Bloggers@large

Bush: pathetic liar In december I wrote about the US becoming it’s own worst enemy because they seem to adopt the same questionable ethics as the so-called terrorists and rogue states they fight. Well, add two new chapters to the whole ‘I told you so’ book. First there is a huge scandal going on right now in Europe: a debate about covert CIA flights moving terrorist suspects to clandestine prisons in various locations on European soil. Supposedly the CIA also tortures the suspects there as well. Off course the US (Condoleeza Rice) denied such stories, but in way that leaves […]

Google campus rulez.. Ok, ok I probably should stop raving about Google, but how cool can it get? ABC news has a segment about the Google campus (they don’t call it a ‘office’ of course), were they take a tour. Man, it sure brings back memories of the pre-9/11 hype in Europe as well. In fact it reminds me of my days at Netcast and Lost Boys were I had my share of the hype. Free food, drinks, cool company trips, weekly chair and table massages and let’s not forget the famous monthly ‘Lounge parties‘ (complete Thai food catering and […]

Youtube: broadcast yourself In december I wrote about this cool website called YouTube. It allows you to upload any movie (up to 100mb) and converts it into a flashmovie, together with a player so you can embed it conveniently on your webpages or Blog. It is pretty cool and I have uploaded quite a few movies myself already. Among them some that I consider ‘classics’. So, if you like to relax a bit, I invite you to read on for this article and just watch the movies. Catch the Cat! Need some glasses?Cat Herders

Jobs: Jackpot! And in other news today (or rather yesterday if you’re American): Disney buys Pixar from Apple’s Steve Jobs. The deal was rumoured for a while but it wasn’t confirmed until tuesday. Both companies have agreed to an ‘all-stock merger’ that will give Pixar shareholders 2.3 shares of Disney for each share they presently own in Pixar. It’s a deal valued at slightly more than $7.5 billion. Jobs will also get a chair in the board of directors: a fact that has some observers already tipping him to be Disney’s new chairman. One year ago Jobs and former Disney […]

Google: going for the big money This came a big suprise for me: Google has said it will censor its search services in China in order to gain greater access to China’s fast-growing market. It seems that the company that prides itself in its motto “don’t be evil”, is giving in to the big money. The Chinese Google site wil be available under http://www.google.cn and will be censored. Google’s decision on China comes less than a week after it resisted efforts by the US Department of Justice to make it disclose data on what people were searching for. According to […]

Sex.com: $14 million? It’s an old marketing wisdom: sex sells. But according to (as yet unverfied) sources the owner of the domain sex.com (Gary Kremen) has sold that domain to a company called Escom LLC. Allegdly he gets $14 million for it. As The Register reports: (…)Kremen had originally registered Sex.com in May 1994 but it was stolen by lifelong con-man Stephen Cohen from under his nose in October 1995. Cohen spent the next five years battling to regain control of the domain. (…)Eventually, however, Kremen won the case and with it $65m in damages. Rather than pay, Cohen fled […]

Rise of the machines Last week I wrote about the Fermi paradox (if there is intelligent life besides us in this universe, then where are they?). As I explained in that article, there are several explanations for the paradox and one of them is that these outer civilizations are so weird (from our current perspective) there’s no way to interact with them. One of the people that believe in this theory is Vernor Vinge, a mathematician, computer scientist and science fiction author. In 1993 he wrote an essay called “The Technological Singularity”, in which he argues that exponential growth in […]

While reading some interesting articles on Fermi’s paradox for my previous Blog “Were are they?”, I came across this interesting little video on the Space.com website. It explains why researchers, dr. Jill C. Tarter (director, Project Phoenix SETI institute) does not put to much value into the Fermi paradox. Basically she adheres to the Drake equation and just believes we haven’t found ‘them’ yet. It is not a really ‘indepth’ coverage of the whole Fermi paradox and all, but I thought it was nice to share it anyway.

Google resists True to it’s company policy “do no harm” Google is resisting efforts by the US Department of Justice to force it to hand over data about what people are looking for online. The department wants the data to try to show in court it has the right approach in enforcing the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which has been blocked by the Supreme Court because of legal challenges over how it is enforced. Google’s refusal to comply has prompted the deparment of Justice to ask a federal judge in the state of California for an order to hand […]

Space.. The final frontier I have been involved in the Seti@home program since 1999: so far without any results. For those who have no idea what SETI is: it is an acronym for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence and SETI@home (“SETI at home”) is a grid computing (distributed computing in the project’s own terminology) project using Internet-connected computers, hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States. The purpose of SETI@home is to analyze data incoming from the Arecibo radio telescope (located in Puerto Rico), searching for possible evidence of radio transmissions from […]