Yep — according to AP,
Google has hired Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf to float more ideas and develop new products, adding another weapon to the online search engine leader’s rapidly growing arsenal of intellect.
If they can lure Bob Kahn then they’ve got a full house!
Thoughtful — and sobering — Guardian column by Timothy Garton-Ash.
You think the looting, rape and armed terror that emerged within hours in New Orleans would never happen in nice, civilised Europe? Think again. It happened here, all over our continent only 60 years ago. Read the memoirs of Holocaust and gulag survivors, Norman Lewis’s account of Naples in 1944, or the recently republished anonymous diary of a German woman in Berlin in 1945. It happened again in Bosnia just 10 years ago. And that wasn’t even the force majeure of a natural disaster. Europe’s were man-made hurricanes.
The basic point is the same: remove the elementary staples of organised, civilised life – food, shelter, drinkable water, minimal personal security – and we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all. Some people, some of the time, behave with heroic solidarity; most people, most of the time, engage in a ruthless fight for individual and genetic survival. A few become temporary angels, most revert to being apes.
And, while we’re on the subject, how about this from today’s New York Times?
Florida’s attorney general has already filed a fraud lawsuit against a man who started one of the earliest networks of Web sites – katrinahelp.com, katrinadonations.com and others – that stated they were collecting donations for storm victims.
In Missouri, a much wider constellation of Internet sites – with names like parishdonations.com and katrinafamilies.com – displayed pictures of the flood-ravaged South and drove traffic to a single site, InternetDonations.org, a nonprofit entity with apparent links to white separatist groups.
The registrant of those Web sites was sued by the state of Missouri yesterday for violating state fund-raising law and for “omitting the material fact that the ultimate company behind the defendants’ Web sites supports white supremacy.”
Late yesterday afternoon, the Federal Bureau of Investigation put the number of Web sites claiming to deal in Katrina information and relief – some legitimate, others not – at “2,300 and rising.” Dozens of suspicious sites claiming links to legitimate charities are being investigated by state and federal authorities.
Terrific explanation by Quentin.
… from the Microsoft-Google hearings.
Ballmer: Kai-Fu had a — a distinct commitment and responsibility on behalf of the company for being the senior executive here in Redmond, with responsibility for godfathering, shepherding all of our R&D activities in China. It’s a structure we also use for India. We have a senior executive with knowledge of India be the R&D godfather for India, encourage work to go there, shepherd, and — and mentor people in the area. Kai-Fu had that broad, important responsibility for China. … ”
Deposing lawyer: “This term, ‘godfather’ — is that an official title within the Microsoft organization?”
Ballmer explained that no, in fact, the correct title was “executive sponsor.”
… first install Internet Explorer Version 6.
Truly, one couldn’t make this up. Anyone wishing to register online for disaster relief at the FEMA disaster aid website is first greeted with this message:
In order to use this site, you must have JavaScript Enabled and Internet Explorer version 6. Download it from Microsoft or call 1-800-621-FEMA (3362) to register.
No, I am not making it up. I’ve just been to the site — which is where I got the quote. No wonder the Yanks are in trouble.
Shock, horror! From today’s New York Times…
SEATTLE, Sept. 6 (AP) – A former Microsoft executive whose defection to Google set off a legal battle testified on Tuesday that an expletive-filled tirade from the chairman of Microsoft, Bill Gates, was a low point before he decided to leave.
If you’ve been to a gas station lately, you have no doubt been shocked by the prices: $1.67, $1.78, even $1.92. And that’s just for Hostess Twinkies. Gas prices are even worse.
Americans are ticked off about this, and with good reason: Our rights are being violated! The First Amendment clearly states: ‘In addition to freedom of speech, Americans shall always have low gasoline prices, so they can drive around in ‘sport utility’ vehicles the size of minor planets.”
And don’t let any so-called ”economists” try to tell you that foreigners pay more for gas than we do. Foreigners use metric gasoline, which is sold in foreign units called ”kilometers,” plus they are paying for it with foreign currencies such as the ”franc,” the ”lira” and the ”doubloon.” So in fact there is no mathematical way to tell WHAT they are paying.
But here in the U.S., we are definitely getting messed over, and the question is: What are we going to do about it? Step one, of course, is to file a class-action lawsuit against the cigarette companies. They have nothing to do with gasoline, but juries really hate them, so we’d probably win several hundred billion dollars.
Dave Barry, writing in 2000.
Thoughtful essay by Godfrey Hodgson…
Whatever you think of the war in Iraq, the absence in the middle east of part of the Mississippi national guard was hardly the reason for the administration’s tardy and incompetent response. The explanation of that is simpler: it is to be found in the callous indifference among conservatives towards the poor.
While it is true that the class bias of the Bush administration’s domestic and budget policies has helped weaken the ability of both state and federal agencies to respond to an almost unprecedented domestic disaster, it was nevertheless an absence of sympathy, not a lack of means, which motivated the low priority given to poor, mostly black victims…
This an an astonishingly clever idea — a collaborative map of the disaster area enabling people to enter information about specific building or locations as they reach them. “If you have information about the status of an area that is not yet on the map”, says the blurb, “please contribute by following the instructions below so that others may get that much needed information.”
This morning’s Observer column. Sample:
Online porn is a huge business which exists for one reason only: there is a vast market for its products. All the internet has done is to reveal the true extent of the demand by lowering the ‘shame threshold’ that must be crossed in order to access the stuff.
But instead of talking about this insatiable demand, and what it tells us about human nature, we focus instead on the technology. We never ask, for example, whether the lust for porn reveals something rotten in the heart of many human relationships, or if it tells us something about a desire to have pleasure without commitment.
The answers to such questions will probably make uncomfortable reading, which of course is why we avoid asking them. By going ahead with the .xxx domain, Icann could do something to stop this hypocritical rot. But I’m not holding my breath.