Overnight Briefing & General Reality Check

The Weather:

Looks like the first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season will miss clean-up activities in the Gulf Coast oil spill.
   Tropical Storm Alex will pass far south and west of the blown-out well and the shores where oil has been washing up for several weeks. Meteorologists believe Alex will make landfall somewhere on the Mexican Gulf coast in the middle of the week, but warn that its path could yet change.
   Alex will likely be the first in a line of hurricanes that could disrupt work in the Gulf as the Atlantic hurricane season runs until November 30 and meteorologists have predicted that this year will be a particularly active one. (Maiman)

Filling a need:

Apple customers are some of the most loyal to their brand. It's no surprise then that with the release of the new iPhone 4 last week, as many as three-fourths of the 1.5-million phones sold went to existing iPhone owners. That means more than one million iPhones are being retired. So, what happens to them?
   An article at CNNMoney explains. Some customers will use them as back-ups or will simply throw them away. But a lot of them end up on the secondhand phone market. A check of eBay the day after iPhone 4 went on sale turned up more than five thousand iPhone 3GS units. And besides eBay, there are plenty of companies that buy, refurbish and resell old cell phones.
   Sites like NextWorth, CashforiPhones.com and Gazelle are hitting record numbers as customers sell their old iPhone 3G's and 3GS's to make the upgrade to the iPhone 4. And since iPhones hold their trade-in value better than most aging electronics, some resellers are paying $200 bucks for a 16 GB iPhone 3GS in good condition. Since the phones cost upwards of $600 bucks without a contract, iPhone owners who break or lose their phones before the end of their contract are better off looking at a used one if they want a replacement. A now-outdated iPhone 3GS can still bring in about $300 or $400 bucks on eBay. That's half what you'll pay for one new without a contract. (Page)

The Internet:

The company that oversees all web addresses on behalf of the U-S government (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, aka, ICANN) has announced the creation of a "dot-xxx" suffix. Just as "dot-edu" denotes educational web sites and "dot-gov" governmental ones, "dot-xxx" will be used for websites hosting pornographic content.
   With more than 370 million websites dedicated to hosting porn, the Triple-X suffix could grow to be bigger even than dot-com.
   In a shocking development, the religious right opposed the creation of Triple-X on moral grounds.
   Use of the suffix will be voluntary. According to Reuters, "figures collated by Internet Pornography Statistics suggest more than $3,000 is spent on Internet pornography every second, with 'sex' the number one search term in the world, accounting for 25 percent of all Internet searches."
   Editor's note: And that's just by the religious right.
   --That "X" key will be worn out by the end of the week. (Maiman)

Grace notes from Vinny Marino:

MICHAEL JACKSON's estate will not be giving up its control of THE BEATLES song catalogue. Bloomberg News says the executors are holding on to the late entertainer's 50-percent stake on the rights to more than 250 Lennon/McCartney tunes. Not a big surprise there since those songs are the estate's valuable asset. That's why experts figured the executors would sell to Sony/ATV Music, which owns the other half of the catalogue, to pay off a 500-million dollar debt. But, the Beatles songs has long-termvalue and will continue to generate lots of cash, so why dump it? (Marino)

Off the beaten path:

If you're in the market for a new place to live, how about buying an entire village?
   Reuters says the small town of Otira on New Zealand's South Island is for sale. The tiny village comes complete with its own pub, a train station and 40 residents.
   Owners BILL and CHRISTINE HENNAH say they bought the village for 56-thousand bucks 12-years ago because they "felt sorry for it".
   Now, the place can be yours for just over 700-thousand dollars. (Still)