Deliver Bad News in a Good Way

There is good news and bad news. Bad news first: Sometimes you have to deliver bad news.

The good news, though, is that the authors of a recent study in Management Science figured out how to take advantage of the silver-lining principle — the observation that separating a small gain from a large loss makes the loss less painful.

In other words, they went looking for the best way to deliver a mix of craptastic tidings (“Sorry, dude, someone at the Genius Bar totally sat on your iPad”) and happy information (“It was Megan Fox, and she wants to say she’s sorry”). Using online gambling games with varying amounts of losses or gains, the researchers asked participants which scenarios they preferred.

The upshot? There are a few different strategies for laying it all out there. Choose wisely.

inspiration

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ICANN OKs .xxx domain name for porn sites

Porn sites may soon be able to tag themselves with a .xxx address now that ICANN has given the new domain name its initial OK.

After denying several requests over the years for a new .xxx top-level domain, ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) finally relented Friday by giving the new domain its conditional approval.

ICM Registry, which would manage and sell the new domain name to porn sites, has waged a long struggle to get .xxx accepted by ICANN as a top-level domain, only to get a thumb’s down at each turn. ICM’s Chairman Stuart Lawley has consistently touted the .xxx domain as a way to segregate and safely filter out adult entertainment sites. However, conservative groups have in the past lobbied Washington and reportedly pressured ICANN to deny the request. 

You Don’t Want ISPs to Innovate

 Ryan Singel      There’s a complicated fight in D.C. right now over how the FCC classifies broadband services, so it can regain the power to impose some basic rules on the industry.

Free-market groups and the industry are banging the table, arguing against the consequences — saying that the FCC is trying to regulate the internet and will kill innovation.

Here’s the simple truth: You don’t want your ISP to innovate.

At least not in the way, they want to “innovate.”

The net has seen an explosion of cool services in the last decade — Google created a search engine that works, Facebook created a social network that helps people stay more connected, webmail became a viable replacement for desktop software, you can collaborate online through wikis and online word processors, and everyone in the world can now have their own online printing press, thanks to blogging software. YouTube became the world’s online video repository, while Netflix and Hulu are demonstrating the future of online video rentals, and sites like Wikipedia, Yelp and IMDB put encyclopedias of knowledge at the disposal of anyone with a net connection and a bit of curiousity.

Where are the major players in the U.S. broadband industry in all of this innovation?

Basically, nowhere. The U.S. is 26th in the world in terms of online access. The industry’s investment in deployment of fiber optics — the transport medium of the future — is laughable (with the noted exception of Verizon, which has devoted significant money to its FiOS buildout — despite being punished by Wall Street for doing so.)

Instead, they are jealous of online services that make money from ads. AT&T’s former CEO Ed Whitacre famously declared that Yahoo and Google couldn’t use his pipes for free, failing to mention that it was the company’s paying customers who were requesting pages from those sites.

Now the industry’s paid pundit Scott Cleland, who runs a faux grassroots group called NETCompetition.org, is arguing that the government is trying to “shift the burden of Google-YouTube’s gigantic video distribution costs completely onto the backs of broadband consumers” by forcing ISPs to follow some fair play rules.

Cleland’s laughable argument depends on the idea that Google has some secret backdoor to the internet where they don’t pay to send YouTube videos or search results to its customers. In fact, Google has paid for or built huge swaths of internet fiber, builds massive data centers around the world to reduce the distance content has to travel to users and pays for bandwidth like any other company on the net.

Still, ISPs would love to find a way to be paid for both sides of their networks — from their users and from online services. And they want to get paid from the packets flowing inside their networks, too.

An Analysis of Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Green Book

By Ashahed M. Muhammad  (FinalCall.com) – Often critical of Arab leaders, Muammar al-Qaddafi has never wavered in his call for Pan-Arab unity, and he has never shied away from supporting revolutionary movements. Recently, his term as chairman of the African Union ended. (Consistent with the policy of the AU, the term of the rotating chairmanship is limited to one-year.)

Perhaps no other current leader has been so identified with the move towards a United States of

Africa than he. Though considered by some to be odd and unpredictable, in this area, he has shown remarkable consistency.

He called for an emergency African Summit of the Organization of African Unity in September of 1999, which led to the formation of the organization of the continental body called the African Union in Durban, South Africa in 2002. Many African leaders have been slow to move and many Western powers considered it unrealistic.

Qaddafi’s consistency and determination has actually reignited the movement towards the formation of a United States of Africa that would make Africa richer, stronger, and more peaceful. Despite his perceived eccentricities, and incessant demonization in the controlled media, “The Great Brother Leader of the Revolution” as he is called by his people, has remained a force on the global stage.

Because of the deliberately dishonest and even vile portrayals of the leader in the controlled media, not much is known regarding Qaddafi’s political thoughts and his guiding ideology. He is described in the media as a dictator, yet in “The Green Book”, Qaddafi outlines the actual governing foundation that undergirds the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. That foundation is The Third Universal Theory—which upon critical analysis—puts many so-called Western Democracies and Republics to shame.

“The Green Book” is broken up into three parts:

Part One: Solution to the Problem of Democracy

Part Two: The Solution to the Economic Problem

Part Three: The Social Basis of the Third Universal Theory                        

When Capitalism Meets Cannabis

BOULDER, Colo.       ANYONE who thinks it would be easy to get rich selling marijuana in a state where it’s legal should spend an hour with Ravi Respeto, manager of the Farmacy, an upscale dispensary here that offers Strawberry Haze, Hawaiian Skunk and other strains of Cannabis sativa at up to $16 a gram.

She will harsh your mellow.

“No M.B.A. program could have prepared me for this experience,” she says, wearing a cream-colored smock made of hemp. “People have this misconception that you just jump into it and start making money hand over fist, and that is not the case.”

Since this place opened in January, it’s been one nerve-fraying problem after another. Pot growers, used to cash-only transactions, are shocked to be paid with checks and asked for receipts. And there are a lot of unhappy surprises, like one not long ago when the Farmacy learned that its line of pot-infused beverages could not be sold nearby in Denver. Officials there had decided that any marijuana-tinged consumables had to be produced in a kitchen in the city.

“You’d never see a law that says, ‘If you want to sell Nike shoes in San Francisco, the shoes have to be made in San Francisco,’ ” says Ms. Respeto, sitting in a tiny office on the second floor of the Farmacy. “But in this industry you get stuff like that all the time.”

Thread: 2nd Annual: Translate a rap verse into proper english

“shit i made a yankee hat more famous than the yankees can”

My widespread popularity and iconic status allows me to set trends that impact the world. For example, people moreso wear Yankee hats because I do than to support the baseball team from which the hats are inspired.

“….and we dont want no problems. okay, you’re a goon. whats a goon to a goblin”

Sir, I assure you, we travel in peace. And while I am aware of your fierce reputation…to you I pose this question: why would a dangerous man ever fear a man uncapable of my level of savagery?

Juvenile – “Ha” 1998.

That’s you with that bad ass Benz ha
That’s you that can’t keep yo’ old lady
cause you keep fuckin her friends ha
You gotta go to court ha
You got served a subpeona for child support ha
That was that nerve ha
You ain’t even much get a chance to say a word ha
I know you ain’t trippin don’t your brother got them birds ha

I see that you have a nice expensive car, but you arent too smart when it comes to women.You choose to continuously break relationship laws by having sex with your s/o’s aquaintences. Now you’re in the system for lack of support for your child and i’m sure that its very aggrevating. In a situation like that, they never give you the chance to speak. But you’re not worried. Nope. Not at all. Lucky for you, you have a sibling knee-deep in the crack game.

icandy jada fire

jada:  hey dickie.

drey:  what’s good b!tch?

champions

this is niiiiiiiiiiiiiiice!!!

Ron Artest- Champions

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porn parodies