Games Workshop Grows a Pair!

Maybe Games Workshop reads the blog, because it has just come to my attention that the Warhammer 40k movie Ultramarines will be written by Dan Abnett! Now there is an actual hope for the movie, and maybe just maybe this shows that the neck beards over at Games Workshop have grown a pair.

Let Me Google That For You!

Ok, you may or may not have noticed that I am a bit of a Google fan boy. I remember back when I was in high school and Google first came on the scene I challenged the librarian to a search engine contest. I used the Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” button and she used some other engine, probably Yahoo (points if you can tell me what Yahoo stands for) we both search for some information on a topic I think I was writing a paper on at the time. My search found by far a more relevant result, than any of the top 10 results she received, so I won, and Google won. Basically from that point on I was hooked, and no other search engine would do for me anymore. I have also jumped on to every product that Google puts out, with the exception of Wave, cause I honestly don’t understand it yet and don’t want to spend a lot of time using it. Google has become a huge part of my online life; this is basically do to the fact that they provide services that are free and easy to use. The internet is currently in a phase of clean design and high usability (partly why I think that MySpace is getting pwned so hard right now) The Google products definitely fit the bill, I love the simplicity of the bar at the top with the link to the various services, like mail, calendar, etc. This blog is published by Google using their free Blogger software.

Google’s stated purpose is to organize the world’s information, but they make their money through ads, and all that information is a big part of their ad strategy. Of late there has been a lot of frightened rumblings about the power that Google wields on the internet. They potentially have all your emails from Gmail, any search query you perform while signed into your account (and once your signed in it leave you signed in) the event you are planning via the calendar, as well and any other information you have offered up on the altar of the Google cloud. Having all this information in one place is very convenient, but for some people its also very scary. I used to be a bit afraid of the amount of information that I have made available to Google, and there is the point, it is information that I made available! Google did not force me to subscribe to their products, I could have used one of the many other free mail clients for my personal email, I could use a different calendar (maybe one with kittens). Typically I use whatever I determine is the best at the time for the need I have, when I graduated from college I needed a new mail client and so I started using Gmail, which lead me to use the other Google products too, but I chose to use these products, so I gave Google my information.

Google themselves have of late been producing way to both see what information they have on you, as well as ways to export the information out of Google and potential move it to someplace else on the internet. I totally understand the reasoning for creating this, it gives people the warm fuzzies thinking they can walk away at anytime, but what are you going to do with that information? I personally think that there are 2 types of people that would actually walk away, the first are people that have a ton of information with Google and get scared by that amount Google knows about them, the second are people that have very little information in Google and remove it to basically make themselves as invisible as possible on the internet. The first people are heavy internet users, so what are they going to do with that information other that put it into another set of services, like Yahoo, who will then own all that information. The second type doesn’t really want their info on the web anyway so it’s not a big deal to them to not use these services.

I am definitely the first type, I want to have all my information at my finger tips, either from any computer I have access too, or my phone and to go this well… Google I choose you! (woot Pokémon reference) I do not plan to take my information out of Google, because basically I am not paranoid about them having this information. As the internet moves forward and the cloud becomes more powerful everything will be on the internet somewhere, and at least with Google I am putting my information all in one entities hands.

Recently I have read a lot of articles about Google’s search suggestions. It’s a fun game, you type in part of a search query and see what that search engine brings back for result, and the results are often humorous. I am all for a laugh, but I think the whole suggestion thing is being taken a bit far, while I am not a Google developer I would guess that the reason for the suggestion is to cut down on the amount of typing you need to do before you get to your results, if the suggestion does not have what you are looking for then you keep typing till you are actually searching for what you are looking for on the web. On top of that the suggestion must be based on a computer algorithm and that algorithm will change over time as Google makes changes to the way it does search so I would not put too much effort into thinking about the greater implications of the search suggestions.

Lastly I would just like to briefly talk about Rupert Murdoch. Rupert (I am going call him by his first name) recently came out saying he was going to take all of the News Corp content out of Google, basically blocking Google crawlers from aggregating the information. His goal here is to stop Google from “stealing” his intellectual properties. I put “stealing” in quotes here because, well, Rupert is crazy! He thinks that by doing this he will stop Google from giving access to News Corps properties, properties he wants to sell to the consumers and make money from. I am not some crazy everything should be free person, I think that companies have a right to make money, cause that money goes to the people that work there who are also consumers (the amount of compensation is a totally different argument) Rupert thinks that he can just produce the properties, like the wall street journal and the people that want them will pay to read them.

There are at least 2 things wrong with this approach

1) The audience of people that will do exactly what he wants is not a self sustaining audience. It does not renew on its own, lets use the Journal as the example. The Journal is a subscription (which is the mail pay model for news papers, Ryan correct me if I am wrong here), people sign up for the Journal cause they are interested in reading it and because they know what the Journal is by its reputation. The people that are willing to subscribe to the Journal are already roped into paying for it so that is fine, but this makes it harder to attract new people who are willing to become part of this model. This stops a viral audience, one of the things that the internet does well from view the articles. I am sure if you asked Rupert this would be more or less what he is going for, he wants to stop these people that just casually consumer his content and limit to just those that will pay, well as I said before the people that want to pay are already paying and are already viewing the content so this is not attracting any new eyes, hence this approach is not self-sustaining. If he was to allow the some of the content to be available for free, as well as not blocking the biggest search engine in the world from accessing the materials, casual readers would come across the article, and either they would read it and do nothing (which is what Rupert does not want as this does not make him money) or they might read it and tell someone else to read it or put a link up on Facebook, or tweet the article. If every set of eye balls falls into one of those two categories then the more eyeballs you get to see the article the more likely that the article will be seen by someone that wants to read the Journal and would pay for it! Even if the percentage of the people who read the article and end up paying for it is small that percentage is going to be greater than the number of people that are just willing to pay for it already and are already paying (people die, need a way to keep drawing people in).

2) He can go ahead and do this, but all it will do is make people go to one of the millions of other free sources for the information. I mean imagine it, New Corp blocks Google, now all the people that use Google, which is almost everyone, have a whole where the News Corp material used to be, opening up a hole in the market that can be filled by a someone else, who will provide the same news and free, and if done correctly will make them a lot of money. Rupert would be creating a vacuum, but it would not be a big enough vacuum to change much of anything, unless he could get all the other big media outlets to also block Google too, and I personally think that this will not happen.

Rupert is showing his crazy old man side, he is trying to apply the business model that worked for print news papers to the internet age, an age where click-throughs and referral traffic is important, cause that is how your stuff gets seen on the net, we live in a world where Googling something is a verb in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. To most people Google is the internet it’s the way things are found. If I want information on something I am not going to check if there is an article in the Journal about it, I am going to Google it and if there is an article on what I am looking for I will give it a read.

So Rupert, give it a rest, Google is not clogging up yours tubes or stealing your revenue, and if Google is really affecting your bottom line then the fault lies with you, and a business model that does not work on the internet. Sorry old man but the times they are a changing and you better change too or else be left behind (granted I would not mind being left behind with all his money).

Your father was the captain of a starship for 12 minutes, he saved 800 lives...

... I dare you to do better. What better existing nerd property to use making an MMO? Star Trek is based on the idea of an ongoing, indefinite journey. Just think, create a character, join a ship, raise to the rank of captain and then build your own ship, explore strange new worlds and new civilizations, boldly go where no man has gone before! The only thing I could think of being better would be a Firefly MMO. Of course the skies of that on-line world would be crowded with gorram Firefly-class transports with Serenity splashed across the side all captained by brown duster- wearing pretty boys.

This is going to be quick. The Star Trek MMO is on it's way! Here's the supposed box art:

And here's a quick clip of the game play:


Looks pretty good to me. And the best part is it would be easy to have universe-changing events. All you would have to do is send out a message to all ships that the borg are invading or something. Check out some of the in game screen grabs too.

Also, here's where R2-D2 was hiding in the new Trek movie. This is confirmed, unlike the last few rumored R2 sightings.

And now for something completely diffrent...

Actually it's the same thing Spence was just talking about. Net Neutrality. In the event you couldn't slug through Specne's tirade, here's the quick and dirty. Right now, you pay a greedy as hell cable company to connect you to the internet, how much you want to pay depends on how fast you get there but once you are there, access to different web pages all run at the same speed. But if the companies have their way, that won't be the case. Google can afford to pay the ISPs a shit-ton of cash so getting to them will be the same speed as now, but Casual Geekery can pay diddly shit so it could take you 10 minutes to load our page. OR, this could happen: think of it as how you pay for cable access. One flat rate just to connect you to the internet THEN, want to get to iTunes and Pandora? An extra $10 per month thank you! Want to get to YouTube and Hulu also? $10 more please ($15 after the first three months). Like to social network? Well Twitter and FaceBook are free (for the first three months, $10 per month after that). Check out this terrifying graphic for more.

Think this can't happen? It is EXACTLY what they do for premium channels. The only difference is those are luxuries, the internet should be a right, like it is in Finland. The internet is the last great bastion of the basis of our democracy, the idea that every man has an equal voice and an equal chance of being heard. Public television and radio? Bullshit. The internet has had more influence that both of them combined in the few years it has been readily and quickly accessible to the masses. Do not let them take it from you, fight them every way you can think of.

So as we take our leave, support the new head of the FCC, he's one bad mother - shut your mouth. He just may be the John Connor we need to raise from the ashes of greedy asshole- contorlled internet and lead us into a safer, brighter future.

Let My Packets Go!

If there is one thing I love it is to argue, especially when the topic is academic, I just love the idea of taking a train of thought through to the end, and I don’t get emotionally involved in the argument because again it’s just academic. However the is something in Tech news that I do feel very strongly about, and that is Net Neutrality (total name fail). Net Neutrality, which I will refer to here on out as NN, is the hot button topic where the spheres or technology meet politics.

If you are unaware of what NN is let me give it to you in the most concise why I have heard it explained. Basically NN mean that the Internet Service Providers, such as Comcast, Verizon, etc cannot prioritize the packets running over their network, in essence it would mean that an email packet, a bit torrent packet or a packet from a webpage would all be treated the same way. Without NN regulation Comcast could throttle Hulu traffic because they want you to use you’re their competing streaming web page (not sure if they have one but that is my example). The ISPs are totally against the idea of NN because they want to be able to dictate how the internet works going forward, and will obviously pick things that benefit them rather than benefit the consumers. Comcast has already been investigated by the FCC for throttling bit torrent ( I would like to point out that bit torrent is a totally legit peer to peer service and does not always mean there is piracy).

The FCC is the body that is created to regulate things like the internet and television and telephones. Basically they are there to stop the companies from totally screwing their consumers. Without FCC regulation in the internet it would be open season for the ISP to do whatever they want. Right now there is nothing set in stone, but the ISP are held to basically a best practices which give us the internet we know today, and when they violate these best practices, for instance by throttling bit torrent the FCC investigates.

The debate over NN needs to happen, and I would think it will need to be settled soon. I really hope that when this comes up for a vote that NN will prevail and the FCC will set about putting in regulations that keep the internet from being segmented. Now you might be saying to yourself that the government has no business regulating the internet, the internet should be allowed to regulate its self. This is true, and I don’t want the FCC to start laying down crazy regulation, but what I do want is regulations that stop the ISP from coming in and screwing the customers.

Let me lay out an extreme example for you of a world where there is no NN. In this world the packets you send are sniffed at every turn in the internet pipe line. So you send an email from your Gmail account to your buddy who has a Yahoo mail. Without NN the ISP you are using could hold that email back just because they don’t like Gmail, on top of that Yahoo could reject any email from Gmail, since they would want people to use Yahoo’s mail rather than a competing mail service. Does this sound good to you? I hope not, the amount of anti completive behavior that would result from a lack of NN would be staggering.

Basically the FCC just needs to lay down the law and the law is “You cannot prioritize any packets regardless of their content” and just let the internet get back to being the internet.

I have heard an argument against NN that basically says that things like Google and Twitter get a free ride and the ISP are footing the bill. Let me tell you this is BS! Google pays for the bandwidth they use, as does Twitter, the more people that use them the more bandwidth they use and the more they pay the ISP, basically the ISPs want to double dip. I am all for paying for what you use, if you are uploading HD video all day long and you need more upstream bandwidth then you should have to pay for that bandwidth, but I don’t want my packets to be sniffed and the prioritized based on their destination or content.

John McCain, who I personally did not vote for but is a person I have a decent amount of respect for, is proposing a bill called the something like the “Internet Freedom Act” but basically what it says is that the government cannot regulate the internet, dumb dumb dumb! The name of the bill is total shit too, yes while on the surface the bill is providing freedom because the government is not regulating the internet, but what it does as I have said before is open the internet up to the ISPs. McCain is also the number 1 recipient of money from the Telecom, over $900,000, companies who are for the most part the ISPs (he is not in their pocket or anything, also if you can find me a politician that is not in someone’s pocket I will print this out and eat it) McCain has said himself that he does not understand the internet, and I am not expecting him to (insert age joke here), but I don’t think it’s out of the question for me to expect him not to try to make legislation on something he has no idea about. I would like to paraphrase Dan Carlin (who I think said this) “when you make legislation the most important things is to see how the legislation is pissing off” for NN the legislation is pissing off the ISP and thus it is good.

The ISP like to claim that if the FCC regulates the internet in favor of NN then they will lose all sorts of money, but right now we have a free internet (free in the sense that all packets are the same) and they are making a mint! I think the figure I read said that Comcast had a 22% jump in earnings. A jump during a recession, they are raking in the money. Without NN the ISP would definitely make more money, but is that really the direction we want the internet to go in? I for one as a consumer and pretty heavy internet user want the FCC to regulate in favor of NN and I know that there are many tech people who are in my camp too (well really I am in their camp since I am not popular enough to have a camp) Check out the video below, it’s a clip from the long running and trustworthy show “This Week In Tech” with Leo Laporte.

If you disagree with me definitely send me an email imaglide@gmail.com! I would love to hear what you think, but if you disagree I am going to assume you are either a greedy bastard or out of touch. If you want to help go check out http://www.savetheinternet.com/ and sign the petition, they will send your request to your politician and get them to make the right call when it comes to voting on this.

This is what happpens when you abuse little people

Over the years, three movies have stood out in my mind as totally and completely abusing midgets, now more commonly known as little people. These flicks are (in no particular order) The Wizard of Oz, Return of the Jedi and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The reason these three are the worst offenders should be obvious, Munchkins, Ewoks and Oompa Loompas. The only real question is, which is the bigger crime? Dressing up little people as semi retarded man-child things?

Dressing up little people as Teddy Bears?



Or dressing little people up as psychedelic acid-trip nightmare creatures that sing perfectly without rehearsal?


Only you can decide but either way, I'd say the little people inside the suits just struck back at LucasFilm Ltd. during the Today Show's Halloween special. I present to you, Ewoks, drinking, brawling, moonwalking and humping Al Roker!!!!

Yeah that's great, you just killed three people

By now, you've all seen the trailers for that flick "The Box". In the event you haven't, here's the setup. James Marsden and Cameron Diaz are a happily married NASA technician and school teacher who are going broke for some reason. One day, they are visited by a gentleman who drank acid or something and brings them a mysterious box containing nothing but a button. He then makes them an offer, push the button and you get $1 million but someone in the world you don't know will die. Check out the trailer. (sorry about the asinine intro, it's the only trailer I could find to embed.)

While there are some good aspects of Sci-fi, horror, conspiracy and I'm going to say aliens, I'm not super excited to see it. However, after seeing that trailer over and over on TV, I laughed my ass off when I saw this little gem on Funny or Die.

The Button - watch more funny videos

That's what I always thought should happen whenever people in movies and on TV are presented with a moral dilemma. Imagine how much easier it would have been if the castaways on Lost just shot Ben Linus the first time he double crossed someone? How awesome would it have been if the Joker said "you'll never kill me because of some misplaced sense of self righteousness..." and Batman said "Fuck this" and dropped him? What if Luke, sans-hand on Cloud City said "oh sure Dad, I'll join the dark side with you, just help me up" Then he force pulled Vader's lightsaber off him and cut him in half?