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Negotiate with your friend, broker, roommate, boss-- anyone!

We were all at Jay's apartment for Entourage night, when both Morgan's mom and Jay's mom called for tech support, seconds apart. Morgan answered the phone, but didn't speak for a minute and then said, "Mom, for the two-hundreth time, just unplug the cable modem, and then plug it back in. Please. How about, if you don't call me for tech support on Sunday nights then I'll have dinner with you and dad once a week, okay?" Jay smiled and then repeated the exact same deal to his mom. And the idea for SM00VE was born.

"Asynchronous Negotiation Favors the Underdog"

Suppose you hold a stock that falls 50% in value. How much does that stock have to gain before you're back where you started? Many people instinctively say 50%, but that's wrong. If the stock's price starts at $10 and loses 50%, it's at $5; from there, gaining 50% would put it only back up to $7.50. To get back to $10, the stock would have to gain 100%, twice as much as it lost in percentage terms.

Recouping losses always requires a larger percentage gain than the loss itself, and the difference between the two gets more dramatic as the losses get larger.

The Pentagon said five Chinese vessels had blocked and surrounded a U.S. surveillance ship, Impeccable, in international waters on Sunday. One of the ships came within 25 feet of the U.S. boat, the Pentagon said.

“The U.S. claims are gravely in contravention of the facts and confuse black and white, and they are totally unacceptable to China,” said Ma Zhaoxu, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, at a briefing Tuesday in Beijing.

He did not specify what laws the American ship had broken, but said the Impeccable had “conducted activities in China’s special economic zone in the South China Sea without China’s permission.”

Those 5 rules will give the CSS designers the most flexibility to do what they need to do to get things to look like they need it to look without coming back to you and telling you to change the template. combining rules #1, #2, and #3 means that your forms should have each input wrapped in a tag, and any text for that input in its own tag inside. l

Great research trumps good access to the powerful: The Stewart piece makes this controversial but critical point in two different ways. For one thing, the story shows how access to the nation's most powerful CEOs -- supposedly the big advantage of a journalistic enterprise like CNBC -- isn't worth a warm bucket of spit when it results in slo-pitch softball questions, for fear of offending the rich and powerful . . .