Gary Robinson's Rants

Christmas

At this time of year, I think of the John Lennon lyric, "And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?"

This year I feel very good. My sister and her husband and son are visiting, Goombah is having an exciting start; my wife and kids are happy and healthy.

I hope you, Dear Reader, are happy and healthy and I wish you a wonderful Christmas with family and friends, and an exciting new year!

And for another view of Christmas, which I have held in some years:

Now that Christmas is at our throats again, let me extend my sincere hope that my readers can survive the nightmare of the next few days with as little psychic, gastro-intestinal, and familial anxiety as possible.[Andrew Sullivan]

Diesel soot major global warming factor

This is both fascinating and a seemingly very important discovery.

NASA scientists say soot, mostly from diesel engines, is causing as much as a quarter of all observed global warming by reducing the ability of snow and ice to reflect sunlight. [CNN]

Goombah back

Goombah's servers should be back operating normally now -- let us know if you have any problems. However, we will focus for a while now on making sure we don't have outages related to disk space again. As pointed out earlier on this blog, there are reasons we consider this to be the 0.22 beta! :)

Testing NetNewsWire for posting

I had a lot of problems using NetNewsWire for posting to TypePad before, but there's a new release of NetNewsWire, so I'm trying again.

Update: Nope, NewNewsWire is NotReadyForPrimeTime yet when it comes to TypePad posting. It is (at least) unable to download my category info from TypePad. Back to using TypePad's web interface.

Oooops

We ran out of space on the server for Goombah, and that precipitated a further snafu which will make the server-based aspects of Goombah (including blogging) unavailable at least until tomorrow.

Sorry!

Blogged songs

I've blogged some songs on my Goombah blog.

Real sues Microsoft, alleges monopoly abuse

"We're accusing Microsoft of engaging in a broad range of predatory practices to protect their operating system monopoly and to try to create a new monopoly in the digital media space," said David Stewart, deputy general counsel for RealNetworks, in an interview.

RealNetworks accuses Microsoft of unlawful tactics including product bundling, restrictive licensing, exclusive dealing, predatory pricing, refusing to sell unbundled operating systems and discriminatory disclosure and withholding of information needed to interoperate with the Windows operating system, according to a copy of the complaint.[MacWorld]

Good for them! Based on history, of course, it seems unlikely that the courts will offer any significant relief no matter how well Real proves its case.

Two major music rulings

A US court said that the recording industry's methods to find music swappers are not allowed by the law.

In a separate ruling, the Dutch Supreme Court decided that the popular file-sharing program, Kazaa, is not breaking the law. [BBC]

iChat room

As an experiment, I'm starting an iChat room named "Goombah" for people who want to discuss Goombah. From the File menu in iChat, select "Go to chat..." and enter "Goombah". Also you should be able to click this link although that may bring up the your AIM client rather than your iChat client, if you have an AIM client.

It looks like we'll hit 500 users today or tomorrow, which is as many as we plan to accept for this beta phase, so if you want to check it out, now's the time!

Goombah updated

We have a new update to Goombah out as of last night. (For any new readers of this blog, Goombah is our product for creating communities of people with similar tastes for purposes of recommendation and discussion, based on music listening history data stored in Apple's iTunes software on OS X.) We also have a new release notes page.

One thing to check out is the Adventurousness slider in Goombah:Preferences:Options. This is an important feature (and one we should perhaps make more prominent in the UI). Slide it to the left, and you'll get recommendations that have a broad consensus of approval among your neighbors. As you slide it to the right, recommendations will be more and more weighted to being sensitive to the tastes of individual people -- the farther you go, the more influence is derived from a single person playing a song more frequently than she plays other songs.

That brings me to another point -- Goombah is not based on music ratings. It's based on a probabilistic analysis of the frequency with which you play various songs. So there is no effort involved in using Goombah -- if simply looks at your iTunes data to see what you've been listening to, and finds others with similar tastes.

The trouble with the world

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.[Bertrand Russell, by way of Dichotomy's Purgatory]

On the other hand, even the smart are too cocksure:

Gödel is best known for his proof of "Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems". In 1931 he published these results in über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme. He proved fundamental results about axiomatic systems, showing in any axiomatic mathematical system there are propositions that cannot be proved or disproved within the axioms of the system. In particular the consistency of the axioms cannot be proved. This ended a hundred years of attempts to establish axioms which would put the whole of mathematics on an axiomatic basis. One major attempt had been by Bertrand Russell with Principia Mathematica (1910-13).[School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences
University of St Andrews]

Doubt would seem to be the more correct state. Doubt -- but with the proviso that when it's time to act, one absolutely must act according to one's best understanding, doubt or not. Wisdom, it may be argued, consists in large part in knowing when that time has come.

In a hole

In a hole in the ground there lived a dictator.

Canada officially legalizes downloads of copyrighted materials

In a ruling released Friday, Canadian copyright regulators said downloading copyrighted music from peer-to-peer networks appeared to be legal under that country's law, but they said uploading was still prohibited.

In the same decision, the Copyright Board of Canada imposed a government fee of as much as $25 on iPod-like MP3 players, putting the devices in the same category as audio tapes and blank CDs. The money collected from levies on "recording mediums" goes into a fund to pay musicians and songwriters for revenues lost from consumers' personal copying.[News.com]

That's pretty amazing in my book. So if someone sets up a server in a country not governed by music-industry-friendly copyright laws, Canadians can apparently download all the music they want without any question over its legality? Wow.

Music Industry Develops Centralized File-Sharing System

A new file-sharing standard designed to distribute copyrighted music and movies legitimately has been developed by a technology consortium. The system could deliver any content format to any computer, and users might even earn rewards points for sharing the files. Using the new standard, computer users could share small files containing information about music, video or other data, but not the content itself. The Content Reference Forum (CRF), founded by Universal Music Group backed by technology companies including Microsoft, is hoping the sharing file standard will be adopted by technology companies and incorporated into software music players." [Slashdot]

Commentary from Slashdot comments:

this is not content they are talking about putting on this sharing network. it is advertising - don't get the two confused!

the last ten years have seen the entertainment industry working very hard to blur the line between content and ads. people regard movie trailers as content, some in the movie industry are starting to regard the movies themselves as advertising (for merchandise like action figures and lunch boxes, which is where the big money is).

More:

If you RTFA, you'll see it's not about content sharing it's about advertising sharing. Users can share information about the content, but not the content itself. This is a non-event.

Five stars on VersionTracker

Earlier today we had some configuration issues on our server that caused it to time out a lot. Essentially, this was due to the user load growing faster than we expected, and we couldn't quite keep up with the tuning task. Many people couldn't connect to the system. One of them gave Goombah two stars on VersionTracker -- which was generous considering he couldn't use the software beyond looking at the layout.

But we focused on the server today and after some changes, it looks like no one has run into a problem since the changes went livew. And then we got our first VersionTracker review from someone who connect. Five stars in every category.

I like that. I'm going to go to bed smiling again tonight. :)

I've also tuned the recommendations algorithm some in light of the real-world data we're getting and expect to put out a new version of that tomorrow. All is well in the world.

Patents

This excellent Washington Post article on the patent situation is generating a lot of links from the blogosphere.

Acacia Research Corp. started by targeting dozens of adult entertainment companies, demanding royalties of as much as 4 percent of their revenue from audio and video streaming. Now the firm is seeking fees from universities that use Web video for remote learning, from companies that serve up movies to hotel rooms, from cable and satellite providers, and from major streaming-media companies such as RealNetworks Inc. and America Online Inc.

"It's pretty much the sky's the limit as to where the impact might fall," said a chagrined John H. Payne, director of educational technologies at the University of Virginia's division of continuing education, which uses online video for lectures and courses. "It's like patenting air. [Washington Post]

First bug-fix release

The first bug-fix release of Goombah, version 0.21, is online now.

* Some changes were made to recommendations. Note, we suggest you keep Preferences:Options:"closeness" of the recommendations all the way to the left until we get a more users. The niceties of recommendations technology don't really count until there is enough critical mass for the math to be meaningful.

* A number of people had their itunes data in a different place than we had it on ours. Yes we should have thought of that before. In any case, Goombah now looks in a couple of places for the the data, and if it isn't in either one, puts up a dialog so that the user can tell us where it is.

It's been quite a busy day working on bugs! Things are going really well, and I'm going to sleep with a smile on my face tonight.

Goodnight! :)

There's a reason we call it 0.2 beta testing!

We're running into a few fairly serious bugs that we hope to resolve in the next day or two. The main ones are

* a problem in the ordering of the recommendations

* a problem for people who have moved their iTunes database to a nonstandard location

* a problem where the server gets overloaded and so connections are refused (we think the server can handle the load at this point but that we have to adjust the number of threads)

Sorry for the inconveniences... we're working hard on it!

Goombah launched!

Well, something my company has been working on for quite some time has launched as of now. Go to goombah.emergentmusic.com to get it. From the press release:

Goombah is a new beta-stage software product that interacts with Apple iTunes Music Store on Mac OS X. Using distributed computing to analyze iTunes music libraries, it finds each user's "nearest neighbors" in musical taste. iTunes music libraries are revealed to neighbors, and used to generate reliable music recommendations. Other included functionality includes a music-oriented blogging service and various utilities to help search for music on the Web.

The complete release is here.

Obviously this program will be a subject for discussion in this blog as time goes on!

Goombah is a work in progress. Let me know what you think!

Microsoft patents

An interesting article in The Register. The idea is that Microsoft can probably attack Linux with patents but hasn't yet because it's been too busy just dealing with its own growth. But now it's "mature" and Office and Windows-based growth is slowing, so they need other forms of revenue -- hence their movements into digital watches, etc.

Enforcing patents will be one more form of such revenue. One of the early manifestations of this change is the recent announcement about licensing the FAT file system. But of course in the case of Linux, patent enforcement would not only be a source of revenue, but of threatening the competition.

Microsoft's actions so far don't constitute a full frontal attack on free software. It's often been rumored that Microsoft has a number of patents - the number varies - on the Linux kernel itself. [Register]

This could get ugly, folks.

Almost 25% higher

"We've been watching the downloads of the Project Rave tools, and they're averaging about 12,000 copies per day," said Sun tools executive Joe Keller. "That's almost 25 percent higher than (IBM) Eclipse, which is doing about 10,000 per day." [Newsforge]

Some might say it was 20% higher.

Yahoo proposes new Internet anti-spam structure

Under Yahoo's new architecture, a system sending an e-mail message would embed a secure, private key in a message header. The receiving system would check the Internet's Domain Name System for the public key registered to the sending domain. If the public key is able to decrypt the private key embedded in the message, then the e-mail is considered authentic and can be delivered. If not, then the message is assumed not to be an authentic one from the sender and is blocked. [Reuters]

One of these solutions will solve the problem. We just need the big companies to coalesce around one solution.

Mini ice-age within 10 years?

The scientists at Woods Hole have some interesting info on their website.  It is about the chance that global warming will likely unleash a mini Ice Age within the next 10 years...

The mechanism for this is simple.  The north pole's ice cap is melting quickly due to global warming.  This has created an extremely large pool of fresh water near the ice cap.  That pool of water will eventually drift southward.  When it does, it will disrupt the gulf stream due a change in the density of the water.  Without the gulf stream, the northeast US and Europe will quickly experience a 10 degree drop in temperatures. [John Robb]

If you live in the Northeast as I do, you may remember the unusually great winter for skiing we had last year. And with much of this weekend's storm still ahead of us, some folks we just talked to at Sugarloaf are reporting 31 inches so far. I'm sure that's only local accumulations, and involves drifting, but still... it's only Dec. 7! Well, the northeast US and Europe may have to deal with a mini ice age, but at least I'm hopeful we'll get some great ski seasons out of it. We'll be at "the 'loaf" next weekend, for sure. :)

(I originally said here that one or maybe two great ski seasons isn't exactly statistically significant, but 10 mediocre ones, as we may have arguably had, followed by two great ones may actually be borderline significant... it would depend on how you looked at it...)

Update: Just got this emailed Snow Report from Sugarloaf:

POWDER ALERT!!! You will not believe how much snow we have here!
We have over 44 inches of snow fall already and snow continues
to come down heavily and is not expected to die down until late
tonight into tomorrow. We may see up to another foot of fresh.
Be sure to check the latest on Sugarloaf.com

A hosted wiki service.

Could be useful. We sometimes set up wikis at my company for special purposes (such as the wecanstopspam.org wiki). It could be nice to have someone else do the hosting for such cases.

Is Linus being rational?

STUPIDITY FROM SMART PEOPLE DEPT (an ongoing inquiry into the subject of how emotionally-laden biases can turn smart people into stupid people):

Linus Torvalds obviously wants Linux to remain free, so he doesn't like the SCO lawsuits. So he's got some emotion involved there.

With that in mind, is this stupid? Linus says:

Maybe you can explain to Darl how the GPL is _designed_ so that people receive the value of other peoples copyrighted works in return for having made their own contributions. That is the fundamental idea of the whole license - everything else is just legal fluff.

(Go to the relevant GrokLaw page for more details.)

OK, but just because a Linux developer would get to use Linux based on that logic does not explain why I (or 99.9% of Linux users) get to use it -- I am not making contributions to Linux. It seems that Linus is grouping all people together into one big mass, and assuming that the GPL is a license to the world as a whole based on what Linux gets from the world as a whole. But I very much doubt that judge would agree with that reasoning.

Has Linus' obvious emotional bias made him a virtual stupid person, in this case? Or is it me who's mistaken?

RIAA lawsuits yield mixed results

The recording industry this week claimed progress in a controversial legal campaign targeting individuals who use peer-to-peer networks, but its optimism appeared to clash with at least some of the evidence, which remains murky.

By some measures, usage of peer-to-peer software such as Kazaa has been cut in half since the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced in late June that it would begin suing alleged file traders. The campaign to date has yielded 382 lawsuits and 220 settlements averaging close to $3,000 apiece. But by other measures, file swapping is hitting an all-time high.

Given contradictory and inconclusive data, reading the RIAA's progress is little more than a Rorschach test, analysts said.[News.com]

Our best hope?

This post will use a news item about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as the jump-off point for a discussion about the future of the human race as it relates to our propensity to unquestioningly believe what we are told.

"When my eyes fell upon the rare copy of this dangerous book, I decided immediately to place it next to the Torah. Although it is not a monotheistic holy book, it has become one of the sacred [tenets] of the Jews, next to their first constitution, their religious law, [and] their way of life. In other words, it is not merely an ideological or theoretical book. Perhaps this book of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' is more important to the Zionist Jews of the world than the Torah, because they conduct Zionist life according to it… It is only natural to place the book in the framework of an exhibit of Torah [scrolls]." - Dr. Yousef Ziedan, museum director of the new Alexandria Library, on why the anti-Semitic forgery is now prominently displayed next to the Torah in the manuscript museum. UNESCO funds helped build it.
[Reported by Andrew Sullivan]

My first temptation is to say, See, this Ziedan guy is another example of smart people mindlessly believing idiotic things...

But, how do I know the PEZ is a forgery? Because I've heard so from people I respect and read it in the writings of people I respect. But I've never personally examined any in-depth evidence on the subject either way.

In other words, I'm relying on hearsay. Just as most people are who believe the PEZ is for real.

Just as fundamentalist Christians do when they believe in the literal truth of things reported in the Bible such as the "virgin birth". Just as most Muslims do when they believe the literal truth of the idea that "The large rock from which Mohammed rose to heaven is believed by Muslims to have been the site where Abraham offered up his son to God as a sacrifice". Just as fundamentalist Jews believe the literal truth of the Abraham/Isaac story.

I dare say very few fundamentalists have personally examined, and tested without bias, compellingly direct evidence in favor of their beliefs. They believe them because people they respect do, and because they are part of overall meme-complexes that offer some kind of gratification to the believer.

But why are we so able to believe things without being presented with substantive evidence in their favor? Because if everyone took the time to figure out every aspect of life and morality from first principles and direct evidence, much of the human race would starve to death within a month. No one would have any time to get anything done, such as growing and transporting food. It just wouldn't be practical.

So it has evolved that we live by a combination of thinking things through for ourselves, and also simply believing what we are told.

Some people are more to one end of the scale, and some people are more to the other end of the scale. There is a division of labor in that sense: some people are thought-leaders who spend their time trying to think things out, and others are leaders in getting the useful things done that we need to have done.

Historically, this division of labor has been a relatively workable system for the survival of the species. We've been able to eat because instead of each of us individually spending all our time with each of us solving the basic questions of life from direct evidence and first principles, most of us can spend most of our time doing useful things like growing and transporting food.

This system has those nasty side effects such as religious and patriotic wars. These are usually based on people believing what their local leaders tell them about the evilness or inferiority of the followers of the other belief systems and/or citizens of other countries and/or those who simply look different. But those wars haven't been able to wipe out the species; after all, historically, somebody had to win the wars, and then life would go on as usual for the victors. (Except of course for their enjoyment of the spoils of victory, such as slaves.) The species would continue. (And, it's worth noting, the victors would propagate their genes more efficiently than the losers.)

Unfortunately, with the advent of nuclear, biological, and (in the not-too-distant future) nanotechnology-based weapons, the idea that the human race can continue after a major war is now obsolete. This is a huge difference. It is a black-and-white, night-and-day difference in our fundamental reality.

In other words, a system that has evolved over tens or thousands of years to be a relatively efficient way of keeping the human race going is now not only obsolete, but extremely dangerous to the human race -- there is no way to overstate its danger.

This "system" may be more than a system. It may be in our genes. That is, we may have a genetic tendency to believe what we're told to believe (some people having more of that genetic tendency than others). Why? Because genes evolve that enhance our survival. This tendency has (as argued above) historically enhanced our survival, and it has become a very deep attribute of our nature. So, it may be genetic (though, of course, it may not; it may be purely mimetic evolution).

If it's genetic, and even if it's "merely" mimetic, it will be extremely hard to overcome this fundamental aspect of the human race before it's too late. Up until the 20th century, this aspect of our nature was consistent with, and arguably even enhanced, the human race's ability to survive. But now, it is in direct contradiction to that ability. That is a radical change in the situation, and an extremely dangerous one.

In fact, it seems unlikely that the tendency to mindlessly believe what we're told is going to be conquered anytime soon. If it's in our genes, it would be well-nigh impossible to conquer without large-scale, direct manipulation of our genetic structure. In that case, it really ain't gonna happen anytime soon.

Therefore, it is arguable that the only solution is to co-opt our tendency to mindlessly believe by replacing the war- and hate-promoting belief systems that currently dominate the world's mindshare with benign ones. That can only happen if benign belief systems are created that are more emotionally compelling, and therefore have a higher tendency to spread from mind to mind, than the existing, destructive ones.

That may be the major challenge facing the human race today -- and our best hope of survival -- even if virtually no one knows it.

Report: A third of spam spread by RAT-infested PCs

Nearly one-third of all spam circulating the Web is relayed through PCs that have been compromised by malicious programs known as Remote Access Trojans, according to Sophos, an antispam and antivirus company. [News.com]

I knew it was happening but am mildly surprised it's that prevalent.

European Anthem

In case you don't know the European Anthem (I didn't), Adam Curry posts this link. He says it intentionally doesn't have words (I can't post the link to his text because it's in an RSS payload-enabled feed). Beethoven would be proud, I suspect, but I wonder how Schiller would feel?

A music business model

A meeting is coming up at Harvard to discuss paying recording artists by taxing bandwidth and hardware sales. (Thanks to Dave Winer for the heads-up.)

I've been critical of Dave's thinking in my blog, but only because out of the people I regularly read online, he's without question one of the smartest and most creative, while at the same time -- it seems to me -- he has the most tendency, by far, to say things that are completely irrational. Frankly, I find it very irksome when smart people make the choice to abdicate their brains in favor of indulging in some emotionally-gratifying but unintelligent meme. But obviously if Dave didn't have a lot to say which is worth saying, I wouldn't be reading him in the first place, and I wouldn't be irked.

And of course, it may be ME who is wrong, since I have no particular access to the inner truths of the universe. And yet, I do think what I think, and I report it here.

About the tax-to-pay-artists meeting, Dave says:

I am reluctant to attend because I don't agree with the premise. I think we should find ways to move on, without the music industry, and let a new commercial medium develop around the strengths of the Internet, rather than tax the Internet to hold back the clock for an industry that's unwilling to change.

I think the possibility he alludes to there really does exist. Music industry contracts are, I have heard, time-limited to 7 years max. Between old artists being freed and new ones coming along every day, I think there is the possibility to use the Internet to serve those artists through an entirely new structure which owes very little to the old one. I think it will happen, but that it will co-exist with the old for quite some time.

Spammers Unleash E-Mail Worm to Disable Critics

Anti-spam organizations are the target of a new Internet worm outbreak that tries to knock them offline with a crippling data barrage, computer security experts said on Tuesday.

Virus experts believe the worm, W32/Mimail-L, is the work of a vengeful spam e-mail peddler bent on paralyzing organizations that try to deal with spam, the torrents of get-rich-quick schemes and body-enhancement deals that clog in-boxes daily. [Boston.com]

Clear photo of West Nile virus

...using an electron microscope.

Music at Your Fingertips, and a Battle Among Sellers

Coming to a music download store in 2004: Yo-Yo Ma's Shostakovich Quartet No. 15 and Bob Dylan's second show at Amsterdam.

So go the predictions of some music industry executives, who say that as music labels and retailers compete more aggressively online, they will offer more obscure titles and recordings of live performances that could find a paying audience through downloads but make no financial sense to distribute on CD's. [NY Times; free registration required]

Google's "eBay-style ecosystem"

I thought this was an interesting comment about a possible future for Google that could justify a big valuation. It's the first positive vision for Google's future I've seen that began to make logical sense. I'm not sure yet whether it actually does make logical sense, but it seems like perhaps it could, and that's a start:

Google just entered the semantic blogging space, via lossless conversion of Atom to RDF. Add support for the RDF dialect FOAF, to encode links between blogs, and query tools, and a precisely searchable/navigable blogspace is enabled.

Very good for ad placement...

So watch for Google to output ad management tools based on Open Office.

And a whole Ebay-style ecosystem to use the tools.
And lots of developers to build out the toolkits...

Especially (college) student developers, who will, along with their peers, use Google as both a Friendster substitute and a professional reputation enhancer.

All told, then, Google's Atom support sets up a dynamic wherein Google and open source become VERY mutually reinforcing...

Iraq stupidity

STUPIDITY FROM SMART PEOPLE DEPT (an ongoing inquiry into the subject of how emotionally-laden biases can turn smart people into stupid people):

Dave Winer asks:

And by the way, do you think it was a coincidence that Bush showed up in Baghdad just hours beforeHillary Clinton?

Er... Dave... this was THANKSGIVING, and the trip was planned six weeks in advance. In other words, the reason Bush went that day was because the day was THANKSGIVING, not because Hillary was going later that day. Get it? You've heard of Thanksgiving, right?

There were obviously very good reasons for visiting on Thanksgiving having nothing to do with Bill Clinton's wife.

OK, now that we've established that there are reasons that the President (and others) would show up on Thanksgiving, let's assume that both Bush and Clinton planned to be there on that day instead of some other random day. Then the only "coincidence" would be that Bush got there first. Let's see -- with two people arriving at two times, there is a probability of .5 that Bush will get there first. So the mysterious "coincidence" of Bush getting there first is associated with a probability of .5.

If Dave finds an event with a probability of .5 to be a mysterious coincidence necessitating theories of evil intent to explain it, I suggest he take Probability 101. As a fellow at Harvard, I suspect he'd get free tuition.

Later in the same post, Dave asks:

And remind me please, why Iraq, of all countries? Why not China or Burma or East Timor?

This is more serious because it's a real question with a real answer. But there is no excuse, IMHO, to still be asking it so late in the game, if you are in a highly public situation and are choosing to use that position to try and spread your opinion to others.

The root cause so many people still ask what Dave asks above is that the reasons for what we did in Iraq are not utterly obvious. To understand the reasoning, you have to actually try to find out the reasoning. If one is not inclined to actually try to find out the reasoning, as many people are not, the result is usually to assume the reason is the first thing that might pop into one's head. With regard to Iraq, that "reason" is often that we're there to get Iraq's oil.

But proper, non-trivial, answers to the "Why Iraq" question may be found pretty easily. One may, with integrity, disagree with that reasoning. But I think we owe it to ourselves to make the effort to try to find out what the reasoning is. Here's one starting point, and this Tony Blair speech is very hard to beat -- not only on this issue but also as a milestone in the history of great political speeches.

With respect to the purely humanitarian aspect of the "Why Iraq" question, Blair puts it very succinctly:

"They ask why we don't get rid of Mugabe . . . I don't because I can't, but
when you can, you should."

Google's value

More on the question of Google's real value. Knowledge@Wharton via News.com quotes a Wharton prof:

The question is whether Microsoft can do to Google what it did with Netscape.

Exactly. It's heartwarming to realize that there are at least some people left who are capable of asking the obvious questions.