Syber News

TechCrunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld appeared on Charlie Rose last night to discuss the Microsoft/Yahoo search deal alongside Steven Levy of Wired and Nick Wingfield of The Wall Street Journal.

The group talked about the initial deal Microsoft offered Yahoo last year to buy Yahoo outright, the complicated nature of this new deal, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo walking away from the search fight rather than engaging, how this was the worst of the deals that Microsoft had offered so far, the Bartz/Ballmer reaction, what this means for Microsoft versus Google now, and the possible antitrust implications of all of this.

Watch the part of the show that featured the discussion below.

Which countries are the worst greenhouse gas emitters? Now you can see for yourself on this handy Google Map created by a department of the UN and Google. The map shows changes in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 to 2006. Green is good (a decrease in emissions) and purple is bad (an increase).

So who are the worst offenders? Topping the list is Sweden! The country has managed to increase its emissions by 110 percent over that time period. So much for Nordic purity. Following Sweden is Turkey (with a 103 percent increase) and Canada (with a 55 percent increase). Yes, Canada. What is it with these northern countries?

“We’re here today to announce the death of comments.”

That’s what JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux said in his opening remarks at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp earlier this month. He went on to unveil ECHO, JS-Kit’s new take on how conversations should be happening around content on the web. And today, we’re going to try a limited test of this new system on the TechCrunch Network.

To reiterate, this is just a test that will reside under only this post for the time-being, so let us know what you think.

While at first glance, the comments you see below this post may look like a slight variation of any other commenting system, the reality is much different. Sure, a part of ECHO is made up by what we think of as traditional comments, that is, comments you fill out on a particular article and post to it. But the majority of the content in this commenting area will actually be populated from sources all around the web talking about this piece of content.

We’ve been getting requests from various citizens to feature their respective cities in our new Geek Weekend feature on CrunchGear, so when a request came in for the Twin Cities, John asked me to write it up and I thought, “Oh, great. More work.” “Perfect! I’m from Minneapolis! I know where geeky stuff is located!”

Background Info: The Twin Cities denotes the capital city of St. Paul, MN and the larger, more cosmopolitan city of Minneapolis, MN. Together the two cities are home to roughly 2.5 million people.

There’s always been a friendly little rivalry going on between the two cities, with some people from Minneapolis viewing people from St. Paul as more blue-collar and rough-around-the-edges, while some from St. Paul think people from Minneapolis are yuppies. I’ve lived in both cities and they’re both nice places. Overall, the rivalry is pretty silly, but it’s there. Look hard enough in any city, though, and you’ll find both a-holes and nice people. No different in the Twin Cities. Everyone’s pretty nice, overall, though.