CNN’s iReport has been taking some bashing lately over a false story submitted about Apple’s Steve Jobs, but don’t let one internet lamer keep you away from this cool site. Where else can you see a sandstorm engulf a city like this:

This happened in Omdurman, Sudan and the video was shot by Abdurrahman Jaafar Idris. Never make mother nature mad, she doesn’t care about the stock market, bailout plans what’s happening in America or abroad.

Would call it cosmic justic that OJ Simpson is finally going to face some prison time.

Karoli writes:

It’s just utterly bizarre that OJ Simpson is found guilty on all counts on the 13th anniversary of the not guilty verdict in his murder trial. Completely, and utterly bizarre. Maybe even symmetrical. Numerically weird, and everything else.

I long ago lost respect for the once great football star. Even if you think he didn’t kill his first wife Nicole and Ronald Goldman, the fact that he’d have anything at all to do with a book called "If I Did It" should have been deserving of declaring a mistrial the first time around and retrying him. OJ, come on man, think about your children.

Soon he’ll be behind those bars that eluded him for 13 lucky years. This would all make a good episode of the Twilight Zone. Enter Rod Serling epilogue: "Picture of solitary jail cell waiting for one incorrigible OJ Simpson. He could have lived his second chance among shadows and substance, but instead chose a life inside … the Jailhouse Zone."

The bulk of American people not listened to again, House passes bailout.

Here in Washington State I encourage other voters to remember who voted yes and no come election time. The details for how all reps voted are here, below are how WA State reps voted.

U.S House of Representatives (4 from WA state) Voted YES on bailout

Baird, Brian (D)
Larsen, Rick (D)
Smith, Adam (D)
Dicks, Norm (D)

U.S House of Representatives (5 from WA state) Voted NO on bailout
McMorris Rodgers, Cathy (R)
Hastings, Doc (R)
Inslee, Jay (D)
McDermott, Jim (D)
Reichert, Dave (R)

President Bush will not veto

President Bush just spoke to say he will sign the bill as soon at it reaches his desk. I remain perplexed what he has done that has been good for this country during his time in office. This bailout is a done deal.

He said: "I know some Americans have concerns about this deal." Some? Some! Bush remains clueless. Most people that I know are against this bailout/rescue/whatever. What about the people you know?

The DOW is down from its high of +300 to +110 -56, as of this writing. Cafepress has some creative anti-bailout hats, t-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers and more.

If you happen to be in the minority in America that is for the bailout that the House contemplates, which they are now trying to sell as a "rescue" plan, then you might find it interesting that national debt clock has run out of digits, according to CNN reporting this morning.

The first screencap above shows the clock which has had to have three digits added since 1989. Three digits. Here are how the 14 digits stack up:

$00, … 000, … 000, … 000, … 000
trillion … billion … million … thousand

So in 1989 when it went up the thought was that 99 billion of debt would be enough space. Then a first digit was added to make it to 999 billion. Oops, not enough. Move to 9 trillion ceiling which they believe would make it until Spring 2009. Not any more.

National debt close to doubles during Bush presidency

When George Bush took over the presidency in 2000, the national debt was at 5.78 trillion dollars:

By the time Bush leaves office the national debt will be close to double, just look where it is now:

No matter what your feelings are on the Iraq war or the bailout/rescuse/whatever the truth is clear: we can’t afford it!

Go straight to sextillion, already

If the national debt sign modders are smart they’ll just skip the 99 trillion ceiling and go straight to sextillion. At the rate this is growing that might last awhile. Doing this would skip quadrillion and quintillion and go straight to something sexy. Americans love sexy things, after all. That’s 21 zereos and would look something like this as a ceiling:

000 (sextillion),000 (quintillion), 000 (quadrillion), 000 (trillion), 000 (billion), 000 (million), 000 (thousand)

Seriously, here’s a better idea: let’s do something about paying down the debt. It’s going to be even more difficult to do this if the bailout/rescue/whatever is approved. The bailout/rescue/whatever that has now grown by another $150 billion and gone from an original draft of 3 pages to 451 pages of fat.

This is so illogical that it would drive the entire Vulcan race into extinction.

With new AC/DC studio album Black Ice street date of October 20 inching closer I peeked into Wal-Mart over lunch time today to complete our collection of AC/DC albums by buying Let There Be Rock, Fly On The Wall and Blow Up Your Video all for the stunningly low price of — get this — $7.

If you’re nodding at this price thinking, yeah, yeah, but Let There Be Rock aside, these aren’t among the strongest AC/DC studio albums out there, Wal-Mart also had Back In Black, Highway To Hell and Dirty Deeds selling for $7 each. Yowsa! As I wrote yesterday, I’m not a Wal-Mart fan, but it’s hard to argue with these bargain prices.

If you need to round out your AC/DC collection, might want to check this deal out. I noticed that the Walmart website had some of their studio albums for $9, but I saw them all priced locally for $7. If you’re new to the rock steady world of AC/DC this means you could pick up their entire back studio album library of 15 CDs (15 x 7 = $98) for a little over 100 bucks [AC/DC studio albums: ‘74 Jailbreak, High Voltage, Dirty Deeds, Let There Be Rock, Powerage, Highway To Hell, Back In Black, For Those About To Rock We Salute You, Flick of the Switch, Fly On The Wall, Who Made Who, Blow Up Your Video, The Razor’s Edge, Ballbreaker, Stiff Upper Lip].

Have you seen new AC/DC studio albums available for less than $7 each? Can’t say I have. Hells Bells for competition, it’s a dog eat dog!

Wal-Mart is getting an exclusive deal on possibly the last AC/DC album Black Ice due out later this month. It doesn’t stop there as the New York Times is reporting another AC/DC exclusive: an AC/DC Rock Band game.

This is hot, we got teased by the Rock Band 2 AC/DC track "Let There Be Rock" and now there will be more:

Both Columbia and the band will make money on the game, which contains the songs from the popular DVD “AC/DC Live at Donnington.” The game, which will be available for all consoles in early November, will cost less than most new games, about $40 instead of about $60. That makes it an attractive product to Wal-Mart, which believes that lower prices drive demand.

Ahh, but what they don’t tell you in this snippet. Keep reading.

The track list for AC/DC Live At Donnington taken from 1992 DVD via Amazon:

1. Thunderstruck
2. Shoot To Thrill
3. Back in Black
4. Fire Your Guns
5. Jailbreak
6. The Jack
7. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
8. Money Talks
9. Hells Bells
10. High Voltage
11. Whole Lotta Rosie
12. You Shook Me All Night Long
13. T.N.T
14. Let There Be Rock
15. Highway To Hell
16. For Those About To Rock (We Salute You)

Note: I’m pretty sure Wal-Mart sells another Live at Donnington (exclusive too?) so this might not be the exact track list of the game (it is NOT, stay with me). There is also an AC/DC Live at Donnington [Blu-ray] version of this concert — oh yea.

Even though it’s AC/DC there needs to be more than 16 songs for $40. I would expect 25 or more songs with some special Rock Band goodies exclusive to this game.

I checked the official Rock Band forums to see if they had any detailed information yet. Indeed, they did, providing the full press release with the actual AC/DC track list, which adds two more songs to the list above ("Hell Ain’t A Bad Place To Be" and "Heetseeker"):

AC/DC LIVE: Rock Band Track Pack will feature the master recordings from the best of the band’s live performances. The live recording was specially remixed for Rock Band by Mike Fraser. The game features 18 tracks, with more than 99 minutes of game play for each instrument:

"Thunderstruck"
"Shoot to Thrill"
"Back in Black"
"Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be"
"Heatseeker"
"Fire Your Guns"
"Jailbreak"
"The Jack"
"Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"
"Moneytalks"
"Hells Bells"
"High Voltage"
"Whole Lotta Rosie"
"You Shook Me All Night Long"
"T.N.T."
"Let There Be Rock”
"Highway To Hell”
"For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)”

Guitar Hero Aerosmith which sold well enough to spark a possible music trend: band-themed play our music games. There have been band video games before (I’m thinking about the Iron Maiden PC game quite some time ago) but they didn’t interact directly with the music like these crop of game. In the Aerosmith game players could rise through the club ranks playing Aerosmith songs along the way. It came with an Aerosmith-themed guitar. The problem with the GH: Aerosmith game was that it was a pretty short experience for experienced players and didn’t add anything that unique or new. My son got through the whole game in a few hours at the expert difficulty.

A Guitar Hero: Metallica game is in the works, presumably following the GH: Aerosmith formula. If GH and Metallica are smart, they’ll include some other goodies to sweeten the deal.

I’m guessing at $40 there will be no AC/DC guitar or other accessories. In fact, they are billing this as "The AC/DC LIVE: Rock Band Track Pack" - which sounds like it’s going to be among the more expensive RB track packs released to date. Rock Band and Guitar Hero players are already paying a premium to play downloadable content songs. Would like to see an AC/DC themed Rock Band game for $20 more perhaps with an exclusive Angus axe.

Good news from the Wal-Mart sales page:

"Go Beyond the Disc! - The Xbox 360 and PS3 versions ship with a code on the back of the game manual that lets you import all of the songs into the Rock Band or Rock Band 2 game environment (Internet connection required)."

So that $40 will include an export code. And these are remixed tracks by Mike Fraser specially for Rock Band. Zing!

I’m not a Wal-Mart fan, but a huge AC/DC fan, so they’ll earn my business for both the Black Ice CD on October 20 (you can buy the CD from AC/DC website if you want) and AC/DC LIVE Rock Band Track Pack on November 2nd. Hat tip to great big geek, who was the first to turn me onto this New York Times article.

BTW, AC/DC is running a YouTube Give It All You Got contest at their website trying to find the best video cover of their song, "Rock and Roll Train" where you can win a Gibson guitar signed by the Young brothers.

Update 10/2/08 4:00pm PST: Harmonix employee Henry writes: “There will be unique achievements and trophies for this track pack, as well as several song specific achievements. They will rule.”

Not sure what there is to be excited about in the Mariners race to having $100+ million payroll and being a mere 6 games away from an abysmal 100+ loss season, but I find myself tuning in to root for them to please, please, please not lose.

They play 9 more games and can only afford to lose 3 of them to stay at 99 or less losses for the season. Having lost the last 9 in a row, I think it’s safe to say that statistically odds are they will win at least some of the remaining games. This season has been a real mess though save for hard working players like Ibanez, that is a free agent at the end of the season and likely to move to greener pastures. Ichiro got his 200 knocks as well, tieing a record from the 1800s.

Don’t want to sound all fair weather fan here with this post, but the Seahawks aren’t off to a good start (0-2), nor are the Huskies (0-3) or Cougars (0-3). That’s 0-8 for the first time ever. Yes, it rains in Seattle, but we’ve had enough rain. It’s time for sunshine in the win column.

Apple is flexing their quality control muscle by rejecting applications based on "limited utility." This, no doubt, a knee jerk response to pulling the expensive iPhone application I Am Rich and spawns a rejection of another app called Pull My Finger. I’m sure there are plenty more what many might call stupid, pointless, worthless applications that Apple is subjectively deciding not to publish and promote.

Techdirt’s Kevin Donavon makes an odd and not quite fitting comparison to Wikipedia, Twitter and CouchSurfing:

While I agree that the application in question has little use, this is a dangerous precedent that could easily have been used to ban Wikipedia, Twitter or CouchSurfing.

I wouldn’t go that far. Look, the web has always been a fairly level playing field for whatever crazy idea someone can come up with and promote. If some dude with an application that does nothing more than be too expensive and it gets popular, hey, more power to them. Same thing with a sophomoric humor application like Pull My Finger.

Wikipedia solved an itch: the ability for regular people to be able to contribute to an encyclopedia collectively. To a much lesser and more niche following, the same applies to Twitter where the cliche ’short and sweet’ and the popularity of text messaging converge. Can’t speak for CouchSurfing because I don’t know much about them but again if they can find success with something you and I might think is silly but others enjoy then more power to them.

Apple has the business right to exercise whatever quality control they want around their App store. If their requirements are too restrictive or too vague this opens the playing field for somebody else to come along and compete. I realize it’s their playing field, but you could always make apps that run on competing phones, yes? Don’t get mad, go out and promote your app on an iPhone competitor that doesn’t reject applications that they deem as having limited utility.

What do you think? Is using "limited utility" a good idea for quality control? Or should Apple let iPhone have the quality control gauge? I believe the web is already a working example of quality control so that you don’t need to impose additional quality control standards on an application breeding ground if you, well, want it to breed.

Perhaps unrelated and of little concern to those who aren’t AAPL shareholders (disclaimer: I am a current AAPL shareholder) but as one I’d like to see Apple not use subjective rules like this for quality control for iPhone applications. They should ferret out anything that’s a security risk or spammy and if they don’t want porn, fine, that too, but beyond that, let the users be your QA team.

Mr. Donavon is right in one respect: having undefined quality control standards on one project will open a company to these questions about other services that accept submissions from third parties. For that reason alone I think if you are planning on releasing something where other developers submit programs to you, it would be wise not to impose subjective quality control rules.

If you follow me on Twitter, then you’ve already seen me write that with Chrome, Google’s (disclaimer: I own GOOG stock) shiny new browser, so far I like what I’m seeing. Chrome is a lean, mean beast and feels snappier, but haven’t run it long enough to benchmark if that’s the reality (Adrian Kingsley-Hughes offers a SunSpider JavaScript benchmark which shows Chrome on top). And yes it lacks features like plugins/extensions, but I’m sure that is on the drawing board.  This is going to turn off those who want to get in and customize. Also it’s Windows only with Linux and Mac OS X versions coming "soon."

What I like most about Chrome is that they stripped it back and will add what’s needed. Reminded me of how Firefox started out. If they don’t weight it down with too many BS features, Chrome could be a contender someday. In their Chrome intro video they emphasize wanting to move the browser space forward. Since talk is cheap, let’s look at interesting Chrome features:

- tabs that are independent processes. This is huge. Every browser should have this feature. Why have one website crash every other tab you have? Major kudos to Chrome for this feature alone, which they borrowed from the Internet Explorer 8 team but as a user, I don’t care. Hurry up everybody else and get this in your browsers now.

- locate the memory hogs. You can track memory usage by each tab by typing:

about:memory

Is your favorite website a memory hog? Now you’ll be one about:memory check away from finding out.

- no need for two different input boxes (URL and search query): Omnibox for multiple functions.

We’ve seen some creative uses of the location bar but Chrome is on the right track by recognizing that having more than one input form is just eating precious pixel space. Chrome helps utilyze pixel space.

- a useful local homepage. When you first load Chrome it will show your most visited pages. Maybe not the most innovative page on the planet, but different from trying to sell us something or advertise to us.

You can check your browsing history at any time by typing CTRL+H

- Incognito mode. Don’t want to have websites you visit show up in the history? Just open an incognito window. No sites you visit here will show up in the history a la Firefox’s Awesome bar or IE8 InPrivate Browsing.

Others talking about Google Chrome (updated)

• Google employee, Matt Cutts, informative as always helps to allay privacy concerns by sharing when Chrome phones home while Ina Fried reminds us to read the Chrome fine print.
• Walt Mossberg spent the last week with Chrome: "My verdict: Chrome is a smart, innovative browser that, in many common scenarios, will make using the Web faster, easier and less frustrating. But this first version — which is just a beta, or test, release — is rough around the edges and lacks some common browser features Google plans to add later."

Note to prospective pot growers: the park is not a wise place to grow marijuana.

Especially not parks using radio transmitter equipped, chronic curious turtles:

A few weeks ago, her little turtle brain guided her to a sun-splashed clearing deep in the woods. And that’s where she was on the afternoon of July 14 — at the northern end of the 1,754-acre main park, far from any trail — when Ferebee, for the first time in nine days, decided to pay her a visit.

The National Park Service picture makes that rado transmitter look uncomfortable for the turtle. Maybe she was trying to find some pot to get away from the pain of that foreign apparatus? With that stony shell, maybe she doesn’t even notice?

Maybe next time the alleged harvester of sorrow, a “kid” as the story describes, decides to grow chronic he’ll check out former drug agent Barry Cooper’s DVD Never Get Busted Again. Haven’t seen the flick but I’m guessing there isn’t a scene about being on the alert for turtles with radio transmitters.