Reuters - A brand-new Democratic governor from
a conservative southern state, giving his party's response to
the State of the Union, said "there is a better way" to
confront the challenges facing the country at home and abroad.
Reuters - President George W. Bush will not
ask Congress to increase U.S. food aid when he presents his
2007 budget next week and some countries will be cut from
donation programs to make funds go further, NGO sources said on
Tuesday.
NewsFactor - A video minigame allowing users to engage in explicit sexual acts has triggered a lawsuit by Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo. The sex game was secretly included with “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” a video game originally rated M (Mature 17+).
Average Forecasted Score: Seahawks 22.7 Steelers 23.9
StatShark’s newest contributor, The Insider, has some interesting early comments on the Superbowl. Check out the article for full details. It looks like StatShark agrees with his basic premise that both Seattle and Pittsburgh have gone above and beyond expectations when it comes to proving they are the best from their conferences. They both dominated playoff competition. However, Pittsburgh has “proven” a little more by winning 3 road games in a row against a higher level of competition. This isn’t about thinking less of Seattle, but rather thinking more highly of Pittsburgh’s recent peformances. This team shut down 3 of the top 5 offenses in the league. If anyone is up to the task of making the big defensive plays against a great Seattle offense, it’s the Steelers. Ben Roethlisberger has scrapped the notion that he’s just going to hand off 40 times and make no mistakes. He’s being allowed to pass early and more often and doing a great job in his “new” role. All the stars of the game should have good performances. While few people envisioned this matchup back in September, this could/should be an excellent Superbowl.
Average Forecasted Score: Seahawks 26.1 Steelers 24.7
StatShark’s newest contributor, The Insider, has some interesting early comments on the Superbowl. Check out the article for full details. It looks like StatShark agrees with his basic premise that both Seattle and Pittsburgh have gone above and beyond expectations when it comes to proving they are the best from their conferences. They both dominated playoff competition. However, Pittsburgh has “proven” a little more by winning 3 road games in a row against a higher level of competition. This isn’t about thinking less of Seattle, but rather thinking more highly of Pittsburgh’s recent peformances. This team shut down 3 of the top 5 offenses in the league. If anyone is up to the task of making the big defensive plays against a great Seattle offense, it’s the Steelers. Ben Roethlisberger has scrapped the notion that he’s just going to hand off 40 times and make no mistakes. He’s being allowed to pass early and more often and doing a great job in his “new” role. All the stars of the game should have good performances. While few people envisioned this matchup back in September, this could/should be an excellent Superbowl.
As the Google Toolbar has gotten more popular, the greatest source of ideas about new features has come from our users. The breadth and variety of these requests is so large that it’s hard to satisfy everyone. But then we started noticing engineers on the team had cool hacks on their Toolbars for doing customized searches on our internal bugs database, corporate employee directory, etc… We were barely done asking ourselves whether it was possible to offer this capability in the new Google Toolbar beta when one of the engineers started designing a feature called Custom Buttons. Here are some of the coolest aspects of Custom Buttons and why I think they’re a big deal:
1) Simple API: The term API is almost a misnomer — it literally takes seconds to make one of these. I just can’t resist the urge to make a new one every time I run into new website. A couple of simple steps and voila - a new button’s sitting on your Toolbar (check out the Getting Started Guide).
2) Flexibility: The simple inclusion of RSS & Atom feeds (and particularly allowing the update of toolbar button icons through feeds) has allowed for buttons like a weather button and a mood ring button.
3) Accessibility: Most users don’t even need to make buttons. It takes one click on our buttons gallery or on a website that offers them to install a button for your favorite sites. And the custom buttons we built to search our intranet showed us how valuable a customizable toolbar can be to organizations, so now there’s an enterprise version of Google Toolbar that can be securely deployed across a company.
And don’t miss some of the other cool features for everyone: a greatly-improved search box for formulating better queries; a streamlined bookmarking interface; and Send-To, for posting or sending content via Gmail, Blogger or SMS.
Reuters - The city of Los Angeles has sued
Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. for selling pornographic
video games to children with its best-selling game "Grand Theft
Auto: San Andreas," which last year was found to have hidden
sex scenes.
AP - Microsoft Corp.'s well-received second-quarter earnings report illustrates a blessing and a curse for the technology company. While it may get attention for things like its Xbox 360 videogame console and MSN Internet search engine, when it comes to making money, Microsoft still depends on less flashy standbys such as Windows, Office and server software.
AP - Shares of video-game maker Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. fell sharply Friday after Banc of America cut its rating to “sell” from “neutral,” citing issues such as a late release of the game Grand Theft Auto Next.
TechWeb - The Los Angeles city attorney has sued the makers of "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," saying that the companies illegally hid porn in their popular video game.
AFP - Leading Democrat Senators John Kerry and Ted Kennedy said they would try to block Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito by preventing a vote on him with a filibuster.
Reuters - Online gaming company PartyGaming said
on Friday it had signed a record number of new poker players in
the fourth quarter and was on track to become the world's
biggest online casino.
AP - The city attorney's office has sued the makers of "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" for allegedly hiding pornographic material inside the video game, officials said.
January 23, 2006 Canadian Press Story- 85% of men over 70 suffer from ED. The 15% not so afflicted should stand tall. McGill study links erectile dysfunction to heart diseaseTue Jan 24 2006By Sheryl UbelackerTORONTO — It’s a subject many guys are loath