A Day in Paradise

… of getting bought up by google?

If 100% of your revenue is through google adsense, and google is making 100% (or more) on your 100%, then wouldn’t your worth to google be cut by 50%?

This is disregarding my “community in a box” article.

Russian former spy dies

I love the hypocricy which surrounds the glorification/demonization of spies.

This disturbs me on many levels.

Police brutality is nothing new, but what was most shocking about this video was how little the 100 or more students standing around did to stop it.

The question that needs to be answered is “if not you, then who?” what is the point in having a free country with the constitutional right to bear arms (to form malitias which keep government tryanny in check) if you’re just going to stand around and ask for the cops badge number after he’s needlessly tasered some kid five times? Or are we so scared of our government that we’re powerless to do anything in the face of tyranny.

I’m not going to get involved with what the kid did and what the police did, and whether or not he was an asshole. It really doesn’t matter. Regardless of what the kid did, the police handled it brutally, and the students (and anyone who watches the video) realize that.

Civil uprisings which have overthrown governments have been triggered by less than this. I guess the bright side is that it was captured and now that has seen it maybe next time someone will do something to stop it.

</rant>

This is an extension to my latest comment on this blog entry.

If you search for just about any term in google, you will find that if a wikipedia entry exists it will be ranked among the top few entries.

This exposes a flaw in the concept of Google search algorithms, as despite the quality of the content of the page, simply because it exists on wikipedia and is well linked within the framework of the site, it gets shuffled to the top of the google search page results.

Creating a page which is within the first page of the biggest search engine freely editable by anyone with any agenda is just asking for abuse.

Del.icio.us has been pretty free of spam and spammy links. The reason for this is their very logical decision not to allow search engines to index the pages by adding the following metatag.

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive,nofollow,noindex"/>

If wikipedia would do this it would solve a LOT of problems. The fact that wikipedia ranks so well not only means that objectionable content often floats to the top of the search engine rankings, but you also get a lot more random people who surf in through google (most likely looking for information) and end up editing the article and bringing the quality down.

So this is a callout to wikipedia, please get your pages out of google and work towards refining your content rather than being a nesting ground for link spammers, people with personal agendas and random vandals.

I’ve been waiting to reveal my conspiracy theory about the Google acquisition of YouTube, but then I saw this post about Sun’s Project Blackbox, and decided it was time to let the cat out of the bag.

Project Blackbox, is a mobile datacenter from Sun. About this time last year Cringley reported that Google was working on exactly this.

From Cringley’s article:

Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google.

Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire data center, and the results are profound. Take Internet TV as an example. Replicating that Victoria’s Secret lingerie show that took down Broadcast.com years ago would be a non-event for Google. The video feed would be multicast over the private fiber network to 300+ data centers, where it would be injected at gigabit speeds into each peering ISP. Viewers watching later would be reading from a locally cached copy. Yeah, but would it be Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime? It doesn’t matter. To Google’s local data center, bits are bits and the system is immune to protocols or codecs. For the first time, Internet TV will scale to the same level as broadcast and cable TV, yet still offer soemthing different for every viewer if they want it.

Sounds a lot like YouTube doesn’t it? One of Sun’s new Blackboxes will hold 1.5 petabytes of data, this is probably sufficient to hold most of YouTubes / google videos popular videos. Drop a couple hundred of these at the peering ISPs and you will have the latency and speed to pipe HD video into any home in the US.

The next step is obviously the YouTube DVR, which you just plug into your network cable and your TV screen, Google will then make deals with the major networks (like we’ve seen following the YouTube acquisition) and you can forget about terrestrial and cable TV.

The last thing I want to mention is the concept that google has to monetize YouTube, and the fear that google will start splicing the videos with commercials. This is not true, and if implemented would take away what everyone loves about youtube. There is no way that Google could monetize YouTube through advertisements to create an acceptable ROI for their stockholders. Google bought YouTube as a stepping stone to grab the largest market share of internet video, which will be monetized once we all sit down in the living room to watch the latest movie releases from YouTube on our big screen TVs. Some people have also mentioned that the stock jump in GOOG prices on the day of the acquisition paid for the purchase.

The move to video is the only way that Google can continue it’s growth as an advertising giant. They have saturated the Web space and need to provide other ways to provide advertising inventory to their clients. This was discussed by Garret Rogers last year.

Whether or not “Project Blackbox” was a surprise to Google, or if Sun even got the idea from Google, I doubt that it will have much effect on the final outcome of what Google’s larger plan.

So here’s to hoping that when Google owns the internet, we don’t wish we had Bill back!

Democracy Now

The guy from loose change sounded like a jerk and called everyone a liar, the guy from popular mechanics violated Godwin’s law.

Facts can be made to say anything when tortured sufficiently. “Experts” will do the same just to get their face on TV. Who are you going to believe?

(putting on his best Jack Bauer voice) I need you to cross check the records for these two men. Call devision and get the names of everyone they met in the weeks preceeding their deaths, cross check those results against our database and see if anything comes up. I also need to coroners reports, cross check any abnormalities in their blood and see if there is any link. Send that information to my workstation.

Alton man throws children off 15th floor of Miami Beach hotel

A cancer doctor from Godfrey celebrating his wedding anniversary threw his two young sons off the 15th-story balcony of a South Beach hotel Saturday before jumping to his death, police say.

Dr. Edward Van Dyk, a radiation oncologist at Alton Memorial Hospital, and his two sons were found dead on the overhang below the hotel balcony, on one of the city’s busiest drives.

Spencer, 4, and Carl, 8, were in their pajamas.

Miami Beach police are investigating the deaths as a murder-suicide.

Van Dyk’s wife, Qinuo, called police at 8:37 a.m. Saturday. She told them that she had seen her husband jump off the balcony and that when she looked over, she saw her sons’ bodies there as well.

Horrible crime, but read the story and look for what substance is being used to justify the headline. The police aren’t talking, the only person who is talking is the widow who aparantly saw her husband jump.

The wife doesn’t seem to have an alibi but the fact that she tells the police that they had been having “marital problems” seems to provide a perfect motive for the husband to throw himself and his kids out of his hotel window.

Could it be that the reason for thier marital problems was that she was having an affair with the butler?

Why is it that these types of crimes are simply brushed off as someone flipping their lid? Where’s Miss Marple when you need her?

I always knew there was something weird about wired!

A couple days ago I blogged about the Loose Change documentary on the events surrounding September 11th. I finally got around to watching it last night.

Now, even though I’m a bit of a conspiracist I do understand a couple basic points about these kinds of events.

1. You are not an expert! Even though something may sound illogical to you, it could have a very simple explanation to an expert.
2. When buildings are blowing up, things get confusing. People will always have different stories, this doesn’t mean that people are lying or there is a cover-up.
3. In the thousands upon thousands of hours of TV footage that is available to dig through, you can find a quote that will suppor ANY theory
4. Listen for “Leaps of Faith”, comments like “We don’t know what happened, but we certainly know what didn’t happen.” These usually surround circumstancial evidence

Having said that, and taking those points into account, this documentary is very well made and does bring up some interesting questions. However, in my opinion the film makers tried too hard to cover all aspects (pentagon, towers, flight 93, and government conspiracy) and that causes parts of the film to be very weak.

Something is obviously wrong with the official story surrounding 9-11, I don’t think there is any question about that. I just don’t see why people can’t present these issues without taking the leaps of faith that are needed to directly involve GWB in the conspiracy. The famous Pentagon Strike movie is a good example of presenting specific information in a focused way. Give the information and let the viewers come to their own conclusions.

Anyway, everyone should certainly watch the movie and draw your own conclusions. The demolition bits were exceptionally good, I especially enjoyed the footage of the demolition of the stadium (OK, so I like watching things blow up). The whole section about flight 93 was pushing it, as was the conspiracy bit at the end.

Are you an Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobiac?

It says it in wikipedia… it must be true!

Cory Doctorow’s Literary Works

Anyone who is interested in DRM and Copy Protection either in Europe and/or around the world needs to listen to this speech which Cory Doctorow gave in a media event in Antwerp, Belguim.

In the first 20 minutes he gives a rundown of what DRM means to regular people, using real world examples of how stupid the basic concepts behind DRM are.

Listen!

php | architect – The PHP Magazine for PHP Professionals

Over the last year or so I’ve been downloading selected PDF versions of the PHP|Arch magazine, printing articles that interest me out and filing them in my categorized folder.

Thanks to today’s $0.99 cent/mag promotion I’ve just about completed my set of PDFs, giving me an impressive stack of printouts (well, I’m sure it will be impressive once I get around to printing and punching holes in them), all for around 10 euros.

Yesterday, I took advantage of the Free PDF subscription and I renewed my Annual subscription so I’ll be fully stocked until August 2007

So, get over there and buy some articles, it’s worth it!

update: The phparch shopping cart is only able to accept 7 items, to qualify for paying with paypal you need a total order of over $15. This means that you can’t buy these magazines and pay with paypal.

I ended up not buying any PDFs and hope that they run this deal again once they have fixed the cart.

witz.org: Natalie Portman is bald, smoking cigarettes

Pictures probably taken during the filming of V for Vendetta, in which she is shorn. I can’t wait for Vendetta to come out, they’ve pushed back the release date (rumored because of the London bomings), but hope they don’t buckle in and change the storyline as well. Would be very ironic if they did.

Stock News Direct: Did Pat Robertson Profit From His Assasination Comment?

Did Pat Robertson make money by publicly calling for the murder of Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela?

Political-economic analyst Al Martin says, “Pat’s comments created a so-called ‘flight to quality’ bid in both the September long bonds and the Sep. dollar cntracts…What’s interesting to note,” Martin continues, “is that a fund that Robertson is a large investor in, one of the deep offshore Smart Republicn Money trading pools, was a substantial purchaser of the Sep long bond and dollar contract indexes last night (Aug 22) just before he made those remarks.