Newtzilla is a different kind of kaiju (Japanese for "strange beast" or "giant monster") but not that different. Like Godzilla, Newtzilla has remarkable healing powers, allowing him to recover from charges that he wanted an open marriage and that he parasitically fed on Freddie Mac.

It's worth a read. The debate tonight showed that Newtzilla can actually dance with the punches, absorb plenty of tank-fire, and oddly enough, even withhold snapping back with his trademark atomic breath.

But for how long?

I just switched the default search engine in my browser from Google to Bing. And if you care about working efficiently, or getting the right results when you search, then maybe you should too. Don't laugh!

It all boils down to Google attempt to force "google+" on everyone. As someone who rarely (around every 8 months) pops up onto facebook, I'm not too concerned with Google+, but altering search results to push the service over twitter (which I use about once a week) does seem like a bad idea.

What's next? Mark Russinovich working on Intune? Bill Gates popping back up to do some coding for Microsoft HealthVault? Ballmer rehiring Ray Ozzie to pitch the next wave for Office?

So what about Cutler? He’s earned the right to do basically whatever he wants at Microsoft. And word is that “whatever” has something to do with the future of Xbox.

Since the Xbox is based on NT, the possibilities are cool to imagine.

But SOPA doesn’t just arrogate these unconstitutional powers for government—it hands them over to entertainment giants. Through a misleadingly named “market-based” system, SOPA would allow private entities to produce enemies lists of sites that offend them, and to give these lists to DNS providers, ISPs, payment processors, and ad brokers, who would then be required to remove the accused sites within five days. It also encourages payment processors to engage in self-censorship, by pre-emptively severing ties with firms they believe are likely to cause a complaint, before any such complaint is received.

Fight back!

...five minutes later...

727

Yay!

A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.

Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don't get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: "So is it the Stalker API?" She got all glum and said "Yeah." I mean, I was joking, but no... the only API call we offer is to get someone's stream. So I guess the joke was on me.

The whole article is brilliant.

Enjoy!

Ever since the news broke last week that Hugo Chávez wanted to transport 211 tons of physical gold from Europe to Caracas, I’ve been wondering how on earth he possibly intends to do such a thing.

There are 99 tons already being held at the Bank of England; according to the FT, the plan is to transfer other gold to the Bank of England from custodians such as Barclays, HSBC, and Standard Chartered; then, once it’s all in one place, um, well, nobody has a clue what might happen.

Lots of interesting ideas...

The bears here in Montana can be whoppers, too. Occasionally, they exceed 800 pounds, the biggest that grizzly bears get outside Alaska. The record here for a captured bear is 860 pounds.

Read for the picture alone!