There’s also the element of sheer luck of being at the right place at the right time that amounts to success – Bill Gates with access to computer programming resources and kits at an early age had a certain advantage over someone in Africa, who perhaps had the same business acumen, but did not have the resources readily accessible to become one of the world’s wealthiest businessmen. There’s an interview with Gladwell on CNN Money:

Bill Gates has this utterly extraordinary series of opportunities. When he’s 13, it’s 1969. He shows up at his private school in Seattle, and they have a computer room with a teletype machine that is hooked up to a mainframe downtown. Anyone who was playing on the teletype machine could do real-time programming. Ninety-nine percent of the universities in America in 1969 did not have that.

Marketing pitches masquerading as the 1099 forms detailing non-payroll income have been arriving in taxpayer mailboxes, while e-mails that appear to be from the Internal Revenue Service are really identity theft scams designed to collect personal financial information.

We are contacting you to inform you that Scottrade has experienced a data security issue with the eCheck Secure service. Our records indicate that you have used eCheck Secure for the purpose of electronically moving funds from your bank to Scottrade. We will detail what we know about the situation and also what steps you should consider taking to safeguard your information.

On October 25, 2005, Troy Group Inc., the provider of the eCheck Secure service and other services to the financial services industry, reported to us that a computer hacker had compromised its eCheck Secure servers. As a result, some of your personal information, including your name, driver’s license or state ID number, date of birth, phone number, bank name, bank code, bank number, bank routing number, bank account number and Scottrade account number may have been compromised. If you used your Social Security number as your driver’s license or state ID number, your Social Security number may have been compromised as well. We do not know whether the hacker has actually accessed and/or used any of your personal information. However, Troy has notified us that it has blocked further unauthorized access to the information. The eCheck Secure service cannot be used to withdraw funds from your Scottrade account. Troy has filed a report with the FBI and is investigating in conjunction with a forensic analysis firm that it has retained. Scottrade has also contacted the FBI on this matter, and has a dedicated team to work on this issue and assist our customers who may have been affected.

Better watch those checking/savings accounts closer now.

It may be time to take coffee off the list of life’s guilty pleasures. New studies indicate that moderate coffee drinkers can not only enjoy their morning java jolt, but they may also get significant health benefits in the process.

Annual coffee sales in the US are estimated at $19.2 bln, worldwide – $70 bln.

We submitted a complaint to the most senior Moscow prosecutor in July (this is the third submission) and are awaiting that decision. Allofmp3.com was declared illegal by the court in Germany in May. The portal to the site in Italy, allofmp3.it was shut down by the Italian police in July. By the way, the Russian Organization for Multimedia & Digital Systems (ROMS) does not have the authority to licence the site and was thrown out of CISAC in October last year for purporting to grant licences it was not entitled to grant. We have consistently said that the site breaks international copyright laws by its sale and digital distribution of copyrighted music without the consent or authorisation of the rights holders.

• Nissan Maxima
• Cadillac Escalade
• Dodge Stratus
• Chrysler Sebring
• Dodge Intrepid

Although ad inventory was surely part of the equation, I believe there is larger strategic reason that motivated Murdoch to make such a bold move: He is planning to create a competitor to MTV.

The 2-column layout (3-column, if you consider settings and ads) offers news on one site and blogs on another. Findory keeps track of the reading history, and it’s easy to delete the story from the history, if you happen to click on a story that you weren’t really interested in. Overall, the suggestions it produces (they are marked with a little spiky logo to the right of the story title) are quite relevant and many times I’ve found myself reading blogs that I would not have visited otherwise. Memeorandum seems to be in the same market, pulling news for headlines and then linking to the blogs discussing the news, but Findory just seems to be more usable. According to the company founder & CEO, there’s API in case someone wants to integrate the headlines into an application.

Few drawbacks there as well. For one, the related links just seem to be randomized. You can add some blogs to the list of Favorites, and then Findory would attempt to find a bunch of articles on a similar topic, but from what I’ve seen, it’s far from exact science. Two – if I read the story, just remove it from the list. The last thing I want to see when I load the front page is a bunch of stories I’ve read. I can always access them in my Reading History, why keep them on the front page? Overall, however, it’s a pretty interesting news/blog recommendation engine that’s also usable as a blog search.