Ars Technica has more information about Snow Leopard—23 pages!—than you could possibly require.

Friday!

* 'Decision to end Reading Rainbow traced to a ‘shift’ in priorities during the Bush administration.' That bastard!

* "Too big to fail" is so 2008. Via Ezra Klein.

J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wall Street's most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show.

A year after the near-collapse of the financial system last September, the federal response has redefined how Americans get mortgages, student loans and other kinds of credit and has made a national spectacle of executive pay. But no consequence of the crisis alarms top regulators more than having banks that were already too big to fail grow even larger and more interconnected.

* No Senate Democrat has gone on record as opposing the public option. More and more I think the public option will pass using reconciliation. I haven't heard a single persuasive counterargument to doing it this way, and Obama and the Democrats are too all-in to let health care die altogether.

* Also in health care news: Steve Benen announces the death of the public option and the rise of the free pony option. Sounds a little bit like socialism to me.

* WAKE UP SHEEPLE. THE OLIGARHY IS REAL.

* Snow Leopard reviews. I've installed this on both our Macs and so far everything appears to be almost exactly the same as before. Disk Utility works much better, which is nice. And a few menus that used to be white are now black. Believe the hype.

* And io9 has your TV science fiction themes by the numbers. We are truly in the dark age of televised time travel.

Thursday morning.

* Tarantino on Tarantino on Charlie Rose. It gets better once Tarantino gets going on IB-related subjects like Goebbels's theory of film or the origins of Col. Hans Landa and the Bride. Watch out for spoilers.

* 61 literary euphemisms for masturbation.

* More Snow Leopard reviews.

* Reading Rainbow to end its 26-year run. You don't have to take my word for it.

Six things you should know about Snow Leopard.

Confidential to Mac users: Here's how to assign half-stars in iTunes. I have wanted to be able to do this for literally my entire life.

Links for your post-Christmas blues.

* In the future, all movies will have lightsabers.

* Rest in peace, Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt.

* Barack Obama is stupendously ridiculously popular.

* Al Franken is not quite so popular, but he's looking like Minnesota's next senator.

* Confidential for Mac users: the weird inability to change location in Finder dialogues is easily rectified.

* In the zeitgeist: people living life backwards.

* 95 Old School Games You Can Play Online. Via MeFi.

* So you're saying we need Batman? (Thanks, Kate!)

Afternoonery.

* Support for renewable energy technology to fight global warming is weakening in the face of worldwide economic problems and the true scale of the carbon reductions required, a survey published today has suggested.

Figures presented at the UN climate talks in Poznan, Poland, show that climate experts have less faith in alternative energy than they did 12 months ago.

* Grist reviews 2008's most essential book on shit.

* DFW's last book will be published next year, based off the Kenyon College commence speech he gave in 2005. Devotees may recall that this speech was the basis for my MetaFilter obit post.

* Everyone's in love with this evolved Mona Lisa. More evolution fun at Pharyngula and MetaFilter.

* Everyone's in love with Macs.

* Don't miss Metallica's latest music video, a prophecy of zombie disaster originating with the Tungska Event.

Busy, busy, busy, as the Bokononists say.

* Sci-Fi has put out a "Catch the Frak Up" video for the last four seasons of Battlestar Galactica.

* All about Patrick Fitzgerald, the man everybody wants to put in charge of everything.

* Daily Routines: how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days. Via MeFi, which has some greatest hits.

* In 1945, after the atomic destruction of two Japanese cities, J. Robert Oppenheimer expressed foreboding about the spread of nuclear arms. “They are not too hard to make,” he told his colleagues on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, N.M. “They will be universal if people wish to make them universal.” How the bomb spread (and didn't) around the world.

* The Los Angeles Film Critics Association has named WALL-E the best film of the year. It's a bit of a strange choice against Dark Knight and Synecdoche, among others, but WALL-E was a hell of a good film, potentially a very important one, and damnit if I don't love Pixar.

* No book more deeply and revealingly explains the spasm of madness through which the United States has passed in recent years than Moby Dick. For generations, it has been considered a masterpiece of world literature, but now can it be seen as an eerily prophetic allegory about 21st-century America. It is now truly the nation's epic.

* The Barack Obama of 2018 has been playing video games all his life.

* Everybody loves Silent Star Wars.

* Pharyngula has been having an awful lot of fun with found images lately.

* Has Greenpeace been rating Apple unfairly?

* Will we nationalize the auto companies?

* And the good news: Gabriel García Márquez is still writing after all.

"What are some of the best documentaries available to watch instantly on Netflix?" is the sort of question that makes me sorry I've fallen out of the habit of reading AskMetafilter.

As a side note, Netflix now supports "Watch Instantly" for Macs. The player isn't the greatest, but it's still a great leap forward...

Confidential to new Macbook users: a new QuickTime update fixes the totally stupid DRM issue I blogged about a week or so ago.

The morning news.

* The bailout has cost more than "Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq war, Vietnam war, and NASA's lifetime budget -- *combined*!" But think of all we have to show for it!

* Related: Alternet's ten worst corporations of 2008. How did they limit themselves to just ten? Via MeFi.

* Marginal Revolution casts some cold water on wind farms, points (where else?) to nuclear energy instead. Isn't the problem here our poor energy infrastructure? The sort of redesigned, rebuilt grid Obama talks about would make these wind farms much more efficient than just about any other source of power, including, I'm given to understand, solar.

* Because of the downturn, colleges aren't hiring. Ugh.

* Cory Doctorow is looking to change the world.



* Confidential to Mac users: an update for Handbrake has been released.

* And Wendy Whitaker is today's poster child for obscenely stringent sex offender laws: because she had oral sex with a 15.9-year-old boy when she was 17, she's a sex offender for life and is currently being forced to vacate her home because it is too close to a church that runs a daycare service. A judge, unbelievably, just upheld this order. Via MeFi.

Confidential to Mac users: NetNewsWire is now free.

I have a long Thanksgiving break this year (something I must admit I'm very thankful for). Here's a few links to celebrate my good fortune.

* Google is now hosting thousands of images from Life magazine dating back to the 1800s. At right: my guy Albert Einstein. More good off-the-top-of-your-head searches at the Valve.

* Boston College will stop offering incoming students email addresses; instead, they will redirect email to a private service of the students' choice. In other words, the moronic email addresses they made up as a joke in eighth grade will now follow BC students forever.

* The new MacBook Pros (like mine!) come saddled with major DRM problems. The good news is that your machine is only crippled for media you purchase legally; pirated media still works just fine.

* Pushing Daisies has been canceled. It's a shame.

* Two pop-criticism reviews of Quantum of Solace I liked: "Guilt-Flavored Ice Cream" and "Quantum of Anti-Imperialism."

* Nabokov, on YouTube.

Internet geeks can't decide whether they're more in love with Barack Obama's MacBook or his comic-book collecting. Either way, truly he is our new bicycle—or have we merely fallen in love with our own shadows?

Speaking of Apple MacBooks, I have to say Apple has won my loyalty forever. I took my computer down to the Apple Store today to get the DVD drive fixed after a completely inexplicable *cough* hardware failure. I also requested that the keyboard be replaced (the 'M' key had become sporadically nonresponsive) and asked if the small number of hot pixels on my screen was past Apple's threshold for replacement. For whatever reason—frankly I didn't want to push the issue—the genius at the Genius Bar with whom I was dealing concluded that the best option for everyone would be to replace my machine with a completely new unit, meaning that my six-month-old MacBook Pro is now being swapped out for one of the brand-new MacBook Pros completely free of charge.

Conclusion: Apple is the greatest company in the world.

Updating this post, anyone looking to get a new laptop in the near future should think about grabbing one of the original recipe MacBooks before they stop being produced—they're starting at $999 at apple.com and $949 at Amazon until, I guess, they're all gone.

We just bought Jaimee's.

Duke students start here for a 10% discount.

Which new MacBook is right for you? Surprisingly, the answer may be the old MacBook Pro, which Kottke notes is is $700 less today than it was two weeks ago. It's a great machine—I bought mine in the spring and I've never once regretted it.

Random Friday links.

* Those "I'm a PC ads"? Made on Macs.

* Slacktivist has finished his years-long read of Left Behind. (Via MeFi.) Amazingly, he plans to keep going.

* Is there a media blackout on the Hurricane Ike aftermath?

* The 'Watchmen' film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I, for one, am sick of worms. Alan Moore doesn't mince words.

* David Simon's next project is Manhunt, "about the Lincoln assassination and the 12-day search that ended in the capture of John Wilkes Booth."

* LeBron James loses to a civilian in Horse.

* Kottke has the trailer for the next Charlie Kaufman movie, Synecdoche, New York.

Thank God it's Tuesday.

* Were you watching the time-travel show Journeyman on NBC this year? You'll never get another episode, but at least you can find out how it all would have ended.

* Bush 'antagonizing environmentalists' on his way out of office.

Just months before President Bush leaves office, his administration is antagonizing environmentalists by proposing changes that would allow federal agencies to decide for themselves whether subdivisions, dams, highways and other projects have the potential to harm endangered animals and plants.

The proposal, first reported by The Associated Press, would cut out the advice of government scientists who have been weighing in on such decisions for 35 years. Agencies also could not consider a project's contribution to global warming in their analysis.

This is nothing we haven't seen before.

* Honda to debut hydrogen-fuel cell car in 2008. We're saved! Unless, you know, the debunkers turn out to be right about hydrogen...

* Fraggmented's John Seavey makes one his storytelling engine posts about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, explaining why the show was never the same (and could never have been the same) after the characters graduated high school.

* A Mac utility that automatically shuts down your Internet connectivity for any length of time you specify. I wouldn't be attracted to something like this if I had any willpower at all.

* Fred Pearce argues the Neo-Malthusian "population bomb" has been defused. We're saved!

Why then is the world’s population still rising? Currently at around 6.7 billion, it is 70 million higher every year. The problem is that the delivery wards are being visited by the huge numbers of young women born during the earlier baby boom. They may only have one or two children each. But that is still a lot of babies. Probably nothing will stop humanity reaching 8 billion by about 2040 and many demographers predict that world population will peak at around 9 billion by the end of the 21st century. But once those baby boomers have had their babies, the falling fertility rate will be translated into a real decline in the world’s population — the first since the Black Death of the 14th century.

The question remains, I think, whether 9 billion will be a Malthusian crisis all by itself.

* And it may be time to rethink climate change in the face of the polar bear menace.

I think I've mentioned before how much I've come to appreciate my MacBook's Dashboard feature. Today's addition was the Say Cheese widget, which throws up a new Calvin & Hobbes strip for me daily.