Who Knew?

I remember when Yahoo and Google first were appearing on the scene. Most of us thought that they were funny names and wouldn't make it. Now they are household words that no one gives a second thought to.

"Slate's has a long, detailed story about how Larry Page founded Google, how he struggled with its growth, and ultimately how he came back to reinvigorate it. 

The story recounts fascinating details about Page's relationship to Sergey Brin, the combative culture Page fostered in the company's early years, his resistance to having engineers managed by non-engineers, the company's struggle through its rapid growth, and how Page once even wanted to hire Steve Jobs as Google's CEO."

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"Ars Technica reports, 'Technology giant Google has been delinquent on its tax payments in France for the past few years, to the tune of more than $1 billion in missed payments, and it now may be hit with a sizable tax penalty by the French government.' 

 Google asserts that it has operated within the law in France, but the French government has reason to believe that in order to avoid French taxes, Google has been passing off some of its business contracts as Irish rather than French."

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"One of the most infamous urban legends in video games has turned out to be true.

 Digging in Alamogordo, New Mexico today, excavators discovered cartridges for the critically-panned Atari game E.T., buried in a landfill way back in 1983 after Atari couldn't figure out what else to do with their unsold copies.

 For decades, legend had it that Atari put millions of E.T. cartridges in the ground, though some skeptics have wondered whether such an extraordinary event actually happened.

 Last year, Alamogordo officials finally approved an excavation of the infamous landfill, and plans kicked into motion two weeks ago, with Microsoft partnering up with a documentary team to dig into the dirt and film the results.

 Today, it's official. They've found E.T.'s home—though it's unclear whether there are really millions or even thousands of copies down there." 

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 If you choose to not get involved, all of this will come to an end

"Stopping the recently announced plan by the FCC to end net neutrality is going to require a significant outcry by the public at large, a public that isn't particularly well versed on the issue or why they should care.

 Ryan Singel, a former editor at Wired, has written a thorough and easy to understand primer on the FCC's plan, the history behind it, and how it will impact the Internet should it come to pass.

 It's suitable for your neophyte parent, spouse, or sibling. In the meantime, the FCC has opened a new inbox (openinternet@fcc.gov) for public comments on the decision, there's a petition to sign at whitehouse.gov, and you can (and should) contact your congressmen."

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 "The folks at Ars Technica have discovered evidence that Netflix is actively researching the possibility of using peer-to-peer technology to stream its videos to its customers. 

The evidence: a one-month old job listing seeking a software engineer with extensive experience developing and testing large-scale peer-to-peer systems.

 In addition: Netflix's admission of wanting to 'look at all kinds of routes.' A recent blog post by BitTorrent's CEO explains how, in a peer-to-peer architecture, 'Netflix traffic would no longer be coming from one or two places that are easy to block. 

Instead, it would be coming from everywhere, all at once; from addresses that were not easily identified as Netflix addresses — from addresses all across the Internet.'"

In other Netflix news, the company has "reached an agreement with three smaller cable companies that, for the first time, will let U.S. subscribers watch the streaming video service’s content as though it were an ordinary cable channel."