Feed: news according 2 me - AggScore: 77.2

It's sure to be a surprise to Republicans. Despite Huntsman being a Republican, and a former co-chairman of Obama rival Sen. John McCain's campaign, Obama asked him to take on a crucial role as U.S. ambassador to China. He's definitely qualified for the job. Mr. Huntsman, 49 and the Governor of Utah, learned to speak Mandarin Chinese from his time as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan. He has worked in the two Bush administrations, serving as the United States ambassador to Singapore in the final year of President George Bush’s term and as a deputy United States trade ambassador for President George W. Bush. He even has an adopted Chinese daughter.
This is a pretty important position right now. "Given the breadth of issues at stake in our relationship with China, this ambassadorship is as important as any in the world," Obama said. The president said there was "much to be gained by a closer, working relationship with China" and that he could think of no one better suited to take on this assignment than Huntsman. "I hope the good people of Utah will forgive me and understand how proud they should be of their governor for his willingness to answer his nation's call," Obama said.

Miss California, Carrie Prejean, finally got a break today. It was bad enough she lost the Miss America crown, but she came pretty close to losing her Miss California Crown. It's all because people are stirring up controversy against her, most of those people are against her statement she made on her stance against gay marriage. I think she has more supporters than non-supporters though. I believe the state of California was ready to take her crown away, and would have, if there wasn't so many people giving their opinion on both sides of the case. They didn't want that kind of pressure so they gave the responsibility to Donald Trump. Fortunately for Kerry, he said that she can keep the crown, that he didn't see anything wrong with the pictures everyone was complaining about and said that her stance on marriage was the same stance many others including the President had taken. As far as the pictures, I think it's ridiculous to say that they were too risque. They couldn't have been that bad if the news sites were able to post all of them for everyone to see.

Cheap hosting can be hard to find. Every provider says their hosting is cheap. They'll tell you anything you want to here. Most of the providers that really are cheap are cheap for a reason. They are worthless. The good cheap hosting providers are hard to find. For example after much searching I found a provider that has a great $1.66/month plan with an amazing 1 GB of space. They don't even have that plan listed anywhere on their site. The only way to get it is to follow the instructions on this site: Cheap Web Hosting. On this site you have to click the line that has this plan listed and read their review. In the review they tell you how to get that plan on the other site. Crazy huh? I hope this helps on everyone's quest for Cheap Hosting.

Who is the largest wireless phone provider? It's Verizon after they bought Alltel back in January. What happens when people decide you are too big and have too much dominance? The Federal Communications Commission makes you auction off part of your company, which is exactly what happened to Verizon. So who buys that piece you are forced to sell? The second largest wireless carrier of course, which is AT&T who offered to pay $2.35 billion in cash. This piece is going to raise AT&T's customers by about 1.5 million. I'm sure that Verizon is happy about that. The funny thing is, in AT&T's quest to become the biggest, they are buying part of a network that isn't compatible with their own. They'll most likely have to replace everyone's phones on that network before too long.

What I want to know is, with the economy the way it is, how does AT&T have $2.35 billion sitting around that they can throw at this. I mean I don't have anything I can throw at anything. You should see how excited I get when I find a good deal on something. Like yesterday I found some cheap web hosting to host a couple little sites I have. Anytime you can find something cheap these days you need to celebrate. Especially when it's something that I need anyway like web hosting.

Federal drug regulators warned today, to stop using the entire line of Hydroxycut weight-loss products, citing reports of a death due to liver failure and other instances of serious health problems. I've actually thought a few times how Hydroxycut has been around for a while, and is one of the few weight loss supplements that hasn't been pulled off the market. This seems to happen to every product out there. Whenever there is something that is too good to be true, it turns out that it really is. If you need to lose weight, is it really worth trying to find a shortcut that could end up risking your life? The only safe way to lose weight is diet and exercise.

A boy from Mexico was traveling in Texas, was hospitalized, and later died. Tests confirmed the presence of the current swine flu. This is definitely a milestone in the development of this new and growing outbreak. Although latest reports say that there are only 100 cases of this flu so far, the possibility of death ought to bring new fear throughout the United States. I don't know that there is enough information on this death or the flu to worry. The boy was only two and there could have been other contributing factors. I am sure there are going to be plenty of sick people out there that will be very worried that they have it.

The wildfires in South Carolina have burned 31 mi.² of forest and many many homes. With winds picking up tonight. The worst is probably yet to come. The bad thing about all of this is that could've been prevented. These fires were man-made. They were caused by a person burning trash in his yard. So far the fires are only 50% contained. Already these have caused millions of dollars in damage. I'm sure this guy that started the fires is going to be in big trouble. You wonder if when the fire started and spread. If he would've had time to call the fire department or if he was embarrassed to let anyone know (afraid he'd get in trouble) and tried to put himself.

In a post written by tech guy, he writes about how the Chinese keep hacking into our systems and keep denying it. I posted recently about how the power grid was hacked into and there was applications left that would allow someone to be able to take control at a future time. Also on this occasion the Chinese were blamed. It makes you wonder if they are getting ready for something. That's a little scary. As far as then denying it, that's not surprise. The Chinese lie about everything. If you want proof, or a little entertainment, just check out any Chinese news site (many have an english version). Of course the government controls all of them. They tell their people all sorts of crazy things everyday. My bet is they have some crazy article about how the United States keeps hacking into the Chinese systems and are blaming someone else. Seriously, that's exactly the type of thing they would say.

Yahoo just announced that they will be closing their free web service, GeoCities. Apparently the web advertising market is low right now and this is causing problems for many major webs sites. YouTube is another one that is struggling right now because of this. What's really crazy is Yahoo bought GeoCities about 10 years ago for $3 billion. So the way I look at it that was money down the drain. Unless they've made that much during these last 10 years. Yahoo is already stopped new sign-ups and will be closing the service completely later this year.

Somebody took the November 2008 Today show Beyoncé concert and altered her song “If I Were A Boy”, making her singing sound horrendous. I watched this video today and thought it was hilarious! I laughed until I cried. Obviously she always performs like no other, that's probably why I thought it was so funny. I'm sure she's got to be pretty upset about it though. I think if I was her I'd be looking into a lawsuit. Fortunately, they made her sound bad enough that most people will know that it's fake. At least for her sake I hope that is the case.

Throughout the years I've bought many, many things on eBay. I've won a lot of auctions and I have lost a lot of auctions. There's been many times I've been outbid at the last second and a few times I lost track of time and missed bidding at the end of the auction. I don't know of many things that can be more frustrating than this after watching an auction for a week. For this reason and the fact that I am very impatient, I always search through the "buy-it-now" ads first. Apparently I'm not alone. EBay just announced that their auctions, which used to be the majority of their gross merchandise value, now only make up 50%. They also expect this to drop to 30% within three or four years. As eBay continues to shift their strategy, many think they will start to favor fixed-price selling over the auctions. EBay has always been the leader when it comes to auctions, but if people are moving away from auctions, I believe this will open the door for stiffer competition with eBay.

I was reading a post at Tech Guy Stuff and it got me thinking about the iPhone. Out of all of AT&T's new customers last quarter, 75% of them were iPhone customers. Why is iPhone exclusive with AT&T? They should be with every provider. In fact they should start being their own cell phone provider. They could probably buy some small company or partner with them and take them over. They need to do it now while the iPhone's are so popular. Eventually other phones are going to catch up in technology. But I would bet as long as Apple can at least keep up with any competition, customers will stick with them. Nobody wants the hassle of switching providers and maybe also their phone numbers more than they have to. They would be able to cut out the middlemen on their phone sales and probably be able to offer better discounts than other providers could to get people to renew their contracts. That just my 2 cents.

With today being Earth Day, Obama talked about a new program that he is creating, that will authorize offshore electricity generated by wind and ocean currents. He stressed the importance of this kind of clean energy as a way of geting away from coal and oil. I think this is great. Of course we need more energy produced by wind, the sun, ocean currents, and any other type of clean energy. My only question is, if we are creating energy offshore, how do we get the energy back here in the US? Is he talking about other countries as being offshore, or is he talking about putting stuff right off our shores within a couple miles? If we are talking about right off the shoreline, how is this going to work? Are we going to build a giant platform and run power lines to it? That obviously wouldn't be cost effective. So I'm thinking he's talking about other countries. I don't see how we can get any power produced in another country here. We're not going to have power lines across the ocean or hall giant batteries back to us. So if we can't get the energy back to us, how will this cut down on our consumption of other types of energies? Has this really been thought through?

By now, everyone should know what took place during the Miss USA pageant on Sunday. Perez Hilton, one of the judges and obviously gay, asked Miss California Carrie Prejean what her stance is on same-sex marriage. "I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman," she said on the live broadcast. "No offense to anybody out there, but that's how I was raised." We all know that it offended lots of people, especially Perez Hilton who later ripped on her and call her names. Obviously with him being one of the judges, he gave her a low score which definitely cost her the crown (she was first runner-up).

People reflecting back to last year may remember what happened in California with proposition 8, which has to do with marriage between a man and woman. One of the largest groups that stood up for marraige at that time was the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints. Many people are now asking if Carrie Prejean is LDS/Mormon. I really don't know if she is or not. What I do know is she has beliefs which she stated and is sticking to. Perez Hilton has beliefs which he is sticking to. The only difference I can see is Carrie Prejean is the only one getting ripped on. If Perez can't handle someone having a different view than his, why is he asking questions like that? The fact is, she told the truth and I applaud her for that. What if she was a politician and was asked what her position was on something? Would you want a politician that told the truth, or one that says whatever they think everyone wants to hear? If you don't agree with a politician, you don't vote for them, which is what Perez did. Why couldn't he, and everyone else leave it at that? It's bad enough that she didn't win. Why does everyone have to get offended and be rude to her? I mean she wasn't answering a right or wrong question. And she didn't say that she hates gays, or is going to beat up anybody who is in a same-sex marriage. She said she didn't want to offend anyone, but this is what I believe. How can you argue with what someone believes?

You can't judge a book by it's cover. If you haven't seen the Youtube video of Susan Boyle, you are not only a minority but you are really missing out. She is not much to look at. Her clothes are not cool. She's not really a people person. Her speech is very plain. She's not very polished. Yet everyone is talking about her, and she is about as popular as any celebrity right now. All because when she opens her mouth to sing, she sounds like a bird. American Idol needs some contestants like her. You really should check her out.