Live from Austin!

Lack of Information at North Pole Leads Google to Draft New Privacy Policies

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – December 15, 2009 UTC – As the holiday season continued, Google Inc. today announced that it is modifying its privacy policies in a new two-part Google Santa initiative.

The inspiration for the Google Santa project came from the realization that Santa has very little information to go on when judging whether people are naughty or nice. Now, thanks to Google’s advanced data mining systems, Santa will be given access to your search history, a log of all the web sites you visit which use Google Analytics, any passwords needed to access them from your Google Toolbar, the contents of your Gmail account, and complete transcripts of any Google Talk IM conversations made in the last year.

“Santa has a clear need for this information,” said Google founder Sergey Brin. “His intuition is unmatched, but his ability to sniff out naughty people will be dramatically improved now that he can search your e-mail and check whether you’ve visited any naughty web sites.”

“Do no evil,” added Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “Because otherwise we will find out, and we’ll tell Santa.”

Google also announced phase two of Google Santa, to launch in January. A new area of the Google Shopping site will enable users to sell coal in a global marketplace.

“By aggregating individual users’ stock of fossil fuels,” explained Google co-founder Larry Page, “we will enable ordinary people to participate in the global energy economy by selling their pieces of coal to their local electricity company.”

“In addition,” he added, “a modest 70% cut of the proceeds will be used to purchase carbon offset credits, making the overall operation carbon neutral, and helping me feel better about my personal Boeing 767.”

About Google Inc.

Google’s innovative web technologies log the lives of millions of people around the world every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google’s targeted advertising program, which is the largest and fastest growing in the industry, provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while recording the browsing patterns of users across almost the entire World Wide Web. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and the North Pole. For more information, visit www.google.com.

From the Daily Telegraph:

Gordon Brown should levy a tax on violent video games to help tackle knife crime, according to the Richard Taylor, the father of murdered schoolboy Damilola Taylor.

[...]

The Tackling Knives Action Plan is a £2million programme aimed at reducing deaths and serious violence among teenagers due to knives.

Violent games are “too cheap” and taxes on them should be “very high”, Mr Taylor told MPs.

Wait a moment. It’s not my favorite genre, but I’ve played enough to know that violent video games rarely glamorize knives. Nobody in their right mind ever tried to complete Grand Theft Auto, Fallout 3 or Resident Evil 4 using knives; it’s shotguns and machine pistols all the way.

So if we’re serious about wanting to do something about knife crime, then what we really need to do is follow the same logic as the UK handgun ban, and try to reduce the availability of knives, right? We need to be tough on knives, tough on the causes of knives.

I call for an immediate and very high tax on unsliced loaves of bread. Have you seen a bread knife recently? If you’re an irresponsible potential murderer, you might even have one in your house–hopefully locked away in the knife cabinet where teenagers can’t get at it. Those evil serrations will slice through innocent flesh like it’s, well, a loaf of bread.

Speaking of flesh, we need a big tax on steak too. Steak knives are conveniently sized for hoodies to carry about their person. Any observant Daily Mail reader will recall incidents where steak knives have been used as stabbing weapons.

Ultimately, if we’re going to solve the problem of knife availability, the population of the UK is going to need to transition to eating only soft foods that require no sharp implements. We can look to the nation’s lunatic asylums and baby food manufacturers for guidance on assembling a safe menu for the nation.

Knives are only part of the problem, though. Damilola Taylor wasn’t killed with a knife; according to the prosecution, he was stabbed with broken glass from a bottle. So clearly, the UK needs to go beyond simple deposits on glass bottles, and start making it prohibitively expensive to put liquids in bottles.

Once everybody is eating baby food from plastic jars and drinking their beer from plastic bottles, the UK may finally see the same kind of change in the number of knife crimes that it has seen in handgun crimes.

Douglas Adams has died suddenly of a heart attack, aged 49.

I don’t generally get upset when the death of a celebrity is announced—after all, it’s not like I know them or anything. Sure, in some abstract sense I’m sad, but I don’t really feel like I’ve lost a friend. But this is different. I’ve spent so much time immersed in the various Adams worlds—from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Starship Titanic—that I feel like I know him.

The last time I was this upset by the death of someone famous was when Willie Rushton died. I doubt anyone in the US has heard of him, but he was well known in the UK. He was a cartoonist, satirist, author, children’s TV presenter, and regular guest on “I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue” on Radio 4. To me, he felt like an uncle. After all, he’d read stories to me when I was a kid.