Your current blogger here at Stargeek, me, is moving over to a new host. Dan Zarrella has set up NEGeek.com as part of the BWP network of websites. So if you like my unique view on tech, politics, and culture intersecting you can find me there.

Has anyone else seen this steaming pile of (err…) video yet? It’s almost like Google is out to prove that I’m right about their grappeling with how to spend all that money.

C’mon. With that much cash and talent you can’t come up with a better video sales mechanic than slapping on the google search engine interface with an extra pulldown? There isn’t actually enough video for sale to warrant the search engine, but it could use a decent frontend.

Google’s minimalist approach works great for a search engine. It doesn’t work all that well with a set library of video content. Although to be honest, yahoo doesn’t have a clue either.

Victor Yodaiken makes some good points about Digital Rights Managment and the law of unintended consequences. There isn’t a “good” way to implement DRM where it won’t affect all systems in unpredictable ways, some of which can have deadly consequences.

Imagine, if you will, your doctor suddenly not being able to check your allergy status because someone used a DRM protected machine to upload information it thought was “protected” and shut itlself down.

That’s a pretty nightmarish scenario but could become a reality in the new more DRM friendly hardware environment. How many lives is a image of Mickey Mouse worth?

Just in case you thought I was joking with the post about The Register and podporn here’s a link to one purvayor of the stuff. It’s a landing page, so (as of this writing) there’s no actualy content on there to offend. Just don’t click the links.

So. Seriously. Podporn. I didn’t actually think someone had monitized on that one yet… but I probably should have, considering porns the market that usually figures out how to cash in on new transport layers first.

While little Johnny is beating a prostitute to death in GTA3: Liberty City Stories he may be at risk of (err…) malicious porn sellers. El Reg has brought to light the nefarious plot to subvert the youth of wherever you happen to be by way of the good people at Surf Control.

Who sell a package to block internet content. Small wonder they’re bleating about the horrible dangers of youths mixing porn in with their violence, eh?

Here’s an idea. If you’re a parent worried about your kids getting the “wrong content” make sure they don’t. Seems simple, yet affective. Better yet, simply don’t buy them whatever they want.

Now that that’s all sorted…

A team from Missouri-Columbia has found a causal link between people viewing violent images and being inured to violent images.

While it’s no great shock that people that regularly view something have a muted reaction to it (this probably occurs in war zones and violent areas, too) their immediate conclusion based on the findings is a bit odd.

There’s no reason to jump to people being innured to violence and those same people commiting violent acts themselves. While it’s a bit disturbing overall, I don’t think there’s any way to show a causal effect based on the findings listed in the article.

We’re going to go (errr…) back to the future and start using TV’s for everything. That’s right. While everyone’s been flocking to any alternative media in site what we all really want is Google and Yahoo on that big paperweight in the living room.

Let me make something perfectly clear. Push media is dead. Deader than that even. I mean dead in bold print. Sure, it’ll still occupy a niche as long as there’s some good content to be had.

But it’s not the future. Somehow, I don’t think Microsoft has much to fear from it’s younger rivals if they think the future is in TV sets that most folks can’t afford.

BBC is running a nice wrapup on Sony’s CD fiasco. Apparently they’ll make mewling noises and fling cheap product to the masses then walk away.

Now, my problem with it is this. If you or I were to infect 10’s of thousands of computers with trojans we’d be seeing serious jail time. Sony? All charges settled in exchange for a pat on the back, a promise to not be bad, and a stick of gum.

While people have been quick to try and bring evolution down, those pesky scientists have been working on ever more convincing proofs. See, if they can show the genomes responsible for evolving they can show how it happened and have a definitive proof that evolution of some form is how we all got here.

Mind you, some people will never be convinced in anything aside from what they’ve been told. For the rest of us free thinkers, check out the article over at Science. They’ve got quite a few cool developments in the scientific field.

You’ve all been duped. It turns out that Dogpile is buying Opera. Yes. Dogpile. I know, I know, it sounds strange. They could use one of the myriad of browsers that are an equally large variety of “free”. But no, they’re going to buy Opera. I’ve got it on good authority.

Which is why you probably shouldn’t believe everything that you read. Why on earth would a search engine company buy, of all things, Opera? They’ve got a smaller install base than most of the free browsers or Netscape.

Add to that the fact that you can pay, say, Mozilla engineers to build you a custom browser tailored to your every whim without buying the company and it starts looking a bit silly.

So no. it’s not bloody likely anyone is buying Opera at anything but a fire sale. Not Google or Microsoft or Yahoo!. There’s really no point.

Roger Ebert apparently thinks that videogames aren’t art. Well… not like movies anyway. Or those metal beams welded together at haphazard angles. No-sir.

Say it with me folks, “anything can be art”. Even if it’s not what you’re into. Now, coming from Ebert I’m assuming it’s not art because it threatens his precious movie nitch. See… games are getting to be pretty close to cinema these days.

And hey, some of them even have better content. Baldur’s Gate II, for instance, has a better plotline than a good portion of this years movies.

But even if that didn’t qualify it, it’s still got, literally, art. That’s right. The painted stuff comprises most every image on the screen. Newer games might have totally rendered-on-the-fly images, but those old school top-down RPGs had painstakingly painted scenery and characters for a while there.

And no. I don’t care that it was a digital canvas. It’s traditional artwork.

In the end games are as much art as that other upstart, movies.

I’ve given this a bit of thought. Hackers are roughly the “Starving Artist” equivelent of the IT world.

Although not always starving. “Art” and inovation in the world of computers tends to pay off even if you’re not driven to make money off it. I think that’s a bit of a difference in the medium rather than a difference of the individual.

Hackers tend to be driven to do interesting, innovative stuff rather than doing it principly for gain.. which is similar to artists that create work because they feal it needs to be done, rather than for any financial reasons. Everything else about the piece is secondary to it’s production.

Pushing the envelope, seeing what you can do, it’s a similar theme in both worlds. There’s even some crossover with 3D artists and mathematicians that do graphical design. I know that might sound a bit weird, but think of the skill set necessary to hack on X.org. Very cross-genre stuff.

FCC Cheif Martin is all for taxing VOIP services. Nevermind that they have the potential to carry phone service to rural areas for far less than it costs to run individual data lines *and* phonelines out to each subscriber.

That assumption is made on the basis that whatever technology works best for bridging the last leg of the IP packets journey will be used. So there’s no need to have a phoneline, per-say, but you would simply use whatever wired or wireless technology is feasible.

My problem with things like the massive telephone subsidizing fund is that it encourages graft, corruption, and market fixing. There’s absolutely no incentive to make low-cost workable solutions while everyone is forced to pay for the broken system.

Looks like some Aussie’s are still ripping up the countryside due to “racial tensions”.

I don’t get why they’re terming it a problem with “youths”. The drunk looking fellow in the picture looks older than the police trying to arrest him.

Family tech support around the holiday’s always a pain. Enjoy! Penny Arcade! - One Day In The Future

I don’t think you can make stuff like this up. According to the AP wire there’s at least one drunken mob roaming Australia attacking Arabic looking people. ‘Round these parts people are usually racially violent when they think they’re being trodden on, not when they want to trod on others.

That’s usually a bit more subtle these days. Or institutionalized. At any rate, this one was due to two lifeguards (possibly?) being attacked by youths of (maybe) Lebanese descent. This all seems a bit sketchy to get a mob together and terrorize random people. On second thought lets just try to avoid mobs altogether, even the Aussies.

Sony just can’t keep themselves from trojaning your computer, it seems. ZDNet’s reporting on yet another flaw with the Sony rootkit-enabled DRM software.

I’m really starting to question what business Sony BMG is in these days. Are they a software house or a music shop? After all those horrible DRM packages that have been chewing through machines out on the ‘net I’m really starting to think they might want to .. ya know .. stick to selling music.

I’ve heard it’s what they do, after all.

Our jails apparently aren’t full enough yet in the USA. Music publishers (not, ya know.. Congress or anything) wants jail time for people that make music lyrics available online.

Remember, every time you write down the lyrics of a song it deprives some poor, starving lyric publishing company that all those readers would have purchased from. Any conceivable way of making a buck should be ingrained in law with a stiff jail sentence, apparently.

Digitizing the print world’s always a huge headache. It looks like Google’s coming to realize this as they attempt to make the print world searchable.

One of the problems I see with complaints on Google is that they tend to gloss over a very pertinent point. While they bitch and moan about the current publications being “ripped off” they fail to mention the real reason they’re so up in arms about Google’s print service.

In a word, it will make printed works which are no longer clearly copyrighted and works that no one lays claim to digital. There will never be another dime made on these work and it may well fall out of human knowledge without this.

But someone, somewhere has to own the copyright by US law. And what the publishers are arguing is that because of that, this work should never see the light of day unless the copyright holders are tracked down and payed.. not that that’s technically possible.

This site’s URL is spot on and the torrents themselves are fairly oddball. Angry College Kid looks like it’s got some pretty interesting media floating on it.

Highlights? “The Monopoly Men” on the subject of the extremely wealthy and world power. “The End of Suburbia” How the Amercan dream is destroying the world. No kidding!