quietmint

Mar 2009

11 months agoJeremiah: Why do we not gather all of the thieves at AIG in a jail cell? AIG Sucks and so does their bonus joke.

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America Bailed Me Out And I Got Was The Alps!

I bought this mountain with my taxpayer-funded bonus! Signs that your company clearly sucks at life:

You remove the AIG name and logo from your office buildings.
Your CEO publicly admits that “the AIG name is so thoroughly wounded and disgraced that we’re probably going to have to change it”.
You send memos to your employees telling them not to wear anything with AIG name to avoid being killed by the public mobs. “If you think you are being followed, immediately dial 911!”
Your mismanagement has prompted Congress to tell AIG executives to kill themselves and attempt to apply a 90% tax to AIG bonuses.
Your web site’s most prominent feature is a button bragging about how you are “Protecting customers, repaying taxpayers”.
Your employees have e-mail addresses that read aloud as “a-i-gag.com” (alright, so the last one has nothing to do with the bailout, but I accidentally discovered this hilarious pronunciation of one of the company’s domain names when a client called technical support last week)

Mar 2009

12 months agoAnonymous: Well beyond the horrors of Orwell's "1984"?

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Google Knows Where You Live So Your Friends Don’t Have To!

So I’ve been playing with Google Latitude recently and it’s both interesting and creepy. Primarily designed to be used on mobile phones, the service can also be used on laptop computer; it detects your approximate location and lets you share this information with friends, optionally with status updates. The idea of adding a geographic component to a friend status list à la Facebook/Twitter sounds like the next logical step.

More interesting, though, is the data required to drive such a service. Google Latitude is powered by the Google Gears browser plugin, which also facilitates offline access to Gmail and a variety of other web enhancements through its in-browser database component. Vaguely mentioned in passing is another, lesser-known feature of Gears: Google’s WiFi location database. Essentially, Google has wardriven major cities in the US and other countries, searching for wireless networks and plotting each wireless router it finds on the map by the geographic coordinates of the drive-by vehicle that detected the wireless signal. With a large enough database, this allows Google to pinpoint most laptop computers on the map by looking up the hardware address of the wireless router they are currently connected to and determining the approximate position on the Earth. Scarily awesome!

Jan 2009

13 months agopapillon: Google should pay you for advertising.

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Make Gmail Your New Year’s Resolution

Gmail Welcome to 2009! If you haven’t joined the revolution, now is the perfect time to switch to Gmail. With the best spam filtering in the industry, instant search, built-in video chat, intuitive message organization using labels and conversations, free POP and IMAP access, and virtually unlimited storage, why use anything else?

Unless your using Yahoo Mail span (sorry!), you can even forward your old e-mail address to your new Gmail account and to move your existing and new e-mail messages all over to Gmail. This means you don’t even need to send friends one of those annoying “I changed my address” messages; it will all be automatic. If you’re still not convinced, consider this: Gmail users are younger, richer, good in bed and have higher credit scores.

Oct 2008

14 months agoNick: I just made the graph myself using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The numbers came from one of the spreadsheets linked to in this PDF report: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_10.pdf

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Satire

Voting For Anyone Else Would Be An “Obamanation”

Outside of chronic degenerative diseases, the top cause of our demise has long been accidental death. This broad category of mortality – which includes much more than simply dying from falling into a ravine or meat grinder – is often taken for granted, yet it is one of our country’s most important strengths. You may be tempted to accept that 4.8% of fatalities in the United States being attributed to unintentional causes is adequate. After all, accidents are already the fifth-largest cause of death, second only to heart disease, cancer, stroke, and respiratory disease. I, however, know that we can do better. Although we are off to a great start, much remains to be done if our nation is to remain a viable world superpower and truly progress in the future. Unless we commit right now and adopt the “I don’t think, therefore I am not” attitude, our once-great nation will swiftly fail. Continue reading

Oct 2008

17 months agoRandy Lee: DIME IT that's alot of dimes.

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Your Family Share: $2.60

Dime In 2007, the US Mint produced 2,089,500,000 new dimes. Two trillion! Averaged evenly across the year, this equates to over 66 dimes per second.

A single dime is 0.705 inches in diameter. Lined end-to-end, the dimes produced last year alone would stretch over 23,249 miles. For comparison, the circumference of the Earth is 24,800 miles.

A single dime weighs 2.268 grams, so there are 200 dimes in one pound. 2007’s dime production weighs in at over 10.4 million pounds. For comparison, my car weighs 2,800 pounds, and the world’s heaviest record land mammal, an African elephant found in Angola, weighed 27,000 pounds.

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