Ultra Right wing tosspots, the BNP, seem to be producing “The Real News�. Strangely it has ended up on google video for the masses to digest. I suppose its inevitable that a service which was made purely for sharing videos of ones cat has been turned into a tool for spreading the drivel of the far right.
After skimming through academia stuck in dusty libraries flicking through thousands of books trying to find that elusive quote describing which routes Russian technology smugglers took during the 1980s, you can understandably get a little frustrated with it all.
Well Google is attempting to cut down that by scanning in virtually every book (in modern use) so that we can search with a few key words. Wonderful. It’s a shame that book publishers who seem to be living in the dark ages or having a music business type fear of the internet should feel threatened. People will still buy these books, or go to libraries to read them, as for one, reading on a screen is still not as nice as sitting in front of a fire place with a nice brandy and secondly its faster and easier, especially when researching , to have 40 open books surrounding you rather than 40 open pdf documents cluttering up your task bar.
So calm down book companies, readers will for sure still purchase fiction books. As for reference and technical manuals when at times all you need is one page (say for example finding out how to use functions in a programming language) why not talk to Google and ask to see if they could limit the page further? To be honest though, Google Book Search makes me want to buy more books online, rather than making do with what the local WH Smiths stock or what I can work out is inside the book from the Amazon blurb or the entirely positive book reviews.
The 24 hours news channels are having a field day reporting the terrorist crack downs happening over Britain (to note Fox news offers possibly the funniest). However one of the strangest things is the amount of eye witnesses reporting they heard gun shots even though the police state there was none. Its not that we live in a country where we here gun shots every day, how on earth do they know what one sounds like?
I know we have movies and TV shows, but I don’t think you get a true effect of a gun noise resonating though a neighbourhood. The only idea in real life that I have is through hearing the bangs from the people who shoot ducks near us. But if I heard two bangs, the first a gun and the second a CS gas canister, I don’t think I would know the difference.