Google has gained a bit of a reputation of trying to outdo everyone else in all things internet related.  GMail was the first free e-mail service to offer a no-need-to-delete-e-mail inbox when all other free e-mail servers imposed strict disk space restrictions.  Google maps has been pretty successful at overtaking the success and functionality of MapQuest  Google video tried to outdue the success of YouTube - without much luck.  Google Docs is currently trying to take the place of Microsoft Office and other office-suite software.  Google's latest venture is an on-line encyclopedia to rival Wikipedia, which they have labeled “Knol,” presumable short for Knowledge.

Wikipedia is quite well established and has a head start of many years over anything that Google will be able to put out.  So how does Google hope to compete?  Well, they've picked up on one of the great weakness (and strengths) of Wikipedia -  the simple fact that anyone can anonymously edit the information.  Realizing that some sources are slightly more reliable than others, Google will require that all submitted work show who the author is.  They also work on a full-article submission system where one must write an article for a given subject.  Multiple articles will exist for every entry, and each on is “signed” by the original author.  Casual editors who only want to improve rather than create have the option of submitting suggested corrections to the author of each article.  Unlike Wikipedia, the original author must approve all changes/edits to their article before the public can see it.

Google's system hopes to avoid edit wars as well as vandalism, whether it be intentional or simply the result of ignorance.  If you don't agree with what someone has written, you are welcome to write your own article on the subject.  This will hopefully force a lot of people to put their keyboard where their mouth is, and silence the many obnoxious backseat article writers.

We're currently living in the “digital world”.  Computers dominate our lives.  We store our musics on CDs or mp3 players. Movies go on DVDs or blu-ray discs.  Even our books can be downloaded in PDF format.  Sticking the word “digital” on anything helps it sell.  And that's because digital is better... right?

Well, in some ways digital is better, which is why we are moving toward it, but in many ways it isn't.  The alternative to digital is analogue.  Think of analogue as a continuous signal.  When you draw a line on a piece of paper, that's analogue. The line is continuous – that's what makes it a line.  Now let's think of a digital line.  Well, we have to break up the paper into discrete blocks.  We can call these blocks pixels for convenience.  For each pixel, the line is either there or isn't.  Our ability to see the line as an actual line is now solely based on how man pixels we have and how large they are.  If the pixels are large, our line looks jagged.  If the pixels are spaced far apart, our line looks dotted rather than smooth.  You've seen this many times before.  Take a close look at a picture printed in a paper or displayed on a TV.  As you get closer, you can see the dots that make up the picture and it ceases to look like the picture.  Now take a traditional film picture and look closer. No matter how close you look, it should still look like the picture.  It may be blurry, it may be boring up close, but it's still continuous.

The bit problem with digitizing everything is that we take something that used to be continuous and represent it with a series of discrete sampled points.  One of the biggest problems this causes is known as “aliasing”, and I'm sure you've heard it before.  This is one of the big reason that there are so many people that still swear by vinyl records rather than CDs and mp3s.  Analogue signals still contain more info.

So why is digital so popular if it is seemingly inferior?  Well, computers use digital signals (1 and 0 for “there or not there”) and allow us to manipulate our signals very easily and quickly, whether they be pictures, music, or otherwise.  We can also conserve or copy digital signals much more easily (e.g., e-mail) and with much higher fidelity (and I'm using this term loosely).  Short of a read/write error, a signal being 1 or 0 doesn't leave much room for ambiguity.

While we are certainly heading toward digital, try not to forget that it isn't necessarily “better” than analogue - just much more convenient in our modern world.

With my last post in my other blog focusing on the differences between analogue and digital, I though it only appropriate for me to also talk about digital TV.  All the advertising I've seen has D-Day at 17 February 2009... but a bit more digging actually shows that here in Canada we'll still be broadcasting analogue signals up to 31 August 2011.  I guess we're still lagging a bit behind the US, even when it comes to the ever popular digital revolution, but considering how many US stations Canadians view (especially near the border), we're sure to start running into problems as soon as the US switches over.

So what does digital TV mean?  Well, obviously the format the signal is being sent/received is changing.  Think discrete signals of 0s and 1s, or “there, not there”.  Why do it this way other than the fact that everything “digital” seems to be popular?  Well, it turns out that we can actually send/receive a lot more information this way.  This means a few things. Either we can send more signals in the form of more TV shows in the same “space” (bandwidth), or we can just send more information for each TV show.  This can mean subtitles, additional audio, or a better resolution sound/picture paving the way for HD TV shows to be broadcast over the air.  (I've also mentioned in a previous post that the reduced bandwidth has freed up a block of frequencies that have been auctioned off.)

No major turn over of formats comes without problems though.  The big problem this switch over will cause is that most older TV sets will not be able to interpret the digital signal.  Continued use of these TV sets will require special converter boxes, which bring with them all the usual problems.  First off you will need to fork out money to buy one of these boxes. You'll also only be able to change the channel via the box, so trying to select channels via your TV, VCR (probably not such a big problem any more), TV remote etc. will not work so well.  In terms of the picture quality, if broadcasters overdue it with the compression (or compression format) that they use, odd artifacts can result in the video, such as odd colouring, sound, blurring or blockiness.  You've probably seen all of these types artifacts in low quality videos on the internet.

The switch to digital TV is definitely a good thing and will bring with it lots of new good things to our viewing enjoyment, but there will almost certainly be teething issues as each country switches over.

They are now up to Guitar Hero III, with additional versions for portable games, the original game developers have moved onto Rock Band, South Park dedicated a full episode to making fun of it, and even Wikipedia has stepped in and put the game in the limelight as one of its featured articles.  I think it's safe to say that the games have become a little popular.

Okay, so it's been about three years since the first game hit the market.  Why is it still so popular?  Well, music is pretty important in the lives of most people.  The game designers did a pretty good job of choosing some “classics” that everyone would love.  (Check.)  Learning how to play an instrument well enough that it actually sounds half decent takes a lot of work.  Most people get frustrated before they ever achieve anything resembling talent.  The game allows you to skip all of that and you are playing a half decent song just by touching a couple of buttons.  (Check.)  Deep down inside at some level most people have a dream of being a rock star with all the fame and fortune it brings.  The game does a pretty good job of trying to recreate that with an overly done-up avatar, virtual screaming fans, and constant reassurance like “You rock.”  (A bit of stretch... but check.)

I guess what I'm saying is that the game makes it easy to think you're good at playing music and could actually sound good, and this makes most people happy.  So is it true?  Sadly not.  Some of the best Guitar Hero players out there still can't pick up a real guitar and play anything resembling music.  Even those who have tried (and I'm basing this on a few people I've talked to), didn't find it all that must easier to learn.  Then of course there is the story of an actual rock star trying to play one of his own songs and being booed off the stage, giving credit to the idea that the game just doesn't mimic playing a real guitar at all.

So go ahead and enjoy Guitar Hero.  But just remember that it is a game and nothing more.  Don't go quitting your day job to pursue ambitions of making it big in the music world because you sound half decent while playing the game.

While this may not apply to everyone, I think it's pretty safe to say that we don't cook all that many meals for ourselves these days.  The average person eats a “cold” breakfast like cereal or some kind of snack bar.  Lunch is often a sandwich (maybe leftovers) or, all too often, bought.  Dinner is the one meal that most people will spend a bit of time cooking – but not always.  I know I'm guilty of relying on frozen foods quite a bit.  Even when I do cook a proper meal, I often cheat and rely on a lot of prepackaged products.  Perhaps the bottle of sauce for my paster, maybe the seasoning I add to flavour my meat, or just the condiments I add afterwards.  Then of course we can also indulge ourselves and just eat out on a proper sit-down restaurant.

Okay, realistically it just doesn't make sense to make things completely from scratch every time we have a meal.  Who really wants to bake their own bread, or perhaps package their own jam?  Who really has the time even if they wanted to?  If you are just resorting to these but otherwise make your own meals, I think you're doing pretty well. What I really want to focus on is prepackaged meals and eating out.

I don't think the danger of prepackaged foods are the ingredients that you can't pronounce and don't know, but rather are the ingredients that you do know:  sugar, salt, carbohydrates and fats.  Let's face it, these companies want to make money and so they want you to like (and preferably become addicted to) their product.  To do this they need to make it “flavourable” and filling.  The easiest way to do it is to dump these things in abundance.  Worse than that, they often pump products full of one, like salt, and then hide this by adding the other, like sugar, to neutralize the flavour.  (This salt and sugar can also be counted toward the net weight of the product.)  While they may try to put catch health-like advertisements on their products (e.g., “cholesterol free” or “fat free” when it's pumped full of salt, sugar and carbohydrates, but no meat), at the end of the day very few of these products are actually good for you.

Eating out (and I'm not thinking fast food here) is probably a bit healthier since most of the ingredients are fresh and only cooked when you order it.  However, most places are more focused on making tasty rather than healthy food again, which means a lot of the same problems listed above.  In addition to this, eating out is usually more expensive and if you're doing it regularly, you're wallet may be suffering as a result.

Unless you're actually making it yourself, or at least making most of it, don't expect your meal to actually be healthy.

Those who have been reading my blogs for a while will know that I tend to focus on a number of things including energy sources and waste resulting from our less than eco-friendly society.  It shouldn't be much of a surprise as I try to tackle both topics in this rant.  How can we bring them together?  Gasification.

Gasification is the process where we take organic garbage, and this can include plastics, and heat it in a environment with little to no oxygen.  The result is called syngas (“synthesis gas”) that can be used as a fuel source.  Syngas consists of hydrogen (good) and carbon monoxide (not so good), and can be further used to create other fuel sources such as methane and methanol.  What's left behind is an inert slag that can be used for road building material and other uses.

The advantages of gasification are obvious:  less garbage, more fuel.  The process of gasification is also considered carbon neutral.  While use of the resulting fuel source does of course give off carbon dioxide as a byproduct, the source of the fuel is biomaterial which traps it in its life cycle.  This is very similar to the carbon cycle from the food we eat.  While we do exhale carbon dioxide as a byproduct of our respiration, this is the “same” carbon dioxide that our food source (which can eventually be traced back to plants) removed from the atmosphere as it grew.  Overall, we are therefore not really adding or removing this greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.

And the bad news?  Well, this isn't really a mature process yet.  All that has been mentioned so far is a “best case” discussion.  If it doesn't work properly, it can be very expensive, produce very little fuel, and potentially worse byproducts.  Then there is the potential stench from the process as well.  While everyone may admit that it sounds like a wonderful idea, who would be the first to volunteer their backyard for the site of a gasification plant?

Apple just released the latest version of their iPhone, and for those of us here in Canada, this is the first time that the iPhone is officially available on our side of the border.  While they are certainly nice and shiny, and there are plenty of fun things that they can do, the phone itself isn't what has caught my attention.   The fact that there were people lining up days before so that they can be one of the first to get one/see interests me more.  This is the same things that happens when new movies come out, like the Star Wars or Harry Potter ones.

I want to blame companies for brainwashing the masses and whipping them into such a frenzy that they feel they must wait in line for the privilege of buying the product.  As much as I try though, I don't think the blame can be placed there.  It's more likely that there are simply crazy people out there who make this decision wholly on their own.  So let me try to take a minute to try and understand these strange beings.

Limited supply:

Okay, if there is a good chance that you won't be able to get one of the items because of limited stock, I guess I can understand (to a degree) why you'd want to wait in a line to ensure you got one.  I may be wrong, but I don't think that was actually the case for the iPhones.  Even if it were, is it really too much to wait an extra week or two to get hold of one?  If this were life saving medicine or needed food, this would make sense to me, but to do this just for a toy (or movie)??

Bragging rights:

I can't think of a girl who'd be impressed with a guy for waiting days in a line to get a hold of toy, so this can't be part of any mating rituals, and would have to be limited to impressing friends.  But again, if you're friends are the type to be impressed by this, they're likely also the type that would be there waiting in the line with you.  “Bragging rights” just seem to lead more to the impression of a sad sad person, rather than anything positive.  Maybe this is more of a “don't want to be the only one left out” type of syndrome.

Nothing better to do:

Yeah right.  Even a person with no life would likely be more interested in staying home and watching TV or playing video games than waiting in line.  Hell, I'd hope they'd be more interested in sleeping in a normal bed and not out in the rain. Everyone has something better to do!

At the end of the day, I think this just comes down to obsession.  As much as I would like to understand these types of people, I really don't think I can... And I can't help but feel a bit nervous near them.

I recently read the book Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson, and he brings up many interesting points about the English language and its evolution.  I thought I'd share a few with them.

To make a word plural we typically add an “s” or “es”.  There were actually a number of contenting ways to make a word plural at one point, and any one of them could have become the standard that we use.  Adding “en” or “ren” to the end of the word was once a big contender for pluralizing words.  Words like oxen, brethren, and children, the plurals of ox, brother and child, are remnants of this alternate style.

Many words had alternate meanings that we have since stopped using, however we still maintain phrases using these alternate meanings.  Here are a few examples:

“The exception proves the rule.”

“In your neck of the woods.”

“One fell swoop.”

Prove used to mean test (such as in “proving grounds”), neck used to refer to a parcel of land, and fell used to mean fierce/cruel.  These sayings probably make a bit more sense to you now, don't they?

There are also pairs of words that used to exist with opposite meanings, but for some reason one of the words have disappeared from the language while the other remains.  The word “expede” is one such example, which is the opposite of impede.  This seems a bit odd especially since expedient, and other variants of the word still exist.

Bryson also goes through many other interesting historical events and facts regarding the language, including why we use the word “gotten” in North America, but no one does in England.  The word “nice” has completely switched meanings throughout history such that in many cases scholars do not know whether the author actually intended the use to refer to pleasant or cruel.  There are also currently more people studying English in China than there are in North America, which is pretty scary if you think about it.

If you found these facts interesting, I highly recommend you go out and pick up a copy of Mother Tongue.

While more and more people have become “computer literate” since the introduction of the PC back in 1982, most are still quite ignorant about their computer's specs.  The average person has no clue what RAM, bus speed, and cache mean in terms of their computing experience.  This makes it equally hard for consumers and retailers when it comes time for a person to buy a computer.  How does a person know what to buy?  How does the retailer explain the choices to the consumer and convince them to buy a system without simpling confusing them?

Well, back in the early days of PCs, brand name was the way to go.  IBM was of course the big guy, and choosing between an IBM and a “clone” was the real question (unless you were an Apple fan).  An IBM was equivalent to quality and reliability, while a clone was the cheap but “risky” alternative.  It didn't take too long though for people to realize that the “clones” were just as good as the “original” IBMs, and so the term has since died away.  We now have a plethora of companies, such as HP, Dell, Gateway, and Acer, all of whom are technically “clones”, but each respected in their own way.  On top of that, each computer component has a multitude of respected (and non-respected) manufacturers, with Intel and AMD being easily recognizable ones when it comes to the CPU.

Once we realized the brand name wasn't all that important, we had to move along to the actual specs of a system to decide if it was good or not.  Enter the clock speed.  For a while, faster clock speed was equated with better computers.  While this is true to a degree, clock speed is far from determining which systems are good and which bad.  Manufacturers realized this public misconception and started a war for the fastest speeds.  They also introduced inferior chips, such as the Celeron, which did not perform as well, but could reach very large clock speeds, to maximize their profits.   Power hungry chips that given off incredible amounts of heat with minimal performance improvements was the breaking point and I think we've finally started to realize our mistake.

So where does that leave us now?  Well, looking through computer ads, I think that manufacturers are using three things to sell their computers:  the number of “cores”, the quality of the included LCD screen,  and, sadly, sex appeal.  The first tries to equate more cores with better computers.  This would be true if all software currently developed actually took advantage of this, but most don't and our extra CPUs tend to sit idle, wasting their potential.  The latter two have been picked up by Apple, as they realize that computers have become a fashion accessory.  The right colour computer, with the right type of case makes all the difference to those who don't actually need much computing power (e-mail and web surfers).  It's sad, but we now seem to be more interested in what's on the outside of our computer than the inside.

I've read a few too many times that children are hitting puberty earlier today, and heard that “kids are having sex earlier and earlier” more than I care to count.  Both of these are inevitably is linked to the slow downfall of society.  Blaming it on hormones in milk, chicken, and other food, or even chemicals leaking out of plastics has become very popular.  While scientific theories explaining how this may be possible may be sound on some level, when it comes down to it, there has been no real satisfactory proof that it is actually happening.  Showing that plasticizers are similar in structure to hormones and could be mistaken for them in the body, doesn't mean it's actually happening.

Hearing this stuff from the media, which are desperate to report anything mildly interesting is one thing, but I'm disturbed by how many people reiterate it in day-to-day conversation.  When I asked the last person about it, I got the “well I remember hitting puberty much later”.  So first off, this person is looking back on their youth with the typical rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia trying to pin point something to the precision of a couple of months compared to the “norm”.  I can't say I trust their memory that much.  Then there is the fact that they are comparing themselves to...? Yeah I doubt they have any idea either.

Then there is the second side to this “problem”:  young people are having sex younger and younger.  Last I read the average age was something like 16 and maybe dropping a bit.  Now perhaps I'm a bit misinformed, but I thought that it wasn't so long ago (and I'm thinking back to the dark ages and earlier) that it was pretty common to marry off daughters at a very young age, or to have arranged marriages where the bride and groom weren't that old.  If anything, our average age is still much higher than many periods in the past.  Perhaps things are changing within recent years, but this is still nothing when looking at history as a whole.

I'm not saying that these aren't things we should be worried about, nor am I saying that we should ignore their possibility.  I'm just saying that we need to confirm the facts first and put them in the bigger perspective of history before running through the streets and screaming that the end is near.  Compared to people throughout history, I don't think we're really all that different in this “modern” age.

I've discussed the dot-com boom, which consisted of a lot of traditional retailers moving their stores into virtual space with limited success.  I've also talked about the advertising revenue that accompanied it, and has since outlasted it.  In the tradition of trying to make money off of internet ventures, Getty Images has partnered up with Yahoo to take advantage of Flickr

Getty Images  is a stock photo supplier to businesses, selling them both exclusive and non-exclusive rights to images to use for any purpose including advertising.  Flickr's database full of user photos will give Getty Images a very large resource from which to draw and could potentially give them a big boost to their business.  And not all the money will go to Yahoo and Getty Images.  Owners of the images uploaded to Flickr stand to get 20-40% of the fee Getty Images charges to customers.

If the possibility of making money off of your photography skills appeals to you, uploading your photos to Flickr will certainly increase your chances of achieving this.  However, like all things internet related, don't expect this to be get-rich-easy path.  Getty Images will be combing the database for “interesting” photos, so if you've never had photographic talent before, don't expect your photos to be chosen.  Even if you're photos are chosen and you're invited to become one of their contributers, at ~$50-$150 per image sold, don't expect to even be able to sustain yourself off of the revenue.  If you are truly serious about making money off of your photography skills, you're probably going to have to search beyond Flickr to make your dreams come true.

The truth is that only a very small percentage of people trying to make money off of the internet actually succeed.  This includes advertising money, as only a small portion of sites receive enough traffic to make large amounts of advertising revenue, and internet retailers, as so many during the dot-com bust learned.  Don't rely on the internet and Flickr to help you make big money from your photography skills, but if your photos are chosen off of Flickr, go ahead and feel proud that someone wants to pay your for your work.

Thomas Beatie has made a lot of news recently for being the first “legally pregnant man” on record.  If this sounds a bit strange to you, the emphasis is on the “legally” part as Thomas is recognized as a man by law, but not by nature, being a female-to-male transgender.

Call me a bit small minded if you like, but I'm actually confused as to why this is making so much news.  When someone is genetically and physically a woman, it doesn't sound like much of a miracle, or even much of an advancement when that person gets pregnant with a child.  Now you might argue that Thomas doesn't look like much of woman physically, but the important parts, namely the ovaries and uterus, are still quite intact, making it very possible for this to happen.

Okay, so realistically I'm not so confused as to why this is getting so much attention.  When someone living (legally) as a man, who is even married to a woman, decides to have a child approaching the dream of a “normal” family, it gets many people scared for the sanctity and survival of the traditional family.  Those who embrace alternative lifestyles also want the attention to show that it can and does work.  What annoys me about this is that for the former, there isn't anything they can do.  We've progressed enough in Western society where we realize that people have the right to live as they choose without being restricted to a specific set of ideas created from a limited tradition in history.  As for the latter, if they truly want to be accepted and considered just another form of “normal”, they must stop drawing attention to just another instance of “normal”.

At the end of the day, while I consider the situation of Thomas and his wife to be incredibly weird, I do respect their right to live the life they have chosen, and I find the amount of media attention to what has happened to them to be ridiculous considering the everyday mundane event that has occurred to them – at least by nature's standards.

One of the side effects of the late '90s dot-com bubble was the growth in the internet advertising market.  Companies offered relatively large sums for sites to host banner ads on their pages.  Most companies paid out “per view” and would “randomly” select a banner from their clients to send to host web site.  Some paid extra, or restricted payment to “per click”.  Even more interesting were the direct-to-user schemes that arose.  A few companies, such as Alladvantage, went directly to the end user and had them install software that would display banner ads while surfing.  Users were paid for the number of hours that they viewed ads while surfing, resulting in up ~$10-$20 per month.  Like most things with the dot-com bubble though, most of the advertising companies collapsed and a lot of site owners never actually received the cheques that they were promised.  Most of the systems were also plagued with fraud of one sort or another.  People constantly refreshing the page, or taking words from an advertisers' webpage as a needed password for page/file access in their site.  Programs to mimic users web surfing also became popular to defeat the “pay-to-surf” schemes.

Okay, so none of this is particularly surprising.  Advertising is big money and for any system out there promising to pay money, there will be people trying to rip it off.  While internet advertising may have taken a large blow, it certainly isn't dead.  Google is a big contender these days and tries to prevent fraud by carefully analyzing the traffic from sites on which it has ads.  Suspicious behaviour is often flagged and they certainly only pay for “unique” loads and clicks.  They also go a step further by scanning the content of the site on which they have ads, and only posting ads relevant to the content of the page.  By focusing on the audience of the site and providing only relevant ads, advertisers are more assured that they are not just wasting their money on ineffective advertising.

What I find more interesting are sites that now let you bid on banner space.  You click on the banner itself, specify how much you want to spend, what hours of the day you want your ad displayed, and then bid on the payment rate that you are willing to pay.  The person with the highest rate gets their ad displayed – until they reach the max sum that they specified they'd be willing to pay.  The next highest bidder then gets their ad up.  This of course changes throughout the day, and cheaper advertising can be found throughout the night.  Not so different from TV advertising, but certainly an interesting innovation.

I recently read an article that was very pro internet journalism over traditional printed material.  Some of the big pros brought up is the instantaneous ability to publish.  If there's a big news event happening, we typically start to know within minutes (or at least it is posted within minutes) and updates to the story can be made at the same pace.  This is possible because we're not restricted to traditional means of printing the matter and distributing it.  It is also due to the lack of traditional checks like fact checking, editors and reviewers in general.  And this is where I see things becoming much more dangerous.

As I've mentioned before, most people distributing the information aren't really employed and therefore aren't really afraid of losing their jobs over mistakes.  Many who are employed have started to rely on less-than-reliable sources such as Wikipedia, leading to errors and issues such as the examples I've previously brought up.  (Makes you want to read all my blogs, doesn't this??)

Then there are the fake or joke articles.  Viral adversing is one example I've talked about, where an article that was supposed to be so outrageous that it should have been instantly recognized as fake floated around the internet quoted by many as truth.  Articles by comedy type sites including The Onion have also been picked up my legitimate news reporting sources and accidentally been reported as truth.

I think overall, this is pretty bad.  The internet has created more of a  large rumour mill rather than a true form of instantaneous news.   Unless it comes from a very reputable site, I've started to become very careful about believing anything I read off the internet.  I recently had a conversation with friends and found myself discussing a news story that was completely fabricated.  I only remembered the source of the story midway through, leaving me in an embarrassing situation of having to admit that I was effectively just propagating gossip.  Not good.  Not good at all.

Those who have been keeping up to date with my blogs won't be terribly surprised to hear that I'm pro banning the use of cell phones in cars.  I'm a believer that they distract drivers and lead to accidents, and I have personally seen too many people do stupid things while yapping away on them.  As a pedestrian I have seen too many motorists tend to to start making a turn without first looking to see if anyone is crossing the road.

So a few states, California included now, have banned the use of a cell without use of a hands-free device.  Canada isn't quite there yet, but I hope we follow suit quickly.  Personally, I'd like to see things a bit stricter; a ban on cell phone use, hands free set or otherwise, is the way to go.  I do acknowledge that banning the use of a hands free set would be equivalent of banning conversation between the driver and passengers in the car, which wouldn't be so easy to implement, but think of how often we have been told of accidents caused by someone yelling at others in the car (or playing with the radio).  If we're truly after improved safety on the roads then this should be were we are aiming.  Granted, without a cell phone in someone's hands, it'd be hard to catch them red handed and prove that they were actually on a cell.  Anyone driving with passengers would just be able to claim that they were talking to them instead.  Even if it's not used that much, having it on the rule books as a warning would probably still be a good thing.

While we're at it, maybe we can also look to laws against walking with cells.  It'd stop people walking around blind to everyone else around them, which often ends up in them bumping into you or something equally obnoxious.  Okay, okay, I'm definitely going too far, but I just can't believe how many annoyances the cell phone culture has brought with it.

Google maps were amazing when they first came out, and even now they're still pretty cool.  Google keeps trying to outdo itself, adding street view, pre/post disaster comparisons, moon and Mars maps, etc.  All this “freedom” of information is having a price though.

The latest report of Google-map abuse is pool party crashers.  Users in the UK are taking advantage of Google maps to figure who has a backyard pool.  With a quick facebook posting and exchange of cell phone numbers, these people throw quickly arranged pool parties... at the home of strangers.  Pool owners are coming home to find their backyard trashed, and in some cases, even come early enough to still find uninvited guests enjoying the use of their pool.

Past invasions of privacy include Google maps catching people sunbathing naked (luckily the map resolutions are still too low to really “see” anything), and funerals in progress, and street view has made many people upset as pictures of their living rooms, and even themselves have wound up on the internet, sometimes showing them doing or coming from places they'd rather that the rest of the world not know.

Many websites have also made a game out of these types of images.  Past ones have included finding evidence of UFOs, “government black helicopter,” and natural features on the Earth that resembles something interesting, including the face of Jesus:

http://amazingillusionsphotos.blogspot.com/2006/11/google-map-spots-jesus.html

Even finding Google's mistakes has become a game of sort.  One of the most publicized was the spotting of a very small bug that must have been squished in the scanner Google was using to digitize some of the images:

http://google.blognewschannel.com/archives/2006/09/28/google-maps-spots-giant-bug-terrorizing-germany/

Considering the shear magnitude of what Google had set out to achieve, it is not exactly surprising that mistakes and other unintentional side effects such as these have arisen.  There simply isn't enough time to shift through all the information that they acquire before making it public, which leaves the public to spot many of these things.  To be fair to them though, they've been pretty good at fixing/removing any images that have caused people grief once it was brought to their attention.

With the current outrageous gas prices, and warnings that it will only get worse, the prospect of any alternatively powered cars is getting most people excited.  But the prospect of a really cheap alternate fuel source seems to be pushing people a little over the edge.  There is a lot of talk about “water-powered cars” floating around the internet.  This is just garbage.

It's certainly easy to understand where people might have become confused.  Hydrogen powered cars are legitimate, and in fact Honda has just released one about a week ago for the southern California market.  It is also common knowledge that hydrogen can be produced through a process known as electrolysis.  Water is essentially split into its component hydrogen and oxygen by passing an electric current through it.  This process requires a lot of energy, and following the basic laws of thermodynamics, the amount of energy you will get out of the hydrogen will necessary be less than the energy from the electricity that you had to use to create it.  So, technically you're better off just using the electricity to power the car directly rather than trying to use the hydrogen to power it. 

Okay, but people are obviously still pursuing hydrogen power.  There must be an advantage to storing the power in hydrogen as a fuel.  Well, if you're thinking of carrying around the hydrogen directly, remember it's a highly volatile low density gas. Since gasoline is pretty volatile too, let me ignore for that for the moment.  The fact that's it's a low density gas is probably a big enough issue on its own.  Store enough of it, and your car will start to float away.  Don't forget that the Hindenburg was a hydrogen-filled airship... before it crashed and caught fire.  Hydrogen fuel cells store the hydrogen in a special and safer manner, and require special fuelling stations – one of the reasons that southern California is seeing these types of cars before the rest of the world.

The bottom line is that you will be seeing a car that you full up with water as a fuel source.  Water might be used at some point to produce hydrogen, but even then, you wouldn't be doing it at home to fill up your hydrogen-powered car.  At least not yet.