Delicious LiveJournal Links for 4-1-2010

• Barack Obama Looking at Awesome Things
  (tags: funny BarackObama photos)
• At the other end of the internet is a real person, a lot like you
  Something to try and remember, next time the flaming starts.
  (tags: communication internet people online society)
• Can Animals be Gay? On homosexual pairings and our tendency to anthropomorphise
  (tags: gender science sexuality homosexuality culture)
• Why the pope's apology for sex abuse in Ireland seems hollow
  (tags: abuse ireland pope religion rape catholic christianity)
• Algorithms that can report the news.
  (tags: journalism future programming ai algorithms)

Thinking makes it so

Bad: Julie's off to see her family over the weekend.
Bad: Because her grandfather's cancer has spread to his bones.
Bad: Leaving me sadly lacking on the snuggle front.
Good: Fish and chips for dinner, with garlic mayo.
Mediocre: The Simpsons episode I just watched. Which had good bits, but not nearly enough of them.

Overall: Certainly not great.

Luckily, I've lined up distractions - tomorrow evening I'm playing board games with stenchpuppy and some other friends, and on Saturday I'm meeting up with marrog and erindubitably to watch a movie and go dancing. And then Julie comes back on Sunday.

This explains a lot

Last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, “It is not free, and is not going to be,” Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that users “just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online”, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.”

Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”

also

In the mid-90s, I got a call from some friends at ATT, asking me to help them research the nascent web-hosting business. They thought ATT’s famous “five 9’s” reliability (services that work 99.999% of the time) would be valuable, but they couldn’t figure out how anyone could offer good web hosting for $20 a month, then the going rate. No matter how many eventual users they assumed, $20 didn’t even seem to cover the monthly costs, much less leave a profit.

I started describing the web hosting I’d used, including the process of developing web sites locally, uploading them to the server, and then checking to see if anything had broken.

“But if you don’t have a staging server, you’d be changing things on the live site!” They explained this to me in the tone you’d use to explain to a small child why you don’t want to drink bleach. “Oh yeah, it was horrible”, I said. “Sometimes the servers would crash, and we’d just have to re-boot and start from scratch.” There was a long silence on the other end, the silence peculiar to conference calls when an entire group stops to think.

If you have any interest in how the internet is affecting business models then I highly recommend the article that's from.
Which I got via @PatrickHadfield)

Now this looks like it's worth playing

(courtesy of anton_p_nym)

So, when are they making the sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

This takes the trailer for Law Abiding Citizen and puts characters from Team Fortress 2 into it.

And it's not until I saw them in the middle of ordinary people that I realised how damned impressive the graphics are.

Not that you could possibly mistake them for real people - but the level of texture and detail is astounding. The light and shadow and movement are all fantastically well done.