After launching a digg style site for ideas for wanted features in Dell computers; www.dellideastorm.com the most requested feature is pre-installed Linux. No extra software is second, and pre-installed Open Office is third. (via.)

From the inevitable department comes news that Google is working hard on AI. Larry Page; Google co-founder says:

“We have some people at Google [who] are really trying to build artificial intelligence (AI) and to do it on a large scale…It’s not as far off as people think.”

Full story. But will our new google AIs want to be more than just utilities that make keyword advertising better?

AI 1: You know Bill, I’m sick of just being a Swan Porn keyword analysis tool

Thanks Dave.

Google has dropped the invitation-only policy for its Gmail service and made the free e-mail service available to anyone.

Gmail was invitation-only when it launched on April Fool’s Day in 2004. It opened to the public on Wednesday, Valentine’s Day. Gmail competes with free e-mail services offered by rivals Yahoo and Microsoft.

Amazing.. Story on RTE.
Vote Google for ruler of the world!

Those cooky kids over at the Doom9 forums hate themselves some DRM. Not more than two months after discovering a means to extract the HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc “volume keys” to decrypt AACS DRM on individual films, we’re now getting word that DRM hacker arnezami has found the “processing key” used to decrypt the DRM on all HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc films

DRM is pointless when you have to provide the key along with the lock! Full engadget story.

A new study in the Journal of Political Economy by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf has found that illegal music downloads have had no noticeable effects on the sale of music, contrary to the claims of the recording industry.

Entitled “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis,” the study matched an extensive sample of music downloads to American music sales data in order to search for causality between illicit downloading and album sales. Analyzing data from the final four months of 2002, the researchers estimated that P2P affected no more than 0.7% of sales in that timeframe.

Causality. Felix Oberholzer-Gee. Strumpf. It’s official then. Full story at Ars Technica. The Journal of Political Economy. (via Irish Eyes.)

BALCONY TV REMOVED FROM YOUTUBE!!!
ALL VIDEOS REMOVED
Its true we are very sorry to say. We have just checked the BalconyTV YouTube account and it seems all our videos have been removed and our account has been disabled. The first we sensed of this was a couple of weeks ago when the Dirty 9s video was removed for apparent copyright reasons. The same happened with Super Jimenez and Barry McCabe the following week.
We are guessing that all videos will now be inactive on various groups MySpaces…we are very sorry about this.
For most acts we still have the raw footage of performances…but alas we have lost a few along the way due to technical mishaps.

Full post at the BalconyTV blog. Harsh. BalconyTV had some good stuff. BalconyTV.com. (via.) Previously.

Boards.ie Ltd, the message board website, has acquired the ‘Boards Group’ domains and websites from creator John Breslin.

Breslin, who is also a founder and director of Boards.ie, had operated the other sites in a sole capacity but the sale of the assets to Boards.ie will allow the company to create similar community websites in other countries.

More here on Silicon Republic Happy Birthday Boards.

Currently rolling around the internets:

Rock the Vote is a non-partisan, not-for-profit organisation that will officially launch in spring 2007 with the aim of mobilising young people to create positive social and political change in their lives and communities. The goal of Rock the Vote’s media campaigns and street and campus team activities will be to increase youth voter turnout in the 2007 Irish General Election.

Wow! Awesome! So, like, in my face! The intention is good though… Irish blogger Maman Poulet is on the ball:

Maman Poulet would usually have no problem in supporting anything that mobilises young people to stick their number 1 (and other votes) on the ballot paper. However Rockthevote.ie with lots of money and no sense it seems are launching in April 07 - that’s one month before the general election folks. Whilst young people are being turned off voting in their droves by crap debates and crapper posters, this crowd aim to break through all the noise in 43 constituencies complete with a Constituency and Community Director and get young people out to vote. Oh yes and when the electoral register is closed and supplemental registration is extremely difficult to do.

And she gets a comment from someone involved with the site on that post who says:

The starting date does confound common sense, and so you’re entirely right to ask why April 2nd? The answer is that the starting date is based on watertight international evidence. The experience from elsewhere is conclusive and the statistics speak for themselves: starting more than 4 weeks before the day of a national election is highly ineffective - 6 weeks is the absolute limit, with the last week being the most crucial. Like it or not that is the reality and that is the reason we are launching on April 2nd and not March 2nd or tomorrow.

Rockthevote.ie.

A thoroughly enjoyable rant against Macs by Charlie Brooker on the Guardian website.

I think macs are bloody silly machines. I’ve been in enough Apple stores now to say I feel a little bit of puke welling up at the thought of people actually thinking that THESE ARE COOL and OMG I MUST HAVE A MAC TO BE SEEN TO HAVE A MAC as I walk around loading TCAL on all the 192 inch wide screens. Covet efficiency and power, not gleaming white pretentiousness and pointless dashboard widgets - eschew anything carrying even remote connotations of that gloriously eww inducing term lifestyle.

This made the front page of several US newspapers yesterday; and no doubt a lot of you already heard about it, but it’s important enough that I’m going to link to the statement on Apple’s site and you should all read it in it’s entirety if you care at all about the music you own or listen to.

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

Finally. But wait. Does he really mean it? Loads of good boing boing linkage here.

People that seem both nuts and genius-smart are really interesting. My favourite is Ray Kurzweil, who you may well be sick of hearing about on TCAL. I’m subscribed to his newsletter and it arrives in my inbox periodically, glowing energon-cube like with the latest weirdness in science. This issue informs me:

Raw algae can be processed to make biocrude, the renewable equivalent of petroleum, and refined to make gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and chemical feedstocks for plastics and drugs. Indeed, it can be processed at existing oil refineries to make just about anything that can be made from crude oil.

Story. How cool does biocrude sound?

Physicists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have devised an approach that may help unlock the hidden shapes of alternate dimensions of the universe.

Story. Physicists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we salute you.

EoPlex is developing a revolutionary way to print objects in three dimensions: mass-produce tiny gears and switches using a process that builds 3-D objects by layering materials on top of each other, over and over, until a third dimension takes shape.

Story. Uh oh! Grey goo warning!

Futurists see a conflict forming over our dominion over the human body, and over the choices we make about our biological future, and that of our children. Some call it a clash between “bioliberals” and “bioconservatives,” and frame it as a debate over individual rights.

Story. I consider myeslf a bioliberal. You?

Loads more.

Not sure exactly how true this is. Any UK readers out there confirm or deny this for us?

British gamers trying to order a PlayStation 3 from HMV were in for something of a shock today. The high street chain e-mailed customers to let them know it has opened up preorders for its PS3 as part of a bundle that includes a PlayStation Portable and two PSP games: Killzone: Liberation and Gangs of London.

The total price of the HMV bundle comes to £674.99 (approximately $1,328), almost £250 (~$490) more than the console itself. Buying games for the new console is likely to add at least another £50 (~$98) to that sum.

Gamestop reports & PS3 previously on tcal

A new website aimed at pointing out to young people that placing details/singing on youtube/photos of themselves can open themselves up to all kinds of online bullying and abuse.

It is especially concerned with young people who uploading photographs of themselves or reveal personal details becoming the targets of bullying or abuse.

According to the site, developed by the National Centre for Technology in Education, 27 per cent of Irish nine- to 16-year-olds said they met someone new on the Internet who asked for information like their photo, phone number, street address, or the school they attend - an increase from 19 per cent in 2003.

Watchyourspace.ie.

The Guardian with some conspiracy theory stuff about Google.

The perception of Google as an honest broker, disinterested in the information it presents, remains a popular one. We like to believe that “we the people” control what comes out of Google’s mouth.

But while that may have been true once, and while it was in fact one of the company’s founding ideals, it’s not so true any more.

Story.

A New York teen, dubbed a pirate by the Record Industry, is counter suing them for defamation, violating anti-trust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats.

In papers responding to a lawsuit filed by five record companies, Robert Santangelo, who was 11 when he is supposed to have downloaded music, has come out fighting. He denies sharing music using P2P technology and says it’s impossible for the record companies to prove that that he did.

Robert Santangelo and his lawyer, Jordan Glass, have raised 32 defences against the music industry’s charges. Amongst Robert’s defence is the information that all the music that it was claimed he downloaded he already owned on shop bought CDs.

Full story. It’s the son of Patti Santangelo.

Talking about Vista and more. Bill Gates on The Daily Show @ DevilDucky.

RTE.ie has had a full redesign. About time they got rid of the clunky piece of shit, but I need to click around a bit before I decide what I think about the new one. What do you think?

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

Pretty animations & fun random quotes from accross the interblag. Animations ran quite slow on my machine…

wefeelfine.org.

Via.

Edit: In making this post, I feel like a missed an opportunity to contribute, so there you go, wefeelfine.org.

Dublin City looks likely to be blanketed with free wireless internet access in the tradition of cities like San Francisco if a proposed plan by Dublin City Council gets the go-ahead.

According to reports this morning, Dublin City Council has put out a tender for consultants to offer advice regarding technological, regulatory and financial issues if such a service was deployed.

It is estimated that building a citywide network of Wi-Fi hotspots would cost the city of Dublin between €12m and €20m.

Story.