Don't Bother Me - Stop Bothering Me

If you just starting in the United States, there are couple of things that you need to get familiar with. The things you will be introduced very soon are telemarketing calls and Unsolicited Mail (or Junk mail as we all call it).

Telemarketing calls are simply calls from people and companies that you don't know, but they want to offer you something (most of the time they simply want your money). The best thing to do to prevent telemarketing calls is to register your number in National Do Not Call Registry - https://www.donotcall.gov/.

Junk mail can very fast overload your mailbox (especially if you are on vacation). You can always stop a lot of this junk by opting out. Use Opt Out Prescreen https://www.optoutprescreen.com/ to remove your name from the marketing list that credit agencies like Equifax, Experian, Innovis, and TransUnion provide to their customers.

You can also pickup a lot of information FTP websites, they even offer free books for consumers.

View or order Consumer Action Handbook:

http://www.consumeraction.gov/pdfs/2010_Consumer_Action_Handbook.pdf

Harry Potter x 3D

Why movie studios want to get more money for inferior movies?

I HATE this late trend of 3Ds that don't deliver anything extra. I only see price for my movie tickets climbing 3 times to $17-$18 and no way to use discount tickets from movie theater chains or AAA.

I really feel that 3d does not bring anything extra to the movies. It is not fair to start charging so much money for the feature. It is also not right to compare the money that the 3d movie earned. Math is very simple... if regular movie for me costs 6.50, I have to pay 3x (~$18) for the 3d.

Office Live

Few new things I uncovered myself from Microsoft:

http://office.live.com - new free online tools like Word, Excel, etc (for some reason we still using Google versions... probably again, failed Microsoft's Marketing machine...)

http://explore.live.com/windows-live-skydrive - New SkyDrive (25GB of free space and 5Gb Synced Storage via Windows Live Mesh). I think all of this is a very interesting offering, but again, I doubt many people even know about it.

I think Windows Mesh can perfectly replace Google Docs and systems like Knowledge Tree.

Russians vs NASA

First Russians pressed the "wrong button" and failed to manage the Progress to dock. Now they "broke some gears" inside the Soyuz and were not able to "undock".

Do they even train those people who go on the orbit?

My Favorite Quotes

I will be updating this one as I find new material:

"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself"

-Albert Einstein

Let My Dataset Change Your Mindset

-Hans Rosling

TU - 154

Some companies are still flying TU-154. I would never think that any normal person would fly it after reading a history of the accidents from wiki:

There have been 67 serious flight incidents with Tu-154s, including 37 hull-losses involving fatalities. Incidents have resulted from mechanical problems (two cases prior to 2001), running out of fuel on unscheduled extended route, pilot error, and cargo fires.

There are less then 200 planes left flying in the world and we already see 3 major TU-154 accidents in 2010. I would never fly the plane if travel agency only gave me 98-99% of success on landing :)

http://lenta.ru/news/2010/09/08/takeoff/

Cuba is firing 500K people

I wonder if Castro is considering it safe shaving 500K people from the government job list. I mean even if we consider they do it evenly through the time, it will be almost 120K of fired people per month. In the end Cuba will easily jump over 10% unemployment rate (Cuba's official work force is 5.1 million — meaning nearly 10 percent of all employees could soon be out of a government job.).

I think we've seen already what happened in Greece when union was cut and many people were left without job. Is Cuba a new economic bomb waiting to go off in coming weeks?