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What might he expect Mr. Ecko to do with his house, belongings and friends? Might he hope that they would all be asterisked, each being a permanent monument to Mr. Usher’s despair?

As Mr. Usher says on his blog:
“The thing that truly amazes me is $750,000, for a baseball!! I have a soccer ball, an Aussie Rules football, and quite a few golfballs here too. I might go out to the sports store and buy a baseball too, assuming they stock them here!
Are you reading this, Marc Ecko?”

I fear that eBay might want to call Social Services in on this one.

This is a picture of a man helping his friend move house. Nothing more.

Still trying to conjure the inspired connection between the value of a man’s life and that of a famous baseball (of COURSE the baseball is worth more), I can only leave you to go to Mr. Usher’s site and perhaps yourselves attempt to reason with him.

The auction ends this weekend.

Mr. Usher appears to have been betrayed by his significant other.
So much so that he decided to set up a website and auction the whole of his life on eBay.

As I write this, the leading bid is some A$390,000.

Mr. Usher has suddenly discovered the tale of Marc Ecko, a soi-disant clothing enterpreneur, who paid $750,000 for Barry Bonds’ record-breaking home run ball in order to bathe in a deluge of goodwill messages.

And all I can say ask of potential buyers is that they gird themselves for strange occurrences.

Mr. Usher claims he will go to the airport when the auction is over and get on the first plane he sees.

I am concerned that Mr. Usher, in believing that his life is the equivalent of a baseball, may have stepped a little too far down the psychological gang plank.

Mr. Usher himself believes that if he is mad, he is suffering only from “inspired madness.”

We don’t have much time.

(Credit:
sillygwailo)

Might he believe that the famous French writers Goscinny and Uderzo would be disinterred to write a sequel, based on Mr. Usher’s life, to their great “Asterix the Gaul”, and entitle it “Asterisk the Ball”?

Perhaps like you, I was initially touched by the story of Ian Usher, an Englishman living in Perth, Australia.

And also in order to see what it feels like to be a deity for a day. Yes, he was the bright spark who held a poll to ask whether the ball should go to the Baseball Hall of Fame with an asterisk scrawled on it.

When I say the whole of his life, I understand that he wants to keep his spleen, shins and heart, albeit broken into a thousand pieces.
However, his house, his sofa and his friends, well, they can all go.

Mr. Usher appears to be a genuine man. His site is full of interesting information about him, such as his buying and selling of
cars and his cycle hire business.

So now Mr. Usher has convinced himself that he, too, is a record-breaking baseball and is begging Mr. Ecko to buy his life.

Shockingly, the asterisk won. And Mr. Ecko cemented his place in the history of sport. As, some have said, a vacant noise.

If you’re thinking of splitting up with your lover tonight, please give it a little more thought.

Yet he also has a blog, the latest entry of which you may find disturbing.

Vuze uses the BitTorrent protocol and a client called Azureus to distribute video from partners such as Showtime, A&E, and the BBC. (In an concession that BitTorrent means more than just transferring pirated material, Comcast’s brief to the FCC this week doesn’t even mention the word “copyright” or “piracy.”)

An electronic arms race
The Comcast vs. BitTorrent battle is fast becoming a full-blown electronic arms race. One way to try to defeat throttling is to encrypt the individual Internet Protocol datagrams so a network provider may not even know that BitTorrent is being used.

What that means is that Comcast is slamming the brakes on perfectly legal television watching that happens to take place over the Internet–leaving it open to allegations of anticompetitive activity. As more TV watching shifts online, the argument goes, Comcast will lose its enviably lucrative position as the content gatekeeper for cable TV and become one of many providers of a commodity broadband service with slimmer margins.

Markey’s new bill (PDF) is not nearly as regulatory as previous Net neutrality efforts. It doesn’t give the FCC unchecked authority over the Internet, for instance. Instead, it requires the FCC to initiate a “proceeding,” hold public events, and provide a report back to Congress.

“We’ve been able to successfully avoid any significant impact through our own evasive maneuvers, such as encryption,” Monahan of Vuze said. But, he added, “I have no confidence that we and our colleagues in the space will be able to do this indefinitely.”

BitTorrent and other companies that provide bulk file distribution lashed out at Comcast on Thursday, saying the throttling of peer-to-peer connections is a naked attempt to harm video services that compete with cable TV.

Another application that relies on BitTorrent, Miro, can automatically download videos from channels based on RSS feeds. Miro, previously called Democracy Player, has
Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows clients. (Here’s CNET’s review).

“It becomes more troubling when the network operator is a competitor,” said Jay Monahan, the general counsel of Vuze, which in part initiated the FCC proceeding. “Comcast is a competitor to all of us who deliver high-quality video content.”

Comcast admits that it targets BitTorrent, but it denies that it throttles based on the content of the BitTorrent streams. “It’s all based on the amount of uploading traffic in the area,” said Sena Fitzmaurice, a spokeswoman for Comcast. “We don’t know what that traffic is. When traffic has gotten to the point that it begins to degrade the experience of other users in that area, we have to manage uploads.” (Comcast says it doesn’t manage–that is, throttle–BitTorrent downloads.)

That was a common refrain from BitTorrent-the-company and the constellation of start-ups that rely on BitTorrent-the-protocol. They’re rallying around new legislation introduced this week by Rep. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of a House of Representatives Internet and telecommunications panel.

From Comcast’s perspective, it’s merely trying to set some reasonable limits on its most bandwidth-consuming customers–thereby avoiding having all of its customers’ connections grind to a halt because of BitTorrent’s insatiable appetite. It notes that peer-to-peer applications can consume up to 80 percent of a network’s capacity and says throttling represents reasonable network management practices.

Which is, of course, exactly what Comcast says it’s doing.

Nicholas Reville, a co-founder of the Participatory Culture Foundation behind Miro, said on Thursday: “The filtering we’re seeing from ISPs is directly affecting our users…We absolutely must have strong Net neutrality legislation.”

That may not be enough to satisfy the BitTorrent alliance–don’t be surprised if you eventually see a Markey bill version 2.0 that’s more regulatory–but from their perspective, it would help provide a far better experience than today’s.

Comcast’s Fitzmaurice says this arms race is one reason her employer hasn’t provided many details publicly about how it detects BitTorrent streams and how it throttles them. “They’re constantly finding ways around the way the network is being managed,” she said.

While the BitTorrent protocol has long been used for piratical purposes, the company formed to commercialize it has signed up a slew of business partners from the entertainment industry that use it to reduce their bandwidth costs while distributing video. Those partners include Warner Bros., Viacom, PBS, and Paramount Pictures.

Comcast’s throttling “not only affects BitTorrent but also affects the hundreds of companies that use BitTorrent technology,” Eric Klinker, the company’s chief technology officer, told reporters on Thursday. Klinker’s comments come a day after Comcast defended the practice in a lengthy filing with the Federal Communications Commission.

At the moment, the BitTorrent alliance probably does not have the law on its side. The House of Representatives rejected extensive Net neutrality rules nearly two years ago, so the closest thing to formal rules are informal FCC broadband principles (PDF) saying consumers should be able to run applications they want–”subject to reasonable network management.”

That story got more complicated after a mixture of denials and partial acknowledgments of SARFT action and a 24-hour shut-down of Tudou that the website said was for a server upgrade, a reason few commentators believed at the time. But the site did come back online on schedule.

As for YouTube, it’s been much reported that YouTube is inaccessible in China since the beginning of the current situation out west. (I have been in Japan the whole time, so haven’t experienced this myself.) But this is not the first time YouTube has been blocked. The most recent example I know of was during last year’s 17th National Party Congress when the site was blocked and then unblocked at a time suspiciously near that important political event.

On Monday, I’ll be able to talk first-hand about what’s on- or off-line from Beijing. For now, Osaka is my new favorite city in Japan.

Beating the AP with a bit of detailed information, Jeremy Goldkorn at Danwei reports that Tudou will be one of 32 sites to be punished, while 25 others will be shut down all together. So, after all, unless the penalty is massive, Tudou will live on to fight (and probably keep on with free illegal TV and movies) another day.

A Chinese agency promised to shut or punish video sharing websites for hosting prohibited material, but this was going on before the incidents in Tibet made a different agency’s occasional blocking of YouTube famous.

As I reported earlier, rumors that Tudou had been ordered to shut down started circulating in the first week of March, with a failure to catch some pornographic material on the site as the justification.

At the time, rumors emerged of a “blacklist” that was circulating as a precursor to some sort of punishment in compliance with new regulations that require video providers to be state-run (but were modified to grandfather in already existing sites if they were vigilant about SARFT’s rules).

An AP reporter says the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) announced Friday that the leading Chinese video site, Tudou, would be penalized. The report notes that no mention was made of Tibet, but doesn’t make clear the most important part: that this all started before the demonstrations in Tibet did. I am sure SARFT takes politically sensitive films into account in addition to their advertised concern about obscene material, but it’s important to note how Tudou’s travails began.

Separately, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce speech on Tuesday that President Bush’s budget proposal next week “will start to deal with” tariffs on imported ethanol. “I think this industry is pretty close to being able to stand on its own,” he was quoted as saying.

A Department of Energy representative issued a statement saying only that the agency needs to reassess the project because of rising prices and technological advances.

Carbon capture and storage is considered an important technology to reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions, but the technology is unproven at a large scale. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last year called for government funding of carbon capture projects in the United States to work out technical issues.

But ballooning costs and a dispute over the location prompted the Department of Energy to pull its support, according to an Associated Press article citing lawmakers who were briefed by the agency. An announcement is expected in the coming days.

The U.S. Department of Energy plans to pull its support of a $1.8 billion project to build a power plant that captures pollution underground, according to published reports.

The FutureGen project is meant to test cutting-edge carbon capture and storage technology, which is supposed to dramatically reduce emissions from fossil fuel-burning power plants.

In December, the FuturGen Alliance, which includes participation of oil and coal companies, announced plans to build its first facility in Matoon, Ill.

Whatever you do, don’t run that .exe file from “Chunkylover53,” an alias for Homer Simpson.

(Credit:
FaceTime)

Since then, the screen name has been inactive, until a few days ago when Chunkylover53’s “Away” message appeared, prompting people to click on a link and run an executable in order to see “a *new* Internet-only exclusive Simpson’s episode.”

Of course, the file doesn’t show a Simpsons video. It infects the machine with a Trojan that throws up error messages, crashes the computer when attempting to open Windows Explorer and drops other nasty files onto the machine, making it part of what is believed to be a Turkish botnet, according to FaceTime, which secures IM, collaboration and Web apps for corporations.

The message has been changed since it was first displayed earlier this week. On Thursday night, this is what it said.

Years ago, fans of The Simpsons added “Chunkylover53″ to their AIM buddy list after learning that the writer-producer of the show was responding to fans in the voice of Homer from “Chunkylover53@aol.com.”

The long dormant "Chunkylover53" awoke this week with this "Away" message for Simpsons fans. Running the executable turns the PC into a zombie on a botnet.

(Credit:
FaceTime)

The service is only available in the U.S. and U.K. initially. If you’d like to try it out, just visit google.com on your compatible phone and click the My Location link under the search box. You can check out a tutorial video–complete with a lame acoustic guitar–for the service here.

So, say if you’re on a hot date–or even not-so hot, OK the amount of hotness doesn’t matter right now–and you’ve decided on sushi, but at the last minute your date reveals to you that he or she is allergic to not only fish, but rice as well. After arguing discussing why this was not made clear earlier, you break out your trusty Blackjack II, search Google for pizza–you’re obviously fed up at this point–and receive a list of local pizzerias in your current area. Or maybe just businesses thought to sell pizza. Actually it’s unclear how precise the technology is. Does it search for online menus or just go by name?

Google makes searching for local information easier by approximating your location.

Previously, when you went to google.com from your phone and performed a local search, the results were tailored to the last location you entered. Now, taking advantage of the Gears Geolocation API, Search with My Location approximates your position using the same Cell ID technology used in Google Maps for Mobile.

For a list of devices that support Search with My Location check here. Don’t fret too much if your phone isn’t listed since Google is working with vendors to add support for future phones.

Anyway, restaurants are not the only thing you’ll have the option to search for. By typing “weather” into the search, you’ll receive the local forecast as well.

On Thursday Google announced an easier way for Windows Mobile users to find the nearest restaurant with the release of Search with My Location.

Google states that “We take your privacy seriously and have designed Search with My Location so that it doesn’t associate your location with any personally identifiable information, even if you are logged in.” According to Google, it won’t send your location until you opt in and you can always opt out.

(Credit:
Google)

PENSACOLA, Fla.–If you’ve ever watched a Blue Angels show, you may not have known that when the F-18 pilots are screaming across the sky, less than 2 feet apart, they’re probably not looking straight ahead.

Two Blue Angels F-18s fly directly at each other during their practice performance at Naval Air Station Pensacola.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

I was curious how someone becomes a Blue Angels pilot, and Weisser explained that there’s an application process, just like for any job. But the requirements are a little more stringent than for most: to qualify, you must have flown at least 1,250 hours as a pilot of an F-18 or F-14.

I was invited to watch the show from the flight line, meaning I was able to get much closer than the public gets for the practices. This was nice since, while I’ve seen the Blue Angels fly probably more than a dozen times in San Francisco and once in Seattle, I was never very close to them.

Weisser said that the practices, no matter where they are, are identical, in fact, to the formal shows. And over the years, the shows have changed very little.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

The show itself was spectacular, especially from up close and with many other planes as backdrops, including “Fat Albert,” the team’s C-130 that ferries its equipment and support crew to various stops around the country.

This week, as part of my Road Trip 2008 project, I stopped in at Naval Air Station Pensacola here for a chance to watch the Blue Angels practice their demonstration show from way up close.

Those selected as finalists then join the current team at air shows around the country so everyone can get to know each other.

Of course, if you’re a student of the Blue Angels, you know there are only six planes in the performances. Weisser, as the No. 7 pilot, serves a three-year term with the team–while the others stay for two years–because his first year is spent taking care of VIPs, organizational duties and talking to the press. After a year, he will step into one of the regular pilot’s roles.

Afterward, I got a chance to sit down with Lt. Frank Weisser, the No. 7 Blue Angels pilot.

Back here in Pensacola, I was curious about whether the practice shows, both here and at various sites around the country, are any different than the formal shows they do.

The six Blue Angels F-18s fly together in perfect formation during a practice performance at their home base in Pensacola, Fla.

As I mentioned above, the planes can get as close as 12 inches during the shows, flying at speeds of between 300 and 400 knots. For a civilian who’s never flown, this was a rather astounding fact. But to Weisser, it’s just how things are for the team.

Though I won’t be in the cockpit of any high-performance fighter jets, Road Trip 2008 will continue for the next week or so. Please stay tuned to this blog, and to my Twitter feed.

In fact, when I was planning Road Trip 2008 and found out the Blue Angels are based in Pensacola, I rearranged the entire second half of the journey to attend one of the practices, which happen on a few specific dates in between the air shows all over the country.

“We have to do it that way so we stay safe in the air,” Weisser said. “There’s such a small room for error, that we can’t change the show…(And) one thing we pride ourselves on is our (consistency). Had you seen the show today and been on the team in the ’60s or ’70s, it would look very, very similar to you.” (See below for a video of some of the Blue Angels’ practice.)

Each year, the team adds three new pilots, but there are probably only about 50 applicants, since the pool of people who have the required hours is pretty small.

This time, I was allowed onto the tarmac where guests get to stand, meaning I was probably a couple of hundred yards away from the planes when they were at rest (see video below for a view of the tarmac, the Blue Angels planes, and the maintenance hanger).

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

But regardless of which team pilots are on, being able to fly as a Blue Angel is a boon for their careers, in large part because of how often they get behind the stick. They fly nearly every day, either in a formal show or in practices, and during their training months in the California desert, they fly as many as 15 times a week.

One thing that surprised me is that the Blue Angels spend about two to three months training each year in the desert outside El Centro, Calif., a small town in the southeast corner of the Golden State. This was particularly interesting to me because they fly there from January to March, and for years, I traveled to near El Centro for the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I guess I just missed the team when they were there all those years.

After being on the Blue Angels, the idea is that the pilots return to whatever squadron they were part of before. The team is very adamant that pilots don’t use the experience as a springboard to, say, getting a plush job flying for FedEx or some private carrier.

“That’s important for us because we’re together for 300 days a year,” Weisser said.

“You get to fly a ton,” Weisser said, “and everyone who’s a pilot loves to fly and wants to be in the air as much as they can.”

The team’s commanding officer, Weisser also explained, has even more strict requirements: he (or she, though the Blue Angels has never had a female member of the performance team) must have already commanded a squadron of F-18s.

The team, of course, is actually two teams. The first is a group of four of the pilots who fly as part of the “diamond,” always working together during a show. The second are the two solo pilots. Essentially, he explained, the Blue Angels fly two separate shows at a time.

That seems like a smart thing, even though it is kind of disconcerting to think the pilots aren’t exactly looking where they’re going, since no one wants these high-performance jets touching while in flight.

The front of a Blue Angels F-18 as seen from the side.

Rather, they’re most likely looking sideways at the fighter just off their side, ensuring that they know exactly where it is as they rocket forward at several hundred miles per hour.

I had never worn Kombi gloves or mittens before now. They are exceptional. Each of the gloves or mittens we reviewed were distinct from the others we reviewed from the other brands, reflecting innovative thinking in what a glove should be. I’d highly recommend any of these three models.

I loved the little touches to this one, as well. The hidden pocket that lets you put in handwarmers (though I can’t imagine needing one). The super-soft fleece cuff. And, of course, that ever-useful nosewipe fabric on the thumb.

Take the Kombi iRip, for example. This is one of the absolute coolest gloves I have ever seen…or heard. The Kombi iRip lets you control your
iPod from your glove. It’s completely wireless so that you don’t have to fumble for your iPod on the chairlift…only to watch it topple into the snow.

The Kombi gloves also include nice touches like the nose wipe (Sounds funny until you’re on the slopes and then you discover what a necessity this little bit of fabric technology is…) and a generally lightweight feel without offering lightweight protection from the cold.

Beyond this, the Kombi Freeform features a textured nylon shell with leather reinforcement and the lining is Accu-Dri (no-stink and wicks moisture away). Though polar bear warm it is doesn’t feel at all bulky.

It works with a wide range of iPods, though I couldn’t get it to work with my iPod Video. (It worked flawlessly with every other iPod we tried, however, so I’m blaming my iPod on this one.) You simply plug the wireless transmitter into your iPod, tuck it away, and go. There is nothing like slamming the moguls to Jane’s Addiction (”Mountain Song,” anyone?), turning it up on the way down without anything more than nudging the iRip’s “joystick.”

The last glove we reviewed was actually not a glove at all: it’s the Kombi Phoenix Mitten (MSRP: $80). As noted above, I’ve worn mittens for years but this one was different: it’s very lightweight, making it easy to grip, yet super warm (due to a Goose Down insulation and a GoreTex lining).

Kombi iRip Glove

While ski technology has dramatically improved over the years, there’s one area that still leaves me cold: gloves. I have very poor circulation in my hands, resulting in freezing hands unless I wear mittens.

Kombi Phoenix Mitten

The Kombi Freeform features Gore’s 2-in-1 technology and includes two chambers. (Meaning: You can slide your hand into one of two chambers.) One chamber isn’t as warm but gives you an incredible grip. The other is fully insulated and kept even my circulation-poor hands toasty warm. (The other reviewers even found the minimally insulated “grip” chamber plenty warm.) This is the perfect glove to use throughout the season: use the “grip” chamber for Spring skiing and the insulated chamber through the colder months.

I like the added control that gloves give me, however, so I was excited to try out three different gloves from Kombi Sports. Of the different brands we reviewed, Kombi’s gloves may well go farthest in seriously pushing the envelope in technology and design.

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The Kombi iRip kept the other three reviewers toasty warm…but left my fingers a little cold. Remember, though, that I’m a bit of an anomaly here so unless you have a history of freezing fingers this glove should be plenty warm for you. It’s made of stretch nylon with X-Loft insulation, a Waterguard waterproof membrane, and Accu-Dri lining (meaning, the lining wicks moisture away from your hands which keeps you dry…and keeps the glove from smelling). This glove is worth its price ($150).

Kombi Freeform Glove

Very, very cool.

Though less flashy, the Kombi Freeform Glove (MSRP: $100) has some interesting tricks up its sleeve. Two, to be exact. That is, two sleeves.

Traditionally, systems that solve complicated problems and queries have been called “intelligent”, but compared to earlier approaches in the field of ‘artificial intelligence’, the path that we foresee has important new elements. First of all, this system will operate on an enormous scale with an unprecedented computational power of millions of computers. It will be used by billions of people and learn from an aggregate of potentially trillions of meaningful interactions per day. It will be engineered iteratively, based on a feedback loop of quick changes, evaluation, and adjustments. And it will be built based on the needs of solving and improving concrete and useful tasks such as finding information, answering questions, performing spoken dialogue, translating text and speech, understanding images and videos, and other tasks as yet undefined. When combined with the creativity, knowledge, and drive inherent in people, this “intelligent cloud” will generate many surprising and significant benefits to mankind.

Google isn’t betting on pure artificial intelligence, replicating all the functions of the human brain, as the way to put more intelligence in the network. The army of Google software engineers will continue to focus on machine-learning and human-engineered relevancy algorithms to unpack trillions of data bits collected from Web crawling and user inputs.

At this point in time Google performs somewhere around 71 percent of Internet searches in the U.S. Google appears destined to increase that share over the next decade unless Microsoft or some company just hatching can come up with a substantially superior search experience.

Google is publishing a series of brief articles during September by 10 of its top scientists on how the Internet will evolve in the next 10 years. In the first article, Alfred Spector, a vice president of engineering, and research scientist Franz Och, outline how Google’s search engine will evolve over the next decade.

It appears that Google will stay on the same path that it is on today, taking advantage of Moore’s Law in terms of faster and cheaper systems, as well as faster and cheaper storage and networks, and moving from hundreds of thousands of servers to millions working in parallel to deliver more relevant and media rich answers to queries.

Self-interested Google? Absolutely. But then, how many companies do you know that aren’t self-interested contributors to open source? Walker notes:

John Mark is in the former camp and, increasingly, so am I. Google is the Teflon open-source company, contributing selectively and strategically…and winning kudos across the board.

It helps when Google launches a new platform, such as Android, because its communities will be the source of a great number of hackers who will enjoy bending Android to their will.

John Mark Walker, Hyperic’s community lead, has an interesting take on whether Google deserves to be loved or loathed for its open-source community outreach.

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I’m always bemused to see companies stop to throw stones back at critics, as if it’s going to help their stock price. The only thing that silences critics is performance–something Google has had in spades.

Back to John Mark’s point. Google has been exceptional in some areas of community development. The Summer of Code was a masterstroke of genius. Hiring key open-source developers such as Greg Stein hasn’t hurt, either. Together, its open-source community outreach has been executed well, though not flawlessly.

Or perhaps Google has done an exceptional job of looking past the criticisms that I and others have thrown at its open-source efforts, and simply barrels forth. When you’re on the top of your game, you can afford to do this.

I didn’t say they were altruistic, but rather that they knew what they were doing with respect to community development. They invest in communities, many of them related to open source, and this devotion to community helps them tremendously. It helps them when they launch a new set of services because the communities they target will no doubt be the early adopters.

I wonder, however, if Google gets a free pass on so many issues simply because developers are praying for an alternative to Microsoft’s dominance? Perhaps many, or most, embrace Google, thinking, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Perhaps Google has more to teach us than advertising.