The flip side was that the photos of snakes and spiders activated the portion of the brain often associated with pain, fear and anger. And those people were more likely to bet low.

This all makes sense to Harvard economist Terry Burnham, author of the book “Mean Genes.” Burnham said it could be all summed up in a famous line from the movie “Scarface.”

“In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.”

On the Net:

Stanford’s Symbiotic Project on Affective Neuroscience:

http://psychology.stanford.edu/span/

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Promo spots for CBS’ ‘Numb3rs’ have taken the Mac vs. PC approach for its return, except this time it’s an FBI agent vs. Mathematician.

The crime drama returns with new episodes today, Friday, April 4.

Via TVShark

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President Bush was showered with boos as he threw out the first pitch at last night’s game between the Washington Nationals and Atlanta Braves.

Bush quickly threw out the pitch and got out of there. Even after Bush delivered the pitch, the jeering did not let up until the President disappeared from the field.

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En el día de hoy en la sección “T&T. – Tecnología y Telecomunicaciones” del Diario Libre se publica un interesante articulo compuesto por tres secciones o partes “¿Quiere reducir su factura de Internet?”, “Cómo espiar teléfonos celulares” y un tercero ya que es un Infomercial “Seminario gestión de cobros”

Aquí hago mis criticas al articulo, pues no tengo garantía de que Diario Libre publique mis comentarios, ya que estos son moderados.

Mis comentarios:

**¿Quiere reducir su factura de Internet?
No solo el tema económico se debe tomar en cuenta, que tal la seguridad?
El vecino que tenga el router puede desconectar a los demás(filtrando direcciones MAC por ejemplo) como cuando usan un switch (cables de red) para compartir la conexión, cuando ven que su velocidad es degradada por compartir 768 Kbps entre tres vecinos. En tiempos donde la FCC en estados unidos esta difiniendo el termino Broadband. Ver: FCC redefines “broadband” to mean 768Kbps, “fast” to mean “kinda slow”

**Cómo espiar teléfonos celulares
Despierta la curiosidad para luego reservarse el nombre del dispositivo para evitar el incremento del espionaje en nuestro país. Vaya articulo… Información para nuestra gente!!! Internet por Dios. Usas Google, las palabras correctas y listo. Aquí algunos enlaces.
http://wiki.thc.org/cracking_a5
http://nsa.unaligned.org/hw.php
http://www.hackaday.com/2007/08/11/cccamp-2007-gsm-a5-cracking/
http://www.hackaday.com/2008/02/15/shmoocon-2008-intercepting-gsm-traffic/

**Seminario gestión de cobros
Y para terminar, publicidad… Llama la atención para luego venderte un seminario gestión de cobros.

Vaya, vaya.

Me pregunto que tiene que ver una cosa con la otra.

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Sadly Findory close operations…

–

Thank you, Findory readers, for the last four years. I hope you not only found interesting news on Findory you otherwise would have missed, but also, just by using Findory, took pleasure in helping others find news they might enjoy.

Sadly, all good things must come to an end. As of November 22, 2007, Findory has shut down.

–

http://www.findory.com/end-of-findory

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