A few hours earlier, about 1,700 miles away, Sue Decker, Chief Financial Officer of Yahoo, and Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft, who are both on the board of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, happened to be meeting in front of 30,000 people attending Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting. Given the momentous meeting between Ballmer and Yang that was to happen later in the day, I kind of wondered what they said to each other. Now I’ve found out:

Sue Decker: Should I kiss you hello? Or will people think we’re getting married?
Bill Gates: Don’t!
[stands up swiftly and shakes her hand]

According to Sue Decker, at the time she spoke to Bill Gates she thought Steve Ballmer would accept Yahoo’s higher asking price, and was surprised they didn’t. Here’s Sue Decker stating all of this and describing in insightful detail Yahoo’s past, present and future:

(http://edcorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1975)

• Multi-touch desktop computer revealed by Microsoft. What’s next?
• The first multi-touch laptop?
• Murdoch: “They’re all going to Facebook at the moment.”
• Sharing and copyright, by electron or atom
• Business Model Judo: Microsoft’s Zune, Universal, and Apple’s iPod

Although some of these systems are more elegant than others, they all suffer the same flaw. All of these methods of sharing either assume (a) you want to share the link on just one website community (facebook, friendfeed, twitthis, reddit) or (b) you want to share the link on more than one website community by using multiple clicks, logons, etc. (sharethis, sociable).

The truth is, most of the time I want to share something, I want to share it across all of the communities I belong to with one click. I often want my input to go everywhere, perhaps with some customization. The communities on the other side can decide what’s important to them (using the friendfeed hide function, the reddit vote down function, etc.). Yet there is no tool that lets you easily share a link, thought or idea across all of the different websites out there with one (or a minimal number) of clicks.

C’mon Internet, hurry up and fix this. Like you did last time: my request and the response.

• The most impressive web company today… is Facebook
• Point and click at the world with your wireless device
• How close is Google to accomplishing its mission?
• Hello, world.
• The coolest multi-touch screen, ever

The trailer for Vitus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfAZ0nBV1Zg

The trailer for The Lives of Others: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3_iLOp6IhM

I’m hoping I can soon add wall-e to my favorite movies.

• Pixar’s best movie yet?
• More on Vudu
• The cell, visualized
• Politics at its best
• Trojan Horse circa 2006

Each type of legal entity has different attributes and requires a multitude of different forms and procedures. Whether you can choose one of these entities is based on some strange and unusual criteria you must meet, which often can be cleverly circumvented by the proper paperwork (for example, although an s-corporation is limited to 100 shareholders, those shareholders can be companies or trusts themselves, allowing you to indirectly expand the number of owners).  Each of these entities gets treated differently by the taxation system on the federal, state and local level, and on an income and payroll level.

Google returns 39 million documents for the word “incorporate” but do any of them cleanly and simply explain how to go about it? The process is so complex and the source material for how these rules get decided is so dispersed across different federal and state agencies that the advice given is often wrong.  The advice lots of lawyers give can be wrong too.  I know, I’m a former large firm lawyer, and I’ve seen people misunderstand the consequences of certain choices.

Incorporation is so complex that various different services of highly different levels of quality have sprung up to tackle it. These vary from $50 incorporation services that often offer poor explanations of the consequences of different incorporation choices to $3000 services at large law firms.  The complexity of the incorporation system is really only to the advantage of the advisors.

Hernando de Soto has explained that for a country to unleash its capital and generate wealth it needs to remove the barriers to entrepreneurs seeking to pool and use capital (see my review of his book).  Muhammad Yunus has explained and demonstrated (wikipedia) even those in great poverty are entrepreneurs, if only they are given access to the opportunity.  It is past time for the incorporation process to be reformed.  Even an incorporation process that costs $100 bars the entry of many people who would like to start their own company (and in California incorporation carries government and tax fees of at least $900, not including advisor’s fees).

How should reform be implemented? Some principles to ponder:

• There should be a single federal website (company.gov) you go to to start a company in any of the 50 states or on a federal level.
• The website should give you a checklist of attributes you would like your company to have.  Check whether it is a nonprofit, for profit, a social business, limited liability, pass through taxation, etc.
• Each attribute you choose should clearly list the prerequisites and effects (pros and cons) of choosing it.
• Regardless of what attributes you choose for your company, there should be a single form you fill out to file taxes for the company.  This form should be the same across all companies.
• Servicing a lawsuit against a company should be as simple as uploading a claim on the federal website.  Companies, the press and the public would easily and freely be able to find out about new claims.
• States should have the freedom to add new attributes to the federal website for companies incorporated in their state, so that innovation in corporate forms is not curtailed.
• Incorporating on the federal website should automatically create your unique taxpayer identification number, and potentially provide further plain language information on how to start and fund your business.

Complexity in the incorporation processes is similar to complexity in the taxation process, creating unfair advantages for those who can afford the best advice. Refining the incorporation process could be a stepping stone to tackling reform of the tax system.

• On the use of “cloned” animals, and the importance of labeling
• Voting on November 7, 2007
• Pandora tries to figure out what music you’ll like
• What does spirituality mean?
• Is Walmart really more evil than Google?

“If you think the plot [of the movie 88 Minutes] sounds like baloney, just wait for its resolution. The only saving grace is the conceit behind the title, whereby our hero is given eighty-eight minutes to live; the countdown unfolds in real time, thus allowing you to call ahead and book a restaurant table.”

- Anthony Lane (his review)

Ouch.

• Book review: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
• My book reviews
• Donate an organ to yourself?
• Capturing the details of an actor’s face, cheaply
• The struggle to stop aging (without starving) advances another step

Socrates meant that he must be free to examine the wisdom of his actions, without the restrictions Athenian voters wished to place upon him, or he would not find it worth living (thus the drinking of the hemlock). That’s certainly a point of view that may be widely shared, although different people and cultures would disagree as to what level of restriction on thoughts or speech might make life not worth living.

While Socrates’ decision is defensible, subsequent philosophers tend to take Socrates’ statement a bit further. They conclude from his statement that it is the process of examining life that gives life its value. Of course philosophers find value in examining the wisdom of ideas and lives, and feel their study of the matter gives them special insights. A philosopher who was unwilling to examine life is a bit of a contradiction in terms. That Socrates was willing to die rather than give up his right to examine his own life has made philosophers sing his praises ever after.

Personally, I have found great value in examining the wisdom of many acts in my life, yet there are many types of people in this world, and if some do not ponder the wisdom of their actions much at all, must we (or particularly they) conclude their life is less worth living? It seems awfully condescending. The people who don’t examine their lives much probably aren’t examining Socrates statement. If they did, they might object to the interpretation with which it is adopted by philosophers.

A less strongly phrased statement might be, “Until you examine your life, you are ignorant of whether it is worth living,” but is even that statement true? Perhaps life is always worth living because of something innate, because of the experiences even an unexamined life gives, or because of the effects a life can have. We ascribe a value to the life of a pet regardless of how unaware the pet is of itself or the wisdom of its own actions.

Whether a life is worth living is a subjective judgment imposed by an observer, not an objective fact. Given the many attributes that might make us conclude a life is worth living, to rest all of a judgment on whether the life is “examined” seems rather excessive. That may be what gives Socrates’ statement its power, but it may also be what robs it of some important truth.

In the spirit of Socrates, here’s a bit of parting wisdom (but even without it I bet your life is worth living): Never trust an audience who are made more self important by their admiration.

• Book review: Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath
• Another reason not to leave a fingerprint
• Talent vs. Genius
• Internet truths that are often wrong: Disintermediation, Death of Distance & Open beats Closed
• The fantastic adaptability of your brain

There appear to be three components to Google’s mission: (1) getting access to all of the world’s information, (2) organizing the world’s information in a useful way, and (3) making sure everyone can access the information.

How much of the world’s information does Google access presently and how can this be expected to change in the future? Google faces a number of problems in getting access to the world’s information. These challenges vary based on where the information is stored (in the Internet cloud, on a computer, or generated in real life but not stored), the privacy of the information (public, private, secret), the legal status of the information (public domain, copyright but shareable, copyright but illegal to share), and the type of media (text, audio, video).

According to a paper on Google’s storage system (pdf), as of November of 2006 Google stored approximately 850 terabytes of information for its search crawler, 70.5 terabytes of information for its maps software, 4 terabytes of information in terms of what users search history is, 2 terabytes in Google Base, and 9 terabytes in Google’s Orkut. This sounds like alot, but as of today, the Internet is 3,000 to 5,000 petabytes of Internet traffic (with about 3 gigabytes of that data being monthly American usage) (see MINTS survey). Even accounting for the discrepancy between 2006 and 2008, and for traffic generated versus actual content of websites, that’s a more than 3,000 fold gap.

One significant problem Google faces with the Internet are that there are significant parts of the Internet that it is prevented from accessing. For example, Google is not allowed by Facebook to crawl most of the information on Facebook’s pages. Google doesn’t know your click history on Yahoo’s websites. Also, alot of our usage of the Internet isn’t actually captured in the Internet very well. Patterns of mouse movements and web page navigation, for example. Furthermore, as Jon Bischke points out, Google is also not very good at indexing audio and video files (although they certainly are working on such problems; see NYTimes on Google’s new image search).

To Google’s benefit, the utility of the Internet keeps pulling more and more information into it. Yet there is a tremendous amount of information that is generated every moment that is on only personal computers or mobile devices, and that amount of information is dwarfed by the information that is not on any computer. While these challenges can be tackled with new tools (like Google’s book scanner, or Google desktop search, or a Google backup service for your computer), Google is far from having access to all of the world’s information. There’s plenty of information companies generate each day that they do not put where Google’s tools can reach the information, from oil company geological data to a consumer products company’s internal documents. For Google the solution likely lies in helping create new tools to capture (life recorders) and manipulate (personal computer software, Google enterprise search) that information, even if the information is never put into Google’s cloud infrastructure.

Will Google be the place people go to find the world’s information organized in a useful way?

The second problem that Google faces is that no matter how useful it is in creating easy to use methods to organize information, there are new ways of organizing information that Google won’t control (Facebook, Friendfeed, etc.). To some extent Google is trying to route around this problem by encouraging software developers to create programs that interface easily with Google’s systems (Google Apps Engine) but such a solution seems limited at best. Like Apple, Google can try to create powerful interfaces that have the best utility for users, but they will be competing against the whole world, including their own former employees. They will never have the best system for accessing all information.

Can everyone access Google’s services?

The third problem Google has is that as ubiquitous as it is, and the Internet allows it to be, Google is not the most commonly used search system everywhere. Google has taken a number of steps to make sure it is easily accessible, from placing their search box wherever they can (including on Dell computers, the Firefox web browser, and the iPhone), to creating their own cell phone software (Android). Although much of the world is not on the Internet yet, technological development proceeds, wireless technology is proliferating across the developing world, and Google may have a shot at being the mobile device of choice in the developing world. The challenge for Google will be to create the best tools, both on the Internet and off it, both connected to Google’s overall architecture and stand alone so people can maintain their privacy, in a world of consistently expanding choice.

For all of the utility that Google provides to people every day, their mission statement is beyond a stretch goal. They are far from achieving it, and likely never will. Perhaps the economics of storage and access mean that it’s not worth storing certain kinds of information at all. Yet it is great that Google has such an audacious goal. Without trying to solve significant problems, no great accomplishments would ever be made. Clearly organizing and making useful even a small portion of the information generated by the world can be fantastically worthwhile and rewarding.

• An excellent graph is worth a million words
• Internet truths that are often wrong: Disintermediation, Death of Distance & Open beats Closed
• The desktop strikes back!
• The most impressive web company today… is Facebook
• Finding good statistics online, solved?

1. Have you ever felt you should Cut down on the activity?
2. Have people Annoyed you by criticizing your doing the activity?
3. Have you ever felt bad or Guilty about doing the activity?
4. Have you ever done the activity first thing in the morning as an Eye opener to get yourself started on the day?

The test was developed by Dr. John Ewing, founding Director of the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. According to Dr. Ewing, two yes answers is considered a clinically significant sign of addiction.

• Using time more effectively
• Many planets alot like Earth?
• Cyborgs take two steps closer to reality
• The struggle to stop aging (without starving) advances another step
• A need for better data on the Internet

Yet because aging has been inevitable does not mean it will continue to be. David Hume once pointed out, “No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.” Human history has been filled with the white swan of aging, and it makes us doubt the black swan of a method to halt aging could actually exist.

There are reasons to believe that aging at the rates humans experience isn’t inevitable and could be modified. The first reason is that different species age at different rates. Charles Darwin explained that species evolved from common ancestors, through the pressures of selection and time. The rate of human aging may therefore be an evolutionary accident or due to selection pressures humanity could use its creativity to escape.

A second reason is that some human beings have diseases which cause them to appear to age significantly faster than normal (see wikipedia article on progeria). If the process of aging can be modified by a genetic abnormality in one direction, it could possibly be modified in the other direction.

A third reason is that aging has already been slowed down significantly in many creatures by severe caloric restriction. This appears to effect metabolism, which then effects the rate of aging. While caloric restriction has worked in even lower order mammals, large scale human studies have yet to be completed. Even if caloric restriction was shown to work in people it requires significant discipline while impacting lifestyle significantly.

These reasons provide potential means for exploring the processes of aging. A great deal of fruitful research has been done on aging in yeast cells. It is the current scientific understanding that inside a yeast cell a reduction in caloric intake causes a reduction in three enzymes (TOR, Sch9, and PKA) that are part of the metabolism process. Reductions in TOR in particular decreases the rate by which a cell creates new proteins and slows aging.

Now, in the April 18, 2008 issue of the journal Cell (see link), a team of researchers led by Brian Kennedy and Matt Kaeberlein have published research linking ribosomes, the protein-making factories in living cells, and Gcn4, a specialized protein that aids in the expression of genetic information, to the pathways related to dietary response and aging.

By studying different strains of yeast cells they found that mutations in the large subunit of ribosomes sometimes led to increased lifespan. They also tested diazaborine, a drug which interferes with the large subunit of ribosomes, and found that treated cells lived 50 percent longer than untreated cells. They also found that longer lived yeast strains with mutations in the large subunit of the ribosome produce an extraordinary amount of Gcn4, a specialized protein which helps transfer genetic information during cell growth. They then tried preventing the increase of Gcn4 to see if it would effect life span, and it did in fact lead to shorter life spans. The researchers have thus found three different ways to effect aging in yeast cells. (This is not the only research approach being followed; see my prior post)

The path from such research in yeast cells to a treatment for human beings will likely be a very long one. While it is possible that a means to short circuit the aging process without significant side effects may be discovered (as was discovered for creating a twin of a sheep; see my prior post), it is far more likely to take decades, or a century.

Yet there could come a time when denying someone anti aging treatments is considered cruel and unusual. Perhaps some people born today will live to see that time. If so, they may be the only people living to have once thought of aging as natural and inevitable. They may have great difficulty in convincing anyone that aging was anything other than a disease, waiting for a cure.

• Searching for the path to youth
• Donate an organ to yourself?
• Science discoveries from 2006
• Philosophers are wrong to state the unexamined life is not worth living
• Analyzing the effects of oil

The jets will have the typical wide leather seats Jet Blue is famous for with 2 seats on both sides of the aisle. So they should actually be more comfortable than Jet Blue’s larger jets, which have 3 seats on both sides of the aisle.

The current competition for such a trip is (a) a 5 hour car ride costing about $50 in gas or (b) a 7 hour bus ride costing about $40. Let me assure you that those alternatives are far worse. The car ride requires your constant attention (and has a 10% chance of a speeding ticket) and the bus ride is cramped and uncomfortable (with a 10% chance of fearing the guy in the seat in front of you). Flying between smaller airports is in contrast rather pleasant.

If Jet Blue succeeds, they will be flying to more and more cities using 100 seat jets. If they would fly from Burbank to San Jose & San Francisco, that would be particularly magnificent. I can’t wait.

• Will microjets end the tyrrany of distance?
• Drug dealing is a terrible job
• Tesla Motors: a different kind of electric car
• Are fuel driven cars (gas, hybrid, ethanol) about to be overtaken by an all electric vehicle?
• Amazon.com’s founder, Jeff Bezos, launches a rocket ship