a rightly timed pause

Google has just launched Lively, a new social network built around the concept of each user creating an avatar and a personal virtual room that can be embedded anywhere on the Web. In essence, Google is looking to create a massive distributed virtual world, where every Google account can have its own avatar that can be used wherever a Lively virtual room is present – for example, on a blog, a social networking profile, or a Web page.

Senator Barack Obama said Tuesday that if elected president he would expand the delivery of social services through churches and other religious organizations, vowing to achieve a goal he said President Bush had fallen short on during his two terms.

Senator Barack Obama’s decision to support legislation granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants …

Congress just passed a new law that will stop your capital — or at least a good portion of it — at the border, should you decide not to be a U.S. citizen anymore. Is it, perhaps, in preparation for the possibility that Americans might rebel at the debt and taxes incurred by their government by leaving for lower-tax locales?

You probably didn’t notice this little provision inserted into the Heroes Act of 2008, passed by Congress on June 17. The headlines in the press release about the law were about the increased benefits for veterans and families of deceased military.

But Richard Kohan of Price WaterhouseCoopers drew my attention to one section of the act, which states that anyone voluntarily giving up his or her citizenship will be taxed on all of his assets as if he or she had sold them — paying capital gains on assets that have increased in value, even though they have not been sold.

And a side note that will surely be overlooked, your beloved Barack Obama voted for it.

What I love about Kluster so far is that they listened to their community unlike some other crowdsourcing communities. They relies that their community is driving their business and that if they are going to invest in the wisdom of the crowds then they should listen to their crowd.  In a series of blog post Kluster has asked its community what it should do to make its product better, and in a matter of weeks they have take those suggestions and put them into practice.

A great man once said, “Why do we fall, sir?  So that we might better learn to pick ourselves up.”

Kluster has taken this to heart, they are not afraid to fall because each time you fall you learn and become stronger.

Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision — an eternity at the speed of thought.