- Some of you didn’t believe me when I told you that Google was looking to take over the world. Perhaps now you will take my warnings a little more seriously. In recent months, the web-search giant has released Google Wave, it’s new Chome operating system, the Nexus One smartphone, netbook computers to run that Chrome OS and designs for tablet computers that could also run Chrome OS. Now, Google is diving into the world of social networking with the release of Google Buzz on Tuesday. Google Buzz borrows concepts from both Facebook and Twitter and will operate with in the context of Google’s Gmail service. It will allow users to post status updates, photos and links to members of their network while also incorporating their activity on other sites like Twitter, Flickr and Picasa. The rollout of Buzz began Tuesday and according to Google spokesman Bradley Horowitz, the service should be available to all in the next couple of days. At its heart, Buzz seeks to cut down on what Google executives view as the excessive clutter of other networking sites. With networking sites, "there's obviously value there," Horowitz said. "It's a phenomenon that's real, but it's increasingly becoming harder and harder to make sense and find the signal in the noise." In creepy, big-brother fashion, Google Buzz will automatically make "friends" out of the people a user e-mails or chats with the most on Gmail. By altering certain settings, users can make their posts from sites like Twitter either public or private and comments on posts will appear in real time. When other users make comments, they will be weighted in the same way that Google's search engine weighs results, to "collapse bad buzz and recommend the good buzz," said Gmail product manager Todd Jackson. Sounds like a lot of corporate mumbo-jumbo to me, Todd, but I’ve been keeping an eye on your company’s clever quest for world domination through technology for some time now, so you’re not pulling anything over on me. The rest of the world may be content to stupidly and mindlessly follow along like so many sheep, but I will not be one of them and I will not sit quietly by as you attempt to subvert the world, piece by piece…………
- Boy, I just do not get why Iraq’s government has such an issue with the private military contractor once known as Blackwater, now going by the name Xe. Just because a few of the company’s employees (allegedly) murdered 17 civilians and then lied about what happened is no reason to overreact, Iraqis. It is certainly no reason to order all former employees of Blackwater/Xe to leave the country, as Iraq’s interior minister announced Wednesday. Not only must any contractors who once worked for Blackwater leave Iraq, they have seven days to leave do so, Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani proclaimed. But I suppose you could somewhat see this coming, what with January’s declaration by Iraq's government that former Blackwater employees were no longer welcome in the country. Again, much of this comes from the September 2007 shooting in Baghdad's Nisoor Square that left 17 civilians dead and just because Blackwater guards were the ones holding the guns and doing the shooting, Iraqis seem intent on blaming them. Weird, right? Oh, and it probably did not help matters when a U.S. judge dismissed manslaughter charges against five guards involved in the shootings on constitutional grounds in December. Since then, the company's last contracts in Iraq have been transferred to other companies. Still, about 250 former Blackwater employees remain in the country and have found work with other security firms. Not content to allow them to stay, the Iraqi government is willing to hunt them down and drag their asses out of the country. "I don't think the Iraqi government is willing to have any Blackwater member, even if they are working in other companies," government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in January. "We don't like to see them here working in any company." Now that, my friends, is holding a grudge. Considering that Blackwater had about 1,000 contractors working in Iraq at the height of its presence there and those killers, er, contractors were performing important tasks such as guarding diplomatic convoys and supply vehicles around the country, this is quite the ignominious ending for Blackwater/Xe. But just to be safe, perhaps other private security firms working abroad in conjunction with the American government should refrain from senselessly gunning down foreign civilians without any actual justification…………
- Perhaps foreign automakers should not have been quite so smug when their American counterparts were on the verge of financial collapse and needed an emergency bailout by the U.S. government to avert a total disaster. Sure, General Motors needed a government bailout and Ford was on the verge of financial ruin, but now that American automakers have trimmed the fat and are trying to battle back, it is their foreign adversaries who are faltering. Of course, millions of faulty Toyota’s are now being recalled because of their Gas Pedals of Death and Floormats of Death, both leading to kamikaze cars that won't stop. Multiple recalls have all centered around what is essentially the same problem and now Toyota has company in the category of foreign automakers recalling their vehicles. Honda, which already issued a recall on 2001 and 2002 Accords and Civics as well as some 2002 model year Acura TL vehicles back in July because of a faulty airbag inflator, has expanded that recall to include 2001 and 2002 Accord, Civic, Odyssey, CR-V, and selected 2002 Acura TL vehicles. The expanded recall was announced in a statement posted on Honda’s Web site late Tuesday. In the statement, Honda said that the driver's airbag inflators in these certain vehicles may expand with too much pressure, which can cause the inflator casing to break and could result in injury or death. Umm, that does sound like a problem. The expanded recall includes an additional 379,000 U.S. vehicles. Honda admits to 12 incidents related to the airbag inflator problem, so go ahead and assume that those are the only ones with ironclad proof that even a self-protecting company cannot refute and that many more cases will come to light in the next few weeks – just kidding Honda…..sort of. Actually, Honda is attempting to paint itself as proactive in this case, saying that even though none of the reported problems occurred after July 2009, it was still expanding the recall because it could not be sure that the inflators in the affected vehicles would work correctly. The company will notify affected customers by mail and phone with instructions on how to have their vehicles inspected and updated at an authorized dealer. This comes on the heels of last month’s announcement of a separate recall of 646,000 2007 and 2008 Honda Fit, City and Jazz models worldwide because of a potential fire hazard involving a power window switch. C’mon Honda, step your game up, because unlike GM, you are not going to be receiving a government bailout……I don’t think so………
- Lost is off to a solid start in its final season, even if the show keeps heaping more and more unanswered questions on top of the ginormous pile we already had coming into the season. This week kicked off with my new favorite modern-day hippie, Lennon, informing Angry Asian Leader (he has a name, we find out later) that Sayid is alive. We still don’t know who Angry Asian Leader and his people are, why they are living in a giant Buddhist temple in the middle of the island and when they got there, but oh well. At the temple, Sayid asks what happened to him and is told that he has come back from the dead. Unexcited by Sayid’s resurrection, a detached Sawyer marvels that a man who spent his life as a member of the Iraqi Guard’s torture unit gets a second chance at life. He goes on to tell Kate that he is considering making a run for it and leaving the “New Others” compound. We then flash to Oceanic-land (where Flight 815 has landed in L.A., never crashed on the island and all its passengers are going on with their lives). Kate is commandeering a cab outside the airport to flee from the custody of the bounty hunter who tracked her down in Australia. She hijacks the cab with her stolen gun and kicks the cabbie out a couple hundreds yards down the road, but only after she forces him to run over some luggage that fellow Oceanic 815 passenger Arzt drops in the road in front of the airport. After kicking the cabbie out of the car, Kate takes the wheel and Claire, in the backseat, begs to be let out. At first Kate refuses, but ultimately she lets Claire get out – after stealing her bags and belongings. Back on the island, Jack examines Sayid’s wound and finds that it’s almost completely healed. But the focus has turned to Sawyer, who ignores Angry Asian Leader’s pleas to stay and flees into the jungle. The New Others want him back safely, so Kate volunteers to track him down and Jin offers to go with her, along with two New Others. Next we see Kate on her stolen-cab rampage, stopping at the first garage she sees and finding a sympathetic mechanic who uses a tire press to help her cut her handcuffs on (he looks like the kind of guy who might have been in handcuffs before himself). Then we zip back to the island, where the New Others demand that Sayid meet with Angry Asian Leader to answer questions about what happened to him. Lennon promises to tell Jack and his friends anything they want to know once Sayid cooperates, to which Jack retorts, “I doubt you’ll be happy to tell us anything.” In a very Spartan, very B.C.-looking operating room, AAL hooks what appear to be electrodes up to Sayid’s chest and proceeds to shoot him full of electrical current. After that, he burns Sayid with a red-hot poker, then proclaims the “test” to be over. Sayid is told that he is free to go and that he has passed the test, but once he exits and Lennon asks AAL whether he just told Sayid a lie in saying he passed the test, AAL replies in the affirmative. Back in Oceanic-land, Kate doubles back to offer Claire a ride in her stolen cab after treating her so poorly before. After initially hesitating, Claire accepts the offer and tells Kate that she was headed to Brentwood to meet the couple who were going to adopt her soon-to-be-born child. When they arrive at the house, Claire asks Kate to knock on the door with her so she doesn’t have to go it alone. The door opens and a startled Mrs. Baskin answers. She is caught off guard because she forgot all about Claire in light of her husband leaving her the week before. Feeling she is in no position to raise a child on her own, she no longer wants the baby but neglected to call to Claire to share the news before she flew all the way from Australia. The sudden stress sends Claire into contractions and Kate rushes her off to the hospital. Back on the island, Kate and Jin are traipsing through the jungle with Aldo and Justin, the two New Others sent with them to track Sawyer. When Kate begins asking too many questions, Aldo explains that he and his group are protecting Kate and her friends from the Black Smoke Monster and snaps at her, “What is this, a press conference?” When Justin begins to answer a few of Kate’s questions, Aldo snaps at him to shut up. Aldo then asks Kate if she remembers him and when it’s clear she doesn’t, he angrily informs her that he is the guard she knocked out with a rifle butt when she escape from the custody of the Others in Season 3. Clearly a fan of repeating history, Kate repeats her rifle-butt kncokout of Aldo and Justin as well, then springs a Danielle Rousseau-left booby trap to keep the two from following her any longer. She sprints off into the jungle with Jin in pursuit, then informs him that she has no intention of going back to be a prisoner at the temple or taking Sawyer back. When he asks for her help in finding his wife Sun, who was on the same Ajira Airlines flight that brought Kate back to the island, she informs him that he has no idea where Sun is and hasn’t seen her since returning to the island. With that, Kate is off and she ends up at the barracks, i.e. New Otherton, the compound of yellow. single-level homes that the Dharma Initiative built decades ago. There, she finds Sawyer rooting around in the bedroom of the home he shared with Juliet before her death. Caught off guard by Kate sneaking into the house, Sawyer pulls a gun and threatens to shoot whoever is there. When he realizes it’s Kate, he asks what she’s doing there and she replies that she was worried about him. Sawyer has been rooting under the floorboard for something and as he and Kate walk out onto the Dharma pier and sit down to look out over the water and chat, we find out what that something was. He planned to propose to Juliet and was looking for the ring. Sawyer also reveals that he blames himself for Juliet’s death because when she wanted to leave the island, he convinced her to stay so he wouldn’t be alone. For her part of the sharing session, Kate explains that her reason for coming back to the island was to find Claire and reunite her with her son Aaron, whom Claire had been raising as her own son before making the return trip to the island. Sawyer stands up, declares that maybe some people are just meant to be alone and chucks the engagement ring into the water. He also tells Kate that she ought to be able to make it back to the temple by dark, but she doesn’t exactly seem inclined to go. In Oceanic-land, Claire and Kate are at the hospital, where Claire’s doctor is none other than Ethan, one of the original Others, also known as Dr. Goodspeed. He informs Claire that she can either have the baby now or he can give her some drugs to delay the delivery and she decides that she’s not ready to have the baby quite yet. When the baby’s heart rate suddenly drops, Goodspeed does an ultrasound and finds that everything is fine, the baby is just out of position. In the chaos, Claire asks, “What’s wrong with Aaron?” Afterward, she admits to Claire that she’s not even sure where the name came from, that she just kind of knew it. Not long after the ultrasound, two police detectives enter Claire’s room looking for Kate, who used the name Joan Hart when checking Claire in. Claire steps up for her new friend, lying and saying that Kate/Joan left soon after she checked in and didn’t say where she was headed. Back on the island, Jack goes to confront Lennon and AAL after their torture of Sayid. They tell him that they were not torturing, but rather diagnosing Sayid. For what, they won't say. Instead, AAL hands Jack a weird green pill and asks him to have Sayid take it. When Jack asks why and what’s in the pill, AAL tells him that Sayid is infected and that the pill will stop the infection from spreading. Not content with what he hears, Jack visits Sayid in the temple, is honest with him about the pill and when Sayid says he will take it only if Jack wants him to, Jack puts the pill away. He goes back to visit AAL and again presses for answers. One answer he does get is AAL’s real name: Dogen. As for why Dogen has a translator when he speaks perfect English, Dogen explains that it helps him to remain detached from those he rules and makes things easer when he makes decisions for them that they don’t agree with. Dogen also explains that he was “brought” to the island just like Jack and that Jack understands what he means by that. But as for the big question, what is in the pill and what Sayid’s infection is, Dogen refuses to say. Jack won't bite when Dogen insists that he trust him and counters, “Let’s see where trust gets us,” before swallowing the green pill himself. Dogen rushes over and begins choking Jack to get him to cough up the pill. The tactic works and moments later, Lennon walks in and is flabbergasted to hear that Jack swallowed the pill. As it turns out, the pill was in fact poison. Asked why they would want to kill Sayid, Dogen explains that their diagnosis revealed that Sayid has been infected with a “darkness,” and that eventually it will spread throughout his body and whatever currently remains of the real Sayid will be gone. Jack questions how he knows this and Dogen tells him that he knows because it also happened to Jack’s sister. Who is that sister? Claire, because if you remember, Claire is the daughter that came from an affair that Jack’s father Christian had with Carole Littleton, the Australian woman Jack met at his father’s funeral before returning to the island. It’s unclear if Jack knows what Dogen means, but he’ll find out sooner or later. Jin finds out first, though. He is out in the jungle, trying to find his way back to the temple without Kate. He stops to get a drink from a stream and is found by Aldo and Justin, who rough him up and ask where Kate it. Jin attacks them and tries to escape, but ends up caught in a bear trap. When Aldo stands over him and prepares to shoot Jin, two shots ring out from a nearby ridge and Justin and Aldo drop to the ground, both shot. Those shots were fired by none other than Claire, clad in her best backwoods flannel, redneck outfit and looking oddly Rousseau-like. She looks at Jin questioningly, trying to figure out either who he is or where he has been in the three years since she last saw him. Either way, a great ending to an awesome episode and once again, plenty of questions raised. It’s setting up quite a series finale, so hopefully Lost delivers in the end……………
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