a convenient truth

An amusing-in-a-sick-way post from Jason Calacanis: Wikipedia leaves $100M on the table.

This says rather more about Mr Calacanis than it does about Jimbo Wales, I fear. I’m not sure I’d like to draw larger conclusions than Jason-Calacanis-in-lack-of-vision-shocker, but the belief you ought to sell out anything, if you get the right price, does seem rather widespread.

The constant reference in articles such as this article from BBC News is starting get on my goat.

*There is no such thing as identity theft* OK? If someone pretends to be me and takes money out of my bank account, *I* am not a victim of “Identity Theft”. The *bank* is a victim of *fraud*.

The myth of Identity Theft has been promulgated by those with an interest in labelling it differently from all the other frauds for which they are liable. By making *me* a victim, they hope to make sure it’s *me* who ends up being responsible, and paying for it.

Grrrr.

An essay from Richard Dawkins to coincide with his new book: Richard Dawkins: Why There Almost Certainly Is No God - Yahoo! News.

It is a matter of wonder to me that the religious ascendency in the US doesn’t scare people so much more than the rather feeble attempts of the “Islamist” movement. They cannot destroy our society — but those in the US most certainly could.

So it’s true — Google Has Acquired YouTube. Props to the YouTube guys for the best possible acquisition deal. I think props to Google too - if anyone can monetize YouTube, they can.

This does leave Yahoo looking like the bridesmaid here though, in many ways YouTube is a better fit for them, because of the community angle. YouTube’s community offering seems very poor to me, although I suspect it is more important than it seems. The real value of it is to the posters of the videos, who get feedback, even if in terms only of number of eyeballs.

The big question is the one about copyrights, but it does seem like Google is the behemoth here, and not the media companies. I think the various media companies have realised that sueing the very people who distribute their stuff is a pretty weird business model, and that doing deals with them makes a lot more sense.

It would be a shame if a lot of the creative uses of copyright content were stopped though - the blatant ripping off of tv shows isn’t so interesting.

Great payoff in this
Slashdot comment.

We moved house a few months ago, and the difference in the satellite images is quite striking. Here is before and after.

The power of the satellite imagery is remarkable — google maps still sends a shiver down my spine sometimes at the sheer awesomeness of it.

A [great letter](http://www.time.com/time/world/printout/0,8816,1543658,00.html) in TIME magazine from a Marine serving in Iraq. It’s just the sort of thing you’d expect, but very amusingly written. Some good bits:

> Most Surreal Moment — Watching Marines arrive at my detention facility and unload a truck load of flex-cuffed midgets. 26 to be exact. We had put the word out earlier in the day to the Marines in Fallujah that we were looking for Bad Guy X, who was described as a midget. Little did I know that Fallujah was home to a small community of midgets, who banded together for support since they were considered as social outcasts. The Marines were anxious to get back to the midget colony to bring in the rest of the midget suspects, but I called off the search, figuring Bad Guy X was long gone on his short legs after seeing his companions rounded up by the giant infidels.

> Most Profound Man in Iraq — an unidentified farmer in a fairly remote area who, after being asked by Reconnaissance Marines if he had seen any foreign fighters in the area replied “Yes, you.”

> Coolest Insurgent Act — Stealing almost $7 million from the main bank in Ramadi in broad daylight, then, upon exiting, waving to the Marines in the combat outpost right next to the bank, who had no clue of what was going on. The Marines waved back. Too cool.

The rest of it sounds like Vietnam with sand.

There are some interesting numbers in [this Reuters story](http://today.reuters.com/misc/PrinterFriendlyPopup.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2006-10-06T125540Z_01_L06708070_RTRUKOC_0_US-MEDIA-GOOGLE-BOOKS.xml).

> Walter de Gruyter/Mouton-De Gruyter, a German publisher, said its encyclopaedia of fairy tales has been viewed 471 times since appearing in the program, with 44 percent of them clicking on the “buy this book” Google link.
>
> One of its many scientific titles, “Principles of Visual Anthropology”, has seen about one-quarter of the 1,206 views click on “buy this book”.

Those are remarkable conversion rates, and ones anyone would be pleased with. If you think a little about how shopping works in meatspace of course it’s not quite so surprising. Flicking through books in a bookshop before buying them is one of the great joys of going to a real bookshop. And you do want to see inside the books. You can see how this works for one of these titles, [Principles of Visual Anthropology](http://books.google.co.uk/books?vid=ISBN311017930X&id=3TsiASDt0Gs&lpg=PR17&sig=9dv9UWTCTOg6LVB5KEn6OP5Ui-E), and you can see what a difference being able to see inside the book makes. It’s a very dry title, but you can at least get a real impression of what the book is like.

What I find bizarre is that publishers are so terrified of their own customers — at least right now. Just like mp3s, reading online is a significantly worse experience than the real thing. The quality of sound you get from an mp3 is poor compared to a CD, reading online is nowhere near as good as having the dead tree. Even for books I use primarily for reference, I get the dead tree copy if I use it more than occasionally.

Publishers real fears will be realised when good ebook readers are available cheaply. These are coming out now, and soon the experience might be good enough to really substitute for dead trees. The same is true of music, where increasing bandwidths will make standards like FLAC real options for download. I have already seen a whole load of FLAC downloads on (legal) torrent sites, and this will only increase.

Some interesting information about Vista’s new security over at [Gadgetell](http://www.gadgetell.com/2006/10/windows-vista-security-how-it-will-be/). I’m not surprised Microsoft are tightening up on security — their understanding of their exposure to this is now pretty good (even if they are still more concerned with PR than real security).

The really interesting bits are:

• Requiring files to be signed before they can be installed
• Only being able to use ‘approved’ anti-virus software

This is the sort of security Microsoft have always liked — top-down, authoritarian security. These files may still be malware of course, it’s just microsoft-approved malware. And the vast majority of perfectly good Windows software will generate all sorts of dire warnings when you try to install it, much as a lot of drivers do now.

Once people are habituated to clicking the “ignore” button on all these warnings, they become pretty pointless — but it does provide Microsoft a nice little earner in certifying software and signing it.

I want [one of these](http://youtube.com/watch?v=NZNTgglPbUA)! Very cool indeed.