• Discrimination

    Gays now entitled to inept online dating

    eHarmony does not hate gay people. It is merely ignorant of them. That is the dating site's excuse for excluding same-sex customers — a practice that led a gay New Jersey man, Eric McKinley, to file a complaint with New Jersey's attorney general which eHarmony has just settled, paying a $50,000 fine to the state adn $5,000 to McKinley. eHarmony was founded in 2000 by Neil Clark Warren, an evangelical Christian and a psychologist; he is still the company's chairman. More »

    12:40 AM on Thu Nov 20 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    105 views, 1 comment

    Latest by TMonster: I'm sorry, McKinley got what!? $5,000 for complaining that a website lacks a feature? This is like me suing Google more »

  • cubicle culture

    Facebook less like a college dorm than you'd think

    One imagines Facebook as a geek utopia, where hackers who dropped out of college play Rock Band all day, then stay up all night coding. The reality: It's as depressingly Dilbertian as any other company — and COO Sheryl "No-Fun" Sandberg is making sure it keeps getting more boring every day. Take the latest tiff we happened to hear about — in the social network's business-development department, the home of glad-handing charmers who negotiate deals. You'd think they'd be experts at sucking up to each other. Tim Kendall (shown left), the company's director of monetization — Valleyspeak for "guy who comes up with ideas to make money" — was left fuming after his boss, VP Dan Rose, instructed him in the art of time management. More »

    5:00 PM on Wed Nov 19 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    2,540 views, 11 comments

    Latest by innocentchild: Translation: Dood you're hella fucking up my game as your manager because you do what you do and you do it more »

  • Caption Contest

    Smile for the camera

    A tipster sent in this photo of Facebook's business-development team, taken in bubblier times at a September offsite in St. Helena, north of San Francisco, where they played a croquet tournament. (Rules about wearing white after Labor Day don't apply in northern California's bubbly clime.) Now more than ever, Facebook needs to develop a business; can this crowd swing their mallets? Suggest a caption in the comments; the best one will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: godospoons for "Jerry Yang explains Internet to Best Buy employees." (Photo courtesy of a thoughtful tipster)

    4:00 PM on Wed Nov 19 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    1,202 views, 13 comments

    Latest by TMonster: I see white people... more »

  • the olds

    Vint Cerf's dream of porn in space comes true

    NASA deemed successful a month-long test of image transfers to and from the Epoxi space probe, currently 20 million miles away somewhere near Mars. Alleged Internet inventor Vint Cerf helped NASA design the enabling technology, known as Delay Tolerant Networking, a decade ago. (I know: What does that guy do now?) More »

    3:20 PM on Wed Nov 19 2008
    By Paul Boutin
    377 views, 2 comments

    Latest by Incognito: So, uh, what happens in space stays in space? Can you get sticky keyboards in zero gravity? I really don't more »

  • Your Privacy Is An Illusion

    Google CEO has no time for your privacy

    Is Google becoming the king of the Web? Well, duh — that happened about five years ago, before anyone really noticed. But activist groups, now and again, worry about whether Google knows too much about us. Yesterday, Consumer Watchdog's John Simpson quizzes Google CEO Eric Schmidt about whether his company is doing enough to guard our privacy. More »

    2:20 PM on Wed Nov 19 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    604 views, 3 comments

    Latest by Incognito: Well, now that they're sponsoring a satellite (I know it's old news, but a reference should always exist) and perhaps more »

  • rumormonger

    Google CEO pulled over for driving with a cell phone

    No man is above the law — not even multibillionaire Google CEO Eric Schmidt. At least that's what we hear from a well-placed tipster, who says Schmidt recently confessed to having been pulled over by the cops last month in Los Angeles for talking on his cell phone while driving. (California law recently changed to require the use of a headset.) Oh, but it gets worse for Schmidt. More »

    1:20 PM on Wed Nov 19 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    7,441 views, 17 comments

    Most discussed MissVolare: Don't dial & drive: like the CHP needs more crap laws, besides "driving while minority," to enforce. I've started asking more »

  • Steve Ballmer

    Microsoft: "We are done with Yahoo"

    Microsoft's chair-hurling 800-pound gorilla slammed the door on talk of a renewed Yahoo acquisition deal at today's shareholder meeting in Bellevue, Washington. "We are done with all acquisition deals with Yahoo ... We did our best. We've moved on." In business, this often means: We'll be back. For now, though, Ballmer said he'd rather cut a deal to serve Live Search results to Yahoo users — as a vendor, not an owner. Why can he speak with such confidence? Because he's already snapped up Yahoo's key search engineers.

    12:20 PM on Wed Nov 19 2008
    By Paul Boutin
    1,520 views, 8 comments

    Most discussed mew: Microsoft no longer needs to buy Yahoo!. Ballmer probably knew that their original offer would be rejected. By more »

  • Clips

    Mark Cuban's overclocked lifestyle -- the 60-second version

    "My blog, because the press never gets it right." This 2006 Hewlett Packard ad featuring Dallas Mavs owner and dotcom bazillionaire Mark Cuban shows why it'll be fun to watch him fight with the SEC over a chump-change $750,000 windfall from what the lawmen claim is insider trading. Cuban is a crazy super-multitasker who gets 1,000 emails a day, yet still had time to do Dancing with the Stars. Halfway through this ad, he checks off The Smartest Guys in the Room, a documentary about the Enron scandal that he coproduced. My guess on this week's insider trading charge against him? He did it, not thinking through the risks. But he's going to make the SEC look like a bunch of dolts on the Internet. Pass the popcorn!

    12:00 PM on Wed Nov 19 2008
    By Paul Boutin
    303 views, 3 comments

    Latest by Kebie: He uses a MacBook Air though, he has several blog posts about switching to MacBooks, and how great he thinks more »

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