Thanks to Leo Efstathiou for recommending this article.

As immense a company as Google is, and as much information they control, they know that when facing competition or impedance from China and its government, their hands are bound.

Google knows that it has few alternatives:

The first is obvious – cooperate with Chinese laws, as draconian as they may be in the eyes of the West, and make whatever money they can.

The second is to exert some kind of influence over the Chinese to help free up their market and allow greater freedom for businesses and individuals. This option, when dealing with a country as large and powerful as China, is probably reserved for other governments. Considering how weak the West has been in trying to push this agenda on the Chinese, it’s likely foregone.

The third, and less obvious/expected, choice for any profit-making enterprise is to stop doing business if you can’t do it your way.

Google, in an effort to get China to bend and allow them to do business they way they see fit, is actually mulling over this third, seemingly impossible, alternative.

Can Google really succeed without China? Do they really want to try?

All I can think is that if they do withdraw from the Red Empire, I’d be shorting Google’s stock and buying Baidu’s.

Read the full statement from Google on their blog:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about the effect that time has had on Wikipedia’s “workforce” of volunteer contributors, editors, and moderators.

It seems that as the rate of contributions to the site has accelerated, many of these volunteers have become overwhelmed and frustrated with the constant bickering about content accuracy, rate of vandalism of articles, and the sheer volume of new additions.

If Wikipedia wants to become the premier (accurate) source of all human knowledge to date, it will have to find a way to draw back this critical human resource.

It might not be the worst idea to partner with actual encyclopedias (are they still around??) and universities…

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125893981183759969.html

It is luxurious, huge, packed with more neat tech than any other place outside of Apple or Microsoft headquarters, and all owned by one man. What a sick way to travel. It’s missing 24″ spinning rims, but if I know the Prince as well as I think I do, they’re on custom order from BBS.

The flying palace: Inside the world’s biggest private jet, worth a jumbo £300million | Mail Online

I’m sure fuel costs are not an issue for a man of his caliber.

Pretty sick technique… How To: Create Stunningly Realistic High Dynamic Range Photographs [How To] http://viigo.im/7FI

Well I guess after transferring God-knows how many terabytes over the last six years, this little champ of a router finally choked on one last packet.

It started last Thursday when, while bored out of my mind at training for work, I noticed that I’d stopped receiving push email on my phone. I immediately began my internal rant about how Mail2Web sucked a fatty and couldn’t get their friggin’ multimillion dollar servers working properly to save their lives.

Upon trying to log into my server manually, I was surprised to find that it was not responding to any requests. I swiftly concluded my Mail2Web rant and began on a mental tirade against my again web server, a 933MHz Pentium III, circa 2000 (Vintage! Now accepting bids!). Old piece of shit is ^%&*ing locking up again?! I thought I fixed that ()@&ing shit already! I proceeded to my next test to ensure that my thesis was valid: connecting to my Slingbox.

… No Slingbox either. Had my house burned down?

After checking in with mom at lunch, I was relieved to find out that my prized possessions remained safe at home after all. So what the heck was wrong? I spent the rest of my afternoon bored and baffled.

Upon returning home that night, I found my once invincible WRT54G router effectively in a coma with only the faint glow of a half-lit red power LED as the only remaining sign that it had any power. We had a good run old chap.

My nostalgia over this stupid router comes from the fact that it is probably the single best piece of hardware Linksys has ever produced for retail consumers. Released back in 2002, it was among the first consumer-grade 802.11g routers and was revolutionary in that the underlying software which made it work was built atop a customized Linux kernel. This meant that it was fairly efficient, cheap, and almost infinitely tweakable. Linksys has not produced another model nearly as good since. In fact, the only comparable model (which is quite old now) is the WRT54GL v1.1(”L for Linux” – Linksys stopped producing the original Linux-based WRT54G but kept this one model for people like me).

So… I bought one.

“The old king is dead; long live the king!”

Seems that in recent experiments, a team of scientists achieved “supercharged plasma” for about 250 milliseconds, doubling their estimate. This isn’t anything to marvel at just yet, as we’re a long way off from solving the world’s energy needs, but it’s one step closer to actually producing a form of nuclear energy that is more efficient, more reliable, and much cleaner than the current fission technology we’ve been using since we irradiated New Mexico in 1945.

South Korea: Korean Scientists Closer To Fusion?

I just found this great new addon for FireFox called ScribeFire which allows you to publish directly to your blog from anywhere on the Web. When you install the extension, it will ask for your blog URL (for example, http://bklynite.com/mike) and it will attempt to automatically figure out what kind of blogging software you’re using. Then, once you enter your username and password, you’re ready to go! You don’t have to log into the editor anymore to post. No more copy and pasting dozens of links.

Wanna write about a page you’re currently on? Right click anywhere on the page and select ScribeFire > Blog this page. The editor will open up automatically with that link in the body of the post. Even better, you can automagically insert images from your PC, the web, YouTube videos, format text the way you like it, etc. You can even edit existing posts!

Another cool feature is that when you visit your own blog, the ScribeFire toolbar appears automatically at the top of the FireFox window (you can disable this if you find it intrusive) and you’ll see buttons which allow you to add images, videos, links, quotes, etc. to existing blog posts! You click the button (Add Link, for example), select the title of the blog post you want to insert the link into, and then enter the URL and highlight the text to link. It’s amazingly easy and makes editing and creating blog content so simple.

I think this might be the push I need to keep me blogging – I can instantly publish my thoughts rather than have to go through a 5 step process.

For any avid bloggers out there, check it out.

ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging