This link to a ridiculously slanted Russian news story about the war in Georgia has 1,194 Diggs, but please don't pay it any mind. Pravda.ru is a joke, a web-only repository of mistranslated hilarity and boob pictures unrelated to any print publication. Russian newspapers can still be oppositional and independent—it's the TV Putin controls. We should probably worry less about wacky Engrish propaganda and more about the return of the Cold War! Russia's intention just might be to actually topple the democratically elected, adorably pro-American government of Georgia. (They say they won't go to Tbilisi, but they also said that about Gori!) George W. Bush's intention is to not get involved and hope a ceasefire happens soon. That funny little dance he did is not so cute anymore! If it spreads to Ukraine, what then? NATO gets involved at some point. That's a big problem. A big problem called the Cold War! Then what? Then we get President McCain. Because he's still stuck in the Cold War. And Obama dithered and hemmed and hawed in his response to this mess, while McCain said he would personally go to Moscow and deck that paper-hanging sonuvabitch Putin (more or less). Which is dangerous crazy rhetoric. And what does America like to hear during times of international instability in far-off places? Dangerous crazy rhetoric! Also fun to ponder right now: Russia's growing friendship with Iran, Georgia's oil reserves. Surprisingly, Dealbreaker of all things has a terribly informative roundtable on the entire situation that will allow you to sound reasonably intelligent at a cocktail party until you finish your third cocktail and find yourself unable to pronounce any of the names involved. And finally, if the John Edwards scandal had been reported on by the MSM back in 2007, none of this would've happened.

The "fist-bump" between Barack Obama and his wife Michelle in St. Paul the other night has already become a semi-iconic detail of an iconic moment—the first black presidential candidate sharing a funny and seemingly genuine moment of affection with his wife. Of course once the glow of "hooray us! we finally made it up to the blacks!" wears off among the pundit class, expect to hear about it again. The fist-bump, we mean—or, as the New York Times might refer to it, the "closed-fist high-fives." You will probably hear that it is a Black Gesture. Some particularly bent people will say even more confused things. Because these people are old and rich and out of touch. Much like the (admittedly AWESOME) time Obama "brushed his shoulders off," it was a simple moment that helped demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, Obama is "in touch" with Real Americans. Allow us to explain!

In an age when software rules, it's got to be tough to be stuck making hardware. Intel's Mash Maker is yet another "mashup" tool for connecting data from one website with tools on another, such as funneling addresses to Google Maps. Microsoft and Yahoo have similar products. Why is Intel, which makes chips, getting into such a profitless business? The "Intel Inside" advertising campaign convinced people to start asking what chip a PC runs on, but never persuaded them to care. A News.com reporter wangled this explanation from an Intel marketer:

In the first quarter of 2007, 83 venture capital firms raised about $6.3 billion. During this year's first quarter, that number dropped to 57 firms, a 32 percent plunge. The actual amount of capital invested remained flat year-over-year, reports Bits. A National Venture Capital Association flack insists the news doesn't mean venture capital is suffering from an economic downturn.

Now that the announcement of Google's App Engine is official, it's opening up the company's cloud computing infrastructure as an API platform for Web application developers. Basically, it binds computing power, storage and database tools — much like Amazon.com's EC2, S3 and SimpleDB, respectively, but all tied together into one package. Plus, for the first 10,000 beta users at least, it'll be completely free up to a certain level of usage. What's in it for Google?

Curt Viebranz, fired as president of AOL's sales arm after just half a year, may have lost a struggle with the internet portal's bosses. But he's unlikely to be the last executive casualty at the Time Warner unit, New York's biggest internet business. Alley Insider reports Viebranz may have been fired because he refused to sign up to unrealistic ad sales targets. But why were the bosses' expectations so unreasonable?

eBay's PayPal division will start holding payments for up to three weeks for certain "high-risk transactions" next month. Some sellers are pissed, but it's totally legal. PayPal is not a bank. It is not insured by the FDIC — the government program which insures deposits should a bank go under. PayPal is a "deposit broker," meaning the company pools deposits from all its users and holds them in bank accounts under PayPal's name, collecting interest on the money — and deposit brokers are not federally regulated.

What do we call this Microsoft-Yahoo thing, anyway? "Merger"? "Buyout"? "Elaborate game of footsie"? It's not a hostile takeover — yet. But Steven Davidoff writes in DealBook that Microsoft could go hostile if Yahoo resists. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote:

Like a child actor, Yahoo has always lived its life in public — and suffered for it. Its April 1996 IPO, when the company had a mere 49 employees, cast it in the spotlight long before it was ready. And like Hollywood, the stock market looks coldly on a fallen star. Microsoft's offer of $44 billion is less than the company was worth in October 1999 — before the tech-stock bubble's grotesque inflation more than doubled that to $97 billion. It has never regained its swagger.

Tumblr differs from most blog software: It doesn't just let you post entries; it also provides an interface for reading the blogs of other Tumblr users. In that regard, it's duplicating a feature available on LiveJournal for a decade — and yet its users still manage to find it befuddling. "Right now I'm following 35 people," Connected Ventures cofounder Rickvy Van Veen writes on his personal blog.

A handy rebuttal to the science-challenged handwringers you're stuck with through New Year's Day. Slate's Green Lantern columnist Brendan Koerner has boiled down the facts on global dimming. It turns out to be global brightening, except in India and China. I pared Koerner's piece even further to one snappy paragraph.

Folks, please stop emailing us that either (a) Valleywag is afraid to run the story that Apple is trying to shut down Fake Steve Jobs, or (b) Fake Steve author Dan Lyons is perpetrating a hoax to — I love this — to get onto Techmeme. Let me spell it out for you: LYONS IS KIDDING! He's trying — and failing — to illustrate that the legal settlement between Apple and Think Secret is a bad thing. Two reasons: (1) It's corporate thuggery from Apple, which once compared itself to friggin' Gandhi in an ad. (2) By shutting down and probably taking a payout, Think Secret's publisher has done himself a favor, but set a bad example. How much should Apple pay Valleywag to shut up? Ok, don't answer that, but you get my point.

PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak's blog proudly displays an image labeled as "used without permission." Is Dvorak bragging about the copyright violation? Nope. He's just pulled a boneheaded move known in the blogging world as "hotlinking," and the altered image shows that he got caught at it.

Those not initiated in the mysteries of databases, i.e. most of us, may think that Amazon.com's new SimpleDB service is competition for established databases from Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM. It's not. Nor is it, in the lofty language of Web-computing evangelists, a "cloud-based" alternative to large Web databases. But it's probably a perfect match for your stupid Web 2.0 startup, which makes it a genius move by Amazon.

You already know how Digg works. Post a funny picture of Kevin Rose or a tribute to Apple's greatness and there you have it — you're on the front page. You're not wrong. But social media maven Muhammad Saleem says there's actually a little science to Digg as well. In a post on Search Engine Land, Saleem explains how Digg's algorithm does and doesn't work. He should know. Most of his recent Digg submissions have garnered several hundred votes. Good stuff, only it runs way too long. Here's our slimmed-down version.

Casual games are those Web-based entertainments your mom is no doubt playing while you hog the Xbox. But are they a real business? According to GigaOm, casual gamesmake up 10 percent of the videogame industry's $30 billion in revenues. A "hit" casual game can get as many as 7 million plays a month. And these free, ad-supported games may actually be a better prospect for marketers than regular videogames. Their audience is far more tolerant of TV-like interruptions than hardcore gamers. But when it comes to actual dollars, few developers are going to make real money from casual games. Most make a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars a month, and no one is getting rich off an ad-supported model. Some developers are turning to micropayments — small charges for in-game items, new levels, or extra play modes — to help pad their wallets.

Software giant Microsoft is getting the attention of the geek blogosphere for moving its drag-and-drop Web mashup development tool, Popfly, into public testing. Why? Because it has a cute name? Because it's being pitched to everyday Internet users who aren't developers — women, even? (As if women don't program now.) Because it's being pitched as an easy way to build widgets for popular social networks MySpace and Facebook? For all those reasons, sure. But that's not why you should care about Popfly.

Yippee! No more crappy, blurry YouTube videos! No more pixelated garbage filling every corner of the Web! Adobe's addition of the advanced H.264 high-definition codec — "codec" being a fancy way of saying "video algorithm" — to its popular Flash software. Flash, of course, has become the ubiquitous means of distributing video on the Web. Adding H.264 will finally bring high-quality moving images into the Web mainstream, and put an end to the rein of amateurism in online video. Or will it? Not so fast.

When Brian Alvey, the cofounder of Weblogs Inc. and a former AOL executive, suggested that AOL change its name to TMZ, the popular gossip blog it owns a stake in, I took it as the throwaway joke it was. But now, some idiot named Bill Hartzer on InternetFinancialNews.com appears to be taking Alvey seriously. For anyone else equally lacking in both sense of humor and sense, let me 'splain something to you. Alvey's idea is, of course, brilliant. But it's not going to happen.