Ad Terras Per Aspera

Andrevan over at Kuro5hin (the not-so-underground for the underground) has an article up about Google‘s past acquisitions and possible future acquisitions.

Technorati – If Google is the average person’s homepage, Technorati is the homepage of the underground, tech-savvy web user. Technorati is a blog portal whose average visitor enjoys podcasts, Wikipedia, and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Providing more cutting edge results than a normal search engine, Technorati would integrate well with Google News and/or Blogger, and could perhaps feature blogs on the Google Personalized Homepage. Technorati is somewhat similar to Bloglines, which was purchased by Ask Jeeves recently.

I agree here, Technorati would be a great purchase. I currently use Technorati services to allow people to see who’s linking to my blog, and I would love to use the Tags system, except there is no clean way to intergrate this into my layout without help from the Blogger software itself.

Ultimately, I’d like to put it where the “Posted at: whenever | Comments | Trackback” stuff is, and thats very hard to do without embedding tons of HTML right into the blog posts themselves, which defeats the entire purpose of having templates and automagic in the first place. Anyone at Blogger wanna take a crack at this?

Another great service that he talks about is Koders…

Koders – Koders is a search engine for open source code that works remarkably well. With the recent push for plugins for Google Desktop search, Koders would be an interesting addition to Google’s software initiatives. It would make sense to combine with Google Code and Google Linux Search in some way.

Wow… just wow. I’ve never heard of this service before, and it looks great. I’ve been playing around with it for the past 10 minutes, and it has been giving me useful results; I’ll definitely be using this more often when I need to find code and don’t want to reinvent the wheel.

30,000 years ago our brains started getting smaller (but more complex). Today, we can grow brain cells in a Petri dish. Tomorrow, we will realize wetware in meatspace sucks and transfer our consciousness into a computer.

Hey Pisanos, its the Super Mario Bros. Super Show!

The Legend of Zelda and The Super Mario Bros. Super Show are finally coming to DVD. This represents a chunk of my childhood that I still fondly remember: I used to watch these before I went to school in the morning, and then again when I came home from school. Wow. Now all we need is Captain N, the Game Master and my set will be complete.

Really, my blog posts write themselves.

The conspiratorially minded think that this update is just an effort on DirecTV’s part to get them to buy receivers with PVRs built in. A DirecTV representative responds “I can absolutely say this is not a tactic to get people to switch over to another receiver,” which is just the sort of thing you’d expect them to say if there were a conspiracy.

Yup, and its all apart of the Trilateral Commission’s plot involving Girl Scout Cookies and stolen nuclear weapons from Russia.

I’ve been thinking about the war lately. So far, we’ve spent $370 billion on the war (including both Afghanistan and Iraq). Enough for one bullet for every man, woman, and child in the Middle East. Enough to pave Iraq into a giant parking lot for Walmart. Enough to screw over the entire world.

You know what we could have done with $370 billion dollars? We could have fed everyone in the world, and given them the medical care they need. We currently spend only $5 billion a year on cancer research, and we could have cured cancer with that money. We could have cured AIDS, which killed 3.1 million people in 2004, and 23 million since 1981.

We could have converted every car in the United States to a fuel efficient engine that doesn’t burn gasoline, and made it easy for all diesel users to switch to biodiesel. We could have finally researched to see if cold fusion exists or not. We could have setup a mining facility on the Moon to mine Helium 3 for a clean power production method. We could have finally stepped foot on Mars, and even made a permanent settlement there.

We could have improved the lives of everyone on Earth, and we didn’t.