Why is poker showing up on the “Sports” page?!
What’s next, spring training?
Why is poker showing up on the “Sports” page?!
What’s next, spring training?
Everyone knows about Google™; they became dominant by doing a single thing very very well. The very name has become a verb in our vernacular.
Their “unofficial motto” is: Don’t be evil. It’s a clear (and well-deserved) slap at other corporations who, well, are.
But Google’s thinking on this is limited to the situation at hand. It’s problematic to proclaim that your intent is to not do evil, while churning out tools that could be perverted to evil uses by others.
What happens to all that carefully-guarded data if a takeover bid convinces the stockholders to sell? Or if the servers get hacked? Or if a no-name black-ops department decides to Waco the building and hot-swap the hard drives at gunpoint?
Data providers, lawmakers, and in fact anyone who creates any entity that directly impacts people or their behavior, must put on the Black Hat from time to time and ask the hard question: How could what I’m creating be abused when I lose control of it?
So at least one modification is required for Google Motto version 1.01:
Don’t be evil… and don’t be naive.
Amidst the holiday joy one hears on the Friday before Memorial Day (“Three-day week-end [clap, clap, clap-clap-clap]“), we should stop for just a few seconds and think about what it all means.
The History Channel has put together a nice brief history of the holiday.
The fact that you and I are here, that things like blogs and History Channels and vacations (and the things we vacation from) even exist, is *wholly* dependent on the efforts of others. They deserve our thanks.
Britney just hasn’t had that much impact on my daily life; she’s a capable performer, but too dependent on the star-making machinery to ever really make it on her own. She’s still a cutie, but she’s not at the top of that game anymore, either.
So, frankly, I’m just not that interested in daily reports of her performance as a mother– good, bad, or indifferent.
But the media isn’t getting that message. These days, if Britney takes a bad step or is distracted while caring for her kid, the paparazzi are all over it like, well, like slime on a paparazzo.
Did anyone ever consider that maybe they’re the cause of the distractions?
Lately in the paper there’s been a series on what a tacky, ugly place to live Gainesville is, and how much better they do things in Savannah, Georgia.
I did some cursory research and found that Gainesville has ample bus, airplane, even moving van services, that all head up Savannah way.
My suggestion is that anyone who likes Savannah that much better than Gainesville should feel free to move there at once– don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, and see if you can convince a meddling, ingrateful newspaper editor or two to join you.
Further proof that my voodoo dolls are defective: Spammers have discovered the blog.
Luckily I get notified of post replies by email so the average lifespan of one of these parasitic posts can be measured in minutes (the last one lasted about ten seconds). Pity the lifespan of the parasites themselves couldn’t be measured the same way.
Anyway, not that there’s been overwhelming use of the “Reply” feature (which is fine; the logs say that people are reading if not commenting), if the spam gets too bad I’ll have to put some sort of barrier in the way– a login or membership requirement or some such.
Apologies in advance. There are always some people who will abuse and ruin what other people have built and see nothing wrong with doing so.
Followup: I modified the system to filter on a fairly comprehensive set of spam attributes; so far it’s been 100%. So once a week or so I’ll have to take out the trash, but the spam shouldn’t appear anymore.
Followup 2: I went ahead and turned off comments for a while (again, not like anyone but the spammers were using them). We’ll see if that decreases the load a bit.
Spammers suck. Seems that if we just dunked a couple of them upside down in a vat of camel snot, the rest would think twice.
It’s amazing how something called “The Weather Channel” can get away with showing so little actual weather. I think they should be forced to intentionally mis-spell their name, the way food manufacturers have to use labels like “froot” or “choklit” or “cheeze” on articles that don’t contain the actual substance.
Five minutes watching The Whethur Channel usually breaks down like this:
This is of approximately equal value to the old rope-on-a-board “weather forecaster” they used to sell in novelty shops.
So get on with it, Whethur Channel. Content sells.