Arghh, I kept getting an empty sitemap.xml. I tried different plugins, changed settings — nothing. I removed an empty file sitemap.xml still nothing. Finally, I noticed a site map.xml.gz — presto, it works. Much better.
Author: peteware
Remember AOL?
Remember dial-up? Good ol’ AOL? AOL-Time Warner merger? Wow, things have changed: Netflix customer base growth opposite of AOL’s. It’d be laughable to compare bandwidth. From Splat F and Dan Frommer.
Investing my money
Here’s some reinforcement from The Big Picture about why I have trouble putting money in the stock market:
Recall what Charles Ellis said when he was overseeing the $15-billion endowment fund at Yale University:
Watch a pro football game, and it’s obvious the guys on the field are far faster, stronger and more willing to bear and inflict pain than you are. Surely you would say, ‘I don’t want to play against those guys!’
Well, 90% of stock market volume is done by institutions, and half of that is done by the world’s 50 largest investment firms, deeply committed, vastly well prepared – the smartest sons of bitches in the world working their tails off all day long. You know what? I don’t want to play against those guys either.
Does it make sense to buy a house?
Here’s a great interactive graphic from Trulia.com that shows the ratio of renting to buying. The ratio is how many years of paying before you paid full price for an equivalent house. This data is comparing the median list price with that of a two bedroom apartment.
For example, in NYC renting is so much better that you’d pay rent for 39 years before you’d paid the amount the house costs. A good estimate is the rent-to-price ratio should be about 17:1.
The size of the circle shows how much the rent is (e.g. bigger circle means more rent). The color indicates the ratio (e.g. red means better to rent; green means better to own).
History of Science Fiction
From here is this great history of science fiction in poster form. So many fond memories: “Cities in Flight”, “The World of Null A”, “Stranger in a Strange Land”, “Dune”, …
Iranian Hackers Suspected in Recent Security Breach
Looks like Iranian Hackers Suspected in Recent Security Breach are either trying to get back for Stuxnet and more on Stuxnet. More likely it was for a man-in-the-middle attack to install viruses or trojan horse by posing as the actual company and uploading a compromised version of the software. The compromised software could make it easier to monitor social networking sites, etc.
Comodo, a digital certificate authority and security software maker, said on Wednesday that it unwittingly issued fraudulent digital certificates for Web sites operated by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Skype and Mozilla. Digital certificates are used to vouch for the authenticity of a site owner and facilitate encrypted communications between sites and their users. Comodo revoked all of the certificates immediately upon discovery of the incident and notified the site owners, the major browser makers and relevant government authorities, it said.
Corporate Taxes: Maybe not so high
So you think US corporate taxes are too high? It’s holding back the economy? Here is what poor General Electric has had to pay.
What’s that right most graph? “Effective Tax Rate”: aren’t those numbers negative? What, US taxpayers paid them money? They most have declared heavy losses. What, they made billions of dollars every year for the past seven years except for 1 year!
Corporate welfare at it’s best!
Inflation
From Calculated Risk is this graph of inflation. You can see the slight, recent, upturn. It is important to see the context: we are still way below “normal” levels and unemployment is still way above “normal” levels.
Death’s in Guantanamo
In the Vietnam war, 144 POWs died. According to documents released to the ACLU there were 190 deaths of detainees in the War on Terror (not all at Guantanamo).
… a detainee was killed by an unnamed sergeant who walked into a room
where the detainee was lying wounded “and assaulted him … then shot
him twice thus killing him,” one of the investigating documents says.
The sergeant then instructed the other soldiers present to lie about the incident.
Later, the document says an unnamed corporal then shot the deceased
detainee in the head after finding his corpse.
It’s horrific that for decades we thought of the treatment of POWs in Vietnam as the epitome of brutality but more prisoner’s died in our custody than in Vietnamese custody!
The defense department defends it as not being as bad as it sounds and that people have been convicted of murder:
The Defense Department disputes the allegations, saying it
takes detainee treatment seriously.
Some history:
More on Stuxnet Worm and Iran’s Nuclear Research
Last month there was an article about a virus that targetted Iran’s Nuclear Research. There’s a little more on Stuxnet worm in the NY Times.
From Stuxnet Worm Used Against Iran Was Tested in Israel:
The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.
Pete Ware 