Green Machine Solutions

The product is called Hydro 4000, a $1,200 device that sits under your hood and uses electrolysis to turn water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. The hydrogen and oxygen are then fed into your engine, and the mixture causes gasoline to burn more efficiently, Havanich says.

"Instead of having anywhere from 5 to 15 percent of your fuel not getting used and going into your catalytic converter, you can burn all your fuel," he told me.

I learned about the Hydro 4000 from a local news report on WPTV Channel 5 in West Palm Beach. Jamie Holmes, the reporter there, was skeptical of Havanich's claims, so he tried the Hydro 4000 on the channel's Dodge Durango news van.

On a dynamometer -- basically a treadmill for a car -- the news van, running at 55 miles per hour for 20 minutes, got an average of 9.4 miles per gallon before installation of the Hydro 4000.

Holmes reports:

We then ran our truck on the street for close to a month with the Hydro-4000 running. The owners said this would give the device time to clean out the engine. We then put our vehicle back on the dynamometer, and did the same test all over again.

And guess what? With the device on, we were now averaging 23.2 miles to the gallon. That's 61 percent better than the gas mileage we were previously getting.

Channel 5's math is off there; a jump from 9.4 MPG to 23.2 MPG is actually a 147 percent gain in gas mileage. Which sounds amazing, doesn't it?

Havanich told me that Channel 5's results were ideal, and that more typical driving conditions -- i.e., not on a dynamometer -- would yield something closer to a 20 to 60 percent efficiency gain.

But if gasoline prices keep going up, even the smaller gain could make a Hydro 4000 a good investment.

Unless, of course, the whole thing's bunk. Which could be true: Hydrogen-injection devices aren't new, and as in many debates about energy, there remains fundamental disagreement about whether they work.

The basic problem is this: The device uses electricity produced by your car's alternator to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen. Does the energy it uses for electrolysis exceed the energy it saves by making your engine consume fuel more efficiently -- and is it, therefore, phony?

Depends on whom you ask. There's at least one trucking company that swears by hydrogen boosting. And in online forums, some people report getting better gas mileage after installing such devices (just as WPTV did).

But there's skepticism that drivers may have adjusted their driving styles after installing the hydrogen boost, and that the adjustment might be the true reason for the savings.

Many online point out that the Discovery Channel show "Mythbusters" once investigated hydrogen boosters and pronounced them busted: The booster device failed to produce much hydrogen at all, "Mythbusters" found.

But others criticize "Mythbusters'" methods there, and say that a more conventional test -- such as WVPT's -- would have proved that the thing works.

So, the question still seems up in the air. Havanich offers a 60-day money-back guarantee on the device, so if you're interested, you risk little by ordering it (you need to have it installed -- and, if necessary, removed -- by a mechanic).

I'm going to ask my bosses here at Salon to buy me a Hydro 4000 to review. If they go for it, I'll let you know whether it works.

And yet it's MySpace, still the world's largest social network, that has recently been acting like the Internet-ethics nerd. And I mean that in the best way: On Thursday MySpace announced Data Availability, a project that will let users move their data to sites across the Web.

This is a long-standing Web community request, not to mention a hobbyhorse of mine. When you put your data -- a list of your favorite movies, of your friends, your relationship status, all of life's coordinates -- into a Web app, there ought to be a way for you to easily, automatically move that stuff around to other places. After all, it's your data -- what right does Facebook have to tell you what you can do with it?

MySpace is allowing just that. Users will be able to choose among other sites -- Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter for now -- that they'd like to connect with their MySpace data. If you connect to Yahoo, for instance, then anything you change on MySpace will be reflected at Yahoo, too.

Facebook has been much more reluctant to allow other sites access to your data (with your permission). In a famous flap a few months ago, tech-blog wag Robert Scoble tested out a script to copy his Facebook contacts to the online address book Plaxo, only to have Facebook temporarily suspend his account.

Chris DeWolfe, MySpace's CEO, told reporters yesterday that the new project "is open to any site out there that wants to work with us, so we're happy to work with Facebook if they want to join up with us on this project."

Let's hope they will. Facebook's unofficial mission is to build the world's social graph -- to map out all the connections between human beings on the planet. To do so, the company will need a lot of our data. The least we can expect in return is some control over it.

Rockstar Games

"Grand Theft Auto IV" wears its reputation on its sleeve, most likely in an ambidextrous shoulder holster with a double-mag pouch. Fans of the series come to this latest game, which has already set sales records since its release last week, with high expectations: that its landscape will be lush and flexible, offering endless opportunities to wreak havoc over a tyrannized virtual populace -- but also intricate and clever, stamped with in jokes, futuristic absurdities and wry references to pop culture and politics.

Detractors, too, keep a checklist handy for any new "GTA" release. In a game that aims to re-create the underside of urban life, there'll be guns and crooks and prostitutes and sex and drugs and booze. The combination, under the thumbs of 14-year-olds and re-created in high-def right in your living room, has proved a recurrent boon to the nation's concern industry.

What's beautiful about "Grand Theft Auto IV" is how grandly it both fulfills and tweaks these expectations. This may be the darkest, most realistically violent game in the series, and if you go looking for sin -- as many players do -- you'll find dozens of sequences that'll provoke outrage on the late local news. "GTA IV" allows you to hire prostitutes and then murder them -- need any more be said?

On the other hand, as several reviewers have pointed out, the graphical and narrative realism of "GTA IV" serves, unexpectedly, to diminish a player's blood lust. The game's story line is so absorbing that you aren't really moved to murder random passersby. Its fictional universe is unendingly deep, far more complex than what came before -- not to mention than much of what one finds on TV or at the movies.

This new dimension elevates "GTA" from mere entertainment into something that can credibly, if a little self-consciously, demand to be called art. The more you play "GTA IV," the more real everything in it feels. And it won't be long before you're calling it the smartest video game ever created.

Folks cleverer than me -- notably Steven Johnson -- have convincingly expounded on the mind-expanding capacities of video games, but with previous versions of "Grand Theft Auto," the argument has been a tough sell. When you tell people you're playing a game that allows you to mow down virtual civilians -- indeed, that such behavior constitutes the game's defining thrill -- they recoil. It sounds hollow, mindless, attractive only to sadists -- on the order of rape porn, "Bumfights" or a Gordon Ramsay reality show.

"GTA IV," like previous versions, sets you up as an outsider in the city, where you gain status and notoriety by embarking on a series of missions (murder, robbery, mayhem) for a variety of friends and associates. But unlike the other "GTAs," this one gives each of your associates unique, fully fleshed personalities and characteristics.

The fellow you play, Niko Bellic, is an Eastern European immigrant scarred by unnamed strife in the motherland, and his actions hew to a moral code born of that conflict. Others have odder quirks: the wife of a gang leader who can't stand the monster her husband has become. The ex-con who feels the press of suicide as he adjusts to life outside the can. The girlfriend who's a clean freak, and who, during some off-screen activity that one presumes is sex (the controller vibrates knowingly), ecstatically compliments your conversational skills.

But it's not only that the people you encounter are interesting -- it's also that there are so many of them! I was often struck, while immersed in "GTA IV," at its resemblance to another fictional universe I love, David Simon's in "The Wire." The similarity is not narrative, but rather structural -- understanding the game's world depends on your learning and navigating a web of sometimes mysterious social connections.

As much as it is a driving and shooting game, then, "GTA" is also a puzzle game. The puzzle concerns social relationships: You're working with and for several characters at once, and what you do for some of them affects how you get along with others. In a game known mainly for carjacking, it's surprising how much time you're asked to spend building and maintaining friendships and romantic liaisons -- going on dates to bowling alleys and comedy clubs, hanging out with your pals at bars and pool halls, keeping up with a surfeit of text messages and e-mail (even deleting Nigerian spam).

Where "The Wire" tries to present the modern American city as it is, "GTA IV" gives us the city as it might become. The city here is called Liberty, a stylized riff on New York, but the name's ironic: There's no liberty in Liberty City. Officials pump up terrorism fears, crime is rampant, ethnic tensions are high, and everyone is rude.

It may be too much to say that "GTA" has a message, but it certainly has a vision: It's the dystopian near-future, something like the world of "The Children of Men" (there are no kids here, either).

The vision is pushed by the media your character encounters -- the radio stations, the TV networks, the astonishingly deep in-game Web (with parodies of Craigslist, Fox News, Match.com and other sites, which you access at Internet cafes called TW@).

As you pass through the city, you learn about the end of reading as a pastime, or the new market in selling babies over the Internet, or the extremely elevated terrorist threat -- "Liberty City is now officially on Charcoal 8 Alert, more serious than the Red High 7 Risk Alert, but not as serious as the recently created Black Severe 9 Alert," the game's Fox News analogue, Weasel News, warns.

Crucially, your aim here, unlike in many games, is not to set right what's wrong with this place. I haven't finished the game -- it could take weeks -- but I get the sense that once Niko Bellic has achieved all he can in Liberty City, it will still be the pits.

Win or lose, the world goes on without you.

Grand Theft Auto IV

Take-Two Interactive, the publishers of "Grand Theft Auto IV," announced today that sales of the game topped $500 million in the first week, more than what many analysts had expected. On its first day on the shelves -- April 29 -- 3.6 million copies were purchased, a retail value of $310 million.

The huge take boosts Take-Two's position in its wrangling with Electronic Arts, the video game behemoth that's put forth a takeover bid for the "GTA" publisher.

But there's another stat worth noting -- "Iron Man" took in more than $100 million at the box office over the weekend. There'd been some speculation that "GTA" would cause young men to stay indoors this week, lowering the take at the cinema. As Ars Technica notes, that didn't quite happen. Looks like movies and games can coexist.

• Danger Room's Noah Shachtman points out that the Defense Department has released thousands of pages of documents relating to its controversial wartime pundit-recruitment program, about which my tenacious Salon co-blogger Glenn Greenwald has been all up in the Pentagon's and Brian Williams' grill.

  "Years' worth of internal Pentagon memos, military talking points and interview tapes and transcripts with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are all now posted to the Pentagon's website," Noah writes. He's asking his readers to go through the stash in search of the fishiest, juiciest bits.

  Already, people have found something interesting, if unsurprising: Talking points and a conference-call transcript show that the Pentagon was feeding inflated estimates of Iraqi troop strength -- and a promise that the insurgency was in its last throes -- to the generals, just as it was to the public.

• The Politico's Ben Smith notes that Hillary Clinton's political advisor Howard Wolfson and Barack Obama's political advisor David Axelrod are old friends. But the only recent conversation the frenemies have had is via instant message.

  One of Smith's readers imagined the IM transcript:

  TheRodster42: lol ur toast
  WolfieSweater69: stfu, we won IN
  TheRodster42: lol NC pwned u
  WolfieSweater69: rev wright said wut?
  TheRodster42: lol typ white person...

• My college classmate Mickey Rapkin, who's now an editor at GQ and the author of the forthcoming "Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory," interviews the Baudboys, an a cappella group made up of Microsoft employees.

  Actually, according to one of the Baudboys, they're just one of the a cappella groups at MS. There's also the Microtones, and a theater group, The Microsoft Theater Troupe, which does Christmas shows (such as, recently, "Grease.")

  Of a cappella groups at rival tech firms, Baudboys bass Dave McEwan tells Mickey,

  We sang the national anthem for the Microsoft Hockey Challenge -- where they play the teams from Sun Microsystems or Google. Someone from Sun said, We have an a cappella group that would kick your ass! But then they disbanded. Groups come and go at Google. We think they're running from us.... I'd love for someone from Google to hear that and challenge us.

  Watch a Baudboys performance here.

The Smoking Gun

During her training at Millersville University in Central Pennsylvania, Snyder's professors gave the 27-year-old student high marks for her professionalism and classroom conduct, marveling over the way she prepared lesson plans and engaged students.

But then her professors found Snyder's MySpace page. There, they saw a publicly accessible picture that bore the caption "drunken pirate," and showed Snyder in a pirate hat drinking from a plastic cup.

A Millersville administrator told Snyder that posting the picture was "unprofessional." The school refused to grant Snyder a bachelor of science in education degree and stripped her of her teaching certificate; she was allowed, instead, to graduate with a bachelor of arts degree, which is insufficient to secure teaching credentials in Pennsylvania.

Snyder has filed suit against the school; you can read an excerpt of her complaint at The Smoking Gun.

Millersville University denies that it dismissed Snyder for the MySpace picture alone. The school contends that she performed poorly as a teacher, and that the MySpace picture was "the straw that broke the camel's back." That story is hard to square with the list of glowing recommendations that Snyder produces in her complaint.

The school's defense suggests that it's wised up, and perhaps understands, now, that it would have been completely ridiculous to dismiss Snyder for what she did on MySpace.

Because in addition to being an apparently great teacher and a single mother of two, Stacy Snyder is, like the vast majority of teachers, a human being. And posting photos of oneself in potentially unbecoming poses isn't just the pastime anymore of uncivilized drunken perverts without decency who ought to be kept away from children at all costs. It is, increasingly, something all of us do, and there'll come a time, soon, when no one can honestly claim that there's nothing untoward about us on the Web.

Why not? Because people like to have fun. And adults -- and Snyder was over the legal drinking age when these photos were taken -- sometimes like to have fun in specifically adult ways, sometimes involving booze and boobs and butts and ... better not enumerate here, but you get the picture. Indeed, you've seen the picture.

It's entirely appropriate for people to have fun this way. But for fear of harming the children -- whom parents hope will not want to one day have such fun -- adults are usually encouraged to keep such things behind closed doors.

That used to be easy. It no longer is. In fact, because we live, increasingly, in an age of instant documentation and broadcast, it's nearly impossible to hide these things from the kids.

As I pointed out after the leak last September of nude photos of "High School Musical" star Vanessa Hudgens, tech trends today almost guarantee that sometime in your life, you'll be photographed without your clothes on: "Unless you're a nevernude, I'll bet you an iPhone there'll be some moment in your life in which a camera, your naked body, and an implacable sense of joie de vivre will come together to produce, without the least bit of planning, a nude photo."

There's an even greater chance that you'll be captured with your clothes on doing something that is just marginally wrong -- say, wearing a funny hat while drinking from a plastic cup.

And nevermind photos! There's an embarrassment of purely textual detail about you online. Your Match.com profile, for instance, might list your romantic and/or sexual interests, and your blog probably describes your political affiliation.

Young people today -- and that's who new teachers are, young people -- live on the Internet. Every moment of their lives, from their first poop to their high school talent show solos to their Spring Break jaunts, is captured and posted online.

If we took Millersville University's approach, very few people would be allowed to enter the workforce. And that doesn't seem quite fair in a country with a president who once flipped off a TV camera.

Will it ruin children to see their teachers acting this way? Will one of Stacy Snyder's students see her MySpace page and become morally unmoored? Or will a kid have trouble following Snyder's lesson plan, knowing that, at one point, the teacher wore a silly hat?

That may happen, though it seems doubtful. The thing is, though, there's no avoiding it. As ABC News points out, you can already find many teachers who say things or are shown doing things online that aren't very kid-appropriate:

One first-grade teacher listed among her favorite activities "dancing like an a**hole." A Teach for America teacher in New York showed pictures of several friends drinking beer on the subway. A high school teacher in Los Angeles prominently displayed photos of her lying on the beach in a bikini....

Abby, a 23-year-old elementary school teacher in New York, described "excessive drinking" as a favorite activity on her Facebook page and had a "bumper sticker" that said "let's drink so much we hate ourselves in the morning."

But remember, 20-year-olds were doing pretty much the same things two and three decades ago, too. We shouldn't hold today's youth to a higher standard just because their actions are easier to document.

The recording industry has long sent legal letters to campuses when it suspects that a student might trading music, but there's been a sudden surge of such letters -- a mysterious surge, considering that network managers at the colleges have not seen any increase in the volume of songs being traded.

So why is the music business sending more letters?

Inside Higher Ed cites college officials who suspect that "the recording industry has altered the standards it uses to allege illegal behavior." Rather than targeting only the students who trade songs, the industry is also going after students who "have stored downloaded music in a folder visible to other users, opening the way to a potential violation."

This is a familiar music industry claim -- the "making available" offense. In several court cases, officials have argued that that I should be punished not only for giving you a copyrighted song, but also for putting a song in a place where you might take it. I should be punished, the industry says, even if you didn't take the song.

Courts have been split on this theory -- some judges have sided with the industry, while others gone with the argument put forward by the likes of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: By itself, putting a song in a certain folder of your computer doesn't harm anyone. To exact legal retribution, shouldn't copyright owners have to prove, at least, that someone has copied something illegally?

Fortunately, reports Inside Higher Ed, some colleges are getting wise to these distinctions, and are beginning to throw out copyright complaints that simply complain of possible -- rather than actual -- infringement.

College officials have another theory about the surge in complaint letters -- they wonder if the industry is preparing to take its numbers to Congress as evidence of rampant copying at universities, in the hopes of persuading members to pass some sort of punitive legislation.

The Recording Industry Association of America denies any such motive. Cary Sherman, RIAA president, told Inside Higher Ed that the rise in copyright complaints is due mainly to improvements in its capacity to detect infringement.

At a press event today across the pond -- that's what clever people say for London -- the Taiwanese cell phone company HTC unveiled the Touch Diamond, a mobile aimed at taking a share of the iPhone's market.

That is, another mobile aimed at taking on the Apple. These days every cell firm on the planet is adding animated and touch-sensitive interfaces in an attempt to show that it, too, can be a bit iPhony.

The Touch Diamond does have some advantages over the iPhone -- it's shorter, narrower, and skinnier, and it's got 3G networking capabilities and GPS (the iPhone doesn't have either, yet). It's got a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus, better than the iPhone's.

But from the demo video posted above, one is tempted to say that in its interface, the thing is iPhony: Where Apple's device responds like lightning to the slightest touch, the HTC, even in the company's own corporate video, seems to ponder a bit after a finger's flicked across the screen.

Or, as Gizmodo's Addy Dugdale, who got to handle the Touch Diamond a bit, says,

[The user interface] was much more attractive than I was expecting, but the touchscreen takes quite a bit of getting used to: it's sluggish to the touch, compared to the hot-butterish iPhone, but the HTC rep assured me that it's not a final version of the software, and everything should have been ironed out by the time of the European and Asian launches next month.

The sluggishness might have to do with its operating system, Windows Mobile 6.1, which isn't known for its capacity for pretty.

The Touch Diamond will be available through the carrier Orange in June in Europe, and then elsewhere at some unannounced time after that. The pricing, too, remains a secret for now.

See more about the Touch Diamond at Endgadget and Crunchgear.

What personal belief would cause people to refuse to vaccinate their kids? The parents put stock in a repeatedly disproven idea that immunizations cause autism -- a belief for which, insanely, all three presidential candidates have recently expressed some sympathy.

So far in 2008, there have been 64 cases of measles in the U.S.; there were just 30 cases in all of 2007. These numbers are far smaller than stats we saw in the early 1990s -- in 1994, the L.A. Times notes, there were more than 900 cases of measles. Since then, the federal government has funded immunizations for low-income children, and infection rates plummeted through the '90s.

During the last few years, though, parents -- mainly upper-income parents -- across the country and the world have begun to forgo vaccinations. And it's in their children that we're now seeing infections.

For instance in January, the Times reports, an unvaccinated 7-year-old boy contracted the disease on a trip to Switzerland, which is experiencing a measles outbreak. When he returned to his home in San Diego, the boy infected 11 other children -- his two siblings, four others at his doctor's office, and five more at his school.

All these kids were unvaccinated. Indeed, at the boy's school, the San Diego Cooperative Charter School, 10 percent of children have received "personal-belief" exemptions from immunizations. Similarly high non-vaccination rates plague communities all over the nation.

The Times says that of the 64 cases of measles reported this year, 63 were in patients who hadn't been immunized.

The idea that there might be a link between vaccines -- specifically, a mercury-based preservative in vaccines called thimerosal, a preservative that is only rarely used anymore -- and autism has been shot down in several scientific studies.

The most thorough study put a thousand children -- some who'd been exposed to thimerosal and some who hadn't -- through a series of standardized mental and physical tests. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine last fall, the researchers concluded:

Our study does not support a causal association between early exposure to mercury from thimerosal-containing vaccines ... and deficits in neuropsychological functioning at the age of 7 to 10 years.

Several other studies have echoed this finding.

Yet the vaccine-autism myth has been kept alive by celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, who pushed the theory in a book and on "Oprah" last year, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who made the case in an article for Rolling Stone and Salon.

During the last few months, John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have gotten into the act.

McCain and Obama are the worst offenders. At a campaign stop in Texas in January, McCain, responding to a question from a mother of an autistic son, said (emphasis mine):

It's indisputable that [autism] is on the rise amongst children, the question is what's causing it. And we go back and forth and there's strong evidence that indicates that it's got to do with a preservative in vaccines.

At a rally in April in Pennsylvania, Obama said:

We've seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it's connected to the vaccines. This person included [referring to a person in the audience who'd asked him a question]. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it.

When an autism advocacy group asked Clinton "Do you think vaccines should be investigated as a possible cause of autism?" she said she would fund further research into the question:

I am committed to make investments to find the causes of autism, including possible environmental causes like vaccines. I have long been a supporter of increased research to determine the links between environmental factors and diseases, and I believe we should increase the NIH's ability to engage in this type of research.

McCain, Obama and Clinton are wrong. There isn't "strong evidence" that the rise in autism is linked to vaccines -- the evidence says just the opposite. The science is not "inconclusive" -- the science, in fact, has busted the myth. And there doesn't need to be further funding to search for a "possible" link between autism and vaccines -- the question has already been funded.

But the candidates are not only clueless on the facts; there's something more deeply wrong about their answers.

As I describe in "True Enough," my book about how myths persist in a niche-media society, when folks split into parallel universes of half-truths and pseudo-science, politicians are apt to follow them, because there's profit in telling people what they want to hear.

And when they do, dangerous policies follow.

Measles is a serious, highly contagious disease. A fifth of the cases reported this year resulted in hospital stays.

McCain, Obama and Clinton ought to counsel parents who are worried about vaccines that there isn't anything to fear -- that the greater risk to children and to society is in refusing immunizations.

That the candidates are instead lending credibility to these myths is sickening.

Correction: I initially said that thimerosal isn't used in vaccines anymore. In fact, a few vaccine preparations, including some flu vaccines, do still use thimerosal as a preservative. Childhood immunization shots, including the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, do not.

Basictheory

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang in a sumo outfit.

Even more so than usual, the tech world is glued to the market today, waiting to see how low Yahoo can go. Indeed, Google Trends says that YHOO, Yahoo's stock symbol, is, so far, the 28th fastest-rising search term today.

But that's the only thing about Yahoo rising today. Its stock opened at $23.02 this morning, about 20 percent down from Friday's closing price of $28.67.

Friday was, of course, a universe away: That was before Saturday's final meeting between Jerry Yang and Steve Ballmer, Yahoo and Microsoft's CEOs, at which Ballmer refused to pay a penny over $33 per share for his takeover of Yahoo.

Yang stuck to his price, $37, and Ballmer flew back to Redmond. Ballmer could always come back -- but for now, Yahoo's got to face the consequences of its strategy.

Yang himself may be pleased with it. Citing "people close to" Yahoo, the New York Times on Sunday reported that Yang considered the outcome a "personal victory," and added that "high-fives were exchanged" among Yahoo execs when they learned of Ballmer's decision.

Yahoo employees -- whose wealth is tied up in the stock -- are surely less excited. On Jan. 31, the day before Microsoft made public its takeover offer, Yahoo's stock was trading at $19. Microsoft's first offer -- of $31 -- caused the shares to surge to $28. But now that a deal's off the table, folks at Yahoo once again face the prospect of sub-$20 shares.

Aware that he wouldn't win any support from his employees if he were seen as happy about standing in the way of a huge Microsoft-stock payday, Yang, in a post on Yahoo's company blog, denied any glee:

Frankly, there's a lot of nonsense and misinformation in what's being reported. Just so we are all clear, here's what happened. The board took its mission very seriously. We clearly indicated to Microsoft that we were open to a transaction but only if it were on terms that fully recognized the value of Yahoo! and was in the best interests of our stockholders.

No one is celebrating about the outcome of these past three months ... and no one should.

As Kara Swisher reports, though, many at Yahoo aren't buying it. Here are some quotes she pulled from distraught employees:

"I am in shock."

"I don't know if we won or we lost. I think we lost."

"I don't love that it was Microsoft, but I think everyone thought $33 was a pretty good offer from a pretty good tech company."

"Having to face my staff tomorrow will not be so much fun and I need some Prozac, since I don't know what I can say to them about how our leadership is going to get our company going again."

"Where's the Jelly memo when you need it?"

"I can't really talk to Jerry, since it is difficult to tell a founder tough things he probably needs to hear."

"Do you think we need to do an intervention with Jerry and the board?"

What should Yahoo do now? Many are pushing it to make permanent a search deal with Google, one that it first initiated as a way to avert the Microsoft offer.

As part of the deal Yahoo would outsource its search operations to Google -- it would get increased revenue in return for what would likely be the end of search-engine innovation at the company.

Henry Blodget argues that this is a fine trade, because Yahoo was never going to beat Google in search anyway. Why continue to invest resources in a game that's already over? Better to spend the money in new markets that Yahoo could potentially lead.

But even a Google deal may not pacify investors. If Yahoo's stock continues to slide, Microsoft could always return with another proposal -- and this time, Ballmer wouldn't have to offer anywhere near $33.

Because as Kara Swisher says, Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer -- who, nearly three weeks ago, gave Yahoo a two-week deadline to respond to his bid, or else -- has since been vacillating over various or elses.

Earlier this week, Swisher notes, Ballmer...

...sent smoke signals that he was considering raising the price of his takeover bid for Yahoo.

And just before that, Ballmer was going to walk away from the deal. Except, before that when he was ready to lower his offer.

But don't forget the friendly path, Ballmer was also promising. Even though, his initial unsolicited offer started off back in February as, well, hostile.

In a talk to employees yesterday, Ballmer explained his crush on Yahoo by citing, once again, its size. Microsoft's online ad strategy is terrific, he said, and if forced to, it could do without Yahoo. But Yahoo enhances the position from which Microsoft can execute that strategy.

"I'd like to have a better position relative to the guy who sells the most advertising," he said -- the guy here being Google.

Stay tuned for something big. Or nothing at all.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving has put out a statement calling on the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, the industry group that rates video games, to re-rate "Grand Theft Auto IV" as "Adults Only," which would effectively pull it from store shelves across the nation.

"GTA" is rated "Mature," which means it is sold only to people 17 and older -- a rating roughly equivalent to an R for movies. MADD wants the new rating -- something closer to an NC-17 or an X -- because the game allows your character to drive while intoxicated (see a demo in the video above).

In its statement, MADD says, "Drunk driving is not a game and it is not a joke. Drunk driving is a choice, a violent crime and it is also 100 percent preventable."

The organization also asks for Rockstar Games to cease selling "GTA IV," "if not out of responsibility to society then out of respect for the millions of victims/survivors of drunk driving."

Oh, where to begin? Yes, drunk driving is not a game; it is a serious offense. But "Grand Theft Auto" is a game. The difference turns out to be of some importance. What one does in a game, see, occurs almost entirely inside one's head, where the action cannot harm another soul. There is no evidence that doing something in a game is predictive of future such real-life action, or even suggestive of a desire to commit such action.

If that were the case, a majority of Americans would spend their days crawling through sewers in search of magic mushrooms, or else hunting ducks and trading real estate.

One might even venture that part of the reason people play games is to do things they'd never consider doing in their lives. They do it in a game because they'd never do it otherwise.

"Grand Theft Auto" is full of such experiences, by the way. As in many, many games, "GTA" allows you to kill (virtual) people. You can visit (virtual) prostitutes, whom you can watch perform (fake) sex. You can also rob anyone (but, right, only on the screen). You can go to strip clubs (again, not really -- it's animation). You can drive criminally recklessly (once more, not really for real).

Note, too, that while you are allowed to do any of this, you are not required to do much of it -- news reports sometimes suggest that "GTA" forces you to drive drunk and kill whores in order to win. That's not true; in some cases, committing such acts penalize your player. Still, you may find yourself doing these things anyway -- because, in truth, there's an escapist thrill to it.

Of course, you may disagree. You may say, "That strikes me as low humor, graceless entertainment. I find it disgusting, outrageous, plainly terrible that you would play a game like that. You, sir, are a lunatic."

And it is perfectly fine for you to react that way. I thought "Life is Beautiful," that Roberto Benigni Holocaust comedy that everybody loved, was offensive. I found "Crash" intolerable. And Buzz Bissinger is a moron.

These are all, obviously, matters of taste, and MADD and I clearly do not share a taste in video games.

But the group's "out of respect for victims" argument endangers all art. Should we pull "Lolita" from the shelves out of respect for victims of child abuse? How about "The Sopranos," out of respect for victims of gangland violence? Or ban Snoop Dogg, out of respect for floating beds in space?

Art is offensive; if it doesn't offend you, it probably offends someone else. Censoring entertainment that many love because a few find it disrespectful -- now that's mad.

Te Papa Tongarewa

The colossal squid's eyes' lenses.

Te Papa Tongarewa

The colossal squid's ovaries.

Yesterday I wrote about scientists who are thawing and dissecting the colossal squid caught off Antarctica last year. The mysterious squid has become an international media sensation -- it won't be long now before Annie Liebowitz snaps some completely inappropriate pictures of the beast lounging about in its birthday suit.

But something's been bugging me about all this squid ink. Headline writers keep calling the thing a giant squid -- but the squid on the table at New Zealand's Te Papa Tongarewa museum this week is not a giant squid. It's a colossal squid. And the two are not the same.

True, both the giant squid, Architeuthis dux, and the colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, are enormous squids -- each with two fins, a body wall called a "mantle," a head, eight arms, and two tentacles. Both are found deep underwater and have been encountered by humans only rarely.

But in several ways the colossal squid is more enormous than the giant squid. Its mantle is nearly twice as long, and it weighs nearly twice as much. The colossal squid at Te Papa Tongarewa weighed in at just over 1000 pounds. (The colossal squid's overall body length, however, is roughly comparable to that of the giant squid).

The Associated Press is the biggest offender here -- one widely reprinted headline (including here at Salon) that the wire service sent out today goes, "Giant Squid Has Biggest Animal Eyes in World, Scientists Say."

As the AP story's lead explains, though, the 11-inch peepers actually belong to the colossal squid, not a giant squid. (Te Papa Tongarewa has also been dissecting a giant squid, but that's not the squid getting press.) The AP's mistake is a particular let-down because it ran a story yesterday that explained the difference between the two squids.

Other squid mixer-uppers include HuffPo, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and The Mail on Sunday, whose headline is otherwise quite fine: "Calamari for 500: Scientists defrost giant squid with 10.8 inch eyes."

Beyond nomenclature, there's more to learn about the colossal squid: It's a girl -- researchers found ovaries containing thousands of itty-bitty squid eggs. Also, on the museum's blog, scientists report that the creature's flesh is very plastic, even "gelatinous."

Here's how one museum staffer describes what the squid feels like:

It's cold -- not surprising. It's smooth, slimey. The gills felt extremely fragile, you could hardly feel them at all other than slime. They were breaking up in my fingers....

What I was really intrigued about was the eye-sockets. Ours are bone. Eyes are squishy and need that support -- so I don't know why I was surprised at how solid the cartilage felt, kind of like a glue gun stick before you melt it....

Now I'm off to face my fears and let one of the scientists stick a sucker on my finger --- ewwwwww.

JUST DONE IT! I've been suckered by a sucker from the big colossal still defrosting (it fell off -- honest!)

It reminded me of an eyeball that wouldn't come off my palm -- when you pull it off it makes a kissey noise.

Read more squid live-blogging here.

Today Ars Technica's Timothy B. Lee offers a thorough look at the case, explaining that the messages were lost, in part, due to an "upgrade" that Bush administration officials instituted when they came into office.

In 1994, the Clinton White House installed an automatic message-archiving system to work with Lotus Notes, the e-mail software that the White House used then. But in 2001 the Bushies, determined to restore honor and integrity to the White House, scrapped Lotus Notes for Microsoft Outlook.

The Clinton administration's archiving system wouldn't work under Outlook, so according to a congressional report (PDF), Bush officials instituted a new archiving plan in which a "White House staffer or contractor would collect from a 'journal' e-mail folder in the Microsoft Exchange system copies of e-mails sent and received by White House employees."

In other words, they dropped automated archiving in favor of manual archiving. Seriously, they did this.

Lee, quoting Steven McDevitt, a former White House IT official who quit in 2006, notes:

Because the archiving process was conducted manually and in an ad hoc fashion, human error could easily lead to the inadvertent omission of e-mails that are required to be preserved under federal law. Files were "scattered across various servers" on the network of the Executive Office of the President, and there "was no consistently applied naming convention" for the files. It's hardly surprising that things tended to get lost.

Even more troubling, due to a lack of redundancy and proper access controls, anyone with access to the White House servers could have tampered with or deleted the e-mails in the archives. And without adequate logging facilities, there might be no way to determine who might have tampered with the files or what might have been changed.

Photo courtesy Te Papa Tongarewa press office

The frozen colossal squid floating in salt water.

A team of marine scientists in New Zealand is just about to begin examining one of the most mysterious creatures of the deep, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, the colossal squid of myth and legend.

The squid -- which certainly is colossal: 1,089 pounds, 26 feet long -- was caught in Feb. 2007 in deep waters off Antarctica by fisherman aboard the vessel San Aspiring. The fishermen were after Patagonian toothfish, also known as Chilean sea bass, and it turned out, so was the squid -- it was caught in a net, eating a toothfish. The fisherman brought the squid aboard and froze it.

Now the squid is at New Zealand's national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, where scientists are preparing to examine it in an effort to learn more about how the rarely encountered creatures roll.

As the Associated Press notes, no one has ever seen a colossal squid alive in its natural habitat -- its habitat being thousands of feet under water. This specimen is the largest ever caught, and it may be the first male ever caught (scientists have yet to determine its sex).

Scientists will also be examining two other recently caught squids. One is a smaller colossal squid, and another is a giant squid, a different sort of very rare, huge (but less than colossal) squid of legend (famous from the depiction of the squid locked in battle with a sperm whale).

Researchers at the museum have been blogging about their squid thawing and examining venture. They write,

From the measurements taken by the scientists, Dr Steve O'Shea and Dr Tsunemi Kubodera, while examining these specimens, it will be possible to determine just how big this species grows. At 495 kg the San Aspiring specimen is the largest known invertebrate on the planet - the question is: Does this species grow even bigger, do larger squid exist?

Preliminary measurements of the beak sizes, and the size of beaks found in the stomachs of sperm whales suggest that colossal squid weighing upwards of three quarters of a tonne may exist!

The unfolding and subsequent examination -- including removal of the stomach, beak, and mouth -- of the colossal squid begins at 9 a.m. New Zealand time on Wednesday, April 30.

That's Tuesday, April 29 here in the U.S.: 2 p.m. Pacific time, 5 p.m. Eastern time. (Click here for other time conversions.)

Here are the many feeds available to watch the show live:

Wide angle camera

Dissection table

Thawing bath, fixed camera

Thawing bath, scanning camera

Rotating view (switches between cameras every 30 seconds)

Four cameras on the same page

If you miss it, don't fret. The museum says that the Discovery Channel will air a show about the colossal squid later this year.

Grand Theft Auto IV

There's a cheesily awesome scene in "Garden State" in which Natalie Portman hands her headphones to Zach Braff, promising him that the song -- "New Slang" by The Shins -- will "change your life, I swear." The bit is meant to illustrate that head-over-heels sensation great art sometimes induces in us; the experience is so grand, so deeply amazing, our efforts at describing the thing inevitably end up sounding vaguely embarrassing, as if we'd lost all self control.

Well to hear reviewers tell it, "Grand Theft Auto IV," the much-anticipated sequel to the intelligent, violent, resplendently liberating, and very popular video game series, is like that Shins song: "GTA IV" will change your life.

Here, for instance, is how Game Informer's Andrew Reiner starts his review of the game (which hits store shelves today):

I now know how film critics felt after screening "The Godfather." It's been days since "Grand Theft Auto IV"'s credits rolled, yet I can't seem to construct a coherent thought without my mind wandering off into a daydream about the game. I just want to drop everything in my life so I can play it again. Experience it again. Live it again.

Reiner's not alone in seeing Sistine Chapel-scale magnificence in "GTA IV." Libe Goad of Game Daily says:

..."Grand Theft Auto" has matured into something that feels as much like a living, breathing piece of interactive art as it does a video game. We have a hard time imagining anyone picking up this game and not feeling like this is one of the best $60 purchases they've made in a long time.

Reviewers were particularly taken by the way "GTA" recreates and pays homage to New York City with its fictional Liberty City.

Your nominal task in the game is to push your character through a series of streetwise missions, but really what "GTA" games have always done best is let you do whatever you want -- let you explore (not to mention feel free to harass, carjack, and murder) along an almost unending graphical paradise.

It's this landscape, says the New York Times' Seth Schiesel, that's "the real star of the game":

It looks like New York. It sounds like New York. It feels like New York. Liberty City has been so meticulously created it almost even smells like New York. From Brooklyn (called Broker), through Queens (Dukes), the Bronx (Bohan), Manhattan (Algonquin) and an urban slice of New Jersey (Alderney), the game's streets and alleys ooze a stylized yet unmistakable authenticity. (Staten Island is left out however.)

Schiesel, piling on the compliments, also calls "GTA" a "richly textured and thoroughly compelling work of cultural satire disguised as fun," and he pedestals its British expat creators alongside "the distinguished cast of Britons from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards through Tina Brown who have flourished by identifying key elements of American culture, repackaging them for mass consumption and selling them back at a markup."

But hey, there were one or one-and-a-half things people didn't totally love about the game. The best summing-up here comes from Michael McWhertor at Kotaku:

Some Characters And Plot Threads Fall Flat: One of the characters, who is intended to have an impact on the later portion of the game, is hard to care about on the level that Rockstar asks of the player. Some of the end-game relationships simply don't carry the same weight of those established in the first half, making it hard to be invested in some of the drama and can ultimately make one of the final chapters feel forced.

Some Missions Are Maddening: Of the 155 missions I attempted, 64 ended in failure. That's fine, but some seem impossible on the first attempt and others come close to resulting in thrown controllers. Missions are quick to restart, but by your third or fourth attempt of The Snow Storm, you may be looking for a Rockstar dev online to kill. There's not much in the way of mission filler, but some jobs are definitely more memorable than others.

But McWhertor also mostly loved it, and I'll end with one of the things he loved -- the city, again:

You Belong To The City: The level of detail packed in to every aspect of Liberty City's boroughs is simply astounding. On a micro level, seeing the neighborhood change from industrial to residential, from posh to sketchy, is impressive. Taking a macro perspective of whole islands during a leisurely helicopter flight can be awe-inspiring.

******

I discussed "Grand Theft Auto" in my weekly video for Current TV.

PopPhoto.com

The candidates have told us what they plan to do over the next four years, but the Photoshopping masters over at PopPhoto.com probed a more important question: What will Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama look like four years from now?

Answer: They'll look older! And in some cases -- McCain, I'm looking at you! -- corpsey old. (Click the pictures to go to PopPhoto's page, with much larger images.)

Here's PopPhoto's description of what it did to add years to the candidates' faces:

• Used the Burn and Dodge tools to deepen wrinkles and paint in age spots.
• Cloned the eyebrows and moved them lower.
• Used the Liquify filter to hollow out cheeks, make jowls, thin out lips, and enlarge ears and noses.
• For Clinton and Obama, brought in forehead wrinkles from separate photos and used the Match Color tool to blend them in.
• For Obama, painted in gray hair on top of his current hair; for Clinton, desaturated with the Sponge tool to make her grayer.

(Thanks, HuffPo!)