Your use of Google’s ... web sites ... is subject to the terms of a legal agreement between you and Google ... You may not use the Services and may not accept the Terms if ... you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google

This passage is a great example of the inanity of shrink-wrap/click-wrap agreements.

Google bans minors

This IS worth a look.

FARK.com: LOLPRESIDENT!!!1

I can now see pictures of my old house on Google Maps. Not from above, but from the street. Its a bit trippy. It makes me miss my old neighborhood... In this picture is the window of my bedroom, which I looked out over my desk when I started working on MemeStreams.

988 fulton st. San Francisco, CA 94117 - Google Maps

As one of about 12,000 passionate Predators fans who are at every game without fail, I could take this opportunity to rant — and there certainly has been plenty of that going on around town for the past few days.

Section 303 publishes an editorial on the Predators situation.

Tennessee Voices: Preds' loyal fans intend to be heard, loud and clear - Nashville, Tennessee - Sunday, 05/27/07 - Tennessean.com

Every morning I get up and delete between 1 and 3 new users who have joined from South East Asia. I delete them because they have posted spam to the site. Its hard to understand why these people do this. The site doesn't increase the search engine page rank of pages that are linked by new users, and most of this content gets deleted immediately.

Some of it doesn't, because it is so borderline between what is clearly spam and what someone might think of as informational content that I don't feel that I can reasonably pull the trigger... Perhaps these people are just throwing ads at me hoping they'll post something I won't delete, and that the page's link on MemeStreams will have more traffic than their page does, and people will come into their site via MemeStreams via some search engine, and finally click on an ad, and those clicks will be worth the time of creating accounts and posting things here every morning.

Given that I'm not making enough off my web ads to even come close to covering colocation costs for this machine, I can't imagine people make much money this way, but then again, maybe the few dollars that roll their way are worth a lot more where they live than they are worth here.

In any event, I find deleting these accounts to be annoying, I find the ones I don't feel I have a clear right to delete even more annoying, and I'm sure that most of you find all of this annoying too.

Furthermore, its really rare that a new user pops up here, starts making great contributions, and sticks around. We've been running this site for a long time now. Its not growing. Almost all of the new participation has been from spammers. The people who do sign up and do make good contributions are usually connected with someone else on the site through a first or second degree association. Thats not true of all of you. There are a couple regular posters who I cannot trace to any direct relationship with anyone else on the site, but for the most part, MemeStreams was a social network offline because it was a social network online, and it hasn't succeeded in it's mission of pushing things the other direction.

So, I'm thinking of making MemeStreams invite only. Everyone who is currently a member would be able to generate invite emails out to people that they wanted to invite. If someone wanted in, they'd have to talk to someone else who was already in. There would be no way to generate an account without an invite and the invites would only work once. In a way the site would become more exclusive.

Positively some spammers would be on the inside when the wall came up, but the invites would be tracked to the person who made them, and both accounts could be deleted.

In a way, I think this could turn the heady environment here into an asset rather than a liability. If this site did become insanely popular it would cease to be what it is. We'd loose something as we gained it. By making this a private club, we have a way of maintaining it's integrity. Anyone would still be able to watch/read from the outside, but to get in, you'd have to put in some effort, and hopefully that would mean that you'd put some effort into participating.

But certainly before we made such a radical change we'd like to know what the rest of the community thinks. If most of the people on this site strongly reject this idea, I'll keep deleting spam. What are your thoughts?

“Forty, perhaps 50 percent of our political beliefs seem to have a basis in genetics,” said Hibbing, whose studies were included in Jost’s analysis. While genetics are unlikely to “hardwire” people into being liberal or conservative, Hibbing said that genes could make people more or less likely to have certain values or react to situations in a particular way.

Political Preference Is Half Genetic - Yahoo! News

Hari & Parker do Junior Big Brother. Hari and Parker are cute little toys that love to hang around.
They watch and listen – and they look great in a child's bedroom. The cute characters are in fact the speculative instruments of a government campaign to promote and encourage children to commit subtle acts of domestic surveillance.
Hari has a microphone ear and Parker a video-camera nose and fingerprint-scanner paw.

The Hari&Parker brand is instantly recognisable. Their reassuring faces can be found on toys,

"Better be nice to me, or I'll send you to guantanamo..."

The Science of Spying - Part 3

possibly noteworthy wrote:

A supporter once called out, “Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!” And Adlai Stevenson answered, “That’s not enough. I need a majority.”

The central idea of this book is that voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational—and vote accordingly.

This book has three conjoined themes. The first: Doubts about the rationality of voters are empirically justified. The second: Voter irrationality is precisely what economic theory implies once we adopt introspectively plausible assumptions about human motivation. The third: Voter irrationality is the key to a realistic picture of democracy.

This all sounds really good until he breaks into parroting this boring Milton Friedman crap.

Economists have an undeserved reputation for “religious faith” in markets. No one has done more than economists to dissect the innumerable ways that markets can fail. After all their investigations, though, economists typically conclude that the man in the street— and the intellectual without economic training—underestimates how well markets work.12 I maintain that something quite different holds for democracy: it is widely over-rated not only by the public but by most economists too. Thus, while the general public underestimates how well markets work, even economists underestimate markets’ virtues relative to the democratic alternative.

No, Libertarians have a well earned reputation for "religious faith" in markets. Arguing with libertarians is not the same thing as arguing with economists. Frankly, I fail to see why every criticism made here of Democracy applies differently to most consumer markets. In fact, it is the consumer markets who teach the political system how to manipulate people's emotions and push them toward irrational decisions.

RE: The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

After eating babies, the WiFi Routers will grow to enormous size and attack our cities!

Don't miss this comic on "wireless radiation" scare journalism.

Wellington Grey -- Miscellanea -- The Truth About WirelessDevices

Venezuela shut down an opposition television channel on Monday and replaced it with one promoting President Hugo Chavez's self-proclaimed socialist revolution in a move widely criticized as a threat to democracy.

"This has exposed the abusive, arbitrary and autocratic nature of Chavez's government, a government that fears free thought, that fears opinion and fears criticism," said Marcel Granier, chief of RCTV, the country's oldest broadcaster.

Reality check time for leftie contrarians who think Chavez is cool for sticking it to the man, whats going on down there is actually fucked up.

Of course, the rationalizations have already begun. Apparently when thousands of people hit the streets to protest and end up in clashes with police over views we support, its because the people are being denied a voice and the police are involved in a conspiracy with the evil men who control the world, but when thousands of people hit the streets to protest and end up in clashes with police over views we don't support, its because they've been manipulated by millionaires and the police were forced to respond because the protestors were violent.

Venezuela replaces opposition TV with state network| Reuters