Slide One: ArsTechnica is running a Jobs vs. Gates discussion. Is Jobs the greedy capitalist (bad?) and Gates along with wife Melanie the charity champion (good)? Look at the numbers that are available to public, the Gates family surely gives a lot in charity while Jobs is nowhere listed. According to the article, the Gates Foundation has a US$29 billion endowment in fighting racism, poverty, inequality or war. Jobs started a charitable foundation in the 1980s but gave up once he "discovered how time-consuming such business can be." Thanks, Steve, for being honest. And thanks for being a "greedy capitalist". The least we can say is that greedy ones like Jobs who strive to make better products, find elegant solutions and have the balls to drive them to the market and influence many for the better while making a profit are the good ones. On the other side no ballistic amount of charity is going to save Gates from the catastrophic mess his products, practices and commercial behaviors are and have been for the past two decades. Bill, use your money better, to cherish the crowd from Times Mag pages with Bono is as little as nothing. Here we know who is doing a good job and who is not.

Slide Two: Push for Elections and market the idea as synonym to Democracy, make it happen and find yourself trapped in an unmarketable mess. The victory of Hamas over Fatah in recent elections for Palestinian government will drive nuts many. Consolation may be something as a civil war within Palestinian borders is already in progress and may distill a better approach on the long run. But as far as things prospect outside of the borders in the short, that's a long standoff. Juan Cole describes Bush's faults in his Salon piece here. And also look for Gilbert Achcar's guest editorial of January 27, 2006 at Cole's place. Let's try now to put pressure for negotiations based on good faith (and who is to convince Israel to do so?) and ask for no machine guns on the table. Can Europeans speak loud on this? The "other" approach, detailed here on TCS Daily is not going anywhere. In deep and focused discussion on Belmont Club here

Slide three: Soaps. The big guns are all set for some color of tragedy. "The O.C.", finally a chance to cut Marissa out of the landscape, now that the little sister is running the show. The one-that-does-not-shake, Ryan, now the wisest man in town, progressively replacing Sandy, whose role has become minimalist, which is sad. So much for the Rumble Fish. "Lost" is midway to the fall with the community half set for all-out-war with the land owners and the other half entangled into a spreading turn for private matters, sexual intercourses and drug rehab without the facilities. Both Saeed and Sawyer are on the rise, is this army to be Iraqi based? What to say about "Desperate Housewives"? At this point we are running circles around daily routines, despite the killings, mean gay children's revolts and Internet porn. The show is begging for a big dip into something that we can not forecast successfully.

Slide four: The loudest political campaign in the world, Italy, is set to spark in a few days. If I was not living here I would rather laugh about. A bloodshed will be, with no particular side detailing a coherent strategy for a country which economy is clearly on a landslide to irrelevance. The "left" conglomerate, apparently with better ties to the EU burgs, will do all it can to lose. Berlusconi, obliterating its allies, will spend whatever it takes and go as far as he can get. Let's only hope it's April soon. What about a standoff reminiscent of Germany a month ago? Is that ugly enough?

Slide five: Google is likely to shape the market's mood next week, when it comes through with its fourth-quarter results. The online search giant has blown Wall Street targets away through its first five quarters as a public company, thanks to a potent combination of improving fundamentals and an insistence on keeping mum when it comes to providing guidance to the investing community. But let's be realistic. After being humbled for five straight quarters, analysts are getting aggressive with their optimism by raising their projections and profit targets almost monthly. In fact, over the past three months, Wall Street consensus estimates for Google's 2006 profitability have grown from $8.36 to $8.76 per share. That means Google will miss, and when it does, it won't be pretty. Away from the coin count and on the flip side, recent snafus suggest not just estimates are being missed. A nasty one was recently found with Gmail forwarding from an x.y account to the corresponding xy account without user's knowledge. Another one was the now famous Google video store, the store with a price policy wholly onto the distributors. I bet anybody to buy anything on a store set up with such business logic. Cherry on the cake is Google China a.k.a. how an engineer's based company deals with censorship. Check this post on LGF to find out how Google Search works from China. It is pretty striking. Here. Amen. It is true when Google screws it, it does it big time.

Slide six:A large set of email messages, the Enron corpus, was made public during the legal investigation concerning the Enron corporation. This dataset, along with a thorough explanation of its origin, is available here. The raw Enron corpus contains 619,446 messages belonging to 158 users. Academic researchers quickly realized the e-mails were a unique and open data trove that could be exploited by researchers interested in social networks and information analysis and retrieval. The Enron Email Analysis Project at Berkley is here and includes search interfaces, specifically developed search algorithms, categorization styles and subset annotations, an email visualization and clustering tool and a database representation built by Andrew Fiore. Dig it.

Off to iTunes.