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There are the poor saps who toil from day to day like you and me. And then there are those like Oracle’s Larry Ellison: a reincarnated Caligula trapped in the modern age. In this ongoing series we’re going to do a public service of pointing out what a cruel, cruel place the world can be when you really are better than everyone else.

So lets say that, yet again, you’ve failed to crack the top ten of Forbe’s richest men in the world. You know that your extreme intellect is unjustly being buried beneath a bushel of plebeian ignorance. But where can you go? What can you do? If you’re Larry Ellison the solution is simple: buy a Malibu fiefdom to cater to your every whim. According to the Los Angeles Times:

By some accounts, he has shelled out as much as $200 million for more than a dozen properties, including five adjacent residential parcels on Carbon Beach, two nearby restaurants, the Casa Malibu Inn and a vacant gas station or two that he apparently intends to use for customer parking.
…
So far, Ellison, 62, has submitted plans to the city of Malibu for two new restaurants, including one expected to feature ultra-high-end Japanese cuisine. That would be in keeping with his affinity for the finer things in life and for all things Japanese.

Ah, yes. There’s nothing like local serfs toiling to make Japanese cuisine to take the sting out of only being the 11th richest person in the world. But when making sushi for the ultra-rich what other issues are there?

Mayor Ken Kearsley, who voted against the amendment, said he fears that the restaurants will cause a traffic backup on the highway. He also said Ellison should honor a development agreement between the city and the previous owner, who had promised to donate $400,000 to local schools and include a community room in his proposed beach club and spa.

They want a $400,000 from a man worth only $20 billion? For kids?! That aren’t even illegitimate Japanese heirs!!! It’s as if people think just because he’s rich he has the capacity to help them. Another gross misunderstanding by the world at large.

POOR ELLISON!

Continuing our propaganda against bull-headed lawyer conglomerates today we have this incredible anti-anti-piracy poster. It’s funny because its true:

This Sunday’s FoxTrot, one of the more geek savvy of the mainstream comics, correctly points out the absurdity inherent at the RIAA. Big props for the issue being placed in front of people who don’t normally read about this sort of thing everyday:

Senator Ted Stevens, here seen warding off the web and its cadre of ’spiders’.

Ted Stevens, when not contemplating how the Internet is a series of tubes, is busy coming up with helpful, well-thought out legislation. Case in point? He’s newly introduced Senate bill 49 which would require any school that receives federal money to block access to ‘interactive’ web sites. Given that that we live in the age of the ‘read/write’ web the vaguely worded legislation would apparently ban students from the web itself… or at least that wily misbegotten haven for ill repute, Wikipedia (Preston Gralla, speaking on Computer World):

There are so many things wrong with this bill, it’s hard to count them all. But its greatest irony would be banning Wikipedia — perhaps the most widely used reference resource in the world — from libraries and schools. I have plenty of problems with Wikipedia, including how easily it can be manipulated, and the way that student rely on it far too heavily. But ban an educational resource merely because it’s interactive? If true, it’s bizarre beyond comprehension.

I’ll admit, I didn’t jump on the ‘Internet is Made of Tubes’ T-shirt bandwagon the first go around because I thought Stevens would quickly move back to his first love, bridges to nowhere. I was wrong. We need a Militant Geek anti-Steven shirt stat! Any ideas?

Say that you’re the world’s largest software company. Now suppose that you’ve just released your latest operating system to less than rave reviews. There are some nice things about it but the universal consensus by consumers is to wait and ‘upgrade’ when they buy a new machine. It now sounds like those users who snooze will lose out Vista completely.

Robert McMillan, writing for the IDG News Service and appearing on PCWorld, states that Vienna, the brand new OS after Vista will be delivered in 2009. That gives Vista a shelf life of a little over two years - or even less than that for those waiting for the first major service pack (Fuji) before upgrading. Of course, with such a small time frame Microsoft must practically have the thing written right? What are the features? Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development with Microsoft’s Windows Core Operating System Division, what can we expect?

According to Fathi, that’s still being worked out. “We’re going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don’t know what it is,” he said. “Maybe it’s a new user interface paradigm for consumers.”

‘Interface paradigm’? Hypervisors? Sure sounds like Vienna is treading water to me.

Jennifer O’Loughlin, if you believe the story from Hawaii’s Channel 8, is one of those feel good stories of the year: single mom goes online, creates a business, and pulls herself and family off of welfare. I guess they missed the part about Jennifer running one of Second Life’s most successful prostitution venues.

Jennifer O’Loughlin started out her road to nefarious riches with a $4,000 welfare grant. She turned that money into an adult nightclub (’The Edge’) which, by her own admission, made more than a quarter of a million dollars in 2006. Just how did she do it? In an archived interview from 2005, our Hallmark heroine explains her keys to success:

“Yes,” Jenna says earnestly, “booty is a very, very basic need.” She laughs. “People come into Second Life and need to find their basic needs, before they want to grow. Safety, food are needs in real life– belonging and booty are needs in Second Life.”

In real life a brothel owner would be the stuff of scandal and shame. Throw in a virtual world, however, and Jennifer O’Loughlin becomes the Channel 8 Young Girl Role Model of the Year.

Microsoft’s Clippy was a rebel. In an age of usability design that stressed minimizing user trepidation by maximizing user control Clippy broke all the rules. He would pop up unexpectantly, break work flows, nag with unnecessary questions, confuse with undesired options, and produce the kind of productivity terrorism now reserved for YouTube. He was a scamp!

With the new Office 2007 ribbon interface, however, there was little room for Clippy’s antics. At militant geek we have this look back at one of the worst attempts at humanizing software since Microsoft’s Bob:

via Gizmodo

We love Valleywag, the irrepressible rapscallion of Silicon Valley skewering, as much as one-blog-crush-to-another can. It’s just one of a many fine Gawker media sites that Militant Geek reads often. That’s why we sat up and took notice when Greg Sandoval and Stephen Shankland from CNET pointed out an interesting trend between copyrighted material posted on YouTube and the quick Gawker advertisements embedded into them. The clips in question seemed to originate almost entirely from one person: Belowtheradar.

Since October 23, of the 60 videos posted by Belowtheradar, 51 feature ads for Gawker or a Gawker Media property and appear to be material obtained from major broadcasters. Nine others either are without any advertising or it is unclear where the content came from.

Sure this could have been any fan taking the time to splice logos of his favorite blogs into existing screen captures… *cough. But its also a sneaky coincidence that those same videos showed up embedded in Gawker media posts. Latest word is that the copyright owners (Viacom, Apple, and *bleh Amanda Congdon) are rather upset that they’re copyrighted material wasn’t even given a proper derivative work treatment.

There isn’t a smoking gun… yet. And this seems like a clever, albeit dubious, way of growing readership. But there is another angle. This is also seems like a cheap way to heave a legal headache up on almost anyone running a site. Just craft a semi-professional looking boilerplate, grab someone’s viral video, create a new YouTube account, and upload away. Congratulations! You’ve framed your foe for copyright violation!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to wrap Amanda Congdon promos around classic 70’s “polluting the environment” PSAs.

update:
Nick Denton, the chiefest of Gawkers pu-bas, responds below, which redirects to his site.

update 2:
It’s Gawker Media, not Gwaker as I repeatedly had mentioned. The references have been corrected. As my signifigant other was quick to remind me: I am so Smooooooooooooooth.

Despite recent miscues like allowing Chinese censorship and paying motion picture studios hush money Google remains an Internet darling. What is the source of this goodwill? From what fount doth Google’s mead flow? Ironically enough, Google may just continue its rocket-ride to unrealistically high expectations because of what it does in the bathroom.

On the Google Code blog the latest entry touts Google’s program for motivating employees. The crux? Google reminds employees how to be #1 while they’re taking a #2. From the post:

Today we’re unveiling the public release of “Testing on the Toilet”: one of Google’s little secrets that has helped us inspire our developers to write well-tested code. We regularly write flyers about everything from dependency injection to code coverage, and then plaster the bathrooms all over Google with each episode, almost 500 stalls worldwide.

We’ve decided to share this secret weapon with the rest of the world to spread our passion to other developers, and to provide a fun and easy way to educate yourself (and the rest of your company) about these important tricks and techniques.

In other words, Google has taken one of the last bastions of personal solitude inside increasingly overbearing corporate structures and turned it into work time. What’s next? Harnessing developer’s body heat while they sleep to power the Googleplex?

Astroturfing isn’t just the stuff of grass replacement anymore; it’s also the term for any PR campaign that tries to appear as an honest, grassroots, spontaneous product of the people. People don’t like to be deceived and when cases of Astroturfing have been discovered the result has usually been a backlash of negative publicity. Wikipedia, because of its prominence as an online authority and its ability to be edited by anyone, makes it a prime target for such manipulation.

It has now come to light that Microsoft attempted to pay individuals to change Wikipedia articles for its behalf. From the Seattle PI piece by Brian Bergstein:

Microsoft Corp. landed in the Wikipedia doghouse Tuesday after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced Web encyclopedia site.

While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors, writers and moderators have blocked public-relations firms, campaign workers and anyone else perceived as having a conflict of interest from posting fluff or slanting entries. So paying for Wikipedia copy is considered a definite no-no.

“We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach,” Wales said.

This comes after Microsoft enraged the temperamental blogsphere a month ago by attempting to buy mentions of its Vista software from a select cadre of tech trendsetters. Before that Microsoft conducted astroturfing campaigns under the guises of the ‘Americans for Technology Leadership’ and the ‘Freedom to Innovate Network’.

Microsoft has stated that its only trying to correct errors. But considering its history of attempted bribery and past relation missteps its no wonder that even honest efforts end up in a bad light.