cynicalbastard

In the old days, one would wander in from the pub or club at the weekend, throw up on the carpet, open a bottle of vodka and slump down in front of the TeeVee to drift into unconsciousness faced with such televisual delights as The Hitman and Her. Excellent post-pub teevee: undemanding, vaguely titillating, sufficient unto the day.

So, what did we find last night? After a few-too-many drinks, wander in, don’t throw up, settle in front of the telly. First a documentary on Hitler’s last hours, then one on Ali, which actually dared to question his current status as all-round Saint (he was a genius boxer, but what an arse…). Personally, I think British TV is heading way down hill.

Someone’s got their figures wrong. One third of Britons back legalising prostitution—that’s one third as in 65% according to the story.

my absence from posting doesn’t seem to be affecting my page views, hovering between 200 and 300 whether I post or not. Who are all you people visiting when there’s nothing to see?

(Edit: yes, I KNOW it’s because of feeds pinging here to see if anything’s going on, but, hey, it’s still early and it takes a while for the world to focus)

Back later this week or early next. I’m brewing on a post called ‘In defence of violent pornography’. But I’m not sure whetgher the writing can live up to the title.

Sorry, just avoiding finishing off the great work. And it appears I’ve missed stories about prostitution (and the opportunity to give Bindel a fisking), equal pay and all sorts of other nonsense which I usually like to blog about.

What I didn’t miss was the story about Google refusing to submit to a subpoena from the US government. Garry, amongst others, has suggested this is a matter of privacy, and praises Google for doing the right thing.

John Battelle, who has probably forgotten more about the mighty Russian search machine than most of us could ever know, begs to differ. He points out it’s rather a matter of commercial confidentiality. The subpoena actually asks for..

” asks Google to produce an electronic file containing ‘[a]ll URL’s that are available to be located through a query on your company’s search engine as of July 31 2005…

“all queries that have been entered on your company’ search engine between June 1, 2005 and July 31, 2005.”

Giving over that information would give a rather large helping to understand how much of the net Google indexes, how it goes about it, etc. Battelle doesn’t go this far, but that information could potentially be of substantial use to other companies seeking to, say, launch their own search engines or improve the ones they currently have.

(entertaining that Google also has to PAY to collect this information–and excellent use of the legal device of ‘we can’t prove you’re guilty of anything, but by forcing you to gather your defence, we’re hoping to bankrupt you anyway.’)

And all that.

The need to finish the great work (ie my dissertation) and the impending deadline for business plans and strategies means nowt from my gob for a while.

And then we will be back in full bile-filled flow in early Feb. In the meantime, if you’re not already aware of them, please check out the blogroll members.

(Something will now happen that I’ll be forced to comment on in great detail of course).

Oh yeah, and listen to Polar Bear. Life is a lot easier with them in your life.