“The system we have now will eventually destroy innovation in Silicon Valley. Every patent is a micro law prohibiting innovation. We’ve gone from a model of companies competing with each other to create the best product to companies suing each other to prevent them from innovating.”
Whether you knew it or not, the U.S. is currently in a state of emergency, declared by President Bill Clinton and extended by his two successors. And in a state of emergency, as the courts generally concede, presidential authority is broader than it is in ordinary times.
For Delta, which consumed roughly 250,000 bpd of jet fuel last year at a cost of 
$12 billion, analysts said the benefit of having a cheap supply of the fuel from Trainer could give it an advantage over rivals in the New York area, where it is expanding services.
I usually arrived at work before most of the staff. On some days, I could wander across the office to get my coffee without seeing anyone. But strangely, that morning, the team’s communications guru, was already there. He pulled me aside. “Be prepared to have a terrible day,” he said. “I can’t tell you any more—you’ll know soon enough. But I’m telling you as a friend, this is going to be a really rough day.”
I went back to my desk trying to decipher what he meant. Soon, my phone rang. On the other end was a member of the operations team: “Jeremy, you need to do something for me. You need to grab the championship trophies. Polish them until they’re spotless and bring them to the Furtado Center [the team’s training facility]. I can’t tell you why, you just need to do it now.”
JetBlue Airways is apologizing for a “computer glitch” it blames for a family being told their 18-month-old daughter was on a government no-fly list.
According to Google’s original guidelines, it said…
“Can competitors harm ranking? There’s nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”
In November, Google changed its tune a little bit…
“Can competitors harm ranking? There’s ALMOST nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”
Did anyone catch the slight difference in this new entry? You don’t have to be a professional writer to see this one.
Then, on March 14th…
“Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”
The simplest explanation of how Google ranks pages. Semi-Geek, but hang in, it’s worth while.
Wal-Mart dispatched investigators to Mexico City, and within days they unearthed evidence of widespread bribery. They found a paper trail of hundreds of suspect payments totaling more than $24 million. They also found documents showing that Wal-Mart de Mexico’s top executives not only knew about the payments, but had taken steps to conceal them from Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. In a confidential report to his superiors, Wal-Mart’s lead investigator, a former F.B.I. special agent, summed up their initial findings this way: “There is reasonable suspicion to believe that Mexican and USA laws have been violated.”
The lead investigator recommended that Wal-Mart expand the investigation.
THIS WEEK’S HEADLINES:
A sleepy Air Canada pilot first mistook the planet Venus for an aircraft, and then sent his airliner diving toward the Atlantic to prevent an imaginary collision with another plane, an official report said on Monday.
